artwork from Barabeke on flickr

Evolution works because it’s not afraid of its children dying. It’s constantly trying new ideas and new combinations of ideas, and a lot of them are really bad. For example, I have asthma and bad eyesight. Thanks evolution.

But evolution doesn’t care. And because its willing to throw so many failed ideas out into the world for testing, it comes up with a lot of good ones as well. Like the brain. Like those little hairs in your ears that keep you from falling over. Like the nuchal ligament on the base of your skull that keeps your head from flopping around when you run (just learned about that today).

Our own idea-making is an evolutionary process as well. But most of the time we hamstring it by holding back most of our ideas, waiting until we find one we’re almost certain will succeed. We’re afraid of our children dying, and maybe even more afraid of how it will reflect on us if they do.

But 2 billion years of R&D tells us that, when it comes to ideas, the more you try, the better. So release a few more into the world for testing. See what happens.

Our friends over at Plywood were kind enough to publish a piece I wrote about one of the quotes that inspired the Ember Arts ethos. Here’s an excerpt:

Life is not given special treatment on our planet. Life struggles. The elements wear down life far more quickly than they do a stone.

But against what often seem terrible odds, life persists. Mothers have babies and teach them to be good. Babies grow and try to make a difference. People find each other and commit to love each other for life. Communities gather to encourage and support and build safety nets for one another. People care for each other.

Somewhere deep in this human thing is a drive to care, a realization that alone before this universe we will perish, but together, somehow, we will persist.

To read the rest, go here.

Yesterday I sat in a crowded bar with about 200 Ugandans (and a handful of Kenyans) and watched a big soccer match between Uganda and Kenya on television. The experience of being there with all those people was great, but my experience of the game itself was awful. I could barely follow the action.

There were vuvzelas and whistles blowing, a busted television, horrible ads splashed across the action, and the TV cameras were so lo-res that you could hardly see the ball.

The two teams were playing only a few miles away, but between them and me were so many layers of noise that I missed much of what was happening on the field. (I don’t mean noise in the auditory sense (though that was definitely part of it), but in the signal-vs-noise sense, noise meaning anything that degrades the information being sent.)

It made me wonder, how many layers of noise come between me and Ember’s customers?

It won’t surprise you that I thought about Steve Jobs, about how he controlled the noise between himself and Apple’s customers. He was a legendary perfectionist and notorious micro-manager, ensuring that his vision came through in Apple’s products. And he built an online and physical retail empire, giving customers direct, noiseless access to that vision.

He even responded with legendary regularity to customer emails. Jobs built a company that stripped noise out wherever possible so that he could broadcast his message loud and clear. I’d like to transmit the Ember message with as much clarity.

“On the field of the self stand a knight and a dragon.
You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon.”
-Steven Pressfield 

Art comes in a million forms. It’s the book you want to write, the meaningful words you want to say to your spouse, the healthy diet you want to start. But why are we sitting around wanting these things rather than doing them? What is stopping us?

That’s the question that Steven Pressfield answers in his books ‘The War of Art‘ and ‘Do The Work.’ And his answer is: Resistance.

If you have ever tried to do something creative, or something that would benefit other people, or something that would make your a healthier or better person, you have felt Resistance. Resistance, according to Pressfield, is what tells us that we’re not good enough, that we are going to fail, that we’ll blow it, that we don’t actually want these good things anyway.

Some critics of Pressfield’s books have called them simplistic, trite, cliched, and overly and amorphously spiritual. According to my readings, this is all true. And yet the power of these books remains. If anything it grows.

The simplicity of Pressfield’s diagnosis of the problem, taking all the various fears and forces that keep us from creating and bundling them up in the term Resistance, allows us to see our task as manageable, to see our enemy as singular and defeatable. And his prescription is equally simple: acknowledge the Resistance that you feel, call it what it is, and then sit down and do your work anyway.

‘The War of Art’ introduces us to Resistance, and to the work of becoming a “pro,” someone who pushes through Resistance day in and day out and gets work done. In ‘Do The Work’ Pressfield acknowledges that many people get mired in Resistance even before starting a project. So he lays out a dead simple framework for quickly planning and starting your project, whether it’s a book or a symphony or a workout routine. And it works.

At Ember we support people in pursuing and realizing their Good Dreams. Pressfield’s books are some of the best in the world at helping you overcome the various faces of Resistance and get to work on your best dreams.

If you find yourself stuck or procrastinating or second guessing yourself on your goals (don’t feel alone, we all do it every day), pick up one or both of these books, read them, and then get to work.

The War of Art: Paperback, Kindle
Do The Work: Hardcover, Kindle

Our Ugandan partner Esther is a comedian, an entrepreneur, and a dreamer. She cares for nine children, has cultivated six different sources of income, and has countless nicknames. When we asked her for three dreams she’d like to accomplish in her life, this is what she told us:

1 – To send her children to college
2 – To build her family a home in her ancestral village
3 – To buy and drive her own car

This year, thanks to her partnership with Ember, she has made some amazing progress. Here’s an update:

1 – This year her eldest son started studying at a local university, and she has several kids making their way through high school and primary.
2 – She has laid the foundation of a 12-room house in her village (including bedrooms, sitting rooms, kitchen, etc.) and has already built the brick walls up to window-level.
3 – The car, she says, will have to wait until after the house is finished and she gets a handle on university tuition. But you can bet she’ll do it.

Esther has a dream, and through her partnership with Ember Arts, she aims to achieve it. Below is a poster celebrating Esther. Click on it to download the hi-res printable file.

(Our deep thanks to Caava Design for creating this poster for free, so that we can offer it freely to our supporters! Follow Caava on Facebook.)

A couple months back I wrote about the “true poverty line,” the income level below which transformational change is nearly impossible, and above which it becomes feasible.

I’ve renamed it the “Prosperity Line,” and we’re going to find out where it lies. At least for the women we work with. My friend Max and I have been working on a questionnaire to determine how much income one of our Uganda partners really needs in order to pursue her dreams. Dreams of educating her children, building a family home, starting a business, and more.

Not only will we keep you updated on our findings, we’re also going to post the questionnaire here when it’s completed, so other businesses and organizations can use it.

The poverty line is only step one. Here’s to chasing the Prosperity Line.

Last week I ran into my friend Tyler at a restaurant. He was there with one of his business mentors, a Ugandan real estate mogul by the name of Anatoli Kamugisha. Tyler introduced us and luckily for me Anatoli thought it appropriate to share one of his favorite quotes. It quickly became one of my favorites.

Download this photo of Mama Esther (click thru for the big version) and add one of your favorite quotes. Share it with us on facebook.

Our good friends at Caava Design designed this poster for free, so that we could offer it as a gift to you. Click here or above to download the hi-res printable version.

Every woman has a dream — of personal success or building a family or lifelong adventure, or any combination of 1,000 goals. And today more women than ever have the liberty and resources to pursue their dreams.

But in places like Uganda where conflict and poverty limit opportunity, women’s dreams are often postponed and forgotten. Families invest their few resources in opportunities for boys and men, while girls are pulled out of school and women are confined to little more than domestic servitude. Over time their dreams flicker and fade.

Not only is this unjust, but new research shows that empowered women are often a family’s best hope to overcome poverty. They typically invest 90% of their income in the education and well-being of their families, as compared to only 30% or 40% among men. And as families succeed, so do communities. And as communities prosper, so do nations.

Ember Arts exists to rekindle the dreams of women in poverty. We build successful business ventures in partnership with these women and invest in their training and education, and they invest in their families and communities as only they can.

Every woman has a dream. And as more women around the world have the liberty and resources to pursue their dreams, more families, communities, and nations will prosper.