How they are provided for upon the earth (appearing at intervals,) How dear and dreadful they are to the earth, How they inure themselves as much as to any - what a paradox appears their age, How people respond to them, yet know them not How there is something relentless in their fate all times, How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation and reward, And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same great purchase
	--Walt Whitman

Beginning my studies

On March 28 1993, I stood up to give the closing speech at the fourth Mid-American Model United Nations. MAMUN was a conference sponsored by the Mid-American Global Education Council, an organization I had co-founded with two friends.

This year was the first time I had been the Secretary General of that conference. I was generally responsible for guiding the educational experience of the 20 staff members, 30 advisors, and especially the 300+ high school students who were the focus of the week's activities. Attending Model United Nations when I was a high school student led me to change my entire life, and was a primary motivating force in my current work in economic development and the Internet. Making that week a meaningful experience for those involved was a very important thing to me.

It was a challenging week. I got food poisoning from the hotel's wonderful Chicken Verinique, and lost 15 pounds from the combination of working 20 hour days and not being able to keep any food down. But the week went better that I had ever dreamed. After five years of work, we had finally built a staff of people who loved what we were working on, and also cared about each other. The whole place was a buzz with this energy generated by all of the collective learning that was going on.

An hour before the closing session, I knew I had something brewing inside of me that could make sense of what was going on that week. I ran upstairs and started tearing through the words of the sages who were motivating me during that time: Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln. Then Lincoln's last words from his speech to the Cooper Union in New York City hit me like a bolt of lightning:

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

The world was changing. We had a lot of new problems in the world, and the old solutions weren't fixing them. I was optimistic, because I felt that after that week, some of the world's problems were going to be in the hands of the people I had just spent this incredible week with. And so when the time came at the closing session, I said this:

We're entering an era when the institutions our mothers and fathers relied upon to guide them have become incapable of getting work done. The solutions to our problems won't come from them. They will come from you. Have faith that you can create peace in Bosnia, that you will find the cure for AIDS, and that you can save the Earth's environment. Dare to do that which you have spoken about so passionately this week, and know that you are right. The world is waiting for a new generation of leaders that know what you know. All you need is the courage to do what you know.

By the time I was at the end of this small speech, I was a blubbering mess. Part of it was the sheer exhaustion. But another part was something I still have trouble describing. I had this incredible feeling of communion with everyone in the room. I didn't know what was going on with me, but I knew I felt different about everyone around me than I had when the week started.

I thought I had made it. I had this cool organization full of people I loved. I was married to an incredible woman that I had been with from the time I was 17, and we had this wonderful new house that we'd been dreaming about for a long time. I had a great job, doing work that meant a lot to me. That moment, I thought I was living my life in a way I had always envisioned for myself.

Sure, I thought I had made it. But what I had really done was announce to the Universe that I was ready...