Guys, what's with the balls? I Okay, wait. Oh, right.
I forgot. I was supposed to read this before coming. I I'll have to read it right now.
Okay, guess I'll read it out loud. So, place yourself in front of the ball. Straighten your non-dominant leg.
Contract the hamstrings of your dominant leg. Make a 45 degree angle about your knee. Contract your quadriceps to extend your leg and make contact with the ball.
What did I just read? It's better to show you. That's it.
I just read the instructions on how to kick a ball. Now, the instructions are very clear. It's literally giving you the muscle physiology of how to make contact with the ball and then watch the flight.
Is that necessary? No. I mean, you know how to kick a ball.
You've been kicking ball since you were you were a child, right? It's one of the first things we actually learned how to do. Now, imagine a hypothetical situation where there's an individual who's never interacted with a ball.
They grew up in a village somewhere, never knew what a ball is, never saw it, and you place a ball in front of them. But for some reason, remember this hypothetical, they have perfect proficiency in English. And when they read the instructions, you think they'll be able to kick the ball?
Probably not. They're going to try. They're going to fail.
And remember that word fail. Then they're going to try again, fail again, try again, fail again, until eventually they get it. Now, was that because of the instructions or was because they kept on trying and they kept on failing?
right now. Was it necessary for the instructions like I asked before? No.
So, I don't need these instructions. And I know how to kick a ball. I just showed you.
I'll do it again right now. Try that again. [Music] Wait, this ball's a little deflated.
Okay. I thought both balls would be the same. That's what I asked for.
But this one's deflated. That doesn't help me at all. And the instructions had absolutely no advice on how to deal with a deflated ball.
They told me how to deal with the optimum situation, which is a perfectly inflated ball. Also, assuming I have perfectly functioning legs. Now, now I failed at kicking this ball as well as the first one because again, hypothetically, I've never dealt with a deflated ball before, and the instructions didn't advise me on how to deal with it.
But I try it again. I know this time that the ball is deflated. I need more power.
But from my previous experience, I'm going to sacrifice accuracy because of that power. So, I'm going to increase my accuracy by taking my shoe off, applying more power and kicking it perfectly. Now, of course, this is a very basic example.
I know how to kick a ball, so don't judge my motor skills, please. and the second ball was supposed to be deflated. So don't judge the OMC organization team because this is supposed to happen.
Now my point being I had to fail because if I hadn't failed, I wouldn't have learned it. For some reason in our society, not just our society, everywhere you go to West, go to the east, failure is such a stigma. Nobody wants their child to fail the math test, even though it's just a six-year-old child.
And what's worse is you compete with everyone else. How come you got a 97 when your cousin got a 99 on the exact same exam? And what's worse is how come you got a 60 when your cousin got a 98 in the exact same exam?
Why are you punishing the child for failing? He's a child. He's supposed to fail.
At this point, you're supposed to tell him, "Try to figure out what you did wrong. " So the next time you have the same problem, you don't do it again. You learn from your mistakes.
You learn how to solve the problem. You learn how to think think in critical situations. And that's the whole point of talk right now.
How to problem solve and think critically. So why do you think you're bad at thinking critically? Because you haven't done it.
Myself included. And I came up with this realization fairly young. I was very lucky.
Uh when I was about 14 years old, I was a overweight, short uh grade nine kid who really wanted to play basketball. Really wanted to play basketball because all of his friends played basketball and they were all good. I used to sit on the sidelines because just couldn't keep up with them.
I also had ads of them. Didn't help. So what I did was I downloaded and printed instructions on how to shoot a basketball.
That was my only chance. I couldn't run and keep up with them. I had to shoot.
So I downloaded these instructions which was the inspiration of the football example here and I started reading these instructions at the school gymnasium after classes. And while I was reading I was so intent on memorizing every single step and I believe that memorizing these instructions would lead me to shoot a basketball properly because that's what I do in classes. I study then I go and write the exams.
The exams are the exact questions that I studied and it's perfectly fine. No problem. So let's try that here.
While I was doing that, my phys teacher snuck up behind me. And I don't know if you guys are aware of the stereotypes in Fizzette teachers in the West. They're very harsh.
And especially to guys, they believe in tough love. So when I was reading this, he saw me and he literally just started laughing at me. He was actually mocking me.
He's like, "It doesn't matter if you memorize every single word in this document. If you memorize every single word on how to shoot a ball in every book written and every single word on the internet on how to shoot a basketball, you'll never be able to shoot a basketball until you actually shoot a basketball. So, he made me shoot the basketball 50 times that day.
And I'm serious. I'm not making this up. I missed every single shot cuz I just didn't have the strength.
By the time I got to the 20th shot, my arms felt like jelly. But he made me finish anyway. And he made me do that several times that week.
I must have missed almost a thousand shots. I'm not exaggerating. 50 shots a day for a few weeks.
I'm going to miss most of those shots. But eventually, I got my first shot in. Now, why did I get that first shot in?
A lot of people think it's because you experienced. You tried so many times. Eventually, you figured out how to do it.
It wasn't so much that I figured out what to do. It was more of a process of elimination. I kept on failing and every time I missed a shot, I realized what I did wrong and I adjusted that.
Sometimes I had too much power, sometimes I sacrificed accuracy, sometimes I sacrificed power for accuracy, vice vice versa. A lot of factors and it took me hundreds of shots to figure out the optimal ratio to get the ball into the net, right? So that's my point here.
You have to fail. You should fail. Failing is good.
Isn't it better that you fail when you're young and you're not liable and you won't be held accountable than when you fail when you are older and you are liable and held accountable? Fail now. Learn from your mistakes so you don't fail later.
Now pretty much explain to you guys why you guys suck, including myself at problem solving, critical thinking. What's the solution? There are many solutions and there are many different pathways everyone can take.
The whole point is you have to try. You have to put yourself into situations where you have to solve problems. Cuz the issue is ever since you started school, you've been sheltered.
You've been given ideal situations. You go and you memorize your perfect inflated ball scenario. Go to your exam hall, answer the perfect scenario with your perfect answer, and then you go home.
And then when you get to real life, your deflated ball comes and you don't know what to do. So experience your deflated ball before you get to real life, before you graduate. And the best way to do that, the first step, what I did, which may some of you may have already done, is to observe people who have already failed countless times.
The experienced people, they're all around you. Most of them are sitting in the front first few rows. Now that the thing about experienced individuals is that they want they always want to share their experience.
So leech off of that experience. See what they do differently. See observe when they are they approach a problem, the way they approach a problem, how they come up with a solution and how they succeed at solving that problem.
They're right there. You won't be able to emulate it perfectly because you're just starting out. But now you'll have a a basis.
So once you have that basis, you can move forward. And it this doesn't have to be within your college. It can be anywhere.
Now if you're a medical student, go to the clinics more. Go to the hospital more. Interact with patients more.
Learn from the patient. Learn their side of the perspective. Look at the doctors at how they are treating the patients, how they're taking history, how they're approaching the problem.
Look at your seniors. Even look at the students that are younger than you, right? You always learn from other people.
Observe how they're solving problems. Try it. If it works for you, great.
If it doesn't, try something else. Try to come up with something yourself. Now, let's say it's too hard.
You're not able to make it to the hospital so much. If you're not able to observe people that solve problems on a daily basis, you still have people in your family that do every day. You have your parents, specifically your mother.
You'd be amazed at how many times your mother solves serious issues every day like it's nothing. It's mindboggling cuz I remember when I was about I was very young about 9 or 10 years old and I was making a project for my school and I was there was a lot of electrical work along and I had one of the extraction wires that you see over here an outlet. My little brother somehow he was riding his bike the wire was very thin and it cut in half and I had no time.
I had to go to school right away. So what do I do as most kids do? They run to their mother.
So what am I supposed to do? I'm going to fail. This is not going to work.
So, she goes into the our tool my father's toolbox, takes out these pliers, rips the wire apart, takes the copper wiring, tapes them together with electrical wire. I was like, "This there, this will work. " And I'm like, "Great.
" She solved another problem. I went home or I went to school, did the project, did fairly well, then came back. And then a few years later after that, I came up with a similar situation.
I'm like, "Oh, I know what to do now. " I did the same thing. It worked relatively well.
Not as well as when she did it, but it did. And that's when I realized, how does she know how to do that? She's not an electrical engineer, right?
She studied journalism. How does she know how to do this? It's because she's experienced these situations so many times in her life, not just for herself, but for her entire family for years, that something like this just didn't even phase her.
So, why not leech off of that experience? It's right there. Give yourself the head start, right?
The second thing you could do, which I mentioned before, to be better at problem solving and critical thinking, is to place yourself in situations where you will have problems, daunting, unimaginable problems, something that you really expect to fail in. Cuz like I said, failing is good. Don't be afraid to fail.
Embrace it. So the ideal situation is one long task that takes a while to perform. You have your final goal and you're starting off with nothing and you know there will be a lot of different problems in between.
Okay, I'll give you an example of that of what we did last year. Yes. So you can see in this picture over here, we built a maze.
It's a humansized maze, right? You can actually go into the maze and you'd come out in one of the four entrances anywhere else. Uh this, okay, it's a maze, but do you realize how amazing this is for a few year four students to pull off on their own?
They have limited resources, limited finances, they have no experience in construction whatsoever, and they have very little time. This was during human function, right? But they still succeeded.
And being part of that team, I can tell you we had no idea what we're doing. We had no idea how we were going to succeed. We thought we were going to fail.
But that didn't stop us. Few creative individuals in our team just came up with a concept of using a humansized maze. We just wanted to do that.
We didn't know how it was relevant to the event. We didn't know what the point of it was. We didn't know what we were going to do with it.
We didn't know how to make it. And we didn't even know what materials we needed. We didn't even know where we were going to make it.
It was really convenient. We had a wide open courtyard last year, right? So, we had about five or six problems in front of us, but we took them one at a time.
What's the first step? Find out what we're going to do with the maze. So, we sat down and we came up with a game.
How do we use the maze? Okay, we came up with really awesome scenarios of something like zombie apocalypse. It was a really fun day.
I don't have time to go into detail about the game itself, but if you can talk to me afterwards, I can tell you. Uh, so once we came up with a solution of what to do with the maze, how do we build the maze? Then we were going, so we were trying to come up with solutions how to build a maze.
One of the members in our team said that she knows an architect, her sister actually. So she sat down with her and gave her the guidelines of what we needed and they designed the maze together. Then we had an outline of the maze.
The next step build the maze. So while we had members trying to get permission to actually use this area, we just started working anyway cuz if we didn't get the permission, whatever, we'll just start somewhere else again from the beginning. Why waste time?
So we started making based on the measurements, we started making out the layouts. This is us working in night at night. So, you can see us measuring out the the layout of the maze.
And keep in mind, at this time, we still have no idea how we're going to build the maze. But we solved our first problem, which was what we're going to do with the maze. Now, you see the chalk over there that we're using.
The maze was huge. It ran out with about a quarter. Well, only a quarter of the maze was mapped out.
Three and a quarters of the maze is left. What are we going to do quickly? We're thinking, okay, someone go buy spray paint.
We'll just use that, right? Hopefully OMC won't mind, but it's sad. We'll just move it over and hide it later.
So, another solution. We have our our outline perfectly well done. Still don't know how to build a maze, right?
Then we come back the next day all happy that we did so much work. And we see it in the sunlight from the top. The measurements are completely off because I told you we have no experience.
We didn't know how to measure these properly. This time we use measuring tape and we did it properly this time and we got more chalk, more spray spray paint. So we were ready.
Then the next day when we saw it in the morning hoping it worked better this time, it worked very well. And while we were doing that, we still needed a way to build a maze. So we were trying many different things while we were still measuring.
We were looking for solutions for problems we knew we were going to face later on while we were working on a current problem as well. So we tried many things. We tried to actually dig and put wooden pillars in.
Didn't work. We tried metal beams. Didn't work.
Eventually, and this is a golden rule for problem solving, look at your surroundings. What resources do you have available to you? We said, "OMC is under heavy construction right now.
They're really rushing to get a lot of work done. We need help with construction. Why don't we ask for advice from actual construction workers?
" We went to them. We told them, "We need this, this, and this. How do you suggest we go along with it?
" They gave us a lot of steps and scenarios, and we were able to move along and get these pillars up. Once these pillars were were up, we realized that, yeah, these are this is hollow. There's nothing here.
People just go right through. We're like, you know what? Just cover it with cloth.
We'll have to do it manually, but let's just cover it with cloth. We covered it with cloth and then we ended up with the final product that I showed you before. And the game went phenomenal.
And I couldn't go into more detail with the maze because the problems didn't end until the last possible minute. Actually, until the game ended, even after when we didn't know how to dispose of it. But the problems kept on coming and we kept on solving the problems as they came.
That's the point. There's always a solution. If you didn't find a solution, it's because you didn't find the solution.
But that doesn't matter. If we had failed at this, oh, whatever. It's it looks bad.
But we would have learned a lot, which we did anyway, and use it the next time. I'm telling you, all the people that worked in this project, most of them are involved in TEDex. And TEDex was easy compared to that because we went through this already.
If we came straight to TEDex, it wouldn't be as successful. Right? So the final message, the take-home message is fail.
Fail now so you don't fail later. Okay? Face the variable of of life of the deflated ball right now.
So when you see it the next time, you can kick the deflated ball right in the face. Thank you.
