I work at Google.

If you want to contact me it's dondodge@google

or if you're a Twitter user

you can find me @DonDodge.

So. Google is this amazing company,

amazing people, creativity,

where there are no limits.

Anything is possible.

I'll talk more about how we do this kind of things a little later.

At Google, we call them moon shots,

shooting for the moon.

Alright.

We want things that are 10 times better,

not 10 percent better, 10 times better.

And it takes a different way of thinking

and a different way of approaching problems

when you're trying to do things that are 10 times better.

The number one thing

that gets in the way of doing great things is fear of failure.

Fear prevents us from doing the things that we want to do,

that we know that we should do,

but we are afraid of failing.

So I am going to talk a little bit about failure

and how to handle that,

and how to break through that fear of failure.

How to unlock your inter creativity.

We are all creative

but it's suppressed by a fear of failure.

So I want to talk about how to get around that.

And lastly how to say yes to life.

So before Google, I worked at Microsoft with some amazing people.

And before that, let me go back in time, I worked at Altavista.

That was 18 years ago, it's hard to imagine now.

Did any of you ever used Altavista?

The first search engine?

God bless you, thank you. (Laughter)

At that time, we were the best search engine in the world.

We were number one.

It was not without risk though. We took amazing risks to make that happen.

My group, the group that I led, invented multimedia search.

So to be able to search for photos and images, to be able to search for music

or to be able to search for video.

Nineteen years later, that seems very obvious.

Of course, you can do that.

But let me tell you, 19 years ago, it was impossible.

You just couldn't do it.

There were a few failures along the way.

It was a very difficult job to do.

One of the things that we found was... well, two things.

Number one was pornography and number two was spam.

And we were innocent,

we didn't know that people would use this search engine to find porn.

Or that they would create all of these pages that were spam.

Spam means that you put pages in there

that say that they are about something and they are not.

They are about something completely different.

So we have to invent algorithms and technology to beat them.

To find the porn and filter it out.

And to find spam and filter it out.

This is very very difficult to do.

We created these algorithms to try to find the porn,

but they weren't always successful.

We were always missing some.

It was very very difficult to do.

So we had to have human intervention.

Technology couldn't do it at that time.

So we had interns who would come in to Altavista,

and they would spend all day looking at pages of porn.

(Laughter)

Interesting job.

But we needed to identify if it was porn or not,

and our algorithms could only go so far.

So we had these interns come in and they're looking at porn everyday

and they're saying "Yep, that's porn, that's porn, that's porn".

Okay, great!

After a week or two, we started to get a little concerned

about what would happen if they are going to look at porn all day everyday.

(Laughter)

This could be a problem.

So we took the people who were looking at porn,

and we put them over to the group that was looking at spam and identifying spam,

and we took the spam people and put them on the porn.

And we kept moving them back and forth.

There probably would have been some excellent sociological experiments

that we could have done,

but we were too busy trying to create this technology,

so we didn't really do it.

But it was an interesting time.

It was one of the most creative and amazing times of my life.

I've had the good fortune to work

with lots of interesting people and creative people.

Napster was another one.

Immediately after Altavista I went to Napster.

And we changed the world.

Literally changed the world. How people find music.

How they appreciate music and how they move on.

We thought that we were going to be what iTunes is today.

But we failed.

We managed to change the world but we failed in our objective.

iTunes could not exist today without Napster coming first.

We paved the way so that iTunes could exist.

And for that, I think okay, it wasn't a failure.

It was fun.

So how many of you used Napster back the day.

Oh, just about everybody.

Excellent, it was fun, wasn't it?

Too bad, it doesn't exist anymore.

Winston Churchill is one of my favorite people

and he has some amazing quotes,

but this one I love.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal.

It's moving forward that counts."

Having the courage to move forward that counts most.

So in the case of the Altavista and Napster and even of Google,

we had tremendous success.

But success is not final, it's not guranteed.

You have to work hard every single day to maintain that success.

No one is going to give you anything.

So today, there are thousands of people all over the world

trying to do a better search, trying to do a better YouTube,

trying to do a better Google maps.

And everyday, there are thousands of people at Google,

who are trying to do it better and running as fast as we can.

That creates an amazing environment.

When I moved to Silicon Valley, one of the first things I realized was

there is a force field of energy around Silicon Valley.

It's the highest concentration of type A personalities, creative people,

brilliant scientists, that I've ever seen in my life.

And what it does is, it drives you to do more than you ever thought possible.

It pushes you that sense of competition and that collaborative work environment,

working with other people, pushes you to excel and to do things

that you didn't think you could do.

It's an amazing place.

After I was at Google for about six months,

my friends at Microsoft, and many other friends said,

"Don, tell me about Google.

It's such a stunning company.

How was it different, how do they do it?"

And I coined this phrase, "At Google achieving 60 percent of the impossible

is better than 100 percent of the ordinary."

And what we mean by that is those moon shots, that I talked about earlier,

we want to do things ten times better, not ten percent better.

And if in the pursuit of doing something ten times better,

a moon shot that seems impossible.

If you only get 60 percent of the way there, that's okay. That's great.

Because we would rather have that,

than have tiny little incremental improvements of ten percent.

So that's the way we think about it.

And it's fairly uncommon, most companies don't think that way.

So I'll tell you a little bit, oh... Let's go back in time even further.

So, if you were to walk into any first grade class,

and you ask them, "Can you paint?", every hand goes up.

"Yes, yes I can paint."

If you ask them, "Can you sing?"

Every hand goes up.

"Yes, I can sing".

It's amazing, they are creative and they are confident.

Ten years later, this is what was happens.

Ten years later you go ask the same students, "Can you paint?".

Not a single hand goes up.

"Can you sing?"

Maybe one or two.

What happened, what happened to these kids?

Well, the problem is we teach conformity.

We don't teach creativity.

We teach our kids to conform,

to paint within the lines, to do only what we tell them to do.

And after a while, it takes a toll

and that creativity gets back smaller, smaller,

and is recessed back into your mind, back into your brain.

We create these filters that don't allow us to be creative.

But it goes back even further.

This poor baby is totally overstimulated and overwhelmed.

And the problem is babies don't know. They don't know how to filter.

They react to everything.

Everything is equally important.

And all of these senses, after a while, it just overstimulates them

and they can't take it anymore and they cry.

So if you have a baby, you know, this happens.

Babies' first word that they learn, other than mom and dada,

the first word they learn is "no".

"No, no, I don't want that."

That's the first word they learn.

That becomes a problem later on.

It becomes a problem for parents when you are trying to do things

and they always say "no".

But I'll show you later why that's a big problem.

But adults do that too.

Adults get into sensory overload.

If you've ever been to Disney World.

I'll never forget the first time I went to Disney World with my two sons.

They were very small, and you are in a sea of thousands of thousands of people.

And there's music blaring, and there's beautiful sights,

and there's kids yelling and screaming.

And every kid is yelling "Dad, dad, mom"

and all ten thousand kids that are yelling dad, I think it's mine.

So I am overstimulated.

At the end of the day, I was exhausted.

I couldn't take it anymore.

I was overstimulated.

So even adults, we create these filters.

So we filter things out.

Remember Julian's presentation earlier today about sound and sensory

and how we create filters to filter things out.

Yeah, we do that. Adults do that. Babies do that.

And over time, we get really good at it.

So remember the baby that says no all the time, as adults, we do that too.

We sit home with our remote control in front of the TV

and say, "No, no, no, next, next, next".

We can say "no" 50 times in one minute.

Fifty times. We are very very good at saying "no".

But we're not very good at saying "yes".

So, I want to talk about how we overcome fear of failure to do amazing things.

How we unlock our creative inner self

and how we say "yes", rather than "no".

So the pattern matching, whenever you meet someone on the street,

the first thing you do before they even approach you,

you're starting to do pattern matching.

You're looking at their eyes, at the way they walk,

you're looking at if they are smiling or not.

And you are deciding right away, within the first second,

whether you are going to interact with this person or not.

On the breaks outside, when you saw people,

now we're all friends here, right?

We know each other, but when someone approaches you,

immediately in your brain you are doing pattern matching.

And you are trying to figure out, should I interact with this person or not.

We are very very good at it.

So, oh, I am behind, OK, here we go.

Failure is not an option.

The first time I heard this word was from NASA.

The Apollo Space Mission.