Our sector makes the wrong things easy

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I was raised in the church of self-sacrifice—Paul Farmer and Jesus Christ, take your pick of saint.

The gospel was plain: good work should cost you, and the more it costs, the holier it counts. So I paid.

For years I lived and worked in rural Liberia—no power grid, no phone signal, not even a gas canister—settling in a region so dangerous even UN peacekeepers wouldn't patrol. I called any discomfort proof I was serious. I ran myself ragged.

Our sector makes the wrong things easy:
Growing the org reads as progress.
Being indispensable reads as commitment.
Proximity to the problem gets mistaken for solving it.

I've done all three—double-digit budget growth seven years running, a job where I literally lived in the office, and a thirteen-dollar-a-day paycheque I mistook for impact

By the metrics of the nonprofit sector, it felt like the most serious version of the work. Yet, none of it moved the problem on the scale required.

Because problems don’t shift with effort. They shift when conditions change, and conditions change when decision-makers change their minds. This happens in three steps:

→ Get in the room — Get invited into the conversations that matter by producing impact people can understand and instantly place.
→ Run it — Meetings die on "let's circle back." Leave with the decision made, the owner named, and the date locked in.
→ Change what happens after you leave — Make the change stick without you. Build it into the default: the standard, the budget line, and the scoreboard.

Since I stopped working harder and started doing the above, the organization I lead has helped shift health worker policy in tens of countries. That work has won the Skoll Award, the Roux Prize, and Schwab Social Innovator of the Year, and been covered by the New York Times, TIME, and Foreign Policy.

All of it came after I put the weight down.

Change the world the same way you run a room: make the right things easy.

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​Try this

Take the thing you've been pushing hardest. The one that refuses to move no matter how much you care.

Stop pushing for a week.

Instead, name the single condition keeping it stuck. Then make the right response the easiest one to give.

🌿 You don't have to push harder—you have to make the right things easy.