HOW TO DO IT ALL? DEMYSTIFYING VERSATILITY | Dr. Divya S Iyer IAS | TEDxMACE

a little girl with starry eyes and lots of dreams go down to a stage like this when she was all of three years of age memorizing the nice little story that her mother had meticulously taught her she loved the audience with that tiny little story and won the first prize in English storytelling in the kindergarten section and she fell in love with stories that day at 4:00 she put on the dress of the great adi shankara for a fancy dress competition and won a prize in that and she fell in love with Indian heritage and tales and legends of Mythology and culture that day at 5:00 she started facing cameras and appeared in the famous Dora darshan channels of India that day and she fell in love with flashes and cameras at six she was taught by one of her favorite teachers as to how to act in a play and she got onto the stage doing that and she fell in love with theater that day and life went on and on with her falling in love again and again with numerous such pursuits and passions and today she is in love with life with the kind of intro that I gave a regular guess might be that the person is a remarkable artist or a film star or say a theatre artist or a performing artist today but let me tell you you're wrong the person is a medical doctor and an IAS officer today now how did this happen ever since I got into civil services which is not too long ago especially the last one year which I've spent in my district as the assistant collector life has taken a very fresh spin for me for good and one of the finest things that my job gives me is the kind of versatility of the platform that it provides me to work in as part of that I have been fortunate enough to meet a lot of young people like you very enthusiastic people filled with dreams and ideas and as I interacted with students especially schoolchildren more and more there is one question that was oft repeated at name which was how to do it all how did you do it all that was a very curious thing that everybody thought how could you be an artist and a doctor and a writer and a civil servant etc etc my answer to them was and it still is that well when I was a child nobody ever told me that it was impossible to do it all nobody ever told me that it was abnormal or it was uncommon to be doing several things at the same time and as I started reading about versatility I came across this tiny little story which I think enunciates this point very clearly which I would want to share with you all today there was a zoologist who once came to Kerala in order to study which animal Kerala obviously the land of elephants right so he came to study elephants here and he looked at the numerous tamed elephants which had been chained with heavy eye link's and there was one place where he went to where in the elephant shed he made them a hoard and so the huge elephant was tied to a little tree with a rope as if you tie a catty to a tree or a plant or to a stone and the scientist was flabbergasted he said why is it that this elephant which can so easily break this rope and run away not run away what is the secret behind it and the Mahal told him we got him when he was tiny when he was just born he was a baby elephant when he came into my hands and at that point of time this rope was more than enough to keep him in place and when we raised him we inculcated that fear in him and the belief in him that this tiny rope is the biggest obstacle and hurdle in your life which you will never be able to break and that elephant despite having grown this huge does not realize that it has the strength and the power to break the tiny rope to flung it away and to walk away free I think this is what society does to each one of us as children restrictions barriers boundaries in the form of such tiny threads and ropes which probably as children we find it as humongous tasks but as we grow up we fail to recognize different facets of us different colours of ourselves and different capabilities of ourselves because of the restrictions and the barriers that we ourselves and the society has built for us and once we try to break the shackles of the self built boundaries and barriers I think versatility is all yours and I am sure that each one of you is versatile here it is just that probably many of us do not realize that we are versatile and we don't take time off in order to express Sam's in numerous fields ourselves so why be versatile that is the next question right so why should you be versatile well let's start off with an area which I probably know the best even now which is science who is the greatest scientist the world has ever seen everybody would say Albert Einstein right so Albert Einstein himself has revealed that music has been the driving force behind most of his scientific inventions and discoveries in fact the picture the photograph of Albert Einstein with a fiddle in his hand with a violin in his hand is one of the most left photograph in the scientific world even today come to India's gift to the scientific world the great dr. APJ Abdul Kalam which instrument did he play the rare Ruth drew veena if you remember not just the two stalwarts in scientific fields but if you look at the Nobel Prize winners in fields of science and physics chemistry medicine etc it has been found that more than 60% of them have excelled in one art form or another and in fact when people started researching behind this they did find out that we do know the functions of the left brain and the right brain the cerebrum of the human beings is righted into left and right lobes and each lobe is got specialized functions of its own and then you inculcate versatility as a pursuit of yours what you are helping the brain do is to develop the left and the right loads of the brain equally well and thus you become a much more holistic person even scientifically it helps you establish new neuronal connections every time you start indulging yourself in a new pursuit or a new passion that you want to continue and from there let me go to the next advantage of being versatile versatility through this whole process in itself I would call is the ambrosia of human beings to remain young it keeps you eternally young how does it every time you start indulging yourself in a new pursuit what are you essentially doing you unlearn and shed all that you have learnt till that point of time come back to Ground Zero start from the humble Novus person who doesn't know anything in that field and start off all over again now this Rises the curiosity in you and the joys of discovering keeps you young forever and ever another wonderful human being who is arguably I would say he's been my role model ever since childhood Rabindranath Tagore the great guru Deva he is an example for this at the age of 16 he realized that he had a penchant for painting and drawing and he became an artist he started painting at the age of 60 I don't know how many of how many people know that and we have a school of painting after him in India after all you know there's a Tagore school of painting even he was someone who was relentless in his discovery of his own self and never shied away from adventures which leads me to the next point which is versatility always pushes you and nudges you to take that last mile into plunging into an adventure and innovating and I would in fact call versatility as a crucible for innovations because you are ready to take the risk you are ready to learn you're ready to come back to Ground Zero and if you have your hands on multiple items at the same time you tend to make these uncanny linkages which is what we generally call as thinking out of the mix or we call as lateral thinking and where does lateral thinking come from it after all comes from your exposure to various things some of you might have known there was a little song which I had made and sung for electioneering as part of my duty for a sweep campaign which almost went viral on social media and I was taken aback at that point of time because I thought I have sung so many songs in my life and suddenly this thing just takes off and I was wondering as to why it happened so so one of my mentors one of my teachers in fact told me that it's not because you sang a song it was because the purpose for which you sang a song was new to people that is the reason why it took off so that uncanny linkages of putting that you know of putting that square peg into the round hole and still making it fit there that is what the versatile mind does in order to innovate we all talk about specialization these days and everybody wants specialist specialization in various fields in fact the civil services itself is under the attack of this specialization debate I would say I agree that specialization has done a lot to humanity in terms of advanced advancement of progress but innovation I think is a fruit that comes out of specialization only when cross-pollination of ideas happen and the bed on which cross-pollination of these ideas happen is nothing but versatility so there is one main aspect of versatility which I want to share with you before I wrap up which is that every time in life as you move ahead we always find goals as destination we talk about goals as goal posts when you are versatile what happens is that goal posts are no longer destinations but they're just starting points for your next journey for your next adventure and thus this concept of dynamic goals keeps happening in your life all the time you have reached somewhere that's only the starting point of the next race which are going to run because you never stop because once you have achieved something your life doesn't end there the fame is entrepreneur and innovator of ika the Swedish or the European chain market which you would know in my comrade once said that any organization which feels that it has attained its goal tends to stagnate quickly and it applies not just to organizations it applies to human minds it applies to human beings once we think that we have reached our goal there we stop thinking we stop learning we start stagnating we start rotting and their boredom sets in once you start being versatile there is no question of boredom trust me you just keep growing and blooming and growing and blooming and spreading more and more fragrance that's what happens and what happens when you start interacting with people from multiple fields from multiple domains from multiple cultures when you're being versatile there is also another dimension of humaneness that creeps into you which is the part of social sensitization when you work with artists as an artist you get to know what their world is like when you work with officers in a government setting you get to know what their world is like when you work with people in the film industry you get to know what their world is like with so much of exposure you're actually learning human beings more and more and more in fact in Japan you would have all heard of the samurai warriors the great samurai warriors they were in the good old ancient days the samurai warriors were made to sit down under a chair three and write poems can you believe that samurai warriors and poems why on earth there are made to write poems so that they have a more gentle attitude towards his human beings when they retire from the battlefield and come back and in fact it did work just sitting under the cherry tree was you know told to create an empathy for nature and people started connecting with nature and writing a poem made people connect with human beings and they started looking at other human beings in a different fashion in a much more gentler fashion so what is all of this put together give us a good leader ain't it someone who can connect with people someone who has empathy someone who is socially sensitive someone who can think out of the box someone who can innovate someone who can reset and refashion goals according to the needs of the time and someone who is self-motivated and is driven from within what more do you need to have an adaptable leader and that is what versatility finally gifts you with let me just wrap up with one tiny example if you remember many of you would have had a tiny little phone probably a decade or two ago which now has become an antique piece I suppose which we used to call the brick model of the phone or so which used to do one or two functions really really well isn't it even now we all say that the battery life of those phones you know you can never beat them right but we still don't use those phones today isn't it even though the battery life is good even though you could use the phone to make that one call and have a clear conversation without any breaks even though you could send SMS is from those phones today people like siju and all the other engineers sitting here all the other entrepreneurs sitting here all of you have tried to incorporate numerous numerous functionality into that tiny handheld device called the mobile phone and what have you essentially done to it you have discovered you have brought about a revolution by just making that humble brick phone much more versatile right and now you call it the smart phone right when it does so many functions so this is the era of smart phones and for you to become smart human beings what do you need to do be versatile ok so live life smart live life versatile live life meaningful thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 437,671

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, India, Life, Achievement, Activism, Art, Change, Leadership, Reform, Self improvement

Id: zG-KG69UFUI

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2017