Transcriber: Bing Li Reviewer: Chryssa R. Takahashi
Hello, my name is Don Dodge.
I work at Google.
If you want to contact me it's dondodge@google
or if you're a Twitter user
you can find me @DonDodge.
So. Google is this amazing company,
amazing people, creativity,
where there are no limits.
Anything is possible.
I'll talk more about how we do this kind of things a little later.
At Google, we call them moon shots,
shooting for the moon.
Alright.
We want things that are 10 times better,
not 10 percent better, 10 times better.
And it takes a different way of thinking
and a different way of approaching problems
when you're trying to do things that are 10 times better.
The number one thing
that gets in the way of doing great things is fear of failure.
Fear prevents us from doing the things that we want to do,
that we know that we should do,
but we are afraid of failing.
So I am going to talk a little bit about failure
and how to handle that,
and how to break through that fear of failure.
How to unlock your inter creativity.
We are all creative
but it's suppressed by a fear of failure.
So I want to talk about how to get around that.
And lastly how to say yes to life.
So before Google, I worked at Microsoft with some amazing people.
And before that, let me go back in time, I worked at Altavista.
That was 18 years ago, it's hard to imagine now.
Did any of you ever used Altavista?
The first search engine?
God bless you, thank you. (Laughter)
At that time, we were the best search engine in the world.
We were number one.
It was not without risk though. We took amazing risks to make that happen.
My group, the group that I led, invented multimedia search.
So to be able to search for photos and images, to be able to search for music
or to be able to search for video.
Nineteen years later, that seems very obvious.
Of course, you can do that.
But let me tell you, 19 years ago, it was impossible.
You just couldn't do it.
There were a few failures along the way.
It was a very difficult job to do.
One of the things that we found was... well, two things.
Number one was pornography and number two was spam.
And we were innocent,
we didn't know that people would use this search engine to find porn.
Or that they would create all of these pages that were spam.
Spam means that you put pages in there
that say that they are about something and they are not.
They are about something completely different.
So we have to invent algorithms and technology to beat them.
To find the porn and filter it out.
And to find spam and filter it out.
This is very very difficult to do.
We created these algorithms to try to find the porn,
but they weren't always successful.
We were always missing some.
It was very very difficult to do.
So we had to have human intervention.
Technology couldn't do it at that time.
So we had interns who would come in to Altavista,
and they would spend all day looking at pages of porn.
(Laughter)
Interesting job.
But we needed to identify if it was porn or not,
and our algorithms could only go so far.
So we had these interns come in and they're looking at porn everyday
and they're saying "Yep, that's porn, that's porn, that's porn".
Okay, great!
After a week or two, we started to get a little concerned
about what would happen if they are going to look at porn all day everyday.
(Laughter)
This could be a problem.
So we took the people who were looking at porn,
and we put them over to the group that was looking at spam and identifying spam,
and we took the spam people and put them on the porn.
And we kept moving them back and forth.
There probably would have been some excellent sociological experiments
that we could have done,
but we were too busy trying to create this technology,
so we didn't really do it.
But it was an interesting time.
It was one of the most creative and amazing times of my life.
I've had the good fortune to work
with lots of interesting people and creative people.
Napster was another one.
Immediately after Altavista I went to Napster.
And we changed the world.
Literally changed the world. How people find music.
How they appreciate music and how they move on.
We thought that we were going to be what iTunes is today.
But we failed.
We managed to change the world but we failed in our objective.
iTunes could not exist today without Napster coming first.
We paved the way so that iTunes could exist.
And for that, I think okay, it wasn't a failure.
It was fun.
So how many of you used Napster back the day.
Oh, just about everybody.
Excellent, it was fun, wasn't it?
Too bad, it doesn't exist anymore.
Winston Churchill is one of my favorite people
and he has some amazing quotes,
but this one I love.
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal.
It's moving forward that counts."
Having the courage to move forward that counts most.
So in the case of the Altavista and Napster and even of Google,
we had tremendous success.
But success is not final, it's not guranteed.
You have to work hard every single day to maintain that success.
No one is going to give you anything.
So today, there are thousands of people all over the world
trying to do a better search, trying to do a better YouTube,
trying to do a better Google maps.
And everyday, there are thousands of people at Google,
who are trying to do it better and running as fast as we can.
That creates an amazing environment.
When I moved to Silicon Valley, one of the first things I realized was
there is a force field of energy around Silicon Valley.
It's the highest concentration of type A personalities, creative people,
brilliant scientists, that I've ever seen in my life.
And what it does is, it drives you to do more than you ever thought possible.
It pushes you that sense of competition and that collaborative work environment,
working with other people, pushes you to excel and to do things
that you didn't think you could do.
It's an amazing place.
After I was at Google for about six months,
my friends at Microsoft, and many other friends said,
"Don, tell me about Google.
It's such a stunning company.
How was it different, how do they do it?"
And I coined this phrase, "At Google achieving 60 percent of the impossible
is better than 100 percent of the ordinary."
And what we mean by that is those moon shots, that I talked about earlier,
we want to do things ten times better, not ten percent better.
And if in the pursuit of doing something ten times better,
a moon shot that seems impossible.
If you only get 60 percent of the way there, that's okay. That's great.
Because we would rather have that,
than have tiny little incremental improvements of ten percent.
So that's the way we think about it.
And it's fairly uncommon, most companies don't think that way.
So I'll tell you a little bit, oh... Let's go back in time even further.
So, if you were to walk into any first grade class,
and you ask them, "Can you paint?", every hand goes up.
"Yes, yes I can paint."
If you ask them, "Can you sing?"
Every hand goes up.
"Yes, I can sing".
It's amazing, they are creative and they are confident.
Ten years later, this is what was happens.
Ten years later you go ask the same students, "Can you paint?".
Not a single hand goes up.
"Can you sing?"
Maybe one or two.
What happened, what happened to these kids?
Well, the problem is we teach conformity.
We don't teach creativity.
We teach our kids to conform,
to paint within the lines, to do only what we tell them to do.
And after a while, it takes a toll
and that creativity gets back smaller, smaller,
and is recessed back into your mind, back into your brain.
We create these filters that don't allow us to be creative.
But it goes back even further.
This poor baby is totally overstimulated and overwhelmed.
And the problem is babies don't know. They don't know how to filter.
They react to everything.
Everything is equally important.
And all of these senses, after a while, it just overstimulates them
and they can't take it anymore and they cry.
So if you have a baby, you know, this happens.
Babies' first word that they learn, other than mom and dada,
the first word they learn is "no".
"No, no, I don't want that."
That's the first word they learn.
That becomes a problem later on.
It becomes a problem for parents when you are trying to do things
and they always say "no".
But I'll show you later why that's a big problem.
But adults do that too.
Adults get into sensory overload.
If you've ever been to Disney World.
I'll never forget the first time I went to Disney World with my two sons.
They were very small, and you are in a sea of thousands of thousands of people.
And there's music blaring, and there's beautiful sights,
and there's kids yelling and screaming.
And every kid is yelling "Dad, dad, mom"
and all ten thousand kids that are yelling dad, I think it's mine.
So I am overstimulated.
At the end of the day, I was exhausted.
I couldn't take it anymore.
I was overstimulated.
So even adults, we create these filters.
So we filter things out.
Remember Julian's presentation earlier today about sound and sensory
and how we create filters to filter things out.
Yeah, we do that. Adults do that. Babies do that.
And over time, we get really good at it.
So remember the baby that says no all the time, as adults, we do that too.
We sit home with our remote control in front of the TV
and say, "No, no, no, next, next, next".
We can say "no" 50 times in one minute.
Fifty times. We are very very good at saying "no".
But we're not very good at saying "yes".
So, I want to talk about how we overcome fear of failure to do amazing things.
How we unlock our creative inner self
and how we say "yes", rather than "no".
So the pattern matching, whenever you meet someone on the street,
the first thing you do before they even approach you,
you're starting to do pattern matching.
You're looking at their eyes, at the way they walk,
you're looking at if they are smiling or not.
And you are deciding right away, within the first second,
whether you are going to interact with this person or not.
On the breaks outside, when you saw people,
now we're all friends here, right?
We know each other, but when someone approaches you,
immediately in your brain you are doing pattern matching.
And you are trying to figure out, should I interact with this person or not.
We are very very good at it.
So, oh, I am behind, OK, here we go.
Failure is not an option.
The first time I heard this word was from NASA.
The Apollo Space Mission.
And when they said, "Failure is not an option",
what they meant was, we will try everything,
we'll try a hundred times until we get it right.
Failure is not an option.
That's the way we think at Google.
We will not fail.
We'll keep trying until we get it right.
I wrote a story about this, failure is not an option.
And I'll never forget,
an executive of a very large European bank came up to me after a conference
and said "Don, I read your story about failure is not an option, it was terrific!
But my CEO at my bank also says failure is not an option."
I said, "That's great. I love that."
He says, "No Don, it's not good.
When he says failure is not an option,
what he means is if you fail, you're fired, you're gone".
In that kind of environment,
how do you think we're going to get 10x improvements,
and moon shots, and amazing things?
You're not, because if you are afraid of failing,
and you are going to be fired,
what kind of goals are you going to set?
Achievable ones, very small ones.
And that's just not going to get you there.
So that's the big difference.
So what I want to do is help you to think differently about failure.
So, anyone knows who this is?
I'm from Boston, this is American Baseball.
His name is Ted Williams.
He was the greatest hitter of all time, the greatest.
In one season, he achieves something that no one else ever did.
He hit 406. It was stunning, and no one has done it since.
In case you don't know baseball 406 means 40.6 percent.
So he was able to successfully get a hit 40.6 percent of the time.
But what that also means is he failed 59.4 percent of the time to get a hit.
So even though he failed about 60 percent of the time,
he was the greatest hitter of all time.
So you need to accept a little failure along the way.
This is Thomas Edison, the greatest inventor of our time.
He invented the light bulb, he invented the phonograph,
he invented motion pictures.
And he said, "I haven't failed 100 times.
I have successfully found 100 approaches that didn't work
and I am that much closer to my goal."
Do you know what this product is?
WD40.
Do you know what it means?
WD means "water dispersant".
The 40 means, it was the 40th time, the 40th formulation.
It took them 40 times to get it right
Angry Birds, everyone has played Angry Birds right?
What you probably don't know is this was the 52nd game that they built.
Rovio built 51 games before this, and you have never heard of them.
But they had the courage to keep going to do something better.
Now this poor guy, he failed one too many times.
And if you end up like this guy, you are going to bang your head against the wall,
and bang your head against the wall, and eventually, you are going to die.
So in order not to do that,
what you need to do is don't make the same mistake twice.
Make a different mistake.
So when you're facing a fork on the road, don't go the one you've already been.
Go a different path.
I want to talk about dreams.
Do you all dream at night? When you sleep?
I think you do.
Some dreams you remember because they're so vivid and bizarre,
but others you don't.
And what's happening is all of the people in those dreams
and the dialogue that happens between the characters
and the places that they happen
and all of these amazing things,
that was you.
You created that in your brain.
But you did it while you were sleeping.
So what I want you to do is to take that creativity when you're dreaming,
and dream during the day, dream when you are awake, dream big.
You can do it, you have it inside you,
but you've suppressed it for so long that you don't remember.
Say "yes".
"Yes" is the most amazing word.
Remember "no" is the word that we learn first and we say the most,
but "yes" is the most powerful word.
So say "yes" to life, say "yes" to opportunity,
say "yes" when someone asks you for help.
Because by saying yes, you are going to open the door to other things,
other creativity, and other opportunities.
So I hope that you can feel differently about the fear of failure
and unlocking your creativity and saying "yes".
Thank you very much.
(Applause)