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When Dorothy was a little girl,
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she was fascinated by her goldfish.
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Her father explained to her that fish swim
by quickly wagging their tails
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to propel themselves through the water.
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Without hesitation,
little Dorothy responded,
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"Yes, Daddy, and fish swim backwards
by wagging their heads."
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(Laughter)
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In her mind, it was a fact
as true as any other.
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Fish swim backwards
by wagging their heads.
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She believed it.
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Our lives are full
of fish swimming backwards.
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We make assumptions
and faulty leaps of logic.
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We harbor bias.
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We know that we are right
and they are wrong.
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We fear the worst.
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We strive for unattainable perfection.
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We tell ourselves
what we can and cannot do.
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In our minds, fish swim by in reverse
frantically wagging their heads
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and we don't even notice them.
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I'm going to tell you
five facts about myself.
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One fact is not true.
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One: I graduated from Harvard at 19
with an honors degree in Mathematics.
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Two: I currently run
a construction company in Orlando.
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Three: I starred on a television sitcom.
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Four: I lost my sight
to a rare genetic eye disease.
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Five: I served as a law clerk
to two US Supreme Court justices.
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Which fact is not true?
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Actually, they're all true.
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Yeah. They're all true.
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(Applause)
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At this point, most people really
only care about the television show.
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(Laughter)
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I know this from experience.
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OK, so the show was NBC's
"Saved By The Bell: The New Class."
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And I played Weasel Wyzell,
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who was the sort of dorky,
nerdy character on the show,
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which made it a very
major acting challenge
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for me as a 13-year-old boy.
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(Laughter)
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Now, did you struggle
with number four, my blindness?
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Why is that?
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We make assumptions
about so-called disabilities.
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As a blind man, I confront
others' incorrect assumptions
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about my abilities every day.
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My point today is not
about my blindness, however.
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It's about my vision.
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Going blind taught me
to live my life eyes wide open.
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It taught me to spot
those backwards-swimming fish
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that our minds create.
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Going blind cast them into focus.
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What does it feel like to see?
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It's immediate and passive.
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You open your eyes and there's the world.
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Seeing is believing. Sight is truth.
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Right?
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Well, that's what I thought.
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Then, from age 12 to 25,
my retinas progressively deteriorated.
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My sight became an increasingly bizarre
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carnival funhouse hall
of mirrors and illusions.
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The salesperson I was relieved
to spot in a store
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was really a mannequin.
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Reaching down to wash my hands,
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I suddenly saw it was
a urinal I was touching, not a sink,
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when my fingers felt its true shape.
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A friend described
the photograph in my hand,
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and only then I could see
the image depicted.
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Objects appeared, morphed
and disappeared in my reality.
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It was difficult and exhausting to see.
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I pieced together fragmented,
transitory images,
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consciously analyzed the clues,
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searched for some logic
in my crumbling kaleidoscope,
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until I saw nothing at all.
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I learned that what we see
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is not universal truth.
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It is not objective reality.
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What we see is a unique,
personal, virtual reality
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that is masterfully
constructed by our brain.
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Let me explain with a bit
of amateur neuroscience.
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Your visual cortex takes up
about 30 percent of your brain.
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That's compared to approximately
eight percent for touch
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and two to three percent for hearing.
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Every second, your eyes
can send your visual cortex
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as many as two billion
pieces of information.
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The rest of your body can send your brain
only an additional billion.
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So sight is one third
of your brain by volume,
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and can claim about two thirds
of your brain's processing resources.
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It's no surprise then
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that the illusion
of sight is so compelling.
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But make no mistake about it:
sight is an illusion.
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Here's where it gets interesting.
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To create the experience of sight,
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your brain references your conceptual
understanding of the world,
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other knowledge, your memories,
opinions, emotions, mental attention.
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All of these things and far more
are linked in your brain to your sight.
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These linkages work both ways,
and usually occur subconsciously,
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so for example,
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what you see impacts how you feel,
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and the way you feel
can literally change what you see.
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Numerous studies demonstrate this.
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If you are asked to estimate
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the walking speed of a man
in a video, for example,
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your answer will be different if you're
told to think about cheetahs or turtles.
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A hill appears steeper
if you've just exercised,
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and a landmark appears farther away
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if you're wearing a heavy backpack.
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We have arrived
at a fundamental contradiction.
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What you see is a complex
mental construction of your own making,
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but you experience it passively
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as a direct representation
of the world around you.
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You create your own reality
and you believe it.
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I believed mine until it broke apart.
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The deterioration of my eyes
shattered the illusion.
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You see, sight is just one way
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we shape our reality.
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We create our own realities
in many other ways.
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Let's take fear as just one example.
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Your fears distort your reality.
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Under the warped logic of fear,
anything is better than the uncertain.
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Fear fills the void at all costs,
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passing off what you dread
for what you know,
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offering up the worst
in place of the ambiguous,
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substituting assumption for reason.
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Psychologists have
a great term for it: awfulizing.
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(Laughter)
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Right?
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Fear replaces the unknown with the awful.
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Now, fear is self-realizing.
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When you face the greatest need
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to look outside yourself
and think critically,
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fear beats a retreat
deep inside your mind,
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shrinking and distorting your view,
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drowning your capacity
for critical thought
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with a flood of disruptive emotions.
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When you face a compelling
opportunity to take action,
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fear lulls you into inaction,
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enticing you to passively watch
its prophecies fulfill themselves.
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When I was diagnosed
with my blinding disease,
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I knew blindness would ruin my life.
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Blindness was a death sentence
for my independence.
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It was the end of achievement for me.
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Blindness meant I would live
an unremarkable life,
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small and sad,
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and likely alone.
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I knew it.
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This was a fiction born of my fears,
but I believed it.
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It was a lie, but it was my reality,
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just like those backwards-swimming fish
in little Dorothy's mind.
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If I had not confronted
the reality of my fear,
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I would have lived it.
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I am certain of that.
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So how do you live your life
eyes wide open?
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It is a learned discipline.
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It can be taught. It can be practiced.
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I will summarize very briefly.
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Hold yourself accountable
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for every moment, every thought,
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every detail.
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See beyond your fears.
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Recognize your assumptions.
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Harness your internal strength.
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Silence your internal critic.
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Correct your misconceptions
about luck and about success.
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Accept your strengths and your weaknesses,
and understand the difference.
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Open your hearts
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to your bountiful blessings.
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Your fears, your critics,
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your heroes, your villains --
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they are your excuses,
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rationalizations, shortcuts,
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justifications, your surrender.
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They are fictions you perceive as reality.
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Choose to see through them.
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Choose to let them go.
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You are the creator of your reality.
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With that empowerment
comes complete responsibility.
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I chose to step out of fear's tunnel
into terrain uncharted and undefined.
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I chose to build there a blessed life.
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Far from alone,
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I share my beautiful life with Dorothy,
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my beautiful wife,
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with our triplets,
whom we call the Tripsky's,
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and with the latest addition
to the family,
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sweet baby Clementine.
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What do you fear?
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What lies do you tell yourself?
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How do you embellish your truth
and write your own fictions?
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What reality are you
creating for yourself?
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In your career and personal life,
in your relationships,
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and in your heart and soul,
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your backwards-swimming fish
do you great harm.
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They exact a toll in missed opportunities
and unrealized potential,
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and they engender insecurity and distrust
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where you seek fulfillment and connection.
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I urge you to search them out.
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Helen Keller said that the only thing
worse than being blind
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is having sight but no vision.
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For me, going blind
was a profound blessing,
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because blindness gave me vision.
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I hope you can see what I see.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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Bruno Giussani: Isaac, before you
leave the stage, just a question.
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This is an audience of entrepreneurs,
of doers, of innovators.
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You are a CEO of a company
down in Florida,
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and many are probably wondering,
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how is it to be a blind CEO?
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What kind of specific challenges
do you have and how do you overcome them?
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Isaac Lidsky: Well,
the biggest challenge became a blessing.
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I don't get visual feedback from people.
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(Laughter)
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BG: What's that noise there? IL: Yeah.
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So, for example,
in my leadership team meetings,
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I don't see facial
expressions or gestures.
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I've learned to solicit
a lot more verbal feedback.
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I basically force people
to tell me what they think.
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And in this respect,
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it's become, like I said, a real blessing
for me personally and for my company,
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because we communicate
at a far deeper level,
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we avoid ambiguities,
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and most important, my team knows
that what they think truly matters.
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BG: Isaac, thank you for coming to TED.
IL: Thank you, Bruno.
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(Applause)