Good morning! If you’re new, my name is Jeremy. My wife Jessica and I moved to Iraq 15+ years ago at the height of the war. Today, our humanitarian work across 10+ countries has been covered by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera, etc.

I help peacemakers like you 10X their impact around the world through a social impact collective called HUMANITE.

I write for those who still have hope.

Jeremy Courtney
HUMANITE

How your view of time affects your ability to serve something bigger than self

Self-preservation has got to be the most natural instinct we have.

Animals got it.

Plants, too.

By default, everything living wants to keep on living.

From the savannah to the Board room, we are primed to save ourselves and then, to save our own.

But what if you want to live in a world that is just a little bit more loving…

A little bit less tribal…

A little bit more inclusive…

How do you overwrite the self-preservation instinct?

How do you train yourself in the discipline of self-giving?

And how do you find and surround yourself with others for whom self-preservation is not the highest value?

Sticky people

Jessica calls them “Sticky People”. That is, people who stick around, stay engaged, continue to reach deep and give themselves away for the benefit of others.

Who else grew up with these sticky little “spider men” characters?

Even when they hit the wall with full force, they always managed to stick around. They’d tumble, lose their grip, and even get turned completely upside down, but they’d always manage to grab on again and just keep hanging in there.

If you want to take on this work of peace over a long period, Sticky People will become the most valuable people in your life.

How to find sticky people

If I had to narrow Sticky People down to one characteristic to bank it all on over another, I’d put my money on people whose operating timeline is, more or less, forever.

Long-term vision.

Long-term returns.

Massive projects that couldn’t possibly come true inside a quarterly earnings cycle.

A life lived in one direction.

I try to avoid working with people who think “months” or “years” is long. That thinking, to me, is too small. And it leads to decisions that are myopic and knee-jerk.

Decades.

Scores.

Lifetimes.

These are the measurements that matter to me.

Of course, life is not lived in decades, it’s lived in days. Hours. Minutes. But when the minutes get hard and the days drag on, Sticky People endure precisely because they don’t get fixated on their own advancement (or lack thereof). The Prize is the long-term advancement of a society, a culture, a people, or even a whole planet: The World Where Everyone Rises.

What is a bad day in the face of a decade?

Or a bad year in view of a life?

Building things that last

Sticky People build things that last because they relate to time differently. They get thrown up against as much as anybody else. But they see every tumble through the lens of their forever project and values. They have targets, dreams, and visions so big that they are lifted above the instinct to retreat into self-preservation and they are drawn forward by the tractor beam of what could happen if we gave up some of our “rights” to risk more and more of ourselves on Love.

Most days, the vision seems insane; the ideals too lofty.

What’s worse, the same walls seem to remain no matter what we throw at it.

But when Sticky People find their grip giving out, they seem to always find a way to wash off the grime and throw themselves back at the wall, believing that one day, it will be the one to crumble, not them.

Hang in there!

The World Where Everyone Rises needs you.

Jeremy Courtney
HUMANITE Peace Collective

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It’s genocide and the world has already moved on.

Months ago we wrote about Russia’s abduction of Ukrainian children when the big Yale report came out. Last week, our Board and partners met with the Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. and she re-upped the issue with us. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this CNN story.

This genocide is happening right now, today, in broad daylight.

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