Thank You/Brandon Harris

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When you work for the Wikimedia Foundation, you will wake up every morning knowing that you are making the world a better place.
It's that simple.

Most jobs I've had? I wake up and think, "Ugh, I've got to go to work." This job? I wake up and think, "Awesome! I get to go to work!"

There is no way to describe that feeling that will do it justice. Some days, the understanding of our mission settles in my brain and I find myself possessed of a clarity and peace that is more powerful than any drug.

Education is the silver bullet to all of the world's problems. Humanity has seen maybe three or four Einstein-level brains in the past century and all of them were from first-world countries. How many geniuses have we missed because they had the misfortune to be born poor and without access to education?

The cure for cancer may very well be locked inside the brain of an impoverished child in Bangladesh or a village on the Amazon. We can educate her &mdash; show her a bigger world. If we show her the way she will make her mind known to us.

With access to free knowledge we can cure diseases. We can develop better space programs. Free knowledge infects the brain and roots out intolerance. It ends oppression: the only way to oppress a people is to keep them ignorant.

I am not embellishing anything. This is real.

If you think you can do these things, if you think that this is what you want out of life &mdash; to make a real difference instead of making some investors richer &mdash; then you should think of working with Wikimedia.

&mdash; Brandon Harris ''Brandon Harris is originally from West Virginia and moved to San Francisco in 1994. He enjoys heavy metal music, playing guitar, cigars, and good scotch. He is currently Senior Designer at the Wikimedia Foundation.''

Image Attribution: by Victor Grigas, under [//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported], from Wikimedia Commons.