#36: I Don't Want to Save The World
Pip, your piece reminds me of the "The Starfish Story" by Peter Straube where a young boy throws starfish one at a time back into the ocean so they don't die in the hot sun. He throws each one at a time, yet there are thousands and thousands along the beach. This young boy wasn't rescuing ALL the sea creatures, but he was devoted to making a difference for the few he could save. I think there is real beauty and power in that notion.
- Amanda
Pip Coburn pcoburn@coburnventures.com
PIP COBURN
"I DON’T WANT TO SAVE THE WORLD"
I might easily have been interpreted as callous or mean-hearted when about 15 years ago I said:
“I Don’t Want To Save The World”
The orientation of the conversation I was in was that solutions HAD TO “scale” to matter
I didn’t have great words for it other than “I don’t want to save the world” but maybe what I meant was that I think each and everything along the way matters… each smile we share with a stranger or our kindness with a cashier who has had a long shift… everything… and that when we get that sorta something sorta Silicon-Valley-ish “scale” thinking and maybe even a smidge of self-importance in us it might discourage the possibility for the beauty and grace and patience and gratitude and joy of continual tender mercies and “small" successes among seven billion people.
As far as I can tell none of even the best of us humans — with the exception of Will Smith in several action movies — has yet accomplished this vague idea of “saving the planet” and I am thinking that the actions many might implicitly judge as merely “small” or “pointless” or “unscalable” might be under-rated.
And… if along the way we can cure XYZ well why the heck not!!!
I was walking down Park Avenue with a friend Michael Hawley a bunch of years back. By age 38 – among many other things -- Michael had been fundamental in leading an effort that created 190 schools in rural Cambodia.
Astonishing!
We were walking toward a celebration. Two young kids were arriving from Bhutan – the next country Michael was involved in creating schools.
So… I looked over at him as we walked and I said “this must be an unbelievable feeling having set out with a big vision and look what has been accomplished!?”
He didn’t break stride and instead softly re-oriented me…
“It’s just one relationship at a time.”
Thank you Michael.
Then this year I heard my initial intention of “I don’t want to save the world” far more helpfully put by a nun Pema Chodron:
“We don’t set out to save the world. We set out to wonder how others are doing and to reflect on how our actions might affect their hearts.”
Pip's first-person bio:
More than anything I suspect I am driven by “community”. Across the past 15 years, I have grown to realize that most any success or fortune I have had in the work I do I have re-invested back into my activities such that I spend more and more of my life with people I adore and admire and just loving being around and working on a whole bunch of things that I am incredibly excited about. I like to study monumental change at the levels of society, marketplaces, organizations and most significantly… people. I like to study culture deeply. I like to attempt to create culture. I like processes and helping others advances their processes and being trusted deeply. My wife Kelly is both supportive and probably confused by what I do for a living which makes two of us. My greatest joy in my work is when I have the chance to draw from two decades of intense work in order to perhaps help someone have a break through.