Transcriber: Annet Johnson Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
The movie "Love Actually" starts out with a great scene,
where even though it's sad,
it's an important one.
A young boy by the name of Sam has just lost his mother,
and he's twelve years old.
And his stepdad is trying to connect with him.
And his step-dad says,
"Sam, why don't you tell me what's wrong?"
And Sam says,
"Well, to be honest, I'm in love."
Sam's stepdad says,
"You're a little young to be in love, don't you think?"
And Sam, like all of us, responds with, "No."
And his stepdad, taken aback, says, "Oh, okay.
Well, I got to be honest.
I thought it was something worse than being in love."
And, again, Sam, like all of us I would imagine, says,
"Something worse than the complete and total agony of being in love?"
And Sam's stepdad says,
"Oh, no. You're right again."
And the idea behind this
is that we as a society can look at a 12-year-old little boy
and accept that he has the emotional capacity to be in love;
in fact, we don't question it.
We think we're quite silly when we do.
We think it's not our place to tell people their own feelings
and what they actually see themselves as.
So, as I started working with children in a variety of settings,
I began to wonder, Do we hold these same feelings towards leadership?
Do we place these same requirements on leadership
that anybody can feel that they're a leader
and be correct in that?
Or do we place requirements and prerequisites on it?
And what I found is
that we as a society absolutely place age prerequisites on it
much in the way you would on driving a car.
Now, this is my cousin Jimmy.
And it's incredibly unfair because he's always looked like Tom Cruise.
He's always been a very good-looking, very brilliant, just an incredible guy.
He's an alchemist.
Everything he touches turns to gold.
So, of course, he was going to med school to be a doctor
because he just wanted to add that to his resume, I suppose.
But so, one day he is going through his training in the hospitals
and he is visiting patients in their rooms,
and as he walks in, the patients say to him,
and this happens all the time,
"Oh, thank goodness you're here. Where is the doctor?"
Now, Jimmy was the doctor.
Jimmy is brilliant.
But the idea behind that is
that if we don't look at people as a leader,
if we judge them based solely on their appearance,
regardless of the training that they've gone through,
regardless of the knowledge that they have,
regardless of the capacity they have to actually change the world,
that we place our bias in front of what they're actually going to do.
Now, that was a few years ago,
and this is Jimmy now.
Jimmy is now a NASA trained, in-flight surgeon.
He is actually in Russia right now, preparing to go up in space.
He's been training with the world's best astronauts
and Navy Seals in places that I can't even tell you.
He's an incredible, incredible person.
So I doubt that anybody would look at Jimmy now
and say, "Well obviously, he's a leader."
But if he's a leader now
and he wasn't here,
at what point did he become a leader?
Now, I would argue that he's always been a leader.
It's always been who he is.
He's always one that grab's life and runs with it.
But if we look at him and say,
"Well clearly, now that you can add the word NASA on your resume,
you're a leader,"
than we miss the bigger concept.
This is my cousin Ellie.
And besides being incredibly beautiful,
Ellie is an activist.
And Ellie was told
that there are little girls around the world
who for whatever reason can't grow hair.
And she didn't think that was right.
So she decided to do something about it.
And when she was eight years old,
Ellie grew out her hair for an entire year.
And at the end of that year, she cut it off and donated it
to an organization that provides hair to other little girls who can't grow it.
Now, imagine being an 8-year-old girl,
growing your hair out for an entire year,
only to then cut it off.
And imagine the discipline it takes to do that;
imagine the maturity, the self-sacrifice.
Ellie, in my opinion, is a leader,
and she's eight years old.
Now, I challenge us to think differently
about the way we look at leaders.
And there are countless examples of people like this.
And just to show you that I'm not a narcissist
and only talking about my people,
I'll give you some real-world examples.
There's a girl in Canada named Hannah Taylor,
who when she was five years old
saw a man eating out of a garbage can.
Now, like any inquisitive 5-year-old,
she asked her mother what he was doing.
Why was that man eating out of the garbage can?
Now, her mother had to explain to her what homelessness was,
what hunger was,
and how not everyone was privileged like them
to have both a home and food in their belly.
So, three years later,
Hannah Taylor started an organization called the "Ladybug Foundation,"
which aims to get rid of homelessness
and get rid of hunger all across Canada.
Sounds like a great idea, right?
Two years later,
she had raised two million dollars for her cause.
She was ten at the time.
So I question us,
Do we look at Hannah Taylor at ten years old and say,
"Even though you're this tall, you're still not a leader.
Even though you're this tall,
you've raised two million dollars,
you're not a leader
because you're not quite big enough yet.
Come back in six or eight or ten years."
There's a gentleman in Sierra Leone by the name of Kelvin Doe
who was 13 years old when he taught himself engineering.
And, when I say he taught himself engineering,
I mean that he made his own battery at 13 years old.
Now, I wouldn't even know how to get started doing that,
but he did it.
So, at 15, he looked around and he said,
"Our neighborhood has intermittent power.
It keeps coming on and off, and we need to do something about this."
So, at 15, he made his own generator.
So now his entire neighborhood has power thanks to him and his ingenuity.
Now, what does this all mean?
Well, we as a society tell our younger generations all the time
that you are going to be the ones to change the world.
We've created all kinds of progress.
We've created a lot more problems in our progress,
and you're going to be the ones to pick up the ball, run with it,
and actually fix problems.
You're going to affect change.
Yet, we look at people like Ellie and Jimmy and Hannah and the others,
and we say,
"You're not old enough yet to be a leader."
And I think that's nonsense.
I think that stops growth instead of advancing growth.
So what we need to do as a society
is we need to change our perspective on how we look at people.
Now, in explaining this talk to other people,
I likened our problems as a society as a bicycle,
and said that our problems are like a bike.
The younger generation is on the bike
and they're ready to get going,
and we're pushing them down the sidewalk
but we're holding them back.
And they're telling us they're ready to go.
There are countless examples like Hannah and Kelvin and the others.
With things like crowd-funding, with social media,
younger people are getting involved at an earlier stage.
And with how impressionable youth are at such a young age,
if instead of saying to them,
"You know, at some point, you're going to make a difference.
At some point in your life, you're going to affect some change."
If instead of saying that, we said, "Here's some real problems.
There are things like homelessness and hunger,
and what would you like to do about it?
What can we do about it?
I'm here to help you. I believe in you, and I think you can make some change.
What do you want to do?"
If we do that,
then we will actually get some real change going.
And, in fact, if we can affect change,
if we can empower our young people,
they will go out and they will change the world.
And they'll do it in ways that are real,
they're effective,
and they're powerful.
Thank you.
(Applause)