Walking The Path of Purpose
by Lyndon Rego | Director, Centre for Entrepreneurial Leadership at ALU
A decade or so ago I was talking to a remarkable change agent named Eboo Patel in Chicago. He talked about two mindsets: One is focused on pointing out what’s wrong in the world and another that focuses on how to make it right. Our traditional education model prepares us to do the first thing — to be critical, to find fault — rather than prepare us to solve problems in the world around us. Solving big problems is seldom easy.
Innovation is filled with failure. Edison failed repeatedly, perhaps 3,000 times, in creating a viable electric light bulb. And then, even when he succeeded, lighting the world took a long time — the solution was expensive, there was no electric grid, and the entrenched system of candles, lamps, natural gas, and kerosene was well established. The first automobile too seemed more like a fanciful toy, expensive and unreliable compared to the horse and carriage. Most great innovations start out this way — clunky, expensive, and imperfect, but they get much better until they disrupt the old ways.
In an innovation leadership program I just completed, an experiential activity had the participants complete a team task. When they did, they were asked to do it in half the time. Then, half the new time and again, half that time until they get it down to a few seconds. At the outset, they focus on efficiency. At some point, a recognition kicks in that efficiency can’t take you much further and you have to innovate. You have to take a leap into the unknown.
Dick Fosbury demonstrated the power of leaping into the unknown. When I was in school, we had the high jump as part of the sports program. We learned various techniques. The standard scissors jump can get you only so far. To jump higher you had to do a Straddle or the Western Roll and go over the bar sideways. Finally, to get higher you had to do something seemingly crazy and unreasonable like the Fosbury Flop which required you to go over the bar headfirst and backwards. The pioneer of this method, Dick Fosbury, was first ridiculed before he claimed gold at the 1968 Olympics. Now every Olympic high jumper uses his method. George Bernard Shaw stated that “all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
I currently work at the African Leadership University founded by Fred Swaniker who was recently named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Fifteen years ago, Fred was an unknown young man, making the rounds in New York seeking support for a wild dream to transform education in Africa. He had no money and little evidence. Today, he is celebrated as a pioneer in education by people like Barack Obama and Bill Gates. For Thomas, Dick, and Fred, innovation is grounded in self-belief and personal action. They act on purpose.
Although I teach innovation and develop programs for people to solve problems in new ways, in a recent silent Vipassana meditation I realized that I tend to spend too much time complaining about the way things are and not enough effort addressing the things I complain about. So, my next venture, as I return to the US, is to lean directly into creating the things that I care about most — community and connection, inclusion and empowerment, innovation and transformation.
A century ago Gandhi called for us to be the change. In 1913 he wrote: “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
Gandhi echoed the message of an earlier social innovator and activist we know as the Buddha who proclaimed that “we must each walk the path.” Transformation in the world begins with transformation within ourselves. We need to bring into alignment our beliefs and actions.
As we look into the future, the example of Gandhi and the Buddha are as relevant as ever. The world today teeters on the edge of environmental collapse, social polarization, and economic marginalization. Many of us are deeply concerned but the shift we seek depends more on our actions than our expressions of concern and outrage. And so, I plan to profess less what I believe and do more to walk the path of actually addressing the things I believe in.
This post was originally published on Lyndon’s LinkedIn page.
