The Science of Taking Action | Steve Garguilo | TEDxCarthage

[Music] Oh shadow lay Post eat I love post-it notes I love post-it notes so much that if I had one right now I would say voulez-vous coucher avec moi I love post-it notes so much that I bought stock in 3m just to support post-it notes and it turns out they have a lot of interesting uses so you can use them to decorate your office you can use them for sunscreen you can use them for the most awesome winter is coming Game of Thrones party you could use them to teach someone a lesson new parks in a handicapped space they shouldn't have parked in and apparently you can even use them for cheese so a few years ago I was at South by Southwest in Austin Texas in the United States the interactive film and music festival and 3m was there and they were giving out these massive post-it notes these ones are bigger than the size of a human head and I had never seen these before so I was really excited so I took a lot of them like a lot and I'm with a friend and we're carrying them trying to figure out what we're going to do with them and we walk over to a bar and we sit down and we find a great spot that's looking outside on this beautiful day we're just sitting outside watching people as they go across and we're thinking like what do we want to do with these post-it notes and almost as a joke we just scribbled on one of them free problem-solving hashtag zero problems put the post-it note out on the table and then as people are walking down the street we're just yelling at them hey do you need any problem solves free problem solving business life horseback riding welding you name it we'll solve your problem and so this is us at our free problem-solving stand and at first is like a guy who's like asking a question about his shirt and then this girl asks a question about her relationship but then this is person I'll never forget this girl in this pink shirt she's like can I solve problems with you and we're like sure so she's solving problems with us then all of a sudden all these people are tweeting about us I peer out there's like actually a big line now of people to get their problems solved we have an intern who's like getting us pizza and directing traffic out then this woman from Goodwill so goodwill is a as a secondhand clothing franchise in the u.s. she's like how can we grow our brand and I'm like how can you not grow your brand you have like 300 stores at one store triple your prices at once they offer gift wrapping at one store off for recycling services at wants to offer co-working space and she's furiously scribbling down all these notes she's like can you come do like a workshop with us to help us get more ideas I'm like I just gave you ten ideas go do those and then maybe we can do a workshop and I remember thinking how crazy it was that people seemed to be much more interested in collecting ideas than actually doing anything with them and so we're doing this for a few hours and we decide to leave and then this crazy thing of like we actually walked back two hours later and the problem-solving stand was still going on with other people and just just kind of crazy so that afternoon we could have done anything we wanted with those post-it notes or we could have just sat there and done nothing at all but we exercised this bias towards action to say just hey let's just try something and see what happens and it ended up being this pretty cool result so up until that point in my life I was kind of this idea magnet I was always talking to people about ideas generating ideas also a TEDx organizer so we bring people together to talk about ideas and I would find myself in a lot of rooms like this right filled with people with big smiles and lots of post-it notes and as someone who loves post-it notes you would think I would be happy about this but I started to reflect on it and thought you know how many times have I been in one of these rooms filled with post-it notes and then a week later like thinking what the heck ever happened to any of this stuff and so I started to study the science of action and what really either sparks people to act or holds people back from acting and what we found is that most people for most ideas either don't do anything with it or will slowly make a little bit of progress over time but people who are incredibly action-oriented they take these massive surges of action right away where they take a massive amount of action right away and surge forward on an idea so I wanted to study this a little bit more and started looking at all kinds of stories I mean if you look at my browser history you'll find a lot of weird stuff there everything from a guy who got a job from a snapchat filter to someone who made this Spanish Bible app to someone who made a restaurant in China out of an old 737 jet all kinds of stuff but I want to share with you three of the primary lessons that we learned in doing this research so one action is a muscle so much like some people exercise their biceps right not me but some people you can exercise these action muscles so think of it like playing a musical instrument who here plays a musical instrument so the first time if you were to sit down and try piano for the first time right it takes a lot of energy and a lot of focus to think about what notes you're playing and make sure you're playing the right notes but the more you practice it and the more you get used to it it becomes this muscle memory right where you don't have to think about it it's the same thing with action I'll give you an example of a guy who has huge action muscles like huge believe me so it's a guy he's at this pool party right and at this pool party there's a bunch of these white dove pool rafts and he's like oh this is really cool he's like I wonder if there's a pink flamingo version of these and so he googles it and it doesn't exist and for most people they would just kind of let it be there but he decides you know what I'm just going to Google China manufacturer get on the phone with somebody like hey China can you design this like pink flamingo raft I want it to be this big whatever blah blah blah six weeks later this thing shows up at his house he has a pool party with it everyone falls in love with this thing and he launches giant flamingo calm where he's made absurd amounts of money selling these pink flamingo rafts because he just exercises that muscle so much that it was it was natural for him to do that so first is it action as a muscle the second thing is that it tends to be when we have an idea we're really passionate about an idea that we think can be great we always say like oh I want to set aside time later to sort that out right like oh I'm going to set aside time when the sun is shining and I'd the right energy and Shalala where I'm going to be able to make this happen right but what happens [Applause] what happens is a week passes a month passes inshallah inshallah and we don't actually take action on our ideas and so we need to commit to taking action right away on things so sitting with my friend Matt the one from the free problem-solving stand about a year later and he is saying to me you know someday I want to take over like a summer camp and do some kind of adult summer camp and I just said to him okay get out your phone google summer camp pick one and reserve it and within minutes we had booked a camp and it sounds simple because it is but we do this to ourselves all the time right when we make it some bigger thing than it is and we wait versus just taking action right away so we ended up having this cool camp okay third thing is that it's actually when we have an idea our selves it's actually really hard to come up with actions for our own ideas but when it's somebody else's idea it's really easy to be like you could do this you could do this you could do this right like think back to that goodwill woman of all the different things uh and so the key is setting yourself up to make sure that you're getting that feedback from others so a good example of that was actually at the camp that we ended up organizing we decided to call it action camp and we brought together a bunch of really cool people to learn from each other have fun and take action on an idea and so one of our friends at camp her name is Kristy she had a great job at a great company but in that environment she decided to share like yeah maybe someday like long into the future I want to start a flower shop and that's something that I might want to do and so we did this process which we call action storming which is generating actions for other people's ideas and through that action storming process came up for with some very specific items for her like think about what venues currently are reserving weddings or document for the next 30 days events that could be enhanced with flowers whatever they are and she decided that over the next month she would start taking action on some of these things and as she did that she was realizing like wow maybe this flower shop doesn't have to be something in you know such a far distant future within a few months she actually had quit her job and started this flower shop if you ever find yourself in Fargo North Dakota you can check out this flower shop it's called love always floral it's beautiful place but the point of all those is that everything in life that's hard is just a series of things that are easy you just have to take that first step right and your idea could be the next Nobel Prize or it could be the next pool toy but the point is taking that responsibility for yourself and committing to yourself to say I'm going to take action and I'm going to make it happen messy [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 141,491

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Tunisia, Design, Ideas

Id: hn9so1zVfR0

Length: 9min 48sec (588 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017