Three Lessons for Keeping the Fight
Start something, work with others, stay ambitious — even when losing.
When faced with crises that feel too large to solve, most people shut down. This framework, drawn from firsthand experience fighting for Afghan women's rights, offers three sequential and reinforcing lessons: begin with a small, concrete action; expand your impact by building unexpected alliances; and resist the temptation to shrink your ambitions just because the odds are long.
The framework is rooted in the insight that momentum itself is a resource. Starting with something — even something imperfect and partial — generates the relationships, credibility, and energy needed to grow the effort. The speaker's work with underground schools, documentary films, and international football campaigns illustrates how each lesson builds on the last.
Central to the framework is a counterintuitive claim: bold goals are not a luxury for winning causes but a necessity for losing ones. 'The bigger the fight, the bolder you have to be.' The framework does not promise victory on a timeline; it offers a sustainable posture for continuing to fight across years or decades.
- Action, however imperfect, is the precondition for all further progress — waiting for ideal conditions is a form of paralysis.
- Unexpected allies and unconventional venues often carry more leverage than traditional institutional channels.
- Bold, long-horizon goals are not naive when losing — they are strategically necessary to maintain the scale of response a large fight demands.
- The people living through the crisis are themselves the most powerful evidence for why the fight matters; connecting others to their stories is a form of organizing.
- Sustaining a fight across years or generations requires accepting that you may not see the final outcome.
- Start With SomethingIdentify a concrete, immediate action you can take right now, even if it addresses only a fraction of the problem. The speaker began by supporting underground schools because Afghan girls were already risking their lives to keep learning. The action does not need to be comprehensive — it needs to exist.Pro tipLook for where the people most affected are already acting. Amplifying existing resistance is often faster and more legitimate than building something new from scratch.WarningDo not wait until you have a complete plan or sufficient resources. Inaction while planning can be mistaken for strategy.
- Work With Others in Unexpected PlacesDeliberately seek out collaborators and venues outside the obvious institutional channels — the speaker found them in movie theaters and football fields. Artists, athletes, and cultural figures can reach audiences and build emotional connection that policy advocates cannot. Unexpected coalitions multiply reach and legitimacy.Pro tipAsk who has a large, engaged audience that cares about human dignity, and find the story that connects their world to yours.WarningAvoid limiting your coalition to people who already agree with you. The power of unexpected allies comes precisely from their distance from the cause.
- Stay AmbitiousResist the pressure to shrink your goals when facing setbacks or a long timeline. The speaker is pursuing justice against the Taliban even knowing it may take many years. Ambitious goals signal to allies, opponents, and the people you are fighting for that the cause will not be quietly abandoned.Pro tipFrame long-term ambitious goals publicly and explicitly — they function as a commitment device that makes retreat more costly.WarningAmbition without the first two steps (starting and building alliances) becomes empty rhetoric. Sequence matters.
After the Taliban banned girls from education, Afghan girls continued learning in secret — listening to lessons on the radio, passing cassette tapes and books, studying covertly. The speaker began by financially and logistically supporting these underground schools.
The speaker produced two documentary films telling the stories of Afghan men and women resisting Taliban oppression, bringing these stories to audiences in movie theaters worldwide.
The speaker joined a campaign alongside the Afghan women's national football team to pressure FIFA to allow Afghan women players to compete in international competitions while in exile.
The speaker arrived at these lessons through direct, ongoing involvement in supporting Afghan women and girls after the Taliban's return to power. Witnessing the systematic erasure of Afghan women's rights — education, sport, public life — while also observing the extraordinary resistance of Afghan girls continuing to learn in secret, the speaker was forced to confront the question of how to act meaningfully under conditions of apparent hopelessness.
The three lessons were not theorized in advance but discovered iteratively: first by funding underground schools, then by producing films to build global connection, then by joining the Afghan women's football campaign to push FIFA on international competition in exile. Each step revealed the next, producing a framework grounded in lived experience rather than abstract strategy.