“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees. If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”
- Paul Gilding, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World
Entrepreneurs have to be dogged and passionate. “It’s like going into a bar filled with 100 beautiful women. You ask the first one, ‘Will you go out with me?’ And she says no. You ask the second one out, and she pours her drink on you. The third one slaps you. Well, most people would give up at beautiful woman No. 2 or No. 3. An entrepreneur is the one who gets all the way to No. 100. And marries her and lives happily ever after.”
Here’s a thought. I call it Instant Goodification. It’s simple. The landscape of socio-economic responsbility is a changing. People are tired of mere symbols of participation (like the livestrong bracelets, red/pink ribbons, or product(red) swag). We expect more. We want real-time impact and real connections (like Kiva, charity:water’s Google Earth proof program of water wells or Oprah’s Katrina Home Registry – where you don’t just donate money, but buy folks personal items like toasters and picture frames).
From my little cousin crying because he didn’t know his home phone to a number scribbled on a cocktail napkin, ten digits is a powerful sequence to have. For me, 813.920.1266 is a number ingrained in my mind. It’s my Grandma’s. She’s gone now. But I still dial it every so often. Today it reaches the Eagles Golf Club instead.
In our cell phone world, I wonder if numbers will become a lost memory as we default to our digital address books. And when we lose our phones in a cab, do we lose more than just a list of digits?!
Nature is not a place we visit on weekends. It’s not a destination that’s separate from our everyday selves. Increasingly people see nature as an essential part of who we are. We are natural when we… eat fresh from greenmarkets on Grand Street, play polo on bikes in Roosevelt Park on Chrystie Street and graffiti fauna and flora on the streets. In today’s modern world, we continually discover ways to bring nature back.
Throughout time, counterculture has been feared, celebrated and often imitated. As technology is the new social currency of our day, geeks have risen as aspirational icons. They are geek gods, loved for their relentless pursuit to find breakthrough solutions to age-old problems. E.g. Herman Miller for Aeron Chair, Frank Gehry for Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Nicholas Negropont for One Laptop Per Child.
Cancer is Live Strong. AIDS is RED. Spinal Cord Injury is Superman. As opposed to earlier generations who view disease only as an end point or something to fear, people today have grown up in a culture being empowered and inspired by disease. Let’s rethink the problem-solution paradigm of pharma marketing.
