TEDxBratislava - Yossi Ghinsberg - On thinking out of the box — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:01Mind wide open
2. 0:06www.tedxbratislava.com
3. 0:10I have a conspiracy theory
4. 0:18My conspiracy theory is
5. 0:22There is no conspiracy
6. 0:28If there is no conspiracy, it's because of me
7. 0:35It’s because of you
8. 0:37There is nobody to blame
9. 0:41So I take it to an extreme measure
10. 0:44I say; the suffering in Burma is because of me
11. 0:52The atrocities in Zimbabwe. I am responsible
12. 0:57The Middle Eastern conflict, it is for me to solve
13. 1:04You see, I don’t think I am separated from the world
14. 1:12The world is not as it is.
15. 1:15The world is as I am, as you are
16. 1:20We are not separated from the world we make the world
17. 1:27So I’m responsible for anything that happens in the world because I can really do something about it
18. 1:35Simply by being me
19. 1:38What I’m am is what I give to the world
20. 1:43That is what the world is made of
21. 2:00You know, there is
22. 2:03One more thing about this
23. 2:10If you blame somebody, you give them the power
24. 2:14If you take responsibility, you are empowered
25. 2:18You can do something about it
26. 2:21If you take responsibility, you cannot be a victim
27. 2:24No matter the circumstances
28. 2:27No matter how much adversity comes to you
29. 2:31If you are responsible, you can do something about it. You don't have to be a victim of anything
30. 2:37Victim is a choice
31. 2:44A poet once said a line, that I can, a notion I can really identify with
32. 2:54It was: "Only my story, I know how to tell. Narrow is my world, as the world of an ant".
33. 3:06I can relate to that, but I say: "Only my story I know how to tell".
34. 3:11"Wide is my world as the entire universe".
35. 3:17So let me tell you a little bit about my story
36. 3:24When I was 21, almost thirty years ago.
37. 3:31I was lost in the Bolivian Amazon
38. 3:36In the midst of the rainy season, I lost everything that I had
39. 3:41I lost my three companions; I lost my raft with all the equipment
40. 3:45I had nothing. No knife, no gun, no fire, not food, no experience. I was hundreds of miles away from civilization
41. 3:54I was hundreds of miles away from civilization
42. 3:58It was the worst rainy season in a decade
43. 4:04And yet, despite that circumstances. I survived
44. 4:14But not only I survived. I actually found something, I didn't know I had.
45. 4:24So I think that sometimes you need to get lost in order to find yourself
46. 4:31The amount of adversities that came my way, is unimaginable
47. 4:36Three weeks of hardship, in the midst of the forest
48. 4:41You may know that the Amazon rainforest covers 4% of the planet,
49. 4:46but 50% of all species live in the Amazon
50. 4:52I know most of them, personally and intimately.
51. 5:02Famine, injury, torrential rains, storms, floods, swamps.
52. 5:14And predator attacks, snakes and jaguars, and leeches and ticks.
53. 5:20You cannot imagine how much adversity came my way
54. 5:25And yet, there were times I was praying not to be saved
55. 5:35Because I've never been so centered and balanced and strong before in my life
56. 5:41I was not desperate, I was not afraid
57. 5:48How can it be?
58. 5:51Well I feel, I was activated. I didn't have a choice
59. 5:57In circumstances like that, you must give all you have
60. 6:03You fight for your life
61. 6:06So fear is an obstacle and worry is taking energy.
62. 6:14So all my faculties came together, to serve the purpose: preserve life
63. 6:24That kind of balance was intoxicating
64. 6:30I never thought of myself to be so powerful
65. 6:37That power is innate, as so much wisdom that I found inside myself
66. 6:45That wisdom is genetic nobody needs to learn how to survive.
67. 6:50That’s why we are here. Because we know.
68. 6:56I was saved, but the things I discovered in the forest, didn't allow me to go back to life.
69. 7:06I found providence. I discovered faith and needed no preaching for that.
70. 7:13I felt I saw the face of God in the forest. In nature itself
71. 7:19Coming back to society, I just didn't fit anymore.
72. 7:23That society prepared me for life.
73. 7:28But everything was broken and nothing fell back into place.
74. 7:33So I was lonely. I didn’t fit in my own home, in my own society.
75. 7:40And after several attempts to adjust. I just left.
76. 7:46And I went back to the roads and became a world - traveler. A nomad.
77. 7:52I call myself the eternal traveler. At home, where ever I am.
78. 7:57But a foreigner, even in the country where I was born
79. 8:03So as a nomad, I have a habit. I sleep in a tent.
80. 8:09It doesn't matter where I live. I build myself a tent and that's my bedroom.
81. 8:14I don't sleep in the house. I sleep in the tent.
82. 8:17If there is an apartment building. I build a tent on the roof and I go and I sleep there.
83. 8:23If it's a house I build a tent in the backyard. And I always sleep in the tent
84. 8:30I love the tent. The tent is a symbol, of being transient.
85. 8:38It is a symbol of being at home everywhere you are. You always belong.
86. 8:45It is a symbol of leaving very light footsteps behind you on the earth.
87. 8:52But more than that. It makes sense.
88. 8:57You think about it.
89. 8:58If you own a house. You are shackled to the house.
90. 9:03With mortgages, whatever it is, you need to protect that house. You are not free.
91. 9:12But when you have a tent, you own the entire world. The world is yours.
92. 9:22What initiated my journey to the Bolivian Amazon, initially, was a dream.
93. 9:33I am a dreamer.
94. 9:38But I don’t say "I have a dream". I don’t say that. I say: "the dream has me".
95. 9:49And I don’t dream when I go to sleep. I don’t go to sleep because the dream keeps me awake.
96. 9:58I describe that condition, calling it the dreamer fool.
97. 10:05Because the dreamer intelligent, just keeps dreaming. The dreamer fool has no choice.
98. 10:13He has to follow his dream.
99. 10:16Now it is much better to be a dreamer intelligent, because to follow your dream is a dangerous thing
100. 10:24You have to leave everything behind and step into the unknown.
101. 10:28You have to leave the comfort zone behind.
102. 10:36I call that place, where most of us live in, I call it the box
103. 10:42I want to describe live, in a box.
104. 10:47You wake up in some boxy bedroom, in a boxy house or a boxy apartment.
105. 10:54You get in your boxy car and drive to a boxy office.
106. 10:58Where you sit in front of a boxy monitor. That describes about half of the life.
107. 11:03Then you drive your boxy car, or your boxy train car, back to your home
108. 11:08If it is a train car then you have a little box in your hand, to keep you busy between boxes.
109. 11:13And when you get home, you sit in your boxy living room, in front of another box.
110. 11:20And that is the other half of your life.
111. 11:23Now, the box tells you everything. The box tells you who you are. And where you are.
112. 11:31And what you should think, and who you should hate, and who you should kill.
113. 11:39And who should lead you, and what you should wear.
114. 11:47It tells you
115. 11:50How you should look.
116. 11:55What you need, what you want. Everything comes from the box.
117. 12:03And then there is the city of boxes.
118. 12:05And the light of that city just swallows the light of the luminous universe.
119. 12:14In that environment, one associates with the box.
120. 12:21Position, possession, religions, ideologies, ideas, belief systems, education.
121. 12:30The box tells us everything about our life.
122. 12:35And then, finally
123. 12:39We die
124. 12:41And they put us in a box
125. 12:49How can you get out of the box?
126. 12:59Nature, if you remember that we are nature ourselves, our lives become much bigger.
127. 13:08There is nothing boxy in the universe.
128. 13:17One of the toughest moments when I was lost in that environment,
129. 13:21was on the 17th day of my solitude
130. 13:27And an airplane, passed in the sky. After 17 days of struggle,
131. 13:34When that airplane passed up in the air a surge of hope went through me.
132. 13:44I started running and screaming, but I was under the canopy and the airplane was up in the sky.
133. 13:50It disappeared, oblivious of my misery.
134. 13:55At that moment, I collapsed.
135. 13:58And I felt something snapped inside my chest.
136. 14:05I cried
137. 14:07And as I was crying, my face was inside the mud.
138. 14:13I gave up on life.
139. 14:17I wanted to die. Death was much sweeter than life.
140. 14:23At least in death I could rest. So, I was praying from the bottom of my heart.
141. 14:27Please, please allow me to die.
142. 14:32I gave up on life.
143. 14:37It is so amazing, that life didn't give up on me
144. 14:43At that very moment, suddenly, I heard somebody else crying.
145. 14:49A young woman, sobbing next to me.
146. 14:52This was so impossible. And yet I heard it
147. 14:55So for a second I raised my head and as I raised my head I saw her right next to me.
148. 15:02And the minute I saw here I jumped up my feet and I started screaming at the top of my lungs:
149. 15:07"Get up! Get up right now!"
150. 15:10"The airplane might come back, we still have a chance. There is no time to cry".
151. 15:14I jumped on her and I grabbed her and I pulled her out of the mud
152. 15:17and I started running towards the river, with her.
153. 15:20No letting go of her, begging her, screaming at her, Whatever it takes keep walking
154. 15:24until we find an open shore by the river
155. 15:27I build you a camp; I’ll bring food for you. don’t give up; we have to make it to the river.
156. 15:33There is still a chance.
157. 15:36For two days, I took care of her.
158. 15:40On the second night with her, I made a place big enough for two people to cover.
159. 15:46I cut more palm tree leaves to cover us.
160. 15:52I told her: "get closer to me so we can absorb each other's warmth".
161. 15:58Then I realized that I was hugging thin air
162. 16:03There was nobody there
163. 16:06I thought I lost my sanity
164. 16:12And yet, by appearing for these two days she saved my life.
165. 16:18Now I don’t know exactly how to explain it. Some people said it may be some sort of guardian angel
166. 16:25But I don’t think so.
167. 16:27I personally think, it was just imagination
168. 16:30She was nothing but imagination
169. 16:34However, what I really truly don't know is
170. 16:39Whose imagination was she?
171. 16:42Because I didn't make her up. And if I didn't make her up who's imagination was she?
172. 16:48When I was lying in the mud, crying and praying to die I didn’t make up plans. I didn't say let's pretend that
173. 16:54somebody is here and play a game. I didn't make it up.
174. 16:58So who did?
175. 17:02I don’t know the answer to this question
176. 17:06But more importantly
177. 17:10She changed my life
178. 17:13Because, not only she saved my life. She changed my life.
179. 17:16Because through her that I realized something, unbelievable.
180. 17:20How did she save my life?
181. 17:23It wasn’t somebody big and strong that helped me.
182. 17:26No, it was somebody weak that needed me.
183. 17:30That's how she saved my life.
184. 17:33She needed me. I couldn't take care of myself anymore, but the moment somebody needed me,
185. 17:39I could take care of her and myself easily.
186. 17:44Our true power is revealed, when we give it to others
187. 17:50It is tenfold more powerful, even a hundredfold more powerful.
188. 17:55When we are not only self-serving, but when we are serving the greater good
189. 18:00That is when we reveal our true power.
190. 18:08Along my travels, I went back to the same place.
191. 18:15And I returned to the Amazon. It was ten years after all this ordeal.
192. 18:19And I went to the people in the village the only tribal people that live by that river.
193. 18:24That were involved in saving my life.
194. 18:27And they told me: "Yossi, we are dying, the entire village is dying, because the youth is leaving.
195. 18:33And never coming back
196. 18:36They said "help us".
197. 18:38I said: “what can I do?” they said: “we have a dream:
198. 18:42we want to build a resort here in the middle of the forest”.
199. 18:46“And tourists from all over the world are going to come to the resort"
200. 18:49"The youth are going to come back to be guides and cooks and motormen”
201. 18:53“and they take pride in their culture because they talk about it to the visitors
202. 18:58that is how we are going to save the village”.
203. 19:01I thought this is the worst idea possible. I mean, this is two days up the river
204. 19:05on a small dug-out canoe, in an isolated forest.
205. 19:09No flights, no transportation
206. 19:14But I didn’t have a better idea
207. 19:17So I told them, this is a great idea.
208. 19:19And let's make it happen.
209. 19:22Since I am the dreamer fool, this became my dream. And when I have a dream, I don't have a life.
210. 19:27I live for the dream
211. 19:29So this was not a project, this was my life.
212. 19:35I moved to the village and lived with them
213. 19:39I stayed there for three years
214. 19:43Walking with the shaman, I learned about the forest and I realized something quite amazing
215. 19:52Nature has the answer.
216. 19:56The forest is an ecosystem
217. 19:59And that ecosystem thrives as a whole.
218. 20:02Because an ecosystem, is interconnected, interrelated and interdependent.
219. 20:10So you cannot extract something, without hurting everything else.
220. 20:16So the only way is to keep the forest as a whole and use it as a whole.
221. 20:22This knowledge of how to do that was there all the time,
222. 20:26because that is how indigenous people lived through millennia.
223. 20:32So based on that idea, of an ecosystem, I started researching and reading.
224. 20:40It is quite amazing
225. 20:42You see,
226. 20:46In an ecosystem, no specie disappears or dies.
227. 20:50Everybody thrives
228. 20:53How can it be? It is so dense; you would think so much competition over resources
229. 20:59And yet, no species goes hungry.
230. 21:01Everybody thrives in the ecosystem, how can that be?
231. 21:07The idea of competition is based on the wrong ascertation
232. 21:13Western societies are built on the idea that there is not enough.
233. 21:18That resources are not enough
234. 21:21If we do not have enough, than it better be mine, not yours
235. 21:25That is competition
236. 21:28And because there is not enough and competition is the highest value we have,
237. 21:32then we have attitudes such as 'kill the competition'.
238. 21:36And this attitude we are very good at because we killed so many competitors.
239. 21:41We destroyed and eradicated hundreds and even thousands of species.
240. 21:47Based on the idea that there is not enough
241. 21:50It's a wrong idea. In nature there is enough
242. 21:55Think about it, if there is enough, there is no need for competition. Because there is enough.
243. 22:01Different strategies emerges
244. 22:05Corporation that is based on specialization.
245. 22:09Niche, relative advantage and cooperation; everybody serves everybody
246. 22:16Based on that idea, I wrote a three pager and flew to Washington DC, to raise money
247. 22:21for the resorts we were about to build
248. 22:26In Washington DC, luckily, I was extremely well connected,
249. 22:30because I had access to the yellow pages
250. 22:34So from a phone booth, with quarters, I made calls.
251. 22:39And after about twenty calls, one organization finally said, okay, come we will meet you.
252. 22:45And I went to see them. The Inter-American Development Bank, it was my first and only meeting in Washington.
253. 22:51As I do the presentation, I don't know anything, I'm a novice. I'm not an ecologist.
254. 22:58I don’t know I'm just a dreamer, a naive dreamer.
255. 23:01They stopped my presentation and said: "Mister Ghinsberg, we want to ask you two things".
256. 23:05"The first is, please; promise us, that you will not talk to anybody else in this town".
257. 23:12They needed the idea
258. 23:15When an idea is timely, it cannot be stopped
259. 23:18The second thing they told me was "Mister Ghinsberg, we are sorry
260. 23:22but the amount of money that you are asking, we cannot give you".
261. 23:27I was asking a grant of 250.000 dollar. We cannot give you,
262. 23:31because we are the small loan department. And the minimum we can give is a million and a half.
263. 23:39I said "I'll take it".
264. 23:44I took it and went back, and we built that resort
265. 23:47This resort, to this very day, is an inspiration for the entire Amazon basin
266. 23:57I want to end, by just telling you about my father.
267. 24:02My father died last year.
268. 24:09He had a tough life, my father.
269. 24:12Eastern European Jew, went to the Second World War he was taken by the Germans into work camps.
270. 24:20After the war he migrated to Israel, started everything from new.
271. 24:26He worked hard all his life and was not too happy. He was a bit bitter.
272. 24:31He considered himself not really lucky
273. 24:35He had a hard life
274. 24:38But then, towards the end of his life. He contracted liver cancer.
275. 24:44He was diagnosed with liver cancer.
276. 24:46To the surprise of all of us, my father refused chemotherapy.
277. 24:52He said no, he found an alternative medicine.
278. 24:58It is a medicine made out of grain, all natural. It's called vodka.
279. 25:06My father treated himself with vodka.
280. 25:10A transformation like that, I had never seen in my life
281. 25:14Living in the shadow of death my father became very alive.
282. 25:21My father was outrageous, he couldn't walk anymore, because in every step
283. 25:26he had a dance move. He was dancing all day
284. 25:30He wasn't speaking, because he was reciting poetry and telling jokes
285. 25:33and singing from morning to evening.
286. 25:36My father died a happy man.
287. 25:39And I reckon, that is the greatest virtue of all.
288. 25:42To die happy
289. 25:44Because
290. 25:47The last impression is the winning one.
291. 25:50What did it care if he had a tough life? He was happy now!
292. 25:54When you are happy now, it colors everything happy
293. 25:58So the last impression takes it all.
294. 26:00If you are miserable when you die, you don't care that you were happy.
295. 26:04If you miserable it colors everything miserable
296. 26:07The last impression takes it all the greatest thing, the most important thing
297. 26:11Is to die happy
298. 26:13But how can you die happy, because no one knows when we die.
299. 26:20So the only way to die happy is to live happy.
300. 26:25It is the only way
301. 26:33Thank you very much
302. 26:46Thank you
303. 26:47Thank you very much