TED Talk Founder Richard Saul Wurman (right) sits with Dean Chang (left), associate vice president for innovation and entrepreneurship, at the Voices of Social Change lecture in Stamp Student Union last night.
Ignorance, failure and terror might actually be crucial components of achieving success, according to author and TED Talks founder Richard Saul Wurman.
Wurman, who is best known for his work with the TED conference series, focused on his life experiences and beliefs in a talk to university students and faculty last night titled “The Next Great Solutions to our World’s Social Challenges,” as part of the Voices of Social Change series.
“I am personally not interested in spreading ideas, I am personally deeply and passionately committed to doing good work, and it is all I care about,” Wurman said.
Wurman created the TED conference in 1984, ran it for 18 years and then sold it. When he was involved with TED, it was just a hobby, he said. It was not his life.
He has published 83 books and has organized conferences around the world. But Wurman, driven by curiosity, said he only takes on projects that he does not understand, giving him an unlimited capacity to think and grow.
“I worship at the foot of my ignorance. I am so proud to be more ignorant than anybody else in this room,” Wurman said. “The terror, the absolute terror of not knowing is my friend and comfort is not my friend.”
Wurman said he loves learning about different aspects of the world and discovering how they are connected. But he said the current education system does not foster this kind of knowledge.
“Most of people’s lives are: You memorize something you’re not interested in, get tested on it, forget it, then memorize something you’re not interested in, get tested on it, forget it,” he said.
Instead, education should be approached from the “bottom up,” rather than the “top down,” he said.
Wurman’s work is often described as “innovative,” he said, but that word has lost its meaning after being overused. He defined innovation with the acronym ANOSE: addition, need, opposites, subtraction and epiphany.
Wurman graduated at the top of his class from the University of Pennsylvania, but he faced challenges in the real world after graduating.
“I was not successful, and I later became less successful, and I was not certainly taken seriously, and it was a struggle,” Wurman said. “You have to accept that you’re going to fail, and I fail a lot, and I have failed and I’ll still fail.”
Wurman stressed that he was not espousing a way of life or trying to attract followers, but rather explaining what approaches he has taken in his life. He emphasized the importance of listening, asking thoughtful questions and surrounding oneself with people who are more intelligent to achieve goals.
Craig Slack, Stamp Student Union’s Leadership and Community Service Learning director, said he hopes Wurman’s ideas about mindset and resiliency resonate with university students.
“You have so many failures before you hit on success, so how does resiliency come into play to help me continue to move forward?“ Slack said.
Several students attended Wurman’s lecture because of their familiarity with TED. Junior elementary education major Ann Marie Huisentruit said she attended Wurman’s lecture because TED Talks encouraged her to “dream bigger.” She was not disappointed that Wurman did not focus on the series, however.
“It was really inspiring to hear what his experience has been, and I really appreciated his honesty in a lot of things because he didn’t just try to sugarcoat everything,” Huisentruit said.
Jonas Okafor, a junior enrolled in letters and sciences, said he came to the talk to receive extra credit for a class, but ended up staying the entire time because he was so interested in what Wurman was saying.
“I feel like we already know about TED,” Okafor said. “We watch the videos, we know the format, we know how it works. I think what matters, or what I appreciate, is that we can draw from his experiences and learn from his lessons.”
