10 Tools & Techniques To Change the World from the Inside

Here, briefly, is my advice to college graduates seeking to employ social justice and change, and to use their idealism within the economy to earn their own way, make a living, and still change the world "from the inside".  If any famous people are planning Commencement addresses and haven't started, feel free to use this.

Twitter is a good utility. I usually praise it for its "search box", you can find breaking insider news if you ignore the "feed" and search for something.  Amazing links show up.

Another good thing is that forcing yourself to make a point in 140 characters can make for better journalism.

Here are my 10 Techniques to "Change the world from the inside", something my friends told me would be impossible when I left Fayetteville Arkansas to attend an MBA program in Boston.  You can choose something, some industry you want to change, and make a living doing so, and in the process actually alter the way the entire world does and sees things in the industry.

In order (Tweets below posted in reverse order).

Tool #1 Humility.   
Tool #2 Math and Secondary Research.
Tool #3 Psychology (including your own)
Tool #4 Networking
Tool #5 Humor (can combine with #1)
Tool #6 Scout Everyones' Perspective (clients, suppliers, regulators, everyone)
Tool #7 Pacing
Tool #8 Statistics and risk analysis and lifecycle analysis (see #2)
Tool #9 History of the field
Tool #10 Be a good citizen.

More

White Liberal Checks Privileges by Bicycle

Two friends shared a link to a blog by Michigan preacher and blogger JDowsett, who hit the Facebook lottery with a blog last week, "What My Bike Has Taught Me about White Privilege".   It is well written.

Liberal white privilege college students 1981

It has been one of those months when a lot of social and racial soul-searching is going on in the USA.  The mysterious shooting of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri...  Without going into a lot about that case here, I'll just put this link to Cracked.com "7 Important Details that No One Mentions about Ferguson" (my Facebook status for much of the week).  The language is salty, but I think Cracked has definitely evolved from a Mad Magazine rip-off in the 1970s to some of the best editorial writing on the web today.  Here's a shot of my status, including a snippet of the article.

Robin Ingenthron via Cracked.com

August 29 at 9:22pm ·

Dudes... Cracked.com has grown into something, like... way different from "Mimic MAD". I've actually considered quitting to go work for Cracked, it's today's editorial.

Robin Ingenthron BTW It's a longer article than usual in Cracked and the language is quite quite salty. But there are some great points made, e.g.: "Aside from protesters throwing rocks and things at police, you've probably heard reports that LOOTERS and RIOTERS were at the protests, and that is true, .... There were people at these protests who got out of hand (some from out of town, some not), and the community paid for it. But small groups of drunken youths do not a riot make, especially when it's surrounded by much larger groups of completely peaceful protesters. Most of them are just like any average citizen in America. If you have to, just imagine that all of these protesters also happen to be white. Hope that helps."

August 30 at 10:39am · 

Note the distinction the author Cody Johnston makes about how a mass protest gets labelled as a "riot" less easily in our minds if we "just imagine that all these protesters also happen to be white".   It's much the same point I make ad nauseum about TV repair... people perceive an African TV repairman as a little more dangerous, a little more criminal.  #HurricaneJoeBenson did not get six bullets like Mike Brown, but the time they took to defame him and prosecute him was a slow motion train wreck.

Hey Yah...Teach me lies...

Even as UN reports surfaced showing 91% reuse, and the original source of the "ewaste hoax" statistic ("80% dumping?") mumbled away a denial of ever having stated otherwise, the prosecution of Joseph Benson and BJ Electronics plodded away, taking a note of none of it.  It's harder to assess, perhaps, a mistaken snap judgement made by a Ferguson MO policeman in seconds.  And Trayvon Martin's killer was acquitted based on the quickness of the killing (and prosecuted in the press for the number of minutes he spent stalking trouble).  Benson was FRAMED over a course of years, and apparently no one ever thought he was worth the time to check that Greenpeace and Basel Action Network were full of @#$*.

Yep, the biggest thorn in Jim's side is indeed a liberal environmentalist, a college chum of Puckett's chums.

Yearbook got us liberal Minnesota PIRGs (leaning left) mixed up with sparse Black Christians in Asia?