TIME names MuSo one of the World's 100 Greatest Places for 2024

TIME Magazine has named MuSo, the Museum of Solutions, one of the World's 100 Greatest Places for 2024.

Congratulations to my beloved (brave, visionary, foolhardy, loving, stubborn :) MuSo colleagues — and the kids and community who keep it real there, every day.

MuSo is in good company here. Fifty-one cultural and nature/heritage destinations in 31 countries are named in TIME's list, among them are the Putep ‘t-awt nature trail and whale observatory in Quebec, Canada; the Ivomo Tea Cooperative in Gisakura, Rwanda; and the Bab Al Salam Mosque in Muscat, Oman.

These are marvelous destinations indeed! But for my own part, as I've said before, I'm a little uncomfortable with these kinds of honors. They can feel arbitrary and superficial, and there are always hundreds of other extraordinary places, projects, and communities, all over the world, that will never get the recognition and support they deserve.

Also, as part of MuSo's founding team, I know our blind spots and skeletons-in-the-closet all too well: If only the reviewers knew too…LOL! My lips are sealed!

That being said, little winks of recognition like TIME's Greatest Places list provide a kind of validation that is incredibly useful to the teams and founders/funders who leap into the void, almost literally*, to start and sustain risky projects like MuSo.

It's scary — a vulnerable feeling — to create a startup venture of any kind, let alone one that seeks to reach so deeply, and so publicly, into the "now" and futures of young people. A billion decisions must be made, often quickly and in a vacuum of expertise and evidence, and it can be hard to tell which decisions are consequential or costly, right or wrong, until long after the moment has passed. Successes often feel quiet and fleeting, while mistakes can be public and harsh.

And a new concept like MuSo is an uncertain proposition for visitors and community too: What is this strange, new place? What will be expected of me? What will I do there? How will it make me feel?

So the editorial imprimatur of TIME — really every sliver of evidence that something new is heading in a good direction — really does help to give founders, funders, teams and communities some confidence that the bold new thing they're creating together makes sense at some level.

That's half the battle, as far as I'm concerned: to gain the confidence and resilience to keep working on hard things together ("Work that matters", as Tim O'Reilly once said), whether in the schoolyard, at the family dinner table, or on a global scale.

In a way, there's some symmetry in this equation. Some poetry too. Finding confidence and resilience is in the meta-purpose of MuSo: to help everyone keep working together — joyfully, purposefully, and playfully — until we get the good stuff right.

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This post on LinkedIn (link)
TIME's 100 Greatest Places, 2024, MuSo: https://time.com/6992399/museum-of-solutions/
The whole list: https://time.com/collection/worlds-greatest-places-2024/

* During MuSo’s construction I almost stepped off a scaffolding into an open 9-story stairwell.