Changing the world
God created man in His own image and sent Jesus, The Buddha, Zoroaster, Muhammad, and many other spiritual teachers to walk the earth so that…so that…someone at Christie’s Restaurant in Houston could make a cowboy shrimp. (John Margolies)
Early on in The Marketing Seminar, participants are asked what change they are trying to make and who they are trying to change.
Seth Godin’s definition of marketing is to make a change happen. Therefore, your marketing needs to change somebody. Who? And how?
Faced with these questions, a lot of us go big. “I want everyone to participate in this initiative!” “I’m trying to end loneliness forever!” “I want to change the world!”
It’s as though our actual work is too feeble and modest to consider. We want to be Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Bob Marley, Oprah, Brené Brown, Gandhi, Lizzo. We want to start a movement or get rich trying.
In reality, though, we might be just trying to delight our community enough to feed our families and go on a couple of vacations every year. We are giving them pressed and clean clothes or delicious meals. We’re offering support to help them do a thing that they want to do, in a way that’s convenient for them. Could it be enough?
It’s more glamorous to talk about changing the world. But to make progress on this massive endeavor, we might need to start with a tiny corner: “I’m trying to change health outcomes for Black women.” From there, we might to get even more specific: “I’m trying to help Black women go from frustrated, unheard, and wary of doctors to confidently advocating for their healthcare needs and those of their families.”
How many of these Black women? “As many as possible!” comes the reply. Anything smaller seems like a cop-out. But no...where do we begin? How many are we capable of serving with the tools and resources we have today? We might refine our target even more to a particular local community or to those struggling with a particular health issue, like diabetes.
As the scope narrows, things get more real. The work is no longer to “raise awareness” or “speak out.” It’s to get down to business and start testing our assertions about how we’re actually going to make this change happen. We’ll probably have to deal directly with actual people and their opinions.
And that’s exactly why so many of us prefer to “think big” and contemplate “changing the world” instead of doing it. Because actual people and their opinions are scary. Failure is demoralizing. It’s cozier to stay in the idealistic realm where our grand vision can remain pristine and unsullied.
In reality, there are a lots of ways to change the world for the better, starting with your own family. Most of them will not make you wealthy or famous. If that’s not your standard, that will suit you just fine.
You’re probably already doing it — you’re probably already changing the world. If you’re not changing it in the direction you want, you can fix that. And then you can build from there.
Changing the world on a giant scale is not the standard. That’s not the only way to measure the value of a human life. For me it’s too much pressure. I prefer to think small.
Ironically, as a teacher, I probably have changed the world in some small way by positively influencing the trajectories of my students. But my school couldn’t serve everybody. It was called The Little Middle School. It was deliberately small so that individual people could feel known and appreciated for being themselves. It didn’t always work, but sometimes it did. To make it bigger in the name of reaching more people and changing more lives would have eliminated its effectiveness and defeated its purpose.
If you are burdened by a sense of responsibility to change the world, I hope you can find a way to do it that satisfies you, even if it’s more modest than you imagined.
And if my words give you any relief, then I will have fulfilled my purpose in writing this. I’m not trying to change the world over here — I only want to share a few ideas. I hope you find them useful.
