As part of the Singapore Design Festival, TedxSingapore had an event yesterday which I’m glad to be able tp participate! Apparently, they had to reject 200 people from the event due to the limited number of seats lah! Check out the awesome list of attendees here!
expectations at 100%.
I think I look like the Ju-on kiddo in this picture with pale face and dark eyes..somebody feed me breakfast already.
excitement 100%
Here’s the videos shown in the event! I’m missing one though, cos I noted down what I thought was the vid title, and turns out that it’s now. :(
(Not in sequence)
Evan Williams on listening to Twitter users
Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in Action
What I like about this vid is how marry technology and nature together, when a lot of times technology is portrayed as destroying nature. Sort of makes people think and start looking at what Earth has given us that we have taken for granted or has once looked down upon, since mankind’s ultimate superiority on Earth is so ingrained in many of us. I’ve learnt how to stop and enjoy how the clouds move in the sky like a play unfolding, listening to the music of the leaves and the sound of the wind. It’s actually an awesome experience that I think many have overlooked in the endless pursuit of clearing to-do lists. Perhaps this is why people couldn’t care less about protecting Earth. After all, how can you protect something you don’t know?
Michael Pritchard’s water filter turns filthy water drinkable
For this talk, it was labelled as “Design with Passionate Anger”, and if you have caught my style, I like to put my main learning points as the post title. What struck me was the term “Passionate Anger”. Pritchard’s idea of the lifesaver bottle came from his frustration of the current situation of the poor clean water distribution. He was pissed off at what was happening, that people are not getting the clean water that they deserve to be drinking. Out of this passionate anger, he come out with this idea which imo, is a brilliant and useful product that can really make him rich if employed.
You see, out of his frustration, he can be made rich AND fulfil his passion to providing clean water to people, helping this people to live better life. What brilliant combination is that lah!
Ueli Gegenschatz soars in a wingsuit
This vid was definitely the highlight of the whole event. Ueli was passionate about flying and you can see how his eyes sparkle when he talks about man’s dream to fly. Watching him paragliding made me add paragliding into my bucket list. Anyway, you can see his zest to continue pushing the limit of possibility with newer and out-of-the-box stunts, yet he is certain about what he is getting himself into. Gotta love his attitude when he mentioned about rejecting stunts because “some people have crazy ideas”. Lol.
After watching this vid and feeling inspired, we were told that Ueli managed to do what he planned for the first jump (longest distance) but has unfortunately passed away from a jump (which was not related to his 2nd goal after checking on google) just recently about two weeks ago. I’ve done a google check and found out that Ueli was hit by a sudden gust of wind which caused him to lose control of his jump and the deployment of his parachute. He ended up hitting a wall, was conscious after impact, apologised for the messed up jump (the jump was a stint for RedBull) before losing consciousness and died from his injuries.
I repeat, this guy apologised after impact. How modest of him when he obviously should not be blamed for the sudden gust of wind!
It’s definitely easy to say, “Look at Ueli! He followed his dream/passion and he died! Why not just give up on your dream now?”, which I supposed that the organisers felt that it would happen too.
No matter what, don’t look back
So in tribute to Ueli, we wrote down the answers to these questions on a piece of paper that we were told to bring.
1. Who inspires you?
2. What inspires you?
3. Who would you like to inspire?
and fold our paper into an air plane before throwing them towards the stage.
My plane. Here are my answers:
1. God, people
2. Nature, stories
3. People without a passion/dream, youths
People getting ready to fly their planes.
The ceremony. The audio is quite crappy, but we shouted “To Ueli” as we threw our planes.
Aftermath on stage.
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All in all, the event was pretty dry in the beginning as the was videos after videos, so it gets quite annoying when I was thinking, “man, someone can just give me the links and I can watch it at home right?”, and wondering why I’ve spent $9 on cab and drag myself out in the morning. Perhaps the curators could have inject some thinking process or discussion of our thoughts on the vids would be nice. But honestly, I didn’t regret going because of the impact Ueli had on me. Awesome awesome.
I had some time to pen down my thoughts on Ueli while I was waiting for my lunch to be served…
Messy, messy thoughts. I believe only I can decipher it.
Basically it surrounds the idea of comparing people who live a great deal of time but are without a dream to someone who has a dream but died in his pursuit of the dream. Which one is worth living? Which one has truly lived? Which one should be the right way to live?
I place my bets for latter option. Which is why I get really really saddened by people who are living without a dream, without passions. Guess that this emotion can be termed as passionate sadness and anger, which is sort of echoed in Ken Robinson’s talk about creativity and education.
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
I tear a little when he talks about Gillian’s story, I wonder how many talents are going to be wasted or have been wasted because of how the society functions. All this greatly motivates me to get my ass moving on developing my business plan, to help people realise that talents and skills are not worthless. If you, my reader, know of someone who could help me develop my plan, please do drop me an email at elisha.tan@gmail.com. I truly believe that God gave each one a talent and that, deserves a special attention in honing and development.
This is a very long post, I’m glad someone will actually finish reading it all (I hope. OH PLEASE FINISH READING THIS). I shall end this off with another jump vid by Ueli, and a song about dreams by Epik High, my fav hip hop artists, which captures a huge portion of emotions I’m feeling. mad props to them.
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