On May 3. 2009, Paul Hawken made an unforgettable commencement address to the class of 2009 at the University of Portland.

So beautiful. It’s long so took the bits that moved me most and copied it below but I would highly highly encourage you to take a moment and read the whole speech here because I don’t think the bits I took can justify it.

But here goes:

“When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there. But let’s begin with the startling part.

Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider.

We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering.

Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich. The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation.

You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.“

This post was sparked by NJ who again, never fails to inspire.

In her latest post she took a piece of advice from Muhammad Yunus who said this:

When you don’t know where to start…

Start small. Do what you can with something you care about so deeply that you simply can’t not do it. Stay focused, close to the ground, rooted in everyday reality. Trust your instincts and your eyes: do what needs doing any way you can, whether the experts agree or not. Put practice ahead of theory and results ahead of conventional wisdom. If it works, keep doing it. If it doesn’t work, change what you’re doing until you find something that does work.

Start small, start with whatever is close at hand, start with something you care deeply about. But start.

But small has the power to tilt things both ways. The baby steps we take now will compound in ways we never expect because so much of the future is past our line of sight.

A few examples.

In 2004, 1.4 million petitioners who signed for the recall of Hugo Chávez were punished by having their names released to the public. The resulting misallocation of workers across jobs has ended up costing Venezuela up to 3% of its GDP. (article)

Right now, decades after the one child policy was implemented in China in 1979, the Chinese extended family, with its network of brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, uncles and aunties, brothers and sisters ranked by age, cousins always underfoot, is on its way to extinction. An institution that was a societal bedrock for millennia has been shattered. (article)

Did anyone see these repercussions coming?

We shouldn’t underestimate the power of the small. Find what you’re passionate about and yes, start small and start now. But make sure it’s genuine, because every step we take now will impact us down the line.

Before taking your baby step, think forward and imagine it compounded a hundred times. If you like that impact it makes, then please, keep going!

The future would be an beautiful place if everyone’s small steps moved towards a genuinely positive end point.

A few interesting articles I read today here and here.

The first point is that pyramid schemes are still very much alive.  Call it what you want, (they call it “network marketing” here) but the same idea holds in that if you wanted to, you could probably be making a cut of some company’s profits by selling to your friends and acquaintances.

The second article makes it clear that social media is changing the game.  With current and developing social media tools, you will have the ability to maintain relationships with an increasingly wider audience.

Marketing stats will tell you that the power of recommendation is stronger than most channels. So companies (or even you) are realizing that the easy thing to do is convince you to market their product or organization within your online network.

There’s a driving factor in network marketing.

Trust.

Try to quantify that before using your networks for the next profitable opportunity that comes along.

“Dear God, I didn’t think orange went with purple, until I saw the sunset you made on Tuesday.  That was cool.”

This was taken from a Sara - a little girl writing letters to God.

Thinking like an adult isn’t always the best way to approach things.

There’s something amazing about how kids process information.  They take in what they see and appreciate it as something new rather than automatically assimiating it with things they already know.

The outcome?  Love for the simplicity of everything around you, attention to details missed, and an immensely creative outlook.

(I wish this video didn’t end in an ad but..)

Maybe it’s time to backtrack and re-learn a few skills we once had.