Going the Extra Mile | Peter Sage | Ted Talks

ah good morning going the extra mile I don't think there's a better phrase that could sum up the essence of what it really means to be human you see animals will be go the extra mile if they're forced to if they need to search for food or if they want to avoid being eaten but human beings can go the extra mile because we possess one of the most godlike qualities on earth and that is inspiration what I'd like to do share with you some ideas I have around where inspiration comes from based on a journey that I took recently and that journey was it started when I was listening to somebody talk about a race and anybody here I'd imagine quite a few of ran a marathon yeah 42 kilometers 26.2 miles and a marathon is quite a race it takes a quite a bit of preparation and it's it can be quite a goal for some people but what my friend was talking about was something different this was a marathon every day back-to-back for seven days across some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world the Sahara Desert and not only that but day four is the double marathon 52 miles 84 kilometers in 50 degrees centigrade heat in the daytime freezing cold at night and not just that we have to carry all of your own equipment so all of the food you're going to be eating for the race all of you means to cook it your sleeping bag your survival equipment everything you have adding about 20 kilos of weight to your shoulders and it sounded so fantastic it was so or inspiring so impossible I thought I have to do it and so I signed up and I went over and it was it was quite a journey for me because you know I decided that this was gonna be something that I wanted to do what was the reason you know once he done proved to myself that this was this was a bar that was so high that I could just try and reach it and what happened was you know if you have a look I've got some slides just give you an idea of what what the desert was like these little ants running over the sound of people and yeah if you look behind me there there's a little dot on one of the sand dunes that's three people on day two we're running over the highest sand dunes in North Africa and if you're running on concrete or if you're running on a running track then that's one thing but when you're running up sand dune soft sand and it's sinking to your knees it takes all the strength out of your legs it's one of the the hardest things to do and that's on day two now luckily we had five-star accommodation we're in a nice hotel and this is what I effectively called the Moroccan Hilton and as you can see there's open sides which means if there was a sandstorm at night and you slept with your mouth open you woke up with a mouth full of sand and we also had some very interesting creatures and one of them was Susan where Susan issues this was our tenth pet and there's obviously camel spiders and at night you can actually feel in your sleeping bag you can feel the scorpions crawling over your sleeping bag sometimes now all the other camel spiders and you know it's amazing the focus that you have on the first night you're like this by the third or fourth night all you can think of is that they're extra calories and this was Susan she crawled out of one of my boots one morning and as you can imagine it sort of sharpened you focus a little bit for next time you go to put on you you're running to used one of the most important aspects of the the race was foot management now if you're little squeamish you may want to turn away on the next slide and I'm luckily here to say that these aren't my feet right but I don't care how fit you are if you don't look after you feed on a race like that you're not running an extra mile but one of the most interesting aspects of the whole race was the isolation you see if you run the Boston Marathon like Dave's daughter a couple of weeks ago or New York or London you have tens of thousands of people lining the streets cheering you on and you can draw a lot of inspiration from them but here when you're out in the desert there's nothing maybe a camel and it's times like that you start to go inwards and start asking yourself honest questions about what is it that you're really doing it or why and I got a lesson on that like you wouldn't believe on the fourth day because on the fourth day which is the day of the double marathon 84 kilometers I woke up with food poisoning I tried to save water the night before by not hydrating my food so much and you know water is actually rationed 9 liters a day that's all you get that's for washing cooking hydrating once it's gone it's gone so it's not just a physical race it's a strategy race you know do you run with a heavy sleeping bag so that you stay warm at night but it's harder to running the day or do you run with a light sleeping bag so it's easier to run in the daytime when you lose energy at night through being cold everything's a call do you go to the bathroom behind a sand dune and wash your hands afterwards and use precious water or do you not use water and risk getting diarrhea you know everything's a strategy call so you know a challenge is almost every part and on day 4 I woke up and I tried to save water the night before and it was the wrong call bearing in mind you're burning 10,000 calories a day and you're putting in 2000 I lost 15 kilos in one week ladies it's not a good way to lose weight trust me ok look at me I can't lose 15 kilos I had to run around in the shower just to get wet ahead so but I woke up with this food poisoning and I remember I was so weak I couldn't lift my rucksack and my friend put it on my back and I walked the start line for that day with 600 other people and the gun went off and 600 people went and I stayed I hadn't got the energy and I walked in the first four hours and then I thought I have to keep going I have to push because if I fall behind the cutoff times I'll be disqualified so I try to pick up the pace and it got to a point where at eight o'clock that night the Sun was just setting the temperature started to go down it started to get cold which means I had to run and I drowned 30 miles 50 kilometers that day and I got another 20 miles about 30 kilometers to go through the night and I was done there's nothing left you know I this kind of race challenges you not just physically but emotionally spiritually mentally and so you know you have all the motivational tricks you can pull and that's like the two dogs you know you have sitting on shoulder one says come on you can do it I believe in you yes let's go and the other one says yeah what's the point yeah quit nice warm hotel bed right right and you know for a large part of the race this dog was going well I mean which one wins obviously the one you feed the most right we know that but at 8 o'clock that night when the Sun was setting i sat down and I was done this this dog have gotta sleep no more food this dog was screaming loudly saying fire the flare and the flare was something that they give you at the start of the race it's a two pound rocket flare nobody like six it weighs a lot of and you have to carry it and if you get you know you break your ankle or you get lost when you get bitten by a snake or a spider then you can fire the flare and the helicopter will come in and obviously rescue you and you're out of the race and so every morning what I did was I used to unpack my kit and I put this flare right at the bottom and I used to put all my stuff on top because I thought in my mind it was always easier to take one more step then it would be to stop and unpack the kitten and find the flare but in my mind this flare was getting higher and higher in my head and you know this dogs saying look just just do it and I was done I hadn't eaten for 24 hours I couldn't stomach breakfast that morning and the prospect of running another thirty case through the night I just on a compass bearing I just couldn't do it and I sat down and I started to cry I was done nothing left and it's times like that where inspiration can either come in or it won't and it can usually has a habit as we've heard from some of the other speakers here today I've coming from some very interesting places and for me I was sitting down and I was ready to throw in the towel I was gonna fire my flare and I heard a noise and I looked up it was like a trudging noise and I looked up and I thought wow what is that and out of the dusk as the Sun was setting these two figures were coming through and one was a blind Korean guy in his late 60s tied at the wrists to his guide and I sat down and watched these guys in silence just move down through the desert what did I just see I mean what makes somebody who clearly isn't an athlete is a pensioner who can't even see where to place his feet want to run what is effectively but this footrace in the world what motivates somebody to do that I'm just in amazement I got to find out but to find out I have to catch him and so I got up and I ran after him and about 10 minutes later I caught up with them and I found out through his translator who was also his guide the several years before this man's brother had died of cancer and every single year he ran this race to raise money for the hospice that will turn to his brother whoa if ever I needed a lesson on or a reminder that it's not about me and we do things for others far more than we would do for ourselves and it was it was incredible he inspired me he inspired me to finish that set that night finishing that stage run another 26.2 miles the next day and then finish the race that they have to run and here's a picture of me a little happier that at the end of the race and I think the smile says it all then alright but you know it gave me a lesson because operants at that point I have some of you know my background I'm a serial entrepreneur and I dropped out of school at 16 I have no formal qualifications I started my first company at 17 and I built many companies over the course of the last 20 30 years and some have failed majestically some have been okay some we just want to talk about you know some shoot of state ideas and and some have been very good but in my early days what I was driven by and what what inspired me to be successful was the avoidance of the the insecurities that I had to try to prove that I was good enough you see one of the things I've done over the last 10 12 years is I've travelled about a month every year volunteering my times at different places working with drug addicts homeless abuse cases trauma suicide and that's given me quite an observation of different types of human behavior one thing I saw was we all have two primary fears and that is the fear that we're not enough that we're not good enough tall enough short enough old enough young enough good-looking enough popular enough rich enough whatever it is fill in the blank and if our mind doesn't think we have a blank to fill in it's usually because I ego is playing hide and seek with reality and for me as a young man it was all about proving that I was good enough to the world and that gets you so far but what I learned was that emotional maturity really starts to happen when you switch your mindset from being egocentric and what can I take from this world to ethnocentric or world centric and what is it that I can contribute I have that one to a blind Korean guy I probably never see again and it was interesting because when I made that switch just yeah and it was like a light bulb going off it's like I'd spent my entire life trying to prove you know to my parents to my friends to myself that I was good enough you know the reason I started and signed up for the race in the first place if I was honest but inspiration sitting on that rock about to throw in the towel was never going to come from me trying to prove something to myself that place wasn't deep enough but seeing somebody as an example to the world to himself to others that was wanting to put himself through such a physical challenge to contribute was inspiration to me to be able to finish and it was shortly after that that I I got exposed to a business idea I get business ideas across my desk almost every week and this was a few years ago I got a business idea that was a technology that could help change the world with regards to energy we know we're living in a time now that is very critical in terms of energy independence energy sustainability we have an energy crisis going on globally and this was a concept called space-based solar power and if you take normal sheets of solar panels but instead of putting them on rooftops where every night it gets dark if you were to put them in space in orbit Sun never sets there's a way you can transmit that energy 24/7 safely and reliably through radio way back to earth as and when it's needed in real time Wow if if that's real that could change everything and I had a look at the technology and I did some due diligence I spoke to some of the guys at NASA and Boeing and and I saw yes it's the technologies there but it's never been commercially viable we've never been able to make it pay and that's the reason it's not been done in business the business case doesn't close and so I looked at and I shared with my business mentors and almost everyone said Peter if you get involved in this it will ruin your reputation you'll likely go bankrupt and it's a thousand to one now when I heard a thousand to one I got excited but what inspired me more and it's been a several year journey now and it's been a journey with obstacles like you wouldn't believe it's been a journey of frustration of almost wins and what has kept me and my team going through that journey is one thing it's the fact that we're focused on what this technology can do for others nobody here wants to be on the cover of Time magazine that's not what we're doing you know we're happy to be in the background will almost be happy almost to go bankrupt if it means that we can pass the baton to the next company that can move this forward because an entrepreneurs dream at this level is the ability to be involved in something that can leave a thumbprint on humanity that can transcend a lifetime and for me that was a huge lesson about again turning my focus from what is it that I can get why am I here what's in it for me I mean what do I want a bigger house versus being able to leave a difference give me a break now if you'd have asked me my twenties the answer was clear I want two houses but again that's that's emotional maturity when it comes down to understanding where true inspiration comes from and I firmly believe that we're living in a time now here in Portugal in many other countries where we're facing tough decisions tough challenges and tough economic times and we have one or two ways that we can approach that sitting on that rock we can either turn around and say well what's in it for us what actions that I need take two look after myself or we can say how can we bound together as a family as a city as a country as a nation as a planet and focus on what it is that we can contribute to getting out of this mess and raising our level of consciousness not just focusing on raising our own bank balance and it is that kind of energy that will transform the situation that we're in right now it is that kind of energy from willing to be able to go the extra mile from that place not from this place it will create lasting change and lasting a lasting impact and I firmly believe that it is the energy of that that we could really change the world with thank you you

Channel: Peter Sage

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Id: pXv80Zeekl0

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2016