What's the Point?

Core beliefs are fundamental to who you are. They reflect what you truly believe about yourself and your world. They form the internal compass that guides you. The idea of your work, your cause, being connected to your core is about knowing what makes you who you are. It's about optimizing what you are good at.

In sports, people talk about the contrast between players who “let the game come to them” versus “force the action.” There is a role for both kinds of players and coaches, but maybe nobody personifies the former concept more than the guy who made one of the most iconic shots in NBA history.

Ray Allen, the all-time greatest three-point shooter in NBA history, is known for getting a “quiet 25 points.” He gets a feel for the game, picks his spots. He lets the game come to him, like in game six of the 2013 NBA finals when he buried a beyond-improbable three-pointer at the buzzer that “spurred” (pun intended) Miami on to an NBA championship over the San Antonio Spurs. Allen knows what he is good at, he's practiced what he is good at over and over again. He's hit that shot in his mind's eye many times before he actually took the one that mattered. At that moment, he knew where to find an open spot based on what was going on around him and when the shot came to him, he nailed it; sorry, Spurs fans. There is a serenity to Allen's game that comes not just from his physical attributes and style of play, but from a clear, strong sense of what he is, and is not, great at on the court.

Like many of the most powerful change agents in the world today, the great players have a focus and passion that comes from something deeply connected to who they are, and that optimizes what they are the very best at. Why tell basketball stories? Because understanding who you are at your core is about each of us letting the game come to us, finding that cause that fits our talents, that fits fluidly into our lifestyle and passions. I can, unequivocally, say that about SVP and my life. Another reason for sharing a basketball story is to illustrate the ideas of core belief and determined optimism in a different way through a different walk of life that might resonate more deeply with you.

David Risher's passion was deeply rooted in his core love of books, which he has had since he was five years old. Would someone less in love with books see the problem the way he did? For others, the cause might take longer to find. What does matter is that your cause is connected to who you are at your core. Because it will play to your talents and passions most intensely; it will feel natural when it comes to you, like the pass that came to Ray Allen in the corner. When your one cause is connected to your core, you will give more to it, more freely, and with greater effort, time and, ultimately, reward and impact.

A Cause Connected to Your Core for Someone Else

“When we first came to America, it was very difficult. I think that really affected the way that I think about the world.” Vu Le was born in Vietnam and moved to the United States with his family when he was eight years old. He went to elementary school in Seattle and then moved to Memphis where his family started a business. He told me, “My parents, like a lot of immigrant families, wanted to own a small business. It's a good way to control things, be their own boss. It's a very symbolic thing.” Vu is a fun guy, also passionate and blunt, almost to a fault. He likes to mix it up. He has this way of looking at you earnestly with a smile on his face and delivering a tough, honest message at the same time. I love working with people like Vu.

He grew up experiencing the challenges of immigration with parents who didn't know how to navigate the new culture or speak the new language. He remembers what it was like being a kid and figuring out systems that were confusing and tasks as ordinary as homework without a lot of support from parents who spoke very little English. He talked a little bit about the experiences that shaped his life. “I knew I wanted to do something that would be helpful to the community, and I think that is because of my upbringing, going through immigration and all the challenges my parents went through.”

After college, like Eric Stowe, Vu wandered for a few years, not knowing where he should land or what he should do. No matter where he went or what he did, he always had the same mantra running through his mind: “How can I be helpful to my community?” That is core to who Vu is and how he sees the world.

He ended up back in Seattle, working with the Vietnamese Friendship Association (www.vfaseattle.org), an organization started in 1978 to help refugees and immigrants resettle in the United States. It was a bit of a full circle. Vu knows how hard things are when the deck is stacked against you. He talks about the kids he sees at one of the Saturday English classes the association runs: “Half of them don't speak much English yet, most of them are low-income, and few have language support from their families at home because their parents work two or three jobs to try to make ends meet or have little knowledge of the school system. We know from current statistics that half of these new-arrival students will not graduate from high school. We work with the school and other nonprofits to try to stem the tide, but there will always be kids whose futures remain uncertain.”

Vu feels VFA is where he is supposed to be. He told me he “wanted to do something great with my life, to go where I am needed.” To go where you are needed is all about being connected to your core. It's about optimizing your talents and life experiences. Vu asks himself again and again, “How would I have helped someone in my situation?” That is an awesome perspective, selfless, forward-looking, a real determination within. How would I have helped someone in my situation? Remember that one; it feels sort of like the Golden Rule.

Vu needed determination when he started at VFA. When he joined, he not only faced the challenges of running a nonprofit, he faced some real hurdles within his own community. To the important elders of the community, many of whom felt the lingering effects of the war in which they fought, Vu was just a young whippersnapper. The elders had lost so much stature in coming to the United States where their professional credentials and experiences were not valued. VFA was their baby and Vu was just an unruly upstart kid who didn't know much. After a bumpy start, Vu stepped back. He started to take more time to get to know people and to listen to their stories.

Vu told me he had to change. He had to learn a lot more about what he didn't know than what he did know (see Chapter 5, Humble and Humbled). Through all that, because he let his cause come to him, he learned how to be a voice for his community.

In Vu's words, “As an immigrant kid whose family went through a lot—war, reeducation camp, migration to a new land with no language skills or jobs—I always felt this guilt for following my passion. For a long time I would think, it's not too late for me to be a doctor and make my parents proud, make our relatives that we left behind proud, too. Once I committed to this path of community organizing and nonprofit leadership, I had to learn to live with the guilt, and also the doubts, and the complete bewilderment and confusion from my family. No one in my family understands what I'm doing, even to this day. I have to be okay with that and to accept that this, at least in the short-term, is part of the price of doing what I feel I'm meant to do.” Vu is living in accordance with something very deep in his core.

If you look back through Vu's life experiences, becoming the executive director of VFA might seem obvious, but for many years, especially in his 20s, it didn't. Sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees when you are so immersed in it. Eventually he listened, looked around, and ended up in a place where he could optimally apply his talents and skills to be, as he desired, most helpful to his community.

Now, before you start thinking that Vu is this saintly kind of guy who sits calmly behind a desk trying to solve world problems, you should also know he writes one of the most irreverent nonprofit blogs in existence (www.nonprofitwithballs.com). He does crazy things like auctioning off the right to choose the middle name of his newborn or have a bathroom stall named after you (like the one that's named for me) in order to raise funds for VFA. His LinkedIn profile kind of says it all: “Vu's passion to make the world better, combined with a low score on the Law School Admission Test, drove him into the field of nonprofit work. Known for his no-BS approach, irreverent sense of humor, and love of unicorns, Vu has been featured in dozens, if not hundreds, of his own blog posts.…”

Whether in his blog posts, his work with the elders, the nonprofit musical he's writing (seriously), or working in the community, Vu is a role model for someone who is doing something deeply connected to he is at his core. In his case, it's his upbringing and ethnicity. He wrote a beautiful blog post (http://bit.ly/1M2MFw1) about Bill Henningsgaard after we lost him back in August 2013, just another poignant way in which the people in this book are connected. One more thing Vu told me, “If you want to do something great, you've got to give up some of the romance, you know. You should be where you're needed, not where you think is the sexiest place to be.” What's at your core that you want to do something about in this world?

The Right Time and Place

Discovering or affirming who you are at your core requires being extremely honest with yourself, taking the time to be self-reflective, enlisting good friends and colleagues who know you well and can perhaps see things you don't see as readily in yourself. Here's a quick checklist you can use:

• What is in my roots when I trace back through the early years of my life? Maybe your family used to do a lot of camping and being outdoors when you were young so you'll be more passionate about and connected to environmental causes. What kinds of things did you talk about as a family that you remember most vividly? What did you most admire, or not, about your parents and siblings? All of these are potential guideposts, any of which just might help lead you to who you are at your core.
• When I look back through my life, what experiences along the way had the most effect on who I am today? Look, for example, at David Risher. He didn't seek out or plan for what happened at that orphanage. However, when it did, it was a short distance for him to travel back to being a reader growing up and translate that into a desire to eradicate illiteracy. He saw a situation and used his life experiences as a powerful reference point that led him to a vital decision for the course of his life. If it hadn't been that orphanage, I believe there would have been another triggering event at some point in his life. In that summer of 2004, David was open and the cause connected with what is core to him.
• If I looked at this like getting a new job or joining a team, what landing spot would best use my skills, experiences, talents? What does Starbucks have to do with curing corneal blindness? There are few more successful examples of franchising around the world than Starbucks. Tim Schottman got the connection almost immediately. In his role of director of global strategy, Tim helped Starbucks grow from 100 local stores to 15,000 stores in more than 44 countries. He was definitely an expert at scaling businesses. SightLife (www.sightlife.org), whose mission is to alleviate corneal blindness around the world, was doing great work, but desperately needed to scale its operations. While the supply of good corneas continually improves, SightLife had few reliable supply chains to get the corneal tissue where it was most needed around the world. It was a classic scaling-up challenge.

  SightLife needed to replicate Starbucks' worldwide growth strategy, and there were few people more qualified than Tim to help. All that was left to do was to get Tim's heart connected and that didn't take very long once SightLife found him. What someone learned about growing a coffee company is going to enable thousands, someday millions of people to get their eyesight back. Tim was at a point in his life when he was open to possibilities. He found the landing spot in life that used his talents, and eventually passion, exceedingly well.

  And how'd it work out? Here's what SightLife's website says, “Each day, we restore sight in more than 50 men, women, and children globally. This is a direct result of working with eye banks and surgeons in dozens of countries.… By sharing our industry-leading approach with our global partners, we're helping to build successful local corneal transplant programs around the world.” Think of the simple, profound life-changing moment that happens every 30 minutes somewhere around the world. Just stop and feel how good that feels for a minute; that's what Tim's can't not do is doing for the world.

• When I think about the future and finding some pursuit to change the world, what avenues affect me in the most visceral, instinctual way? What sends that chill up my spine? Jeff Carr, who you met earlier, had a career based in social justice and community work. He spent 17 years in Los Angeles working with youth and afterschool programs in that city. During that time, he made connections with civic organizations, police, schools, and the city council. He also got to know the kids, the neighborhoods, and the challenges.

  He eventually got restless, as he put it, he could feel the winds of change blowing around him (I know that sounds a little corny). So when the right idea came along, to help reduce gang violence in Los Angeles in a significant and profoundly different way, it was as if his life had been preparing him for this moment, for this cause to find him, like Ray Allen in the corner. He became the city's first deputy mayor for gang reduction and youth development. Everything he'd learned, the relationships he built, and the faith he had in young people all came to bear when he took on the role. Jeff knew he had to do it. He couldn't not do it.

In all of these instances, the cause intersected with each person at an opportune time in their lives. Inherent in this idea is being open to a cause finding you in the first place. Vu needed a job and was open to all sorts of possibilities. Jeff felt the winds of change and knew it was time for something different. When SightLife reached out to Tim, he was open for a different challenge. We are all more or less open at different stages of our lives. There are times in life when change fits and other times when it just doesn't. Just be listening to yourself and the world around you along the way in life so you don't miss it.

Quite often, your can't not do will appear at a transition point in life—when you move into a new town, once all the kids are in school, something changes and you have more time on your hands, you are ready for something new and meaningful in your life, you have a lingering feeling or an itch to scratch. I hope using the seven questions in this book helps you be more ready to find a cause connected to your core self.

When I was working on how to talk about core, I e-mailed back and forth with my friend, Larry Fox, and more than once I saved a few things he said like, “Caring is actually hard, it can be a burden, it brings with it responsibility. It makes us vulnerable to disappointment and loss, and that's why it is essential for us as individuals to reflect on our values, goals, and behavior. It is important to reconnect with and reestablish what we stand for at our core; it is important to stimulate our courage, to encourage ourselves, and to feel the full weight of what it means to care and to recommit to the work it requires of us, from our core.”

Your time and resources have the potential to make a profound impact on the world. Remember the idea about only needing to find that one thing you are a determined optimist about? Too many people commit too much of their time and resources to something that doesn't come from—and isn't deeply connected to—who they are at their core. Your time matters. Lives can be saved and enriched. The sooner the right cause finds you, the sooner you can make a long-term commitment and the more good you can do for the world.

Putting Optimism to Work: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 10

I answered this question about what is core for me rather unintentionally, at first. As I mentioned earlier, my dad was a Methodist minister while I was growing up. The last thing I want to do in this world is be a minister, and I don't believe there is a divinity school in the country that would accept me; God would send a hailstorm upon any school that would.

But I was there, all those years growing up, watching my dad do his thing. He was a man of faith, no doubt. But more than that, I think he was a man of connection. He loved being in the middle of the action and figuring out who needed to know who and when and why and then making the connections happen.

The strength of a church is highly correlated with the quality and quantity of connections between the members. That was true 40 years ago, it is true today, and will be for the next 400 years. And it is true for many institutions, not just the church. All of that is to say I must have been paying attention, watching what he did and how he did it, because connecting people is what I've been doing the last 17 years. It's most certainly where I came from and it's who I am today. It's the game that fits my skills and experiences. It's who I am at my core, though it took me half my life to see it. And now I live in a world of far greater social multipliers, so those connections are more and more valuable with each passing day.

I recognized, over time, how my mind would work when I went into a meeting or sat down with a new person, one to one. I would start doing this sort of networking and connecting thing, like my dad did, without even realizing it. My mind would go to things like, who would this person want to know or be connected to that would help her achieve her goals? Who else out there has common challenges or problems and could help her and be helped in turn? Who were the other three people that asked me just about the same question during the last month, and can I get the four of them together? What is the 1 + 1 that isn't connected, but should be? And where is the 1 + 1 = 3 connection out there waiting to happen? There is a sort of matrix, a network map going on in my head all the time; that is the fun of the job. That is where the potential for real change is. (See Chapter 6, Do You Believe 1 + 1 = 3? to learn more about connections.)

Sometimes a cause finds you when you're not even looking for it. Sometimes it's out there and it takes about 40 years to find an important part of who you are at your core. Maybe I was, in fact, born to do this…yep, that feels right to me now.