What’s wrong with the world

A reflection for a fresh start of year

G.K. Chesterton, British writer and philosopher, was once asked to provide an answer to the question: “what’s wrong with the world”?

He provided the simplest yet most powerful answer anyone could think of:

“I am”.

It’s powerful because it speaks to the core of any issue or matter:

 What can I do about it?

That’s what we should always focus on: the things we can change, or influence. Do something about those, and hopefully that will make others better too, through the complexity of oblique (indirect) ways.

It’s both a call for action and a deep reflection at the same time.

I bring this up today because normally this time of the year is a time of reflection for me. Being a Christian, coming from a Judaeo-Christian tradition and culture, but also more recently for living in the Northern hemisphere and facing the winter cold during the same period.

Although, as this blog/newsletter name conveys, I am very conceptual in my thinking, and believe that anything starts with an idea, a theory, otherwise we are just talking about sheer random trial and error; I have learned to become very practical and pragmatic. And thanks to that…

“…do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” – Matthews 6:34 (Bible)

That has served me well. And while it can be said as relatively obvious –I have experienced enough to understand that the obvious is often worth reiterating, remembering… For there is still too much out there of living in some sort of idealism, the ‘what-ifs’ – of some unrealistic expectation in context. What might be sometimes even desirable in an ideal world – but guess what? Life is not always fair… yet still beautiful in mess...

Perhaps that is because the whole point is what we can make out of it, what we can learn, what we can take on as responsibility and do something about it. Being a positive influence in our circle of influence, our own sort of fractal of the world, if your like.

And as the saying goes, ultimately…

Be the change (or the difference) we want to see in the world!

With that, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas, if you do celebrate it. In any case, a great end of year and (Gregorian) New Year. I am going to take a small pause in posting here, until somewhere early January. I am pretty looking forward to that - as I enter a new chapter of my professional career (if you are curious watch out my LinkedIn page to learn about it).

Hope to you ‘see’ you back here!

by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact