"Fatal Flaws" | TEDx Talk Transcript

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Hook

I’m going to tell you all a secret — but you know, keep it between us: the fact that I’m up on this stage today is a miracle. Not because I’m short and like feeling tall for once, and not because I tripped on my way up. It’s because just a little while ago, public speaking was a complete impossibility for me.

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Introduction

Grade 9. For some of you in the audience, it's in your near future. For others, it's a distant memory. For me, it was only 2 years ago, but I don’t remember much — other than my life and death battles with acne, of course. One other, perhaps more important thing I do remember is that back in grade 9, I was an extremely shy and introverted person. If you were to go back and tell younger me that I would be up on this stage today, I would probably not take in a word you said. Honestly, I had no ability whatsoever to speak to strangers — without at least a week’s warning in advance. Even then, I think I would have struggled. Public speaking as a skill was something that I couldn’t even think about.

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So, what changed? The answer is simple, and it will set the stage for what I want to talk about today. The most important thing that changed for me — the transformation that altered my perspective on public speaking and life as a whole — was my development of soft skills.

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What are Soft Skills?

Soft skills can be briefly defined as non-technical, [Slide Change]

interpersonal [Slide Change]

skills that describe how you work [Slide Change]

and interact [Slide Change]

with others, often developed through experience rather than formal training. Skills like communication, time management, creativity, and others of that sort.

These characteristics are crucial to success in the modern world, whether you’re at work, school, or just socializing. At social events, not having soft skills is just as much of a death sentence as not having the wifi password. Another perfect example is this very stage:

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Every speaker we listened to today followed a theme, yes, but they also spoke about many different things. One thing they all had in common though, the greatest common factor for all you math enthusiasts out there, were their soft skills. We’re also all amazingly dressed, for those of you who noticed.

It’s a fact of life: Soft skills affect each and every one of us. They affect us in our workplaces, our friendships, and our communities.

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For today, I’ll focus first on how soft skills affect the workplace, as the majority of us here are about to be entering the working world. For those of you here who aren't in high school, I still want you to bear with me for the next few minutes. Or, more specifically, I want you to bear with George. [Slide Change]

George & Michael

Now, George is less of a person, and more of a story. George followed the typical pathway many of you in this room might be following as we speak. He worked hard in high school, secured his high average, and went to University for a degree that everyone told him would be the best to get a job. He gets through university with the inputs of red bull and coffee, and the outputs of blood, sweat, and tears.

[Slide Change] Now, on paper, George is an excellent student. Graduated with all the awards you could expect, I mean, he’s an all around high-achiever. Let’s pause on George’s story for now, though, and talk about Michael. [Slide Change]

Michael worked hard in high school as well, and got into the same highly competitive program as George. However, this is where their paths change.

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When Michael came onto campus, he immediately joined a ton of clubs, teams, societies, you name it. He made an attempt to try as many things as possible, and he did — short of the anime club, though I’m pretty sure he just kept that secret. Unfortunately, life is all about tradeoffs, and the time he spent hanging out with friends or organizing campus events was time that he didn’t spend studying. So, on paper, his marks were good enough, but certainly not as good as those of our friend George.

[Slide Change] To review: Michael and George graduate, and on paper, George comes across a lot better. His marks are higher than Michael’s, he has more accolades, pretty much anything any employer could want.

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Now it’s time for the next step - they both enter the working world, and by sheer coincidence, they both apply for the same job. Can you guess what happens next?

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To George’s shock, he gets rejected.

Imagine his surprise when he learns that Michael, someone he looked down upon his entire time in university, got the job.

How? What was the difference between them?? The skills they carried. George had hard skills - think of these as direct representations of training. Some examples are technical skills, like programming, or certifiable skills, like CPR.

Michael had soft skills. Skills like confidence, empathy, situational awareness, basic people skills. And that's what made a lasting impact on the interviewer.

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But — if you recall, Michael wasn’t the one that the school would say was the better candidate, was he? And that’s precisely the issue:

Those very soft skills, these essential parts of the working world, are being skipped over in most schools in Canada. So how exactly should we strive to fix this?

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Community Involvement

It’s simple: community involvement. That involvement can mean different things to different people, but interaction with others is a tried and tested method of developing soft skills. For high school students, a great example of this comes in the form of clubs.

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Clubs can take many forms. Whether you’re part of DECA, Ethics Bowl or the kpop club, what’s common between every club are their unique and tailored benefits. To expand on what I mean by this, let me describe my personal journey in my school’s Model United Nations Club.

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Like I said before, I was an extremely shy person in grade 9. I’m not nearly as shy today, though it does make winning at hide and seek a lot harder. This completely changed for me, all because of a toy lightsaber.

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You heard me right - a lightsaber, as in the cool laser sword from Star Wars. I really wish this story started in a different way, because whenever I tell it, people see me as even more of a nerd than usual.

Basically, at our school’s club fair, the club president at the time had a lightsaber on the desk. That’s literally the only reason why I actually walked up to him and asked about the club. I’m mentioning this because it's important that people understand how different my story could’ve been - this was not an intentional, curriculum based process, it was a decision that was born out of pure chance. More on that later.

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For now, as I go through my time in the club, I’ll be breaking certain portions of that time into stages and describing them in that format. Each stage will have its own unique lessons and acquired skills, and I hope all of you can relate to at least one of them.

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With that said, let’s begin with the first stage. I like to call this stage the handshake stage. When you join a club like Model UN, a club based on debate and communication, you meet a lot of new people, very quickly. That comes with a lot of handshakes.

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This stage also comes with one of the biggest benefits of joining a club - forming a stronger sense of identity. This benefit is pretty universal, as well, and can be applied to all kinds of organizations. For example, those of us looking to find acceptance in our own identity may join a Cultural Association. By uniting members around something they all have in common, those members immediately interact, and learn more about each other — and as a result, learn more about themselves.

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Now here’s the cool part — Working with others in this way gives us a sort of bonus benefit: Improving our communication skills.

Person to person connection isn’t easy, but Stage One forces you to learn the basics- how to talk to new people, how to empathize with people, how to work with those you don’t want to, all skills that are incredibly necessary in the real world.

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Next: Stage Two. This stage started when I applied for, and became a Junior Executive at the club. It’s when I started to learn the basics about how collaboration and productivity work hand in hand on any meaningful endeavor. Particularly, being able to listen and sort of set your pride aside - that's what I learned most from this stage.

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The Competitive Mentality & Nobel

Interestingly enough, this is in direct contrast to an ever-increasing trend in schools today; Being too competitive. Essentially, the mentality that competition between peers is the best way to succeed; and specifically, a form of competition where the central belief is that — for you to do better, someone else has to do worse.

If you’ve ever heard someone say they won’t help someone out to ensure there’s quote unquote “less competition”, that’s a great example of this phenomenon. It’s a fairly common assumption that people who isolate themselves and focus only on their marks will be more successful, or at least more academically successful, than those who remain more social.

And this is exactly where I have to disagree.

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Collaboration is without a doubt an important component of success.

Don’t believe me? Let’s go back to the year 2017. The year that fidget spinners were everywhere, and the year that Vine got shut down. It was also the year that the Nobel Prize in Physics was shared between three people.

That might shock you, because when most people hear “Nobel Prize” they think of Einstein and his lonely thought experiments, or Marie Curie and her radioactive study.

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You see, in the past, this is precisely how science, and the human race, was progressing. Scientists and mathematicians and other exceptionally talented people burned the midnight oil, alone, and worked on these essential theories. Naturally, they’ve become some of the most well-known Nobel Laureates.

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Today, however, the prize is usually awarded to more than one person. It being awarded to three people in 2017 is not at all unusual or a one-off in this day and age. There’s a lot more to this story though, so let’s read off of the Nobel Foundation’s website to find out how they describe that year’s laureates.

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“LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, is a collaborative [slide change] project with over one thousand [slide change] researchers from more than twenty [slide change] countries.

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Pioneers Rainer Weiss and Kip S. Thorne, together with Barry C. Barish, the scientist and leader [slide change] who brought the project to completion, ensured that four decades of effort led to gravitational waves finally being observed.”

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There’s two parts of this quote I want to highlight. First: the beginning, where the most important thing to note is the emphasis on collaboration. As they say, this was a collaborative project with over a thousand researchers, from more than twenty countries. I mean, just think of the time zones!

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The second part I want to highlight, or more accurately the person I want to highlight, is Barry C. Barish, the third laureate of the year. The foundation describes him as a scientist, of course, but also as a leader. Leaders aren’t born. Leaders don’t become leaders by self-isolating and keeping their noses to the books. Leadership, despite its many implications, is undoubtedly a soft skill.

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What I’m trying to say is that the era of loners’ success is long gone. Collaboration is undoubtedly an integral contributor to progress. Leadership is essential to any organization that wishes to make consistent strides forward, especially in today’s landscape of innovation.

And that is why I disagree with the belief that the best are those who are hyper focused on their own success. If Nobel laureates have to collaborate with others, what makes you think that you don’t?

I know what you might be thinking - that this is true, but only for those at the top. After all, Nobel laureates aren’t exactly worried about getting into their target university.

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Teamwork & Stanford

To address that, let’s talk about one last soft skill - teamwork. It's often ignored by the very same competitive mentality from before, so I want to speak to why that’s fundamentally; an incorrect viewpoint. A common saying about teamwork is that “a rising tide lifts all ships”. That’s backed up by science.

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In fact, A Stanford study published in 2014 argued that teamwork is less a way of dividing up tasks, and more of a mindset, or psychological shift.

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The study went like this: Thirty five participants were split into groups of three to five.

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The people in those groups were then given some time to meet each other and introduce themselves. Small talk, stuff like that.

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While this was happening, the scientists behind the study were being a bit sneaky, and secretly splitting each group into two teams. Let’s call them team A and team B.

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Now, after their meet and greet and sometimes awkward small talk, all members of each group were separated into individual rooms, and given a logic puzzle to solve. After giving them some time to solve it on their own, all of the participants were then given a handwritten clue on how to solve certain parts of the puzzle. Literally, just a piece of paper with some untidy writing on it. And this, is where the key to the study comes in - there was a difference in how the clue was presented to each team.

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The participants in team A were told that their clue had been written for them as part of the study, by one of the scientists behind it. They had never met the scientists face to face, so it might as well have been generated by a computer, and printed out.

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On the other hand, those in team B, were told that the clue had been written by one of the participants they had met earlier, when they first introduced themselves. There was a personal aspect to it, like phoning a friend in a game show.

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With these differences in mind, do you have a clue as to what happened next? The first team reported feeling no connection to the other participants of the study or their team members, which, of course, makes sense. But not only did the people in the second group feel like they were part of a team and a collective mission, they also worked on the puzzle for an average of 48% longer than the first group.

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You heard me right - 48% longer! Participants described that they felt obligated to work hard on the puzzle so as to not disappoint the person they thought wrote their clue. They weren’t just working at the same time, or doing the same task in parallel.

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Fatal Flaws

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We’ve spent a lot of time today talking about soft skills in the abstract, about other people’s stories. Now, I want to put the ball in your court with a simple question.

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What is your fatal flaw? Think about your answer for a little bit. It could be anything, so long as it's something that you believe is the #1 barrier between you and your goals; you and your ideal future self.

Pause

Would it surprise you that most people who answer this question don’t talk about their latest math test, or their career. They talk about their emotional skills, the skills that affect others, the fundamental traits we carry when meeting other people.

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Answers like “My fatal flaw is that I can’t manage my time well”, or

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“My fatal flaw is that in tough situations I lash out at people who are just trying to help” are fairly common. In short, oftentimes when people respond to this question, they are, consciously or not, talking about their soft skills.

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Self-Improvement

I’ll ask again - how do we get better?

Schools today are making an effort to nurture these skills. Group projects, funds for clubs, student councils, these are all attempts that are working, albeit slowly.

Despite this, it's important to understand that soft skills are, by their very nature, difficult to teach in traditional environments. Oftentimes, it's about actively making the right decisions at the individual level, and as any teacher can tell you, they can assign homework and extra credit, but can’t force you to do it. Soft skills are even more self-driven.

Whether you’re improving your relationships, improving as a student, an employee or as an individual, there is almost never a time when you can say that you’re done learning, that you’re done improving.

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You might’ve noticed that we only got up to two stages in my Model UN story. That’s because I have no idea what Stage will come next. I have no idea what they have in store, and that makes sense - There is always more to do, more to improve upon.

The most important thing I want everyone in this audience to do from now on, the #1 takeaway from today, is to always show up.

What am I getting at? Well, think back to how I joined Model UN in the first place.

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That lightsaber. Yeah, the lightsaber again - I’m going somewhere with this, I promise. There is a lightsaber in everyone’s life, a trigger that leads to a small decision, that leads to a massive change.

In my case, as I mentioned before, this wasn’t structured, at all, and therefore could very easily have not happened.

This particular time, it worked out.

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But how many opportunities did I miss? In your life, were there times when you didn’t attend a class, didn’t submit an application, or above all: didn’t show up when you could have? There were certainly times in my life, unfortunately.

A lot of people can relate to that. It’s why we spend a lot of time thinking about the past, and how things could have been.

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Conclusion

Here’s an image of Tim Urban’s that I’ll be using to emphasize my final points.

On the left, we can see what I just talked about - all of the different paths we could have taken. Highlighted in green is the path that we’re actually on.

But look on the right side. We never think about the right side, do we? The future, where we have just as many paths open to us.

We won’t have a lot of lucky days, but the rare times we do? We don’t want to miss them.

That idea you’re not pursuing, that conversation you’re avoiding, that class you’re not taking, they could open entirely new paths for you. (dramatic pause) Don’t let these opportunities pass you by, because opportunities are finite.

What I hope is that every person in this building today, all of us who are faced with unlimited pathways, will choose one that will develop our soft skills. As I said earlier, life is full of trade offs; but choosing to develop your humanity, your empathy, your relationships, your personality, your very sense of self - is that not a trade off we need to make?

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Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk.