Creativity Ideas and Innovation and How to Lose 400 Million

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[Applause]

hi now

this is not going to be a motivational

speech because a i’m not a motivational

speaker

and b uh motivational speakers get paid

well and

apparently tedx doesn’t pay now um

so i’m a writer and director and let’s

see how it all came around

every parent dreams to know

the dream of his child

when my parents got to know about my

dreams they were not too excited

so i lived in a society in warsaw which

is in mumbai

we had a big playground one day my

parents overheard me

telling my friend that my biggest dream

is to create

a graveyard in my playground most

specifically a christian graveyard

at multiple levels maybe my parents

found it disturbing and i don’t

necessarily blame them for not sharing

my fascination towards the christian

biblical

you know roman sort of a culture

now um psychiatric treatment in those

days usually meant uh tying the patient

down to a bed and electrocuting him

my parents opted for a simpler method

i still remember that day that night uh

three things came home

one was

a carrying board second was a

not this fancy uh this one more simpler

chessboard

and third was the rubik’s cube now uh

cara manchester’s required partners i

had none so that left a poor little

rubik’s cubes in the hand of a

seven-year-old who has the biggest dream

which is to create his playground into a

graveyard

a christian graveyard now don’t please

don’t look at me like that because uh i

just like the

whole way in which the crosses used to

be stacked with all those little lilies

and flowers stacked i had no idea what

lay been in

a seven-year-old so you can forgive me

next day when my parents were leaving

for office my dad gave me the rubik’s

cube and told me

that only the geniuses of the geniuses

can solve this

loving the odd challenge i started at it

trying to stake my claim to genius

and i tried i tried i tried my level

best and i was just not able to do it

in the evening when my parents came home

they saw the rubik’s cube and it was

solved

absolutely my dad was so very proud of

me he was so happy

my mom was also happy for the christians

in our society but

how was i able to crack it how was i

able to do it

something like this

so i had scraped the stickers stuck it

on a wall and then

sort of put them together in the right

place

that’s not me i was cuter than that

so that’s how i had gotten it right now

you think my dad didn’t realize it of

course he did

but did he call my bluff and snubbed me

for cheating no he didn’t

did he wait in that foolish ambition

that yeah one day i’ll be able to get it

right

no he didn’t because for him i had

already gotten it right and this is

something which he told me

uh years later that i had found an

unconventional solution

to a conventional problem nine out of

ten people would probably have done it

the right way

but i had thought of something

completely different i had thought

not out of the box but out of the cube

is what he said

he thought maybe i have a creative

streak in me maybe i should be a painter

or a writer

one day he saw me paint and that is the

day he decided i should be a writer

my school was changed and i was put in a

different school

we had no idea what was waiting for us

the school was heavily into academics

and by the time i reached my

all-important 10th standard the ssc

board

we as in uh me and three four of my

friends manisha and

archie zoshi we had acquired the

reputation of being the nasty boys of

the school

because we just couldn’t score the marks

and the school just everyone and

everything on the basis of the marks

that you scored

we started feeling that the simplest of

our pranks are being met

out with the harshest of punishments and

then we realized or we thought that way

that maybe the school is trying to make

examples out of us so that they can

scare the more studious students into

studying harder and getting more marks

to say

that see if you don’t study this is

what’s going to happen to you

things sort of started reaching a boil

and then came

a day a very unfortunate day which i

still regret in my life

where we did the unthinkable

in the short races we used to have three

resources in the short rises

five of us got together and vandalized

the entire property in our class

the other students stood aghast and saw

the carnage

we were going bizarre with violence of

course we were suspended

we were about to be rusticated from the

school but then an angelic teacher our

class teacher shantapati stood behind us

and made sure that nothing of that sort

happened

the damage property was repaired

but i know at least one mind one teenage

mind which was damaged for life

ah what do i say it was a it was a very

chaotic

time time in all our lives the students

refused to talk to us the rest of the

students they never used to even sit

next to us and have their defense

the best memories of the kids all when

we have grown up now

are of their school i had none i felt

let down by the very institution

which was supposed to groom me we were

not even able to

or we were not allowed to attend our

send-off function

it was a very very traumatic time in our

life

now when i look back at this trauma

i think it only helped me i mean as much

as i regret the violence

i still think it helped me because as a

15 year old

i discovered so many emotions that i

didn’t even know existed

i mean things like love friendship

bonds of brotherhood betrayal guilt

complexes

insecurity so many things and later on

when i took up

professional writing uh all these

emotions all my exposure to these

emotions

definitely made its way into how i

approached my characters

and how i viewed my stories i mean

childhood trauma growing up issues

almost always

find their way in your art

why am i sharing this with you because

i’m sure

at every given point of time or at some

point of time in your lives

you must have felt not wanted

people must have questioned why are you

even here they must have questioned your

place in the society

they may have made you feel unwanted

you yourself may have questioned why are

you there in this world existing

but that’s exactly why i want to tell

you the fire and the heat that you’re

experiencing at that moment

or at the most weakest point in life is

the fire that is actually making the

dough

fight the fire no problem fight the fire

but live the fire

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and trust the fire because it is soon

going to make something very very

beautiful

and it all came around for me just like

i’m about to tell you

so after sort of just about getting out

of school

and not scoring the marks as predicted

by my school i started writing took up

writing and

was writing small snippets when i was in

college in youth columns in

the times of india and the indian

express and everything

and then i was able to secure admissions

in the prestigious film and television

institute of india

in script writing now you know which is

the first script that i wrote

the first script that i wrote ever in my

life was about this five school kids who

vandalize the school property

and they are about to be sacked and a

teacher comes and takes the

responsibility to improve them

and as a teacher and as a as as a

tribute

to the woman who had stood by us i named

it

teacher probably be making it very soon

after that i went to college

i took up

direction as a career now direction is a

completely different aesthetic from

films

it involves creating worlds it involves

creating the

imaginary imagining alternative

realities now even those

roots i trace back to my school because

when i used to be sitting in the

lectures

and the teacher would be talking which i

obviously couldn’t understand anything i

should stare out of the window

and stare into nothingness creating my

own world which i knew it didn’t exist

but i liked slipping into it

now after i graduated my girlfriend had

just left me

she had gone to puna forever i was

heartbroken i had nowhere to go

i hated this world i hated everything

that was around me

and i knew there were many like me not

because all the girlfriends had gone to

puna but for various reasons

i thought why not do something about it

the year

was 1999. sounds ring

the dot-com boom i thought why not

create a world

which is online but where you can come

into where you can log into

and forget the problems of your real

life where you can get married

you can have affairs you can date

probably have all these three things at

the same time

party have a career excellent sport

perfect an art be a celebrity find true

love

i mean all the things that you don’t do

it in this world you can do all that

i pitched that idea to an investor then

mr got very very excited

after about three four months the

investor got all the more excited so

much so that he kicked me out of the

business

and he took over i was heartbroken

shattered my confidence gone i had

nowhere to go again

did i fight for my idea no did i give up

on my idea yes i did i went back to

doing my mb and then the chronology

followed up the mba and then the script

writing and direction all of that

followed

but the real twist was about to come

the investor didn’t had it and have it

in him to do anything about that idea

he just sat on it now in about

three to four years of that time around

2003

a company in silicon valley called as

linden labs

unveiled their most ambitious project

here it is

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supposed to be my idea i could have done

so much with it

but did i fight for it no i just gave up

a techie friend later told me that

this idea if it would have seen the

light of the day it would have

been valued at a whopping 400 million

dollars

400 million all gone

later on this whole thing of creating

worlds that stayed with me

and i found my true calling which is

direction and that is something i tell

myself every day when i miss those 400

million dollars

so uh i just shared my personal

experience with you

two three of them just to show that

sometimes

celebrating accepting and then

celebrating a bit of oddity in a child

can help you discover his creativity

like my dad did

he did not snub me in fact celebrated my

oddity

going through trauma can almost become a

crash course in you understanding your

own emotions getting in touch with them

and therefore that reflecting in your

creativity

and when it all comes together the most

sure short way of losing 400 million

dollars

is to give up on your idea and not fight

for it

that brings us to today’s core topic

which is creativity ideas

and innovation now what is creativity

creativity is of course what painters

writers actors

sculptures singers

musicians do is that creativity no even

doctors engineers

mbas teachers more so teachers more than

anyone teachers

what businessmen do what firefighters do

what

government officials can do what cops do

all of them

what they can do is be creative what

they should do

is be creative now what is creativity

creativity is knowing

that what you are doing can be done

better and

can be done different and when this

creativity

expressed through a big idea can lead us

to innovation

now why are ideas important i mean i

know this whole rhetoric about uh

you know big idea can change your life

and all that but ideas

do make this world a better place to

live and they are so contrary to facts

facts is what is ideas is what can be

and many times what should be

uh this whole thing about you know the

logical part

the irrational the the the rational part

of it

i don’t completely agree with that i’m

talking about the irrational

i’m talking about the unreasonable i

know i’ve been told that too many times

that you know we’ll only believe if we

see

seeing is believing that’s the gospel

that we live by i’m talking about it the

other way round

first believe and believe it in so much

that the world will be able to see

in concrete and in the finite what you

have imagined

in the infinite and the abstract

and that when you give it to the world

is innovation

now i want you to sort of have your

minds together and come up with some of

the greatest innovations

that you have seen in the last 20 years

anyone

anyone

okay okay

okay hyperloop okay

uh here’s what i’m getting at uh tesla

maybe hyperloop i mean you’re just

speeding it up and that’s

that’s where we come to the real problem

now i googled

and if you see these things most of

these innovations have happened

way back none of them in the last 20

years

none of them why have we suddenly hit a

creative block have we stopped being

creative

have we dumped down i don’t know i call

this the fine paper theorem

now imagine a time when we used to write

letters to people

now if we had the mindset that we have

today

the writers the thinkers of those times

would have made paper and they would

have made better paper and better paper

and they would have come out with the

best of inks the most colorful of things

and the most centered offings

and it would have stopped at that but it

took one mad man

one unreasonable man to say that no i’m

going to talk

to my cousin who’s 10 000 miles away

right now right here

and bingo we have alexander graham bell

giving us the telephone but what has

happened of it today

we are making products which are just

better versions of what we already have

we are not doing enough i mean look at

our coordinates

from a nokia to a iphone that’s our

range of invention

can we do better the last 20 years trust

me we have sucked at everything

but the next 20 years we will not

because you are all 18 minus

and you guys can be the change that i’m

talking about very quickly i’m going to

tell you

two secrets on how to do it um

gadgets now what gadgets do is that they

make impossible for you to be bored

and when you get bored and when you

don’t grab a gadget you start imagining

scenarios

you start thinking of some stupid

realities something which doesn’t exist

that is exactly what happens when

you get bored the internet the gadget

makes it impossible for us to be bored

it makes it impossible for our mind to

be empty i know the empty mind is a

devil’s workshop

but it’s the empty mind where most of

the times the best of the ideas come

so the gadget has to be away please be

bored that is the key

to unleashing your creativity and second

is empathy

i want you to quickly think of one

person that you hate the most in your

life

oh yeah everyone is ready we have our

hit list very ready very soon

now the exercise is you have to think of

reasons to not hate him

mostly it’s a him so that’s why i’m not

saying her but

can you do that now you know what that

means

you are trying to create a world from

that person’s point of view

when you decide to not hit the person

that you’re hating

you’re trying to imagine scenarios as to

why is that person doing what he’s doing

what what is his point of view what is

his world view what are his emotions

and when you are doing that in the

process you are unleashing your

creativity imagining worlds

you imagining scenarios you are

imagining possibilities

i mean sometimes

to be creative is to be more emphatic

or empathetic towards someone

as stupid as it may sound but by being

by understanding what the other person’s

point of view is you can become creative

that to me is the gist of what we are

here today for

empathy and keep you and being bored

once you can do that you can come out

with the two big ideas or the three big

ideas that can change the world

and those ideas better be unreasonable

they better be mad

and they better be not something which

can sell but something which you are

just yearning to tell they better be

stupid

they better be impractical because in

that impracticality

lies the future of the world and since

you are here today

you are able to you have you have

privilege with you privilege comes at

depth

the depth is to give the world something

better than what you did not have when

you came into this world

thank you very much