AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT
DAX DASILVA
VANCOUVER-BORN tech entrepreneur Dax Dasilva turns 43 this year – a stage of life, he believes, in which we possess our greatest influence and ability to make a positive impact on the world.
“You have a certain amount of understanding and knowledge and experiences. At some point, you feel a responsibility and a duty to give back,” he explains during an interview in downtown Toronto. “Whether it’s to make an impact for people who don’t have as much or to take whatever is special about what you’ve been given and focus that outwards, that responsibility is something that should nag at you.”
The founder and CEO of the international cloud-based retail payment company Lightspeed and the Montreal-based non-profit Never Apart, which aims to bridge social and cultural divides to affect positive social change, Dasilva used lessons learned from his business and philanthropic enterprises – along with passions for spirituality, environmentalism and community building – as the core of his first book, Age of Union: Igniting the Changemaker.
Age of Union is “a toolkit for the changemaker,” Dasilva notes, adding that he distilled what he learned during his own journeys in business and philanthropy into four primary pillars – leadership, culture, spirituality and nature. And the book, a manifesto of sorts, charts the ways they can be used together to positively affect the world around us.
To that end, the book also includes a list of 40 acts of union that, Dasilva writes, “are inspired by the concept of mitzvoth: daily actions elevated by a sense of spiritual intention, leading to ‘cosmic healing,’ as described by Arizal, a 16th century Jewish mystic.”
Those acts include exploring a plant-based diet, growing your own food, supporting animal rights, adopting conservationist and minimalist mentalities, nourishing your body and soul and various ideas for embracing your community. The latter act includes important roles for “elders” in a community, including as both a source of wisdom and as mentors for youth – a relationship he describes as “two-way learning. Both people are enriched by that situation.”
But ultimately, when I ask Dasilva what he hopes readers get out of the book, his answer is simple: “We each have the power to be a changemaker, and the book is about igniting a flame within.”