How To Make the Divine Jealous: Lessons From My Students: Sam Potolicchio at TEDxAUBG
[Applause] I'm Sam poio it's great to be here I want to talk about leadership today and I want to talk about how you can be charismatic and I want to do so through a love song to my students and what they've taught me about being charismatic and about leadership I want to start with a quote I'll tell you a secret something they don't teach you in your temple the gods Envy us they Envy us because we're mortal because any moment might be our last everything is more beautiful because we're doomed you will never be Lovelier than you are now we will never be here again now you might be thinking Brad Pit or at aubg you might be thinking Professor trinsky here and the first time I should have read this probably in college it's Homer if you haven't figured it out by now but the first time I was exposed to this quote was in this classroom room okay these are my fifth grade Latin students and just to give you a sense of this class I try to get my students to fall in love with language and to fall in love with storytelling and as you can see here it's a little bit of a chaotic classroom so imagine a 10-year-old boy walking into my classroom and reading this quote and reciting this quote on top of that table okay it was pretty profound for me and I started to think about what Charisma was after he said this quote I'll tell you one thing I think if 10-year-old kids taught Homer we'd read it a little bit more fast forward a couple months and I'm having a strategy session with four of my star basketball players before we play the Georgetown women's basketball team these are kids are only 12 years old by the way these are shirle temples don't get any ideas nothing besides Shirley temples we save the strong stuff for after the game we have vanilla milkshake after the game now I'm sitting there and I'm trying to tell them and map out the whole game strategy this is who you're going to defend this is the play We're going to run in the first minute this is what you're going to do in this situation and one of my players rolls his eyes at me says coach chill we got this calm down let's just enjoy our our cherries and Shirley temples and I continue I say you know this is a very big game we have a win streak that we need to protect you're going to listen to what I say and I get back to diagramming everything and dissecting everything and then another one of my players says coach when things break down that's when I get magical another player says when it gets chaotic that's when we have the best shot to win and the finally the fourth player says look I don't even really start trying until I don't know what's going to happen and this conversation really made me think about what Charisma is and it made me think about uncertainty we don't know what's going to happen we overestimate how much we do know sometimes we pretend that the illusion is better than embracing uncertainty the world is moving at such a fast pace you have to adapt so quickly those that welcome uncertainty that actually live for uncertainty are going to perform a lot better in this game after we had our Shirley temples we were losing by nine points I called the kids into a huddle during a timeout and I could see in their eyes the look that said to me chill we got this not only did I see that but they were actually more alive knowing that things weren't going as planned they relished it to me this was extraordinarily charismatic when you live off the script you become more alive it's a lot more compelling to taste uncertainty than it is to pretend that you have all the answers to live the questions second skill that makes up Charisma opposable mind okay now what I mean by opposable mind I think F scottf Cheryl quote sums this up the best if you can keep two disagreeing ideas together simultaneously at the same time and still Rin the ability to function that's the sign of a First Rate intelligence one of the things that you should do in life is to seek out and quest for disagreement and for difference you should jolt your beliefs you should confront data that disrupts your own opinions this is a picture from the Balan Youth Forum I was in Serbia just about 10 days ago and these students are from all over the Balkans and one of the things that we tried to do at this conference was get people who passionately disagreed with each other together to talk in a civil way about Imagining the future so we made them confront things that they maybe wouldn't want to confront the default situation of your brain should be uncertainty and disagreement because this world is so complex the stimuli that your brain is getting is going to be all about so why do we try to impose certainty on this default condition we shouldn't I teach at a Jesuit School Georgetown University and the Jesuits would always say assume the good faith of others arguments teach me your beliefs and that's what you should do as a leader you should want to know what the other person is thinking and how they're thinking it John glavin who trains our most ambitious undergrads at Georgetown for scholarships like the road scholarship and the Marshall Scholarship tries to get his students to think in the round to think complexly to put themselves in the shoes of their adversaries now how do you get the supposable mind this is me abusing one of my students okay this is hitting him in the face he's laughing because it's such a weak attempt this is my friend Armen in Armenia in yavan and I'm hitting him in the face jokingly I already checked the statue of limitations nothing can happen to me because we couldn't get to the airport in time you know why we couldn't get to the airport in time because when we were walking through the main streets of yavan every single person wanted to talk to him because this is someone who every single second he gets he tries to understand people's stories people's beliefs their opinions the connectivity of this guy is Stupify he puts something on his Facebook wall that I have a lecture in yavon and hundreds of people show up they trust him what's incredible about how he's decided to live his life to treat every single person like they're an expert in something the knowledge that he has now is incredible you hang out with him for an hour and he'll know about the ins and outs the incres of so many different professions because he has he has this desire to know everything about everyone in a very civil way and what do you think is more charismatic having Limitless possibilities of knowledge or having constrained blinkered thinking these are two pictures here on the left I'm right near Tito's birthplace I'm having a meal with the Bosnian Serb in a Croatian on the right I'm in the downtown Belgrade this is probably before I discovered kafana and rakia okay I'm still standing as you can see and what's incredible this was my first lecture tour to other countries that my former students had organized I've now gone to 30 countries and this was about a year and a half ago in fact my friend Milan on the left organized a tour where we started in Croatia and we ended up all the way here in Bulgaria and I taught in every single country in between being a global Explorer being exposed to as many different situations and circumstances and cultures and tastes and smells and histories as possible gives you an incredible leverage to understand the human condition but to also know what you don't know to know what you have to find out more about and you have such an expansive understanding of what the world is like when you constantly seek it out people can actually feel this Charisma this is me dancing the Georgian dance okay I have learned and I I put this slide because one of my good friends and former students is from the Republic of Georgia I knew he'd be here today I could have put in 29 different dances and and for your eyes I didn't do that I found out two things learning all these dances first I'm a terrible danc answer but second I'm addicted to other people's lives trying to inhabit them trying to learn more about them and my friends when I come back from these visits to these other countries with my former students will actually say sam your voice has changed a little bit it feels warmer and this is something that I think really carries off to others they know when you explore the human situation and you become a lot more charismatic and compelling to them this is a former basketball player of mine if you can't read the caption it talks about how he helped them Harvard University to their best season in school history for the first time ever they played in the NCA tournament which is a very big deal in the United States and one of the only things I've ever been right about in my life was when this kid was 10 years old I knew he'd be in this situation okay he looked like this when I told him so this is Christian as a 10-year-old don't worry I got permission he's not going to be embarrassed he actually wanted me to put the slide up I was expecting everyone to go a but wait at least the girls then I can I can tell them that they did that now I was in Harvard Square eating a very big burrito and I called him up with my mouth full and I told him one day you're going to be at Harvard eating the same burrito before you go play one of your rival schools in basketball and I don't think he really understood me probably because my mouth was full with that very big burrito but he honestly didn't think it would happen and how did I know he wasn't the best basketball player I've ever had in fact he was pretty small at this moment you couldn't really predict this future if you just saw him play basketball shoot his shots and play defense I knew because he played with an unbridled Joy you could see him out on the court and there was complete Focus he was wrapped and it was almost glorious to watch the energy that he had because not only does this joy and passion and wrapped attention leads yourself to a personal Renaissance but it lifts everyone else that's around around it with you to love what you do is extraordinarily charismatic so there's these three things that I've talked about embracing uncertainty having an opposable mind and having joy to me these are the three key elements the Trinity so to speak of Charisma something that we think we can't Define let me take you back to my Latin class when you have these three qualities you construct a confidence and I like to cite my favorite philosopher Little Wayne who says confidence is something you can't wipe off it's part of you you're cloaked in it when you have these three skills and I remember one time I'm not going to point out which one because it's a little bit embarrassing but one of my students before a public speaking competition had a little bit of a wardrobe malfunction and the zipper to his pants was completely down and so before he got up into our Auditorium to deliver this impassioned speech I said to him you know look brother your zipper is down right now you might want to fix that before you go up there and he turned to me he said Mr pikio I know it's down I'm going to make it my style and rock this thing and turned around and gave the best speech he's ever given in his life now one of the reasons I tell this through the lens of my students and my former players is one sometimes they lift me closer to Enlightenment literally but secondly what I've seen traveling the world what I've seen teaching fifth grade Latin what I've seen coaching Middle School basketball players has given me an enormous optimism for the future not just because they've demonstrated these three skills but because they're authentic they're authentic leaders they really know themselves they have this deep introspection before they try to go out and Lead because you need to know the me before you connect with the we and one of the things that's very important when you do Master the me which is a lifelong process and you are ready to connect with the wi and you want to be a leader you need to practice the inconvenience of leadership which is asking people to make sacrifices telling people things they might not want to hear that's being a leader and if you have these three skills you're going to be more prepared to be able to do that and so to answer the quote that I played from Brad Pit AKA Professor trinsky why are the gods jealous of us why is the Divine jealous of us well to to me Charisma leadership the jealousy of the Divine is having the confidence to be human thank you [Applause]