Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action

Chapter 5

Relevance

Relevance is the mother of invention.

—Tim Manners, Relevance: Making Stuff That Matters

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.

—Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

 

In 2009, the United Nations decided to host an event that critics predicted would accomplish nothing. The aim was to bring together the world’s largest nations to discuss how to collectively address the issue of global warming. The skeptics’ concerns were well founded. It was a topic on which the largest nations had never been able to agree. Deciding to move ahead nonetheless, the UN selected Copenhagen as the host location, and the United Nations Climate Change Conference was announced for December of 2009.

A few months before the conference, TIME Magazine published a special issue naming a small group of pioneers as “Heroes of the Environment.” The list featured many recognizable celebrities and scientists who were well known in the global development community. It was the number one choice in the “Leaders & Visionaries” category; however, that caused a bit of a stir.

His name was Mohamed Nasheed, the newly elected president of the tiny island nation of the Maldives, located in the Indian Ocean off the southern coast of India. Just four months after taking office, he had made headlines around the world for declaring publicly that his government would commit to becoming ...