Transcriber: Josephine Wilson Reviewer: Theresa Ranft
I mean we've all got a story we like to tell,
myself included, so here goes.
As a kid, I sang in a pretty decent choir.
We'd go around the world performing for popes and presidents.
But upon turning teenager,
I decided I was going to trade that in for a chance of being cool.
So, for me, this meant cigarettes, skateboards, petty crime.
I'm sure you can fill in the rest.
I failed miserably at this particular brand of cool
and then proceeded to become target 1A for bullies for quite some time.
Until finally, I found a path to relevance
by stumbling into a role with nearly universal high school importance:
selling drugs.
As I crossed into adulthood, that decision and those that came with it
nearly cost me everything in my life, everything I'd worked for.
But, as it happened, I was given a second chance
by a woman I haven't seen in 14 years
but who is out there in the audience today -
Justice Mavin Wong, thank you.
This is where my story begins.
I'm sure, no doubt, you tell yours just as well.
We are unbelievably skilled at telling our own story -
the progression, the adversity,
always managing to convey this sense of triumph in the present moment.
And often, there's a hopefulness,
sometimes even a confidence in what the future has in store for us.
We're like these master storytellers,
and we... we're our favourite story.
But our stories are going to kill us.
Already, I can tell you they limit us,
they hold us down and constrain us.
Sometimes they even suffocate us.
To their credit, though, at least they're consistent.
They all follow the same narrative pattern,
what we've come to call the hero's journey.
It's just that the hero's journey we see played out on the big screen
teaches us that change happens inside the hero,
while the world around them stays constant.
Everyone effectively waits for the hero to be reborn.
And every time I see this, I can't help but think to myself,
how beautiful would it be if the world worked that way,
if it waited for us to come around on our own time
to fully embrace our new selves,
and then step back into the picture
with both feet firmly planted on the ground.
Wouldn't that be nice?
It's not at all how it happens.
Instead, while we're out legalising same-sex marriage in one moment,
the very idea of a binary gender system or a two-spouse limit
is being challenged in the next.
I can assure you, what we call gay marriage today
is going to seem like a traditional idea to us a couple of years from now.
That's the world we live in.
We don't get to experience change as this beautiful arc
that moves at a pace we're comfortable with.
Change comes quickly and without pause.
And yet, studies show that our willingness to change
goes down as we age.
It's built right into our expectations of people at different stages of life.
We expect our friends to understand concepts like white privilege
but are satisfied if our parents can simply avoid stereotypes.
And our grandparents, I mean, we hope for the best.
(Laughter)
But sometimes we resign ourselves to the fact 'old dogs, new tricks'.
It's just that that's a card we're not going to get to play for much longer.
You see, unlike my dear grandmother, who's managed to get through life
without ever pumping her own gas or using a cell phone,
my soon-to-be 14-year-old goddaughter
will grow up with an incredible amount of technological change
happening everywhere around her.
And unlike our willingness to change, which decreases linearly,
technology's rate of change is exponential.
In fact, The Law of Accelerating Returns,
that which governs technology's rate of change,
is quick to point out that the amount of progress we saw
in the whole of the 20th century was effectively repeated
during the first 14 years of Jessica's life.
And what just took us 14 years will take us only seven more from today.
By 2040, when Jessica is 38 years old
and beginning to consider children of her own,
a 20th century-worth of progress will be happening multiple times a year.
Think about that.
What wisdom can we possibly impart to a young person
about living in a world we can't even fathom?
That's the nature of an exponential curve -
it takes a long time to reveal itself,
but when it does, almost nothing stays the same.
And though we prefer to talk about drones and self-driving cars,
historians tell us that it's actually technology's ability
to deliver us new ideas, which in turn change our behaviour,
which we most often underestimate and fail to predict.
We're not only slow to predict them, we're slow to adapt
because our stories weigh a ton.
Let me give you an example.
How many of us recall being nudged
towards a good career when we were young -
safe bets, like law or medicine or accounting?
These were the careers to aspire to, we were told.
They're also amongst the top of the chopping block
when it comes to automation.
Turns out machines don't need eight years of school
to memorise facts and patterns.
But will we seriously start teaching today's middle schoolers
that they may want to avoid these at-risk jobs?
Or are we wrapped in the warmth of a story
that we've been writing for decades -
that degrees always mean better jobs?
Better jobs lead to better pay, better pay to better possessions,
and better possessions afford us greater security.
But how much security can there be
if we're already spending two-thirds of our income on a single-family home
because that's our version of a storybook ending?
The truth is that the further we are into a story,
the less likely we are to want to rewrite it.
So we stick to the script.
Now, at this point, I think I need to go on the record
and tell you guys that I love stories.
Really, I do. I've got a company in the business of telling stories even.
But as we start to peer over the horizon, I think it's hard not to notice
that what's needed here is something lighter,
something easier to move,
something malleable that can keep up with the pace.
Like an idea.
What would that look like, do you think? The 'idea of me'.
Now granted, as far as psychological constructs go,
at first, the two seem strikingly similar.
The story of me, the idea of me. Almost like semantics even.
I want to make sure you're with me here
before I go any further down this rabbit hole.
When I talk about a story, I'm talking about something we write once.
But 'the idea of me' is something we rewrite every day.
It's untying ourselves from these goals we have way out there
that assume the world out there looks much the same as it does here today.
So letting go of what should be for what is.
So with that all squared away,
I'd like to tell you the most recent time I had to rewrite my own story.
It would have been just over two years ago now.
After about a decade in the industry, at least for me,
my partners and I achieved something
most entrepreneurs consider to be a benchmark of success,
especially in tech:
we sold our company.
We didn't just sell it to anyone, but to the next great chapter
in Canadian technology history,
a company whose IPO you might have followed this year.
I got to tell you, it's a pretty great story.
I don't think I could have written a better script.
Sure enough, so the story goes, roughly six months later, I was let go.
Who am I kidding? We're all friends here.
Six months later, I was fired.
(Laughter)
After a decade of writing my story as a tech entrepreneur,
I was fired by the top act in town. It's a long fall.
While it wasn't immediately obvious to me in the moment,
there was something beautiful about having the rug pulled out from under me that day.
Like a lightness that came from realising I didn't actually vanish
by virtue of losing my story.
That there, in the empty space, was an idea of who I might be next.
At the same time, it was deeply unsettling.
I found the switch from story to idea really challenged my sovereignty.
You see, my story had one author with veto power and final say
on the interpretation of all the events in my life.
When it's a story, that's kind of how it is.
We get to choose how we perceive those events,
and we do so in a way that best suits us,
that leaves the story as much intact as possible.
Got bullied as a kid? You pick the reason.
Got let go? Ultimately, you're going to decide why that was.
Stories force us into these either/or choices,
where either it fits the script we have for ourselves or it doesn't.
But 'the idea of me',
I quickly realised 'the idea of me' isn't built on an either/or at all.
It's built on 'and'.
Instead of getting caught up with whether we're a success or a failure,
whether we're right or we're wrong,
'and' reminds us that both are true.
In fact, all things new are born this way by standing at the intersection
and holding the tension between two choices that already exist
so that a third can emerge.
And it isn't just true for 'the idea of me',
this is true for all ideas.
When you start to tune into it,
you can start to see ideas being added to everywhere.
Gender, privacy, mental health, democracy:
take any one of these as ideas for a moment
and ask yourself whether you remember a time when they were simpler.
I know I do.
When I was growing up, gender used to mean boy or girl.
If you go back just a couple of years,
mental health used to only imply there was something wrong with you.
But then these ideas got bigger.
We kept adding to them.
They expanded.
Maybe the most prescient example from the past year is racism.
This is an idea going through an expansion.
You see, racism started out as a struggle for equal rights,
but the achievement of equal rights didn't dispel the idea of racism,
it just expanded the conversation
to include all of racism's less obvious expressions.
Today, when we talk about racism,
we talk about an idea that's many layers deep.
We talk about that which we can't always point to
or that's not necessarily propagated by any one group or person.
But it's there.
It's there in privilege.
It's there in access. It's there in protection.
We talk about racism as being systemic, a system we're all a part of
but only a fraction of us benefit from.
This is how an idea gets bigger with time.
And if, in turn, you choose to see yourself as an idea,
then hearing you might be the beneficiary of a still racist system is not a threat -
it's a chance to expand your own idea,
to add in that new perspective.
But if we're a story, we're going to find ourselves at an either/or impasse,
where either we protect the part of the script that says we're not racist
or we'll have a lot of rewriting to do.
Stories are how we've come to construct our identity.
And we're terrified to lose track of who we are.
But I've got to tell you, I think this is where we're getting it terribly wrong.
When you build your identity on a story, it becomes a once and for all discovery.
We even talk about people before and after
this elusive moment where they 'found themselves'.
But if you believe yourself to be an idea, then identity becomes a moving target,
a never-ending discovery.
Not just because the idea of you is always expanding,
but so too are the ideas all around you.
Every moment becomes this wonderful chance
to recalibrate, to revisit your relationship to another idea.
It's an acknowledgement that 'I'm not racist' is a temporary state,
just like 'I'm a capitalist' or 'I'm a feminist',
or frankly, 'I'm straight.'
This is the practice, this is growth, this is what growth is.
And so rather than fearing the fast-paced future
hiding in plain view,
why not choose to see it as the force bringing us into alignment
with the rest of life?
Everywhere we look, our systems are wired for growth.
From our words and concepts to the neuroplasticity of our brain.
From the evolution of our species to the universe at large.
When it's change out there, we feel excitement,
we feel a hopefulness about a tomorrow that is bigger
and more full and more inclusive.
We chase after it with our art and our science and our debates.
When it's out there, we demand change, we see the possibility for it everywhere -
everywhere except in the way we talk about ourselves.
Only there do we write the story once and expect the future to obey.
The good news for us is that it never does.
Whether an arrest or getting fired,
divorce, disease, the death of a loved one,
maybe a failure of some kind,
we've all seen our stories interrupted.
We don't write these tragic bits into the original script,
they're wrenches that are thrown our way that force us to rewrite again and again.
And I think that's what 'the idea of me' needs to be -
a commitment to that rewriting every day.
Not because we have to, because we want to.
Because we love to create, and it is infinitely easier to do so
without a story dragging along behind.
You know, Bob Dylan knew this when he famously said, tongue in cheek,
'Do not create anything' because 'it will not change' -
implying, of course, that the world might love what you make,
but you'll be different by the time they do.
As an artist, he refused to get married to his own mythology,
the story of Dylan, the folk singer or the voice of protest.
Steve Jobs knew this
when he continuously cannibalised Apple's product lines.
He knew falling in love with the story
that Apple was the best at computers, the best at phones, the best at tablets,
was a death sentence,
in that it meant the end was just around the corner.
He knew creating was an act of letting go.
And now, after quite a few rewrites,
and though sometimes kicking and screaming,
I'm beginning to see this for myself.
And I think it's something we should all embrace.
Because creating isn't reserved for artists and entrepreneurs,
it's the natural state in all of us.
All technology ever does is put that power to create squarely in our hands
because it knows something about us
that we're still not quite ready to admit -
that more than being our favourite story, we'd rather be our greatest creation,
an idea waiting to happen.
Thank you.
(Applause)