to go into acting. Or there’s Casey Gerald’s question: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Fear is a pretty good GPS system; it tells you where you true desires are, even if they are on the far side of social disapproval.
I have a friend named Fred Swaniker who was born in Ghana in 1976, the son of a lawyer and magistrate, and lived in four different African countries as a boy. His father died while he was a teenager, and his mother opened a school in Botswana, at first with just five students. She made her son the headmaster.
After high school, Swaniker won a scholarship to attend Macalester College in Minnesota. Then he got a job at McKinsey and a degree at Stanford Business School. Throughout all this, he was haunted by the fact that he had been given these opportunities while hundreds of millions of young Africans just like him never would be.
He thought about returning to Africa and opening a chain of healthcare clinics. But at the crucial moment of his life, he came to the conclusion that the biggest impediment to progress in Africa was the lack of a well-trained leadership class. So he raised some money from friends in Silicon Valley and went back to South Africa to launch the African Leadership Academy, with the goal of training six thousand leaders over a fifty-year period. ALA now takes some of the most talented students from across the continent, offers them a free education, and sends them to universities abroad so long as they promise to return to Africa to lead their lives.
In 2006, Swaniker was nominated to receive an Echoing Green Fellowship, which at that time was given annually to sixteen of the most promising social entrepreneurs in the world. During the interview process, Swaniker was asked to describe his “moment of obligation,” the moment when he realized he had to quit his job and pursue this calling. As Swaniker later wrote on Medium, “being asked that question helped me to crystallize why I had been put on this earth.”
Swaniker believes that we are defined by these moments of obligation, which are “usually caused by a sense of outrage about some injustice, wrong-doing or unfairness we see in society.” But he goes on to argue that “you should ignore 99% of these moments of obligation,” no matter how guilty it makes you feel. The world is full of problems, but very few are the problems you are meant to address.
When you feel the tug of such a moment, Swaniker advises, ask three big questions:
First, Is it big enough? Those who have been fortunate to receive a good education, who are healthy, and have had great work experiences should not be solving small problems. If you were born lucky, you should solve big problems.
Second, “Am I uniquely positioned…to make this happen?” Look back on the experiences you have had. Have they prepared you for this specific mission?
Third, “Am I truly passionate?” Does the issue generate obsessive thinking? Does it keep you up at night?
If your answer to each question is not a resounding yes, Swaniker advises, you should ignore that idea. Swaniker’s life fits his own formula. He grew up across Africa, so had a pan-African perspective. He was raised by a teacher and had seen his own life transformed by a scholarship, so was fit to focus on education. He picked an audaciously big problem—educating the cream of students from across the continent—something that could occupy a lifetime.
But Swaniker’s really impressive moment came later in life. He’d already launched ALA, the school. He’d launched something called the African Leadership Network, an association of about two thousand promising young professionals from across the continent. But in his thirties, he saw a new big problem: Africa has a university shortage. Someone should create an African Leadership University, he thought, with the goal of building a network of twenty-five new universities across the continent. Each campus would have ten thousand students. Over fifty years it would produce three million leaders.
He urged his friends to start building universities. None would. But he could not let the idea rest. It was a big problem, it was something he cared about passionately, and it was something he was uniquely prepared to do. How many people had been a headmaster at eighteen and developed a feeder system of five thousand high schools and a leadership network of young entrepreneurs across the continent? “As I connected the dots, I realized