SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

Look at the background of a dress that you paid a lot of money to buy. Question the company that manufactured it. Look into its relationships with its employees and suppliers. Look through its purchase contracts. You don’t have to read its policies about environmental awareness. Just ask non-governmental organisations how much these policies are put into practice.
How big is your carbon footprint or your water footprint? Do you calculate your plastic footprint? This footprint calculation provides the data that makes the distance between the people who leave a mark and the people who leave a scar shorter or longer. Nobody evaluates whether you can leave a mark by looking at the amount of your money, how much your profit was last year or how much you made your investors earn per share.
I gave a talk entitled “You either leave a Mark or a Scar” at the 5th Coaching Summit organised in Istanbul in the past weeks. Here are my notes on the talk I gave at the summit, which was organised by the International Coaching Federation and which had highly-qualified attendees.

I’ve been thinking of my mum and dad since the first day I started reflecting on the matter of leaving a mark. My dad’s name was Seyfettin Kadibesegil. He passed away when I was three years old. I guess it’s fair to say that I don’t even have any childhood memories of him. He was one of the 26 engineers who were sent to Germany by Ataturk to get an education in agriculture after the establishment of the Turkish Republic. He was a republican engineer who achieved the goal of being a self-sufficient country through his studies in plantations and fruit growing in 1930s. There were a great number of works on organic farming translated by him among his studies in the Ministry of Agriculture.

My mum’s name was Fahrunnisa Kadibesegil. She was a republican woman who used to ride a bike, play tennis, paint and do translation from English into Turkish in 1930s. Olusum, a literary review that she started publishing in 1970s, was a platform where more than 2000 authors, illustrators, poets and art lovers met in the literary world of our country. She opened art exhibitions all around Anatolia and put the plays that she translated on stage in the state theaters. The Boy Friend, a musical translated by her in 1969, is being staged in the state theaters this year. It is also one of the first musicals performed in Turkey. (www.olusumdostlari.com)
You don’t have to try to do big things and it is meaningless to spend a lot of money to leave a mark.

Ryan Hreljac

Look at the story of Ryan Hreljac. He found out that there was no drinking water in the villages and women had to walk about 10 km carrying pots on their heads in order to get water when he went to Africa with his family at age six. That was the beginning of a journey which would leave a “mark”. Ryan witnessed that a well built with the contribution of his father radically changed the life of people in there. Therefore, he talked about it in his school. He organised campaign after campaign with other students and their families. Thus, wells were built in the remotest villages of Africa. This initiative is shown as one of the examples of the fight against problems of epidemics and famine. A foundation was built to work on that matter since Ryan’s idea was supported. Today, 750.000 families can get water in the villages where wells were built with the help of Ryan’s foundation.

Steve Jobs and Elon musk

Look at Steve Jobs. He listened to his conscience. He was even fired from the company that he founded. But in the end, he became a pioneer who changed “the world, our habits, our lifestyles” and many other things.
Look at Elon Musk, who is the current version of Steve Jobs. He is running after life in Mars after building electric cars. His belief in life in Mars was brought up once more due to his success in reusable rockets.
However, I say that “village institutes” have a special place in my heart whenever the issue of leaving a mark comes up.

Village Institutes

I think that the village institutes were one of the major social innovation projects of the twentieth century. The vision and practices of Hasan Ali Yucel and Ismail Hakki Tonguc were the symbol of the human quality in the Turkish Republic. They were the first real examples of how we could go from country to town, from town to country, from agriculture to industry and from industry to a global vision through a foundation based on village institutes. And of course, they deserve one of the front seats among the institutions leaving a mark.

Victor Ananias

Victor Ananias was given as one of the examples of people who left a mark in my talk. I am proud of having known him and having made a journey to world citizenship with him. Victor, the founder of Bugday (Wheat) Association passed away at a very young age a few years ago. However, the foundation that he laid introduced ecological farms and markets to our country. Victor was the pioneer of raising awareness of the ecological movement.

Characteristics of those…

There are, of course, many more people who can be given as an example. I did not give any examples of politicians in my talk. I see politics, by its very nature, as a field mostly full of examples of people leaving a “scar”. However, we can remember Ataturk, Nelson Mandela, Olaf Palme, Wily Brandt etc. as leaders who could leave a “mark” outside this scarred field.
We see some common characteristics in the people who leave a mark. I also mentioned these characteristics in my talk.
 They focus on happiness rather than conflict.
 They feed off real cultures rather than copies.
 They share information, knowledge and experience unconditionally.
 They take their time, they do not rush.
 They live with results rather than goals.
 They care about local issues, but think globally.
 They turn minutes into the art of living.
 They put humans on one side and nature on the other side of the scale of justice.
 Their richness is hidden in respect.
Finally, I shared a picture drawn by Orhan Ay with my audience. Orhan drew that picture at primary school in Samsun in 2009 and he came first in the national drawing competition. That picture showed what kind of a world we were about to hand over to the kids. We don’t need to look anywhere else for the people who leave a mark and the ones who leave a scar. We should just look at ourselves!