ENTREP FINALS: TED TALKS

1. Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action

How do you explain when things don't go as we assume? Or better, how do you explain when others
are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions? For example: Why is Apple so
innovative? Year after year, after year, they're more innovative than all their competition. And yet,
they're just a computer company. They're just like everyone else. They have the same access to the
same talent,the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media. Then why is it that they
seem to have something different? Why is it that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights
Movement? He wasn't the only man who suffered in pre-civil rights America, and he certainly wasn't
the only great orator of the day. Why him? And why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure
out controlled, powered man flight when there were certainly other teams who were better qualified,
better funded and they didn't achieve powered man flight, and the Wright brothers beat them to
it. There's something else at play here.

1:17About three and a half years ago, I made a discovery. And this discovery profoundly changed
my view on how I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I
operate in it. As it turns out, there's a pattern. As it turns out, all the great inspiring leaders and
organizations in the world,whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all
think, act and communicate the exact same way. And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. All
I did was codify it, and it's probably the world's simplest idea. I call it the golden circle.

2:07Why? How? What? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able
to inspire where others aren't. Let me define the terms really quickly. Every single person, every
single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do
it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your
USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by "why" I don't
mean "to make a profit." That's a result. It's always a result. By "why," I mean: What's your
purpose? What's your cause? What's your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you
get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care? As a result, the way we think, we
act, the way we communicate is from the outside in, it's obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the
fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations regardless of their size,
regardless of their industry all think, act and communicate from the inside out.

3:13Let me give you an example. I use Apple because they're easy to understand and everybody
gets it. If Apple were like everyone else, a marketing message from them might sound like this: "We
make great computers. They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy
one?" "Meh."That's how most of us communicate. That's how most marketing and sales are
done, that's how we communicate interpersonally. We say what we do, we say how we're different or
better and we expect some sort of a behavior, a purchase, a vote, something like that. Here's our
new law firm: We have the best lawyers with the biggest clients, we always perform for our
clients. Here's our new car: It gets great gas mileage, it has leather seats. Buy our car. But it's
uninspiring.

4:00Here's how Apple actually communicates. "Everything we do, we believe in challenging the
status quo.We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our
products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great
computers. Want to buy one?" Totally different, right? You're ready to buy a computer from me. I just
reversed the order of the information. What it proves to us is that people don't buy what you
do; people buy why you do it.

4:35This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer
from Apple. But we're also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple, or a phone from
Apple, or a DVR from Apple. As I said before, Apple's just a computer company. Nothing
distinguishes them structurally from any of their competitors. Their competitors are equally qualified
to make all of these products. In fact, they tried. A few years ago, Gateway came out with flat-screen
TVs. They're eminently qualified to make flat-screen TVs. They've been making flat-screen monitors
for years. Nobody bought one. Dell came out with MP3 players and PDAs, and they make great
quality products, and they can make perfectly well-designed products and nobody bought one. In
fact, talking about it now, we can't even imagine buying an MP3 player from Dell. Why would you buy
one from a computer company? But we do it every day. People don't buy what you do; they buy why
you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do
business with people who believe what you believe.

5:47Here's the best part: None of what I'm telling you is my opinion. It's all grounded in the tenets of
biology.Not psychology, biology. If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, from the top down,
the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the
golden circle. Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the "what"
level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. The
middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our
feelings, like trust and loyalty. It's also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it
has no capacity for language.

6:35In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast
amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn't
drive behavior.When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the
brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say
and do. This is where gut decisions come from. Sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and
figures, and they say, "I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn't feel right." Why
would we use that verb, it doesn't "feel" right? Because the part of the brain that controls decision-
making doesn't control language. The best we can muster up is, "I don't know. It just doesn't feel
right." Or sometimes you say you're leading with your heart or soul. I hate to break it to you, those
aren't other body parts controlling your behavior. It's all happening here in your limbic brain, the part
of the brain that controls decision-making and not language.

7:29But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you
do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more
importantly, be loyaland want to be a part of what it is that you do. The goal is not just to sell to
people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal
is not just to hire people who need a job; it's to hire people who believe what you believe. I always
say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they'll work for your money, but
if they believe what you believe,they'll work for you with blood and sweat and tears. Nowhere else is
there a better example than with the Wright brothers.

8:14Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. And back in the early 20th century, the
pursuit of powered man flight was like the dot com of the day. Everybody was trying it. And Samuel
Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success. Even now, you ask
people, "Why did your product or why did your company fail?" and people always give you the same
permutation of the same three things: under-capitalized, the wrong people, bad market
conditions. It's always the same three things, so let's explore that. Samuel Pierpont Langley was
given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. Money was no
problem. He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-
connected; he knew all the big minds of the day. He hired the best minds money could find and the
market conditions were fantastic. The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and
everyone was rooting for Langley. Then how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley?

9:15A few hundred miles away in Dayton Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, they had none of what we
consider to be the recipe for success. They had no money; they paid for their dream with the
proceeds from their bicycle shop; not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college
education, not even Orville or Wilbur; and The New York Times followed them around nowhere.

9:38The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. They
believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world. Samuel
Pierpont Langley was different. He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. He was in pursuit
of the result.He was in pursuit of the riches. And lo and behold, look what happened. The people
who believed in the Wright brothers' dream worked with them with blood and sweat and tears. The
others just worked for the paycheck. They tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went
out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's how many times they would crash
before supper.
10:19And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there
to even experience it. We found out about it a few days later. And further proof that Langley was
motivated by the wrong thing: The day the Wright brothers took flight, he quit. He could have
said, "That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology," but he didn't. He
wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he quit.

10:50People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you talk about what you believe, you
will attract those who believe what you believe.

10:58But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? Something called the law
of diffusion of innovation, if you don't know the law, you know the terminology. The first 2.5% of our
population are our innovators. The next 13.5% of our population are our early adopters. The next
34% are your early majority, your late majority and your laggards. The only reason these people buy
touch-tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore.

11:28(Laughter)

11:30We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of
innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an
idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market
penetration, and then the system tips. I love asking businesses, "What's your conversion on new
business?" They love to tell you, "It's about 10 percent," proudly. Well, you can trip over 10% of the
customers. We all have about 10% who just "get it." That's how we describe them, right? That's like
that gut feeling, "Oh, they just get it."

12:05The problem is: How do you find the ones that get it before doing business versus the ones
who don't get it? So it's this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it,
"Crossing the Chasm" because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone
else has tried it first.And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable
making those gut decisions.They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are
driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available. These are the
people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out, when you could
have bought one off the shelf the next week. These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat-
screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. And, by the way,
they didn't do it because the technology was so great;they did it for themselves. It's because they
wanted to be first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply
proves what you believe. In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe. The reason
that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours, stood in line for six hours, was because of what
they believed about the world, and how they wanted everybody to see them: They were first. People
don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it.
13:27So let me give you a famous example, a famous failure and a famous success of the law of
diffusion of innovation. First, the famous failure. It's a commercial example. As we said before, the
recipe for successis money and the right people and the right market conditions. You should have
success then. Look at TiVo. From the time TiVo came out about eight or nine years ago to this
current day, they are the single highest-quality product on the market, hands down, there is no
dispute. They were extremely well-funded. Market conditions were fantastic. I mean, we use TiVo as
verb. I TiVo stuff on my piece-of-junk Time Warner DVR all the time.

14:05(Laughter)

14:07But TiVo's a commercial failure. They've never made money. And when they went IPO, their
stock was at about 30 or 40 dollars and then plummeted, and it's never traded above 10. In fact, I
don't think it's even traded above six, except for a couple of little spikes.

14:23Because you see, when TiVo launched their product, they told us all what they had. They said,
"We have a product that pauses live TV, skips commercials, rewinds live TV and memorizes your
viewing habitswithout you even asking." And the cynical majority said, "We don't believe you. We
don't need it. We don't like it. You're scaring us."

14:47What if they had said, "If you're the kind of person who likes to have total control over every
aspect of your life, boy, do we have a product for you. It pauses live TV, skips
commercials, memorizes your viewing habits, etc., etc." People don't buy what you do; they buy why
you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe.

15:11Now let me give you a successful example of the law of diffusion of innovation. In the summer
of 1963,250,000 people showed up on the mall in Washington to hear Dr. King speak. They sent out
no invitations, and there was no website to check the date. How do you do that? Well, Dr. King
wasn't the only man in America who was a great orator. He wasn't the only man in America who
suffered in a pre-civil rights America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But he had a gift. He didn't
go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what
he believed. "I believe, I believe, I believe," he told people. And people who believed what he
believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And some of those people
created structures to get the word out to even more people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people
showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak.

16:16How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. It's what they
believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in
Washington in the middle of August. It's what they believed, and it wasn't about black versus
white: 25% of the audience was white.
16:38Dr. King believed that there are two types of laws in this world: those that are made by a higher
authority and those that are made by men. And not until all the laws that are made by men are
consistent with the laws made by the higher authority will we live in a just world. It just so happened
that the Civil Rights Movement was the perfect thing to help him bring his cause to life. We followed,
not for him, but for ourselves. By the way, he gave the "I have a dream" speech, not the "I have a
plan" speech.

17:07(Laughter)

17:11Listen to politicians now, with their comprehensive 12-point plans. They're not inspiring
anybody.Because there are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power
or authority,but those who lead inspire us. Whether they're individuals or organizations, we follow
those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead, not for
them, but for ourselves.And it's those who start with "why" that have the ability to inspire those
around them or find others who inspire them.

17:52Thank you very much.

17:53(Applause)
2. Sarah Lewis: Embrace the Near Win

3. 0:12I feel so fortunate that my first job was working at the Museum of Modern Art on a
retrospective of painter Elizabeth Murray. I learned so much from her. After the curator
Robert Storr selected all the paintings from her lifetime body of work, I loved looking at the
paintings from the 1970s. There were some motifs and elements that would come up again
later in her life. I remember asking her what she thought of those early works. If you didn't
know they were hers, you might not have been able to guess.She told me that a few didn't
quite meet her own mark for what she wanted them to be. One of the works, in fact, so didn't
meet her mark, she had set it out in the trash in her studio, and her neighbor had taken
it because she saw its value.

4. 1:03In that moment, my view of success and creativity changed. I realized that success is a
moment, but what we're always celebrating is creativity and mastery. But this is the thing:
What gets us to convert success into mastery? This is a question I've long asked myself. I
think it comes when we start to valuethe gift of a near win.

5. 1:32I started to understand this when I went on one cold May day to watch a set of varsity
archers, all women as fate would have it, at the northern tip of Manhattan at Columbia's
Baker Athletics Complex. I wanted to see what's called archer's paradox, the idea that in
order to actually hit your target, you have to aim at something slightly skew from it. I stood
and watched as the coach drove up these women in this gray van, and they exited with this
kind of relaxed focus. One held a half-eaten ice cream cone in one handand arrows in the left
with yellow fletching. And they passed me and smiled, but they sized me up as theymade
their way to the turf, and spoke to each other not with words but with numbers, degrees, I
thought,positions for how they might plan to hit their target. I stood behind one archer as her
coach stood in between us to maybe assess who might need support, and watched her, and
I didn't understand how even one was going to hit the ten ring. The ten ring from the standard
75-yard distance, it looks as small as a matchstick tip held out at arm's length. And this is
while holding 50 pounds of draw weight on each shot. She first hit a seven, I remember, and
then a nine, and then two tens, and then the next arrow didn't even hit the target. And I saw
that gave her more tenacity, and she went after it again and again. For three hours this went
on. At the end of the practice, one of the archers was so taxed that she lied out on the
ground just star-fished, her head looking up at the sky, trying to find what T.S. Eliot might
call that still point of the turning world.

6. 3:21It's so rare in American culture, there's so little that's vocational about it anymore, to look
at what doggedness looks like with this level of exactitude, what it means to align your body
posture for three hours in order to hit a target, pursuing a kind of excellence in obscurity. But I
 stayed because I realized I was witnessing what's so rare to glimpse, that difference between
success and mastery.

7. 3:49So success is hitting that ten ring, but mastery is knowing that it means nothing if you
can't do it again and again. Mastery is not just the same as excellence, though. It's not the
same as success, which I see as an event, a moment in time, and a label that the world
confers upon you. Mastery is not a commitment to a goal but to a constant pursuit. What gets
us to do this, what get us to forward thrust more is to value the near win. How many times
have we designated something a classic, a masterpiece even, while its creator considers it
hopelessly unfinished, riddled with difficulties and flaws, in other words, a near win?Elizabeth
Murray surprised me with her admission about her earlier paintings. Painter Paul Czanne so
often thought his works were incomplete that he would deliberately leave them aside with the
intention of picking them back up again, but at the end of his life, the result was that he had
only signed 10 percent of his paintings. His favorite novel was "The [Unknown] Masterpiece"
by Honor de Balzac, and he felt the protagonist was the painter himself. Franz Kafka saw
incompletion when others would find only works to praise, so much so that he wanted all of
his diaries, manuscripts, letters and even sketchesburned upon his death. His friend refused
to honor the request, and because of that, we now have all the works we now do by
Kafka: "America," "The Trial" and "The Castle," a work so incomplete it even stops mid-
sentence.

8. 5:33The pursuit of mastery, in other words, is an ever-onward almost. "Lord, grant that I
desire more than I can accomplish," Michelangelo implored, as if to that Old Testament God
on the Sistine Chapel, and he himself was that Adam with his finger outstretched and not
quite touching that God's hand.

9. 5:58Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving. It's in constantly wanting to close that
gap between where you are and where you want to be. Mastery is about sacrificing for your
craft and not for the sake of crafting your career. How many inventors and untold
entrepreneurs live out this phenomenon? We see it even in the life of the indomitable Arctic
explorer Ben Saunders, who tells me that his triumphs are not merely the result of a grand
achievement, but of the propulsion of a lineage of near wins.

10. 6:38We thrive when we stay at our own leading edge. It's a wisdom understood by Duke
Ellington, who said that his favorite song out of his repertoire was always the next
one, always the one he had yet to compose. Part of the reason that the near win is inbuilt to
mastery is because the greater our proficiency,the more clearly we might see that we don't
know all that we thought we did. It's called the DunningKruger effect. The Paris Review got
it out of James Baldwin when they asked him, "What do you think increases with
knowledge?" and he said, "You learn how little you know."
11. 7:19Success motivates us, but a near win can propel us in an ongoing quest. One of the
most vivid examples of this comes when we look at the difference between Olympic silver
medalists and bronze medalists after a competition. Thomas Gilovich and his team from
Cornell studied this difference and found that the frustration silver medalists feel compared to
bronze, who are typically a bit more happy to have just not received fourth place and not
medaled at all, gives silver medalists a focus on follow-up competition. We see it even in the
gambling industry that once picked up on this phenomenon of the near win and created
these scratch-off tickets that had a higher than average rate of near wins and so compelled
people to buy more tickets that they were called heart-stoppers, and were set on a gambling
industry set of abuses in Britain in the 1970s. The reason the near win has a propulsion is
because it changes our view of the landscape and puts our goals, which we tend to put at a
distance, into more proximate vicinity to where we stand. If I ask you to envision what a great
day looks like next week, you might describe it in more general terms. But if I ask you to
describe a great day at TED tomorrow, you might describe it with granular, practical
clarity. And this is what a near win does. It gets us to focus on what, right now, we plan to do
to address that mountain in our sights. It's Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who in 1984 missed taking
the gold in the heptathlon by one third of a second, and her husband predicted that would
give her the tenacity she needed in follow-up competition. In 1988, she won the gold in the
heptathlon and set a record of 7,291 points, a score that no athlete has come very close to
since.

12. 9:14We thrive not when we've done it all, but when we still have more to do. I stand here
thinking and wondering about all the different ways that we might even manufacture a near
win in this room, how your lives might play this out, because I think on some gut level we do
know this. We know that we thrive when we stay at our own leading edge, and it's why the
deliberate incomplete is inbuilt into creation myths. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and
women would deliberately put an imperfection in textiles and ceramics. It's what's called a
spirit line, a deliberate flaw in the pattern to give the weaver or maker a way out, but also a
reason to continue making work. Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its
conceptual end. They're masters because they realize that there isn't one.

13. 10:11Now it occurred to me, as I thought about this, why the archery coach told me at the
end of that practice,out of earshot of his archers, that he and his colleagues never feel they
can do enough for their team,never feel there are enough visualization techniques and
posture drills to help them overcome those constant near wins. It didn't sound like a
complaint, exactly, but just a way to let me know, a kind of tender admission, to remind me
that he knew he was giving himself over to a voracious, unfinished paththat always required
more.
 14. 10:48We build out of the unfinished idea, even if that idea is our former self. This is the
dynamic of mastery.Coming close to what you thought you wanted can help you attain more
than you ever dreamed you could. It's what I have to imagine Elizabeth Murray was thinking
when I saw her smiling at those early paintings one day in the galleries. Even if we created
utopias, I believe we would still have the incomplete. Completion is a goal, but we hope it is
never the end.

15. 11:28Thank you.

16. 11:31(Applause)

3. Seth Godin: How to Get Your Ideas Spread

0:11I'm going to give you four specific examples, I'm going to cover at the end about how a company
called Silk tripled their sales; how an artist named Jeff Koons went from being a nobody to making a
whole bunch of money and having a lot of impact; to how Frank Gehry redefined what it meant to be
an architect. And one of my biggest failures as a marketer in the last few years a record label I
started that had a CD called "Sauce."

0:36Before I can do that I've got to tell you about sliced bread, and a guy named Otto
Rohwedder. Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said? Like the
greatest invention since the telegraph or something. But this guy named Otto Rohwedder invented
sliced bread, and he focused, like most inventors did, on the patent part and the making part. And
the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was
available no one bought it; no one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure. And the reason
is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one
wanted it. That the success of sliced bread,like the success of almost everything we've talked about
at this conference, is not always about what the patent is like, or what the factory is like it's about
can you get your idea to spread, or not. And I think that the way you're going to get what you want, or
cause the change that you want to change, to happen,is to figure out a way to get your ideas to
spread.

1:43And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual, or
you're in business, or you're flying hot air balloons. I think that all this stuff applies to everybody
regardless of what we do. That what we are living in is a century of idea diffusion. That people who
can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. When I talk about it I usually pick
business, because they make the best pictures that you can put in your presentation, and because
it's the easiest sort of way to keep score. But I want you to forgive me when I use these
examples because I'm talking about anything that you decide to spend your time to do.

2:22At the heart of spreading ideas is TV and stuff like TV. TV and mass media made it really easy
to spread ideas in a certain way. I call it the "TV-industrial complex." The way the TV-industrial
complex works, is you buy some ads, interrupt some people, that gets you distribution. You use the
distribution you get to sell more products. You take the profit from that to buy more ads. And it goes
around and around and around, the same way that the military-industrial complex worked a long time
ago. That model of, and we heard it yesterday if we could only get onto the homepage of
Google, if we could only figure out how to get promoted there, or grab that person by the throat, and
tell them about what we want to do. If we did that then everyone would pay attention, and we would
win. Well, this TV-industrial complex informed my entire childhood and probably yours. I mean, all of
these products succeeded because someone figured out how to touch people in a way they weren't
expecting, in a way they didn't necessarily want, with an ad, over and over again until they bought it.

3:28And the thing that's happened is, they canceled the TV-industrial complex. That just over the last
few years, what anybody who markets anything has discovered is that it's not working the way that it
used to.This picture is really fuzzy, I apologize; I had a bad cold when I took it.

3:44(Laughter)

3:46But the product in the blue box in the center is my poster child. I go to the deli; I'm sick; I need to
buy some medicine. The brand manager for that blue product spent 100 million dollars trying to
interrupt me in one year. 100 million dollars interrupting me with TV commercials and magazine ads
and Spam and coupons and shelving allowances and spiff all so I could ignore every single
message. And I ignored every message because I don't have a pain reliever problem. I buy the stuff
in the yellow box because I always have. And I'm not going to invest a minute of my time to solve her
problem, because I don't care.

4:22Here's a magazine called "Hydrate." It's 180 pages about water.

4:27(Laughter)

4:28Articles about water, ads about water. Imagine what the world was like 40 years ago, with just
the Saturday Evening Post and Time and Newsweek. Now there are magazines about water. New
product from Coke Japan: water salad.

4:42(Laughter)

4:43Coke Japan comes out with a new product every three weeks, because they have no idea
what's going to work and what's not. I couldn't have written this better myself. It came out four days
ago I circled the important parts so you can see them here. They've come out... Arby's is going to
spend 85 million dollars promoting an oven mitt with the voice of Tom Arnold, hoping that that will get
people to go to Arby's and buy a roast beef sandwich.

5:12(Laughter)

5:13Now, I had tried to imagine what could possibly be in an animated TV commercial featuring Tom
Arnold, that would get you to get in your car, drive across town and buy a roast beef sandwich.

5:25(Laughter)

5:26Now, this is Copernicus, and he was right, when he was talking to anyone who needs to hear
your idea."The world revolves around me." Me, me, me, me. My favorite person me. I don't want
to get email from anybody; I want to get "memail."

5:40(Laughter)

5:42So consumers, and I don't just mean people who buy stuff at the Safeway; I mean people at the
Defense Department who might buy something, or people at, you know, the New Yorker who might
print your article. Consumers don't care about you at all; they just don't care. Part of the reason is
they've got way more choices than they used to, and way less time. And in a world where we have
too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here
is you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving because you've seen cows
before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say "Oh, look,
a cow." Nobody.
6:28(Laughter)

6:30But if the cow was purple isn't that a great special effect? I could do that again if you want. If
the cow was purple, you'd notice it for a while. I mean, if all cows were purple you'd get bored with
those, too.The thing that's going to decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets
changed, what gets purchased, what gets built, is: "Is it remarkable?" And "remarkable" is a really
cool word, because we think it just means "neat," but it also means "worth making a remark
about." And that is the essence of where idea diffusion is going. That two of the hottest cars in the
United States is a 55,000-dollar giant car, big enough to hold a Mini in its trunk. People are paying
full price for both, and the only thing they have in common is that they don't have anything in
common.

7:24(Laughter)

7:25Every week, the number one best-selling DVD in America changes. It's never "The Godfather,"
it's never "Citizen Kane," it's always some third-rate movie with some second-rate star. But the
reason it's number one is because that's the week it came out. Because it's new, because it's
fresh. People saw it and said "I didn't know that was there" and they noticed it. Two of the big
success stories of the last 20 years in retail one sells things that are super-expensive in a blue
box, and one sells things that are as cheap as they can make them. The only thing they have in
common is that they're different.

8:00We're now in the fashion business, no matter what we do for a living, we're in the fashion
business. And people in the fashion business know what it's like to be in the fashion business
they're used to it. The rest of us have to figure out how to think that way. How to understand that it's
not about interrupting people with big full-page ads, or insisting on meetings with people. But it's a
totally different sort of process that determines which ideas spread, and which ones don't. They sold
a billion dollars' worth of Aeron chairs by reinventing what it meant to sell a chair. They turned a chair
from something the purchasing department bought, to something that was a status symbol about
where you sat at work. This guy, Lionel Poilne, the most famous baker in the world he died two
and a half months ago, and he was a hero of mine and a dear friend. He lived in Paris. Last year, he
sold 10 million dollars' worth of French bread. Every loaf baked in a bakery he owned, by one baker
at a time, in a wood-fired oven. And when Lionel started his bakery, the French pooh-pooh-ed
it. They didn't want to buy his bread. It didn't look like "French bread." It wasn't what they expected. It
was neat; it was remarkable; and slowly, it spread from one person to another person until finally, it
became the official bread of three-star restaurants in Paris. Now he's in London, and he ships by
FedEx all around the world.

9:22What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That's what mass
marketing is.Smooth out the edges; go for the center; that's the big market. They would ignore the
geeks, and God forbid, the laggards. It was all about going for the center. But in a world where the
TV-industrial complex is broken, I don't think that's a strategy we want to use any more. I think the
strategy we want to use is to not market to these people because they're really good at ignoring
you. But market to these people because they care. These are the people who are obsessed with
something. And when you talk to them, they'll listen, because they like listening it's about
them. And if you're lucky, they'll tell their friends on the rest of the curve, and it'll spread. It'll spread to
the entire curve.

10:12They have something I call "otaku" it's a great Japanese word. It describes the desire of
someone who's obsessed to say, drive across Tokyo to try a new ramen noodle place, because
that's what they do: they get obsessed with it. To make a product, to market an idea, to come up with
any problem you want to solve that doesn't have a constituency with an otaku, is almost
impossible. Instead, you have to find a group that really, desperately cares about what it is you have
to say. Talk to them and make it easy for them to tell their friends. There's a hot sauce otaku, but
there's no mustard otaku. That's why there's lots and lots of kinds of hot sauces, and not so many
kinds of mustard. Not because it's hard to make interesting mustard you could make interesting
mustard but people don't, because no one's obsessed with it, and thus no one tells their
friends. Krispy Kreme has figured this whole thing out. It has a strategy, and what they do is, they
enter a city, they talk to the people, with the otaku, and then they spread through the city to the
people who've just crossed the street.

11:11This yoyo right here cost 112 dollars, but it sleeps for 12 minutes. Not everybody wants it but
they don't care. They want to talk to the people who do, and maybe it'll spread. These guys make the
loudest car stereo in the world.

11:24(Laughter)

11:26It's as loud as a 747 jet.

11:28You can't get in, the car's got bulletproof glass, because it'll blow out the windshield
otherwise. But the fact remains that when someone wants to put a couple of speakers in their car, if
they've got the otaku or they've heard from someone who does, they go ahead and they pick this.

11:43It's really simple you sell to the people who are listening, and just maybe, those people tell
their friends. So when Steve Jobs talks to 50,000 people at his keynote, who are all tuned in from
130 countries watching his two-hour commercial that's the only thing keeping his company in
business it's that those 50,000 people care desperately enough to watch a two-hour commercial,
and then tell their friends. Pearl Jam, 96 albums released in the last two years. Every one made a
profit. How? They only sell them on their website. Those people who buy them have the otaku, and
then they tell their friends, and it spreads and it spreads. This hospital crib cost 10,000 dollars, 10
times the standard. But hospitals are buying it faster than any other model. Hard Candy nail polish,
doesn't appeal to everybody,but to the people who love it, they talk about it like crazy. This paint can
right here saved the Dutch Boy paint company, making them a fortune. It costs 35 percent more than
regular paint because Dutch Boy made a can that people talk about, because it's remarkable. They
didn't just slap a new ad on the product; they changed what it meant to build a paint
product. AmIhotornot.com everyday 250,000 people go to this site, run by two volunteers, and I
can tell you they are hard graders

12:56(Laughter)

13:00They didn't get this way by advertising a lot. They got this way by being remarkable, sometimes
a little too remarkable. And this picture frame has a cord going out the back, and you plug it into the
wall. My father has this on his desk, and he sees his grandchildren everyday, changing
constantly. And every single person who walks into his office hears the whole story of how this thing
ended up on his desk. And one person at a time, the idea spreads. These are not diamonds, not
really. They're made from "cremains." After you're cremated you can have yourself made into a gem.

13:36(Laughter)

13:37Oh, you like my ring? It's my grandmother.

13:40(Laughter)

13:45Fastest-growing business in the whole mortuary industry. But you don't have to be Ozzie
Osborne you don't have to be super-outrageous to do this. What you have to do is figure out what
people really want and give it to them.

13:57A couple of quick rules to wrap up. The first one is: Design is free when you get to scale. The
people who come up with stuff that's remarkable more often than not figure out how to put design to
work for them.Number two: The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe. Proctor and Gamble knows
this, right? The whole model of being Proctor and Gamble is always about average products for
average people. That's risky. The safe thing to do now is to be at the fringes, be remarkable. And
being very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do. Very good is boring. Very good is
average. It doesn't matter whether you're making a record album, or you're an architect, or you have
a tract on sociology. If it's very good, it's not going to work, because no one's going to notice it.

14:42So my three stories. Silk put a product that does not need to be in the refrigerated section next
to the milk in the refrigerated section. Sales tripled. Why? Milk, milk, milk, milk, milk not milk. For
the people who were there and looking at that section, it was remarkable. They didn't triple their
sales with advertising; they tripled it by doing something remarkable. That is a remarkable piece of
art. You don't have to like it, but a 40-foot tall dog made out of bushes in the middle of New York
City is remarkable.
15:13(Laughter)

15:14Frank Gehry didn't just change a museum; he changed an entire city's economy by designing
one building that people from all over the world went to see. Now, at countless meetings at, you
know, the Portland City Council, or who knows where, they said, we need an architect can we get
Frank Gehry?Because he did something that was at the fringes. And my big failure? I came out with
an entire

15:36(Music)

15:39A record album and hopefully a whole bunch of record albums in SACD, this remarkable new
format and I marketed it straight to people with 20,000-dollar stereos. People with 20,000-dollar
stereos don't like new music.

15:53(Laughter)

15:57So what you need to do is figure out who does care. Who is going to raise their hand and
say, "I want to hear what you're doing next," and sell something to them. The last example I want to
give you. This is a map of Soap Lake, Washington. As you can see, if that's nowhere, it's in the
middle of it.

16:16(Laughter)

16:22But they do have a lake. And people used to come from miles around to swim in the lake. They
don't anymore. So the founding fathers said, "We've got some money to spend. What can we build
here?" And like most committees, they were going to build something pretty safe. And then an artist
came to them this is a true artist's rendering he wants to build a 55-foot tall lava lamp in the
center of town. That's a purple cow; that's something worth noticing. I don't know about you, but if
they build it, that's where I'm going to go.

16:52Thank you very much for your attention.

 4. Linda Hill: How to Manage for Collective Creativity

0:11I have a confession to make. I'm a business professor whose ambition has been to help people
learn to lead. But recently, I've discovered that what many of us think of as great leadership does not
work when it comes to leading innovation.

0:24I'm an ethnographer. I use the methods of anthropology to understand the questions in which I'm
interested. So along with three co-conspirators, I spent nearly a decade observing up close and
personalexceptional leaders of innovation. We studied 16 men and women, located in seven
countries across the globe, working in 12 different industries. In total, we spent hundreds of hours on
the ground, on-site, watching these leaders in action. We ended up with pages and pages and pages
of field notes that we analyzed and looked for patterns in what our leaders did. The bottom line? If
we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must unlearn our conventional
notions of leadership.
1:07Leading innovation is not about creating a vision, and inspiring others to execute it. But what do
we mean by innovation? An innovation is anything that is both new and useful. It can be a product or
service. It can be a process or a way of organizing. It can be incremental, or it can be
breakthrough. We have a pretty inclusive definition.

1:28How many of you recognize this man? Put your hands up. Keep your hands up, if you know who
this is.How about these familiar faces? (Laughter) From your show of hands, it looks like many of you
have seen a Pixar movie, but very few of you recognized Ed Catmull, the founder and CEO of Pixar
one of the companies I had the privilege of studying.

1:57My first visit to Pixar was in 2005, when they were working on "Ratatouille," that provocative
movie about a rat becoming a master chef. Computer-generated movies are really mainstream
today, but it took Ed and his colleagues nearly 20 years to create the first full-length C.G. movie. In
the 20 years hence, they've produced 14 movies. I was recently at Pixar, and I'm here to tell you that
number 15 is sure to be a winner.

2:25When many of us think about innovation, though, we think about an Einstein having an 'Aha!'
moment.But we all know that's a myth. Innovation is not about solo genius, it's about collective
genius. Let's think for a minute about what it takes to make a Pixar movie: No solo genius, no flash of
inspiration produces one of those movies. On the contrary, it takes about 250 people four to five
years, to make one of those movies.

2:54To help us understand the process, an individual in the studio drew a version of this picture. He
did so reluctantly, because it suggested that the process was a neat series of steps done by discrete
groups.Even with all those arrows, he thought it failed to really tell you just how iterative, interrelated
and, frankly, messy their process was.

3:17Throughout the making of a movie at Pixar, the story evolves. So think about it. Some shots go
through quickly. They don't all go through in order. It depends on how vexing the challenges are that
they come up with when they are working on a particular scene. So if you think about that scene in
"Up" where the boy hands the piece of chocolate to the bird, that 10 seconds took one animator
almost six months to perfect.

3:49The other thing about a Pixar movie is that no part of the movie is considered finished until the
entire movie wraps. Partway through one production, an animator drew a character with an arched
eyebrow that suggested a mischievous side. When the director saw that drawing, he thought it was
great. It was beautiful, but he said, "You've got to lose it; it doesn't fit the character." Two weeks later,
the director came back and said, "Let's put in those few seconds of film." Because that animator was
allowed to share what we referred to as his slice of genius, he was able to help that director
reconceive the character in a subtle but important way that really improved the story.
4:29What we know is, at the heart of innovation is a paradox. You have to unleash the talents and
passions of many people and you have to harness them into a work that is actually useful. Innovation
is a journey. It's a type of collaborative problem solving, usually among people who have different
expertise and different points of view.

4:52Innovations rarely get created full-blown. As many of you know, they're the result, usually, of trial
and error. Lots of false starts, missteps and mistakes. Innovative work can be very exhilarating, but it
also can be really downright scary. So when we look at why it is that Pixar is able to do what it
does, we have to ask ourselves, what's going on here?

5:22For sure, history and certainly Hollywood, is full of star-studded teams that have failed. Most of
those failures are attributed to too many stars or too many cooks, if you will, in the kitchen. So why is
it that Pixar, with all of its cooks, is able to be so successful time and time again? When we studied
an Islamic Bank in Dubai, or a luxury brand in Korea, or a social enterprise in Africa, we found that
innovative organizations are communities that have three capabilities: creative abrasion, creative
agility and creative resolution. Creative abrasion is about being able to create a marketplace of
ideas through debate and discourse. In innovative organizations, they amplify differences, they don't
minimize them. Creative abrasion is not about brainstorming, where people suspend their
judgment. No, they know how to have very heated but constructive arguments to create a portfolio of
alternatives.

6:25Individuals in innovative organizations learn how to inquire, they learn how to actively listen, but
guess what? They also learn how to advocate for their point of view. They understand that innovation
rarely happens unless you have both diversity and conflict. Creative agility is about being able to test
and refine that portfolio of ideas through quick pursuit, reflection and adjustment. It's about
discovery-driven learning where you act, as opposed to plan, your way to the future. It's about design
thinking where you have that interesting combination of the scientific method and the artistic
process. It's about running a series of experiments, and not a series of pilots.

7:07Experiments are usually about learning. When you get a negative outcome, you're still really
learning something that you need to know. Pilots are often about being right. When they don't work,
someone or something is to blame. The final capability is creative resolution. This is about doing
decision making in a way that you can actually combine even opposing ideas to reconfigure them in
new combinations to produce a solution that is new and useful. When you look at innovative
organizations, they never go along to get along. They don't compromise. They don't let one group or
one individual dominate, even if it's the boss, even if it's the expert. Instead, they have developed a
rather patient and more inclusive decision making process that allows for both/and solutions to
arise and not simply either/or solutions. These three capabilities are why we see that Pixar is able to
do what it does.
8:09Let me give you another example, and that example is the infrastructure group of Google. The
infrastructure group of Google is the group that has to keep the website up and running 24/7. So
when Google was about to introduce Gmail and YouTube, they knew that their data storage system
wasn't adequate. The head of the engineering group and the infrastructure group at that time was a
man named Bill Coughran. Bill and his leadership team, who he referred to as his brain trust, had to
figure out what to do about this situation. They thought about it for a while. Instead of creating a
group to tackle this task,they decided to allow groups to emerge spontaneously around different
alternatives.

8:53Two groups coalesced. One became known as Big Table, the other became known as Build It
From Scratch. Big Table proposed that they build on the current system. Build It From Scratch
proposed that it was time for a whole new system. Separately, these two teams were allowed to work
full-time on their particular approach. In engineering reviews, Bill described his role as, "Injecting
honesty into the process by driving debate."

9:23Early on, the teams were encouraged to build prototypes so that they could "bump them up
against reality and discover for themselves the strengths and weaknesses of their particular
approach." When Build It From Scratch shared their prototype with the group whose beepers would
have to go off in the middle of the night if something went wrong with the website, they heard loud
and clear about the limitations of their particular design. As the need for a solution became more
urgent and as the data, or the evidence, began to come in, it became pretty clear that the Big Table
solution was the right one for the moment. So they selected that one.

10:01But to make sure that they did not lose the learning of the Build it From Scratch team, Bill
asked two members of that team to join a new team that was emerging to work on the next-
generation system. This whole process took nearly two years, but I was told that they were all
working at breakneck speed.

10:20Early in that process, one of the engineers had gone to Bill and said, "We're all too busy for this
inefficient system of running parallel experiments." But as the process unfolded, he began to
understand the wisdom of allowing talented people to play out their passions. He admitted, "If you
had forced us to all be on one team, we might have focused on proving who was right, and
winning, and not on learning and discovering what was the best answer for Google."

10:49Why is it that Pixar and Google are able to innovate time and again? It's because they've
mastered the capabilities required for that. They know how to do collaborative problem solving, they
know how to do discovery-driven learning and they know how to do integrated decision making.

11:03Some of you may be sitting there and saying to yourselves right now, "We don't know how to do
those things in my organization. So why do they know how to do those things at Pixar, and why do
they know how to do those things at Google?" When many of the people that worked for Bill told
us, in their opinion, that Bill was one of the finest leaders in Silicon Valley, we completely agreed; the
man is a genius.

11:28Leadership is the secret sauce. But it's a different kind of leadership, not the kind many of us
think about when we think about great leadership. One of the leaders I met with early on said to
me, "Linda, I don't read books on leadership. All they do is make me feel bad." (Laughter) "In the first
chapter they say I'm supposed to create a vision. But if I'm trying to do something that's truly new, I
have no answers. I don't know what direction we're going in and I'm not even sure I know how to
figure out how to get there." For sure, there are times when visionary leadership is exactly what is
needed.

12:05But if we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must recast our
understanding of what leadership is about. Leading innovation is about creating the space where
people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovative problem solving.

12:22At this point, some of you may be wondering, "What does that leadership really look like?" At
Pixar, they understand that innovation takes a village. The leaders focus on building a sense of
community and building those three capabilities. How do they define leadership? They say
leadership is about creating a world to which people want to belong. What kind of world do people
want to belong in at Pixar? A world where you're living at the frontier. What do they focus their time
on? Not on creating a vision. Instead they spend their time thinking about, "How do we design a
studio that has the sensibility of a public square so that people will interact? Let's put in a policy that
anyone, no matter what their level or role, is allowed to give notes to the director about how they feel
about a particular film. What can we do to make sure that all the disruptors, all the minority voices in
this organization, speak up and are heard? And, finally, let's bestow credit in a very generous way." I
don't know if you've ever looked at the credits of a Pixar movie, but the babies born during a
production are listed there. (Laughter)

13:30How did Bill think about what his role was? Bill said, "I lead a volunteer organization. Talented
people don't want to follow me anywhere. They want to cocreate with me the future. My job is to
nurture the bottom-up and not let it degenerate into chaos." How did he see his role? "I'm a role
model, I'm a human glue, I'm a connector, I'm an aggregator of viewpoints. I'm never a dictator of
viewpoints." Advice about how you exercise the role? Hire people who argue with you. And, guess
what? Sometimes it's best to be deliberately fuzzy and vague.

14:10Some of you may be wondering now, what are these people thinking? They're thinking, "I'm not
the visionary, I'm the social architect. I'm creating the space where people are willing and able to
share and combine their talents and passions." If some of you are worrying now that you don't work
at a Pixar, or you don't work at a Google, I want to tell you there's still hope. We've studied many
organizations that were really not organizations you'd think of as ones where a lot of innovation
happens.

14:39We studied a general counsel in a pharmaceutical company who had to figure out how to get
the outside lawyers, 19 competitors, to collaborate and innovate. We studied the head of marketing
at a German automaker where, fundamentally, they believed that it was the design engineers, not the
marketeers, who were allowed to be innovative. We also studied Vineet Nayar at HCL
Technologies, an Indian outsourcing company. When we met Vineet, his company was about, in his
words, to become irrelevant. We watched as he turned that company into a global dynamo of I.T.
innovation. At HCL technologies, like at many companies, the leaders had learned to see their role
as setting direction and making sure that no one deviated from it. What he did is tell them it was time
for them to think about rethinking what they were supposed to do. Because what was happening is
that everybody was looking up and you weren't seeing the kind of bottom-up innovation we saw at
Pixar or Google. So they began to work on that.

15:43They stopped giving answers, they stopped trying to provide solutions. Instead, what they did is
they began to see the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the young sparks, the people who were
closest to the customers, as the source of innovation. They began to transfer the organization's
growth to that level.In Vineet's language, this was about inverting the pyramid so that you could
unleash the power of the many by loosening the stranglehold of the few, and increase the quality and
the speed of innovation that was happening every day.

16:22For sure, Vineet and all the other leaders that we studied were in fact visionaries. For sure,
they understood that that was not their role. So I don't think it is accidental that many of you did not
recognize Ed. Because Ed, like Vineet, understands that our role as leaders is to set the stage, not
perform on it. If we want to invent a better future, and I suspect that's why many of us are here, then
we need to reimagine our task. Our task is to create the space where everybody's slices of
genius can be unleashed and harnessed, and turned into works of collective genius.

17:10Thank you.

17:12(Applause)
 5. Richard St. John: 8 Secrets of Success

0:11This is really a two-hour presentation I give to high school students, cut down to three
minutes. And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. And in the seat
next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. And she
wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. She said, "What
leads to success?" And I felt really badly, because I couldn't give her a good answer.

0:36So I get off the plane, and I come to TED. And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of
successful people! So why don't I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids? So
here we are, seven years, 500 interviews later, and I'm going to tell you what really leads to
success and makes TEDsters tick.

0:56And the first thing is passion. Freeman Thomas says, "I'm driven by my passion." TEDsters do it
for love; they don't do it for money.

1:04Carol Coletta says, "I would pay someone to do what I do." And the interesting thing is: if you do
it for love, the money comes anyway.
1:11Work! Rupert Murdoch said to me, "It's all hard work. Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of
fun." Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes!

1:21(Laughter)

1:22TEDsters do have fun working. And they work hard. I figured, they're not workaholics. They're
workafrolics.

1:28(Laughter)

1:29Good!

1:30(Applause)

1:31Alex Garden says, "To be successful, put your nose down in something and get damn good at
it."There's no magic; it's practice, practice, practice.

1:39And it's focus. Norman Jewison said to me, "I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one
thing."

1:45And push! David Gallo says, "Push yourself. Physically, mentally, you've got to push, push,
push." You've got to push through shyness and self-doubt.

1:54Goldie Hawn says, "I always had self-doubts. I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. I
didn't think I'd make it."

2:01Now it's not always easy to push yourself, and that's why they invented mothers.

2:05(Laughter)

2:06(Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, "My mother pushed me."

2:12(Laughter)

2:13Serve! Sherwin Nuland says, "It was a privilege to serve as a doctor."

2:19A lot of kids want to be millionaires. The first thing I say is: "OK, well you can't serve
yourself; you've got to serve others something of value. Because that's the way people really get
rich."
2:30Ideas! TEDster Bill Gates says, "I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software
company." I'd say it was a pretty good idea. And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with
ideas it's just doing some very simple things. And I give lots of evidence.

2:46Persist! Joe Kraus says, "Persistence is the number one reason for our success." You've got to
persist through failure. You've got to persist through crap! Which of course means "Criticism,
Rejection, Assholes and Pressure."

2:58(Laughter)

3:01So, the answer to this question is simple: Pay 4,000 bucks and come to TED.

3:07(Laughter)

3:08Or failing that, do the eight things and trust me, these are the big eight things that lead to
success.

3:14Thank you TEDsters for all your interviews!

3:17(Applause)

7. Navi Radjou: Creative Problem-Solving in the Face of Extreme Limits

0:11When you grow up in a developing country like India, as I did, you instantly learn to get more
value from limited resources and find creative ways to reuse what you already have. Take Mansukh
Prajapati, a potter in India. He has created a fridge made entirely of clay that consumes no
electricity. He can keep fruits and vegetables fresh for many days. That's a cool invention, literally. In
Africa, if you run out of your cell phone battery, don't panic. You will find some resourceful
entrepreneurs who can recharge your cell phone using bicycles. And since we are in South
America, let's go to Lima in Peru, a region with high humidity that receives only one inch of rainfall
each year. An engineering college in Lima designed a giant advertising billboard that absorbs air
humidity and converts it into purified water, generating over 90 liters of water every day. The
Peruvians are amazing. They can literally create water out of thin air.

1:35For the past seven years, I have met and studied hundreds of entrepreneurs in India, China,
Africa and South America, and they keep amazing me. Many of them did not go to school. They don't
invent stuff in big R&D labs. The street is the lab. Why do they do that? Because they don't have the
kind of basic resources we take for granted, like capital and energy, and basic services like
healthcare and educationare also scarce in those regions. When external resources are scarce, you
have to go within yourself to tap the most abundant resource, human ingenuity, and use that
ingenuity to find clever ways to solve problems with limited resources.

2:28In India, we call it Jugaad. Jugaad is a Hindi word that means an improvised fix, a clever solution
born in adversity. Jugaad solutions are not sophisticated or perfect, but they create more value at
lower cost. For me, the entrepreneurs who will create Jugaad solutions are like alchemists. They can
magically transform adversity into opportunity, and turn something of less value into something of
high value. In other words, they mastered the art of doing more with less, which is the essence of
frugal innovation.

3:16Frugal innovation is the ability to create more economic and social value using fewer
resources. Frugal innovation is not about making do; it's about making things better. Now I want to
show you how, across emerging markets, entrepreneurs and companies are adopting frugal
innovation on a larger scale to cost-effectively deliver healthcare and energy to billions of people who
may have little income but very high aspirations.

3:51Let's first go to China, where the country's largest I.T. service provider, Neusoft, has developed a
telemedicine solution to help doctors in cities remotely treat old and poor patients in Chinese
villages.This solution is based on simple-to-use medical devices that less qualified health workers
like nurses can use in rural clinics. China desperately needs these frugal medical solutions because
by 2050 it will be home to over half a billion senior citizens.

4:28Now let's go to Kenya, a country where half the population uses M-Pesa, a mobile payment
solution. This is a great solution for the African continent because 80 percent of Africans don't have a
bank account,but what is exciting is that M-Pesa is now becoming the source of other disruptive
business models in sectors like energy. Take M-KOPA, the home solar solution that comes literally in
a box that has a solar rooftop panel, three LED lights, a solar radio, and a cell phone charger. The
whole kit, though, costs 200 dollars, which is too expensive for most Kenyans, and this is where
mobile telephony can make the solution more affordable. Today, you can buy this kit by making an
initial deposit of just 35 dollars, and then pay off the rest by making a daily micro-payment of 45
cents using your mobile phone. Once you've made 365 micro-payments, the system is unlocked, and
you own the product and you start receiving clean, free electricity. This is an amazing solution for
Kenya, where 70 percent of people live off the grid.This shows that with frugal innovation what
matters is that you take what is most abundant, mobile connectivity, to deal with what is scarce,
which is energy.

6:05With frugal innovation, the global South is actually catching up and in some cases even leap-
frogging the North. Instead of building expensive hospitals, China is using telemedicine to cost-
effectively treat millions of patients, and Africa, instead of building banks and electricity grids, is
going straight to mobile payments and distributed clean energy.

6:32Frugal innovation is diametrically opposed to the way we innovate in the North. I live in Silicon
Valley,where we keep chasing the next big technology thing. Think of the iPhone 5, 6, then 7,
8. Companies in the West spend billions of dollars investing in R&D, and use tons of natural
resources to create ever more complex products, to differentiate their brands from competition, and
they charge customers more money for new features. So the conventional business model in the
West is more for more. But sadly, this more for more model is running out of gas, for three
reasons: First, a big portion of customers in the Westbecause of the diminishing purchasing
power, can no longer afford these expensive products. Second, we are running out of natural water
and oil. In California, where I live, water scarcity is becoming a big problem. And third, most
importantly, because of the growing income disparity between the rich and the middle class in the
West, there is a big disconnect between existing products and services and basic needs of
customers. Do you know that today, there are over 70 million Americans today who are
underbanked, because existing banking services are not designed to address their basic needs.

8:04The prolonged economic crisis in the West is making people think that they are about to lose the
high standard of living and face deprivation. I believe that the only way we can sustain growth and
prosperity in the West is if we learn to do more with less.

8:22The good news is, that's starting to happen. Several Western companies are now adopting
frugal innovation to create affordable products for Western consumers. Let me give you two
examples.

8:35When I first saw this building, I told myself it's some kind of postmodern house. Actually, it's a
small manufacturing plant set up by Grameen Danone, a joint venture between Grameen Bank of
Muhammad Yunus and the food multinational Danone to make high-quality yogurt in
Bangladesh. This factory is 10 percent the size of existing Danone factories and cost much less to
build. I guess you can call it a low-fat factory. Now this factory, unlike Western factories that are
highly automated, relies a lot on manual processes in order to generate jobs for local
communities. Danone was so inspired by this model that combines economic efficiency and social
sustainability, they are planning to roll it out in other parts of the world as well.
9:27Now, when you see this example, you might be thinking, "Well, frugal innovation is low
tech." Actually, no. Frugal innovation is also about making high tech more affordable and more
accessible to more people. Let me give you an example.

9:42In China, the R&D engineers of Siemens Healthcare have designed a C.T. scanner that is easy
enough to be used by less qualified health workers, like nurses and technicians. This device can
scan more patients on a daily basis, and yet consumes less energy, which is great for hospitals, but
it's also great for patients because it reduces the cost of treatment by 30 percent and radiation
dosage by up to 60 percent. This solution was initially designed for the Chinese market, but now it's
selling like hotcakes in the U.S. and Europe, where hospitals are pressured to deliver quality care at
lower cost.

10:27But the frugal innovation revolution in the West is actually led by creative entrepreneurs who
are coming up with amazing solutions to address basic needs in the U.S. and Europe. Let me quickly
give you three examples of startups that personally inspire me. The first one happens to be launched
by my neighbor in Silicon Valley. It's called gThrive. They make these wireless sensors designed like
plastic rulers that farmers can stick in different parts of the field and start collecting detailed
information like soil conditions.This dynamic data allows farmers to optimize use of water
energy while improving quality of the products and the yields, which is a great solution for California,
which faces major water shortage. It pays for itself within one year.

11:16Second example is Be-Bound, also in Silicon Valley, that enables you to connect to the
Internet even in no-bandwidth areas where there's no wi-fi or 3G or 4G. How do they do that? They
simply use SMS, a basic technology, but that happens to be the most reliable and most widely
available around the world.Three billion people today with cell phones can't access the Internet. This
solution can connect them to the Internet in a frugal way.

11:45And in France, there is a startup calle Compte Nickel, which is revolutionizing the banking
sector. It allows thousands of people to walk into a Mom and Pop store and in just five minutes
activate the service that gives them two products: an international bank account number and an
international debit card.They charge a flat annual maintenance fee of just 20 Euros. That means you
can do all banking transactions send and receive money, pay with your debit card all with no
additional charge. This is what I call low-cost banking without the bank. Amazingly, 75 percent of the
customers using this serviceare the middle-class French who can't afford high banking fees.

12:29Now, I talked about frugal innovation, initially pioneered in the South, now being adopted in the
North.Ultimately, we would like to see developed countries and developing countries come together
and co-create frugal solutions that benefit the entire humanity. The exciting news is that's starting to
happen.Let's go to Nairobi to find that out.
12:51Nairobi has horrendous traffic jams. When I first saw them, I thought, "Holy cow." Literally,
because you have to dodge cows as well when you drive in Nairobi. To ease the situation, the
engineers at the IBM lab in Kenya are piloting a solution called Megaffic, which initially was designed
by the Japanese engineers.Unlike in the West, Megaffic doesn't rely on roadside sensors, which are
very expensive to install in Nairobi. Instead they process images, traffic data, collected from a small
number of low-resolution webcams in Nairobi streets, and then they use analytic software to predict
congestion points, and they can SMS drivers alternate routes to take. Granted, Megaffic is not as
sexy as self-driving cars, but it promises to take Nairobi drivers from point A to point B at least 20
percent faster. And earlier this year, UCLA Health launched its Global Lab for Innovation, which
seeks to identify frugal healthcare solutions anywhere in the world that will be at least 20 percent
cheaper than existing solutions in the U.S. and yet more effective. It also tries to bring together
innovators from North and South to cocreate affordable healthcare solutions for all of humanity.

14:23I gave tons of examples of frugal innovators from around the world, but the question is, how do
you go about adopting frugal innovation? Well, I gleaned out three principles from frugal innovators
around the world that I want to share with you that you can apply in your own organization to do more
with less.

14:41The first principle is: Keep it simple. Don't create solutions to impress customers. Make them
easy enough to use and widely accessible, like the C.T. scanner we saw in China.

14:55Second principle: Do not reinvent the wheel. Try to leverage existing resources and assets that
are widely available, like using mobile telephony to offer clean energy or Mom and Pop stores to offer
banking services.

15:11Third principle is: Think and act horizontally. Companies tend to scale up vertically by
centralizing operations in big factories and warehouses, but if you want to be agile and deal with
immense customer diversity, you need to scale out horizontally using a distributed supply chain with
smaller manufacturing and distribution units, like Grameen Bank has shown.

15:38The South pioneered frugal innovation out of sheer necessity. The North is now learning to do
more and better with less as it faces resource constraints. As an Indian-born French national who
lives in the United States, my hope is that we transcend this artificial North-South divide so that we
can harness the collective ingenuity of innovators from around the world to cocreate frugal
solutions that will improve the quality of life of everyone in the world, while preserving our precious
planet.

16:17Thank you very much.

16:19(Applause)
 8. Bill Gross: The Single Biggest Reason Why Startups Succeed

0:11I'm really excited to share with you some findings that really surprise me about what makes
companies succeed the most, what factors actually matter the most for startup success.

0:24I believe that the startup organization is one of the greatest forms to make the world a better
place. If you take a group of people with the right equity incentives and organize them in a
startup, you can unlock human potential in a way never before possible. You get them to achieve
unbelievable things.

0:42But if the startup organization is so great, why do so many fail? That's what I wanted to find
out. I wanted to find out what actually matters most for startup success.

0:51And I wanted to try to be systematic about it, avoid some of my instincts and maybe
misperceptions I have from so many companies I've seen over the years.

0:59I wanted to know this because I've been starting businesses since I was 12 years old when I
sold candy at the bus stop in junior high school, to high school, when I made solar energy devices, to
college, when I made loudspeakers. And when I graduated from college, I started software
companies. And 20 years ago, I started Idealab, and in the last 20 years, we started more than 100
companies, many successes, and many big failures. We learned a lot from those failures.

1:22So I tried to look across what factors accounted the most for company success and failure. So I
looked at these five. First, the idea. I used to think that the idea was everything. I named my
company Idealab for how much I worship the "aha!" moment when you first come up with the
idea. But then over time, I came to think that maybe the team, the execution, adaptability, that
mattered even more than the idea.

1:45I never thought I'd be quoting boxer Mike Tyson on the TED stage, but he once said, "Everybody
has a plan, until they get punched in the face." (Laughter) And I think that's so true about business
as well. So much about a team's execution is its ability to adapt to getting punched in the face by the
customer. The customer is the true reality. And that's why I came to think that the team maybe was
the most important thing.

2:11Then I started looking at the business model. Does the company have a very clear path
generating customer revenues? That started rising to the top in my thinking about maybe what
mattered most for success.

2:20Then I looked at the funding. Sometimes companies received intense amounts of

funding. Maybe that's the most important thing?

2:26And then of course, the timing. Is the idea way too early and the world's not ready for it? Is it
early, as in, you're in advance and you have to educate the world? Is it just right? Or is it too late, and
there's already too many competitors?

2:38So I tried to look very carefully at these five factors across many companies. And I looked
across all 100 Idealab companies, and 100 non-Idealab companies to try and come up with
something scientific about it.

2:48So first, on these Idealab companies, the top five companies Citysearch, CarsDirect, GoTo,
NetZero, Tickets.com those all became billion-dollar successes. And the five companies on the
bottom Z.com, Insider Pages, MyLife, Desktop Factory, Peoplelink we all had high hopes for,
but didn't succeed.

3:05So I tried to rank across all of those attributes how I felt those companies scored on each of
those dimensions. And then for non-Idealab companies, I looked at wild successes, like Airbnb and
Instagram and Uber and Youtube and LinkedIn.
3:19And some failures: Webvan, Kozmo, Pets.com Flooz and Friendster. The bottom companies had
intense funding, they even had business models in some cases, but they didn't succeed. I tried to
look at what factors actually accounted the most for success and failure across all of these
companies, and the results really surprised me.

3:36The number one thing was timing. Timing accounted for 42 percent of the difference between
success and failure. Team and execution came in second, and the idea, the differentiability of the
idea, the uniqueness of the idea, that actually came in third.

3:50Now, this isn't absolutely definitive, it's not to say that the idea isn't important, but it very much
surprised me that the idea wasn't the most important thing. Sometimes it mattered more when it was
actually timed.

4:01The last two, business model and funding, made sense to me actually. I think business model
makes sense to be that low because you can start out without a business model and add one later if
your customers are demanding what you're creating. And funding, I think as well, if you're
underfunded at first but you're gaining traction, especially in today's age, it's very, very easy to get
intense funding.

4:20So now let me give you some specific examples about each of these. So take a wild success like
Airbnb that everybody knows about. Well, that company was famously passed on by many smart
investorsbecause people thought, "No one's going to rent out a space in their home to a stranger." Of
course, people proved that wrong. But one of the reasons it succeeded, aside from a good business
model, a good idea, great execution, is the timing.

4:41That company came out right during the height of the recession when people really needed
extra money,and that maybe helped people overcome their objection to renting out their own home to
a stranger.

4:50Same thing with Uber. Uber came out, incredible company, incredible business model, great
execution, too. But the timing was so perfect for their need to get drivers into the system. Drivers
were looking for extra money; it was very, very important.

5:02Some of our early successes, Citysearch, came out when people needed web
pages. GoTo.com, which we announced actually at TED in 1998, was when companies were looking
for cost-effective ways to get traffic. We thought the idea was so great, but actually, the timing was
probably maybe more important.And then some of our failures. We started a company called Z.com,
it was an online entertainment company. We were so excited about it we raised enough money,
we had a great business model, we even signed incredibly great Hollywood talent to join the
company. But broadband penetration was too low in 1999-2000. It was too hard to watch video
content online, you had to put codecs in your browser and do all this stuff, and the company
eventually went out of business in 2003.

5:38Just two years later, when the codec problem was solved by Adobe Flash and when broadband
penetration crossed 50 percent in America, YouTube was perfectly timed. Great idea, but
unbelievable timing. In fact, YouTube didn't even have a business model when it first started. It
wasn't even certain that that would work out. But that was beautifully, beautifully timed.

5:58So what I would say, in summary, is execution definitely matters a lot. The idea matters a lot. But
timing might matter even more. And the best way to really assess timing is to really look at whether
consumers are really ready for what you have to offer them. And to be really, really honest about
it, not be in denial about any results that you see, because if you have something you love, you want
to push it forward, but you have to be very, very honest about that factor on timing.

6:22As I said earlier, I think startups can change the world and make the world a better place. I hope
some of these insights can maybe help you have a slightly higher success ratio, and thus make
something great come to the world that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

6:34Thank you very much, you've been a great audience.

6:36(Applause)
9. Gary Vaynerchuk: Do What You Love. [No Excuses]
 10. Tony Robbins: Why Do We Do What We Do

0:13Thank you. I have to tell you I'm both challenged and excited. My excitement is: I get a chance to
give something back. My challenge is: the shortest seminar I usually do is 50 hours.

0:23(Laughter)

0:24I'm not exaggerating. I do weekends I do more, obviously, I also coach people but I'm into
immersion, because how did you learn language? Not just by learning principles, you got in it and
you did it so often that it became real.

0:36The bottom line of why I'm here, besides being a crazy mofo, is that I'm not here to motivate
you, you don't need that, obviously. Often that's what people think I do, and it's the furthest thing
from it. What happens, though, is people say to me, "I don't need any motivation." But that's not what
I do. I'm the "why" guy. I want to know why you do what you do.

0:56What is your motive for action? What is it that drives you in your life today? Not 10 years
ago. Are you running the same pattern? Because I believe that the invisible force of internal drive,
activated, is the most important thing. I'm here because I believe emotion is the force of life. All of us
here have great minds. Most of us here have great minds, right? We all know how to think. With our
minds we can rationalize anything. We can make anything happen.

1:23I agree with what was described a few days ago, that people work in their self-interest. But we
know that that's bullshit at times. You don't work in your self-interest all the time, because when
emotion comes into it, the wiring changes in the way it functions. So it's wonderful to think
intellectually about how the life of the world is, especially those who are very smart can play this
game in our head. But I really want to know what's driving you.

1:47What I would like to invite you to do by the end of this talk is explore where you are today, for two
reasons. One: so that you can contribute more. And two: that hopefully we can not just understand
other people more, but appreciate them more, and create the kinds of connections that can stop
some of the challenges that we face today. They're only going to get magnified by the very
technology that connects us, because it's making us intersect. That intersection doesn't always
create a view of "everybody now understands everybody, and everybody appreciates everybody."

2:15I've had an obsession basically for 30 years, "What makes the difference in the quality of
people's lives?What in their performance?" I got hired to produce the result now. I've done it for 30
years. I get the phone call when the athlete is burning down on national television, and they were
ahead by five strokesand now they can't get back on the course. I've got to do something right now
or nothing matters. I get the phone call when the child is going to commit suicide, I've got to do
something. In 29 years, I'm very grateful to tell you I've never lost one. It doesn't mean I won't some
day, but I haven't yet. The reason is an understanding of these human needs.
2:52When I get those calls about performance, that's one thing. How do you make a change? I'm
also looking to see what is shaping the person's ability to contribute, to do something beyond
themselves. Maybe the real question is, I look at life and say there's two master lessons. One is:
there's the science of achievement, which almost everyone here has mastered amazingly. "How do
you take the invisible and make it visible," How do you make your dreams happen? Your business,
your contribution to society, money whatever, your body, your family.

3:23The other lesson that is rarely mastered is the art of fulfillment. Because science is easy,
right? We know the rules, you write the code and you get the results. Once you know the game, you
just up the ante, don't you? But when it comes to fulfillment that's an art. The reason is, it's about
appreciation and contribution. You can only feel so much by yourself.

3:43I've had an interesting laboratory to try to answer the real question how somebody's life
changes if you look at them like those people that you've given everything to? Like all the resources
they say they need.You gave not a 100-dollar computer, but the best computer. You gave them love,
joy, were there to comfort them. Those people very often you know some of them end up the
rest of their life with all this love, education, money and background going in and out of rehab. Some
people have been through ultimate pain, psychologically, sexually, spiritually, emotionally abused
and not always, but often, they become some of the people that contribute the most to society.

4:19The question we've got to ask ourselves really is, what is it? What is it that shapes us? We live
in a therapy culture. Most of us don't do that, but the culture's a therapy culture, the mindset that we
are our past. And you wouldn't be in this room if you bought that, but most of society thinks
biography is destiny.The past equals the future. Of course it does if you live there. But what we know
and what we have to remind ourselves because you can know something intellectually and then
not use it, not apply it.

4:47We've got to remind ourselves that decision is the ultimate power. When you ask people, have
you failed to achieve something significant in your life?

4:58Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye.

5:00TR: Thanks for the interaction on a high level there. But if you ask people, why didn't you
achieve something? Somebody who's working for you, or a partner, or even yourself. When you fail
to achieve, what's the reason people say? What do they tell you? Didn't have the knowledge, didn't
have the money,didn't have the time, didn't have the technology. I didn't have the right manager.

5:24Al Gore: Supreme Court. TR: The Supreme Court.

5:26(Laughter)
5:28(Applause) (Cheering)

5:41(Applause continues)

5:43TR: And

5:44(Applause)

5:47What do all those, including the Supreme Court, have in common?

5:50(Laughter)

5:51They are a claim to you missing resources, and they may be accurate. You may not have the
money, or the Supreme Court, but that is not the defining factor.

6:01(Applause) (Laughter)

6:07And you correct me if I'm wrong. The defining factor is never resources; it's resourcefulness. And
what I mean specifically, rather than just some phrase, is if you have emotion, human
emotion, something that I experienced from you the day before yesterday at a level that is as
profound as I've ever experienced and I believe with that emotion you would have beat his ass and
won.

6:28Audience: Yeah!

6:30(Applause) (Cheering)

6:34How easy for me to tell him what he should do.

6:37(Laughter)

6:39Idiot, Robbins. But I know when we watched the debate at that time, there were emotions that
blocked people's ability to get this man's intellect and capacity. And the way that it came across to
some people on that day because I know people that wanted to vote in your direction and
didn't, and I was upset.But there was emotion there. Do you know what I'm talking about?

7:02Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye.

7:03TR: So, emotion is it. And if we get the right emotion, we can get ourselves to do anything. If
you're creative, playful, fun enough, can you get through to anybody, yes or no?
7:12If you don't have the money, but you're creative and determined, you find the way. This is the
ultimate resource. But this is not the story that people tell us. They tell us a bunch of different
stories. They tell us we don't have the resources, but ultimately, if you take a look here, they say,
what are all the reasons they haven't accomplished that? He's broken my pattern, that son-of-a-bitch.

7:32(Laughter)

7:35But I appreciated the energy, I'll tell you that.

7:38(Laughter)

7:39What determines your resources? We've said decisions shape destiny, which is my focus here. If
decisions shape destiny, what determines it is three decisions. What will you focus on? You have to
decide what you're going to focus on. Consciously or unconsciously. the minute you decide to focus,
you must give it a meaning, and that meaning produces emotion. Is this the end or the beginning? Is
God punishing me or rewarding me, or is this the roll of the dice? An emotion creates what we're
going to do, or the action.

8:06So, think about your own life, the decisions that have shaped your destiny. And that sounds
really heavy, but in the last five or 10 years, have there been some decisions that if you'd made a
different decision, your life would be completely different? How many can think about it? Better or
worse. Say, "Aye."

8:21Audience: Aye.

8:22So the bottom line is, maybe it was where to go to work, and you met the love of your life there,
a career decision. I know the Google geniuses I saw here I mean, I understand that their decision
was to sell their technology. What if they made that decision versus to build their own culture? How
would the world or their lives be different, their impact? The history of our world is these
decisions. When a woman stands up and says, "No, I won't go to the back of the bus." She didn't just
affect her life. That decision shaped our culture. Or someone standing in front of a tank. Or being in
a position like Lance Armstrong, "You've got testicular cancer." That's pretty tough for any male,
especially if you ride a bike.

8:58(Laughter)

9:00You've got it in your brain; you've got it in your lungs. But what was his decision of what to focus
on?Different than most people. What did it mean? It wasn't the end; it was the beginning. He goes off
and wins seven championships he never once won before the cancer, because he got emotional
fitness, psychological strength. That's the difference in human beings that I've seen of the three
million I've been around.
9:20In my lab, I've had three million people from 80 countries over the last 29 years. And after a
while, patterns become obvious. You see that South America and Africa may be connected in a
certain way, right? Others say, "Oh, that sounds ridiculous." It's simple. So, what shaped Lance?
What shapes you?Two invisible forces. Very quickly. One: state. We all have had times, you did
something, and after, you thought to yourself, "I can't believe I said or did that, that was so
stupid." Who's been there? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye.

9:51Or after you did something, you go, "That was me!"

9:53(Laughter)

9:55It wasn't your ability; it was your state. Your model of the world is what shapes you long
term. Your model of the world is the filter. That's what's shaping us. It makes people make
decisions. To influence somebody, we need to know what already influences them. It's made up of
three parts. First, what's your target? What are you after? It's not your desires. You can get your
desires or goals. Who has ever got a goal or desire and thought, is this all there is?

10:19Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye.

10:21It's needs we have. I believe there are six human needs. Second, once you know what the
target that's driving you is and you uncover it for the truth you don't form it then you find out
what's your map,what's the belief systems that tell you how to get those needs. Some people think
the way to get them is to destroy the world, some people, to build, create something, love
someone. There's the fuel you pick. So very quickly, six needs.

10:43Let me tell you what they are. First one: certainty. These are not goals or desires, these are
universal.Everyone needs certainty they can avoid pain and at least be comfortable. Now, how do
you get it?Control everybody? Develop a skill? Give up? Smoke a cigarette? And if you got totally
certain, ironically,even though we need that you're not certain about your health, or your children,
or money. If you're not sure the ceiling will hold up, you won't listen to any speaker. While we go for
certainty differently, if we get total certainty, we get what? What do you feel if you're certain? You
know what will happen, when and how it will happen, what would you feel? Bored out of your minds.
So, God, in Her infinite wisdom,gave us a second human need, which is uncertainty. We need
variety. We need surprise. How many of you here love surprises? Say, "Aye."

11:26Audience: Aye.

11:27TR: Bullshit. You like the surprises you want. The ones you don't want, you call problems, but
you need them. So, variety is important. Have you ever rented a video or a film that you've already
seen? Who's done this? Get a fucking life.
11:40(Laughter)

11:42Why are you doing it? You're certain it's good because you read or saw it before, but you're
hoping it's been long enough you've forgotten, and there's variety.

11:50Third human need, critical: significance. We all need to feel important, special, unique. You can
get it by making more money or being more spiritual. You can do it by getting yourself in a situation
where you putmore tattoos and earrings in places humans don't want to know. Whatever it
takes. The fastest way to do this, if you have no background, no culture, no belief and resources or
resourcefulness, is violence. If I put a gun to your head and I live in the 'hood, instantly I'm
significant. Zero to 10. How high? 10. How certain am I that you're going to respond to me? 10. How
much uncertainty? Who knows what's going to happen next? Kind of exciting. Like climbing up into a
cave and doing that stuff all the way down there.Total variety and uncertainty. And it's significant, isn't
it? So you want to risk your life for it. So that's why violence has always been around and will be
around unless we have a consciousness change as a species. You can get significance a million
ways, but to be significant, you've got to be unique and different.

12:41Here's what we really need: connection and love, fourth need. We all want it; most settle for
connection, love's too scary. Who here has been hurt in an intimate relationship? If you don't raise
your hand, you've had other shit, too. And you're going to get hurt again. Aren't you glad you came to
this positive visit?Here's what's true: we need it. We can do it through intimacy, friendship,
prayer, through walking in nature. If nothing else works for you, don't get a cat, get a dog, because if
you leave for two minutes, it's like you've been gone six months, when you come back 5 minutes
later.

13:12These first four needs, every human finds a way to meet. Even if you lie to yourself, you need
to have split personalities. I call the first four needs the needs of the personality. The last two are the
needs of the spirit. And this is where fulfillment comes. You won't get it from the first four. You'll figure
a way, smoke, drink, do whatever, meet the first four. But number five, you must grow. We all know
the answer. If you don't grow, you're what? If a relationship or business is not growing, if you're not
growing, doesn't matter how much money or friends you have, how many love you, you feel like
hell. And I believe the reason we grow is so we have something to give of value.

13:48Because the sixth need is to contribute beyond ourselves. Because we all know, corny as that
sounds,the secret to living is giving. We all know life is not about me, it's about we. This culture
knows that, this room knows that. It's exciting. When you see Nicholas talking about his $100
computer, the most exciting thing is: here's a genius, but he's got a calling now. You can feel the
difference in him, and it's beautiful. And that calling can touch other people.

14:11My life was touched because when I was 11 years old, Thanksgiving, no money, no food, we
were not going to starve, but my father was totally messed up, my mom was letting him know how
bad he messed up, and somebody came to the door and delivered food. My father made three
decisions, I know what they were, briefly. His focus was "This is charity. What does it mean? I'm
worthless. What do I have to do? Leave my family," which he did. It was one of the most painful
experiences of life. My three decisions gave me a different path. I set focus on "There's food." What
a concept!

14:42(Laughter)

14:43But this is what changed my life, shaped me as a human being. Somebody's gift, I don't even
know who it is. My father always said, "No one gives a shit." And now somebody I don't know, they're
not asking for anything, just giving us food, looking out for us. It made me believe this: that strangers
care. And that made me decide, if strangers care about me and my family, I care about them. I'm
going to do something to make a difference. So when I was 17, I went out on Thanksgiving, it was
my target for years to have enough money to feed two families. The most fun and moving thing I ever
did in my life. Next year, I did four, then eight. I didn't tell anybody what I was doing, I wasn't doing it
for brownie points. But after eight, I thought I could use some help.

15:22So I went out, got my friends involved, then I grew companies, got 11, and I built the
foundation. 18 years later, I'm proud to tell you last year we fed 2 million people in 35
countries through our foundation. All during the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, in different
countries around the world.

15:38(Applause)

15:40Thank you. I don't tell you that to brag, but because I'm proud of human beings because they
get excited to contribute once they've had the chance to experience it, not talk about it.

15:49So, finally I'm about out of time. The target that shapes you Here's what's different about
people.We have the same needs. But are you a certainty freak, is that what you value most, or
uncertainty? This man couldn't be a certainty freak if he climbed through those caves. Are you driven
by significance or love? We all need all six, but what your lead system is tilts you in a different
direction. And as you move in a direction, you have a destination or destiny. The second piece is the
map. The operating system tells you how to get there, and some people's map is, "I'm going to save
lives even if I die for other people,"and they're a fireman, and somebody else says, "I'm going to kill
people to do it." They're trying to meet the same needs of significance. They want to honor God or
honor their family. But they have a different map.

16:33And there are seven different beliefs; I can't go through them, because I'm done. The last piece
is emotion. One of the parts of the map is like time. Some people's idea of a long time is 100
years.Somebody else's is three seconds, which is what I have. And the last one I've already
mentioned that fell to you. If you've got a target and a map I can't use Google because I love
Macs, and they haven't made it good for Macs yet. So if you use MapQuest how many have made
this fatal mistake of using it? You use this thing and you don't get there. Imagine if your beliefs
guarantee you can never get to where you want to go.

17:03(Laughter)

17:04The last thing is emotion. Here's what I'll tell you about emotion. There are 6,000 emotions that
we have words for in the English language, which is just a linguistic representation that changes by
language. But if your dominant emotions If I have 20,000 people or 1,000 and I have them write
down all the emotions that they experience in an average week, and I give them as long as they
need, and on one side they write empowering emotions, the other's disempowering, guess how
many emotions they experience? Less than 12. And half of those make them feel like shit. They have
six good feelings. Happy, happy, excited, oh shit, frustrated, frustrated, overwhelmed,
depressed. How many of you know somebody who, no matter what happens, finds a way to get
pissed off?

17:44(Laughter)

17:45Or no matter what happens, they find a way to be happy or excited. How many of you know
somebody like this?

17:51When 9/11 happened, I'll finish with this, I was in Hawaii. I was with 2,000 people from 45
countries, we were translating four languages simultaneously for a program I was conducting, for a
week. The night before was called Emotional Mastery. I got up, had no plan for this, and I said we
had fireworks, I do crazy shit, fun stuff, and at the end, I stopped. I had this plan, but I never know
what I'm going to say.And all of a sudden, I said, "When do people really start to live? When they
face death." And I went through this whole thing about, if you weren't going to get off this island, if
nine days from now, you were going to die, who would you call, what would you say, what would you
do? That night is when 9/11 happened.

18:29One woman had come to the seminar, and when she came there, her previous boyfriend had
been kidnapped and murdered. Her new boyfriend wanted to marry her, and she said no.

18:37He said, "If you go to that Hawaii thing, it's over with us." She said, "It's over." When I finished
that night, she called him and left a message at the top of the World Trade Center where he worked,
saying, "I love you, I want you to know I want to marry you. It was stupid of me." She was asleep,
because it was 3 a.m. for us, when he called her back, and said, "Honey, I can't tell you what this
means. I don't know how to tell you this, but you gave me the greatest gift, because I'm going to
die." And she played the recording for us in the room. She was on Larry King later. And he said,
"You're probably wondering how on Earth this could happen to you twice. All I can say is this must be
God's message to you. From now on, every day, give your all, love your all. Don't let anything ever
stop you." She finishes, and a man stands up, and he says, "I'm from Pakistan, I'm a Muslim. I'd love
to hold your hand and say I'm sorry, but frankly, this is retribution." I can't tell you the rest, because
I'm out of time.

19:31(Laughter)

19:38Are you sure?

19:39(Laughter)

19:4310 seconds!

19:45(Laughter and applause)

19:4810 seconds, I want to be respectful. All I can tell you is, I brought this man on stage with a man
from New York who worked in the World Trade Center, because I had about 200 New Yorkers
there. More than 50 lost their entire companies, friends, marking off their Palm Pilots. One financial
trader, woman made of steel, bawling 30 friends crossing off that all died. And I said, "What are
we going to focus on? What does this mean and what are we going to do?"

20:12And I got the group to focus on: if you didn't lose somebody today, your focus is going to be
how to serve somebody else. Then one woman stood up and was so angry, screaming and yelling. I
found out she wasn't from New York, she's not an American, doesn't know anybody here. I asked,
"Do you always get angry?" She said, "Yes." Guilty people got guilty, sad people got sad. I took these
two men and I did an indirect negotiation. Jewish man with family in the occupied territory, someone
in New York who would have died if he was at work that day, and this man who wanted to be a
terrorist, and I made it very clear. This integration is on a film, which I'd be happy to send
you, instead of my verbalization, but the two of them not only came together and changed their
beliefs and models of the world, but worked together to bring, for almost four years now, through
various mosques and synagogues, the idea of how to create peace. And he wrote a book, called "My
Jihad, My Way of Peace." So, transformation can happen.

21:03My invitation to you is: explore your web, the web in here the needs, the beliefs, the
emotions that are controlling you, for two reasons: so there's more of you to give, and achieve,
too, but I mean give,because that's what's going to fill you up. And secondly, so you can appreciate
not just understand, that's intellectual, that's the mind, but appreciate what's driving other
people. It's the only way our world's going to change.

21:27God bless you, thank you. I hope this was of service.

21:29(Applause)
 11. Joi Ito: Want To Innovate? Become A "Now-ist"

0:11On March 10, 2011, I was in Cambridge at the MIT Media Lab meeting with faculty, students and
staff,and we were trying to figure out whether I should be the next director.

0:24That night, at midnight, a magnitude 9 earthquake hit off of the Pacific coast of Japan. My wife
and family were in Japan, and as the news started to come in, I was panicking. I was looking at the
news streamsand listening to the press conferences of the government officials and the Tokyo Power
Company, and hearing about this explosion at the nuclear reactors and this cloud of fallout that was
headed towards our house which was only about 200 kilometers away. And the people on TV weren't
telling us anything that we wanted to hear. I wanted to know what was going on with the reactor, what
was going on with the radiation, whether my family was in danger.

1:07So I did what instinctively felt like the right thing, which was to go onto the Internet and try to
figure out if I could take matters into my own hands. On the Net, I found there were a lot of other
people like me trying to figure out what was going on, and together we sort of loosely formed a
group and we called it Safecast, and we decided we were going to try to measure the radiation and
get the data out to everybody else, because it was clear that the government wasn't going to be
doing this for us.

1:34Three years later, we have 16 million data points, we have designed our own Geiger
counters that you can download the designs and plug it into the network. We have an app that shows
you most of the radiation in Japan and other parts of the world. We are arguably one of the most
successful citizen science projects in the world, and we have created the largest open dataset of
radiation measurements.

1:58And the interesting thing here is how did (Applause) Thank you. How did a bunch of
amateurs who really didn't know what we were doing somehow come together and do what NGOs
and the governmentwere completely incapable of doing? And I would suggest that this has
something to do with the Internet. It's not a fluke. It wasn't luck, and it wasn't because it was us. It
helped that it was an event that pulled everybody together, but it was a new way of doing things that
was enabled by the Internet and a lot of the other things that were going on, and I want to talk a little
bit about what those new principles are.
2:38So remember before the Internet? (Laughter) I call this B.I. Okay? So, in B.I., life was
simple. Things were Euclidian, Newtonian, somewhat predictable. People actually tried to predict the
future, even the economists. And then the Internet happened, and the world became extremely
complex, extremely low-cost, extremely fast, and those Newtonian laws that we so dearly
cherished turned out to be just local ordinances, and what we found was that in this completely
unpredictable world that most of the people who were surviving were working with sort of a different
set of principles, and I want to talk a little bit about that.

3:23Before the Internet, if you remember, when we tried to create services, what you would do is
you'd createthe hardware layer and the network layer and the software and it would cost millions of
dollars to do anything that was substantial. So when it costs millions of dollars to do something
substantial, what you would do is you'd get an MBA who would write a plan and get the money from
V.C.s or big companies,and then you'd hire the designers and the engineers, and they'd build the
thing. This is the Before Internet, B.I., innovation model. What happened after the Internet was the
cost of innovation went down so much because the cost of collaboration, the cost of distribution, the
cost of communication, and Moore's Law made it so that the cost of trying a new thing became
nearly zero, and so you would have Google, Facebook, Yahoo, students that didn't have permission
permissionless innovation didn't have permission, didn't have PowerPoints, they just built the
thing, then they raised the money, and then they sort of figured out a business plan and maybe later
on they hired some MBAs. So the Internet caused innovation, at least in software and services, to go
from an MBA-driven innovation model to a designer-engineer-driven innovation model, and it pushed
innovation to the edges, to the dorm rooms, to the startups, away from the large institutions, the
stodgy old institutions that had the power and the money and the authority. And we all know this. We
all know this happened on the Internet. It turns out it's happening in other things, too. Let me give
you some examples.

4:47So at the Media Lab, we don't just do hardware. We do all kinds of things. We do biology, we do
hardware, and Nicholas Negroponte famously said, "Demo or die," as opposed to "Publish or
perish,"which was the traditional academic way of thinking. And he often said, the demo only has to
work once,because the primary mode of us impacting the world was through large companies being
inspired by usand creating products like the Kindle or Lego Mindstorms. But today, with the ability to
deploy things into the real world at such low cost, I'm changing the motto now, and this is the official
public statement. I'm officially saying, "Deploy or die." You have to get the stuff into the real world for
it to really count, and sometimes it will be large companies, and Nicholas can talk about
satellites. (Applause) Thank you. But we should be getting out there ourselves and not depending on
large institutions to do it for us.

5:39So last year, we sent a bunch of students to Shenzhen, and they sat on the factory floors with
the innovators in Shenzhen, and it was amazing. What was happening there was you would have
these manufacturing devices, and they weren't making prototypes or PowerPoints. They were fiddling
with the manufacturing equipment and innovating right on the manufacturing equipment. The factory
was in the designer, and the designer was literally in the factory. And so what you would do is, you'd
go down to the stalls and you would see these cell phones. So instead of starting little websites like
the kids in Palo Alto do, the kids in Shenzhen make new cell phones. They make new cell phones
like kids in Palo Alto make websites, and so there's a rainforest of innovation going on in the cell
phone. What they do is, they make a cell phone, go down to the stall, they sell some, they look at the
other kids' stuff, go up, make a couple thousand more, go down. Doesn't this sound like a software
thing? It sounds like agile software development, A/B testing and iteration, and what we thought you
could only do with software kids in Shenzhen are doing this in hardware. My next fellow, I hope, is
going to be one of these innovators from Shenzhen.

6:43And so what you see is that is pushing innovation to the edges. We talk about 3D printers and
stuff like that, and that's great, but this is Limor. She is one of our favorite graduates, and she is
standing in front of a Samsung Techwin Pick and Place Machine. This thing can put 23,000
components per hour onto an electronics board. This is a factory in a box. So what used to take a
factory full of workers working by hand in this little box in New York, she's able to have effectively
She doesn't actually have to go to Shenzhen to do this manufacturing. She can buy this box and
she can manufacture it. So manufacturing, the cost of innovation, the cost of prototyping, distribution,
manufacturing, hardware, is getting so lowthat innovation is being pushed to the edges and students
and startups are being able to build it. This is a recent thing, but this will happen and this will
change just like it did with software.

7:33Sorona is a DuPont process that uses a genetically engineered microbe to turn corn sugar into
polyester.It's 30 percent more efficient than the fossil fuel method, and it's much better for the
environment.Genetic engineering and bioengineering are creating a whole bunch of great new
opportunities for chemistry, for computation, for memory. We will probably be doing a lot, obviously
doing health things,but we will probably be growing chairs and buildings soon. The problem is,
Sorona costs about 400 million dollars and took seven years to build. It kind of reminds you of the old
mainframe days. The thing is, the cost of innovation in bioengineering is also going down. This is
desktop gene sequencer. It used to cost millions and millions of dollars to sequence genes. Now you
can do it on a desktop like this, and kids can do this in dorm rooms. This is Gen9 gene
assembler, and so right now when you try to print a gene, what you do is somebody in a factory with
pipettes puts the thing together by hand, you have one error per 100 base pairs, and it takes a long
time and costs a lot of money. This new device assembles genes on a chip, and instead of one error
per 100 base pairs, it's one error per 10,000 base pairs. In this lab, we will have the world's
capacity of gene printing within a year, 200 million base pairs a year. This is kind of like when we
went from transistor radios wrapped by hand to the Pentium. This is going to become the Pentium of
bioengineering, pushing bioengineering into the hands of dorm rooms and startup companies.
9:05So it's happening in software and in hardware and bioengineering, and so this is a fundamental
new way of thinking about innovation. It's a bottom-up innovation, it's democratic, it's chaotic, it's hard
to control.It's not bad, but it's very different, and I think that the traditional rules that we have for
institutions don't work anymore, and most of us here operate with a different set of principles. One of
my favorite principles is the power of pull, which is the idea of pulling resources from the network as
you need themrather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything.

9:38So in the case of the Safecast story, I didn't know anything when the earthquake happened, but I
was able to find Sean who was the hackerspace community organizer, and Peter, the analog
hardware hackerwho made our first Geiger counter, and Dan, who built the Three Mile
Island monitoring system after the Three Mile Island meltdown. And these people I wouldn't have
been able to find beforehand and probably were better that I found them just in time from the
network.

10:03I'm a three-time college dropout, so learning over education is very near and dear to my
heart, but to me, education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself.

10:14(Applause)

10:18And it feels like, and I'm biased, it feels like they're trying to make you memorize the whole
encyclopedia before they let you go out and play, and to me, I've got Wikipedia on my cell
phone, and it feels like they assume you're going to be on top of some mountain all by yourself with a
number 2 pencil trying to figure out what to do when in fact you're always going to be
connected, you're always going to have friends,and you can pull Wikipedia up whenever you need
it, and what you need to learn is how to learn. In the case of Safecast, a bunch of amateurs when we
started three years ago, I would argue that we probably as a group know more than any other
organization about how to collect data and publish data and do citizen science.

11:01Compass over maps. So this one, the idea is that the cost of writing a plan or mapping
something is getting so expensive and it's not very accurate or useful. So in the Safecast story, we
knew we needed to collect data, we knew we wanted to publish the data, and instead of trying to
come up with the exact plan, we first said, oh, let's get Geiger counters. Oh, they've run out. Let's
build them. There aren't enough sensors. Okay, then we can make a mobile Geiger counter. We can
drive around. We can get volunteers. We don't have enough money. Let's Kickstarter it. We could not
have planned this whole thing, but by having a very strong compass, we eventually got to where we
were going, and to me it's very similar to agile software development, but this idea of compasses is
very important.

11:44So I think the good news is that even though the world is extremely complex, what you need to
do is very simple. I think it's about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to
stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and focus on being connected, always
learning, fully aware,and super present.

12:07So I don't like the word "futurist." I think we should be now-ists, like we are right now.

12:18Thank you.

12:20(Applause)