Forward unto dawn
If you playing Halo, "Forward Unto Dawn" is a poem on the idea of space venture. The journey that define human as a race, and the deep desire that within us, the needs for self-actualization.
Heaven and Earth, we need both
The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos is a 2018 book by Christian Davenport. It covers the rise of the commercial space companies Blue Origin, led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX - Wiki
And is the first book I read when I work in tech, absolutely love it. The space race is a contradiction in belief, it’s based on personal gain that get the two (and more) billionaires get into the rat race, but at the same time it’s representing the humanity's shared destiny and ascendancy unto the space.
It’s a generational effort and down on Earth frontier it’s the same battle, homebase need to be protected. It’s as noble and as hard as the venturing outward, and we must win that battle also.
I’m in a generation that born just after the Kyoto protocol, LA riot a bit.
Cable TV was on, I had Discovery channel and NatGeo at home, good old time when sir David Attenborough catching frogs and tell us they are the cutest things ever, nature is cool but on the line at the same time, socially speaking, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air succeeded but there’s rarely a black person making it outside of Entertainment and Basketball, the Earth was a beautiful place and it’s becoming something lesser.
For our generation, we all know that already, who don’t believe in climate change? who don’t believe in social equality and good governance? I don’t believe I have such protestors in my circle. It’s a concrete why.
But getting people to believe in the “why” is half of the story.
The second half
The other half is getting people exciting until the end goal, we are forgetful and need constant reminders, or are there better ways?
I was presenting for the office lately on ESG topic - the thing that I do and love - for the team, but I don’t want to preach for ESG just because it’s an important thing to do, that’s boring, and it has been in repeat mode too many times already.
I think the point is laying elsewhere, and from believing something to actually making it, has great distance inbetween. Mainly because it’s a hard thing to be done, when even the laptop you are using to read this article makes the Earth warmer, right?
My favourite dark joke on this:
“Do you know smoking is one of the fastest ways to save the Earth”
“What? Why?”
”Smoking kills”
Saying is easier than doing, and finishing what you started requires refreshment. We should go the different way, getting people out of bed everyday, and go “Thunderberg” on this (yup, go screaming) for every hour they stay awake.
The other way around
Objectivism - a philosophical system developed by Russian-American writer and public philosopher Ayn Rand.
She described it as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute" - Wiki again, I am supposed to stop quoting Wikipedia.
In simple words, people always work for what they want, and it’s not a bad thing. (Actually this is ways weirder if you read into it, but that’s another story). You don’t go tell the raw why of the problem anymore, involving it into something deeply resonating to their purpose in life (or hiring someone that has this purpose to begin with).
See this pyramid before? A typical John/Jane Doe would want to climb the summit, becoming the most that one can be.
This idea echoes back when I do the slides, ESG - saving the world? To think about it, we know it’s real, it’s hard, and it’s rewarding, the perfect combination of elements from typical Disney princess movie, where prince charming charged into that dragon to save the beauty (Or might be the princess saved the prince, anyway work).
That’s the kind of story you wanna tell to the audience - a hero journey.
Not because it’s easy
ESG is not easy, it’s a way up from downhill, but we want it bad, we want it in this generation. The story I told was from the previous space race.
It’s was January 1961, the US was losing in space race with the USSR. A young man from Boston with an accent, Kennedy proposed that they were bringing someone to the moon and back on May 25, 1961. It was an unthinkable task at that time.
Poll showed a shocking 58 percent of Americans were opposed, if you’ve watched the movie October Sky (1999), you would understand how the Americans was shook with the USSR victories at that time.
On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy delivered his speech before a crowd of about 40,000 people, he kicked off his plan to land a man on the Moon before 1970.
You don’t really need the introduction below, the man is the PONTUS
And I quote him:
“But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon.
We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard;
because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too”
We choose ESG, we choose to amend the damages for the next generation to live in better conditions, we choose that just to prove that we are the best, the GOATs for that is the measure of greatness and the challenges that we intend to win.
The crowd didn’t go wild, but I will get there. Go green!