Last night I went out to have a drink with my friend Angela. Nothing special there you might think. Except that we were meeting outside the Pitt-Rivers, Oxford's Natural History museum. And we were waiting for ten trees from Ghana's rainforest to be delivered and installed.
Angela Palmer has spent the best part of 18 months visiting Ghana, selecting the trees, getting them shipped to the UK, displaying them in Trafalgar Square, taking them to Copenhagen and setting them up there. Then she bought them all back to the UK. As part of this massive project to bring the rainforests to us in a way most of us would simply never see them, she's had to raise the funds, cajole and coax multiple and often unknown officials, and persuade a huge crew of dozens to help her. Mostly for free. And so far about 500,000 people know about her project.
So there we were, a crowd of about 200 which swelled as passersby stopped to see the amazing sight of a vast 20 ton Denya tree arriving on the back of a lorry with its own police escort. As this enormous stump swung high into the air the crowd stood in silence - bursting into applause when then tree was gently lowered onto its plinth. After which three cheers went up for the crew who'd done the hard work. And who'd escorted the stumps from location to location.
So if you want to know why people take on huge and ambitious projects, write books, go back to college, change careers, run triathlons or simply stand up and get counted, it's because doing difficult things makes us happy. Challenges are something we set ourselves all our lives because that's how we achieve our potential. You only have to watch a toddler trying to stand to know that. Repeated falling doesn't mean failing. In an educational context it's called learning. And we're hard wired to want to learn.
Not only that.
When we see other people doing amazing things we experience something known as ‘elevation'. That feeling of awe, inspiration and admiration, when we think we could be better versions of ourselves. When we could do more, deliver more and be more than we currently are. That's what I felt last night: deeply moved by what I was seeing.
But what if you're thinking ‘that's all very well and good but it sounds too risky, too much like hard work.' Here's the flipside of the coin.
People who never take risks, who never try something tough find that their comfort zone shrinks. As they do less, they feel less confident and their ability to take a risk reduces too. So the result is a vicious circle. And their world literally gets smaller as they turn down opportunities to grow. That's clear from the five year research study we've been running, collecting data on the strong correlation between confidence and achieving your potential.
So although doing difficult things is tough, in the long run not doing them is tougher still.
If you want to know more about Angela Palmer's work, go to www.ghostforest.org
