TEDxCMU is an independently organized TED event at Carnegie Mellon University. It is taking place on April 4th, 2010 from 10 AM to 5 PM. The theme is this set of talks is FEARLESS.

To tweet about this event, use #TEDxCMU. You can see the twitter steam in this post.

If you didn’t catch it earlier, make sure you check out my interview with the TEDxCMU founders.

I’m very happy and grateful I was selected to attend this event. During the event, I will be taking notes on things I find particularly interesting.

Summary Notes

• All fears and obstacles to achieving your goals are petty in the face of death.
• 3 big fears are FAILURE – JUDGEMENT – SUCCESS
• Doing nothing does not help you avoid failure – life applies friction.
• There are no rules for being innovative. Innovation is about breaking the rules.
• Being forced to be innovative is scary – people don’t want to break the rules! They feel like they’re cheating.
• People tend to follow the crowd. Being yourself is the ultimate fearlessness.
• Goals are achieved when you turn your ‘shoulds’ into ‘musts’.
• Think like an amateur – only then can you focus on innovation and not limit yourself according to norms or tools.
• Technology should be a last resort in solving problems.
• The terrain for innovation is outside the office.
• ‘Playing it safe’ is like bargaining with fear. But fear doesn’t know about this ‘deal’.
• Fearlessness is playing the believer, not the cynic. Step onto the stage.
• Leaders get too caught up in their own voices and forget to listen. Listening ignites movements.
• Maybe leaders can only create change once they surrender their power.
• Sharing ideas is often met with resistance. However, it can be for the greater good. So let’s set our ideas free and see what happens.

Live Notes

tedx “at” ted.com – feel free to write them if you have comments on the show

Why FEARLESS? Not because the speakers are not afraid of anything. It’s because they’re calm in the face of what they fear.

Jonathan Fields
Author, Blogger, Entrepreneur

Starts with question: What is the Number 4 fear in the world?
Answer: Death
Number 1 fear is public speaking.

Number 1.1 fear – saying hello to a stranger. Tells everyone in the audience to do this.

What did he do that was fearless?
Signed a 6 year lease to start a yoga center in New York City. He had no yoga background, and a family to support.
Date he signed the lease – September 10th, 2001. One day before 9.11.

Was it appropriate to launch a business during this atmosphere?

Remembering that you’re going to die is motivation to follow your dreams. All obstacles are small in the face of death. If you really want to pursue something, and if you accept the reality of death, you realize you must be FEARLESS.

Decided he had to launch his business. His yoga center became one of the most successful in the city.
In Dec. 2009 he sold the company.

What let’s fear blossom?
The things we don’t see. The questions we don’t ask.

What are the 3 big failures.
Failure
Judgment
Success

We tend to ramp up our fear, especially of failure.
We also spin things. Repetition breeds belief.

What about the ‘hidden questions’ -
What is I miss the opportunity?
What if I do nothing?

When thinking about ‘what if I fail’, be realistic! Also ask yourself the second important question: ‘how will I recover?’

Why should you do nothing? Because life applies friction.
Life doesn’t move sideways – doing nothing amplifies your current situation.
If you’re unhappy now, doing nothing will make you more and more unhappy.
This can be a far more terrifying outcome than failing!

What if I succeed?
Are you doing things only because you’re sure you won’t fail?

What you should do:
Take something you’ve been putting off.
Ask the 3 questions:
What if I fail? (how do I recover)
What if I do nothing?
What if I succeed?

MK Haley
Faculty at the Entertainment Technology Center

What is innovation?
It’s everywhere! In some companies, everyone is responsible for being innovative. This can be scary!

IBM: ‘Think’
Apple: ‘Think Different’
They told us ‘do it’… But we had no idea how.

Is innovation “cheating”?
If cheating is breaking the rules, then how can we do this if we don’t know the rules? What are the rules of innovation?
People put artificial rules in their head. Norms are not rules!

Mazlow’s heirarchy of needs: Need to be accepted, and part of the group.
But innovation is inherently risky and characterized by deviation from the norm.

What can we do to add incentive innovation?
Just shut up! Don’t feed your ego by judging.
Besides not judging, you can also reward deviations from the norm. Many time success is the result of multiple failures!

Also use success to create opportunities.
When you come up with a hit product, take another look at its uses. See if it can keep squeezing innovation out of that.

What you should do:
Thank your model.
Be a role model.
Congratulate success.
Never eat lunch alone.
Collaborate.
Napping.

Jackson Chu
Beautiful musical solo performance on erhu, an ethnic Chinese instrument.

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Video: Wildly popular TED2010 talk from Blaise Aguera y Arcas on augmented reality maps
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Raghava KK
Multi-disciplinary Artist

Being yourself can be fearless. People tend to mold themselves to the crowd.

Tried to study how people get money and fame.
Discovered that these are just means to an end.
How do you want to make money? Why do you want to be famous?

When you are famous, what do you do with the exaggerated exposure? What do you do with all these followers?

Moved to NYC with family from Bangalore.
“In NYC you live and die several deaths per year” – an excellent place to lose control. People fear the loss of control.

How did he learn to paint? Needed to get rid of painting materials. Just painted with no critics.

Now he does ‘investigative art’. The art changes and evolves based on the audience. Sometimes you need to produce to learn and get to success, not to succeed. Don’t always need to be didactic.

You must understand your fears.
Talking/creating art can help you articulate your fears.
In the end, you should invite fear! It makes it easier to deal with.

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Speakers are given gifts of artwork from TEDxCMU attendees.
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-INTERMISSION-
I’ll try to have a word with the speakers over lunch until 1:30. I’ll be back for more notes then!

RF Culbertson
Entrepreneur and Professor at Tepper School of Business

Investing is simple. You can do this.
Imagine you’re playing golf. Your partner says “let’s play for a dime a hole”. For the second hole he says “let’s double it”. A similar trend continues. By the 18th hole you’re doing a second mortgage on your house. Compounding is powerful!

Example of Ted – UPS worker.
Died with $ 70 million in the bank. How?
Worked for UPS, not on too high a salary. He took 10% of his salary and invested it.

So why isn’t everyone wealthy?
The meaning of wealth changes. But set a goal – it’s much harder to hit a moving target.
Turn your ‘should’ into a ‘must’. It’s not a goal until it is a must!

Never stop asking why or why not. You need to be content with watching paint dry sometimes.
The secret to wealth is gratitude – help people who have helped you.

Who is most fearless person he knows? Here’s a story.
He was judging a beauty contest. As part of her act, a contestant threw up a baton. It was supposed to come down for her to catch it – but it got stuck on the ceiling!
What did she do? She kept going with an imaginary baton.
Lesson: Don’t blame failures ‘out of your control’. If you have a goal, keep going. No excuses.

Ends with a ‘fearless rap’. The audience gave a beat. Amazing!!!

Nathan Martin
CEO, Deeplocal

Background as a fine artists, and metal band musician.

Think of how to solve problems without thinking whether about whether the tool exists.

The problem with expertise is that it limits your scope of vision.
Looking at things the way the are will lead you produce things that have already been done.
Look at something and ignore what you’ve been taught.
The Lesson: Think like an amateur

Dissolve the roles that you’re traditionally ‘supposed to be good at’.
The only way to be good is to be passionate.

Wants to make DeepLocal more like his band. Wants to learn from artists.
He has a ‘Corporate Artists Residency’ project.
Helps artists have access they wouldn’t have access to. Deep Local helps artists who come to them with an idea. A requirement is that neither the artists or Deep Local know how to create.

Think like a deviant
Run controversial projects and don’t get discouraged by criticism and threats.

Solve projects without technology if possible – always remember this.
Put the problem itself at the focus.
Being given too many tools to help solve your problems can make you overlook the simpler solutions.

Why Gutter Tech? Why should businesses learn from artists?
All the innovation comes from the outside world – outside of the office. The problems still exists there, and often so do the solutions.

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Video: Eric Mead, Magician
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Chris Guillebeau
World Traveler and Writer

Talks about crocodile farm experience. When he went, the crocodile didn’t act tame, as the leader said it usually does.
Similar incident with Killer Whale killing its trainer at SeaWorld.

Fear is like a crocodile or a killer whale. We don’t know how to engage with it, so we try to bargain with it – “I won’t take any risks or do anything out of the ordinary. In return, fear let’s you live your little life.”
But fear does not understand your bargain – just like the crocodile or the killer whale.

Going down the road of change, you don’t know where you’ll end up.
With a sociology degree, he worked carrying boxes in Sierra Leone. What was great about his job was that he always saw who he helped. However, this job did not require actual executive decision making.
Six months into his job carrying boxes, he got a significant boost in his position within the heirarchy of the company.

Lessons learned:
(1) Being an executive is not as easy as it looks. It’s hard to make non execs understand this.
(2) If you want to face your fears, you have to step forward onto the stage. You need to become the believer, not the cynic.

‘Permission’ is not given, it is taken. Its is not bestowed, it is acted upon.
You can’t ‘write the permission slip’ for someone, but you can help them see the life beyond that which is restrained by the slip

Hafiz – A Small Man Builds Cages for Everyone

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INTERMISSION 2-
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DS Company

Dance performance by Carnegie Mellon’s Dancer’s Symposium

And may I say, it was truly a FEARLESS performance.

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Video: Michael Pritchard makes filthy water drinkable
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Stacey Monk
Founder, Epic Change

Greatest fear: Not rising to the top and not being a leader.

Experiencing trauma can help you clarify your real desires – death of her brother led her to travel.

Went to Tanzania – met Mama Lucy Kamptoni. Mama Lucy helped many local children in Tanzania and created a school.
In Tanzania, Stacey was asked by Mama Lucy if she would join her in her mission.
Stacey came back to the U.S. After trying to go back to work, she couldn’t leave Mama Lucy’s offer hanging. She then founded EpicChange to help grassroots humanitarian changemakers.

Started the #tweetsgiving tag on twitter – raised money for Mama Lucy’s school.

Wanted to help the kids in Tanzania share their stories in their own voices. Helped kids use twitter and other social media tools to communicate with the world.

We are so caught up in our own voices that we sometimes forget the voices of those like Mama Lucy and the kids.
Our efforts to be leaders can make us forget to listen.
When we choose to follow, we ignite movements. When we are trying only to lead, we forget to have each others’ backs.
It’s not only the ‘leaders’ that can change the world.

What should you do?
Take your gifts and invest them in someone else.

Are leaders the ones who change the world?
Maybe not. Maybe the world can only change when we surrender our power.

Chase Jarvis
Photographer, Director and Social Artist

First film at age 6 – the Sons of Zoro
17 people came to the premiere
He knew it was good art – but he had a distribution problem. He didn’t have the mechanism. But now, we have it!

Artists used to have to get approval – whether it was from the King or the Pope, or a magazine or a gallery.
Now creativity has been democratized.

Artists are defying the old model.
In the old model, people held onto their ideas.
Now we are bombarded with ideas – to the point at which it is disruptive!

What about FEARLESS?
If you’re an artist and you’re not scared, you’re not pushing hard enough.
Had to quit lots of things.
For one thing, bailed on medical school. Also left a PhD program on the philosophy of art.
All these moves allowed him to call himself an artist.
After you ‘become an artist’, there is a second level of fear. Standing behind your ideas is not easy.

Sharing ideas can lead to resistance.
Sometimes information protects people.
But he knew that sharing was for a greater good – getting to the truth of things.
If you give ideas to the community, you are also likely to take ideas away.

You can have more ideas than you have time to implement.
However, there might be someone out there who wants your idea. And by sharing ideas you are promoting this symbiosis.

Set your ideas free. Will it work? Only time will tell.

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Speakers and performers all invited up. Again given gifts of art.

Closing remarks. Everyone comes up and adds to the blackboard behind the speakers.
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