Inspiration from Ariel Beery
Two weeks ago, we had the pleasure of meeting PresenTense co-director Ariel Beery. Our time with Ariel was short, but his words left a deep impression on us.
PresenTense is the social venture incubator where TAMID was founded. We owe our earliest progress to the summer of 2008, when co-founder Eitan Ingall was a PresenTense Fellow in Jerusalem, developing TAMID. Ariel was Eitan’s mentor that summer, guiding him along the basics of launching a nonprofit. TAMID co-founder Sasha Gribov was in Israel too, and together they laid the groundwork for TAMID’s programming today.
When we sat down with Ariel, he humbly listed his many degrees, and then went on to discuss current trends in today’s entrepreneurial scene. Ariel is hyper-plugged-in to the latest in entrepreneurship, and it’s clear that he blends lessons from the world of tech startups into his focus on social ventures. His for-profit sensibilities in a setting that primarily focuses on non-profit development caught our attention– TAMID is a social venture that is inherently intertwined with the world of business.
Given all of his gifts–prolific student, visionary, manager of a high impact organization–his biggest gift of all was clearly the power to motivate. Everyone left the room energized to make a significant impact on society and conquer big problems. I will paraphrase one lesson from Ariel to the best of my memory, and hopefully it will pass along some of the inspiration to my readers.
He referred to thinker Clay Shirky, who highlights two major statistics:
- 200 billions hours: the amount of time Americans spend every year watching TV
- 100 million hours: the amount of time of collective work that it has taken to create Wikipedia
Wikipedia, Ariel reminded us, is a project that revolutionizes world access to knowledge. Never before have there been so few barriers to a high quality collection of information. As the 3rd world improves internet connections, Wikipedia will reach deeper and deeper into communities that could never have imagined being plugged in to such a source of learning. Writing for Wikipedia is an effort that will change lives.
And yet, 2,000x the amount of time spent on Wikipedia is essentially wasted on watching television (though someone needs to write the detailed episode summaries of the latest Modern Family). Trading in a pittance of America’s non-productive time could bear the fruit of another project on the scale of Wikipedia. If we refocus our attention towards such virtuous efforts, how many world problems could we solve?
