Want to save the world? Reclaim the authority of your unique dreams
How genuine imagination begins by leading from our inner authority
Friends, after my last post, a few readers sent me messages along the lines of: “Vision sounds great, but I’m too worn down from the pandemic to dream. How do I dream again?” My answer: start by learning to listen for the authority of your unique desires. As always, I love hearing your reactions. Much love, M.
The vast majority of crises we have today — personal and collective — are due to a crisis of imagination. We’ve mistaken other peoples’ dreams as our own, and it’s expensive: it’s burning us and the earth out.
As a Millennial/cusp Gen X’er, the advice I heard endlessly as a kid was: work hard to get into a good college to get a good job. This was, I was told, the path to the good life.
So, I followed the formula to a T: I accumulated fancy degrees from Harvard and Yale; and by my early/mid 20s, I was advising Fortune 500 CEOs on strategy. I invested enormous time, energy, and resources to follow this dream. But it didn’t bring me to the promised land. In fact, I ended up pretty miserable and burnt out.
I thought, hm, maybe I have the wrong flavor of the dream? …maybe I need to be in a place where people are innovating and changing the world! So, I pivoted to Silicon Valley. And by my early 30s, I was leading product development teams at unicorn startups. But I found myself burnt out again, and the sense of meaning I’d been hoping for felt even more elusive.
I’d seemingly done everything ‘right’. So where had I gone wrong?
I listened to prevailing wisdom instead of my own. I honored other peoples’ dreams more than my own.
In this interview (which I highly recommend), writer Amitav Ghosh uses this small, but powerful example to illuminate climate crisis as a ‘crisis of culture', and thus of our desires:
If you travel to the Middle East or to water-stressed parts of Australia, you’ll see people trying to grow lawns. …They purify seawater and create, through very energy intensive processes, very expensive water to create lawns.
And really, why? People who lived in these areas 200 years ago didn’t know about lawns, didn’t care about lawns, didn’t want lawns. So where does this desire for the lawn come into being? You have to think about a whole history and culture of people reading, perhaps Jane Austen and imagining English greensward all around them. That becomes the model of the good life.
What we are all chasing is a model of the good life that comes to us from culture.
Just as it was expensive for me to follow dreams that weren’t intrinsically my own, it’s also tremendously expensive for us as a planet.
Our stuckness is perhaps a reflection of the supremacy we’ve granted to a relatively limited number of ways to have a good life: to pursue wealth, fame, power, &/or a family with 2.2 kids and a picket fence lawn.
And we’ve built our culture around replicating these limited models of success — through education systems modeled after factories, policies that privilege wealth over work, and tying basic benefits like healthcare to traditional employment. As a culture, we’ve made it difficult to do life differently when we most need breakthroughs in seemingly every realm of life.
So, what are we to do?
Change starts with reclaiming inner leadership — owning our own inner authority, dreams, and desires.
Many traditional cultures understood that each person is born with unique gifts and dreams; and that communal thriving was dependent upon everyone expressing the deepest desires of their soul. It was up to each person in the community to help the young identify and develop these gifts, and express them as only they could.
So, what has your inner authority been trying to tell you?
The answer may be what helps us all get out of our collective stuckness.
Let us know by dropping a note in the comments or sending me an email!
PS, In a culture where this understanding has been lost, this is the crux of the work I do with leaders: helping people reclaim their inner wisdom and gifts, and to learn to listen deeply to what they already know.
Melissa’s Reading & Watch List
What’s giving me hope?
Mythology’s Wisdom | “A Story to Save the World” with Michael Meade (YouTube | 7 min)
Knowing that times of challenge are inevitable, all ancient cultures embedded wisdom in their myths to help us find our way again. Master storyteller and mythologist Michael Meade has a knack for sharing this ancient wisdom applied to modern challenges. The story he shares in this snippet does a great job at illuminating the essence of our modern crises, and how by each of us picking up our unique thread, we can re-weave the world. (If you enjoy this, he also has a weekly podcast called Living Myth and a lovely book: The Genius Myth).
What’s making me curious?
What if we all need to start thinking of ourselves as artists? | Amitav Ghosh on how climate change can’t be left just to scientists. (LA Review of Books, 12 min)
In Amitav Ghosh’s book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, he makes the case that climate solutions can’t be left to scientists, technocrats, and politicians. “The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination,” he writes. We need radically new ways of thinking, even a new paradigm, to see how the Anthropocene is already transforming our lives. And who’s best equipped to show us this reimagined landscape? Artists, of course.
But my question is: what if we all need to start thinking of ourselves as artists?
What’s making me laugh?
Sometimes epiphanies are staring us right in the face…
And in case you missed it…
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