Why you have to fail to have a great career: Michael Litt at TEDxUW

hey guys i'm here today to talk to you about the f word uh you've all said it you've probably said it earlier today once or twice if you're me maybe 20 times you've probably said it to your friends your friends have said it to you you'd be surprised you said it to your parents your parents have said it to you and this academic institution that we're sitting in today has taught you to fear it that word is in fact f u n fun that was a good one um i'm glad you guys are interactive so in all honesty today i'm actually talking to you about failure that was kind of given in the preemptive failure is a terrible thing everybody experiences it you will experience it you'll be you'll experience it academically career-wise so i did what any good speaker who hasn't really done much speaking would do and i googled the word and i was going to do a definition thing but everybody hates those and so i did something else i found there was 543 million data points on the internets about failure that's a lot of numbers and google found that for me in about 0.23 seconds that's a lot of information very fast people obviously care about failure so i pretended that i was an alien from outer space and i was coming to earth after a nuclear apocalypse and the only thing left was mother google servers and i had to piece together humanity and so i googled failure and i found this it's an epic fail i found this [Laughter] it's an absolutely epic fail this guy it hurts and finally the most epic fail of all and so i thought about what this would mean to society in all honesty that's not what my talk is about my talk is about the fact that you will fail to have a great career and this obviously pulls on a fantastic tedx uw talk of past from larry smith and his talk was he deserves applause and his talk was you will fail to have a great career unless and in typical larry fashion he left unless as this low-hanging fruit it was dangling in front of you and all you had to do was reach out and grab it but you really didn't know what it was and he left it to you to make your own conclusions i'm an engineer and i want to make it easier for you to understand what that unless is through my own experiences so this is an optical illusion you've all seen this optical illusion before and you know what to think about optical illusions so which line is longer yell it out yell it out the top one right okay so everybody's saying that it is the same at least most people are saying it's the same you're trained okay you're trained to believe that these lines are actually the same and some of you are smart and should keep your mouth shut i'm just kidding um but you're taught to believe that they're actually the same length it's an optical illusion i must be tricking you therefore they're the same length because i asked you which line is longer so those of you that yelled out the same you're actually wrong because i changed it the top line is longer and so those of you who are like the same the same you probably feel a little foolish because the guy next to you who thought it but didn't say it is now just chilling he's like that's right and if you're malcolm you love it because you got it right and you somehow can calculate distances with your brain but that feeling you have inside of you right now is the feeling of failure you shouldn't have shouted out you shouldn't have commented you shouldn't have made that step you shouldn't have followed your gut instinct and you'll learn from that and what i want to teach you is how to learn from that and so story time in second year university i started a company called lit entities that is not a jar of my urine that is a jar of biodiesel and my brother and i wanted to produce biodiesel in guelph and sell it to companies all over the world but mostly in canada petrochem petrochemical companies had not committed to producing biodiesel yet and the greater transit the greater transit authority of the greater toronto area gta squared was going to be buying biodiesel from small producers because the government wanted all fleets to run biodiesel so i traveled all over southwestern ontario with this little jar of biodiesel trying to sell it to these companies and we needed to sell five million liters of biodiesel or to raise five million dollars in cash to build this refinery in guelph it was a lofty goal and there's one particular incident this is the actual jar i kept it in my glove box and it was a very cold january day and the fear around biodiesel specifically in canada is that it freezes at a temperature that's higher than regular diesel fuel that's a big issue in a cold climate my car was old it didn't have a heating core i was running it on one percent biodiesel to make a point could barely start it in the morning and i drove all the way to toronto with this jar of biodiesel in the glove box i was 10 minutes early and this was a meeting with the greater transit authority of the greater toronto area big meeting 42nd floor get out of my car 10 minutes early reach into the glove box and i find a biodiesel popsicle and you can imagine how difficult the sale was going to be because you need to have a product like this that's tangible for people to buy into it especially when there's fear so i pulled this popsicle which is now leaking on me and i get into the elevator 42 floors two and a half minutes feels like 18 years and i rub this jar between my legs this is the feeling of failure so i get to the floor i check in my hands are shaking i go to the bathroom i open the top and i hold it underneath the hand dryer two and a half minutes feels like 18 years and i start to see it slowly thawing i go sit in the waiting room i find a vent on the floor i put my bag on top of the vent and i'm believing that this vent is going to melt the biodiesel and i'm watching it i'm watching it and the lady behind the counter sees me looking in my bag and she's probably worried that i've got like a bomb or a weapon in there meaning gets delayed probably because of that and i finally go in the room and so everybody knew i had this jar everybody wanted to see it and what i would do is i'd pour it into a wine glass people could touch it feel it i wouldn't touch the stuff myself some guys would drink it because they believed in the capabilities of this product have the meeting where's the biodiesel we really want to see it because we had produced this ourselves in our garage i have it but let's talk about the environmental implications of the product for a little while longer where's the biodiesel we want to see it i have it but let's talk about being a clean feet a green fleet for canada finally i could no longer wait and i looked into the bag and i saw this wonderfully clear golden liquid and it had thawed and i reached in pulled it out uprighted it and thunk 80 ice and that was the end of the meeting and that feeling is a feeling of failure and i remember instinctively thinking to myself which is a comical thought that i was literally selling ice to eskimos and it could have been more true we failed to build that energies it was not a success not only did we fail to build lit energies but this was my second year at university this is even before the two third point 2a wasn't even 2b or not to b i tried to build this business and i failed that term in school as well and so if you can imagine you start a business you're crazy everybody thinks you're insane and they all think that you're going to fail and then you fail your term in school and all the people that thought you're going to fail now rub it in because your friends are moving on in academia and you've got a year of your life with nothing to do because your business failed there's no way to sell this product there's no money from investors and you don't even have an academic career so i did what everybody else does and i went and worked at a big software company in town and i learned how to write code and i bettered myself through the process but digging myself up from that wall dusting myself off and moving forward was very very difficult again my best friends in the world were no longer going to be going through an education with me and i watched as they did i learned from that and so i have another optical illusion which line is longer the difference is that everybody's a lot quieter because i told you that you failed the first time and that's the wrong lesson to learn even though you were wrong and i still hear people mumbling it doesn't even matter and i'm not going to tell you the answer and if you find me after i can show you but you should still be willing to shout something out even if you're wrong who cares what that guy next to you thinks who cares what your friends think who cares what your parents think you will fail to have a great career unless you fail to have a great career it's an oxymoron and it's ridiculous but it makes sense right so again you will fail to have a great career unless you fail to have a great career don't listen to your friends don't listen to your parents don't listen to academic institutions that make you fear the concept of failure failing that academic turn term and failing at building lit energies was the best thing that ever happened to me if you want to find out more about that i'll stick around and talk to you about it remember be somebody or be somebody's fool thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 535,145

Keywords: tedx, Entrepreneurship, TED, Michael Litt, Investing, Psychology, ted, University of Waterloo, Business, English, Careers, Work, tedx talk, Technology, Canada, Larry Smith, Engineering, TEDx, Failure, Passion, ted x, Vidyard, TEDxUW, ted talk, Global Issues, Media, Management, Training, Waterloo, Student, Lifestyle, Velocity, Success, Education, tedx talks, ted talks, Coaching

Id: hNQRRsL3R4A

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 23 2012