TED Talk Highlight Week 1: Good and Bad are Incomplete Stories we tell Ourselves

I found this video by accident while looking for another TED talk that I wanted to share on the blog. I’m so glad I did because it forever changed my perspective.

Without further ado, the TED talk is embedded below. It’s 13.5 minutes and well worth the watch.

At the end of the day I reach the same conclusion as Heather in her video. Avoiding labeling a situation allows me to be more mindful, and I can feel myself observing and thinking about things more deeply than I had before.

It also has been making it a bit easier for me (a recovering former perfectionist like so many of you that I know) to take entrepreneurial risks.

When things go “wrong” it makes it easier to accept them as learning experiences.

When doing something new and groundbreaking, there are going to be mistakes. And whether they are good or bad, it’s hard to say right now.

Only time will tell.

On that vein, one of favorite quotes from this talk is:

“By gripping tightly to the story of good or bad I close down my ability to truly see a situation. I learn more when I proceed and loosen my grip and proceed openly and with curiosity and wonder.”

In manufacturing, supply chain, management, and science, a universal truth is that in order to succeed we need to keep our eyes wide open – a “bad process,” “bad supplier,” “bad employee,” or a “bad result” could all be critically important opportunities if we can bring ourselves to step back and delabel the situation before making a plan for how to proceed.

If you didn’t view it as a bad process, would you throw the whole thing out the window? Or would you study it and figure out how it worked and then make incremental adjustments, avoiding whiplash for your employees and encouraging steady efficiency growth?

If you didn’t view them as a bad employee, but dug deep to gain understanding and worked to improve the root causes of unacceptable behaviors with them, how much money could you save your company in recruitment, training time, etc.?

And of course any science experiment giving what appear initially to be troublesome results is a golden opportunity for either growth in skills of the operator due to some mistake they made or growth in understanding of the system that dealt the result.

I’ve also applied the parable Heather shares to my personal career journey -

I was laid off from a role I loved in a company with great benefits and people. Good or bad? Hard to say.

I had a handful of job interviews where I wasn’t quite the right fit for the hiring manager. Good or bad? Hard to say.

One job interview seemed to go well but then I was told the company could not fund the role. Good or bad? Hard to say.

I asked the hiring manager from that interview if they’d like to stay in touch and perhaps get coffee sometime since I enjoyed talking with them and they agreed to meet with me sometime in the future.

A few weeks later, they asked if I’d be interested in working with their company on a very short contract as a consultant since they saw I had a consulting business. Good or bad? Hard to say. But of course I took the contract!

Now I am the Laboratory Director for their pharmaceutical startup company. And I’m still keeping the consulting business on the side. Good or bad? Hard to say. But I feel very optimistic for the future and my eyes are wide open.

Do you have a specific situation you now are looking at differently after watching this TED talk? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Thanks for joining me,