When we live local our focus is primarily on the details.

We were given the full set of The West Wing videos about life in the White House. Boy they seem to be living at a million miles an hour making world-changing decisions constantly (with very little thinking unfortunately!).

It made me think: “What are we doing that matters that makes any difference to anyone at all to the world? Do we make a difference for good? Are we part of the problem?”

Sometimes we seem so small and powerless it is easy to feel that what we do doesn’t matter at all for good or ill. Powerful corporations wealthy individuals media barons governments seem to call all the shots!

Then I started to think of some ways we make a huge difference.

Firstly I thought of the life and death difference we make in our children’s lives how crucially important it is to look after our children well. Also how important it is to our children and our communities to look after our marriages well.

Then there is the difference we make when we act together or vote together or work together.

But here is a way to make even more difference.

Think big. Imagine that you are in charge of deciding how to spend a huge government budget (choose a figure of at least $500000 but you can make it as big as you like.) Now decide what the very best way you could spend it would be for the good of the world. Come up with ideas for huge projects and social change programs that will solve some of the biggest problems we all face together. Put yourself in charge. You have the budget to employ the experts hire the equipment support the inventers and rally whole nations. What would you spend it on?

I’ve had two goes at doing this. The first time was when the WA Government was planning to spend $400000000 on a coal fired power station. I put in a submission to establish an industry in WA putting solar panels on every roof. It would have cost less than $400 million created a lot of jobs and the coal fired power station wouldn’t have been needed. Well that idea had to wait more than 2 decades before it is finally getting put into action.

But the next chance I had to think about how to spend $400 million it worked and there is now a whole railway line servicing thousands of new homes and suburbs as an outcome. I had a chance to go on that train and it was full of people using it.

The thing is it wasn’t hard to come up with the ideas once you start thinking: The government is proposing to spend $2 billion on XXXXXX. Are there better things I think they could do with $2 billion?

We’re all good consumers. This is easy stuff.

Once you get ideas put in submissions. Talk about them. Put them on blogs or Twitter or Facebook. Send them to politicians or candidates for election. Even ask entrepreneurs like Dick Smith to help you promote them.

Once you’ve got a good idea watch out for every opportunity to spread it and share it. Who are the leaders in the world who are in a position to make it a reality? Email them the idea. Think about who can be part of making it happen.

One of the things the world needs now is good ideas very good ideas.

We can all make a difference just by doing it!