“There is no passion to be found playing small — in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living” — Nelson Mandela

Time is Nothing // Around The World Time Lapse from Kien Lam on Vimeo.

“You write in order to change the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” –James Baldwin

The question that caused this surprising reaction was: why do you believe in social entrepreneurship?

My brain raced through the reasons, each reason followed by what seemed like a giant red sign that screamed CLICHE.

I believe in a human centred market based solution to poverty. Cliche.

I believe in making the world a better place and leaving it better than when I’ve found it. Cliche.

My background and journey has led me to believe in the power of entrepreneurship. Cliche.

I come from a family whose lives have been changed through entrepreneurship. Cliche.

I stumbled into this field unknowingly. Cliche.

Social entrepreneurs are the key in unlocking the levers of change. Cliche.

Entrepreneurs have the ability to create and imagine. With support and direction, they can be the change we wish to see in this world. Cliche.

In my head, my emotions quickly churned from alarm to frustration. Why was it that I couldn’t explain my Why? Was it because I didn’t understand my reasons, or perhaps was it because I couldn’t find the words to say? Why do these reasons seem cliche? Perhaps people have overused them and they have lost their meaning…and then the question becomes: how do you do then convey any one of those reasons with sincere belief? After all, how can you capture passion and belief in 30 seconds. In a paragraph even. It doesn’t seem to even do it justice.

About a year ago, I wrote a post on the beauty of imagination. Although I still believe this reason to be true, I couldn’t quite get the reason of imagination to fit within the social enterprise/international development piece of my beliefs. It seemed to be missing a piece.

Truth be told, I was then suddenly mesmerized by the fact that perhaps, just perhaps my reason WAS the combination of all those cliches. And more. After all, isn’t our understanding of the world a limitation of what we have experienced and inherited knowledge? Maybe my passion is a combination of a mathematical sequence of experiences (I like to think so!):

1) I grew up painfully aware of poverty and socio-economic oppression

2) My family’s story changed because of entrepreneurship

3) Hard work and a stranger’s faith in seeing my potential allowed me to continue my education in Canada

4) I unknowingly stumbled into this field through a “less-than-perfect” volunteer program through my university

5) Tipping point: Working with a women’s group in Lesotho ignited an understanding that identifying change levers in a community can change lives

6) Throughout business school, I have developed a natural bias towards a market based solution to solving problems.

Therefore: 7) Giving people the opportunity (just like it has been given to me) to create and imagine a better life is the key to creating a better world. A human-centered market based solution.

Social entrepreneurship shakes up our complacencies by challenging how we place value on social and economic urgencies. It spins us round in two ways at once: it shows us the sights and social values that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us parts of capitalism that have grown rusty and need changing.

So what is my answer you might ask? For now, I will have to settle for a combination of cliche answers, my sequence of experiences and that nagging voice at the of my head telling me that it is the right thing to believe in.

I’ll be sure to check in with my answer again as my understanding of the world continues to grow!

1. The action or process of flowing.

2. Continuous change

I recently stumbled across this incredible list of books, that I am now determined to get through in a year (I’ll let you know how it goes!). It’s a list by one of my fav organizations: Acumen Fund and it’s actually the recommended reading list for their Fellows. I’ll try to share my thoughts on each book as I move through the list. But meanwhile, here it is, below:

*I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read.. it’s a start!

GOOD SOCIETY READINGS
Rights and Responsibilities

“Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew” by Fareed Zakaria (Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994)
“Empowerment for a Culture of Peace and Development” by Aung San Suu Kyi (address to World Commission on Culture and Development, November 21, 1994)
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr. (April 16, 1963)
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (General Assembly of the United Nations, December 10, 1948)

Liberty and Social Order
“The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer” by Wendell Berry in Farming: A Hand Book (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich)
“Democracy” by Langston Hughes
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
“Message to the Congress of Angostura, 1819” by Simón Bolívar
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
“Two Concepts of Liberty” by Isaiah Berlin (address before University of Oxford, October 31, 1958)
Equality and the Quest for Social Justice
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela by Nelson Mandela (Little, Brown and Company)
“O Yes” by Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Riddle (Random House)
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Community and the Search for Humanity
The Book of Genesis
The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism
“How to Write about Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina (Granta 92, Winter 2005)
On Identity by Amin Maalouf (Harvill Panther)
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin)
“Speech upon Receiving the Philadelphia Liberty Medal” by Václav Havel (July 4, 1994)
Property and Productivity
Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (Anchor)
Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by Arthur M. Okun (The Brookings Institution)
The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldūn (Princeton University Press)
The Republic by Plato

LEADERSHIP READINGS
“Because We Can, We Must” by Bono (commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania, May 17, 2004)
A Confession by Leo Tolstoy
Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka (W.W. Norton)
“A Far Cry from Africa” by Derek Walcott in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (W.W. Norton)
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t by Jim Collins (HarperCollins)
“Great Expectations” by Bill Gates (commencement address at Harvard University, June 7, 2007)
Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky (Harvard Business School Press)
Leading from Within: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Lead by Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scribner (Jossey-Bass)
Letter to Daniel: Dispatches from the Heart by Fergal Keane (Penguin Books)
The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin (Harvard Business School Press)
“Rebellion” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov
Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society by John W. Gardner (HarperCollins)
Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness by Robert K. Greenleaf (Paulist Press)

FICTION
Black Boy by Richard Wright (HarperPerennial)
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (Vintage International)
A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Heinemann)
Independent People by Halldór Laxness (Vintage International)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Penguin Books)
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (Creative Education)
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Anchor)
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (NYRB Classics)
Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh (Mariner Books)
Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell (Penguin Books)
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Heinemann)
Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh (Grove Press)

BOOKS ON INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR POVERTY ALLEVIATION
“A Behavioral-Economics View of Poverty” by Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir (American Economic Review 94, no. 2)
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier (Oxford University Press)
Capitalism as if the World Matters by Jonathon Porritt and Amory B. Lovins (Earthscan Publications)
Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (Anchor)
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Penguin Press)
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C.K. Prahalad (Wharton School Publishing)
Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Norton)
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Knopf)
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando de Soto (Basic Books)
Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer (University of California Press)
Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green (Bloomsbury Press)
Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Norton)
Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven (Princeton University Press)
The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by Williams Russell Easterly (Penguin Books)
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio Hardcover)
The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press)

I’m at a point in my life where the decisions that I make are of my own and not predetermined by the educational path that society has laid out for me. It’s almost alarming to think about the fact that for the bulk of my life, my education has been shaped by forces that has approved this path as a “natural” (and necessary!) progression in life.

What I have come to realize over the years though, through a series of unexpected events, is the beauty of imagination. I was asked the question recently of why/what I was passionate about international development/life… and the words tumbled out of my mouth explaining social change and the nature of aid before I even realized, wait… it was a textbook answer and wasn’t the entire truth of why I love this space — the international development, empowerment, social finance and innovation.

So, to share a part of my journey, this is why I love this space and what I got out of education. One word.

This singular concept has been the catalyst in my life to meeting amazing concepts, people, books and initiatives. It is the fact that imagination is the ability to free oneself from the constraints of the human condition. The fact that when you allow yourself to explore spaces that leaves you completely out of your comfort zone, it serves the purpose of satisfying your mind’s hunger for knowledge. The human thirst for knowledge and innovation is the result of imagination. Humans create and invent as a result of imagination. But most of all, what I am really excited about, is that with imagination, its the way that we view the world, and how all of that can change, the minute you open your mind to the possibilities. i.e. Sharing a social finance model to the investment world, empowering women that there are better ways to feed your child or something as simple as remaking used plastic bags into makeshift footballs.

Most people get through life thinking “if I can make it through this, things will be better later,”. But they forget that the experiences they have, shape who they are and they eventually forget what “better” and “later” means. And we see this phenomenon everywhere, from the politically suppressed society to the 40 year old who’s working a 9–5 job and hating every minute. They forget how to imagine. To create. They forget that the predetermined paths that society has somehow conjured along the way may not necessarily be the best path, and who is to say it is the right path to begin with? The world/people are quite eager to give you a set of criterias for your life, if you let it. They forget that we have the power to change educational systems, to change the way we interact with our environment, to bring on the culture we wish to see at work, or to even bring on that New Economic World Order!

Is imagination merely a talent, such as a good singing voice, the ability to “make things up: or “think things up” or “get ideas”? Or is it, like science, a way of knowing things that can be known in no other way? We have much reason to think that it is a way of knowing things not otherwise knowable. As the word itself suggests, it is the power to make us see, and to see, moreover, things that without it would be unseeable. In one of its aspects it is the power by which we sympathize. By its means we may see what it was to be Odysseus or Penelope, or David or Ruth, or what it is to be one’s neighbor or one’s enemy. By it, we may “see ourselves as others see us.”

It is also the power by which we see the place, the predicament, or the story we are in.”

– From Wendell Berry, “God Science, and Imagination” in Imagination in Place

The truth of experience always contains an orientation towards new experience. That is why a person who is called ‘experienced’ has become such not only through experiences, but is also open to new experiences. The perfection of his experience, the perfect form of what we call ‘experienced’, does not consist in the fact that someone already knows everything and knows better than anyone else. Rather, the experienced person proves to be, on the contrary, someone who is radically undogmatic; who, because of the many experiences he has had and the knowledge he has drawn from them is particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them.

The dialectic of experience has its own fulfillment not in definitive knowledge, but in that openness to experience that is encouraged by experience itself. But then this gives the concept of experience that we are concerned with here a qualitatively new element. It refers not only to experience in the sense of the information that this or that thing gives us. It is that experience which must constantly be acquired and from which none can be exempt. Experience here is something that is part of the historical nature of man. Although in bringing up children, for example, parents may try to spare them certain experiences, experience as a whole is not a thing that anyone can be spared. Rather, experience in this sense involves inevitably many disappointments of one’s expectations and only thus is experience acquired. That experience refers chiefly to painful and disagreeable experiences does not mean that we are being especially pessimistic, but can be seen directly from its nature. Only through negative instances do we acquire new experiences, as Bacon saw.

Every experience worthy of the name runs counter to our expectation. Thus the historical nature of man contains as an essential element a fundamental negativity that emerges in the relation between experience and insight. Insight is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive. Thus insight always involves an element of self-knowledge and constitutes a necessary side of what we call experience in the proper sense. Insight is something to which we come. It too is ultimately part of the nature of a man, ie to be discerning and insightful.

- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Chapter: Analysis of effective-historical consciousness, ‘The Concept of Experience and the Essence of Hermeneutical Experience’)

Complex. Intriguing. Radically undogmatic. Experience with purpose.

Here’s to — not the end — but the continuation of something purposeful.

” What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but if the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson