Action takes time and effort, cogitating just happens. Why do so many people talk about starting a business, and few actually do? Why do so many people talk about writing a great book or screenplay, and so few people take the time?

Ideas are one thing, talking is one thing, cogitating is one thing...making real things happen is a whole different thing. I remember a friend years ago who wanted to start a business but getting a business license intimidated him greatly.

Holy cats.

Starting a business from scratch based on a totally new idea means making hundreds (thousands) of decisions and keeping dozens of balls in the air. Dealing with a total level of uncertainty and being comfortable in a world of ambiguity, risk, failure, fluid decision making, constant change and the relentless passing of time.

I also think there is often this unease about the mistakes that could be made int he process -- and the general fear/uncertainty of anything unknown.

I think more than action, if you look at what makes people do "inspired action" my guess that most people have few ideas of how it is suppose to look and more space to experiment and fall down.

was there a question on how we -born to network weave sustainability with all due urgency http://valuetrue.com/home/commun ity.cfm - can differentiate between saints who are all very lovable except when they over-compete in many thousand separate boxes for advocay money, and those who have a social franchise ready to open and network weave all over the world?

I am going to play devil's advocate and say that most social entrepreneurs are saints and dont have any of the entrepreneurial market competemces that all previous entreprenurial revolutionaries http://entrepreneurialrevolution .blogspot.com have innovated with

Thank heavens for Dr yunus http://grameen.tv - I see him as giving the world the most open benchmarks between the difference between the entrepreneur and the saint

Chris,

Bless your soul, I have no idea what you're saying.

chris said:

was there a question on how we -born to network weave sustainability with all due urgency http://valuetrue.com/home/commun ity.cfm - can differentiate between saints who are all very lovable except when they over-compete in many thousand separate boxes for advocay money, and those who have a social franchise ready to open and network weave all over the world?

I am going to play devil's advocate and say that most social entrepreneurs are saints and dont have any of the entrepreneurial market competemces that all previous entreprenurial revolutionaries http://entrepreneurialrevolution .blogspot.com have innovated with

Thank heavens for Dr yunus http://grameen.tv - I see him as giving the world the most open benchmarks between the difference between the entrepreneur and the saint

I don't agree with Mark that cogitating "just happens." It is an effort.

A carpenter said that every job has three roughly equal parts: planning it, doing it, and cleaning up. It's too easy to imagine that planning and cleaning up aren't relevant and important actions.

David Bornstein's answers provided the importance of "the hierarchy of values that govern that person’s decisions." I think that Chris is making a similar point when he talks about saints. Chris also notes the problem with saints. Bornstein remarks about both aspects too.

Bornstein points to the importance for people to become aware of how bad things really are in order to be motivated to action.

It's really hard to come to grips with that for so many reasons. Peter says that it takes more than uplit, and Mark says to stop dithering. Soren's observation to look for what makes for inspired action provides a new perspective on both.

People when confronted with the problems going on all around generally don't know what they can do. But as David Bornstein observes, knowing is part of what motivates people to do. So uplift, at least in the sense of spreading the idea that there is something real people can do can inspire action. But uplift is really only useful once a person has faced up to the magnitude of the problems. These all seem part of the planning phase of things.

Of course nothing will happen without the doing. Really, I think Mark is amplifying Bornstein's point that we neglect to tell "how wonderful it feels to take meaningful action in line with your core beliefs.

We all have gifts differing as Bornstein notes. Surely I do appreciate the doers in the world. But also am a bit sensitive, having worked in low-tier jobs, to how essential aspects of a job, especially the cleaning up parts, are so often devalued by those whose total focus is on the doing part of the job.

We're all in this together and someway we've got to make it work.

John Powers said:

We're all in this together and someway we've got to make it work.

We can extend this thought to - we can't make these changes happen alone.

Chris McCrae said:

compete in many thousand separate boxes for advocacy money, and those who have a social franchise ready to open and network weave all over the world?

When we look at the "save the world" (movement?) it is composed of a multitude of special interest groups all competing against each other for 1) the limited attention of the public and 2) available charitable funds. I assert that this arrangement wastes most of the funds contributed as evidenced by the facts of the current world condition.

I would re-phrase Chris's call for social franchise to say that we need systems of production in which everyone can participate and that cooperate with nature's systems rather than diminish them. Those kinds of new systems require 1) people understanding how they work 2) people agreeing to invest time in them, and 3) people willing to support them as investors of money and as customers - which none of us can do alone.

what I a saying is that I am delighted to worship/applaud one or 2 saints I personally have had the 56 year privilege to accidentally bump into but what they do/systemise in one locality may suffer from 2 translation difficulties such as: 1 it may not be relevant because a totally different lack of infrastructure or may require someone equally as saintly (or lifetime experienced) to be there in charge- we are wasting global awareness, energy, priorities, etc when we talk of all SEs as if everyone needs a world networked weaved round them

consequently I wish we could all communally Q&A the 2000 ashoka nominations to distinguish those who are saints from those who have an entrepreneurially praclically franchise ready for open source replication worldwide- ready for flowing right action right time right place right people through as Yunus describes the change world system media and mediation we truly need to interface out of every city or hub you are reading this with

of course there are shades of grey in this ; whilst I guess in today's Ashoka there may be 1900 saints (or locally only applicable solutions) and 100 ready to chnage world everywhere their local crisis of need is being suffered socially, we could start with knowing of 10 of ashoka's 2000 who are up for worldwide open sourcing- then we could network weave around them

originally I had assumed this was the way that bornstein had made his selections for his book- but now about 3 years later there does not seem to have been any collaborative marketing of the people he selcted; they were not introduced eg to omidyar.net even though ashoka and omidyar are close partners; with a few excellent exceptions (eg Yunus who incidentally only bacmae an ashoka partnering net after Bornstein's book) they are not as far as i can see generally inviting public debates anywhere; whilst I appreciate that ashokas SE are incredibly busy, I mean even one day a year when they or their personal assiatnts answered the most popular questions of how cane we co-participate in your productions that would be good nay really useful My Skoll-

do you all remember at onet someone tried out some software for asking world trusted people questions, and how few of the people he asked to play did- to be fair here Bill Drayton did answer but then he is like a meta-hub for social entrepreneurship responsible for the whole school; that means the level of his answers are not at the replicable franchise/grassroots level that we would need to test out particular SE's service franchises

at other deeper levels of media crisis: if you valued what this mail said so far, you might want to faceoff for grassroots activism at WORLD IMAGE DAY http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6075902779 -for example n day of writing my image is blacked out for malaria as is another million network weavers of this issue http://www.ned.com/group/econo-p olitics/news/6/ we people can use the net to scale the world if we up our trust in each other and if we are presented with replicable franchises not just observing saints days