Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results by Josh Linkner

Author:Josh Linkner [Linkner, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Decision-Making & Problem Solving, Leadership, Self-Help, Creativity
ISBN: 9781642936780
Google: 6KYeEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B08VBS32BV
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2021-04-20T05:00:00+00:00

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When a catastrophic earthquake struck Nepal in 2015, Mallory Brown had to change everything. The 7.8 magnitude quake was devastating, killing nearly nine thousand people and crippling the country’s already shaky economy. Her plan to help electrify a remote village now seemed insignificant compared to the new troubles that ravaged the area. Instead of going back to the drawing board, retooling her game plan and wasting precious time, Mallory boarded her previously booked flight to Kathmandu and raced into the postapocalyptic chaos.

Years prior, Mallory had no plans to pursue humanitarian work as her profession. She was a business major in college and never imagined she’d be rushing into Nepal’s earthquake devastation less than a decade after her fun-loving university days. But an unexpected injury in a foreign land would change her career trajectory and help thousands of people around the world as a result.

“I took a backpacking trip just for fun when I graduated from college,” Mallory told me as we began our conversation. “I was in Indonesia when I flipped over the handlebars of my bicycle, falling face-first into the ground. It could have been much worse, but I busted open my chin and needed stitches. The accident shook me out of vacation mode and into real life. The doctors told me to go to a clinic every other day because of the risk of infection, and I saw the health-care quality that people received. I started to see what it looked like for people living in poverty.”

While her friends snorkeled and frolicked in the sun, Mallory wandered through local villages. She ate strange food and immersed herself in foreign culture. She loved the way she felt as she learned and explored, but she also realized how difficult life could be for people without the advantages she had grown up with in an upper-middle-class family in the United States.

As her poorly stitched chin began to swell in the sweltering hot sun of a rural Indonesian village, Mallory had an epiphany. “This is what I want to do with my life,” she told herself as she tried to contain the smile from overtaking her street-dirtied face. Amidst the pungent smell of spices from a local market and the noise from half-broken bicycles colliding with potholes, Mallory decided to shift her life’s work to the nonprofit sector, pursuing humanitarian progress over materialistic profits. Crucially, she fell in love with the problem. And with great zeal for the challenge ahead of her, Mallory Brown started before she was ready.

“I started traveling to very impoverished places, and I was immediately surrounded by need,” Mallory explained. “You see houses that you can’t even imagine living in. The first time I actually saw someone carrying water on their head was very different from the National Geographic moment I’d imagined…you’re seeing this person struggling to carry a super-heavy, super-dirty container on top of their head, and it looks brutal. I quickly saw that there were endless needs to tackle. We need schooling, we need health care, we need water, we need transportation, we need housing.

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