The Clubs That Carry the Ember

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
— Margaret Mead

There were thirty minutes until midnight, and I was struggling to light a fire. I went through the shredded newspaper. All the little twigs I had brought to start it were burned through. I sat looking at a pile of embers, coughing smoke, having spent fifteen minutes trying. All I had to show for it was frustration. I turned to ChatGPT in desperation.

Why am I struggling to bring this fire to life? It feels symbolic of Endless.

The answer came back quickly.

This fire is already alive, just not in the way you're expecting. What you have in Endless is heat without spectacle. Endless has never been about sparks or fireworks. It's been about coals that glow from within. They don't announce themselves. They endure.

It was comforting. But I replied:

I want to literally know how I can light this fire so that I can go back with my family.

Fires have always carried a spiritual weight for me. Years ago, at a meditation retreat, it rained hard enough that it put the fire out entirely. When the rain stopped, there was nothing left but a single ember, smaller than a large grain of salt. Somehow, irrationally, it lodged itself in my mind that if I could save that ember, I could save Endless. What was at stake was the idea that if I failed, the fire of Endless would die. The final ember would grow cold. Eventually, against all odds, the soggy wood caught just enough that a fire no larger than my palm took hold. From there, slowly, patiently, I built it up. By the time I finally looked at my watch, the fire was raging. 90 minutes. The people there cheered for me.

For as long as I can remember, I have carried the quiet belief that if I stopped tending this Endless fire, it would go out. That if I failed, everything would fail. That the responsibility was singular. Mine to bear. Heavy.

Sitting there, coughing smoke, it was clear what the fire actually needed. The structure was too tight. The fuel was too dense. It needed air. All true. But I was still sitting there alone, trying to fix it. Then my son walked over. He asked, "Daddy, can I help?"

"Yes," I said. "I need help."

We went hunting for tinder together and my son found a small handful of dry grass. We pushed it gently into the embers. I pulled some logs away. We blew on the coals together. Whoosh. The fire danced to life.

Endless doesn't need more logs. The structure is already there. Programs running every day, in different corners of the world. Tools designed so people can step in. The substance exists. What it needs is more twigs, more tinder, more small strands of hay. And more helpers. More people breathing life into the fire. I cannot bring the twigs and tinder myself. And maybe I never was meant to.

The fire caught just in time for us to throw our New Year’s wishes, written on crumpled paper, into the flames.

Let Others Lead

For years, the question was not how to spread the Endless fire. It was how to keep it alive.

We had to build the logs first: the programs, the curriculum, the tools, the studios, the partnerships, the financial security. We chased sustainability. Then, finally, we achieved it. On New Year’s, I entered the year knowing that the question had changed. This was the year we finally got to ask: How does the fire spread? But that night, beside the fire, I realized I had still been asking the question wrong. The question was not how I could spread the fire. The question was how to make it easy for someone else to pick up an ember.

When I was a freshman at Harvard, I started a campus club. I had been running the China Care Foundation for a few years and I found someone who wanted to volunteer in China. We decided that China Care would pay to send him to China for the summer and he would come back and start Harvard China Care. He started running playgroups for local adopted children, raising money for surgeries and sending volunteers to work in orphanages.

A year later, a friend from Brown told me that he wanted to start one. The next thing I know, I’m invited to a fundraising event with hundreds of people. Brown China Care found their own orphanage and started supporting them directly. It was another mini China Care.

More people on college campuses wanted to start clubs, so we threw a club conference and soon we had a dozen more clubs. By my last China Care conference, after we had merged it into another non-profit, there were eighty chapters. One of those founders was Stephanie Lo, who later took what she learned and built TED-Ed's clubs across thousands of schools. Years later, she came to help us build Endless. Today she is one of my best friends.

I remember speaking to a parent who said that his daughter had been on antidepressants. He told me that she stopped taking them when she got back from her summer in China. The impact on the club members was so profound that it evolved into our second formal mission: to empower American youth.

I entered this year with the persistent question of how we spread the Endless fire and, somewhere along the way, I realized that the clubs of my youth were our answer. Endless Clubs may be the single most important thing we do on college campuses.

I do not say that lightly. We have incredible partnerships with top universities. We are wrapping a degree around the entire learning experience at the University of Silicon Valley. Those are deep institutional partnerships and they matter. But the clubs are different. Clubs are how we reach students in Los Angeles and Lagos, in rural Jordan and rural Kentucky, and in a community college in Nevada that no recruiter visits. Institutions are powerful but slow. Clubs are small but viral. A club does not require a contract, a curriculum committee, or an accreditation cycle. It requires one student.

Here is how it works. A student downloads the kit. Inside is everything they need to start. A one-page charter. A first-meeting script. A 48-hour game jam playbook. Posters. A landing page on our site with their campus name on it. A Discord channel waiting for them. A faculty advisor guide if they want one.

Their first event is a game jam. Forty-eight hours, theme announced Friday, demos Sunday. Participants walk out having built something real with their own hands.

From there the club opens three doors.

The first door is to build. Students keep making games for the love of making games. Endstar. Threadbare. Godot. Unity. Unreal. We do not care which game or engine. We care that they are building.

The second door is to mentor. Students teach kids who would not otherwise have access. It might be a class across the railroad tracks. It might be a school halfway around the world, in a place that means something to them. The mission is simple. Teach more kids the skills that open pathways to employment.

The third door is to contribute. Real bounties on real games from real studios. A sophomore in a club at the University of Nairobi can ship a feature in a game that may be played by millions. She is a credited contributor on a shipped title before she graduates. Build a portfolio and have fun doing it.

Whatever door someone opens, they are building skills for their own career while they advance the mission. Turning consumers into creators. Preparing people for a world of AI.

Honestly, the clubs solve our most expensive problem, which is reach. We cannot fly to every campus. We cannot call every dean. But we can put a kit on the internet, and a sophomore in Austin can pick it up at midnight, and on Monday she can start a club.

We have designed the rest of our business so that we can be patient about this. The clubs are not a revenue line. They are the twigs and the tinder to our mission. Our job is to make the door so obviously worth walking through that students come and find us.

When people ask me who this book is for, I often give a vague answer. But the real answer: it’s for the students around the world who can help us make all of this come true.

So if you are reading this and you are in college, start a club. Build a mini Endless.

Host a game jam. Invite five friends. Teach some kids. Claim a bounty. That is how the fire spreads. Come kneel beside it with us, and breathe life into this dream.