October 13, 2015
Justin was 9 years old when he watched his dad Craig Hostert battle kidney disease. For two and a half years, Craig was hooked up to a dialysis machine three days each week for 4 hours having his blood cleansed and returned to his body. For Craig, the only way to live without dialysis was a kidney transplant. When they told Justin that Craig’s wife was donating a kidney to his dad, he “stormed out of the room, crying and stomping his feet” Kathleen Hostert said, “We didn’t know what he was thinking.” It turned out, Justin was jealous. His dream was to save his dad’s life. In 2014, 17,105 kidney transplants took place in the United States with 11,570 coming from deceased donors and 5,535 from living donors like Kathleen. The 5 years prognosis for people receiving kidney transplants is 83.4% from deceased kidney donors and 92% from living donors. Of these amazing living donors, 181 anonymously donated their kidney without having any relationship to the recipient. After the successful kidney transplant, the couple started a fundraiser run/walk to tell people about organ donations. In its first year, it attracted a few hundred people. Over the years, it grew into a massive […]
August 27, 2015
Kailash Satyarthi was a 26 year old electrical engineer with a lifelong anger about how vulnerable people were treated in his homeland of India. This anger led him to create a magazine where he wrote about children under age 14 forced to be laborers and slaves. He couldn’t understand how this could be happening in 1980. One day that year, a man named Vasal Kahn knocked on Kailash’s door hoping to get his story published. “He had been trafficked 17 years ago, along with his wife and family. All of them were confined to work as slave laborers at a brick factory,” Kailash told the Huffington Post. “They had a daughter who was born and grew up in slavery. She was 15 years old and just about to be sold to a brothel.” Kailash wanted to see the conditions for himself and went to the factory. “We were badly manhandled, beaten up, our cameras were smashed, and the man was caught again by those brick kiln people,” Kailash said. Kailash tried to free the man and his family. He called on the high court and his friends, who were lawyers. Kailash did help rescue the man and more than 30 people […]
June 9, 2015
It was late December when two brothers had to finish their experimenting. The bike mechanics had to focus on producing the bicycles for next season. They had built a wooden box 6 feet long and 16 inches square with one open end and attached a fan on the other end. The box served as a wind tunnel to test wing surfaces for their dream to fly. That same month, the chief engineer of the United States Navy, Rear Admiral George Melville denounced the dream of flight as a shame in the respected North American Review. He was among many scientific authorities who believed this¹. In the new book titled “The Wright Brothers”, historian David McCullough offers insight into the lives of Wilbur and Orville. The brothers owned the bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio that was just a few blocks from their lifelong home at 7 Hawthorn. Their shop had a bike showroom in front and a machine shop in back. They did their experiments using a generator as they didn’t have electricity. Wilbur and Orville’s dream was to make human flight possible. In May of 1899, Wilbur wrote a letter to the Smithsonian Institute asking for any information they had […]
April 8, 2015
John Crowley married his high school sweetheart. In the summer of 1997, they moved from the East coast to Walnut Creek just outside San Francisco. They moved for John’s new job as a financial consultant just after graduation. A few months later, he and his wife Aileen were living with their now three young children in their four bedroom home. John, Jr was three, Megan was 15 months and Patrick was just a week old. Megan had been displaying a lack of upper-body strength, so they brought her to see a doctor. After a series of tests, a doctor informed them that Megan suffered from Pompe’s disease. It is a rare form of muscular dystrophy that affects only a few thousand worldwide. It is caused by an inherited genetic mutation which didn’t have any treatment. They soon discovered Patrick had the same mutation. Doctors told John and Aileen they’d be lucky if their children lived to see their second birthday. Although John had just graduated that summer from Harvard, he owed $140,000 in student loans and had $40,000 of credit card debt. John was determined to find a way to save Megan and Patrick. He took to the web to […]
February 12, 2015
It was early January 1865. Abraham Lincoln had just been re-elected president. He surprised or even shocked his wife Mary, Secretary of State William Seward and several others when he told them of his big idea. He wanted to get the 13th Amendment passed through the House of Representatives before the new Congress was installed at the end of the month. The Amendment would abolish slavery, yet it was 13 votes short when these same House members rejected it nine months earlier. Seward tells Lincoln in a scene in the movie Lincoln, that he would need every Republican to vote for it (which never happens) and a virtually impossible 20 Democrats votes for passage. Seward asks “Why tarnish your invaluable luster with a battle in the House?…we will lose”. Lincoln responds, “I like our chances now”. Dream or big idea pursuits are usually complex. They require finding the common intersection amongst many people with diverse interests, several areas of knowledge and managing our personal lives (family, friends, relationships, school, career, passions and other interests). Lincoln led a country being ravaged by a war that took over 600,000 lives. His dream was to eliminate slavery while preserving the union. He was […]
January 14, 2015
David Roy was diagnosed two years ago with stage four, metastatic pancreatic cancer. At the time, he was given four and a half months to live and was told to settle his affairs. Few people with this diagnosis live more than a few months. David was not willing to accept the prognosis and set out to create a different one. David reached out to Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, whom he met on a plane years before. Dr. Soon-Shiong is a billionaire physician with a dream to convert cancer into a treatable chronic condition like high blood pressure or diabetes. It is without question a worthy dream to prevent the 500,000 deaths each year in the United States that are attributed to cancer. Yet achieving a dream or big idea may be best described by Ray Bradbury. You need to “jump off the cliff and learn how to make wings on the way down.” David and Dr. Soon-Shiong do not have the benefit of waiting for all the answers prior to pursuing their dreams. Most likely, neither does anyone else. The complexity of our modern day means that key insight you need may only surface as the result of experimentation. Achieving dreams […]
November 13, 2014
Unless you want to land on a Comet traveling 34,000 mph to analyze its material, you may want to wait as long as possible. Gerhard Schehm’s dream was to analyze a comet’s composition for insight into how earth and the solar system were formulated. It would be like the discovery of carved written inscriptions in both Greek and Egyptian on the Rosetta Stone that helped historian translate the mysterious hieroglyphics language of ancient Egypt. Gerhard became the lead scientist in 1985 on the aptly named Rosetta mission, which landed a probe this week on a comet 317 million miles away. Rosetta was approved for funding in 1993 and was launched into space on a rocket in 2004. The mission’s ten year journey through space will continue into 2015. So what about your dream or big idea equivalent of landing on a comet? When is it a good idea to share it with people? People that have achieved big ideas suggest you wait as long as possible. Self-made billionaire Sara Blakely kept her big idea of making a new women undergarment under wraps for an entire year while working on developing the prototype. She waited until she was 100% committed and […]
October 22, 2014
It is a good thing that a 19 year old college sophomore didn’t believe that the grown-ups had it covered. If you ever watched your blood fill up multiple vials in the doctor’s office and wonder if you’ll pass out, you’ll be thanking Elizabeth Holmes soon. Elizabeth believed the problem was people dying prematurely because diseases weren’t detected early enough. Elizabeth’s big idea was to develop a way to fix this. “When I thought about having the greatest impact with my life, I thought about all the times that people lose loved ones because diseases weren’t detected early enough. I thought, ‘I can play a role there.’” She was also motivated by her fear of needles stating “It’s the only thing that actually scares me.” The young chemical engineering major dropped out of Stanford University to start a company called Theranos. She used the money her parents saved for college to begin developing a convenient, low cost way to test for disease biomarkers. Her mission sounded very familiar to what she wrote to her dad as a 9 year old, “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something mankind didn’t know was possible to do.“ Do […]
September 24, 2014
A $40 video rental late fee? Students from poor neighborhoods with low college graduation rates? People dying of starvation in Bangladesh? A son born without fingers? Small pox ravaging a village? We improve our individual prosperity and those of others by achieving our dreams and big ideas. They result in purpose and meaning, love and belonging as well as feeling competent (success) from leveraging our unique strengths and talents. It could be from ensuring our daughters get college degrees, improving relationships with loved ones, opening restaurants, changing careers, improving our communities or maybe competing in a marathon. To make almost anything happen, it requires the aspirer of a dream or big idea to take action along with many others. We need to be inspired to act, change or fit something new in our lives. Successful aspirers tap into these human motivations that are looking to improve well-being. It’s the well-being coming from solving a problem or addressing an unmet need. It provides an almost singular focus to the aspirer as well as insight into the beneficiaries and people that must change. Here are 5 problems solved by successful aspirers with this laser-like focus: 1. Reed Hasting began to understand the […]
July 1, 2014
Perry loved music. When he graduated from college he became a regular DJ in New Orleans. He then moved into a one bedroom apartment in Manhattan with a couple of friends hoping to get in the music business. He applied for many entry level positions, though he wasn’t able to get a single interview. He moved back to New Orleans and spent several years trying to become an electronic musician while waiting on tables and working at a pre-school. He got an idea to create a web site to help working artists like him. He contacted Austrian DJ duo Kruder and Dorfmeister to ask what it would cost to bring their show to the New Orleans Jazz Fest in 2001. They wanted $15,000 and five business class tickets, an amount that was beyond what Perry could raise. He felt that if he could only create a way for people to contribute, they could raise the money and many people would have a great time. Over the next 4 years, he would ignore the idea and return to it when he was feeling lost. “This thing had a power to it,” says Perry, referring to his idea as “it was pulling […]
