西溪书社

Today, there are 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24 in the world. It is the largest cohort in human history. Meeting their needs will be a big challenge. But it’s also a big opportunity.

They hold our shared future in their hands. Every day, we read about young people lending their ideas and passions to fighting for change, social change, political change, change in their communities. Imagine what they’ll create: breakthroughs, inventions. Maybe new medicines, new modes of transportation, new ways to communicate, sustainable economies and maybe even a world at peace. But this opportunity, this youth dividend, is not a given.

One point eight billion young women and young men are standing at the door of adulthood. Are they ready? Right now, too few of them are. My favorite part of my job at UNICEF is a chance to talk to, meet with and hear from young people all around the world. And they tell me about their hopes and dreams. And they have amazing hopes and dreams for what they’ll accomplish in their lives. But what they’re also telling me is that they have fears.

They feel that they’re facing a series of urgent crises. A crisis of demographics, a crisis of education, a crisis of employment, a crisis of violence and a crisis for girls. If you look at these crises, you realize that they’re urgent and they need to be addressed now. Because they tell us that they’re worried. They’re worried that they might not get the education that they need. And you know what? They’re right.

Two hundred million adolescents are out of school worldwide, about the population of Brazil. And those that are in school feel that they may not be getting the right skills. Globally, six in 10 children and young people do not meet the minimum proficiency level for reading and mathematics. No country can be successful if nearly half of its population of young people are unable to read or write. And what about the lucky few who are in secondary school? Many of them are dropping out because they’re worried that they’re not getting skills that they can use to make a livelihood. And sometimes, their parents can no longer afford the fees. It’s a tragedy.

And young people are also telling me that they’re worried about employment, that they won’t be able to find a job. And again, they’re right. Every month, 10 million young people reach working age. It’s a staggering number. Some will go on for further education, but many will enter the workforce. And our world is not creating 10 million new jobs each month. The competition is fierce for the jobs that are available. So, imagine being a young person today, needing a job, seeking a livelihood, ready to build a future, and opportunities are hard to find.

Young people are also telling me that they’re worried that they’re not getting the skills that they need. And again, they’re right. We are finding ourselves at a time in the world when the world is changing so fast for work. We’re in the fourth industrial revolution. Young people do not want to be on the farms and in rural communities. They want to go to the cities. They want to learn future skills for future work. They want to learn digital technology and green technologies. They want to have a chance to learn modern agriculture. They want to learn business and entrepreneurship, so that they can create a business of their own. They want to be nurses and radiologists and pharmacists and doctors. And they want to have all of the skills that they’ll need for the future. They also want to learn the trades, like construction and electricians. These are all the professions that a country needs, as well as the professions that have not been invented yet.

And young people are also telling me that they’re worried about violence. At home, online, in school, in their communities. And again, they’re right. A young person can have hundreds of friends on social media, but when they need to find a friendly face, someone who can be there as their friend, to talk to, they do not find one. They face bullying, harassment and more. And hundreds of millions are facing exploitation and abuse, and violence. Every seven minutes, an adolescent boy or girl somewhere in the world is killed by an act of violence.

And girls are telling me that they’re especially worried about their futures. And sadly, they’re right, too. Girls face prejudice and discrimination. They face early childhood marriage and they face life-threatening early pregnancy. Imagine a population of the United States. Now double it. That’s the number of women who were married before their 18th birthday. Six hundred and fifty million. And many were mothers while they were still children themselves. One out of every three women will face physical abuse or sexual abuse in her lifetime. So, no wonder girls are worried about their futures.

These urgent crises may not be a reality in your life or in your neighborhood. And perhaps you’ve had opportunities for a good education and for marketable skills, and for getting a job. And maybe you’ve never faced violence, or prejudice, or discrimination. But there are tens of millions of young people who are not so lucky. And they are sounding the alarm for their futures.

And that is why UNICEF and our many public and private partners are launching a new global initiative. Young people themselves have named it. And it’s called Generation Unlimited or Gen-U or Gen you. So, what they’re saying is, it’s our time, it’s our turn, it’s our future.

Our goal is very straightforward. We want every young person in school, learning, training, or age-appropriate employment by the year 2030. This goal is urgent, it’s necessary, it’s ambitious. But we think it’s also achievable. So we’re calling out for cutting-edge solutions and new ideas. Ideas that will give young people a fighting chance for their futures. We don’t know all the answers, so we’re reaching out to businesses and governments, and nonprofits, and academia, and communities, and innovators for help.

Gen-U is to be an open platform, where people can come and share their ideas and solutions about what works, what does not work, and importantly, what might work. So if we can take these ideas and add a little bit of seed money, and add some good partners, and add good political will, we think they can scale up to reach thousands and millions of people around the world. And with this project, we’re also going to do something new. We’re going to co-design and co-create with young people. So with Gen-U, they’re going to be in the driver’s seat, steering us all along the way.

In Argentina, there’s a program where we connect students who are in rural, remote, hard to reach mountainous communities, with something they’ve seldom seen: a secondary school teacher. So these students come to a classroom, they’re joined by a community teacher and they’re connected to urban schools online. And there is the secondary school teacher, who is teaching them about digital technology and a good secondary school education, without them ever having to leave their own communities.

And in South Africa, there’s a program called Techno Girls. And these are girls from disadvantaged neighborhoods who are studying the STEM program area: science, technology, engineering and math. And they have a chance to job shadow. This is the way that they then can see themselves in jobs that are in engineering, in science, and maybe in the space program.

In Bangladesh, we have partners who are training tens of thousands of young people in the trades, so that they can become motorcycle repair people, or mobile phone service people. But these are a chance to see their own livelihoods. And maybe even to have a business of their own.

And in Vietnam, there’s a program where we are pairing young entrepreneurs with the needs in their own local communities. So with this program, a group gathered and they decided that they would solve the problem of transportation for people with disabilities in their communities. So with a mentor and a bit of seed funding, they’ve now developed a new app to help the whole community.

And I’ve seen how these programs can make a difference. When I was in Lebanon, I visited a program called Girls Got IT, or Girls Got It. And in this program, girls who have been studying computer skills and the STEM program have a chance to work side by side with young professionals, so that they can learn firsthand what it’s like to be an architect, a designer or a scientist. And when you see these girls, smiles on their faces, the hot lights in their eyes, they are so excited, they have hope for the future. They want to change the world. And now, with this program and these mentors, they’ll be able to do it.

But these ideas and programs are just a start. They’ll only reach a fraction of the young people that we need to reach. We want to take these ideas and find ways to scale them up. To reach more young people in more communities, in more places around the world. And we want to dream big. Could every school, everywhere in the world, no matter how remote or mountainous, or even if it’s in a refugee camp, could they be connected to the internet? Could we have instant translation for young people, so that you could get a good education in your own language, anywhere in the world? And would it be possible that we could connect the education in your school with skills that you’re going to need to get a job in your own community? So that you actually can move from school to work. And more.

Can each one of us help? In our everyday lives and in our workplaces, are there ways that we could support young people? Young people are asking us for apprenticeships, for job shadowing, for internships. Could we do this? Young people are also asking us for work-study programs, places where they can learn and earn. Could we do this and could we reach out to a community that’s nearby, that’s less advantaged, and help them? Young people are also saying that they want to help other young people. They want more space and more voice, so that they can gather to help each other. In HIV centers, in refugee camps, but also to stop online bullying and early child marriage.

We need ideas, we need ideas that are big and small, ideas that are local and global. This, in the end, is our responsibility. A massive generation of young people are about to inherit our world. It is our duty to leave a legacy of hope and opportunity for them but also with them. Young people are 25 percent of our population. But they are 100 percent of our future. And they’re calling out for a fighting chance to build a better world. So their call should be our calling. The calling of our time. The time is now, the need is urgent. And 1.8 billion young people are waiting.

Thank you.

(Applause)

I’ve spent nearly two decades observing what makes people luckier than others and trying to help people increase their luck. You see, I teach entrepreneurship, and we all know that most new ventures fail, and innovators and entrepreneurs need all the luck they can get.

So what is luck? Luck is defined as success or failure apparently caused by chance. Apparently. That’s the operative word. It looks like it’s chance because we rarely see all the levers(method/trick) that come into play to make people lucky. But I’ve realized, by watching so long, that luck is rarely a lightning strike(exists or live for a short time), isolated and dramatic. It’s much more like the wind, blowing constantly. Sometimes it’s calm, and sometimes it blows in gusts, and sometimes it comes from directions that you didn’t even imagine.

So how do you catch the winds of luck? It’s easy, but it’s not obvious. So I’m going to share three things with you that you can do to build a sail to capture the winds of luck. The first thing you want to do is to change your relationship with yourself. Be willing to take small risks that get you out of your comfort zone. Now, when we’re children, we do this all the time. We have to do this if we’re going to learn how to walk or talk or ride a bike or even quantum mechanics. Right? We need to go from someone one week who doesn’t ride a bike to, next week, someone who does. And this requires us to get out of our comfort zone and take some risks. The problem is, as we get older, we rarely do this. We sort of(somewhat) lock down the sense of who we are and don’t stretch(reach) anymore.

Now, with my students, I spend a lot of time giving them encouragement to get out of their comfort zone and take some risks. How do I do this? Well, I start out by having them fill out a risk-o-meter. Now, it’s basically a fun thing we developed in our class where they map out(mark on a map) what risks they’re willing to take. And it becomes clear very quickly to them that risk-taking is not binary. There are intellectual risks and physical risks and financial risks and emotional risks and social risks and ethical risks and political risks. And once they do this, they compare their risk profiles with others, and they quickly realize that they’re all really different.

I then encourage them to stretch, to take some risks that get them out of their comfort zone. For example, I might ask them to do an intellectual risk and try to tackle(struggle) a problem they haven’t tried before; or a social risk, talking to someone sitting next to them on the train; or an emotional risk, maybe telling someone they really care about how they feel.

I do this myself all the time. About a dozen years ago, I was on an airplane, early, early morning flight on my way to Ecuador. And normally, I would just put on my headphones and go to sleep, wake up, do some work, but I decided to take a little risk, and I started a conversation with the man sitting next to me. I introduced myself, and I learned that he was a publisher. Interesting. We ended up having a fascinating conversation. I learned all about the future of the publishing industry. So about three quarters of the way through the flight, I decided to take another risk, and I opened up my laptop and I shared with him a book proposal I put together for something I was doing in my class. And he was very polite, he read it, and he said, “You know what, Tina, this isn’t right for us, but thank you so much for sharing.” It’s OK. That risk didn’t work out. I shut my laptop. At the end of the flight, we exchanged contact information.

A couple of months later, I reached out to him, and I said, “Mark, would you like to come to my class? I’m doing a project on reinventing(improve) the book, the future of publishing.” And he said, “Great. I’d love to come.” So he came to my class. We had a great experience.

A few months later, I wrote to him again. This time, I sent him a bunch of video clips from another project my students had done. He was so intrigued(fascinated) by one of the projects the students had done, he thought there might be a book in it, and he wanted to meet those students.

I have to tell you, I was a little bit hurt.

(Laughter)

I mean, he wanted to do a book with my students and not with me, but OK, it’s all right. So I invited him to come down, and he and his colleagues came to Stanford and met with the students, and afterwards, we had lunch together. And one of his editors said to me, “Hey, have you ever considered writing a book?”

I said, “Funny you should ask.” And I pulled out the exact same proposal that I had showed his boss a year earlier. Within two weeks, I had a contract, and within two years, the book had sold over a million copies around the world.

(Applause)

Now, you might say, “Oh, you’re so lucky.” But of course I was lucky, but that luck resulted from a series of small risks I took, starting with saying hello. And anyone can do this, no matter where you are in your life, no matter where you are in the world — even if you think you’re the most unlucky person, you can do this by taking little risks that get you out of your comfort zone. You start building a sail to capture luck.

The second thing you want to do is to change your relationship with other people. You need to understand that everyone who helps you on your journey is playing a huge role in getting you to your goals. And if you don’t show appreciation, not only are you not closing the loop, but you’re missing an opportunity. When someone does something for you, they’re taking that time that they could be spending on themselves or someone else, and you need to acknowledge what they’re doing.

Now, I run three fellowship(ORG) programs at Stanford, and they are very competitive to get into, and when I send out the letters to those students who don’t get in, I always know there are going to be people who are disappointed. Some of the people who are disappointed send me notes, complaining. Some of them send notes saying what could I do to make myself more successful next time around? And every once in a while, someone sends me a note thanking me for the opportunity.

This happened about seven years ago. A young man named Brian sent me a beautiful note saying, “I know I’ve been rejected from this program twice, but I want to thank you for the opportunity. I learned so much through the process of applying.”

I was so taken by the graciousness(nounce of grace) of his message that I invited him to come and meet me. And we spent some time chatting and cooked up(define) an idea for an independent study project together. He was on the football team at Stanford, and he decided to do a project on looking at leadership in that context. We got to know each other incredibly well through that quarter, and he took the project that he started working on in the independent study and turned it, ultimately, into a company called Play for Tomorrow, where he teaches kids from disadvantaged backgrounds how to, essentially, craft the lives they dream to live.

Now, the important thing about this story is that we both ended up catching the winds of luck as a result of his thank-you note. But it was the winds that we didn’t expect in the first place.

Over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve come up with some tactics for my own life to help me really foster appreciation. My favorite is that at the end of every single day, I look at my calendar and I review all the people I met with, and I send thank-you notes to every single person. It only takes a few minutes, but at the end of every day, I feel incredibly grateful and appreciative, and I promise you it has increased my luck.

So first, you need to take some risks and get out of your comfort zone. Second, you need to show appreciation. And third, you want to change your relationship with ideas. Most people look at new ideas that come there way and they judge them. “That’s a great idea” or “That’s a terrible idea.” But it’s actually much more nuanced. Ideas are neither good or bad. And in fact, the seeds of terrible ideas are often something truly remarkable.

One of my favorite exercises in my classes on creativity is to help students foster an attitude of looking at terrible ideas through the lens of possibilities. So I give them a challenge: to create an idea for a brand new restaurant. They have to come up with(figure out) the best ideas for a new restaurant and the worst ideas for a new restaurant. So the best ideas are things like a restaurant on a mountaintop with a beautiful sunset, or a restaurant on a boat with a gorgeous view. And the terrible ideas are things like a restaurant in a garbage dump, or a restaurant with terrible service that’s really dirty, or a restaurant that serves cockroach sushi.

(Laughter)

So they hand all the ideas to me, I read the great ideas out loud, and then I rip them up and throw them away. I then take the horrible ideas and redistribute(re-distribute) them. Each team now has an idea that another team thought was horrible, and their challenge is to turn it into something brilliant.

Here’s what happens. Within about 10 seconds, someone says, “This is a fabulous(unbelieveable) idea.” And they have about three minutes before they pitch the idea to the class. So the restaurant in the garbage dump? What does that turn into? Well, they collect all the extra food from Michelin star restaurants that was going to get thrown out, and they have another restaurant at a much lower price, with all the leftovers. Pretty cool? Or the restaurant that’s dirty with terrible service? Well, that turns into a restaurant that’s a training ground for future restauranteurs to figure out how to avoid all the pitfalls. And the restaurant with cockroach sushi? It turns into a sushi bar with all sorts of really interesting and exotic ingredients.

If you look around at the companies, the ventures that are really innovative around you, the ones that we now take for granted that have changed our life, well, you know what? They all started out as crazy ideas. They started ideas that when they pitched to other people, most people said, “That’s crazy, it will never work.”

So, yes, sometimes people were born into terrible circumstances, and sometimes, luck is a lightning bolt that hits us with something wonderful or something terrible. But the winds of luck are always there, and if you’re willing to take some risks, if you’re willing to really go out and show appreciation and willing to really look at ideas, even if they’re crazy, through the lens of possibilities, you can build a bigger and bigger sail to catch the winds of luck.

Thank you.

(Applause)

There was a day, about 10 years ago, when I asked a friend to hold a baby dinosaur robot upside down. It was this toy called a Pleo that I had ordered, and I was really excited about it because I’ve always loved robots. And this one has really cool technical features. It had motors and touch sensors and it had an infrared camera. And one of the things it had was a tilt sensor, so it knew what direction it was facing. And when you held it upside down, it would start to cry. And I thought this was super cool, so I was showing it off to my friend, and I said, “Oh, hold it up by the tail. See what it does.” So we’re watching the theatrics of this robot struggle and cry out. And after a few seconds, it starts to bother me a little, and I said, “OK, that’s enough now. Let’s put him back down.” And then I pet the robot to make it stop crying.

And that was kind of a weird experience for me. For one thing, I wasn’t the most maternal person at the time. Although since then I’ve become a mother, nine months ago, and I’ve learned that babies also squirm when you hold them upside down.

(Laughter)

But my response to this robot was also interesting because I knew exactly how this machine worked, and yet I still felt compelled to be kind to it. And that observation sparked a curiosity that I’ve spent the past decade pursuing. Why did I comfort this robot? And one of the things I discovered was that my treatment of this machine was more than just an awkward moment in my living room, that in a world where we’re increasingly integrating robots into our lives, an instinct like that might actually have consequences, because the first thing that I discovered is that it’s not just me.

In 2007, the Washington Post reported that the United States military was testing this robot that defused land mines. And the way it worked was it was shaped like a stick insect and it would walk around a minefield on its legs, and every time it stepped on a mine, one of the legs would blow up, and it would continue on the other legs to blow up more mines. And the colonel who was in charge of this testing exercise ends up calling it off, because, he says, it’s too inhumane to watch this damaged robot drag itself along the minefield. Now, what would cause a hardened military officer and someone like myself to have this response to robots?

Well, of course, we’re primed by science fiction and pop culture to really want to personify these things, but it goes a little bit deeper than that. It turns out that we’re biologically hardwired to project intent and life onto any movement in our physical space that seems autonomous to us. So people will treat all sorts of robots like they’re alive. These bomb-disposal units get names. They get medals of honor. They’ve had funerals for them with gun salutes. And research shows that we do this even with very simple household robots, like the Roomba vacuum cleaner.

(Laughter)

It’s just a disc that roams around your floor to clean it, but just the fact it’s moving around on its own will cause people to name the Roomba and feel bad for the Roomba when it gets stuck under the couch.

(Laughter)

And we can design robots specifically to evoke this response, using eyes and faces or movements that people automatically, subconsciously associate with states of mind. And there’s an entire body of research called human-robot interaction that really shows how well this works. So for example, researchers at Stanford University found out that it makes people really uncomfortable when you ask them to touch a robot’s private parts.

(Laughter)

So from this, but from many other studies, we know, we know that people respond to the cues given to them by these lifelike machines, even if they know that they’re not real.

Now, we’re headed towards a world where robots are everywhere. Robotic technology is moving out from behind factory walls. It’s entering workplaces, households. And as these machines that can sense and make autonomous decisions and learn enter into these shared spaces, I think that maybe the best analogy we have for this is our relationship with animals. Thousands of years ago, we started to domesticate animals, and we trained them for work and weaponry and companionship. And throughout history, we’ve treated some animals like tools or like products, and other animals, we’ve treated with kindness and we’ve given a place in society as our companions. I think it’s plausible we might start to integrate robots in similar ways.

And sure, animals are alive. Robots are not. And I can tell you, from working with roboticists, that we’re pretty far away from developing robots that can feel anything. But we feel for them, and that matters, because if we’re trying to integrate robots into these shared spaces, we need to understand that people will treat them differently than other devices, and that in some cases, for example, the case of a soldier who becomes emotionally attached to the robot that they work with, that can be anything from inefficient to dangerous. But in other cases, it can actually be useful to foster this emotional connection to robots. We’re already seeing some great use cases, for example, robots working with autistic children to engage them in ways that we haven’t seen previously, or robots working with teachers to engage kids in learning with new results. And it’s not just for kids. Early studies show that robots can help doctors and patients in health care settings.

This is the PARO baby seal robot. It’s used in nursing homes and with dementia patients. It’s been around for a while. And I remember, years ago, being at a party and telling someone about this robot, and her response was, “Oh my gosh. That’s horrible. I can’t believe we’re giving people robots instead of human care.” And this is a really common response, and I think it’s absolutely correct, because that would be terrible. But in this case, it’s not what this robot replaces. What this robot replaces is animal therapy in contexts where we can’t use real animals but we can use robots, because people will consistently treat them more like an animal than a device.

Acknowledging this emotional connection to robots can also help us anticipate challenges as these devices move into more intimate areas of people’s lives. For example, is it OK if your child’s teddy bear robot records private conversations? Is it OK if your sex robot has compelling in-app purchases?

(Laughter)

Because robots plus capitalism equals questions around consumer protection and privacy.

And those aren’t the only reasons that our behavior around these machines could matter. A few years after that first initial experience I had with this baby dinosaur robot, I did a workshop with my friend Hannes Gassert. And we took five of these baby dinosaur robots and we gave them to five teams of people. And we had them name them and play with them and interact with them for about an hour. And then we unveiled a hammer and a hatchet and we told them to torture and kill the robots.

(Laughter)

And this turned out to be a little more dramatic than we expected it to be, because none of the participants would even so much as strike these baby dinosaur robots, so we had to improvise a little, and at some point, we said, “OK, you can save your team’s robot if you destroy another team’s robot.”

(Laughter)

And even that didn’t work. They couldn’t do it. So finally, we said, “We’re going to destroy all of the robots unless someone takes a hatchet to one of them.” And this guy stood up, and he took the hatchet, and the whole room winced as he brought the hatchet down on the robot’s neck, and there was this half-joking, half-serious moment of silence in the room for this fallen robot.

(Laughter)

So that was a really interesting experience. Now, it wasn’t a controlled study, obviously, but it did lead to some later research that I did at MIT with Palash Nandy and Cynthia Breazeal, where we had people come into the lab and smash these HEXBUGs that move around in a really lifelike way, like insects. So instead of choosing something cute that people are drawn to, we chose something more basic, and what we found was that high-empathy people would hesitate more to hit the HEXBUGS.

Now this is just a little study, but it’s part of a larger body of research that is starting to indicate that there may be a connection between people’s tendencies for empathy and their behavior around robots. But my question for the coming era of human-robot interaction is not: “Do we empathize with robots?” It’s: “Can robots change people’s empathy?” Is there reason to, for example, prevent your child from kicking a robotic dog, not just out of respect for property, but because the child might be more likely to kick a real dog?

And again, it’s not just kids. This is the violent video games question, but it’s on a completely new level because of this visceral physicality that we respond more intensely to than to images on a screen. When we behave violently towards robots, specifically robots that are designed to mimic life, is that a healthy outlet for violent behavior or is that training our cruelty muscles? We don’t know … But the answer to this question has the potential to impact human behavior, it has the potential to impact social norms, it has the potential to inspire rules around what we can and can’t do with certain robots, similar to our animal cruelty laws. Because even if robots can’t feel, our behavior towards them might matter for us. And regardless of whether we end up changing our rules, robots might be able to help us come to a new understanding of ourselves.

Most of what I’ve learned over the past 10 years has not been about technology at all. It’s been about human psychology and empathy and how we relate to others. Because when a child is kind to a Roomba, when a soldier tries to save a robot on the battlefield, or when a group of people refuses to harm a robotic baby dinosaur, those robots aren’t just motors and gears and algorithms. They’re reflections of our own humanity.

Thank you.

Who do you want to be? It’s a simple question, and whether you know it or not, you’re answering it every day through your actions. This one question will define your professional success more than any other, because how you show up and treat people means everything. Either you lift people up by respecting them, making them feel valued, appreciated and heard, or you hold people down by making them feel small, insulted, disregarded or excluded. And who you choose to be means everything.

I study the effects of incivility on people. What is incivility? It’s disrespect or rudeness. It includes a lot of different behaviors, from mocking or belittling someone to teasing people in ways that sting to telling offensive jokes to texting in meetings. And what’s uncivil to one person may be absolutely fine to another. Take texting while someone’s speaking to you. Some of us may find it rude, others may think it’s absolutely civil. So it really depends. It’s all in the eyes of the beholder and whether that person felt disrespected. We may not mean to make someone feel that way, but when we do, it has consequences.

Over 22 years ago, I vividly recall walking into this stuffy hospital room. It was heartbreaking to see my dad, this strong, athletic, energetic guy, lying in the bed with electrodes strapped to his bare chest. What put him there was work-related stress. For over a decade, he suffered an uncivil boss. And for me, I thought he was just an outlier at that time. But just a couple years later, I witnessed and experienced a lot of incivility in my first job out of college. I spent a year going to work every day and hearing things from coworkers like, “Are you an idiot? That’s not how it’s done,” and, “If I wanted your opinion, I’d ask.”

So I did the natural thing. I quit, and I went back to grad school to study the effects of this. There, I met Christine Pearson. And she had a theory that small, uncivil actions can lead to much bigger problems like aggression and violence. We believed that incivility affected performance and the bottom line. So we launched a study, and what we found was eye-opening.

We sent a survey to business school alumni working in all different organizations. We asked them to write a few sentences about one experience where they were treated rudely, disrespectfully or insensitively, and to answer questions about how they reacted. One person told us about a boss that made insulting statements like, “That’s kindergartner’s work,” and another tore up someone’s work in front of the entire team. And what we found is that incivility made people less motivated: 66 percent cut back work efforts, 80 percent lost time worrying about what happened, and 12 percent left their job.

And after we published these results, two things happened. One, we got calls from organizations. Cisco read about these numbers, took just a few of these and estimated, conservatively, that incivility was costing them 12 million dollars a year.

The second thing that happened was, we heard from others in our academic field who said, “Well, people are reporting this, but how can you really show it? Does people’s performance really suffer?” I was curious about that, too. With Amir Erez, I compared those that experienced incivility to those that didn’t experience incivility. And what we found is that those that experience incivility do actually function much worse.

“OK,” you may say. “This makes sense. After all, it’s natural that their performance suffers.” But what about if you’re not the one who experiences it? What if you just see or hear it? You’re a witness. We wondered if it affected witnesses, too.

So we conducted studies where five participants would witness an experimenter act rudely to someone who arrived late to the study. The experimenter said, “What is it with you? You arrive late, you’re irresponsible. Look at you! How do you expect to hold a job in the real world?” And in another study in a small group, we tested the effects of a peer insulting a group member. Now, what we found was really interesting, because witnesses’ performance decreased, too — and not just marginally, quite significantly.

Incivility is a bug. It’s contagious, and we become carriers of it just by being around it. And this isn’t confined to the workplace. We can catch this virus anywhere — at home, online, in schools and in our communities. It affects our emotions, our motivation, our performance and how we treat others. It even affects our attention and can take some of our brainpower. And this happens not only if we experience incivility or we witness it. It can happen even if we just see or read rude words. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

To test this, we gave people combinations of words to use to make a sentence. But we were very sneaky. Half the participants got a list with 15 words used to trigger rudeness: impolitely, interrupt, obnoxious, bother. Half the participants received a list of words with none of these rude triggers. And what we found was really surprising, because the people who got the rude words were five times more likely to miss information right in front of them on the computer screen. And as we continued this research, what we found is that those that read the rude words took longer to make decisions, to record their decisions, and they made significantly more errors. This can be a big deal, especially when it comes to life-and-death situations.

Steve, a physician, told me about a doctor that he worked with who was never very respectful, especially to junior staff and nurses. But Steve told me about this one particular interaction where this doctor shouted at a medical team. Right after the interaction, the team gave the wrong dosage of medication to their patient. Steve said the information was right there on the chart, but somehow everyone on the team missed it. He said they lacked the attention or awareness to take it into account. Simple mistake, right? Well, that patient died.

Researchers in Israel have actually shown that medical teams exposed to rudeness perform worse not only in all their diagnostics, but in all the procedures they did. This was mainly because the teams exposed to rudeness didn’t share information as readily, and they stopped seeking help from their teammates. And I see this not only in medicine but in all industries.

So if incivility has such a huge cost, why do we still see so much of it? I was curious, so we surveyed people about this, too. The number one reason is stress. People feel overwhelmed. The other reason that people are not more civil is because they’re skeptical and even concerned about being civil or appearing nice. They believe they’ll appear less leader-like. They wonder: Do nice guys finish last? Or in other words: Do jerks get ahead? (Laughter) It’s easy to think so, especially when we see a few prominent examples that dominate the conversation.

Well, it turns out, in the long run, they don’t. There’s really rich research on this by Morgan McCall and Michael Lombardo when they were at the Center for Creative Leadership. They found that the number one reason tied to executive failure was an insensitive, abrasive or bullying style. There will always be some outliers that succeed despite their incivility. Sooner or later, though, most uncivil people sabotage their success. For example, with uncivil executives, it comes back to hurt them when they’re in a place of weakness or they need something. People won’t have their backs.

But what about nice guys? Does civility pay? Yes, it does. And being civil doesn’t just mean that you’re not a jerk. Not holding someone down isn’t the same as lifting them up. Being truly civil means doing the small things, like smiling and saying hello in the hallway, listening fully when someone’s speaking to you. Now, you can have strong opinions, disagree, have conflict or give negative feedback civilly, with respect. Some people call it “radical candor,” where you care personally, but you challenge directly. So yes, civility pays. In a biotechnology firm, colleagues and I found that those that were seen as civil were twice as likely to be viewed as leaders, and they performed significantly better. Why does civility pay? Because people see you as an important — and a powerful — unique combination of two key characteristics: warm and competent, friendly and smart. In other words, being civil isn’t just about motivating others. It’s about you. If you’re civil, you’re more likely to be seen as a leader. You’ll perform better, and you’re seen as warm and competent.

But there’s an even bigger story about how civility pays, and it ties to one of the most important questions around leadership: What do people want most from their leaders? We took data from over 20,000 employees around the world, and we found the answer was simple: respect. Being treated with respect was more important than recognition and appreciation, useful feedback, even opportunities for learning. Those that felt respected were healthier, more focused, more likely to stay with their organization and far more engaged.

So where do you start? How can you lift people up and make people feel respected? Well, the nice thing is, it doesn’t require a huge shift. Small things can make a big difference. I found that thanking people, sharing credit, listening attentively, humbly asking questions, acknowledging others and smiling has an impact.

Patrick Quinlan, former CEO of Ochsner Health [System], told me about the effects of their 10-5 way, where if you’re within 10 feet of someone, you make eye contact and smile, and if you’re within five feet, you say hello. He explained that civility spread, patient satisfaction scores rose, as did patient referrals.

Civility and respect can be used to boost an organization’s performance. When my friend Doug Conant took over as CEO of Campbell’s Soup Company in 2001, the company’s market share had just dropped in half. Sales were declining, lots of people had just been laid off. A Gallup manager said it was the least engaged organization that they had surveyed. And as Doug drove up to work his first day, he noticed that the headquarters was surrounded by barbwire fence. There were guard towers in the parking lot. He said it looked like a minimum security prison. It felt toxic.

Within five years, Doug had turned things around. And within nine years, they were setting all-time performance records and racking up awards, including best place to work. How did he do it? On day one, Doug told employees that he was going to have high standards for performance, but they were going to do it with civility. He walked the talk, and he expected his leaders to. For Doug, it all came down to being tough-minded on standards and tenderhearted with people. For him, he said it was all about these touch points, or these daily interactions he had with employees, whether in the hallway, in the cafeteria or in meetings. And if he handled each touch point well, he’d make employees feel valued.

Another way that Doug made employees feel valued and showed them that he was paying attention is that he handwrote over 30,000 thank-you notes to employees. And this set an example for other leaders. Leaders have about 400 of these touch points a day. Most don’t take long, less than two minutes each. The key is to be agile and mindful in each of these moments.

Civility lifts people. We’ll get people to give more and function at their best if we’re civil. Incivility chips away at people and their performance. It robs people of their potential, even if they’re just working around it. What I know from my research is that when we have more civil environments, we’re more productive, creative, helpful, happy and healthy.

We can do better. Each one of us can be more mindful and can take actions to lift others up around us, at work, at home, online, in schools and in our communities. In every interaction, think: Who do you want to be?

Let’s put an end to incivility bug and start spreading civility. After all, it pays.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement(the ceremony of graduation) address (speech,talk) by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5?? deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on(understand gradually) me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over(restart).

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.