From vision to action: how to beat a lack of self-belief

My friend has a failure to follow through. He is full of ideas. Catch him on the right day and you’ll be blown away by what a happy, vibrant, and creative person he is – always leading the conversation, always ready with an idea for taking things forward. Every now and again, he’ll astound me with a new idea for a book, a project, or a business initiative. The next week I’ll ask him how things are going. He’ll be cagey. ‘Oh, ok’. Time drags on and the great idea drops from view. It is a continuing cycle: ideas proliferate but plans go nowhere.

My friend is a visionary thinker. But he continually fails to follow through on his ideas.

I was talking to another friend about Philosophy for Change. This person is empowered individual, the CEO of a successful tech company. He brought into focus what the problem is: a question of self-belief. The gist of his insight was as follows:

‘What if someone doesn’t believe in themselves? What if they’ve been told from day one: ‘You’re no good’. They may be brimming over with ideas. But when it comes to applying these ideas and realizing them, they don’t have the courage for it. It is not that they don’t believe in their ideas. They don’t believe in themselves, and thus they don’t believe they can achieve these ideas’.

It is a genuine problem. Plenty of people have the capacity to think and dream. Without a robust sense of self-worth, however, these dreams tend to remain dreams. We know where we want to go. We just don’t believe that we have the resources to get us there.

RIP Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011)

‘No one wants to die. Even people who want to get to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is a destination that we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be. Because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old and makes way for the new. … Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become’.

Socrates, Seneca, Heidegger, or Sartre never said it better: ‘Remembering that you are about to die is the best way of I know of avoiding the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart’. Powerful words and true from one of recent history’s most inspiring innovators and entrepreneurs.

Commemorative vision: how to use the past to transform the present and future

It is August 28, 1963. A crowd of 200000 people gathers in the National Mall in Washington DC. Black and white faces choke the avenues down either side of the Reflecting Pool. Their numbers stretch all the way to the Capitol Building.

Before them is the Lincoln Memorial, where Abraham Lincoln studies them from his giant chair. A man stands at a microphone, dwarfed by the statue behind him. The civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King is ready to deliver his speech.

The people have come to the US capitol by buses, trains, cars, and planes. Their hearts are full of hope, their minds full of memories of recent struggles. They have known discrimination, inequality, and injustice. Canvas the crowd and you’d hear thousands of stories of persecution, forced eviction, police brutality, murder and lynching. You’d hear the name Rosa Parks, who eight years before had refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. You’d hear stories of boycotts, sit-ins, angry demonstrations and non-violent protests.

The crowd simmers with anger and frustration. Will this day mark a grand step forward in the struggle for civil rights? Or is it the case, as Malcolm X says, that the organizers have compromised too much by allowing white folks to participate?

The crowd has come to Washington DC fired by the momentum of the Civil Rights movement, which is not yet a decade old. They reflect on this struggle and what it has achieved as Martin Luther King steps up to the microphone.

Dr King takes a deep breath, as if drawing back the string of a bow. He has never addressed a crowd of this size, in a moment of such importance. He looks down the Mall towards the Capitol Building. Yes, he thinks – this is my time.

He tenses the string and releases it. The arrow of vision flies into the future.

‘Four score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation’.

It is an epic start. Instead of invoking the present struggle, reinforcing in the minds of those gathered the memory of the movement that they are presently engaged in, King has them remember a different struggle: the struggle by Lincoln’s Republican Party to free the American slaves. In this gesture, King invites those gathered – black and white – to reflect on a common source of empowerment: the fact that one hundred years before, the United States granted freedom and equality to all its citizens. Yet as people’s breasts swell with patriotic pride, King brings them back to earth. His next line speaks of present day reality.

‘But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. … And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition’.

In the space of two paragraphs, King has projected for his audience a visionary sense of what it means to exist in the present. The people in the crowd have inherited the empowering promise of freedom, but today, this promise is denied them. How can they forge ahead? How can they overcome this ‘shameful condition’ – a condition that affects all of them as Americans?

Dr King speaks. The arrow of vision flies into the future, and the hearts and minds of those gathered in the Mall fly after it.

‘I have a dream’, King says – a dream that is ‘rooted in the American dream’.

‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!’

King’s speech is a brilliant example of commemorative vision. Commemorative vision involves reframing people’s perspective on, and expectations of, the present moment by taking the memory of a common source of empowerment and projecting it differently. King’s dream concerned the future of the Civil Rights movement, yet it didn’t simply tap the energy of that movement, it’s anger, resilience, its practical and symbolic achievements. King reached back one hundred years to find an important source of empowerment that everyone contributing to the movement could take pride in. The Emancipation Proclamation was a historical precedent that legitimated the struggle and that warranted an optimistic vision of its success. Seizing on this historical touchstone, King projected a bold vision of the possible future, offering an inspiring map for thought and action.

Martin Luther King transfigured the historical moment. It is not that he predicted the future. By drawing on a common memory, he projected a roadmap linking the past to the future, which would serve as a guide for those who continued the struggle, even after his death.

By refiguring elements of the past, visionary leaders make the present a place of opportunity. This is what King did in his speech at the National Mall. This is why we remember him as one of the great leaders of history.

Camus, absurdity, and revolt

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French writer and existentialist philosopher. He was born in Algeria, then a colony of France, which gave him a unique perspective on life as an outsider. Camus is widely acknowledged as the greatest of the philosophers of ‘the absurd’. His idea is simple: Human beings are caught in a constant attempt to derive meaning from a meaningless world. This is the ‘paradox of the absurd’.

Camus’ novels The Outsider (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956) are classics of existentialist fiction. His philosophical writings The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951) are profound statements of position. Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Unlike fellow existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, he accepted it.

It is instructive to consider the differences between Sartre and Camus. The men were friends in the war years. Together, they edited the political journal Combat. But Sartre and Camus fell out on account of their views on Stalin and communism. In the 1950s, Sartre threw his support behind Stalin’s vision of the global communist struggle. Camus was unimpressed by the “ends justify the means” mentality of the communist revolutionaries, and would have no truck with Stalin’s mass production of a perfected humanity. In The Rebel, he made his criticisms plain. Sartre responded in anger and ended their friendship.

Philosophy and courage

Courage is an ancient philosophical virtue. Some people are surprised by this fact. Philosophers, in the public mind, are forever associated with petty debates far removed from the hot-blooded concerns of life. When we think of philosophers, we imagine fusty academics puzzling over questions like: ‘How long is a piece of string?’ – not stalwart, heroic, types brimming over with courage and forbearance. Yet courage was an essential philosophical virtue in ancient times. Socrates and Aristotle affirmed this virtue, and other philosophers echoed the idea. Philosophers were made of sterner stuff in the ancient world. Philosophy wasn’t just an education in ideas. It involved a rigorous personal training aimed to free us from false ideas, and to prepare us for whatever hardships life could throw our way.

Swarm politics (or, the future of tea and coffee culture)

It was billed as the Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes. In November 2004, the election was over and Democratic Americans had plenty to feel blue about. George W. Bush, who’d stolen the Presidency four years before, waged oil war on Iraq at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, trashed international conventions and implemented draconian extensions to the powers of spy agencies at home, was back in the White House.

Conservative America was having a party. The other forty nine percent of the country, along with the rest of the world, was fighting a major depression.

James Zetlen decided to make a personal statement. He bought the domain name
www.sorryeverybody.com and posted a photo of himself holding a handwritten sign that said: “Sorry world (we tried) – Half of America.”

It was supposed to be a joke. Very quickly it became something else.

For the new year!

On January 1st, 1882, Nietzsche wrote in celebration of the new year:

“Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish for myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year – what thought shall for me be the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things: then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati [love of fate]: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer” (Gay Science, 276).