Let the Age of Humanity Begin
We have spent the past 150 years learning how to be good capitalists. We have learned how to use our leadership, ideation, strategy, execution and promotion skills to produce financial return. Those that were willing to take risk, calculated risk, in order to gain financial return have been rewarded with success in the form of things; tangible assets that we can touch. We have beautiful homes, drive nice cars, eat at nice restaurants, and vacation in the most beautiful places around the globe. What if all of this was just a warm up act to what we are really here to do?
The Industrial Age came and brought a new modern culture. We graduated from hunters and farmers to “civilized” beings that could create financial return by using our brains not just our brawn. After the Industrial Age came the Information Age where we continued to use our intellect to create income for ourselves. Over the past 20 years we have lived through the Technology and Internet Age where instant communications and access to every bit of data in the world is now at our finger tips.
What if the past 150 years has been preparing us for our greatest challenge ever? What if this is all just a training ground and now it’s time to put our learning into action? We have learned how to build great organizations with strong leadership, idea creation, strategy, execution and promotion. The only challenge is that the end result has been financial gain for those who took the risk. Most of these people, not all, have not re-invested that capital gain back into society. What if it’s time to take all of these amazing skills and decide that we have enough? That we have consumed enough and we now need to focus our efforts on the greatest challenges we have ever faced: saving humanity.
We are destroying humanity. We have dealt with this issue through a non-profit and NGO culture that says “if you want to go change the world you need to get paid less than if you want to make money.” This is insane!
We invest billions of dollars in the latest and greatest technologies when we should be focusing on investing in brainpower. We could be redirecting the brainpower of the smartest university students, the amazing institutions on Wall Street, technology companies and other financially motivated organizations. I know that we need to make a living and put food on our tables, but when will we be satisfied with what we have and start focusing our talent on the pressing issues that matter the most?
I wake up every day wondering how I can impact the world and leave this place infinitely better than I found it. I am a life coach, one that loves to work with a very unique creature called an entrepreneur. My goal is to help the best and brightest entrepreneurs focus their time and talent on impacting our most pressing challenges; education, the environment, political reform, homelessness, human trafficking; the list goes on and on.
We need to start looking at social change as a business. We need to use all of our skills; every ounce of leadership that we have, our ability to create new ideas, put good strategies behind them and then execute and promote them effectively to the world. We have learned how to build great organizations, now we just need to stop focusing our energy on making more money and refocus our energy on the issues that matter.
Let the Age of Humanity begin!
Larry Kesslin 