The fifth key ingredient for creating inspiration in this time of change is to explain why your project or vision matters: the values or principles it upholds.
When John F Kennedy announced that America would go to the Moon, he not only described what they would do (“land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth”) and when they would do it (“before this decade is out”), he also explained why this mattered:
“We choose to go to the Moon … and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
Two hundred years before that, in 1771, a disagreement over taxes had triggered the Boston Tea Party. But what sustained America’s War of Independence, and was eventually enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, was not a new set of tax rates but the principles the new republic stood for:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
It was principles that inspired the French Revolution:
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
And it was principles, in 1215, that had led Britain’s barons to stand up against their bully king and demand the laws of Magna Carta, including the radical new idea that:
“No person may be held indefinitely without trial.”
These principles then became the foundation not only of modern British law but also American law and the laws of many other nations around the world
People take great actions to uphold great principles: they go to the Moon for them, they fight revolutions for them, they overcome tyrants for them.
So if you want to create something new during this time of change, tell your audience why it matters: the principles it stands for, the ideals it upholds.
What are the principles or ideals that inspire the work you do today? Are there other principles or ideals that would inspire you even more?
Adapted from The Churning, Inner Leadership: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.
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