Do The D*mn Thing

A two day retreat gives me a "mic drop" moment

Last week, I spent two days at a retreat with nonprofit leaders from across the Midwest and even further (one attendee came from Maryland!). It was a great opportunity to catch up with colleagues and talk about our work and how we can respond to the challenges of running a nonprofit organization in a healthy way.

On the last morning of the event, we each went around and shared about something we took away from the experience of being together. One particular young lady that runs a nonprofit talked about how she has always had this dream, but hesitant to go after it.

This was on one hand a bit shocking. The previous night, our entire crew was at dinner, and we talked about something about our past that wouldn’t be on our resume, but was foundational to who we were, or at least interesting. The best I could muster up was that I was the “Guess your age/weight/birthmonth” guy at an amusement park for a summer.

This young lady revealed that she was a world traveler. And we aren’t talking about taking selfies at the Eiffel Tower while eating a baguette. No, this young lady has been to over twenty countries, none of which scream “tourist hotspot”. We are talking places like Sudan and Pakistan. Heck, she even lived in Egypt for a while raising young children.

If there was one person at that table that had the gumption and grit to do anything, this was young lady personified that to a t. So, to hear her say that she has some dream that she is a bit hesitant to achieve was a bit, well, it was almost offensive. I mean come on, this lady has been to corners of the world no one of us could imagine, yet she is letting her own head get in the way of what she wants to do? Give me a break.

My mind was yelling at me to say something.

I politely waited for her to stop and then my deep, gut-level reaction came out, warts and all. Granted, this isn’t a 100% verbatim recollection of what I said, but a few days out, this is what a recollect saying to my colleagues.

Do the damn thing.

That thing, whatever it is, inside you…it’s calling you, and it will not let you go. Not now, not ever.

In fact, it will torment you if you don’t give it the work and the attention it deserves.

You think you have passions and desires? Not true. Your desires and dreams have you. You don’t find them, they find you.

And don’t tell me the world won’t care about your dream, because it does.

It cares because, this is the important part, you and I don’t see the world the same way.

What you have done through your dream, is you have found something broken with the world, and you have taken responsibility about it. That’s important because you have already taken the most difficult and most important step. If everything was fine, you wouldn’t dream about it; you wouldn’t even think about it.

You want to find meaning in your life? Do the damn thing. Because once you do that thing, once you put it out there, it may not change the world, but it will change you in a million different ways that you didn’t even realize needed to be changed.

And that, right there, will change the world.

Do the damn thing.