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Erik: Where you find value reading autobiographies and biographies of great leaders?
Andrew: When I’m facing a challenge in my day to day work with corporations on environmental
issues or just broader, you know, policy issues around environmental conditions. You know,
I don’t have a chance to sit down with Gandhi and say, “How would you solve this problem?”
You can’t do that, so I'm able to have a one way conversation at least and just draw
inspirations from the way they solve problems and then, so lately I've been, I think feeling
frustrated with a really, the level of discourse the disrespectful in the public and…all
side of issues, I think there's a discourse that's happening. That’s kind of upset me
a little bit, in problem solving in that environment is very challenging. And so, I can sit down
and read Gandhi’s autobiographies or read books about how he approached social problems
and social justice and draw inspiration from that. So, why I'll never be a person that
as executing Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement of non violent resistant to big social problems.
I can draw insights and inspirations from what he did to. Which was, you know look for
truth, holding on to truth, holding on to the moral force to truth, being respectful
to your opponents even if you don't agree with them, having the concept of – and I
don’t know if I’m saying this word right – himsa which is basically none injury.
Which means that even if I’m not a violent person, I'm not gonna punch someone in the
nose if I don't agree with them, but I can also restrict my words to saying, not emotional
violence too, like I’m not going to attack someone personally or escalate conflict and
those are really helpful because you don’t solve conflict by adding more conflict. That’s
something that, you know, reading a biography from a famous person can teach me that I would
not probably have come up with on my own. So, I find it incredibly valuable, especially
in times when I'm having – finding difficulty of finding frustration that someone out there
can teach me a lesson even if I don’t know them.