you’ll be waiting if you are waiting for permission…
ABC Q&A aired a special extra episode tonight after securing an audience with visiting billionaire Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates. The program featured Gates as the sole guest, fronting an audience at the University of NSW with host Tony Jones.
Whilst Mr Gates is interesting, impressive and industrious, he performed admirably and did himself and his causes proud. What I found even more impressive though was the quality of the thinking that had gone into the audience questioning and the Twitter feed happening concurrently.
There are many who think deeply about some of the hard stuff and that buoys my faith in humans being able to better do good stuff. However, as Mr Gates pointed out this evening, if one sits around waiting for permission to do what needs to be done, death is likely to come first!
A case in point, Stephanie Woollard. Such a dynamic young woman, who has taken it upon herself to assist and truly empower all the marginalised women she can. Starting in Nepal first, world domination is definitively on the cards. She didn’t have to do it, she could have talked about it and done nothing because working from Australia would have been too difficult but she didn’t…
Instead, she started “Seven Women” (www.sevenwomen.com.au) which has since established two business centres whereby they become financially stand-alone entities as well as enabling the women to learn to earn. No permission sought, other than to appreciate the enormity of the task and then getting down to the tin-tacs of working out how to get it done.
With the women now eternally grateful.
