Dear Family and Friends,
As I think about each of you, I am filled with thankfulness. Your love and kindness towards me give me courage and confidence. You also bring fulfillment to my life as we share in large and small moments. In those moments, many times you will ask me about what I do. You genuinely want to know me and so you want to understand my career and the way I spend my working days. But often I feel that my responses have lacked clarity and simplicity. In the end, many of you walk away shrugging and saying, "I still don't really understand what you do all day!"
So I thought I would take a few minutes and write you a letter to share with you about what I do and why I love it. For starters, I am a Chief Innovation Officer for a large nonprofit called SIL International. I also run a small business with my wife Mindy called Generous Mind. My mission in life is to "release ideas to the world" and I do that through disciplined innovation. Innovation is simply "Fresh ideas that create value." (a definition I got from Richard Lyons)
I spend my best hours playing with ideas and the rest of the hours collaborating with others on how to bring them to life. Mostly that takes the form of three activities:
1. Sitting on Zoom talking through ideas or their implementation
2. Taking trips to talk through the same things but in person
3. Creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations that bring those ideas to life.
What brings me most joy is when an idea that someone thought about is fleshed out into a tangible product, service or program that solves a real problem for people out in the world today. I love this process because it brings fulfillment to the person with the idea and it brings real help to those who have the problem. Let me give you a few simple examples:
1. Helping reimagine a print publication for the Internet back in the early 2000’s.
2. Developing a new fundraising approach designed to help donors grow and learn as they gave.
3. Building the first missions infographic service.
4. Designing a program to link sustainable development goals to literacy projects.
My greatest frustration is when good ideas get sabotaged or slowed down for bad reasons. When you see me discouraged or sigh deeply it is usually because busyness, distraction, pride, anger or obstinance has won the day and the victim is a good idea that is being kept from those it could help.
Not every part of this effort is equally enjoyable. Budgets, spreadsheets, expense reports, goal reporting and forms of all kinds suck energy from me. But I do all those things so that I can spend time imagining or fleshing out an idea and bringing it to life. One of the necessary parts of helping to flesh and idea out, is physical presence. That means travel. Travel is a two edged sword for me. I grew up on airplanes as the son of missionaries, so I feel very at home on the road. But I also love to be with all of you. I am constantly torn between rushing off to explore the next amazing idea and rushing home to those people I care most about. It is one of my great struggles.
So what does a win look like in my world? Success looks like a person having enough confidence and understanding of their idea to run an experiment and try it out. I love to sit down after an experiment and hear what the person learned and what they plan to do next.
One of the things that drives me and fills my time is lifelong learning. I spend my days reading, processing, synthesizing and then sharing. If you notice that I'm very active on social media, this is why. Places like facebook, LinkedIn and Threads are the places I go to learn and share. Because I value community, learning is way more fun to do with others. One of the things that brings me the most joy is when one of you takes the time to read something that I'm thinking about and shares a comment or question. That energizes me and connects me to each of you.
I know that my work might seem very abstract and hard to pin down. But I hope that this letter gives you a new and clearer perspective on how I spend my days and why it matters in the world.
With great love,
Jon
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