About the event

Beverly Schwartz is the Senior Strategic Advisor/Consult at Ashoka—an international network for social entrepreneurs. She is also the author of Rippling—a book on how normal people like you and me have become system and world changing social entrepreneurs and problem solvers. On March 2nd and 3rd, Beverly was invited to come to Evergreen and share her experience with students. Students from different class participated in her workshop, presentation, and mentoring sessions.

In this article, I want to talk about some of my reflections from Beverly’s presentations and workshop. 

About taking risks

Beverly inspired me to take risks and follow my passion. This theme came out many times from her talk, as well as from her book—jump right into the pool.

After Beverly’s talk on Friday afternoon, my friend Andy came to me and told me that I am not an entrepreneur, but an intrepreneur. He later said it was because I am too careful and cautious with what I do. I don’t dare to be out there and risk things. It is true. I have been very careful with what I say, do, and the consequence of it. My belief is that I cannot fail, otherwise, I will be miserable. Until now, I haven’t seen this in me so clearly—the need to be safe and secure. Perhaps to many people, I am somewhat fearless, but I know that I live with fear everyday. Fear stops me from taking many actions everyday, from small actions to future planning. 

My latest fear is with my education research. It is a travel research that will bring me to China, Denmark, and Finland to learn about what educational approaches and models help students develop creativity and problem solving skills. Feeling excited, I also often feel unliberated and constrained by my own fears of failing, or not reaching my ideal goals.

This has limited my imagination of what is possible, and act from that ideal vision. Taking a new action will risk losing what I already have, while facing an unknown future. I am struggle between the unknown and my passion. Beverly encourage us to jump off the pool, when we have the passion. I am inspired to take the risk and confront with unknown, because I am going after something that is extremely rewarding. I feel what I have to do is to connect more deeply with the ideal goal, and use that excitement to direct my action, as opposed to my lingering thoughts on consequences of change.

photo credit to Chris Brignola, from unsplash.com

Finding the true north

In the past two years, and throughout this quarter, I have been finding my true north, and is still not so clear what it truly is. Lately, and especially with Beverly’s talk, I noticed that many people’s true north and passion arise from certain kind of problems facing themselves, their community, or the larger society. Individuals feel a sense of responsibility, righteousness, and purpose to help improve the undesirable conditions.

I have not yet clearly and strongly identified such a problem, one that pushes me to defy reality and work towards a better, yet different world. Perhaps this is because I am staying out of touch with certain realities, and thus cannot get a deep understanding of what problems are facing our society. At the same time, I am not fully recognizing my own feelings, and values, and dreams to understand my own passion. Dreams to change the world, in order to be meaningful, need to be grounded in the imperfections of reality and the lives of people. I think I need to be more open and empathetic towards the conditions of my fellow community members, and consolidate my dreams based on what people really need.