Umair Haque is Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business, and he is ranked one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. Earlier this morning Harvard Business Review published Umair’s essay entitled How To Fix Your Soul, and it’s a gorgeous little piece filled with some refreshing perspective on our world where “everyone we know (young, dumb, and hopelessly awesome) seems foot-draggingly tired, existentially fatigued — literally world-weary.”
Haque believes we are “on the cusp of what [he calls] The Human Age: an age in history rich with Big Ideas about, and Great Transformations towards, eudaimonia — life lived meaningfully well.” But in order for our world to truly flourish in this new age we need to begin embracing the Big Ideas, Haque argues. These Big Ideas are all around us, however, we live in an age where our instituions (from political to economic) are engineered to deny the benefits of these Big Ideas to the majority of the world. Why not, Haque proposes, redefine the GDPs of the world to include the currency of a nation’s creative output and ingenuity? Why not redefine a corporation’s health to include its embrace of human values? Why not revolutionize “our conception of what prosperity is and why it matters — to encompass the quiet wholeness and furious incandescence of a life well lived.” This kind of change, Haque adds, is not achieved through one single revolution, rather a million tiny ones. “Each and every one of us is a leader,” Haque writes. “Some of just don’t know it yet.” You can read Umair Haque’s How To Fix Your Soul by visiting the blog of Harvard Business Review, and be sure to follow Umair Haque on Twitter.
As soon as I finished reading Haque’s essay there were two people that instantly came into my mind: Craig Kielburger and Dov Seidman. Craig Kielburger is the 29-year-old humanitarian who at age 12 set out the change the world. Now, 17 years later and with 2 million volunteers, he’s still at it, and you can watch his extraordinary 60 Minutes profile below. And if you aren’t aware of the amazing work of Dov Seidman you absolutely must click on the link just below. Dov is the CEO of LRN, a company that specializes in fixing the souls of huge multi-national corporations by helping them instill human values into everything they do. Dov Seidman’s passion and life’s work is one of the most inspiring stories I have ever profiled here on FEELguide and hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of him:
SEE ALSO: Dov Seidman Is Blowing My Mind: “HOW” One Man Is Redirecting The Moral Compass Of The Modern World
