One factor that allowed me to step up into higher education after several decades of intentionally avoiding a teaching career, was Seth Godin’s book, “What to do when it is your turn (and it is always your turn).”  We are called to make a difference!  And it IS ALWAYS YOUR TURN.

The founding Dean of the Greenville University business school, Suzanne Davis, who invited me to build an agribusiness program in 2016, gave me a copy of Godin’s book.  When I read it, my response was, “Of course!” Our lives are authentically scary and exhilarating at the same time.  And as M. Scott Peck wrote in his book, The Road Less Traveled, “Life is difficult.”  If we wait for our choices to be convenient before getting started, it will never happen.  Change is up to us, not elected leadership. Suzanne Davis is now the President of Greenville University, because it is her turn.

In my blog post, A Fork-in-the-Road Appeared, So I Took It, I make light my 40 years of making a difference, plotting my 10 careers against the price of crude oil.  It is easy to pick a single metric with which to measure an elected leader: inflation, national debt, unemployment, or growth.  The economy is far too robust to be quantified on a single indicator, like the price of crude oil.  Most of my career has been shaped by finding alternative ways to do what are accepted practices.  For a decade, 2003-2012, I intentionally identified and developed economically feasible solutions to using crude oil as a primary source of energy.  During that period, the price of crude oil consistently increased.  This is a fun chart, but the price of crude oil is NOT a representative metric of my career path.

A more meaningful blog message that actually does show that biomass energy can substitute for fossil fuels is the 6 or 7 decade chronology of the development of Renewable Natural Gas (RNG), in the blog post, Full Circle Waste to Revenue – RNG Story.  As biogas from organic waste leftovers becomes codified in the Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS), the biogenic and monetary value of RNG becomes legally recognized.

We will not get to the finish line waiting for an elected leader to do the right thing.  They can help or slow us down.  But government policies and elected leaders are supplemental to everything else.

The President of the United States is a powerful position.  We all need to be engaged in that selection.  However, the most significant actions that shape our lives happen on the ground with the people we work with and against in our day-to-day lives.

Teaching undergraduate economics the last eight years at Greenville University, I took some joy in providing students with news that an elected leader, or business darling, moved in a specific direction or action.  Usually a few weeks later, emerging information indicated that ‘specific direction’ was not happening.  Over and over again.  I shared bits from “What to do When it is Your Turn (and it is always your turn)” in undergraduate economics.  My mission was to help young adults find their voice and their pathway.

It is important to keep up with all the policy changes, but my experience is innovation and change happens working together, bumping into conflicting ideas, and finding new routes that build a new tomorrow.  Be that force! Don’t wait for an elected official to get around to promising something and falling short.