This crazy thing we do…
I woke up early this morning thinking about something that our land manager, Kelly Mulville, said at a meeting recently. It was something to the effect of wanting more results, more perfection, at the ranch that we steward before we bring lots of people there and show them what we’re doing. I commented that I was the counterbalance to perfection. We also talked about wanting everyone at the ranch to feel like an “educator.”
As I lay in bed this morning, I realized that I view this very differently. In 21st century America, the idea of an educator is to give someone answers. That isn’t at all what we are about. We are on a journey to make a change in the world, and we are about sharing that journey, with all of its questions, ideas, experiments, successes, failures, and, yes, squirrels. We want to inspire our visitors to ask their own questions, start or continue their own journeys, and share that with us. Together we will come up with whatever answers we can for our own places and lives. We will never achieve anything close to perfection. We might come up with some answers that work for us, but we may actually become less inspirational as that happens. If you show up somewhere and it looks like they have it all figured out and are way ahead of you, sometimes that’s more intimidating than inspirational.
So, this is why I prefer to call Elaine Patarini the Director of Innovation Sharing. I would suggest that we all think of ourselves more as sharers of the journey than educators. We are all part of this crazy thing and have something of it that we can talk about. To me, thinking about it this way is exhilarating and exciting, rather than daunting and overwhelming.
I think that this can inform the way we tell stories, and applies equally well to all parts of the No Regrets Initiative — Paicines Ranch, Cienega Capital, and the Globetrotter Foundation. This is what Esther Park and I are doing in the #No Regrets Initiative videos when we talk about integrated capital and new investing paradigms.
And to my team and my community, thanks for doing this crazy thing with me. — Sallie