good afternoon thank you very much to
the TEDx organizers for inviting me to
be part of this wonderful occasion with
this amazing group of people you never
know when you’re the last speaker if
it’s a compliment or a punishment for
some crime but we’re here so let’s make
the most of it so let me start off by
giving you a date January 25th 2015
according to Dethklok org that’s the day
that I’m going to die the Internet is a
wonderful thing you can go and find all
kinds of great information including
your your death date so the average
Canadian is going to live roughly eighty
two years that is twenty nine thousand
nine hundred and thirty days so for me I
have 14 thousand five hundred and fifty
nine days left and and by the way my
birthday is January the 14th so January
the 14th 2050
I’m gonna have one hell of a party
you’re all invited I have eleven days to
go we are going to light it up so you
have roughly thirty thousand days on
this planet and the question is as you
get close to those thirty thousand days
I want you to imagine now that you are a
few days before your specific ending and
I want you to ask yourself how do I know
that I lived a good life how do I know
that my time on earth mattered because
at the end of the day we have this one
life to live and so far when we talk
about what is a good life well a good
life is a life that’s filled with
achievement a good life is getting
better education is getting a better job
it’s getting better things things that
show we’ve made it and this good life
unfortunately is all about the I how did
I succeed and so when we look at the
good life the way that we define it now
we look at the consequences of this I
mindset and what are those consequences
the consequences are that we have a
world of haves and have-nots we have a
world of extreme and opulent wealth on
one side and that right next to it
extreme poverty we have a world where a
last majority of people feel ignored and
feel like their lives don’t matter so
you say to yourself wait a minute though
we’re not all that bad we donate we give
our our money and we give our our time
to other people and yes we do do that
but let’s let’s have a look at that so
there is something called the world
giving index that is won by the the
Gallup Organization it’s a very large
polling organization they do something
called the World poll and part of that
they come up with the world giving index
so when you see where is Canada in that
there’s a hundred and thirty nine
countries by the way that they survey so
Canada is actually not so bad we’re
number seven right so you look at Canada
and you’re like we’re number seven there
and they’ve got these different
dimensions
you know we help strangers sixty percent
of us roughly we donate money or again
another sixty percent although the
average Canadian gives a hundred and
twenty three dollars a year that’s 34
cents a day and thirty five percent of
us give give our time now what’s
interesting when you look at this index
is the number one country and the number
one country which actually has been the
number one country for four years in a
row is my anmar formerly known as Burma
and for those of you that don’t know a
lot about my anmar
it’s got a per capita income of 702
dollars and 38% live at or below the
poverty line and by the way the poverty
line in my anmar is 88 cents us a day so
when we’re talking about a poor country
this is one of the poorest countries in
the world and yet it has been for the
last four years
one of the most giving countries in the
world and we say to ourselves what does
that have to do with well 99% of the
people of my anmar are buddhists and
those of you that know about Buddhism
Buddhism places a lot of emphasis on
kindness and giving and Buddhism has
this concept of Karma which is that for
every action there’s a reaction and that
you have to be intentional about what
you do because it has consequences and
I’m not suggesting here that we all
become Buddhists but we’re all on
different paths in terms of spirituality
with beliefs and non beliefs in higher
beings but we are all on that same path
called humanity and if we look at
humanity and what it means to be a human
being
it’s about commonality and about
connecting in my life I’ve been very
fortunate to have traveled extensively
I’m at around 70 give or take a country
or two and what I notice is as I travel
around the world there’s so much of us
that’s in common we all laugh we all
find joy we all cry when there’s
something that’s deeply grieving and we
all all want to have this feeling of
connection with something what if we
started to reimagine and redefine the
world and the living of a good life
vennett from that i mentality to the us
mentality what if we started to say and
reimagine what it means to be successful
it’s not just about going to the top
yourself but actually to help others get
there with you so I was once like you a
bit younger than I am right now
and I did my undergraduate in business
and I went and started working for a big
company and then I went and did my MBA
and started you know working for another
big company and then I was like that’s
not enough I’m gonna go do my PhD and so
I when I did my PhD and I started
working at elite universities around the
world and consulting to top
multinationals and with that I started
to accumulate all those things that show
that you’re successful fancy house and
fancy cars and fancy gadgets but what I
noticed was that in that pattern of
accumulating things and successes I
wasn’t really happy and so I mentioned
this to a colleague once I said you know
I I’ve got everything I’m not really
that happy and he said to me success is
getting what you want and happiness is
wanting what you get and I saw that the
more I got the less happy I became and
as I started to reflect on this I want
to share a story with you it was in one
of my travels in Brazil I’d gone to Rio
de Janeiro and Rio de Janeiro is is
famous for its its beaches and its
wonderful scenery and of course also for
its poverty and one day as I was coming
out of my hotel room there was a little
kid that was running up to the tourists
and tugging at their legs but there was
a
or man at the hotel who just kept
chasing this kid around and basically
shooing him away and but he didn’t give
up he just kept coming back and so when
I kind of got closer he ran up to me and
the the doorman again jumped in there to
try and down the shoe and when I and I
said I said no it’s okay it’s okay you
know he had this little spark and made
me want to connect with him and so he
looked up to me and very excitedly in
Portuguese I couldn’t understand
anything he was saying so you just took
my hand and he took me to this table and
this table was a checkers table and
those are our bottle caps though there’s
a water bottle caps and he started to to
teach me how to play checkers with him
and we sat there and we played checkers
for for a couple of hours and at each
time he would want a game and then I
would win a game and he was so full of
joy he was so full of love for what he
was doing in fact at one point you know
I was getting a bit hungry and I said
let’s go get something to eat he said no
and so there was somebody who was just
selling chips we just got the chips that
I mean we just continued playing and
from that couple of hours that I spent
with him I I felt this this sense of
happiness that hadn’t felt in such a
long time just because of his passion
and and his energy that was coming over
to me and history his desire to connect
and and after I laughed and he just gave
me this high-five I was so impressed
with his intelligence and determination
and enjoy and I said this little boy
deserves more than to just live on the
streets and I with all my education and
experience and background can actually
take some action to do something for
people like this little boy and so the
more I traveled and the more I got in
contact that I and I thought I try I
started to seek this out going to
developing
countries are not going there just to
lie on the beach anymore but going into
the rural areas and going into the slums
the more the more determined I became
that in my time here I’m gonna start to
do something about it
so with that started my not-for-profit
human OHS and our mission is to marry
the mind of business with the heart of
humanity to transform the lives of the
disadvantaged and the way that we do
that is by using this approach called
design thinking design thinking is a an
innovative approach that centers on the
human being and why is it so powerful
well first of all it begins with the
person and here I’m going to show you
our first project in Nicaragua where we
went to to trying to help the problem of
financial inclusion so once you begin
with the person you can start to hear
their stories we’re in this this world
of big data and billions of bits of
information but at the end of the day
those billions of bits of information
don’t mean anything until we see the
world through the eyes of someone else
until we develop this thing called
empathy and empathy is just having to
walk in someone else’s shoes and see
what they’re seeing is very different
from sympathy but once you have the
empathy you can actually start to feel
that you want to do something that you
want to make a difference in someone’s
lives and from there once you have that
empathy once you’ve understood the
person’s pain points you can start to
listen more deeply and co-create with
them and here we have a lady who’s 80
years old and we are having this
discussion with her to tell her about an
idea that we had for a animal loan
program and what we said to her is hey
what do you think we’ll give you a loan
in you you go on and buy a pig and raise
this pig and then sell this pig
and the profit you know can increase
your livelihood and he or she is telling
us that nope pigs won’t work and we were
like well why not well pigs they’re too
big they are too dirty they eat too much
in fact they can actually run through
our homes if you notice the picture of
the home there is just a bit of mud and
sticks and a picket at full speed can go
right through that and and hey if they
catch a disease that’s it right there
goes your livelihood so we’re like okay
we didn’t really think about that so she
said I think you guys should go with
chickens
everybody has experience with chickens
they’re a lot smaller or the cleaner we
can put them into our homes so that we
can protect them from the elements and
predators and if you know a couple of
them died that’s okay because there’s
others there and so we took that back
and using her input and her set of
assumptions we redid our thinking around
it and what we actually came up with was
exactly what she had said that in fact
chickens are a much much better deal
than than pigs and so we created this
program when we saw that you could take
a family of five sustainably out of
poverty in less than two years with a
chicken micro-enterprise program and
what was interesting was at the time
that we were putting the finishing
touches around this program there was
this summit of the top 400
philanthropists in New York where Bill
Gates said if I was living on $2 a day
I’d become a chicken farmer and we were
tweeting out we’re glad that Bill Gates
agrees with us and this eighty year old
grandmother in El Morocco Nicaragua sure
so design thinking for for Humanity is
bringing this approach this approach of
deep understanding of deep listening of
deep co-creation and and not to tell
people what to do it’s it’s to show them
something that perhaps they hadn’t seen
before and then to give them to empower
to take control of their own destinies
and to pave that path for prosperity for
themselves and their community members
for generations to come and this program
that’s being piloted for a couple years
is going very well and we’re looking at
how can we expend that to another 30
communities and really allow people to
feel what it’s like to be in charge of
their own lives and in and their own
livelihoods so when you think to
yourself so well you know how do I be
the change that matters well the first
thing is you got to believe in that you
are the generation that can change
everything you just have to have that
spirit that imagination that dares to
dream dreams that nobody else believes
in and to chase rainbows that nobody
else sees it takes courage and faith
that things are gonna work out in the
end because if it hasn’t worked out it’s
not the end and it takes you redefining
what it means to live a successful life
it means when you look back on your life
and you say I lived a good life I lived
a successful life you can say that I did
that because I looked beyond my own
needs beyond my own wants and I took
action with passion and with purpose to
improve the lives of others thank you very much