Jason O'Neil

This is one of the few “feel good” stories coming out of Ukraine: Ms Lam Bao Yan and Mr Rudy Taslim, a married couple from Singapore, who together run an architecture firm, have been building insulated and shock resistant homes for displaced Ukrainians, as well as other things that they know the people need, like public places with electricity and internet access (they’re calling “lighthouses”) so people can communicate.

Read it here: The Stories Behind: The S’pore couple given residency by Ukraine after designing, building 500 emergency homes there.

There are several things I love here:

They’ve found a way to have an impact that doesn’t just feel nice to them, but is valuable to the country – valuable enough that they’ve been officially offered residency in Ukraine to continue their work.
This quote from Ms Lam: “(We want to) overcome injustice with good, and good looks differently to different people. ‘Good’ could look like a word of encouragement to some, (but to us) ‘good’ looks like our skill sets. We are not politicians, neither are we militarians, so we cannot overcome injustice with these because we are not influential people like that. But we overcome all this injustice with the good that we know – our skill sets and our lives.”
They encourage smaller acts of justice too – like knitting scarves or drawing pictures! They don’t judge lesser efforts, but encourage and celebrate it and invite more people to join.
The whole approach seems very humble (not over-celebrating their success, not looking down on others) and very non-judgemental (not criticising the military)
They’re Christians, and 10 years ago bought one-way tickets to Mozambique to study to be missionaries. But that experience taught them that the best thing they can do for the world, and for God, is use their skill sets to serve others.
They keep their day-jobs and self fund their impact work. (This is similar to the take in The Future is Bi-vocational but for social impact work, not just church work. Lots of the same reasoning applies).
They hire locals to be involved in the building and installation, stimulating the local economy rather than trying to capture that value themselves.
This isn’t their only project! They’ve got a history of noticing a need, and getting something started, building it up, and then spotting the next opportunity. It feels like this gives them compounding momentum. I’m not sure the degree to which it stretches them thin – these projects feel like they can be handed over to locals giving them headspace for the next opportunity. There seems to be a delightful responsiveness – they see a need and jump to help.

Very inspiring. Ties in close to the message Ryan Gageler gave at Riverview this morning on The Parable of the Talents, and the idea that “from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked”:

So what is it that’s in your hands? Perhaps you have a family, or significant relationships, that are truly a gift from God. Perhaps you’ve been given financial blessing, or the ability to grow wealth. Maybe God has entrusted to you the gift of hospitality, and you love to help people feel like they belong. Maybe you have capacity for enormous things – you’re like the energizer bunny – and you can do far more than most people in a single day. Maybe you’ve been given the gift of time, you have more time and space in your schedule than most. Or maybe you’re just wired a certain way and you can bring joy and peace to every space that you walk into.
Ryan Gageler – the parable of the talents

The pre-recorded message from Ryan that was shared at my church this morning.

Learning new things and “garbage fountains”

From my friend Lars Doucet: Operation Garbage Fountain

Some nuggets from this post:

Maybe you’ve heard that story about the pottery teacher who divided the class into two groups: half would be graded traditionally based on the quality of their work, but the other half would be graded on sheer quantity alone. As in, literally, he would take all the pots they made that year, weigh them, and X kilograms of pottery would get you an A+. As the story goes, the quantity group produced not only the most pots, but also unambiguously the best pots.
Lars Doucet: Operation Garbage Fountain

And then a link to a post that shared the original story.

I’ve always been captivated by music, but much like many kids decide they “can’t draw” or “suck at math,” I likewise labeled music as a mystical alien magic that would forever be beyond me.

Later, in high school, I met a girl in the year below me who played the saxophone. She was really good and I assumed she started playing in elementary school. Nope, she started playing the previous year. That moment was the first click for me – you can just start learning new things, anytime. Even today.
Lars Doucet: Operation Garbage Fountain

The key argument is that it’s all about putting in the pracitce, the repetitions or “reps”, and not making excuses. From his own story:

It wasn’t easy learning an entirely new career, but I’m quite good at it now, and it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would. It turns out you can just learn new things if you have the right people to guide you and you have the opportunity and the inclination to put in the reps.

…

Learning, ultimately, is about putting in the reps. Figure out what you want to get better at, and practice doing it.

There’s a lot of things I would like to do. I mostly don’t do them. My reasons are all stupid excuses.
Lars Doucet: Operation Garbage Fountain

He outlines – and then rebuts – all the usual reasons we don’t learn more then outlines his solution, “operation garbage fountain”.

Basically a set of commitments to himself to just do the creative practice to get better, and to share it online in its raw form. Not concerned about quality, not concerned about the overall narrative arc of your posts, not concerned about audience or community building. And no guilt about posting too little or too much – just a commitment to make a little progress as often as you can, and to always post it in some form.

I love this. It’s a different take to what I also liked in Blogging as an Ideas Garden … but I’m not sure it’s incompatible.