Why We Made An App

You’d think that -- considering we just spent two years building our new What Can I Do? app -- that I’d have a really good answer for why we were doing it in the first place.

But I didn’t. Not until about a week ago.

I knew, of course, the practical reasons why it needed to exist, and I had a good idea of what I wanted it to look and feel like.

I knew it was the natural evolution and a significant missing piece of our work.

But I had never really interrogated myself to understand why I was so hell-bent on building an app -- a tool -- that gathered all the action steps we’d researched over the years, and made them accessible to anyone across the world, anytime they wanted or needed them.

At Important, Not Important, we cover climate change, hunger, ecosystem decline, education, biotech, and other fun stuff from a human perspective because humans are, for the most part, for better or worse, in the driver’s seat.

It’s why the subtitle of these essays is “250,000 years of fucking around and finding out.”

The decisions we make are mostly predictable, because we never really change, but they’re more connected and impactful than ever.

Good news: that also means the good you choose to put into the world can put a much bigger dent in the universe than ever before.

Which is why one -- or, really, two -- of my favorite questions to ask are:

1. Why do YOU have to this work?

2. Why do you have to do THIS work?

Gently expanded:

1. Why do you think it’s essential that -- of anyone -- you’re the person to do this particular work? Why are you special?

2. What internal reason do you have where you absolutely have to do this specific work? Why are you obsessed with this?

Re: our new app, I’d really never asked myself either of these.

And I never did. This, despite the focus of these essays being, “The decisions we make are mostly predictable, because we never really change, but they’re more connected and impactful than ever.”

But about a week ago, my kid asked me, and as I answered him, it suddenly — predictably — made sense.

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