Translator: Erman Turkmen
Reviewer: Gözde Caymazer Emre Soyer Behavioral Scientist Ladies and gentlemen.
How do we miss opportunities? To seize them, we first
need to understand how we miss them. Who is this? Harry Potter. Do you know Harry Potter?
Anybody who hasn’t heard of him? Anybody? No! There aren’t many
who don’t know him. This is the highest selling book series
in the world so far. Translated into 73 languages.
It's writer is famous worldwide. It has film adaptations, multiple books... But let us go back to a time
where nobody knew who Harry Potter was. To early 1990s.
When J.K. Rowling, its writer, wrote most of the first book
at a cafe in Edinburgh. I went to the place where that café was.
I drank a lot of tea and coffee. Hoping that maybe it was the water
or something. She writes the manuscript
and takes it to a publisher. The publisher is an expert
who wants to earn money. The publisher looks at Harry Potter
and rejects it! Good day. Opportunity is missed. But wait. She takes it
to another publisher. Sorry. A third one. No. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve times, Harry Potter gets rejected. Twelve experts in this field
push away this opportunity. The thirteenth publisher
doesn't know what to do. Goes home and puts the book on a table. His little daughter takes it and reads it, says “Daddy, daddy, what happens next?" Thanks to this he decides to print
a thousand copies. Only thousand. From there, it becomes
a legend. A phenomenon. Those twelve publishers who rejected it
wake up early every morning, and bang their heads to the wall. Bang, bang... The opportunity is missed. Well wait. There is more. At the same time, on the other side
of the world, two PhD students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page,
are working on their theses. Same time they create a search engine. They design a very simple page for it
and call it “Google.” Is there anyone who doesn’t know
about Google? Anyone who hasn’t heard of it? Don’t miss this opportunity. Google.
Everybody in the world knows it. It is worth 400 billion dollars
today, like a country. One of the most successful
companies in the world. Turkey’s GDP is 800 billion dollars.
It’s like a country. But let us once again go to the beginning
of this idea. While Harry Potter was being rejected, Google is deciding
that they want to sell this idea. It didn't hit big yet. They look for some people
who might be interested in it. One of these was Altavista.
Anybody remember Altavista? None of my students remember it.
Good day Altavista. They eat dinner with Altavista. Number one search engine at the time.
The expert in search engines. Altavista asks what’s up?
They say they want to sell their idea. "How much?" asks Altavista.
They say 1 million dollars would suffice. 1 million dollars. Not billion, million. We are roughly 4.000 people here,
250 dollars each. 750 Turkish Liras per person
and we buy Google. Altavista looks at this idea,
which will lead to its demise, and passes. Yahoo, Netscape. Anybody remember it?
None of my students do. Excite? None of them opt to buy Google
at this price. Google then hits big. But what is the main lesson here? Who almost misses the biggest opportunity? Google. By trying to sell itself to 1 million dollars Google is actually
the one who almost misses the opportunity. Our heroes, these entrepreneurs,
the creators of the idea. The makers of Google cannot predict
their own success. This is scary. There are many examples like this. Penicillin? It changes millions' lives.
The first antibiotic. Alexander Fleming discovers it
while not looking for it, by mistake. Nets. There are many of them. They merge different nets,
call it the Internet. It explodes after that,
and it grows worldwide. Good day. Internet is a crucial part
of our infrastructure today. The computer you use at home.
The one with a mouse, a keyboard, icons? Who built the first one?
Not Bill Gates. Not Steve Jobs. Not Apple. Not Microsoft. Not IBM. Xerox. Xerox invents this.
In the beginning of 80’s, predicts that it would amount to nothing,
and decides to make more photocopies. (Laughter) Meanwhile Steve Jobs passes by that place,
seizes the opportunity. Apple is the most valuable company today. Can you tell me which is the next idea,
opportunity, technology, infrastructure or book that will change
the country, the sector, the world? Please tell me. We’ll be rich in the process,
we’ll make history. Please tell me. Very good. Is that your own company? We don’t know! We don’t know. The funny thing is, or the scary thing is,
whatever that thing might be, not even those who are working on it
know. We have no idea. Because, ladies and gentlemen,
our world has become strange. We say it’s complicated, unpredictable.
But it has these side effects. As Steve Jobs said, we can only
connect the dots looking backwards; hence we say that Google was a great idea. Look at these people
who rejected Harry Potter. But there is no way to predict the success
even one day before it happens. Impossible. The people
who create it cannot predict it. We think we can. Yet we don't know.
Being an expert become this strange thing. Statistician and author Nassim Taleb
describes this situation through swans. He says, imagine that you saw, say,
one million swans, all of them white. You are an expert on swans. Yet you can't claim
the next one will be white. It can turn out to be black. Good day.
The swan itself can be surprised. He named this the Black Swan theory. This has nothing to with Natalie Portman
or ballet, by the way. That’s a different Black Swan.
This is another. Both are beautiful. Perhaps one of the worst things
that can happen to you in such a world. Perhaps the biggest mistake a company,
person could do is opportunity blindness. Missing such opportunities. Missing them continuously,
systematically, and all the time. How do we seize them then? Given all we talked about until now,
I would like to suggest 3 strategies. The first: not to say "I wish."
We love to use these words. We stay in the past,
and use them very frequently. Real story: I have a friend.
He missed an opportunity a few years back. He wakes up since that day and says,
“What have I done? Emre, I missed it.” Enough! Get up, go out, move on!
He misses others while clinging to past. I’m not saying we should not be depressed
when we miss one, however. People do get depressed when this happens.
I’m saying we should move on quickly. 3 days, 5 days of crying
and being depressed is enough. We should look ahead.
We should continue our quest. Think about the future. First one is not to hang up on the past.
The world is changing too fast for that. The second strategy, trying a lot.
But I mean a lot! Edison. Together with his team,
he had to try 6.000 different materials until he got to right version
of the light bulb. These people failed 5.999 times. Harry Potter was rejected 12 times. Truth is, I wouldn't be rejected 12 times.
Maybe rejected 2, 3 times. Then I would just give up. Good day. But today’s world is not like that. Unfortunately, our education system,
and the way we do business is outdated. Failure, for instance, is condemned here.
Mistakes are unacceptable. Those who fail are disappointments. Whenever we’ll start to go against
this convention and write our failures above our successes in our resumes,
we will then start encountering unexpected opportunities. There is another issue here.
There is research on this. For instance, we call people
smart and talented. What happens then is that, those people,
begin to fear mistakes and stop trying, worried of not being deemed
smart and talented anymore. They then miss opportunities. Hence, we should instead reward
determination, and those who try. The second strategy is to try a lot, and create an environment
that allows for that to happen. The third strategy is the hardest and,
as not many people are talking about it, perhaps the one that will make
the most difference. Leslie Winston is from Australia. One day, on the way from work,
she falls and cracks a tooth badly. There’s nothing to do. By the way I’m talking nonsense right now.
I don’t know who she is. The man has six fingers. Is there anyone
who saw it before I mentioned it? Anybody? This is very hard.
The man is missing an ear. Has. Not. Has. Not. Has. Human eye
misses both the extra and the missing. Makes sense. We focus on the face.
The periphery may be missed. The question is: if our vision errs
in such a way, could we also miss such opportunities
that are right in front of our eyes? There is an experiment on this, conducted by the British
psychologist Richard Wiseman. He says, there are two types of people
in the world. It’s quite strange. One of them frequently seizes
opportunities, luck is on their side. In Turkish we call them “balli”
extremely lucky. Are there any such people
here with us today? Hello, welcome. Well done. Any others? Nice, thank you.
And then there’s the opposite type. They miss opportunities all the time,
things don’t go well for some reason. We call them “bahtsiz”
- extremely unlucky. Any such people among us here today?
Nice too meet you. Thank you. He puts those types of people in a room. He gives them a newspaper each
and asks them to count the number of pictures in them. Just the pictures. He promises them a monetary reward
if they count them correctly. They start immediately, one, two, three,
four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. But there’s a catch. On one of the inside pages,
he places an ad, with no pictures on it. In there, he reveals the number of photos
in the paper and promises them to give a much larger monetary reward,
if they tell him that they saw the ad. He essentially presents
these people with an opportunity. One of these groups spots this ad better.
Which one do you think? The lucky ones! Why?
Because they are lucky. Unfortunately, our brain works similarly,
in that it can fail to perceive and notice the things that are beyond
its immediate focus. Lucky ones separate themselves from those
who are unlucky in the way they focus. It is possible to become luckier. Both types start in a tunnel.
They just count and count. Once, twice, three times, maybe four. The unlucky continue with their counting,
again and again and again, preoccupied. When the time is up,
they collect their money. The lucky, instead, count once, twice,
three times, and maybe more. But then they just say "enough"
and get out of that tunnel. They go a bit beyond their specific duty.
And they start reading the paper. They lose their focus. They start seeing the six fingers,
the missing ear. And when they start reading the news they also notice the ad,
and get the bigger reward. Good day. This is the way they operate. As the world becomes more complex, we miss more of such opportunities
when we are stuck in a narrow tunnel. The third strategy, therefore,
is losing one’s focus once in a while, to feed the brain using
different sources in order to connect the different dots together. I’m sorry again that the education system and the way we do business
have remained in the past. We are trying to change it. I work in both these domains,
I see it all the time. Dear child, come here, sit down,
do the tests tests tests, do do do. Going out? No, don’t, focus on the task.
Madam, sir, come, sit down! Do the things that we want, in a way
that we want, in the place that we want. Don’t look outside. Social media? Banned!
This is not the way to do things. World has changed. Yet these systems are changing rather
slowly. What can we do in the mean time? That’s the question.
Hobby. Hobby can be a tactic. But when I say a hobby, I mean one
which lets you meet unexpected people, takes you to unexpected places,
something that you love to do, something that comes from within. Do you have such a hobby?
Very few hands are raised. In fact, the other systems
are the reason for this. Other systems don’t allow us to have
a hobby. Some are raising their hands only half way. What’s that?
Does it mean that you do it as a “hobby”? When we say “I do it as a hobby”
in Turkish, we usually mean that we are actually not doing it. Shame, really. How shame you will ask? Clarice Crosby. An American writer
who lived in early 1900s. Her hobby is to dance. But in those times,
everybody wears a corset. She hates corset.
That’s her problem. One day, she has enough.
She says I’ll do something about it. She can do some knitting.
She plays around with handkerchiefs and some ribbons, combines them
and wears this instead. She dances amazingly. Others come to her after,
asking how she did it. She discovers at that moment,
connects the dots, sees something that others were not able to.
The bra. She obtains the patent in 1914.
Builds the modern bra. Starts a company. In 1940s, George de Mestral,
a Swiss engineer. In his spare time, his hobby is to walk in the woods,
in the mountains, to trek, to hunt. A thing that bothers him is to clean
the belly of his dog after the walk, from these seeds and plants that stick
with the dog’s fur. Why is this happening? It’s not sticky, it’s not magnetic.
How’s this happening? He pledges to look more into it.
Takes a piece to his lab, and puts it under a microscope. He discovers Velcro. Velcro? Velcro! Don’t take it for granted.
He goes to space with this idea. This is the way the opportunities work. Velcro is used by NASA in space. Things must stay put without being glued,
without magnetic fields. Two PhD students are writing algorithms
in 90s to mirroring those used to find information in a digital library,
as part of their PhD thesis. They realize that Internet isn't different
from such an environment. Bam! Google. And companies like Google today,
perhaps with the wisdom of not having predicted their own success, leave
spaces for their employees to explore. They tell them to try things without
the fear of a loss, discover things, tackle problems, add something
from your own life. And some of the innovations
come out are Gmail – do you have a Gmail? – Google Talk, Adsense.
At the end, Google wins. This whole story is a bit analogous
to finding the love of your life. Those who found the love of their lives
will understand me better. How did your life change after
that moment? Bfffffff. Incredible. Ok. Travel back to a time
before you met that person. Were you able to predict when,
where and how you’d meet them? Impossible! That’s why these three strategies
I mentioned would also be valid for those who are looking
for the love of their lives. But if you look at this notion as
an opportunity, there is no reason why a worldwide, or country-wide,
or sector-wide, or personal opportunity or a Black Swan would not come
from one of us here or from those who are watching this. No reason! As long as we don’t get stuck
in the past, and stay depressed about it. As long as we keep trying
without fear of failure. As long as we lose our focus
and see the different aspects of things that others failed to notice. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s keep going on. Good luck in your endeavors. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot. (Applause)
