Beyond the doomscrolling — movement building for positive change
Some additional thoughts from the Powershift conference that took place in February in California — guests included artists, business leaders and even some legends (hello, Ed Catmull of Pixar fame)! This post touches on Peter Sims’ new book “BLK SHP: How to be Human in an Inhuman World” and what he and Ed are up to now.
When having it all is less than fulfilling
As he tells it, Peter Sims was getting paid a lot of money working in the financial sector in London, but increasingly feeling like a hamster on a treadmill. As he said in a podcast interview with author Whitney Johnson, “I don’t think I realized until maybe, maybe a half of the way through my experience with Summit in London when I realized, like, look, I’m just this is I’m supposed to be living the dream I’m in. I’m living in Holland Park. I’ve got a beautiful French girlfriend. I’m like, walking past Richard Branson and he’s reading the Financial Times and it’s like we’re neighbors. And yet I wasn’t fulfilled at a deeper level. And I think that happens to a lot of us.” What he was describing was what he calls the “white sheep” world of doing what’s expected, ticking the boxes and having success defined by conventional metrics.
He went to Stanford Business School, where he became familiar with former Medtronic CEO Bill…
