ENERGY JUSTICE & WHY ONE OF MY CORE BELIEFS IS THAT YOU JUST NEED TO BE EMBARRASSED SOMETIMES

More than a few months ago, my marketing team took me at my word when I said I wanted to include something about energy justice on our website. One day it just showed up on the homepage! I was pleased but also a little embarrassed. Our new statement felt flimsy without ANY other mention of energy justice on the website or the “about” section, so we resolved to flesh out my ideas in the coming insert period of time.

Then I postponed a couple of weeks. Then I had nothing to say for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Then I postponed it for a couple more months. Then I wrote this note to them in our shared to-do list (below). As you’ll read, we were sketching out the electrification coaching program (“GPG 2.0”). You’ll also read that I thought this would take “a few meetings” (LOL).

This note is about being true to yourself and, in retrospect, it’s about the best-laid plans o’ mice an’ men (they go awry). More than anything, it’s about one of my core beliefs: you just have to DO stuff. You can’t wait until it’s perfect. And that sometimes causes me to feel embarrassed. For me, that’s just a necessary part of the process of moving forward. Here’s the note:

First of all, thank you for putting energy justice on the homepage. You probably didn't know that would cause me to undertake some very big and important reflections.

Here's the deal: I've been struggling to explain my thoughts on this because I feel like the website (and company) is in a huge state of flux. To properly explain GPG's vision for energy justice feels like a big job. It's not enough to type out a definition of energy justice and call it good. It's not enough to say "Free LEDs is an example of energy justice." It's not enough to write a truly great blog post about energy justice where I reveal that I think conscious capitalism is a crock (hold my beer!).

It's more than those things; this feels like a task that requires re-envisioning and reorganizing the whole GPG brand to be more about education and lifestyle. Up until now, GPG has mostly been a vehicle for free bulbs. I've been kind of holding back anything that would betray a certain worldview because it seems risky to alienate any potential Free Lightbulb Program customers.

But I don't think I can accurately update the "about" section until we meet and sketch out the new and redesigned GPG 2.0. This will probably take a few meetings. And I'll need to do a lot of thinking and writing on it. Like, a few months.

I still have a lot more work to do. We need to build out those pages and each of those topic areas needs to be connected to energy justice and I'm excited to make that happen. I want to have a meeting with y'all before we take action on those.

So. Even though I'm not comfortable leaving the home page as-is forever without a more detailed explanation, I am comfortable putting this task out a little farther (which I've sheepishly been doing anyway haha)... because I am getting honest with myself about the scale of this task.

So I'm moving it out 1 month and it will change and permutate as we talk about GPG 2.0. I'll probably delay even more when we dig into it.

Thank you!

There you have it, folks. Hopefully, that might inspire you to just do the thing, imperfectly, and try to circle back around to it and always be true to yourself. As you can see, I have yet to actually DO the thing I’m writing about. I’ve got some really smart articles saved, and lots of ideas about energy justice bopping around in my head. I’ve had a few meetings with smart people locally. But now you know where my head’s at.