If you don't think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.

"The real point to the est Training was to go down through layer after layer […] until you got to the last layer and peeled it off, where the recognition was that it’s really all meaningless and empty. That’s Existentialism’s endpoint.

Est went a step further in that people began to recognize that it was not only meaningless and empty, but it was empty and meaningless that it was empty and meaningless. And in that there’s an enormous freedom. All the constrictions, all of the rules you’ve placed on yourself are gone, and what you’re left with is nothing. And nothing is an extraordinarily powerful place to stand, because it is only from nothing that you can create. And from this nothing people were able to invent a life."

- werner erhard

Standing on Nothing

"In order to deal with something new that is for you at first counter-intuitive, that is, doesn't fit with what you already know or believe, you have to so to speak get off your already existing wall of bricks (as we said, be like the cat thrown into the air), and take on what is new just as itself, that is, without trying to deal with it by making it like anything with which you are already familiar.

To be successful in dealing with what is new and at first counter-intuitive for you and produce a transformation for yourself, you must be willing to tolerate the conflict and resulting tension between what is new and your existing wall of bricks. You must stick with it even though sticking with it feels like having been thrown up in the air topsy-turvy.

What makes something counter-intuitive is nothing more than its being inconsistent with your existing wall of bricks. A new brick that is counter-intuitive has to be held in suspension, held apart from and out beyond your already existing wall of bricks.

In fact, you have to be willing to stand on nothing, as it were, and grapple with creating what is new for you as a new realm of possibility for yourself."

- from Introductory Reading For Being a Leader and The Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/Phenomenological Model

"We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. We can choose to make our love for the world what our lives are really about. Each of us has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us. It will require courage, audacity and heart. It is much more radical than a revolution – it is the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet.

What we create together is a relationship in which our work can show up as making a difference in people's lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us all as human beings. If not you, who? If not now, when? If not here, where?"

-- Werner Erhard, The Graduate Review (1980)