Transcriber: Monica Ronchi Reviewer: Denise RQ
So I have a question.
How do we bridge the gap between cleverness and wisdom?
We live in an age of rapid invention and scientific discovery
when so much of what we've learned is literally transforming our world.
How do we balance
between the clever things we can do, and the wisdom with which we act?
For much of my life,
I've been noticing gaps and wondering how to bridge them.
The first prison I ever visited
was a maximum security prison in South Africa.
I was there to learn
about rehabilitation programs run by the inmates.
I walked into a room full of men wearing orange jumpsuits,
lying on the floor, meditating.
Twenty five young men, aged between 17 and 22,
each serving a sentence of between 12 and 48 years for violent crimes.
I went expecting to see a difference between us,
to notice something bad in them that I didn't share,
but that wasn't true.
Instead I met people who might have been my brother or my son.
I sat listening to stories of boys
who typically had very little love in their lives.
With depressing predictability,
they had lost their way, made terrible choices,
and done horrific things to other people.
I saw young men struggling to hold up a mirror,
to look themselves in the eye,
and find something to love.
And I saw myself in them.
Instead of the gulf that I thought we'd notice between us,
my deepest feeling that day
was a profound sense of what we had in common.
The work I do has taken me to all kinds of places.
From a factory in Shanghai,
where 20, 000 women sit in rows silently,
as far as the eye can see, making laptops,
to a slum in Mumbai that lies beside a river
so dense with filth that it flows very slowly,
like thick black treacle.
From a campus in Silicon Valley,
where engineers are creating driverless cars,
to a shack in Lagos,
where a single teacher stands before 100 children
in a school without power, without electricity, and without books.
Spending time with all these different people,
I often feel as if the gap is getting wider as the world speeds up.
We are ever more connected in so many ways,
but also the world is more disrupted and more complicated.
And at the same time, we, human beings,
we seem to learn very, very slowly
when it comes to our own compassion and humanity.
So we have a gap.
On the one hand, we have technology today
with the power to solve many of our biggest challenges,
faster, cheaper, and at a greater scale than ever before.
And on the other hand,
as we better understand our complete interdependence with one another,
so we come to realize how vulnerable we are
and how much damage we can do.
I love this quote from Rumi, the Sufi poet
written way back in the 13th century,
"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.
Today I'm wise, so I'm changing myself.'
What I'm still learning,
is that every gap I see in the world out there
is a reflection of a gap inside here.
And that in those moments,
when I can find the compassion
to heal the gap inside myself,
I can transform the impact that I have on those around me.
Neuroscience shows how we're wired for compassion.
Research on mindfulness shows
how the brain can and does change when we focus on kindness.
History shows that cultures advance, social norms shift.
Indeed, they can do so remarkably quickly.
So in a world of accelerating change in so many fields of life,
I think we need to imagine compassion on a similar exponential scale,
what I call CompassionX,
wisdom combined with the brilliance of human creativity.
That scale of transformation only happens when millions of people,
people like us,
choose to make a change in how we show up.
The idea of CompassionX has three steps,
and the first step is doing the work on the inside,
and it looks different for every person.
In my case, it's been a heavy question
that I've carried for years.
"Am I doing enough?"
"There are so many problems, so many challenges,
so much suffering, so little time."
"Am I making a difference?"
"Do I even matter?"
It took a very special friend to point out how absurd it was
not to mention arrogant,
for me to assume that it was my job to fix everything.
That every time I climb a mountain,
I'll get to the top, and I'll look out from the peak
and I'll see countless more mountains.
That to simply keep on walking is enough.
Doing the work on the inside is a lifetime's journey,
life, in fact,
with some welcome breaks along the way.
When the clouds part, I feel the sun on my face, and I know,
at least until I next forget, I know that I am enough.
The second step in CompassionX is meeting in the big middle,
all of us and beyond.
A couple of years back, I was in the West Bank,
visiting leaders from the Israeli settler movement
who'd built controversial settlements in the midst of Palestinian communities
that hated them being there.
I got into a heated argument with one of the settler leaders,
a woman named Miriam.
We had an angry debate, full of emotion and judgment.
Neither of us was remotely interested in hearing the other,
and every time she spoke,
I felt my brain rushing in a whirl to find a smart reply,
until I made myself slow down,
and I began to listen.
I heard what Miriam had to say.
I didn't agree with her, but I understood,
and in that process, I made a little bit of space.
Enough space for us both to move
from fury to disappointment, and fear, and finally to tears.
I couldn't just put Miriam in a box marked "other,"
and write her off as wrong or crazy.
We were not on the same page,
but I knew that somehow,
the intimacy we shared actually mattered.
So, in a world that can feel increasingly polarized and radicalized,
it's easy to focus
on all the drama and the violence that are going on out there.
To move from "we" to "they,"
to take myself out of the picture, where I don't have to take responsibility.
But the truly radical work isn't happening out at the extremes,
the radical work lies in healing the big messy middle where we all live.
It's about occupying the middle,
and overcoming the difficulties that push people to the margins.
Doing the work in the middle takes creativity,
it calls for generosity,
it calls for humor, it calls for self-awareness.
This is tough stuff to do but really, really important.
And the third step is about connecting the dots,
all of those magical dots, people like all of you.
A month ago, I made my first visit to Detroit.
In 1960, Detroit on a per capita basis was ranked the richest city in America,
and in 2013, it filed for bankruptcy.
Unable to keep the street lights on,
unable to clear the trash from the sidewalks,
with more than a third of its buildings vacant or unoccupied,
and with 60% of its children living in poverty.
Yet, what I experienced there,
just two and a half years after the bankruptcy,
was the incredible power of hope, and pride, and will.
In a single afternoon, I met with an entrepreneur
who is roasting coffee in disused factories,
with a workforce from the homeless community.
He's created a chain of local cafes
and is pushing to sell another million bags of coffee
to fund more of them in the poorest parts of town.
I met with a PhD student who's using big data
to create eco-efficient urban farms,
and with a former gang member who's running turnaround programs
for young people at risk.
I met with the leader of a major corporation
who is creating hundreds of new jobs in Detroit,
and I met with a young mother
who is working with 15 of the poorest schools in the city
to change the outcomes for children.
I was reminded that whenever I feel disheartened
by the gap between the clever things we can do,
and the wisdom with which we do them,
I'm probably spending
too much time following the news and too little time meeting people.
Connecting the dots is about seeking out, and amplifying, and scaling
the millions of examples of compassionate, courageous leadership
at work in every corner of life.
It's about the people who are the bridge.
We have a surplus, an abundance of great solutions,
we just have to see
how we can connect them even more powerfully.
So, doing the work on the inside,
meeting in the middle, connecting the dots,
isn't it impossibly idealistic?
To be honest this question, the idealistic one,
feels pretty daunting, very tough.
Compassion is a hard word to use in tough company,
but I think this a conversation we need to have much more of,
like a missing piece of the puzzle.
We have lots of issues to deal with:
climate change, migration, education,
healthcare, jobs, social exclusion,
the list goes on.
But the idea of CompassionX isn't a choice between being smart or being wise,
it's about combining the two.
Combining the phenomenal power of ideas and innovation
with our own lived experience.
Albert Einstein, a man who knew a thing or two about cleverness,
once said,
"Compassionate people are geniuses in the art of living,
more necessary to the dignity, security, and joy of humanity
than the discoverers of knowledge."
So I wonder,
can we bring the kind of focus to this question
that we're so good at bringing to other fields of life?
The paradox is that it takes thousands of us,
and then millions of us to change a culture,
and yet, this all begins with just one,
with you and with me.
Can enough of us live compassionate scale
in a way that changes the outcomes for society?
I hope so, I really hope so, because the stakes look very high.
We are the hardware,
we have the software.
Thankfully, we don't have to speed up the evolution of human nature,
we just have to practice what we already know,
starting with the only person I can actually change,
and that's me.
Thank you.
(Applause)