Which means one of two things:
1. You must either improve your leadership abilities so that people will follow you where you want to go.
Or, if you already have the skill…
2. You must find the right people willing to go on the journey with you.
The right skills or the right people—figure out which one is holding you back.
Benjamin Franklin knew how to make things happen.
He founded the first post office in the (future) United States, its first subscription library, and even established the first fire departments and police force.
He created what eventually became the University of Pennsylvania and the nation’s first learned society (The American Philosophical Society) to promote useful knowledge for the good of the citizenry.
He was able to do this by constantly asking, “What does this community need?”
It might seem like this question is harder than ever to answer. So many of the things we need have already been created.
But even in the digital age, humans need new creations.
Maybe the community isn’t the one you live in, like it was for Franklin. Maybe it’s one you can create online.
Maybe the needs are less tangible than they were for Franklin. We have fire departments and schools, so what do we need now?
Perhaps it’s connection. Or understanding. Or a group. Perhaps it’s a new tool or process.
The needs may be less obvious than they were, but they still exist. And remember, the needs Franklin solved were probably not obvious in his time either, even if they are now in hindsight.
Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”
But how do you write things worth reading in a world where so few people are reading anymore?
Most of what is on the Internet is video and garbage. It’s not worth watching. Yet that’s the medium that we consume.
Perhaps the modern equivalent is to do things worth making a TikTok reel about.
Old Ben must be rolling in his grave.
It’s the ambiguity. It’s not knowing what you’re doing or what’s expected of you. Uncertainty about the next right thing.
It’s the feeling of incompetence, not being sure that it’ll work or if you’re even capable of it.
Most jobs can be quite fulfilling, but not knowing what needs to be done, or how, robs us of that satisfaction.
And in the Information Age, with ever greater numbers of bullshit jobs and technology advancing faster than ever, that uncertainty becomes more prevalent each day.
It’s a truism, but you can’t do more than you can do.
Yet we insist on committing to more than we’ll ever be capable of doing.
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” —Arthur Ashe
You can’t do more than that. And you don’t have to.
How will you know when you get there?
“Know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.” —Stephen R. Covey
If the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall, he liked to say, you’ll only get to the wrong place faster.
Not tomorrow. Not Monday. Not on New Year’s Day.
Right now.
There will always be another tomorrow to which you’ll be tempted to push it.
Until there isn’t.
Maybe your job isn’t to teach the class a mass of information.
Instead, your job may be to show students you believe in them. That they have value. That they are anything but average.
Analyze a great piece of writing they submitted with the rest of the class.
Have them teach a math solution to a concept they’ve grasped.
Give them the opportunity, as my middle school teacher did, to stand up and lecture on a great moment in history on which they have become self-motivated experts.
Do your best to get them the information, but more importantly, help them understand their worth as human beings.
After that, the learning will take care of itself.
Sometimes, you just have to let people touch the metaphorical hot stove.
We work so hard to enact safeguards that protect people from making poor choices. But those safeguards are often viewed as a shackle on individual liberty, either because they don’t understand or don’t care.
For many, experiencing the consequences of their actions and choices is the only way they’ll learn.
The problem is that, in a society as interconnected and dependent as ours, those of us who know the stove is hot often get burned in the process.
I found this quote in one of my old folders. It seems apt for our current situation:
“This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
—C.S. Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age (1948)
