Thursday, August 9, 2012

The Internet is my religion



I came across this inspiring speech and the notes below here. I would urge you to see the 12 minutes of video, if possible.

"In the video, Jim Gilliam gives us a short tour of his life’s story. I encourage you to watch the entire mind-blowing twelve minutes. In it, Jim tells the story of how after contracting life-threatening cancer, he went from following a popular movement—Jerry Falwell-branded fundamentalist Christianity—to creating two of his own. First, following the tragedy of September 11, 2001, Jim became an activist for a better America and produced a series of compelling documentary films to further his cause. In order to promote these films, Jim developed a series of techniques using the Internet to basically create a movement—i.e. to organize a group of people to do something. In this case, learn from his films and strive to improve the country. Later, we find that the cancer treatment that Jim received earlier in the story burned out his lungs requiring that he receive a double lung transplant or die. Finding a donor for two healthy lungs and a doctor willing to perform the insanely risky surgery is the mother of all long shots, so Jim had to start a new movement to get new lungs. Organizing people to save his own life profoundly impacted Jim’s view of how he should spend the rest of it. So much so that his personal domain is called 3dna.us to represent the 3 different DNAs that combine to keep him alive, a constant reminder that he cannot do it alone. 

After recovering from the operation, Jim had a defining revelation. He realized that everything good comes from people working together to accomplish something important and, furthermore, that the Internet would be the great enabler of the most important endeavors."

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