The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (24 page)

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Later that summer I dug up the business card of the investor from the rooftop and invited him to lunch. I wanted to tell him that he’d helped me change the language I used to describe my work. Chatting
over a soup and a sandwich in TriBeCa, I shared my newly developed belief that any company that treats its social mission as its true bottom line should call itself a for-purpose. He smiled, nodded, and said, “I like that line of thinking.”

Several weeks later, I received an envelope in the mail; in it was a check from this gentleman to help build one of our new schools in Guatemala. He now saw his contribution as an investment. He wasn’t increasing his annual profits, but he definitely saw a spike in his sense of purpose.

I
t hardly happened overnight, but with lots of practice and experience, I began to feel more comfortable speaking in public. Actually, I began to enjoy it. When I received an invitation from Semester at Sea to go back on the ship as a guest lecturer, I jumped at the opportunity. I would join the voyage in Morocco, spend a full week with the students as the ship traveled along the African coastline, then disembark in Ghana, where I would travel independently. The organizers even sweetened the deal by letting me bring a guest, which was great because I didn’t know a single other person on board.

I invited my mother to celebrate her fifty-fifth birthday.

Once I set foot on the MV
Explorer
, I was overcome by nostalgia. The fresh smell of my cabin’s interior immediately brought me back to that feeling of being a student on the ship six years earlier. This was the experience that had most shaped the person I’d
become deep down inside. Time seemed to accordion—I simultaneously felt so far removed from those days and yet I could envision myself right back in my old Nike Air Force 1s.

Most of my recent speeches had been at corporate conferences, so this would be the first time in a while that I was speaking to college students. It felt freeing: I didn’t have to sugarcoat anything; I could simply speak from the heart.

When it came time for my first talk, I focused on what I thought the students would most want to hear. Many of them had told me that this was their first time traveling independently, so I shared some advice on Backpacking 101.

Reflecting on my experiences in Latin America, I advised, “First, accept that plans change and new opportunities will suddenly present themselves while traveling, so just go with the flow. If you remove your cynicism and allow yourself to be astonished by the wonders of the world, you’ll be blown away by the memories you’ll make via the unexpected itinerary. Second, if you make yourself a target, you’ll become one. Don’t wear bright clothing, and if you don’t want someone touching your valued possessions, keep them in a money belt down your pants. Your privates should stay next to your privates. Trust me, no one will be going there without your permission. Third, music and body language are universally spoken, so when someone invites you to dance, let go of your inhibitions and dance. And lastly, when in doubt, just say you’re Canadian. People hate a lot of countries, but no one hates the Canadians.”

A handful of kids laughed, and I could tell the three hundred students in the room appreciated the honest and relatable advice. I knew that because this talk was the first time that I used a technique called “one person, one thought.”

Weak speakers look down at the floor, good speakers look up
but scan the room, great speakers make eye contact selectively, and exceptional speakers deliver every complete thought directly to one person in the audience, making that person feel like the center of the room—and then they move on and do it again. We’ve all been in that position when a speaker looks right at you, and for a few fleeting moments your heart starts to race. You are locked in.

I started to look directly at just one student for the entirety of every thought I delivered and attempted to tell them a story as if no one else was listening. It emboldened me to speak with greater conviction, and as the speech gained momentum, I could feel the pulse of the room elevate. After nearly an hour of talking about what I knew and loved, I ended with the most sincere beliefs that I could share.

“You have to find a mantra and live it fully. The one I’d adopt right now if I were you is something I found on the inside of a friend’s journal last year: ‘You may be safe, but I am free.’ Take advantage of the freedom that comes with your youth. Inhale life, exhale fire, and embrace the late, sleepless nights, because that’s when the magic happens—when everyone else is asleep and you’re awake thinking about the world as it is, and the world as it could be. Make the most of those moments,” I said forcefully. “And in the coming years people will tell you that you’re too young to change the world. I’m here to tell you, that’s fucking bullshit.”

I’d never cursed in a speech before. It just came out. An audible gasp filled the room. There was dead silence. Then, much to my surprise, the students began clapping raucously with agreement. After months and months of practiced pitches back home, it felt good to simply speak the truth unfiltered. That night, I vowed, going forward, to speak from the heart no matter which audience I was addressing.

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Following an invigorating week on the ship, I felt like a new man. The students’ sense of wonder and willingness to sprint toward the unknown was refreshing. After my second lecture fifty students even stuck around to brainstorm about a campaign we would launch the following year called the Impossible Ones, which would celebrate the spirit these students embodied by having people take on “impossible” challenges to raise money for PoP. I stepped off the MV
Explorer
in Accra, Ghana, ready to explore the country as a potential location for PoP’s expansion into Africa.

After a year of research, Ghana was our top choice due to its tremendous need for primary education in the countryside. Since we would need to find a local partner to help us get a foot in the door before building our own fully independent operations (this usually takes about a year), our team set up several visits for me with local NGOs.

On the three-hour shuttle ride to Ho, the capital of the deeply impoverished Volta Region, the poverty juxtaposed with the beauty of this West African nation was captivating. Towering waterfalls dropped misted waters like snowfall onto the mountainsides, while malnourished children emerged from mud huts to wave at each passing car. When we arrived in the dusty capital, I was greeted by the founding team from Disaster Volunteers of Ghana (DIVOG), an NGO started by four Ghanaian friends, which had been building schools in the region for years. Right away, they briefed me on statistics that demonstrated the need for trained teachers and new classrooms throughout Volta.

The following morning, they took me in an old van to see some of their project sites. In one village after another, I saw school-less sites and met children without classrooms or any opportunity to
learn. In those same communities, parents verbally committed to provide 100 percent of the labor to build their children’s school if they received funding for the raw materials and a commitment from the education ministry to provide trained teachers. The culture was one of complete community participation. In the days ahead I spent hours with members of the education ministry, who agreed to provide trained teachers for any school we built, and I visited several schools under construction where I witnessed that 100 percent labor commitment being fulfilled. The determination of the Ghanaian people won me over—as did a boy named Justice.

Two years earlier I had received an email from a Ghanaian student named Justice, who told me of his dream to bring education to the children of his country, who were learning under mango trees instead of in classrooms and often had no teachers or books at all. He had discovered PoP through Facebook, and his email was so uplifting that we started corresponding regularly and eventually talked on Skype too. Back then PoP was just getting started, but when the Semester at Sea voyage brought me to Ghana, I knew I had to find him.

On my last day in Ho, I finally got to meet Justice in person. We spent the entire day together, walking through monkey forests and remote villages. Before I left, he asked me for one thing:

“When you go back home, you will not forget about us?”

“Of course I won’t forget about you,” I said.

“Then you must promise me that you will come back. And Pencils of Promise will work in Ghana to support the education of our children.”

“I hope so.” I meant it.

“Hope is not enough. You have to believe, and then it will be so.”

When I went back to my hotel that night, I wrote an email to our team stating that I expected us to expand to Ghana the following
year. Rainer Maria Rilke said, “Live not in dreams, but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.” It was time to make that future happen. We’d need to raise a lot of money at our upcoming gala to make it possible, but the first step was acknowledging the goal itself.

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Six weeks later, Justice’s voice was still ringing in my head on the biggest night in the history of the organization, the night of our first gala. We had thrown large events before, but this was a long way from my twenty-fifth birthday party where people launched PoP with $20 and $25 donations. Gala tickets were now $500, and purchasing a table cost $10,000 to $50,000. I was amazed when we sold out three weeks in advance and there was a fifty-person wait-list of generous supporters willing to pay $1,000 each the night of the event—all of whom we had to reluctantly turn away because we were so over capacity.

I had never attended a major gala, and now I was leading this one, attended by Shaquille O’Neal and Usher. One of the evening’s honorees was Justin Bieber, who was by then donating $1 from every US concert ticket to PoP. We were also honoring my brother, Scooter, for his tremendous advocacy and support of our work, along with Rich Lent and the entire AgencyNet team. Sophia Bush, the beautiful actress and activist, was the night’s host.

I had invested so many hours in getting this night right, and I knew that my opening speech would set the tone for the entire evening. As the program began, I made my way toward the stage and, with the audience of 550 people, watched a short video of our work. On the screen flashed the words I had spoken in tiny rooms so many times before: “We don’t just want you to support us, we want you to join us.” After speaking passionately about how much
she believed in our work, Sophia, whom I had met through Summit Series, invited me onto the stage.

As I stepped up to the podium, I took a long, deep breath. The confidence I’d gained on Semester at Sea led me to believe that I could wing anything, but it suddenly hit me that I’d only have one shot at this. I scanned the audience and saw my entire family. My parents. My siblings. My grandmothers. My cousins. My friends. My team. I looked into each of their eyes and felt the heat in my hands start to dissipate.
One person, one thought,
I told myself.

I began by telling the story of the boy who asked for the single pencil, then projected an image of the $25 that started the organization. Each of these set the context, but the next image was something I’d never before shown anyone. The large screen projected a handwritten page from my leatherbound journal. After a decade of writing in these journals, filling hundreds of pages, I read an entire page aloud for the first time. It described the night that the name Pencils of Promise entered my mind at the Philharmonic and the moment when the idea for the organization was born.

Sometimes you just know. With absolute conviction. The complete absence of doubt is so rare it generates a sense of excitement that’s so powerful it becomes shocking. . . . That name just appeared in my head, and I remember a hard closing of my eyes followed by an opening and a quick punch of breath. It literally knocked the wind out of me, left me searching for air, a tingling of excitement surging through my chest. Yes. With absolute conviction. Everything had changed.

People began to nod their heads and clap. They felt what I felt, that we were participating in something bigger than any one of us as individuals, and that we had the opportunity to do something
remarkable together. I then showed the video of Nith and Nuth, so that every person in the room could connect with the children we were working to support. The groundwork had been laid, now we just had to follow through.

Lanoy had flown in days earlier and received a standing ovation when introduced. She and Leslie tied baci string around each of the honorees’ wrists when they took the stage, and Justin, Scooter, and Rich all gave moving speeches. Their conviction in our work set up a perfect opportunity to go big, and just before the part of the night when the auctioneer would encourage major pledges from those in attendance, I shared one more announcement. The SAS experience had given me the confidence to speak our loftiest aspirations aloud, and this one night was the only chance we’d get to fulfill Justice’s request. I needed to announce a clear goal, and the transformational outcome it would produce if we hit it. Defining both cleanly was the key.