Maintaining optimism and perseverance in a time of global uncertainty
Class Speech at Closing Ceremonies of Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program 2016
A few days before the end of Singularity University’s 2016 Global Solutions Program (GSP), the class held a small election to select a class speaker for the closing ceremonies. The class speaker’s task was to give a short speech synthesizing our experience living and learning together over the last 10 weeks and share some common hopes we had for the coming years. Like all things at SU, it needed to be condensed into 5 minutes.
“How the hell do you tell the class story in 5 minutes?!” I asked myself.
A few of us foolish overachievers put our names forward for the role and despite much worthier candidates, I was elected class speaker.
The privilege to say a few words on behalf of us all has been one of the biggest honours of my life. Honestly. To represent a group of people I admire so much and who have had such an enormous impact on my life—on my sense of optimism, agency, and future ambitions — was quite overwhelming. I felt tremendous pressure to do them and their stories justice, and share something that reflected what we learned, what we were skeptical about, what we wanted to achieve and our shared gratitude to those that made this experience possible for us.
I didn’t know if I would share this speech publicly, but given all everyone has experienced in 2016, I thought the message was important to share broadly; That enduring and unforgiving experiences transform you into a stronger and more refined individual who can handle the pressure. Maintaining day-to-day perseverance in times of uncertainty was the key to that change.
For many, 2016 was filled with strong and consistent unexpected headwinds making people question if we’re making progress or regressing into some kind of civilizational abyss. Slowly, most have been reduced to side-line spectators of failing institutions, failed diplomacy, the normalisation of proxy wars, of civilian casualties and atrocities, of institutionalized racism, prejudice, and inequality. We witness intolerance, populism and injustice without having access to tools as powerful as these forces to adequately fight back against them. We’ve been reduced to spectators who watch existential threats such as biodiversity loss, species extinction and climate change continue to rise and grow almost unchallenged. We see the normalisation of careerism and self-interest trumping selfless and necessary leadership at every level. And we see social institutions utterly failing to adapt or deal with problems before they arise. With the incoming US presidential leadership and the rise of fear and populism around the world, 2017 doesn’t look like things will get any better.
And what options do everyday people have? To protest, disobey, donate to charities, or “grow up” and accept the state of the world. These are disproportionate measures against the magnitude of the challenges faced and inadequate tools to fight back with. People are compelled to reconcile at the personal level, trading in their optimism for realism, setting aside hopes for how we might co-exist in order to survive in what the current reality is prepared to offer. An enormous delta and trade-off, to some…
So, if this is the state of play, how should someone rational calibrate to this new reality? How should you maintain optimism and inertia in light of the realities you’ve seen and the one’s you’re expecting? Blind optimism doesn’t seem to be a winning recipe…
I don’t have the answer, and don’t have enough space in this post to elaborate on all the thoughts that have run through my mind. What I do know is that the things happening all around are signs of an old world breaking and a new one emerging. The Italian political theorist and sociologist, Antonio Gramsci, said it best, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” His words fortify my convictions and bring me comfort that we are undergoing a meta transition, and within it opportunities are emerging to build and shape things anew. To me, the trajectory is clear, but timing isn’t. The route ahead meanders, is filled with risks and setbacks, and at times, unforgiving. Anything that’s worthy of accomplishing in life has a similar pathway. Some are waking up with similar realizations and shifting their energy, time and resources towards building the new. Others are stuck in the present, paralyzed by pessimism, fear, and self-interest. I choose to invest in progress and bet on other unreasonable people — including my classmates — to continue pushing boundaries unapologetically. Certain technologies may also soon empower the average person to be more than a side-lined spectator.
So I remain rationally hopeful and I share the speech below as a reminder to myself, my classmates, and to anyone who shares this worldview, to carry on building the things that prove alternatives are possible and we are better than what we’ve portrayed so far.
Here is the link to the speech, and below that is the transcript.
Transcript of Speech
To the faculty, Peter, Ray, Rob Nail, and Nick Haan, as you’ve heard and as we’ll never fully express, thank you for creating SU and giving us your support throughout this experience. The GSP experience has changed our lives.
Introduction
Five minutes.
The most important things at Singularity happen in 5 minute chunks. Some wrote their applications in 5 minutes. Those same applications were reviewed and tossed in bins in 5 minutes by the admissions team. We celebrated Sourav’s birthdays almost every 5 minutes. We were forced to condense our convictions and wildest ideas into 5 minute pitches, and now I have to deliver a meaningful message about the 78 most impressive people I’ve ever met, in under 5 minutes.
Class characteristics
We meet here at the most interesting time of our lives, each at a particular inflection point. We’re from 41 countries, multiple dual nationalities and diverse professional backgrounds. We’re a group of globally connected entrepreneurs and risk takers, bound together under one guiding goal — to positively impact a billion lives. This is you.
In our first days, I remember hearing how overwhelmed some of you felt by the collection of talent. One of my classmates, when introducing herself, said “I’m only a doctor…” as if it wasn’t enough.
You have audacious, unapologetic courage. You built a self-driving car when you were 15. Some of you left your partners and kids back home to pursue your calling. Others brought them with you in your belly’s and are expecting very soon!
Some of you became entrepreneurs very early, selling art and building small businesses to help your families escape the dehumanizing impacts of poverty. Some were brave enough to go knocking on doors to ask for a chance to access education even when you couldn’t afford it, knowing it was your only route upwards. Others came to it later, building impressive ventures and mentoring others like you so they don’t have to take the same drastic measures you did.
Week after week, hearing all your stories, you demonstrated to me that circumstance was not destiny and you could learn and grow to overcome any barrier. You beat cancer, and you plan on beating other life threatening diseases that stand in the way of you to shape the future of your countries.
The GSP experience & our metamorphosis
In the first days, my wife Aubrey asked, “What’s it like being there?”
Only one response came to mind:
“Love, It’s like being at Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Mutants. You’re surrounded by weirdos, we’re all alike, you’re totally accepted from day one, and are trained to use your time, skills, and other talents to improve the state of the world.”
You have gone through life not asking permission to pursue ideas, convictions, and ventures you care about. You just leap.
Two to three weeks into the program we morphed from individuals with these big stories and personal agendas into a community and central nervous system. Without words, we intuitively knew how the group was feeling, and if any one person needed some support.
We showed up for one another. We helped one another overcome personal loss and grief. And when one of us beamed in from halfway around the world, we embraced them as if they were right here with us.
With all your talents, what do you plan to do?
Some are building ventures to mitigate the impacts of technological unemployment, some are building SkyHub, others medicated dildo’s, and spectrometers measuring the texture and colour of your sh*t, and some are even, building tools that will change global governance. You want to change the world, one wild moonshot at a time.
You’ve also shown a strange bond to animals — whether its sequencing the cat genome — “meow” — to advance discoveries in human health, or preparing to send the first ever Llama into space. This group has shown that nothing is impossible.
Our future & the group’s resemblance to an old Iranian poem
But what about our future? A lot of people see the mission we signed up for — impacting the lives of a billion people in 10 years — as impossible? Will we succeed…?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that, to me, this group resembles the tale told by an important poem [the Conference of the Birds, by Farid ud-Din Attar] from my home country, Iran, a story of the soul’s search for truth.
The poem begins where all the birds of the world gather together to seek enlightenment. Each bird has a special significance, and a corresponding fault resembling us humans. The wisest bird of them all suggest they go and search for the great Phoenix, the King of Birds, who might teach them how to achieve enlightenment.
The birds fly together, crossing seven peaks and valleys searching for the Phoenix, each peak and valley representing what an individual must go through to understand the true nature of him/herself and God [based on Sufi philosophy].
One by one, birds drop out of the journey. In the end, only a few birds were left.
When the group of birds finally reach the kingdom of the Phoenix, all they find is a lake, and in that lake they see only their own reflection.
What they find is that they themselves, through the journey, have collectively transformed into the Phoenix.
Will we do the impossible? I don’t know, but this experience has changed us enough to not be afraid to try. We have the skills and opportunity to act, the only question is will we? I fully believe we will.
End of speech.
Choosing the poem and its link to my past
When I younger, maybe 8 or 9, I attended Saturday morning Farsi classes in Vancouver, where I learned to read and write, recite the national anthem, and learned about old poems, plays and folk stories.
One of the poems and plays that had been etched into my mind since this time was The Conference of the Birds. The administrators at the Farsi school decided to organise a play and since I was a troublemaker, they convinced my parents that I should be the narrator, that it would be good for my development.
Despite this form of cruel and unusual punishment, I accepted and set out on the task of memorizing nearly 18 pages of traditional Farsi prose to recite back to a pretty large audience. I spent almost every evening over an entire summer reading and memorizing words I didn’t even understand, adjusting the intonation and accent, stuffing the paragraphs into my short term memory.
To everyone’s surprise, especially my own, I learned them all. As soon as the play was over, all the words and paragraphs I had memorized vanished into oblivion. Today, I struggle to remember any detail about the play.
However, what did stay with me was the symbolism and message of the play, which to me was perfectly fitting to how transformational an experience we had had while at SU, especially what laid ahead for each of us as individuals — to continue pushing boundaries and continue being unreasonable about changing the state of the broken world.
