TEDxTucson George Land The Failure Of Success

[Music] what I want to do in the little time we have tonight is to share with you something an idea uh some knowledge that

has been the most important thing in my entire life and an idea that has me totally frustrated and Incredibly

optimistic at the same time about the future so to get started what I would like to do is is to uh this is going to be a short presentation don't get

[Laughter] scared but let's start out with the last two million years and what I've done to make that a little easier to grasp in

the time we have is to condense that two million years into one calendar year just to give us some perspective about where we're going so we're going to take

that two million years and look at it as one C calendar year and I'll start at the beginning about 2 million years ago

give or take a million the first humans took steps became bipedal started to move around in a different way and began

the human Journey January 1 the Stone Age we spent quite a bit of time hunting and Gathering and it was not until November the

19th that we discovered fire that we could control heat our homes cook our food protect us from

predators but by December the 29th agriculture had been invented and all of a sudden cities emerged and people living together and sharing and

collaborating that was a very incredible invention of people agriculture on December 29th of that calendar year on

December the 31st was Rome Greece the Advent of the idea of Science of replicatable knowledge that somebody could

investigate something that nature did understand it and then take that knowledge and put it to human

use big idea because we at that point could move to 11:05 because now people started to gather together and apply those ideas in

a mass way way and uh they could replicate the results of these ideas and a very important part of the science idea itself is to find something and

then be able to repeat it in a very predictable way that was critical and of course we had to since we're building a lot of these factories we had to build

factories for human beings too called schools so we could manufacture people that could work well in the factories and that was

extraordinary and important idea because starting at 11:05 in the last few

minutes all hell broke loose and we have moved in such a a fantastic way during that period in those last few minutes

think about the just a hundred years ago most people living in America lived in poverty very few people had indoor plumbing very few people had

electricity in the last 100 years in the last few minutes of that calendar year it's incredible what has happened during

this period and that has produced so much progress that we have now turned success into failure now that that knowledge has

spread itself all over the world and people are pushing up against each other a little bit in the sense that a third world country can do just

as well producing something as we can and that produces a problem and we're we're now facing a period in history where no

institution is not facing profound turbulent unpredictable change and that's everywhere in the world so

what do we do because we have all these old answers but they don't seem to be working the way they used to well few years ago about 60 of the leaders in

industry in America got together and started to study to say okay with this new kind of world that we have with the internet with all the satellite

communication with telepan there are many more telephones in the world than there are people at this point uh what does America do and I

won't try to go through the whole study but they the result was they said that there's only one possibility for us to succeed As Americans to be competitive

and that is to innovate and to innovate continuously and that's really what I want to share because we have been looking at what it is that's behind that

process of innovation creative thinking what we can do with our brains what is that the possibilities of that resource that we all have in these heads of

ours uh the thing that changed everything for us in trying to understand creativity is that somebody from NASA came to us the

deputy director and said look we have a lot of people working for us we need some way to select the people that are the most creative so they can go on the

teams that are facing the toughest problems can you give us a some kind of an instrument a test or something that we can give to find those people uh we didn't have such a thing but we

developed it uh we applied it and it was very predictive it worked really well but the idea emerged that gee uh we still don't know where creativity comes

from is it that some people are born with it and others not or is it learned does it come from our experience in life and the idea came up this this test is

so simple why don't we give it to some children and see how they do so we did we we've created a sample of the American population with 1,600 children

and started it out when they were about 5 years old now here's a question I want to ask you this is a test for the

ability to look at a problem and come up with new different and innovative ideas what percentage of those 5-year-olds

fell into what you might call the genius category of imagination 809 wow this is a great audience there are some audiences that don't

guess quite that high 98% we were pretty shocked some people like you would probably not be shocked you Pro I suspect you've been

5-year-olds so there you are but you know the information was so astonishing we decided to turn that into a longitudinal study go back 5 years

later and see how they doing so we went back they're now 10 what would you guess somebody came on very close

30% we decided to extend it for five more years they're now 15 well we have some pessimists out there it was all the way up to 12 so you

can see something of a trend here right that that study ended because so many people got depressed Mo most of the testing was done by teachers and they just didn't want to do

it again but we have tested a lot of adults and what would you guess you're

close 2% now the great historian oswal uh spingler uh once said in all of his years of studying history he had

concluded it only takes 2% of a population to create the basic idea ideas and that everybody else applies them and it turned out gee he was pretty

close to right look folks if we're going to enter the future with hope that's not going to work we have to do something about it

and what we found with those children was the thing that I want to try to share with you and hope that you walk out of here tonight knowing why that happened and what you can do about it

because you have the possibility of being in that 98% tomorrow and I'm serious about that what we found from the studies with children and from

looking at the way brains work we can actually do that there are two kinds of thinking that occur in the brain and they use different parts of the brain and it's a

totally different Paradigm in the sense of how we form something in our minds one is called Divergent that's imagination that's generating new possibilities and the others called convergent and that's where you're

making a judgement you're making a decision you're testing something you're criticizing you're evaluating so one is like an accelerator and the other one is like the break we

found that what happens to these children as we educate them is we teach them to do both kinds of thinking at the same time so when somebody asks you to come

up with new ideas as you come up with them what we have mostly learned in school is to start looking at them immediately and trying to say oh well

you can hear the stuff that goes on we've done that before we've never done that that's crazy that'll cost too much all of that when you actually look at what's happening inside the brain you

find that neurons are fighting each other and actually diminishing the power of the brain because we're constantly

judging criticizing Etc this is not going to work folks you need to find the 5-year-old and you can that capability

never goes away that part of the brain that produces this wonderful imagination is something you exercise every day when you're

dreaming so the great designer said you know I'm going to put that mechanism so they exercise it every day in case they ever need an idea you've got that capability

absolutely and you'll move from the normal brain which is that colored area shows normal thinking to a brain that is very active everywhere particularly in

the front so it gets worse because if we're operating under fear we're using even a smaller part of the brain and as we

begin to use logic we use more but we begin to use creative thinking and the Brain lights up it's just extraordinary what happens and nature does this as well we found that Evolution works that

way producing many Alternatives then through natural selection selecting the best ones but it's always creating a lot of possibilities before it starts

selecting so the the question we face for the future is are we going to be in a culture that depends on right answers that are repeatable that are always

predictable or are we going to have a culture where whatever it is we're thinking about a new recipe or a spaceship are there many possibilities

can we create a new future that solves the new problems that that we have never seen before

so Einstein was right and your issue is to go beyond the first step that we took and take the First Leap and turn

your five-year-old on to tap into that imagination that every one of you has that can make the future extraordinarily brighter for everybody

tomorrow do an exercise pick up a table Fork turn your 5-year-old on and come up with 25 or 30 ideas on how to improve

let that 5-year-old figure out ideas on how to improve that table Fork you can begin that exercise and like anything else you can start exercising that part

of the brain and turn yourself into a great innovator of the wonderful future we can have if we start doing this thank you

[Applause]