Geek Heresy (25 page)

Twenty years might seem a long time to wait. Those feeling the burden of the world’s thousands of corrupt politicians, millions of starving children, and hundreds of millions of subsistence workers might say that we can’t afford to spend two decades nurturing individuals when people are suffering right now. But that is less an argument for a particular course of action than a lament for unavoidable tragic tradeoffs.

The best insurance against this suffering is a country’s own development. But taking a nation from a dollar-a-day income to $11,670 a year per capita, the US poverty level for a single-person household, would require about four decades at a sustained breakneck growth rate of 10 percent a year.
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In comparison, it only takes twenty years to raise a new generation. Speed is relative. China and the East Asian tigers pulled themselves up in a matter of decades, thanks in great part to widespread
investments in high-quality universal education. With Ashesi, Awuah is helping to lay a new foundation for Africa.

Progress can’t be taken for granted, but even small efforts to raise intrinsic growth tend to be self-sustaining. And big efforts, such as the one that raised Sreenivasa, are truly transformational.

CHAPTER 8

Hierarchy of Aspirations

The Evolution of Intrinsic Motivation

M
arch 1, 2012, began like any other day for Regina Agyare, a software engineer at Fidelity Bank in Ghana. She woke up, got dressed, and had breakfast. She drove to work. She logged onto her computer and checked her emails. But that day wasn’t like any other day. That day, she quit.

She had tried to quit once before. The company wanted to keep her, though, and “they countered with a promotion, a raise, and other incentives,” she told me. That first time, Agyare decided to stay.

But not on March 1. “That day, too, the bank tried to convince me to stay,” Agyare said. “My manager suggested that I stay at least until the end of the month when the bank gave out employee bonuses.” It was tempting, and, again, she reconsidered. But not for long. Something in her just knew it was time to go. By the afternoon, “I packed up my office and left for good.”

“I didn’t have another job lined up, and I didn’t have any grand plans,” Agyare said. But she had a rough idea what she wanted to do. Two weeks later, she started Soronko. Soronko means “unique” in the Ghanaian language of Twi, and it lives up to its name. It’s actually a pair of entities: a for-profit business called Soronko Solutions and the
nonprofit Soronko Foundation. “Soronko Solutions provides software development services to small and medium businesses, which are underserved in Ghana even though there are so many of them,” Agyare explained. From the revenue she makes through Soronko Solutions, she applies an astounding 80 percent to fund Soronko Foundation, her true passion. Soronko Foundation teaches technology skills to Ghanaian youths. Its Growing STEMS program provides rural kids with supplementary science and technology classes. “We recently started another program called Tech Needs Girls,” Agyare told me. “We organize women engineers to mentor girls from urban slums in computer programming and entrepreneurial skills.”

Agyare’s work has not gone unnoticed. She has been crowned with laurels by the World Economic Foundation, the Aspen Institute, and Hillary Clinton’s Vital Voices Fellowship. Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg wrote about Agyare in
Lean In for Graduates
.
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And in 2014 Agyare was selected for the Young African Leaders Initiative begun by President Barack Obama.

In previous chapters, I’ve discussed the best ways to deploy packaged interventions and to nurture the intrinsic growth needed to implement them. But social causes need more than that. They also need people who, leading or following, put in time and resources for the sake of others. Just a few years ago, Regina Agyare appeared to be just like the hundreds of millions of other comfortable adults in the world’s middle and upper classes. She was doing well for herself (which is important!), but her positive impact on others was limited. Then she made a transition.

Advanced Intrinsic Growth

What differentiates the effective social activist from everyone else? And what causes the difference?

I know Agyare well because she was the top student in my calculus class at Ashesi University. Then as now, she had the bearing of a queen, confident and graceful. She liked doing things her own way and at her own tempo. (She also once threw a pie in my face. I had assigned a
tedious problem set, and I wanted to give the students a chance at payback. She rushed to volunteer as the class’s angel of revenge.)

Back then, Agyare had little interest either in starting her own firm or in mentoring groups of Ghanaian girls. She was focused on securing her own future. “One of the classes I took at Ashesi was about entrepreneurship,” she said. “I told the lecturer that I didn’t see myself starting a company. At the time, I just wanted a dependable job.” She studied computer science and expected to become a programmer.

But while Ashesi offers majors in technical subjects, its mission is much broader; the school’s motto is “Scholarship, leadership, and citizenship.” Agyare remembers that the school expected students to become “a new generation of ethical leaders,” whether in business, academia, government, or other fields.

The administration tried to model this behavior through a standing policy of never paying bribes, even though that meant that some things slowed to a snail’s crawl in the Augean muck of local bureaucracy. Extracurricular service activities were encouraged. In the year I taught there, students raised funds for a local charity that worked with blind children. And an honor code the students proudly followed held them to a high standard of integrity. During the university’s accreditation process, the government questioned whether students could be trusted to police themselves and recommended stricter oversight. The students rebelled with a passionate and ultimately successful appeal. They argued, “If we cannot maintain a culture of honesty as students, then how can we be expected to do it when we grow up to become the nation’s leaders?”

The seeds that Ashesi planted in its students bloomed in Agyare. “We’d been taught that we could change the world,” she said, and she wanted to do her part. But how? “When I graduated, a good friend of mine started a business right away. But I wasn’t sure that I could do the same – I had no capital, no experience, no network.” So, for seven years, she worked a series of corporate jobs. She bided her time until she was ready.

When I asked Agyare why she finally left Fidelity Bank, she had many reasons. “My first manager was terrific – he understood
technology, gave me credit for my work, and let me set my own milestones,” she said. “But he left, and let’s just say my new manager did less of those things.” There had also been a series of reorganizations at the firm, the result of which was to leave Agyare with pettier colleagues and fewer interesting opportunities. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was when the bank started outsourcing technology projects to foreign companies,” she said. “When I first joined the bank, I liked it because they promoted it as a local bank built and run by Ghanaians.”

Meanwhile, her desire to strike out on her own was gradually growing. Slowly, she gained experience. Slowly, she gained confidence. And slowly, she built up a supportive network. About March 1, she said, “Even that day when I woke up, I didn’t know I was going to resign.”

In the years before she quit, Agyare wanted to ensure a secure livelihood. She had positive intention for her future self. She had a solid base of knowledge and the discernment to land good jobs. She had the self-control to see her goals through. In a nutshell, she had enough heart, mind, and will to secure personal well-being and success.

But by the time she started Soronko, Agyare’s intentions had expanded. She was no longer content to serve herself and her employer; she wanted to contribute to the betterment of children who lacked her advantages. She also had greater discernment and self-control: “I was just more confident and more experienced. I had skills and I had passion. And I remembered what I did at Ashesi, when I held leadership roles like being president of a social club, vice president of a women’s group, and a peer educator about HIV/AIDS. By the time that I left, I just knew that I could do something on my own.”

So the key difference between Agyare before and after her bank job is more heart, mind, and will, more intrinsic growth. Of course, there were other factors. After seven years of work, Agyare had some savings, making it easier for her to leave behind a steady paycheck. She also had a stronger network to call upon for support. But if Agyare had had those things at the start of her career, would they have been enough? She thinks not. “I didn’t see myself as an entrepreneur,” she said. “It required too much initiative.”

Agyare’s case suggests that with more heart, mind, and will – if you take intrinsic growth further and further – you reach a tipping point of sorts. A point where you become a net contributor to social causes. Intrinsic growth is both the basis for those suffering from social problems to rise above them and the reason why those who are secure in their own well-being contribute on behalf of others. The difference is one of degree: a larger radius of intention, keener discernment, and greater self-control. In other words, more intrinsic growth is the root controllable cause of all positive social change, whether you start poor or rich, oppressed or oppressing, powerless or powerful.

Changing People

Technocrats – especially the economists among them – say that people respond to incentives, and by incentives, they usually mean money. The standard “rational choice model” of economics postulates that everyone works selfishly to maximize her or his own utility, most often measured, again, in dollars.
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Of course, for many people, money is not the only incentive. It’s often not even the primary one. Economists themselves offer plenty of counterexamples. Here are a set of rational people who are the world’s experts on money. If their main goal were to maximize financial utility, they would all chase after the best-paying jobs on Wall Street. Some economists do just that, but there are plenty of others who become professors, policymakers, and journalists who aren’t achieving their full earning potential.

What’s more, there are economists who’ve held previous jobs in banking and finance and who have quit to pursue less lucrative careers. I’ve run into a few people like that, and the reasons they gave for switching include: “I got sick of the rat race, although I was a well-paid rat”; “I wanted to do something that was more intellectually rewarding”; “Time with my family became more important”; “I wanted to be my own boss”; and “I was looking for something with more meaning.”

These responses betray two radical deviations from the dominant economics. First, none of the transitions were about earning more
money. They were about family, autonomy, recognition, intellectual reward, and social impact. Money was still important – few took on work without pay, and many of them could afford to change jobs because they had a fluffy financial cushion. But the desire for wealth was satiated at some point, and other desires took over.

Second, people changed. Preferences evolved. Human nature isn’t fixed – people’s motivations change over time. Some who leave lucrative jobs take a cut in pay or give up a paycheck altogether. A few even begin giving away the wealth they’ve accumulated. Nor is this kind of change limited only to economists. Agyare is a standout example, but, as we’ll see, she’s hardly alone.

The Role of Aspirations

Whether it’s economists or engineers, or, for that matter, farmers or factory workers, the cause of a voluntary life change is often a change in aspiration. In Agyare’s case, we see a very clear shift from wanting a solid, dependable job to being her own boss and making a larger societal contribution.

Aspirations are potent forces, and it’s a cliché to encourage their pursuit. But some truth must underlie this mother of all commencement-speech exhortations. In fact, there are at least four reasons why aspirations are so meaningful.

First, aspirations challenge a person to aim for something better, “for something above one,” as the
Oxford English Dictionary
puts it.
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Throughout her adult life, Agyare’s aspirational concerns were for her own future welfare and then for the welfare of others. For some time now, I have been asking people I meet what they would like to change about themselves or their lives over the next five years. In Kenya, I inserted the question into a sample survey of 2,000 respondents who cut across all walks of life. So far, every single response has been positive. They fall into a dozen broad categories. They want to fulfill basic needs, earn more income, nurture their families, achieve personal growth, or live more spiritual lives. And, though the survey doesn’t reveal whether some aspirations might be expressed in dubious ways, no one aspires to
crime and corruption for its own sake.
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Aspirations urge us forward in the epic human quest against complacency.