Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic.: 25 Successful Habits For An Extremely Disruptive World by Bill Jensen

Author:Bill Jensen [Jensen, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780988879539
Publisher: Net Minds Corporation
Published: 2013-07-27T14:00:00+00:00

For More: Click, The Journey Continues, page 150

• Five Dos and Don’ts With a Half-Age Mentor

“In the slums of Kenya, eight million people resort to a practice known as flying toilets — open defecation in plastic bags and then tossing the bags onto the side of the road.

“They do this because no better options are available to them.

“We are trying to address this by building a dense network of low-cost sanitation facilities throughout the slums.”

That’s Lindsay Stradley and David Auerbach, MIT MBAs and co-founders of the Sanergy project — whose objective is to build a new sanitation infrastructure in the slums of Nairobi. Once their model is proven, they hope to then take it global to other urban areas with similar needs. Each toilet is operated by local entrepreneurs, and Sanergy collects the waste, converts it into bio-gas, fertilizer and electricity — which creates sustainable funding for the project and payments to the owner/operators.

Since launching operations in June 2011, Sanergy has become the largest provider of hygienic sanitation in the Mukuru district of Nairobi — safely removing over 500 megatons of waste and creating 250 jobs within that slum.

Stradley and Auerbach will be the first to tell you that — as in many large-scale changes — their biggest challenges aren’t in building the actual infrastructure, but in creating a community of champions who want and will support those changes. “One woman became a champion because, especially at night, most women leave themselves open to sexual assault in their trip to and from a toilet,” Stradley shared. Such attacks would be prevented with the new and well-lit Sanergy locations. “She was also excited to become a toilet owner/operator because income opportunities are so rare for the women in her slums.”

“Alan, who is 10 years old, was at one of the schools where we were piloting the use of the toilets. He quickly became the ambassador to the other students,” says Auerbach. “He blew us away, not only with his ability to communicate the importance of sanitation to his fellow students, but he also enforced good behaviors … like not throwing rocks in the toilet and waiting your turn in line. This taught us the importance of working with kids Alan’s age. For this idea to take hold in their society over a long time, children will be the main champions.”

The Secret of Happiness in a Disruptive World:

Yours and Everyone’s

The world is filled with tough, intractable and systemic problems, like flying toilets, which are fixable only if enough of us step up to help. And stepping up isn’t just important because we all live on the same blue sphere. It’s important to your own happiness.

This chapter’s subtitle — find something more important than you and dedicate your life to it — comes from philosopher Dan Dennett during a TED talk titled “Dangerous Memes.” His dangerous idea: The secret to true happiness is dedicating ourselves to something bigger than ourselves. To an idea. A cause. A need. A set of values or principles. Or to others, those we know and those we don’t.

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