A Heads Up

Tonight I go back into the recording studio to tape three new podcasts for The Humanity Project. It’s always fun to return to beautiful Zebra Studios here in Fort Lauderdale. And it’s always great to work with Matt Corey, the talented musician and engineer who owns the studio. He’s got a great ear for sound quality, a wonderful feel for music and a determination to make each podcast as good as possible. Matt’s become a good friend as well and I feel lucky to work with him.

I’m talking about our podcasts in this week’s blog because the next three programs will be different in some ways – and quite important in some ways too. The next two will be about my recent experiences in Asia and how those influenced the future of The Humanity Project. In the second of these two programs, I’ll finally get into some more specifics about where our organization is going. (I’m not trying to be coy by not talking about that here. But the podcast gives us a chance to discuss this in a bit more depth than I can in a blog.) The third of the next three podcasts will tell the story of a remarkable man – someone you probably don’t know but whose life may have a key lesson for us all. This show also very much ties in with the more tightly focused new mission of The Humanity Project.

So yes, tonight I record the programs and the original music we offer in each show. (That’s our usual pattern – taping three programs and music in one session.) We hope you will be looking for these programs, especially the second and third shows. We think they will begin to give you a clearer sense of all these changes we keep talking about at The Humanity Project – exciting things just ahead as we work to make a greater contribution to this world of ours.

Far East Reflections

I’m just back from two weeks in the Far East. It was an amazing travel-writing trip for me, my first to Asia. (By the way, I want to again thank Zach Ziskin of Funny Monkey Enterprises for his help in updating the website daily during my absence.) I began in Thailand, moved on to Vietnam, then to Brunei (not exactly a common stop for travelers), Malaysia and finally Singapore. In each place, the cities and countryside were vibrant, the food was excellent, the people were beautiful and very friendly.

I’m mentioning my trip for a reason. This journey gave me a great chance to reflect on some new things. Or maybe it was really some old things viewed from fresh perspectives. Here was one of those perspectives: I crawled more than 120 feet while some 15 feet underground through a tiny tunnel built during the Vietnam War for Viet Cong soldiers. It was a hole barely 2 ½ feet tall and maybe 1 ½ feet wide, just enough for me to squeeze through. During the war, 20,000 people lived in this 120-mile complex of tunnels and miniscule underground rooms. Literally, lived there. I’m planning an upcoming podcast on the experience, but I can tell you that this greatly strengthened my ideas about the incredible emotional toughness and adapability of human beings.

I also learned once again that people are basically the same everywhere. We all struggle with self-doubts and we look for ways to feel good about ourselves, especially to feel somehow important in this world. I’ve seen those same traits in folks at 11,000 feet in the Andes of South America and I saw them again in Asia, just as I notice them all around me each day in the United States. It’s a universal human issue. In Asia, though, individuality seems less prized than community – the idea of serving a greater cause. I think that’s why the Viet Cong could live in those hellish tunnels for so many years. They were working for something they felt was bigger than themselves, more important than their own personal needs. And I think this helped to crystallize my thinking about the individual’s place in society. The Humanity Project wants to build a better society by helping individuals become better. Maybe the best way to do that is by helping individuals serve something bigger than themselves – service to society, to humanity itself. We’ll have a lot more to say about this in the weeks ahead. Stay tuned.

Big Changes Coming

We keep talking about changes coming in the near future at The Humanity Project. We’re eager to move ahead. We see this past six months as a time when we were just beginning to find our feet. We are the nonprofit group equivalent of a newborn baby. But like that baby, we’ve been learning and growing constantly. And we’re nearly ready to take our first big step now: to sharpen our message and our methods. We’ll be the same group with the same name and the same basic goals. It’s just that we’ll be able to more effectively show you what we mean so that we may be able to offer more practical help.

Frankly, the biggest holdup in our plans now is funding. We are in need of about $15,000 to do a complete website redesign as well as to create a compelling new intereactive feature that will help our readers understand more about the best human traits every person possesses. We also need to produce the next two chapters of our feature “A Human Drama.” We are exploring various possible money sources. But what we’re really hoping for is our own guardian angel – someone with the financial resources to underwrite this redesign through a tax-deductible donation. We know that a growing number of people believe in our work, judging by the increasing hits on our website. So we hope that someone will step forward to carry The Humanity Project to the next level. If they do, we plan to make sure they understand how deeply we appreciate their generosity and confidence in our group – we’ll tell the world about it through press releases, information on our website and more. Unless of course the donor prefers anonymity. In any case, they will have the satisfaction of knowing that their money has helped to propel forward a new idea, a new movement that we believe will help many people in the future. It’s all bold and exciting and we can’t wait to show you exactly what we have in mind. Stay with us ‘til then – you won’t be disappointed. And in the meantime, you’ll continue to enjoy our entertaining blogs, podcasts, famous quotes and more. All of it free to anyone with access to the Internet.

A Positive Approach

We’ve sometimes heard from people who say that The Humanity Project is a great idea – but then they add that, hey, many folks just don’t want to think about self-doubt in order to change it in themselves. We’re reminded that many men and women want to completely avoid confronting this problem. We understand this natural tendency, of course. But we want to remind you that The Humanity Project’s approach is not to force anyone to look at anything they don’t want to look at. We’re not about making you feel bad. Rather, we’re all about making you feel good. Our basic message isn’t really negative: “You’ve got a problem!” What we’ve been trying to say for months is just the opposite: “You DON’T have a problem! There’s nothing wrong with you at all!”

It’s a fine line, isn’t it? It seems important to point out the cause of distress in many people’s lives, this tendency toward self-doubt. But we’re trying to make clear that this tendency is only based on a misperception of ourselves as individuals. As we grow up, we learn to believe we are somehow deeply flawed, that we’re not good enough. That is simply inaccurate – NO human being is “not good enough” or “wrong.” And that’s our group’s real focus: to point out that we are each a human being like every other, first and foremost, and only after that are we each unique in special ways. We are more alike than unlike each other. That’s good news because it means that the great basic qualities that humans have always demonstrated are also within each of us today, including the ability to control the direction of our lives and to better understand ourselves. That’s the good news of The Humanity Project. That’s our positive message. Stay tuned … because we’re working out some exciting new ideas to help communicate this message in the near future.