In The Blue Sweater we follow Jacqueline on her journey from an idealistic 20-something out to change the world who learned some hard lessons in reality, to a world-changer who is truly making her dent in the universe.
The book starts out in the concrete jungle of New York City, where Jacqueline starts her career as an international banker at Chase Manhattan. We follow her career as she has stints in South America and Africa and finally back to the US where she founds the Acumen Fund. She now works to find ways to eradicate poverty through innovative businesses that have the poor as their customers. How’s that for an innovative solution?
What follows are three lessons I took from the book.
Start.
We often find ourselves waiting for the exact right time to do something, especially when it’s something big. I know I’m guilty of that. Here’s some advice that Jacqueline got right before she started her work at the Acumen fund, after she had spent a number of years over in Africa:
“Don’t wait for perfection”. Just start and let the work teach you. No one expects you to get it right in the very beginning, and you’ll learn more from your mistakes than you will from your early successes anyway. So stop worrying so much and just look at your best bets and go”.
Such great advice. There is one truth you will never escape - you’ll never get there if you don’t take the first step. So start. Right now.
Understand people and cultureThe people in Africa gave Jacqueline a very hard time when she first went to there to help. Why? She, and the people who sent her, didn’t understand the people or the culture there. Here’s and example: UNICEF once hired an expensive Italian designer to create a poster campaign aimed at convincing women to vaccinate their children with simple written messages accompanied by gorgeous photographs. They were perfect, except for the small fact that there was an extremely low female literacy rate in Rwanda. Ooops!
Remember if you haven’t walked a mile in a person’s shoes, it is hard for you to understand them, and impossible for you to move them to action.
The solution lies in simplicity on the far side of complexity
Oliver Wendall Holmes once said that I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
This simplicity often comes in the form of a third alternative to two seemingly conflicting ideas. For Jacqueline, the issue became more and more clear as time went on. Charity alone, wasn’t the answer. The market alone, wasn’t the answer. Jacqueline’s key insight was that change could be created by finding solutions where the poor were the customers, not the recipients of handouts. It’s a dramatic paradigm shift, and the results are dramatic as well.
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