“If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.”
That was the concluding line from Adam Braun, the founder of Pencils of Promise, at a luncheon today at Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton for the Heller School of Business at Roosevelt University. I don’t have any affiliation with Roosevelt, so why was I there? My wife and I were invited by our attorney, Michaeline Gordon of the Dolgin Law Group, which sponsored a table to which Michaeline had invited a number of us, including someone she wanted us to meet for insurance purposes. And surely, such networking is always important.
But the important thing about the event was the presentation by Braun. Frankly, I had never heard of this 29-year-old man before being invited, and had no real idea who he was until he began to speak. His life experiences, his family background, and his dedication to his cause make one expect someone much older, but Braun has packed a lot into a few short years. He has made the kinds of decisions that make others agonize, yet which he seems to swallow as a matter of routine. Given a choice at age 23 between a six-figure position at Lehmann Brothers and a lesser-paid position at Bain Capital that offered more learning, he took the latter. As it turns out, a year later Lehmann filed bankruptcy, and Braun’s decision looks prescient in retrospect. But even he would not claim that he foresaw that outcome. What he saw was that learning at a young age was more important than starting salary. I have never worked on Wall Street, andI never will, but I can still relate to his decision because I have always leaned to the notion that learning should be a lifelong activity–and that it should ultimately serve a purpose. But I don’t interpret the connections between those two statements too narrowly. I have often learned things that seemed to serve no purpose at all, only to reveal their value years later in some completely unexpected context.
But back to Braun. This young man who values education highly had traveled cheaply at a very young age. His adventures exposed him to the lifestyles and needs of those in developing countries. He also shared early in his presentation his near-death experience aboard a boat in the Pacific Ocean that nearly sank due to being disabled by a rogue wave, which led Adam in that moment of crisis to wonder what purpose his life would have served. In his subsequent travels, he began to ask young children what they most wanted in life. The seminal moment came in India when a young boy replied, “a pencil.” Such a simple need highlighted the stark fact that what most of us take for granted, just simple literacy and basic education, was merely a dream for this youngster. The idea that a pencil could change a life apparently changed Adam Braun’s life as well.
In the end, he had to choose between making money at Bain Capital or building his organization, which he insists is not a “nonprofit” organization but a “for-purpose” organization. He firmly believes that “for-purpose” organizations, whether for-profit or not, will come to dominate the landscape of the future, replacing the simplistic notion that getting ahead is strictly about compensation in the form of cash.
In fact, he says, cash is only one of three forms of compensation, the other two being learning and purpose. People ultimately want to attach meaning to their work, he says, and working for a purpose will overwhelm mere mercenary motivation in the end. In fact, he offers three “M’s” in this arena as not entirely divorced, but certainly distinct, forms of compensation: meaning, money, and motivation.
Repeatedly, he discussed undertaking efforts that seemed quixotic but actually betrayed an underlying savvy typical of the motivated millennials, working atop platforms that seemed to be burning beneath his feet, but stirred him to greater levels of effort and wisdom, including the choice to leave Bain Capital with no cushion beneath him as he shifted gears to a full-time focus on his newfound passion for raising money to build schools in developing nations, so far including Laos, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Ghana. A brief video highlighted scenes from these various places, and Braun stressed that, while Western donors could certainly visit the schools, their construction was best left to those who would benefit from them. “But you can sit back and watch,” he suggested. In my experience, he had already learned what many international nonprofits have learned only after decades of struggle with doing too much and expecting too little of their beneficiaries. Adam Braun is on to something.
After the presentation, my wife, a retired Chicago Public Schools teacher, bought his book (The Promise of a Pencil), which he signed, “Thank you for your wonderful work.” He seems to be someone who would understand the value of a good teacher in ways that many in our affluent society do not. Let us hope there are more young people like him emerging in the years to come. With young women being denied education, or threatened for seeking it, in some parts of the world like Pakistan and Nigeria, the world needs all the help it can get from organizations like his.
Jim Schwab
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