If only I could get X person (President, senator, multibillionaire, celebrity) in a room with Y (your favourite 3P Rockstar) then the world would change.  

Having heard (and thought) some version of this many times ever since I came across this understanding…and then having actually run a number of 3P programs over the past year, my perspective on this has shifted completely. Whether I work with street kids in Kathmandu, pilots in a corporate HQ, 6 random school girls or combatants in a militant group is, in a sense, irrelevant to the bigger picture of how do I make an impact on the world that moves it in a better direction.

The way the world is set up, I don’t get to pick who meets who and gets impacted by what over their life time.  

So the random school girls might have a father who heads the regional armed police forces; the politician I work with might get exactly ZERO % of what I’m saying but a CEO I work with might be on a committee that heavily influences tourism policy in Nepal. * I’m almost the worst judge of where I should start and what my ideal ‘impact’ looks like. It’s a myth to think if I only had x as a client or I could get x in a room with y for 3 days the world would change. Maybe.

But the world also changes through each of us un-seeing barriers where we’d made them up before and finding in our own experience the freedom we keep talking about.  

Besides, most big things don’t look like big things when they start. It looks like A conversation A chance encounter A random idea A side project We go where we’re called and do what we’re inspired to do and almost always get surprised by how those small things suddenly got so bold. Another example: I thought development/community work is a good place to start with making some larger, societal impact. First thing that happens when I think that’s a good idea- I start getting invitations from tech firms to run programs on innovation. I love the idea of that, it seems an obviously fun thing to do even though it has no relation to what I thought is the right place to begin. So, yes. It started out as a side track and somehow, through a long series of improbable events I found myself speaking to a room full of women entrepreneurs from across the Asian region which connected me to someone in a government department in-charge of education reform who thinks this is all very curious and wants to know how this relates to changing stodgy old bureaucracies.*

Service opens doors.  

Lots of love and good luck to all of you who are inspired and starting things; and to those who are still waiting: deepening your own understanding of the human mind still seems to me among the most radical acts of service to self and society. *All examples are true….and reminders to me of how much I don’t know and can’t predict.? For more on service, serendipity and social change, subscribe here

Originally a Facebook Post