A short story on optimism. Or: How "The Sustainability Puzzle" came to life

? Last year, as Covid hit, we started a good part of our Friday mornings in our virtual "Optimist Café". Our gatherings were based on the tradition of the Vienna coffee salons in the late 19th century and the early 20th centuries. Home to discussions between writers, artists, business people, politicians and philosophers, the Viennese coffee salons were places for cross-disciplinary networking, in the best sense.

?? Our Optimist Café became such a space, but instead of being confined to Viennese residents, it included more than 100 thought leaders from across the globe, who worked on topics related to forging a positive and sustainable future.

???????????? Connecting online on Friday mornings was like opening a surprise gift: What insights would we discover today? Each session featured a guest speaker to focus the dialogue, and each time we learned something new.

??????????It was the participants themselves who made these discussions truly exciting. They offered multiple perspectives and wide-ranging insights drawn from across the breadth of issues they had worked on, from #sustainablefoodsystems to #regenerativecapitalism, from #impactentrepreneurship to the #circulareconomy, from #supplychains to #climateaction.

????????????The diverse members of the Optimist Café community all shared a strong passion: They wanted to understand our #future and what is at stake for us all. By the time the #OptimistCafé took a breather, most of our Friday morning coffee drinkers had developed a sense of #optimism about the future as the Optimist Café enabled us to develop a holistic (though certainly not exhaustive) overview of the key issues affecting the #sustainability of our future.

???? Little by little, we together outlined the pieces of the #sustainabilitypuzzle and how they fit together. Our #book came about because of our interactions with people like our colleagues and friends in the Optimistic Café who feel that the world needs to change and that the time for action is NOW.

Claudia Winkler and I teamed up to summarize our findings. We don‘t remember who‘s idea it was, but we think we delivered something that should matter to all of us. Our book is for people like us who want to preserve a planet that will allow humans to continue to live comfortably, and who want to understand more of the bigger picture.

We thank all of you, who inspired us!

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