Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Deepak Chopra]I'm Deepak Chopra, and you're watching One World with Deepak Chopra brought
to you from Deepak Home Base in New York City. My very special guest today is Adam Braun.
And you'll know all about him in a few minutes. Adam, thanks for joining me today.
[Adam Braun]Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[DC]So, it's nice to see you again, of course, we've met before. Tell me a little bit about
where you grew up. [AB] Yes, so I was born in New York City actually,
but I grew up in the suburbs of the city in Connecticut. And as a kid had a very, very closely
knit family, but my grandparents were actually holocaust survivors, and it was a really,
really big, influential part of our upbringing to understand where we came from, the struggles
that they went through so that we could have the lives that we were able to enjoy. And so,
grew up in the suburbs, kind of your traditional suburban upbringing. The one difference I would
say is that my home town was a commuter's town for a lot of business executives working in New
York City and particularly in finance. And so... [DC]Which town is that? [AB]It was in Greenwich.
Greenwich, Connecticut. [DC]Everyone knows Greenwich.
[AB] Yeah, yeah. So growing up in Greenwich, it's somewhat of a different upbringing. And you know, the guys who are coaching
your little league soccer teams and baseball teams, you know, they're also running huge hedge funds during the day. And so,
I played a ton of sports, but was really competitive and strong at math at the same time, and the
intersection of those two was the desire to work in finance. So as a kid, especially being
around these influential figures in the financial world, my whole desire was to one day work
in finance. [DC]Did you travel as a kid?
[AB] So we travelled a little bit. It wasn't like we were extensive world travelers. You know, if we took
a vacation, my dad's a pretty active guy, so he was usually trying to find somewhere that
he could go wind-surfing. So we travelled somewhat, but not anywhere close to the type
of travel I did in my early twenties. [DC]So then there was one pivotal moment in
your life that led to what you're doing now with Pencils of Promise. [AB] Yes, so.. [DC] Talk about that.
[AB]I was on this path to work on Wall Street. And then, when I was 20-21, I saw a film called "Baraka".
It was shot in 24 countries, and all of these beautiful cultures, and it showed the way
that people were living, mainly in the developing world, and all these geographical wonders,
things that I just never even knew existed, and I thought, "If these exist somewhere in
the world, I need to go see them with my own eyes. I need to leave the bubble of comfort
that I have..." [DC]Greenwich village.
[AB]Right, right, Greenwich to then New England school, I was going to Brown University at the time.
And then moving to New York, it was like I was never gonna leave the north-east. So I
went on this program called "Semester at Sea," which was a crew ship that goes around the
world, travels to 10 different countries, and about 13 days into my voyage, we were
struck by a 60 foot rogue wave, 800 miles from land.
[DC]Wow. [AB]And, you know, what you can envision,
that panicked announcement, "Get to the fifth floor or higher. Get to your muster stations."
Essentially, a may-day call that our ship was gonna go down in the north pacific in
winter, and we were all gonna perish with it, and I had this moment, where I really,
genuinely knew I was gonna die, and then about 30 seconds later after, kind of, evaluating,
"Is this what my life is meant to be?" I had this total stillness, this total calmness
kind of set all over me, and there was this sudden recognition that I had a purpose, that I had
more to do here than, you know, "21 year old perishes at sea" being my legacy. And so, I changed
into swimming gear, because I thought the whole ship was gonna go down, everyone was
gonna disappear with it, I was gonna be the one guy left floating, you know, swimming
for days. And fortunately, the ship didn't go down, but it created a sense of weight around
whatever was gonna come next. You know, just everything felt so much deeper, because I'd
kind of had this come-to-God moment. And the next thing I was able to experience was traveling
through the developing world as part of this program, and when I was in India, the depths
of poverty that I witnessed were just unlike anything that I'd seen, or even thought fathomable.
And because of that I felt helpless, and I had this habit of asking one child per country,
"What do you want most in the world?" And I would have them write it down, and I thought
that they would say what I wanted as a kid, which was a house, or a car, a boat or something.
[DC]Or a video game... [AB]Yeah, yeah, something very impressive. [DC] Or a computer.
[AB] Right, and I met this boy begging on the streets with just nothing, and I asked him... [DC]Where
was this now? [AB]This was in northern India, we were on
our way between Agra and Varanasi, so it was just outside of Agra. I asked him, and he
said a pencil. [DC]Just some kid on the street?
[AB]Boy on the street begging, just a beggar, alone. And I said, "If you could have anything?" And he said,
"Something to write with." And a man came over, he translated with "Pencil." I thought,
"No, no, no, he could have anything in the world, it's just a question, but what would
he want?" He said, "He'd like something to write with." And explained to me, this boy,
as I realized, has never been to school. He'd seen other children going to school, and I
had a pencil. So I gave him my pencil, and he just lit up. He was so happy about it,
and I realized, in that moment, two things. One was that, this is a situation for many,
right now 57 million children around the world, who have no access to any form of education
and that it's the single, greatest tool to unlock a person's potential. It's a fundamental
injustice. The second one was that I was 21 at the time, and I'd always been told, "You're
too young to make a difference. Unless you're someone with huge amounts of resources at
your disposal, you can't actually change the world." And in giving this one boy a pencil,
it changed his world. At least for a small period of time, and this, kind of, fire lit
in me to address this issue on a bigger scale, but again I was just the guy passing out pencils,
but again, I would start passing out pencils, and I became obsessed with travel with backpacking,
and so that's what I did on and off for the next few years. I would either study, work,
take the money, I would get a one way flight to Guatemala or somewhere else, and then I'd
spend several months backpacking with just pens and pencils and those pens and pencils
allowed me to have conversations with people, families, you know, mothers about education...
[DC]How old are you now? [AB]I'm 29. So this has been kind of an 8
year mission. [DC]So how did Pencils of Promise come about?
[AB]So as much as I had a real passion for this issue, I had all these opportunities
to work in the financial world, and I was still very young. So I moved into New York and I
started working at Bane as a management consultant, and kind of had this dream job that I always
aspired to... [DC]Did you finish school? College?
[AB]So I graduated from Browne, spent basically a year, backpacking. Literally, on a world
trip. Lived in Australia, spent 4 months going to Guatemala, all the way down to Argentina
and back up. And then moved into New York to start work at Bane and Company. And I was enjoying
what I was doing, but I didn't have that sense of passion and conviction and pretty quickly,
I think, a lot of people especially, in this city, you get obsessed with your work life
and your social life, and there's no third party, you know.
[DC]When they're two different things anyway. [AB]Right, but when you're a kid, when you're in
high school, you do extra-curricular activities. You join a club, you work on things that you're
passionate about, and for some reason, when we become adults, we lose those things. Especially,
if you're in your early twenties in New York. And I found myself after working there for
about a year and a half, not only totally disconnected from the one thing I was most
passionate about... [DC]Which was?
[AB]Which was education for children in the developing world. The other thing is, I was
living a very self-absorbed life. It was just about my job, and then what party I was going
to that night, what friend I was seeing, or what restaurant I was getting a meal at. And
I realized that I was pretty much living in service of myself, and I wasn't all that
happy. And so, I kind of got this idea, what if I try to live in service of somebody else,
and my grandmother, who's the heart and soul of my family in a lot of ways. She was taken
into Auschwitz when she was 14, 28 other family members, including her mother and her sister
were gassed the first night. And she survived through a series of miracles in several
different concentration camps over almost a year and a half. And I thought, you know,
she was turning 80, and what could I do to really honor her.
[DC] And she was in Greenwich? [AB]No, she was living down in Florida. In
Boca Raton, the Mecca for Jewish grandmothers. [DC] Yes. [AB] So I thought, you know, the most meaningful
thing that I could do is actually apply my passion, this desire to create a school somewhere
for a community that doesn't have access to that education, and dedicate it to her so
that her legacy, her footprint would carry forward. And so I went to the bank and said,
"I wanted to start an organization called Pencils of Promise." And the woman said, "I like the
name." I said, "Me too. Where do I have to start with?" And she said, "Well, it takes
$25 to open up a new bank account minimum." And I was turning 25 that month. This is October
1st, 2008, I'm born on Halloween. And so I thought, that's a really good sign, karmaically.
It's just something feels right about that. So I gave her $25, we opened up a bank account,
and I used my birthday, and I asked for donations in the lieu gifts, and friends came out
and we threw that, and another event, and an another smaller event, you know, 20 to 60 dollars to get in. Acraped
together enough money to build a school, and I took a leave from my company, they let me
leave on their externship program for 9 months, and I went off to Laos, went underground,
started developing partnerships with again, a motorbike and a backpack.
[DC]How much money did you have? [AB]So by the end of that first year, we had
raised a little bit more than $30,000, and I knew in my mind from all the time... because
I had lived with communities in the developing world, I'd backpacked a ton before I started
working at Bane, and I'd never been someone who's been particularly interested in seeing
churches or historic sites or mosques or synagogues or museums. I like being with people and particularly,
locals who are living in the rural countryside. So my thing was, I'd always go into a café
or a restaurant, and I would ask the person who was serving me, "Where do you live?" And
they would say, "Oh, over here." And I'd say, "Can I stay with you and your family? Can
I eat with you?" And they'd say, "No, the food's better here, trust me." I said, "No,
no, I wanna stay with you." And I would end up spending nights and days living with people.
[DC]And they would be okay with that, most people?
[AB]Not only were they okay with it, the level of hospitality, and then dignity that they provided
was unparalleled. I mean, growing up, sometimes I could end up in a home of a friend of mine,
there was a massive mansion, and you'd see the way... there wasn't always happiness in
that home, and then I would be with a woman in Vietnam who'd take me into her house...
[DC]The mansion was a projection of the ego more than anything else, right?
[AB]Yeah, yeah. And then this one woman in Vietnam, you know, this really pivotal experience in
my life. I was with a group, on kind of on a group tour, and I kind of figured out I don't
like this so I kind of wandered off and this was in Halong Be in Vietnam at 10 o'clock
at night. This woman was running a little tea stand where local men would come and take
tea, and it was kind of cold. She kept on rubbing her hands. And there was a little shop
and everything was a dollar, and so I bought a pair of gloves for a dollar, and I came
back and gave her a pair of gloves for a dollar, and suddenly it was cause for celebration.
And so she pulled out her nicest item, which was a bottle of wine, and all the men came
around, and we all shared this one little tea cup of wine, and we all drank it and celebrated.
And then, I said, "Where do you live?" And she tried in broken English, she said, "Up
in this community, behind us." She took me back to her house, and it was a one-room shack.
There was her and her husband and her one-year-old son. But the level of joy that was housed
in that little shack was beyond anything I'd ever witnessed in any mansion, and also the
way that they treated me, personally, I mean, they pulled out bottled water, and a China
set. Their nicest items, they treated me like I was some king, but I was a scraggly, 21-year-old
backpacker. And truthfully, and this has been the case throughout the history of Pencils
of Promise, I have gained so much more than I have ever been able to give out, and I find
that to be pretty true across the world. Whenever you give true, I mean, give with both hands,
not the kind of traditional one, and then you take with the other. When people give
with both hands, you end up receiving far more. And so I started with this $25, this
desire to build a school. The school got built. [DC]Where? [AB]In Laos. In the long rural
area, in a remote village called Patung. I was touring different villages that were
very high in need, and I went to this village on a Sunday, and there was three girls drawing
on a chalkboard unsupervised in a bamboo hut that was serving as a makeshift classroom. And I just thought this
is the place, the desire for education is evident. They don't know I'm even showing
up, I'm just a random guy, in on a Sunday unsupervised, and they are practicing letters. And this community
didn't have a preschool, so kids aged 3-5 didn't have access to education. So that was
the very first school, just the one classroom, basic school. And I came back to my job at
Bane, and as much as I liked the people there, I felt that this true sense of purpose around
the work that Pencils of Promise was doing and so that March 2010, they said, "You eitherneither
have to be an employee here, or work on this Pencils of Promise thing." And so I stepped away.
I came home from work the night that they gave me the kind of choice, and a graffiti artist
had graffiti-ed the words "Become your dream" on a piece of garbage in front of my apartment
in the east village, and I cut it out, and I said "One day, when we have an office, I'm
gonna put this up." And so now its hanging up in our office, on 20th and Broadway.
[DC]How many schools? [AB] So We've built about a 150 schools now. We'll
break ground on 20 new schools in the next 30 days.
[DC]And where are these schools? [AB] So they're in four different countries. We started in
Laos, south-east Asia and then we grew to Nicaragua, Guatemala. Then we opened up in
Ghana about a year and a half ago. [DC]And where does the funding come from?
[AB]So it's a combination of things. The first two years, 98% of our unique donation were in amounts
of a hundred dollars or less. So we've always been supported. Our kind of true base, the average
person, who isn't able to write a huge check, but in one way or another is able to make
a meaningful contribution, however they define it. We also get a lot of corporate support
now because we built a really large, engaged community, and one of my big, early beliefs
was that companies want the world better, and if we could be a great partner for them, they
would fund our work to do cause marketing campaigns together. And then the third part
of the equation for is a combination of foundations, institutional supporters and we threw a really
big gala, and the gala does really well. [DC]And your offices are here in New York?
[AB]Our offices are 10 blocks away. They're really close. [DC]20 more schools coming up?
[AB]So the goal is, actually, it took us four years to build the first hundred schools.
In 2013, the goal is to break ground on a hundred schools in this year. And then ultimately
build 500 schools by 2015. And now we're really focussed on training teachers, and providing
scholarships to students. So training a thousand teachers and 10,000 kids in our programs.
[DC]So you have this mantra, For Purpose, tell me about it.
[AB] Yes, so I believe that purpose is the single most powerful thing that an individual can
find. Actually, in that year when I was traveling a friend of mine sent me an email and said,
"You gotta read this book. 'Book of Secrets.'" And so she said, "Get it on an audio book
because Deepak's got a great voice." So I remember listening to your book, "Book of
Secrets," and in particular there was one phrase that really, really resonated with
me, and it was this concept that, "You are not in the world, the world is in you." And
I really took it to heart and started applying it to a lot of different things that I was
experiencing and decisions that I was making. And what I came to realize was just that if
you subscribe to that belief, then if you're able to find purpose, then you can craft whatever
path you choose. There's nothing more powerful than an individual finding meaning. And so
I work in the non-profit space, and I found that as somebody who sees himself as an entrepreneur,
and my background is kind of, it's very finance and business oriented with backpacking as
a passion. I would meet people and they'd say, "What do you do?" And we'd have this
equal conversation, and when I explain, "Oh, I run a non-profit." Suddenly it was,
"Oh, that's really nice. Good for you!" [DC] Yes. [AB] It was almost like we are on different levels
because of this one phrase and that word "non-profit," it's the only industry that says what they
don't do, that starts with 'non' -- a negative, and who wants to begin with 'non.' And it's
also not a characterization of our work. Our work is very purpose based, it's around creating
social good. And so I started thinking, I said, "Well, why don't we describe what we
are doing instead of what we're not?" And I believe a lot of this work is very purpose
based, and we're bringing social good the world, so I decided instead of calling this
work "non-profit." I call it "for purpose." And ultimately, it's another way to characterize
the space, but it's starting to get adopted very, very heavily. And so all the time I'm
now seeing online, different companies saying, "We're for purpose organization," or, "We're
a for profit, for purpose entity." But that sense of a desire to make the world better,
to provide benefit to others, more than just, you know, green backed profit, I think it
resonates with a lot of people, so this phrase is started...
[DC]Adam, you think your generation is different than my generation? Or the older generations?
[AB]I think there's a sense of inter connectivity that's never existed before. I'm kind of on
the borderline between the way things were, and the way things are. So I grew up without
access to the internet. I remember very distinctly as 6th grader, spending a ton of time in my
local library, and loving reading through Encyclopedia Britannica, enjoying the pages, and the microfiche. That was really fun for me.
[DC]They don't do that any more. [AB]No, why would a kid do that? Now we have
interns at our organization that have never experienced life without the internet, ever.
And so when I think about living on the cusp of this huge change, the biggest difference to
me is that they have a sense of inter connectivity around global issues. If somebody said the
word 'Zimbabwe' to me, as a kid, that was a foreign word.
[DC]They participate in the global brain, the emerging global brain.
[AB] Yeah. And they can see it, they can experience it, they can witness it. And I think because
of that there is an emerging consciousness that people cannot ignore. If you've never
experienced something, I can't be critical of something, or of somebody if they've never
been in my eyes, or had my experience, and I believe that goes both ways, but because
of the way that newer generations are experiencing, and going to experience the world, I think
these broad, broad global issues that we're facing, they're going to get solved because people now acknowledge
them. [DC]You're writing a book?
[AB]Yes. [DC]What's it about?
[AB]So the book's called, "The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create
Extraordinary Change." The organizing principle is actually around mantras. So there's 30
chapters, each chapter is titled with a mantra. I've always been a great believer that these
single phrases can really help guide you. [DC]Magical words.
[AB]Yeah, yeah, and I've learned a lot of this from you.
[DC]Words of power. Okay, listen, we're getting close to our ending, but I wanna ask you some
questions. I create a soul profile, so to speak. So I'm just gonna ask you a few questions,
and just say whatever comes to your mind. [AB]Sure, okay.
[DC]But keep it short. [AB] Yeah. [DC] Who are you? [AB]I'm Adam Braun.
[DC]Beyond that, who are you? [AB]Oh, that's a good question. I'm Adam Braun,
founder of Pencils of Promise, and someone who believes that every single person possesses
meaning. [DC]What is the most joyous experience of
your life? [AB]Most joyous experience of my life is the
night I got engaged. [DC]Other happy moments.
[AB]The night that I showed my grand mother the very first school that we built through
Pencils of Promise, which was dedicated to her, and I never told her about it.
[DC]So what's your life purpose now? [AB] My life purpose is two folds, the
first is I'd like to help every individual out there. Actualy no, let me do that again. Is it okay if I... [DC] Yeah. [AB] Okay, my life purpose. My life purpose to help people
find their sense of passion and meaning. [DC]What's your legacy going to be? You're
still too young to think if it, but what will it be?
[AB]Ultimately, I hope my legacy is to help create a world that's better and more just
and more equal than the one that I came into. [DC]What do you think makes a good relationship?
[AB]A good relationship is one in which the 60-40 principle that I recently learned about
applies, in which, you give 60 and you take 40, and that applies to both of you.
[DC]Very good. Do you have any heroes? [AB]I have a lot of heroes. My greatest heroes
are members of my family. It's my grandparents, my parents, my siblings, people that have
sacrificed so much so that I could have the life that I now have. Those are my greatest
heroes. [DC]What do you think is unique about you,
strengths? [AB]These are really good questions. I think
one of the things that's unique to me personally, and a strength is, I'm very comfortable spending
time alone, and in the process of spending that time alone, figuring out really, truly,
deeply who and what I am, and then once I establish that knowledge, comfortably sharing
that with other people. [DC]You're good asking people if you can stay
at their homes too, right? [AB]Yes! Yeah, yeah.
[DC]Do you think there's a higher intelligence in the universe?
[AB]Yes, absolutely. That's one of the things I believe in most.
[DC]Adam Braun, Pencils of Promise, and the book is?
[AB]"The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change."
[DC]Thank you, Adam. [AB]Thank you so much.