[Music] I'm imagining all of you naked it doesn't help Comfort zones are beautiful places but nothing ever grows there when I was living here in the Army I learned to ski with some of my friends Matt and a med uh we were coming down from the mountain one time and Matt says how many times did you fall today I said none he says you just wasted an entire day of skiing and he was absolutely right and it's not just skiing it's everything if you're not pushing your limits if you're not stepping out of your comfort
zone you're not learning and you're not growing worse than that Comfort zones are like traps the longer you go without falling the more scared you get of falling you forget that you can just get back up and start skiing again so how do we do it how do we break out of comfort zones I'm going to talk about five lessons I've learned over the past 20 years or so of of people breaking out of and staying out of comfort zones uh for me the farther into a comfort zone I get the the bigger a jump
I have to make to get out I remember when I was 17 I was living in the suburbs of Portland Oregon I'd never seen anything I'd never been anywhere uh the idea of going to college just meant I was going to go back to the suburbs to find a job so I had to do something extreme which was not exactly what my liberal anti-war mother had in mind for me but the Army taught me so many things it taught me that I'd overvalued grades it overvalued where I went to school and I undervalued things like
loyalty and integrity it also taught me that when something scares me and this scared the hell out of me there's only one thing that I can do close my eyes take a deep breath and jump but as much as the Army challenged me I was kind of in an intellectual comfort zone now going to Piva to study theoretical math broke me out of my comfort zone but math was just a little tiny part of what I learned in Piva a lot of you may know Piva is not exactly favorable to US foreign policy as a
lot of places needless to say I was the only US Army War veteran at the University at the time at least the only one who was public about it and but every day the people in POA challenged my American Centric worldview until a crack opened and then another and then another crack opened until my entire worldview came crumbling down and I was finally able to see a different perspective expect the unexpected I expected to become a great mathematician in Piva that didn't happen but that's probably a good thing so you have to appreciate the unexpected
lessons the unexpected results because this new way of seeing the world took me on a path I have no regrets for so POA finished and you can't study forever and I know a lot of you disagree with that so it's time to take another jump With a Little Help From My Best Friend kicking me out the door and I went to a rock with Mercy Corp a humanitarian organization that allowed me to work on some of the problems I had been a part of creating there was a lot of suffering in Iraq but there was
also a lot of inspiration like my friend Dr kther Dr kther comes from a small town that was hit pretty hard by a lot of violence and a lot of conflict and she experienced a lot of that directly herself it's a very conservative town a lot of the women are covered a lot of them can barely leave their house and then you have kther walking around in tight jeans and high heels she was afraid of no one and the first time I met her she basically told me I was incompetent the second time I met
her I offered her a job to go around basically tell the same thing to dysfunctional bureaucrats Hospital directors and this 27-year-old young woman took on doctors that were twice her age kther doesn't even know what a comfort zone is she taught me to do something that scares me every single day to stay out of my comfort zone from Iraq I went to Beirut which is a beautiful city even by your Venza standards but in 2011 I was entering into a comfort zone um it was about the same time that there was something moving underneath with
the youth in the region Decades of Oppression lack of opportunity lack of jobs and a growing youth population I mean something was going to give and it did and it was amazing and inspiring and exciting and frustrating and scary so when the war first kicked off in Libya I called my friend Fel he was in Istanbul at the time trying to fix an old relationship and I said hey you want to go to Libya with me and about 24 hours later me and a very now single fuddle we're crossing the border into Libya there was
no passport control there was no stamp there was a bunch of kids with AK-47s we made our way across the eastern part of the country to Benghazi but it was in misrata Under Siege by Gaddafi that needed humanitarian assistance now if you told me when I was in Venza that I would get on a boat and sneak into a city under siege being bombed I probably would have said you were crazy in more words than that but Fel and I had already stepped out of our comfort zone we already jumped it was a lot easier
the biggest thing that made it easier is that we were together we had a partner when we get to Libya we get to misrata and the first thing we had to do was find a safe place to stay for some obvious reasons we found some found this really stable building we asked some of the rebels hey can we stay there and they said it's an abandoned Bank we don't have the keys can we stay there at this point I know you have to expect the unexpected and my mom is proud of me for a lot
of things but breaking into a bank is not one of them so the first thing we do we go up on the roof set up our satellite Communications and I connect to my boss then I connect to Facebook actually might have been the other way around but I posted on my wall hey we're in mrata everything is safe and that's when the unexpected happened Amed from 10 years prior skiing days with within a minute posts on my wall Are you seriously in miss rata my dad is there and we've been trying to get in touch
with him for 2 weeks that was unexpected the next day we go out to try to look for him we're waiting for our ride to get into town and this older gentleman's talking to us we meet him at the port and and I say hey you know I'm looking for somebody about your age maybe you know him his name's Ibrahim dermish he just looks at me and says I'm Ibrahim dermish who the hell are you very unexpected about a week later we got Ibrahim out of misrata along with F's ability to get thousands of Africans
that were stranded in misrata out of the city and back home with their families fle taught me something very amazing and that's always have a partner when you jump don't go It Alone this is me and FDLE on the way back on the boat with a brilliant journalist that we met on the way he married her a year later they have a beautiful son named Hassan now and I had to find a new partner so off to Egypt Millions took to the streets not going out alone facing live ammunition to take down a dictator and
I could talk for hours about all of the amazing Egyptians I've met over the past four years but I'm going to talk about one and he's actually Irish Khan has been living in Egypt for 20 years 10 years ago he started a company that became a Empire employing almost a thousand Egyptians he was in streets with everyone else in the During the Revolution but then after the revolution what do you do there's still no jobs there's still no opportunity a thousand jobs is important but it's a drop in the bucket in Egypt we needed 100
200 cons and that's what he does he has taken his money he's taken his his experience he's taken his time and he's investing in the next generation of Egyptian entrepreneurs who are stepping out of their comfort zones Now to create opportunities for thousands of other Egyptians and this was the great lesson that Khan taught me it's contagious and you have to spread it it's your responsibility so at this point you might be saying do we have to go to war zones and revolutions to get out of our comfort zone and no obviously not this is
Lisa she's one of the two most amazing woman I know and I'm really lucky to be her kid brother for all of the eyes closing and deep breath jumping I've done I've done nothing nearly as courageous as she has she has jumped twice and their names are Will and Greta arguably the cutest kids on the planet you think they don't challenge her every single day help her learn every single day she's permanently outside of her comfort zone because she's a mother so what's the unexpected result this is the other most amazing woman I know when
Lisa had will and Greta she didn't know that my mom was going to get cancer and she didn't know that it was going to be too fast to treat the day that we spread my Mom's ashes at the beach and every day since then the only thing that keeps me going is this smile of the great times that she spent with Will and Greta and only because my sister closed her eyes to took a deep breath and jumped so what does it have to do with you Venza is not the place it was when I
left the financial crisis hit here like everywhere else there's very little opportunity very few jobs and you've been pushed out of your comfort zone but now is not the time to complain about that you are outside of your comfort zone embrace it because that is where magic happens thanks [Applause] [Music]
