Dr. Jeff Karp
speaker
137 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Jeff Karp’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I initially said no, because I was so frightened. I had not memorized anything since public school. But then I thought about it and I was like, okay, I will never be asked again to speak on this stage. And I went and I said yes.
So what happened was I practiced like crazy. I rented out the Kresge Auditorium at MIT, which is the biggest auditorium. I presented to four people, my family who were there. And I knew that talk inside and out. It was like 15 minutes, purely memorized. I had slides, I had animations, I had to get the timing right. I had to make it look like I didn't memorize it. There was all these sort of stages.
And I was ready to go. And I get to TEDMED. It was at the Kennedy Center in DC. And I practiced my talk and they suggest some changes. And I'm like, oh my god, I can't change it now. It's tomorrow. So I try to figure out how am I going to because I've memorized it. Then we go on stage beforehand, there's sort of like walkthrough and they say, by the way, the clicker only goes forward.
It doesn't go back. If you go too fast and hit it, you know, you have to yell to the AV person, can you go back? And I'm like, there's no way I'm doing that. And they said, sometimes people freeze in the middle of their talk. They said, the two reactions that we've seen is one, they run off the stage. They said, don't run off the stage if that happens.
The second reaction we've seen is people will actually start crying. They said, don't do that either.
I'm sure that's happened at some point. And then they said, just stand there and smile. And so I am like, you know, I'm ready to go. I'm like, I get a pack of Hall's in my hand. I'm eating them all right before I go up. I get up on stage. I have it so well memorized that I can think about other things. It's five high definition cameras on me being live streamed throughout the world.
It's filled at this Kennedy Center in D.C., the president of my institutions in the audience. And I get to the middle of my talk and I think to myself, I missed a line. There was a line that I forgot to say. And my mind couldn't get unhooked from that. And I stopped in the middle of it for 15 seconds. I said nothing. Now, 15 seconds is a very long time to pause on this type of a stage.
Yeah.
Well, I was so nervous. I, you know, had this like visceral reaction where it was like this negativity came within me. I'm trying to think, okay, I can't run off the stage. I can't start crying. They want me to smile. The swear words are going through my head. I'm holding the clicker, trying to like use it like a lightning rod of energy. And you can see me like going like this with it.
Like I'm smiling. Yeah. And I'm like, the only thing I can think of is to turn the slide. And so I hit the clicker to go forward. I turn the slide, a blank slide. And I'm like, and then I was like, what is that? I go forward again and something magical happens, which is I'm like, wait a moment. I know what I'm supposed to say on this slide. The last slide was a cue.
I know what I'm supposed to say there. And I just started up again. And as I'm walking off the stage, the stage manager whispers to me, she goes, we can cut that out for the YouTube version. And that was it. Somebody came to me afterwards and they said, I noticed you paused in the middle of your talk. And I'm like, I think everybody did.
And they said, but the fact you were able to recover is really important. And think about that. And I had actually been shamed earlier in my life when I gave a presentation, just one presentation, I've given so many, that imprinted and created anxiety and fear and every time I presented after that.
And this allowed me to detach from that experience and gain more confidence because I knew that anytime moving forward, if I stopped, that I could find my words again and keep going. And so it's like this... This tool is focusing beyond failure.
It's about finding ways to look at failure completely differently, to see it as opportunities where we can find our greatest insights and opportunities for growth. And to me, one of the key things in all the failures that I've ever encountered is that is just huge, it's so big, is what you were saying before, like we have these expectations.
Even the first time we try things, we expect we're gonna miraculously succeed in everything we do, right? Like that's our expectation, then we go in with that. And what I've realized is that if we reframe failure, like we learn in school, failures over here, successes over here, avoid failure, maximize success. I see it as a prerequisite to success.
I see failure as an opportunity to be creative, as an opportunity to explore other possibilities you didn't think of before. I see failure now as a way to learn. And that's the shift, right? So I'll give you an example where I think this will become really clear. The first talk that I was invited to give on Lit was at Stanford, right? Many months ago. I'd never spoken about it.
I put all these slides together. I was super nervous. And I didn't even know how to talk about the book. I'd been writing it. I hadn't been communicating it. And I get there and I said to myself, you know what, Jeff? you're going to give it your best, but this is Gen 1.0. I said, focus on doing your best, but also tapping into the cues that you get from people as you're speaking.
What are the insights so you can move to Gen 2.0 and 2.0 is going to be better than 1.0. So I was able to shift away from the expectation of giving a spectacular talk to to focusing on the learnings, the insights I could gain to make the talk better. Because I was like, there's probably going to be a generation 5.0, a 10.0, a 20.0, whatever it is.
And that shift is basically focusing on away from success and moving that to learning, to gaining an insight. So you're focusing on the evolution. And that's changed everything for me.
Yeah, Rudy Tanzi is a neuroscientist who spoke about some elements of what you just said in the book. And he said that before he goes to give a talk, he says to himself, I am here to serve. And it's more like he's here for a performance. He's here to share. He's here to give what he has, his gifts, his work. And to me, again, it's just...
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