Learning from some of the best minds in the world

Learning from some of the best minds in the world
I was fortunate to have had the opportunity for the second year in a row to speak at TED.com in Long Beach, California.
It is absolutely amazing what happens when great minds get together to learn, to network, and to look at solutions instead of whining about how bad things are.
I met Larry Page, co founder of Google, one of the most successful companies in the world. They are now struggling with how to deal with the situation of Google in China where the government, as every communist government is known for, tries to prohibit people to read whatever they want to read. Their company has been the target of cyber attacks and they have had to review their security parameters. They are now negotiating with the Chinese government so that this type of behavior stops, or they will leave China. He certainly got a copy of my book.
I wrote about my meeting David Shore the producer of House and even Hugh Laurie himself a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas and how Shore had rejected my book.
Well, not all actors and actresses are the same. Had the chance to talk to Meg Ryan quite a while and she was delighted to get my book. The following day she even went out of her way to tell me that she was reading it.
Will Smith, another great actor was also present and he was very nice, very down to earth, talking to everyone and allowing people to take pictures with him.
Al Gore and Bill Gates were there. Al didn’t speak this time but did sign a few books. He has written one for children so that they start thinking about how to save the environment at an early age.
Bill had a great talk. Bu this time he didn’t speak about what his foundation is doing to eliminate Malaria or hunger. This time he spoke about climate. His speech was called, “Innovating to Zero” and it was described by the web site worldchanging.com as the year’s most important climate speech. You can take a peek at the speech at http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html?awesm=on.ted.com_89Dt&utm_campaign=bill_gates&utm_medium=on.ted.com-twitter&utm_source=direct-on.ted.com&utm_content=ted.com-talkpage.
Very soon it will be made public, maybe by the time you read this article but it doesn’t matter whether you see it first or not, the important thing is to see it.
Met and had a chat with Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner on behavioral economics and he had an interesting concept about the difference between experience and memory. Human beings go through experiences and what they remember later on about the experience is not the real experience but what they are able to recall. Think about it, very interesting.
I met two fascinating fellows; they are very dear to my heart because they are firm believers in the marshmallow concept. In fact, in their schools, they now have over 80 all over the US with over 20,000 students, they distribute a t shirt that says, “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow…Yet”. The schools they run are named, KIPP, Knowledge is power program. Now, pay attention to what I am going to tell you. If our department of education officials simply went to KIPP and copied exactly what they are doing, they would change the future of Puerto Rico. Believe me; we would solve some of our most pressing problems in education. Do a search in Google and type KIPP so that you can see what I am talking about, I don’t have the space to go into it in this column.
The last guy I met that I want to mention was James Carpenter. This guy is simply amazing. Can you imagine one person being responsible for the two most money making movies in the history of film? Titanic and Avatar.
Carpenter told us how he became interested in science fiction. It turns out that he had to ride a school bus for one hour each way every day of his life to go to school and he read science fiction books.
He mentioned four principles that he believes are very important for anyone to be successful, not only in movie making but in anything else you do for a living.
1. Curiosity. You must always be curious. The day you stop being curious, your creativity will stop.

2. Imagination. There is no limit to a human being's imagination and you must continue to nurture it, even though many people will try to squash it.

3. Work as a team. No one can do it alone. Everyone needs to be surrounded by people that are willing to express opinions without fear of being criticized.

4. Failure is an option, fear is not. Those that pursue their dreams and passion will necessarily fail many times, but each failure must become a lesson and a step towards achieving your objective.

He mentioned that one of his secrets is always creating an emotional response to his movies.

Shouldn't we create an emotional response to everything we do in our professional lives?

Interesting question, isn't it?