Activism

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Think about it. We live in a country in which the will to develop missiles is much stronger than the will to save millions of children each year. That's something worth getting passionate about. And isn't that one of the major reasons we are here, to find and correct profound distortions of humanity's purpose on Earth?

This inevitably leads you to Step 5: See the warrior inside of you, the person of courage that maybe you've never really expressed. You'll need to connect with your courage because you'll face constant pressure from yourself, friends, and the culture to not get involved or to give up when things get hard.

Here is another way to look at the kind of courage I'm talking about. For the last few years, I have been director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign. It is an effort to reach, by the year 2005, 100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services. I have a small, young staff. Whenever I do an interview with a prospective staff member, I let them know what I am looking for in an employee. The first thing I say is that I am looking for someone who is committed to expressing his or her greatness. 'What does that mean to you,' I ask, 'and when have you expressed your greatness?' It is fascinating to see how people react to that question and hear how they respond.

For me, expressing your greatness is doing something that you can't see yourself doing. It's going beyond your perceived limits. There is an anonymous quote that begins to touch the place about which I'm talking. 'Be outrageous. It's the only place that isn't crowded.'

So you've 1) gotten in touch with your commitment to serve, 2) faced a problem that concerns you, 3) faced the hopelessness you feel about the problem, 4) looked for solutions, and 5) connected with your courage. That logically leads you to Step 6: Find others to work with, both locally and, if it's a national or international problem, with an institution and people that are working at that level. In other words, don't do it alone. If you try to do it alone, you'll never make it.

I moved through these 6 steps and started a journey that I could never have predicted. In 1978, I began speaking to high school classes about world hunger. Between 1978 and 1979, I spoke to 7,000 high school students. In preparation for my first presentation, I read statements from Jimmy Carter's Commission on Hunger and from the National Academy of Sciences Food and Nutrition Study calling for the 'political will' to end hunger. At that point, I wasn't sure what political will was, but I knew it might start with a basic awareness of who represented us in Washington. So I asked that first high school class to tell me the name of their representative in Congress. I was shocked to learn that only 4 out of 28 knew the answer. So I asked the next class, and none of the students knew. Do you have any idea how many of the 7,000 students knew their U.S. representative's name? Two hundred.

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