What One Person Can Do!
Consider for a moment how what you are doing is in some way, shape or form impacting the world.
You may be dedicating your time to raising your children, writing for a newspaper informing people of the events in your community or the world, preparing financial statements for your key stakeholders, rehabilitating people from a serious accident or finalizing your studies pondering what’s next.
Regardless of what your vocation is it’s a fact that as human beings we derive the greatest sense of joy and happiness when we enrich the lives of others.
A new bread of people is emerging in every corner of the world and they are seen as being ‘unreasonable’. They are social entrepreneurs who are creating markets and changing the world - innovative, resourceful, practical, and opportunistic.
CEO John Wood was “an overworked Microsoft Executive looking for the quiet solitude of a trekking vacation”. While he was backpacking in the Himalayas, Wood came across a middle-aged Nepalese man who invited him to visit a nearby village school. Jumping at the chance to see the real Nepal, rather than sticking to his tourist’s trek, Wood agreed - and the encounter changed his life.
The Nepalese man turned out to be an education resource officer. Wood discovered that despite the man’s best efforts - which involved crossing high mountain passes on foot to visit schools - he had few resources to offer the schools for which he was responsible. Wood, in short, came face-to-face with a harsh reality facing millions of Nepalese children: there were almost no books. He was shocked to discover that the few books the local school had - “a Danielle Steele romance, the Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia, and a few other backpacker castoffs” - were considered so precious that they were locked up to protect them from the children.
As Wood left the village, the headmaster made a simple request: “Perhaps, Sir, you will some day come back with books.” When he got home, Wood e-mailed friends to ask for help in collecting children’s books and says he was overwhelmed with the response: “Over three thousand books arrived within two months.” The following year, he returned to Nepal, rented a team of six donkeys, and visited the village to deliver the books.
On that trip, he also made a decision to leave the corporate world, which he did in late 1999, to start Room to Read. His goal? To connect the business practices he had learned at Microsoft with his new mission to provide the lifelong gift of education to millions of children in the developing world.
In his memoir, ‘Leaving Microsoft to Change the World’, he explains, “Did it really matter how many copies of Windows we sold in Taiwan this month when there were millions of children without access to books?”. With 750 million illiterate adults worldwide and 100 million children without access to school, he set out to build the nonprofit venture “with the ability of Starbucks and the compassion of Mother Teresa.”
This is only one story, there are hundreds of more stories of people who are changing the world. Ask yourself, what can you do to change the world around you.
