#425: SPOTLIGHT: Charlie Kronick

#425: Charlie Kronick

April 29, 2025

A Backbeat of Community

Question for Charlie: 

What is one thing that is small and perhaps nuanced or surprising and perhaps typically sub conscious that you can tell drives you each day ?

Charlie's Response: 

Like most "simple" tasks, this one turned out to be more difficult than it at first appears...  "What is one thing that is small and perhaps nuanced or surprising and perhaps typically sub conscious that you can tell drives you each day?"   

So the first thing might be "habit", but hopefully in the manner of a well developed "muscle" that brings a yogi to the mat every day, or a swimmer to the pool, or a runner to the road.   But inevitably it's more than the comfort of repetition (well, it's comfort for me at least).  So I thought a little harder and conjured a legendary colleague - Harald Zindler, who worked at our office in Hamburg - with whom I overlapped  for many of the years that we both worked there, but whom I never met.  

Harald was what we call an "action coordinator" - he came up with what many would consider the crazy stunts for which Greenpeace is sometimes known, if not always loved, involving  ships, inflatable boats, micro light aircraft, hot air balloons, remote controlled billboards and countless other gizmos.  I often loved and always admired what Harald came up with but the thing that I really admired was what I guess people would call his "credo". It was pretty simple but to the point:  "The optimism of the action is better than the pessimism of the thought." Which ironically - or not, you decide - leads me to another, simpler and even deeper formulation -  which has gotten me back to work every day that I have faltered:  if not now, when?