This World Needs Brave

Brave. Not a long word, but a big one. A big, scary word, that implies reaching for important things and taking serious risks. But it’s a big, scary world, too. And it that world needs us to be brave enough to change it. To speak truth to power, to find work with meaning. To take chances instead of settling for a damaged status quo. We can’t face our global problems if we’re too scared to look right at them. The odds are stacked against us. Global systems of capitalism and governance are very, very broken. Not to mention climate change and the way all of our antibiotics are ceasing to work. I am not going to pretend you can law-of-attraction your way into endless freedom and abundance. I’ve met Iraqi refugees and Ebola survivors; the law of attraction is victim blaming crap and it has no place in my coaching world. Everyone that if you design your system around exceptional people, it won’t work. You can’t assume that people will be brave, wise, or unerring. You need to assume that people will be ordinary. Sometimes amazing, sometimes terrible, and generally mediocre. You design systems for average people doing average work. If your system requires extraordinary people, you are in trouble. And you know what? We're in trouble. Our soil is literally producing vegetables with less nutrition. Our attempts at stopping climate change are pathetic. For ten years in a row, the world has seen increases in conflict deaths. And Syria. And Iraq. And Afghanistan. I’ll stop there, but I believe the point is made. So, our system is broken and there is no authority to fix it. Too many people are benefiting from watching us burn. What next, then? My best guess is brave. Our systems are too damaged to function without exceptional people. So it’s time to become exceptional. To do jobs that matter, to do them better, to leverage our time and our money and our willingness to make a lot of noise in an attempt to force this broken world to turn out just a little bit better.