Transcriber: Queenie Lee Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Imagine putting all of your heart and soul and energy
into searching for your passion
and then running into a TED Talk with the title:
Don't search for your passion.
Why not search for it?
Are the things that we are passionate about trivial?
Is a life drenched in passion just something that we see in the movies?
What role does passion play in our lives?
Some people have trouble finding their passion.
Later in this talk,
I'll ask a question that anyone can answer in one minute,
and your answer will include the things that you're passionate about
even if you have no idea what they are right now.
Now, if you google passion,
you'll find people telling you to pursue it
by setting a goal and taking action.
And if that doesn't work, motivate yourself.
Think positively.
Looks like every motivational speaker guru that we know and hate
just vomited on the screen.
(Laughter)
Outdated belief systems and isolated concepts like these
don't cut it anymore.
It's 2016 and it's time to raise our level of thinking.
I want to tell you three stories about three of my passions,
not because I want to talk about what I've done,
but because I want to talk about what I was thinking while doing it.
My first passion was entrepreneurship.
In my mind, entrepreneurs were rebels and renegades
that wanted to change the status quo.
And I could relate, and I felt strongly about it.
My first business at the age of 23 was in property development.
It succeeded and then it failed.
And then I had no money.
Literally zero.
Then I discovered that zero is not as low as you can go,
so I got some credit cards and went into debt
(Laughter)
to fund my next big idea:
delivering education through this new thing
called the Internet.
This time, my company succeeded and we completed an IPO.
But it was a rollercoaster ride.
The funds were mainly lost,
I felt like I was metaphorically beaten up at least once a week,
and I'd lost an arm and a leg, but I made it across the finish line.
The bank account that once had no money in it,
now had a lot of money in it.
And I was faced with that moment of truth
where anyone has been in his position or imagines being in this position
asks this question:
has money solved all of our problems and made me happy?
It solved some problems, but there was still something missing.
At the same time,
I was working on a project called World Reconciliation Day,
featuring Nelson Mandela.
Told anybody that would listen that my three heroes
were Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
I spent the day with Mandela,
I gave a speech in front of him
and two former prime ministers and a list of other important people,
and thousands of people came to a concert in a football stadium.
But I recall when Mandela was answering questions from the media
about his lifelong struggle for the rights of his people,
it occurred to me that a lot of people think that human rights are important
but don't actually do anything about it.
So why is that?
Later that year, the stock market crashed.
The value of my stock fell by ninety percent.
So I lost a lot of money,
but I still had more than the zero that I started with.
So, did I succeed or did I fail?
Did it make any difference? What was the point of it all?
What should I do next?
Well, I decided to continue being an entrepreneur,
but my heart wasn't in it.
I was more interested in answering that question
about why people like Mandela
do what they do and other people didn't.
All I knew was that I didn't want to be one of the other people,
and I felt strongly about it.
And it led to passion number two.
[Passion 2: Helping people]
Now, what happened next was a process of elimination
that unfolded over four years and here it is in 60 seconds.
There's a lot of people in the world that need help, but who should I help?
Helping one group of people meant not helping another group of people,
so it was an important decision.
I decided that the world's poorest people needed the most help.
I found a report from the United Nations
that ranked all countries from richest to poorest,
and the country that was ranked lowest on the list but safe enough to visit
was Mali in West Africa.
The people in the North had less rainfall than the people in the South,
so I decided to help a village in the North.
Now, the village needed a million things, but my resources were finite.
So what should I do?
Well, at the time they had no electricity,
and one in five children died before the age of five
due to malaria and childbirth complications.
So I decided on a combination of solar power and a health center.
That's me in the middle.
(Laughter)
When I look back on the sequence of decisions,
I could see that I was always trying to answer one question:
what could I do that would have the Maximum Positive Impact?
Over time I thought to myself,
"Well, maybe all nonprofits should use this 'MPI' methodology.
Then I thought, "Why not all schools?
Why not all governments or corporations?"
I eventually thought, "Well, why not make it a way of life?"
Well, that was a more philosophical concept,
but I was at a point in my life
where I was desperate to break everything down
to its most fundamental level.
And it led to passion number three.
[Passion 3: Philosophy]
Now, if there was a philosophy buried inside of those three words,
I wanted to discover it by only considering
what I could observe and reasonably believe to be true.
And my thinking went something like this.
What does MPI really mean?
If it literally means
dedicating 100% of my time to saving the planet,
then the philosophy breaks down immediately
because living that way is not sustainable.
At the very least, I need to take breaks for food, water and sleep.
So what else does a human need?
Well, I found some answers in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
And I did some research and found some more,
and came up with this.
Life broken down into 21 elements.
I found research telling me
that I only needed 60,000 dollars a year to be happy;
that bad friends are as bad for you as a bad diet;
that being present and meditating would add use to my life,
and getting into flow, and expressing my individuality,
were all ridiculously enjoyable.
So if I focus on these elements,
I'm selfish;
and if I focus on saving the planet,
I'm selfless.
Is that really true?
Seems to me that if I theoretically perfected all of these elements,
I will end up having the biggest impact on myself
and the biggest impact on the planet.
So MPI on myself and MPI on the planet are the same thing.
And I do believe that we're all part of one organism,
so they should be the same thing.
OK, so let's test this out.
This is my life wall
on the day that I asked myself if money had made me happy,
and felt like there was something missing.
You can see why I wasn't happy.
Income is only one out of 21 elements,
and I overdosed on it.
You can see what was missing:
total lack of attention to everything else.
So this tells me what I should do, but why should I do it?
And while I was having this conversation with myself,
I thought, "Well, why do anything?"
For me the primal selfish and simplistic answer
had to be something like,
I really just want to be happy,
and everything else is just an act for the outside world.
So I want to imagine doing something that I think will make me happy,
and then I'll do it, and then I'll see if it worked,
and I'll use that information to see if I want to do it again.
So it's like an ongoing cycle of trial and error experiments.
But the interesting thing
is that I would always end up getting this information -
information about whether it made me happy,
how happy it made me,
how it compared with other ways to make myself happy.
Another name for this information: self-discovery.
Seems like important information to have
if at the most primal simplistic and selfish level
I just wanted to be happy,
and this is the information that tells me how to do it,
then my purpose must be to get as much of it as possible.
So my purpose in my mind was self-discovery,
and happiness was the reward.
So now I know what to do and why to do it.
What should I do next?
I mean literally, right now, while I'm standing here in front of you?
Well, my thinking was,
well, self-discovery seems to be infinite.
So it cannot be a destination.
And if there's no destination,
I have no choice but to enjoy the journey -
a journey that can only unfold in the present.
So I'm standing here enjoying myself.
(Laughter)
This is a trial and error experiment unfolding in real time.
When I get off the stage,
nature has pre-programmed me to make a mental note
about whether it made me happy
and which life wall elements it contributed to.
So there it is:
a very brief summary of one part of my philosophy of everything.
Now I felt very strongly about putting it into practice, but how?
Well, I imagined a new way of thinking
where success was measured by impact instead of money.
So I created a project called "iimagine."
Its impact comes from helping individuals maximize their own impact.
In order for it to succeed on the biggest possible scale,
I decided to make it totally free to use, and it has no profit motive.
MPI is its only purpose.
If people can use it to manage their life walls in detail,
people can also use it to rate
corporations, politicians, and celebrities,
and even ideas on a scale of negative ten to positive ten.
If you think that Philip Morris makes money by killing people,
you might give them a negative eight.
If you think that Twitter
facilitates the overthrow of Middle Eastern dictators,
you might give them a plus eight.
So what impact could this have?
Well, imagine one day in the future you get a job offer from Philip Morris,
you might think,
"Well, what's their impact rating?"
You might not take that job.
What happens if investors act the same way?
Well, eventually Philip Morris would deteriorate into nothing,
not because of government regulation or the influence of powerful people,
it would just happen organically.
People can also use iimagine
to crowdsource ideas to the world's biggest and smallest problems.
I kicked it off by creating a listing focused on reducing poverty,
by giving people that don't have bank accounts
but do have smartphones access to a digital currency,
whose value is based on the elements of the periodic table.
Now what about the MPI philosophy?
It also is part of the iimagine project.
Let me ask a question:
is this MPI philosophy a complete and accurate breakdown of life?
I don't know;
it's an abstraction, a perspective – my perspective.
But I do know that the world needs a new way of thinking.
Now, the old way to introduce new thinking
would be for me to convince you to believe what I believe.
The new way to introduce new thinking
is to bring together our collective wisdom from all of our combined self-discovery.
So I decided to make MPI the world's first open source philosophy.
It's the first opportunity for people
from different backgrounds and belief systems to come together
and develop a philosophy that reflects a unified view of life,
based on what we can observe and reasonably believe to be true.
So I'm not trying to tell you what to think.
I'm trying to tell you to tell humanity what you think.
So those are my three stories about my three passions.
Now what role did passion play?
When somebody tells you not to pursue your passion,
you're being challenged.
And it goes something like this.
A man in a gray suit appears out of nowhere,
and he leans into you and he says,
"I've been hearing that you're thinking about pursuing your passion.
I'll tell you what:
why don't you come back and join us on the production line of life
and would you pretend this never happened?"
Of course, you're not convinced, but he tries to convince you and he says,
"Life over here is good. Income is more reliable.
You're 92% less likely to get criticized.
Pursuing your passion - that takes courage.
Come back. All this stress will go away."
So it's like the movie.
Do you want the red pill or the blue pill?
I mentioned earlier that people like Mandela
dedicated his life to human rights while other people did nothing
even though they agree that it's a good idea.
Well, they agree that it's the important problem.
You might feel that way about my idea to reduce poverty.
You agree that poverty is an important problem,
but you don't feel strongly about it.
I could respond by saying,
"Well, people are dying, what's wrong with you?"
You should feel strongly about it.
But I'm going to say,
"It's okay because I know you feel strongly about something else."
Humanity is the ultimate team game.
If we all felt strongly about the same things,
we'd all be solving the same problems and ignoring the same problems.
If humanity held a team meeting,
I would say, "OK.
You take climate change; I'll take poverty.
Let's do this."
So what do you feel strongly about?
It doesn't matter if your answer to that question
includes things that are big or small.
But there is one wrong answer, and it's: nothing.
Your genetics and experience
have created a unique combination of things that you feel strongly about.
Doesn't matter if they're big or small, ridiculous or insignificant;
they all matter if you feel strongly about them.
And they all belong in your life wall,
and the combination of all of our life walls
is the life wall of humanity.
We all have a unique role to play.
Of the infinite number of things
that you could do to make your life wall look good,
it's the unique combination of things that you feel strongly about
that you actually want to do,
and by interesting coincidence,
it's the same unique combination of things that humanity needs you to do.
Now let's really nail down passion
because the idea of not even bothering to search for it
is still ringing in my head.
This is the Webster definition of passion:
a strong feeling of enthusiasm or excitement;
or a strong feeling, such as anger,
that causes you to act in a dangerous way.
The things you feel strongly about are the things you're passionate about.
The things you feel strongly about are the things you're passionate about,
and they're not trivial, and they shouldn't be suppressed.
And you don't need a motivational speaker guru
to convince you to act on them,
because you already feel strongly about them.
Nelson Mandela said,
"I've dedicated my life to the struggle of the African people;
if needs be it's an ideal for which I'm prepared to die."
What do you think when you see this image?
Are you thinking this guy should get a job?
Passionate people are behind every important moment in history,
and we live in the world that they created.
The theme of this event is passion, fear and failure,
and they're all related.
In most cases, the only fear is the fear of failure.
If you feel strongly enough about what you're doing,
your passion will overcome your fear of failure.
And the only way to truly fail is not to try.
In my case,
I don't have the security of standing here
and talking about how successful iimagine became.
It just started.
This is the beginning of act three of my life.
I don't know what's going to happen next, or how it's going to end.
Do I have any fear of what might happen?
Well, yes, it might fail, but I'm going to do it anyway
because I feel strongly about it.
Finally, my journey did not involve
randomly swapping out one passion for another;
each one led to the next.
In my mind, I'm climbing the mountain
and it's my passion that's driving me to do it.
You might ask,
what's at the top of the mountain?
I don't know,
but like all of you,
I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning
and I'm going to keep walking up the mountain
until I find out or die trying.
So my question for you is:
what do you feel strongly about and what will your impact be?
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)