In Chapter 4 of 17 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, leadership philosopher Bijoy Goswami answers "How Are Your Community Responsibilities Changing?" Goswami shares how he has been developing and why he is letting go of existing responsibilities to make space for something new. He sees it as a process or cycle that allows him to distill his purpose. Bijoy Goswami is a writer, teacher, and community leader based in Austin, Texas. He develops learning models, including MRE, youPlusU, and Bootstrap, to help others live more meaningfully. Previously, he co-founded Aviri Software after working at Trilogy Software. Goswami graduated from Stanford University, where he studied Computer Science, Economics, and History.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: How are your community responsibilities changing?
Bijoy Goswami: What I found is this three-stage process in terms of finding your way, you start with another way. You’re painting, let other people paint upon you. Second, you start to strip off that paint and a lot of what I've been doing the last while is stripping off some of this paint and that has meant actually not being as integral to things like Bootstrap Austin or things like that and say, how can I take a backseat, how can I let go of some of these things so that I can make a space for something new.
So, again, I find it to a cycle. It’s not like I’m, you know, going away from everything fully but it’s part of I'm saying, I'm doing that process so I can find out what the next way of engaging is. So, I think I might have brought up the Banksy analogy where I hack systems. I try to intervene inside of systems but I'm don’t necessarily try to hold on to them or be part of them for much—a long time. So, what I found is I'm still involved, I'm still engaged but in terms of projects where I am assisting those projects, I go in and I leave, you know, rather than try to be ongoingly in them.
So, that’s a lot of what’s been happening. I think it’s given me the opportunity to then say okay. What am I really trying to – How am I distilling all that into something that I'm really putting forward in the world.