I Seek Failure: Adam Kreek at TEDxVictoria 2013

there is an incredible power that is unleashed when you don't quite get what you want yet find a way to remain happy and today what I'm going to be talking about is the power of non-attainment and there's there's a grand irony in this because if we fail happily and and we fail effectively in fact we gain more self-confidence we have greater self esteem we have more connection to each other to the universe in fact we become more successful earlier this year myself and three other individuals decided that we were going to row from the SCAR Senegal to Miami Florida yeah and we called this the CWF Africa to the Americas expedition and we did it in a boat that looked like this your sleeping quarters are pretty small it's about the size of a sheet of plywood and you share it with one other person a six foot six 220 pound bearded snuggle bear' alright you should see his jammies and on this boat you're responsible for rowing twelve hours a day on top of rowing twelve hours a day you're also responsible for conducting scientific experiments on human psychology on the human physiology on human circadian rhythms as well as the state of our planet's oceans on top of this you are also maintaining a blog you have educational curriculum that you're delivering to kiddies in America and Canada and you also phone up and talk to the media every once in a while and it you know it was a lot of work right and I do realize that you can fly over the ocean yes but we deliberately took the slow route across the ocean because we knew that we would learn more by taking the slow route and I would like to encourage each and every one of you here today and watching on the internet take the slow route across and the slow route changed drastically for us on the morning of day 73 of our ocean row I had laid down in the cabin for a nap my partner Pat who is going to be my sleeping buddy he he came into the cabin Pat's that he is an avalanche control guy grew up in Connecticut he's crawling in when a couple of funky waves come and they start flooding our cabin before I could say anything the boat had flipped upside down and Pat was in the cabin with me I push him out I say go pack go go pack go and all of a sudden I was in there as in this 4 foot by 4 foot by 8 foot cabin rapidly filling with water upside down and I had no air I was looking around and I see the floor which is now the ceiling and there's an air pocket there so I cook I pop up I grab a breath of water and I see blue light below me for the hatch I think do this properly right take another breath and I dive under swim through and there's all these cables hanging I come out I pop up out of the water and I look around and I see Pat I see Jordan I see Marcus my other crewmates we say are you okay are you okay are you okay we go we deploy our emergency life raft we tie it to the boat we put on our emergency beacons and we look at one another we failed right and this drastically contrasts an experience I personally had four years ago I won the Olympics right yeah and now let me tell you there is no feeling of success like it you cross the finish line after five and a half minutes of grueling pain the first thing that goes through your mind is I just wanted you impacts alright the thing the next thing that goes through your mind is that I just won the Olympics with my eight closest friends in the world right and I did it in spandex and we we we learned a lot we learned a lot on this Olympic journey and one of the things I learned the most on going to the Olympics and being successful at the Olympics was a lesson on failure and if you turn your eyes to that middle guy that big bald Viking with the sunglasses arms up in the air that guy's name is Jake Wetzel and before Jake Wetzel showed up at the training center before Jake Wetzel showed up the training center I was the fastest star bird in Canada then Jake started to beat me jerk all right and the first thing that happened when Jake started to beat me he was faster this egoic shield went up around me I didn't want anything to do with Jake you know Jake was an idiot I wanted to beat him I wanted to confront him I wanted to beat him on every curve and then eventually I had this chance where he's able to step back and say wait a second even though we're competing against one another we're on the same team I can learn something from him so I invite Jake out for lunch and we're sitting over this pile of bagels and a dozen eggs right leda's how I eat as much as a five-person family does every day and I ask him Jake what's your secret to success you know how are you so successful and Jake looks at me is this you know like I said a big bald Viking and he speaks with a bit of a stutter and he's a close talker i-i-i-i seek failure i wither come on are you serving me a cone for like lunch too right and like what what are you trying to say Jake and Jake said I seek failure and he went to explain it to me he said every week we train from Monday through Saturday and I pick one workout every week where I will willingly push myself through my known limit and I will embrace failure and in fact my body will fail on me and for the rest of the week I will know what this limit is I will know what my limit is and I will hover below it and in fact the greatest point of growth occurs right below your limit I looked at him I said genius okay and I believe that you know each and every single one of us has a capacity bubble a capacity to achieve to find success to find fulfilment to find happiness in life we can choose to stay in the center of our capacity bubble and slowly let that bubble shrink or we can hover around the edges of our capacity bubble and let that bubble grow and if you are impatient and you want that bubble to grow as fast as possible what should you do you should be right at the edge of your capacity bubble and how do you know where your edge is you fail but you don't just fail you're happy about it we'll get to that in a bit I've had my sixth share of success and failures in life and I realized that you can fail and be happy or fail and be sad you can succeed and be happy or you can succeed and be sad and I went to the Olympics in 2004 we didn't win the Olympics we finished fifth we were expected to win I remember crossing the finish line with my teammates and sobbing all right eight big guys all crying in spandex right hey I remember winning the World Championships for the first time and having a surprising realization that I was depressed after being have you a champion of the world what is that right I went to the Olympics and I won and that was just pure awesome and obviously I went to the Atlantic Ocean and we didn't succeed yet we were happy and as I've traveled around and as I've learned more about life I've actually come to believe that most of life actually occurs in this bottom corner of the graph right and seeing us today we're here talking about emergence let me present to you the theory that a most emergence occurs in the bottom left-hand corner of this box so let's talk about the happy fail in fact your brain is smarter when it is happier all right brain research has come up to show that you're better at math you're better at language you are better at communication when you are happy and failure is inevitably going to come towards you so if you find a way to be happy in the midst of failure in fact you will find bigger ideas and now picture all of us here today we're we're stumbling around in the world and we're setting big goals but we're not quite getting them but yet we're happy in the moment right we're selfishly kind of going to say I want to do this I'm gonna get it oh no I didn't get that but wait a second you know look at all I accomplished I'm still a little bit happy right and I think a funny thing happens when we have a bunch of happy failures setting big goals and going for those goals and making the best with what comes emergence occurs right you strive to go into that best neighborhood in town but you can't quite afford it so you go into this other neighborhood and guess what you make that neighborhood better and a bunch of other people have that same experience and all of a sudden before you know it that neighborhood comes out as the neighborhood to be right and you can think of countless metaphors like that and my father taught me this my father is an investor and an economist and one of the things that my father said to me my father said Adam you can do anything in the world you want just be the best at it because there's always a niche for the best right hand and my goal in life is to be the best happy failure there is and like a good happy failure I was attracted to this other happy failure and his name is Jordan Hansen and I met Jordan Hansen down in San Francisco we were doing this Dory rowing race we rode out under the Golden Gate Bridge and then we came back in and we had this barbecue and it was a bit of rowing love because Jordan had rowed across the North Atlantic in 2006 and he had heard that yeah I gone to the Olympics um won an Olympic medal and so our eyes caught across the barbecue we walked towards one another and and we were we were instantly connected you know when you meet a person who you with in whom you see your own soul now that was Jordan and myself we just had that instant connection and Jordan tell told me about his adventure in fact he felt like he had some failure on his row because his crew going from New York to England did not pack enough food and in fact they each lost 20 to 45 pounds a person by the time they made it to the other side and now they've got a very successful weight loss program I wouldn't recommend it but it was and I remember Jordan and I remember looking to Jordan's eyes right before we climbed into the emergency life raft come back to the ocean with me we're in the Bermuda Triangle we'll bobbing around we've been trying to rewrite this boat we're tying ropes on it we're hauling on it we're singing we're pulling we're trying to rewrite the boat and it's not happening we've been in the water for about three hours I look over at Jordan and Jordans turning purple hypothermia I look at Jordans say we got to get into the life raft you're turning purple and Jordan looks at me and says I look good in purple we we go to the life raft and we climb in and now picture it's the sizes little red dot we climb in all right more big guys we're kind of sitting there it's like a I don't know what you want to call it a kiddie pool with a tent tarp on top of it and we're sitting there waiting for someone to show up and I remember when the Coast Guard did show up they're flying overhead five hours after we flipped in a c-130 the first thing Pat said he started to scream we're gonna be okay hi and Marcus and Jordan are Americans I'm Pat and Jordan are the Americans Marcus and myself are the Canadians and as soon as US to Canadians saw the US Coast Guard's coming you know what we did we just started chanting USA USA USA and so here we are we're sitting in this little life raft and we're waiting for for someone to show up and we were having a conversation right and we're saying well we failed now we know that we're not going to do kind of the biggest failure in life which is I suppose dying before your time right so what are we actually going to do here and we came to the decision that we were actually going to make the most of this opportunity and so as we're sitting we're waiting we have we eventually get in contact with the the plane that's flying overhead we pull up one of our radio transmitters and it's a guy from from northern Florida and it's like we got the envy hygiene coming to pick y'all up and Jordan looks over me and says huh I think that's a clean boat right huh Marcus looks over he's like I think it's full of dental hygienists right but it was a it was a big boat full of a Filipino crew and they dropped a ladder a rope ladder clanging off the side of the boat five stories up and we go and we grab on it and we climb up and we get onto this boat and we have some time to collect our thoughts before we hit the media storm and we decide that we were going to take advantage of this we decide that we're going to take advantage edge of this this moment and so the media calls us up and they said you've just slipped in the middle of the ocean aren't you disappointed we you failed and what we said was no we actually had an incredible time when we were off the coast of Africa we were stampeded by thousands of dolphins they were jumping over a bound they were screaming right I was 200 feet away from a giant humpback whale that completely breach and belly flop beside me and my bones vibrated I've never felt anything like that I got to swim over the mid-atlantic ridge I had flying squid come and hit me and I ate them the ocean is beautiful and when I think of the Atlantic Ocean that is what I think of I think of the beautiful things that we saw of the magical experiences we shared and so my challenge to each and every single one of you here today is think about that big goal in your life and go out embrace the power of non-attainment go seek failure and PS we recovered our boat and I recovered my wedding ring but that's a story for another time thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 152,474

Keywords: Emergence, Adam Kreek, Rowing, TEDx, Failure, TEDxVictoria, tedx, ted x, ted talk, 2013, ted, seeking failure, ted talks, capsizing, olympian, tedx talk, atlantic ocean, tedx talks

Id: H8P7Ni1NwB0

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 17 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/DasDoctor]

Why does he have a picture of J.F.K on his prompter?

But seriously awesome talk

[u/914Gangles]

This is fantastic stuff.