How to transcend Time with the Teach Fishing story
In 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote "The World will certainly accept your own measure of your doing and being, whether you sneak about and deny your own name, or whether you see your work produced to the concave sphere of the heavens, one with the revolution of the stars.”
We don't know what that last part means. Are there examples of people who saw their work "produced to the concave sphere of the heavens"?
But our version of this goes something like this: if you can evoke a powerful emotional core human experience, and express it well, then use AI to make it understandable to different people in different formats, then use social media to share it with those who really have the ability to 'get it', then use media like online press releases to spread knowledge of it worldwide, then use internet tools to filter the people who are inspired, motivated, and moved to action by it, then build working relationships with them, then you've achieved our conception of having your work "produced to the concave sphere of the heavens."
No one can take such an accomplishment from you. If it resonates with large numbers it can only grow. If it is genuinely helpful to people it will spread far and wide for a long time.
One example of this from our community is the Hero Awards. It began with a thought 6 years ago: how can we celebrate the feats of ordinary people who've taken great strides to help achieve the UN's 17 Agenda for Sustainability Goals?
First, it was an Instagram and Twitter post. Then it spread to other social networks. Then we created an academia.edu account for it. After people began winning the prize, others found out about it and wanted to push themselves further to do similar things. Now it is world-famous and always on page one of Google for "The Hero Award" even though many other organizations offer something called a Hero Award.
Best of all, almost every day it instigates conversations about Sustainability that we couldn't have dreamt of 6 years ago, from people in Africa, India, Jamaica, Vanuatu, the Azores, New Zealand, Slovakia, and Madagascar, just to name a few we had this month.
Important takeaway: we didn't spend money to create the Hero Award. We didn't spend a lot of time. What we did was use popular free technologies to encourage behaviors that people ALREADY want to engage in, but for which they could use a little push.
We started by asking questions about one of what today we call the 6 Portals: the Hero's Journey. AI and social media friends helped us determine that assisting lots of others on THEIR Hero's Journeys can have much more impact than just engaging in your own journey.
You can develop similar things by asking the right questions of the Portals in your life.
