What Reality Are You Creating for Yourself?

Isaac Lidsky
(a transcription)

When Dorothy was a little girl, she was fascinated by her goldfish. Her father explained to her
that fish swim by quickly wagging their tails to propel themselves through the water. Without
hesitation, little Dorothy responded, "Yes, Daddy, and fish swim backwards by wagging their
heads."

In her mind, it was a fact as true as any other. Fish swim backwards by wagging their
heads. She believed it.

Our lives are full of fish swimming backwards. We make assumptions and faulty leaps of
logic. We harbor bias. We know that we are right, and they are wrong. We fear the worst. We
strive for unattainable perfection. We tell ourselves what we can and cannot do. In our minds,
fish swim by in reverse frantically wagging their heads and we don't even notice them.

I'm going to tell you five facts about myself. One fact is not true. One: I graduated from Harvard
at 19 with an honors degree in mathematics. Two: I currently run a construction company in
Orlando. Three: I starred on a television sitcom. Four: I lost my sight to a rare genetic eye
disease. Five: I served as a law clerk to two US Supreme Court justices. Which fact is not
true? Actually, they're all true. Yeah. They're all true.

At this point, most people really only care about the television show.

I know this from experience. OK, so the show was NBC's "Saved by the Bell: The New
Class." And I played Weasel Wyzell, who was the sort of dorky, nerdy character on the
show, which made it a very major acting challenge for me as a 13-year-old boy.

Now, did you struggle with number four, my blindness? Why is that? We make assumptions
about so-called disabilities. As a blind man, I confront others' incorrect assumptions about my
abilities every day. My point today is not about my blindness, however. It's about my
vision. Going blind taught me to live my life eyes wide open. It taught me to spot those
backwards-swimming fish that our minds create. Going blind cast them into focus.

What does it feel like to see? It's immediate and passive. You open your eyes and there's the
world. Seeing is believing. Sight is truth. Right? Well, that's what I thought.

Then, from age 12 to 25, my retinas progressively deteriorated. My sight became an

increasingly bizarre carnival funhouse hall of mirrors and illusions. The salesperson I was
relieved to spot in a store was really a mannequin. Reaching down to wash my hands, I
suddenly saw it was a urinal I was touching, not a sink, when my fingers felt its true shape. A
friend described the photograph in my hand, and only then I could see the image
depicted. Objects appeared, morphed and disappeared in my reality. It was difficult and
exhausting to see. I pieced together fragmented, transitory images, consciously analyzed the
clues, searched for some logic in my crumbling kaleidoscope, until I saw nothing at all.
I learned that what we see is not universal truth. It is not objective reality. What we see is a
unique, personal, virtual reality that is masterfully constructed by our brain.

Let me explain with a bit of amateur neuroscience. Your visual cortex takes up about 30 percent
of your brain. That's compared to approximately eight percent for touch and two to three percent
for hearing. Every second, your eyes can send your visual cortex as many as two billion pieces
of information. The rest of your body can send your brain only an additional billion. So sight is
one third of your brain by volume and can claim about two thirds of your brain's processing
resources. It's no surprise then that the illusion of sight is so compelling. But make no mistake
about it: sight is an illusion.

Here's where it gets interesting. To create the experience of sight, your brain references your
conceptual understanding of the world, other knowledge, your memories, opinions, emotions,
mental attention. All of these things and far more are linked in your brain to your sight. These
linkages work both ways, and usually occur subconsciously. So for example, what you see
impacts how you feel, and the way you feel can literally change what you see. Numerous
studies demonstrate this. If you are asked to estimate the walking speed of a man in a video, for
example, your answer will be different if you're told to think about cheetahs or turtles. A hill
appears steeper if you've just exercised, and a landmark appears farther away if you're wearing
a heavy backpack. We have arrived at a fundamental contradiction. What you see is a complex
mental construction of your own making, but you experience it passively as a direct
representation of the world around you. You create your own reality, and you believe it. I
believed mine until it broke apart. The deterioration of my eyes shattered the illusion.

You see, sight is just one way we shape our reality. We create our own realities in many other
ways. Let's take fear as just one example. Your fears distort your reality. Under the warped logic
of fear, anything is better than the uncertain. Fear fills the void at all costs, passing off what you
dread for what you know, offering up the worst in place of the ambiguous, substituting
assumption for reason. Psychologists have a great term for it: awfulizing.

Right? Fear replaces the unknown with the awful. Now, fear is self-realizing. When you face the
greatest need to look outside yourself and think critically, fear beats a retreat deep inside your
mind, shrinking and distorting your view, drowning your capacity for critical thought with a flood
of disruptive emotions. When you face a compelling opportunity to take action, fear lulls you into
inaction, enticing you to passively watch its prophecies fulfill themselves.

When I was diagnosed with my blinding disease, I knew blindness would ruin my life. Blindness
was a death sentence for my independence. It was the end of achievement for me. Blindness
meant I would live an unremarkable life, small and sad, and likely alone. I knew it. This was a
fiction born of my fears, but I believed it. It was a lie, but it was my reality, just like those
backwards-swimming fish in little Dorothy's mind. If I had not confronted the reality of my fear, I
would have lived it. I am certain of that.

So how do you live your life eyes wide open? It is a learned discipline. It can be taught. It can be
practiced. I will summarize very briefly.

Hold yourself accountable for every moment, every thought, every detail. See beyond your
fears. Recognize your assumptions. Harness your internal strength. Silence your internal
critic. Correct your misconceptions about luck and about success. Accept your strengths and
your weaknesses, and understand the difference. Open your hearts to your bountiful blessings.

Your fears, your critics, your heroes, your villains -- they are your excuses, rationalizations,
shortcuts, justifications, your surrender. They are fictions you perceive as reality. Choose to see
through them. Choose to let them go. You are the creator of your reality. With that
empowerment comes complete responsibility.

I chose to step out of fear's tunnel into terrain uncharted and undefined. I chose to build there a
blessed life. Far from alone, I share my beautiful life with Dorothy, my beautiful wife, with our
triplets, whom we call the Tripskys, and with the latest addition to the family, sweet baby
Clementine.

What do you fear? What lies do you tell yourself? How do you embellish your truth and write
your own fictions? What reality are you creating for yourself?

In your career and personal life, in your relationships, and in your heart and soul, your
backwards-swimming fish do you great harm. They exact a toll in missed opportunities and
unrealized potential, and they engender insecurity and distrust where you seek fulfillment and
connection. I urge you to search them out.

Helen Keller said that the only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. For me,
going blind was a profound blessing, because blindness gave me vision. I hope you can see
what I see.

Thank you.

Bruno Giussani: Isaac, before you leave the stage, just a question. This is an audience of
entrepreneurs, of doers, of innovators. You are a CEO of a company down in Florida, and many
are probably wondering, how is it to be a blind CEO? What kind of specific challenges do you
have, and how do you overcome them?

Isaac Lidsky: Well, the biggest challenge became a blessing. I don't get visual feedback from
people.

BG: What's that noise there? IL: Yeah. So, for example, in my leadership team meetings, I don't
see facial expressions or gestures. I've learned to solicit a lot more verbal feedback. I basically
force people to tell me what they think. And in this respect, it's become, like I said, a real
blessing for me personally and for my company, because we communicate at a far deeper
level, we avoid ambiguities, and most important, my team knows that what they think truly
matters.

BG: Isaac, thank you for coming to TED. IL: Thank you, Bruno.