Dan Pallotta

3.12.2005

SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2005

This is a painting my friend Chris did of Buckminster Fuller way back in 1980 when we were all together at the Windstar Foundation. Buckminster Fuller was a light to all the world. A renowned mathematician and philosopher, he called our home "Spaceship Earth," and reminded us how inextricably connected we are to one another and the earth. He believe in a world that could work for everyone. I encourage you to visit the Buckminster Fuller Institute website. The following excerpt is inspiring:

During the course of his remarkable (life) he:

Was awarded 25 U.S. patents;

Authored 28 books;

Received 47 honorary doctorates in the arts, science, engineering and the humanities;

Received dozens of major architectural and design awards including, among many others, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Buckminster Fuller is best known for the invention of the geodesic domethe lightest, strongest, and most cost-effective structure ever devised. The geodesic dome is able to cover more space without internal supports than any other enclosure. It becomes proportionally lighter and stronger the larger it is. The worlds largest aluminum clear-span structure is a geodesic dome which houses the "Spruce Goose" at Long Beach Harbor. Fuller is most famous for his 20-story dome housing the U.S. Pavilion at Montreals Expo '67. Later, he documented the feasibility of a dome two miles in diameter that would enclose mid-town Manhattan in a temperature-controlled environment, and pay for itself within ten years from the savings of snow-removal costs alone.

In 1927, at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller stood on the shores of Lake Michigan, prepared to throw himself into the freezing waters. His first child had died. He was bankrupt, discredited and jobless, and he had a wife and new-born daughter. On the verge of suicide, it suddenly struck him that his life belonged, not to himself, but to the universe. He chose at that moment to embark on what he called "an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity." Over the next fifty-four years, he proved, time and again, that his most controversial ideas were practical and workable.

Buckminster Fuller was ridiculed for the many ideas he had that were ahead of his time. Such is the nature of genius. Remember that when others laugh at you for your failures, your disappointments, and your crazy ideas.

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SATURDAY, MARCH 12, 2005

You don't have to be a mental genius to be great. You don't need to be the most creative person in the world. You don't need to have the best voice or the best looks or be the best credentialed. So take heart, ye who worries that God under-stocked you for greatness. Greatness has a lot to do with the simple willingness to do something no one else is willing to do. It's about sticking you neck out when everyone else is covering their ass. These are the people they call "genius" and brilliant," like Muhammad Ali and Rosa Parks and the Wright Brothers and Gandhi. Kennedy stuck his neck out when he said we'd get to the moon in nine years. He wasn't a rocket scientist. And it could have been a disaster. Most people spend their lives avoiding any possibility of a mistake, and certainly a disaster. But like that saying goes, if you're not willing to get lost, how you ever going to find a new road?

So there's hope. If you're willing to stick your neck out, in a world where almost no one is willing to do that, you too can be great. And this is why, as Margaret Meade said, a small group of dedicated citizens can change the world. All they need is the willingness to go out on a limb.

Speaking of going out on a limb, check out Results - a group of citizens committed to creating the political will to end hunger and the worst aspects of poverty. There's going out on a limb.

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3.11.2005

Friday, March 11, 2005, Third Post

A 16,000-Mile Walk Across America - Make a Donation

Yesterday I got this e-mail from a former Pallotta TeamWorks walker:

"I started a nonprofit called Big John\'s Team in memory of my parents who passed away from cancer. We help uninsured and underinsured cancer patients pay for their treatments. In two weeks, I will be taking another life changing step, actaully many steps. I am setting out on a 3 year, 48 state, 16,000 mile walk to riase money for cancer patients all over the country."

That's just so inspiring. Check out his website and make a donation if you can. I'm definitely going to...TheBigWalk.Org

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Friday, March 11, 2005, Second Post

So this image that I posted, which I thought was a photograph my friend Chris had taken, is actually a painting. Is that unbelievable or what? It is the most realistic paintin I think I have ever seen in my life. The patience it must have taken boggles the mind. Or my impatient mind, anyway. This of course, brings to mind Thomas Merton:

The value of our activity depends almost entirely on the humility to accept ourselves as we are. The reason why we do things so badly is that we are not content to do what we can.

We insist on doing what is not asked of us, because we want to taste the success that belongs to somebody else.

We never discover what it is like to make a success of our own work, because we do not want to undertake any work that is merely proportionate to our powers.

Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a "means of livelihood" while he waits to discover his "true vocation."

The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies.

This might seem at odds with all the impossible dream stuff I'm always writing about. I don't think it is. When I have the humility to accept my calling is when I can begin to do really limitless things - like this amazing painting...

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3.10.2005

Friday, March 11, 2005

Today's photo is by Chris Chantland. Chris and I met way back in 1981 at a summer program John Denver ran for college students called Windstar. It was a magical time and place. We ate macrobiotic food, took aikido lessons out in the Rockies, slept in teepees, and attended lectures by Buckminster Fuller. Such an atmosphere of possibility.

Here's one to brighten up your day. Sunkist is running this program that gets kids to open lemonade stands for charity - check out these stories. Kids can buy the raw materials to construct their stand online, download marketing materials, and meet other lemonade-selling children. Ryan Graham, 9, of Birmingham, AL, wanted to help blind people "travel safely and independently." He took a stand and donated 100% of his earnings to Leader Dogs for the Blind.

And one of the more impossible dreams I've heard of in recent memory - a plan to open a five-star underwater resort in late 2006 Talk about outside of the box thinking. While everyone else is thinking about hotels in space, these guys go in the very opposite direction. How cool would it be to wake up next to a whale outside your window? The realm of imagination is so muchy more interesting than the realm of fear.

Have a really great weekend. Dream up an impossible dream. Or just be goood to yourself and relax. That's how all my impossible dreams got started in the first place.

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3.09.2005

Thursday, March 10, 2005

When I was a senior in college a group of classmates and I took on this impossible goal to get a group of 50 students to bicycle across the United States with us the next summer to raise money to fight world hunger. It was 1982, and computers and dot matrix printers were just starting to make their way on campus. We spent a year trying to recruit students to go and sending out merged letters, which we thought were so cool, to Rotary Clubs and churches and synagogues all across the country to find places to sleep and groups that would feed us. The dot matrix printer was as much a part of that dream becoming reality as our hearts and souls were. A year later, 39 of us flew to Seattle, Washington to begin our journey. Over the next nine and a half weeks we bicycled 4,256 miles, up and over the Rockies, across the badlands and the great plains, through the Alleghenies, and up the east coast all the way back home to Boston. We raised about $80,000. A lot of people don't know it, but that was the event that gave birth to the AIDS Rides ten years later. I came across this picture the other day of 20 or so of us in Connecticut, just a few days before completing our journey.

That year taught each of us that anything is possible - that no dream is too crazy to come true - all you have to do is overcome that voice in your head that tells you you can never do it. Sometimes you don't even overcome it. You just forge ahead with the stupid thing yelling in your ear the whole time. Beyond that voice is the world of our dreams, and that voice desperately wants to keep us from it.

On the impossible dreams front today, it looks as though researchers in the UK may have a cure for Type 1 diabetes,the most extreme form of the disease. Imagine that. A cure for diabetes. Can you imagine the scientist responsible, when he was a kid, saying, "I'm going to be the person that finds a cure for diabetes." Can you imagine what the cynical voices within him and around him would have had to say about that?

Sadly, there is another story out today that malaria may soon outpace the mortality of AIDS. This is devestating. AIDS takes the lives of over 8,000 people a day - 3 million people a year. Imagine if the world rallied around the idea of getting available drugs to people with AIDS and malaria the way they did for the Tsunami victims. Why don't they? Very simple. It's not because people are immoral. It's because they don't know. The reason so much money went to Tsunami relief was that it was in the news every moment of every day for weeks on end. It's all about awareness. If we made Americans as aware of that there is something we can do to save the lives of 9 million people each year who will otherwise die of AIDS and malaria, is there any doubt that they would rise to the challenge.

It's all about changing the national conversation. And that is possible. Not easy. But possible.

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3.08.2005

Wednesday, March 9, 2005

This is a photo of "Arlington West," a memorial on the beach at the Santa Monica pier in California to all the American soldiers who have died in Iraq. The week before last the death toll rose above 1,500 soldiers. To put this in context, approximately 2,395 Americans kill other Americans each year, just in the State of California alone. (Based on 2002 data.)

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Tuesday, March 8, 2005

The economist Jeffrey Sachs has just released a book that says the United States could end world poverty by the year 2025. Does anyone doubt that we could do it even more quickly if we set our minds to it? And can anyone imagine what kind of international reputation and power that would bring the United States? Or what great things it would do for the gloabl economy, and for all of us here at home? Possibility politics. This is the new era into which we must take America.

This is a long article, and you may not have time for it, but if you do it will inspire you. It's by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and it's called "For the Sake of Our Children." It is an unbelievable asessment of what the current administration is doing with environmental regulation. I could hardly believe it. He is a strong voice for democracy and a true free market economy, and ultimately, for progress. I am more and more struck by how little the Republican party seems to promote industrial progress. More on this in a letter this week.

Finally, its election day in L.A. today. So many political signs promising changes and so many political policies that stay the same. No wonder no one is excited.

We can change that. We can change the nature of the way change occurs. That's real possibility.

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3.07.2005

Monday, March 7, 2005

What makes human beings unique is our ability to achieve the impossible. As a close friend of mine says, gravity says that things fall, and human beings go flying around in helicopters and airplanes and gliders and spaceships in joyful defiance of the law of gravity. We were told no human being could ever run a four minute mile and now there are dozens of people who have done it. Elephants don't run a mile and then try to see if they can run the mile faster. Somehow our satisfaction and fulfillment are tied to this innate longing to explore our full potential.

This is why framing things like the need to end hunger in moral terms is so defeatist. It makes us feel guilty, and guilt does not inspire the human spirit. But if we frame the end of world hunger as an impossible challenge, the overcoming of which will advance the human race, stir unbelievable progress, and bring us joy, then we have a game worth playing.

We didn't get to the moon because we felt guilty about not going.

In the late 1970s or early 1980s, Werner Erhard wrote this amazing treatise for the Hunger Project, called, "An Idea Whose Time Has Come." I don't know where it can be found. I have two copies. Perhaps I will have someone re-type it for the site.

In any event, in it he quotes Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, authors of "Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity." What they have to say about ending hunger is very Ayn Randian. Democrats should not be so quick to shudder at Rand's philosophy - much of the change we wish to see in the world could be achieved by embracing her philosophy.

Anyway, here's what they say:

THE GUILT REFLEX

"Americans, we are told, have a special role to play in staving off the apocalypse. We are made to feel that world hunger is our cross to bear. . . Well intentioned attempts to stir public action have shifted the world food crisis out of the political-economic arena onto the ground of individual morality. Our consumption is tirelessly contrasted with deprivation elsewhere; the message being that our consumption causes their suffering. We are told, for example, that the amount of fertilizer used on our lawns, golf courses, and cemeteries equals all of what India uses to grow food. We inevitably experience some shame, feeling our wastefulness must reflect a moral failing. Some find protection by pointing out, quite rightly, that eating one less hamburger a week will not mean that the grain saved will necessarily get to a hungry mouth. Yet with no understanding of how hunger is actually created, we are defenseless against a diffuse but powerful sense of guilt for just being American."

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3.06.2005

Sunday, March 6, 2005

This is from Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged:"

"'You see, Dr. Stadler, people don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.'

'And you propose to pander to that?'

'That is the road to popularity.'"

To my mind, there is only one thing that can overcome this aversion to thinking - a vision so impossible and so breathtaking that it makes people once again begin to feel.

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