TEDxToronto Talk

I gave a talk at TEDxToronto this year. Below is the manuscript. [Update: the video is now online and linked to above.]

Thank you to TEDxToronto for the opportunity to speak. I learned a lot about myself in the process.

We’ve all got a story we like to tell. Myself included so, here goes…

As a kid, I sang in a pretty decent choir while touring the world performing for popes and presidents. But upon turning teenager, I traded it all in for a chance at being cool — this meant cigarettes, skateboards, petty crime — you can fill in the rest.

I failed miserably at this particular brand of cool and proceeded to become target 1-A for bullies until finally, I found a path to relevance by stumbling into a role with nearly universal high-school importance; selling drugs.

As I crossed into adulthood, that decision nearly cost me everything in my life, but as it happened, I was given a second chance by a woman who hasn’t seen me in nearly 14 years, and who happens to be sitting in the first few rows here today… (to her) Your Honour.

That’s how my story begins. I’m sure you tell yours just as well. We’re unbelievably skilled at telling our own story; the progression, the adversity, always managing to convey a sense of triumph in the present moment, and often a hopefulness, sometimes even confidence, in what the future has in store for us.

We’re like these master storytellers and we are our favourite story.

But our stories are going to kill us.

Already I can tell you they limit us, hold us down and constrain us — sometimes they even suffocate us.

To their credit though, at least they’re consistent. They all follow the same narrative pattern: the hero’s journey.

It’s just that the hero’s journey we see played out on the big screen teaches us that change happens inside the hero while the world around them stays constant — essentially waiting for the hero to be reborn.

And I can’t help but think… How beautiful would it be if the world worked that way? If it waited for us to come around on our own time, fully embrace our new selves, and then step back into the picture with both feet firmly planted on the ground.

But that’s not at all how it happens!

Instead, while we’re out legalizing same-sex marriage in one moment, the very idea of a binary gender system, or a two spouse limit, is being challenged in the next. I can assure you that what we call “gay marriage” today, is going to seem traditional to us a few short years from now.

That’s the world we live in.

We simply don’t get to experience change in ourselves as this beautiful arc that moves at a pace we’re comfortable with.

Change comes quickly and without pause.

And yet, studies show that our willingness to change decreases as we age. It’s built right into our expectations of people at different stages of life. We expect our friends to understand concepts like “white privilege,” but are satisfied if our parents can just avoid stereotypes. And our grandparents? I mean, we hope for the best, but let’s face it, we often resign ourselves to the idea that sometimes; old dog, new tricks.

But that’s a card we won’t get to play much longer.

You see, unlike my dear grandmother, who has managed to get through life without ever pumping her own gas or using a cell phone, my soon-to-be 14-year old goddaughter, Jessica, will grow up with an incredible amount of technological change happening everywhere around her. And, unlike our willingness to change, which decreases linearly, technology’s rate of change is exponential.

In fact, the Law of Accelerating Returns is quick to point out that the amount of change we saw in the whole of the 20th century, was effectively repeated during the first 14 years of Jessica’s life.

And that same amount of change that just took us 14 years to achieve, will take only 7 from today. By 2040, when Jessica is 38 years old and starting to consider children of her own, a 20th century worth of progress will be happening multiple times per year.

Think about that. What wisdom can we possibly impart to a young person about living in a world we can’t even fathom?

That’s the nature of an exponential curve — it takes a while for it to reveal itself, but once it does, almost nothing stays the same.

And while we mostly like to talk about drones and self-driving cars — historians believe it’s the speed with which technology brings about new ideas, that force changes in our behaviour, that we vastly underestimate when predicting the future. We’re not only slow to predict them — we’re slow to adapt.

Because our stories weigh us down.

Even the most well-intentioned ones.

I’ll give you an example; How many of us can recall being nudged in the direction of a good career when we were young; safe bets like law, medicine, or accounting. These were the careers to aspire to, we were told.

They’re also among the ones at top of the chopping block when it comes to automation. Turns out machines don’t need 8 years of school to memorize facts and patterns.

But are we seriously going to start teaching today’s middle schoolers that they might want to avoid these at-risk jobs? Or are we still wrapped in the warmth of a story we’ve been writing for decades; that degrees always mean better jobs. Better jobs equal better pay. Better pay leads to better possessions. And better possessions means greater security.

Except how much security can there be if we already spend 2/3 of our income on a single-family home because that’s our version of a storybook ending?

The reality is that the further we are into our story, the less likely we are to rewrite it. So we stick to the script.

[Long Pause]

Now at this point, I think I need to go on record and say that I actually love stories. Really. But as we start to peer over the horizon, I think it’s hard not to notice that what’s needed here is something lighter. Something easier to move. Something that can keep up.

Like an idea.

What would that look like, do you think — the idea of me?

At first, granted, as far as psychological constructs go, they seem strikingly similar — almost like semantics even. And so I really want to make sure you’re all with me here before I go any further down this rabbit hole.

When I talk about a story, I’m talking about something you write once.

But the idea of you is something you rewrite every day. It’s untying ourselves from these goals we set way out there, that assume the world looks the same in the future, as it does now.

It’s a letting go of what “should be” for what “is”.

So with that in mind, I’d like to tell you about the most recent time I had to rewrite my own story.

It would have been just over two years ago now, after about a decade in the industry (at least for me), that my partners and I were able to achieve something most entrepreneurs — especially in tech — consider a benchmark of success. We sold our company — and not just to anyone — to the next great chapter in Canadian technology history. A company who’s IPO you might have followed this year.

I gotta tell ya, it was a pretty good story. I don’t think I could have written a better script.

And sure enough… so the story goes… six months later I was let go. Actually, you know what. We’re all friends here… six months later, I was fired.

After a decade of writing my story as a tech entrepreneur, I was fired by the top act in town. It was a pretty big fall.

While it wasn’t immediately obvious, there was something beautiful about having the rug pulled out from under me that day; like a lightness that came from realizing I didn’t actually vanish by virtue of losing my story.

That there, in the empty space, was an idea of who I might be next.

To be fair, there was also an unsettling difference to it. The switch from story to idea really challenged my sovereignty. My story had one author — with veto power and final say on the interpretation of all events in my life.

When it’s a story, that’s kind of how it works — we get to choose how we perceive those events — and it’s usually in a way that best suits us — that leaves the story as much in tact as possible. Bullied as a kid? You pick the reason. Got let go? Ultimately, you’ll decide why that was.

Stories force us into these either-or choices. Either it fits the story we have of ourselves, or it doesn’t. But the idea of me isn’t built on “either-or.” It’s built on “And”. Instead of getting caught up with whether we’re a success or a failure, whether we’re right or we’re wrong — “And” reminds us that both are true.

It allows us to give birth to something new by holding the tension between two choices that already exist, so that a third can emerge.

And this isn’t just true for the idea of me — it’s true of all ideas. When you start to tune into it, you can see ideas being added to everywhere.

Gender. Privacy. Mental Health. Democracy. Take any one of these ideas and ask yourself whether you remember a time when they were simpler. I know, I do. When I was growing up, gender used to mean boy or girl. If you go back just a few years, mental health used to only imply that there was something wrong with you.

But then these ideas got bigger. We keep adding to them. They expanded.

Maybe the most prescient example from the past year is racism. It’s an idea going through an expansion.

You see, racism started as a struggle for equal rights. But as we know, the achievement of equal rights didn’t dispel the idea of racism. It just expanded the conversation to include all of racism’s less obvious expressions.

Fast forward and when we talk about racism today, we talk about an idea that runs many layers deep. We talk about that which we can’t always point to, or that’s not necessarily propagated by any one person, or group. But it’s there. It’s there in privilege, in protection, and in access. We talk about racism as being systemic — a system we’re all a part of, but that only a fraction of us benefit from.

This is how an idea gets bigger with time.

And if, in turn, you choose to see yourself as an idea, then hearing you might be the beneficiary of a still-racist system is not a threat — it’s a chance to expand your own idea. To add a new perspective.

But if you’re a story, you’re going to find yourself at an either-or impasse; where either you protect the part of the script that says you’re not racist, or you’ll have a lot of rewriting to do.

Our stories are how we’ve come to construct identity. And we’re terrified to lose track of who we are.

But I gotta tell you… I think this is where we’re getting it terribly wrong.

When we build our identity on a story, it becomes a “once and for all” discovery of who we are. We even talk about people before and after this elusive moment where they “found themselves”.

But when we believe ourselves to be an idea, identity becomes a moving target — a never-ending discovery. Not just because the idea of you is always evolving, but because so too are the ideas all around you. Every moment becomes this wonderful chance to re-calibrate; to re-visit your relationship with another idea.

It’s an acknowledgement that, “I’m not racist” is a temporary state. Just like, “I’m a capitalist” or “I’m a feminist” or even, “I’m straight.” This is the practice. This is growth. This is what growth is!

So rather than fearing the fast-paced future that’s hiding in plain view, why not choose to see it as the force bringing us into alignment with the rest of life? Everywhere we look, our world is wired for growth, for expansion. From our words and concepts, to the neuroplasticity of our brain. From the evolution of our species, to the universe at large.

When it’s change out there, we feel an excitement. A hope that tomorrow will be bigger, and more inclusive, and more full. We chase after it with our science, and our art, and our debates.

We demand change when it’s out there! We see the possibility for change everywhere!

Everywhere except in the way we talk about ourselves. Only there do we write the story once and expect the future to obey.

The good news for us, is that it never does.

Whether an arrest or getting fired — divorce, disease, or the death of a loved one — maybe a failure of some kind. We’ve all seen our stories interrupted. We don’t write those tragic bits into the original script. They’re wrenches thrown our way, that force us to rewrite — again and again and again.

And I think that’s what the “idea of me” needs to be. A commitment to that rewriting — every day — not because we have to, because we want to. Because we love to create, and it’s infinitely easier to do so without a story to drag around.

Bob Dylan knew this when he famously said, tongue-in-cheek, “Do not create anything… [Because] it will not change.” Implying, of course, that the world might love what you make, but you’ll be different by the time they do. As an artist, he refused to get married to his own mythology, the story of Dylan the folk singer and voice of protest.

Steve Jobs knew this when he continuously cannibalized Apple’s product lines. He knew that falling in love with the story that Apple was the best at computers, or phones, or tablets — was effectively a death sentence in that it meant the end was right around the corner. He knew creating was an act of letting go.

And now, after so many rewrites, and though still sometimes kicking and screaming — I’m beginning to see this for myself. And it’s something I think we should all embrace.

Because creating isn’t reserved for artists and entrepreneurs. It’s the natural state in all of us.

All technology ever does, is put the power to create squarely in our hands.

Because it knows something about us we’re still not ready to admit. That more than being our favourite story, we’d rather be our greatest creation…

An idea waiting to happen.