Hello, I'm Shlomo Maital and welcome back to Cracking the Creativity Code. I hope that you're enjoying our course as much as we're enjoying bringing it to you. This is session seven, and session seven is titled, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Zoom In, in action: Stories to inspire and to aspire. So I'm going to tell you a lot of stories and I hope through these stories, you will build your own story, your own legend about how you changed the world with powerful creativity. But first we need to talk about a downside of creativity. Look, let's be honest, Creativity Can be risky. You can fail when you try to widen the range of choice. When you widen the range of choice for yourself, as an individual, sometimes it can be uncomfortable or unpleasant at least at first because we're exploring new territories. The worst that happens is you go back to the same old thing. When you widen a range of choice for other people, the risks are greater and the reason is very simple. Creativity, innovation, it is not a science it's an art. [COUGH] It's not like physics or chemistry that we don't have Newton's laws. I can't give you a law that tells you when an idea is going to be successful and create value for many people. There's only one way to find out and that way is to try it. To bring it to people and see if they like it and use it. So, the point here is that you have to be willing to take a risk. But there's another upside to the downside and that is that there really is no such thing as failure in creating new ideas, because even if the ideas don't catch, you still learn a great deal. And the failure becomes a foundation for future successes and I have many examples of that and I'll tell you some stories about that. But before we do that, let me show you this book. This is a book I mentioned in one of the earlier sessions. It's by David Shank and it's called The Genius in All of Us, Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ Is wrong. And the point David Shank makes as an author and he tells this brilliantly is that it's true there may be genes that drive creativity. There are gene's that drive everything. We have 22,000 genes in our body. Some of them must be related to our creative imagination. But this is the point he makes in a footnote and sometimes footnotes we skip them, but they're the most interesting parts of many books. This brief footnote, page 149. Genes, all 22,000 of them, are more like volume knobs and switches. What he means by that is in order to get volume from your music player, you have to turn it up. In order to get creativity from your genes, you have to turn it on and turn them up. And how do you do that? By creating an environment that's suitable for it, by challenging your genes, by working on new ideas, by challenging your imagination, the parts of your brain that deal with new ideas, and that will turn on these crucial genes. So the upside of the risk, the downside is that when you take creative risks, you stimulate these genes. [COUGH] And they get better and better and stronger and drive your creativity in the future. So just going back to a quote that I used earlier from a psychoanalyst named Carl Jung. A student of Freud who was very creative and had the courage to differ from his teacher's views and create his own school of thought. And Jung again said human creativity has no limits except those we ourselves place upon it. Test your limits, you test your limits by tackling really hard problems and seeing if you have what it takes to crack them to solve them. In 1985 when I was 42, I decided to do a marathon and test my own limits. I've been a jogger, but 26 miles is a long way, and I managed to complete the New York Marathon in under four hours. That really tested my limits. You really do hit the wall at 20 miles, and at 24 miles I had a severe cramp in my leg and I finished somehow with reasonably good time, tested my limits. And that was life changing because after you test your limits successfully, or even unsuccessfully the next time you try it, it's a lot easier and you can push your limits farther out. So let's keep Jung in mind. Stories, Zoom in/Zoom Out stories of various kinds. I use stories a lot. In business school, we call them case studies. But in fact a good case study is actually a really interesting story. With people, characters, and conflict and things that you can relate to. So here are some stories, some of my favorite stories that I really like and I hope you'll find these instructive and useful, but the goal is for you to create your own story, your own personal story. How you change the world. How you will change the world. Now here's how some others have changed the world. This is one of my favorites. What you are seeing on your screen is a young lady named Claire Lomas. She lives in London. She's a chiropractor. She loved horseback riding. She had a tragic accident, she was thrown from a horse or fell off her horse and suffered a spinal injury. And she became a paraplegic, she was confined to a wheelchair. Fast forward, on the inset now on your screen an Israeli, Technion graduate. Three degrees in electrical engineering. His name escapes me for the moment but I'll come back to that. And he also had a rather tragic story and the story was this. He was a successful entrepreneur, a start up person. He worked at a high tech company after graduating, his name by the way is Amit Goffer, Dr. Amit Goffer. He started a company, was succesful, sold it, made a great deal of money and then had a tragic accident. He was in a SUV vehicle in the desert on a trip, and the vehicle overturned, and tragically he injured his spine and was confined to a wheelchair. And in seconds, Dr. Gopher went from Being an outstanding, successful, wealthy entrepreneur to being someone disabled, as it were, and confined to a wheelchair. But he tested his limits. He didn't accept the disability and he set himself a really difficult challenge, he started a company. And the goal of the company to enable crippled people, disabled people, people confined to wheel chairs, to enable them to stand on their own two feet and to walk. And in a Blog that I wrote about this, I quoted from the new testament. Acts 14 the new testament describes a miracle done by the apostle Paul who faced demand lame from his mother's womb. And Paul fixed his gaze on him, saw the man had faith, and said with a loud voice, stand up right on your feet. And the man leaped up, and began to walk. Now, I'm Jewish, and we Jewish people believe in the Old Testament, not in the new. But I like the story from the New Testament. Because this is precisely what Amit Goffer did. He had faith and he looked a problem in the eye. And he said, I will get people to walk who are in wheelchairs. And this is how he did it. He used his skill, his knowledge, from electrical engineering. He created an exoskeleton, he and his partners and colleagues, an exoskeleton framed to fit on the legs. You can see it on your screen with Claire Lomas. Attached the frame to an electric motor and a backpack. Put some sensors into it and a control pad on the wrist, and here is what happens. The person confined to a wheelchair, stands with the aid of two crutches and then leans forward. As the person leans forward the computer and the sensors and electric motor move the left leg forward to take a step. And then the right leg. And then the left leg and soon the person sitting in a wheelchair is standing and walking. And what Dr. Goffer discovered in his wheelchair is that people in wheelchairs are always looking up when they Interact with other people, with the rest of the world, they're looking up. And they really like to look at other people eye to eye. So he wanted to make that possible, and he did. And the proof is Claire Lomas, and you can see her in the picture. She is crossing the finish line of the London marathon in 2009. It took her 16 days she walked about two miles a day 13 days. 13 days two miles a day 26 miles. The officials of the London marathon wouldn't give her a medal because you have to finish the marathon in one day but a lot of good people who finished the marathon gave her their medals. And you can see that she has an Honor Guard in the background are the Queen's Royal Calvary. And because she is fond of horseback riding, they gave her an escort to the finish line. This is the story of Rewalk, the device that enables people Who cannot walk to stand and walk and you can use this device to go up and own stairs. And here on your screen we see our Prime Minister and President Obama, the President of the United States together with the Rewalk employee and he's demonstrating the ReWalk device, which is now widely available in the US and Europe and other countries, demonstrating this to President Obama when he visited my country. There is a sad part to this story which is that Doctor Goffer himself cannot use this device because it takes some upper body strength to handle the crutches. But he's working on that, and there may be a breakthrough in it soon. And meanwhile, many many thousands of people, wounded soldiers and others, are able to restore their activity and their dignity by standing by standing and walking. Test your limits, change the world, widen the range of choices for people, give people in a wheelchair the choice of standing up and walking. The problem by the way, with this device is that it's very expensive, but like all devices, as we make more of them the cost will come down. And we're hopeful for mass production to bring this to a great many people all over the world. On your screen you can see that's me, and I'm there with my wife, Sharona. And we are at the headquarters of Google in New York City. Their New York City office is on the west side. And there's a story that I want to tell you about Google. And the story is two nerdy computer scientists named Larry Page and Sergei Brinn, friends at Stanford University completing their doctorates. Their doctorates was in the area of search engines, how to search the internet. They came up with a very clever way of fast comprehensive searching. There were search engines at the time. They completed their doctorates and left Stanford and started a company called Google. Google comes from a word meaning very, very large number with a lot of zeroes, and the reason for that is that they had a vision. Their vision was to bring all the information that exists anywhere in the world at any time and bring that to the use of everybody all over. That the word every and all and any, those are powerful words when you come up with a creative idea. The response many people gave him is who needs another search engine. We have the search engine already. Their response was, ours is ten times better. This is an important principle, you can widen people's range of choices by offering them something that exists already, but if you make it ten times better you'll change the lives of a great many people. But it has to be ten times better. If you offer something that exists already and it's 2% better or 5% better, it's not quite enough. Because your startup is unknown, and why would people take a risk trying something unknown and unproven, if they have something that does more or less the same thing. So follow the Google principle ten times better. Okay to do something that exists already but you need to make a powerful ten times leap to really change people's lives. Well this ends session seven, and we begun telling you some stories about zoom in, zoom out. We'll continue with some more stories in our next session.
