Mihai Toader-Pasti (ELP 2024) | Founder, towards0 & ÎntreVecini, Romania
What Life and the Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program Taught Me
I was born in Eastern Europe, just after the fall of the Communist regime, in a small town in the southern part of Romania, with no traffic lights and fewer people than a shopping mall in San Francisco. At 18, I moved to Bucharest for my university studies and started focusing on green buildings by joining a non-profit. 12 years later, after a sabbatical and one month solo-riding my motorbike through Europe, I set my goals for my third decade orbiting around the sun. I now run a business and a non-profit, while also working with the public sector and academia to make cities more sustainable, and I love it.
My life as an environmental leader has been an amazing roller coaster. I reached rock bottom in 2014 when I had to convince my sister and brother-in-law to lend their wedding money to save an NGO that everyone abhorred and slept in the bucket of a loader to solve a last minute problem. From there I went up to becoming a world champion in green homes and driving the legislative change that will help millions of Romanians produce solar energy and feed it into the grid. It was hard and beautiful.
There were many moments, in a decade of working 18 hours, 7 days a week, when I failed badly and publicly. I was told that “It’s your fault we failed, you should be ashamed and you are a disgrace for your country’’ by representatives of ministries, governments, and universities in Romania. But I never thought about quitting. Not because I believed I’d succeed, but because curiosity drives me. Sustainability is so complex and dynamic, so I feel like a kid in a candy shop even when things go wrong. Sometimes you go forward, sometimes you go backward. This is the beauty of life.
Everything seems impossible when you start and everything looks easier when you look back. One day it will all be worth it, so I always ask myself : “How does my past impact my future and what will my future self thank me for doing now?"
These are 4 recommendations I would have told my younger self if I could go back in time:
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Manage your emotions in the long run.
Remember your “why,” hope for the best and prepare for the worst. You need to balance patience with impatience and develop a joyful persistence. Be an ambitious stoic and go to therapy. -
Understand how people make choices.
No other person in the world thinks like you. Everyone has different triggers, communication styles, and goals. Map relevant stakeholder’s logical, emotional, cultural, and ethical influencers. -
Understand how the world functions.
The world is more similar to pool than chess, because real life is more dynamic and unpredictable. It's a puzzle and domino. Develop a map and find the pieces you can move to amplify change. -
Understand what you can be very good at.
Build the future you today, step by step. We are computers. BIOS is emotions, the Operating System is all our mental-models and Apps are skills. Be intentional, ambitious and objective.
Every morning when we wake up, we shape the environment indirectly by all the choices we make. What we eat, what we drink, what clothes we wear, what car we drive, what computers we use, how much we consume, produce and recycle. What we do may influence others or might not matter, but will have ripple effects in time. Family, Friends, Colleagues, Neighbours. We are the end results of our collective actions that grow from the seeds of individual actions.
We can bridge the gap between the world as it can be and the world as it is by bridging expertise and influence, while making change enjoyable and collaborative. ‘“Change is hard when it happens to you. But Change is exhilarating when you are leading it.’’ - Susan Carpenter, Beahrs ELP, University of California, Berkeley
And please, don’t forget to enjoy the process, celebrate small wins, and be grateful to others for contributing to our growth and the world as it is – an amazing place where we continue to grow. So dear reader, whoever you are, wherever you come from, thank you for your time, and always believe in yourself. You can drive change. What you do matters. You’ll figure it out.
- Mihai
[The blog post image was published on Wikipedia Commons. Original image by VictorCozmei. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.]