Author Unknown: “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

William Drenttel: “Great design does not, in fact, come from compromise; it comes from strength of character, persistence of vision, and expertise.”

Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912): “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”

Tim Brown: “Inspiration. Where do ideas come from? Insights are the fuel of inspiration. You don’t get ideas from sitting at your desk. Use the world as a source of inspiration (not as a source of validation). It starts with empathy and seeing things from other people’s viewpoints, not yours. Aim to understand people on multiple levels: physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and culturally.”

Louis Pasteur: “Luck favors the prepared mind.”

Andy Rachleff: “Well I don’t believe that entrepreneurs are created, I think they are born… You can always hire execution, you can never hire vision.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly: “To be human means to be creative.”

Edward Albee: “Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of their way to come back a short distance correctly.”

Pablo Picasso: “[Work] below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”

David Cabianca: “Rules are used as a substitute for skills of observation.”

Steve Jobs: “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

Frank Gehry: “Is starting hard? You know it is.”

Richard Schoenwald: “I can’t lead the life of the mind in solitude, and neither can you, and together we defy the tyranny of change, and we escape being imprisoned by falseness and triviality, and we jointly venture onward.

Unknown: “To be bound to our own mistakes is the ultimate expression of freedom.”

From John Maeda’s Blog: “Your expression of anger … belies the qualities … of a lesser man.”

According to World Bank estimates, $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.

At the upper range of those estimates, the $456 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world’s poor for five and a half years.

Boston.com has comparisons for 9 other ways that money could have been spent.

“There are things in this life I would rather not sacrifice…” – John Butler Trio. JBT has a new album out, and I’ve been listening to it almost every day. Great music matched with meaningful and current lyrics, and a political edge if you choose to listen that carefully. They’re playing at The Fillmore in June, I’m gonna get tickets for sure.

I’ve been feeling really optimistic about things in general lately. I feel like there’s a tipping point approaching for environmental and humanitarian concerns, that people are interested on genuine, positive interactions more than ever, and that people aren’t buying the bullshit of governments and major corporations. The disconnect that I feel betweent the marketing and advertising I see every day and the actions of my peers makes me hopeful that we may be the generation to really turn some things around and redefine this unsustainable system we’ve created. The fact that the most valuable information these days seems to be coming from person to person, very human and very personal interactions. Blogging, social networking, all of these things are building human capital in ways I know that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. I’ll admit that I might be biased in my perception of this because every project I’m doing for every class this quarter is focused on sustainability, but I still feel like that tide is turning, and its a very exciting time to be a young person about to leave college and enter the working world.

And then Virginia Tech happened. My heart goes out to all those people at VT. I just can’t reconcile this general optimistic feeling of growing goodwill and humanity with something like that, it completely upends the faith that I have in my generation to do great things with this world. I don’t know how to rationalize those two things. Maybe its just a fluke, but something we’re doing as a society is allowing these kinds of things to happen more often and with more bloodshed. How do you get around this? I have no answers here, its just so hard for me to understand that mindset of someone that does something like that… and it seems like it could happen at any school.

Last week I went to two events. On Sunday my parents took me to see the Dalai Lama speak in San Francisco. A great opportunity to see a very interesting man speak. He said a lot of things, some of which I think went over my head, but two things that he said stood out to me:

1) You can disagree with someone and still have respect for them. Disagreement combined with respect creates dialogue and through that conflicts can be resolved. Compassion is key to this interaction.

2) The idea of one “right” religion applies only at the individual level. Whatever religion, whatever god is right for someone is the one that fits them personally. The idea of a universally “right” religion is just not something that people should concern themselves with, much less kill eachother over.

3) People are generally good, and don’t want trouble. No one wakes up in the morning looking for trouble, and people want to be happy.

On Thursday, I went to a mini-conference at Stanford put on for their Creating Infections Action d.school class. The conference focused on a newly coined idea called social entrepreneurship; basically the idea of business for social good, not just bottom-line profits. I say newly coined because apparently people have been doing this for years but it was just recently given this name. The speakers were the founders from Kiva, GlobalGiving, and Benetech. The conference was one of the most interesting lectures I’ve gone to in a while and made me even more sure that the path I’m following with my own professional career is the right one. Just a few highlights/thoughts:

The GlobalGiving founders, former World Bank people, explained that they thought one of the problems/limitations with the world bank system is that it deals in huge quantities of dollars (hundreds of millions to billions), and deals directly with governments. Now, there are some things that you have to interface with governments to affect – taxes, trade laws, etc. But their point was that in many cases, the governments are not the best people to be distributing this aid. Their anecdotal story goes something like this: A government gets a huge sum of money from world bank, and they decide how to disperse it. 6 months to a year later, a bulldozer shows up in a village and starts building a school. The villagers stop the bulldozer and say, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m building a school.” They say, “We don’t need a school, we’ve already got one that works well enough. What we really need is a new water well.” He says, “Thats too bad, because I have orders to build a new school, so that’s what’s going to happen.” The orders from higher up don’t necessarily reconcile with needs on a local level. To counter this problem, GlobalGiving fills the gap in the WorldBank system of local, smaller aid packages. This seems to be much more efficient, much faster, and ensures people get exactly what they need. Sounds like a great idea to me. Then, as a guiding principle for trying to effect change, it seems wise to try to work as locally as possible. Want to encourage education? Lets build schools and train teachers in the places they live, not make a top down command to make it happen. I’m sure people have been saying this for years, but the clarity with which I understand this point is new to me. The exciting thing about technology an the Internet is that it allows the global connection between highly specific, localized efforts. I think this is going to be on of the most exciting things to watch in the near future.

Kiva is an organization started by a current Stanford MBA student, and they connect lenders with borrowers for micro-loans. Their minimum loan is $25 dollars. Over that past 2 years they’ve raised $5.5 million in loans. And the great thing is that these aren’t donations – these loans get paid back in a fairly resonable time frame! To me, it seems like they pretty much just created $5.5 million dollars, and in the processs are helping to create a lot of local businesses that will sustain families and communities for years to come. It seems like all of this sucess is being driven by creating the connections between lenders and borrowers – people are much more excited to participate when they can see the face and here the story of the person they’re loaning to. Right now update come back on a monthly time scale, but if you combine this idea with the ideas presented by Ray Kurzweil that I’ve talked about before, and look down the road of mobile technology a few years, I forsee a time when lenders can get weekly, maybe even daily, picture and text updates about the progress of their borrowers. Great idea that’s accomplishing great things.

One common issue with these organizations that they can’t seem to get the high school and college demographics involved. Surprising, because we’re usually the first to adopt these kinds of internet-based communities and networks. I have a few ideas about why this might be:
1) Most of the people on the other end of these systems, on the receiving ends, seem to not be in the high school/college demographic either. I don’t go on facebook to connect with the 35-50 year olds that I know, so maybe I’d be more interesting in getting involved with an organization like Kiva if the people on the other end were my age or closer to my age – right now they seem mostly like middle aged/married with family types.

2) High school and college students are a powerful consumer demographic, and we spend money, but disposable income is still a very precious thing for us. As financially well of as many in my position are, we are MUCH less financially comfortable than even a college grad with their first job. Working full time, even if its only 30k/year, gives you much more freedom to give or loan $100 here or there (Kiva’s average loan is $92). In my exporations of career and living options for after college, I am absolutely amazed how many things are possible with a 50k/year job that were just completely out of reach in college. So how to get around this? Maybe a new system needs to be created – sort of like the facebook $1 gifts, where we can donate smaller amounts more often. Another idea – maybe the best way the college/high school demographic can contribute isn’t with money. What other skills do we have, what can we do that requires time and not money (we usually have more of the former and less of the latter). I’m not sure what form this would/could take, but I think there’s something worth exploring here. I think there’s an opportunity for partnerships with companies that sell to this demographic – something along the lines of the RED campaign, but maybe each purchase adds $1 or $5 to a cause?

Once upon a time I bombed a Stanford undergraduate application because I really didn’t want to fight the battle of explaining to my parents why I didn’t want to go there if I did get in. I still think it would have been the wrong place for me as an undergrad, and I wouldn’t trade my UC Davis education for anything, but the interesting stuff they have going on down there and the access to the resources of Silicon Valley makes me strongly consider that as my best option for grad school in a few years should I choose to go that route.

Not much time left over for #3 these days, I’m afraid. But I found this quote today, and its one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. The more I read it the more I love it.

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”

-Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912)

While sitting at a bus stop, waiting to catch a bus to the shopping center to buy sheets and a pillow, I ended up chatting with a woman in her late 70’s who turned out to be a Catholic nun from Ireland (she wasn’t dressed in a habit, otherwise I would have known this off the bat. obviously.) We were small-talking about the weather for a bit and then got into a pretty interesting conversation the touched on politics, young people, spirituality vs religion, global warming, finding your life’s work and passion, and the paradox of the existence of God in relation to evil in the world and free will (Her simple answer is that God gave us free will but we have to take responsibility for the use of it, and the irresponsible use of it is where the evil comes from).

The spirtuality vs religion bit was great, particularly because I consier myself a spiritual person but definitely not a religious person and I was a bit wary of revealing that to a Catholic nun. But it didn’t seem to bother her too much, and she said that she thought the difference between religion and spirtuality was that religion was just the daily steps and rituals, and that only does not make for spirtuality, that there has to be some deeper relationship for the religion and spirituality to become one feeling inside a person.

Although this is already an interesting encounter, to understand why this was a more meaningful thing than it might have otherwise been, you have to understand the context for me. I’ve been in Sydney for 6 days. I don’t know anybody here, its been pretty lonely, and I’ve really been questioning what I’m doing here and whether this is where I should be, in a personal and professional sense. I was trying to relate this feeling to Sister Anne, and her response to my dilemma was,

“Do you mind if I have a yarn with the Lord about you?”

And although I’m not a religious man and for the most part have trouble squaring with organized religion, that seemed like an offer I couldn’t refuse, particularly in my current state of inner turmoil and doubt in my direction. Soon after, the bus stopped and we went our separate ways.

Her departing words were, “I hope you come to the right choices.”

Something about the way she said that just hit me, as it seemed to address all the complexity and weight of the things I’m juggling right now. I walked away with a huge smile on my face and couldn’t help but think that sometimes the right people appear in our lives at just the right time.

Thanks, Sister Anne. You made my day. And I’ll be stopping by to see how that yarn with the Lord went…

So I tried to do things a little differently this year. For my extended family, I donated to www.carbonfund.org to offset 50,000 pounds of CO2 production for my family (really only 1/10 of what one person produces in a year, but I think it covers the impact of just our family christmas on the planet). So I guess you could say that for the first time ever, I took away something for christmas instead of giving. But I still felt wierd about that, so I bought a copy of An Inconvenient Truth book for every household in that attended my family xmas celebration – which turned out to be a great choice because the books producers have chosen to make it a carbon-neutral production by devoting some of the proceeds to carbon-offsetting.

It took a little explanation to the family to get them into it, but they all seemed to like the idea, and I feel better about my small stand against the waste of this time of year. And it started a family discussion on electric vehicles, the sort of topic we don’t often talk about on Christmas. What every family in the US started doing this? I think it would be a great step in the right direction.

More info, if you’re interested:
http://www.climatecrisis.net/
http://www.carbonfund.org

Happy Holidays all, lets shoot for a carbon-neutral Christmas in 2007!