Genuine Insights

Raw Talk

“Your presentation was great, but you really can’t take that laptop out of your bag in front of anyone anymore,” said Celeste, a young “fat brain” who walked up to me after the first talk I delivered in Silicon Valley recently. According to Celeste, the problem was that while my 5-year-old laptop is as familiar and comforting as family to me, for my audience—especially in this part of the world—it’s an eyesore.

Celeste is a beautifully bold woman in her early twenties who, instead of showering me with niceties upon meeting me, decided to speak her truth and give it to me raw. Wow, did I love her for it. You see, I have never been good at censoring myself and have been known my whole life as a passionate straight shooter so when I meet other raw talk masters, it’s refreshing.

Celeste’s candid advice was a hard pill to swallow but it was also dead-on accurate and shared out of a unique, practical kind of compassion. She “outed” my tech fear of losing everything in a data transfer between my comfy old laptop and the new equipment I know I should be using. She suspected that was my fear and talked me off the ledge and offered to go shopping with me to help with the process. It was such a small but interesting and powerful moment. Celeste—a complete stranger—chose to feed me the truth instead of empty chitchat or—worse—nothing at all.

After that encounter, I waited to hear from her and last week she wrote me and we met up, had an amazing lunch together, and today I write this post from my spanky new 2012 laptop.

The moral of this story isn’t about upgrading your technology, it’s about upgrading your conversations. It’s about the power of being truthful and bold enough to skip the small talk and actually “kick some science” upon meeting someone who is worthy of your opionion, advice, and perspective.

This post is dedicated to those youthful fat brains who speak their raw truth every single day to one another and—lucky for me—sometimes to someone twice their age!

Posted Aug 15, 2012 Tagged under: authenticity, fat brains, uncategorized

BEFORE YOU DIE

Three months ago I met a Fat Brain named Ben Nemtin on a shuttle bus heading to Lake Tahoe for a Summit Series gathering. I was pleasantly surprised by a question he asked me only seconds after sitting down beside me and introducing himself.

“So what do you want to do before you die?”

Never a fan of small talk, I smiled at this question and instead of answering, I asked him if he had an idea of what he would like to do in his lifetime.

“Well, I’ve already accomplished 80 of 100 things I want to do before I die,” he answered.

This wasn’t any ordinary fellow sitting next to me. This was a Practical Genius who had created a list of 100 mutual lifelong dreams with a group of friends, including Jonnie Penn, Dave Lingwood, and Duncan Penn. Wanting more of out life than what college was offering them, they hit the road in a rented Winnebago and began crossing items off their list and helping strangers achieve their dreams at the same time.

Their epic six-year adventure eventually landed them a show on MTV and as of today, they have completed 80 items on their list, including playing basketball with President Obama and delivering a baby. Especially exciting is their most recent accomplishment, #19 on their list: “Write a bestselling book.”

What Do You Want to Do Before You Die? published on March 27th by Artisan Books. Ben sent me a copy and I soaked it up in one sitting. It’s vibrant, hyper-visual, and is full of beautiful artwork created by Kevin Brainard. And the best part is instead of just writing about their own accomplishments, which they could easily have done, they included many chosen from tens of thousands of submission answers to the question: “What do you want to before you die?”

I cried when I read this entry: “Before I die I want to let my English teacher know that she saved my life.”

I want to ask you the same question: What do you want to do before you die?

Here’s #1 on my list: Before I die I want to positively impact the lives of a million people.

If many of us have mutual quests, dreams, and aspirations, maybe we can collaborate and accomplish them together.

What’s on your list?

Posted Apr 16, 2012 Tagged under: fat brains, goals and goal setting, motivation, reflection

Summit Basecamp An Expedition that Blew My Mind and Opened My Heart

This weekend I had the humbling honor of participating in the Summit Series Basecamp in Squaw Valley, California. This highly curated gathering of trailblazing entrepreneurs, activists, scientists, thought leaders, educators, artists, authors, provocateurs, spiritual leaders, and three-dimensional creatives produced a spontaneous combustion of conversation, collaboration, and adventure the likes of which I have never seen. And the best part is the masterminds behind the whole thing are an awesome group of young Fat Brains who have literally broken the mold on the large group experience.

The only way I can come close to describing the experience is to say think TED meets Burning Man meets the X Games—a truly non-traditional, break-all-the-conference-rules happening that featured a group of hand-selected rock star innovators as speakers and participants.

Genius peaks

I don’t know if it was the altitude or just the collective consciousness doing what it does but the energy exchanged amongst us all was one of the most powerful, radiant energy fields I have experienced. It was as if we were all of one intuitive and intellectual organism, connected for three days by an invisible pulsing vibe that allowed us to rapidly build upon our ideas and passions together in a cross- disciplinary way that only innovation labs seem to be able to pull off.

Whether it was for the span of an elevator ride or a three-hour, deep-dive, fireside conversation, there was constant sharing, learning, and building upon the assets of each and every person who shared an exchange. Dialogues about new disruptive technologies, to a groundbreaking scientific discovery in health care, to an original perspective on the entrepreneurial mindset combined to suggest monumental potential for communities, businesses, and individuals across the globe.

Some talks were held in a Buckminster Fuller-style dome especially created for us to be immersed in multidimensional media experiences. Sessions were held around the clock, regardless of hour. There were 2:00 a.m. jam sessions and 4:00 a.m. yoga. There were group meals, lectures, mind-game activities, skiing, and extraordinary mediation sessions. If you didn’t want to shut down at all, you didn’t have to. It’s like Steve Jobs said: “Who needs an on and off switch?” Many grabbed a few hours of sleep here and there, but everyone seemed to be in a perpetual state of engagement.

I know that nothing should surprise me, but the unexpected beginning and end of most interactions was punctuated by a six-second hug. If you hug someone for six seconds, your brain releases oxytocin, which gives you a warm, nurturing, emotionally invested feeling. This practice was introduced at the start of day one and we spent the rest of our time together testing and confirming this finding, discovering it produced an invisible, unstoppable, round-the-clock connectivity of mind and heart for all of us. Astonishing.

As both subject and observer of my experience during Summit Basecamp, I couldn’t believe there were 750 incredible examples of what life, play, work, and ventures can look like when they exist at the intersection of heart and mind. This is what I teach, speak, and write about in my book, Practical Genius, and for the first time, I was in the midst of a tribe comprised entirely of practical geniuses living wholly in their genius zones. It felt like I was home at last.

This post is dedicated to the amazing masterminds of Summit Series and Summit Basecamp.

Posted Feb 2, 2012 Tagged under: creativity, entrepreneurship, events, fat brains, uncategorized

Watch TEDxMIA live at 7 p.m. tonight!

Tonight’s TEDxMIA’s Between the Lines will be BROADCASTED LIVE from the New World Center in Miami for you to enjoy at home. Highlights include 9 amazing life changing talks which explore what happens between the lines of life and death, art and science and music and technology. These genius talks will also inspire you to embrace the paradoxical shifts that occur when trash becomes treasure, disability becomes beauty and higher learning is taken to 36,000 feet literally.

Watch TEDxMIA – ‘Between the Lines’ on TEDx’s official livestream channel.

Posted Sep 13, 2011 Tagged under: events, fat brains, ideas and innovation

Got Fat Brains?

From time to time, my husband and I have what we like to call a “playdate of genius,” where we invite people over for a home-cooked meal, great conversation, and, of course, a good mix of music and what usually happens with people our age—we sit, dream out loud, debate, share, dream out loud some more, and usually end up discussing our children. It’s always a great time, the conversation flows, and the evening is usually elegantly and pleasantly predictable.

Last night, I set out with the same formula, made a great meal, got the playlist of music together, and set the mood lighting just right for the evening’s gathering. The only difference was that our guests were three young guys between the ages of 23 and 31 who were crashing at my place before embarking on a conference at sea for young entrepreneurs called Summit Series (it’s basically the Davos conference for young people). These young people are a few of what I call the Fat Brains in my life—the young smart explorers who remind me every day how much there is to learn and do if we want to live our lives all the way to the edges.

Let me tell you, last night I experienced one of those moments where you step back and look upon the scene and think out loud to yourself, “Is this really happening?” We dug deep into topics ranging from entrepreneurship, body hair, galactic travel, emotional intelligence, and “The Price is Right.” And the highlight for me was spending hours discussing Brain Computing Interface (BCI) while we played with Emotiv’s EPOC , a revolutionary mind-reading headset.

Read the rest of "Got Fat Brains?"

Posted Apr 7, 2011 Tagged under: conversations and interviews, fat brains, ideas and innovation, social media and technology