English transcription

0 - 1' 
  What would happen if I fail ? I mean this talk is supposed to be about the importance of failure, but what if this talk were a total flop, the talk itself a failure, would that make the talk a success since the talk is about failure ? Probably not. It would probably suck. It would probably mean everyone here knows I'm a total loser. And I wouldn't like that, you probably wouldn't like that, it would probably feel really bad, but you know what? Before I got OK enough at public speaking I've given some talks that really totally sucked. It made it really obvious that I was really terrible and a failure at public speaking. And it still feels really terribly horribly embarassing when I think of those talks. But you know what else? 
1' - 2' 
  If I didn't give those talks, and it's only by giving those talks, and failing spectacularly at them, that I learnt from them -- I wouldn't have gotten OK enough at public speaking to be here today. 
  Here is a fact : you can't do anything cool in your life without failing. You can't. You have to fail, in order to do cool things! In China where I go every year (I travel a lot), I saw this incredibly cool sign (I thought it was incredibly cool).  And in China this is a place where failure is amazingly shameful. Much more than most places in the world. The sign in a primary school, full of little kids, said : "Every master was once an amateur". And it's true! You can't become a master at anything without starting from the beginning. 
2' - 3' 
  At the beginning, even if you're way talented, you'll suck at it. But if you put your 10,000 hours into doing whatever-it-is you're doing, you'll make lots of mistakes. You'll make lots of failures along the way. It's frustrating, but it's part of learning. And after you've put in your 10,000 hours, you'll be really glad that you went trough all you went through learning from all your mistakes -- which are a necessary part of the process. So, failure is kind of complex and there are many aspects to it. One big ugly aspect of failure is feeling shame. Let me tell you just a little bit about shame in my life. 

3' - 4'
  The first half of my life was nothing but hopeless miserable depression. It's true. I was a total failure at life. I was beaten daily by bullies, often as gym teacher watched (are gym teacher as bad here as they are in the US?) ... Anyways. As a little kid, you know, what did I know? I blamed myself for all this, I felt I deserved my misery. To avoid my pain, when I got home I retreated into the magical world of television. Kids on TV, unlike me, were beautiful, had loving parents, understanding friends, problems that resolved by the end of the show... it was so depressing. I became more depressed, only to become more of a  target at school, only to retreat more in TV again when I got home. 

4' - 5' 
  Yes. I am a TV addict. It's part of my life. But also to avoid my pain, I retreated into doing lots of way geeky things when I got home. Taking things appart to see how they worked, and somethimes being able to put them back together again, and sometimes, even, when I put them together again, even if there were extra parts leftover, which there often were, it sort of worked again, and maybe it even did something a little bit different -- and I thought that was cool ! But doing these geeky things was totally solo, totally on my own, not with other kids, I was just on my own, and this is part of the reason why all these bullies would beat me up all the time and tourment me for being who I am, so... this was another fail. 

5' - 6' 
  When you're depressed, everything leads to fail, everything feels shameful, everything sucks. When I first started taking those things apart, and unable to put them back together again, this seemed a total failure. I was a failure, again. I felt like a failure, full of shame. Every failure filled me with more shame. It reminded me of why I was being bullied, or why I believed I was being bullied, proving what a miserable snot I really was (or so I believed). But eventually. as I was saying, after enough of this (years, really), I learned to put things back together again in interesting ways.  And this really did feel great. I now know that putting things together, even if it's not the way it's supposed to be, is called: Hacking. I learned to hack through lots and lots of failures. Hacking is all about failures. 

6' - 7' 
  Hacking is taking anything that exist as resources, using them for your project - even if you use them not as intended - and then learning from it, and sharing the results. This is hacking. We can hack anything. Anything can be used for this, we can even hack ourselves. And we should hack ourselves! 
  Another aspect of failure is unexpected results : you expect one thing from what you're doing but something else happens - it's different. It feels like a failure. But to hack well, you need to try stuff. It's totally fine if you have no idea how things will work out: you try it because you want to. Just to see what happens. And whether or not things come out as expected, as intended, it's totally unimportant. Regardless of the outcome, you'll learn from your experience. 

7' - 8' 
  And this is not just OK, it's really cool ! This is also exactly what science is all about. The scientific method is : you make a hypothesis, you set up an experiment to test your hypothesis, and then you learn from the results, whether it came out as expected or not. And then you can try more experiments if you like. If you try an experiment, and you require the outcome to be what you expect, this is not good science. In fact this isn't even science, it's bad science maybe, but it's not science. Good science requires that you are open to the outcome whether it's what you're expecting or not. Whatever the outcome is, hopefully you'll learn from it - you can choose to learn from it. 

8'  9' 
  And if you like, you can come up with a new hypothesis and test it out with a new experiment. Science, like hacking, requires lots of failures. Before coming up with useful theories, you've got to try things again and again, and it will come out unexpected almost all the time. This is how we learn, this is how science progresses. We can do science on anything as well. I do science on myself. I use my life as a laboratory to run experiments on mysellf. Up until a certain point in my life, all of the choices that I made were based only on what I thought others wanted from me. I only chose to do what I thought others wanted. I was too depressed to make choices based on what I wanted, I didn't even know what I wanted. All I knew that I wanted was not to be depressed. That wasn't much to go on. 

9' - 10' 
  I eventually, though, made a choice for myself. Eventually, I realized that I watched hours and hours and hours of TV everyday, and did this day after day, week after week, month after month... I realized that I actually didn't like TV. And I asked myself "So why do I do this everyday?" and I knew the answer! The answer was... "I don't know!"

10'-11'
  But I did know that I didn't have to continue, so I quit. That was easy. And... it was awful. Suddenly I had SO MUCH TIME. All those hours I used to spend watching TV ,now I had time to just sit there and feel all this stuff that was so unconscious before, that I just pushed away, and it all came screaming into conciousness! It sucked. FAIL! At least it felt like a failure. But only at first. I noticed one really important thing from this : I made a choice for myself and it had a huge impact on my life. Which brought up a hypothesis : if I make choices based on what I thought might make my life better, perhaps over time, with enough trial and error in making these choices and learning from them, perhaps, life would get better.

11'-12'
  It was worth a try. After plenty of experimenting on myself I started getting results, it took a long time but I eventually learned to live a life that was pretty cool. I could make a living, after a while, working as a consultant doing all this geeky electronic stuff for small companies. I could actually make enough money in a few month to live the rest of the year. And I thought that was pretty cool. But after about a decade of a this, I had the bright idea of starting my own company in Silly Valley. Ah, it's SiliCon Valley, but whatever. I started a company called 3ware.  We made RAID controllers.  We had free software drivers, and, um, you know, don't worry about it if you don't know what those are, but it seemed like a really cool way to make enough money to live off of. 

12'-13'
  At least it did until the V.C.s took over the company. V.C.s -- in english that's Venture Capitalists AKA Vulture Capitalists. For very good reasons. [mic cut] They ensure that they get at least 51% of your company. They take over and then they start making terrible decisions that they think are good ones. And when you complain, they fire the founders. That's what V.C.s do. But anyways I'll stop ranting about them. I managed not to get fired because I quit before they could fire me. And I went back to being a consultant, which was pretty cool. But after a little bit of this, a little bit more of this, I wanted more than just a pretty cool life.

13'-14'
  I wanted to live a life I loooooooooove, a life I really love living, a life that gets me out of bed in the morning wondering how/what problems I can solve and what things I can do with all of that. Working and just having a pretty cool job wasn't that. So I came up with a notion of doing an doing an experiment on myself to check out my hypothesis : what if I could explore what I love in my life so I actually try doing what I love in my life. And then maybe that thing - or maybe a bunch of things - could make me enough money doing what I love so that i could keep doing what I love. And that would be my definition of success. So the experiments that I tried was to save a year's worth of money - I was lucky enough to be able to do that - a year's worth of living expenses, and then for a year I decided that I would only choose to do what i love.

14'-15'

  I would only do something if I believed that I would love it. Of course I still had to do laundry, but for the most part I would do only what I love. What would life be like if I only did things I loved for one year? Including the work that I do, the work for money. That notion is actually scary... How would I make money again?  Would anyone ever hire me again after saying "no" to people just because I don't love the work they are offering me ? I didn't know. But if I didn't quit doing things that were just OK, I wouldnt have enough time to explore and then do what I love. I didn't know what that would be. 

15'-16'
  I certainly didn't know how I would make money doing this. But, since I didn't know what to do, I started off by doing a bunch of vonlunteer work that I knew I loved. That didn't make me any money, but I knew I loved it so I did it. And to see if I could make money doing the volunteer work, I took a class on grant writing and spent several month on writing grants to fund some of the volunteer work that I did that I knew that I loved.
  But I soon realized that I wasn't loving grant writing. That I really hated grant writing. So I chalked up that as a failure. I stopped grant writing and I focused on geeky electronic projects that I've been working on, or playing with, and thinking about, but that I hadn't putting much energy into playing with this electronics 'cause when I worked on electronics all day I didn't want to come home so much and play with it. But I had plenty of time now! To do what I thought I might I love and do these electronic projects I thought I would love or were worth trying. 

16'-17'
  And TV-B-Gone is the one project that really got on a roll. The idea for TV-B-Gone -- and TV-B-Gone, for those that don't know, is an electronic keychain that turns TV's off in public places. That's all it does. I wanted one. I became obsessed with doing this. I wanted to turn off TV's everywhere I went. And it really did get on a roll and the idea for TV-B-Gone is actually very simple conceptually. It would simply transmit TV off codes. TV's off code are just invisible lights blinking on and off at just the right rate to be an off code for a TV. If I could collect the off codes for the most popular TV's and transmit all of them, one rate after the other, it would turn off TV's. That would be it. What could be simpler ? 

17'-18'
  Well... What I thought would take me maybe a few weeks ended up taking me a year and a half to accomplish. That was unexpected. Therefore that is a FAIL! But it didn't feel like a fail. It felt great. And since I was obsessed with getting all of these off codes I did what I needed to do, and that included recording the off codes from universal remote controls that I bought. But, back in 2003 when I was doing this, logic analyzers were $10,000, which i couldn't afford.  That was kind of frustrating, so I made my own. I was obsessed with this so I did whatever was necessary, and it felt great, so I kept doing it, and that took several more months, and since I kept loving this, i kept doing it, and I eventually made the prototype work! It really worked, and it enabled me to go around San Francisco where I live, turning off TV's in public everywhere I went, and enjoying the hell out of it. And of course all my friends saw me doing this, and they all wanted one. They are my friends, of course I expected that;  so I figured I' d make one for each of them.  But, of course, they told all their friends, and many of them wanted one. And I couldn't make one for everybody. Er, and many of those friends told their friends, and so there were friends of friends of friends, and many of these people all wanted TV-B-Gones, and then I thought, "WOW, maybe this is an opportunity", and I took a gamble and I actually made as many of these things as I could afford, which was: 20,000. That cost a bunch of money, but I had it, and what else was I gonna do with this money except do something that I thought I might love.  And did the math and I figured that if I sold 5,000 of those, that I would break even. I wouldn't lose any money if i sold 5,000 of the 20,000  and if it took 5 years or whatever, I don't really care!

19'-20'
 And then it would be 5000 people going around all over the world turning TV's off making the world a better place for everybody. I thought that would be pretty cool, well, as it turned out, i sold out 20000 in three weeks. And it's the only way I made money since 2004. That, is an unexpected result, and therefore it's a fail ! But what a successfull failure that is, and my life is never been the same ever since. Since then I've been doing what I love, and by doing what I love, I make enough to keep doing what I love. This is a success. But the success is also unexpect result as I said, in addition to what I said, it's unexpected result because it came from my TV addiction, it came from my geekiness which I used to think was also why I was beaten up. 

20' - 21' 
  These two things that i thought were totally wrong with me that lead me nothing to misery, lead to my first spectacular successful invention : Tv-Be-Gone. This unexpected result, as with all unexpected results, has to be considerated a failure which is also a success. How would you want to look at that ? 
  I want to encourage all of you to fail early and fail often. It's really actually quite important. You need to take risks to live a life you love living. You need to try things that you might suck at. You need to allow yourself to fail, and fail a lot. You can hack yourself. 

21'-22'
  Maybe it's scary, but please, make choices for yourself. See what happens!  And if you like, you can learn from what happens. And then you can make new choices. What if you make those choices to the best of your ability,  and what you believe might make your life a little bit better, what  would happen? 
  Some choices might get unexpected results, " WTF MITCH?" olol --- shame. But you can if you like learn from the results. And then you can make new choices. You now know a lot more so the new choices might work out a little better. Maybe not. You can see, and learn from it and then make new choices based on what you believe might make your life a little bit better. And then maybe, hopefully, probably over time, you'll look back from where you are, from where you were, through all the failure and success inbetween, which led you to where you are now, living a life you love, because of all the choices you made. Envision that, the choices you made, made all of this happen. Choice is a very powerfull thing, so please, choose well what you do with the time of your life. Thanks for your time :) 
  If you ever want help quitting a job you don't like, talk to me !