Transformers often pay a hefty price for our comfort

By JENNY LUESBY

Several weeks back, across the space of a few days, I sat before a row of videos declaring the vision and ideals of three different organisations. They were each inspiring, yet all with a common thread: celebrating the change-for-good brought by those who dare to be different and to innovate.

It’s a common theme these days: very current. And it’s lovely, fluffy, feel-good stuff.

Some draw on those who have improved lives in the most colossal ways of all, be it Mandela, or Gandhi, or the business equivalent in Steve Jobs. They draw on music, and beautiful sentiments, and quotes about the power of originality and being true to what we believe in.

But I wonder, sometimes, how much these messages can really inspire more change without us understanding the other side of the lives of the people who really do change things for the better: what it costs them, the suffering, the setbacks, and why they never give up.

Resistance

For it isn’t just a matter of believing that things can be better (although that’s a first base), or seeing how to get to a better place and engaging in the day-in, day-out process of showing others, leading and engineering the change.

Achieving genuine transformation and innovation takes an ability to keep going through every kind of opposition, resistance and blows.

For sure, we can delude ourselves now that no-one ever told Mandela he was a fool, or bad, or wrong, misguided, and hurting people, that no-one ever attacked him, spread malicious gossip about him, or tried to destroy him.

But the truth is that for most of his life that was his daily experience. He spent years in jail, lost his wives and loves. He was often alone, and widely condemned.

Quality time

We can believe he was never beaten when he was fighting apartheid, and we can set aside how he must have felt afterwards, as he lay bruised and abused.

Likewise, Steve Jobs got fired from his own brainchild, Apple Inc.

We can look back and think it a small thing, when it set him back so little. But it wasn’t at all some neutral, passing thing at the time.

The people around him, jointly and together, condemned him and decided he was incompetent. They said it, argued it, and won the day.

He had to suffer that.

He had to walk out of his own HQ the day the board sacked him knowing they all believed he was bad for those around him.

Yet the real miracle of these transformers is not that they bounce back, or that they find a way to keep going in achieving what they believe in.

The miracle is that they maintain their respect for all those that condemn them along the way, and still carry on caring enough to deliver results that end up changing the world, for everyone.

They never stop trying, no matter how much they are scorned, or how hard the path.

Which is a reality we should inject, sometime, into our inspirational literature.

For making things better means caring enough to keep going even when it’s really hard. There are no 9-to-5 hours for those on a mission. Moreover, the personal price can be heavy, with those who stand beside them paying too: the wives, husbands, the children, the friends — for they often come second.

Our true passionates, who reshape the world from the smallest local arena to the broadest international canvas, are rarely available for routines, and don’t often get bundles of ‘quality time’.

Yet, perhaps, all those inspirational videos aren’t meaning that we should all be apostles.

Perhaps, instead of being dazzled by these leaders’ extraordinary achievements, we should see the lessons from how they struggled.

Maybe, really, all these videos are trying to say is that we need to care enough about what we are doing to do it through every setback.

For the truth is that no team ever won, no mission ever thrived, on us forever clocking off early, or on us so losing the point of our efforts that we think all that matters is to argue about what we cannot do — to call a matatu ride to work too much effort, to pour our energy into resisting giving any more.

When the smallest act of engagement becomes a source of resentment, then we have become the problem, instead of the solution.

Dreams and beliefs

For we can surely, every one of us, opt for an easy life. We can stand by as others fix things. We can ride the efforts of others, picking up the gains and never suffering the pains. But if we all do it, and we each believe that any extra effort is unreasonable, then those who suffer today will forever suffer.

And there lies the real point of all those fluffy expositions about living what we believe in.

We most certainly can trade our dreams and beliefs for convenience, and many do. But we won’t end up with convenience, or even living easy, if what we traded was the energy to make our world better for all of us.

We will only end up, each of us, living in a worse world for everyone.

The writer is Group Content and Training Editor at The Standard Group.

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