If you had the chance to make a difference and didn’t take it, would that matter?

If you’ve had enough head starts to have access to powerful people, is flying halfway around the world to work with poor people an effective intervention, or just self-expiation?

Could it be that the greatest privilege is not to use the privilege you have?

Imposter syndrome is real, and the feeling is as ugly as the term.

But here’s the thing: there’s always a reason not to be generous if you’re looking for one, or willing to take it.

The work’s not ready.

The audience isn’t ready.

You’re not ready. (And who are you to lead these people, anyway?)

You might as well accept that all those things are going to feel true any time you’re trying to do work that matters. If it’s risky enough to make a difference, it’s risky enough that you’ll be looking for the off-ramp — and you’ll surely spot one.

The moment you spot the off-ramp is the moment to ask yourself a different question:

Rather than How dare you stand up and lead?, try, How dare you hide your best work, or your best self, from the people who are already ready for what you already have to offer?

Bring it.

I learned a new word from Steve Pressfield’s blog yesterday: McGuffin.

According to Steve, it’s a Hollywood term, attributed to Hitchcock, for the usually meaningless item that a movie villain desperately wants.

Steve cites the example of Key Largo, in which the villain can’t even say what he wants when asked point-blank — the answer, which Humphrey Bogart’s character supplies for him is that he just wants more.

In addition to wanton pursuit of essentially meaningless ends, Steve says that the key characteristic of a villain is the inability to change: even if you point out that all he’s after is more, the villain will laugh, agree with you, and then go right on chasing it.

Our culture offers a lot of McGuffins as objects of desire. Often, they’re aggressively marketed. And aggressive marketing tends to position some McGuffin or other as the thing you simply must have in order to play the hero in your own movie.

Of course, the point of aggressive selling isn’t to satisfy our desires but to sell us more.

You don’t have to buy that McGuffin. Or, if you do find yourself chasing one — as we all do from time to time — you can change.

Unless, of course, you’re determined to play the villain of insatiable, irrational appetites.

What would you do if nobody had to pick you? If you didn’t need a signature or an approval? If you didn’t have to ask for permission to create something, because you already had it?

What would that feel like?

In my experience it’s freeing and frightening at the same time: as soon as you realize that you can do something, you’re on the hook for whether you will do it or not.

Waiting for permission is usually waiting in vain — by design. It’s a convenient way to avoid facing the fear without admitting our own responsibility.

If you already had permission, it would just be you standing in your own way.

Would you forge ahead then?

Raise your hand if you thought a purpose of school was to get a stable job.

Keep it raised if you thought that was the purpose of school.

Now look around: how many stable jobs do you see? How many of them would you actually want to do?

We’re going through some enormous shifts in school, life, and work, and the stories we’re telling ourselves still tend to be years (decades?) out of date.

A stable job was a reasonable goal for the industrial economy, but we’re leaving all that in the dust. These days, the interesting jobs aren’t stable, and the stable ones are getting automated away.

First we’ve got to reset our cultural expectations about school and work.

And then we’re going to have to embrace the big (read: political) paradox — most people need a certain amount of stability in their lives and work, especially if they’re going to do interesting, generous, creative work that matters.

If we can’t tie our expectation of and desire for stability to the big industrialists anymore (not even for white-collar work), where will we anchor them instead?

In his TED talk and free ebook “Stop Stealing Dreams,” Seth Godin poses the question, What is school for?

“Stop Stealing Dreams” is his answer, and it boils down to the assertions that school is for teaching people to lead and to solve interesting problems.

He also challenges readers and listeners to start asking that question, too — and to come up with their own answers.

One year after completing a professional, terminal master’s degree in international affairs (a field that has always seemed full of opportunities to lead and solve interesting problems, even before I learned to think in those words), here’s my latest answer:

School is for preparing people to take real responsibility in the real world.

For some people, that will mean walking the heady path of professional scholarship. But not for most — and even professional scholars can’t pretend their work doesn’t have real-world implications.

The problem is that schools are by and large run by and for professional scholars. Left to its own devices, scholarship can fall in love with itself and try to slip the surly bonds of earth. Unfortunately, most students — or, practically speaking, graduates — don’t have that luxury.

There’s a big and endlessly interesting conversation to be had about scholars and students or teaching and learning. But perhaps it’s time to frame the question in terms of graduates rather than students: is what we’re doing right now preparing these people to be the kind of graduates we want to put into the world? If not, what needs to change?

This doesn’t rule out liberal or humanist education. Far from it. The student must first learn how to think — but the reason she must learn how to think is that, as a graduate, she will have to decide.

In the 21st century, practical education doesn’t mean teaching a 22-year-old all she’ll need to know for the rest of her life. The world moves too fast. Instead, it’s about admitting and choosing to deal with the ultimate practicality that every graduate eventually faces: given that she’ll live a life of consequence, what kind of consequence should she wish her life to have?

One year ago today, I sat where you’re sitting — baking in my black bag of a gown, silly master’s sleeves flapping, listening to Serious People providing valedictory advice.

I don’t expect this will be much more memorable, but I want to tell you about the biggest shift I’ve seen in the year since I walked across that stage.

Quite simply, the shift is that being effective eventually requires that we get specific about what difference we’re trying to make, or whom we’re seeking to serve and how.

This may take some time after graduation. Even if you’re going to medical school, you won’t specialize for at least a couple of years; for those — like me — who proudly wear the white hoods of the humanities and have the whole world ahead (or so it seems), it may take quite a bit longer to chart a course.

You have much to offer the world. That’s not in question. Rather, the question you’re about to be living is what exactly you have to give and how you’re meant to give it.

In my experience, school doesn’t prepare most people to answer that question. In too many cases, it doesn’t even prepare people to ask that question. Instead, I think too many people collect their credentials and then climb down from the stage to find their great desire to make a difference meeting the world’s great need for things to be made better — and then get stuck because they don’t know where or how to start.

The answer, as implied in the idea of commencement, is to simply start. Don’t look for the answer to everything; look for the next thing.

It’s OK if that’s not too specific at first. There’s much to be said for gaining broad experience and exposure early. Find the best people you can, doing the best work they can, and lend a hand. Try some of column A, try all of column B.

As you go along, though, pay attention: which problems, or which people, really call to you? Where do you seem to have something extra special to offer? Where might you find an opportunity to apply your special skill to a specific need?

Class, you have — our generation has — been raised on the myth of changing the world. That myth is crumbling, and I hope we’ll tell our children a different story about how to show up and make a difference in this world. But, in the meantime, your job — our job — is simply to make lives better: our own, our peers’, our communities’.

Don’t get stuck trying to change the world. Just get specific enough to pick a place or a problem or a person to start with, and commence.

I was recently teasing a professor for bringing me up to a pivotal moment: this wasn’t the plan at all, but, having seen what he had to teach, I couldn’t un-see it — and am therefore left with the decision of what to do about it.

As I told him, the moment the penny dropped for me was when we had a guest lecture by Michael Weinstein, recently of the Robin Hood Foundation. At Robin Hood, Michael had become famous for being a data-driven do-gooder: the heart of the case study we discussed with him was the process he instituted for measuring current and potential grants in terms in pure dollar terms.

That idea wasn’t universally popular in the press, the public, or the philanthropic community when Michael was running Robin Hood — and it wasn’t with our class, either. The obvious objection, which found plenty of voice in our discussion, was and is that it’s icky, impossible, or both to measure charity by “relentless monetization.”

Oddly, I found myself supporting Michael’s position. I’m heavily natured and nurtured against the idea that money can measure everything, or especially the most important things. In general, I just want to help out, and I’m pretty intuitive about that.

What I saw and respected in Michael’s process, though, was the premise that we shouldn’t be awarding millions of dollars purely or even mostly on the basis of intuition. Monetization wasn’t about cheapening human lives; it was about imposing discipline on the always-slippery process of grantmaking.

I still think about this, and wonder how well it worked in real life beyond the confines of a neatly-packaged case study. In any case, I’m sure Michael’s methods weren’t the last word in effective charity, but I don’t think that was the point. Instead, they were the first words that convinced me that being disciplined even in charity is not a matter of having no heart but rather using our brains to do the work our hearts insist needs doing.

What to do next remains an open question. But putting the power of mind in service of the heart’s vision should be part of the answer.

When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say “more perfect” because she said if a thing is perfect it can’t be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.
— Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

Like “more perfect,” it is grammatically impossible to be very unique.

And yet, when I think about the nearly 94 four years of the life of my grandmother, I can only say that she lived enough of life to give anyone confidence in the idea of “very unique.”

How else to encapsulate a woman who sampled six continents, who’d be first to tell you she had perfect taste, who took credit for everything good in her grandsons, and who, unforgettably, once proclaimed herself “the original cougar”?

God only knows where this lifelong traveler is journeying now, or who she’ll meet along the way. She already ran off with one Greek sailor (that I know of) in this life, and I have every reason to believe that her perfect taste will remain intact in the next.

Grandma strode across the stage of life with all the outsized passion and drama of the opera she learned to love as a child and listened to until the very end (with the volume getting progressively louder as even the recorded singers lost their ability to project their voices properly). When my brothers and I visited her early in the week, the one who’s a chef made supper for her while I put on a recording of Pavarotti’s greatest hits. I’ll always remember her eating that meal, teasing my brother about his cooking (and for being, of all things, a chef!), and humming the final lines of Nessun Dorma.

Pavarotti, a hamburger, and her grandsons: in all her life, I don’t think it ever got more perfect for Grandma than that. And yesterday morning, like Calaf, she won at dawn. The lifelong traveler took one look at the walker that was never destined to be her walker and, with typical taste and timing, quit the stage.

I’ll miss her terribly — we all will. And still we can be grateful for her good sense in knowing when the show was over, and not hanging around afterward.

Bon voyage, Grandma. And brava for a life very uniquely lived.

It’s lease time, which is a good opportunity to reflect on another year in this house, in this city, in this region.

In recent years, what’s become increasingly clear to me is that a combination of less-extreme elements doesn’t necessarily make for a golden mean amongst them all.

For example, the place I live now is a little funky, not quite city, and surely not rural. It’s also connected to Boston, but — in that strange way of “the area” — most certainly not in Boston.

What’s most striking, though, is that not-too-funky plus not-too-city does not equal halfway between a funky town in Alaska and a big city on the East Coast. And a little strip of lawn around the house isn’t halfway between an apartment building and a ranch house.

Earlier this week, I had a chance to visit a friend with whom I’ve explored big cities, small towns, and more than a few mountains. Sitting in a speakeasy in the city, sporting our outdoor-inspired fashion, we shared a good laugh about how we like to explore the edges and find it hard to settle between them.

There are places worth living, and places worth visiting. But I’m not so sure about the idea of difference-splitting. Two halves of the baby isn’t quite the same as a whole one.