Confidence, Opportunity, & Capacity Will Shape an Impactful Life: David Baker at TEDxNashville

when I'm rated after I speak I speak about 35 times a year I just wanted to tell you in advance well if you don't have time to fill out those forms I'll do it for you just give them to me but I usually get a four point one on delivery and a five point zero on content this is not on a ten point scale by the way it's a five point scale so so what I do is I just I buy a shirt and wear ostrich boots to distract you from my delivery and help you concentrate on the content I when I look at when I look at all the things I'm doing this year this is something I've been looking forward to for a long time I not just because I live in Nashville but because you're not here you didn't pay to come to a seminar to learn specific content it's this is something this is a message that I have chosen to give to you and my goal as you saw in the title is to is to make it so that you have a more impactful life that's my goal and really I would be satisfied if 10 years from now I found that just 10 of you were influenced by this but I at the end of this I want you to either agree or disagree I don't want any middle ground and if you disagree I don't want it to be because I have not been clear all right now all of these pictures are mine that's the one advantage of you know putting your own presentation together even if the pictures don't fit you can just throw them in and and and you could you'll find there's a connection in some cases but in some cases there's not and I'll try to point that out for you so you know what I'm saying thank you for your time I just want to say that before I get into this this is such a precious opportunity and I feel such such a burden too to use your time wisely you are your time is more value than money and thank you for coming and thank you for inviting me to speak here I'm very grateful for it so many of you are hovering over life the landing pad says life and you're hovering over it moving around and you haven't really landed yet you're playing around or you're you're experimenting with things or even if that's not you you know when you go to a family reunion there's always the the uncle who's who's on to this new exciting thing and may even want you to invest in it and this is somebody who's been excited perennial II there's like you know 15 times they have landed on the right job we all know somebody like that if you if you're that kind of person you don't realize it you're not self-aware probably the person next to you does know that and I would appreciate it if you would just elbow the person next to you if you think they fit that I know a few of you in the audience that we're that would fit you're hovering above life looking for a place to land and it isn't just somebody who never accomplishes anything it's also people like me who try to accomplish too much I'm 53 I got home from Los Angeles late at night a few months ago and I was in a very reflective mood my wife was already in bed it was about 11:30 I'm sitting in my office which is in my home it's dark my dog's dying of cancer this is starting to sound like a country song and my my dog's dying of cancer I'm an incredible pain I had just gone to the doctor and asked if it would help I'd be fine if they just took my left arm off really was fine with that I just disappointed a client and I'm and I'm thinking to myself what is my life what what difference am I going to make in the world have you asked yourself that question what difference are you going to make in this world I mean you may be you may be counting on doing amazing things was work and think that's going to change the world but you know the truth is that the people that work for you they'll remember you 20 years from now and everything about your management style nobody's going to remember what you did for work 20 years from now and as I looked over my goals in life I realized I had way too many of them way too many of them and as I get older I knock the goals that are at the edges of my life off and I start digging deeper with the ones that are very important to me I can't answer what that is for you but I can say that you have too many goals I have a word document on my computer that's titled when I grow up and it's it's I looked at it before I came up here and there's 18 things on it that I would love to have been career choices and I'll never get to them unless there is you know reincarnation I don't know I'm I'm hoping that there is I know which one I would choose next we have we have way too many goals and because of that we're spread so thin and really don't accomplish a whole lot so as you think about this lack of folks does lack of focus that you have where do you think it comes from because I find that it's a little bit unique to developed nations I've worked in 42 countries and it's more prevalent in developed nations how did we become Restless eager opportunity seekers with life on a bow wave ahead of the ship but it's always ahead of the ship and so you say to yourself okay when I graduate I'm going to do X when I get married I'm going to do X when we have our first kid then I'm going to and it's always something in the future that you're going to do as opposed to figuring out how to make life work right now with nothing else changing assume the economy doesn't change assume that you still have the same shitty boss how are you going to make life work for you you cannot count on everything changing and then you start living your life this is one of those pictures it doesn't fit this doesn't look like opportunity does it it looks like but we live in the land of opportunity where it's almost viewed as sinful to pass up on opportunities we're in the land of opportunity and so to say no when I say to my clients you have to say no they look at me and they try to form the word and they can't even do it they have to go in the mirror just you know like this with their lips they don't know how to say no to anything that's part of what gets us here we're also a culture of overconfident risk-takers Cowboys without horses I think we also are reacting against the Industrial Revolution when you think of the Industrial Revolution what do you think of maybe Henry Ford with somebody on an assembly line doing the same thing every day putting the front right fender on and we think we define death as doing repeated things without new challenges and we have overreacted to the Industrial Revolution how did that get they just like to skipped it and you got to see that first so we're going to go right back to it because this is all of you had one of these and this is this is the person who told you that you could be anything even in spite of all the evidence to the contrary and if I could fix something in somebody's life their business life usually it could be fixed if I could reach down inside them and pull up that level of confidence that they they don't have frequently when I'm working with people I have more confidence and their abilities than they do what's wrong with that picture you have to still believe what your mom said but I can't be your mom so if that's if that didn't happen for you then what's the solution so let's picture that you have one cup of water that's your life you drink it a little more carefully wouldn't you if you knew that was it one cup of water you could do a couple of things with it one of the things that I think most people do is they pour it in a long sort of 18 by 12 shallow cake pan and so they touch lots of things and never make much in act on anything we achieve a tentative confidence in many things have you let me just ask you a personal question have you tasted competence somewhere in your life it could be business it could be personal doesn't make any difference have you tasted competence and we all define that differently the way I define it is if there's a mic in the middle and after I speak anybody can come up and ask a question I know I can answer any question they ask about that particular subject how do you define competence and have you tasted it and are you tired of being in roles where you're not tasting competence you ought to be there's no clear deep enduring taste and so you move on and this is what you say to yourself variety variety yes yes I can do that no problem how hard can it be full service years of experience yes more and if if I could look into your life and sort of overhear the conversations you have you're you're at a client's and you make a promise that you know you have no business making and you get back in the car and you call your fellow employees on the way back to the office and you say you will not believe what I just promised them and that happens because you can't say no to opportunity so when and how are we stamped with this true confidence by the way that's a little girl from Guatemala I was listening very carefully to the speaker right before me because I lived in Guatemala for 13 years and that subject is dear to my heart at an early age when we know we can be president right yeah our youngest son they were they were in school and he went to em okay by the way in our oldest son went to Hume Fogg and when our youngest son was it was just elementary I don't remember what what grade but they the teacher went around and asked everybody what they wanted to be when they grew up and I don't know what the other kids said I wasn't there but Nathan raised his hand at that point he said I want to be a pyromaniac I think he was serious too because like he we had to make some laws around the house about how many how many candles he could have burning at one single time but if you didn't if you if you feel like like if somebody if I just picked one of you and said okay come up here and speak and you and if you're terrified about that the only thing that will fix that for you it's too late for the mom thing now when mom talks it's just annoying its marketplace acceptance that is where you will get the confidence that you need to focus somewhere and one of the reasons you don't focus is because you don't have enough confidence and one of the reasons you don't have enough confidence is because you've never spent a long enough time concentrating on something to figure out how to be an expert in it the problem is not lack of opportunity that problem is your lack of courage the only way we have true marketplace acceptance is to focus and instead of pouring that cup of water into a 12 by 18 cake pan we pour it into a champagne glass or something like that that's how you impact your world and I don't have any idea how you intend to impact your world but I would guess that there are some amazing people in this room yeah I took that picture that this one fits quit laughing at it but with opportunity all around you look there's a rabbit focus means it just seems like waste death diminishment missing potential and so we go through our lives lives bouncing from one thing to the next and not really landing in any particular price you gather opportunity by saying yes at the beginning of your career that's how you gather opportunity by saying yes okay the flip side of that is this you gather expertise by saying no and the reason you're afraid to say no is because you're afraid you'll run out of opportunity and I think one of the most unethical business practices is shaping your business life so that it brings you the variety that you're interested in instead of bringing you the deep competence that people are paying you for I did a study recently to figure out where that crossover point was and it was between 32 and 34 years of age that's when people started to concentrate and the lower edge of that range was when they were they had dependents and they thought okay I've got to get serious now why is focus so important three things it's the only method of providing repeated application I'm going to say these in Reverse and then I'm going to come back and say them in the other way repeated application is the only way to see patterns and finally the very essence of intelligence is pattern recognition and you cannot see patterns until you put yourself in a place where you can have repeated application so if we do this backwards and I did that intentionally it looks like this this is the way it should look the essence of intelligence is pattern recognition that's why we can measure it in young children you can't even speak because we can draw a picture of duck duck goose duck and they point to the goose because it doesn't fit the pattern that's why all of children's toys are usually built around pattern recognition Legos fitting things in that's the essence of intelligence pattern recognition is only possible with repeated application and finally repeated application is only possible with focus remember this movie A Beautiful Mind he's standing in front of this wall and he's noticing a pattern that nobody else saw and you can see his face light up and then he turns around and he says I think we need a map I cried when I saw this movie I thought I'd met my long-lost brother so I want to ramp some more focus is more about saying no than yes when you pull when you when you decide about how you're going to position yourself in life it's about saying no not about saying yes and if all you have is one opportunity if you just have one opportunity and one slot then you're going to take that opportunity but if you have two opportunities one that's not a good fit one that is you'll take the good one this is why it's so important to always have more opportunity than capacity because it doesn't take courage to choose the better of the two but it does take courage to say no when you're still going to be not quite as busy as you want to be so take that single cup of water and pour it into a tall narrow glass where you can reach deeply see the patterns hungrily gulp expertise and I'm going to go through this pretty quickly here I took this picture in somebody's garage and that interesting if you get to the end of your life and you look back on it and you are not as effective as you could have been will it be because you lacked opportunity or will it be because you didn't focus if it's because you lacked opportunity then you're just an incompetent boob the reason you will not have had the impact that you wanted is because you didn't choose and say no thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 90,322

Rating: 4.826087 out of 5

Keywords: tedx, tedx talks, ted talks, Marketing, English, ted, ted talk, \United States of America\, ted x, tedx talk, Business, TEDxNashville

Id: eItuJ-Rrn20

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2013