Nilofer Merchant - The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

MARY OLIVER

Three teenage boys get the Boy Scouts of America to change its discriminatory policies. An older brother trying to save his sick younger sibling makes the entire health care industry address previously incurable diseases. Complete strangers come together to obtain justice for a seventy-year-old war crime.

The young, the sick, the neglectedthese are not typically the people whose ideas are heard. Most often, whether ideas are considered or dismissed is based on who contributes them, and how powerful their sponsorsnot the ideas themselvesare. So if the young, sick, and neglected can succeed in making a dent, what does their achievement mean for the rest of usthose of us who are told that our ideas cant be heard because our voices are too shrill, or because we lack certain credentials, or simply because the idea were proposing is too much? Couldnt our ideas have a chance, too?

And dont they need to?

When I first began to write about this concept, in 2011, I struggled to describe it. I didnt want to argue only that new ideas and perspectives mattered to the modern creative economieswhich they door that people gathered in networks could now scale projects that once only large hierarchical organizations could manage, or that changing times meant that we no longer had to fit in to organizations as a way to get things done. What I was seeking to propose, rather, was that anyonesquite possibly everyonesideas mattered.

The key concept was that every one of the 7.5 billion humans on this planet has value to offer. How? Youre standing in a spot in the world that only you stand in, a function of your history and experiences, visions, and hopes. From this spot where only you stand, you offer a distinct point of view, novel insights, and even groundbreaking ideas. Now that you can grow and realize those ideas through the power of networks, you have a new lever to move the world.

I tried to use existing vocabulary to express this concept, but nothing sufficed. The word I was searching for had to be a noun, one that would convey how value creation can come from anyone, and how even wild ideas now have a chance to flourish because networks allow anyone to bypass the standard gatekeepers and the frameworks they hold as true. As Sarah Green Carmichaelmy editor at Harvard Business Review, for whom I was writing an articleand I twiddled back and forth, we finally realized no standard term worked. was born. Through the power of onlyness, an individual conceives an idea born of his narrative, nurtures it with the help of a community that embraces it, and, through shared action, makes the idea powerful enough to dent the world.

The storm that created that particular lightning bolt had in fact been brewing for some time. I had often wondered whether anyone could actually be eligible to have a shot at success, or whether people had to fit a particular profile to have their ideas be valued. The tension between those two alternatives had profound effects in my own life, so let me share three stories of how I discovered my own onlyness.

I didnt know my life would never be the same when, one day in 1986, I walked through my suburban Cupertino, California, neighborhood and into the local Winchells Donut House. I thought I would be back at home in an hour, maybe twofour hours at most. I turned out to be deeply wrong.

Earlier that day, at age eighteen, I had come home to an unexpectedly full house of aunties making the fragrant, buttery rice and chicken dish Indians call biryani. It was impossible to identify amongst the medley of voices which one of them announced it to me first, but my arranged marriage was now apparently a done deed. My future husband, a widower, was to give my mother a house, and she, an Indian divorce with three children, would no longer have to worry about her finances. These tumbling sentences pronouncing my entire future were both a relief to hear and the start of a new chapter of my life.

Even though I had been raised in America since I was nearly five, I had always understood it was my duty to marry in this fashion. I dont know when or how exactly that message was conveyed, but it was clear that this would be my fate. I respected my mother enough to want to do this for her, for our familyto do right, especially given all the sacrifices she had made as an immigrant to bring us to America and the better life it promised.

Still, I did have my own private yearnings, so I turned to my progressive uncle, Zafar, for help. Zafar had come to America to attend college and was now an executive at a big pharmaceutical company in Palo Alto. He had been the familys male representative at the marriage negotiations, as my father had long been out of the picture. Does he [the groom] know I want to go to university? I asked him. I was attending community college, having deferred my entrance to the University of California at Berkeley for a year. No, my uncle replied. Your mother would not let me bring it up. You can discuss it with him after you are married.

The implications of this went rattling around in my brain, as it would mean a delay of at least a year, maybe more, before I could begin university. As is traditional in arranged marriages, I would not be allowed to get to know the groom before we were wed. We might say hello, or sit in the same room together in the company of others, but he would not have any notion of my life goals, nor I of his. To tell him what I wanted for myself would be quite out of the ordinaryessentially impossible.

Given that was the case, I argued with, and may even have whined to, my uncle. I knew from listening to the aunties chatter that my proposed groom had a housekeeper, a cook, a nanny for his child from his first marriage, and a big house on the hill nearby, so he was certainly not marrying me to help with the household. I felt confident that he would agree to my getting an education if it was understood up front that that was my intention. But if I had to wait and slowly build a relationship with him to the point where I could ask such a thing, the outcome would be uncertain. Certainly the one-year deferment to Berkeley I had gotten without my mothers permission would expire. Would he even let me keep going to community college?