We Create What We Want

The following is an excerpt from Mohammad Yunus' Nobel lecture, given during the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, December 10, 2006. I was very happy when Yunus and Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, as I had been impressed by their working system of micro-credits and microfinancing. That is a true path from poverty to empowerment and autonomy, economic as well as personal growth.

But in Yunus' lecture, what spoke to me was a part about how we create the world we live in; how we get what we want by accepting certain things. If we objected to poverty, then surely we would fight to eradicate it. We - the west in general - don't, but our silence and passivity is an acceptance.

We Create What We Want

We get what we want, or what we don't refuse. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us, and that poverty is part of human destiny. This is precisely why we continue to have poor people around us. If we firmly believe that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have built appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.

We wanted to go to the moon, so we went there. We achieve what we want to achieve. If we are not achieving something, it is because we have not put our minds to it. We create what we want.

What we want and how we get to it depends on our mindsets. It is extremely difficult to change mindsets once they are formed. We create the world in accordance with our mindset. We need to invent ways to change our perspective continually and reconfigure our mindset quickly as new knowledge emerges. We can reconfigure our world if we can reconfigure our mindset.

© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2006

I believe in the power of manifestation and attraction; I believe in our power to change the world with our thoughts and actions. It is not just a matter of poverty, but also of injustice based on gender, sexual orientation, age, race, class, caste, and status, of gendercide, of the atrocities committed in the name of religion... We have the power to change it, if we want to. Each change has to start from ourselves, and sometimes, silence is acceptance.