Here's another great TED video that is giving me some more direction
for my talk. Haha, actually this is a little bit "meta", as it were -
Dan Gilbert's talk is helping me narrow down the potential avenues that I
could go down during my talk, and hilariously enough, that's basically
what his message is that I'm keen to reference from his talk.
He
talks about the benefits of "synthetic happiness", a form of happiness
that we create in our own minds, a sort of "internal" happiness. I see
this as tying into the work of Epictetus, the great stoic Philosopher
who questioned happiness. He discussed how we should be aware of what we
can and can't control - we cannot control someone else's behaviour, we
can only control our own internal reaction to outside stimuli. The
phrase, "You made me feel bad" is impossible - someone does not force
you to have a certain reaction. Rather it should be "The way I am
responding to your actions is negative" - if we could say that without
sounding like the android character Data from Star Trek.
Anyway
that was an aside, back to my point. Dan Gilbert here talks about
creating happiness with our minds, and how that requires different tools
than our methods to achieve "real" or "experiential" happiness. Freedom
is a natural tool for experiential happiness - you can choose between
one of many different outcomes and naturally that makes you feel good.
What Dan argues is that freedom is the enemy of synthetic happiness - he
says, "The psychological immune system works best when we are totally
stuck, when we are trapped." In other words, having boundaries on our
choices allows us to pick something, stick with it (since there was no
option in the first place), and we just find a way to be happy with what
occurs.
This is profound, this idea is damn amazing,
and it really is well supported by my own experience. I may potentially
reference a couple of his quotes in my talk (which - amazingly - is
freely allowed by the TED conference).
One problem I
have right now as I develop my TEDx talk, is that I have WAY WAY WAY
WAAAAYYY too much choice. I feel like a kid at the grocery store,
looking up at the looonnng cereal aisle and having absolutely no clue
which one to pick. I have so many random stories from my childhood, all
with a little bit of self-deprecating humour, some silly childhood
photos to back them up... so many possibilities. Maybe TOO many
possibilities. I'm trying desperately to narrow it down so that I can
boldly choose some of them and then make those stories really work well
in the speech - to be happy with my choice. How I'm choosing to narrow
them down is a little tough - some stick out better than others and some
have cuter or more ridiculous childhood photos to go along with them.
All of these things weigh in on whether that particular anecdote will be
usable.
One method I'm using is going to TED.com,
filtering existing amazing inspiring awesome TED videos by the few
topics I'm going to be covering with my talk ("happiness", "motivation",
"success"), and watching and listening very closely. Today I found this
one from Dan Gilbert and it's so solid. I can tie this to a story about
my Grade 7 art teacher in Oxford, England. My parents came in for a
teacher-parent conference and he said in a direct style very atypical
for someone of British descent, "Michael is an excellent student. Very
motivated, always on time, very excitable, great guy, hardworking, etc.
But whatever you do, don't let him be an artist. He's a TERRIBLE
artist."
Hahaha. Now, most people would say this seems
like it would have been a huge hit to my self-esteem, given that I
wanted to "make visual effects for movies". The thing was though, my
self-esteem was already too high as my Dad would say, haha, so no
trouble there. This phrase from my teacher helped re-iterate things I
already knew. My Math and Computer Science marks were through the roof,
and I absolutely LOVED that stuff. I was bad at painting, I wasn't
motivated by drawing, I found I didn't really have any kind of
creativity in artwork. My stick figures were even hard to comprehend. So
this helped me with something very important, removing the overwhelming
amount of choices in the modern world. I wanted to do visual effects
for movies - boiling it down do a very over-simplified, basic core,
there are 2 jobs inside of the visual effects industry: art, and
science. You can choose one or the other. Some very very very very few,
ultra talented, truly awe-inspiring people in this world like my buddy
Matthew Parrott have been truly blessed with exceptional skills in BOTH.
But that is hugely uncommon. Usually it's one or the other. For me,
this moment was very important - it was a call to arms. It was a way to
tell me to cast aside the things I was not good on, and put the required
time and effort into something that mattered. Something that I loved
and something I was already showing a lot of potential in. I could
easily have squandered my childhood, sticking to my guns and saying that
I *had* to be an artist to work in visual effects. But rather, I
researched the positions further, I found out more about it, and
discovered that art and science really work hand-in-hand to create
visual effects. John Lasseter's famous quote is, "The art challenges the
technology and the technology inspires the art." It's a great
collaboration, a back-and-forth between the two. This "reduction of
freedom" allowed me to narrow down all the potential avenues and put my
time and energy where it counted - on something I loved and was actually
good at. Removing the choice was a great tool for helping me focus, and
commit myself to something that I knew would be worth sticking to.
And
then I was set up nicely to be happy with any outcome. I started in a
technical role in visual effects and found out there was a real sliding
scale of art and science talents. I was bad at drawing, but I had a
pretty reasonable ability at forms and silhouettes. So at Pixar they
handed me the "paintbrush" (a mouse) and I got to dabble in modeling and
shading, a sort-of "technical artwork." Things have a way of working
out. My long term career has slid back to where my real talents lie, in
the technical world, but it was cool to get a chance to experiment and
see that things aren't quite as black-and-white as "you're an artist" or
"you're a scientist". But that initial judgement call from my high
school art teacher could not have been more helpful for keeping me
focused on the best way forwards in my studies and focus at school.
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