CONFERENCIAS TED CONFERENCIA STACEY KRAMER

En una conmovedora parbola personal de 3 minutos Stacey Kramer nos muestra cmo una experiencia no deseada (aterradora, traumtica y costosa) puede llegar a ser un regalo que no tiene precio.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/es/stacey_kramer_the_best_gift_i_ever_survived.html Transcripcin en espaol Piensen, si lo desean, en un regalo. Me gustara que lo imaginen en sus mentes. No es demasiado grande... es del tamao de una pelota de golf. Concbanlo todo envuelto. Pero antes de mostrarles el contenido les dir que va a hacer cosas increbles por ustedes. Va a unir a toda la familia. Se van a sentir amados y apreciados como nunca antes, entrarn en contacto con amigos y conocidos que no vean desde hace aos. Van a ser abrumados por adoracin y admiracin. Pondr en su lugar las cosas ms importantes de la vida. Va a redefinir el sentido de la espiritualidad y la fe. Van a tener un nuevo entendimiento y confianza en sus cuerpos. Van a tener vitalidad y energa sin igual. Van a ampliar su vocabulario, van a conocer gente nueva, y van a llevar una vida ms sana. Y piensen quevan a tener vacaciones de 8 semanas de no hacer absolutamente nada. Van a comer innumerables comidas gourmet. Van a recibir camionadas de flores. La gente les va a decir:"Te ves muy bien. Te hiciste algo?" Y van a tener un suministro de por vida de "buenas" medicinas. Van a ser desafiados, inspirados, motivados y estarn agradecidos. Sus vidas tendrn un nuevo significado: paz, salud, serenidad, felicidad, nirvana. El precio? $55.000. Y es una oferta increble. S que se mueren por saber qu es y dnde pueden conseguir uno. Se consigue en Amazon? Tiene el logotipo de Apple? Hay una lista de espera? Probablemente no. Este regalo me lleg hace unos cinco meses. Se vea as cuando estaba todo envuelto... no tan bonito. Y as. Y luego as. Era una gema rara, un tumor cerebral, hemangioblastoma, el regalo que sigo recibiendo. Y si bien ahora estoy bien, no les deseo este regalo. No estoy segura que lo quieran. Pero yo no cambiara mi experiencia. Esto alter profundamente mi vida de maneras que no esperaba de las maneras que acabo de compartir con Uds. As que la prxima vez que enfrenten algo inesperado, no deseado e incierto, considerenque podra ser un regalo. (Aplausos) Transcripcin en ingls Imagine, if you will -- a gift. I'd like for you to picture it in your mind. It's not too big -- about the size of a golf ball. So envision what it looks like all wrapped up. But before I show you what's inside, I will tell you, it's going to do incredible things for you. It will bring all of your family together. You will feel loved and appreciated like never before and reconnect with friends and acquaintances you haven't heard from in years. Adoration and admiration will overwhelm you. It will recalibrate what's most important in your life. It will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith. You'll have a new understanding and trust in your body. You'll have unsurpassed vitality and energy. You'll expand your vocabulary,meet new people, and you'll have a healthier lifestyle. And get this -- you'll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing. You'll eat countless gourmet meals. Flowers will arrive by the truckload. People will say to you, "You look great. Have you had any work done?" And you'll have a lifetime supply of good drugs.

You'll be challenged, inspired, motivated and humbled. Your life will have new meaning.Peace, health, serenity, happiness, nirvana. The price? $55,000, and that's an incredible deal. By now I know you're dying to know what it is and where you can get one. Does Amazon carry it? Does it have the Apple logo on it? Is there a waiting list? Not likely. This gift came to me about five months ago. It looked more like this when it was all wrapped up -- not quite so pretty. And this, and then this. It was a rare gem -- a brain tumor, hemangioblastoma --the gift that keeps on giving. And while I'm okay now, I wouldn't wish this gift for you. I'm not sure you'd want it. But I wouldn't change my experience. It profoundly altered my life in ways I didn't expect in all the ways I just shared with you. So the next time you're faced with something that's unexpected, unwanted and uncertain,consider that it just may be a gift. (Applause)

Nigel Marsh: cmo abordar el equilibrio vida-trabajo con equilibrio?

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/es/nigel_marsh_how_to_make_work_life_balance_work.htm l
El equilibrio vida-trabajo, dice Nigel Marsh, es demasiado importante para dejarlo en manos del empleador. En TEDxSydney, Marsh establece un da ideal equilibrado entre el tiempo con la familia, el tiempo personal y la productividad -y ofrece un cierto estmulo conmovedor para lograrlo. Nigel Marsh is the author of "Fat, Forty and Fired" and "Overworked and Underlaid.

Lo que pensaba hacer era empezar pidindoles algo simple. Me gustara que Uds paren un momento malditos dbiles y hagan un balance de sus existencias miserables. (Risas) Ese fue el consejo que San Benito le dio a sus atnitos seguidores en el siglo V. Fue el consejo que decid seguir yo mismo al cumplir 40 aos. Hasta ese momento yo haba sido un guerrero empresarial csico: coma demasiado, beba demasiado, trabajaba muy arduamente y estaba descuidando a la familia. Y decid que intentara cambiar mi vida. En particular decid que intentara abordar el espinoso tema del equilibrio entre vida y trabajo.Me retir del mercado laboral y pas un ao en casa con mi mujer y mis cuatro hijos. Pero todo lo que aprend del equilibrio vida-trabajo en ese ao fue que me pareci bastante fcil equilibrar el trabajo y la vida cuando no tena trabajo. (Risas) Esto no es muy til sobre todo cuando se termina el dinero. As que volv a trabajar y he pasado estos ltimos 7 aos lidiando con eso, estudiando y escribiendo sobre el equilibrio vida-trabajo. Y tengo 4 observaciones que me gustara compartir hoy. La primera es que si la sociedad quiere avanzar en esta cuestin hace falta un debate honesto. Pero el problema es que mucha gente habla mucha basura sobre el equilibrio vida-trabajo. Las discusiones sobre el horario flexible, los viernes de vestimenta informal, o el permiso de paternidad slo sirven para enmascarar el tema principal que esque ciertos empleos y opciones de carrera son fundamentalmente incompatibles con un compromiso significativo en el da a da con una familia joven. Ahora, el primer paso para resolver un problema es reconocer la realidad de la situacin en la que estamos. Y la realidad de la sociedad en la que estamos es que hay miles y miles de personas por

ahdando gritos ahogados de desesperacin en sus vidas trabajando duras e interminables horas en empleos que odian para poder comprar cosas que no necesitan e impresionar a personas que no quieren. (Risas) (Aplausos) Yo opino que ir a trabajar los viernes con ropa informal no es ir al meollo de la cuestin. (Risas) La segunda observacin que me gustara hacer es que tenemos que enfrentar la verdad de que los gobiernos y las empresas no van a resolver el problema por nosotros. Tenemos que dejar de mirar para otro lado; depende de nosotros como individuos tomar el control y la responsabilidad del tipo de vida que queremos llevar. Si uno no piensa su vida alguien lo har por uno y puede que a uno no le guste la idea de equilibrio del otro. Es de particular importancia -esto no sale en Internet, no? Si no me van a despedir- es de particular importancia nunca poner la calidad de vida en manos de una empresa. Y no estoy hablando de las malas empresas los mataderos del alma humana como yo las llamo. (Risas) Estoy hablando de todas las empresas. Porque las empresas estn pensadas en esencia para conseguir lo mximo que puedan de nosotros. Est en su naturaleza, en su ADN, es lo que hacen incluso las empresas buenas, bien intencionadas. Por un lado, poner guarderas infantiles en el trabajo es maravilloso, es genial. Por otro lado, es una pesadilla; slo significa que uno pasa ms tiempo en la maldita oficina. Tenemos que ser responsables de establecer y hacer cumplir los lmites que queremos en nuestra vida. La tercera observacin es que tenemos que tener cuidado con la ventana de tiempo que elegimos para evaluar el equilibrio. Antes de volver a trabajar luego de mi ao en casa me sent y escrib una descripcin detallada, paso a paso del da de equilibrio ideal al que aspiraba. Y deca algo as: despertar bien descansado luego de un sueo reparador. Tener sexo. Pasear al perro. Tomar el desayuno con mi mujer e hijos. Tener sexo otra vez.(Risas) Llevar a los nios a la escuela de camino a la oficina. Trabajar 3 horas. Hacer deporte con un amigo en el almuerzo. Trabajar otras 3 horas. Reunirme con compaeros en el pub a tomar algo a la tarde. Volver a casa para la cena con mi mujer e hijos. Meditar media hora. Tener sexo. Pasear el perro. Tener sexo otra vez. Ir a dormir. (Aplausos) Con qu frecuencia creen que tengo das as? (Risas) Tenemos que ser realistas. No se puede hacer todo en un da. Tenemos que estirar la ventana de tiempo con la que evaluamos el equilibrio en nuestra vida pero tenemos que estirarla sin caer en la trampa de "Voy a tener una vida cuando me jubile, cuando mis hijos se vayan de casa; cuando mi mujer se divorcie de mi, cuando flaquee mi salud no me van a quedar compaeros ni intereses". (Risas) Un da es muy poco y cuando me jubile es demasiado. Tiene que haber un punto medio. Una cuarta observacin: Tenemos que abordar el equilibrio con equilibrio. El ao pasado vino a verme una amiga -a ella no le importa que lo cuente- vino a verme una amiga el ao pasado y me dijo: "Nigel, le tu libro y me di cuenta que mi vida est completamente desequilibrada. Est totalmente dominada por el trabajo. Trabajo 10 horas al da, viajo 2 horas por da. Todas mis relaciones fracasaron. No hay nada en mi vida aparte del trabajo.Por eso decid tomar el control y hacer algo. Me anot en el gimnasio". (Risas) No quiero burlarme pero ser una rata de oficina en forma no es ms equilibrado, es estar ms en forma. (Risas) Por ms adorable que sea el ejercicio fsico la vida es mucho ms que eso.Hay un lado intelectual, hay un lado emocional, hay un lado espiritual. Para estar equilibrado creo que tenemos que atender todas esas reas y no slo hacer 50 abdominales. Eso puede ser desalentador. Porque la gente dice: "Maldito amigo, yo no tengo tiempo para ponerme en forma; quieres que vaya a misa y llame a mi madre". Y lo entiendo. De verdad entiendo que puede ser desalentador. Pero un incidente que ocurri hace un par de aosme dio una nueva perspectiva. Mi mujer, que est en algn lugar entre la audiencia, me llam a la oficina y me dijo: "Nigel, tienes que pasar a buscar a nuestro hijo

menor" Harry "por la escuela". Porque ella tena que ir a algn otro lado con los otros 3 nios esa tarde.As que me fui del trabajo una hora ms temprano esa tarde y pas a buscar a Harry por la escuela. Caminamos hasta el parque local, lo pasamos en la hamaca, jugando a tonteras,despus caminamos colina arriba hasta el caf local y compartimos la pizza para el tluego caminamos colina abajo hasta casa y le di su bao y le puse su pijama de Batman.para despus leerle un captulo de "James and the Giant Peach", de Roald Dahl. Luego lo acost, lo arrop, le di un beso en la frente y le dije: "Buenos noches, amigo", y sal de su dormitorio. Cuando estaba saliendo de su habitacin me dijo: "Papi? Dije: "S, amigo?"Me dijo: "Papi, este ha sido el mejor da de toda mi vida". Yo no haba hecho nada no lo haba llevado a Disney ni le haba comprado una Playstation. La idea es que las pequeas cosas cuentan. Tener ms equilibrio no significa cambios dramticos en la vida. Con pequeas inversiones en los lugares correctos uno puede transformar radicalmente la calidad de sus relaciones y la propia calidad de vida. Por otra parte, creo que eso puede transformar la sociedad. Porque si hay suficiente gente que lo haga podemos cambiar la definicin social de xito de esa nocin estpidamente simplistaque dice que la persona con ms dinero al morir, gana, a una definicin ms reflexiva y equilibrada del aspecto de una vida bien vivida. Y eso, creo, es una idea que vale la pena difundir. (Aplausos) What I thought I would do is I would start with a simple request. I'd like all of you to pause for a moment, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence.(Laughter) Now that was the advice that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers in the fifth century. It was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40. Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior -- I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I was working too hard and I was neglecting the family. And I decided that I would try and turn my life around. In particular, I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance. So I stepped back from the workforce, and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children. But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn't have any work. (Laughter) Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out. So I went back to work, and I've spent these seven years since struggling with, studying and writing about work-life balance. And I have four observations I'd like to share with you today.The first is: if society's to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance. All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. Now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in. And the reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like. (Laughter)(Applause) It's my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and [a] T-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue. (Laughter) The second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us. We should stop looking outside. It's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead. If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance. It's particularly important -- this isn't on the World Wide Web, is

it? I'm about to get fired -- it's particularly important that you never put the quality of your lifein the hands of a commercial corporation. Now I'm not talking here just about the bad companies -- the "abattoirs of the human soul," as I call them. (Laughter) I'm talking about all companies. Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you [as] they can get away with. It's in their nature; it's in their DNA; it's what they do -even the good, well-intentioned companies. On the one hand, putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened. On the other hand, it's a nightmare -- it just means you spend more time at the bloody office. We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life. The third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance. Before I went back to work after my year at home, I sat downand I wrote out a detailed, step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to. And it went like this: wake up well rested after a good night's sleep. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have breakfast with my wife and children. Have sex again. (Laughter) Drive the kids to school on the way to the office. Do three hours' work. Play a sport with a friend at lunchtime. Do another three hours' work. Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink. Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids. Meditate for half an hour. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have sex again. Go to bed. (Applause) How often do you think I have that day?(Laughter) We need to be realistic. You can't do it all in one day. We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the "I'll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I've got no mates or interests left." (Laughter)A day is too short; "after I retire" is too long. There's got to be a middle way. A fourth observation: We need to approach balance in a balanced way. A friend came to see me last year -- and she doesn't mind me telling this story -- a friend came to see me last year and said, "Nigel, I've read your book. And I realize that my life is completely out of balance. It's totally dominated by work. I work 10 hours a day; I commute two hours a day.All of my relationships have failed. There's nothing in my life apart from my work. So I've decided to get a grip and sort it out. So I joined a gym." (Laughter) Now I don't mean to mock, but being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat isn't more balanced; it's more fit. (Laughter)Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life -- there's the intellectual side; there's the emotional side; there's the spiritual side. And to be balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas -- not just do 50 stomach crunches. Now that can be daunting. Because people say, "Bloody hell mate, I haven't got time to get fit. You want me to go to church and call my mother." And I understand. I truly understand how that can be daunting. But an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective. My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today, called me up at the office and said, "Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son" -- Harry -- "up from school."Because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening. So I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school gates. We walked down to the local park, messed around on the swings, played some silly games. I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe, and we shared a pizza for two, then walked down the hill to our home, and I gave him his bath and put him in his Batman pajamas. I then read him a chapter of Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach." I then put him to bed, tucked him in, gave him a kiss on his forehead and said, "Goodnight, mate," and walked out of his bedroom. As I was walking out of his bedroom, he said, "Dad?" I went, "Yes, mate?" He went, "Dad, this has been the best day of my life, ever." I hadn't done anything, hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation. Now my point is the small things matter. Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically

transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. Moreover, I think, it can transform society. Because if enough people do it, we can change society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like. And that, I think, is an idea worth spreading. (Applause)

Sheryl WuDunn: la mayor injusticia de nuestro siglo

Half the Sky" ("La mitad del cielo"), el libro de Sheryl WuDunn, cuyas historias impresionan, analiza la opresin de la mujer a nivel mundial. Slo cuando tengan igual acceso a la educacin y a las oportunidades econmicas en los pases en desarrollo utilizaremos todos los recursos humanos. As a journalist reporting on China, Sheryl WuDunn saw the everyday oppression of women around the world. She and Nick Kristof wrote "Half the Sky," chronicling women's stories of horror and, especially, hope

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/es/sheryl_wudunn_our_century_s_greatest_injustice.html El desafo mundial del que quiero hablarles hoy rara vez ocupa las primeras pginas. Sin embargo es enorme tanto en escala como en importancia. Vean, todos Uds viajan mucho;despus de todo esto es TEDGlobal. Pero espero llevarlos a algunos lugares a los que no han ido antes. Empecemos en China. Esta foto fue tomada hace dos semanas. En realidad, un indicio es que ese niito en los hombros de mi marido se gradu de la secundaria. (Risas) Esa es la Plaza de Tiananmen. Muchos de Uds han estado all. Pero no es la verdadera China.Djenme llevarlos a la verdadera China. Esto es en las montaas Dabian en una parte lejana de la provincia de Hubei en China central. Dai Manju tiene 13 aos cuando esta historia comienza. Ella vive con sus padres, sus dos hermanos y su ta abuela. Tienen una choza sin electricidad, ni agua potable, no tienen reloj de pulsera, ni bicicleta, y comparten esta majestuosidad con un cerdo muy grande. Dai Manju estaba en sexto grado cuando sus padres le dijeron "Te vamos a sacar de la escuela porque los 13 dlares de la cuota escolar son mucho para nosotros. Vas a pasar el resto de tu vida en los arrozales. Por qu malgastaramos el dinero en ti?" Esto es lo que sucede con las nias en zonas lejanas. Resuta que Dai Manju era la mejor alumna de su grado. Ella todava hace la caminata de dos horas a la escuela y trataba de captar toda la informacin que se filtraba por las puertas. Escribimos sobre ella en el New York Times. Recibimos gran cantidad de donaciones en su mayora cheques de 13 dlares, porque los lectores del New York Times son muy generosos en pequeas sumas. (Risas) Pero luego tuvimos una transferencia de $ 10.000, un hombre muy agradable. Le entregamos el dinero al hombre de all, el director de la escuela. l estaba encantado. Pens: "Puedo renovar la escuela. Puedo dar becas a todas las nias". Si trabajan mucho y permanecen en la escuela. As que Dai Manju bsicamente termin la escuela media. Fue a la secundaria. Fue a la escuela profesional de contabilidad. Busc trabajo en la provincia de Guangdong en el sur. Encontr un empleo, busc trabajo para sus compaeras de clase y amigas. Le envi dinero a su familia.Construy una casa nueva, esta vez con agua potable, electricidad, una bicicleta, sin un cerdo. Lo que vimos fue un experimento natural. No es usual conseguir una inversin externa para la educacin de las nias. Con el correr de los aos, siguiendo a Dai Manju, pudimos verque ella pudo pasar de un ciclo vicioso a un ciclo virtuoso. No slo cambi su propia dinmica, cambi su casa, su familia, su aldea. La aldea se volvi un verdadero

soporte de salida. Claro que por el momento toda China estaba prosperando, pero fueron capaces de hacer construir una va para conectarse con el resto de China. Lo que me lleva a los dos primeros y grandes principios de "Half the Sky". Y eso es que el desafo moral fundamental de este siglo es la desigualdad de gnero. En el siglo XIX fue la esclavitud. En el siglo XX fue el totalitarismo. La causa de nuestro tiempo es la brutalidad que tantas personas enfrentan en el mundo por cuestiones de gnero. Por lo que algunos de Uds pueden pensar, "Caramba, eso es una exageracin. Ella est exagerando". Bien, djenme preguntarles esto. Cuntos piensan que hay ms hombres y cuntos ms mujeres en el mundo? Permtanme encuestarlos. Cuntos piensan que hay ms hombres en el mundo? Levanten las manos, por favor. Cantos piensan... pocos... cuntos piensan que hay ms mujeres en el mundo? De acuerdo, la mayora. Bien, este ltimo grupo est equivocado. Hay, es cierto, en Europa y Occidente cuando las mujeres y los hombrestienen igual acceso a la comida y al cuidado de la salud hay ms mujeres, vivimos ms.Pero en la mayora del resto del mundo eso no es as. De hecho, los demgrafos han mostrado que hay entre 60 millones y 100 millones menos mujeres en la poblacin actual. Y eso sucede por diversas razones. Por ejemplo, en el medio siglo pasado, ms nias fueron discriminadas a muerte que todas las personas asesinadas en los campos de batalla en el siglo XX. A veces es tambin por la ecografa. Las nias son abortadas incluso antes de nacer cuando hay escacez de recursos. Esta nia de aqu, por ejemplo, se encuentra en un centro de alimentacin en Etiopa. Todo el centro est lleno de nias como ella. Lo notable es que sus hermanos, en la misma familia, estaban completamente bien.En India, en el primer ao de vida, de cero a uno, nios y nias sobreviven bsicamente en la misma proporcin porque dependen del seno y el seno no tiene preferencias por el hijo.De uno a cinco las nias mueren a una tasa 50% ms alta que los nios, en toda India. El segundo principio de "Half the Sky" es que, dejemos de lado la moralidad de lo correcto y lo incorrecto de esto. Y slo a un nivel prctico, pensamos que una de las mejores maneras de luchar contra la pobreza y el terrorismo es educar a las nias e incorporar mujeres a la fuerza de trabajo formal. La pobreza, por ejemplo. Hay tres razones por las que este es el caso. La primera, la superpoblacin es una de las constantes causas de pobreza. Y, ya saben, cuando uno educa a un nio su familia tiende a tener menos niospero slo levemente. Cuando uno educa a una nia ella tiende a tener significativamente menos hijos. La segunda razn tiene que ver con el gasto. Es algo as como el secretito sucio de la pobreza, que es que la gente pobre no slo tiene ingresos muy bajos sino que tambin los ingresos que reciben no los gastan de manera muy inteligente. Y, desafortunadamente, la mayora de ese gasto lo hacen los hombres. As, la investigacin muestra, si uno mira la gente que vive con menos de dos dlares diarios, una mtrica de pobreza 2% de ese ingreso va a la canasta de aqu, en educacin. 20% va a una canasta que es una combinacin de alcohol, tabaco, bebidas azucaradas, prostitucin y fiestas. Si uno toma 4 puntos porcentuales y los pone en esta canasta, tendra un efecto transformador. La ltima razn tiene que ver con mujeres que son parte de la solucin, no del problema.Uno necesita usar los recursos escasos. Es un derroche de recursos si uno no usa alguen como Dai Manju. Bill Gats lo dijo muy bien cuando estaba viajando por Arabia Saudita.Estaba hablando ante una audiencia parecida a Uds. Sin embargo, a dos tercios del camino haba una barrera. En este lado estaban los hombres, luego la barrera, y de este lado las mujeres. Y alguien de este lado de la sala se levant y dijo, "Sr. Gates, aqu tenemos el objetivo en Arabia Saudita en ser uno de los 10 pases principales en trminos de tecnologa. Piensa que podremos lograrlo?" Y Bill Gates, mientras miraba fijamente a la audiencia, dijo: "Si no utilizan a pleno la mitad de los recursos de su pas, no hay manera en que puedan llegar a los 10 principales". Por eso aqu est Bill de Arabia.

(Risas) Entonces, a qu se pareceran alguno de los desafos especficos? Yo dira, en el tope de la agenda est el trfico sexual. Y voy a decir slo dos cosas al respecto. La esclavitud en la cima de la trata de esclavos en la dcada de 1780: haba unos 80.000 esclavostransportados de frica al Nuevo Mundo. Hoy, la esclavitud moderna: segn las estadsticas aproximadas del Departamento de Estado hay cerca de 800.000, 10 veces la cantidad, que se trafica por las fronteras internacionales. Y eso ni siquiera incluye los queson traficados dentro de las fronteras del pas, que es una parte importante. Y si uno miraotro factor, otro contraste, un esclavo vala entonces unos $40.000 en dinero de hoy. Hoy, uno puede comprar una nia de trata por unos cientos de dlares, lo que significa que en realidad es ms desechable. Pero se ven progresos en lugares como Camboya y Tailandia.No tenemos que esperar un mundo en el que las nias son compradas, vendidas o asesinadas. El segundo punto del programa es la moralidad materna. El nacimiento de los nios en esta parte del mundo es un acontecimiento maravilloso. En Nigeria, 1 de cada 7 mujeres se espera que muera durante el parto. En todo el mundo muere una mujer por minuto y medio despus del parto. No es que no tengamos la solucin tcnolgica sino que estas mujeres tienen tres golpes en contra: son pobres, son de zonas rurales, y son mujeres. Por cada mujer que muere, hay 20 que sobreviven pero terminan con lesiones. Y la lesin ms devastadora es la fstula obsttrica. Se trata de un desgarro durante el parto obstruido que deja a una mujer incontinente. Djenme contarles sobre Mahabuba. Ella vive en Etiopa. Se cas contra su voluntad a los 13 aos. Qued embarazada, corri al campo a tener el beb pero, ya saben, su cuerpo era muy inmaduro, y termin teniendo un trabajo de parto obstruido. El beb muri y ella termin con una fstula. Lo que significa que qued incontinente; no poda controlar sus desechos. En una palabra, apestaba. Los aldeanos pensaron que estaba maldecida; no saban que hacer con ella. As que finalmente la dejaron al borde de la aldea en una choza.Le arrancaron la puerta para que las hienas pudieran atacarla por la noche. Esa noche haba un palo en la choza. Ella luch con las hienas con ese palo. Y a la maana siguiente,saba que si poda llegar a una aldea cercana donde hubiese un misionero extranjero, se salvara. Dado que tena algn dao muscular, se arrastr todo el camino, 50 kms, hasta esa puerta, medio muerta. El misionero extranjero abri la puerta, saba exactamente lo que haba sucedido, la llev a un hospital cercano en Addis Abeba, y ella fue atendida con una operacin de 350 dlares. Los doctores y enfermeras observaron que no slo era una sobreviviente era realmente inteligente, y la convirtieron en enfermera. As que ahora Mahabuba est salvando las vidas de cientos, miles de mujeres. Se ha vuelto parte de la solucin, no del problema. Pas de un ciclo vicioso a un ciclo virtuoso. He hablado de algunos de los desafos, djenme hablarles de algunas de las soluciones y hay soluciones predecibles. Las he indicado: educacin y tambin oportunidad econmica.As, por supuesto, cuando uno educa una nia, ella tiende a casarse ms tarde en su vida,tiende a tener hijos ms tarde en la vida, tiende a tener menos hijos, y esos hijos que ella tiene, son educadas de una manera mucho ms culta. Con oportunidades econmicaspuede ser transformador. Djenme contarles sobre Saima. Ella vive en una pequea aldea en las afueras de Lahore, Pakistn. En ese momento, ella era infeliz. Era golpeada todos los das por su marido, que estaba desempleado. l era del tipo jugador, y por lo tanto desempleado, y proyectaba sus frustraciones en ella. Bien, cuando tuvo su segunda hija, su suegra le dijo a su hijo: "Creo que sera mejor que tuvieras una segunda esposa. Saima no va a darte un hijo". Esto es cuando ella tuvo su segunda hija. En ese momento, haba un grupo de microcrdito en la aldea que le dio un prstamo de 65 dlares. Saima tom ese dinero y emprendi un negocio de bordado. Los comerciantes apreciaban sus bordados; se

vendan bien, y comenzaron a pedirle ms. Y cuando no pudo producir lo suficiente contrat a otras mujeres de la aldea. Pronto tena 30 mujeres de la aldea trabajando en su negocio de bordado. Y luego cuando tuvo que transportar todos los bordados desde la aldea hasta el mercado, necesitaba alguien que la ayude con el transporte, as que contrat a su marido.Por lo que ahora trabajan en eso juntos. l hace el transporte y la distribucin y ella la produccin y el abastecimiento. Y ahora tienen una tercera hija, y las hijas, todas ellas, estn siendo instruidas en educacin porque Saima sabe qu importa realmente. Lo que me lleva al elemento final, que es la educacin. Larry Summers, cuando fue jefe economista del Banco Mundial, una vez dijo que "Es muy posible que el mayor retorno de la inversin en el mundo en desarrollo sea la educacin de las nias". Djenme contarles acerca de Beatrice Biira. Beatrice viva en Uganda cerca de la frontera con el Congo y, como Dai Manju, no iba a la escuela. En realidad, nunca haba ido a la escuela ni un poquito, jams. Sus padres, otra vez, decan: "Por qu habramos de gastar dinero en ella? Se pasar gran parte de su vida acarreando agua de un lado a otro". Bien, da la casualidad que en ese entonces haba un grupo en Connecticut llamado Niantic Community Church Group, en Connecticut. Ellos donaron a una organizacin con sede en Arkansasllamada Heifer International. Heifer envi dos cabras a frica. Una de ellas acab en lo de los padres de Beatrice. Y esa cabra tuvo mellizas. Las mellizas comenzaron a producir leche. Vendieron la leche por dinero. El dinero comenz a acumularse, y muy pronto los padres dijeron: "Ya saben, tenemos suficiente dinero. Enviemos a Beatrice a la escuela".As que a los nueve aos Beatrice comenz primer grado, despus de todo, ella nunca haba ido a la escuela, con nios de 6 aos. No importaba, ella estaba encantada de ir a la escuela. Ella lleg a la cima de su clase. Permaneci en la cima de su clase en la primaria, en la escuela intermedia, y luego en la secundaria, sac notas excelentes a nivel nacional por lo que fue la primera en su aldea, en venir a los Estados Unidos con una beca escolar. Hace dos aos se gradu en la universidad de Connecticut. El da de su graduacin dijo: "Soy la chica con vida ms afortunada gracias a una cabra". (Risas) Y esa cabra cost $120. As que vean lo transformadora que puede ser una pequea ayuda. Pero quiero darles un bao de realidad. Miren: ayuda de EE.UU., ayudar a la gente no es fcil. Y ha habido libros que criticaron la ayuda de EE.UU. Est el libro de Bill Easterly. Hay un libro llamado "Dead Aid". Ya saben, la crtica es bastante; no es fcil. La gente dice cmo la mitad de los proyectos de pozos de agua, un ao despus, fracasaron. Cuando estuve en Zimbabwe,estbamos recorriendo un lugar con el jefe de la aldea, quera recaudar dinero para una escuela secundaria, y haba una construccin a pocos metros de distancia y yo le dije: "Qu es eso?" l en cierto modo murmur. Resulta que es un proyecto de irrigacin fallido. A pocos metros de all haba una cooperativa avcola fallida. Un ao, todos los pollos murieron, y nadie quera poner los pollos all. Es cierto, pero pensamos que uno no baa el beb con el agua del bao; uno en realidad mejora. Uno aprende de los errores y mejora constantemente. Pensamos que los individuos pueden marcar una diferencia, y deberan hacerlo, porque los individuos juntos podemos ayudar a crear un movimiento. Y movimientos de hombres y mujeres es lo que se necesita para producir cambios sociales, cambios que se ocuparnde este gran desafo moral. Entonces, pregunto: cmo se ven en esto? Probablemente se estn preguntando eso: por qu debera importarme? Yo slo les digo dos cosas. Una de ellas es que la investigacin muestra que una vez que han cubierto todas las necesidades materiales muchos de nosotros, todos nosotros en esta sala, la investigacin muestra quehay muy pocas cosas en la vida que pueden elevar nuestro nivel de felicidad. Una de esas cosas es contribuir a una causa ms grande que uno mismo.

Y la segunda cosa. Es una ancdota que les dejo. Y es la historia de una trabajadora humanitaria en Darfur. Esta es una mujer que trabajaba en Darfur y vea cosas que ningn humano debera ver. Durante su estancia all ella fue fuerte, ella se mantuvo firme. Nunca se venci. Y luego regres a Estados Unidos y estaba de vacaciones, vacaciones de Navidad.Estaba en el patio trasero de su abuela, y vio algo que la hizo romper en llanto. Lo que viofue un comedero para pjaros. Y se dio cuenta que tuvo la gran suerte de haber nacido en un pas en el que damos por sentada la seguridad en el que no slo podemos alimentarnos, vestirnos y tener casa para nostros mismos sino que adems se la damos a los pjaros silvestres para que no pasen hambre en el invierno. Y se dio cuenta que con esa gran suerte viene una gran responsabilidad. Y as, como ella, Uds, yo, todos hemos ganado la lotera de la vida. Y entonces la pregunta se convierte en: cmo cumplimos con esa responsabilidad? Por lo tanto, aqu est la causa. nanse al movimiento. Sintanse ms felices y ayuden a salvar el mundo. Muchas gracias. (Aplausos) The global challenge that I want to talk to you about today rarely makes the front pages. It, however, is enormous in both scale and importance. Look, you all are very well traveled; this is TEDGlobal after all. But I do hope to take you to some places you've never been to before. So, let's start off in China. This photo was taken two weeks ago. Actually, one indication is that little boy on my husband's shoulders has just graduated from high school. (Laughter)But this is Tiananmen Square. Many of you have been there. It's not the real China. Let me take you to the real China. This is in the Dabian Mountains in the remote part of Hubei province in central China. Dai Manju is 13 years old at the time the story starts. She lives with her parents, her two brothers and her great-aunt. They have a hut that has no electricity, no running water, no wristwatch, no bicycle. And they share this great splendorwith a very large pig. Dai Manju was in sixth grade when her parents said, "We're going to pull you out of school because the 13-dollar school fees are too much for us. You're going to be spending the rest of your life in the rice paddies. Why would we waste this money on you?" This is what happens to girls in remote areas. Turns out that Dai Manju was the best pupil in her grade. She still made the two-hour trek to the schoolhouse and tried to catch every little bit of information that seeped out of the doors.We wrote about her in The New York Times. We got a flood of donations -- mostly 13-dollar checks because New York Times readers are very generous in tiny amounts (Laughter) but then, we got a money transfer for $10,000 -- really nice guy. We turned the money over to that man there, the principal of the school. He was delighted. He thought, "Oh, I can renovate the school. I can give scholarships to all the girls, you know, if they work hard and stay in school. So Dai Manju basically finished out middle school. She went to high school.She went to vocational school for accounting. She scouted for jobs down in Guangdong province in the south. She found a job, she scouted for jobs for her classmates and her friends. She sent money back to her family. They built a new house, this time with running water, electricity, a bicycle, no pig. What we saw was a natural experiment. It is rare to get an exogenous investment in girls' education. And over the years, as we followed Dai Manju, we were able to see that she was able to move out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle. She not only changed her own dynamic, she changed her household, she changed her family, her village. The village became a real standout. Of course, most of China was flourishing at the time, but they were able to get a road built to link them up to the rest of China. And that brings me to my first major of two tenets of "Half the Sky." And that is that the central moral challenge of this century is gender inequity. In the 19th century, it was

slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. The cause of our time is the brutality that so many people face around the world because of their gender. So some of you may be thinking, "Gosh, that's hyperbole. She's exaggerating." Well, let me ask you this question.How many of you think there are more males or more females in the world? Let me take a poll. How many of you think there are more males in the world? Hands up, please. How many of you think -- a few -- how many of you there are more females in the world? Okay, most of you. Well, you know this latter group, you're wrong. There are, true enough, in Europe and the West, when women and men have equal access to food and health care,there are more women, we live longer. But in most of the rest of the world, that's not the case. In fact, demographers have shown that there are anywhere between 60 million and 100 million missing females in the current population. And, you know, it happens for several reasons. For instance, in the last half-century, more girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on all the battlefields in the 20th century. Sometimes it's also because of the sonogram. Girls get aborted before they're even born when there are scarce resources. This girl here, for instance, is in a feeding center in Ethiopia. The entire center was filled with girls like her. What's remarkable is that her brothers, in the same family, were totally fine. In India, in the first year of life, from zero to one, boy and girl babies basically survive at the same rate because they depend upon the breast, and the breast shows no son preference. From one to five, girls die at a 50 percent higher mortality rate than boys, in all of India. The second tenet of "Half the Sky" is that, let's put aside the morality of all the right and wrong of it all, and just on a purely practical level, we think that one of the best ways to fight poverty and to fight terrorism is to educate girls and to bring women into the formal labor force. Poverty, for instance. There are three reasons why this is the case. For one, overpopulation is one of the persistent causes of poverty. And you know, when you educate a boy, his family tends to have fewer kids, but only slightly. When you educate a girl, she tends to have significantly fewer kids. The second reason is it has to do with spending. It's kind of like the dirty, little secret of poverty, which is that, not only do poor people take in very little income, but also, the income that they take in, they don't spend it very wisely, and unfortunately, most of that spending is done by men. So research has shown, if you look at people who live under two dollars a day -- one metric of poverty -- two percent of that take-home pay goes to this basket here, in education. 20 percent goes to a basket that is a combination of alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks -- and prostitution and festivals. If you just take four percentage points and put it into this basket, you would have a transformative effect. The last reason has to do with women being part of the solution, not the problem. You need to use scarce resources. It's a waste of resources if you don't use someone like Dai Manju.Bill Gates put it very well when he was traveling through Saudi Arabia. He was speaking to an audience much like yourselves. However, two-thirds of the way there was a barrier. On this side was men, and then the barrier, and this side was women. And someone from this side of the room got up and said, "Mr. Gates, we have here as our goal in Saudi Arabia to be one of the top 10 countries when it comes to technology. Do you think we'll make it?" So Bill Gates, as he was staring out at the audience, he said, "If you're not fully utilizing half the resources in your country, there is no way you will get anywhere near the top 10." So here is Bill of Arabia. (Laughter) So what would some of the specific challenges look like? I would say, on the top of the agenda is sex trafficking. And I'll just say two things about this. The slavery at the peak of the slave trade in the 1780s: there were about 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World. Now, modern slavery: according to State Department rough statistics, there are about 800,000 -- 10 times the number -- that are trafficked across international borders. And that does not even include those that are trafficked within country

borders, which is a substantial portion. And if you look at another factor, another contrast, a slave back then is worth about $40,000 in today's money. Today, you can buy a girl trafficked for a few hundred dollars, which means she's actually more disposable. But you know, there is progress being made in places like Cambodia and Thailand. We don't have to expect a world where girls are bought and sold or killed. The second item on the agenda is maternal mortality. You know, childbirth in this part of the world is a wonderful event. In Niger, one in seven women can expect to die during childbirth.Around the world, one woman dies every minute and a half from childbirth. You know, it's not as though we don't have the technological solution, but these women have three strikes against them: they are poor, they are rural and they are female. You know, for every woman who does die, there are 20 who survive but end up with an injury. And the most devastating injury is obstetric fistula. It's a tearing during obstructed labor that leaves a woman incontinent. Let me tell you about Mahabuba. She lives in Ethiopia. She was married against her will at age 13. She got pregnant, ran to the bush to have the baby, but you know, her body was very immature, and she ended up having obstructed labor. The baby died, and she ended up with a fistula. So that meant she was incontinent; she couldn't control her wastes. In a word, she stank. The villagers thought she was cursed; they didn't know what to do with her.So finally, they put her at the edge of the village in a hut. They ripped off the door so that the hyenas would get her at night. That night, there was a stick in the hut. She fought off the hyenas with that stick. And the next morning, she knew if she could get to a nearby village where there was a foreign missionary, she would be saved. Because she had some damage to her nerves, she crawled all the way -- 30 miles -- to that doorstep, half dead. The foreign missionary opened the door, knew exactly what had happened, took her to a nearby fistula hospital in Addis Ababa, and she was repaired with a 350-dollar operation. The doctors and nurses there noticed that she was not only a survivor, she was really clever, and they made her a nurse. So now, Mahabuba, she is saving the lives of hundreds, thousands, of women.She has become part of the solution, not the problem. She's moved out of a vicious cycleand into a virtuous cycle. I've talked about some of the challenges, let me talk about some of the solutions, and there are predictable solutions. I've hinted at them: education and also economic opportunity. So of course, when you educate a girl, she tends to get married later on in life, she tends to have kids later on in life, she tends to have fewer kids, and those kids that she does have,she educates them in a more enlightened fashion. With economic opportunity, it can be transformative. Let me tell you about Saima. She lives in a small village outside Lahore, Pakistan. And at the time, she was miserable. She was beaten every single day by her husband, who was unemployed. He was kind of a gambler type -- and unemployable, therefore -- and took his frustrations out on her. Well, when she had her second daughter, her mother in-law told her son, "I think you'd better get a second wife. Saima's not going to produce you a son." This is when she had her second daughter. At the time, there was a microlending group in the village that gave her a 65-dollar loan. Saima took that money, and she started an embroidery business. The merchants liked her embroidery; it sold very well, and they kept asking for more. And when she couldn't produce enough, she hired other women in the village. Pretty soon she had 30 women in the village working for her embroidery business.And then, when she had to transport all of the embroidery goods from the village to the marketplace, she needed someone to help her do the transport, so she hired her husband.So now they're in it together. He does the transportation and distribution, and she does the production and sourcing. And now they have a third daughter, and the daughters, all of them, are being tutored in education because Saima knows what's really important. Which brings me to the final element, which is education. Larry Summers, when he was chief economist at the World Bank, once said that, "It may well be that the highest return

on investment in the developing world is in girls' education." Let me tell you about Beatrice Biira. Beatrice was living in Uganda near the Congo border, and like Dai Manju, she didn't go to school. Actually, she had never been to school, not to a lick, one day. Her parents, again, said, "Why should we spend the money on her? She's going to spend most of her life lugging water back and forth." Well, it just so happens, at that time, there was a group in Connecticut called the Niantic Community Church Group in Connecticut. They made a donation to an organization based in Arkansas called Heifer International. Heifer sent two goats to Africa. One of them ended up with Beatrice's parents, and that goat had twins. The twins started producing milk. They sold the milk for cash. The cash started accumulating,and pretty soon the parents said, "You know, we've got enough money. Let's send Beatrice to school." So at nine years of age, Beatrice started in first grade -- after all, she'd never been to a lick of school -- with a six year-old. No matter, she was just delighted to be in school. She rocketed to the top of her class. She stayed at the top of her class through elementary school, middle school, and then in high school, she scored brilliantly on the national examinations so that she became the first person in her village, ever, to come to the United States on scholarship. Two years ago, she graduated from Connecticut College.On the day of her graduation, she said, "I am the luckiest girl alive because of a goat."(Laughter) And that goat was $120. So you see how transformative little bits of help can be. But I want to give you a reality check. Look: U.S. aid, helping people is not easy, and there have been books that have criticized U.S. aid. There's Bill Easterly's book. There's a book called "Dead Aid." You know, the criticism is fair; it isn't easy. You know, people say how half of all water well projects, a year later, are failed. When I was in Zimbabwe, we were touring a place with the village chief -- he wanted to raise money for a secondary school -- and there was some construction a few yards away, and I said, "What's that?" He sort of mumbled. Turns out that it's a failed irrigation project. A few yards away was a failed chicken coop. One year, all the chickens died, and no one wanted to put the chickens in there. It's true, but we think that you don't through the baby out with the bathwater; you actually improve. You learn from your mistakes, and you continuously improve. We also think that individuals can make a difference, and they should, because individuals, together, we can all help create a movement. And a movement of men and women is what's needed to bring about social change, change that will address this great moral challenge.So then, I ask, what's in it for you? You're probably asking that. Why should you care? I will just leave you with two things. One is that research shows that once you have all of your material needs taken care of -- which most of us, all of us, here in this room do -- research shows that there are very few things in life that can actually elevate your level of happiness.One of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself. And the second thing, it's an anecdote that I'll leave you with. And that is the story of an aid worker in Darfur. Here was a woman who had worked in Darfur, seeing things that no human being should see. Throughout her time there, she was strong, she was steadfast. She never broke down. And then she came back to the United States and was on break, Christmas break. She was in her grandmother's backyard, and she saw something that made her break down in tears. What that was was a bird feeder. And she realized that she had the great fortune to be born in a country where we take security for granted, where we not only can feed, clothe and house ourselves, but also provide for wild birds so they don't go hungry in the winter. And she realized that with that great fortune comes great responsibility. And so, like her, you, me, we have all won the lottery of life. And so the question becomes: how do we discharge that responsibility? So, here's the cause. Join the movement. Feel happier and help save the world. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Cameron Herold: Eduquemos los nios para ser emprendedores

Se aburre en la escuela, le va mal en las clases, est en desacuerdo con sus compaeros: este nio podra ser un emprendedor, dice Cameron Herold. En TEDxEdmonton, sostiene que la crianza y una educacin que ayude haran florecer la iniciativa empresarial, tanto en nios como en adultos.

Estar dispuesto a apostar que soy el tipo ms tonto de la sala porque no pude terminar la escuela. Luch con la escuela. Pero lo que saba a una edad muy temprana era mi amor por el dinero y me encantaban los negocios y me encantaba esta cosa empresarial. Y me educaron para ser un emprendedor. Y lo que me ha apasionado desde entonces, y nunca he hablado de esto antes, hasta ahora, esta es la primera vez que alguien lo escucha, salvo mi mujer hace tres das, porque ella dijo: "De qu ests hablando?" y yo le dije: es que pienso que perdemos una oportunidad de encontrar estos nios que tienen rasgos empresariales y prepararlos o mostrarles que ser un emprendedor es en verdad algo "cool".No es algo malo y vilipendiado, que es lo que sucede en gran parte de la sociedad. Los nios, cuando crecemos, tenemos sueos. y tenemos pasiones y tenemos visiones. Y de algn modo esas cosas se nos aplastan. Y se nos dice que tenemos que estudiar msy concentrarnos ms o conseguir un tutor. Y mis padres me consiguieron un tutor francs,y todava soy malo en francs. Hace dos aos, fui el conferencista ms votado en el programa de la maestra empresarial del MIT. Y era un evento de oratoria en frente a grupos de emprendedores de todo el mundo. Cuando estaba en segundo grado gan un concurso de oratoria de mi ciudad, pero nadie dijo nunca "Hey, este chico es buen orador. El no puede concentrarse pero le encanta andar por ah animando a la gente." Nadie dijo: "Entrnenlo en oratoria". Dijeron que me pusieran un tutor en lo que yo soy malo. Los nios muestran estos rasgos. Y tenemos que empezar a buscarlos. Pienso que deberamos criar nios para ser emprendedores en vez de abogados. Y, por desgracia, el sistema escolar est preparando este mundo para decir: "Hey, seamos abogados o seamos mdicos", y estamos perdiendo una oportunidad porque nadie dice nunca: "Hey, s un emprendedor". Los emprendedores son personas, porque tenemos muchos de ellos en la sala, que tienen estas ideas y pasiones o ven estas necesidades en el mundo y deciden ponerse de pie y hacerlo. Y ponemos todo en lnea para hacer que las cosas sucedan. Y tenemos la capacidad de rodearnos de las personas cercanas que quieren construir ese sueo con nosotros. Y pienso que si pudiramos hacer que los nios adopten la idea, a una edad temprana, de ser emprendedores, podramos cambiar todo lo que hoy en el mundo es un problema. Para cada problema existente alguien tiene la respuesta. Y como nio, nadie puede decir que eso no puede suceder porque eres demasiado tonto para darte cuenta que no podras imaginarlo. Pienso que tenemos la obligacin como padres y como sociedad, empezar a ensear a los nios a pescar en vez de darles el pescado. La vieja parbola: "Si le das a un hombre un pescado, lo alimentas por un da. Si le enseas a un hombre a pescar, lo alimentas de por vida". Si podemos ensearles a nuestros nios a ser emprendedores, a los que muestren esos rasgos, as como enseamos a los dotados en ciencia que sigan con la ciencia.Qu tal si visemos los que tuviesen rasgos emprendedores y les ensesemos a ser emprendedores? Podramos tener a todos estos nios propagando negocios en vez de esperar ayuda del gobierno. Lo que hacemos es sentarnos y ensearles a nuestros nios las cosas que no deberan hacer. No pegues, no muerdas, no jures. Estamos enseando a nuestros nios a ir detrs de buenos trabajos ya saben, y el sistema escolar les ensea a ir detrs de cosas

comoser mdico(a), ser abogado(a) contador(a), dentista, maestro(a) o piloto. Y los medios nos dicen que sera muy bueno si pudiramos ser modelos o cantantes o hroes del deporte como Sidney Crosby. Nuestras escuelas de negocios no ensean a los chicos a ser emprendedores. La razn por la que evit un programa de MBA aparte del hecho que no poda entrar a ninguno porque tuve un promedio de 61% en la secundaria y luego un promedio de 61% en la nica escuela de Canad que me acept, Carlton, pero nuestros MBA no ensean a los chicos a ser emprendedores. Les ensean a ir a trabajar en las empresas. Entonces, quin funda estas empresas? Estas pocas personas al azar. Incluso en la literatura popular, el nico libro que he encontrado, y que debera estar en todas sus listas de lectura, el nico libro que he encontrado que hace del emprendedor un hroe es "Atlas Shrugged" (La revelin de Atlas) Todo lo dems en el mundo tiende a ver a los emprendedores y decir que somos malas personas. Miro incluso a mi familia. Mis dos abuelos eran emprendedores. Mi pap era emprendedor. Tanto mi hermano como mi hermana y yo, los tres, tenemos compaas propias tambin. Y todos decidimos fundar estas cosas porque es en realidad el nico lugar en que encajamos. No encajbamos en el trabajo normal. No podramos trabajar para alguien ms porque somos muy testarudos y tenemos todos estos otros rasgos. Pero los nios tambin pueden ser emprendedores. Soy una gran parte de un par de organizaciones a nivel mundial llamadas Organizacin de Empresarios y Organizacin de Jvenes Presidentes (OJP). Recin regres de hablar en Barcelona en la conferencia mundial de OJP y todo el mundo que conoc all todos los emprendedores lucharon con la escuela. Me diagnosticaron 18 de 19 signos de trastorno por dficit de atencin. As que esta cosa de aqu me est volviendo loco. (Risas) Probablemente sea por eso que estoy un poco en pnico en este momento, aparte de toda la cafena que he tomado y el azcar,pero esto es algo realmente escalofriante para un emprendedor. Trastorno por dficit de atencin, trastorno bipolar. Saben que ese trastorno bipolar es apodado "enfermedad del CEO"? Ted Turner lo tiene. Steve Jobs lo tiene. Los tres fundadores de Netscape lo tienen.Podra seguir y seguir. Los nios... pueden ver estos signos en los nios. Y lo que estamos haciendo es darles Ritalin y decirles: "No seas del tipo emprendedor. Encaja en este otro sistema e intenta ser un estudiante". Lo siento, los emprendedores no son estudiantes.Vamos por la va rpida. Entendemos el juego. Rob ensayos. Hice trampa en los exmenes. Contrat nios para que hagan mis tareas de contabilidad en la Universidad en 13 asignaturas consecutivas. Pero como emprendedor uno no hace contabilidad, contrata contadores. As que ented eso desde un principio. (Risas) (Aplausos) Al menos yo puedo admitir que hice trampa en la Universidad; la mayora de Uds no.Adems soy citado -- y le dije a la persona que escribi el libro -- ahora soy citado en ese mismo texto universitario en cada universidad e instituto de educacin superior canadiense.En contabilidad de gestin, soy el captulo ocho. Abro el captulo ocho hablando de elaboracin de presupuesto. Y le dije a la autora, despus que me entrevistaron, que hice trampa en ese mismo curso. Y ella pens que era demasiado gracioso como para no ponerlo de todos modos. Pero los nios, pueden ver esas seales en ellos. La definicin de emprendedor es "una persona que organiza, opera, y asume el riesgo de una empresa comercial". Eso no significa que uno tiene que hacer un MBA. Eso no significa que uno tiene que pasar por la escuela. Slo significa que esas pocas cosas tienen que sentirse bien desde adentro. Y hemos odo de si estas cosas nacen o se hacen, correcto. Es la primera o la segunda? Cul es? Bueno, no creo que sea una o la otra. Pienso que pueden ser ambas. Me prepararon como emprendedor.

Cuando estaba creciendo de nio, no tuve alternativa, porque me ensearon a muy temprana y corta edad, cuando mi pap se dio cuenta que no iba a encajar con nada de lo que me iban a ensear en la escuela, que poda ensearme a entender los negocios a muy temprana edad. Nos prepar, a los tres, a odiar la idea de tener un trabajo y a amar el hecho de crear compaas en las que pudisemos emplear a otras personas. Mi primera pequea empresa comercial. Tena 7 aos, estaba en Winnipeg, y yo estaba en mi habitacin con uno de esos largos cables. Estaba llamando a todas las tintoreras de Winnipeg para averiguar cunto pagaran las tintoreras por las perchas. Y mi mam entr en la habitacin y dijo: De dnde vas a sacar las perchas que vas a vender a la tintorera?Y le dije: "Vamos a ver en el stano". y bajamos al stano. Y abr este armario. Y haba unas mil perchas que haba recolectado. Porque, cuando le deca que sala a jugar con los nios iba puerta por puerta en el vecindario juntando perchas para dejar en el stano para venderlas. Porque yo haba visto unas semanas antes que a uno le pagaban. Solan pagar dos centavos por percha. As que era como, bueno hay todo tipo de perchas. Y as que voy a ir a por ellas. Y yo saba que ella no querra que vaya a buscarlas, as que lo hice de todos modos. Y aprend que se poda negociar con la gente. Esta persona me ofreci 3 centavos y logr que lo suba a 3,5 centavos. Saba incluso a los 7 aos que poda obtener una fraccin porcentual de centavo y la gente lo pagara porque se multiplica. A los 7 aos lo entend. Consegu 3,5 centavos por mil perchas. Vend protectores de matrculas de puerta en puerta. Mi pap realmente me hizo ir a buscar a alguien que me las vendiera al por mayor. Y a los 9 aos caminaba por la ciudad de Sudbury vendiendo protectores de matrculas de puerta en puerta. Y recuerdo a este cliente de forma vvida porque hice tambin algunas otras cosas con estos clientes. Vend peridicos. Y l jams me comprara un peridico. Pero yo estaba convencido que me iba a comprar un protector de matrculas. Y l como que "pues, no lo necesitamos". Y yo le deca: "Pero tienen dos autos" -- tengo 9 aos. Y yo: "Pero tiene dos autos y no tienen protectores de matrcula". Y l me deca: "Lo s". Y yo dije: "El auto de aqu tiene una matrcula toda abollada". Y l dijo: "S, ese es el auto de mi esposa". Y yo dije: "Por qu no probamos uno en el frente del auto de su esposa y vemos si dura ms". As que saba que haba dos autos con dos matrculas en cada uno. Si no poda vender las cuatro, poda vender al menos una. Aprend eso a muy corta edad. Hice arbitraje financiero de cmics. Cuando tena unos 10 aos vend historietas fuera de nuestra casa de campo en la baha de Georgia. E ira en bicicleta hasta el final de la playay comprara todas las historietas de los nios pobres. Y luego regresara a la otra punta de la playa y se las vendera a los nios ricos. Pero era obvio para m, correcto. Comprar barato, vender caro. Uno tiene esta demanda por aqu que tiene dinero. No trates de venderle a los nios pobres; no tienen dinero. Los ricos lo tienen. Anda y toma un poco.Eso es obvio, correcto. Es como una recesin. Hay una recesin, todava hay 13 billones de dlares en circulacin en la economa de EE.UU. Ve a buscar algo de eso. Y aprend eso a una corta edad. Tambin aprend a no revelar la fuente porque me apalearon despus de cuatro semanas de hacer esto dado que uno de los nios ricos descubri dnde estaba comprando las historietas y no le gust el hecho de estar pagando mucho ms. Fui obligado a obtener un reparto de diarios a los 10 aos de edad. Yo realmente no quera un reparto de diarios, pero a los 10 mi pap dijo: "Ese va a ser tu prximo negocio". As que no slo me consigui uno sino que tuve dos y luego quiso que contrate a alguien para que reparta la mitad de los diarios cosa que hice, y entonces me di cuenta que con propinas es como se hace todo el dinero. As que recogera las propinas y recibira el pago. Yo las recolectara para todos los peridicos. l slo podra repartirlos. Porque entonces me di cuenta que podra hacer dinero. En este punto yo definitivamente no iba a ser un empleado.

(Risas) Mi pap era dueo de una tienda de reparacin de automotores. Tena todas estas piezas de automviles antiguos por ah. Y tenan este viejo bronce y cobre. Y entonces le pregunt qu haca con eso. Y me dijo que los tiraba. Y le dije: "Pero alguien no te pagara por eso?" Y l dijo: "Quiz". Recuerden, a los 10 aos, por ende hace 34 aos vi una oportunidad en esto. Vi que haba una oportunidad en la basura. Y la estaba recolectando de todas las tiendas de automviles del rea en mi bicicleta. Y entonces mi pap me llevara los sbados a un reciclador de chatarra donde me pagaban. Y pens que era algo "cool". Curiosamente, 30 aos despus, estamos construyendo 1-800-GOTJUNK? (1-800-Tiene-basura?) y haciendo dinero con eso tambin. Constru estos pines cuando tena 11 aos en los boy scouts y hemos hecho estos pines para nuestras mams para el Da de la Madre. E hicimos estos porta agujas con broches de madera cuando solamos tender la ropa en los tendederos exteriores. Y uno tena estas sillas. Y tena estas pequeas almohadillas que yo cosera. Y podan ponerse alfileres en ellas. Porque la gente sola coser y necesitaban almohadillas. Pero lo que me di cuenta era que haba que tener opciones. As que pint una gran cantidad de marrn. Y luego cuando iba a la puerta, no deca: "Quiere comprar una?" deca: "De qu color quisiera?" Era como, tengo 10 aos, no puede decirme que no a m, en especial si tiene dos opciones: tiene las marrones y las claras. As que aprend esa leccin a una edad temprana. Aprend que el trabajo manual realmente apesta. Bueno, como cortar el csped es lo peor.Pero debido a que tuve que cortar csped todo el verano para todos nuestros vecinos y me pagaban para hacer eso, me di cuenta que los ingresos recurrentes de un cliente es asombroso. Que si pesco este cliente una vez y cada semana esa persona me paga eso es mucho mejor que si intento vender una almohadilla a una persona. Porque no se le puede vender ms. As que me encant ese modelo de ingresos recurrentes que aprend a una edad temprana. Recuerden, yo estaba siendo preparado para hacer eso. No me permitan tener empleos.Hice de caddy, ira al campo de golf a hacer de caddy para la gente. Pero me di cuenta que haba una colina en nuestro campo de golf el hoyo 13 que tena esta colina enorme. Y la gente nunca poda llevar sus bolsas hasta all. As que me sentaba all con una silla de jardn y simplemente cargaba para toda la gente que no tena caddy. Yo llevara sus bolsos de golf hasta la cima y ellos me pagaran un dlar. Mientras tanto, mis amigos trabajaban por 5 horas transportando la bolsa de alguien y ganaban 10 dlares. Pens: "Eso es una tontera, porque tienes que trabajar durante cinco horas. No tiene sentido". Encuentra una manera de ganar ms dinero ms rpido. Cada semana ira al almacn de la esquina y comprara todas estas gaseosas. Luego me acercara y las entregara a estas mujeres de 70 aos que jugaban al bridge. Y me haran el pedido para la semana siguiente. Y entonces entregara las gaseosas cobrando el doble. Y tena este mercado cautivo. Uno no necesita contratos. Simplemente se necesita tener una oferta y una demanda y este pblico que le compre a uno. Estas mujeres no iban a ir a comprar a nadie ms porque me queran y yo como que me lo imaginaba. Iba a buscar pelotas a los campos de golf. Pero todos los dems estaban buscando entre los arbustos y buscando en las zanjas las pelotas de golf. Y yo como que, eso no va conmigo. Todas estn en el estanque y nadie est entrando all. As que ira a los estanques, gateando, y las recogera con los dedos de los pies. Uno simplemente las recoga con ambos pies. No se puede hacer en el escenario. Y uno consigue las pelotas de golf y las pone en el traje de bao y cuando uno termina tiene un par de cientos de ellas.Pero el problema es que la gente no quera todas las pelotas de golf. As que las empacaba. Yo tena unos 12 aos, correcto. Las empacaba en tres maneras. Tena las Pinnacles, las DBHs y las ms codiciadas de entonces. Esas se vendan a 2 dlares cada una. Despus tena las buenas, no tan desgastadas, que costaban 50 centavos cada

una.Y luego vendera 50 juntas de las baqueteadas. Podan usar esas como pelotas de prctica. Y venda gafas de sol, cuando estaba en la escuela, a todos los nios de la secundaria.Esto es lo que hace como que todo el mundo te odie porque uno est tratando de sacar dinero todo el tiempo a sus amigos. Pero eso pagaba las cuentas. As que vend montones y montones de gafas de sol. Y luego cuando la escuela me lo prohibi, la escuela en realidad me llam a la oficina y me dijo que no poda hacerlo, as que fui a las estaciones de gasolina y vend montones de gafas a las estaciones e hice que las estaciones se las vendan a sus clientes. Eso fue genial, porque luego tuve puntos de venta. Y creo que tena 14 aos. Y luego me pagu todo el primer ao de universidad en Carlton vendiendo botas de vino de puerta en puerta. Saben que entran una botella de ron de 1 litro y dos coca-colas en una bota de vino? y qu con eso? S, pero saben qu? Te la pones entre los pantalonescuando vas a un partido de ftbol puedes entrar alcohol de forma gratuita, todo el mundo las compraba. Oferta, demanda, gran oportunidad. Les puse marca, as que las venda a cinco veces lo normal. Tena el logo de nuestra universidad. Ya saben, le enseamos a nuestros nios y les compramos juegos, pero por qu no se los compramos si son nios emprendedores, as eso alimenta los rasgos que uno necesita para ser emprendedor? Por qu no les enseamos a no malgastar el dinero? Recuerdo que me hicieron caminar por el medio de una calle en Banff, Alberta, porque haba tirado una moneda en la calle. Y mi pap deca: "Ve y bscala". l deca: "Trabajo muy duro para ganar mi dinero. No quiero verte nunca malgastar un centavo". Y recuerdo esa leccin hasta el da de hoy. Las asignaciones semanales inculcan malos hbitos a los nios. Las asignaciones semanales, por naturaleza, les ensean a pensar en un empleo. Y el emprendedor no espera una paga regular. Las asignaciones semanales inculcan a temprana edad esperar una paga regular. Eso est mal, para m, si uno quiere criar emprendedores. lo que hago con mis hijos ahora -- tengo dos, de 9 y 7 aos -- es ensearles a caminar por la casa y el patio buscando cosas para hacer. Venir y decirme qu es. O ir yo y les dir: "Esto es lo que necesito". Y luego, saben lo que hacemos? Negociamos. Ellos van a buscar qu hacer. Pero luego negociamos cunto se les va a pagar. Y no tienen un cheque regular, pero tienen ms oportunidades de encontrar ms cosas, y aprenden la habilidad de la negociacin y tambin la habilidad de encontrar oportunidades. Uno cultiva ese tipo de cosas. Cada uno de mis hijos tiene dos alcancas. El 50% de todo el dinero que ganan o les regalan, el 50% se destina para su cuenta de la casa, el 50% se destina para su cuenta de juguetes. Con lo que va a su cuenta de juguetes pueden comprar lo que quieran. El 50% de lo que va a la cuenta de la casa, cada 6 meses, va al banco. Van conmigo. Cada ao todo el dinero del banco va a su agente. Tanto el de 9 aos como el de 7 ya tienen un corredor de bolsa. Pero yo les estoy enseando a forzar el hbito del ahorro.Me pone loco cuando escucho a los treintaeros decir "Quiz voy a comenzar a contribuir para mi retiro". Joder, has perdido 25 aos. Se les puede ensear esos hbitos a los niitoscuando ni siquiera han sentido el dolor todava. Tal vez pueden leerles cuentos cuatro noches a la semana y tres noches a la semana hagan que ellos cuenten historias.No les lean cuentos antes de dormir todas las noches. una camisa roja, una corbata azul, un canguro y una laptop, y hacer que ellos cuenten una historia con esas cuatro cosas? Mis hijos hacen eso todo el tiempo. Les ensea a vender; les ensea creatividad; les ensea a pensar con los pies en la tierra. Slo hagan este tipo de cosas y divirtanse con eso. Hagan que los nios se paren en frente de grupos y hablen, incluso si slo es pararse en frente de sus amigos y hacer representaciones y discursos. Esos son rasgos de emprendedores que uno quiere fomentar. Mustrenle a los nios cmo se ven los malos clientes y los malos empleados. Ensenles los empleados de mal humor. Cuando vean

un empleado atendiendo de mal humor al cliente, mustrenselo. Digan: "A propsito, ese tipo es un mal empleado". Y digan: "Estos otros son buenos". (Risas) Si van a un restaurante y tienen mal servicio de atencin al cliente mustrenles cmo es un mal servicio al cliente.(Risas) Tenemos todas esas lecciones frente a nosotros pero no aprovechamos esas oportunidades; les enseamos a ir a conseguir un tutor. Imaginen si uno en realidad tomara toda la basura de los nios que hay en la casa ahora mismo, todos los juguetes que ya no usan hace 2 aos, y dijera: "Por qu no empezar a vender algo de esto en Craigslist y Kijiji?" Y que en realidad pueden venderlos y aprender cmo encontrar estafadores cuando llegan ofertas por correo electrnico. Pueden ingresar a la cuenta de uno o a una subcuenta o lo que sea. Pero enseles a fijar el precio, estimar el precio, subir las fotos. Enseles cmo hacer ese tipo de cosas y ganar dinero. Luego con el dinero que reciben, el 50% va a su cuenta de la casa y 50% va a su cuenta de juguetes. A mis hijos les encanta esto. Algunos de los rasgos empresariales que hay que inculcar en los nios: logros, tenacidad, liderazgo, introspeccin, interdependencia, valores. Uno puede encontrar todos estos rasgos en los nios y ayudarles a desarrollarlos. Busquen ese tipo de cosas. Hay otros dos rasgos que tambin quiero que busquen que parece costarnos sacar de su sistema. No mediquen a los nios por el trastorno por dficit de atencin a menos que sea algo muy, muy anormal. (Aplausos) Y lo mismo con cosas como la mana, el estrs y la depresin, a menos que sea clnicamente serio, hombre. El trastorno bipolar es llamado "enfermedad del CEO" Cuando Steve Jurvetson y Jim Clark y Jim Barksdale todos lo tuvieron y construyeron Netscape. Imaginen si les hubiesen dado Ritalin. No hubisemos tenido esas cosas, verdad? En realidad Al Gore habra inventado Internet. (Risas) Estas son las habilidades que deberamos estar enseando en las aulas como todas las dems. No se trata de impedir que los nios quieran ser abogados. Pero qu tal si posicionamos el emprendimiento bien en lo alto junto al resto de las dems. Porque hay grandes oportunidades en eso. Quiero terminar con un videito rpido. Es un video que fue realizado por una de las empresas que apoyo. Estos chicos, Grasshopper. Es sobre los nios. Es sobre iniciativa empresarial. Espero que esto los lleve a tomar lo que han odo de m y hacer algo con eso para cambiar el mundo. [Nio... "Y pensabas que podas hacer cualquier cosa?"] [Todava puedes.] [Porque mucho de lo que consideramos imposible...] [...es fcil de superar][Porque en caso que no lo hayan notado, vivimos en un lugar en el que] [un individuo puede marcar una diferencia] [Quieren pruebas?] [Basta con mirar a la gente que construy nuestro pas;] [Nuestros padres, abuelos, tas, tos...] [Ellos eran inmigrantes, recin llegados dispuestos a dejar su marca] [A lo mejor vinieron con muy poco] [O tal vez no traan nada salvo... [...una idea simple y brillante] [Estas personas eran pensadores, hacedores...] [...innovadores...] [...hasta que se les ocurri el nombre...] [...emprendedores!] [Ellos cambian el modo en que pensamos lo posible.] [Tienen una visin clara de cmo la vida puede ser mejor] [Para todos nosotros, incluso en tiempos difciles.][En este momento, es difcil de ver...] [...cuando nuestra visin est llena de obstculos.][Pero la turbulencia crea oportunidades] [Para el xito, los logros, y nos empuja...] [a descubrir nuevas maneras de hacer las cosas] [Entonces, detrs de qu oportunidad irs y por qu?] [Si uno es emprendedor] [sabe que el riesgo no es la recompensa.] [No. Las recompensas son la innovacin...] [...cambiar la vida de la gente, crear empleos.] [Impulsar el crecimiento.] [Y hacer un mundo mejor.] [Los emprendedores estn en todas partes.][Dirigen pequeas empresas que sostienen nuestra economa,] [disean herramientas que nos ayudan...] [...a estar conectados con amigos, familiares y colegas en todo el mundo.][Y estn encontrando nuevas maneras de ayudar a resolver antiguos problemas de la sociedad.] [Conocen a un emprendedor?] [Emprendedor puede ser cualquiera...][Incluso... t!] [As que aprovecha

la oportunidad para crear el trabajo que siempre quisiste][Ayuda sanear la economa] [Marca una diferencia.] [Lleva tu negocio a nuevas alturas.][Pero lo ms importante] [recuerda cuando eras un nio...] [cuando todo estaba a tu alcance,] [y luego di para ti mismo en voz baja, pero con determinacin:] ["An es as."] Muchas gracias por invitarme. I would be willing to bet that I'm the dumbest guy in the room because I couldn't get through school. I struggled with school. But what I knew at a very early age was that I loved money and I loved business and I loved this entrepreneurial thing, and I was raised to be an entrepreneur, and what I've been really passionate about ever since -- and I've never spoken about this ever, until now -- so this is the first time anyone's ever heard it, except my wife three days ago, because she said, "What are you talking about?" and I told her -- is that I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits, and to groom them or show them that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing. It's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified, which is what happens in a lot of society. Kids, when we grow up, have dreams, and we have passions, and we have visions, and somehow we get those things crushed. We get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor. My parents got me a tutor in French, and I still suck in French.Two years ago, I was the highest-rated lecturer at MIT's entrepreneurial master's program.And it was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world. When I was in grade two, I won a city-wide speaking competition, but nobody had ever said, "Hey, this kid's a good speaker. He can't focus, but he loves walking around and getting people energized." No one said, "Get him a coach in speaking." They said, get me a tutor in what I suck at. So as kids show these traits -- and we need to start looking for them -- I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers. Unfortunately the school system is grooming this world to say, "Hey, let's be a lawyer or let's be a doctor," and we're missing that opportunity because no one ever says, "Hey, be an entrepreneur." Entrepreneurs are people -- because we have a lot of them in this room -- who have these ideas and these passions or see these needs in the world and we decide to stand up and do it. And we put everything on the line to make that stuff happen. We have the ability to get those groups of people around us that want to kind of build that dream with us, and I think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age of being entrepreneurial, we could change everything in the world that is a problem today. Every problem that's out there, somebody has the idea for. And as a young kid, nobody can say it can't happen because you're too dumb to realize that you couldn't figure it out. I think we have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fishinstead of giving them the fish -- the old parable: "If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." If we can teach our kids to become entrepreneurial -- the ones that show those traits to be -- like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science, what if we saw the ones who had entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs? We could actually have all these kids spreading businesses instead of waiting for government handouts. What we do is we sit and teach our kids all the things they shouldn't do: Don't hit; don't bite; don't swear. Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs, you know, and the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. And the media says that it's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like Luongo, Crosby. Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs. The reason that I avoided an MBA program -- other than the fact that I couldn't get into any because I had a 61 percent average out of high school and then 61 percent average at the only

school in Canada that accepted me, Carlton -- but our MBA programs don't teach kids to be entrepreneurs. They teach them to go work in corporations. So who's starting these companies? It's these random few people. Even in popular literature, the only book I've ever found -- and this should be on all of your reading lists -the only book I've ever found that makes the entrepreneur into the hero is "Atlas Shrugged." Everything else in the world tends to look at entrepreneurs and say that we're bad people. I look at even my family. Both my grandfathers were entrepreneurs. My dad was an entrepreneur. Both my brother and sister and I, all three of us own companies as well. And we all decided to start these things because it's really the only place we fit. We didn't fit in the normal work. We couldn't work for somebody else because we're too stubborn and we have all these other traits. But kids could be entrepreneurs as well. I'm a big part of a couple organizations globallycalled the Entrepreneurs' Organization and the Young Presidents' Organization. I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO global conference, and everyone that I met over there who's an entrepreneur struggled with school. I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed. So this thing right here is freaking me out. (Laughter)It's probably why I'm a little bit panicked right now -- other than all the caffeine that I've had and the sugar -- but this is really creepy for an entrepreneur. Attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder. Do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease? Ted Turner's got it. Steve Jobs has it. All three of the founders of Netscape had it. I could go on and on. Kids -- you can see these signs in kids. And what we're doing is we're giving them Ritalin and saying, "Don't be an entrepreneurial type. Fit into this other system and try to become a student." Sorry, entrepreneurs aren't students. We fast-track. We figure out the game. I stole essays. I cheated on exams. I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments. But as an entrepreneur you don't do accounting, you hire accountants. So I just figured that out earlier. (Laughter) (Applause) At least I can admit I cheated in university; most of you won't. I'm also quoted -- and I told the person who wrote the textbook -- I'm now quoted in that exact same university textbookin every Canadian university and college studies. In managerial accounting, I'm chapter eight. I open up chapter eight talking about budgeting. And I told the author, after they did my interview, that I cheated in that same course. And she thought it was too funny to not include it anyway. But kids, you can see these signs in them. The definition of an entrepreneur is "a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk of a business venture." That doesn't mean you have to go to an MBA program. It doesn't mean you have to get through school. It just means that those few things have to feel right in your gut. And we've heard those things about "is it nurture or is it nature," right? Is it thing one or thing two? What is it? Well, I don't think it's either. I think it can be both. I was groomed as an entrepreneur. When I was growing up as a young kid, I had no choice, because I was taught at a very early, young age -- when my dad realized I wasn't going to fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school -- that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age. He groomed us, the three of us, to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies that we could employ other people. My first little business venture: I was seven years old, I was in Winnipeg, and I was lying in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords. And I was calling all the dry cleaners in Winnipeg to find out how much would the dry cleaners pay me for coat hangers. And my mom came into the room and she said, "Where are you going to get the coat hangers to sell to the dry cleaners?" And I said, "Let's go and look in the basement." And we went down to the basement. And I opened up this cupboard. And there was about a thousand

coat hangers that I'd collected. Because, when I told her I was going out to play with the kids, I was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect coat hangers to put in the basement to sell. Because I saw her a few weeks before that -- you could get paid. They used to pay you two cents per coat hanger. So I was just like, well there's all kinds of coat hangers. And so I'll just go get them. And I knew she wouldn't want me to go get them, so I just did it anyway. And I learned that you could actually negotiate with people. This one person offered me three cents and I got him up to three and a half. I even knew at a seven-year-old age that I could actually get a fractional percent of a cent, and people would pay that because it multiplied up. At seven years old I figured it out. I got three and a half cents for a thousand coat hangers. I sold license plate protectors door to door. My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me these things at wholesale. And at nine years old, I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license plate protectors door to door to houses. And I remember this one customer so vividly because I also did some other stuff with these clients. I sold newspapers. And he wouldn't buy a newspaper from me ever. But I was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license plate protector. And he's like, "Well, we don't need one."And I said, "But you've got two cars ..." -- I'm nine years old. I'm like, "But you have two cars and they don't have license plate protectors." And he said, "I know." And I said, "This car here's got one license plate that's all crumpled up." And he said, "Yes, that's my wife's car." And I said, "Why don't we just test one on the front of your wife's car and see if it lasts longer." So I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each. If I couldn't sell all four, I could at least get one. I learned that at a young age. I did comic book arbitrage. When I was about 10 years old, I sold comic books out of our cottage on Georgian Bay. And I would go biking up to the end of the beach and buy all the comics from the poor kids. And then I would go back to the other end of the beach and sell them to the rich kids. But it was obvious to me, right? Buy low, sell high. You've got this demand over here that has money. Don't try to sell to the poor kids; they don't have cash. The rich people do. Go get some. So that's obvious, right. It's like a recession. So, there's a recession. There's still 13 trillion dollars circulating in the U.S. economy. Go get some of that. And I learned that at a young age. I also learned, don't reveal your source, because I got beat up after about four weeks of doing this because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics from, and he didn't like the fact that he was paying a lot more. I was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old. I didn't really want a paper route, but at 10, my dad said, "That's going to be your next business." So not only would he get me one, but I had to get two, and then he wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers, which I did, and then I realized that collecting tips was where you made all the money. So I would collect the tips and get payment. So I would go and collect for all the papers. He could just deliver them. Because then I realized I could make the money. By this point, I was definitely not going to be an employee. (Laughter) My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop. He had all these old automotive parts lying around. They had this old brass and copper. I asked him what he did with it, and he said he just throws it out. I said, "But wouldn't somebody pay you for that?" And he goes, "Maybe." Remember at 10 years old -- so 34 years ago I saw opportunity in this stuff.I saw there was money in garbage. And I was actually collecting it from all the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle. And then my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid. And I thought that was kind of cool. Strangely enough, 30 years later, we're building 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and making money off that too. I built these little pincushions when I was 11 years old in Cubs, and we made these pin cushions for our moms for Mother's Day. And you made these pincushions out of wooden

clothespins -- when we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside. And you'd make these chairs. And I had these little pillows that I would sew up. And you could stuff pins in them.Because people used to sew and they needed a pin cushion. But what I realized was that you had to have options. So I actually spray painted a whole bunch of them brown. And then when I went to the door, it wasn't, "Do you want to buy one?" It was, "Which color would you like?" Like I'm 10 years old; you're not going to say no to me, especially if you have two options -- you have the brown one or the clear one. So I learned that lesson at a young age. I learned that manual labor really sucks. Right, like cutting lawns is brutal. But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing. That if I land this client once, and every week I get paid by that person, that's way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person. Because you can't sell them more. So I love that recurring revenue model I started to learn at a young age. Remember, I was being groomed to do this. I was not allowed to have jobs. I would caddy, I would go to the golf course and caddy for people. But I realized that there was this one hill on our golf course, the 13th hole that had this huge hill. And people could never get their bags up it. So I would sit there with a lawn chair and just carry up all the people who didn't have caddies. I would carry their golf bags up to the top, and they'd pay me a dollar.Meanwhile, my friends were working for five hours to haul some guy's bag around and get paid 10 bucks. I'm like, "That's stupid because you have to work for five hours. That doesn't make any sense." You just figure out a way to make more money faster. Every week, I would go to the corner store and buy all these pops. Then I would go up and deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge. And they'd give me their orders for the following week. And then I'd just deliver pop and I'd just charge twice. And I had this captured market. You didn't need contracts. You just needed to have a supply and demandand this audience who bought into you. These women weren't going to go to anybody elsebecause they liked me, and I kind of figured it out. I went and got golf balls from golf courses. But everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. I'm like, screw that. They're all in the pond and nobody's going into the pond. So I would go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes. You just pick them up with both feet. You can't do it on stage. You get the golf balls, and you just throw them in your bathing suit trunks and when you're done you've got a couple hundred of them. But the problem is that people all didn't want all the golf balls. So I just packaged them. I'm like 12, right? I packaged them up three ways. I had the Pinnacles and DDHs and the really cool ones back then. Those sold for two dollars each. And then I had all the good ones that didn't look crappy. They were 50 cents each. And then I'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones. And they could use those for practice balls. I sold sunglasses, when I was in school, to all the kids in high school. This is what really kind of gets everybody hating you is because you're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time. But it paid the bills. So I sold lots and lots of sunglasses. Then when the school shut me down -- the school actually called me into the office and told me I couldn't do it -- so I went to the gas stations and I sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers. That was cool because then I had retail outlets. And I think I was 14. Then I paid my entire way through first year university at Carlton by selling wine skins door to door. You know that you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin? So what, right? Yeah, but you know what? You stuff that down your shorts, when you go into a football game you can get booze in for free, everybody bought them. Supply,

demand, big opportunity. I also branded it, so I sold them for five times the normal cost. It had our university logo on it. You know we teach our kids and we buy them games, but why don't we get them games, if they're entrepreneurial kids, that kind of nurture the traits that you need to be entrepreneurs? Why don't you teach them not to waste money? I remember being told to walk out in the middle of a street in Banff, Alberta because I'd thrown a penny out in the street, and my dad said, "Go pick it up." He said, "I work too damn hard for my money. I'm not going to see you ever waste a penny." And I remember that lesson to this day. Allowances teach kids the wrong habits. Allowances, by nature, are teaching kids to think about a job. An entrepreneur doesn't expect a regular paycheck. Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck. That's wrong, for me, if you want to raise entrepreneurs. What I do with my kids now -- I've got two, nine and seven -- is I teach them to walk around the house and the yard, looking for stuff that needs to get done. Come to me and tell me what it is. Or I'll come to them and say, "Here's what I need done." And then you know what we do? We negotiate. They go around looking for what it is. But then we negotiate on what they're going to get paid. And then they don't have a regular check, but they have more opportunities to find more stuff, and they learn the skill of negotiating, and they learn the skill of finding opportunities as well. You breed that kind of stuff. Each of my kids has two piggy banks. Fifty percent of all the money that they earn or get gifted, 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. Anything in their toy account they can spend on whatever they want.The 50 percent that goes in their house account, every six months, goes to the bank. They walk up with me. Every year all the money in the bank goes to their broker. Both my nine- and seven-year-olds have a stock broker already. But I'm teaching them to force that savings habit. It drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying, "Maybe I'll start contributing to my RSP now." Shit, you've missed 25 years. You can teach those habits to young kidswhen they don't even feel the pain yet. Don't read them bedtime stories every night. Maybe four nights out of the week read them bedtime stories and three nights of the week have them tell stories. Why don't you sit down with kids and give them four items, a red shirt, a blue tie, a kangaroo and a laptop, and have them tell a story about those four things? My kids do that all the time. It teaches them to sell; it teaches them creativity; it teaches them to think on their feet. Just do that kind of stuff and have fun with it. Get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk, even if it's just stand up in front of their friends and do plays and have speeches. Those are entrepreneurial traits that you want to be nurturing. Show the kids what bad customers or bad employees look like. Show them the grumpy employees. When you see grumpy customer service, point that out to them.Say, "By the way, that guy's a crappy employee." And say, "These ones are good ones."(Laughter) If you go into a restaurant and you have bad customer service, show them what bad customer service looks like. (Laughter) We have all these lessons in front of us, but we don't take those opportunities; we teach kids to go get a tutor. Imagine if you actually took all the kids' junk that's in the house right now, all the toys that they've outgrown two years ago and said, "Why don't we start selling some of this on Craigslist and Kijiji?" And they can actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when they get email offers come in. They can come into your account or a sub account or whatever. But teach them how to fix the price, guess the price, pull up the photos. Teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money. Then the money they get, 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. My kids love this stuff. Some of the entrepreneurial traits that you've got to nurture in kids: attainment, tenacity, leadership, introspection, interdependence, values. All these traits you can find in young kids, and you can help nurture them. Look for that kind of stuff. There's two traits that I want you to also look out for that we don't kind of get out of their system. Don't medicate

kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really, really freaking bad. (Applause) The same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression, unless it is so clinically brutal, man.Bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease. When Steve Jurvetson and Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale have all got it, and they built Netscape -- imagine if they were given Ritalin.We wouldn't have have that stuff, right? Al Gore really would have had to invented the Internet. (Laughter) These skills are the skills we should be teaching in the classroom as well as everything else. I'm not saying don't get kids to want to be lawyers. But how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them as well? Because there's huge opportunities in that. I want to close with a quick little video. It's a video that was done by one of the companies that I mentor. These guys, Grasshopper. It's about kids. It's about entrepreneurship.Hopefully this inspires you to take what you've heard from me and do something with it to change the world. [Kid ... "And you thought you could do anything?"] [You still can.][Because a lot of what we consider impossible ...] [... is easy to overcome] [Because in case you haven't noticed, we live in a place where] [One individual can make a difference][Want proof?] [Just look at the people who built our country;] [Our parents, grandparents, our aunts, uncles ...] [They were immigrants, newcomers ready to make their mark] [Maybe they came with very little] [Or perhaps they didn't own anything except for ...] [... a single brilliant idea] [These people were thinkers, doers ...] [... innovators ...] [... until they came up with the name ...] [... entrepreneurs!] [They change the way we think about what is possible.] [They have a clear vision of how life can be better] [for all of us, even when times are tough.] [Right now, it's hard to see ...] [... when our view is cluttered with obstacles.][But turbulence creates opportunities] [for success, achievement, and pushes us ...] [to discover new ways of doing things] [So what opportunities will you go after and why?] [If you're an entrepreneur] [you know that risk isn't the reward.] [No. The rewards are driving innovation ...] [... changing people's lives. Creating jobs.] [Fueling growth.] [And making a better world.] [Entrepreneurs are everywhere.] [They run small businesses that support our economy,] [design tools to help you ...] [... stay connected with friends, family and colleagues around the world.] [And they're finding new ways of helping to solve society's oldest problems.] [Do you know an entrepreneur?] [Entrepreneurs can be anyone ...] [Even ... you!] [So seize the opportunity to create the job you always wanted] [Help heal the economy] [Make a difference.] [Take your business to new heights.] [But most importantly,][remember when you were a kid ...] [when everything was within you reach,] [and then say to yourself quietly, but with determination:] ["It still is."] Thank you very much for having me.

Candy Chang: Before I die I want to...

In her New Orleans neighborhood, artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang turned an abandoned house into a giant chalkboard asking a fill-in-the-blank question: Before I die I want to ___. Her neighbors' answers -- surprising, poignant, funny -- became an unexpected mirror for the community. (What's your answer?) Candy Chang creates art that prompts people to think about their secrets, wishes and hopes -- and then share them. She is a TED Senior Fellow.

Quienes nos rodean pueden ayudarnos de muchas maneras a mejorar nuestras vidas. No conocemos a todos los vecinos, por eso no intercambiamos mucho conocimiento a pesar de compartir los mismos espacios pblicos.

En los ltimos aos he tratado de compartir ms con mis vecinos en el espacio pblico,con herramientas simples como autoadhesivos, plantillas y tiza. Estos proyectos surgieron de preguntas como: cunto pagan mis vecinos por sus apartamentos? (Risas) Cmo podemos prestar y pedir prestado ms cosas sin llamar a la puerta en un mal momento?Cmo compartir ms recuerdos de nuestros edificios abandonados y comprender mejor nuestro paisaje? Cmo compartir ms nuestras esperanzas ante las tiendas vacas para que nuestras comunidades puedan reflejar hoy nuestras necesidades y sueos? Vivo en Nueva Orlens y estoy enamorada de Nueva Orlens. Mi alma siempre encuentra alivio con los robles gigantes que dan sombra a amantes, borrachos y soadores desde hace siglos y confo en una ciudad que siempre da cabida a la msica. (Risas) Siento que ante el menor estornudo hay un desfile en Nueva Orlens. (Risas) La ciudad tiene una de las arquitecturas ms bellas del mundo, pero tambin una con la mayor cantidad de propiedades abandonadas de EE.UU. Yo vivo cerca de esta casa y pensaba cmo podra convertirla en un espacio ms agradable para el barrio y tambin en algo que cambi mi vida para siempre. En 2009 perd a alguien a quien amaba mucho. Era Joan, como una madre para m; su muerte fue repentina e inesperada. Pens mucho en la muerte y y esto me produjo una profunda gratitud por el tiempo vivido y le dio claridad a las cosas significativas de mi vida actual. Pero brego por mantener esta mirada en mi vida cotidiana. Me parece que es fcil dejarse atrapar por el da a da y olvidar lo realmente importante para uno. As que con la ayuda de viejos y nuevos amigos transform la pared de esta casa abandonada en una pizarra gigante y pint sobre ella frases para completar: "Antes de morir quiero..." As, los transentes podan tomar una tiza, reflexionar sobre sus vidas y compartir aspiraciones personales en el espacio pblico. No saba qu esperar de este experimento pero al da siguiente la pared estaba repleta y segua cubrindose. Y me gustara compartir algunas cosas que la gente escribi en la pared. "Antes de morir quiero ser juzgado por piratera". (Risas) "Antes de morir quiero sentarme a horcajadas en la lnea de cambio de fecha". "Antes de morir quiero cantar para millones de personas". "Antes de morir quiero plantar un rbol". "Antes de morir quiero vivir fuera de la red". "Antes de morir quiero abrazarla una vez ms". "Antes de morir quiero ir al rescate de alguien". "Antes de morir quiero ser completamente yo mismo". Este espacio abandonado se torn constructivo y los sueos y esperanzas de la gente me hicieron rer a carcajadas, me destrozaron, y me dieron consuelo en momentos difciles. Se trata de saber que uno no est solo. Se trata de entender a nuestros vecinos de maneras nuevas y esclarecedoras. Se trata de dar cabida a la reflexin y la contemplacin, y de recordar qu es lo ms importante para nosotros conforme crecemos y cambiamos. Esto ocurri el ao pasado y empec a recibir cientos de mensajes de personas apasionadas que queran hacer un muro en su comunidad por eso con mis colegas del centro cvico hicimos un kit y ahora se han hecho muros en pases de todo el mundo, como Kazajstn, Sudfrica, Australia, Argentina y ms all. Juntos demostramos el poder de nuestros espacios pblicos si nos dan la oportunidad de expresarnos y compartir mutuamente. Dos de las cosas ms valiosas que tenemos son el tiempo y nuestras relaciones con otras personas. En nuestra era de distracciones en aumento, es ms importante que nunca, encontrar las formas de conservar la perspectiva y recordar que la vida es breve y delicada.La muerte es algo de lo que a menudo evitamos hablar, o incluso pensar, pero entend que prepararnos para la muerte es una de esas cosas que nos confieren ms poder. Pensar en la muerte clarifica nuestra vida.

Nuestros espacios compartidos pueden reflejar mejor lo que nos importa como individuos y como comunidad y con ms medios para compartir esperanzas, miedos e historias, la gente que nos rodea no slo puede ayudar a mejorar lugares, puede ayudar a mejorar nuestras vidas. Gracias. (Aplausos) (Aplausos) Gracias. (Aplausos) (Aplausos)

There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces. So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space,using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. And these projects came from questions I had, like, how much are my neighbors paying for their apartments? (Laughter) How can we lend and borrow more things without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? How can we share more of our memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? And how can we share more of our hopes for our vacant storefronts, so our communities can reflect our needs and dreams today? Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans. My soul is always soothed by the giant live oak trees, shading lovers, drunks and dreamers for hundreds of years, and I trust a city that always makes way for music. (Laughter) I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade. (Laughter) The city has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, but it also has one of the highest amounts of abandoned properties in America. I live near this house, and I thought about how I could make it a nicer space for my neighborhood, and I also thought about something that changed my life forever. In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. Her name was Joan, and she was a mother to me, and her death was sudden and unexpected. And I thought about death a lot, and this made me feel deep gratitude for the time I've had, and brought clarity to the things that are meaningful to my life now. But I struggle to maintain this perspective in my daily life. I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you. So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to ... " So anyone walking by can pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their lives, and share their personal aspirations in public space. I didn't know what to expect from this experiment, but by the next day, the wall was entirely filled out, and it kept growing. And I'd like to share a few things that people wrote on this wall. "Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy." (Laughter) "Before I die, I want to straddle the International Date Line." "Before I die, I want to sing for millions." "Before I die, I want to plant a tree." "Before I die, I want to live off the grid." "Before I die, I want to hold her one more time." "Before I die, I want to be someone's cavalry." "Before I die, I want to be completely myself." So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times. It's about knowing you're not alone. It's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways. It's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change. I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate peoplewho wanted to make a wall with their community, so my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina and beyond. Together, we've shown how

powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice and share more with one another. Two of the most valuable things we have are time and our relationships with other people. In our age of increasing distractions, it's more important than ever to find ways to maintainperspective and remember that life is brief and tender. Death is something that we're often discouraged to talk about or even think about, but I've realized that preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. Thinking about death clarifies your life. Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us as individuals and as a community,and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extra years of life
When game designer Jane McGonigal found herself bedridden and suicidal following a severe concussion, she had a fascinating idea for how to get better. She dove into the scientific research and created the healing game, SuperBetter. In this moving talk, McGonigal explains how a game can boost resilience -- and promises to add 7.5 minutes to your life. Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how

Soy jugadora, as que me gusta tener metas. Me gustan las misiones especiales y los objetivos secretos. As que esta es mi misin especial para esta charla: voy a intentar alargar la vida de cada uno de vosotros siete minutos y medio. Literalmente, vivirn siete minutos y medio ms justamente por ver esta charla. Algunos parecen un poco escpticos Est bien, porque vanlo, tengo los nmeros para probarlo. No tienen mucho sentido ahora, los explicar ms tarde. Solo pongan atencin al nmero de abajo: ms 7,68245837 minutos ser mi regalo para Uds. si tengo xito en mi misin. Ahora bien, Uds. tambin tienen una misin secreta. Su misin es imaginar en qu quieren emplear esos siete minutos y medio extras. Pienso que deberan hacer algo inusual con ellos ya que son una bonificacin. No contaban con ellos. Como yo soy diseadora de juegos, pueden estar pensando: "s lo que quiere que hagamos con esos minutos, quiere que los gastemos jugando". Es una presuncin completamente razonable, dado que tengo el hbito de alentar a la gente a pasar ms tiempo jugando. Por ejemplo, en mi primera charla en TED propuse que deberamos pasar 21 mil millones de horas a la semana como planeta jugando a videojuegos. 21 mil millones de horas es mucho tiempo. Es tanto, de hecho, que el mayor comentario no pedido que he odo de la gente alrededor del mundo desde que di esa charla, es este:"Jane, lo juegos son grandiosos, pero en tu lecho de muerte, realmente desears haber pasado ms tiempo jugando Angry Birds? Esta idea et tan generalizada que los juegos son una prdida de tiempo de la que nos arrepentiremos que la he odo en todos sitios.Por ejemplo, una historia verdica: hace pocas semanas, este taxista, al enterarse de que mi amigo y yo estbamos en la ciudad por una conferencia de desarrolladores de juegos,se dio vuelta y dijo, abro comillas: "Odio los juegos. Desperdicio de vida. Imaginen llegar al final de su vida y lamentar toda esa prdida de tiempo".

Quiero afrontar este problema seriamente. Quiero decir, quiero juegos que fomenten el progreso en el mundo. No quiero jugadores que lamenten el tiempo perdido jugando, tiempo que yo les alent a gastar. Vengo pensando en esta pregunta desde hace mucho. Cuando estemos en nuestro lecho de muerte, lamentaremos el tiempo que pasamos jugando? Tal vez les sorprenda, pero hay investigaciones cientficas sobre esta pregunta. Es verdad. Trabajadores de hospicios, las personas que nos cuidarn al final de nuestras vidas,reportaron recientemente los lamentos ms frecuentes de las personas que estaban a punto de morir. Eso es lo que quiero compartir hoy, cinco lamentos principales antes de morir. Primero: deseara no haber trabajado tan arduamente. Segundo: hubiera querido estar ms en contacto con mis amigos. Tercero: quisiera haberme permitido ser ms feliz. Cuarto: deseara haber tenido el valor de ser yo mismo. Y quinto: deseara haber vivido fiel a mis sueos, en vez de hacer lo que otros esperaban de m. Hasta dnde s, ninguno dijo a los trabajadores del hospicio "quisiera haber jugando ms videojuegos", pero cuando oigo estas cinco quejas antes de morir, no puedo dejar de escuchar cinco deseos que los juegos pueden ayudar a cumplir. Por ejemplo, deseara no haber trabajado tan arduamente. Para muchas personas esto quiere decir "quisiera haber pasado ms tiempo con mi familia, con mis hijos cuando crecan". Sabemos que jugar juntos beneficia a la familia. Un reciente estudio de la Brigham Young University School of Family, conclua que lo padres que dedican tiempo a jugar videojuegos con sus hijos tienen un relacin en la vida real ms fuerte con ellos. Deseara haber tenido ms contacto con mis amigos. Bien, cientos de millones de personas usan juegos sociales como FarmVille o Words With Friends para estar en contacto con amigos y familiares de la vida real. Un reciente estudio de la Universidad de Michigan mostr que estos juegos son una herramienta increblemente poderosa para manejar las relaciones. Nos ayuda a mantenernos conectados con personas de nuestra red social con los que de otra forma no hablaramos, si no estuviramos jugando juntos. Quisiera haberme permitido ser ms feliz. Bueno, aqu no puedo sino pensar en los ensayos clnicos innovadores hechos recientemente en East Carolina University que muestran que los juegos en lnea pueden superar a los tratamientos farmacuticos para la ansiedad y depresin clnicas. Solo 30 minutos de juego en lnea al da fueron suficientes para cambiar drsticamente el estado de nimo e incrementar a largo plazo su felicidad. Deseara haber tenido el valor de expresar mi verdadero yo: Bien, los avatares son la forma de expresar nuestro verdadero yo la ms heroica e idealizada versin de lo que podemos llegar a ser. Pueden verlo en esta imagen del alter ego de Robbie Cooper de un jugador con su avatar. Y la Universidad de Stanford ha estado haciendo una investigacin de cinco aospara documentar cmo jugar con un avatar idealizado cambia cmo pensamos y actuamos en la vida real volvindonos ms valientes, ms ambiciosos, ms comprometidos con nuestras metas. Deseara haber vivido de acuerdo a mis sueos y no a las expectativas de otros. Hacen lo mismo los juegos? No estoy segura, as que dejo un signo de interrogacin, uno de Super Mario. Y volver ms tarde sobre este punto. Pero mientras tanto, quiz se estarn preguntando, quin es esta diseadora que nos est hablando de lamentos en el lecho de muerte? Y es verdad, nunca he trabajado en un hospicio, nunca he estado a punto de morir. Pero recientemente estuve 3 meses en cama, esperando morir. Realmente deseando morir. Les contar la historia. Comienza hace dos aos, cuando me golpe la cabeza y tuve una conmocin. La conmocin no san adecuadamente, y luego de 30 das estaba postrada con sntomas como un dolor de cabeza que no paraba, naseas, vrtigo, prdida de memoria, aturdimiento. Mi mdico me dijo que para sanar mi cerebro, deba descansar. As que tuve que evitar todo lo que desencadenaba los sntomas. Lo que para

m fue no leer ni escribir ni usar videojuegos ni trabajar o escribir correos ni correr ni el alcohol ni la cafena.En otras palabras imagino que saben a dnde voy, no tener razn para vivir. Claro que parece extrao, pero con toda seriedad, la idea de suicidarse es muy comn en lesiones cerebrales traumticas. Sucede en uno de tres, y me pas a m. Mi cerebro comenz a decirme: "Jane, t quieres morir". Deca: "Nunca vas a mejorar. El dolor nunca pasar". Y estas voces se hicieron tan persistentes y convincentes que empec a temer legtimamente por mi vida, que es cuando me dije, despus de 34 das nunca olvidar el momento, dije: "O me mato o lo convierto en un juego". Bien, por qu un juego? Saba por investigaciones psicolgicas de ms de una dcada sobre los juegos que cuando juegas y esto es literatura cientfica afrontas los desafos difciles con ms creatividad, ms determinacin, ms optimismo, y que somos ms capaces de pedir ayuda a otros. Y yo quera llevar estas cualidades al reto de mi vida, as que cre un juego de rol llamado "Jane, la asesina de la conmocin". Esta sera mi nueva identidad secreta y lo primero que hice como asesina fue llamar a mi hermana gemela tengo una hermana gemela idntica, Kelly y le dije: "Voy a jugar un juego para sanar mi cerebro y quiero que juegues conmigo". Esta es una forma fcil de pedir ayuda. Se volvi mi principal aliada en el juego, luego se sum mi esposo Kiyash, y juntos identificamos y peleamos contra los tipos malos, que eran cualquier cosa que desencadenara los sntomas y que por ello ralentizaban el proceso de curacin, cosas como luces brillantes o lugares atestados. Tambin recogimos y activamos mejoradores.Eran cualquier cosa que poda hacer an en mi peor da para sentirme un poquito mejor, un poco productiva. Cosas como acariciar a mi perro 10 minutos o levantarme y caminar una vez alrededor de la manzana. El juego era tan simple como: adopte una identidad secreta, reclute aliados, pelee contra los chicos malos, active los mejoradores. Pero an con un juego tan simple, con solo un par de das de estar jugando, esa niebla de depresin y ansiedad se fue. Se desvaneci. Fue como un milagro. Ahora bien, no cur milagrosamente los dolores de cabeza o los sntomas cognoscitivos. Duraron ms de un ao y fue de lejos el ao ms difcil de mi vida.Pero an cuando segua con los sntomas, incluso cuando an dola, dej de sufrir. Y lo que pas despus con el juego me sorprendi. Sub algunos blogs y videos en lneaexplicando cmo jugar. Pero no todos tienen una conmocin, obviamente, no todos quieren ser "el asesino", as que renombr el juego SuperMejor. [SuperBetter] Y pronto empec a escuchar de gente de todo el mundo que estaba adoptando su identidad secreta, reclutando aliados, y que iban "super mejorando", enfrentando retos como el cncer o el dolor crnico, la depresin o la enfermedad de Crohn. Incluso pacientes terminales con esclerosis lateral amiotrfica. Y puedo decirles por sus mensajes y videosque el juego les ha ayudado de la misma forma en que me ayud a m. Hablan de sentirse ms fuertes y valientes. Hablan de sentirse mejor entendidos por sus familias y amigos.Incluso hablan de sentirse ms felices, an teniendo dolor, an cuando estn afrontando el mayor reto de sus vidas. Entonces me plante, qu est pasando aqu? Quiero decir, cmo un juego tan trivial puede ser tan poderoso en circunstancias tan serias, en algunos casos de vida o muerte?Es decir, si no hubiera servido para m, no lo hubiera credo posible. Bueno, resulta que hay algo de ciencia aqu tambin. Algunas personas se vuelven ms fuertes y felices despus de un evento traumtico. Y esto es lo que estaba pasndonos. El juego nos estaba ayudando a experimentar lo que los cientficos llaman crecimiento postraumtico, que no es algo de lo que generalmente oigamos. Normalmente omos de estrs postraumtico. Pero los cientficos saben ahora que un evento traumtico no nos

condena a sufrir indefinidamente. Al contrario, podemos usarlo como un trampoln para desplegar nuestras mejores cualidades y llevar una vida ms feliz. Aqu estn las cinco cosas que dicen las personas con crecimiento postraumtico: Mis prioridades han cambiado. No me da miedo hacer lo que me hace feliz. Me siento ms cercano a mis amigos y familia. Me entiendo mejor a m mismo. S ahora quin soy realmente. Tengo un nuevo sentido y propsito de vida. Estoy mejor capacitado para centrarme en mis metas y sueos. Les suena familiar ahora? Debera, porque los cinco primeros rasgos del crecimiento postraumtico son esencialmente opuestos a los cinco lamentos antes de morir. Es interesante, verdad? Parece que de alguna forma, un evento traumtico desencadena nuestra habilidad de llevar una vida con menos lamentos. Pero cmo lo logra? Cmo pasa uno del trauma al crecimiento? Mejor, hay alguna forma de obtener los beneficios del crecimiento postraumtico sin el trauma, sin que te tengas que golpear antes la cabeza? Sera bueno, verdad? Quera entender mejor el fenmeno, as que devor la literatura cientfica y esto es lo que aprend. Hay cuatro formas de fortaleza, o resiliencia, que contribuyen al crecimiento postraumtico, y hay actividades validadas cientficamente que uno puede hacer todos los das para construir esa resiliencia, y uno no necesita un trauma para hacerlo. Les dir cules son esas cuatro fortalezas, pero preferira que las experimentaran directamente, preferira que comenzramos ahora a construirlas juntos. Esto es lo que haremos. Vamos a jugar a un pequeo juego juntos. Aqu es donde ganan esos siete minutos y medio adicionales que les promet antes. Todo lo que tienen que hacer es terminar con xito estas cuatro SuperMejores misiones. Siento que pueden hacerlo. Confo en Uds. Todos listos? Su primera misin. Ah vamos. Elijan una: o se levantan y dan tres pasos o hacen dos puos y los levantan sobre la cabeza tan alto como puedan durante cinco segundos. Vamos! Muy bien, me gustan los que hacen las dos. Estn sobrados. Muy bien. (Risas) Bien todos. Esto vale un punto ms en resiliencia fsica, lo que significa que su cuerpotolera ms estrs y se cura ms rpidamente. Sabemos por la investigacin, que lo primeroque puede potenciar su resiliencia fsica es no permanecer sentados. Es todo lo que hay que hacer. Cada segundo en que no estn sentados mejoran activamente su salud y su corazn, y sus pulmones y cerebros. Todos listos para la siguiente misin? Quiero que chasqueen los dedos 50 veces, o cuenten hacia atrs desde 100 de siete en siete, 100, 93... Vamos! (Chasquidos) No se rindan. (Chasquidos) No dejen que los que cuentan bajando de 100 interfieran con su conteo de 50. (Risas) Lindo. Oh! Es la primera vez que veo esto as. Bonos para la resiliencia fsica. Bien hecho.Esto vale un punto para la resiliencia mental, lo que significa que tienen ms foco mental, ms disciplina, determinacin y voluntad. Sabemos por la investigacin cientfica que la voluntad trabaja realmente como un msculo. Se fortalece conforme se ejercita. As que aceptar un pequeo reto sin rendirse, incluso tan absurdo cono chasquear 50 veces o contar hacia atrs de siete en siete es realmente una forma cientficamente validada de fortalecer la voluntad. As que buen trabajo. Misin nmero tres. Elijan: debido al lugar donde estamos, la suerte decidi por Uds., pero hay dos opciones. Si estn dentro, encuentren una ventana y miren afuera. Si estn afuera, encuentren la ventana y miren adentro. O busquen en YouTube o Google imgenes de "beb [su animal favorito]".

Pueden hacerlo con sus telfonos o solo griten nombres de animales bebs. Voy a buscar algunos y proyectarlos. Qu quieren ver? Perezoso, jirafa, elefante, serpiente. Djenme ver qu consigo. Un delfn beb y una llama beb. Todos miren. Lo tienen? Bien, uno ms. Un elefante beb. Aplauden esto? Sorprendente. Bien, lo que acabamos de sentir es un punto ms en resiliencia emocional, lo que significa que tienen la habilidad de provocar poderosas emociones positivas como curiosidad o amor,lo que sentimos cuando miramos animales beb, cuando ms lo necesitamos. Y he aqu un secreto de la literatura cientfica para Uds. Si pueden lograr experimentar tres emociones positivas por cada una negativa a lo largo de una hora, un da, una semana, mejorarn dramticamente su salud y su habilidad de afrontar exitosamente cualquier problema al que se enfrenten. Es la denominada relacin de emocin positiva, tres a uno.Es mi SuperMejor truco favorito, consrvenlo. Bien, escojan la ltima: Denle la mano durante seis segundos a alguien o envenle a alguien un breve gracias por mensaje de texto, correo, Facebook o Twitter. Vamos! (Chateando) Buena pinta, muy buena. Lindo, lindo. Sostngalo. Me encanta! Muy bien, todos un punto ms en resiliencia social, lo que significa que realmente tienen ms apoyo de sus amigos,vecinos, familia o comunidad. Una excelente manera de potenciar la resiliencia social es la gratitud. Tocarse es an mejor. Un secreto ms para Uds.: dar la mano durante seis segundos a alguien sube dramticamente su nivel de oxitocina sangunea la hormona de la confianza. Lo que significa que todos los que estrecharon las manos estn biolgicamente impulsados a agradar y querer ayudarse entre Uds. Esto permanecer durante el descanso, as que aprovechen la oportunidad de formar redes sociales. (Risas) Bien, terminaron exitosamente sus cuatro tareas, as que djenme ver si termin con xito mi misin de darles un bono de siete minutos extra de vida. Aqu es donde comparto un pedacito de ciencia. Resulta que quienes con regularidad potencian estas cuatro resiliencias, fsica, mental, emocional y social, viven 10 aos ms que los dems. Es verdad. Si con regularidad logran la relacin emocional positiva tres a uno, si no se sientan por ms de una hora continua, si contactan una persona que les importa todos los das, si afrontan pequeos retos para potenciar su voluntad, vivirn 10 aos ms que los dems, y aqu es donde aparece la matemtica que les mostr antes. La esperanza de vida promedio en EE. UU. y Reino Unido es de 78,1 aos, pero sabemos por medio de ms de 1000 estudios cientficos evaluados por pares que uno puede aadir 10 aos a la vida potenciando sus cuatro tipos de resiliencia. As que por cada ao que unopotencie sus cuatro resiliencias, realmente gana 0,128 ms aos de vida o 46 das ms, o 67 298 minutos ms de vida, lo que significa que por cada da, gana 184 minutos de vida,cada hora que potencien las cuatro resiliencias, como lo hemos hecho juntos, estn ganando 7,68245837 minutos de vida. Felicitaciones, esos siete minutos y medio son todos suyos. Se los ganaron. (Aplausos) S! Asombroso. Esperen, esperen, esperen. Aun tienen su misin especial, su misin secreta. Cmo van a gastar esos siete minutos y medio adicionales de vida? Bien, esta es mi sugerencia: estos siete minutos y medio son una especia de genio de la lmpara, su primer deseo puede ser un milln de deseos ms. Muy inteligente, cierto?As, si utilizan estos siete minutos y medio al da haciendo algo que los haga felices o haciendo actividad fsica o ponindose en contacto con alguien que les importe o incluso, aceptando un pequeo reto, potenciarn sus resiliencias, as que ganarn ms minutos. Y la buena noticia es que pueden mantenerse as. Cada hora del da, cada da de su vida,hasta sus muertes, que llegar ahora 10 aos ms tarde de lo que llegara de otra

forma. Y cuando estn all, no tendrn ninguno de esos cinco lamentos, porque habrn construido la fortaleza y resiliencia para conducir su vida siguiendo sus sueos. Y con esos 10 aos extras, pueden incluso tener tiempo suficiente para jugar ms juegos. Gracias. (Aplausos) I'm a gamer, so I like to have goals. I like special missions and secret objectives. So here's my special mission for this talk: I'm going to try to increase the life span of every single person in this room by seven and a half minutes. Literally, you will live seven and half minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk. Okay, some of you are looking a little bit skeptical. That's okay, because check it out -- I have math to prove that it is possible. And it won't make a lot of sense now. I'll explain it all later, just pay attention to the number at the bottom: plus-7.68245837 minutes that will be my gift to you if I'm successful in my mission. Now, you have a secret mission too. Your mission is to figure out how you want to spend your extra seven and a half minutes. And I think you should do something unusual with them, because these are bonus minutes. You weren't going to have them anyway. Now, because I'm a game designer, you might be thinking to yourself, I know what she wants us to do with those minutes, she wants us to spend them playing games. Now this is a totally reasonable assumption, given that I have made quite a habit of encouraging peopleto spend more time playing games. For example, in my first TEDTalk, I did propose that we should spend 21 billion hours a week as a planet playing video games. Now, 21 billion hours, it's a lot of time. It's so much time, in fact, that the number one unsolicited comment that I have heard from people all over the world since I gave that talk, is this: Jane, games are great and all, but on your deathbed, are you really going to wish you spent more time playing Angry Birds? This idea is so pervasive -- that games are a waste of time that we will come to regret -- that I hear it literally everywhere I go. For example, true story: Just a few weeks ago, this cab driver, upon finding out that a friend and I were in townfor a game developer's conference, turned around and said -- and I quote -- "I hate games. Waste of life. Imagine getting to the end of your life and regretting all that time." Now, I want to take this problem seriously. I mean, I want games to be a force for good in the world. I don't want gamers to regret the time they spent playing, time that I encouraged them to spend. So I have been thinking about this question a lot lately. When we're on our deathbeds, will we regret the time we spent playing games? Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out there is actually some scientific research on this question. It's true. Hospice workers, the people who take care of us at the end of our lives, recently issued a report on the most frequently expressed regrets that people say when they are literally on their deathbeds. And that's what I want to share with you today -the top five regrets of the dying. Number one: I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number two: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Number three: I wish I had let myself be happier. Number four: I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self. And number five: I wish I'd lived a life true to my dreams,instead of what others expected of me. Now, as far as I know, no one ever told one of the hospice workers, I wish I'd spent more time playing video games, but when I hear these top five regrets of the dying, I can't help but hear five deep human cravings that games actually help us fulfill. For example, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. For many people, this means, I wish I'd spent more time with my family, with my kids when they were growing up. Well, we know that playing games together has tremendous family benefits. A recent study from Brigham Young University School of Family life reported that parents who spend more time playing video games with their kids have much stronger real-life relationships with them.

I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. Well, hundreds of millions of people use social games like FarmVille or Words With Friends to stay in daily contact with real-life friends and family. A recent study from [University of Michigan] showed that these games are incredibly powerful relationship-management tools. They help us stay connected with people in our social network that we would otherwise grow distant from, if we weren't playing games together. I wish I'd let myself be happier. Well, here I can't help but think of the groundbreaking clinical trials recently conducted at East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression. Just 30 minutes of online game play a day was enough to create dramatic boosts in mood and long-term increases in happiness. I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self. Well, avatars are a way to express our true selves, our most heroic, idealized version of who we might become. You can see that in this alter ego portrait by Robbie Cooper of a gamer with his avatar. And Stanford University has been doing research for five years now to document how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making us more courageous, more ambitious, more committed to our goals. I wish I'd led a life true to my dreams, and not what others expected of me. Are games doing this yet? I'm not sure, so I've left a question mark, a Super Mario question mark. And we're going to come back to this one. But in the mean time, perhaps you're wondering, who is this game designer to be talking to us about deathbed regrets? And it's true, I've never worked in a hospice, I've never been on my deathbed. But recently I did spend three months in bed, wanting to die. Really wanting to die. Now let me tell you that story. It started two years ago, when I hit my head and got a concussion. Now the concussion didn't heal properly, and after 30 days I was left with symptoms like nonstop headaches, nausea, vertigo, memory loss, mental fog. My doctor told me that in order to heal my brain, I had to rest it. So I had to avoid everything that triggered my symptoms. For me that meant no reading, no writing, no video games, no work or email, no running, no alcohol, no caffeine. In other words -- and I think you see where this is going -- no reason to live. Of course it's meant to be funny, but in all seriousness, suicidal ideation is quite commonwith traumatic brain injuries. It happens to one in three, and it happened to me. My brain started telling me, Jane, you want to die. It said, you're never going to get better. It said, the pain will never end. And these voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life, which is the time that I said to myself after 34 days -- and I will never forget this moment -- I said, I am either going to kill myself or I'm going to turn this into a game. Now, why a game? I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game -- and this is in the scientific literature -- we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we're more likely to reach out to others for help. And I wanted to bring these gamer traits to my real-life challenge, so I created a role-playing recovery game called Jane the Concussion Slayer. Now this became my new secret identity, and the first thing I did as a slayer was call my twin sister -- I have an identical twin sister named Kelly -- and tell her, I'm playing a game to heal my brain, and I want you to play with me. This was an easier way to ask for help. She became my first ally in the game, my husband Kiyash joined next, and together we identified and battled the bad guys. Now this was anything that could trigger my symptomsand therefore slow down the healing process, things like bright lights and crowded spaces.We also collected and activated power-ups. This was anything I could do on even my worst day to feel just a little bit good, just a little bit productive. Things like

cuddling my dog for 10 minutes, or getting out of bed and walking around the block just once. Now the game was that simple: Adopt a secret identity, recruit your allies, battle the bad guys, activate the power-ups. But even with a game so simple, within just a couple days of starting to play, that fog of depression and anxiety went away. It just vanished. It felt like a miracle. Now it wasn't a miracle cure for the headaches or the cognitive symptoms. That lasted for more than a year, and it was the hardest year of my life by far. But even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was still in pain, I stopped suffering. Now what happened next with the game surprised me. I put up some blog posts and videos online, explaining how to play. But not everybody has a concussion, obviously, not everyone wants to be "the slayer," so I renamed the game SuperBetter. And soon I started hearing from people all over the world who were adopting their own secret identity, recruiting their own allies, and they were getting "super better" facing challenges like cancer and chronic pain, depression and Crohn's disease. Even people were playing it for terminal diagnoses like ALS. And I could tell from their messages and their videos that the game was helping them in the same ways that it helped me. They talked about feeling stronger and braver. They talked about feeling better understood by their friends and family.And they even talked about feeling happier, even though they were in pain, even though they were tackling the toughest challenge of their lives. Now at the time, I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here? I mean, how could a game so trivial intervene so powerfully in such serious, and in some cases life-and-death, circumstances? I mean, if it hadn't worked for me, there's no way I would have believed it was possible. Well, it turns out there's some science here too. Some people get stronger and happier after a traumatic event. And that's what was happening to us. The game was helping us experience what scientists call post-traumatic growth, which is not something we usually hear about. We usually hear about post-traumatic stress disorder.But scientists now know that a traumatic event doesn't doom us to suffer indefinitely.Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives. Here are the top five things that people with post-traumatic growth say: My priorities have changed. I'm not afraid to do what makes me happy. I feel closer to my friends and family. I understand myself better. I know who I really am now. I have a new sense of meaning and purpose in my life. I'm better able to focus on my goals and dreams. Now, does this sound familiar? It should, because the top five traits of post-traumatic growthare essentially the direct opposite of the top five regrets of the dying. Now this is interesting, right? It seems that somehow, a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets. But how does it work? How do you get from trauma to growth? Or better yet, is there a way to get all the benefits of post-traumatic growth without the trauma, without having to hit your head in the first place? That would be good, right? I wanted to understand the phenomenon better, so I devoured the scientific literature, and here's what I learned. There are four kinds of strength, or resilience, that contribute to posttraumatic growth, and there are scientifically validated activities that you can do every day to build up these four kinds of resilience, and you don't need a trauma to do it. Now, I could tell you what these four types of strength are, but I'd rather you experience them firsthand. I'd rather we all start building them up together right now. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to play a quick game together. This is where you earn those seven and a half minutes of bonus life that I promised you earlier. All you have to do is successfully complete the first four SuperBetter quests. And I feel like you can do it. I have confidence in you. So, everybody ready? This is your first quest. Here we go. Pick one: Stand up and take three steps, or make your hands into fists, raise them over your head as high as you can

for five seconds. Go! All right, I like the people doing both. You are overachievers. Very good. (Laughter) Well done, everyone. Now that is worth plus-one physical resilience, which means that your body can withstand more stress and heal itself faster. Now we know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still. That's all it takes. Every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the health of your heart, and your lungs and brains. Everybody ready for your next quest? I want you to snap your fingers exactly 50 times, or count backwards from 100 by seven, like this: 100, 93 ... Go! (Snapping) Don't give up. (Snapping) Don't let the people counting down from 100 interfere with your counting to 50. (Laughter) Nice. Wow. That's the first time I've ever seen that. Bonus physical resilience. Well done, everyone. Now that's worth plus-one mental resilience, which means you have more mental focus, more discipline, determination and willpower. We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you exercise it. So tackling a tiny challenge without giving up, even one as absurd as snapping your fingers exactly 50 times or counting backwards from 100 by seven is actually a scientifically validated way to boost your willpower. So good job. Quest number three. Pick one: Now because of the room we're in, fate's really determined this for you, but here are the two options. If you're inside, find a window and look out of it. If you're outside, find a window and look in. Or do a quick YouTube or Google image search for "baby [your favorite animal.]" Now, you could do this on your phones, or you could just shout out some baby animals, I'm going to find some and put them on the screen for us. So, what do we want to see? Sloth, giraffe, elephant, snake. Okay, let's see what we got. Baby dolphin and baby llamas. Everybody look. Got that? Okay, one more. Baby elephant. We're clapping for that? That's amazing. All right, now what we're just feeling there is plus-one emotional resilience, which means you have the ability to provoke powerful, positive emotions like curiosity or love, which we feel when we look at baby animals, when you need them most. And here's a secret from the scientific literature for you. If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of an hour, a day, a week, you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing. And this is called the three-to-one positive emotion ratio. It's my favorite SuperBetter trick, so keep it up. All right, pick one, last quest: Shake someone's hand for six seconds, or send someone a quick thank you by text, email, Facebook or Twitter. Go! (Chatting) Looking good, looking good. Nice, nice. Keep it up. I love it! All right, everybody, that is plus-one social resilience, which means you actually get more strength from your friends,your neighbors, your family, your community. Now, a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude. Touch is even better. Here's one more secret for you: Shaking someone's hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream, now that's the trust hormone. That means that all of you who just shook hands are biochemically primed to like and want to help each other. This will linger during the break, so take advantage of the networking opportunities. (Laughter) Okay, well you have successfully completed your four quests, so let's see if I've successfully completed my mission to give you seven and a half minutes of bonus life. And

here's where I get to share one more little bit of science with you. It turns out that people who regularly boost these four types of resilience -- physical, mental, emotional and social -- live 10 years longer than everyone else. So this is true. If you are regularly achieving the three-to-one positive emotion ratio, if you are never sitting still for more than an hour at a time, if you are reaching out to one person you care about every single day, if you are tackling tiny goals to boost your willpower, you will live 10 years longer than everyone else,and here's where that math I showed you earlier comes in. So, the average life expectancy in the U.S. and the U.K. is 78.1 years, but we know from more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies that you can add 10 years of life to that by boosting your four types of resilience. So every single year that you are boosting your four types of resilience, you're actually earning .128 more years of life or 46 more days of life, or 67,298 more minutes of life, which means every single day, you are earning 184 minutes of life, or every single hour that you are boosting your four types of resilience, like we just did together, you are earning 7.68245837 more minutes of life. Congratulations, those seven and a half minutes are all yours. You totally earned them. (Applause) Yeah! Awesome. Wait, wait, wait. You still have your special mission, your secret mission.How are you going to spend these seven and a half minutes of bonus life? Well, here's my suggestion. These seven and a half bonus minutes are kind of like genie's wishes. You can use your first wish to wish for a million more wishes. Pretty clever, right?So, if you spend these seven and a half minutes today doing something that makes you happy, or that gets you physically active, or puts you in touch with someone you care about, or even just tackling a tiny challenge, you are going to boost your resilience, so you're going to earn more minutes. And the good news is, you can keep going like that. Every hour of the day, every day of your life, all the way to your deathbed, which will now be 10 years later than it would have otherwise. And when you get there, more than likely, you will not have any of those top five regrets, because you will have built up the strength and resilience to lead a life truer to your dreams. And with 10 extra years, you might even have enough time to play a few more games. Thank you.

Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education

http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.htm l
Daphne Koller is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free -- not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. With Coursera (cofounded by Andrew Ng), each keystroke, quiz, peer-to-peer discussion and self-graded assignment builds an unprecedented pool of data on how knowledge is processed. With Coursera, Daphne Koller and co-founder Andrew Ng are bringing courses from top colleges online, free, for anyone who wants to take them

Como muchos de Uds., soy una de las afortunadas. Nac en una familia en la que la educacin lo impregnaba todo. Soy la tercera generacin de doctores, hija de dos acadmicos. De nia jugu alrededor del laboratorio universitario de mi padre. As que se

daba por hecho que asistira a una de las mejores universidades, lo que me abri la puerta a un mundo de oportunidades. Por desgracia, la mayora no es tan afortunada. En algunos lugares, como Sudfrica, no se accede fcilmente a la educacin. All el sistema educativo se estableci durante la segregacin racial para la minora blanca, por eso hoy no hay suficientes plazas para los muchos que desean y merecen una educacin de alta calidad. Esta escasez provoc una crisis en enero de este ao en la Universidad de Johannesburgo. Quedaba un puado de plazas y la noche anterior a que se abriera el registro, miles aguardaban en una fila de 1,5 km. esperando conseguir una plaza. Cuando las puertas abrieron hubo una estampida, 20 personas resultaron heridas y una mujer falleci. Era una madre que dio su vida intentando obtener para su hijo la oportunidad de una vida mejor. Pero incluso donde la educacin est disponible, como en EE.UU., puede estar fuera del alcance. En los ltimos aos se ha discutido mucho sobre el creciente costo de la asistencia mdica. No obstante, durante el mismo periodo el costo de la educacin superior ha incrementado hasta un total de 559 % desde 1985. Esto hace la educacin inaccesible para muchos. Finalmente, incluso quienes logran terminar la universidad pueden no tener oportunidades.Poco ms de la mitad de los universitarios recin graduados en EE.UU. tienen empleos que requieren ese nivel de formacin. Ciertamente, esto es diferente para los graduados de las instituciones de prestigio, pero muchos otros no recuperan el valor de su tiempo y esfuerzo. Tom Friedman, en un artculo para el New York Times, reflej, como ninguno, el espritu de nuestro proyecto. Dijo que las grandes innovaciones ocurren cuando lo que de repente es posible encuentra lo desesperadamente necesario. He hablado sobre lo que es desesperadamente necesario. Ahora hablemos sobre lo que de repente es posible. Esto fue demostrado en tres grandes clases ofrecidas por Stanford, cada una con 100 000 o ms personas inscritas. Para entenderlo, veamos una de ellas, Aprendizaje automtico, ofrecido por mi colega y cofundador Andrew Ng. Andrew dicta una de las mayores clases en Stanford. Es sobre Aprendizaje automtico con 400 estudiantes inscritos cada periodo.Cuando Andrew ofreci la clase al pblico, se registraron 100 000 personas. Pongamos la cantidad en perspectiva: para que Andrew alcanzara la misma audiencia en Stanford tendra que dictar la clase durante 250 aos. Claro, se aburrira mucho. Al haber visto este impacto, decidimos intentar llevarlo a una mayor escala, para llevar la mejor educacin a tantas personas como pudiramos. As que creamos Coursera, cuyo objetivo es tomar las mejores clases de los mejores profesores de las mejores universidades, y ofrecerlas gratis a todo el mundo. Actualmente tenemos 43 cursos en la plataforma, de cuatro universidades y varias disciplinas. Les mostrar cmo se ve a grandes rasgos. (Video) Robert Ghrist: Bienvenidos a Clculo. Ezekiel Emanuel: 50 millones carecen de seguro. Scott Page: Los modelos permiten disear polticas ms efectivas. Tenemos una segregacin increble. Scott Klemmer: Bush imagin que en el futuro, llevaramos una cmara en la frente. Mitchell Duneier: Mills desea que el estudiante de sociologa desarrolle las cualidades mentales RG: Los cables colgantes adoptan la forma de un coseno hiperblico. Nick Parlante: Fijen el rojo de cada pxel a cero. Paul Offit: las vacunas permitieron erradicar el polio. Dan Jurafsky: Lufthansa sirve desayunos y San Jos? Suena raro. Daphne Koller: sta es la moneda elegida y stos los posibles resultados. Andrew Ng: El objetivo del aprendizaje automtico, a gran escala, es

(Aplausos) DK: Resulta, quiz no es una sorpresa, que a los estudiantes les gusta tener acceso gratuito a los mejores materiales de las mejores universidades. Desde que abrimos el sitio Web en febrero, hemos tenido 640 000 estudiantes de 190 pases. Tenemos 1,5 millones de matrculas, 6 millones de exmenes en los 15 cursos impartidos y se han visto 14 millones de videos. Pero no se trata solo de las cifras, sino tambin de las personas. Bien sea Akash, que vive en un pequeo pueblo en India, y que nunca habra tenido acceso a un curso de la calidad de uno de Stanford ni habra podido costearlo. O Jenny, madre soltera de dos, que desea mejorar sus habilidades para poder reanudar y terminar su maestra. O Ryan, que no puede ir a la escuela porque su hija con inmunodeficiencia no puede exponerse a los grmenes que entran a la casa, as que l no puede salir de su casa. Me da gusto decir hemos mantenido contacto con Ryan que la historia tiene un final feliz. La pequea Shannon, a la izquierda, est mucho mejor, y Ryan consigui un empleo por formarse en algunos de nuestros cursos. Qu hizo estos cursos tan diferentes? Si bien los cursos en lnea han estado disponibles durante un tiempo la diferencia estuvo en que estos recreaban la experiencia de una clase real. Empezaban en un da determinado, los estudiantes vean los videos sobre una base semanal y se les asignaban tareas. Tareas reales con valor para una calificacin real y una fecha de entrega definida. Aqu ven las fechas lmite y el grfico de uso del sitio. Estos picos demuestran que el posponer es un fenmeno global. (Risas) Al final del curso los estudiantes recibieron un certificado. Lo podan presentar a un posible empleador para obtener un mejor empleo, y conocemos a muchos que lo hicieron. Algunos lo presentaron en su institucin educativa para validar crditos. As que los estudiantes obtuvieron algo valioso a cambio de su tiempo y esfuerzo. Ahora hablemos sobre algunos componentes de estos cursos. El primero es que cuando se dejan atrs las restricciones fsicas del aula y se disean contenidos explcitamente para una clase virtual, se puede escapar, por ejemplo, del inflexible formato de una hora.Puedes fraccionar el material, por ejemplo, en unidades cortas de entre 8 y 12 minutos, que constituyen cada una un concepto coherente. Los estudiantes pueden revisar el material de diferentes formas, dependiendo de sus conocimientos previos, habilidades e intereses. Por ejemplo, algunos se benefician del material preparatorio que otros ya conocen. Otros pueden estar interesados en un tema particular que quieren seguir de forma individual. Este formato nos permite abandonar el modelo educativo en que todo es igual para todos y permite a los estudiantes seguir un currculo ms personalizado. Por supuesto, como educadores sabemos que no se aprende viendo videos de forma pasiva. Quiz uno de los mayores componentes del proyecto es que necesitamos tener estudiantes que practiquen con el material para asegurar su comprensin. Numerosos estudios han demostrado la importancia de esto. Este, que apareci en Science el ao pasado, por ejemplo, demuestra que incluso el simple repaso de retencin, que consiste en solo repetir lo aprendido, produce una mejora considerable en los resultados de varias pruebas de rendimiento, superando otro tipo de intervenciones didcticas. Tratamos de incorporar el repaso de retencin, entre otras formas de prctica. Por ejemplo, nuestros videos son ms que videos. Cada pocos minutos hay una pausa y se plantea una pregunta. (Video) SP: Teora de la perspectiva, descuento hiperblico, sesgo del statu quo y sesgo de conocimiento previo, son desviaciones cognoscitivas bien documentadas del pensamiento racional. DK: Aqu viene una pausa, el estudiante escribe su respuesta en el recuadro y la enva. Obviamente no puso atencin.

(Risas) As que intenta de nuevo y esta vez acierta. Si lo desea, puede revisar la explicacin. Ahora el video contina. Esa fue una pregunta fcil de las que yo podra hacer en clase, pero cuando las hago, el 80 % de los alumnos an est anotando lo ltimo que dije, el 15 % est distrado en Facebook, y el sabelotodo de enfrente grita la respuesta antes de que el resto pueda reflexionarla. Y yo estoy muy complacida de que alguien haya sabido la respuesta. La clase contina y la mayora ni siquiera nota que hice una pregunta. Aqu, cada estudiante debe interactuar con el contenido. Desde luego, hay mucho ms que estas simples preguntas. Se deben incorporar ejercicios ms significativos y retroalimentar a los estudiantes en todos ellos. Cmo calificar el trabajo de 100 000 estudiantes si no se tienen 10 000 asistentes? La respuesta es dejar a la tecnologa hacerlo por ti. Y por fortuna, la tecnologa ahora nos permite evaluar una diversidad interesante de tareas. Adems de las preguntas de opcin mltiple y de respuesta corta como la que mostr, podemos evaluar expresiones y derivaciones matemticas. Podemos calificar modelos, bien sean financieros en una clase de negocios,o fsicos en una clase de ciencias o ingeniera, y tambin ejercicios sofisticados de programacin. Les mostrar uno sencillo, pero muy visual. Es de la clase Ciencias de la Computacin 101, de Stanford. Los estudiantes deben corregir el color de esta imagen roja borrosa.Escriben su programa dentro del explorador, pero no muy bien, la Estatua de la Libertad an parece enferma. As que intentan de nuevo y lo logran, y ahora pueden ir al siguiente ejercicio. Esta posibilidad de interactuar activamente con el material y recibir evaluacin inmediata es esencial para el aprendizaje. Aunque an no podemos evaluar por completo las actividades que se requieren en todos los cursos. En especial, faltan las actividades de pensamiento crtico, tan esenciales en disciplinas como las humanidades, las ciencias sociales y los negocios. Intentamos convencer a algunos profesores de humanidades, de que las preguntas de opcin mltiple, no eran tan mala estrategia. Pero no funcion bien. Tuvimos que idear otra solucin, y llegamos a la evaluacin por pares. De acuerdo a estudios previos, como este de Saddler y Good, la evaluacin por pares es una estrategia efectiva para conseguir calificaciones reproducibles. Solo se ha usado en clases pequeas,pero se demostr, por ejemplo, que las calificaciones asignadas por alumnos, en el eje Y,estn muy bien correlacionadas con la calificacin asignada por el maestro, en el eje X.An ms sorprendente es que las calificaciones autoasignadas, cuando los mismos estudiantes calificaron su trabajo, en tanto los incentivos sean apropiados y no puedan asignarse una calificacin perfecta tuvieran an mejor correlacin con la calificacin asignada por el maestro. As que sta es una estrategia efectiva para calificar a gran escalay tambin para enriquecer el aprendizaje, pues los estudiantes aprenden de la experiencia.Contamos con el mayor sistema de evaluacin por pares jams concebido, decenas de miles de estudiantes estn calificando el trabajo de sus compaeros y exitosamente, hay que decirlo. Pero no se trata de tenerlos aislados en un cuarto resolviendo problemas. En cada curso se form una comunidad de estudiantes. Son comunidades globales que comparten un esfuerzo intelectual. Aqu ven un mapa generado por los estudiantes del curso Sociologa 101, de Princeton, donde marcaron su localizacin en un planisferio. Pueden apreciar el alcance global de la iniciativa. Los estudiantes colaboraron entre ellos de varias formas. Primero, haba un foro de preguntas y respuestas, donde algunos estudiantes planteaban sus dudas y otros las respondan. Lo maravilloso es que, debido a la gran cantidad de alumnos, si alguno haca una pregunta a las 3 de la madrugada, en alguna parte del mundo alguien estaba despiertoy trabajando en el mismo problema. Por lo que en muchos de nuestros cursos el

tiempo de respuesta promedio en el foro, era de 22 minutos. Es un nivel de servicio que nunca he ofrecido a mis alumnos en Stanford. (Risas) Y pueden ver por sus testimonios, que estos estudiantes creen que debido a esta gran comunidad en lnea, pudieron interactuar unos con otros en varias formas ms profundas que las que haban tenido en un aula. Adems, los estudiantes se organizaron sin nuestra intervencin en pequeos grupos de estudio. Algunos se establecieron fsicamente a partir de limitaciones geogrficas, y se reunan cada semana a trabajar en los problemas. ste es el grupo de San Francisco, pero los haba en todo el mundo. Otros grupos eran virtuales,centrados alrededor de un idioma u otro elemento cultural. Y abajo, a la izquierda, pueden ver el grupo multicultural, cuyos miembros deseaban explcitamente interactuar con personas de otras culturas. Hay enormes oportunidades en este tipo de contexto. Primero, tiene el potencial de darnosuna mirada sin precedente en el entendimiento del aprendizaje, porque podemos recopilar informacin nica. Se pueden recopilar todos los clics, tareas y entradas en el foro, de decenas de miles de estudiantes. As, el estudio del aprendizaje puede pasar de estar fundamentado en hiptesis a estar fundamentado en datos, un cambio que, por ejemplo, revolucion la biologa. Los datos pueden ayudar a responder preguntas fundamentales,como qu estrategias de aprendizaje son efectivas y cules no. Y para cada curso particular se pueden preguntar cosas como, cules son las equivocaciones ms comunes y cmo ayudar a los estudiantes a corregirlas. Aqu hay un ejemplo, tambin de la clase de Aprendizaje automtico, es la distribucin de respuestas errneas de una de las tareas. Las respuestas vinieron a ser pares de nmeros,por lo que se pudieron graficar en dos ejes. Cada pequea cruz es una respuesta errada diferente. La grande de arriba es de 2000 estudiantes que cometieron exactamente el mismo error. Ahora, si dos estudiantes en una clase de 100 cometen el mismo error,puedes no percibirlo. Pero cuando se trata de 2000 estudiantes, es imposible ignorarlo.Andrew y sus estudiantes revisaron algunas de las tareas para entender la causa de la equivocacin y elaboraron una explicacin especfica que enviaron a quienes daban esa respuesta equivocada, y as los estudiantes que cometan ese error reciban retroalimentacin personalizada indicndoles de manera efectiva cmo corregirlo. Esta personalizacin es posible gracias a la gran cantidad de informacin recopilada. La personalizacin representa una de las mayores oportunidades aqu, porque nos da la posibilidad de resolver un problema de 30 aos. En 1984, el investigador educacional, Benjamin Bloom plante el llamado problema de las dos sigmas, que observ al estudiar tres grupos de estudiantes. El primero estudiaba en un aula tradicional, a base de conferencias. El segundo tambin estudiaba a base de conferencias, pero con un enfoque dirigido a objetivos, de tal forma que los estudiantes no avanzaban sin antes dominar el tema anterior. Y en el ltimo grupo, un tutor daba instruccin individual a los estudiantes. El grupo basado en aprendizaje dirigido a objetivos obtuvo una desviacin estndar o una sigma, por encima del rendimiento del grupo corriente con clases basadas en conferencias.Y la instruccin individual produjo una mejora de dos sigmas en el rendimiento. Para entender qu significa, veamos la clase basada en conferencias y tomemos el valor medio como umbral. As, en la clase basada en conferencias, la mitad est por encima de ese nivel y la otra mitad por debajo. En el caso de la instruccin individual, el 98 % estar por encima de ese nivel. Imaginen lograr que el 98 % de los estudiantes superara ese promedio. De aqu el problema de las dos sigmas, dado que no podemos costear, como sociedad, el darle a cada estudiante un tutor humano individual. Pero quiz podamos darles una computadora o un telfono inteligente. La pregunta es, cmo usar la tecnologa para ir de la zona izquierda, de la curva azul, a la zona derecha de la curva verde? Es fcil dominar un tema usando una

computadora, porque esta no se cansa de repetir el mismo video cinco veces, ni siquiera de calificar una actividad muchas veces, como les he mostrado en muchos de los ejemplos. Incluso estamos viendo los inicios de la instruccin personalizada, bien sea a travs del currculo o de la retroalimentacin personalizada. La meta aqu es probar, impulsar y ver cunto nos acercamos a la curva verde. As que, si esto es tan bueno, son obsoletas las universidades? Bueno, as lo crea Mark Twain, quien dijo: "La universidad es el lugar donde los apuntes del profesor van directo a los del estudiante, sin pasar por el cerebro de ninguno de ellos". (Risas) Sin embargo, me permito disentir de Mark Twain. Creo que lo que criticaba no eran las universidades, sino las clases basadas en conferencias a las que estas dedican gran parte del tiempo. As que retrocedamos, hasta Plutarco, quien dijo: " La mente no es un vaso por llenar, sino una lmpara por encender". Quiz debamos dedicar menos tiempo a llenar de conferencias las mentes de los estudiantes y dedicar ms tiempo a encender su creatividad, su imaginacin y sus habilidades de resolucin de problemas, a partir de la interaccin genuina con ellos. Cmo lograrlo? Lo hacemos adoptando el aprendizaje activo. Numerosos estudios, incluyendo ste, demuestran que si se emplea el aprendizaje activo, interactuando con los estudiantes en el aula, mejoran todos los indicadores de rendimiento: asistencia, compromiso y aprendizaje medidos en exmenes estandarizados. Pueden ver que, por ejemplo, el nivel de logro mejora hasta el doble en este experimento. Quiz as debamos usar el tiempo en las universidades. En resumen, si pudiramos ofrecer educacin de calidad a todos en el mundo, gratuitamente, Qu supondra esto? Tres cosas. Primero, la educacin se establecera como un derecho fundamental. Cualquier persona en el mundo con la capacidad y la motivacin, podra desarrollar las habilidades que necesitara para mejorar autnomamente su calidad de vida, la de su familia y su comunidad. Segundo, permitira el aprendizaje continuo. Es una lstima que para muchos el aprendizaje termine al completar la escuela secundaria o la universidad. Al tener disponible esta asombrosa coleccin de cursos, es posible aprender algo nuevo cuando se desee, ya sea para expandir nuestras mentes o para cambiar nuestras vidas. Por ltimo, impulsara una ola de innovacin, porque en todas partes hay talento asombroso. Quiz el prximo Albert Einstein o el prximo Steve Jobs viva en una villa remota en frica. Y si pudiramos ofrecerle una educacin, podra ser capaz de producir la nueva gran idea y hacer del mundo un lugar mejor para todos nosotros. Muchsimas gracias. (Aplausos) Like many of you, I'm one of the lucky people. I was born to a family where education was pervasive. I'm a third-generation PhD, a daughter of two academics. In my childhood, I played around in my father's university lab. So it was taken for granted that I attend some of the best universities, which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity. Unfortunately, most of the people in the world are not so lucky. In some parts of the world, for example, South Africa, education is just not readily accessible. In South Africa, the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority. And as a consequence, today there is just not enough spots for the many more people who want and deserve a high quality education. That scarcity led to a crisis in January of this year at the University of Johannesburg. There were a handful of positions left open from the standard admissions process, and the night before they were supposed to open that for registration,thousands of people lined up outside the gate in a line a mile long, hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions. When the gates opened, there was a

stampede, and 20 people were injured and one woman died. She was a mother who gave her life trying to get her son a chance at a better life. But even in parts of the world like the United States where education is available, it might not be within reach. There has been much discussed in the last few years about the rising cost of health care. What might not be quite as obvious to people is that during that same period the cost of higher education tuition has been increasing at almost twice the rate, for a total of 559 percent since 1985. This makes education unaffordable for many people. Finally, even for those who do manage to get the higher education, the doors of opportunity might not open. Only a little over half of recent college graduates in the United States who get a higher education actually are working in jobs that require that education. This, of course, is not true for the students who graduate from the top institutions, but for many others, they do not get the value for their time and their effort. Tom Friedman, in his recent New York Times article, captured, in the way that no one else could, the spirit behind our effort. He said the big breakthroughs are what happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. I've talked about what's desperately necessary. Let's talk about what's suddenly possible. What's suddenly possible was demonstrated by three big Stanford classes, each of which had an enrollment of 100,000 people or more. So to understand this, let's look at one of those classes, the Machine Learning class offered by my colleague and cofounder Andrew Ng. Andrew teaches one of the bigger Stanford classes. It's a Machine Learning class, and it has 400 people enrolled every time it's offered. When Andrew taught the Machine Learning class to the general public, it had 100,000 people registered. So to put that number in perspective, for Andrew to reach that same size audience by teaching a Stanford class, he would have to do that for 250 years. Of course, he'd get really bored. So, having seen the impact of this, Andrew and I decided that we needed to really try and scale this up, to bring the best quality education to as many people as we could. So we formed Coursera, whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free. We currently have 43 courses on the platform from four universities across a range of disciplines, and let me show you a little bit of an overview of what that looks like. (Video) Robert Ghrist: Welcome to Calculus. Ezekiel Emanuel: Fifty million people are uninsured. Scott Page: Models help us design more effective institutions and policies. We get unbelievable segregation. Scott Klemmer: So Bush imagined that in the future, you'd wear a camera right in the center of your head. Mitchell Duneier: Mills wants the student of sociology to develop the quality of mind ... RG: Hanging cable takes on the form of a hyperbolic cosine. Nick Parlante: For each pixel in the image, set the red to zero. Paul Offit: ... Vaccine allowed us to eliminate polio virus. Dan Jurafsky: Does Lufthansa serve breakfast and San Jose? Well, that sounds funny. Daphne Koller: So this is which coin you pick, and this is the two tosses. Andrew Ng: So in large-scale machine learning, we'd like to come up with computational ... (Applause) DK: It turns out, maybe not surprisingly, that students like getting the best content from the best universities for free. Since we opened the website in February, we now have 640,000 students from 190 countries. We have 1.5 million enrollments, 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched so far have been submitted, and 14 million videos have been viewed. But it's not just about the numbers, it's also about the people. Whether it's Akash, who comes from a small town in India and would never have access in this case to a Stanfordquality course and would never be able to afford it. Or Jenny, who is a single mother of

twoand wants to hone her skills so that she can go back and complete her master's degree. Or Ryan, who can't go to school, because his immune deficient daughter can't be risked to have germs come into the house, so he couldn't leave the house. I'm really glad to say --recently, we've been in correspondence with Ryan -- that this story had a happy ending.Baby Shannon -- you can see her on the left -- is doing much better now, and Ryan got a job by taking some of our courses. So what made these courses so different? After all, online course content has been available for a while. What made it different was that this was real course experience. It started on a given day, and then the students would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments. And these would be real homework assignments for a real grade, with a real deadline. You can see the deadlines and the usage graph. These are the spikes showing that procrastination is global phenomenon. (Laughter) At the end of the course, the students got a certificate. They could present that certificate to a prospective employer and get a better job, and we know many students who did. Some students took their certificate and presented this to an educational institution at which they were enrolled for actual college credit. So these students were really getting something meaningful for their investment of time and effort. Let's talk a little bit about some of the components that go into these courses. The first component is that when you move away from the constraints of a physical classroom and design content explicitly for an online format, you can break away from, for example, the monolithic one-hour lecture. You can break up the material, for example, into these short, modular units of eight to 12 minutes, each of which represents a coherent concept.Students can traverse this material in different ways, depending on their background, their skills or their interests. So, for example, some students might benefit from a little bit of preparatory material that other students might already have. Other students might be interested in a particular enrichment topic that they want to pursue individually. So this format allows us to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education, and allows students to follow a much more personalized curriculum. Of course, we all know as educators that students don't learn by sitting and passively watching videos. Perhaps one of the biggest components of this effort is that we need to have students who practice with the material in order to really understand it. There's been a range of studies that demonstrate the importance of this. This one that appeared in Science last year, for example, demonstrates that even simple retrieval practice, where students are just supposed to repeat what they already learned gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests down the line than many other educational interventions. We've tried to build in retrieval practice into the platform, as well as other forms of practice in many ways. For example, even our videos are not just videos. Every few minutes, the video pauses and the students get asked a question. (Video) SP: ... These four things. Prospect theory, hyperbolic discounting, status quo bias, base rate bias. They're all well documented. So they're all well documented deviations from rational behavior. DK: So here the video pauses, and the student types in the answer into the box and submits. Obviously they weren't paying attention. (Laughter) So they get to try again, and this time they got it right. There's an optional explanation if they want. And now the video moves on to the next part of the lecture. This is a kind of simple question that I as an instructor might ask in class, but when I ask that kind of a question in class, 80 percent of the students are still scribbling the last thing I said, 15 percent are zoned out on Facebook, and then there's the smarty pants in the front row who blurts out the answer before anyone else has had a chance to think about it, and I as the

instructor am terribly gratified that somebody actually knew the answer. And so the lecture moves on before, really, most of the students have even noticed that a question had been asked. Here, every single student has to engage with the material. And of course these simple retrieval questions are not the end of the story. One needs to build in much more meaningful practice questions, and one also needs to provide the students with feedback on those questions. Now, how do you grade the work of 100,000 students if you do not have 10,000 TAs? The answer is, you need to use technology to do it for you. Now, fortunately, technology has come a long way, and we can now grade a range of interesting types of homework. In addition to multiple choice and the kinds of short answer questions that you saw in the video, we can also grade math, mathematical expressions as well as mathematical derivations. We can grade models, whether it'sfinancial models in a business class or physical models in a science or engineering classand we can grade some pretty sophisticated programming assignments. Let me show you one that's actually pretty simple but fairly visual. This is from Stanford's Computer Science 101 class, and the students are supposed to color-correct that blurry red image. They're typing their program into the browser, and you can see they didn't get it quite right, Lady Liberty is still seasick. And so, the student tries again, and now they got it right, and they're told that, and they can move on to the next assignment. This ability to interact actively with the material and be told when you're right or wrong is really essential to student learning. Now, of course we cannot yet grade the range of work that one needs for all courses.Specifically, what's lacking is the kind of critical thinking work that is so essential in such disciplines as the humanities, the social sciences, business and others. So we tried to convince, for example, some of our humanities faculty that multiple choice was not such a bad strategy. That didn't go over really well. So we had to come up with a different solution. And the solution we ended up using is peer grading. It turns out that previous studies show, like this one by Saddler and Good, that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy for providing reproducible grades. It was tried only in small classes, but there it showed, for example, that these student-assigned grades on the y-axis are actually very well correlated with the teacher-assigned grade on the x-axis.What's even more surprising is that self-grades, where the students grade their own work critically -- so long as you incentivize them properly so they can't give themselves a perfect score -- are actually even better correlated with the teacher grades. And so this is an effective strategy that can be used for grading at scale, and is also a useful learning strategy for the students, because they actually learn from the experience. So we now have the largest peer-grading pipeline ever devised, where tens of thousands of students are grading each other's work, and quite successfully, I have to say. But this is not just about students sitting alone in their living room working through problems. Around each one of our courses, a community of students had formed, a global community of people around a shared intellectual endeavor. What you see here is a selfgenerated map from students in our Princeton Sociology 101 course, where they have put themselves on a world map, and you can really see the global reach of this kind of effort. Students collaborated in these courses in a variety of different ways. First of all, there was a question and answer forum, where students would pose questions, and other students would answer those questions. And the really amazing thing is, because there were so many students, it means that even if a student posed a question at 3 o'clock in the morning,somewhere around the world, there would be somebody who was awake and working on the same problem. And so, in many of our courses, the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes. Which is not a level of service I have ever offered to my Stanford students. (Laughter)

And you can see from the student testimonials that students actually find that because of this large online community, they got to interact with each other in many ways that were deeper than they did in the context of the physical classroom. Students also selfassembled, without any kind of intervention from us, into small study groups. Some of these were physical study groups along geographical constraints and met on a weekly basis to work through problem sets. This is the San Francisco study group, but there were ones all over the world. Others were virtual study groups, sometimes along language lines or along cultural lines, and on the bottom left there, you see our multicultural universal study groupwhere people explicitly wanted to connect with people from other cultures. There are some tremendous opportunities to be had from this kind of framework. The first is that it has the potential of giving us a completely unprecedented look into understanding human learning. Because the data that we can collect here is unique. You can collect every click, every homework submission, every forum post from tens of thousands of students. So you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode, a transformation that, for example, has revolutionized biology. You can use these data to understand fundamental questions like, what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not? And in the context of particular courses, you can ask questions like, what are some of the misconceptions that are more common and how do we help students fix them? So here's an example of that, also from Andrew's Machine Learning class. This is a distribution of wrong answers to one of Andrew's assignments. The answers happen to be pairs of numbers, so you can draw them on this two-dimensional plot. Each of the little crosses that you see is a different wrong answer. The big cross at the top left is where 2,000 students gave the exact same wrong answer. Now, if two students in a class of 100give the same wrong answer, you would never notice. But when 2,000 students give the same wrong answer, it's kind of hard to miss. So Andrew and his students went in, looked at some of those assignments, understood the root cause of the misconception, and then they produced a targeted error message that would be provided to every student whose answer fell into that bucket, which means that students who made that same mistake would now get personalized feedback telling them how to fix their misconception much more effectively. So this personalization is something that one can then build by having the virtue of large numbers. Personalization is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities here as well, because it provides us with the potential of solving a 30-year-old problem. Educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, in 1984, posed what's called the 2 sigma problem, which he observed by studying three populations. The first is the population that studied in a lecture-based classroom. The second is a population of students that studied using a standard lecture-based classroom, but with a mastery-based approach, so the students couldn't move on to the next topic before demonstrating mastery of the previous one. And finally, there was a population of students that were taught in a one-on-one instruction using a tutor. The mastery-based population was a full standard deviation, or sigma, in achievement scores better than the standard lecture-based class, and the individual tutoring gives you 2 sigmaimprovement in performance. To understand what that means, let's look at the lecture-based classroom, and let's pick the median performance as a threshold. So in a lecture-based class, half the students are above that level and half are below. In the individual tutoring instruction, 98 percent of the students are going to be above that threshold. Imagine if we could teach so that 98 percent of our students would be above average. Hence, the 2 sigma problem. Because we cannot afford, as a society, to provide every student with an individual human tutor. But maybe we can afford to provide each student with a computer or a smartphone.So the question is, how can we use technology to push from the left side of the graph, from the blue curve, to the right side with the green curve? Mastery is easy to

achieve using a computer, because a computer doesn't get tired of showing you the same video five times.And it doesn't even get tired of grading the same work multiple times, we've seen that in many of the examples that I've shown you. And even personalization is something that we're starting to see the beginnings of, whether it's via the personalized trajectory through the curriculum or some of the personalized feedback that we've shown you. So the goal here is to try and push, and see how far we can get towards the green curve. So, if this is so great, are universities now obsolete? Well, Mark Twain certainly thought so.He said that, "College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either." (Laughter) I beg to differ with Mark Twain, though. I think what he was complaining about is notuniversities but rather the lecture-based format that so many universities spend so much time on. So let's go back even further, to Plutarch, who said that, "The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting." And maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them. So how do we do that? We do that by doing active learning in the classroom. So there's been many studies, including this one, that show that if you use active learning, interacting with your students in the classroom, performance improves on every single metric -- on attendance, on engagement and on learning as measured by a standardized test. You can see, for example, that the achievement score almost doubles in this particular experiment.So maybe this is how we should spend our time at universities. So to summarize, if we could offer a top quality education to everyone around the world for free, what would that do? Three things. First it would establish education as a fundamental human right, where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities. Second, it would enable lifelong learning. It's a shame that for so many people, learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college. By having this amazing content be available, we would be able to learn something new every time we wanted, whether it's just to expand our minds or it's to change our lives. And finally, this would enable a wave of innovation, because amazing talent can be found anywhere. Maybe the next Albert Einstein or the next Steve Jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in Africa. And if we could offer that person an education, they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us. Thank you very much.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: The mysterious workings of the adolescent brain

http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_jayne_blakemore_the_mysterious_workings_of_the_adole scent_brain.html
Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self-aware than grown-ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically teenage behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore studies the social brain -- the network of brain regions involved in understanding other people -and how it develops in adolescents

Hace quince aos se daba por sentado que el mayor desarrollo cerebral sucede en los primeros aos de vida. Hace 15 aos, no tenamos la capacidad de ver dentro del cerebro humano vivo y seguir su desarrollo a lo largo de la vida. En la ltima dcada, principalmente debido a los avances tecnolgicos en estudios de imagen cerebral como las imgenes de resonancia magntica (IRM), los neurocientficos han comenzado a mirar dentro del cerebro humano vivo de todas las edades, y hacer seguimiento de los cambios en la estructura y en funciones cerebrales. As que usamos la IRM estructural si queremos hacer una fotografa, a resoluciones muy altas del interior del cerebro humano vivo, y nos podemos preguntar:cunta materia gris contiene el cerebro?, y cmo cambia con la edad? Y tambin usamos IRM funcional, llamada IRMf, para hacer un video de la actividad cerebral cuando los participantes desarrollan algn tipo de tarea como pensar, sentir o percibir algo. Laboratorios de todo el mundo estn involucrados en este tipo de investigacin,por eso tenemos un cuadro muy completo y detallado de cmo se desarrolla el cerebro humano vivo. Y esto ha cambiado radicalmente la forma en que pensamos sobre el desarrollo cerebral, al revelar que no todo se termina en la infancia temprana, ya que el cerebro contina desarrollndose a travs de toda la adolescencia y a los veintitantos y a los treintaitantos. La adolescencia define como el perodo de la vida que comienza con los cambios biolgicos, hormonales, fsicos de la pubertad y termina a la edad en la que un individuo consigue un rol estable, independiente en la sociedad. (Risas) Puede prolongarse mucho tiempo. (Risas) Una de las regiones del cerebro que cambia ms drsticamente durante la adolescencia es la corteza prefrontal. Este es un modelo del cerebro humano, y esta es la corteza prefrontal, justo delante. La corteza prefrontal es un rea interesante del cerebro.Es proporcionalmente mucho mayor en humanos que en cualquier otra especie, y est involucrada en funciones cognitivas de alto nivel: la toma de decisiones, la planificacin, planificar lo que vamos a hacer maana o la prxima semana, o el prximo ao, inhibicin del comportamiento inapropiado, contenindonos de decir algo muy grosero o de hacer algo muy estpido. Tambin est involucrada en la interaccin social, el entendimiento de otras personas, y la autoconciencia. As que los estudios de IRM que observan el desarrollo de esta regin muestran que sufre un desarrollo realmente espectacular durante el perodo de la adolescencia. As que si observan el volumen de materia gris, por ejemplo, el volumen de materia gris a travs de la edad, desde los 4 a los 22 aos, se incrementa durante la infancia, como se ve en este grfico. Y alcanza su punto mximo en la adolescencia temprana. Las flechas indican el volumen mximo de materia gris en la corteza prefrontal. Se ve que ese mximo ocurre un par de aos ms tarde en nios que en las nias, y probablemente es porque los nios atraviesan la pubertad en promedio, un par de aos despus que las nias. Y despus durante la adolescencia, hay una disminucin significativa en el volumen de materia gris en la corteza prefrontal. Eso puede parecer malo, pero en realidad es un proceso del desarrollo realmente importante, porque la materia gris contiene cuerpos celulares y conexiones entre clulas, las sinapsis, y esta disminucin en el volumen de materia gris dentro de la corteza prefrontal se cree que corresponde a una poda sinptica, la eliminacin de sinapsis no deseadas. Este es un proceso muy importante. Depende parcialmente del ambiente donde est el animal o el humano, y las sinapsis usadas se fortalecen, y las sinapsis no usadasen ese ambiente en particular se recortan. Lo pueden comparar como podar un rosal. Se podan las ramas ms dbiles para que las ramas que quedan, las importantes, puedan crecer ms fuertes, y este proceso que ajusta eficazmente el tejido cerebral al ambiente especfico de la especie, ocurre en la corteza prefrontal y en otras regiones del cerebro durante el perodo de la adolescencia humana. Una segunda lnea de investigacin usada para rastrear cambios en el cerebro adolescente es mediante IRM funcional para observar cambios en la actividad cerebral a

travs de la edad. Simplemente les dar un ejemplo de mi laboratorio. En mi laboratorio, nos interesa el cerebro social, es decir, la red de regiones cerebrales usadas para entender e interactuar con otras personas. Quisiera mostrar una fotografa de un partido de ftbol para ilustrar dos aspectos de cmo funcionan nuestros cerebros sociales. Bueno, este es un partido de ftbol. (Risas) Michael Owen acaba de fallar un gol, y est tirado en el suelo, y el primer aspecto del cerebro social que ilustra esta foto realmente bien es lo automticas e instintivas que son las respuestas socio-emocionales. De manera que dentro de la fraccin de segundo en que Michael Owen falla el gol, todos hacen lo mismo con los brazos y lo mismo con la cara, incluso Michael Owen mientras est tumbado en la hierba, hace lo mismo con las manos, y supuestamente tiene una expresin facial similar, y las nicas personas que no lo hacen, son los tipos de amarillo al fondo (Risas) y creo que estn en el extremo equivocado del estadio, y ellos dan otra respuesta socio emocional que reconocemos instantneamente. Y ese es el segundo aspecto del cerebro social que esta foto ilustra muy bien, lo bueno que somos para leer el comportamiento de los otros, sus acciones, sus gestos, sus expresiones faciales, en trminos de sus emociones y estados mentales subyacentes. As que, sin necesidad de preguntarle a ninguno de estos individuos, Uds. tienen una idea bastante buena de qu sienten y piensan en este instante. De manera que eso es en lo que nos interesa observar en mi laboratorio. Al laboratorio traemos adolescentes y adultos para hacerles un escner cerebral, les damos alguna tarea que involucre pensar sobre otras personas, sus estados mentales, sus emociones. Y uno de los resultados constatado varias veces, al igual que en otros laboratorios en todo el mundo, concierne a la zona de la corteza prefrontal llamada corteza prefrontal mesial, en azul en la diapositiva, y est justo en medio de la corteza prefrontal en la lnea media de la cabeza. Esta regin es ms activa en adolescentes cuando toman decisiones sociales y piensan en otras personas de lo que es en adultos. Y este es en verdad un metaanlisis de 9 estudios sobre el tema de laboratorios en todo el mundo, y todos muestran lo mismo, que la actividad en esta rea de la corteza prefrontal mesial disminuye durante el perodo de la adolescencia. Y pensamos que eso podra ser porque los adolescentes y los adultosusamos un enfoque mental distinto, una estrategia cognitiva diferente, para tomar decisiones sociales, y una manera de verlo es hacer estudios conductuales, traemos gente al laboratorio y les damos alguna tarea conductual. Les pondr otro ejemplo del tipo de tarea que usamos en mi laboratorio. Imagnense que son los participantes de uno de nuestros experimentos. Entran al laboratorio, ven esta tarea computarizada. En esta tarea, ven estantes. Ahora, hay objetos en algunos de estos estantes, y ven que hay alguien de pie detrs de los estantes, y hay objetos que no puede ver. Desde su perspectiva quedan ocultos por un pedazo de madera gris. Estos son los mismos estantes desde la perspectiva de l. Noten que l slo puede ver algunos objetos, mientras que hay muchos ms objetos que Uds. pueden ver. Ahora bien, la tarea de Uds. es mover los objetos. El director, de pie detrs de los estantes, les ordenar a Uds. mover los objetos, pero recuerden, l no les pedir mover objetos que no puede ver. Esto introduce una condicin muy interesante que genera una especie de conflicto entre la perspectiva de Uds. y la perspectiva del director. As que imagnense que les dice que muevan el camin de arriba a la izquierda. Ah hay tres camiones. Uds. instintivamente irn a por el camin blanco, porque ese es el camin de arriba desde su perspectiva, pero despus tienen que recordar: "l no puede ver ese camin, as que querr decir que mueva el camin azul", que es el camin de arriba desde su perspectiva. Ahora, aunque no lo crean, adultos normales, saludables, inteligentes como Uds. cometen erroresalrededor del 50% de las veces en ese tipo de ensayos. Mueven el camin blanco en vez del camin azul. As que damos estas tareas a adolescentes y adultos, y tambin tenemos condiciones de control donde no hay director y en su lugar, damos una regla a la gente.Les decimos: "De acuerdo, haremos exactamente lo mismo, pero esta vez no hay

director. En lugar de eso, se deben ignorar los objetos con el fondo gris oscuro". Vern que esta es exactamente la misma condicin, salvo que en la condicin sin director, tienen que acordarse de aplicar esta regla algo arbitraria, mientras que en la condicin con director, tienen que recordar tomar en cuenta la perspectiva del director para guiar su conducta en curso. Les muestro el porcentaje de errores en un numeroso estudio del desarrollo que hicimos,esto es en un estudio de los siete aos, hasta la adultez, y lo que vern es el porcentaje de errores en el grupo adulto en ambas condiciones, as que el gris es la condicin con director, y ven que nuestros adultos inteligentes cometen errores cerca del 50% de las veces, mientras que cometen muchos menos errores cuando no hay director presente, cuando slo tienen que recordar esa regla de ignorar el fondo gris. Desde el enfoque del desarrollo, estas dos condiciones se desarrollan exactamente de la misma forma. Entre el fin de la niez y el medio de la adolescencia, hay una mejora, en otras palabras, una reduccin de errores, en ambos ensayos, en ambas situaciones. Pero slo al comparar los dos ltimos grupos, el grupo adolescente medio y el grupo adulto, es donde esto se pone realmente interesantes, porque ah no hay una mejora continua en la condicin sin director.En otras palabras, todo lo que se necesita hacer para recordar la regla y aplicarla parece estar completamente desarrollada en la adolescencia media, mientras que en contraste, si miramos las dos ltimas barras grises, todava hay una mejora significativa en la situacin con director entre la adolescencia media y la adultez. Esto significa que la habilidad de tener en cuenta la perspectiva de alguien para guiar la conducta de ese momento, cosa que, por cierto, hacemos en nuestra vida cotidiana todo el tiempo, an se desarrolla durante la adolescencia media y tarda As que si tienen un hijo o hija adolescente y piensan a veces que tienen problemas para ponerse en el lugar de otros, estn en lo correcto: s los tienen. Y esta es la razn. As que a veces nos remos de los adolescentes. Son parodiados, a veces incluso demonizados en los medios por su tpico comportamiento adolescente. Corren riesgos, a veces estn de mal humor, son muy vergonzosos. Tengo una ancdota muy simptica de un amigo mo que dijo que lo que ms notaba en sus hijas adolescentes antes y despus de la pubertad era su nivel de vergenza ante l. Dijo, "Antes de la pubertad, si mis dos hijas se portaban mal en una tienda, les deca: Dejen de portarse mal y les canto su cancin favorita. E instantneamente paraban de portarse mal y les cantaba su cancin favorita. Despus de la pubertad, eso se convirti en una amenaza. (Risas) La idea misma de su pap cantando en pblico era suficiente para hacer que se comportaran bien. As que la gente a menudo pregunta, "Bueno, es la adolescencia un fenmeno ms bien reciente? Es algo que inventamos recientemente en Occidente?" Y en realidad, la respuesta es que probablemente no. Hay un montn de descripciones de la adolescencia en la historia que suenan muy similar a las descripciones que usamos hoy en da. Hay una cita famosa de Shakespeare de "Cuento de Invierno" donde describe la adolescencia como sigue: "Quisiera que no mediara tiempo ninguno entre la edad de 10 y 23, o pasar durmiendo los aos juveniles. Porque en el intervalo, slo se trata con jvenesse ofende a los mayores, se roba y pelea". (Risas) Despus contina diciendo: "Habiendo dicho eso, quin, sino esos cerebros en ebullicin de 19 y 22, salen a cazar con este tiempo?" (Risas) As que hace casi 400 aos, Shakespeare retrataba adolescentes con una luz muy similar con la que los retratamos hoy en da, pero hoy tratamos de entender sus conductas en trminos de los cambios subyacentes que ocurren en su cerebro. Por ejemplo, tomemos el correr riesgos. Sabemos que los adolescentes tienen tendencia a correr riesgos. La tienen. Corren ms riesgos que los nios o los adultos, y son particularmente propensos a correr riesgos cuando estn con sus amigos. Hay un impulso importante para llegar a ser independiente de los padres y para impresionar a los amigos en la adolescencia. Pero ahora intentamos entender eso en trminos del desarrollo de una

parte del cerebro llamada sistema lmbico, as que les mostrar el sistema lmbico en rojoen la diapositiva atrs, y tambin en este cerebro. El sistema lmbico est justo en lo profundo del cerebro, y est involucrado en tareas como el procesamiento de emociones y el procesamiento de recompensas. Nos da la sensacin de recompensa al hacer cosas divertidas, incluyendo correr riesgos. Nos da el disfrute al correr riesgos. Y las regiones dentro del sistema lmbico, han demostrado ser hipersensibles a la sensacin de recompensa al correr riesgos en adolescentes, en comparacin con adultos, y exactamente al mismo tiempo, la corteza prefrontal, la que pueden ver en azul aqu en la diapositiva, que nos impide correr excesivos riesgos, est todava en franco desarrollo en los adolescentes. As que la investigacin cerebral ha mostrado que el cerebro adolescente realmente sufre un desarrollo bastante profundo, y esto tiene implicaciones para la educacin, la rehabilitacin, y la intervencin. El ambiente, incluida la enseanza, puede formar y forma el cerebro adolescente, y an as es slo ms bien recientemente que hemos educado rutinariamente a adolescentes en Occidente. Mis cuatro abuelos/as, por ejemplo, abandonaron la escuela en su adolescencia temprana. No tenan alternativa. Y ese es todava el caso de muchos, muchos adolescentes en todo el mundo hoy en da. El 40% de los adolescentes no tiene acceso a educacin escolar secundaria. Y sin embargo, este es un perodo de la vida donde el cerebro es particularmente adaptable y maleable. Es una oportunidad fantstica para el aprendizaje y la creatividad. As que, lo que a veces es visto como el problema con adolescentes toma de riesgo aumentada, mal control de impulsos, autoconciencia no debera estigmatizarse. En realidad refleja los cambios en el cerebro que proveen una excelente oportunidad para la educacin y el desarrollo social. Gracias. (Aplausos) Fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life. Back then, 15 years ago, we didn't have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track development across the lifespan. In the past decade or so, mainly due to advances in brain imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, neuroscientists have started to look inside the living human brain of all ages, and to track changes in brain structure and brain function, so we use structural MRI if you'd like to take a snapshot, a photograph, at really high resolution of the inside of the living human brain, and we can ask questions like, how much gray matter does the brain contain, and how does that change with age? And we also use functional MRI, called fMRI,to take a video, a movie, of brain activity when participants are taking part in some kind of task like thinking or feeling or perceiving something. So many labs around the world are involved in this kind of research, and we now have a really rich and detailed picture of how the living human brain develops, and this picture has radically changed the way we think about human brain development by revealing that it's not all over in early childhood, and instead, the brain continues to develop right throughout adolescence and into the '20s and '30s. So adolescence is defined as the period of life that starts with the biological, hormonal, physical changes of puberty and ends at the age at which an individual attains a stable, independent role in society. (Laughter) It can go on a long time. (Laughter) One of the brain regions that changes most dramatically during adolescence is called prefrontal cortex. So this is a model of the human brain, and this is prefrontal cortex, right at the front. Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area. It's proportionally much bigger in humans than in any other species, and it's involved in a whole range of high level cognitive functions, things like decision-making, planning, planning what you're going to do tomorrow or next week or next year, inhibiting inappropriate behavior, so stopping yourself saying something really rude or doing something really stupid. It's also involved in social interaction, understanding other people, and self-awareness.

So MRI studies looking at the development of this region have shown that it really undergoes dramatic development during the period of adolescence. So if you look at gray matter volume, for example, gray matter volume across age from age four to 22 yearsincreases during childhood, which is what you can see on this graph. It peaks in early adolescence. The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls, and that's probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average, and then during adolescence, there's a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex.Now that might sound bad, but actually this is a really important developmental process, because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells, the synapses, and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning, the elimination of unwanted synapses. This is a really important process. It's partly dependent on the environment that the animal or the human is in, and the synapses that are being used are strengthened, and synapses that aren't being used in that particular environment are pruned away. You can think of it a bit like pruning a rosebush.You prune away the weaker branches so that the remaining, important branches, can grow stronger, and this process, which effectively finetunes brain tissue according to the species-specific environment, is happening in prefrontal cortex and in other brain regionsduring the period of human adolescence. So a second line of inquiry that we use to track changes in the adolescent brain is using functional MRI to look at changes in brain activity across age. So I'll just give you an example from my lab. So in my lab, we're interested in the social brain, that is the network of brain regions that we use to understand other people and to interact with other people. So I like to show a photograph of a soccer game to illustrate two aspects of how your social brains work. So this is a soccer game. (Laughter) Michael Owen has just missed a goal, and he's lying on the ground, and the first aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates is how automatic and instinctive social emotional responses are, so within a split second of Michael Owen missing this goal, everyone is doing the same thing with their arms and the same thing with their face, even Michael Owen as he slides along the grass, is doing the same thing with his arms, and presumably has a similar facial expression, and the only people who don't are the guys in yellow at the back (Laughs) and I think they're on the wrong end of the stadium, and they're doing another social emotional response that we all instantly recognize, and that's the second aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates, how good we are at reading other people's behavior, their actions, their gestures, their facial expressions, in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states. So you don't have to ask any of these guys. You have a pretty good idea of what they're feeling and thinking at this precise moment in time. So that's what we're interested in looking at in my lab. So in my lab, we bring adolescents and adults into the lab to have a brain scan, we give them some kind of task that involves thinking about other people, their minds, their mental states, their emotions, and one of the findings that we've found several times now, as have other labs around the world, is part of the prefrontal cortex called medial prefrontal cortex, which is shown in blue on the slide, and it's right in the middle of prefrontal cortex in the midline of your head. This region is more active in adolescents when they make these social decisions and think about other peoplethan it is in adults, and this is actually a meta-analysis of nine different studies in this area from labs around the world, and they all show the same thing, that activity in this medial prefrontal cortex area decreases during the period of adolescence. And we think that might be because adolescents and adults use a different mental approach, a different cognitive strategy, to make social decisions, and one way of looking at that is to do behavioral studies whereby we bring people into the lab and we give them some kind of

behavioral task, and I'll just give you another example of the kind of task that we use in my lab. So imagine that you're the participant in one of our experiments. You come into the lab, you see this computerized task. In this task, you see a set of shelves. Now, there are objects on these shelves, on some of them, and you'll notice there's a guy standing behind the setof shelves, and there are some objects that he can't see. They're occluded, from his point of view, with a kind of gray piece of wood. This is the same set of shelves from his point of view. Notice that there are only some objects that he can see, whereas there are many more objects that you can see. Now your task is to move objects around. The director, standing behind the set of shelves, is going to direct you to move objects around, but remember, he's not going to ask you to move objects that he can't see. This introduces a really interesting condition whereby there's a kind of conflict between your perspective and the director's perspective. So imagine he tells you to move the top truck left. There are three trucks there. You're going to instinctively go for the white truck, because that's the top truckfrom your perspective, but then you have to remember, "Oh, he can't see that truck, so he must mean me to move the blue truck," which is the top truck from his perspective. Now believe it or not, normal, healthy, intelligent adults like you make errors about 50 percent of the time on that kind of trial. They move the white truck instead of the blue truck. So we give this kind of task to adolescents and adults, and we also have a control condition where there's no director and instead we give people a rule. We tell them, okay, we're going to do exactly the same thing but this time there's no director. Instead you've got to ignore objects with the dark gray background. You'll see that this is exactly the same condition, only in the no-director condition they just have to remember to apply this somewhat arbitrary rule, whereas in the director condition, they have to remember to take into account the director's perspective in order to guide their ongoing behavior. Okay, so if I just show you the percentage errors in a large developmental study we did, this is in a study ranging from age seven to adulthood, and what you're going to see is the percentage errors in the adult group in both conditions, so the gray is the director condition, and you see that our intelligent adults are making errors about 50 percent of the time, whereas they make far fewer errors when there's no director present, when they just have to remember that rule of ignoring the gray background. Developmentally, these two conditions develop in exactly the same way. Between late childhood and mid-adolescence, there's an improvement, in other words a reduction of errors, in both of these trials, in both of these conditions. But it's when you compare the last two groups, the mid-adolescent group and the adult group where things get really interesting, because there, there is no continued improvement in the no-director condition. In other words, everything you need to do in order to remember the rule and apply it seems to be fully developed by midadolescence, whereas in contrast, if you look at the last two gray bars, there's still a significant improvement in the director condition between mid-adolescence and adulthood, and what this means is that the ability to take into account someone else's perspective in order to guide ongoing behavior,which is something, by the way, that we do in everyday life all the time, is still developing in mid-to-late adolescence. So if you have a teenage son or a daughter and you sometimes think they have problems taking other people's perspectives, you're right. They do. And this is why. So we sometimes laugh about teenagers. They're parodied, sometimes even demonized in the media for their kind of typical teenage behavior. They take risks, they're sometimes moody, they're very self-conscious. I have a really nice anecdote from a friend of mine who said that the thing he noticed most about his teenage daughters before and after pubertywas their level of embarrassment in front of him. So, he said, "Before puberty, if my two daughters were messing around in a shop, I'd say, 'Hey, stop messing around and I'll sing your favorite song,' and instantly they'd stop messing around and he'd sing their

favorite song. After puberty, that became the threat. (Laughter) The very notion of their dad singing in public was enough to make them behave. So people often ask, "Well, is adolescence a kind of recent phenomenon? Is it something we've invented recently in the West?" And actually, the answer is probably not. There are lots of descriptions of adolescence in history that sound very similar to the descriptions we use today. So there's a famous quote by Shakespeare from "The Winter's Tale" where he describes adolescence as follows: "I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wencheswith child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting." (Laughter) He then goes on to say, "Having said that, would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-andtwenty hunt in this weather?" (Laughter) So almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portrayingadolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today, but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain. So for example, take risk-taking. We know that adolescents have a tendency to take risks. They do. They take more risks than children or adults, and they are particularly prone to taking risks when they're with their friends. There's an important drive to become independent from one's parents and to impress one's friends in adolescence. But now we try to understand that in terms of the development of a part of their brain called the limbic system, so I'm going to show you the limbic system in red in the slide behind me, and also on this brain. So the limbic system is right deep inside the brain, and it's involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing. It gives you the rewarding feeling out of doing fun things, including taking risks. It gives you the kick out of taking risks. And this region, the regions within the limbic system, have been found to be hypersensitive to the rewarding feeling of risk-taking in adolescents compared with adults, and at the very same time, the prefrontal cortex, which you can see in blue in the slide here, which stops us taking excessive risks, is still very much in development in adolescents. So brain research has shown that the adolescent brain undergoes really quite profound development, and this has implications for education, for rehabilitation, and intervention. The environment, including teaching, can and does shape the developing adolescent brain, and yet it's only relatively recently that we have been routinely educating teenagers in the West.All four of my grandparents, for example, left school in their early adolescence. They had no choice. And that's still the case for many, many teenagers around the world today. Forty percent of teenagers don't have access to secondary school education. And yet, this is a period of life where the brain is particularly adaptable and malleable. It's a fantastic opportunity for learning and creativity. So what's sometimes seen as the problem with adolescents heightened risk-taking, poor impulse control, self-consciousness shouldn't be stigmatized. It actually reflects changes in the brain that provide an excellent opportunity for education and social development. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html
This demo -- from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED. It's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

At the MIT Media Lab's new Fluid Interfaces Group, Pattie Maes researches the tools we use to work with information and connect with one another. Full bio Pranav Mistry is the inventor of SixthSense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data.

I've been intrigued by this question of whether we could evolve or develop a sixth sense -a sense that would give us seamless access and easy access to meta-information or information that may exist somewhere that may be relevant to help us make the right decision about whatever it is that we're coming across. And some of you may argue, well, don't today's cell phones do that already? But I would say no. When you meet someone here at TED -- and this is the top networking place, of course, of the year -- you don't shake somebody's hand and then say, "Can you hold on for a moment while I take out my phone and Google you?" Or when you go to the supermarket and you're standing there in that huge aisle of different types of toilet papers, you don't take out your cell phone, and open a browser, and go to a website to try to decide which of these different toilet papers is the most ecologically responsible purchase to make. So we don't really have easy access to all this relevant information that can just help us make optimal decisions about what to do next and what actions to take. And so my research group at the Media Lab has been developing a series of inventions to give us access to this information in a sort of easy way, without requiring that the user changes any of their behavior. And I'm here to unveil our latest effort, and most successful effort so far,which is still very much a work in process. I'm actually wearing the device right now and we've sort of cobbled it together with components that are off the shelf -- and that, by the way, only cost 350 dollars at this point in time. I'm wearing a camera, just a simple webcam, a portable, battery-powered projection system with a little mirror. These components communicate to my cell phone in my pocket which acts as the communication and computation device. And in the video here we see my student Pranav Mistry, who's really the genius who's been implementing and designing this whole system. And we see how this system lets him walk up to any surface and start using his hands to interact with the information that is projected in front of him. The system tracks the four significant fingers. In this case, he's wearing simple marker caps that you may recognize. But if you want a more stylish version you could also paint your nails in different colors. And the camera basically tracks these four fingers and recognizes any gestures that he's making so he can just go to, for example, a map of Long Beach, zoom in and out, etc. The system also recognizes iconic gestures such as the "take a picture" gesture, and then takes a picture of whatever is in front of you. And when he then walks back to the Media Lab, he can just go up to any wall and project all the pictures that he's taken, sort through them and organize them, and re-size them, etc., again using all natural gestures. So, some of you most likely were here two years ago and saw the demo by Jeff Han or some of you may think, "Well, doesn't this look like the Microsoft Surface Table?" And yes, you also interact using natural gestures, both hands, etc. But the difference here is that you can use any surface, you can walk to up to any surface, including your hand if nothing else is available and interact with this projected data. The device is completely portable, and can be ... (Applause) So one important difference is that it's totally mobile. Another even more important difference is that in mass production this would not cost more tomorrow than today's cell phones and would actually not sort of be a bigger packaging -- could look a lot more stylishthan this version that I'm wearing around my neck. But other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in "Minority Report," the reason why we're really excited about this device is that it really can act as one of these sixthsense devicesthat gives you relevant information about whatever is in front of you. So we see Pranav here going into the supermarket and he's shopping for some paper

towels. And, as he picks up a product the system can recognize the product that he's picking up, using either image recognition or marker technology, and give him the green light or an orange light. He can ask for additional information. So this particular choice here is a particularly good choice, given his personal criteria. Some of you may want the toilet paper with the most bleach in itrather than the most ecologically-responsible choice. (Laughter) If he picks up a book in the bookstore, he can get an Amazon rating -- it gets projected right on the cover of the book. This is Juan's book, our previous speaker, which gets a great rating, by the way, at Amazon. And so, Pranav turns the page of the book and can then see additional information about the book -- reader comments, maybe sort of information by his favorite critic, etc. If he turns to a particular page he finds an annotation by maybe an expert of a friend of ours that gives him a little bit of additional information about whatever is on that particular page. Reading the newspaper -- it never has to be outdated. (Laughter) You can get video annotations of the event that you're reading about You can get the latest sports scores etc. This is a more controversial one. (Laughter) As you interact with someone at TED, maybe you can see a word cloud of the tags, the words that are associated with that person in their blog and personal web pages. In this case, the student is interested in cameras, etc. On your way to the airport, if you pick up your boarding pass, it can tell you that your flight is delayed, that the gate has changed, etc. And, if you need to know what the current time is it's as simple as drawing a watch -(Laughter) (Applause) on your arm. So that's where we're at so far in developing this sixth sense that would give us seamless access to all this relevant information about the things that we may come across. My student Pranav, who's really, like I said, the genius behind this. (Applause) (Standing ovation) He does deserve a lot of applause because I don't think he's slept much in the last three months, actually. And his girlfriend is probably not very happy about him either. But it's not perfect yet, it's very much a work in progress. And who knows, maybe in another 10 yearswe'll be here with the ultimate sixth sense brain implant. Thank you. (Applause) He estado intrigada por esta pregunta de si se podra evolucionar o desarrollar un sexto sentido. Un sentido que nos dara un acceso fluido y fcil a meta-informacin o informacin que pueda existir en algn lugar y que pueda ser relevante para ayudarnos a tomar la decisin correcta sobre lo que sea que nos encontremos. Y algunos de ustedes pueden argumentar, acaso los telfonos celulares actuales no hacen eso ya? Pero yo dira que no. Cuando conoces a alguien aqu en TED -- y este es el lugar ms importante del ao para el networking, por supuesto -- no le das un apretn de manos y luego le dices: "Puede esperar un momento mientras tomo mi telfono y lo busco en Google? " O cuando va al supermercado y est all en ese enorme pasillo con diferentes tipos de papel higinico, no toma su telfono celular, abre un navegador, y va a un sitio web para tratar de decidir cul de estos diferentes tipos de papel higinico es la compra ms ecolgicamente responsable que puede hacer. As que en realidad no tenemos fcil acceso a toda esta informacin relevante, que puede ayudarnos a optimizar las decisiones acerca de qu hacer a continuacin y qu medidas tomar. Y as, mi grupo de investigacin en el Media Lab ha venido desarrollando una serie de inventos para darnos acceso a esta informacin de una manera, digamos, sencilla, sin exigir que el usuario cambie su comportamiento. Estoy aqu para develar nuestro ltimo esfuerzo, el ms exitoso hasta la fecha que todava es un trabajo en curso. Estoy usando

el dispositivo en este momento y lo hemos ensamblado ms o menos con componentes listos para ser usados -- y que cuestan, por cierto, slo 350 dlares en este momento. Estoy usando una cmara, una cmara web simple, un sistema de proyeccin porttil alimentado por bateras, con un pequeo espejo. Estos componentes se comunican a mi celular en el bolsillo que acta como dispositivo de comunicacin y computacin. Y en este video vemos a mi estudiante Pranav Mistry, quien es realmente el genio que ha estado implementando y diseando todo este sistema. Y vemos cmo este sistema le permite dirigirse a cualquier superficie y comenzar a utilizar sus manos para interactuar con la informacin que se proyecta delante de l. El sistema realiza un seguimiento de los cuatro dedos ms significativos. En este caso, l est usando unas pequeas tapas de marcadores que ustedes pueden reconocer. Pero si quieren una versin ms elegantetambin pueden pintar sus uas con colores diferentes. Y la cmara, bsicamente, sigue estos cuatro dedos y reconoce cualquier gesto que l hace as que puede ir, por ejemplo, a un mapa de Long Beach, acercarlo y alejarlo, etc. El sistema tambin reconoce gestos icnicos como el gesto de tomar una foto, y toma una foto de lo que est frente a ti. Y luego, cuando camina de vuelta al Media Lab, l puede acercarse a cualquier pared y proyectar todas las imgenes que ha tomado, navegar por ellas y organizarlas, cambiar su tamao, etc., usando, de nuevo, slo gestos naturales.Algunos de ustedes muy probablemente estaban aqu hace dos aos y vieron la demostracin de Jeff Han o algunos pueden pensar "Bueno, esto no es parecido a lo que hace la mesa de Microsoft Surface?" Y s, tambin interactan mediante gestos naturales,ambas manos, etc. Pero la diferencia aqu es que se puede utilizar cualquier superficie, se puede caminar hacia cualquier superficie, incluida su mano si no hay nada ms disponiblee interactuar con los datos proyectados. El dispositivo es totalmente porttil, y puede ser ...(Aplausos) As que una diferencia importante es que es totalmente mvil. Otra diferencia an ms importante es que en la produccin en masa esto no costara maana ms de lo que cuestan hoy los telfonos celulares y en realidad no requerira un embalaje ms grande -podra verse mucho ms elegante que esta versin que estoy usando en mi cuello. Pero ms all de dejar que algunos de ustedes vivan su fantasa de verse tan sofisticados como Tom Cruise en "Minority Report", la razn por la que estamos realmente entusiasmados con este dispositivo es que realmente puede actuar como uno de estos dispositivos de sexto sentido que le da informacin pertinente acerca de lo que sea que est delante suyo.As que vemos aqu a Pranav entrar en el supermercado, para comprar algunas toallas de papel. Cuando l toma un producto el sistema puede reconocer el producto que est sosteniendo usando ya sea reconocimiento de imgenes o tecnologa de marcado, y darle una luz verde o una luz naranja. Se puede solicitar informacin adicional. As que aqu esta eleccin es una opcin especialmente buena, dados sus criterios personales. Algunos de ustedes podran querer que sus toallas de papel tengan ms blanqueador en lugar de la opcin ms responsable desde el punto de vista ecolgico. (Risas) Si toma un libro en la librera, puede obtener la calificacin de Amazon. Se proyecta directamente en la portada del libro. El libro es de Juan, nuestro orador anterior, que tiene una gran calificacin, por cierto, en Amazon. Y as, Pranav pasa la pgina del libro y puede ver informacin adicional sobre l -- comentarios de los lectores, tal vez alguna informacin de su crtico favorito, etc. Si va a una pgina especfica encuentra una anotacin por un experto o por un amigo nuestro que le da un poco de informacin adicional acerca de lo que sea que haya en esa pgina en particular. Leer el peridico -nunca tendra que ser obsoleto. (Risas)

Usted puede conseguir las anotaciones de video del evento sobre el que est leyendo.Puede obtener los ltimos resultados deportivos, etc. Este es uno un poco ms controversial. (Risas) Mientras interacta con alguien en TED, tal vez podra ver una nube de palabras de las etiquetas, las palabras que estn asociadas con esa persona en su blog y pginas web personales. En este caso, el estudiante est interesado en cmaras, etc. En el camino al aeropuerto, si usted toma su tarjeta de embarque, puede decirle que su vuelo se retrasa,que ha cambiado la puerta, etc. Y, si lo que necesita saber es cul es la hora actual es tan simple como dibujar un reloj -- (Risas) (Aplausos) en su brazo. De modo que es donde nos encontramos de momento en el desarrollo de este sexto sentido, que nos dara un acceso fluido a toda esta informacin pertinente acerca de las cosas con las que nos podemos encontrar. Mi estudiante Pranav, quien es realmente, como he dicho, el genio detrs de esto. (Aplausos) El merece un montn de aplausos porque no creo que haya dormido mucho en los ltimos tres meses, en realidad. Y su novia, probablemente, tampoco est muy feliz con l. No es perfecto todava, es en gran medida un trabajo en progreso Y quin sabe, tal vez en 10 aosvamos a estar aqu con el mximo implante cerebral de sexto sentido. Gracias. (Aplausos)

Shukla Bose: Enseando a un nio por vez

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/es/shukla_bose_teaching_one_child_at_a_time.html
Educating the poor is more than just a numbers game, says Shukla Bose. She tells the story of her groundbreaking Parikrma Humanity Foundation, which brings hope to India's slums by looking past the daunting statistics and focusing on treating each child as an individual. Shukla Bose is the founder and head of the Parikrma Humanity Foundation, a nonprofit that runs four extraordinary schools for poor children.

I'm standing in front of you today in all humility, wanting to share with you my journey of the last six years in the field of service and education. And I'm not a trained academic. Neither am I a veteran social worker. I was 26 years in the corporate world, trying to make organizations profitable. And then in 2003 I started Parikrma Humanity Foundation from my kitchen table. The first thing that we did was walk through the slums. You know, by the way, there are two million people in Bangalore, who live in 800 slums. We couldn't go to all the slums, but we tried to cover as much as we could. We walked through these slums, identified houses where children would never go to school. We talked to the parents, tried to convince them about sending their children to school. We played with the children, and came back home really tired, exhausted, but with images of bright faces, twinkling eyes, and went to sleep. We were all excited to start, but the numbers hit us then: 200 million children between four to 14 that should be going to school, but do not; 100 million children who go to school but cannot read; 125 million who cannot do basic maths. We also heard that 250 billion Indian rupees was dedicated for government schooling. Ninety percent of it was spent on teachers' salary and administrators' salary. And yet, India has nearly the highest teacher absenteeism in the world, with one out of four teachers not going to school at all the entire academic year. Those numbers were absolutely mind-boggling, overwhelming, and we were constantly asked, "When will you start? How many schools will you start? How many children will you get? How are you going to scale? How are you going to replicate?" It was very difficult not

to get scared, not to get daunted. But we dug our heels and said, "We're not in the number game. We want to take one child at a time and take the child right through school, sent to college, and get them prepared for better living, a high value job." So, we started Parikrma. The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line. Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums, a second story building, the only second story building inside the slums.And that rooftop did not have any ceiling, only half a tin sheet. That was our first school. One hundred sixty-five children. Indian academic year begins in June. So, June it rains, so many a times all of us would be huddled under the tin roof, waiting for the rain to stop. My God! What a bonding exercise that was. And all of us that were under that roof are still here together today. Then came the second school, the third school, the fourth school and a junior college. In six years now, we have four schools, one junior college, 1,100 childrencoming from 28 slums and four orphanages. (Applause) Our dream is very simple: to send each of these kids, get them prepared to be educated but also to live peacefully, contented in this conflict-ridden chaotic globalized world. Now, when you talk global you have to talk English. And so all our schools are English medium schools. But they know there is this myth that children from the slums cannot speak English well. No one in their family has spoken English. No one in their generation has spoken English. But how wrong it is. Girl: I like adventurous books, and some of my favorites are Alfred Hitchcock and [unclear]and Hardy Boys. Although they are like in different contexts, one is magical, the other two are like investigation, I like those books because they have something special in them. The vocabulary used in those books and the style of writing. I mean like once I pick up one bookI cannot put it down until I finish the whole book. Even if it takes me four and a half hours, or three and half hours to finish my book, I do it. Boy: I did good research and I got the information [on the] world's fastest cars. I like Ducati ZZ143, because it is the fastest, the world's fastest bike, and I like Pulsar 220 DTSIbecause it is India's fastest bike. (Laughter) Shukla Bose: Well, that girl that you saw, her father sells flowers on the roadside. And this little boy has been coming to school for five years. But isn't it strange that little boys all over the world love fast bikes? (Laughter) He hasn't seen one, he hasn't ridden one, of course,but he has done a lot of research through Google search. You know, when we started with our English medium schools we also decided to adopt the best curriculum possible, the ICSE curriculum. And again, there were people who laughed at me and said, "Don't be crazy choosing such a tough curriculum for these students. They'll never be able to cope."Not only do our children cope very well, but they excel in it. You should just come across to see how well our children do. There is also this myth that parents from the slums are not interested in their children going to school; they'd much rather put them to work. That's absolute hogwash. All parents all over the world want their children to lead a better life than themselves, but they need to believe that change is possible. Video: (Hindi) SB: We have 80 percent attendance for all our parents-teachers meeting. Sometimes it's even 100 percent, much more than many privileged schools. Fathers have started to attend.It's very interesting. When we started our school the parents would give thumbprints in the attendance register. Now they have started writing their signature. The children have taught them. It's amazing how much children can teach. We have, a few months ago, actually late last year, we had a few mothers who came to us and said, "You know, we want to learn how to read and write. Can you teach us?" So, we started an afterschool for our parents, for our mothers. We had 25 mothers who came regularly after school to study. We want to continue with this program and extend it to all our other schools.

Ninety-eight percent of our fathers are alcoholics. So, you can imagine how traumatized and how dysfunctional the houses are where our children come from. We have to send the fathers to de-addiction labs and when they come back, most times sober, we have to find a job for them so that they don't regress. We have about three fathers who have been trained to cook. We have taught them nutrition, hygiene. We have helped them set up the kitchenand now they are supplying food to all our children. They do a very good job because their children are eating their food, but most importantly this is the first time they have got respect, and they feel that they are doing something worthwhile. More than 90 percent of our non-teaching staff are all parents and extended families. We've started many programs just to make sure that the child comes to school. Vocational skill program for the older siblings so the younger ones are not stopped from coming to school. There is also this myth that children from the slums cannot integrate with mainstream. Take a look at this little girl who was one of the 28 children from all privileged schools, best schools in the country that was selected for the Duke University talent identification programand was sent to IIM Ahmedabad. Video: Girl: Duke IIMA Camp. Whenever we see that IIMA, it was such a pride for us to go to that camp. Everybody was very friendly, especially I got a lot of friends. And I felt that my English has improved a lot going there and chatting with friends. There they met children who are with a different standard and a different mindset, a totally different society. I mingled with almost everyone. They were very friendly. I had very good friends there, who are from Delhi, who are from Mumbai. Even now we are in touch through Facebook. After this Ahmedabad trip I've been like a totally different mingling with people and all of those. Before that I feel like I wasn't like this. I don't even mingle, or start speaking with someone so quickly. My accent with English improved a lot. And I learned football, volleyball, Frisbee, lots of games. And I wouldn't want to go to Bangalore. Let me stay here.Such beautiful food, I enjoyed it. It was so beautiful. I enjoyed eating food like [unclear] would come and ask me, "Yes ma'am, what you want?" It was so good to hear! (Laughter) (Applause) SB: This girl was working as a maid before she came to school. And today she wants to be a neurologist. Our children are doing brilliantly in sports. They are really excelling. There is an interschool athletic competition that is held every year in Bangalore, where 5,000 children participatefrom 140 best schools in the city. We've got the best school award for three years successively. And our children are coming back home with bags full of medals, with lots of admirers and friends. Last year there were a couple of kids from elite schools that came to ask for admissions in our school. We also have our very own dream team. Why is this happening? Why this confidence? Is it the exposure? We have professors from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Indian Institute of Science who come and teach our children lots of scientific formulas, experiments, much beyond the classroom. Art, music are consideredtherapy and mediums of expression. We also believe that it's the content that is more important. It is not the infrastructure, not the toilets, not the libraries, but it is what actually happens in this school that is more important. Creating an environment of learning, of inquiry, of exploration is what is true education. When we started Parikrma we had no idea which direction we were taking. We didn't hire McKinsey to do a business plan. But we know for sure that what we want to do today istake one child at a time, not get bogged with numbers, and actually see the child completethe circle of life, and unleash his total potential. We do not believe in scale because we believe in quality, and scale and numbers will automatically happen. We have corporates that have stood behind us, and we are able to, now, open more schools. But we began with the idea of one child at a time.

This is five-year-old Parusharam. He was begging by a bus stop a few years ago, got picked up and is now in an orphanage, has been coming to school for the last four and a half months. He's in kindergarten. He has learned how to speak English. We have a model by which kids can speak English and understand English in three month's time. He can tell you stories in English of the thirsty crow, of the crocodile and of the giraffe. And if you ask him what he likes to do he will say, "I like sleeping. I like eating. I like playing." And if you ask him what he wants to do, he will say, "I want to horsing." Now, "horsing" is going for a horse ride. So, Parusharam comes to my office every day. He comes for a tummy rub,because he believes that will give me luck. (Laughter) When I started Parikrma I began with a great deal of arrogance of transforming the world.But today I have been transformed. I have been changed with my children. I've learned so much from them: love, compassion, imagination and such creativity. Parusharam is Parikrma with a simple beginning but a long way to go. I promise you, Parusharam will speak in the TED conference a few years from now. Thank you. (Applause

Hoy me encuentro ante ustedes con toda humildad queriendo compartirles mi experiencia de los ltimos 6 aos en el campo del servicio, y la educacin. No soy una profesora diplomada, ni tampoco una asistente social veterana. Estuve 26 aos en el mundo empresarial, intentando hacer rentables a diferentes organizaciones. Y despus en el 2003,Inici la Fundacin Humanidad Parikrma desde la mesa de mi cocina. Lo primero que hicimos fue caminar por los barrios pobres. Por cierto, hay 2 millones de personas en Bangalore que viven en 800 barrios marginados. No pudimos ir a todos los barrios, pero intentamos recorrer tanto como pudimos. Caminamos por estos barrios, e identificamos casas en donde vivan nios que nunca iran a la escuela. Hablamos con sus padres, tratamos de convencerlos acerca de mandar a sus nios a la escuela. Jugamos con los nios, y volvimos a casa muy cansados, exhaustos, pero con imgenes de caras radiantes, de ojos chispeantes, y nos fuimos a dormir. Estbamos todos muy entusiasmados por comenzar. Pero luego nos topamos con los nmeros. 200 millones de nios entre 4 y 14 aos, que deberan ir a la escuela, pero no lo hacen. 100 millones de nios que van a la escuela, pero no saben leer; 125 millones no saben hacer clculos matemticos bsicos. Tambin escuchamos que 250 mil millones de rupias indias fueron destinadas a educacin estatal. El 90 por ciento de ese monto fue utilizado en el salario de profesores y administradores. Pero an as, India tiene una de las tasas de absentismo de profesores ms elevadas del mundo, con 1 de cada 4 que no van a la escuela en todo el ao escolar. Esos nmeros fueron totalmente inconcebibles, abrumadores, y constantemente nos preguntaban "Cundo van a comenzar las clases? Cuntas escuelas van a inaugurar?Cuntos nios van a ingresar? Cmo van a calificar? Cmo se van a expandir? Fue muy difcil no asustarse, no ser intimidados. Pero nos mantuvimos en nuestra idea y dijimos: "No estamos aqu por los nmeros". Queremos dedicarnos a un nio por vez y guiarlo a lo largo de la escuela, mandarlo a la universidad y prepararlo para una mejor vida, con un trabajo de gran valor. De esa forma iniciamos Parikrma. La primer escuela Parikrma comenz en un barrio pobredonde haba 70.000 personas viviendo bajo la lnea de pobreza. Cuando comenzamos, nuestra primer escuela estaba en el techo de un edificio que tena 2 pisos, el nico edificio de 2 pisos dentro del barrio. Y esa azotea no tena techo, slo la mitad de una plancha de lata. Esa fue nuestra primera escuela. 165 nios. El ao acadmico indio comienza en junio. Y como suele llover mucho en junio, todos nos acurrucbamos bajo el delgado techo de lata esperando que dejara de llover. Dios mo, qu buen ejercicio de vinculacin afectiva tuvimos. Y todos nosotros que estbamos bajo

el techo, todava estamos juntos. Luego surgi la segunda escuela, la tercera, la cuarta, y un primer ciclo universitario. En 6 aostenemos 4 escuelas, 1 colegio pre-universitario, y 1.100 nios provenientes de 28 barrios pobres y 4 orfanatos. (Aplausos) Nuestro sueo es muy simple: preparar a cada uno de estos chicos para la vida, educarlosy tambin ensearles a vivir pacficamente, satisfechos en este mundo conflictivo, catico y globalizado. Ahora, cuando uno habla a escala mundial tiene que hablar en ingls. Por eso todas nuestras escuelas son escuelas donde se habla ingls. Pero existe este mito acercade que los nios de los barrios pobres no pueden hablar bien en ingls. Nadie de sus familias ha hablado ingls. Nadie de su generacin ha hablado ingls. Pero qu equivocados estn. Video: Nia: Me gustan los libros de aventura, y otros de mis favoritos son los de Alfred Hitchcock y la saga Hardy Boys. Todos esos tres son parecidos, aunque lo son en distintos contextos. Uno es como mgico, los otros dos son como de investigacin. Me gustan esos libros porque hay algo especial en ellos, el vocabulario usado en esos libros, y la forma, el estilo de escritura. Quiero decir, una vez que tomo un libro no lo puedo dejar hasta terminarlo por completo. Incluso si me toma como cuatro horas y media, o tres horas y media para terminar mi libro, lo hago. Nio: Hice una buena investigacin y consegu informacin sobre los autos ms rpidos del mundo. Me gusta la Ducati ZZ143, porque es la ms rpida, la moto ms rpida del mundo.Y me gusta la Pulsar 220 DTSI porque es la moto ms rpida de India. Bueno, el padre de esa nia que vieron vende flores al costado de la carretera. Y este nio ha estado asistiendo a clases por 5 aos. Pero no es extrao que nios de todo el mundoamen las motos rpidas? l no ha visto ninguna. No se ha subido a ninguna, por supuesto,pero ha investigado mucho a travs del buscador Google. Saben, cuando comenzamos con nuestras escuelas de habla inglesa tambin decidimos adoptar el mejor programa de estudios posible, el currculo ICSC. Y otra vez, hubo personas que se rieron de mi y dijeron, "Ests loca eligiendo una currcula tan difcil para estos alumnos? Nunca sern capaces de lograrlo". Nuestros nios no slo se las arreglan muy bien, sino que tambin se destacan. Slo tendran que venir y ver cuan bien les est yendo a nuestros nios. Tambin existe otro mito acerca de que los padres de los barrios marginados no estn interesados en que sus nios vayan a la escuela, preferiran ponerlos a trabajar. Eso es absolutamente una tontera. Todos los padres alrededor del mundo quieren que sus hijos lleven una mejor vida que ellos. Pero necesitan creer que el cambio es posible. Video: (Hindi) Shukla Bose: Tenemos un 80 por ciento de asistencia en todas nuestras reuniones entre padres y maestros. A veces hasta un 100 por ciento, mucho ms que en varias escuelas privilegiadas. Los padres han empezado a asistir. Es muy interesante. Cuando empezamos nuestra escuela los padres marcaban huellas digitales en el registro de asistencia. Ahora han aprendido a firmar. Los nios les han enseado. Es increble lo mucho que los nios pueden ensear. Algunos meses atrs, en realidad a fines del ao pasado, hubo algunas madres que se acercaron y nos dijeron, "Saben, queremos aprender a leer y a escribir. Pueden ensearnos?". As que comenzamos con una actividad extracurricular para nuestros padres, para nuestras madres. Haba 25 madres que venan regularmente despus de la escuela a estudiar. Queremos continuar con este programa y extenderlo a todas nuestras dems escuelas. El 98 por ciento de nuestros padres son alcohlicos. As que pueden imaginarse cuan traumatizadas y cuan disfuncionales son las casas donde vienen nuestros nios. Tenemos que mandar a los padres a laboratorios de desintoxicacin y cuando vuelven, la mayora de las veces sobrios, tenemos que encontrarles un trabajo para que no recaigan. Hay alrededor de 3 padres que han sido capacitados para cocinar. Les hemos enseado sobre

nutricin, higiene. Los hemos ayudado a montar una cocina y ahora estn cocinando para todos nuestros nios. Hacen un muy buen trabajo porque sus hijos estn comiendo su alimento, pero lo ms importante es que es la primera vez que tienen respeto, y sienten que estn haciendo algo valioso. Ms del 90 por ciento de nuestro personal no docente son todos padres y del clan familiar.Hemos comenzado muchos programas slo para asegurarnos de que el nio venga a la escuela. Un programa vocacional para hermanos mayores de manera que a los menores no se les impida venir a la escuela. Otro mito acerca de los nios de los barrios es que no pueden integrarse con el resto de la sociedad. Miren a esta nia, una de los 28 nios de escuelas privilegiadas -las mejores escuelas del pas- que fue seleccionada para el programa de identificacin de talentos en la Universidad Duke y fue enviada al IIM- Amedabad. Video: Nia: Cada vez que lo recordamos sentimos tanto orgullo de haber ido al campamento. Cuando fuimos todos eran muy amables, particularmente, yo hice muchos amigos. Y sent que mi ingls ha mejorado mucho al haber ido all y hablado con amigos y dems. Ah se conocen nios con diferentes principios y todo eso, un pensamiento diferente, una sociedad totalmente diferente. Me relacion con casi todos. Eran muy amables. Tuve muy buenos amigos ah, que son de Delhi y de Mumbai. Incluso hoy seguimos en contacto por Facebook. Despus de este viaje a Amedabad me he convertido en esta persona totalmente diferenteque se relaciona con gente y todo eso. Antes de eso senta como que no era as. Ni siquiera me relacionaba o empezaba a hablar con alguien tan rpido. Mi acento en ingls ha mejorado mucho. Y aprend a jugar al ftbol, vleibol, frisbee, muchos juegos. Y no quera ir a Bangalore. Dejen quedarme aqu. Una comida muy estupenda. La disfrut. Fue tan estupenda. Disfrut comiendo y como que se me acercaban y me preguntaban, "Si seora, qu desea?" Fue tan bueno or eso! (Risas) (Aplausos) Esta nia estaba trabajando de mucama antes de ingresar a la escuela. Y hoy quiere ser una neurloga. A nuestros nios les est yendo de maravillas en los deportes. Realmente se estn destacando. Hay una competencia atltica intercolegial que se celebra cada ao en Bangalore, donde participan 5.000 nios de las 140 mejores escuelas de la ciudad. Hemos obtenido el premio a la mejor escuela por 3 aos consecutivos. Y nuestros nios vuelven a casa con una bolsa llena de medallas, con muchos admiradores y amigos. El ao pasado hubo un par de nios de escuelas de elite que vinieron a preguntar sobre el ingreso a nuestra escuela. Tambin tenemos nuestro propio equipo ideal. Por qu esto est sucediendo? Por qu nos tienen tanta confianza? Es la exposicin? Tenemos profesores de MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, el Instituto Indio de Ciencia, que vienen y les ensean a nuestros nios muchas frmulas cientficas, experimentos, mucho ms all del aula. El arte y la msica son considerados como terapia y medios de expresin.Tambin creemos que lo que ms importa es el contenido. No es la infraestructura, ni los baos, ni las bibliotecas, sino lo que en realidad sucede en esta escuela lo que ms importa. Crear un ambiente de aprendizaje, de investigacin, de exploracin es una verdadera educacin. Cuando comenzamos Parikrma no tenamos ni idea cul era el rumbo que estbamos tomando. No contratamos a Mackenzie para hacer un plan de negocios. Pero sabemos con seguridad que lo que queremos hacer hoy es dedicarnos a un nio por vez, sin enredarnos con los nmeros, y realmente ver al nio completar el crculo de la vida, y liberar todo su potencial. No creemos en escalas porque creemos en la calidad, y las escalas y los nmeros ocurrirn automticamente. Hay empresas que nos han apoyado, y ahora podemos abrir ms escuelas. Pero comenzamos con la idea de un nio por vez.

Este es Parusharam, de 5 aos. Estaba mendigando en una parada de autobs hace algunos aos. lo recogieron y ahora est en un orfanato. Ha estado viniendo a la escuela durante los ltimos 4 meses y medio. Est en jardn de nios. Ha aprendido a hablar ingls.Tenemos un modelo por el cual los nios pueden hablar ingls y entender ingls en un perodo de 3 meses. l sabe contar historias, en ingls, sobre el cuervo sediento, el cocodrilo, y la jirafa. Y si le preguntan qu le gusta hacer l dir, "Me gusta dormir. Me gusta comer. Me gusta jugar." Y si le preguntan qu quiere hacer l dir, "Quiero hacer caballeo" Bueno, "caballeo" es andar a caballo. As que Parusharam viene a mi oficina todos los das. Viene a darme un masaje en la pancita, porque cree que eso me dar suerte. Cuando comenc Parikrma lo hice con mucha arrogancia, pensando que transformara el mundo. Pero hoy yo he sido transformada. He sido cambiada con mis nios. He aprendido tanto de ellos, amor, compasin, imaginacin, y mucha creatividad. Parusharam es Parikrma con un comienzo simple pero con un camino muy largo por recorrer. Se los prometo, Parusharam hablar en una conferencia de TED dentro de unos aos. Gracias.(Aplausos)

Elizabeth Gilbert: Your elusive creative genius

I am a writer. Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career,which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. Seriously -- doomed, doomed! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, "Aren't you afraid -aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?" So that's reassuring, you know. But it would be worse, except for that I happen to rememberthat over 20 years ago, when I first started telling people -- when I was a teenager -- that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same kind of, sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?" (Laughter)Like that, you know. The answer -- the short answer to all those questions is, "Yes." Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been. And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at. Like seaweed, and other things that are scary. But, when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. You know, and what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each

other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? It didn't -- that chemical engineering block John, how's it going? It just didn't come up like that, you know? But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. (Laughter) We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable.And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know?And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work, you know. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish. And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that -- because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know -- I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious. And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live. And I definitely know that, in my case -- in my situation -- it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. Which is -- you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now -- it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Oh, so Jesus, what a thought! You know that's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there. (Laughter) I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love. And so, the question becomes, how? And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. And, as I've been looking over the last year for models for how to do that I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we haveabout how to help creative people, sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome -- people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, O.K.? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons." Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual.They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was

believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. So brilliant -- there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about -- that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant you couldn't take all the credit for it,everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame.And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history,you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius. And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. Maybe not. Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this. But the question that I kind of want to pose is -- you know, why not? Why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something -- which is to say basically everyone here ---knows does not always behave rationally. And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal. I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone,who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to

the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other handand she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first. (Laughter) So when I heard that I was like -- that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like. (Laughter) That's not at all what my creative process is -- I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane? And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized. But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles he told me, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, you know, it's gorgeous,and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, he doesn't have a pencil, he doesn't have a tape recorder. So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, "I'm going to lose this thing, and then I'm going to be haunted by this song forever. I'm not good enough, and I can't do it." And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said,"Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?" (Laughter) "Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen." And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it kind of back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom. So when I heard that story it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and it already saved me once. This idea, it saved me when I was in the middle of writing "Eat, Pray, Love," and I fell into one of those, sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, this is going to be the worst book ever written. Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. And I started to think I should just dump this project. But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. And I said aloud, "Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right?Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. So if you want it to be better, then you've got to show up and do your part of the deal. O.K. But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep

writing anyway because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job." (Laughter) Because -- (Applause) in the end it's like this, O.K. -- centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. And they were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." That's God, you know. Curious historical footnote -- when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "Allah, Allah, Allah," to "Ole, ole, ole," which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, ole, ole, Allah, magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is -- a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that. But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way it starts to change everything. This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success. And what I have to, sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that, is, don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "Ole!" And if not, do your dance anyhow. And "Ole!" to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. "Ole!" to you, nonetheless,just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: Ole! (Applause)
Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk. The author of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert has thought long and hard about some large topics. Her next fascination: genius, and how we ruin it

Soy una escritora. Escribir libros es mi profesin pero es ms que eso, por supuesto. Es tambin el gran amor y fascinacin de mi vida. Y no espero que eso vaya a cambiar nunca.Pero, dicho esto, algo un poco peculiar ha ocurrido recientemente en mi vida y mi carrera,lo que ha causado que tenga que recalibrar completamente mi relacin con este trabajo. Y lo peculiar es que recientemente escrib este libro, esta memoria llamada "Eat, Pray, Love" ("Come, Reza, Ama") que, decididamente a diferencia de mis libros anteriores, sali al mundo por alguna razn, y se convirti en un enorme, megasensacional e internacionalmente exitoso libro. El resultado de esto es que a donde quiera que vaya, la gente me trata como si estuviera desahuciada. Seriamente - desahuciada, desahuciada!Por ejemplo, se acercan a m, muy preocupados y dicen, "No tienes miedo -- no tienes miedo de que nunca puedas superar este xito? No tienes miedo de que vayas a continuar escribiendo toda tu vida y nunca ms vayas a crear un libro que le importe a alguien en el mundo, nunca jams?" As que eso es tranquilizante, saben. Pero sera peor, excepto que recuerdo que hace ms de 20 aos, cuando empec a decir -- cuando era una adolescente -- que quera ser una escritora, me top con este mismo tipo de reaccin basada en miedo. Y la gente preguntaba, "No tienes miedo de que nunca vayas a tener xito? No tienes miedo de que la humillacin del rechazo te mate? No tienes miedo de trabajar toda tu vida en este arte y de que nada vaya a salir de eso y de que morirs sobre una pila de sueos rotos con tu boca llena de la amarga ceniza del fracaso?" (Risas) Algo as, saben. La respuesta - la respuesta corta a todas sas preguntas es, "S." S, tengo miedo de todas esas cosas. Y siempre lo he tenido. Y tengo miedo de muchas, muchas otras cosasque la gente ni siquiera puede adivinar. Como las algas, y otras cosas que dan miedo.Pero, cuando se trata de escribir, en lo que he estado pensando ltimamente, y que me he estado preguntando, es por qu? Ya saben, es racional? Es acaso lgico que se espere que uno tenga miedo del trabajo para el que siente que fue puesto en la Tierra? Ya saben, y que es eso que especficamente tienen las carreras creativos que aparentemente nos pone realmente nerviosos sobre la salud mental de los dems de una manera que otras carreras no lo hacen, saben? Como mi pap, por ejemplo, que era un ingeniero qumico y no recuerdo ni una vez en sus 40 aos de ingeniera qumica que alguien le preguntara si tena miedo de ser un ingeniero qumico, saben? No suceda -el ingeniero qumico ese, John, como va? Simplemente no pasaba, saben? Pero para ser justos, los ingenieros qumicos como grupo no se han ganado una reputacin a lo largo de los siglos de ser alcohlicos manaco-depresivos. (Risas) Nosotros los escritores, tenemos esa reputacin, y no solo escritores, sino la gente creativa de todo tipo, parece tener esta reputacin de ser enormemente inestable mentalmente. Y todo lo que tienes que hacer es ver esta sombra lista de muertes slo en el siglo XX, de mentes creativas magnficas que murieron jvenes y a menudo por su propia mano, saben? E incluso los que no se suicidaron parecen destruidos por sus dones, saben? Norman Mailer, justo antes de morir, su ltima entrevista, dijo "Cada uno de mis libros me ha matado un poco ms." Una declaracin extraordinaria acerca del trabajo de tu vida, saben? Pero ni siquiera pestaeamos cuando omos a alguien decir esto porque hemos odo cosas como sta por tanto tiempo y de alguna manera hemos interiorizado y aceptado colectivamente esta idea de que la creatividad y el sufrimiento estn inherentemente ligados y que el arte, al final, siempre llevar a la angustia. Y la pregunta que quiero hacerles a todos hoy es estn todos ustedes a gusto con esa idea? Se sienten cmodos con ella -- porque la ven aunque sea a slo una pulgada de distancia y, saben -- yo no me siento cmoda con esa suposicin. Creo que es odiosa. Y tambin creo que es peligrosa, y no quiero verla perpetuada en el prximo siglo. Creo que es mejor si alentamos a nuestras grandes mentes creativas a vivir. Y definitivamente creo que, en mi caso -- en mi situacin -- sera muy peligroso para m empezar a fugarme por ese camino oscuro de suposicin, particularmente dada la

circunstancia en la que estoy justo en este punto de mi carrera. La cual es -- ustedes saben, bueno, soy bastante joven, slo tengo alrededor de 40 aos. Tal vez tengo todava otras cuatro dcadas de trabajo en m. Y es extremadamente posible que cualquier cosa que escriba de ahora en adelante sea juzgada por el mundo como el trabajo que vino despus del extrao xito de mi libro pasado, verdad? Debera decirlo sin rodeos, porque somos todos como amigos aqu -- es extremadamente probable que mi mayor xito ya haya pasado. Oh, Jess, qu idea! Saben que es el tipo de pensamiento que gua a una persona a beber ginebra a las nueve de la maana y no quiero hacer eso. (Risas) Preferira continuar haciendo este trabajo que amo. As que, la pregunta se vuelve cmo? Y a m me parece, despus de mucha reflexin, que la forma en la que tengo que trabajar ahora, para seguir escribiendo, es que tengo que crear algn tipo de constructo psicolgico de proteccin, verdad? Tengo que encontrar algn modo de tener una distancia segura entre m, mientras escribo, y mi ansiedad natural sobre lo que ser la reaccin a lo que escriba, de ahora en adelante. Y, mientras estuve buscando durante el ao pasado modelos de cmo hacer eso he estado mirando a travs del tiempo, y he intentado encontrar otras sociedades para ver si podran tener ideas mejores y ms lcidas que las que tenemos acerca de cmo ayudar a la gente creativa, a administrar los inherentes riesgos emocionales de la creatividad. Y esa bsqueda me ha llevado a la antigua Grecia y a la antigua Roma. As que mantnganse conmigo, porque esto da la vuelta completa. Pero, en la Grecia y Roma antiguas -- la gente no crea que la creatividad vena de los seres humanos, OK? La gente crea que la creatividad era este espritu asistente divino que vena a los humanos de una fuente distante y desconocida, por razones distantes y desconocidas. Los griegos llamaron a estos espritus divinos asistentes de la creatividad, "daimones." Scrates, popularmente se crea que tena un daimon que le hablaba con sabidura desde lejos. Los Romanos tenan la misma idea, pero llamaban a este espritu creativo incorpreo un genio. Lo que es genial, porque los Romanos no crean que un genio era un individuo particularmente inteligente. Ellos crean que un genio era este tipo de entidad mgica y divina, que se crea, viva, literalmente, en las paredes del estudio de un artista, algo as como Dobby el elfo domestico, y que sala y asista invisiblemente al artista con su trabajo y daba forma al resultado de ese trabajo. Tan brillante -- ah est, justo ah esa distancia de la que estoy hablando -- ese constructo psicolgico para protegerse de los resultados de tu trabajo. Y todos saban que as es como funcionaba, verdad? As el artista antiguo estaba protegido de ciertas cosas, como, por ejemplo, demasiado narcisismo, verdad? Si tu trabajo era brillante no te podas atribuir todo el mrito por l, todos saban que tuviste este genio incorpreo que te haba ayudado.Si tu trabajo fracasaba, no era totalmente tu culpa, saben? Todos saban que tu genio era algo dbil. Y eso es lo que la gente pensaba sobre la creatividad en Occidente por mucho tiempo. Y entonces lleg el Renacimiento y todo cambi, y tuvimos esta gran idea, y la gran idea fue vamos a poner al ser humano individual en el centro del universo sobre todos los dioses y misterios, y no hay ms espacio para criaturas msticas que toman dictado de lo divino.Y es el principio del humanismo racional, y la gente empez a creer que la creatividad vena completamente del individuo mismo. Y por primera vez en la historia, empiezas a escuchar a gente referirse a este o aquel artista como si fuera un genio en vez de tener un genio. Y debo decirles, creo que eso fue un gran error. Saben, creo que permitir a alguien, una simple persona creer que l o ella es como, el contenedor, como la fuente, la esencia y el origen de todo misterio divino, creativo, desconocido es quiz demasiada responsabilidad para una frgil psique humana. Es como pedirle a alguien que se trague el sol. Deforma y distorsiona egos, y crea todas estas expectativas inmanejables sobre el rendimiento. Y creo que la presin de eso ha estado matando a nuestros artistas los ltimos 500 aos.

Y, si esto es verdad, y yo creo que es verdad, la pregunta se vuelve, ahora qu?Podemos hacer esto de una manera diferente? Tal vez regresar a una comprensin ms antigua sobre la relacin entre humanos y el misterio creativo. Tal vez no. Tal vez no podemos simplemente borrar 500 aos de pensamiento humanstico racional en un discurso de 18 minutos. Y probablemente hay gente en esta audiencia que puede tener legtimas sospechas cientficas sobre la nocin de hadas, bsicamente, que siguen a la gente frotando zumo de hada en sus proyectos y cosas as. No voy a conseguir que todos estn de acuerdo conmigo. Pero la pregunta que quiero presentar es -- Por qu no? Por qu no pensar de esta manera? Porque tiene tanto sentido como cualquier otra cosa que yo haya escuchado en trminos de explicar la enloquecedora arbitrariedad absoluta del proceso creativo. Un proceso que, como cualquiera que alguna vez haya intentado hacer algo conoce -- lo que es decir, bsicamente todos los presentes -- no siempre se comporta racionalmente. Y, de hecho, a veces puede sentirse definitivamente paranormal. Hace poco me encontr con la extraordinaria poetisa norteamericana Ruth Stone, que est ya en sus 90 aos, pero ha sido una poetisa toda su vida y me dijo que cuando creca en su Virginia rural, ella estara trabajando en el campo, y dijo que iba a sentir y or un poemaque venia hacia ella desde el paisaje. Y dijo que era como un atronador tren de aire. Y vendra hacia ella descontroladamente sobre el paisaje. Y lo senta venir, porque haca que la tierra temblara bajo sus pies. Ella saba que solo tena una cosa que hacer en ese momento, y era, en sus palabras, "correr como una endemoniada." Y corra como una endemoniada a la casa y era perseguida por este poema, y lo que deba hacer era que tena que conseguir un pedazo de papel y un lpiz lo suficientemente rpido para que cuando tronara a travs de ella, lo pudiera recoger y atraparlo en la pgina. Y a veces no era lo suficientemente rpida, as que ella estara corriendo y corriendo, y no llegara a la casa y el poema la atropellara y ella lo perda y ella dijo que seguira avanzando sobre el paisaje, buscando, como ella dijo, "a otro poeta." Y a veces existan estas ocasiones --esta es la parte que nunca olvid -- dijo que existan momentos en los que ella casi lo perda, verdad? As que, est corriendo a la casa y buscando el papel y el poema la pasaba de largo, y ella agarraba el lpiz justo mientras pasaba por ella, y entonces ella dijo, era como si lo hubiera alcanzado con su otra mano y lo hubiera atrapado. Atrapaba el poema por la cola, y lo tiraba hacia atrs dentro de su cuerpo mientras lo transcriba en la pgina. Y en estas ocasiones, el poema apareca en la pgina perfecto e intacto pero al revs, de la ltima palabra a la primera. (Risas) As que cuando lo escuch pens -- que extrao, as es exactamente mi proceso creativo.(Risas) Eso no es todo mi proceso creativo -- No soy la tubera! Soy una mula, y la manera que tengo de trabajar es que me tengo que levantar a la misma hora todos los das, y sudar y trabajar y pasar por todo eso torpemente. Pero an yo, en mi mulismo, an yo me he rozado contra esa cosa, a veces. Y me imagino que muchos de ustedes tambin. Saben, incluso he tenido trabajo o ideas que vienen a m desde una fuente que honestamente no puedo identificar . Y qu es esa cosa? Y cmo podemos relacionarnos con ella sin que nos haga perder el juicio, pero, de hecho, nos mantenga cuerdos? Y para m, el mejor ejemplo contemporneo que tengo de cmo hacerlo es el msico Tom Waits, a quien entrevist hace algunos aos para una revista. Y estbamos hablando acerca de esto, y ya saben, Tom, por la mayor parte de su vida ha sido el ejemplo del atormentado artista moderno contemporneo, intentando controlar y manejar y dominarestos impulsos creativos incontrolables que estn totalmente interiorizados. Pero entonces se volvi ms viejo, ms tranquilo, y un da estaba conduciendo en la autopista en Los ngeles me dijo, y fue entonces cuando todo cambi para l. Est conduciendo, y de repente escucha este pequeo fragmento de meloda, que viene a su cabeza como llega la inspiracin a menudo, evasiva y sugerente, y la quiere, ustedes

saben, es hermosa, y la aora, pero no tiene manera de conseguirla. No tiene un pedazo de papel, no tiene un lpiz, no tiene una grabadora. As que empieza a sentir esa vieja ansiedad crecer en l as como, "Voy a perder esta cosa, y entonces esta cancin me va a atormentar para siempre. No soy lo suficientemente bueno, no puedo hacerlo." Y en vez de caer en el pnico, se detuvo. Detuvo el proceso mental completo e hizo algo completamente novedoso. Simplemente mir al cielo, y dijo,"Disculpa, no ves que estoy conduciendo?" (Risas) "Te parece que puedo escribir una cancin ahora? Si realmente quieres existir, regresa en un momento ms oportuno cuando me pueda encargar de ti. Sino, ve a molestar a alguien ms. Ve a molestar a Leonard Cohen." Y su proceso de trabajo cambi por completo despus de eso. No el trabajo, el trabajo an era a menudo tan oscuro como siempre. Sino el proceso, y la pesada ansiedad a su alrededor fue liberada cuando tomo al genio, y lo saco de su interior donde solo causaba problemas, y lo liber de vuelta al lugar del que vino, y se dio cuenta que no tena que ser una cosa interiorizada, atormentadora. Poda ser esta colaboracin peculiar, magnfica, extraordinaria tipo de conversacin entre Tom y la extraa cosa externa que no era precisamente Tom. As que cuando o esa historia, empez a cambiar un poco la manera en que yo trabajaba, y ya me salv una vez. Esta idea me salv cuando estaba escribiendo "Eat, Pray, Love," y ca en uno de esos pozos de desesperacin en el que todos caemos cuando trabajamos en algo y no est funcionando y empiezas a pensar que va a ser un desastre, que va a ser el peor libro jams escrito. No solo malo, sino el peor libro jams escrito. Y empec a pensar que debera de dejar el proyecto. Pero me acord de Tom hablandole al aire y lo intent.As que levante mi cara del manuscrito y dirig mis comentarios a una esquina vaca del cuarto. Y dije en voz alta: "Escucha t, cosa, ambos sabemos que si este libro no es brillante no es enteramente mi culpa, verdad? Porque puedes ver que estoy poniendo todo lo que tengo en esto, no tengo nada ms. As que si quieres que sea mejor, tienes que aparecer y cumplir con tu parte del trato. OK. Pero si no lo haces, sabes, al diablo con esto. Voy a seguir escribiendo porque es mi trabajo. Y quisiera que quede reflejado hoy que yo estuve aqu para hacer mi parte del trabajo." (Risas) Porque -- (Aplausos) al final es algo as, OK -- hace siglos en los desiertos de frica del Norte, la gente se juntaba en bailes sagrados con msica a la luz de la luna que continuaban durante horas y horas hasta el amanecer. Y siempre eran magnficos, porque los bailarines eran profesionales y eran geniales, verdad? Pero de vez en cuando, muy raramente, algo pasaba, y uno de estos interpretes se volvera trascendente. Y yo s que ustedes saben de lo que estoy hablando, porque s que todos han visto, en algn momento, una ejecucin as. Era como si el tiempo se detuviera, y el bailarn pasaba por un tipo de portal y no estaba haciendo nada diferente de lo que haba hecho las mil noches anteriores, pero todo se alineaba. Y de repente, no pareca ser un simple humano. Estaba iluminado internamente y desde abajo y todo iluminado con divinidad. Y cuando esto pasaba, en esos tiempos, la gente saba lo que era, saben, y lo llamaban por su nombre. Juntaban sus manos y empezaban a cantar, "Allah, Allah, Allah, Dios, Dios, Dios." Eso es Dios, saben? Una curiosa nota histrica -- Cuando los moros invadieron el sur de Espaa, llevaron esta costumbre con ellos y la pronunciacin cambi con los siglos de "Allah, Allah, Allah" a "Ol, ol, ol," Que an se escucha en plazas de toros y bailes flamencos. En Espaa, cuando alguien ha hecho algo imposible y mgico,"Allah, ol, ol, Allah, magnfico, bravo," incomprensible, ah est -- una visin de Dios. Lo que es grandioso, porque lo necesitamos. Pero, la parte difcil viene a la maana siguiente, para el mismo bailarn, cuando se despierta y descubre que es martes a las 11 a.m., y l ya no es una visin de Dios. Es solamente un mortal con malas rodillas, y tal vez jams lograr ascender a esas alturas de nuevo. Y tal vez nadie ms cantar el nombre de Dios mientras da vueltas, Y qu va a

hacer con el resto de su vida entonces? Esto es difcil. Es una de las reconciliaciones ms dolorosas en la vida creativa. Pero tal vez no debe estar lleno de angustia si ustedes no creyeran, en primer lugar, que los aspectos ms extraordinarios de su ser vinieron de ustedes. Pero tal vez si simplemente se creyeran que era un prstamo de alguna fuente inimaginable por una exquisita porcin de su vida para entregar a alguien ms cuando hubieran terminado. Y saben, si pensamos de esta manera, empieza a cambiar todo. As es como he empezado a pensar, y es definitivamente como he pensado en los ltimos meses mientras he trabajado en el libro que pronto ser publicado, como la peligrosa, atemorizante sobreanticipada secuela de mi extrao xito. Y lo que tengo que seguir dicindome cuando realmente me pongo nerviosa es, no tengas miedo. No te abrumes. Solo haz tu trabajo. Contina presentndote para hacer tu parte, sea cual sea. Si tu trabajo es bailar, haz tu baile. Si el divino, absurdo genio asignado a tu caso decide dejar que se vislumbre algn tipo de maravilla, aunque sea por un momento a travs de tus esfuerzos, entonces "Ol!" Y si no, haz tu baile de todas formas. Y "Ol!" para ti, de todas formas. Creo en esto y siento que debemos ensearlo. "Ol!" a ti, de todas formas, solamente por tener el amor y la tenacidad humana de continuar intentndolo. Gracias. (Aplausos) Gracias. (Aplausos) June Cohen: Ol! (Aplausos)

Sugata Mitra y sus nuevos experimentos en autoaprendizaje

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/es/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
El investigador en educacin Sugata Mitra aborda uno de los mayores problemas de la educacin: los mejores profesores y las mejores escuelas no estn donde ms se los necesita. En una serie de experimentos de la vida real yendo desde Nueva Delhi, pasando por Sudfrica, hasta Italia, le dio a los nios acceso auto-supervisado a la web y vio resultados que podran revolucionar cmo pensamos acerca de enseanza. Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity and peer interest.

Bueno, all arriba hay una declaracin obvia. Empec con esa frase hace unos 12 aos, y empec en el contexto de los pases en desarrollo pero Uds. vienen de todos los rincones del planeta. As que si piensan en el mapa de sus pases creo que se darn cuenta que para cada pas del mundo se pueden dibujar pequeos crculos que digan: "Estos son lugares donde los buenos maestros no llegan". Adems de eso, esos son los lugares donde se generan los problemas. As que tenemos un problema irnico. Los buenos maestros no quieren ir justamente a los lugares donde ms se les necesita. Empec en 1999 a tratar de abordar este problema con un experimento, un experimento muy simple en Nueva Delhi. Bsicamente incrust una computadora en una pared de un barrio pobre de Nueva Delhi. Los nios apenas iban a la escuela. No saban nada de ingls.Nunca antes haban visto una computadora y no saban qu era internet. La conect a internet de alta velocidad -est a un metro del suelo-, la encend y la dej all. Despus de esto, observamos un par de cosas interesantes, que ya van a ver. Repet esto por toda Indiay luego en gran parte del mundo y observ que los nios aprendern a hacer lo que quieren aprender a hacer. Este es el primer experimento que hicimos: un nio de 8 aos a la derecha ensendole a su alumna, de 6 aos, le estaba enseando a navegar. Este nio en medio de India central... esto es en un pueblo de Rajastn, donde los nios grabaron su propia msica y luego la tocan unos a otros, y, durante el proceso, ellos mismos han disfrutado a fondo.Hicieron todo esto en 4 horas despus de ver la computadora por primera vez. En

otro pueblo al sur de India estos nios armaron una cmara de video y estaban tratando de sacarle una foto a un abejorro. Lo descargaron de disney.com o uno de estos sitios web, 14 das despus de poner la computadora en su pueblo. As que al final de eso concluimos que los grupos de nios pueden aprender a usar computadoras e internet por su cuentaindependientemente de quines sean o dnde se encuentren. En ese momento, me volv un poco ms ambicioso y decid ver qu otra cosa podan hacer los nios con una computadora. Empezamos con un experimento en Hyderabad, India,donde le di a un grupo de nios... hablaban ingls con un acento telugu muy fuerte... les di una computadora con una interfaz de voz a texto que, ya saben, ahora viene gratis con Windows y les ped que le hablaran. As, cuando le hablaban la computadora escriba cualquier cosa, y entonces decan: "Bueno, no entiende nada de lo que decimos". Yo dije: "S, se las voy a dejar durante 2 meses. Hganse entender por la computadora". Los nios dijeron: "Cmo hacemos eso?" Y les dije: "En realidad, no lo s". (Risas) Y me fui.(Risas) Dos meses despus, y esto est documentado ahora en el peridico Information Technology for International Development, que cambi el acento y se parece mucho al acento britnico neutral con el que haba entrenado al sintetizador de voz a texto. En otras palabras, todos estaban hablando como James Tooley. (Risas) As que pudieron hacer eso por su cuenta. Despus de eso comenc a experimentar con varias otras cosas que podran aprender a hacer por su cuenta. Recib una llamada telefnica interesante desde Colombo del finado Arthur C. Clarke, que deca "quiero ver qu est sucediendo". Y l no poda viajar as que fui hasta all. l dijo dos cosas interesantes: "Un maestro que puede ser reemplazado por una mquina debera serlo". (Risas) La segunda cosa que dijo fue que "Si un nio tiene inters entonces ocurre la educacin". Y yo estaba haciendo eso en el campo as que cada vez que lo miraba pensaba en l. (Video) Arthur C. Clarke: Y definitivamente pueden ayudar a la gente porque los nios rpidamente aprenden a navegar y entrar y encontrar lo que les interesan. Y si uno tiene inters, entonces tiene educacin. Sugata Mitra: llev el experimento a Sudfrica. Este es un muchacho de 15 aos. (Video) Muchacho: ...me gustan los juegos los animales, y escuchar msica. SM: Y le pregunt: "Envas mensajes de correo?" Y l dijo: "S, y saltan a travs del ocano". Esto es en Camboya, la Camboya rural, un juego aritmtico bastante tonto, que ningn nio jugara en clases o en la casa. Ellos, ya saben, se lo arrojaran de vuelta.Diran: "Esto es muy aburrido". Si lo dejas en el piso, y si todos los adultos se van, ellos alardearn unos con otros sobre lo que pueden hacer. Esto es lo que estos nios estn haciendo. Estn tratando de multiplicar, creo. Y por toda India, al cabo de unos 2 aos, los nios estaban comenzando a googlear sus tareas. En consecuencia los maestros informaron enormes mejoras en sus ingls... (Risas) una mejora rpida y toda clase de cosas. Decan: "Se han vuelto grandes pensadores" y cosas por el estilo. (Risas) Y, de hecho, lo eran. Digo, si hay algo en Google, para qu lo quiere uno en la cabeza? As, al cabo de los siguientes 4 aos decid que los grupos de nios podan navegar internet para lograr objetivos educativos por su cuenta. En ese momento ingres gran cantidad de dinero a la Universidad de Newcastle para mejorar la educacin en India. Me llamaron de Newcastle y les dije: "Lo voy a hacer desde Delhi". Dijeron: "No hay manera de que manejes un milln de libras de la Universidadsentado en Delhi". As que en 2006 me compr un abrigo pesado y me mud a Newcastle.Quera probar los lmites del sistema. El primer experimento que hice desde Newcastle en realidad fue en India. Y me fij un objetivo imposible: pueden los nios de 12 aos que hablan tamil en una aldea del sur de India ser autodidactas en biotecnologa, en ingls y por su cuenta? Y pens: les tomar un examen y sacarn un cero. Les dar los materiales. Regresar y los evaluar. Sacarn otro cero. Regresar y les dir: "S, necesitamos maestros para ciertas cosas".

Llam a 26 nios. Vinieron todos y les dije que haba algo muy difcil en esta computadora.No me sorprendera que no entendieran nada. Todo est en ingls y me estoy yendo.(Risas) As que los dej con eso. Volv luego de dos meses los 26 entraron muy, muy silenciosos. Les dije: "Bueno, miraron algo del material?" Respondieron: "S, lo hicimos"."Entendieron algo?" "No, nada". Entonces dije: "Bueno, cunto practicaron antes de decidir que no entendieron nada?" Me dijeron: "Lo miramos todos los das". Y dije: "Durante dos meses estuvieron mirando algo que no entendan?" Entonces una nia de 12 aos levanta la mano y dice literalmente, "Aparte del hecho que la replicacin indebida de la molcula de ADN provoca enfermedad gentica no hemos entendido nada ms". (Risas) (Aplausos) (Risas) Me llev 3 aos publicar eso. Acaba de publicarse en el British Journal of Educational Technology. Uno de los evaluadores que revis el artculo dijo: "Es demasiado bueno para ser verdad", lo que no era muy agradable. Bueno, una de las nias se auto-ense como convertirse en la maestra. Y all est ella. Recuerden, ellos no estudian ingls. Edit la ltima parte en la que pregunt: "Dnde est la neurona?" y ella dijo: "La neurona? la neurona?" Y luego mir e hizo esto. Cualquiera fuese la expresin, no era muy agradable. As, sus resultados haban pasado de 0% a 30% lo cual es una imposibilidad educativa en esas circunstancias. Pero 30% no alcanza para pasar. Descubr que tenan una amiga una contadora local, una muchacha, y jugaban ftbol con ella. Le pregunt a la muchacha: "Les ensearas biotecnologa para que aprueben?" Y dijo: "Cmo lo voy a hacer? No conozco el tema". Le dije: "No, usa el mtodo de la abuela". Ella dijo: "Qu es eso?" Le dije: "Bueno, lo que tienes que hacer es pararte frente a ellos y admirarlos todo el tiempo.Slo diles: "Eso es genial. Eso es fantstico. Qu es eso? Puedes hacerlo de nuevo? Puedes mostrarme un poco ms?" Ella hizo eso durante dos meses. Las notas subieron a 50% que es lo que las escuelas elegantes de Nueva Delhi, con un profesor de biotecnologa entrenado, estaban consiguiendo. As que volv a Newcastle con estos resultados y decid que estaba pasando algo aqu que sin duda era muy importante. As, despus de haber experimentado en todo tipo de lugares remotos, Llegu al lugar ms remoto que se me pudo ocurrir. (Risas) A unos 8.000 kms. de Nueva Delhi est el pueblito de Gateshead. En Gateshead tom 32 nios y empec a refinar el mtodo. Los puse en grupos de 4. Les dije: "Formen sus propios grupos de 4.Cada grupo de 4 puede usar 1 computadora y no 4 computadoras". Recuerden, igual que el Agujero en la Pared. "Pueden cambiar de grupo. Pueden pasarse a otro grupo si no les gusta su grupo, etc. Pueden ir a otro grupo, mirar sobre sus hombros, ver qu estn haciendo, regresar a su propio grupo y considerarlo su propio trabajo". Y les expliqu que, ya saben, que mucha investigacin cientfica se hace con ese mtodo. (Risas) (Aplausos) Los nios vinieron entusiasmados y me dijeron: "Qu quiere que hagamos?" Les di 6 preguntas de secundario. El primer grupo, el mejor, resolvi todo en 20 minutos. El peor, en 45. Usaron todo lo que saban... foros, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc. Los maestros decan: "Es esto aprendizaje profundo?" Les dije: "Bueno, probemos. Regresar en dos meses. Les daremos un examen... sin computadoras, nadie habla con nadie, etc". La nota promedio cuando lo haba hecho con la computadora y en grupo era de 76%. Cuando hice el experimento, cuando tom la prueba, despus de 2 meses, la nota fue de 76%. Hubo recuerdo fotogrfico en los nios, sospecho porque estaban discutindolo entre s. Un nio solo frente a una computadora no har eso. Tengo otros resultados, que son casi increbles, de puntuaciones que aumentan con el

tiempo. Porque los profesores dicen que despus de terminada la clase los nios siguen googleando ms cosas. Aqu en Gran Bretaa hice un llamado a las abuelas britnicas luego de mi experimento.Bueno, ya saben, son gente muy vigorosa, las abuelas britnicas. 200 se ofrecieron de inmediato. (Risas) El trato era que me daran una hora de banda ancha sentadas en sus casas un da por semana. Y as hicieron. Y durante los ltimos dos aos se han impartido ms de 600 horas de instruccin a travs de Skype, usando lo que mis estudiantes llaman la "nube de abuelas". La nube de abuelas se sienta all. Puedo transmitirla a la escuela lo que quiero. (Video) Maestra: No puedes atraparme. Dganlo ustedes. No puedes atraparme. Nios: No puedes atraparme. Maestra: soy el hombre de pan de jengibre. Nios: soy el hombre de pan de jengibre. Maestra: Bien hecho, muy bien... SM: De vuelta en Gateshead, una nia de 10 aos se mete en el corazn del hinduismo en 15 minutos. Cosas que incluso yo no conozco. Dos nios miran una charla TEDTalk. Antes queran ser futbolistas. Luego de ver 8 charlas TEDTalks l quiere ser Leonardo da Vinci. (Risas) (Aplausos) Es algo bastante simple. Esto es lo que estoy construyendo ahora. SOLES, acrnimo en ingls de Entornos de Aprendizaje Auto-Organizado. El mobiliario est diseado para que los nios se pueden sentar frente a pantalla grandes, poderosas, con grandes conexiones de banda ancha, pero en grupos. Si quieren pueden llamar a la nube de abuelas. Este es el SOLE en Newcastle.El mediador es de India. Hasta dnde podemos ir? Una ltima cosa y me detendr. Fui a Turn en mayo. Alej a todos los maestros de mi grupo de estudiantes de 10 aos. Hablo slo ingls, ellos hablan slo italiano, as que no tenamos manera de comunicarnos. Empec escribiendo preguntas en ingls en el pizarrn. Los nios miraron y dijeron: "Qu?" Yo dije: "Bueno, hganlo". Lo escribieron en Google, lo tradujeron en italiano, volvieron al Google en italiano. 15 minutos despus... Siguiente pregunta: Dnde est Calcuta? Esta les llev slo 10 minutos. Luego prob con una bien difcil. Quin fue "Pythagoras" y qu hizo? Hubo silencio por un momento y dijeron: "Lo escribi de modo incorrecto. Es Pitgoras". Y luego, en 20 minutos, comenzaron a aparecer en pantalla los tringulos rectngulos. Esta escena me dio escalofros. Estos nios tienen 10 aos. [En otros 30 minutos llegaran a la Teora de la Relatividad. Y luego qu?] (Risas) (Aplausos) SM: Saben lo que ha pasado? Creo que hemos tropezado con un sistema autoorganizado. Un sistema auto-organizado es aquel en el que aparece una estructura sin intervencin explcita del exterior. Los sistemas auto-organizados siempre revelan surgimiento, lo cual significa que el sistema empieza a hacer cosas para las que nunca fue diseado. Esa es la razn por la que Uds. reaccionan as porque parece algo imposible.Creo que puedo arriesgar una conjetura. La educacin es un sistema autoorganizado en el que el aprendizaje es un fenmeno emergente. Va a llevar unos aos demostrarlo empricamente pero lo voy a intentar. Mientras tanto hay un mtodo disponible. Mil millones de nios, necesitamos 100 millones de mediadores, hay muchos ms en el planeta, 10 millones de SOLEs, 180 mil millones de dlares y 10 aos. Podramos cambiarlo todo. Gracias. (Aplausos)

Well, that's kind of an obvious statement up there. I started with that sentence about 12 years ago, and I started in the context of developing countries, but you're sitting here from every corner of the world. So if you think of a map of your country, I think you'll realize that for every country on Earth, you could draw little circles to say, "These are places where good teachers won't go." On top of that, those are the places from where trouble comes. So we have an ironic problem -- good teachers don't want to go to just those places where they're needed the most. I started in 1999 to try and address this problem with an experiment, which was a very simple experiment in New Delhi. I basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in New Delhi. The children barely went to school, they didn't know any English -- they'd never seen a computer before, and they didn't know what the internet was. I connected high speed internet to it -- it's about three feet off the ground -- turned it on and left it there. After this,we noticed a couple of interesting things, which you'll see. But I repeated this all over Indiaand then through a large part of the world and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do. This is the first experiment that we did -- eight year-old boy on your right teaching his student, a six year-old girl, and he was teaching her how to browse. This boy here in the middle of central India -- this is in a Rajasthan village, where the children recorded their own music and then played it back to each other and in the process, they've enjoyed themselves thoroughly. They did all of this in four hours after seeing the computer for the first time. In another South Indian village, these boys here had assembled a video camera and were trying to take the photograph of a bumble bee. They downloaded it from Disney.com, or one of these websites, 14 days after putting the computer in their village. So at the end of it, we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own,irrespective of who or where they were. At that point, I became a little more ambitious and decided to see what else could children do with a computer. We started off with an experiment in Hyderabad, India, where I gave a group of children -- they spoke English with a very strong Telugu accent. I gave them a computer with a speech-to-text interface, which you now get free with Windows, and asked them to speak into it. So when they spoke into it, the computer typed out gibberish, so they said, "Well, it doesn't understand anything of what we are saying." So I said, "Yeah, I'll leave it here for two months. Make yourself understood to the computer." So the children said, "How do we do that." And I said, "I don't know, actually." (Laughter) And I left.(Laughter) Two months later -- and this is now documented in the Information Technology for International Development journal -- that accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral British accent in which I had trained the speech-to-text synthesizer. In other words, they were all speaking like James Tooley. (Laughter) So they could do that on their own. After that, I started to experiment with various other things that they might learn to do on their own. I got an interesting phone call once from Columbo, from the late Arthur C. Clarke, who said, "I want to see what's going on." And he couldn't travel, so I went over there. He said two interesting things, "A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be." (Laughter) The second thing he said was that, "If children have interest, then education happens." And I was doing that in the field, so every time I would watch it and think of him. (Video) Arthur C. Clarke: And they can definitely help people, because children quickly learn to navigate the web and find things which interest them. And when you've got interest, then you have education. Sugata Mitra: I took the experiment to South Africa. This is a 15 year-old boy. (Video) Boy: ... just mention, I play games like animals, and I listen to music. SM: And I asked him, "Do you send emails?" And he said, "Yes, and they hop across the ocean." This is in Cambodia, rural Cambodia -- a fairly silly arithmetic game, which no child

would play inside the classroom or at home. They would, you know, throw it back at you.They'd say, "This is very boring." If you leave it on the pavement and if all the adults go away, then they will show off with each other about what they can do. This is what these children are doing. They are trying to multiply, I think. And all over India, at the end of about two years, children were beginning to Google their homework. As a result, the teachers reported tremendous improvements in their English -- (Laughter) rapid improvement and all sorts of things. They said, "They have become really deep thinkers and so on and so forth.(Laughter) And indeed they had. I mean, if there's stuff on Google, why would you need to stuff it into your head? So at the end of the next four years, I decided that groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own. At that time, a large amount of money had come into Newcastle University to improve schooling in India. So Newcastle gave me a call. I said, "I'll do it from Delhi." They said, "There's no way you're going to handle a million pounds-worth of University money sitting in Delhi." So in 2006, I bought myself a heavy overcoat and moved to Newcastle. I wanted to test the limits of the system. The first experiment I did out of Newcastle was actually done in India. And I set myself and impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own? And I thought, I'll test them, they'll get a zero -- I'll give the materials, I'll come back and test them -- they get another zero, I'll go back and say, "Yes, we need teachers for certain things." I called in 26 children. They all came in there, and I told them that there's some really difficult stuff on this computer. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't understand anything. It's all in English, and I'm going. (Laughter) So I left them with it. I came back after two months,and the 26 children marched in looking very, very quiet. I said, "Well, did you look at any of the stuff?" They said, "Yes, we did." "Did you understand anything?" "No, nothing." So I said, "Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing?"They said, "We look at it every day." So I said, "For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand?" So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, "Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else." (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) It took me three years to publish that. It's just been published in the British Journal of Educational Technology. One of the referees who refereed the paper said, "It's too good to be true," which was not very nice. Well, one of the girls had taught herself to become the teacher. And then that's her over there. Remember, they don't study English. I edited out the last bit when I asked, "Where is the neuron?" and she says, "The neuron? The neuron,"and then she looked and did this. Whatever the expression, it was not very nice. So their scores had gone up from zero to 30 percent, which is an educational impossibility under the circumstances. But 30 percent is not a pass. So I found that they had a friend, a local accountant, a young girl, and they played football with her. I asked that girl, "Would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass?" And she said, "How would I do that? I don't know the subject." I said, "No, use the method of the grandmother." She said, "What's that?" I said, "Well, what you've got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time. Just say to them, 'That's cool. That's fantastic. What is that? Can you do that again? Can you show me some more?'" She did that for two months. The scores went up to 50,which is what the posh schools of New Delhi, with a trained biotechnology teacher were getting. So I came back to Newcastle with these results and decided that there was something happening here that definitely was getting very serious. So, having experimented in all sorts of remote places, I came to the most remote place that I could think

of. (Laughter)Approximately 5,000 miles from Delhi is the little town of Gateshead. In Gateshead, I took 32 children and I started to fine-tune the method. I made them into groups of four. I said, "You make your own groups of four. Each group of four can use one computer and not four computers." Remember, from the Hole in the Wall. "You can exchange groups. You can walk across to another group, if you don't like your group, etc. You can go to another group, peer over their shoulders, see what they're doing, come back to you own group and claim it as your own work." And I explained to them that, you know, a lot of scientific research is done using that method. (Laughter) (Applause) The children enthusiastically got after me and said, "Now, what do you want us to do?" I gave them six GCSE questions. The first group -- the best one -- solved everything in 20 minutes. The worst, in 45. They used everything that they knew -- news groups, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc. The teachers said, "Is this deep learning?" I said, "Well, let's try it. I'll come back after two months. We'll give them a paper test -- no computers, no talking to each other, etc." The average score when I'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent. When I did the experiment, when I did the test, after two months, the score was 76 percent. There was photographic recall inside the children, I suspect because they're discussing with each other. A single child in front of a single computer will not do that. I have further results, which are almost unbelievable, of scores which go up with time. Because their teachers say that after the session is over, the children continue to Google further. Here in Britain, I put out a call for British grandmothers, after my Kuppam experiment. Well, you know, they're very vigorous people, British grandmothers. 200 of them volunteered immediately. (Laughter) The deal was that they would give me one hour of broadband time,sitting in their homes, one day in a week. So they did that, and over the last two years, over 600 hours of instruction has happened over Skype, using what my students call the granny cloud. The granny cloud sits over there. I can beam them to whichever school I want to. (Video) Teacher: You can't catch me. You say it. You can't catch me. Children: You can't catch me. Teacher: I'm the gingerbread man. Children: I'm the gingerbread man. Teacher: Well done. Very good ... SM: Back at Gateshead, a 10-year-old girl gets into the heart of Hinduism in 15 minutes.You know, stuff which I don't know anything about. Two children watch a TEDTalk. They wanted to be footballers before. After watching eight TEDTalks, he wants to become Leonardo da Vinci. (Laughter) (Applause) It's pretty simple stuff. This is what I'm building now -- they're called SOLEs: Self Organized Learning Environments. The furniture is designed so that children can sit in front of big, powerful screens, big broadband connections, but in groups. If they want, they can call the granny cloud. This is a SOLE in Newcastle. The mediator is from Pune, India. So how far can we go? One last little bit and I'll stop. I went to Turin in May. I sent all the teachers away from my group of 10 year-old students. I speak only English, they speak only Italian, so we had no way to communicate. I started writing English questions on the blackboard. The children looked at it and said, "What?" I said, "Well, do it." They typed it into Google, translated it into Italian, went back into Italian Google. Fifteen minutes later -next question: where is Calcutta? This one, they took only 10 minutes. I tried a really hard one then. Who was Pythagoras, and what did he do? There was silence for a while, then

they said, "You've spelled it wrong. It's Pitagora." And then, in 20 minutes, the right-angled triangles began to appear on the screens. This sent shivers up my spine. These are 10 year-olds. Text: In another 30 minutes they would reach the Theory of Relativity. And then? (Laughter) (Applause) SM: So you know what's happened? I think we've just stumbled across a self-organizing system. A self-organizing system is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside. Self-organizing systems also always show emergence, which is that the system starts to do things, which it was never designed for. Which is why you react the way you do, because it looks impossible. I think I can make a guess now -education is self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon. It'll take a few years to prove it, experimentally, but I'm going to try. But in the meanwhile, there is a method available. One billion children, we need 100 million mediators -- there are many more than that on the planet -- 10 million SOLEs, 180 billion dollars and 10 years. We could change everything. Thanks. (Applause)

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

How do you explain when things don't go as we assume? Or better, how do you explainwhen others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions? For example: Why is Apple so innovative? Year after year, after year, after year, they're more innovative than all their competition. And yet, they're just a computer company. They're just like everyone else. They have the same access to the same talent, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media. Then why is it that they seem to have something different? Why is it that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement? He wasn't the only man who suffered in a pre-civil rights America, and he certainly wasn't the only great orator of the day. Why him? And why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure out controlled, powered man flight when there were certainly other teams who were better qualified, better funded ... and they didn't achieve powered man flight, and the Wright brothers beat them to it. There's something else at play here. About three and a half years ago I made a discovery. And this discovery profoundly changedmy view on how I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it. As it turns out, there's a pattern. As it turns out, all the great and inspiring leaders and organizations in the world -- whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers -- they all think, act and communicate the exact same way. And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it, and it's probably the world'ssimplest idea. I call it the golden circle. Why? How? What? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren't. Let me define the terms really quickly. Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by "why" I don't mean "to make a profit." That's a result. It's always a result. By "why," I mean: What's your purpose? What's your cause? What's your belief?Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care? Well, as a result, the way we think, the way we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in. It's obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations -- regardless of their

size, regardless of their industry -- all think, act and communicate from the inside out. Let me give you an example. I use Apple because they're easy to understand and everybody gets it. If Apple were like everyone else, a marketing message from them might sound like this: "We make great computers. They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?" "Meh." And that's how most of us communicate. That's how most marketing is done, that's how most sales is done and that's how most of us communicate interpersonally. We say what we do, we say how we're different or how we're better and we expect some sort of a behavior, a purchase, a vote, something like that.Here's our new law firm: We have the best lawyers with the biggest clients, we always perform for our clients who do business with us. Here's our new car: It gets great gas mileage, it has leather seats, buy our car. But it's uninspiring. Here's how Apple actually communicates. "Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?" Totally different right? You're ready to buy a computer from me. All I did was reverse the order of the information. What it proves to us is that people don't buy what you do; people buy why you do it. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer from Apple. But we're also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple, or a phone from Apple, or a DVR from Apple. But, as I said before, Apple's just a computer company. There's nothing that distinguishes them structurally from any of their competitors. Their competitors are all equally qualified to make all of these products. In fact, they tried. A few years ago, Gateway came out with flat screen TVs. They're eminently qualified to make flat screen TVs. They've been making flat screen monitors for years.Nobody bought one. Dell came out with MP3 players and PDAs, and they make great quality products, and they can make perfectly well-designed products -- and nobody bought one. In fact, talking about it now, we can't even imagine buying an MP3 player from Dell.Why would you buy an MP3 player from a computer company? But we do it every day.People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe. Here's the best part: None of what I'm telling you is my opinion. It's all grounded in the tenets of biology. Not psychology, biology. If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, looking from the top down, what you see is the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle. Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the "what" level. The neocortex is responsible for all of ourrational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It's also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language. In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn't drive behavior. When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from. You know, sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures, and they say, "I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn't feel right." Why would we use that verb, it doesn't "feel" right? Because the part of the brain that controls decisionmaking doesn't control language. And the best we can muster up is, "I don't know. It just doesn't feel right."Or sometimes you say you're leading with your heart, or you're leading with your soul. Well, I hate to break it to you, those aren't other body parts controlling your

behavior. It's all happening here in your limbic brain, the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language. But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do. Again, the goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it's to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they'll work for your money, but if you hire people who believe what you believe, they'll work for you with blood and sweat and tears. And nowhere else is there a better example of this than with the Wright brothers. Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. And back in the early 20th century, the pursuit of powered man flight was like the dot com of the day. Everybody was trying it. And Samuel Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success.I mean, even now, you ask people, "Why did your product or why did your company fail?"and people always give you the same permutation of the same three things: under-capitalized, the wrong people, bad market conditions. It's always the same three things, so let's explore that. Samuel Pierpont Langley was given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. Money was no problem. He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected; he knew all the big minds of the day. He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were fantastic. The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley. Then how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley? A few hundred miles away in Dayton Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, they had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success. They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop; not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur; and The New York Times followed them around nowhere. The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world. Samuel Pierpont Langley was different. He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. He was in pursuit of the result. He was in pursuit of the riches. And lo and behold, look what happened. The people who believed in the Wright brothers' dream worked with them with blood and sweat and tears. The others just worked for the paycheck. And they tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's how many times they would crashbefore they came in for supper. And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there to even experience it. We found out about it a few days later. And further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong thing: The day the Wright brothers took flight, he quit.He could have said, "That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology," but he didn't. He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous so he quit. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And if you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe. But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? Something called the law of diffusion of innovation, and if you don't know the law, you definitely know the terminology. The first two and a half percent of our population are our innovators. The next 13 and a half percent of our populationare our early adopters. The next 34 percent are your early majority, your late majority and your laggards. The only reason these people buy touch tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore. (Laughter) We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of

innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips. And I love asking businesses, "What's your conversion on new business?" And they love to tell you, "Oh, it's about 10 percent," proudly.Well, you can trip over 10 percent of the customers. We all have about 10 percent who just "get it." That's how we describe them, right? That's like that gut feeling, "Oh, they just get it." The problem is: How do you find the ones that get it before you're doing business with them versus the ones who don't get it? So it's this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, "Crossing the Chasm" -- because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions. They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available. These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out, when you could have just walked into the store the next week and bought one off the shelf. These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. And, by the way, they didn't do itbecause the technology was so great; they did it for themselves. It's because they wanted to be first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simplyproves what you believe. In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe. The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours, stood in line for six hours, was because of what they believed about the world, and how they wanted everybody to see them: They were first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. So let me give you a famous example, a famous failure and a famous success of the law of diffusion of innovation. First, the famous failure. It's a commercial example. As we said before, a second ago, the recipe for success is money and the right people and the right market conditions, right? You should have success then. Look at TiVo. From the time TiVo came out about eight or nine years ago to this current day, they are the single highestquality product on the market, hands down, there is no dispute. They were extremely wellfunded. Market conditions were fantastic. I mean, we use TiVo as verb. I TiVo stuff on my piece of junk Time Warner DVR all the time. But TiVo's a commercial failure. They've never made money. And when they went IPO, their stock was at about 30 or 40 dollars and then plummeted, and it's never traded above 10. In fact, I don't think it's even traded above six, except for a couple of little spikes. Because you see, when TiVo launched their product they told us all what they had. They said, "We have a product that pauses live TV, skips commercials, rewinds live TV and memorizes your viewing habits without you even asking." And the cynical majority said, "We don't believe you. We don't need it. We don't like it. You're scaring us." What if they had said, "If you're the kind of person who likes to have total control over every aspect of your life, boy, do we have a product for you. It pauses live TV, skips commercials, memorizes your viewing habits, etc., etc." People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe. Now let me give you a successful example of the law of diffusion of innovation. In the summer of 1963, 250,000 people showed up on the mall in Washington to hear Dr. King speak. They sent out no invitations, and there was no website to check the date. How do you do that? Well, Dr. King wasn't the only man in America who was a great orator. He wasn't the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But he had a gift. He didn't go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. "I believe, I believe, I believe," he told people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And some of those people created

structures to get the word out to even more people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak. How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. It's what they believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August. It's what they believed, and it wasn't about black versus white: 25 percent of the audience was white. Dr. King believed that there are two types of laws in this world: those that are made by a higher authority and those that are made by man. And not until all the laws that are made by man are consistent with the laws that are made by the higher authority will we live in a just world. It just so happened that the Civil Rights Movement was the perfect thing to help him bring his cause to life. We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. And, by the way, he gave the "I have a dream" speech, not the "I have a plan" speech. (Laughter) Listen to politicians now, with their comprehensive 12-point plans. They're not inspiring anybody. Because there are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us. Whether they're individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to.We follow those who lead, not for them, but for ourselves. And it's those who start with "why" that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them. Thank you very much. (Applause) Cmo se explica cuando las cosas no salen como se supone? O mejor, cmo se explica cuando otros son capaces de lograr cosas que parecen desafiar todas las hiptesis? Por ejemplo: Por qu Apple es tan innovador? Ao tras ao, tras ao, tras ao,son ms innovadores que toda su competencia. Y, sin embargo, son slo una empresa de computadoras. Son como todas los dems. Tienen el mismo acceso a los mismos talentos, las mismas agencias, los mismos consultores, los mismos medios. Entonces por qu es que parecen tener algo diferente? Por qu es que Martin Luther King dirigi el movimiento de derechos civiles? No fue el nico hombre que sufri la era previa a los derechos civiles en EE.UU. Y ciertamente no era el nico gran orador del momento. Por qu l? Y por qu es que los hermanos Wright fueron capaces de idear los vuelos tripulados autopropulsados cuando ciertamente haba otros equipos mejor calificados, mejor financiados que no lograron un vuelo tripulado y los hermanos Wright tomaron la delantera?Aqu hay algo ms en juego. Hace unos tres aos y medio descubr algo y este descubrimiento cambi profundamentemi visin sobre cmo funcionaba el mundo, incluso cambi profundamente mi manera deactuar en l. Resulta ser que hay un patrn: al parecer, todos los grandes lderes que inspiran y las organizaciones en el mundo, se trate de Apple, de Martin Luther King o de los hermanos Wright, todos piensan, actan y se comunican exactamente de la misma manera. De manera opuesta a todos los dems. Todo lo que hice fue codificarlo. Y probablemente sea la idea ms simple del mundo. Lo llamo "El crculo de oro". Por qu? Cmo? Qu? Esta pequea idea explica por qu algunas organizaciones y algunos lderes pueden inspirar mientras que otros no. Permtanme definir los trminos muy rpidamente. Cada persona, cada organizacin del planeta sabe lo que hace en un 100%.Algunas saben cmo lo hacen: llmese propuesta de valor agregado, proceso patrimonial, o PUV (Propuesta nica de Venta). Pero muy, muy poca gente u organizaciones saben por qu hacen lo que hacen. Y cuando digo "por qu" no me refiero a "ganar dinero". Eso es un resultado. Siempre lo es. Con "por qu" quiero decir: cul es el propsito? Cul es la causa? Cul es la creencia? Por qu existe la compaa? Cul es la razn para levantarse cada maana? Y por qu debera importarle a alguien? Bueno, como resultado, nuestra manera de pensar y actuar, nuestra manera de comunicarnos, es de afuera hacia adentro. Es obvio. Vamos de lo ms definido

a lo ms difuso. Pero los lderes inspirados y las organizaciones inspiradas sin importar su tamao, sin importar su rubro, todos piensan, actan y se comunican desde adentro hacia afuera. Les voy a dar un ejemplo. Yo uso Apple como ejemplo porque se entiende fcilmente. Si Apple fuera como todas las dems, su mensaje de mercadeo dira algo as: "Fabricamos computadoras geniales. Estn muy bien diseadas, son sencillas y fciles de usar.Quieres comprar una?" No. Y as es como la mayora de nosotros se comunica. As se hace la mayora del mercadeo y de las ventas. As es la comunicacin interpersonal para la mayora de nosotros. Decimos lo que hacemos, decimos cun diferentes o mejores somosy esperamos un determinado comportamiento: una compra, un voto, algo as. Esta es nuestra nueva firma de abogados. Tenemos los mejores abogados, tenemos los clientes ms grandes. Siempre le respondemos a nuestros clientes comerciales. Este es nuestro nuevo auto. Tiene mucha autonoma, asientos de cuero. Compre nuestro auto. Pero es poco inspirador. Apple realmente se comunica as: "En todo lo que hacemos, creemos en el cambio del status quo. Creemos en un pensamiento diferente. La manera como desafiamos el status quo es haciendo productos muy bien diseados, sencillos y fciles de usar. Sencillamente hacemos computadoras geniales. Quiere comprar una?" Completamente diferente, verdad? Est listo para comprarme una computadora. Todo lo que hice fue invertir el orden de la informacin. Esto demuestra que la gente no compra lo que uno hace; la gente compra el porqu uno lo hace. La gente no compra lo que uno hace sino el porqu uno lo hace. Esto explica por qu todas las personas en esta sala se sienten tan cmodas comprando computadoras de Apple. Pero tambin nos sentimos muy a gusto comprando reproductores de MP3 de Apple, telfonos de Apple, o un DVR de Apple. Pero como dije antes, Apple es simplemente una empresa de computadoras. No hay nada que los distinga,estructuralmente, de sus competidores. Sus competidores estn todos igualmente calificados para fabricar estos productos. De hecho, lo intentaron. Hace pocos aos Gateway sac televisores de pantalla plana. Estn altamente calificados para hacer televisores de pantalla plana. Han hecho monitores de pantalla plana durante aos. No vendieron ni uno. Dell lanz reproductores de MP3 y PDA. Y ellos fabrican productos de muy alta calidad. Y ellos pueden fabricar productos con muy buen diseo. No vendieron ni uno. De hecho, hablando de eso, ni remotamente se nos ocurre comprar un reproductor de MP3 de Dell. Por qu comprara uno un reproductor de MP3 a una compaa de computadoras? Pero lo hacemos a diario. La gente no compra lo que uno hace; compra el porqu uno lo hace. El objetivo no es hacer negocio con todos los que necesitan lo que uno tiene. El objetivo es hacer negocio con la gente que cree en lo que uno cree. Esa es la mejor parte. Nada de lo que les estoy diciendo es mi opinin. Todo est basado en los principios de la biologa. No en psicologa, en biologa. Si uno mira un corte transversal del cerebro humano, desde arriba hacia abajo, lo que v es que el cerebro humano est dividido en tres componentes principales que se correlacionan perfectamente con el crculo de oro. Nuestro nuevo cerebro de Homo sapiens, nuestro neocrtex se corresponde con el nivel "qu?". El neocrtex es responsable de todos nuestros pensamientos racionales y analticos y del lenguaje. Las dos secciones del medio forman nuestro cerebro lmbico. Y nuestros cerebro lmbico es responsable de nuestros sentimientos como la confianza y la lealtad. Tambin es responsable del comportamiento humano, de la toma de decisiones y no tiene habilidad para el lenguaje. En otras palabras, cuando nos comunicamos de afuera hacia adentro la gente puede entender gran cantidad de informacin complicada, como caractersticas, beneficios, hechos y cifras. Eso no gua el comportamiento. Cuando nos comunicamos de adentro hacia afuera, estamos hablando directamente con la parte del cerebro que controla el

comportamiento y entonces le permitimos a la gente racionalizarlo con las cosas tangibles que decimos y hacemos. Aqu se originan las decisiones instintivas. Ya saben, a veces uno puede darle a alguien todos los hechos y las cifras y ellos dicen "conozco todos los hechos y detalles, pero siento que algo no est bien". Por qu usamos el verbo "sentir"? Porque la parte del cerebro que controla la toma de decisiones no controla el lenguaje. Y lo mejor que podemos elaborar es: "No s, siento que algo no est bien". O en ocasiones uno dice que lo gua el corazn, o que uno tiene un plpito. Bueno, odio tener que decirles que esa parte del cuerpo no controla el comportamiento. Todo sucede aqu en el cerebro lmbico, la parte del cerebro que controla la toma de decisiones y no el lenguaje. Pero si uno no sabe por qu hace lo que hace y la gente responde al porqu hacemos lo que hacemos, entonces, cmo vamos a hacer que la gente vote por uno o nos compre algoo, ms importante, sea leal y quiera ser parte de lo que sea que uno haga. De nuevo, el objetivo no es venderle a la gente lo que uno tiene; el objetivo es venderle a la gente que comparte nuestras creencias. El objetivo no es sencillamente contratar gente que necesita un empleo; es contratar a la gente que crea en lo mismo que uno. Yo siempre digo, ya saben, si uno contrata gente slo porque puede hacer un trabajo, entonces trabajarn por el dinero pero si uno contrata gente que comparte nuestras creencias, entonces trabajarn poniendo sangre, sudor y lgrimas. Y no hay mejor ejemplo de esto que el de los hermanos Wright. Mucha gente no sabe de Samuel Pierpont Langley. En los albores del siglo xx conseguir el vuelo tripulado autopropulsado era como el "punto com" de hoy. Todo el mundo lo estaba intentando. Y Samuel Pierpont Langley tena lo que suponemos es la receta del xito.Quiero decir, incluso hoy uno pregunta "Por qu fall tu producto o tu empresa?" Y la gente siempre responde una variante de las mismas tres cosas: falta de capital, las personas equivocadas, malas condiciones de mercado. Son siempre las mismas tres cosas, as que exploremos eso. El Departamento de Guerra le dio a Samuel Pierpont Langley 50.000 dlares para que ideara esta "mquina voladora". El dinero no fue un problema. l fue asistente en Harvard, trabajaba en el Smithsoniano y tena conexiones extremadamente buenas. Conoca a todos las grandes mentes del momento. Contrat a los mejores que el dinero pudo reunir. Y las condiciones de mercado eran fantsticas. The New York Times lo sigui a todas partes. Y todo el mundo estaba a favor de Langley. Entonces, cmo es que nunca omos hablar de Samuel Pierpont Langley? A unos cientos de kilmetros de distancia en Dayton, Ohio, Orville y Wilbur Wright, no tenan ningn ingrediente de lo que consideramos como la receta del xito. No tenan dinero. Financiaban su sueo con las ganancias de su tienda de bicicletas. Ninguno en el equipo de los hermanos Wright tena educacin universitaria, ni siquiera Orville o Wilbur. Y The New York Times no los sigui a ninguna parte. La diferencia fue que a Orville y Wilbur los guiaba una causa, un propsito, una creencia. Creyeron que si fueran capaces de idear una mquina voladora, eso cambiara el curso del mundo. Samuel Pierpont Langley era diferente. Quera ser rico, y quera ser famoso. Estaba en busca del resultado. Estaba en busca de la riqueza. Y miren lo que sucedi: la gente que crey en el sueo de los hermanos Wright trabaj con ellos dejando sangre, sudor y lgrimas. Los otros slo trabajaron por la paga. Y cuentan historias de cmo cada vez que los hermanos Wright salan, deban llevabar consigo cinco conjuntos de piezas porque esas eran las veces que se estrellaran antes de regresar para la cena. Y, eventualmente, el 17 de diciembre de 1903 los hermanos Wright remontaron el vuelo y nadie estaba all siquiera para experimentarlo. Nos enteramos de eso unos das ms tarde.Y una prueba ms de que a Langley lo mova un inters equivocado, es que el da que los hermanos Wright remontaron el vuelo, l abandon. Pudo haber dicho: "Muchachos, es un descubrimiento asombroso y voy a mejorar su tecnologa", pero no lo hizo. No fue el primero, no se hizo rico, tampoco famoso, as que abandon.

La gente no compra lo que uno hace; compra el porqu uno lo hace. Y si uno habla de sus creencias, atraer a los que creen en lo mismo. Pero por qu es importante atraer a los que comparten nuestras creencias? Por algo llamado "la ley de difusin de la innovacin".Y si uno no conoce la ley, definitivamente conoce la terminologa. El primer 2,5% de nuestra poblacin son nuestros innovadores. El siguiente 13,5% de nuestra poblacin son los adoptadores tempranos. El prximo 34% son la mayora temprana, la mayora tarda y los rezagados. La nica razn por la que esta gente compra celulares tctiles es que ya no venden telfonos de disco. (Risas) Todos caemos en distintos lugares en distintos momentos en esta escala, pero lo que nos dice la ley de difusin de innovacin es que si queremos xito de mercado masivo o que una idea sea aceptada en el mercado masivo, no puede lograrse hasta alcanzar este punto de inflexin que est entre el 15% y 18% de penetracin de mercado. Y luego el sistema se inclina. Me encanta preguntar a los empresas: "Cul es la diferencia en nuevos negocios?" Todos contestan con orgullo: "Oh, cerca del 10%". Bueno, uno puede alcanzar con el 10% de los clientes. Todos tenemos cerca del 10% que simplemente "lo entiende".As es como los describimos. Es como ese plpito: "Oh, ellos simplemente lo entienden".El problema es: cmo encontrar a los que lo entienden antes de hacer negocios con ellos versus los que no lo entienden? As que hay una pequea brecha que hay que cerrar. Como Jeffrey Moore la llama: "cruzar el abismo". Porque, ya ven, la mayora temprana no probar algo hasta que otro lo haya probado primero. Y estos tipos, los innovadores y los adoptadores tempranos, estn cmodos tomando esas decisiones instintivas. Se sienten ms cmodos tomando esas decisiones intuitivas que son guiadas por lo que ellos creen acerca del mundo y no por el producto que est disponible. Esta es la gente que esper en lnea seis horas para comprar un iPhone cuando salieron por primera vez, cuando pudieron haber ido a la tienda la semana siguiente y comprarlo all.Esta es la gente que pag 40.000 dlares por televisores de pantalla plana cuando recin salieron a pesar que la tecnologa no estaba a punto. Y, a propsito, no lo hicieron porque la tecnologa fuera genial. Lo hicieron por ellos mismos. Porque queran ser los primeros. La gente no compra lo que uno hace; compra el porqu lo hace. Y lo que uno hace simplemente demuestra lo que uno cree. De hecho, la gente har las cosas que demuestren sus creencias. La razn por la que esas personas compraron el iPhone en las primeras seis horas parados en lnea durante seis horas, fue debido a lo que crean sobre el mundo y por cmo queran que los dems los vieran. Fueron los primeros. La gente no compra lo que uno hace; compra el porqu lo hace. As que permtanme darles un famoso ejemplo, un fracaso famoso y un xito famoso de la ley de difusin de la innovacin. Primero, el fracaso famoso. Es un ejemplo comercial.Como dijimos antes, hace un segundo, la receta del xito es el dinero, la gente adecuada y las condiciones de mercado favorables. Correcto. Uno debera tener xito entonces. Miren TiVo. Desde su lanzamiento, hace unos ocho o nueve aos hasta nuestros das son el nico producto de ms alta calidad en el mercado, eso no se discute. Tuvieron muy buena financiacin. Las condiciones de mercado eran fantsticas. Quiero decir, usamos TiVo como verbo. Yo "tiveo" cosas en mi DVR Time Warner todo el tiempo. Pero TiVo es un fracaso comercial. Nunca han ganado dinero. Y cuando hicieron OPA (oferta pblica de acciones) sus acciones estaban en 30 40 dlares y luego se desplomaron y ya nunca superaron los 10. De hecho, creo que nunca superaron los 6,salvo en un par de pequeos picos. Porque ya ven, cuando TiVo lanz el producto nos dijeron todo lo que tena. Dijeron: "Tenemos un producto que pausa la TV en vivo salta comerciales, retrocede la TV en vivo y memoriza los hbitos del televidente sin que uno lo pida". Y la mayora cnica dijo: "No les creemos. No lo necesitamos. No nos gusta. Nos estn asustando". Y si hubieran dicho: "Si eres el tipo de persona al que le gusta tener

control total sobre cada aspecto de su vida, hombre, tenemos un producto para ti: pausa la TV en vivo, salta los comerciales, memoriza tus hbitos de televidente, etc, etc". La gente no compra lo que uno hace; compra el porqu lo haces. Y lo que uno hace simplemente sirve como prueba de lo que uno cree. Ahora djenme que les d un ejemplo exitoso de la ley de difusin de la innovacin. En el verano de 1963, 250.000 personas se hicieron presentes en el Paseo de Washington para or al Dr King. No mandaron invitaciones y no haba sitio web para verificar la fecha. Cmo se hace eso? Bueno, el Dr. King no era el nico gran orador en EE.UU. No fue el nico hombre de EE.UU. que sufri la era previa a los derechos civiles en EE.UU. De hecho, alguna de sus ideas eran malas. Pero l tena un don. No iba por ah diciendo a la gente lo que tena que cambiar en EE.UU. Iba dicindole a la gente en qu crea. "Yo creo, yo creo, yo creo", le dijo a la gente. Y la gente que crea lo mismo que l tom su causa y la hizo propia, y la transmitan a la gente. Y algunas de estas personas crearon estructuras para correr la voz a otras personas. Y he aqu que 250.000 personas se hicieron presentes el da indicado, en el momento indicado, a orlo hablar. Cuntos fueron a verlo a l? Ninguno. Fueron por s mismos. Es lo que crean sobre EE.UU. lo que los llev a viajar en bus 8 horas a pararse bajo el sol de Washington a mediados de agosto. Eran sus creencias, no un tema de negros contra blancos. El 25% de la audiencia era blanca. El Dr King crea que hay dos leyes diferentes en este mundo: la que emana de la autoridad divina y la de los hombres. Y slo cuando todas las leyes de los hombres sean consistentes con las leyes que emanan de la autoridad divina viviremos en un mundo justo. Y result que el Movimiento de Derechos Civiles era el instrumento perfecto para ayudarlo a darle vida a su causa. Lo seguimos, no por l, sino por nosotros.Y, a propsito, l dio el discurso "Tengo un sueo" y no el discurso "Tengo un plan". (Risas) Escuchen a los polticos ahora con sus planes generales de 12 puntos. No inspiran a nadie. Porque hay lderes y hay personas que lideran. Los lderes tienen una posicin de poder o de autoridad. Pero los que lideran, nos inspiran. Ya sea que se trate de individuos u organizaciones seguimos a los que lideran, no porque tenemos que hacerlo sino porque queremos hacerlo. Seguimos a quienes lideran, no por ellos, sino por nosotros mismos. Y son los que comienzan con el "por qu?" que tienen la habilidad de inspirar a quienes los rodean o de encontrar a otros que los inspiren. Muchsimas gracias. (Aplausos)

Rita Pierson: Every kid needs a champion

I have spent my entire life either at the schoolhouse, on the way to the schoolhouse, or talking about what happens in the schoolhouse. Both my parents were educators, my maternal grandparents were educators, and for the past 40 years I've done the same thing.And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reformfrom a lot of perspectives. Some of those reforms have been good. Some of them have been not so good. And we know why kids drop out. We know why kids don't learn. It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences. We know why. But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection,relationships. James Comer says that no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship.George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult. For years, I have watched people teach. I have looked at the best and I've look at some of the worst. A colleague said to me one time, "They don't pay me to like the kids. They pay me to teach

a lesson. The kids should learn it. I should teach it. They should learn it. Case closed." Well, I said to her, "You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like." (Laughter) (Applause) She said, "That's just a bunch of hooey." And I said to her, "Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear." Needless to say it was. Some people think that you can either have it in you to build a relationship or you don't. I think Stephen Covey had the right idea. He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to understand as opposed to being understood, simple things like apologizing. You ever thought about that? Tell a kid you're sorry, they're in shock. I taught a lesson once on ratios. I'm not real good with math, but I was working on it. And I got back and looked at that teacher edition. I'd taught the whole lesson wrong. (Laughter) So I came back to class the next day, and I said, "Look, guys, I need to apologize. I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry." They said, "That's okay, Ms. Pierson. You were so excited, we just let you go." (Laughter) (Applause) I have had classes that were so low, so academically deficient that I cried. I wondered, how am I going to take this group in nine months from where they are to where they need to be?And it was difficult. It was awfully hard. How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time? One year I came up with a bright idea. I told all my students, "You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it." One of the students said, "Really?" (Laughter) I said, "Really. We have to show the other classes how to do it, so when we walk down the hall, people will notice us, so you can't make noise. You just have to strut." And I gave them a saying to say: "I am somebody. I was somebody when I came. I'll be a better somebody when I leave. I am powerful, and I am strong. I deserve the education that I get here. I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go." And they said, "Yeah!" You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you. And so (Applause) I gave a quiz, 20 questions. A student missed 18. I put a "+2" on his paper and a big smiley face. He said, "Ms. Pierson, is this an F?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Then why'd you put a smiley face?" I said, "Because you're on a roll. You got two right. You didn't miss them all." I said, "And when we review this, won't you do better?" He said, "Yes, ma'am, I can do better." You see, "-18" sucks all the life out of you. "+2" said, "I ain't all bad." (Laughter) (Applause) For years I watched my mother take the time at recess to review, go on home visits in the afternoon, buy combs and brushes and peanut butter and crackers to put in her desk drawer for kids that needed to eat, and a washcloth and some soap for the kids who didn't smell so good. See, it's hard to teach kids who stink. And kids can be cruel. And so she kept those things in her desk, and years later, after she retired, I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her, "You know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life.You made it work for me. You made me feel like I was somebody, when I knew, at the bottom, I wasn't. And I want you to just see what I've become." And when my mama died two years ago at 92, there were so many former students at her funeral, it brought tears to my eyes, not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear. Can we stand to have more relationships? Absolutely. Will you like all your children? Of

course not. And you know your toughest kids are never absent. (Laughter) Never. You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason. It's the connection. It's the relationships. And while you won't like them all, the key is, they can never, ever know it. So teachers become great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway. We teach anyway, because that's what we do. Teaching and learning should bring joy. How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. Is this job tough? You betcha. Oh God, you betcha. But it is not impossible. We can do this. We're educators. We're born to make a difference. Thank you so much. (Applause)

Bren Brown: El poder de la vulnerabilidad

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html#conversation So, I'll start with this: a couple years ago, an event planner called me because I was going to do a speaking event. And she called, and she said, "I'm really struggling with how to write about you on the little flier." And I thought, "Well, what's the struggle?" And she said, "Well, I saw you speak, and I'm going to call you a researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call you a researcher, no one will come, because they'll think you're boring and irrelevant." (Laughter)And I was like, "Okay." And she said, "But the thing I liked about your talk is you're a storyteller. So I think what I'll do is just call you a storyteller." And of course, the academic, insecure part of me was like, "You're going to call me a what?" And she said, "I'm going to call you a storyteller." And I was like, "Why not magic pixie?" (Laughter) I was like, "Let me think about this for a second." I tried to call deep on my courage. And I thought, you know, I am a storyteller. I'm a qualitative researcher. I collect stories; that's what I do. And maybe stories are just data with a soul. And maybe I'm just a storyteller. And so I said, "You know what? Why don't you just say I'm a researcherstoryteller." And she went, "Haha. There's no such thing." (Laughter) So I'm a researcherstoryteller, and I'm going to talk to you today --we're talking about expanding perception -and so I want to talk to you and tell some stories about a piece of my research that fundamentally expanded my perception and really actually changed the way that I live and love and work and parent. And this is where my story starts. When I was a young researcher, doctoral student, my first year I had a research professor who said to us, "Here's the thing, if you cannot measure it, it does not exist." And I thought he was just sweet-talking me. I was like, "Really?" and he was like, "Absolutely." And so you have to understand that I have a bachelor's in social work, a master's in social work, and I was getting my Ph.D. in social work, so my entire academic career was surrounded by people who kind of believed in the "life's messy, love it." And I'm more of the, "life's messy, clean it up, organize it and put it into a bento box."(Laughter) And so to think that I had found my way, to found a career that takes me --really, one of the big sayings in social work is, "Lean into the discomfort of the work." And I'm like, knock discomfort upside the head and move it over and get all A's. That was my mantra. So I was very excited about this. And so I thought, you know what, this is the career for me, because I am interested in some messy topics. But I want to be able to make them not messy. I want to understand them. I want to hack into these things I know are important and lay the code out for everyone to see.

So where I started was with connection. Because, by the time you're a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it's all about. It doesn't matter whether you talk to peoplewho work in social justice and mental health and abuse and neglect, what we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is -- neurobiologically that's how we're wired -- it's why we're here. So I thought, you know what, I'm going to start with connection. Well, you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss, and she tells you 37 things you do really awesome, and one thing -- an "opportunity for growth?" (Laughter) And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right? Well, apparently this is the way my work went as well, because, when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection. So very quickly -- really about six weeks into this research -- I ran into this unnamed thingthat absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn't understand or had never seen.And so I pulled back out of the research and thought, I need to figure out what this is. And it turned out to be shame. And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection:Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection? The things I can tell you about it: it's universal; we all have it. The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough," -- which we all know that feeling: "I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough." The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability, this idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen. And you know how I feel about vulnerability. I hate vulnerability. And so I thought, this is my chance to beat it back with my measuring stick. I'm going in, I'm going to figure this stuff out, I'm going to spend a year, I'm going to totally deconstruct shame, I'm going to understand how vulnerability works, and I'm going to outsmart it. So I was ready, and I was really excited. As you know, it's not going to turn out well. (Laughter) You know this. So, I could tell you a lot about shame, but I'd have to borrow everyone else's time. But here's what I can tell you that it boils down to -- and this may be one of the most important things that I've ever learned in the decade of doing this research. My one year turned into six years: thousands of stories, hundreds of long interviews, focus groups. At one point, people were sending me journal pages and sending me their stories -- thousands of pieces of data in six years. And I kind of got a handle on it. I kind of understood, this is what shame is, this is how it works. I wrote a book, I published a theory, but something was not okay -- and what it was is that, if I roughly took the people I interviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness -- that's what this comes down to, a sense of worthiness -- they have a strong sense of love and belonging -- and folks who struggle for it, and folks who are always wondering if they're good enough. There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging.That's it. They believe they're worthy. And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understand better. So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way, and just looked at those. What do these people have in common? I have a slight office supply addiction, but that's another talk. So I had a manila folder, and I had a Sharpie, and I was like, what am I going

to call this research? And the first words that came to my mind were whole-hearted. These are whole-hearted people, living from this deep sense of worthiness. So I wrote at the top of the manila folder, and I started looking at the data. In fact, I did it first in a four-day very intensive data analysis, where I went back, pulled these interviews, pulled the stories, pulled the incidents. What's the theme? What's the pattern? My husband left town with the kidsbecause I always go into this Jackson Pollock crazy thing, where I'm just like writing and in my researcher mode. And so here's what I found. What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word cor, meaning heart -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect.They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly.And the last was they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection. The other thing that they had in common was this: They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they really talk about it being excruciating -- as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say, "I love you" first, the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees, the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out.They thought this was fundamental. I personally thought it was betrayal. I could not believe I had pledged allegiance to research, where our job -- you know, the definition of research is to control and predict, to study phenomena, for the explicit reason to control and predict. And now my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting. This led to a little breakdown -- (Laughter) -- which actually looked more like this. (Laughter) And it did. I call it a breakdown; my therapist calls it a spiritual awakening. A spiritual awakening sounds better than breakdown, but I assure you it was a breakdown. And I had to put my data away and go find a therapist. Let me tell you something: you know who you are when you call your friends and say, "I think I need to see somebody. Do you have any recommendations?" Because about five of my friends were like, "Wooo. I wouldn't want to be your therapist." (Laughter) I was like, "What does that mean?" And they're like, "I'm just saying, you know. Don't bring your measuring stick." I was like, "Okay." So I found a therapist. My first meeting with her, Diana -- I brought in my list of the way the whole-hearted live, and I sat down. And she said, "How are you?" And I said, "I'm great. I'm okay." She said, "What's going on?" And this is a therapist who sees therapists, because we have to go to those, because their B.S. meters are good. (Laughter) And so I said,"Here's the thing, I'm struggling." And she said, "What's the struggle?" And I said, "Well, I have a vulnerability issue. And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. And I think I have a problem, and I need some help." And I said, "But here's the thing: no family stuff, no childhood shit." (Laughter) "I just need some strategies."(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. So she goes like this. (Laughter) And then I said, "It's bad, right?" And she said, "It's neither good nor bad." (Laughter) "It just is what it is." And I said, "Oh my God, this is going to suck." (Laughter) And it did, and it didn't. And it took about a year. And you know how there are people that, when they realize that vulnerability and tenderness are important, that they surrender and

walk into it. A: that's not me, and B: I don't even hang out with people like that. (Laughter)For me, it was a yearlong street fight. It was a slugfest. Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but probably won my life back. And so then I went back into the research and spent the next couple of years really trying to understand what they, the whole-hearted, what choices they were making, and what are we doing with vulnerability. Why do we struggle with it so much? Am I alone in struggling with vulnerability? No. So this is what I learned. We numb vulnerability -- when we're waiting for the call. It was funny, I sent something out on Twitter and on Facebook that says, "How would you define vulnerability? What makes you feel vulnerable?" And within an hour and a half, I had 150 responses. Because I wanted to know what's out there. Having to ask my husband for help because I'm sick, and we're newly married; initiating sex with my husband;initiating sex with my wife; being turned down; asking someone out; waiting for the doctor to call back; getting laid off; laying off people -this is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability. And I think there's evidence -- and it's not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think it's a huge cause -- we are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. The problem is -- and I learned this from the research -- that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, here's the bad stuff. Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. (Laughter) I don't want to feel these. And I know that's knowing laughter. I hack into your lives for a living. God. (Laughter) You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle. One of the things that I think we need to think about is why and how we numb. And it doesn't just have to be addiction. The other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up. That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. This is what politics looks like today. There's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort. We perfect. If there's anyone who wants their life to look like this, it would be me, but it doesn't work. Because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks. (Laughter) Which just, I hope in 100 years, people will look back and go, "Wow." (Laughter) And we perfect, most dangerously, our children. Let me tell you what we think about children. They're hardwired for struggle when they get here. And when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand, our job is not to say, "Look at her, she's perfect. My job is just to keep her perfect -- make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh grade." That's not our job. Our job is to look and say, "You know what? You're imperfect, and you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging." That's our job. Show me a generation of kids raised like that, and we'll end the problems I think that we see today. We pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people. We do that in our personal lives. We do that corporate -- whether it's a bailout, an oil spill, a recall -- we pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people. I would say to companies, this is not our first rodeo, people. We just need you to be authentic and realand say, "We're sorry. We'll fix it." But there's another way, and I'll leave you with this. This is what I have found: to let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen; to love with our whole hearts, even

though there's no guarantee -- and that's really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that's excruciatingly difficult -- to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, "Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?" just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, "I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive." And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough.Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, "I'm enough," then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves. That's all I have. Thank you. (Applause) Empezar... Hace un par de aos, una organizadora de eventos me llam porque yo iba a dar una conferencia; me llam y dijo: "Intento la manera de describirte en el folleto". "Y, cul es la dificultad?" Y ella: "fundamentalmente te escuch hablar. Iba a llamarte investigadora, pero pens que si lo haca, nadie vendra porque pensaran que seras aburrida e irrelevante". (Risas) Y yo "OK". Y ella: "Lo que me gust de tu conferencia es que cuentas historias. As que te llamar cuentacuentos". Y mi parte acadmica e insegura pens: "Me llamars qu?" Y ella: "Te llamar cuentacuentos". Y yo: "Y por qu no hada mgica?" (Risas) Y dije: "Djame pensarlo un segundo". Entonces intent apelar a mi valenta. Y pens: soy cuentacuentos y tambin investigadora cualitativa. Colecciono historias, eso hago. Y tal vez las historias sean solamente datos con alma. Quiz sea slo una cuentacuentos. As que dije: "Sabes qu? Por qu no escribes que soy una investigadora que narro cuentos?" Y ella: "Ja, ja, ja! Eso no existe". (Risas) As, soy una investigadora que cuenta cuentos. Y les hablar hoy de la percepcin ampliada. Quiero contarles algo sobre mi investigacin que fundamentalmente ampli mi percepcin y que realmente cambi la manera en que vivo, amo, trabajo y soy madre. Y as empieza mi historia: Cuando era una joven investigadora y estudiante de doctorado,durante mi primer ao tuve un profesor que nos dijo: "Esto es as, si no lo puedes medir, no existe". Y yo pens que solamente me adulaba, y dije:"De verdad?" Y l: "Por supuesto".Entiendan que tengo una licenciatura y una maestra en trabajo social y me doctoraba en lo mismo. Esto es que durante toda mi carrera acadmica estuve rodeada de gente que pensaba: "la vida es desordenada, disfrtala". Y yo ms bien pienso: "la vida es desordenada, ordnala, organzala y clasificala en una caja". (Risas) Y as pensaba que haba encontrado mi camino, mi profesin y eso me lleva a... como se dice en trabajo social, "entrar en la incomodidad del trabajo". Y soy ms de "saca de la cabeza con un golpe la disconformidad y saca buenas notas. Ese fue mi mantra. Estaba muy emocionaday pens, esta es mi profesin porque me interesan algunos temas confusos para ordenarlos. Quiero entenderlos. Quiero llegar hasta el fondo de ellos porque s que son importantes y para develar para todos el cdigo. As que empec con la nocin de conexin Porque cuando eres trabajadora social durante diez aos, te das cuenta que si estamos aqu es por la conexin. Es lo que nos da sentido y finalidad a nuestras vidas. De eso se trata. No importa si hablas con gente que trabaja en justicia social o en salud mental, abuso o negligencia. Esa conexin, la habilidad de sentirnos conectados, es nuestra programacin neurolgica. Por esto estamos aqu. Y pens, "Comenzar con la conexin". Bien, conocen esa situacin donde su jefa los evala... y dice las 37 cosas que estn haciendo realmente bien y una que, ya saben, en que tienes una "oportunidad para crecer"? (Risas) Y slo piensas en esa "oportunidad para crecer," verdad? Pues, aparentemente as se desarroll mi trabajo tambin. Porque al preguntar a las personas sobre el amor te hablan de desilusin amorosa. Al preguntar sobre pertenencia, te contarn experiencias muy dolorosas de exclusin. Y al preguntar sobre la conexin me contaron historias de desconexin.

Rpidamente (a unas 6 semanas de empezar a investigar), me top ante esta cosa innombrada que descifr por completo la conexin. De un modo que no entenda y nunca haba visto. Di marcha atrs la investigacin y me dije: "debo averiguar qu pasa". Y result ser la vergenza. Result que -y la vergenza se entiende fcilmente como el miedo a la desconexin- Existe algo en m que si otros lo saben o ven, no ser digna de conexin?Lo que les puedo decir es esto: es universal, todos lo sentimos. Las nicas personas que no sienten vergenza son las incapaces de sentir empata o conexin humana. Nadie quiere hablar de ello y cuanto menos lo hablas, ms lo sientes. Lo que refuerza esta vergenza es: "no soy suficiente bueno". Todos conocemos este sentimiento, el "no soy suficiente , no soy suficiente delgado, suficiente rico o suficiente brillante, o no me han ascendido lo suficiente"... Lo que lo corrobora es esta vulnerabilidad insoportable. Esta idea de "para que exista conexin debemos dejarnos ver", que nos vean de verdad. Y saben lo que opino respecto a la vulnerabilidad, la ODIO. Y as pens que esta sera mi oportunidad de eliminarla con mi vara de medir. Lo har. Lo resolver. Pasar un ao con esto. Desarmar por completo la vergenza. Entender cmo funciona la vulnerabilidad y la derrotar con astucia. Estaba lista y realmente emocionada! Como se pueden imaginar, esto no iba a terminar bien. (Risas) Uds. ya lo saben. Podra explicarles mucho sobre la vergenza pero consumira el tiempo de todos los dems. Pero puedo decirles que ocurre.Y esto tal vez sea una de las cosas ms importantes que he aprendido en la dcada que llevo con esta investigacin. Mi ao se convirti en seis, miles de historias, cientos de entrevistas largas, grupos focales, a veces la gente me enviaba pginas de sus diarios, sus historias... miles de datos en seis aos. Y casi lo llegu a entender. Entend lo que es la vergenza y cmo funciona. Escrib un libro y publiqu una teora, pero algo no encajaba. Y es que cuando me fij en las personas que entrevist, y los divid entre los que realmente tenan un sentido de dignidad, de esto se trata, del sentido de dignidad, stos tienen un sentido fuerte de amor y pertenencia. Y luego los que luchan por mantener la dignidad, los que siempre estn preguntndose si son suficientemente buenos.Haba slo una variable que los separaba de las personas con un sentido fuerte de amor y pertenencia. Las personas con un sentido fuerte de amor y pertenencia, pensaban que eran dignas de amor y pertenencia. Es todo. Crean que valan la pena. Y para m, la parte difcilde eso que nos mantiene desconectados es nuestro miedo a no ser dignos de conexin.Era algo que personal y profesionalmente sent que necesitaba entender. As que tom todas las entrevistas donde vi dignidad, busqu la gente que viva de ese modo, y slo los observ a ellos. Qu tiene esta gente en comn? Tengo una ligera adiccin a los artculos de oficina... esa es otra historia. As que tom una carpeta y un marcador y pens: "Cmo nombrar esta investigacin?" Y la primera palabra que se me vino a la mente fue "genuinas". Son un tipo de personas entusiastas y sinceras que viven desde un sentido profundo de dignidad. Lo escrib en la parte superior de la carpeta y empec a estudiar los datos. Al principio de esteanlisis intenso de cuatro das, cuando repas y rescat las entrevistas e historias, preguntando -"Cul es el tema? Cul es el patrn?" Mi esposo y mis hijos se fueron de la ciudad porque yo entraba en esta locura, estilo Jackson Pollock, donde slo escribo y activo el modo "investigadora". Y esto es lo que descubr... Lo que tenan en comn era un sentido de coraje. Y quiero diferenciar entre coraje y valenta por un momento. Coraje,cuando se integr a la lengua inglesa, viene de la palabra latina "cor" que significa corazn,originalmente significaba explicar la historia de quin eres con todo tu corazn. As que estas personas, sencillamente, tenan el coraje de ser imperfectas. Tenan la compasinpara ser amables con ellas mismas primero y luego con otros, pues no podemos tener compasin de otros si no podemos tratarnos a nosotros mismos con amabilidad. Y por ltimo, tenan conexin, y esta era la parte difcil, como

resultado de su autenticidad. Eran capaces de renunciar a quienes pensaban que deban ser para ser lo que eran, que es absolutamente lo que se tiene que hacer para conectar. Otra cosa en comn era que ellos aceptaban por completo la vulnerabilidad. Crean que lo que los haca vulnerables los haca hermosos. No hablaban de vulnerabilidad como algo incmodo o doloroso, como yo haba escuchado antes en las entrevistas sobre la vergenza. Simplemente mencionaban que era necesaria. Hablaban de la buena voluntadpara decir "te amo" primero. La buena voluntad de hacer algo donde no haba garantas. La disposicin de respirar calmadamente mientras esperaban al mdico despus de su mamografa. La voluntad de invertir en una relacin que pueda o no salir bien. Pensaban que esto era fundamental. Yo personalmente pens que esto era una traicin. No poda creer que me haba aliado con este tipo de investigacin, cuando en nuestro trabajo la definicin de investigacin es controlar y predecir. Estudiar fenmenos por la razn explcita de controlar y predecir. Y ahora mi misin de controlar y predecir haba dado por respuesta que la manera de vivir es con vulnerabilidad. Y dejar de controlar y predecir. Esto me llev a un pequeo ataque de nervios (Risas) de hecho se vea ms bien as. (Risas) Y esto me llev a lo que yo llamo un ataque de nervios y mi terapeuta llama un "despertar espiritual". Despertar espiritual suena bien pero les aseguro que fue un ataque de nervios. Tuve que guardar mis datos e ir a buscar un terapeuta. Y t sabes quien eres cuando llamas a tus amigos y les dices: "Creo que necesito ayuda. Alguna recomendacin?" Pues casi cinco de mis amigos dijeron:"Uy, no quisiera ser tu terapeuta". (Risas) "Y eso?" "Ya sabes, solo digo que no lleves tu vara de medir". "Bueno". Finalmente encontr una terapeuta. Y en mi primera cita con Diana, llev mi lista de cmo viven los genuinos. Ella se sent y pregunt: "Cmo ests?" Y le contest: "Estoy bien, genial". Y ella dijo: "bien, qu ocurre?" Es una terapeuta especializada en terapeutas, los necesitamos porque son los mas aptos para detectar mentiras. (Risas) Le dije: "pasa esto, estoy en lucha". Y ella dijo: "contra qu?" Dije: "Tengo un problema con la vulnerabilidad".S que la vulnerabilidad es el ncleo de la vergenza y el miedo y de nuestra lucha por la dignidad. Pero tambin es donde nace la dicha, la creatividad, la pertenencia, el amor. Y creo que tengo un problema y necesito un poco de ayuda". "Pero, no quiero hablar de problemas familiares ni traumas infantiles. (Risas) Slo necesito algunas estrategias".(Risas) (Aplausos) Gracias. Y ella hace as. (Risas) "Est mal verdad?" Y ella: "ni bien, ni mal". (Risas) Solamente es lo que es. Y yo: "Dios mo, esto va a ser pattico!" (Risas) Y lo fue y no. Me llev aproximadamente un ao. Y saben cmo es la gente al darse cuenta que la vulnerabilidad y la ternura son importantes? A) Yo no soy as y B) Tampoco paso tiempo con gente as. (Risas) Para m fue una lucha callejera que dur un ao. Fue una contienda. La vulnerabilidad avanzaba, yo la haca retroceder. Perd la pelea pero recuper mi vida. Entonces retom la investigacin y pas los siguientes aos intentando entender realmentea los "genuinos", las decisiones que tomaban y qu es lo que hacemos con la vulnerabilidad? Por qu luchamos tanto contra ella? Lucho solo contra la vulnerabilidad?No. Y esto es lo que aprend... insensibilizamos la vulnerabilidad. Cuando esperamos a que nos atiendan, al esperar... Saben, es gracioso, el mircoles publiqu algo en Twitter y Facebook que deca: "como definiras la vulnerabilidad, qu te hace sentir vulnerable?" En hora y media tena 150 respuestas. Porque yo quera saber... qu hay all afuera. "Tener que pedir ayuda a mi marido porque estoy enferma y somos recin casados". "Tomar la iniciativa en el sexo con mi esposa". "Tomar la iniciativa en el sexo con mi marido". "Ser rechazado". "Invitar a alguien a salir". "Esperar la llamada del mdico". "Ser despedido". "Despedir a la gente". Este es el mundo en el que vivimos. Vivimos en un mundo vulnerable.Y una manera de enfrentarlo es insensibilizando

la vulnerabilidad. Y creo que existe la evidencia. Y no es la nica razn para que exista esta evidencia, pero es una gran causa. Somos los adultos ms endeudados, obesos, adictos y medicados en la historia de EE.UU. Por qu? El problema es, y lo descubr en esta investigacin... es que no se puede insensibilizar selectivamente una emocin. No puedes decir, "aqu est todo lo malo: la vulnerabilidad, la pena, la vergenza, el miedo, la decepcin; no quiero sentir esto. Me voy a tomar unas cervezas y un panecillo de banano y nueces. (Risas) No quiero sentir eso! Esas risas son conocedoras; estudio sus vidas para ganarme la vida. As es, "ja,ja,ja, Ay Dios!" (Risas) No puedes insensibilizar los malos sentimientos sin insensibilizar otros afectos. No puedes insensibilizar selectivamente. No se puede insensibilizar lo malo sin anular la dicha. sin insensibilizar lo lindo. Insensibilizamos tambin la gratidud, la felicidad. Y luego nos sentimos miserables y vamos buscando finalidad y sentido y luego nos sentimos vulnerables y nos tomamos un par de cervezas y un panecillo de pltano. Y se convierte en un ciclo peligroso. Algo sobre lo que pienso necesario reflexionar es por qu y cmo insensibilizamos. Y no tiene slo que ser una adiccin. Otra cosa que hacemos es convertir todo lo incierto en cierto. La religin ha pasado de ser de una creencia a fe y de misterio a una certeza."Tengo razn, t te equivocas. Cllate". As es. Slo certezas. Mientras ms miedo tengamos, ms vulnerables somos, y ms miedo tenemos. Miren a los polticos de hoy. Ya no hay discurso, ni conversacin. Slo se culpan. Saben cmo describimos la culpa en nuestra investigacin? "una forma de eliminar el dolor y la incomodidad". Perfeccionamos.Djenme decirles, si hay alguien que quisiera que su vida fuese as, esa sera yo. Pero no funciona. Porque nos quitamos la grasa del trasero y nos la ponemos en las mejillas.(Risas) Y esto no funciona! Espero que de aqu a 100 aos la gente mire atrs y diga, "Guau". (Risas) Y ms peligrosamente, tratamos de perfeccionar a nuestros hijos. Brevemente, permtanme explicarles esto... Los nios vienen ya adaptados para luchar. Cuando sostenemos en las manos esos bebs perfectos, nuestra tarea no es decir: "Mira, qu perfecto". "Mi tarea es que siga as y asegurar que sea parte del equipo de tenis en 5 y aceptado en Yale en el 7". No es nuestra tarea, nuestra tarea es verlo y decir, "Eres imperfecto y ests hecho para luchar pero eres digno de amor y pertenencia". Esa es nuestra tarea. Mustrenme una generacin de chicos que crezcan as y acabaremos con los problemas que tenemos hoy.Nos engaamos pensando que lo que hacemos no tiene efecto en otras personas. Lo hacemos en nuestra vida personal o colectiva, ya sea con una fianza o un derrame de petrleo una retirada. Fingimos que lo que hacemos no tiene un gran impacto sobre otras personas. Yo les dira a las empresas: "No somos ingenuos". Slo queremos que sean autnticos y reales y que digan "lo sentimos, lo arreglaremos". Pero existe otra manera... y me despido con esto. He descubierto, que tenemos que dejarnos ver, que nos vean vulnerables. Hay que amar con todo el corazn aunque no haya garantas. Y esto es muy difcil, y puedo decirlo como madre, esto puede ser extremadamente difcil. Ejercer la gratitud y la dicha en esos momentos de terror cuando nos preguntamos "Puedo amarte tanto? Puedo creer en esto tan apasionadamente?Puedo enojarme tanto por esto?" Me puedo detener y en lugar de ser catastrfico decir:"Simplemente estoy muy agradecido". "Porque estoy vivo, porque sentirse vulnerable significa que estar vivo". Y por ltimo, creo que es ms importante creer que somos suficientes. Porque cuando funcionamos desde la perspectiva "Soy suficiente" entoncesdejamos de gritar y empezamos a escuchar. Somos ms amables con las personas que nos rodean y ms amables y considerados con nosotros mismos. Eso es todo. Gracias.

(Aplausos)

Barry Schartz y nuestra prdida de sabidura

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom.html In his inaugural address, Barack Obama appealed to each of us to give our best as we try to extricate ourselves from this current financial crisis. But what did he appeal to? He did not, happily, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, and tell us to just go shopping. Nor did he tell us, "Trust us. Trust your country. Invest, invest, invest." Instead, what he told us was to put aside childish things. And he appealed to virtue. Virtue is an old-fashioned word. It seems a little out of place in a cutting-edge environment like this one. And besides, some of you might be wondering, what the hell does it mean? Let me begin with an example. This is the job description of a hospital janitor that is scrolling up on the screen. And all of the items on it are unremarkable. They're the things you would expect: mop the floors, sweep them, empty the trash, restock the cabinets. It may be a little surprising how many things there are, but it's not surprising what they are.But the one thing I want you to notice about them is this: even though this is a very long list,there isn't a single thing on it that involves other human beings. Not one. The janitor's job could just as well be done in a mortuary as in a hospital. And yet, when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like, they encountered Mike, who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise, trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall. And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor's admonition and didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day who, at this moment, happened to be taking a nap. And then there was Luke, who washed the floor in a comatose young man's room twice because the man's father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months, didn't see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry. And behavior like this from janitors, from technicians, from nurses and, if we're lucky now and then, from doctors,doesn't just make people feel a little better, it actually improves the quality of patient careand enables hospitals to run well. Now, not all janitors are like this, of course. But the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions involving kindness, care and empathy are an essential part of the job.And yet their job description contains not one word about other human beings. These janitors have the moral will to do right by other people. And beyond this, they have the moral skill to figure out what "doing right" means. "Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill." A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule, as the janitors knew when to ignore the job duties in the service of other objectives. A wise person knows how to improvise, as Luke did when he re-washed the floor. Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. A wise person is like a jazz musician -- using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims. To serve other people, not to manipulate other people. And finally, perhaps most important, a wise person is made, not born. Wisdom depends on experience, and not just any experience. You need the time to get to know the people that you're serving. You need permission to be allowed to improvise,try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures. And you need to be mentored by wise teachers. When you ask the janitors who behaved like the ones I described how hard it is to learn to

do their job, they tell you that it takes lots of experience. And they don't mean it takes lots of experience to learn how to mop floors and empty trash cans. It takes lots of experience to learn how to care for people. At TED, brilliance is rampant. It's scary. The good news is you don't need to be brilliant to be wise. The bad news is that without wisdom, brilliance isn't enough. It's as likely to get you and other people into trouble as anything else.(Applause) Now, I hope that we all know this. There's a sense in which it's obvious, and yet, let me tell you a little story. It's a story about lemonade. A dad and his seven-year-old son were watching a Detroit Tigers game at the ballpark. His son asked him for some lemonade and Dad went to the concession stand to buy it. All they had was Mike's Hard Lemonade, which was five percent alcohol. Dad, being an academic, had no idea that Mike's Hard Lemonade contained alcohol. So he brought it back. And the kid was drinking it, and a security guard spotted it, and called the police, who called an ambulance that rushed to the ballpark, whisked the kid to the hospital. The emergency room ascertained that the kid had no alcohol in his blood. And they were ready to let the kid go. But not so fast. The Wayne County Child Welfare Protection Agency said no. And the child was sent to a foster home for three days. At that point, can the child go home? Well, a judge said yes, but only if the dad leaves the house and checks into a motel. After two weeks, I'm happy to report, the family was reunited. But the welfare workers and the ambulance people and the judge all said the same thing: "We hate to do it but we have to follow procedure." How do things like this happen? Scott Simon, who told this story on NPR, said, "Rules and procedures may be dumb, but they spare you from thinking." And, to be fair, rules are often imposed because previous officials have been lax and they let a child go back to an abusive household. Fair enough. When things go wrong, as of course they do, we reach for two tools to try to fix them. One tool we reach for is rules. Better ones, more of them. The second tool we reach for is incentives. Better ones, more of them. What else, after all, is there? We can certainly see this in response to the current financial crisis. Regulate, regulate, regulate. Fix the incentives, fix the incentives, fix the incentives ... The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job. How could you even write a rule that got the janitors to do what they did? And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic? It's preposterous on its face. And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom. Let me just give you a few examples, first of rules and the war on moral skill. The lemonade story is one. Second, no doubt more familiar to you, is the nature of modern American education: scripted, lock-step curricula. Here's an example from Chicago kindergarten.Reading and enjoying literature and words that begin with 'B.' "The Bath:" Assemble students on a rug and give students a warning about the dangers of hot water. Say 75 items in this script to teach a 25-page picture book. All over Chicago in every kindergarten class in the city, every teacher is saying the same words in the same way on the same day. We know why these scripts are there. We don't trust the judgment of teachers enough to let them loose on their own. Scripts like these are insurance policies against disaster. And they prevent disaster. But what they assure in its place is mediocrity. (Applause) Don't get me wrong. We need rules! Jazz musicians need some notes -- most of them need some notes on the page. We need more rules for the bankers, God knows. But too

many rules prevent accomplished jazz musicians from improvising. And as a result, they lose their gifts, or worse, they stop playing altogether. Now, how about incentives? They seem cleverer. If you have one reason for doing somethingand I give you a second reason for doing the same thing, it seems only logical that two reasons are better than one and you're more likely to do it. Right? Well, not always.Sometimes two reasons to do the same thing seem to compete with one another instead of complimenting, and they make people less likely to do it. I'll just give you one example because time is racing. In Switzerland, back about 15 years ago, they were trying to decide where to site nuclear waste dumps. There was going to be a national referendum. Some psychologists went around and polled citizens who were very well informed. And they said, "Would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?" Astonishingly, 50 percent of the citizens said yes. They knew it was dangerous. They thought it would reduce their property values. But it had to go somewhereand they had responsibilities as citizens. The psychologists asked other people a slightly different question. They said, "If we paid you six weeks' salary every year would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?" Two reasons. It's my responsibility and I'm getting paid. Instead of 50 percent saying yes, 25 percent said yes.What happens is that the second this introduction of incentive gets us so that instead of asking, "What is my responsibility?" all we ask is, "What serves my interests?" When incentives don't work, when CEOs ignore the long-term health of their companies in pursuit of short-term gains that will lead to massive bonuses, the response is always the same. Get smarter incentives. The truth is that there are no incentives that you can devise that are ever going to be smart enough. Any incentive system can be subverted by bad will. We need incentives. People have to make a living. But excessive reliance on incentives demoralizes professional activityin two senses of that word. It causes people who engage in that activity to lose morale and it causes the activity itself to lose morality. Barack Obama said, before he was inaugurated, "We must ask not just 'Is it profitable?' but 'Is it right?'" And when professions are demoralized, everyone in them becomes dependent on -- addicted to -- incentives and they stop asking "Is it right?" We see this in medicine.("Although it's nothing serious, let's keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't turn into a major lawsuit.") And we certainly see it in the world of business. ("In order to remain competitive in today's marketplace, I'm afraid we're going to have to replace you with a sleezeball.") ("I sold my soul for about a tenth of what the damn things are going for now.") It is obvious that this is not the way people want to do their work. So what can we do? A few sources of hope: we ought to try to re-moralize work. One way not to do it: teach more ethics courses. (Applause) There is no better way to show people that you're not serious than to tie up everything you have to say about ethics into a little package with a bow and consign it to the margins as an ethics course. What to do instead? One: Celebrate moral exemplars. Acknowledge, when you go to law school, that a little voice is whispering in your ear about Atticus Finch. No 10-year-old goes to law school to do mergers and acquisitions. People are inspired by moral heroes. But we learn that with sophistication comes the understanding that you can't acknowledge that you have moral heroes. Well, acknowledge them. Be proud that you have them. Celebrate them.And demand that the people who teach you acknowledge them and celebrate them too.That's one thing we can do. I don't know how many of you remember this: another moral hero, 15 years ago, Aaron Feuerstein, who was the head of Malden Mills in Massachusetts -- they made Polartec -The factory burned down. 3,000 employees. He kept every one of them on the payroll. Why? Because it would have been a disaster for them and for the community if he had let them go. "Maybe on paper our company is worth less to Wall Street, but I can tell you it's worth more. We're doing fine."

Just at this TED we heard talks from several moral heroes. Two were particularly inspiring to me. One was Ray Anderson, who turned -- (Applause) -- turned, you know, a part of the evil empire into a zero-footprint, or almost zero-footprint business. Why? Because it was the right thing to do. And a bonus he's discovering is he's actually going to make even more money. His employees are inspired by the effort. Why? Because there happy to be doing something that's the right thing to do. Yesterday we heard Willie Smits talk about reforesting in Indonesia. (Applause) In many ways this is the perfect example. Because it took the will to do the right thing. God knows it took a huge amount of technical skill. I'm boggled at how much he and his associates needed to know in order to plot this out. But most important to make it work -and he emphasized this -- is that it took knowing the people in the communities. Unless the people you're working with are behind you, this will fail. And there isn't a formula to tell you how to get the people behind you, because different people in different communitiesorganize their lives in different ways. So there's a lot here at TED, and at other places, to celebrate. And you don't have to be a mega-hero. There are ordinary heroes. Ordinary heroes like the janitors who are worth celebrating too. As practitioners each and every one of us should strive to be ordinary, if not extraordinary heroes. As heads of organizations, we should strive to create environmentsthat encourage and nurture both moral skill and moral will. Even the wisest and most well-meaning people will give up if they have to swim against the current in the organizations in which they work. If you run an organization, you should be sure that none of the jobs -- none of the jobs -have job descriptions like the job descriptions of the janitors. Because the truth is that any work that you do that involves interaction with other people is moral work. And any moral work depends upon practical wisdom. And, perhaps most important, as teachers, we should strive to be the ordinary heroes, the moral exemplars, to the people we mentor. And there are a few things that we have to remember as teachers. One is that we are always teaching. Someone is always watching.The camera is always on. Bill Gates talked about the importance of education and, in particular, the model that KIPP was providing: "Knowledge is power." And he talked about a lot of the wonderful things that KIPP is doing to take inner-city kids and turn them in the direction of college. I want to focus on one particular thing KIPP is doing that Bill didn't mention. That is that they have come to the realization that the single most important thing kids need to learn is character. They need to learn to respect themselves. They need to learn to respect their schoolmates. They need to learn to respect their teachers. And, most important, they need to learn to respect learning. That's the principle objective. If you do that, the rest is just pretty much a coast downhill. And the teachers: the way you teach these things to the kidsis by having the teachers and all the other staff embody it every minute of every day. Obama appealed to virtue. And I think he was right. And the virtue I think we need above all others is practical wisdom, because it's what allows other virtues -- honesty, kindness, courage and so on -- to be displayed at the right time and in the right way. He also appealed to hope. Right again. I think there is reason for hope. I think people want to be allowed to be virtuous. In many ways, it's what TED is all about. Wanting to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. This kind of wisdom is within the grasp of each and every one of us if only we start paying attention. Paying attention to what we do, to how we do it, and, perhaps most importantly, to the structure of the organizations within which we work, so as to make sure that it enables us and other people to develop wisdom rather than having it suppressed. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: You have to go and stand out here a sec.

Barry Schwartz: Thank you very much. (Applause)

Bill Gates: Los profesores necesitan retroalimentacin real

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_teachers_need_real_feedback.html Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. (Laughter) My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else's in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go. We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve. Unfortunately, there's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better, and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world. I'm talking about teachers. When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get, we were blown away. Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback:Satisfactory. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was "satisfactory," I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently? Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice. Our teachers deserve better. The system we have today isn't fair to them. It's not fair to students, and it's putting America's global leadership at risk. So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve. Let's start by asking who's doing well. Well, unfortunately there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems. So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve. Consider the rankings for reading proficiency. The U.S. isn't number one. We're not even in the top 10. We're tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland. Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve? Eleven out of 14. The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math. So there's really only one area where we're near the top, and that's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills. Let's look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China. Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving. They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work. They have weekly study groups, where teachers get together and talk about what's working. They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues. You might ask, why is a system like this so important? It's because there's so much variation in the teaching profession. Some teachers are far more effective than others. In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains. If today's average teacher could become as good as those teachers,our students would be blowing away the rest of the world. So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best. What would that system look like? Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective

Teaching. We had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices. For example, did they ask their students challenging questions?Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea? We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, "Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson?" "Do you learn to correct your mistakes?" And what we found is very exciting. First, the teachers who did well on these observationshad far better student outcomes. So it tells us we're asking the right questions. And second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools, because they pointed to specific places where they can improve. I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action. (Music) (Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Good morning everybody. Let's talk about what's going on today. To get started, we're doing a peer review day, okay? A peer review day, and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays. My name is Sarah Brown Wessling. I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa. Turn to somebody next to you. Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove. I've talk about -I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it. Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers. I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality. You can't really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this. I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens. At the beginning of class, I just perch it in the back of the classroom. It's not a perfect shot. It doesn't catch every little thing that's going on. But I can hear the sound. I can see a lot. And I'm able to learn a lot from it. So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection. All right, let's take a look at the long one first, okay? Once I'm finished taping, then I put it in my computer, and then I'll scan it and take a peek at it. If I don't write things down, I don't remember them. So having the notes is a part of my thinking process, and I discover what I'm seeing as I'm writing. I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom. I'm glad that we've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works, what doesn't. I think that video exposes so much of what's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about. I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan, things you cannot convey in a standard, things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy. Alrighty, everybody, have a great weekend. I'll see you later. [Every classroom could look like that] (Applause) Bill Gates: One day, we'd like every classroom in America to look something like that. But we still have more work to do. Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle. We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis. If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions.

So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won't be easy. For example, I know some teachers aren't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom. That's understandable, but our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process, if they collect video in their own classrooms, and they pick the lessons they want to submit, a lot of them will be eager to participate. Building this system will also require a considerable investment. Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars. Now that's a big number, but to put it in perspective, it's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries. The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. We would finally have a way to give them feedback, as well as the means to act on it. But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country. It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams. This wouldn't just make us a more successful country. It would also make us a more fair and just one, too. I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve.I hope you are too. Thank you. Todo el mundo necesita un entrenador. No importa si uno es jugador de baloncesto, jugador de tenis, gimnasta o jugador de bridge. (Risas) Mi entrenadora de bridge, Sharon Osberg, dice que hay ms fotos de la parte posterior de su cabeza que de cualquier otra persona del mundo. (Risas) Lo siento, Sharon. Aqu tienes. Todos necesitamos personas que nos den retroalimentacin. De esa forma mejoramos. Por desgracia, hay un grupo de personas que casi no recibe retroalimentacin sistemtica que los ayude a hacer mejor su trabajo, y estas personas tienen uno de los mejores trabajos del mundo. Hablo de los profesores. Cuando Melinda y yo supimos la pocaretroalimentacin til que tenan la mayora de los profesores nos quedamos impresionados. Hasta hace poco, ms del 98 % de los profesores slo reciban esta respuesta: satisfactorio. Si mi entrenadora de bridge solo me dijera "satisfactorio", no tendra esperanza de mejorar. Cmo saber quin era el mejor? Cmo saber que hice diferente? Hoy en da, los distritos escolares renuevan la forma de evaluar a los profesores,pero an as casi no les damos respuestas que les ayuden a mejorar sus prcticas.Nuestros profesores merecen algo mejor. El sistema actual no es justo con ellos. No es justo para los estudiantes, y est poniendo en riesgo el liderazgo estadounidense. Por eso hoy quiero hablar de cmo podemos ayudar a los profesores a conseguir las herramientas de mejora que quieren y merecen. Empecemos preguntando a quin le va bien. Por desgracia, no hay tablas de clasificacin internacionales de las respuestas a los profesores. As que estudi los pases cuyos estudiantes tienen buen rendimiento acadmico y observ qu hacen all para ayudar a sus profesores a mejorar. Veamos los resultados en capacidad de lectura. EE.UU. no es nmero uno. Ni siquiera est entre los 10 primeros. Empata en el puesto 15 con Islandia y Polonia. Ahora, aparte de los lugares con mejor rendimiento en lectura que EE.UU.,cuntos tienen un sistema formal para ayudar a mejorar a los profesores? Once de los 14.EE.UU. empata en lectura en el puesto 15, pero en ciencia es el 23, y en matemtica el 31. Solo hay un rea en la que estamos casi en la cima, y es en no dar a nuestros profesores la ayuda necesaria para que desarrollen sus habilidades. Analicemos los sistemas que tienen mejor rendimiento acadmico: la provincia de Shanghi, China. Ocupa el primer lugar en todas las reas: en lectura, matemtica y ciencias, y una de las claves del xito increble de Shanghi es la forma en la que promueve la mejora en los profesores. Se aseguran de que los profesores ms jvenestengan la oportunidad de ver trabajar a profesores magistrales. Tienen grupos de

estudio semanales donde se renen los profesores a hablar de lo que funciona. Incluso solicitan que cada profesor analice y d retroalimentacin a sus colegas. Se preguntarn por qu es tan importante un sistema as. Porque en la enseanza hay mucha variabilidad. Algunos profesores son mucho ms efectivos que otros. De hecho, hay profesores en todo el pas que ayudan a sus estudiantes a obtener logros extraordinarios.Si hoy el profesor medio llegase a igualar a esos profesores, nuestros estudiantes arrasaran al resto del mundo. Por eso necesitamos un sistema que ayude a nuestros profesores a ser lo mejor de lo mejor. Cmo sera ese sistema? Bueno, para averiguarlo, nuestra fundacin ha trabajado con 3000 profesores en distritos de todo el pas en un proyecto llamado Mtricas de la Enseanza Eficaz [MEE]. Pusimos observadores a ver videos de profesores en el aula para que los calificaran en una serie de prcticas. Por ejemplo, le hicieron a sus estudiantespreguntas estimulantes? Encontraron mltiples formas de explicar una idea? Tambin le pedimos a los estudiantes que respondieran un cuestionario: "Sabe tu profesor cundo la clase entiende una leccin?" "Aprendes a corregir tus errores?" Y hallamos cosas interesantes. Primero, los profesores a los que les fue bien obtenan mucho mejores resultados estudiantiles. Eso nos dicta que hicimos las preguntas correctas. Y, segundo, los profesores del programa nos dijeron que estos videos y encuestas de los alumnos fueron herramientas de diagnstico muy tiles, porque sealaron lugares especficos que podan mejorarse. Quiero mostrarles este video del MEE en accin. (Msica) (Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Buenos das a todos. Hablemos de lo que haremos hoy.Para empezar, una revisin por pares, s? Una revisin por pares, y el objetivo al final de la clase es que puedan determinar si tienen correcciones para sus ensayos. Mi nombre es Sarah Brown Wessling. Soy profesora de ingls de secundaria en la Escuela Secundaria Johnston, de Johnston, Iowa. Giren hacia alguien que est cerca. Dganle qu cadena lgica es necesario demostrar. Creo que hay una diferencia para los profesores entre lo abstracto de cmo vemos nuestra prctica y luego la realidad concreta de la misma. Bien, me gustara que traigan sus artculos. Creo que el video nos ofrece un cierto grado de realidad. Uno no puede negar lo que se ve en el video, hay mucho que aprender de eso, y hay muchas maneras de crecer en la profesin viendo esto. Tengo una cmara de video y un pequeo trpode e invert en esta pequea lente gran angular. Al principio de la clase coloco la cmara en el fondo de la clase. No es una toma perfecta. No capta todo lo que sucede. Pero puedo or el audio. Puedo ver mucho. Puedo aprender mucho con el video. De modo que ha sido una herramienta simple pero potente para analizar la clase. Bien, primero veamos la larga, s? Cuando termino de grabar, lo pongo en la computadora, lo repaso y tomo notas. Si no escribo, no las recuerdo. As que tomar notas es parte de mi elaboracin mental y descubro cosas conforme escribo.Me ha servido para mi crecimiento personal y para mi propia reflexin sobre la estrategia de enseanza, la metodologa, la gestin del aula y los diferentes aspectos de la clase. Me alegro de que ya se haya aplicado este mtodo para comparar, en cierto modo, lo que funciona y lo que no. Creo que ese video expone muchos elementos intrnsecos a la docencia de forma que nos ayuda a entender, y ayuda a la comunidad ms amplia a entender, de qu se trata en realidad este complejo trabajo. Creo que es una forma de ilustrar cosas que no se pueden transmitir en un plan de estudios, cosas que no pueden transmitirse en una norma, cosas que ni siquiera a veces se pueden transmitir en un libro de pedagoga.

Muy bien, que tengan un buen fin de semana. Hasta la prxima. [Todas las clases pueden ser as] (Aplausos) Bill Gates: Nos gustara que algn da las aulas de EE.UU. sean como esa. Pero todava hay trabajo por hacer. Diagnosticar las reas de mejora docente es la mitad de la batalla.Tambin tenemos que darles las herramientas necesarias para actuar frente al diagnstico.Si uno sabe que tiene que mejorar la forma de ensear fracciones, debera poder ver un video de la persona que mejor ensea fracciones en el mundo. Pero construir esta retroalimentacin para el profesor y mejorar el sistema no ser fcil. Por ejemplo, s que algunos profesores no se sienten inmediatamente cmodos con la idea de una cmara en el aula. Es comprensible, pero nuestra experiencia con MEE sugiere que si el profesor gestiona el proceso, si son ellos quienes graban las clases, y ellos eligen los cursos que quieren publicar, muchos estarn ansiosos de participar. Construir este sistema requerir adems una inversin considerable. Nuestra fundacin estima que podra costar hasta USD 5000 millones. Es una suma grande, pero puesta en perspectiva, es menos del 2 % de lo que se paga en salarios a los docentes. Las ventajas para los profesores seran fenomenales. Finalmente tendramos una forma de darles retroalimentacin as como los medios para hacer algo al respecto. Pero este sistema tendra incluso un beneficio ms importante para el pas. Nos colocara en una senda segura en la que nuestros estudiantes tendran buena formacin, encontraran una carrera satisfactoria y gratificante, y tendran la oportunidad de cumplir sus sueos.Esto no solo mejorara el xito de nuestro pas, sino que lo hara ms justo, tambin. Estoy muy entusiasmado con la oportunidad de darles a nuestros profesores el apoyo que quieren y merecen. Espero que Uds. tambin. Gracias.

Susan Cain: El poder de los introvertidos

www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html
En una cultura donde ser sociable y extrovertido se valora sobre todo lo dems, resulta difcil, incluso doloroso, ser introvertido. Pero como Susan Cain argumenta en esta apasionada conferencia, las personas introvertidas brindan extraordinarias habilidades y talentos al mundo, y por ello se las debera motivar y celebrar.

Cuando tena nueve aos fui por primera vez a un campamento de verano y mi madre me empac una maleta llena de libros, lo que me pareci lo ms natural del mundo porque en mi familia leer era la actividad grupal principal. Esto puede sonarles antisocial pero para nosotros slo era una forma distinta de ser sociable. Tenas el calor corporal de tu familia,sentada junto a ti, pero al mismo tiempo eras libre de vagar por la tierra de la aventuradentro de tu propia mente. Tena esta idea de que el campamento iba a ser algo parecido a esto, pero mucho mejor. (Risas) Imaginaba a 10 chicas sentadas en el interior de una cabaa leyendo libros cmodamente todas con camisones idnticos. (Risas) El campamento pareca una fiesta pero sin alcohol El primer da nuestra consejera nos reuni a todas y nos comunic con alegra lo que bamos a hacer cada da del resto del verano para as motivar el espritu del campamento. Deca algo as: "R-U-D-O-S-O, as es

como deletreamos ruidoso. Ruidosas, seamos ruidosas." S! No saba en base a mi vidapor qu tenamos que ser tan ruidosas o por qu haba que deletrear la palabra incorrectamente. (Risas) Pero mostr regocijo. Lo mostr junto a las dems. Lo hice lo mejor que pude y slo esperaba el momento para ir a leer mis libros. Pero al sacar por primera vez el libro de la maleta, la chica ms popular del dormitorio se me acerc y me pregunt "por qu eres tan sosegada?" siendo "sosegada" lo opuesto a R-U-D-O-S-A. La segunda vez que lo intent la consejera se me acerc con expresin de preocupacin y repiti cosas sobre el espritu del campamento y dijo que todas deberamos trabajar mucho para ser extrovertidas. Y as puse mis libros, de vuelta en la maleta que puse debajo de la cama, donde permaneci hasta acabar el verano. Me sent un poco culpable. Senta como si los libros me necesitaran, como si me estuvieran llamando y yo los hubiera abandonado. Pero los olvid y no volv a abrir esa maleta otra vez hasta haber regresado a casa con mi familia al final del verano. Les cuento esta historia sobre el campamento de verano. Podra contarles otras 50 historias parecidas, sobre todas la veces que recib la consigna de que mi forma de ser calmada e introvertida no era necesariamente la indicada, de que debera intentar ser mucho mas extrovertida. Siempre sent en lo profundo que eso era un error y que los introvertidos eran excelentes tal cual. Pero durante aos negu esta intuicin, y as, de entre todas las cosas, me convert en una abogada de Wall Street en lugar de la escritora que siempre quise ser, en parte, porque necesitaba probarme a m misma que poda ser atrevida y asertiva tambin. Y siempre iba a bares abarrotados de personas cuando en realidad habra preferido cenar agradablemente con amigos. Y tom estas decisiones que me negaban tan reflexivamente que no era consciente de que las estaba tomando. Esto es lo que muchos introvertidos hacen y sin duda es una prdida para nosotros, y tambin es una prdida para nuestros colegas y para nuestras comunidades. Y aunque suene presuntuosa, es la prdida ms grande del mundo. Porque cuando se trata de creatividad y liderazgo, necesitamos de los introvertidos haciendo lo que hacen mejor. De un tercio a la mitad de la poblacin es introvertida, De un tercio a la mitad. Eso es, una de cada dos o tres personas que conocen. As que incluso si algunos de Uds. son extrovertidos, hablo de sus compaeros de trabajo y de sus parejas y de sus hijos y de la persona que se sienta justo a su lado. Todos ellos estn sujetos a este prejuicio que est muy arraigado y muy presente en nuestra sociedad. Todos lo interiorizamos desde edad muy temprana sin tener un lenguaje para lo que hacemos. Ahora, para ver este prejuicio con claridad se necesita entender lo que es introversin. Es diferente a ser tmido. La timidez es sobre el miedo al juicio social. La introversin est ms relacionada con cmo se responde a la estimulacin, incluyendo la estimulacin social. As que la extroversin ansa estimulacin mientras que los introvertidos se sienten ms vivos,ms activos y capaces cuando estn en ambientes mas tranquilos con menos estimulacin. No todo el tiempo, estas cosas no son absolutas, pero s durante mucho tiempo. As que la clave para maximizar nuestros talentos es colocarnos en la zona de estimulacin ms adecuada para cada uno. Pero aqu es donde llega el prejuicio. Nuestras instituciones mas importantes, nuestras escuelas y nuestros lugares de trabajo, estn diseados principalmente para los extrovertidos y sus grandes necesidades de estimulacin Y actualmente tambin tenemos este sistema de creencias, que llamo el nuevo grupo de pensamiento, que sostiene que toda creatividad y toda productividad proviene de un lugar extraamente sociable. Imagnense una tpica aula escolar actual. Cuando yo iba a la escuela, nos sentbamos en filas. Nos sentbamos en filas de escritorios, y hacamos la mayor parte de nuestro trabajo de forma autnoma. Pero en la actualidad, la tpica aula tiene un montn de escritorios, con cuatro, cinco, seis o siete nios mirndose entre s participando en incontables tareas de grupo. Incluso en materias como matemticas y escritura

creativa, las que podran considerarse dependientes de vuelos de pensamientos solitarios, ahora se espera que los nios acten como miembros de un comit. Y para los nios que prefieren ir a su aire o trabajar solos, a menudo son vistos como atpicos o en un caso peor, como un problema.La mayora de los maestros piensan que el estudiante ideal es uno extrovertido en contraposicin a uno introvertido, incluso aunque estos ltimos en realidad sacan mejores calificaciones. y tienen ms conocimientos segn las investigaciones. (Risas) Lo mismo es cierto en nuestros lugares de trabajo. La mayora de nosotros trabajamos en oficinas abiertas, sin paredes, donde estamos sujetos al ruido y la mirada constante de los compaeros. Y cuando se trata de liderazgo, se excluyen habitualmente a los introvertidos de los puestos de liderazgo, a pesar de que stos tienden a ser mas prudentes, y mucho menos propensos a tomar riesgos excesivos, algo que todos podramos apoyar. Una investigacin interesante de Adam Grant, del Colegio Wharton, ha constatado que los lderes introvertidos a menudo arrojan mejores resultados que los extrovertidos, debido a que cuando tratan con empleados proactivos son mas propensos a dejar a esos empleados ejecutar sus ideas, mientras que alguien extrovertido puede, involuntariamente,emocionarse tanto con las cosas como para poner su propia huella en ellas haciendo que las ideas de las otras personas no afloren con facilidad. De hecho, algunos de nuestros lderes transformacionales en la historia eran introvertidos.Les dar algunos ejemplos: Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Park, Gandhi... Todas estas personas se autodescribieron como tranquilos, de tono suave e incluso tmidos. Y todos ellos fueron el centro de atencin incluso cuando cada hueso de su cuerpo les deca no hacerlo. Y esto en s parece tener un poder especial, porque se podra pensar que estos lderes estaban al mando no porque les gustara dirigir y no por el placer de ser el centro de atencin; hicieron eso porque no tenan opcin, porque se vieron obligados a hacer lo que pensaban que era correcto. En este punto pienso que para m es importante decir que en verdad me encantan los extrovertidos. Me gusta decir que algunos de mis mejores amigos son extrovertidos,incluido mi amado esposo. Y que por supuesto todos nos ubicamos en distintos puntos a lo largo del espectro introvertido/extrovertido. Incluso Carl Jung, el primer psiclogo en popularizar estos trminos, dijo que no existe un introvertido puro o un extrovertido puro.Dijo que ese tipo de persona debera estar en un manicomio, si existiera. Algunas personas estn justo en el medio del espectro introvertido/extrovertido, Y las llamamos "ambivertidas". A menudo pienso que tienen lo mejor de dos mundos. Pero muchos de nosotros nos reconocemos en un tipo u otro. Y lo que digo es que culturalmente necesitamos un mayor equilibrio. Necesitamos una suerte de ying - yang entre estos dos tipos. Esto es especialmente importante en cuanto a lo que se refiere a creatividad y productividad, porque cuando los psiclogos estudian las vidas de las personas ms creativas, lo que observan son personas muy buenas intercambiando y desarrollando ideas, pero que tienen tambin una profunda introversin. Y esto es as porque la soledad a menudo es un ingrediente crucial de la creatividad.Pensemos en Darwin, l daba largas caminatas por el bosque y rechazaba enfticamente invitaciones a fiestas. Theodor Geisel, mejor conocido como Dr. Seuss soaba con muchas de sus creaciones en un oficina solitaria en un campanario, en la parte trasera de su casa en la Jolla, California. Y en realidad l tena miedo de conocer a los nios que lean sus libros por miedo a que esperaran que l fuera una especia de personaje alegre como Santa Claus y que se decepcionaran ante su personalidad reservada. Steve Wozniak invent la primera computadora Apple sentado solo en su cubculo en Hewlett-Packard donde trabajaba entonces. Y dice que jams se habra convertido en un experto de no haber sido tan introvertido para salir de casa cuando era pequeo. Por supuesto, esto no significa que debamos detener toda colaboracin. Un ejemplo,

Steve Wozniak es famoso por colaborar con Steve Jobs en montar Apple Computer, pero s significa que la soledad importa y que para algunas personas es el aire que respiran. De hecho, hemos sabido durante siglos del poder transcendente de la soledad. Es slo que extraamente empezamos a olvidarlo. En la mayora de las religiones del mundo,encontraran "buscadores" -- Moiss, Jess, Buda, Mahoma, buscadores que se van solos al desierto, donde tienen profundas epifanas y revelaciones que brindan al resto de la comunidad. As que sin desierto no hay revelaciones. Esto no es una sorpresa si se considera el pensamiento de la psicologa contempornea.resulta que no podemos ni estar en un grupo de personas sin de manera instintiva imitar sus opiniones. Incluso cosas personales y viscerales, como las que te atraen, empezars a imitar las creencias de la gente de tu alrededor sin darte cuenta de que eso es lo que ests haciendo. Y los grupos siguen las opiniones de la persona ms carismtica o dominante en el lugar,incluso aunque exista una correlacin nula entre ser el mejor orador y tener las mejores ideas. Y quiero decir cero. As... (Risas) Podras estar siguiendo a la persona con las mejores ideas, pero podras no hacerlo. Y realmente quieres dejarlo al azar? Sera mucho mejor para todos ir por libre, generar las ideas propias liberados de la distorsin de la dinmica de grupo y posteriormente reunirse como grupo para hablar en un ambiente bien manejado y partir de ah. Ahora, si todo esto es cierto, por qu lo hacemos tan mal? Por qu adecuamos as las escuelas y espacios de trabajo? Y por qu hacemos sentir tan culpables a los introvertidos por querer ir por libre en algn momento? Una respuesta reside en nuestra historia cultural. Las sociedades occidentales, y en particular los EEUU, han favorecido siempre a la persona de accin por encima de la persona contemplativa, y la persona contemplativa. Pero en los principios de EEUU vivamos en lo que los historiadores llaman una cultura de carcter, donde, en ese punto, an valorbamos a las personas por su ser interno y su rectitud moral. Y si miran los libros de autoayuda de esa poca, todos tienen ttulos como "Caracter, lo ms grande del mundo" Y presentan modelos a seguir como el de Abraham Lincoln alabado por ser modesto. Ralph Waldo Emerson lo llam "Un hombre que no se ofende ante la superioridad" Y entonces en el siglo XX entramos en una nueva cultura que los historiadores llaman la cultura de la personalidad. Lo que sucede es que hemos evolucionado de una economa agrcola a un mundo de grandes negocios. Y as repentinamente las personas migran de los pueblos a las ciudades. Y en lugar de trabajar al lado de personas que conocen de toda su vida, ahora tienen que probarse a s mismos en una multitud de extraos. As que indudablemente cualidades como el magnetismo y el carisma de repente llegan a parecer muy importantes. y seguro que los libros de autoayuda cambian para satisfacer estas nuevas necesidades y comienzan a tener nombres como "Cmo ganar amigos e influir en las personas." Y utilizan como modelo a seguir a grandes vendedores. Ese es el mundo en el que vivimos hoy. Esa es nuestra herencia cultural. Nada de esto quiere decir que las habilidades sociales no sean importantes, tampoco estoy haciendo un llamado para la abolicin total del trabajo en equipo. Las mismas religiones que enviaron a sus sabios a las solitarias cimas de las montaas tambin nos ensearon amor y confianza. Y los problemas que estamos enfrentado hoy en campos como la ciencia y la economa son tan vastos y complejos que vamos a necesitar ejrcitos de personas trabajando juntas para resolverlos. Lo que digo es que si damos mayor libertad a los introvertidos de ser ellos mismos, ser ms probable que tengan una solucin nica a estos problemas. As que ahora me gustara compartir con Uds. lo que traigo en mi maleta hoy. Adivinan qu? Libros. Tengo una maleta llena de libros. Aqu est "Ojo de gato" de Margaret Atwood,Aqu una novela de Milan Kundera. Y aqu la "Gua de Perplejos" de Maimonides. Pero estos no son exactamente mis libros. Traje estos libros conmigo porque

fueron escritos por los autores favoritos de mi abuelo. Mi abuelo era rabino y viudo que viva solo en un pequeo apartamento en Brooklyn, mi lugar favorito cuando era nia, en parte porque estaba lleno de su presencia tan gentil y en parte porque estaba lleno de libros. Literalmente cada mesa, cada silla de este apartamento haba cambiado su funcin original para servir como superficie para colocar pilas de libros. Al igual que el resto de mi familia, Lo preferido para mi abuelo era leer. Pero l tambin amaba a su congregacin, y se poda sentir ese amor en los sermones que daba cada semana durante los 62 aos que fue rabino. Tomaba los frutos de la lectura de cada semana y teja estos intrincados tapices de pensamiento antiguo y humanista. Y las personas venan de todas partes para orlo hablar. Pero he aqu lo especial de mi abuelo. tras ese papel ceremonial, en realidad era modesto e introvertido, tanto que cuando daba estos sermones, tena problemas para hacer contacto visual con la propia congregacin a la que le haba estado hablando durante 62 aos. E incluso lejos del podio, cuando le llamabas para decirle hola, a menudo terminaba la conversacin prematuramente por temor a que te estuviera robando tiempo. Pero al ,morir a los 94 aos, la polica tuvo que cerrar las calles de su vecindario para acomodar a la masa de personas que fueron a llorarle. Y as estos das intento aprender del ejemplo de mi abuelo a mi manera. As que acabo de publicar un libro sobre la introversin, y me tom 7 aos escribirlo. Y para m, esos 7 aos han sido como una bendicin total, porque estaba leyendo, estaba escribiendo, estaba pensando, estaba investigando. Fue mi versin de las horas que pas mi abuelo solo en su biblioteca. Ahora, de repente, mi trabajo es muy distinto, y consiste es estar aqu hablando sobre ello, hablando sobre introversin. (Risas) Y esos es mucho ms difcil para m, porque a pesar de sentirme tan honrada de estar aqu y ahora con todos Uds., este no es mi medio natural. As que me prepar para momentos como este lo mejor que pude. Estuve el ao pasado practicando hablar en pblico en toda oportunidad que tena. Y llamo a esto mi "ao de hablar peligrosamente." (Risas) Y eso en realidad me ayud mucho. Pero les dir que lo que me ayuda ms es mi sentido, mi creencia, mi esperanza de que cuando se trata de nuestras actitudes hacia la introversin y a la calma y a la soledad, estamos en verdad al borde de un cambio drstico. En serio, lo estamos. Y as los dejo ahora con tres llamados a la accin para aquellos que comparten esta visin. Nmero 1: Detengan la locura del constante trabajo en grupo. Slo detnganla, (Risas)Gracias (Aplausos) Y quiero ser clara sobre lo que estoy diciendo, porque en el fondo pienso que nuestras oficinas deberan animar las interacciones del tipo de charla informal de caf, ya saben, del tipo donde las personas se renen y de manera espontnea intercambian ideas. Eso es grandioso. Es genial para introvertidos y para extrovertidos.Pero necesitamos mucha ms privacidad y libertad y mucha ms autonoma en el trabajo.En la escuela lo mismo. Debemos ensear a los nios a trabajar juntos, por supuesto, pero tambin debemos ensearles cmo trabajar por su cuenta. Tambin es especialmente importante para los nios extrovertidos . Necesitan trabajar a su aire porque de ah provienen en parte los pensamientos profundos. De acuerdo, nmero dos: vayan al desierto. Sean como Buda, tengan sus propias revelaciones. No digo que todos debamos irnos y construir cabaas propias en los bosquesy no volver a hablar con alguien, lo que digo es que todos deberamos poder desconectarnos y meternos dentro de nuestras propias cabezas un poco ms a menudo. Nmero tres: Den una buena mirada a lo que hay dentro de su propia maleta y por qu lo pusieron ah. As que extrovertidos, quiz sus maletas estn tambin llenas de libros. O quiz estn llenas de copas de champn o de un equipo de buceo. Lo que sea, espero que las saquen en cada oportunidad que tengan y nos bendigan con su gracia y su alegra.Pero introvertidos, siendo quienes son, probablemente tengan el impulso de guardar cuidadosamente lo que est dentro de su maleta. Y eso est bien. Pero ocasionalmente,

slo ocasionalmente, espero que abran su maleta para que otras personas la vean, porque el mundo los necesita y necesita las cosas que llevan. As que les deseo el mejor de todos los viajes posibles y el valor para hablar con sosiego. Muchas gracias. (Aplauso) Gracias... Gracias (Aplausos) When I was nine years old I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do.Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. (Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns. (Laughter) Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: "R-OW-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books. But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?" -- mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing. And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. And I felt kind of guilty about this. I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them.But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer. Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it --all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of beingwas not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be -- partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them. Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss.Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. A third to a half of the population are introverts -- a third to a half. So that's one out of every two or three people you know. So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society.We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing.

Now to see the bias clearly you need to understand what introversion is. It's different from being shy. Shyness is about fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switchedon and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. Not all the time -- these things aren't absolute -- but a lot of the time. So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us. But now here's where the bias comes in. Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink,which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place. So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously.But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks -- four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other. And kids are working in countless group assignments. Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. And for the kids who preferto go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research. (Laughter) Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. Now, most of us work in open plan offices,without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers. And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions,even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks -- which is something we might all favor nowadays. And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface. Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts. I'll give you some examples. Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi -- all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. And this turns out to have a special power all its own, because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm,not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at;they were there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what they thought was right. Now I think at this point it's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts. I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. And we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum,and we call these people ambiverts. And I often think that they have the best of all worlds.But many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other. And what I'm saying is that culturally we need a much better balance. We need more of a yin and yang between these two types. This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them.

And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner party invitations.Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creationsin a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California. And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubical in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time. And he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up. Now of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating -- and case in point, is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer -- but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe.And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it. If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers -- Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad -- seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. So no wilderness, no revelations. This is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to,you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing. And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas -- I mean zero. So ... (Laughter) You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. And do you really want to leave it up to chance? Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a wellmanaged environment and take it from there. Now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? Why are we setting up our schools this way and our workplaces? And why are we making these introverts feel so guiltyabout wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time? One answer lies deep in our cultural history. Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the man of contemplation and "man" of contemplation. But in America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. And if you look at the selfhelp books from this era, they all had titles with things like "Character, the Grandest Thing in the World." And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "A man who does not offend by superiority." But then we hit the 20th century and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business. And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities. And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "How to Win Friends and Influence People." And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. So that's the world we're living in today. That's our cultural inheritance. Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and I'm also not calling for the

abolishing of teamwork at all. The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems. So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. Guess what? Books. I have a suitcase full of books. Here's Margaret Atwood, "Cat's Eye." Here's a novel by Milan Kundera. And here's "The Guide for the Perplexed" by Maimonides. But these are not exactly my books. I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors. My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read. But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gaveevery week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. And people would come from all over to hear him speak. But here's the thing about my grandfather. Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. And even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time.But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him. And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way. So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write.And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching. It was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion. (Laughter) And that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu. So I prepared for moments like these as best I could. I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get. And I call this my "year of speaking dangerously."(Laughter) And that actually helped a lot. But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change. I mean, we are. And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision. Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. Just stop it. (Laughter) Thank you.(Applause) And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions -- you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. That is great. It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. School, same thing. We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. This is especially important for extroverted children too. They need to work on their own because that is where deep thought comes from in part.

Okay, number two: Go to the wilderness. Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often. Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. Or maybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment. Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy. But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. And that's okay. But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry. So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

The rise of the new global super-rich

www.ted.com/talks/chrystia_freeland_the_rise_of_the_new_global_super_rich.html So here's the most important economic fact of our time. We are living in an age of surging income inequality, particularly between those at the very top and everyone else. This shift is the most striking in the U.S. and in the U.K., but it's a global phenomenon. It's happening in communist China, in formerly communist Russia, it's happening in India, in my own native Canada. We're even seeing it in cozy social democracies like Sweden, Finland and Germany. Let me give you a few numbers to place what's happening. In the 1970s, the One Percentaccounted for about 10 percent of the national income in the United States. Today, their share has more than doubled to above 20 percent. But what's even more striking is what's happening at the very tippy top of the income distribution. The 0.1 percent in the U.S. today account for more than eight percent of the national income. They are where the One Percent was 30 years ago. Let me give you another number to put that in perspective, and this is a figure that was calculated in 2005 by Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Reich took the wealth of two admittedly very rich men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and he found that it was equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population, 120 million people. Now, as it happens, Warren Buffett is not only himself a plutocrat, he is one of the most astute observers of that phenomenon, and he has his own favorite number. Buffett likes to point out that in 1992, the combined wealth of the people on the Forbes 400 list -- and this is the list of the 400 richest Americans -- was 300 billion dollars. Just think about it. You didn't even need to be a billionaire to get on that list in 1992. Well, today, that figure has more than quintupled to 1.7 trillion, and I probably don't need to tell you that we haven't seen anything similar happen to the middle class, whose wealth has stagnated if not actually decreased. So we're living in the age of the global plutocracy, but we've been slow to notice it. One of the reasons, I think, is a sort of boiled frog phenomenon. Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic. Think about what happened, after all, to the poor frog. But I think there's something else going on.Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel

uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger. And if you do happen to be on the Forbes 400 list, talking about income distribution, and inevitably its cousin, income redistribution, can be downright threatening. So we're living in the age of surging income inequality, especially at the top. What's driving it, and what can we do about it? One set of causes is political: lower taxes, deregulation, particularly of financial services,privatization, weaker legal protections for trade unions, all of these have contributed to more and more income going to the very, very top. A lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of "crony capitalism," political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but don't actually do much good for the rest of us. In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult. Think of all the years reformers of various stripes have tried to get rid of corruption in Russia, for instance, or how hard it is to re-regulate the banks even after the most profound financial crisis since the Great Depression, or even how difficult it is to get the big multinational companies, including those whose motto might be "don't do evil," to pay taxes at a rate even approaching that paid by the middle class. But while getting rid of crony capitalism in practice is really, really hard, at least intellectually, it's an easy problem.After all, no one is actually in favor of crony capitalism. Indeed, this is one of those rare issues that unites the left and the right. A critique of crony capitalism is as central to the Tea Party as it is to Occupy Wall Street. But if crony capitalism is, intellectually at least, the easy part of the problem, things get trickier when you look at the economic drivers of surging income inequality. In and of themselves, these aren't too mysterious. Globalization and the technology revolution, the twin economic transformations which are changing our lives and transforming the global economy, are also powering the rise of the super-rich. Just think about it. For the first time in history, if you are an energetic entrepreneur with a brilliant new idea or a fantastic new product, you have almost instant, almost frictionless access to a global market of more than a billion people. As a result, if you are very, very smart and very, very lucky, you can get very, very rich very, very quickly. The latest poster boy for this phenomenon is David Karp.The 26-year-old founder of Tumblr recently sold his company to Yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars.Think about that for a minute: 1.1 billion dollars, 26 years old. It's easiest to see how the technology revolution and globalization are creating this sort of superstar effect in highly visible fields, like sports and entertainment. We can all watch how a fantastic athlete or a fantastic performer can today leverage his or her skills across the global economy as never before. But today, that superstar effect is happening across the entire economy. We have superstar technologists. We have superstar bankers. We have superstar lawyers and superstar architects. There are superstar cooks and superstar farmers. There are even, and this is my personal favorite example, superstar dentists, the most dazzling exemplar of whom is Bernard Touati, the Frenchman who ministers to the smiles of fellow superstarslike Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich or European-born American fashion designerDiane von Furstenberg. But while it's pretty easy to see how globalization and the technology revolution are creating this global plutocracy, what's a lot harder is figuring out what to think about it. And that's because, in contrast with crony capitalism, so much of what globalization and the technology revolution have done is highly positive. Let's start with technology. I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium. I'm even more of a fan of globalization. This is the transformation which has lifted hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class, and if you happen to live in the rich part of the world, it's made many new products affordable -- who do you think built your iPhone? and things that we've relied on for a long time much cheaper. Think of your

dishwasher or your t-shirt. So what's not to like? Well, a few things. One of the things that worries me is how easily what you might call meritocratic plutocracy can become crony plutocracy. Imagine you're a brilliant entrepreneur who has successfully sold that idea or that product to the global billions and become a billionaire in the process. It gets tempting at that point to use your economic nous to manipulate the rules of the global political economy in your own favor.And that's no mere hypothetical example. Think about Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbucks.These are among the world's most admired, most beloved, most innovative companies. They also happen to be particularly adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very, very significantly. And why stop at just playing the global political and economic system as it exists to your own maximum advantage? Once you have the tremendous economic power that we're seeing at the very, very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails, it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor. Again, this is no mere hypothetical. It's what the Russian oligarchs did in creating the sale-of-the-century privatization of Russia's natural resources. It's one way of describing what happened with deregulation of the financial services in the U.S. and the U.K. A second thing that worries me is how easily meritocratic plutocracy can become aristocracy. One way of describing the plutocrats is as alpha geeks, and they are people who are acutely aware of how important highly sophisticated analytical and quantitative skills are in today's economy. That's why they are spending unprecedented time and resources educating their own children. The middle class is spending more on schooling too, but in the global educational arms race that starts at nursery school and ends at Harvard, Stanford or MIT, the 99 percent is increasingly outgunned by the One Percent. The result is something that economists Alan Krueger and Miles Corak call the Great Gatsby Curve. As income inequality increases, social mobility decreases. The plutocracy may be a meritocracy, but increasingly you have to be born on the top rung of the ladder to even take part in that race. The third thing, and this is what worries me the most, is the extent to which those same largely positive forces which are driving the rise of the global plutocracy also happen to be hollowing out the middle class in Western industrialized economies. Let's start with technology. Those same forces that are creating billionaires are also devouring many traditional middle-class jobs. When's the last time you used a travel agent? And in contrast with the industrial revolution, the titans of our new economy aren't creating that many new jobs. At its zenith, G.M. employed hundreds of thousands, Facebook fewer than 10,000.The same is true of globalization. For all that it is raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the emerging markets, it's also outsourcing a lot of jobs from the developed Western economies. The terrifying reality is that there is no economic rule which automatically translates increased economic growth into widely shared prosperity. That's shown in what I consider to be the most scary economic statistic of our time. Since the late 1990s, increases in productivity have been decoupled from increases in wages and employment. That means that our countries are getting richer, our companies are getting more efficient, but we're not creating more jobs and we're not paying people, as a whole, more. One scary conclusion you could draw from all of this is to worry about structural unemployment. What worries me more is a different nightmare scenario. After all, in a totally free labor market, we could find jobs for pretty much everyone. The dystopia that worries me is a universe in which a few geniuses invent Google and its ilk and the rest of us are employed giving them massages. So when I get really depressed about all of this, I comfort myself in thinking about the Industrial Revolution. After all, for all its grim, satanic mills, it worked out pretty well, didn't it? After all, all of us here are richer, healthier, taller -- well, there are a few exceptions and

live longer than our ancestors in the early 19th century. But it's important to rememberthat before we learned how to share the fruits of the Industrial Revolution with the broad swathes of society, we had to go through two depressions, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Long Depression of the 1870s, two world wars, communist revolutions in Russia and in China, and an era of tremendous social and political upheaval in the West. We also, not coincidentally, went through an era of tremendous social and political inventions. We created the modern welfare state. We created public education. We created public health care. We created public pensions. We created unions. Today, we are living through an era of economic transformation comparable in its scale and its scope to the Industrial Revolution. To be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats, we need to embark on an era of comparably ambitious social and political change. We need a new New Deal.

Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks

http://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks.html

Meg Jay: Por qu los 30 no son los nuevos 20

http://www.ted.com/talks/meg_jay_why_30_is_not_the_new_20.html
La psicloga clnica Meg Jay tiene un mensaje importante para los veinteaeros: contrario a la creencia popular, tus veintes no son una dcada para desperdiciar. En esta charla provocadora, Jay dice que solo porque el matrimonio, el trabajo y los hijos pasan despus en la vida, no significa que no debes empezar a planearlos hoy. Ella da 3 consejos de cmo los veinteaeros pueden reclamar su adultez en la dcada que definir sus vidas. In her book "The Defining Decade," Meg Jay suggests that many twentysomethings feel trivialized during what is actually the most transformative and defining period of our adult lives. Full bio

When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client. I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley. She was a 26-year-old woman named Alex. Now Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was there to talk about guy problems. Now when I heard this, I was so relieved. My classmate got an arsonist for her first client. (Laughter) And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. This I thought I could handle. But I didn't handle it. With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. "Thirty's the new 20," Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right. Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later. Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time. But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life. I pushed back. I said, "Sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to marry the guy." And then my supervisor said, "Not yet, but she might marry the next one. Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one."

That's what psychologists call an "Aha!" moment. That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20. Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime. That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there blowing it. That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere. There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States right now. We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first. Raise your hand if you're in your 20s. I really want to see some twentysomethings here. Oh, yay! Y'all's awesome. If you work with twentysomethings, you love a twentysomething,you're losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see Okay. Awesome, twentysomethings really matter. So I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists already know: that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world. This is not my opinion. These are the facts. We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35. That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and "Aha!" moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s. People who are over 40, don't panic. This crowd is going to be fine, I think. We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn. We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30. We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it. We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35. So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options. So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain. It's a time when your ordinary, dayto-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. But what we hear less about is that there's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical period of adult development. But this isn't what twentysomethings are hearing. Newspapers talk about the changing timetable of adulthood. Researchers call the 20s an extended adolescence. Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like "twixters" and "kidults." It's true. As a culture, we have trivialized what is actually the defining decade of adulthood. Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time. Isn't that true? So what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, "You have 10 extra years to start your life"? Nothing happens. You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens. And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my office and say things like this: "I know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time." Or they say, "Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be fine." But then it starts to sound like this: "My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself. I had a better rsum the day after I graduated from college." And then it starts to sound like this: "Dating in my 20s was like musical chairs. Everybody was running around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down. I didn't want to be the only one left standing

up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30." Where are the twentysomethings here? Do not do that. Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high. When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time.Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s. The post-millennial midlife crisis isn't buying a red sports car. It's realizing you can't have that career you now want. It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a sibling. Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, "What was I doing? What was I thinking?" I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking. Here's a story about how that can go. It's a story about a woman named Emma. At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis. She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead. Because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend who displayed his temper more than his ambition. And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder. She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, "You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends." Well one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour. She'd just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the morning filling in her many contacts, but then she'd been left staring at that empty blank that comes after the words "In case of emergency, please call ... ." She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, "Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck? Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?" Now in that moment, it took everything I had not to say, "I will." But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared. Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance. I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex to just sit there while Emma's defining decade went parading by. So over the next weeks and months, I told Emma three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear. First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. By get identity capital, I mean do something that adds value to who you are. Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital. So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. I'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. That's procrastination. I told Emma to explore work and make it count. Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated. Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work. That new piece of capital, that new person to date almost always comes from outside the inner circle. New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends.So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed. But half aren't, and weak tiesare how you get yourself into that group. Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that un-posted job. It's not cheating. It's the science of how information spreads. Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma

would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own. I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now. Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you. But grabbing whoever you're living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress. The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one,and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work. Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you. So what happened to Emma? Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state. That weak tie helped her get a job there. That job offer gave her the reason to leave that live-in boyfriend. Now, five years later, she's a special events planner for museums. She's married to a man she mindfully chose. She loves her new career, she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, "Now the emergency contact blanks don't seem big enough." Now Emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what I love about working with twentysomethings. They are so easy to help. Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come. So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know. It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex. It's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. You're deciding your life right now. Thank you.(Applause)

Cuando estaba en mis 20s, vi a mi primer cliente de psicoterapia. Yo era una estudiante doctoral en psicologa clnica en Berkeley. Ella era una mujer de 26 aos llamada Alex.Alex entr a la primera sesin usando vaqueros y un top holgado, se tir en el sof de mi oficina se quit los zapatos y me dijo que quera hablar de sus problemas con los hombres.Cuando escuch esto, me sent tan aliviada. Mi compaera de clase tuvo un pirmano como primer cliente. (Risas) Y a m me toc una veinteaera que quera hablar de hombres.Cre que poda manejarlo. Pero no lo hice. Con las historias chistosas que Alex traa a las sesiones, se me hizo fcil solo mover la cabeza mientras que retrasabamos la solucin. "Los treinta son los nuevos veinte", deca Alex, y por lo que yo vea, ella tena razn. Uno empieza a trabajar despus, se casa despus, tiene hijos despus, hasta la muerte pasa despus. Para veinteaeros como Alex y yo haba tiempo de sobra. Pero poco despus, mi supervisor me presion para presionar a Alex que hablara sobre su vida amorosa. Yo me resist. Dije, "Claro, est saliendo con tipos debajo de su categora, se acuesta con un cabeza hueca, pero no es como si fuera a casarse con l". Y entonces mi supervisor dijo, "Todava no, pero tal vez se case con el prximo. Adems, el mejor momento para trabajar en el matrimonio de Alex es antes de que se case". Esto es lo que los psiclogos llaman un momento "Aj!". Fue cuando me di cuenta que los los 30s no son los nuevos 20s. S, la gente sienta cabeza despus de lo que se acostumbraba, pero esto no hizo que los 20s de Alex fueran una pausa en su desarrollo.Esto hizo que los 20s de Alex fueran el momento perfecto y lo estbamos desperdiciando.Entonces me di cuenta, que esta clase de negligencia benigna era un problema real y tena consecuencias

reales, no solo para Alex y su vida amorosa sino para las carreras, las familias y los futuros de veinteaeros de todos lados. Hay 50 millones de veinteaeros en Estados Unidos, hoy da. Esto significa el 15% de la poblacin, o el 100% si consideran que nadie llega a la adultez sin pasar antes por los 20s. Levanten la mano si estn en sus 20s. Quiero ver a los veinteaeros de aqu. Oh, S! Son increbles. Si trabajan con veinteaeros, aman a un veinteaero, les quita el sueo un veinteaero, quiero ver. Est bien. Increble, los veinteaeros de verdad importan. Yo me especializo en los veinteaeros porque creo que cada uno de esos 50 millones de veinteaeros merecen saber lo que los psiclogos, socilogos, neurlogos y especialistas en fertilidad ya saben: que reclamar sus 20s es una de las cosas ms simples, y ms transformadoras, que pueden hacer por trabajo, por amor, por su felicidad, tal vez hasta para el mundo. Esta no es solo mi opinin. Estos son los hechos. Sabemos que el 80% de los momentos claves en la vida pasarn a los 35 aos. Esto significa que 8 de cada 10 decisiones y experiencias y momentos "Aj!" que le dan forma a su vida habrn pasado para cuando tengan 30 y tantos. Personas de ms de 40, no entren en pnico. Este pblico va a estar bien, creo. Sabemos que los primeros 10 aos de una carrera tienen un impacto exponencial sobre la cantidad de dinero que ganarn. Sabemos que ms de la mitad de los estadounidenses estn casados, viven o estn saliendo con su pareja futura a los 30 aos.Sabemos que el cerebro termina su segunda y ltima etapa de crecimiento en sus 20s y se reprograma para la adultez, lo que significa que si hay algo que quieran cambiar de s mismos, ahora es el momento para cambiarlo. Sabemos que la personalidad cambia ms veces durante sus 20s que en cualquier otro momento de la vida y sabemos que la fertilidad femenina llega a su tope a los 28, y las cosas se vuelven complicadas a los 35. Los 20s son el momento para educarse sobre su cuerpo y sus opciones. Cuando pensamos en el desarrollo del nio, todos sabemos que los primeros 5 aos son cruciales para el lenguaje y el apego en el cerebro. Es un momento en el que su vida diaria y comn tiene un impacto desmedido en la persona que se convertirn. Pero lo que no escuchamos con frecuencia es que hay algo llamado desarrollo adulto y nuestros 20s son un momento crtico en el desarrollo adulto. Pero esto no es lo que los veinteaeros estn escuchando. Los peridicos hablan sobre cambios en la lnea del tiempo de la adultez. Los investigadores llaman a los 20s una adolescencia extendida. Los periodistas le acuan nombres ridculos a los veinteaeroscomo "twixters" y "kidults." Es verdad. Como cultura, hemos considerado una trivialidad lo que en realidad es la dcada que define la adultez. Leonard Bernstein deca que para lograr grandes cosas, necesitas un plan y no suficiente tiempo. No es verdad? Qu creen que pasa cuando le dan palmadas a un veinteaero en la cabeza y le dicen, "tienes otros 10 aos para empezar tu vida"? No pasa nada. Le robaron a esa persona el sentido de urgencia y su ambicin y no pasa absolutamente nada. Y luego todos los das, veinteaeros inteligentes, interesantes como ustedes o sus hijos e hijas llegan a mi oficina y dicen algo as: "Ya s que mi novio no es bueno para m, pero esta relacin no cuenta. Solo estoy matando tiempo". O dicen, "Todos dicen que mientras empiece una carrera antes de los 30, todo estar bien". Pero luego empieza a sonar algo as: "Mis 20s estn por terminarse y todava no tengo nada que mostrar. Tena mejor currculum el da que me gradu de la universidad". Y despus empieza a sonar algo as: "Mis citas durante los 20s eran como el juego de las sillas. Todos corran y se divertan, pero luego en algn momento alrededor de los 30, se apag la msica y todos comenzaron a sentarse. Yo no quera ser la nica que se quedara parada, as que a veces pienso que me cas con mi esposo porque l era la silla ms cercana cuando tena 30".

Dnde estn los veinteaeros aqu? No hagan eso. Bueno, eso suena un poco extremo, pero no se equivoquen, los riesgos son muy altos.Cuando se dejan muchas cosas para los 30s, hay una enorme presin a los treinta y tantosde empezar una carrera, elegir una ciudad, elegir una pareja, y tener dos o tres hijos en un periodo de tiempo mucho ms corto. Muchas de estas cosas no son compatibles, y hay investigaciones que empiezan a mostrar, que es mucho ms difcil y estresante hacer todo de una vez a los 30s. La crisis de la mediana edad post-milenio no se trata de comprar autos deportivos rojos. Se trata de darte cuenta que no puedes tener la carrera que quieres ahora. Darte cuenta que no puedes tener el hijo que quieres ahora, o que no le puedes dar un hermano a tu hijo.Muchos treintaeros y cuarentones se ven a s mismos, y a m, sentados en la habitacin,y hablan sobre sus 20s, "Qu estaba haciendo? En qu estaba pensando?" Quiero cambiar lo que los veinteaeros estn haciendo y pensando. Aqu les va una historia de cmo podra ser. Es una historia sobre una mujer llamada Emma. A los 25, Emma lleg a mi oficina porque estaba, en sus propias palabras, teniendo una crisis de identidad. Deca que le gustara trabajar en el arte o en el entretenimiento, pero todava no se poda decidir, as que pas los ltimos aos trabajando como mesera.Como era ms barato, viva con un novio que mostraba ms temperamento que ambicin. Y a pesar de vivir unos 20s muy difciles, su vida anterior haba sido an ms difcil. Lloraba frecuentemente en nuestras sesiones, pero luego se levantaba ella misma al decir, "Uno no elige a su familia, pero puede elegir a sus amigos". Bueno, un da Emma lleg puso su cabeza sobre sus piernas y llor durante casi toda la hora. Acababa de comprar una nueva libreta para directorio, y haba pasado toda la maana llenndola con sus muchos contactos, pero luego se qued viendo el espacio vaco que sigue despus de las palabras "En caso de emergencia, por favor llame a..." Estaba a punto de la histeria cuando me vio y dijo, "Quin va a estar para m si tengo un accidente automovilstico? Quin me va a cuidar si me da cncer?" En ese momento, me cost mucho trabajo resistir y no decir, "Yo". Lo que Emma necesitaba no era una terapista que de verdad se preocupara. Emma necesitaba una vida mejor, y yo saba que esta era su oportunidad. Yo haba aprendido mucho desde que trabaj con Alex como para solo sentarme mientras la dcada decisiva de Emma pasaba delante. As que, durante las siguientes semanas y meses, le dije a Emma tres cosas que todo veinteaero, hombre o mujer, merece saber. Primero, le dije a Emma que se olvidara de esa crisis de identidad y consiguiera capital de identidad. Por capital de identidad, me refiero a hacer algo que agregue valor a su persona.Hacer algo que sea una inversin en lo que quieren ser despus. No saba el futuro de la carrera de Emma, y nadie sabe el futuro del trabajo, pero s s esto: capital de identidad genera capital de identidad. As que ahora es el momento para ese trabajo del otro lado del pas, de ese internado, de esa empresa que quieren probar. No estoy descartando la exploracin veinteaera, estoy descartando la exploracin que no debera de contar, que, por cierto, no es exploracin, es procrastinacin. Le dije a Emma que explorara trabajos y que los hiciera contar. Segundo, le dije a Emma que las tribus urbanas estn sobrevaloradas. Los mejores amigos son excelentes para llevarte al aeropuerto, pero los veinteaeros que se juntan con amigos con mentes similares se limitan en cuanto a quin conocen, qu conocen, cmo piensan, cmo hablan, y dnde trabajan. Esa nueva pieza de capital, esa nueva persona con quien salir casi siempre viene de fuera de su crculo ms cercano. Las cosas nuevas vienen de lo que se llaman vnculos dbiles amigos de amigos de sus amigos. S, la mitad de los veinteaeros tienen un mal trabajo o no tienen trabajo. Pero la otra mitad no, y los vnculos dbiles son la forma de colarte a este grupo. La mitad de los trabajos creados nunca se publican, entonces, conocer al jefe de tu vecino es la forma de

conseguir un trabajo no publicado. No es hacer trampa. Es la ciencia de cmo la informacin se pasa. Por ltimo pero no menos importante, Emma crea que uno no elige a su familia, pero s a sus amigos. Esto era verdad cuando estaba creciendo, pero como veinteaera, Emma pronto eligir a su familia. cuando tenga una pareja y forme su propia familia. Le dije a Emma que el tiempo para elegir su familia haba llegado. Tal vez piensan que los 30 es mejor edad para sentar cabeza que los 20 o incluso los 25 y estoy de acuerdo con ustedes. Pero elegir a la persona con la que vives ahora o te acuestas ahora cuando todos en Facebook comienzan a caminar hacia el altar no es progreso. El mejor momento para trabajar en tu matrimonio es antes de que lo tengas, y eso implica ser tan intencional en el amor como lo eres en el trabajo. Elegir tu familia debe ser una eleccin consciente de quin y qu es lo que quieren en lugar de solo hacerlo funcionar o matar tiempo con quien sea que los elija a ustedes. Entonces, qu pas con Emma? Bien, revisamos ese directorio, y ella encontr al compaero de cuarto de un primo que trabajaba en un museo de arte en otro estado. Este vnculo dbil le ayud a conseguir un trabajo ah. Esa oferta de trabajo le dio una razn para dejar al novio con el que viva. Ahora, 5 aos despus, es organizadora especial de eventos en museos. Esta casada con un hombre que eligi conscientemente. Ama su nueva carrera, ama su nueva familia, y me envo una carta que deca, "Ahora los espacios de contactos de emergencia no son lo suficientemente grandes". La historia de Emma puede sonar fcil, pero eso es lo que me encanta de trabajar con veinteaeros. Es muy fcil ayudarles. Los veinteaeros son como aviones que salen del aeropuerto de Los ngeles, que salen a algn lugar del oeste. Justo antes del despegue, un ligero ajuste en su trayectoria hace la diferencia entre aterrizar en Alaska o en Fiji. De la misma manera, a los 21 o a los 25 e incluso a los 29, una buena conversacin, un buen descanso, una buena charla TED puede tener enormes efectos en los aos siguientes o incluso en las generaciones siguientes. Aqu esta mi idea digna de difundir a todos los veinteaeros que conozcan. Es tan simple como lo que aprend a decirle a Alex. Es lo que ahora tengo el privilegio de decirle a veinteaeros como Emma todos los das: Los treintas no son los nuevos 20s, reclamen su adultez, consigan capital de identidad, usen sus vnculos dbiles, elijan a tu familia. No se dejen definir por lo que no saban o lo que no hicieron. Estn decidiendo su vida hoy.Gracias. (Aplausos)

El poderoso derrame de iluminacin de Jill Bolte Taylor

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/es/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
Jill Bolte Taylor tuvo una oportunidad de investigacin muy poco comn para los cientficos dedicados al estudio del cerebro: tuvo un derrame cerebral y pudo observar cmo se interrumpan, una por una, las funciones de su cerebro; el movimiento, el habla, la conciencia. Una historia asombrosa. Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor studied her own stroke as it happened -- and has become a powerful voice for brain recovery.

I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder: schizophrenia. And as a sister and later, as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true? What is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality, so they instead become delusion?
So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to

Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, "What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder?" So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain: which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals? So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day. But then in the evenings and on the weekends, I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body. If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. So this is a real human brain. This is the front of the brain, the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each of our hemispheres think about different things, they care about different things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities. Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy. Assistant: It has been. Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about "right here, right now." Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneouslythrough all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful. My left hemisphere -- our left hemisphere -- is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and myinternal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning." It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke. On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain -- caustic pain -- that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me -- and then it released me. And then it just gripped me -- and then it released me. And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, "OK, I'll just start my normal routine." So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body, full-exercise machine.And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, "That's very peculiar." And I looked down at my body and I thought, "Whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing." And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience. And it was all very peculiar, and my headache was just getting worse. So I get off the machine, and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perceptions, so I'm just focused on internal systems. And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower, and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voicesaying, "OK. You muscles, you gotta contract. You muscles, you relax." And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy -energy. And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me? What is going on?" And in that moment, my brain chatter -- my left hemisphere brain chatter -- went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated

by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there. Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online, and it says to me, "Hey! We got a problem! We got a problem! We gotta get some help." And I'm going, "Ahh! I got a problem. I got a problem." So it's like, "OK. OK. I got a problem." But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness -- and I affectionatelyrefer to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. So here I am in this space, and my job -- and any stress related to my job -- it was gone.And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those -- they were gone. And I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage!(Laughter) Oh! I felt euphoria -- euphoria. It was beautiful. And then, again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says, "Hey! You've got to pay attention. We've got to get help." And I'm thinking, "I got to get help. I gotta focus." So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, "I gotta get to work. I gotta get to work. Can I drive? Can I drive?" And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. Then I realized, "Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke! I'm having a stroke!" And the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow! This is so cool." (Laughter) "This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?" (Laughter) And then it crosses my mind, "But I'm a very busy woman!" (Laughter) "I don't have time for a stroke!" So I'm like, "OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening, so I'll do this for a week or two, andthen I'll get back to my routine. OK. So I gotta call help. I gotta call work." I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number on it. So I go into my business room, I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards. And I'm looking at the card on top and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell. And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell that's not the card ... that's not the card ... that's not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards. In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it's the only plan I have. So I take the phone pad and I put it right here. I take the business card, I put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I came back if I'd already dialed those numbers. So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality, I'd be able to tell, "Yes, I've already dialed that number." Eventually, the whole number gets dialed and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, "Woo woo woo woo." (Laughter) And I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!" And so I say to him -- clear in my mind, I say to him: "This is Jill! I need help!" And what comes out of my voice is, "Woo woo woo woo woo." I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I sound like a Golden Retriever." So I couldn't know -- I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried. So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help. And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to [Massachusetts] General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air, just, just right out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just -- I felt my spirit surrender. And in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life, or this was perhaps my moment of transition. When I woke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life. And my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire, and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise, and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body. But then I realized, "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I havefound Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover. Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who is a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover. So who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can

step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is.Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid. Separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we willproject into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

Crec para estudiar el cerebro porque tengo un hermano que fue diagnosticado con un trastorno cerebral: esquizofrenia. Y como hermana y ms tarde, como cientfica, quera entender por qu puedo abstraer mis sueos, puedo conectarlos a mi realidad y hacerlos realidad. Qu sucede con el cerebro de mi hermano y su esquizofrenia que no puede conectar sus sueos con una realidad comn y compartida sino que se vuelven delirios?
Entonces dediqu mi carrera a investigar las enfermedades mentales severas. Me mud de mi hogar en Indiana a Boston donde trabaj en el en el Departamento de Psiquiatra de Harvard. All nos preguntamos "Cules son las diferencias biolgicas entre los cerebros de los individuos que tuvieron un diagnstico normal en comparacin con los cerebros de los individuos diagnosticados con esquizofrenia, trastorno esquizoafectivo o trastorno bipolar?Mapeamos esencialmente los microcircuitos del cerebro: qu celulas se comunican con qu clulas, con qu qumicos, y en qu cantidades de qumicos. Mi vida tena mucho sentido porque estaba realizando este tipo de investigaciones durante el da pero por las noches y los fines de semana viajaba apoyando a la Alianza Nacional de Enfermedades Mentales, NAMI. Pero la maana del 10 de diciembre de 1996, me despert y descubr que yo misma tena un trastorno en mi cerebro.Un vaso sanguneo explot en la parte izquierda de mi cerebro y en el curso de cuatro horas, vi cmo mi cerebro se deterioraba en su capacidad de procesar todo tipo de informacin. En la maana de la hemorragia no poda caminar, hablar, leer, escribir ni recordar nada de mi vida. Esencialmente me convert en una nia en el cuerpo de una mujer. Si alguna vez han visto el cerebro humano, es obvio que los dos hemisferios estn completamente separados uno del otro. Y he trado para ustedes un cerebro humano real. Este es un cerebro humano real. Esta es la parte frontal del cerebro, la parte posterior con la mdula espinal colgando y sta es la ubicacin en el interior de la cabeza. Cuando observamos el cerebro, es obvio que las dos cortezas cerebrales estn completamente separadas entre s. Para los que entienden de ordenadores, nuestro hemisferio derecho funciona como un procesador en paralelo. mientras que nuestro hemisferio izquierdo funciona como uno en serie. Los dos hemisferios se comunican entre s a travs del cuerpo calloso, que est compuesto por alrededor de 300 millones de fibras de ax n. Pero excepto por eso, los dos hemisferios estn completamente separados.porque procesan informacin de manera diferente, cada uno de nuestros hemisferios piensa cosas distintas. Les interesan cosas diferentes, y me atrevo a decir que hasta tienen muy diferentes personalidades. Disculpe. Gracias. Un placer. (Ayudante: Realmente un placer). Nuestro hemisferio derecho se ocupa del momento presente. Solo le concierne el aqu y ahora. Nuestro hemisferio derecho piensa en imgenes y aprende quinestticamente a travs del movimiento de nuestros cuerpos. La informacin, en forma de energa, fluye simultneamente a travs de todos nuestros sistemas sensoriales y explota en este enorme collage con la apariencia de este momento el gusto, el sabor de este momento... los sonidos y los sentimientos que provoca. Soy un ser hecho de energa conectado a la energa que me rodea a travs de la conciencia de mi hemisferio derecho.Somos seres hechos de energa, conectados entre s mediante la conciencia de nuestros hemisferios derechos como una familia humana. Y en este lugar, en este momento, somos hermanos y hermanas en este planeta, estamos aqu para hacer del mundo un lugar mejor.Y en este momento somos perfectos, completos y hermosos. Mi hemisferio izquierdo, nuestro hemisferio izquierdo es un lugar muy diferente. Nuestro hemisferio izquierdo piensa lineal y met dicamente. El hemisferio izquierdo se concentra en el pasado y en el futuro. Este hemisferio est diseado para sacar ese enorme collage del momento presente y observar los detalles, detalles y ms detalles de esos mismos detalles. Luego, categoriza la informacin y la organiza, la asocia con todo lo que hemos aprendido en el pasado y la proyecta en el futuro de todas nuestras posibilidades. El hemisferio izquierdo piensa en forma de lenguaje. Es esa voz que escuchamos en el cerebro que me conecta a m y mi mundo interno con mi mundo externo.Es esa vocecita que me dice: "Oye, tienes que recordar comprar pltanos cuando vuelvas a casa. Las necesito por la maana". Es la inteligencia calculadora que me recuerda cundo tengo que lavar la ropa. Pero quiz lo ms importante, es que la vocecita me dice"Yo soy". Y mientras mi hemisferio izquierdo me diga "Yo soy", me vuelvo un ser separado.Me convierto en un individuo singular, independiente del flujo de energa que me rodea y separado de los otros. Y esa fue la parte del cerebro que perd la maana de mi derrame cerebral. En la maana de mi derrame cerebral, me despert con un dolor punzante en mi ojo izquierdo. Era un dolor custico... como el que aparececuando mordemos un helado. Y apareca... y desapareca. Y otra vez, apareca... y desapareca. Era muy poco comn para m experimentar esta clase de dolor. Entonces pens, bueno, simplemente empezar con mi rutina normal. Me levant y me sub a la mquina para hacer ejercicios

en la que se hace ejercicios para todo el cuerpo. Y mientras estoy movindome en esa cosa, me doy cuenta de que mis manos parecan garras primitivas agarrndose a la barra. Y pens... es muy peculiar... y me mir el cuerpo y pens..."Oh, soy una cosa extraa". Y as fue como mi conciencia haba cambiado mi percepcin normal de la realidad, de ser la persona que est en la mquina viviendo la experiencia, a un espacio esotrico donde era testigo de que me observaba teniendo esa experiencia. Y eso realmente era extrao, y mi dolor de cabeza era cada vez peor. Entonces me baj de la mquina y mientras caminaba por la sala, me d cuenta de que el interior de mi cuerpo se haba desacelerado. Y cada paso era muy rgido y muy deliberado. No haba fluidez en mis pasos y estaba esta limitacin en el rea de las percepciones, de modo que estaba enfocada en los sistemas internos. Estaba parada en el bao lista para meterme en la ducha y poda escuchar el dilogo dentro de mi cuerpo. Escuchaba una vocecita que me deca: "Msculos, contraerse. Msculos, relajarse". Y fue entonces cuando perd el equilibrio y me apoy en la pared. Me mir el brazo y me di cuenta de que no poda definir los lmites de mi cuerpo. No poda definir dnde comenzaba y dnde terminaba porque los tomos y las molculas de mi brazo se mezclaban con los tomos y molculas de la pared. Y todo lo que poda detectar era esta energa... energa. Y me pregunt... Qu me pasa?... ...Qu sucede?... Y en ese momento, mi vocecita... la vocecita del hemisferio izquierdo... qued en silencio. Igual que cuando pulsamos el botn de silencio del mando a distancia. Silencio total. Y al principio, me sorprend por el hecho de encontrarme dentro de una mente en silencio. Pero la magnificencia de la energa que me rodeaba me cautiv. Y como ya no poda identificar los lmites de mi cuerpo, me senta enorme y expansiva. Me senta en comunin con la energa y era hermoso. De repente, mi hemisferio izquierdo vuelve a ponerse en lnea y me dice... " Oye, tenemos un problema! Tenemos un problema y debemos buscar ayuda". Y yo digo. " Ahh! Tengo un problema. Tengo un problema". Y me dije "Bien. Bien. Tengo un problema". Inmediatamente despus volv a estar a la deriva en mi conciencia... y a este espacio lo llamo afectuosamente La La Land. Era hermoso. Imaginen lo que sera estar totalmente desconectado de la voz del cerebro que nos conecta con el mundo externo. Estaba en este espacio y mi trabajo... y el estrs relacionado con l... haba desaparecido. Y me senta ms ligera. Imagnense...todos los vnculos con el mundo externo y las preocupaciones relacionadas con l... se haban ido. Y tuve esa sensacin de paz. Realmente imaginen lo que sera dejar de lado 37 aos de carga emocional! (Risas). Oh! Me senta eufrica! Euforia. Era hermoso. Pero luego mi hemisferio izquierdo vuelve a ponerse en lnea y me dice: "Oye! Tienes que prestar atencin. Hay que buscar ayuda". Y pienso "Tengo que buscar ayuda. Tengo que concentrarme". Sal de la ducha y me vest mecnicamente y camin por el apartamento, y pens "Tengo que ir al trabajo. Tengo que ir a trabajar Puedo conducir? Puedo conducir?" Y en ese momento mi brazo derecho se paraliz totalmente. Y entonces me di cuenta "Oh, Dios mo! Estoy teniendo un derrame cerebral!Y lo siguiente que me dijo mi cerebro fue: "Oh.. Qu genial!... (Risas) Esto es genial! Cuntos cientficos del cerebro tienen la oportunidad de estudiar su propio cerebro de adentro hacia afuera? (Risas) Pero despus pens: "Soy una mujer muy ocupada" (Risas) "No tengo tiempo para un derrame cerebral!". Y reflexion: "Bueno, no puedo evitar que suceda. Estar con esto una semana o dos y luego y volver a mi rutina. Est bien. Tengo que pedir ayuda. Tengo que llamar al trabajo. No me acordaba del nmero del trabajo entonces me acord de que en mi despacho tena una tarjeta con mi nmero. Fui a mi despacho. Saqu una pila de siete centmetros de tarjetas de visita. Y miraba la primera tarjeta y aunquepoda ver claramente en mi mente cmo era mi tarjeta, en ese momento no poda decir si era mi tarjeta o no porque solo poda ver pxeles. Y los pxeles de las palabras se mezclaban con los pxeles del fondo y de los smbolos. Y yo simplemente no lo distingua.Entonces esper, a lo que llamo, un momento de claridad. En ese momento podra volver a conectarme la realidad normal y podra ver que no era la tarjeta... no era la tarjeta... no era la tarjeta. Tard 45 minutos en bajar unos dos centmetros de la pila de tarjetas. Mientras tanto, por 45 minutos, la hemorragia era cada vez mayor en mi hemisferio izquierdo. No entenda los nmeros, no entenda el telfono, pero era el nico plan que tena. Cog el telfono y lo coloqu as. Cog la tarjeta, la puse aqu y quera hacer coincidir la forma de los garabatos de la tarjeta con los del telfono. Pero entonces volv a regresar a La La Land,y no me acordaba de si ya haba marcado los nmeros. Tuve que empuar mi brazo paralizado como un mun y cubrir los nmeros mientras los marcaba para que cuando volviera a la realidad normal, pudiera darme cuenta de que s, ya haba marcado ese nmero. Finalmente, marqu el nmero y escuch el telfono y mi colega contest el telfono y me deca: "Guau, guau, guau". (Risas) Y me dije a m misma "No puede ser. l suena como un Golden Retriever!" Y entonces le dije... con claridad mental le dije: "Soy Jill! Necesito ayuda!" pero lo que sali de mi boca fue "Guau, guau, guau". Y pens "Oh dios mo, yo tambin sueno como un Golden Retriever!" No poda saber. Yo no saba que no poda hablar ni entender el lenguaje hasta que intent hacerlo. l se dio cuenta de que necesitaba ayuda y me envi ayuda. Y ms tarde, estaba en una ambulancia desde un hospital de Boston al Hospital General de Massachusetts. Me encog y adopt una posicin fetal. E igual que a un globo al que se le va la ltima gota de aire, sent que mi energa se haba ido... que mi espritu se haba rendido. En ese momento, yo saba que ya no era ms el artfice de mi vida. Entonces, o los mdicos rescataban mi cuerpo y me daban una segunda oportunidad de vida o quizs ese era mi momento de transicin. Cuando luego me despert, esa tarde, me sorprend al descubrir que segua viva. Cuando sent que mi espritu se renda, dije adis a mi vida. Y mi mente estaba ahora suspendida entre dos planos de realidad muy distintos. Los estmulos que ingresaban a travs de mis sistemas

sensoriales me causaban puro dolor. La luz quemaba mi cerebro y los sonidos eran tan altos y caticos que no poda distinguir ninguna voz entre el ruido de fondo y quera escaparme. Como no poda identificar la posicin de mi cuerpo en el espacio, me senta enorme y expansiva. como un genio recin liberado de su botella. Mi espritu flotaba libre como una gran ballena navegando por un mar de euforia silenciosa. El nirvana. Encontr el nirvana. Y recuerdo haber pensado que no haba forma de que yo fuera capaz de comprimir la enormidad de mi ser dentro de este cuerpo tan pequeo. Pero me di cuenta de que " Sigo viva! Todava estoy viva y he encontrado el nirvana". Y si he encontrado el nirvana y todava estoy viva, entonces todos los que estn vivos pueden encontrar el nirvana. Imagin un mundo de personas hermosas, tranquilas, compasivas, que saban que podan visitar este espacio en cualquier momento, y que saban que podan elegir deliberadamente dar un paso a la derecha de su hemisferio izquierdo y encontrar esta paz. Y entonces, me di cuenta del enorme regalo que era esta experiencia, lo que un derrame de iluminacin puede significar y cmo vivimos nuestras vidas. Y eso motiv mi recuperacin. Dos semanas y media despus de la hemorragia, los cirujanos me operaron para sacar un co gulo de sangre del tamao de una pelota de golf que presionaba mis centros de lenguaje. Aqu me ven con mi madre, que ha sido un verdadero ngel en mi vida. Mi recuperacin completa tard ocho aos. Entonces, quines somos? Somos la fuerza generadora de vida del universo con destrezas manuales y dos mentes cognitivas. Y tenemos el poder de elegir, momento a momento, quines somos y cmo queremos estar en este mundo. Aqu mismo, en este momento, puedo ir a la conciencia de mi hemisferio derecho, donde estamos. Soy la fuerza generadora de vida del universo. Soy la fuerza generadora de vida de 50 trillones de hermosos genios moleculares que componen mi forma como una persona con todo lo que eso significa. O puedo elegir ir a la conciencia de mi hemisferio izquierdo donde soy un individuo particular una sustancia, independiente del resto, separada de ustedes. Soy la Dra. Jill Bolte Taylor intelectual, neuroanatomista. Estos son los distintos "yo" interiores.Cul elegiran ustedes? Cul eligen? Y cundo? Creo que mientras ms tiempo pasemos eligiendo utilizar los profundos circuitos que nos dan paz de nuestro hemisferio derecho, ms paz, podremos proyectar al mundo y nuestro planeta ser ms pacfico. Y pens que vala la pena compartir esta idea.