In May 2025, our Co-Founder and Chair, Kim Polman, took to the TEDx stage in Florence to share the question that guides her life and her work: is what I'm doing hurtful or helpful?

It is a simple question. Lived honestly, it changes everything.

For Kim, the answer begins with a modern version of an ancient and universal idea: the Golden Rule. Treat others and the planet as you would wish to be treated. It appears across faiths, cultures and centuries, from the Yoruba people of Nigeria to Confucius, Socrates and the UN Charter, and it sits at the heart of everything we do at Reboot the Future.

Her challenge is to make it personal, and to go first. As she puts it: "I must be the first to be kind and generous. I must be the first to be patient and to forgive. I must be the first to listen and be curious."

To show what this looks like in practice, Kim told the story of Daryl Davis whom she met recently, a black musician who, rather than meet hatred with hatred, chose curiosity. Through patient conversation and a refusal to take offence, he helped hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members leave the movement behind, one friendship at a time. It is a reminder that being helpful often takes real courage, and that change begins when someone is willing to be the first to reach out.

Kim does not shy away from naming the world we have built, an extractive system that the author John Perkins calls the Death Economy, where a few win big and many are left behind. But she does not dwell there. Her focus is on what we can become. People everywhere, she reminds us, share the same values: curiosity, fairness, forgiveness, generosity and honesty. The Golden Rule is the thread that ties them together, and the foundation of what she calls a Life Economy, one where all life can thrive.

This idea sits at the very heart of Kim's work. Drawing on the image that gives her book its name, she describes the imaginal cells within a caterpillar that hold the vision of the butterfly. As the old form breaks down, those cells find one another, cluster, and bring a new being to life. The Golden Rule, Kim suggests, is our common frequency. As more of us choose to live by it, we find each other too, and together we can transform the old ways into something better.

It is a question that Kim meets head on. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Thomas Friedman, who supported the launch of Kim's book Imaginal Cells: Visions of Transformation, offered the answer she returns to: it is far more naive to imagine we will survive without the Golden Rule. It is a question we keep returning to at Reboot the Future, and one we now explore every week through our podcast, Let's Reboot the Future, where guests share their own stories of moral courage and what it means to keep believing in a kinder world.

Kim's message points us towards the simple, practical acts within all our reach. Each time we choose empathy over anger, each time we choose compassion over indifference and hatred, each time we remember that what we do affects others around the globe, we have answered the question for ourselves: am I being helpful or hurtful?