Meaning
I had a long and relaxing Christmas vacation, from December 24th all the way to today. It was great to have time to spend with family, reading, discussing things, and thinking about life, blogging and everything in between.
But all that thinking made it painfully clear to me that it’s time to stop playing with words and get my hands dirty. It’s time to get to work. This world is in quite a pinch, and we need permanent, practical, implemented solutions to make it a better place for more than just you and me.
I believe we are the ones who can build those solutions (if you are reading this, you are part of what I call “we”). As curious, interested, creative idea people, we can come up with the ways to change our shared and personal futures, and through them create meaning and change lives.
Working Man Hands by The Newb
The Big Idea
Here is what is keeping me up at night:
- This world is a troubled place: People are suffering from war, hunger, curable diseases, unhappiness, unbearable work loads, unemployment… All problems that could be solved if we only had the will. At the same time, our planet is on the verge of throwing us up: Its blue seas are becoming gray swamps filled with plastic bags and toilet seats. Its forests are being cut at a pace that’s almost impossible to imagine. We are spending natural resources on credit, forgetting that there is no way we can ever repay our loans.
- The solutions are there: There was a time when we could honestly say we didn’t know what to do to change the course of things or that we didn’t know the severity of the damages we were making. That time is history. We know exactly what we need to do: cut consumption, lend out a hand and help our neighbors, spend our days focusing to the important instead of filling them with the urgent. But most importantly, we need to get serious about this.
- We are a lazy bunch of people: In my next posts, I will share more of my adventures as I try to change my consumption habits. What’s interesting is that pretty much every one of the stories seems to have something to do with overcoming laziness. It’s unbelievable how deeply we have built consumption to be a crucial part of our society. Each of us can easily consume a plastic bag worth of wrappers and other material that is used once and then thrown away — every day. Same with electricity, water, heating, transportation, food, pretty much everything we touch. Even if we don’t seem to consume anything much, we are still filling our land with pollution that wouldn’t need to ever have been created in the first place! If there was a quota for consumption, there wouldn’t be any left for the things we really want to spend our money in (like the new book, laptop or iPod).
- That’s why the traditional solutions don’t work: We have been getting educated about these things over and over again. All of us have friends who can’t stop talking about the world’s problems and how we need to change things to solve them. And most of us have read more than one book, watched more than a handful of TV shows talking about things such as the climate crisis, and heard a rock star talk about AIDS, poverty and justice. But there is a limit to how far education will get us, and I think we are pretty close to that limit now: Most people will never change their habits unless it’s effortless and they can clearly see how the change improves their personal happiness. They do care about the problems, but for one reason or another, they think that someone else needs to provide them with the solution, and that everyone else needs to go first. They don’t want to be the weirdos who cut back when everyone else is consuming to their hearts’ content.
- So what do we do? We are idea people. We are creative. And we care. And now we also understand that the change has to start from somewhere. If we keep waiting for someone else to come up with the easy solutions for us to then use, we’ll have a long wait ahead of us. Let most people wait, they’ll do that anyway, but let’s make sure someone is creating those solutions people are waiting for.
Smart people tell me all the time: “I’m sure someone is working on a solution.”
Well, that’s great — assuming that someone really is working on the solution.
But I wouldn’t count on it. I’d rather walk an extra mile to make sure that I’m doing all I can to help and then notice that someone already came up with a better solution than wake up one day and notice that in the end, everyone was thinking the same way and there was no such someone out there!
Insanely Interested in 2009
This site, blog, or whatever you want to call it has been looking for its shape since October when I branched it off my personal blog. In hindsight, all that search has been about finding meaning. And now that it’s getting clearer to me, I want to do all in my powers to make Insanely Interested meaningful.
That means that this will be a blog that is all about action. Instead of talking about abstract things such as being interested, getting more focused or enjoying a good life, I want to make this a place where all that comes alive and instead of talking and thinking about these things, we are working to put these qualities into use and build the solutions that our friends are waiting someone to come up with. This is how we will make it happen:
- Problems and opportunities: I will write about ideas that I want to pursue further, problems I think we need to address, and about cool solutions that I notice the someones around the world work on. Every now and then, I might still make a jump back to the more generic topics such as being curious and focusing, but all of that will be there for one purpose only: to enable the flow of ideas and help us turn the ideas into action.
- IDEAS: This is what we need the most. Practical ideas for products and procedures that will make it easier for people to change their habits — so easy that they don’t even notice that they are doing something ecological and overly ethical. Being the business oriented guy I am, I am thinking products and services that improve the lives of the customers while at the same time helping fix our planet. But it can be anything, and I can’t wait to get to see what you will dream up!
- Implementation: Innovation is what happens when ideas get implemented. And innovation is what changes lives. Without implementation, ideas are nothing more than a nice way to spend time. So, we need to take all the ideas that we come up with and look for some that we can build into real products and solutions. And then, we need to get to work. I’m not sure how this will happen, but what I hope to see this year is an explosion in the number and quality of ethical, ecological ideas that get implemented.
I get excited when I think about changing the world through business, because that’s something that takes the things that I’m most insanely interested in, and gives them a meaningful connection: entrepreneurship, human behavior, marketing, building things, and having an impact on peoples lives and surroundings. If that’s something that gets you going as well, join me in turning the dream into reality.
If this post gave you ideas, speak up! I want to hear it all. What do you think is needed to get the change started? Do you think it makes sense to even try? Or should we maybe try even harder? Thanks for listening, now the floor is yours, so speak up!
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