Create a remarkable life, with Adam Braun, founder of Pencils of Promise | Ramit's Brain Trust

How do you create a remarkable life? How do you make remarkable decisions when you have too many options? Today, I'm thrilled to introduce my friend Adam Braun. He's the founder of Pencils of Promise and the author of the New York Times bestselling book, the Promise of a Pencil.

Hi, I'm Adam Braun. I'm the author of the bestseller the Promise of a Pencil. And I'm also the founder of Pencils of Promise, which is an organization that has built more than 300 schools for over 30,000 students around the world and has been driven by a movement of everyday people just like yourself who get involved with the organization to bring a sense of passion and purpose into their life and business.

So you had taken the time to train your intuition?

Oh yeah, over many. And that happened through truthfully travel and backpacking. I mean, you know, it was all the. I backpacked through probably 50 plus countries in my early 20s and naturally I'm pretty introverted, I'm a middle child. You know, I don't really love confrontation and I'm happy to kind of sit back and observe while other people go out and socialize first. But as a backpacker, that led to me not speaking to people for days on end sometimes when I was traveling solo through some of these countries. And so I had to develop not only kind of a personal instinct, but a sense of just intuition to either go right or left. Alright.

You're the first person I've ever met who actually went to Semester at Sea for a reason other than partying, which is amazing. So tell us about the beginning of your travels.

So it really started for me with Semester at Sea. I was a sophomore in college. I went to my friend's dorm room one night and I watched a film called Baraka that was shot in 24 countries, kind of documentary style. And I'd just never seen anything like it. And it really showed these indigenous cultures and then put those clips side by side with kind of the most beautiful natural wonders and kind of sights that you could imagine, but the ones that aren't always written about in kind of the popular guidebooks. And I remember seeing it and just thinking, I have to go see these places and meet these people. And so Semester at Sea happened to be going to 10 of the countries that I really wanted to explore. And so I went on the program. I didn't tell any of my friends. I wanted to go. I really wanted to go alone. You know, I don't know what it was at that age, but I think maybe when you're 2021. You're kind of breaking out of someone who had conformed to the norm. Yeah. And there was this maybe internal curiosity to see, like, if I'm not bounded by all these identifiers, because I think, you know, it starts in school, but it continues throughout your career. You meet somebody, they ask, what do you do? Or where do you go to school? What's your major? That becomes, where do you live? And you have all these identifiers that speak about what you are, but not at all about who you are. And so I thought, you know, the only period that I had to really define who I was was freshman orientation. You know, no one knows who you are. You can kind of reinvent yourself. But I was identified as a basketball player because I was at Brown, I was playing basketball, and I thought this might be my last opportunity to really just figure out who I was. And if I go with none of my friends and I just go into all these environments completely alone, maybe I'll learn something about myself. Okay, So I went on. Semester at City. Thirteen days into my voyage, I was on one of the famous voyages. It's called the wave voyage. It's known as January 2005. My ship was about 800 miles from land, crossing from Vancouver to South Korea, and in winter, so North Pacific in winter. And we got caught in between three major storm fronts, and we got caught in the middle of 40, 45 foot swells, and a 60 foot rogue wave hit us head on, went over the top of my ship, shattered the glass on the bridge, which houses the area that holds the navigation equipment, and we lost all power to our engines. And so I had this kind of mass hysteria, you know, certain death moment. And fortunately, obviously, the ship didn't go down. But it forced me to really reassess a lot of my kind of priorities and, you know, my purpose. Like, if I didn't go down this day, why am I here? And as I started to backpack and travel, you know, you're right, I wasn't as interested in the partying. And I think the wave had a lot to do with it because it's like you're given a second chance at life. You certainly want to make the most of it. And there's just a kind of increased depth and richness to whatever experience comes next. And so that, you know, first started with Hong Kong and China, and then pretty soon I found myself in India, where I met a boy begging on the streets. I asked him if he could have anything in the world, what would he want most? And his Answer was a pencil, which became the inspiration for the organization.

What did you think that people were gonna say, these poor children around the world that you were asking them, what did you think they were gonna say?

I thought they were gonna say the stuff that I wanted as a kid. You know, I thought they were gonna say a huge house or a, I don't know, fancy car, like an amazing yacht, a. Or maybe in some places, like a soccer ball. But to own a soccer team. Right. And the answers were just so simple. So just kind of. Yeah. There's no other word, simple in the kind of response. And oftentimes you recognize there's both, like, simplicity and so much wisdom in the answers that a child gives you.

The one that struck me was the young girl who said, I wish my mother was healthy so she could walk.

With me to school. Yeah.

I mean, that really changes your perspective.

Oh, completely. So.

So you started hearing this pencil response.

Yeah.

And what do you do when you hear it the first time or the second time? Well, it's a little bizarre when you're sitting in Manhattan to imagine somebody saying, I want a pencil.

Yeah, it's so. So funny. So over the years, people have said to me, like, did they. Did that boy really ask you for a pencil? And then I'll just ask him a simple question. Have you spent much time in parts of the developing world? Because people that have. They've been asked it all the time. I mean, there are certain parts of the world where kids just go up and they say, bic, Bic, Bic. Because they want Bic pens. So, you know, I gave him mine, he lit up, I started to ask questions. What I came to realize was he had never been to school before, which for me was unfathomable. That a kid would never have a day of education in their life because.

You'Ve just been steeped in it since child.

I mean, look, I grew up. I think less than 80% of the country even has. Sorry, 80% of the country does not have a passport. I think it's some stat like that. There's some crazy statistic about how few people actually in the country. I grew up in the Northeast. I had traveled, I think, to the Caribbean maybe once or twice. I'd been to Europe maybe once. I'd never been in the developing world at that stage of my life. And so all these things. I mean, the fact that the majority of the world does not live the way that we live in Western culture. I mean, right now you have 7 billion people on the planet, 4 1/2 billion have access to a toilet. 2 1/2 billion people, right? Almost. Almost 10 times the size of the United States population, doesn't have a toilet to go use on the average day. And I think when you aren't exposed to those environments, you just don't realize how the rest of the world lives. So as I told you, I was kind of naturally introverted. So once I heard that, that question, I started carrying pens and pencils with me everywhere. I would just buy a bunch of pens and pencils, and those became the kind of conduit for me to have conversations with people because I was kind of shy. So I'd walk up to a woman in a market and her kid would look at me and I'd give the kid a pencil. And then I could sit down to the woman and say, well, tell me about your life. And I'm just kind of curious about people's stories. I mean, I'm naturally a storyteller, but I like other people's stories as well. And those pens and pencils became the enabler of a lot of those conversations.