Transcript

TEDxSantaMonica - TEDxChange - John Kobara - Educating our children

my mother uh taught me a japanese phrase for occasions like this okagasama hokkaido which means because of you but i'm really here because of you and cause kazura i was at that president clinton event and he was uh he was wonderful i want to talk to you a little bit about the nexus between passion talent ideas and need and i have had tremendous opportunities over my life to be at those that different collision of things and it has taught me that amazing things can happen and really it's about ted i mean that's really the inspiration we get from other people but i've been in three startups in three different decades so in 1980 i was invited by a guy named mark nathanson who wrote his master's thesis on the future of cable television and he predicted uh that there would be hundreds of channels before mtv and espn it changed the way we viewed entertainment and then in the 90s i had a guy named alan arkatov who said that we're going to do our education online and he was heavily criticized we started a company called onlinelearning.net and that became a part of walden university if you've heard of that and now today more people take courses online than they do face to face and in this last decade i was invited by nero coe's law up in northern california to help them with their ck-12 foundation which is for free virtual flexible customizable textbooks for the k-12 market worldwide and is going to change the way we educate our kids and what i've seen is when those things happen amazing things happen but sometimes even though we all want to help each other and we all have dreams and expectations about making a difference we don't make those connections despite the mdg goals and the daunting tasks we have before us as a community we need to make those connections we need to be the best we can be so i want to talk to you a little bit about perspective maybe technology perspective is everything right how we look at things our opportunities how we look at ourselves how we see ourselves just today in santa monica and when we see things we see things different signs we assign them a particular meaning this sign we think is maybe german it's a swastika and we think that's a german word and then we turn it around we find out that there's not german it's a sanskrit word that's from 3 000 years ago that needs good fortune and success but somebody else changed that meaning for us but the way we look at things is very important and how we look at our opportunities and our challenges ahead of us so one of the things is i get a chance to be on college campuses i've been probably on 90 college campuses i talked to young people i remember when we were younger or some of you were younger but when we were younger and and the world was ahead of us and we had nothing before us made everything before us and that perspective is really critical in our lives and one of the things i learned over at ucla is they do the study the freshman survey you've probably heard 46 years now they've interviewed 300 000 freshmen from two year four-year public private institutions every state and they ask them what do you want you're 18 years old you're 19 years old doesn't get any better than that and they tell us they say look i want to be an expert in my field i want to raise a family i want to be financially well off that's what it's been for 46 years pretty much like this but then they did a survey of 10 years later so you're 29 and 30. and now how do you view it the same 300 000 people they interviewed and he said well i don't want to raise a family i haven't done that yet i want to get around to that the second thing was i need to develop a philosophy of life i have an education 10 years have gone by and i don't know what i'm doing and i got to figure it out and then i want to be an expert in my field i haven't done that either before was help others in difficulty and what's interesting is when i'm on these campuses i pick on people young people because they're fun to pick on and they're trying to figure out their lives and i would say i said to a young man the other day on campus i was in chicago and i said what do you want to do and you know he gets up and he goes so um i uh i want to work with people i'm a people person but we've heard that one before and we've said it even and i don't know what the alternative is you know like we're gonna be a zookeeper i mean i don't get it we're gonna work with people okay we're on earth and human beings but we gotta be a little bit more specific about what we want because really what we're trying to do is figure out the connections so what i found in my travels and my journeys and talking to thousands of people is that there are a lot of career strategies and i'm going to tell you the ones that are popular and ineffective these are the ones that people like but they don't work i don't know why they gravitate to these i'm very lucky very lucky person good things happen to me or there's a predestiny for me i just haven't found it yet or you know what we live in a meritocracy and if i just put my head down and work hard i will be rewarded even though i'm below the radar screen or the career dividing ride you know i just went to the set conference and i heard the future is this and therefore my whole career we based on that publisher's clearinghouse i applied for everything everything's interesting to me i love all opportunities i don't care really it doesn't really matter to me the federal witness relocation program i'm under an assumed identity because everybody's told me what i'm good at and what i'm not good at my parents have told me my spouse has told me my employers so i'm just going to take that identity because i really don't have one and of course the worst strategy is wait and see you know this just is not a good time to make a change you know the kids are just back in school and then well you know then the holidays and then there's my birthday and then the kids are going back and you know there's never a good time to make a change louie thomas said one of my favorite people said i always wanted to be somebody but i realized i should have been more specific we've got to be a little specific you know i wouldn't be talking about these things and we're going to develop a philosophy of life so one of the things is you know when we're talking about uh the strategies that work what i've discovered are these what i call the power ps these are things that are essential for your career strategy right you can move forward i mean you have to have a positive perspective the negative just brings you down i don't mean to be pollyanna's i mean to see the opportunities ahead because they are extraordinary even though those are challenging times you have to have goals you have to set some milestones at least some benchmarks to measure yourself and you have to interlace a sense of passion into your life and we'll talk a little bit about that but we also want to see you get through the things that you're you have weaknesses and shortcomings on things that you can address and do it quickly because you don't have a lot of time for it that says tom peters used to say get fast failures and then you've got to adopt professional development continuous education it's not about getting another degree it's about learning all the time and we all are committed to learning but really constantly we have to learn and there is no other time but now there's only a future now and a past now and it's right now that we're talking about and think about we are lucky to just be sitting here and thinking about our futures and taking a pause from our busy lives out of the rushing river alive and saying hey what do i want to do and what should we do what should i do on the mdg goals we got to take advantage of these time and then we got to push ourselves out of bounds we got to get out of our comfort zones and change our routines and our little habits and play out of bounds i learned this phrase from michael phelps who invented positron emission tomography the pet scan and he said in the brain john when they use different synapses they are playing out of bounds because they are not on their neural pathways meaning you're not doing what you think you want to do you are doing something different you have to think about it playing out of bounds is absolutely critical and what i've learned is there are three important lessons on connecting and making the connections between passion and talent and opportunity three connections that you have to make the first one is you have to connect with yourself we talk about so many different issues and causes and ideas and really it's about what do you want and really what i say is you got to find yourself by losing yourself you have to discover who you are by thinking about the passions that you have within you what you want and what you want to be what are your goals right what do you have in mind for your legacy why don't we live our legacy instead of planning to leave one yeah so one of the things that's really important is if you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything and one of the things we need to have in our lives is what our cause and issue and things that resonate with us that make us stronger right and that define who we are so we got to connect with ourselves first that's the primary connection so much time is wasted so much talent his way so only a few of us will realize our potential but regrettably many of us will never make the connection and so one of the things that really is important is making that connection papa kasala said it takes courage for you to listen to your goodness and act on it one of the things we have to do is listen to our heart our heart speaks to us in all kinds of ways and all the practicality and rationality that we have to enter and sometimes it screams at us and sometimes it just whispers but we have to listen to our heart because your path is going to be defined by your heart so we can talk about the millennium goals mgg as it's being called maybe there's something on here that really resonates with you maybe a couple of these really interest you or maybe there's a new list of issues and then you take some of those and you start to drill down and make it personal and local and maybe it's in africa and maybe it's two blocks from you and you begin to research it and think about it and maybe if you're really inclined you start to moonlight or volunteer and do some things with these organizations you meet the people that are organizing benefiting from it and needing it and what will happen is you will be moved because that's where passion starts is from the people the people in need the people doing it and once that happens your heart beats a little faster your mind begins to throw and then you start saying that's what i care about and that's what's going to give me meaning in my life so we can look at that list but the first thing is we're going to connect with ourselves we're going to find ourselves by losing ourselves in this pursuit of passion but second we're going to connect with others because we can't do it alone we're in this room together we can't be isolated from one another we have to actually connect and there's this great african bantu word ubuntu the philosophy of mentor and for me it's an undefinable word but it's a word that means interconnectedness or common destiny the fact that what our connection to one another actually improves us it defines us that by the fact that we know each other we're getting better because we're connected and the notion is that because you can't do it alone because isolation is our enemy that we have to think about ways of connecting and one of the things is the more diverse our connections i don't just mean ethnically i mean points of view and perspective the diversity of our connections our social network are actually very important to our life expectancy and so one of the things is the american medical association has done a study of 3 000 people up in northern california it's been going on for many years and i found that people with more diverse networks live longer fewer surgeries and fewer respiratory illnesses so you have to make the connection how do we make connections when we're so busy we don't even know who we live next door to anyone we don't know who we work with it's amazing who you know who you don't know you don't even know who you're sitting next to probably and my life has been changed by who i've been seeing next so we have to engage others in conversations we have to connect we actually have to talk to people and we have to treat everyone as you're equal don't make any assumptions about people's title or classification in life about what influence they can have in your lives and we have to give first without an expectation we have to contribute and make a commitment to the community that we're a part of and we have to lead with what we care about because we leave with what we care about we will connect to other people so the third thing we have to do we have to connect with ourselves we have to connect with others but we also have to connect through mentoring we have to help each other learn teach each other what we've learned because that will make our community much better by the sharing of knowledge and the sharing of passion so one of the things is that you have to learn is we have to get out of the rut and into the groove we have to develop a philosophy of life and we have to think about these three connections connecting with ourselves to understand our greatness and what we are meant to do we have to connect with others to be inspired just like we are in ted but through other people we see the inspiration and we have to share that to strengthen the connection and the sense of community because your destiny is tied to us and our destiny is tied to you i wish you a life of ubuntu i hope that all of you begin to pursue who you are and i really appreciate what you're doing and what you will do for all of us okay you