Can't Not Do: The Compelling Social Drive that Changes Our World

Appendix 220 Suggestions for a Personal ChecklistHow You Do This Work Well

Chapters 4–6 are all about how you show up and put your can't not do into action. Those three chapters about humility, listening, and connecting are what make you and your can't not do most effective once you've defined it in chapters 1–3. Consider this a list of 20 pointers or best practices to think about to help guide you in your work.

Humility

1. Authentically humble people, regular heroes, have a sort of egoless quality, a willingness to be vulnerable, to ask for help, to say “I don't know.”
2. Being deeply authentic and vulnerable builds trust, respect, and safety.
3. You have to know and embrace that you are going to be put in uncomfortable positions and hard places where you will not be in control. Be ready to be vulnerable.
4. Humility, or lack of it, probably shows up more intensely and influences more outcomes in philanthropy, than it does just about anywhere else in our lives. Be extra mindful: you need to practice “humility on steroids.”
5. It's hard to overstate how meaningful this “I deserve it” versus “I was lucky” mindset about money and power is. The reality of the answer doesn't matter nearly as much as your perception, the true lens through which you see the world.
6. Humility in the name of only doing so much or worrying about offending someone when the truth will have greater impact is not much better than arrogance.

Listening

7. Study, absorb, understand, try to get the whole situation and all ...