Last week my wife and I heard Greg Mortensen speak before a packed theater in Washington DC.  Mortensen is the co-author of the best selling book Three Cups of Tea and author of a recently released new book called Stones for Schools.  Mortensen grew up in Africa as the son of missionaries and after a brief time living in Montana found himself in Pakistan.  Today because of his efforts hundreds of schools have been built primarily for young girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries historically opposed to secular education, particularly for girls.  Mortensen’s recipe for success is simple: just do it.  He told us that he is frequently asked to describe his strategic plan and he replies that he has no strategic plan. If you have a passion and feel strongly about an issue, he says, you need to do something about it.  (By the way, his “no plan” line drew an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience.) Waiting for some one else to tackle an issue isn’t going to make it happen.  As he put it: you can’t fight poverty from a think tank in Washington.

When Mortensen started out, he had no idea how to fundraise. He started by writing to over 500 celebrities and ended up raising a grand total of $100 – from NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, who lived nearby in Montana.  He shared a wise saying that’s worth remembering next time you’re feeling low: “when it is dark, you can see the stars.” But some young kids were touched by a talk he gave in a school and helped to raise 62,000 pennies – enough for him to build his first school.  Today he supports a program called Pennies for Peace, where young people throughout the world get involved and raise money for his project and for other new nonprofits.

He also learned – after some false starts – to let go of the control of the projects and give more responsibility to the locals.  As a result they became invested in the success of the schools and destruction of the schools by militants has been remarkably low.

 My point?  A successful nonprofit program usually starts with passion, and to be more pointed a passionate, driven leader.  And passion usually trumps analytics and expert opinions.  Could Mortensen be more successful, more efficient, more effective?  Could we learn lessons about how to replicate his good work and scale it up? Probably.  Even the American military is asking him for advice on how to deal with the locals in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  When the analytic doctors come to town, however, and argue that only they can collect the data and make a proclamation about an organization’s effectiveness, I hope they’ll take a moment to think about the power of passion and the success of Greg Mortensen.

Here in Washington, daytime temperatures are barely in the 70s, and the nights are dipping into the 50s. Without even looking at the calendar, I can sense we’ve moved into September. School buses are back on the road in morning rush hour. The hordes of tourists posing for pictures in front of the White House, down the street from our offices, are beginning to dwindle. My backyard is sprinkled with fallen leaves.

"Changing of the seasons." I’ve always liked that term. It suggests a certain predictability, the dependable rhythms of life. The heat and humidity of summer ultimately give way to the coolness and color of the fall. It happens every year. And yet there is change too. Things don’t stay the same. That’s what makes life so interesting.

Here are my resolutions for this weekend: Enjoy friends and family. Take special notice of my surroundings—the color in trees, the nighttime skies with a full moon, the graceful shape of a front porch. Bicycle every day.

And when I come back next Tuesday? I’ll think about that later.