Somewhere in the world today a baby is born and unknowingly pushes the population ticker to 7,000,000,000.

Seven billion people. Seven billion dreamers.

It is humanity’s unique blessing to envision things that never were and by our work to make them real. We are a species of dreamers.

And whether we are born in American suburbs or Ugandan villages we dream of the same things. We dream of finding love, finding a calling, finding success. We dream of good lives for our families. We dream of a world where more people, where all people, have the liberty and resources to pursue their dreams.

Our dreams unite us.

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.

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It was business ethics that taught me the importance of a dream.

I was on a plane to Uganda and I was thinking deeply about my ethical responsibilities as a business owner. Specifically my responsibilities to the Ugandan women I call partners.

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” This line came back to me as the foundational ethical statement. But how, I wondered, do I actually love myself?

We’ve all asked ourselves this question, but it struck me that I didn’t really know the answer. I mean, I brush my own teeth and feed myself and earn my own paycheck. But is that it? Is that all it means to love myself?

I tried to take a larger view, to ask what preference I naturally give myself that I don’t naturally give other people. And this is what I came up with: Every morning when I wake up, after brushing my teeth, I go out and try to make my own dreams come true.

This, I realized, is how I truly love myself. And so this is my ethical responsibility: to support my neighbors as they pursue their dreams, just as I pursue mine.

To me, this was a deeply revolutionary thought, that people’s dreams were ethically important. And as I thought further I realized that maybe they are more than just important. Maybe they are primary.

My ethical responsibility is to support other people in pursuing their dreams, and their ethical responsibility is to support still more people in pursuing their dreams. So opening opportunities for dreaming and pursuing those dreams is an ethical mandate.

For many years I have tried to define what Good with a capital G is. I’ve tried to figure out if there is some universal way for humanity to talk about how we should and shouldn’t act. This is the closest I’ve come:

Giving more people the chance to dream and pursue their dreams is Good.

A Good Dream then is a dream that, when realized, ensures people the liberty and resources to pursue their dreams. And those people ought to be encouraged to dream Good Dreams as well. In other words, a Good Dream makes it more likely that other Good Dreams will be realized.

This idea has profoundly shaped my life and work. I encourage you too, dream Good Dreams, and love your neighbor as yourself.

It’s no secret that when money gets tights, like it is for most Americans just now, one of the first things to be squeezed off the budget is giving to charities and non-profits. This is understandable for families trying to pay the mortgage and keep food on the table. Unfortunately it hurts those who can least afford it – the global poor who depend on those organizations.

Socially Proactive Businesses, like Acholi Beads, have one great advantage over non-profits: We don’t rely on donations. Quite the opposite in fact. Our business is set-up so that Americans can make an income right alongside our Acholi partners.

Almost all of our sales are made through stores or other resellers, who mark Acholi Beads up to a competitive market price and reap the benefits, while simultaneously growing the market for our jewelry and changing lives in Uganda. Everyone wins.

And in a down economy like this one, Americans need an income just like everyone else. So while nonprofits lose volunteers and donors, Acholi Beads is gaining reps and resellers. People love the chance to make the world a better place, and pay some bills while doing it.

Don’t get me wrong, I think nonprofits do necessary and amazing work around the world.  I’m just exploring the different ways that such work can be done, and I think that Socially Proactive Business is emerging as one of the most powerful and sustainable modes of changing the world for the better.

For info on how you can get involved, visit our Contact page here.

Acholi Beads is part of what I call The New Luxury.  The New Luxury is our society’s response to consumerism’s inability to add meaning to our lives, while recognizing its power to improve livelihoods.

The New Luxury is smarter than advertising.  It doesn’t seek its values in airbrushed images or phrases engineered to be memes.  The New Luxury abides in story.  It basks in the soft fabric of lives woven together by intention and fate.

The New Luxury transcends the sterile front of retail shelves.  It peers into the true history of products, joining hands with the many people behind the supply chain, on the far side of the world, who brought the products into existence.

The New Luxury doesn’t rely on the weight of a price tag, but knows the glory of connection to stories larger than any dollar figure, more important than any bragging rights.

The New Luxury acknowledges that value cannot be bought, but that we can buy based on values.  It asserts that meaning is broader than a slogan, more attractive than a photo, and deeper than any pockets.  It assures us that beauty created in a studio pales when compared to the faintest reflection of real love.  And The New Luxury insists that we will not be blinded by advertisements or manipulated by marketing; we are too smart and passionate to allow our dollars to be tempted away by false promises of happiness.

The New Luxury chooses joy, truth, hope, and love.

When we walk into one of our favorite stores (for me, the Apple store) and look at a shiny new product, we miss one of the most fundamental aspects of what that product is.  We might think about what it does, how it will make our lives easier or more fun, how we will feel cooler once we own it.  We refer in our minds to the advertisements or the pop culture references or to what our friends have said about the product.  But we forget where it comes from.  In fact, we forget that it comes from anywhere at all.

It seems unnecessary to say ‘things come from somewhere,’ but I think that we as a society are quickly forgetting this.  We fail to realize when standing before our next purchase that it was made somewhere, by a person, or even many people, and that often it was shipped thousands of miles to be there in front of us.

Products have a history.  And I believe that this history is more important than what the TV ads say about a product.  Shouldn’t we be more connected to the real person whose hands assembled the product in our hands than to a character on a screen who is paid to sell it to us?  Aren’t our lives directly connected to theirs through these products?

Acholi Beads is completely transparent about the history of our products.  Our jewelry is made by 16 women from the Acholi tribe who live in a slum near their country’s capital.  They work from their homes, rolling strips of recycled paper into beautiful beaded necklaces, bracelets and earrings.

I hope that your understanding of this history enhances your appreciation for Acholi Beads.  Know that each piece began its life on another continent, in the hands of a woman whose life is better because you now own her creation.

Next time you go out shopping, think about the history of the products that you see.  And think about how much the world would change if we all cared about these little histories.