You matter. You are here for a purpose, something you and only you can do. This world needs you. Not the you that goes to meetings or parties or classes and wants people to like you. I mean the you that wonders, in the empty moments, just who you are anyway, and where you might be going. The you that has looked up suddenly and for a brief second thought “I know what the world needs!”.

Remember that moment, if you can. If you can’t, watch for it, it will come again. Repeat to yourself, every moment you can remember: “I matter”. My dreams matter. My life matters. The work I want to do matters. The way I want to live matters. Every truth I speak matters. Every battle I fight against the darkness matters. Every step I take matters. Every act of love, for myself or for another, matters.

It does not matter if you are the most brilliant, the most witty, the most popular, or the most talented. It does not matter if what you say or do is the most profound, the most original, or the most revolutionary. It matters that you say what is in you to say, and do what is in you to do. Be brave enough to express what burns in your soul or sings in your heart and not be rich or famous for it.

Whatever it is you are here to do, know that it is needed, no matter what reception it gets. Know that you will reach the beauty you strive for even though your first attempts are clumsy or crude. Start where you are. It is enough.

The road to freedom is long and has pitfalls that you won’t see coming. You will be tested. When you are so tired and confused and frustrated that you just want to give up, remember: something is always better than nothing. Take one step, and then another. Write one page, write one song, draw one picture. You are alive, and you can create. That is everything.

Remember who you are. You are not this body, this mind, this set of ideas and beliefs and emotional responses. You are a power beyond words. You are the power to say something new, to create something different, to design and rework and lead and give voice to an idea. It is a precious gift. Use it.

I was born a communist. But I got over it. Business is fun.

When I started, I definitely didn’t care about “creating a business”. I just wanted to make a living, and profit was just a way for me to get by.

As I’ve gotten more and more interested in business and developed my skill at it, I am more equally invested in the purpose of the business AND the profit – BUT, I’m not interested in the profit MORE than doing interesting and good things in the world.

I think of it like a game, where I only win if I do all three things:
a)    create an interesting and good thing that helps people
b)    really enjoy myself
c)     make a profit

So without a) and b) I lose. So I am motivated by c) but only in part. It’s part of the game, the business game, to make a profit. It’s part of my motivation. Like, playing basketball, you want to win. But if you don’t have fun, and the people around you don’t have fun, you lose, even if you win.

But can you imagine playing basketball where nobody wanted to win? Eh, boring.

It’s all about the balance. Profit isn’t evil. Profit out of whack with the joy and the service might become evil. But don’t blame profit. Blame the out-of-whack-ness.

Here is the common progressive wisdom on why our governmental system sucks:

1. It sucks because we need real leaders and there are none to be found.
2. It sucks because people are apathetic and don’t vote.
3. It sucks because the system is corrupt (money buys power).

What I see is that at some point we will have a paradigm shift in government. The apathy of voters is an important indicator of the core problem.

Our entire paradigm of government is based on a “Government as Parent” model. We protect people from themselves, punish people who are bad, take care of the weak, etc.

One problem is that it’s a bad parenting model. Good parenting is about setting boundaries, but functional ones. Having consequences, but ones that help the kid grow and learn, not be randomly punished.

But a more fundamental problem is that adults don’t need parenting. What we really have is a failure of our culture and society as a whole to support people to develop into mature adults. Government is part of this problem, but not the whole of it. All of our institutional systems encourage and enable dependency, most notably to me, our education system. We are not encouraged and supported to grow and develop into autonomous beings capable of critical thinking and self-government.

Now don’t start thinking I’m a Libertarian. I think there are many solutions, but kicking people to the curb isn’t one of them.

I don’t believe that the government can solve this problem, or any other institution. They come out of a paradigm that is flawed. The #1 flawed assumption is that people are unable to govern themselves. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you treat people as incapable, many of them will start to believe it and act it out.

I also don’t think a single Savior-type leader is the solution. We don’t need a leader, we all need to become leaders – our own leaders. No government or forced education system is going to get us there, because growth and development is by definition a self-directed process. The good news is that it is a natural and organic process, so it’s just a matter of learning how to allow and support it for everyone.

This isn’t something that makes sense in the context of a political process as we know it because our current political and governmental processes are fundamentally dis-empowering. There is a reason nobody votes, and the answer is not more voter drives. It’s a problem that can’t be solved at the level of development that created our government. It has to be solved by the next level of evolution. that next level will envision “government as facilitator of the creative human endeavor”, not “government as parent punishing errant children, run by other children who aren’t mature enough for the job anyway”.

I agree somewhat with the idea of “The system is broken and it’s not worth fixing”. I do think at some point we will have a critical mass of folks who are operating from the next paradigm and we can start using the infrastructure of the government and industrial complex to facilitate creative self-empowerment and social evolution. There are a lot of resources there which would be dumb to ignore. But until that point, I think it makes more sense to focus energy on developing our understanding of how to evolve and liberate ourselves and support others to do the same, until that critical mass is reached.

Many people have visceral reactions to the word God. Fear, discomfort, aversion. But the definition of God is changing. Old ideas of God come from the top-down hierarchical paradigm. God is being understood once again as bottom-up.

Sometimes I observe a sense of confounded inexplicability behind the questions asked about school shootings. “How could they possibly do this?” etc. I want to offer two things: some ideas on what could be up for these kids, and also a clear conviction that the problem is not mysterious or unsolvable. This distinction is important to me because a problem is never solved until people believe it is solvable. Before that, they cry and throw up their hands but don’t get down to work. A willingness to change things generally comes after a certainty that things can in fact be changed, and the change will be better than the current situation.

So. Why would a kid shoot his classmates?

I would guess they have unmet needs for meaning, hope, belonging, acceptance, connection to something greater, choice, contribution, and connection.

Many of these kids have all their “sustenance” needs met – but not the real life-giving needs named above. I think “basic needs” for human go beyond food and shelter – we need a lot of emotional needs met to feel OK. I think studies have shown that emotional abuse can be worse than physical abuse – emotional neglect is worse than physical neglect.

I don’t see these incidents as isolated or strange. I see them as symptoms of these needs not being met by our culture in general. Kids, especially teenagers, don’t have much of a context to deal with the pain of all those human needs not getting met, and yet they feel that pain keenly. Our culture doesn’t encourage admitting that these needs aren’t met – and talking about them openly–and brainstorming solutions that would meet them. If you’re a teenager, and don’t know any of those needs will ever get met – let alone even have a consciousness that those need are there – and are just swirling in the pain and confusion of them not being met – that is a very desperate place to be.

That’s why I am a fan of NVC, because it can really change our culture to be one where everyone’s needs are met in profound ways – and the first step is learning to have a consciousness around needs in general – that they exist, that pain and violence are a result of them not being met, and that by talking about them, two of our deepest needs can be met: connection/empathy and contribution to each other’s wellbeing.

This clarity about the cause of suffering is essential. Without understanding the cause of something, it is very difficult to remedy it.

I also value NVC for humanizing “otherness” – seeing these kids as human, as kids in a great deal of pain, not inexplicable, but rather extreme expressions of the desperation any of us might feel in a similar situation. If we can own their expressions of pain as echoes of our own, then we can start to understand each others’ pain, and from that understanding, create healing and new ways to address these needs.

Many people are motivated either by the carrot or the stick: reward or punishment. Reward and punishment is embedded in our education system, our justice system, our economic system, and many parenting models. It starts with wanting to get good grades and gold stars. Or avoid disappointing our parents.

I believe to be truly creative and free (not to mention happy) it’s essential to root out the extrinsic motivating factors from our brain and do what is in our hearts. True motivation is “What is alive in me today? What makes my heart sing? What am I passionate and excited about doing?”.

Some definitions

Intrinsic motivation = when you do something because you want to.

Extrinsic motivation = when you do something because of the result it will get you – generally, either avoiding punishment or receiving a reward.

Our culture runs on extrinsic motivation. Schools, parenting, the justice system, our economic system – they are all focused on rewarding certain behaviors and punishing other behaviors.

There is research showing that rewarding people damages their intrinsic motivation to do a task, even when they previously enjoyed doing it. Once you get hooked on the reward, you lose touch with your internal motivation. But neither punishment or reward work as long term motivators.

Extrinsic motivation is bad for your mental health

In our culture, a mid-life crisis is expected. Why? Why do we end up with people who are 30, 40, 50 and wondering what they are living for anyway?

I think this phenomenon and the high percentages of depression in industrialized countries is related to our focus on what an activitity will get us rather than finding and doing the activities we enjoy for their own sake.

You know what it’s called when you enjoy what you are doing? Play. We have a special word for doing activity we enjoy, because so much of the time we are doing things we think we ‘have’ to do but don’t want to. What is up with that? These are our lives we are talking about.

Many people give up on living lives that are truly enjoyable every day. They believe this myth of “there are just some things you’ve gotta do” or “that’s just the way it is”. Well I think that is B.S. There are lots of choices in life, and the major one we all have is whether or not to give up on what we truly want, or keep being creative and persistent until we make it happen.

Protecting what is precious

I’ll tell you what gives you that kind of energy: being devoted to protecting and following your heart.

There are lots of things in the world that will sap your energy, if you let them. Watching the TV news, for instance, will just about do me in. So I stopped. For 10 years I haven’t gone near the major news channels. Because I could see that it would destroy something inside me: my faith in the world, in humanity.

It’s up to you to protect what is fragile and precious in yourself: your true desires, your dreams, your faith in yourself, your belief that you can create a life for yourself that is what you want. Not to mention your faith in your fellow humans, that we are all doing the best we can, and we will get there someday–to the world we all can enjoy.

We can change the world, but to do that we have to believe it can be changed. There is so much out there that is negative. I’m not saying live in a cave or in denial. I’m saying do what you need to do to protect what can be so easily damaged. That still small voice in yourself can get drowned out by despair pretty easily. It’s up to you to fight for it, in a world that can be very harsh.

Pay yourself first

When you catch a vision of who you are, of what you want to do, that comes straight from your heart–say yes to it. Whatever it is, put it first. Before your job, before what you “have to do”. Take the financial concept of “pay yourself first” and apply it to your dreams. Pay your energy, your passion, to yourself first.

It takes dedication. It takes being willing to go against the grain of pessimism and cynicism. But it is the birthplace of joy. Nothing feels better than knowing who you are and that you are going for what you truly believe in: that you are giving yourself to your path, your purpose, your heart’s longing.

To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else— means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

~ e.e. cummings