You’re an artist.

Let’s call it creative generosity.

I love how we can use our thoughtful minds to develop unique ways to help other people. It’s a great feeling when you find success as a problem solver.

What if we thought more about new ways to make an impact rather than hold the old ways?

If It’s Broke, Fix It

You know the old saying but it’s almost too easy to assume things are working in today’s world. The Internet and fast information transfer come up a lot in The Impactmaker Movement. While I’d like to think we can always use them for good, there are times they are used for bad. I’ll assume you aren’t doing the latter by intention.

Useful Tools

What good are tools if you don’t use them?

You may not have malintent but you might have complacency. It’s anything but creative.

Complacency is the result of assuming things are optimal. Things are moving so fast in today’s world that it might seem that what is troubled is working well.

The Internet is a perfect example of a tool that we now take for granted. We also see the best of most companies, people, and other things that are shared in the digital space.

We can all agree that presenting your business or self well on the Internet is a normal and acceptable practice. We know that people have imperfect lives (and that’s okay). But, we can’t assume people’s actual lives are just a standard deviation away from what might be considered perfect.

We can assume that the majority of people are doing well enough to put forth the effort needed to run a company, market a business, and present their personal life for all to see. However, if just one person in your network is hurting, that’s too many.

The Internet is a great tool but we can’t be complacent with it. It’s good to use it to keep track of how your friends are doing but it’s not good enough.

We’re called to do more than just observe people’s lives.

Using

The Internet is just an example of useful tools we don’t take advantage of enough. But I’ll stick with the example to go deeper into the concept.

I know some people that love to tell how many people they are connected to on social media platforms. I don’t think it’s wrong to have a lot of friends or followers. In fact, I think it’s another great digital tool we can use for good. However, it can be easy to fall into vanity metrics and online “content” consumption.

What do you actually do with the people that you interact with on your social media apps?

Use the Internet to not just “see” people but to “connect” with them. Use direct messaging and other applications like Zoom and Google Meet to speak with people. It pays to get to know someone a bit deeper than what their profile shows.

Think about how many direct messages and deeper conversations you create from social media. A good business person might be able to say they consistently and productively use DMs. Most of the rest of us can’t say that. We have a tool that we are not maximizing and we are finding our complacency.

We need to use the tools more actively for impact.

Abusing

I mentioned above that I’ll assume that you are not abusing your use of the Internet but what if it is abusing you?

One of the most important things to consider about powerful tools is that they can accelerate movement in any direction. You should take responsibility for your actions with any tool you use but certain things are such a foundational part of life they can start to use you.

Things that come to mind are cars, kitchen appliances, phones, and of course, the Internet. You may not even realize it, but these things that are part of most people’s lives have become second nature. They can begin to control us at times.

The Lost Keys

I remember a time that I lost my keys and I thought my life was over. I couldn’t go anywhere and had to cancel some appointments. In the moment, I was so upset I wasn’t thinking straight. I had a legitimate reason to be upset, but I learned something when I was stuck.

I realized that everything I had to do that day was possible because of the Internet, phones, and my car. The tools were abusing me and my stress level had skyrocketed. Had I not expected to have the car available or been able to make the contact I did, I never would have felt that way. Life would have been just fine without the appointments.

Burning the House Down (Almost)

Another example of modern tools abusing me is included in a story of when I almost burnt our house down. I was spoiled in my previous career when our office was just a few miles from our house. Some people have multiple-hour commutes and mine was less than five minutes.

I had come home for lunch one day and put some ground beef on the stove. In the midst of my preparations to eat, I received an important phone call. It was so critical (or, was it?) that I lost track of what I was doing and went back to the office. It wasn’t like me to skip a meal but I suppose it was a pretty meaningful situation to take me away from the stove.

Mrs. DePasquale called me shortly before I was coming back home for the evening. I thought nothing of it but she was panicked. The stove was on high and the ground beef was charred and smoking like a chimney. The house was full of smoke and our cat was hiding in a closet upstairs. It was a terrible scene.

I came home to my wife and cat, thankfully alive, and a house that could’ve easily caught fire.

I was so distracted it’s still embarrassing to this day. I consider myself to be abused by the tools and amazingly blessed. It could have been much worse.

Useful Mind

We have one tool that is more powerful than the others. That’s our mind. Unfortunately, this one can all go wrong with complacency. For as creative as the mind is, if we don’t train it to think disruptively from time to time, assumptions and bad habits will take over.

The mind is a great tool because it controls all the others. The Internet, social media, kitchen appliances, cars, and even ChatGPT need a human mind to run them.

Think about what you can use in your mind. It’s a great thing to tell young people that you can do anything you put your mind to…but what we don’t say is that if you don’t put your mind toward something, it will find something on its own.

There are some broken systems in our world. There are tools that are abusing us. It’s impossible to fix all of them at once. In fact, I fear we only continue to add more as technology advances. We are automating ourselves into oblivion. You know I love modernity if you’ve been reading E-Impact for a while. I’m cautious about how the masses apply it, though.

The solution is not an attempt to train everyone in the world to use all of their tools more actively for impact. We can encourage them too and train those who have specifically identified themselves but it would be better to teach the masses how to use their mind better.

I suppose this is why the “self-help” industry and “mind-hacking” is so strong. Hear my conversation with Robert Riopel on Speaking of Impact episode 88 and why we need to avoid “shelf-help”. The problem with today’s suggestions about how to improve your life and psychology is that they assume we need to either catch up to everyone else or get ahead. Life is not a zero-sum game. We don’t have to compete for everything and we definitely don’t have to take down our fellow humans to thrive.

Concentrate on how you can default your thinking to disruption.

This system is in fact, broken.

Disruption

I support radical generosity not because I’m looking for attention or believe you have to surprise people to be successful. I support it because it allows us to think about things that don’t often come to mind. We tend to think in packs as humans. I love community and encourage you to work within a team but you have to find a team that compliments each other’s skills not replicates. Be okay with disrupting each other’s thought patterns. Then, you will be prepared to disrupt the thought patterns of the masses.

Make no mistake that enacting change is partially about identifying where it is needed. This is why disruptive thought is essential to what you do.

Once you identify an area of need, you can spend the time researching and learning more about the situation. You’d be surprised how obvious what is going on might seem. But you’ll then notice how most of the reasons are related to complacency.

If there is criminal activity, it’s time to get the authorities involved (I don’t want to minimize criminal activity and there are definitely these types of situations in the world).

Your next efforts will need to focus on checking the status quo, combating complacency, and disrupting what most people are doing simply out of habit.

Your art is impact and your pieces are abstract. People will question you not because they believe your efforts are bad but because it challenges their complacency.

Disrupt their thought patterns and they’ll thank you for it later.