A photo of myself and my traveling companion with Dr. Muhammad Yunus



Visit to Bangladesh

Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh, a city typical of a ‘developing world’ megalopolis: a chaotic amalgamation of pollution, noise, people, animals, poverty, wealth.  But there is one difference: in this city, the skyscrapers belong neither to multinational corporations nor to government opulence.  No, in Dhaka the largest buildings are owned by Asa, BRAC and Grameen Bank—some of the largest and most innovative social enterprises in the world.

I am here to learn from Grameen, a bank unlike any other in the world.  Owned by the poor and built to unleash their own potential to move out of poverty, Grameen shouldn’t work.  But it does.  The village in which I am staying is 30 miles from the border with India.  When I awake in the morning an old lady brings a steaming hot bucket of water with which I shower; I find it to be an invigorating way of starting the day.  Breakfast consists of delicious, homemade food whose provenance I can see out the window.  My interpreter and I follow a loan officer as she travels by bicycle rickshaw or rickety motorcycle to group borrower meetings; the borrowers, all women, sit beneath a bamboo structure in the center of the village.  In an orderly fashion, with the precision of a Swiss clock or a well-drilled military, the women make their cash payments.

When Grameen first starting making loans in the 70s, Bangladesh was a country that practiced Purdah: women neither left their homes unattended by men nor did they control the money.  Thirty years later, sixty Bangladeshi women are meeting in the center of a village—accompanied by men, managing the family’s money and running, or helping to run, the family business.  Grameen has changed the social fabric of an entire nation; it shouldn’t work, but it does.  Had I, on the day of the Bank’s founding, presented what currently exists and laid out a vision for how to get there, every businessman, politician, activist would have laughed me out of the room: they would have known that this wouldn’t work.  I pause and think of the fact that Jesus was a carpenter, Gandhi was a lawyer and the best and brightest bankers, statisticians, mathematicians and lawyers, precipitated the Great Recession of 2008.  So much for the connection between what we know is possible and what is actually possible, between expertise and success.

Introduction to Poetry

As of this morning my goal in life is to become a professional tennis player.  I’m in 10th grade and, completely disinterested in what high school has to offer me, tennis is an anchor that prevents me from going adrift.  Today our English professor has us reading ‘A Defense of Poetry’ by Percy Shelley and discussing the philosophy of Romanticism.  Poetry is of little interest to me, but as I sleepily glance through the pages I come across a sentence that catches my eye: “Poets are…the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.  Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ” These lines have bottled the swirling smoke of emotion that drifts in and out of my young mind.  There is a language that can catapult me from the banal to the sublime.  For the first time in my life I say to myself what has to be one of the most powerful sentences in the world: I am a Poet.

Bipolar

The thing with being a poet is that the attendant assumptions about you can be misleading, dangerous, wrong.  For years I have been a chaotic whirlwind. Some days my mind is full of energy; I come up with dozens of world changing ideas; I neither need to sleep nor rest; I feel an unflinching sense of bliss and love of life.  Then other days I can barely move; the synapses in my brain seem to fire through molasses; my skeleton struggles to hold my body aloft; I care about nothing and feel an excruciating restlessness.  And for years this is either ignored or attributed to the disposition of an artist. 

I spend much of my college years glued to a sofa, overwhelmed by depression.  Where others my age travel, hang out with friends and generally enjoy college life, my days are bleak and solitary.  Despite this, I manage to live in Spain for a year, bicycle across the United States, get a masters degree from Brown University and start an organization.

Now, at the age of 25 and two years after graduating from Brown, I can no longer ignore the vicissitudes of my soul.  I am the Executive Director of a non-profit; I have responsibilities that add additional pressure to my frail state of being.  A failed relationship threatens to sever the last chords holding me together.  The clouds darken to the point that I wonder how much more misery I can take.  And so it is that, finally, after 10 years are constant uncertainty and pain, I am diagnosed with bipolar II disorder (the milder form of the illness).  Bipolar is characterized by moods that swing from high-energy to low-energy, from creative to miserable.  For a year my doctor and I work to find the right cocktail of medications to treat my illness. Some of the medications make me extremely nauseated while others make me dizzy.  But the experimentation bears fruit: my moods are for more stable and the side effects are minimal.  I must always remember that I am not an illness, I am simply a human being that has an illness.

Posing in the Mark Twain State Park, Missouri



The Bike Trip

Missouri is beautiful this time of year.  I’ve already bicycled from the Altantic Coast and through Virginia and Kentucky.  The September heat has bronzed my skin; the Appalachians have toned my legs, expanded my lungs.  In front of me is a road that stretches, long and tempting, until it disappears into a ferocious sky rushing headlong toward my riding partner, Jared, and I.  The clouds are an invading force that quickly conquers the space around us; before we have time to react the black sponge of clouds wrings out a deluge of water, hail, thunder and lightning.  Unable to retreat or move forward, we become aware of a disconcerting fact: we are in a lightning storm and we—atop our steel, lighting-friendly bicycles—are the highest points for miles around.

We search the distance for a place of refuge and spot a barn a mile away.  Loaded with our bicycles and all our gear we sprint across a grassy field as all hell breaks loose around us. When we come upon the barn we see a house behind it—a family is in their living room calmly watching TV.  They see us and begin waiving their hands and shout, “Get in the barn!  Get in the barn!” We oblige.  Not a minute after we take shelter, a lightning bolt strikes a tree nearby; it crashes to the ground, not far from where we just were.

After the storm abates the family brings us some food, water and towels: they think we are crazy!  We are grateful to spend the night in the barn.  As we prepare our dinner there is a blissful stillness; the sun sets behind an Earth that has been scrubbed clean.  The morning dawns cool.  We get on the road in the semi-darkness, ready to ride another 80 miles, our only job to use our legs to reach the day’s destination.  The bliss of fitting into a couple of dry bags everything you need to live is thrilling.

2 months and 3,000 miles later I arrive in San Francisco.  I look at a map of the United States and see the extent of the terrain I have covered.  If I can traverse an entire nation with my legs, what can I do with my heart?  What of my relentless ideas, my tireless passion?  Looking back at the map I resolve to honor the beauty of the land and the people and the life that has allowed me to experience such depths of feeling.

I firmly believe that the ideas I disseminate through my writings, my public talks and my other interactions with people have the potential to foster more social change than any organization I can ever create.  To bring home this point, let’s consider the case of Dr. Muhammad Yunus, Founder of Grameen Bank and the co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. To many, including myself, Dr. Yunus is not only the ‘Father’ of microfinance (don’t worry, we will return to this topic in more detail in later chapters), he is also a source of personal inspiration.  Known as the ‘Banker to the Poor,’ Yunus’ bank, Grameen Bank, has over 7 million borrowers in Bangladesh—97% of whom are women.  Grameen has 30,000 employees, has a branch in every village in the country, is owned by its borrowers, manages to empower 65% of its clients to move out of poverty within five years and has, in the past 30 years, been profitable all but three years—and remember, the Bank operates in one of the poorest countries in the world!  Pretty impressive, right?

But now consider that over a quarter billion people have benefited from microfinance—small loans, insurance products, financial coaching and other financial services designed to empower the poor—in large part because of the example he set and the business model he created.  7 million versus 250 million.  That’s a powerful ratio. What Dr. Yunus has done is transform a country thanks to the organization he started, while at the same time transforming the world thanks to the ideas and strategies he has developed.

After many years of wanting to do so, I’ve finally begun writing my first book, to be called ‘Pragmatic Idealism.’ Instead of the traditional model of a writer toiling away on his work in a dark corner of his office, I’m going to take a different approach: every day, I will post my writing from the day.  What I hope is that you, o reader, will provide feedback and suggestions.  THat way, this will be a kind of collaborative, open-source process.  What could be more aligned with my core beliefs?  This is exciting–let’s get started!

Pragmatic Idealism – An Introduction

When I was little, my family lived on a Cul-de-sac near the top of a steep road that wound its way into the Santa Monica mountains in Los Angeles, CA.  From my balcony I could see long, straight streets point like arrows across the San Fernando Valley and into a distance I could only fill with my imagination.  I remember one weekend I became deeply interested in paper airplanes—I believe my mom had even bought me a paper airplane design book—and I proceeded to design and build a number of different models.  Armed with this veritable Air Force of childish delight, I stationed myself behind a gate overlooking a steep drop and began to launch plane after plane into the sky; after each throw I would watch my creation mingle with the wind and excitedly count every second of tenuous flight.  By the end of the day my arm was aching from so many throws, my eyes stinging from staring up into the sun.

Even though I am only 28, I already find it hard to recall all the moments in my life, the variables that, taken together, comprise the equation of who I am today.  I suppose it would be easier to identify a single, seminal moment, but reality is more subtle, more nuanced than that.  Did I decide to commit myself to following my dreams and battling injustice because of a day, 18 years ago, when I transmuted paper into possibility?  Was it when, at age 14, I was first introduced to Romantic poetry and philosophy? Or what about the fact that my dad, an engineer, and my mom, a university professor, have infused my life with a love of science, literature, ideas, technology, language?  Does it matter?

For whatever reason, the thing of which I am most proud is that I am living exactly the life I wish to lead.  There is nothing I would change; no regrets; no doubts about my path.  And of all the things I’ve done—however few—and all the things I hope to do—however many—I believe my greatest contribution to this world is and always will be the passion that drives me.