It is easier to hold one thought firmly in mind than to have contradictory thoughts active in the brain.  The nature of reality is complex, the nature of human opinion: simple.  The human mind has been programmed to respond to slogans.  It’s easier to rally under a banner with a few bold words on it than under one with a complex of equally true facts. 

Joey Reiman (see Purpose)  has a private jet he bought, presumably, because he is excellent at what he does and well-paid for it.   He advises the richest businesses in the world about how to become richer, while having a work force that believes it is doing something to make the world a better place.   He advises big business how to convince the public it is doing work to make the world a better place.  This makes the world a better place and it also increases the profits of the company that does this well.

I struggle with bitterness sometimes, even with the several things I love to do and the good health I generally enjoy to do them in.  Even in the face of slow, but great, forward progress of my dream from idea to reality, a certain malaise hovers.   I have neither private jet nor any pay for what I do, however well I may be doing it.  I have built no organization.   I live on diminishing savings, unable to shift my focus from this dream long enough to figure out how to bring in more income.  My thoughts tend to darken at times as I dream of things most people consider too abstract to shoehorn into their busy schedules.   The darkness remains even as I realize how little I care about the details of what other people do for a living, and that this unpaid work I’m doing is also my livelihood and why should I expect others to be engaged by that?   Time is money, after all, so if it’s not fun, or at least exciting, it better pay me something for my time.  

Reading Reiman’s book I allow my distaste for Win-Win Kissinger and McDonald’s (though their products are, in my formerly carnivorous opinion, and in the opinion of billions served, tasty)  to color something more complicated and important– how does one carry out a dream and where does one get help learning that difficult thing?

And Reiman has concrete recommendations– make a short, emotional one-minute purpose film that inspires people with your vision.   Bring in outside experts to energize your organization.   He points out the folly of expecting someone from inside an unworkable workplace to be able to fix the problems of that workplace.  This is also basic common sense.  If the people you have don’t care, find people who care.  It may be easier to do when you can pay the expert consultant her enormous fee, but it needs to be done nonetheless.  My program is designed for poor people and is all about workarounds, I have solved a dozen problems already, a dozen more await.  There is a workaround for each one.

I ran a meeting recently, thinking it was very snappy and productive as I went from one agenda item to the next, succinctly, leaving space for discussion, nodding sagely at every criticism, no matter how slapdash, wrapping up precisely when I promised I would.   I presented a lot of information, laid out immediate goals and challenges and succeeded in everything but recruiting anybody to help me in any facet of the work.  Or even getting anyone to respond to a series of subsequent emails about it.  When I got home, still energized by what I thought of as a productive meeting, I had an email from one of the directors.

“When you’re feeling overwhelmed”  was the subject line.  Under it was a long forwarded email about the many exertions the successful, well-to-do business woman turned energetic social entrepreneur had ahead of her in coming days; proofing the new product, expanding the line to Canada, exploring cheaper production of the product line in Canada, hiring a new North American liaison and raising the money for her salary, breaking in a new secretary, meeting with the powerful partner social entrepreneur from India, accepting another award from the Prime Minister.  The email, intended to give me the inspiring idea that I wasn’t the only one with a lot of work ahead of me, was forwarded to me, I noted, (not without a bitter aftertaste), at the exact epicenter of the meeting, when this tired director was reading her friend’s email and forwarding it to me from her Blackberry.

You can see dynamic speakers at TED talks speaking eloquently of the need for a program exactly like the one I am running on a small scale, in one school, with ten kids.   They talk about the need to allow children to experiment, follow their imaginations, create, problem-solve and collaborate.  The model of schools in our grim, divided, fearful, murderous society is a holdover from factory days when industrialists needed millions of literate High School graduates who could follow instructions, repeat those instructions in unison, if prompted.  

No Child Left Behind, a program with a stirring slogan/name with unintended irony as great as the old Arbeit Macht Frei sign worked in metal atop the gates of an infamous death factory, is a remnant of this factory school mentality.  (OK, this comparison might be unfair, there is no evidence the Nazis didn’t intend the irony of their slogan, they were famous, after all, for practical jokes with a big punchline.  I should also give the designers of No Child Left Behind the same presumption of irony.)  

Like all visionary programs to deal with longstanding problems, the basics of No Child Left Behind (since rebranded as Race to the Top) were clear and simple.   You give standardized tests that measure how every student compares to every other student, you do this often, focusing the children’s attention on the importance of these tests and how to do as well as possible on the tests.  If a kid fails, force them to learn the stuff the second time around, the third time.  If the teacher fails, fire that teacher.  If the school fails, close the school and let a private outfit run it better.  Clean and easy to monitor, just hand out boxes of number two pencils and fire up a bunch of computers to do the scoring and tabulating.

If you watch the TED talks of Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Sugata Mitra and others you will wonder how, in actual practice, we carry out the ideal of having public education where children, motivated by their imaginations, reach for things considered impossible in a society that values things only in terms of its market sale value.  Externalities like the world’s largest prison population, no decent jobs for most graduates, a dispirited electorate who don’t even bother voting for the corrupt politicians that represent our democracy, well, these are just things to get over, eh?

Here’s another thought to keep in your head at the same time:

Every positive vision of the future began as a dream in somebody’s head, spread because it was a good idea that flowered in other people’s imaginations.   Every organization promoting such ideas began with one or two people.  What luck it must be to have a second person!  But the fact remains, we are set here briefly between two dates, one that we celebrate every accelerating year and one we do not know, unless we are sitting on Death Row, our last appeal denied, date set.  Better, I am thinking to myself alone, and for a clear reason, to be a small light someone might some day read by than another hissing passerby, rushing headlong in the darkness.

All to say, I’m making my way through the rest of Reiman’s book.  He’s a smart guy, no matter how stupid some of his examples and quotes are (e.g., Henry Kissinger as the ultimate win-win guy), and I need all the help and inspiration I can get at the moment.