I just finished a very inspiring book with the unlikely title, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood. I really don't like the title of this book. (Raise your hand if you want to read a book about Microsoft. Uh-huh. Me neither.) In fact, I remember seeing this book when it first came out (2006), but it wasn't until I saw it at my local library last month that I actually read it. (Maybe the yak photo got to me. It certainly wasn't the back cover blurb that touted the author as a "Microsoft velociraptor.")
I was surprised how much this book affected me. The basic story is about a Microsoft executive who goes on vacation in Nepal. By chance, he meets a local man who shows him a local school with so few books in the library that they are locked up so that they remain safe. The books include a Danielle Steel romance, an Umberto Eco novel in Italian, the Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia, and Finnegans Wake. He emails his friends and asks them to donate children's books which he personally delivers to the school.
Eventually, he decides to leave his job and start his foundation Room
to Read to build libraries in Nepal and later Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, South Africa, and Zambia.
This is the kind of "one person can make a difference" story that I really enjoy. Not only can you cheer on the author, but you're also provided with a blueprint of how small steps can lead to big changes. I liked that he detailed the road bumps along with the successes. He included not just the obvious problems like getting financial support, but the smaller internal issues like rehearsing a good answer to the cocktail party question "What do you do?" (For the record, I kind of liked his second answer to that question: "I deliver books on the back of a yak to rural villages in the Himalayas.")
This is the kind of book that gets you to wonder what your life might be like if you decided not to conform to expectations. After reading this, you might decide to leap into the unknown, too.