Translator: Laura Pasquale
Imagine a meadow.
A nice, beautiful meadow out in the middle of nature.
Glorious, sunny day.
And on the edge of the meadow there's a forest.
And there's a path leading into the forest.
On the edge of the path there's a sign.
There's something written on the sign.
What's written on the sign?
Don't try to think of something clever or original or creative or witty.
Just the first thing that you see written on that sign is the right answer.
This is a kind of a diagnostic exercise that I do in creativity workshops.
I've done it with lots of different groups around the world.
Different kinds of professions, from different cultures.
And there are very consistent patterns that emerge in the responses.
Who had something nice and positive written on the sign?
"Welcome to Paradise," that kind of thing.
Not too many.
Who had something negative on the sign?
"Warning," "Danger," "Lookout," "Guard Dog on Duty."
"Private Property. No Entry."
About 80 to 90% of people have something negative on the sign.
And if you had something negative on your sign,
there's a very strong chance that somebody, somewhere in your life,
told you that you're not allowed into your own imagination.
It's a dangerous place. There are monsters there.
Nothing good can come of it.
A very very small number of people have positive things
and think that they're allowed into their own imagination.
So, if you had a negative sign, then I would suggest
that you would benefit enormously by cultivating the art of chutzpah.
Who knows this word, chutzpah? Who's heard of it?
Yeah.
Chutzpah is originally a Hebrew word.
It comes to English via Yiddish.
It often has a rather negative connotation.
There's no direct English translation.
There's no precise word that defines it in English,
so people usually define it by using illustrative examples
to describe what it means.
The classic example is the guy who murdered both of his parents
and then asked the judge to pity him because he was an orphan.
There's another example
of an old lady who is selling matches on the street corner, for 10 cents a box.
Every morning a nice young man would pass on his way to work
and drop 10 cents into her box, never took any matches.
He was a nice guy, he wanted to help her out.
He didn't want to take her matches.
This carried on for five years. Five years of generosity.
One day, after five years, she said to him:
"Young man, I really like you.
You're one of my favourite customers, but I've got to tell you,
the price has gone up to 15 cents."
(Laughter)
So, that's rude, right? That's inconsiderate.
It's socially unacceptable, greedy, pushy.
That woman had what a lot of people in the modern world call chutzpah.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines chutzpah as
"a behaviour, or a person's attitude, that is rude or shocking
but so confident that people may feel forced to admire it."
What a load of nonsense. What absolute rubbish.
That's like defining a tiger as a nasty, vicious beast.
It's kind of true,
but it's so much more than that.
So I reject this definition of chutzpah.
I think it's unfair.
And I'm here to give chutzpah a good name, to restore its good name.
The essence of all meaningful creativity is a nice, big dose of chutzpah.
So I define chutzpah very differently.
I start to define it by identifying what it's not.
There's an old kabbalistic story of two men in a mental institution.
Two patients who decided they were going to break out one night, escape.
And one of them says to his friend: "OK, here's the plan.
I'm going to go to the laundry, steal some clothes, blankets,
so we can be warm,
and I'm going to go to the kitchen, steal some food.
Your job is to check out the outside wall, the perimeter wall,
and if it's less than 10 feet high, we're going to climb over it.
If it's more than 10 feet high, we're going to tunnel underneath it, OK?
That's the plan. Right. See you back here in 10 minutes."
And they met up again 10 minutes later,
and the guy with the food and the blankets,
he saw his friend lying on the floor,
crying his eyes out, desperate, a broken man.
He's saying: "It's no use. We're going to be stuck here forever.
We're never going to escape.
We're going to be here for the rest of our lives.
There's no wall!"
(Laughter)
So, that guy definitely lacked chutzpah.
I define chutzpah as "refusing to be limited by imaginary boundaries."
That's a lot more than just a rude or shocking attitude,
and it's a very, very good thing.
We all have plenty of imaginary boundaries in our lives.
I heard online a radio interview from the BBC from the 1930s
with a Titanic survivor.
It's about 25 years after the disaster.
They were interviewing this posh English aristocratic guy,
and the interviewer said:
"What did you talk about in the lifeboats,
when you were waiting to be rescued?"
And the man said: "Well, nothing, really."
"Really? You didn't speak?"
"No."
"I suppose you were in a state of shock."
"No, no. We hadn't been introduced."
(Laughter)
And I'm not making it up, it's absolutely true.
Now, if you come from a culture like that,
then there are an awful lot of social boundaries
that limit your behaviour.
And if you have a lot of social boundaries,
as we do in Northern Europe and as they do in Asia, for example,
then it tends to bleed into intellectual boundaries.
There are a lot of invisible barriers in our minds
that we don't even realise are there, that limit and block our thinking.
So, there are really only two kinds of chutzpah,
broadly speaking: social chutzpah and intellectual chutzpah.
Having said that, though, within intellectual chutzpah
there are as many applications of chutzpah
as there are kinds of imaginary boundaries that limit us.
So there's business chutzpah, there's political chutzpah,
there's economic chutzpah, there's medical chutzpah,
there's climate chutzpah, there's even cultural chutzpah.
Business chutzpah is AirBnB. It's Uber.
They broke the rules that we didn't even know were there.
And actually, they were possible years and years ago.
We could have had AirBnB as soon as we had Amazon.
The barrier wasn't technological, the barrier was in people's minds.
Habits of mind. Assumptions. Conventions.
The way things have always been done.
We could have had Uber about 15 years ago,
as soon as we had WAP phones.
Again, the barrier wasn't technological, it was in our minds.
Political chutzpah is the hippie communes of the Sixties.
Political chutzpah is the existence of the European Union.
Political chutzpah is the Estonian e-residency initiative.
Breaking down imaginary walls that we didn't realise were there
until they were broken down.
Economic chutzpah is Bitcoin.
Economic chutzpah is the Euro, the existence of the Euro.
A lot of people said:
"No country will ever tolerate the existence of a single currency.
No country will every tolerate the loss of sovereignty
that comes with the single European currency."
Well, that wasn't true, was it?
This, this is chutzpah. You have chutzpah in your pocket.
Don't get excited, I don't mean it like that.
Keep it clean.
There's medical chutzpah.
Medical chutzpah is the Israeli guy who was crippled in a car accident
and Fate said to him: "You will never walk again,"
and he said: "Yes, I will."
And he built for himself a robotic exoskeleton,
so he could walk again.
And thanks to this one man and his chutzpah,
thousands of paraplegics around the world can walk again,
many for the first time in their lives.
Are we going to dismiss that as just a rude or shocking attitude?
If so, bring it on. I'm all for it.
Rude and shocking is good.
Then there's climate chutzpah.
Did you know, in the desert in Israel they grow fish, and they sell it to Japan?
That's chutzpah.
So, if you live in the desert and you have chutzpah,
what's the obvious thing to do?
Let's grow fish and sell it to a country surrounded by fish.
That's the obvious thing to do if you have chutzpah.
Then there's cultural chutzpah.
All art has a sense of transgression about it, almost all art.
But some types of art are a bit more transgressive than others.
An old collaborator and friend of mine,
a guy called Desmond Morris, who's a zoologist - this isn't Desmond -
was curator of mammals at London Zoo in the 1950s,
and he taught a chimpanzee to paint.
This is the chimp, Congo.
Congo did nearly 400 paintings, and Desmond exhibited them
at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London,
and he said they were by an "unknown young artist,"
which is technically true,
(Laughter)
and Picasso and Dali became two of Congo's biggest fans,
they even had original Congo paintings in their homes.
And then Desmond called a press conference to meet the artist,
and the curtain went back,
and there's this little chimpanzee playing on the stage,
and the art world went absolutely mad.
Artists loved it even more because they could see
the pure essence of what they were doing in Congo's work.
They could see the struggles they had
between the limitations of the form,
and the struggle to express what they wanted to express
within those limitations.
And the critics hated it
because they thought it was a joke he was playing on them.
It wasn't. It was very serious.
And Picasso took Desmond out for dinner in London,
a very nice restaurant called The Ivy,
a very smart restaurant, lots of social boundaries.
And they're sitting there, having their dinner,
and an art critic approached the table and said:
"Mr Picasso, I see you're having dinner with this charlatan, Desmond Morris.
Tell me, do you honestly believe this ridiculous nonsense
about chimpanzees being able to paint?
Surely, we humans are the only ones
who are blessed with the divine gift of art."
And Picasso's response was without a word.
He jumped up out of his seat and did a chimpanzee threat display
all around the restaurant, stamping his feet, "Ua-a-a-a o-o-oh,"
slapping tables, banging the walls, glasses are flying.
And he sat down panting, and he bit the critic on the arm.
(Laughter)
That was his way of saying that we're all primates, buddy.
He knew; Picasso knew that chimps could paint.
Desmond Morris, of course, knew that chimps could paint.
The chimp knew that chimps could paint.
But the art critic knew best. He knew. He was the expert.
He knew, chimps can't paint, because he didn't have chutzpah.
So, don't listen to the critics.
He thought, if it hasn't been done before,
it can never be done.
If that formula was true, we'd still be up in the trees,
scratching our armpits and eating bananas.
It took a monkey with chutzpah to come down from the trees
and investigate what was going on at ground level.
I can guarantee you, some mother monkey said:
"Oi, oi, where do you think you're going?
(Laughter)
Do you think you're better than us? Get back up in the tree.
This is where you belong. Know your place.
Don't stand out, don't show off. Don't rock the boat."
So thank God for that monkey.
How do you do it? Let's get practical.
How do you do chutzpah?
Chutzpah is not just a quality or a characteristic,
it's a thing you do.
How do you apply chutzpah in your life?
Because you need to: we're entering a very uncertain world,
and everybody needs to be more creative than they were before,
especially the decent, nice, principled people.
Unprincipled people already have plenty of chutzpah,
don't worry about them.
We need the principled people to have chutzpah.
So, how do you do it?
It's a very, very simple procedure.
It's not easy, but it is simple.
First thing you do is identify what you want to achieve,
what your objectives are, nice and simple.
Then comes the depressing part,
where you identify all of the things that stand in your way,
all the obstacles, all the barriers, all the limitations,
all of the "facts" that stand in your way.
Then you identify - this is the fun part -
you identify which ones of them are really "facts,"
and which ones of them are just "facts" that aren't actually true,
that are just conventions, assumptions,
habits of mind that can be challenged.
And you'll be very, very surprised to see how many of them are simply not true.
It just takes a lack of chutzpah to believe them.
And it takes chutzpah to stop believing them
and make a breakthrough.
Then the next stage comes, which is even more fun,
when you discover that so many of these facts are only facts
because they depend on other facts in your logic chain being true.
I'll give you an example of how this works, from my own career.
I had a client who came to me and said:
"We're a wind energy company. We make wind turbines."
I thought: "Oh, hello handsome! Ugh!"
And they said: "No, no, they're not that ugly,
they're not like these, they're quite nice, they're smaller,
they go around like this, they're quite nice.
We want to put them all over cities and car parks, and so on."
So we listed all of the facts that stood in their way,
and there are a number of facts that stood in their way.
Turbines produce electricity,
that's what they do and that's all they do.
That's a fact.
You can only make money from wind turbines
by selling the electricity they produce.
That's also a fact.
And in some countries electricity prices are so low
that you'll never make your money back from selling electricity.
Also a fact.
And in any case, people don't like turbines,
because turbines are ugly.
Two separate facts.
People don't like turbines. That's a fact.
And turbines are ugly. That's a fact.
So we started to challenge these facts.
First of all, turbines only produce electricity,
that's all they do,
and therefore you can only make money by selling electricity.
Is that really a fact?
It's always been true up until now, but did Moses come down from Mt. Sinai,
say: "Ladies and gentlemen, the good Lord has decreed
that turbines can only produce electricity,
that's all they're allowed to do; forbidden to do anything else."
No, not true.
They realised that if you put media screens on a turbine,
and if you sell branding rights,
then you can make a lot more money from that
than you can from selling the electricity.
This is an example of turbines
that the company is hoping to build in a location in Belgium.
So, the first two facts disappear, which means that the next fact,
which is "you can only make money from selling electricity,"
that fact disappears, falls away, simply dissolves into irrelevance.
And then the next fact starts to fall away as well,
which is that "people don't like turbines,"
because, let's be honest,
people like free electricity a lot more than they dislike turbines.
And in any case, even if turbines are still quite ugly,
why does that always have to be the case?
Can't they be made pretty? Sure they can.
There are people in the world who know how to make things pretty.
So this company, it's called Windfire, they went to Pininfarina,
the Italian design agency who are famous for designing Ferraris,
and they said: "Will you make a wind turbine look pretty?"
And Pininfarina said: "Mamma mia!"
(Laughter)
They didn't, because Italians don't really say that very much.
But they said: "Sì,"
and it took a certain amount of chutzpah for them to say "Sì,"
because they work on cars, right?
"Vroom vroom," you know? Fossil fuels burning up the planet.
So it took a certain amount of chutzpah for them to work on a product
which is the avowed enemy of fossil fuels, and they did.
And so they developed a pretty turbine.
And millionaires everywhere said: "Well, I want one of them! Oh yes, please!
Yes! I want that in my garden.
I don't even care if it doesn't produce electricity.
I just want one!"
Now I'm not here to sell you turbines although they are very reasonably priced.
(Laughter)
Not much more than a Ferrari, actually.
I'm here to sell you chutzpah, your own chutzpah.
I need you to have chutzpah.
The world needs you to have chutzpah.
Because I can't make any big changes on my own, neither can anybody else.
As I said, the world is already dominated by unprincipled predators,
so I and everybody else need you to get your chutzpah game on.
If you don't want to live in a world dominated by unprincipled predators,
if you want to leave behind for your kids a world worth living in,
then you need to cultivate the art of chutzpah.
Go back to that meadow. Go back to that sign.
Replace it with something more encouraging.
Replace it with something that says: "Welcome to Pure Potential,"
because that's what your imagination is when you know how to use it.
Go deep into that forest, and don't be scared.
You'll be rewarded with untold riches.
And so will the rest of us.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)