Freshmen: Is it possible to change the world?

Undergraduate | Sep 16, 2014 | Claire Curry

Gabelli school freshmen considered the possibility of social change one person at a time with journalist David Bornstein who helped kick off the school year with a talk about his book How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas—required summer reading for entering business students.

Vincent DeCola, S.J., assistant dean for the Lincoln Center undergraduate program, summed up Mr. Bornstein’s message in these top-ten points—they’re worth remembering now and in the future:

1. Know yourself – find your passion.
2. Locate a need in the world (of some degree of criticality) to which you wish to respond. The need provides the power of the marketplace.
3. Keep a balance between the reality of the problem and your hope to alleviate the problem.
4. Constructive intelligence: Discover the “new”thing or process — or the new combination of things or processes — that will make the difference.
5. Travel light, especially while young. Be open to some risk.
6. If you can make a convincing business case, you are probably too late.
7. Provide the tenacity of a pit bull, but with empathy. Never lose your humanity.
8. Capacity is not fixed; it grows.
9. Antoine de Saint Exupéry (The Little Prince), said: No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
10. Form a group.