Everyone a Changemaker

David Brooks FEB. 8, 2018

In the New York Times, David Brooks offers a ray of hope for you miserable American non-immigrant losers:

… [Bill] Drayton believes we’re in the middle of a necessary but painful historical transition. For millenniums most people’s lives had a certain pattern. You went to school to learn a trade or a skill — baking, farming or accounting. Then you could go into the work force and make a good living repeating the same skill over the course of your career.

But these days machines can do pretty much anything that’s repetitive.

So that’s why “the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak,” as David recently explained in the NYT.

The new world requires a different sort of person. Drayton calls this new sort of person a changemaker.

Changemakers are people who can see the patterns around them, identify the problems in any situation, figure out ways to solve the problem, organize fluid teams, lead collective action and then continually adapt as situations change.

See: that’s All We Have to Do.

Just make everyone a Jeff Bezos. Why can’t everyone be a Richest Man in the World?

Ask yourself: Has anyone even tried this solution yet?

I didn’t think so!

Millions of people already live with this mind-set.

Like, uh … Elon Musk! And Mark Zuckerberg. (But not Donald Trump. What did he ever change?)

And Steve Jobs, although not lately.

But a lot of people still inhabit the world of following rules and repetitive skills. They hear society telling them: “We don’t need you. We don’t need your kids, either.” Of course, those people go into reactionary mode and strike back.

The central challenge of our time, Drayton says, is to make everyone a changemaker.

Obviously.

It’s simply All We Have to Do to enjoy the new, improved America 2.0 of unrestricted immigration.

Okay, to be frank, it’s actually a two-step process to make everyone a changemaker.

… In an earlier era, he says, society realized it needed universal literacy. Today, schools have to develop the curriculums and assessments to make the changemaking mentality universal.

All we have to do to make everyone a changemaker is to first make public schoolteachers much more like Bill Gates.