Headlining it “Never think you are too powerless to make a difference!,” I shared a post on Facebook about an elementary school teacher in the then-broke Chicago school system finding a way to fund that system by forcing the city’s utilities to pay their fair share, as required but not enforced under existing law.

Someone commented that this victory could never have happened today, because “The courts are all shills for the other side. They would look at her hand written ledgers and say she made it all up.”

This was my response:

You’re such a pessimist! I’ve been part of enough successful “impossible” struggles that I named my TEDx talk “Impossible” is a Dare! [To watch that talk, click the link above and select “videos” and then “event videos”].

Yes, we lose a lot. But we win sometimes. And if we choose not to bother because we won’t win, we certainly lose. Right now, I’m active on two fronts. The immigration justice work is depressing, because as long as the current federal government is in power, we will always be sticking a finger in the dike to try to prevent a flood: it’s not enough but it’s something. Once in a while, we even win some small victory. Occasionally, as in the Minneapolis resistance, we win a big one.

I’m a lot more optimistic about the safe energy work, even after hearing the State Senator in charge of the energy bill basically say yesterday that he was going ahead with trying to repeal our nuclear protections.

Why? Because even if we lose the fight to keep the repeal out of the bill (which is likely), we are a long way from done. Any nuclear plant trying to build in MA is going to be confronted in every public hearing, and even if they get their permits, there will be people in front of the construction sites holding big signs and maybe even filling the jails in civil disobedience. There might even be a movement to withhold that portion of the electric bill going to the project.

One of those victories that inspired the TEDx talk was starting the movement that led me to the work I’ve been doing for about 25 years. A developer announced a plan to build 40 McMansions all the way up the mountain right next to a much-loved state park. It wasn’t the plan itself in the newspaper article that moved me to take action, but the quotes from local environmentalists who should have known better, all issuing variations on “this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.” When I saw those quotes, I knew I had to prove them wrong.

So I put out a call for the first meeting of Save the Mountain. I rode my bicycle around the neighborhood distributing fliers, announced it in local media, and spread it around to my friends.

From that first press release and flier, I maintained the mindset that we would win. I expected that 20 or 30 people would show up, maybe 5 would get seriously involved, and we’d make the developer’s life miserable for five years or so before our victory.

It was a pleasant shock when 70 people crammed themselves into our dining room, formed a core group of more than 30, assigned ourselves into committees—and won just over a year later. I attribute a lot of both our success and our rapid pace of victory to that success mindset. It was a game changer.

That activist campaign used everything I knew after 20+ years in marketing. After we won, I started pondering what lessons from the activist world could make a difference on the business side, and that’s how I started sharing the message that social and environmental good are business success tools. Four of my ten books are specifically about that, most recently Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I’m happy to send you a PDF at no charge if you subscribe to my newsletter and then reply to the welcome message requesting one.