Reviewer: Theresa Ranft
Whenever we embark on adventures,
whether through travel,
learning a new language, exploring a different culture,
it can open our minds, it can transform us.
And there is a type of transformation which I think is very important,
that happens when we learn to choose
how we'll interpret our experiences.
So, the same way we choose a program on a computer or an app on an iPad,
we can choose how to process those experiences
and knowing this can have a great impact on our quality of life,
because we suffer a lot when we run the wrong program.
So this is what I want to talk about today.
I'll use some personal adventures to illustrate what I want to say.
I was born here in Vila Mariana -- it's great to be back.
When I was about that age in the photo, my father, who was a photographer,
decided to try his luck in Brasilia.
He sold everything he had and we embarked on our first adventure.
It began right there.
That was all there was in 1960 -- the "Palácio da Alvorada."
It was a great adventure, a very positive upward spiral.
My father did very well, his investments went really well.
He started off with a bar.
But despite its success he sold it,
and opened up a store of imported goods that was even more successful.
He was a man who had status, who had important friends in Brasilia.
He was the president of the Japanese community in Brasilia.
Life was great and I felt like a little prince in an enchanted life.
We'd go on vacation twice a year, thirty days each time.
My best friend in fifth grade was Oscar Niemeyer's grandson,
so I was always playing in their home.
In the sixth and seventh grades, my best friend, Bento,
was the son of the President of the Central Bank of Brazil.
Even Nelson Piquet, who then was just called "Nelsinho,"
would come to play slot car racing in the basement of my father's store.
I even had orthodontic treatment
which was something very unusual at that time.
But that enchanted life fell apart in 1968
when the military dictatorship closed the Congress.
We then embarked on our next adventure,
which was a completely opposite downward spiral.
My father went bankrupt, we returned to São Paulo
because it was a humiliation for him to stay in Brasilia,
and he had no credit, we were really in the red.
He borrowed some money from relatives and started up a bar,
a small bar on Francisco Morato avenue in the neighborhood of Ferreira.
There we sold coffee, bread and butter,
and, at night, alcohol for those who were already drunk
and were constantly fighting.
To my dad, that was no way to lead a life.
The contrast with our life in Brasilia was unbearable for him.
So, in less than a year he gave up, he didn't even try to sell it,
he simply gave up and abandoned it.
Then a family friend of ours
told us that selling chicken in São Paulo was a good way of making money.
He borrowed some money once again from the family
and invested in poultry farming in the neighborhood of Bixiga.
So off we went to sell chickens.
I still can debone a chicken in two minutes and a half.
(Chuckling)
But the trick was that you leave a little bit of chicken blood
on the weighing scales,
and that added up to about 40 or 50 grams on each sale.
So at the end of the month
you get from 100 to 200 Brazilian reais more profit on it.
But to my dad, that wasn't his idea of success,
and, to tell you the truth, nor mine either.
It was humiliating to be cleaning up chicken blood,
what would my friends back in Brasilia think of me?
And so my father gave up again.
And so it was this endless spiral until a day that I remember well:
September of my senior year in high school.
We were in a situation where we had very little food in the fridge.
I had 32 cavities and no money to treat them.
My father came to me with tears in his eyes,
feeling that he had failed as a father, saying,
"Enio, we don't have money to pay for school. I'm sorry, son."
And since I was at a school where you can only study if you pay,
I had to quit in the last year of high school.
And that was when our adventures split up.
Throughout my life, I moved from town to town 16 times in four countries.
So I had many ups and downs; I did well, I did badly.
But there came a point
when I started thinking about my father there in São Paulo
wanting that life we had in Brasilia instead of cleaning up chicken blood.
And what about me? Had I changed? Had I learned anything?
All those adventures, had they helped me transform myself in a meaningful way?
Since I didn't know the answer, I decided to meditate.
This time I went on a ten-day retreat
where you sit seven times a day, an hour each time.
On the fifth day of sitting that way,
they asked us to sit and try not to move.
I thought that was fine.
You sit in the full lotus position, I thought it would be easy.
But the problem is that after exactly 27 minutes,
my knees started to ache as if the bones were separating.
It's like your knees are on fire!
And I was loathing that pain,
thinking myself a fool to be there meditating;
but I endured it.
I didn't know exactly why, but I endured it.
Then the next day, the sixth day,
I had been eating tasteless vegetarian food for five days.
On the sixth day, they served spicy Mexican food.
I love pepper!
It was jalapeño pepper, but I ate it!
Finally, a taste of paradise; finally, some flavor.
Then in the middle of the lunch I realized,
"Damn! This pepper burns my mouth
the same way that meditation burned my knee."
It's like fire! It really burns!
Concerning my knees, I’d say,
"It's horrible, I loathe it, I don't want it."
Concerning my mouth, I’d say, "Wow, that's good, I want more!"
It's all just in my head!
Then I realized
that my father and I had suffered so much
with this wanting and not wanting, this is good and that's bad.
Actually, my father continued in that vicious circle
for 22 years,
wanting what he didn't have from his life in Brasília,
and not wanting what he had in his life at that moment.
He died after those 22 years,
depressed with a feeling of failure.
And I was thinking about my own life, had mine been different?
How has mine been?
My life has been like this.
I always have to put things on a two by two table to understand:
I want, I don't want; I have, I don't have.
So if I have what I want, I'm happy.
If I have what I don't want, I'm unhappy.
And if I don't have what I want, I'm unhappy.
And if I don't have what I don't want, then I don't care anyway.
My life was something like this, 25% in each of these quadrants.
I mean, statistically, I'm screwed!
(Chuckling)
What can I do?
But do we have to live this way:
I want, I don't want; that's good, that's bad?
And then I started thinking about that life of ups and downs.
If I could look at my own life from a slightly different perspective,
if I could look at those curves from above,
I could see that it was an interesting life!
I had washed dishes, I had been daddy's little boy,
I had orthodontic treatment, I had 32 cavities,
I had cleaned up chicken blood, I was a scientist at Apple,
I was an uneducated immigrant, I was an immigrant with a Ph.D.
It's been an interesting life!
So is there a different way to deal with my two by two table?
There are people who say
that the secret for happiness is wanting what you have.
Well, okay. It seems to work, but then things happen.
People who we love and they die,
we get sick.
Let's say you have an amputation, it's hard to say,
"Wow! Amputation was exactly what I wanted!"
(Laughter)
I think if I have to live like that table there,
it's better to be masochistic.
Torment me, give me what I don't want
and don't give me what I want, so I'll be happy!
Isn't that right?
But does it have to be like that?
Is there any other solution?
There's an image in Eastern philosophy that I love,
it looks like an LP.
For those of us who are very young -- it's where music was recorded.
(Chuckling)
There's a part that's recorded and a needle that reads the music.
Joseph Campbell, an American mythologist who inspired "Star Wars",
describes it as being a very beautiful mystical experience,
when people stop identifying themselves with the story of their body
and begin to identify
with the consciousness that fills that body.
It's a beautiful description. I love it.
But for a mere mortal like me, how do we experience that?
How do I get into this cosmic consciousness?
And when thinking about that I realized
that I don't have to be an enlightened being,
it's just a matter of focus.
I can choose where to focus my attention.
Do I focus on what's happening now or do I focus on what's inside my memory?
Daniel Kahneman, an economist who won a Nobel Prize,
gave an amazing lecture at TED,
and he asks a question which I also think is great.
Think about this next question:
let's say you go on a trip, you have to plan a trip.
At the end of your trip
you'll have to destroy all memories, all photos, videos, everything.
Not only that,
you'll have to take a medicine that will make you forget that trip.
Would you choose the same trip?
What's more important to you:
the experience or the memory of the experience?
As a person who sells artificial intelligence,
I like to think of ourselves as cognitive machines.
We're a cognitive machine that has a processor and a memory,
and we need both.
You can't function without them both; one doesn't work without the other.
Except that we can choose the program
that we run on this cognitive machine.
And there are some important types of programs.
There's one that processes new data
that enter the system through our senses.
This is one type.
There's another type that processes data in the database memory.
Then there is a kind of program that's dangerous -- I'm warning you.
It's the one that compares.
But the important thing is that we can choose.
We can choose the program that we'll run
on this operating system of ours, this cognitive machine.
Let me give some examples of how the choice may affect our quality of life.
I once went to meditate at an ashram in India,
and when I entered the room there was no bed, no mattress;
it was pure cement.
At that point, what do we do?
I can go back to my LP of memories and say,
"What's this, man?
I stay in the best hotels, I have an important job.
I even had orthodontic treatment as a child.
I won't sleep on the floor!"
Or I can choose a program that says,
"Sleep on the floor?
Let's see what happens."
There's another example which is even more difficult
because we want to record things.
I was in Istanbul earlier this year, a wonderful place,
but it's interesting to observe the tourists,
the number of tourists there taking photos and filming.
They're practically not experiencing what's in front of them.
For them, it's more important to return to São Paulo and say,
"Listen, I'm from São Paulo, but I've been in Istanbul, and you?"
And what about the experience?
So, whenever we have a new adventure,
they help us see how we're interpreting these same adventures,
which program we're running.
They help us see that cleaning chicken, cleaning up chicken blood
is very different from what we think about cleaning up chicken blood.
You know what?
Cleaning up chicken blood doesn't hurt.
I promise you. You can try, it doesn't hurt.
What hurts is what I think my friends will think
if they see me cleaning up chicken blood.
What's important is knowing that we can choose
and we don't need to be enlightened to be able to choose,
we just have to be aware that the choice of program that we run is ours.
So, as a scientist, I like to think in terms of cognitive machines,
but as a human being, a Brazilian at heart,
an image that redeems and inspires me a lot
is thinking about my father,
thinking that my father is up there
watching me now from a different perspective,
a perspective that helped him make sense of his own life.
He now looks at my life, he looks at those ups and downs and says,
"Look at Enio, he's having an amazing adventure!"
And with this image he reminds me
that I'm not just a trip that was recorded.
I'm a traveler!
And as a traveler, I can choose how I will run my adventures.
I can be the master of my adventures.
And the reason I do the work that I do
is that every time we prepare the individual to go traveling,
to learn a new language, be exposed to a new culture,
they embark on an experience
that can transform into an illuminating adventure.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheering)
Thank you, thank you.