“The first and most important act of building anything meaningful - a company, a movement, a career, a life - is to get radically honest about who you are and what you truly care about. Not what looks impressive, not what’s trending, not what someone else thinks is good, but what actually moves you.”
Everything good I’ve ever made or been a part of started with listening to the people I wanted to serve.
Or did it?
I’ve talked a lot about how hearing the incredible stories of entrepreneurs in East Africa, and trying to understand their needs, was the start of the most important insights that would lead to Kiva. In many ways this is true. The amazing rural entrepreneurs I met across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania through an internship with Village Enterprise - my big break, the first time I’d really gotten to work in the field - inspired so much.
But before I boarded a plane, I had to quit my job at Stanford. Before I quit my job, I co-created my dream work assignment with Brian Lehnen (thank you Brian!), founder of Village Enterprise. Before Brian gave me that assignment, he met with me a dozen times, patiently listening to me share my ideas and dreams. Before he met with me, I had to cold-call him to ask for an informational interview. Before I cold-called him, I had to figure out what I really wanted to do most in the world, which was to learn more about microfinance from borrowers themselves. Before I knew what that was, I had to crash the lecture where I would first learn about microfinance from Dr. Muhammed Yunus, who visited Stanford one evening in the fall of 2003 and gave a last-minute talk to about 30 people (this was three years before he’d win the Nobel Peace Prize). And before I crashed that lecture, I had to know I wanted to stay late after work and go. I had to be so curious, curious enough that for years I was searching and seeking and praying and journaling and wondering and reading and trying really, really hard to know what I wanted.
Before we can listen to others, we have to listen to ourselves.
The first and most important act of building anything meaningful - a company, a movement, a career, a life - is to get radically honest about who you are and what you truly care about. Not what looks impressive, not what’s trending, not what someone else thinks is good, but what actually moves you.
I’ve tried working on things that I didn’t fully believe in, projects that looked great from the outside but felt slightly off inside. It just never works. When you’re not aligned, when you’re spending the best of yourself on something that doesn’t feel right to you, it will drain you instead of energize you. No amount of effort or cleverness, no matter how strong others’ opinions are about what you’re doing, can make up for that. In the end misalignment isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s a waste of your time and talents.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: you can set big, noble goals and even reach them - but if they don’t align with what you value most, you won’t feel like you’ve succeeded. And the opposite is also true. When your actions are in harmony with your deepest values, even if you fall short of your goals, there’s a steadiness, a peace, that feels like success because the way you’ve been living is already an expression of what matters to you.
When we first started Kiva, I thought I was motivated to help others. But what I was really doing was listening to what pulled at me. My intention wasn’t to start a global platform; it was simply to respond truthfully to the human beings I had come so far to learn about and from. Before anything official had begun, I was already doing what I cared about most. Even if Kiva had never happened, or if it had stayed a small local project, I would have felt deeply grateful for the privilege of getting to do what I loved.
When you begin from a place of authentic passion, the work itself is the reward. Anything that unfolds beyond what you can control because of that work - like when so many others fall in love with what you’ve fallen in love with too, which happened with Kiva - is the gift of a lifetime.