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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-08-25
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBRlUzzYfLc
I am standing on a plywood floor in front of an aluminum wall inside of a storage unit in Santa Monica California where I have just put everything that I own save what fits in these two bags right here into storage number five oh too because I am about to begin the journey of a lifetime I am about to spend a gypsy ask here traveling the world
staying with friends family Airbnb hotels doing the work that I normally do consulting teaching speaking but with the next remission added in which is figuring out discovering how is it that we might empower ourselves in this uncertain economy as I'm sitting there contemplating what this year is going to look like I reach out I lock the master lock I down down the stairs of the storage
unit and I leaped into my freedom chariot my jeep and I head up the Pacific coast highway it is a quintessential California day the sun is shining the sky is blue the wind is coming in the window there this is what the future work is suppose to feel like freedom it's adventure its possibility its opportunity until I hit a literal roadblock I pulled the jeep over
I get out to figure out what's going on and %HESITATION apparently there's been a landslide my first thought is that I have a jeep like that's what this is for let me tester out but there is no amount of convincing that was going to get make that happen the second thing I thought was only god what is this is a sign like what if I just
turned back around and almost often storage go back to my apartment life as it was before but then I remembered something that I learned early on in my career which is stuck with me for such a long time which is between unknown that socks are that isn't working very well an unknown with some potentially always gotta go for the potential so with that in mind and
let back up in the jeep turned around head down the highway to the detour and then heading down the road I'm reflecting back to what got me into this in the first place I'm sitting in a conference room in midtown Manhattan a few years ago the vice president of human resources for Dow Jones in the Wall Street journal and I'm sitting across the candidate interviewing them
for a role that I've opened and this conversation is ending like so many of them that I have had which is more or less like Joe you're amazing you can do the job that I have to offer you but what in the heck are you doing talking to me about this job when you're so clearly passionate about something else and this conversation and happened so many
times in my career all over the world Brazil Russia China the U. S. all over Europe and from the C. suite all the way down to the interns they begin to look into the numbers behind it and it turns out that in the U. S. sixty eight percent of people and that number aggregates up globally to eighty seven percent of people are disengaged a highly disengage
at work which I read as board to miserable or worse it is bonkers more than half of us spend more than half of our waking hours doing something that is making us unhappy or bored or miserable or worse this is not now in the spirit of stuff that I don't want you to know about me %HESITATION I was one of those people who wasn't as engaged
as they could have been in my work so I decided to quit the corporate world only twenty thirteen to create a career that was more fulfilling for me and then the coach others into doing the same and over the last couple of years coaching teaching speaking consulting for companies I've begun to notice a confluence of events which really provides the context for this question how might
we empower success in the uncertainty of this economy and that confluence of events is the following first there's the advent of technology so there's a study out of Oxford more than forty seven percent of jobs in the United States are going to be taken over by comply robots are computerized in the next coming years now this isn't all doom and gloom because according to Accenture eight
trillion dollars in economic value is gonna be created because of this but what it does mean is that work and how we think about work is going to shift the second piece of this is the work force we read the newspaper we hear a lot all the baby boomers are retiring in the millennials are coming in and we can't figure out what to do with them
so that's their and their two other factors here that are raising questions like what is work what does success mean what is a career what's a job and the these are first a trend toward contract work so in Europe since two thousand ten more than fifty percent the jobs that have been created our contractor freelance work and this isn't just temporary stuff we're talking medical doctors
were talking senior executives so this is really disrupting what's going on and then there's the phenomenally exciting idea that in the next five to seven years three billion people who have never had access to the internet the educational opportunities that provides the entrepreneurial opportunities that provides are coming on line we have no idea what this landscape looks like and there's a ton of opportunity hiding here
and then the third thing is the economy so on average since nineteen forty six every five years there's been a crash now this is normal it's cyclical it's but our last big donors to thousand eight so her depending on which economists you talked to were were a couple months to a couple of years out but this is going to happen to all of these three things
together raise questions about work that I want to solve so that I can help all of us create amazing this for ourselves it was within this context that I start out on this journey and there I've learned a lot as I've been traveling today's day one hundred forty nine I miss your three of the main things with you so that you can walk out the door
with a tool set to help you empower your own success the first one is mine set and that's the distinction between being captive to the circumstances around me or the captain of your destiny a day forty seven I board a plane in Los Angeles California I slice three thousand miles to Miami Florida I walk out of the plane I walk up to the rental car counter
and you see this bag here heavy there's a lot of stuff in here that I got a year on the road and I'm looking for my wallet so I can get my driver's license out and I'm looking and get close to the bottom the wall of the bag and there's no wallet and get close to the bottom of the bag in there is no wall they
get to the bottom of the bag and there is no wallets today forty seven of a year of travel and a driver's license I have no money and no credit cards I am asking myself what did I do to my life why did I do this what am I doing and I sit down and cry I mean I didn't know what to do I'm sitting there
and then I realize that no amount of wishing or crying or hoping was gonna make the wallet appear so I stood up and said okay given that's what I want to create so I get on the phone to call a friend who lives in Miami find myself a place it's a he's is get yourself here I'll pick you up you can stay with me I'll lend
you money until I go on to my next destination south by southwest phenomenal right so I for the moment that I did I sat there and I let the circumstances control what was happening but then I made the decision that I was gonna see what I could create and that's gonna be a critical skill for us as the economy continues and and as the workforce continues
to shift around the second piece is education I could talk to for hours I've been interviewing people all over the world about what's going on in education but there are three things that I wanna but I want to share with you the first one is really we really need understand what industries are an ascension and what industries are in decline today thirty five I'm in Whistler
Canada Tony Robbins is putting on a conference on finance for a group of about a hundred and fifty of us and we're debating what's happening in the world of mechanization and artificial intelligence and the subject of self driving trucks come up now these already exist so it's just a matter of time before the more than three million truckers in the United States are out of a
job so if I were in trucking right now I would seriously be thinking about what might be coming next and if I'm in an industry that insular to the truck driving industry I would also be thinking about how my business model might be shifting some writer on it's not good or bad but if we can get out in front of it then we can create amazing
us and then of course if you're thinking about being a truck driver you may want to think about %HESITATION spending a few years in school and doing that as if we know that this is what the trend is that's coming so under seems coming up understand what's going down the second piece is the critical role of entrepreneurship so well I mention this trend in contracts work
more and more of us even if we don't want to create billion dollar unicorns we're gonna have to understand how to market what we sell it still looks like what finance looks like what raising money looks like and we're gonna have to acquire a but the tease for risk that many of us maybe don't have right now in entrepreneurship is a perfect way to do that
day eighty five in Chicago Illinois to give a talk I stop by eighteen seventy one the vibrant entrepreneurial space there to speak with the CEO of the Illinois Hispanic chamber of commerce this is us actually in front of a really cool our insulation and they're creating programs for young kids to do incubators so to grow small businesses they bring in high school students two days a
week to teach them the fundamentals of bin is a business and entrepreneurship these are the kinds of programs and training that are gonna help us be successful and then there's a third piece of education which is the institutions themselves schools moving away from traditional eight to three sit in the dusky get talked out go home do some homework into bubbling life design centers day nineteen I'm
at Stanford experimenting with some school stuff in the space they've actually brought in folks from the design school into the career services center to help people not just get a job really design a life that's gonna be fulfilling for them and the third piece of the US the collaboration so before %HESITATION business very transactional I give you access you give me something of equal value in
return for acts and we go our separate ways but was so much chaos swirling around out here we're gonna have to come together to find creative solutions so institutionally not competitors we're gonna have to start working together day ninety one I'm invited by the dean of the business school of Yale University to come and watch a dean's and directors meeting for the last five years more
than twenty of the deeds and directors from the world's top business schools are coming together to discuss not only management education but what's the future of business and how might we work together the folks who you think might be collaborating in fighting are actually coming together to create solutions and then on the individual level this is day one hundred forty six a couple of days ago
every morning I am on a call a math with the master mind group %HESITATION one of whom is here tonight so I'm so glad you're here arm in the master mind group because each of us individually is growing our businesses but what we do together is we bring best practices into the room in Mexico work together to create joint ventures and build business for ourselves so
collaboration is going to be increasingly more important so let's mindset it is education and it is collaboration now we're going to be we're here this is a one hundred and forty one %HESITATION we are at the very front here of the future of work we are at the precipice of what's happening you're all here with me and I invite you to do a couple of things
first understand the distinction between unknown that sucks so that isn't working in an unknown with some potential it's good for the the second thing is that we can allow ourselves to be buffeted around a what's happening outside of us or you can step into the captain's chair and ask the effective question given all of this what do we want to create and this is going to
