How the entrepreneurial mindset can change you: Henrik Scheel at TEDxSacramento

[Applause] when you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and that your life is just to live inside this world try not to bash into the walls too much that's a very limited life and life can be much broader once you discover that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and that you can change it and influence it and you can build your own things that other people can use once you learn that you'll never be the same again I really like the quote by Steve Jobs because it so beautifully summarizes that life is not predefined life is an open opportunity and we could do with it whatever we want we can go and explore this beautiful wealth and do amazing things live fulfilling life or we can lean back and expect other people to come and make our lives meaningful we can expect some corporation to come and offer us a great career but we will probably be disappointed because life doesn't work that way you need to be proactive about creating your own opportunities in life and that's what I'm here to talk to you about today the entrepreneurial mindset and how I think we can change the world by creating a new generation of entrepreneurial minded young people I need a clicker thank you Vinod Khosla is a famous entrepreneur and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley he says that every big problem is a big opportunity and that's very true if you start adopting this entrepreneurial approach to your own life you will start identifying opportunities all around you where other people see problems so you can start coming up with solutions for these problems instead of coming up with excuses on why not to do something about it I think that entrepreneurship is an amazing thing and the way I look at entrepreneurship is a typical entrepreneur would be a person who live his or her life in a way where they don't just accept the way things are entrepreneurs are those who dare to challenge the status quo this dare to to stand against the crowd and tried to solve some of these problems and it can be many different take many different shapes and forms unfortunately we have a very narrow scope of knock tomorrow today most people when the thing of an out of an urn the thing about some guy in his early 20s living in a dirty dorm room where he eats too much pizza and he's now trying to come up with some new online social photo sharing community or a new location-based restaurant search application for your smartphone and sure that might be valuable for you to some extent you might find your restaurant slightly faster but it's a real innovation it's really making impact in the world I think entrepreneurship can be much more than that I think it can be a way to to live your life where you actually dare to approach those big problems so when I think of a long to learn I think of a guy called Dimitri's Demetrius Booker's very recently Demetrius was an unemployed carpenter living in one of the poor regions in the Philippines he didn't know what to do with his time so he started looking around in his local community for problems that he could solve and he identified a big problem for many of these people living in very poor living conditions most of these people live in very simple homes it's sort of like a shag where they don't have any light imagine living your life in your home where you don't have any daylight coming because you don't have windows in your Shack and you can't afford an electricity so it's basically pitch darkness all year round even during the day you can't find your stuff your stumble over stuff on the floor because it's just lying around and you can't see it so he said there must be a way to solve this big problem for a lot of people so he came up with this idea on how to build a very smart light installation in these houses he discovered that if he takes a 2-liter water bottle and he fills it up with filtered water and a little bit of bleach then he makes a hole in this tin roof of the shag and he mounts it up on the top of the Shack the light will come in through the bottle and light up this entire home he can line up f35 square meter home with this very inexpensive solution so a very kind of low-cost high-impact solution he has now created employment for himself and for other people in his community and it's basically lighting up the homes of thousands of people in the Philippines and my shelter foundation has picked up this Brailey brilliant idea in the scaling it up to hundreds of thousands of people this is a good example of how entrepreneurship can be about solving real problems in the world so if we agree that entrepreneurship can be the key to making this world a better place how can we teach it in a good way I think unfortunately most students around the world today has never heard about entrepreneurship nobody has ever told them that you can go and change the world so that's the very first very good first step secondly we need to change the way we teach entrepreneurship because today it's oftentimes taught in a university setting where we're sitting in an auditorium like this listening to a professor who doesn't have any previous experience with entrepreneurship and he's now trying to teach them how to write a hundred page long business plan on how to make a detailed plan about how you're going to execute on this idea without ever having gone out and talked to potential customers without really having understood the problem he will also teach you how to make these very advanced financial projections of the next five years in a some kind of weird excel sheet another thing that is completely impossible to do for early-stage company right so it has to be in a done in a different way it has to be experiential so I kind of said that this is something that we need to do better and so I sat down with a couple of friends of mine in in Denmark a couple of years ago and started creating an experience that can expose more young people to entrepreneurship and basically build their entrepreneurial confidence so the first thing we do is to present them with a great social challenge so we're kind of adding a layer of social responsibility as well well present with a big challenge and then ask them to come up with innovative solutions for these problems an example here in the United States where we did a workshop on helping underserved communities so we look at all these veterans returning from war and don't know how to apply their skills into modern society how can we come of brilliant solutions for that another example in in Ireland where we asked the high school students to look at Adam world or at a life in a nursing home so we had senior citizen come in and talk about their stories about their lives we had a nurse from a nursing home come in and explain some of these daily problems that the the senior citizens are facing and the students came up with ideas on how to use technology to improve the lives of these people last example is recently I was in India where we looked at how can we use technology to improve the lives of these rural farmers that don't know what type of crops to grow in their soil and don't know how to sell their their crops when when they're done harvesting and it's amazing what these students can come up with over the course of two days we call this the startup experience and it's a six type very structured process we start presenting the challenge then we teach them about some new technology trends and then we take them through an ideation process which is the core of the program where they learn about systematic creativity in design thinking this will be the first time many of these students are exposed to creativity and how to work together as a creative team so it's quite an overwhelming experience as you're probably aware of when you work with creativity you need to overcome your own personal barriers and you need to allow yourself to come up with stupid and silly ideas this can be a very foreign thought for many of the students specifically in in Asia and Africa in the Middle East where they are not allowed to fail right they grow up in the belief that they are not allowed to fail because then they are failure so I do these exercises where I force them to fail and they they will make a lot of mistakes and I tell them to celebrate those mistakes and they look at me like this guy is weird we would never celebrate our mistakes but I tell them to raise their arms above their heads and scream yes I made a mistake and then they look at me and say this guy is definitely weird but after a while they start doing this and and we see this amazing transformation going on in these young people they will start unleashing their own creative potential by opening up by losing all that self judgment and start coming up with creative ideas so we feel the energy in the room feedly changed and we see this creative flow going on in all the teams where they come up with ideas they build on each other's ideas and having this creative momentum going on it's really an amazing experience so finally we come up with lots of ideas we select the best one we build a business wall around this idea and again we don't just assume that we've understood the problem we're dealing with and that we've come up with solution that will work we go out in the field and try to verify all those assumptions that we've made so these kids from India drove out a hundred kilometres there will be 60 miles and to this rural village to talk to these rural farmers and understand the world they're living in finally they learn about pitching technique visual communication and prototyping and they end up presenting this idea to a professional jury so I've had the privilege to work with universities and NGOs corporate nonprofits in different parts of the world we tested it out in seven countries with students from different cultural backgrounds and it really resonates with these students it's amazing what kind of transformation you can see even though over the course of two days so we're hoping to scale this up now across the globe we have created this program we are giving away all our materials for free to new trainers the new facilitators who can be teachers or volunteers from in an NGO so we're training them on how to run these experiential entrepreneurship programs and hoping to reach a million students over the next three years I want to close with a little story about how important it is to have your big dreams when I was a young boy growing up in a wonderful family in Denmark I always tend to rebel against this concept of writing a wish list I don't know if you do that here but in then what you write a wish list come when you get close to Christmas or birthdays and then you're hoping to get some of these things on the list so I would always pray bill against the concept of writing down all the things that you thought you could get so I would write down at least one or two ridiculously big wishes and my mom was she tended to get slightly frustrated with me because she was concerned that on the day of my birthday I would be so disappointed that I didn't get a trip to the moon or I didn't get to ride a Ferrari or go down into a submarine or whatever other crazy idea I came up with that year but it was not really because I was greedy and I just wanted these things it was more like I guess I thought that what if one day some genie or Santa Claus walks by and randomly decides that Henrique has been a good boy this year I'm gonna fulfill his wildest dreams and he gets ahold of this wishlist with all these different things and I had been to logical and rational this year so I put down all the things that I thought of again so he fulfills all my dreams but all I get is a new cab a pair of tennis shoes and a t-shirt that would suck right I could have had this trip to the moon or whatever so I guess I will leave you with that that we need to allow ourselves to dream big and encourage the young people that we interact with to have big dreams to set those ambitious goals and then work hard to achieve them and then I hope we can go out and create a new generation of entrepreneurial minded young people thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 112,165

Rating: 4.8901958 out of 5

Keywords: tedxsacramento, entrepreneurship, ted, startup, United States Of America (Country), tedx talks, ted talk, startupexperience, tedx talk, business, education, tedx, technology, entrepreneur, ted talks, sacramento, Startup.com (Film), inspirational, ted x, henrik scheel, youth, Education, English Language (Human Language)

Id: SjLhFdxnPJc

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 19 2012