How F.A.T people changed the world (and why you need them in your life)

So you want to change the world, do you? Maybe you would be satisfied just to start a revolution at work as a starting point. Whatever your message, the secret to inspiring change in your organization, a movement will never happen without a small band of F.A.T people who will be your change-agents. But the kind of F.A.T. that I am talking about is a good thing. Consider this scenario:

You literally want to change the way the entire world acts and thinks. You have your message, your ultimate goals, but it is so revolutionary that you can't simply publish it or announce it to the world. So you come up with a strategy that goes like this:

Hide from the world until you exist in anonymity and in an obscure place that is considered Third World, tucked in the slums surrounded by uneducated, superstitious people. So far so good. No one but your mother knows your plan and she promises she won't tell a soul. You have waited for 30 years, and now you are ready to unleash your message, but because your neighbors think you are nuts, you have to get out of the community and become a sort of nomad who never sleeps in your own bed. You ask a bunch of good ole boys who are sun-drenched laborers with big hearts to be your band. They work hard, laugh hard, and put their pants on just like everyone else--nothing extraordinary. Next, you invite them on an all-expenses paid field trip and reveal the basic outline of your plan. They love it! They are amazed! They want to know where to sign up. You decide that you only have twelve spots on the board and that each "member" will have to learn a whole new skill set; no slackers allowed. They must pay their own way; you will no longer foot the bill and joining will cost them more than they know. They continue with great enthusiasm day after day because your vision is so compelling, so world-changing, that they would be crazy to ignore how wonderful the world would be if it only knew what they now knew. Their excitement grows and after two years of grass roots fund raising, on-the-job training, constant technical glitches where nothing seems to be working as they thought, you reveal to them that it is now time to take the dream public. But you surprise them with a revelation that much of the world is going to REJECT the idea. Some competing industries will actually try to kill the visionary. They will lie, deceive, and confuse the masses into thinking that your idea is diabolical, destructive and despicable. But these few and faithful followers (they are the FAT people I want to tell you about) are fully committed, immersed and ready to follow you to your fate, good or bad. They are die-hard believers who follow you to the end because you invested the best of your time and energy to them, and them alone. All that you have done was for them; you chose this type of person because you needed people who would not hijack your vision. You saw in them something that the rest of the world rejected. You sacrificed for them because you knew something they don't know and your vision has hinged on this final great secret: you are going to die before the vision is ever accepted by the world. When you reveal to them this startling, earth-shaking fact, they just can't believe it. They plead with you to alter the plan's timeline so that you will be the one who unveils it to the world. They believe in you so strongly but you have chosen to place the success of the mission squarely on them. Your plan has always been to make them a copy of you. For three years you changed THEM and in turn, twelve of THEM will change the world rather than just one of you. They are the F.A.T people that I will now introduce you to. This actual historical narrative is about the greatest teacher in the history of the world and his band of misfit disciples. Whether you agree with this world-changing teacher or not, his strategy was the most effective campaign of all time: it is none other than Jesus of Nazareth (the slums) who took a band of "dropouts" who were uneducated fisherman who argued a lot and didn't fully understand their teacher until he was gone. Yet by the end of their lifetime the entire known world would be impacted by the message of their teacher who multiplied himself into the lives of others. Today, time is divided by this undeniably effective world changer who chose a strategy so shocking and so unconventional that anyone who wants to change the world should model his strategy. He found F.A.T. people and built his whole strategy on them. So let's break it down... F.A.T, stands for...

FAITHFUL--if you want to change your group, change your corporation, overhaul your industry, change your world with your passion, you need a small band of FAITHFUL people on whom you will invest the best of your time. These people are like a funnel in whom you pour the best of your time with the greatest of impact so that your message can be intensified and given the best hearing. The Teacher's strategy was to focus on a VERY small group of people and he would take them through a process: he would TRAIN them, TEST them, and ultimately TRUST them by unleashing them to do it on their own. His group of unexceptionally talented people were not simply volunteers; they were taken through a process where they were given a good dose of what the message was about, but then, significantly, they were asked to pay a price. Ultimately, they would be faced with death and they were so firmly fixed to the truth of the message that they sacrificed everything. As you seek to revolutionize your world you can't start with a call for sacrifice. How often do you as the visionary talk about sacrifice and surrender from your team to trade their time to follow your vision without clearly spelling out EXACTLY what the mission is? If you think you have done that, go ask one of your "followers" to explain in his own words what your great mission is all about. See how well they can explain it in their own terms. Repeating your phrases is not much more than a parrot; enunciating and synthesizing your mission in their vernacular and obtuse words demonstrates that they are incorporating it in the real world and not the greenhouse of your ideas. A world-changer fully unfurls the message BEFORE s/he tries to call for sacrifice from the team. If you are to change the [fill in the blank], you need to give your best hours, your best resources, your best energy to a few FAITHFUL followers who can expound the vision in their own words and demonstrate that they not only are "in it to win it" but that they are actually paying a price to be on your team. These are the people who deserve the best of your time and its your chief role to give it to them, the few, the faithful. Don't waste time on troublemakers and rebelrousers who steal precious time from the faithful.

AVAILABLE: The world-changers in your band are the one's who order their lives in such a way as to be in the moment with you. When you have to force people to come to a vision-casting session and they would rather have a root canal, this is a pretty good clue they are not your FAT people. Jesus would often provide inconvenient and unconventional times for "class" to be in session (the middle of a terrifying storm, during a riot, in the middle of the night); he did this to constantly keep his students focused on the sufficiency of his message. He loved to remind them there is a back door and an easy way out, but AVAILABLE prioritize their lives to be around for the next lesson. He needed to know who would absorb his hard-to-grasp principles and would not run away when it got tough. So often this great teacher would send curious people away simply by giving them an obstacle they had to overcome. AVAILABLE people order their lives around your compelling mission and they are the ones who always seem to "show up", volunteer, take on the extra work, wear the company logo and lead the cheer. You need to take note of these people because they are world-changers who have bought in to your vision. You need to understand that their quirks and idiosyncrasies that may get under your skin are the very factors that make them strong individuals who are longing to follow a visionary. They are like melting butter that gets into the nooks and crannies of the English muffins of life with an authentic voice that you would not be able to do on your own. They will make their lives available to you and you will not have to chase after them. If you are trying to make it easy for people to be your big hitters you are setting yourself up for multiple strikeouts.

TEACHABLE--You have a message and that message comes from your blood, sweat and tears, paid dearly with sacrifice and torturous discipline. YOU are actually the message and now you need capable people who will carry that message faithfully to fulfill your vision. You absolutely must find TEACHABLE people who are not only willing to be with you for the entire journey and willing to pay the price for the ride, but they trust you enough that they long to be taught by you. They mimic your mantra, they are easily convinced, they crowd your office, "hang around" when you want to go home; these people choose to be influenced by you. You may even disregard them at first because they don't fit your preconceived image of what your fanatics would look like. These people are willing to accept your value system while at the same time feel free to challenge what they don't understand. You need an outcast or two, a misfit and a GD fool because ultimately you need people who learn to speak your language and drink the Kool Aid. These people demonstrate that your vision is believable and they will soon begin evangelizing the world with your message.

So, with apologies to anyone who is fighting the battle of the bulge, we need F.A.T. people may not fit the image of a world-changer but who can believe our message, re-arrange their lives to be in the center of the stream of our philosophizing and re-engineering, and are eager to be taught by those whose life has a seminal message. If you invest the BEST of your day with the F.A.T. people you can be sure that you will change the world, one inch at a time.