Knowing is the enemy of learning: Tom Chi at TEDxSemesteratSea

right well my name is Tom Chi and over the years I've worked on tons and tons of Technology products so you might have you probably used some of them I worked on Microsoft Outlook helped create that and I've worked on things ranging from mass-market software like Microsoft Outlook to pioneering hardware like Google glass and self-driving cars now that experience actually instead of making me more and more certain about what it what it was to go build something and how technology should be created actually made me way more curious about the ways that people work together and the ways that that amazing things can be created through like the processes and how we think in the ways that that we cooperate now all that said you know along that journey I saw that there was actually a lot more to the world than creating new technology products my wife had enrolled in a program and through that program she taught me a lot about you know the problems in global sustainability that we're facing us all and I got inspired because of that to go out into the world and try to do something directly with that because I'm all about trying to figure out by doing first and then looking at the theory afterwards so I've spent the last year and a half out in the world working with social entrepreneurs on issues like access to clean water or access to essential micronutrients or being able to get power to to remote villages in rural Guatemala and I brought the lessons that that about how to work rapidly and how to invent and how to create new technologies to that world and with no understanding of actually whether it would apply at all so what happened well the first surprise came relatively quickly it was actually that it worked you know there's no reason that's a process that developed to make software development go ten times faster should have anything to do with a a startup being able to raise funds faster or being able to create jobs in in a impoverished community but it worked and on the second surprise that came more gradually and was actually way more eye-opening to me was that it wasn't actually the techniques at all that were the reason that it worked it there it was the mind shifts that were inspired by those techniques that allowed people to go see the problems in their life in new ways and because of that I got I went on to this kind of crazy journaling thing I filled three journals with extremely tiny writing some of it is behind you and I considered this process to basically be the the debugging of collective consciousness like what are the assumptions that we have in our minds that prevent us from solving the problems in our lives that we never even look at and today I've distilled down some of those lessons I'd like to share the first couple lessons from that process with you so three mind shifts to share that will make impossible problems possible again for you the first is that knowing is the enemy of learning now you know everybody thinks knowledge is great I mean actually knowledge as a noun and knowledge is great but knowing is a verb that you apply to your knowledge it's a way that you use your knowledge and just like any two verbs it's very difficult to do two verbs at once it's difficult to ride a bike and juggle at the same time it's difficult to to play the piano and read a book at the same time and it's extremely extremely difficult to be in a state of learning and a state of knowing at the same time actually it is the worst because knowing makes learning impossible what happens in the mind when your knowing something well actually you've got this current sphere of knowledge and that you know you are exuding what you know about that current sphere of knowledge like knowing something makes it so that you look you you just draw upon existing experiences you're not open to new data you don't consider new possibilities in the process of sharing your knowing and learning is the opposite of process learning is the process that seeks new ideas that that seeks new possibilities and plays with them in this kind of dynamic way that that allows new things to form there is a time and place for knowing I mean but the the time is for knowing are in situations where you have problems that have already been solved really well then you can just kind of solve them in that way again but a lot of the global problems that we face today not only have they not been solved well they've never been solved period and we do the exact opposite with these problems we tried out a bunch of experts and if there's one thing about experts that they're really good at doing is being in a constant state of knowing and that is actually paralyzed our society like that our first instinct about big problems is to do the exact opposite things to our minds that is required to be able to find real solutions now this is true about creating new technology products it screw true about you know unlocking potential in the developing world but it's also true really about anything any problem that you have in your life and up here I put an exercise we don't really have time to do it together but around the world I've been doing these exercises and sort of honing them this is a really simple one to go try when you get home just pick anything that's a stubborn challenge in your life and within you know minute jot down some things you know for sure about them and then challenge yourself just for one minute to pick any of those things and say what else might I learn about it and if you do that in a very short amount of time the things that are intractable problems in your life will start to to loosen new possibilities will arrive and you find your creative engine starting again your learning engine starting again and the enemy of knowing will disappear and learning will begin again now with that we'll move on to a second mind shift so what is this it's fork right and actually something happen in all your minds right here and about a tenth of a second you saw this picture you said fork and then as soon as you that was done you stopped thinking about it and that this is actually exactly what we do thousands of times every day we put a noun on to a thing like a fork and as soon as we're done the assigning the noun to it we're done thinking about it well the second mind shift is to see verbs not nouns so we're going to go into little exploration of a fork and see it through its verbs instead of its noun and we're going to do it there just a single phrase we're going to discover all the verbs inside of the fork by asking the question how is it nuanced all right so we got a fork well what does this work made of how is it nuanced its looks like it's stainless steel and that's kind of interesting because stainless steel is made of iron it's made of chromium it's made of a couple other things but an interesting thing about iron and chromium is that it can only be created in a supernova and actually the the iron and chromium that's in this fork has gone through at least two or three generations of supernovae to be able to be in my hand today another thing about this fork how else is it nuanced well it's got a particular shape there's no other utensil that's shaped like this where did where the heck did that come from well it turns out that around 800 AD the ancient Persians kind of made the very first fork now it wasn't very popular at the time but after some time like it became a little bit popular amongst the the nobles in the Byzantine Empire and once the Byzantine Empire fell a lot of those nobles and intellectuals fled and participated in the Italian Renaissance and several hundred years after the Italian Renaissance the French picked it up and in their pursuit of creating what we now know today as table manners they basically created the shape of the fork that we're used to today they also diversified the fork into the salad fork the cake fork in the dinner fork yeah so if you're confused that that's what happened that's that's why it happened now look what happened in just the last couple minutes you took something as simple as a noun that you would just look at and dismiss in seconds and in just a minute or two by looking at the verbs that were behind it we've traveled over billions of years to go look at how a series of supernovas made this fork possible we've traveled over half a dozen civilizations that were involved in allowing the fork to to get the shape that it currently has and while this is very you know all well and good and interesting as as it pertains to Forks as it pertains to inanimate objects the real danger that happens is we do this with people too and we'll look at a person and we'll say Republican Muslim senior vice president anything and in a tenth of a second we're done thinking about them we're done engaging with them and that process makes it so that it our capacity for compassion is lessened we might be missing out on amazing friendships and relationships and at the end of the day I actually feel that this thing that we do in our mind in a tenth of a second is the root of where racism sexism and jingoism all the isms that plague us originate now how hard was it to debug this it didn't take it took longer than a tenth of a second because that's a very fast brain pathway that's happening but it didn't take more than a couple minutes just asking that question a couple times to say how is it nuanced and there's a thing that goes around you know everybody says well everything is connected we're all connected but they talk about it in kind of like new-age airy-fairy type way or they use things like the butterfly effect so it's kind of like scientific airy-fairy no actually everything is connected in a direct tangible way that you can see in a couple minutes if you were to pay attention this is connected to all the stars that exploded that make us up to this is connected to the civilizations that that form that allowed us to be where we are today and it's connected to the global supply chain which fills every single thing that we experience in our lives day to day and if it's true about these intimate objects and we lose so much potential of sight in that think about how much we're missing by not being able to relate to each other beyond the labels that we put on each other now the third mind shift I call using reality as your medium and this is an oil painting that my wife did and I'm you know watching her work it's very powerful right when when a painter is doing an oil painting they're living in that medium you know a a brushstroke comes on and it's the wrong color and you can scrape it off with a palette knife and change the color the stroke isn't exactly right and you can use the next set of strokes in order to go modify it and in the spaces where people are able to work in the medium these are the spaces that we actually I think it's no coincidence that these are the spaces where we see masterpieces arise might be painting it might be music it might be sculpture when people are able to really connect inside of their medium we see mass pieces but actually how do we choose to work today something like this this is like a normal software process and we don't get in the medium at all we have an interesting idea and instead of being in the medium of how the software might affect people's lives we create slide decks and then we have meetings and those meetings circle around forever and then maybe if they escape that though they'll graduate to specifications which are still not how the software impacts people's lives no instead if we're able to go look at the problems that we are working on today and get out of our cubicles or get out of our our study desks and say well the place where this problem is actually going to to be resolved out in the world is there and I'm going to go there and work in the medium then so many things like your ability to understand the world becomes so much richer your ability to go find solutions becomes dramatically expanded and this relates to to kind of a thought process which might help you guys get this done a lot of times we think before we do I think we got to do before we think it's number one but it's because we have this illusion that we've got a reason with the mind we got to figure it all out before we actually go out there and and do things but I would actually challenge that like what's way more important than knowing why something you know how something is going to work is knowing that it works there's a joke you know where one economist says the other well you know the main problem for Wikipedia for me is that it doesn't work in theory and actually I think a lot of people that work I wake up you don't even know why it works in practice and it's true really about the most complex system a bird a a flower of Fox doesn't actually really know how the whole ecosystem works but there's still critical components to making that whole thing work and especially as we enter a more global world with far more complex problems we need to trust in the fact that it doesn't actually matter that we know how the thing was solved it's way more important to get out there work in the medium and know that what you are doing by seeing it just like a painter sees the brushstroke change the the painting see that it does work and with that I'd like to wrap up three mind shifts for you guys to take a look at and apply in your own lives knowing is the enemy of learning see the verbs behind something instead of the nouns and then use reality is your medium and hopefully you guys will be able to take some of these lessons and bring them back to your own lives to solve your own impossible problems thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 37,000

Rating: 4.9321213 out of 5

Keywords: ted x, ted talks, TEDx, Lifestyle, United States Of America (Country), ted, Social Change, ted talk, Education, tedx, Global Issues, tedx talk, TEDxSemesteratSea, culture, tedx talks, English, Technology, Design

Id: _WtsMrkfG1w

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2014