Transcriber: Bing Li
Reviewer: Chryssa R. Takahashi Hello, my name is Don Dodge. I work at Google. If you want to contact me
it's dondodge@google or if you're a Twitter user you can find me @DonDodge. So. Google is this amazing company, amazing people, creativity, where there are no limits. Anything is possible. I'll talk more about how we do
this kind of things a little later. At Google, we call them moon shots, shooting for the moon. Alright. We want things that are 10 times better, not 10 percent better, 10 times better. And it takes a different way of thinking and a different way
of approaching problems when you're trying to do things
that are 10 times better. The number one thing that gets in the way of doing
great things is fear of failure. Fear prevents us from doing
the things that we want to do, that we know that we should do, but we are afraid of failing. So I am going to talk
a little bit about failure and how to handle that, and how to break through
that fear of failure. How to unlock your inter creativity. We are all creative but it's suppressed by a fear of failure. So I want to talk about
how to get around that. And lastly how to say yes to life. So before Google, I worked at Microsoft
with some amazing people. And before that, let me go back in time,
I worked at Altavista. That was 18 years ago,
it's hard to imagine now. Did any of you ever used Altavista? The first search engine? God bless you, thank you.
(Laughter) At that time, we were
the best search engine in the world. We were number one. It was not without risk though.
We took amazing risks to make that happen. My group, the group that I led,
invented multimedia search. So to be able to search for photos
and images, to be able to search for music or to be able to search for video. Nineteen years later,
that seems very obvious. Of course, you can do that. But let me tell you, 19 years ago,
it was impossible. You just couldn't do it. There were a few failures along the way. It was a very difficult job to do. One of the things that we found
was... well, two things. Number one was pornography
and number two was spam. And we were innocent, we didn't know that people would use
this search engine to find porn. Or that they would create
all of these pages that were spam. Spam means that you put pages in there that say that they are about
something and they are not. They are about something
completely different. So we have to invent algorithms
and technology to beat them. To find the porn and filter it out. And to find spam and filter it out. This is very very difficult to do. We created these algorithms
to try to find the porn, but they weren't always successful. We were always missing some. It was very very difficult to do. So we had to have human intervention. Technology couldn't do it at that time. So we had interns
who would come in to Altavista, and they would spend all day
looking at pages of porn. (Laughter) Interesting job. But we needed to identify
if it was porn or not, and our algorithms could only go so far. So we had these interns come in
and they're looking at porn everyday and they're saying "Yep, that's porn,
that's porn, that's porn". Okay, great! After a week or two, we started
to get a little concerned about what would happen if they are going
to look at porn all day everyday. (Laughter) This could be a problem. So we took the people
who were looking at porn, and we put them over to the group that was
looking at spam and identifying spam, and we took the spam people
and put them on the porn. And we kept moving them back and forth. There probably would have been
some excellent sociological experiments that we could have done, but we were too busy trying
to create this technology, so we didn't really do it. But it was an interesting time. It was one of the most creative
and amazing times of my life. I've had the good fortune to work with lots of interesting people
and creative people. Napster was another one. Immediately after Altavista
I went to Napster. And we changed the world. Literally changed the world.
How people find music. How they appreciate music
and how they move on. We thought that we were going
to be what iTunes is today. But we failed. We managed to change the world
but we failed in our objective. iTunes could not exist today
without Napster coming first. We paved the way
so that iTunes could exist. And for that, I think okay,
it wasn't a failure. It was fun. So how many of you
used Napster back the day. Oh, just about everybody. Excellent, it was fun, wasn't it? Too bad, it doesn't exist anymore. Winston Churchill is
one of my favorite people and he has some amazing quotes, but this one I love. "Success is not final,
failure is not fatal. It's moving forward that counts." Having the courage
to move forward that counts most. So in the case of the Altavista
and Napster and even of Google, we had tremendous success. But success is not final,
it's not guranteed. You have to work hard every single day
to maintain that success. No one is going to give you anything. So today, there are thousands of people
all over the world trying to do a better search,
trying to do a better YouTube, trying to do a better Google maps. And everyday, there are
thousands of people at Google, who are trying to do it better
and running as fast as we can. That creates an amazing environment. When I moved to Silicon Valley,
one of the first things I realized was there is a force field of energy
around Silicon Valley. It's the highest concentration of type A
personalities, creative people, brilliant scientists,
that I've ever seen in my life. And what it does is, it drives you to do
more than you ever thought possible. It pushes you that sense of competition
and that collaborative work environment, working with other people,
pushes you to excel and to do things that you didn't think you could do. It's an amazing place. After I was at Google
for about six months, my friends at Microsoft,
and many other friends said, "Don, tell me about Google. It's such a stunning company. How was it different, how do they do it?" And I coined this phrase, "At Google
achieving 60 percent of the impossible is better than 100 percent
of the ordinary." And what we mean by that is those
moon shots, that I talked about earlier, we want to do things ten times better,
not ten percent better. And if in the pursuit of doing
something ten times better, a moon shot that seems impossible. If you only get 60 percent of the way
there, that's okay. That's great. Because we would rather have that, than have tiny little incremental
improvements of ten percent. So that's the way we think about it. And it's fairly uncommon,
most companies don't think that way. So I'll tell you a little bit, oh...
Let's go back in time even further. So, if you were to walk
into any first grade class, and you ask them, "Can you paint?",
every hand goes up. "Yes, yes I can paint." If you ask them, "Can you sing?" Every hand goes up. "Yes, I can sing". It's amazing, they are creative
and they are confident. Ten years later, this is what was happens. Ten years later you go ask
the same students, "Can you paint?". Not a single hand goes up. "Can you sing?" Maybe one or two. What happened,
what happened to these kids? Well, the problem is we teach conformity. We don't teach creativity. We teach our kids to conform, to paint within the lines,
to do only what we tell them to do. And after a while, it takes a toll and that creativity gets
back smaller, smaller, and is recessed back
into your mind, back into your brain. We create these filters
that don't allow us to be creative. But it goes back even further. This poor baby is totally
overstimulated and overwhelmed. And the problem is babies don't know.
They don't know how to filter. They react to everything. Everything is equally important. And all of these senses, after a while,
it just overstimulates them and they can't take it anymore
and they cry. So if you have a baby,
you know, this happens. Babies' first word that they learn,
other than mom and dada, the first word they learn is "no". "No, no, I don't want that." That's the first word they learn. That becomes a problem later on. It becomes a problem for parents
when you are trying to do things and they always say "no". But I'll show you later why
that's a big problem. But adults do that too. Adults get into sensory overload. If you've ever been to Disney World. I'll never forget the first time I went
to Disney World with my two sons. They were very small, and you are in a sea
of thousands of thousands of people. And there's music blaring,
and there's beautiful sights, and there's kids yelling and screaming. And every kid is yelling "Dad, dad, mom" and all ten thousand kids
that are yelling dad, I think it's mine. So I am overstimulated. At the end of the day, I was exhausted. I couldn't take it anymore. I was overstimulated. So even adults, we create these filters. So we filter things out. Remember Julian's presentation earlier
today about sound and sensory and how we create filters
to filter things out. Yeah, we do that.
Adults do that. Babies do that. And over time, we get really good at it. So remember the baby that says no
all the time, as adults, we do that too. We sit home with our remote control
in front of the TV and say, "No, no, no, next, next, next". We can say "no" 50 times in one minute. Fifty times. We are very very good
at saying "no". But we're not very good at saying "yes". So, I want to talk about how we overcome
fear of failure to do amazing things. How we unlock our creative inner self and how we say "yes", rather than "no". So the pattern matching, whenever
you meet someone on the street, the first thing you do before
they even approach you, you're starting to do pattern matching. You're looking at their eyes,
at the way they walk, you're looking at
if they are smiling or not. And you are deciding right away,
within the first second, whether you are going to interact
with this person or not. On the breaks outside,
when you saw people, now we're all friends here, right? We know each other,
but when someone approaches you, immediately in your brain
you are doing pattern matching. And you are trying to figure out,
should I interact with this person or not. We are very very good at it. So, oh, I am behind, OK, here we go. Failure is not an option. The first time I heard this word
was from NASA. The Apollo Space Mission. And when they said,
"Failure is not an option", what they meant was,
we will try everything, we'll try a hundred times
until we get it right. Failure is not an option. That's the way we think at Google. We will not fail. We'll keep trying until we get it right. I wrote a story about this,
failure is not an option. And I'll never forget, an executive of a very large European bank
came up to me after a conference and said "Don, I read your story about
failure is not an option, it was terrific! But my CEO at my bank also
says failure is not an option." I said, "That's great. I love that." He says, "No Don, it's not good. When he says failure is not an option, what he means is if you fail,
you're fired, you're gone". In that kind of environment, how do you think we're going to get
10x improvements, and moon shots, and amazing things? You're not, because
if you are afraid of failing, and you are going to be fired, what kind of goals are you going to set? Achievable ones, very small ones. And that's just not
going to get you there. So that's the big difference. So what I want to do is help you
to think differently about failure. So, anyone knows who this is? I'm from Boston,
this is American Baseball. His name is Ted Williams. He was the greatest hitter of all time,
the greatest. In one season, he achieves something
that no one else ever did. He hit 406. It was stunning,
and no one has done it since. In case you don't know baseball
406 means 40.6 percent. So he was able to successfully get a hit
40.6 percent of the time. But what that also means is he failed
59.4 percent of the time to get a hit. So even though he failed
about 60 percent of the time, he was the greatest hitter of all time. So you need to accept
a little failure along the way. This is Thomas Edison,
the greatest inventor of our time. He invented the light bulb,
he invented the phonograph, he invented motion pictures. And he said, "I haven't failed 100 times. I have successfully found
100 approaches that didn't work and I am that much closer to my goal." Do you know what this product is? WD40. Do you know what it means? WD means "water dispersant". The 40 means, it was the 40th time,
the 40th formulation. It took them 40 times to get it right Angry Birds, everyone has played
Angry Birds right? What you probably don't know is
this was the 52nd game that they built. Rovio built 51 games before this,
and you have never heard of them. But they had the courage
to keep going to do something better. Now this poor guy,
he failed one too many times. And if you end up like this guy, you are
going to bang your head against the wall, and bang your head against the wall,
and eventually, you are going to die. So in order not to do that, what you need to do is don't make
the same mistake twice. Make a different mistake. So when you're facing a fork on the road,
don't go the one you've already been. Go a different path. I want to talk about dreams. Do you all dream at night? When you sleep? I think you do. Some dreams you remember because
they're so vivid and bizarre, but others you don't. And what's happening is
all of the people in those dreams and the dialogue that happens
between the characters and the places that they happen and all of these amazing things, that was you. You created that in your brain. But you did it while you were sleeping. So what I want you to do is to take
that creativity when you're dreaming, and dream during the day,
dream when you are awake, dream big. You can do it, you have it inside you, but you've suppressed it for so long
that you don't remember. Say "yes". "Yes" is the most amazing word. Remember "no" is the word
that we learn first and we say the most, but "yes" is the most powerful word. So say "yes" to life,
say "yes" to opportunity, say "yes" when someone asks you for help. Because by saying yes, you are going
to open the door to other things, other creativity, and other opportunities. So I hope that you can feel differently
about the fear of failure and unlocking your creativity
and saying "yes". Thank you very much. (Applause)
