Sean M Everett

It’s not often that a storm takes two massive cruise ships past the breaking point. 

Yesterday, Hurricane Sandy left many of my friends and extended family flooded without power in Manhattan. It also spelled the demise of Scott Forstall, who’s been the architect of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, since the first iPhone.

And it feels like there’s even a bigger storm brewing around the world. We’ve got religious strife, still, in the middle east. And political strife as a result of it.

Where I live in America, we’re facing public outcry of offshoring jobs, a souring economy, a war over foreign oil, a mounting bucket of debt and our cellular communication networks owned by China, not to mention our future generation of leaders graduating with massive student loan debt and no jobs.

With the Presidential election and All Hallow’s Eve only a few days a way, it seems that now, more than ever, we need to dig in. As individuals, as families, as nations, and as human beings, we must gird our positions and prepare for this inevitable storm. 

The unrest is mounting, and if we don’t do anything about it, we’re all going to be in troubled waters without an outboard motor, life rafts, or even paddles.

There’s holes in the ship, Martha, and we’re taking on water.

We can’t rely on the religious zealot to fix the holes. He’ll just pray. We can’t rely on the politician to fix the holes, she’ll just talk of legislation. We can’t even wait for the teacher to teach us how to fix the holes because we don’t have the time. The hurricane is here now. We need to act on instinct, but who’s built for that?

It’s up to the entrepreneur. The one who springs into action at a moments notice without regard for the gale force winds and sideways rain, nor the fear for his own safety. He acts because, in not doing so, would surely sink the ship and drown everyone on board. The cost would be too great not to act. Lives would be lost.

And so, he begins by repairing holes with whatever’s around him, shouting to the others to do the same. As this is underway, he’s turning the ship into the wind so they don’t capsize. He’s battening down hatches, and spewing orders, and people seem to follow because he somehow seems to know what he’s doing. He begins communication with other ships nearing defeat, spreading the message of how to survive. He hasn’t slept in days, his stomach grumbles, he pushes thoughts of failure aside. “That’s not an option.”

And soon the storm passes. Lives are saved. And an opening for a new potential direction has emerged. He’s begun building a system that helps people fix things themselves and find a way to not just survive, but go further. And yet, he sees people go back into their same routines.

“There is much to prepare for…”, he thinks to himself floating on the current calm waters and realizes he needs to start, first, with people’s innate habits. For by changing one tiny atom at the core, he knows it will snowball all the way back up the chain to a global level.

Because inside, he knows that this storm was merely a drop in the bucket compared to the one that’s began to build, deep out to sea.