The first part of this quote from author Thomas Friedman was featured in Thanks for the Feedback. It resonated with me as it sums up what I love the most about our world at this time and the messaging that my own generation (millenials) were raised with. I left a profession that I loved (teaching music) because I felt constrained by the walls that confined me within it. I had trouble accepting that seniority was the primary way to rank individuals vs merit and performance. I was frustrated by this and switched my professional career track to a world I felt didn't have a built-in ceiling based on my age or the length of my career to date.
This statement also captured the tensions that we are seeing in the world. As some traditional jobs disappear and the onus is put more and more on the individual and not organizations to take care of ourselves and each other. To me this statement does not equate to the dream of the classic hero story of an individual defeating all odds on their own to reach success, rather that we stop relying on traditional institutions to take care of ourselves and our communities and realize that we each have an immense amount of power to make the world a better place as a group of motivated, kind and caring individuals.
Being a Force for Good 