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
[Applause]
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