I am a sponge for knowledge. I love to learn and I especially love to learn about things that maybe I have none or very little knowledge about. I generally want to be able to have a conversation with someone about any topic. Knowledge can be very powerful if leveraged for good. Knowledge can be terrible if all you become is a know-it-all. Unfortunately I tend to become the second rather than the first.
The Idea Camp is amazing because it brings together all these brilliant people who have years of knowledge and experience and who are leveraging their knowledge for good. The people that show up for the idea camp are the ones who are being the change they want to see in the world, or are very close to stepping out and doing something. As Charles Lee said so well, “The collective knowledge of the room is so much greater than one individual.”
Scattered throughout the room during the Idea Camp were a handful of us that play no active role in any of the subjects presented and some of us who even have no knowledge about some of the issues presented. I am guilty as charged. I will admit that I know very little about sex trafficking and homosexuality.
Why?
I didn’t want to know. The things we want to know about we seek out knowledge. When it came to the topics of homosexuality and sex trafficking I choose not to learn about them because it made life easier and safer. I am tired of easy and I am tired of safe. The reality is that very few people in this world live in a safe and easy environment and those of us who think we do I just blind. I don’t want to be blind anymore.
The very fact that I want to step out of my own self admitted ignorance and into the light of knowledge about these subjects is what really excited me about day 2 of the Idea Camp. The topic line-up seemed heavy on the conversation of trafficking and homosexuality among a few other topics.
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Have you ever tried to accomplish something and everything went wrong? Ever wanted to be apart of something and things just kept preventing you from attending?
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From the afternoon break out on Monday with Andrew Marin from the Marin Foundation and throughout the day on Tuesday, every time a subject came up that I wanted to learn more about something would get in the way. You name it, it went wrong on Monday afternoon and Tuesday: lunch meetings, morning deliveries, warehouse issues, lost orders, unshipped orders, etc, etc. It was a bad idea to try and work and go to a conference at the same time. By the time I had left work on Tuesday to get home to my wife and daughter I had successfully been interrupted almost a dozen times throughout the latter part of Monday and all of Tuesday.
As a result of the interruptions I missed most of the second day of the idea camp and I definitely missed most of the conversations I really wanted to be apart of. Running into roadblock after roadblock was extremely frustrating and almost upsetting, but at the end of the day I realize that I was able to make the connection to the right channels to learn more about these conversations. I am sure that as my knowledge grows I will leave my thoughts on the table here. In the mean time I challenge all of you to take time to write down 2 or 3 subjects that maybe you have limited knowledge about. What are you doing to gain more knowledge? How do you plan to leverage that knowledge for good?





