Initiative

Each year Buckminster Fuller receives and answers many hundreds of unsolicited letters from youth anxious to know what the little individual can do. One such letter from a young man named Michael – who is ten years old – asks whether I am a “doer or a thinker.” Although I never “tell” anyone what to do, I feel it quite relevant at this point to quote my letter to him explaining what I have been trying to do in the years since my adoption of my 1927 - inaugurated self-disciplinary resolves. The letter, dated February 16, 1970, reads:

Dear Michael

Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning “thinkers and doers.”

The things to do are the things that need doing that you see need to be done and that no one else seems need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often get buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviours induced or imposed by others on the individual.

Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don’t be disappointed if something doesn’t work. That is what you want to know – the truth about everything and the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their systems.

Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word. Words are tools and once you have learned how to use a tool you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is not enough. If your vocabulary is comprehensive, you can comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.

You have what is most important in life – initiative. Because of it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.

Sincerely yours,

Buckminster Fuller

Source:

Critical Path

Buckminster Fuller

Page xxxviii

St. Martin's Press

ISBN: 0312174888