Translator: Marina Kurzeneva
Reviewer: Theresa Ranft
A few years ago, I had a chance
to put together a team
to go to Mali Africa, a group of dental
and medical professionals.
Mali Africa is one of the poorest
countries in Africa.
The average annual income in Mali Africa
is 200 American dollars per year.
People die, thousands of people
die every year in Mali Africa
as a result of infection,
dental infection,
that can get so severe,
it can take your life.
We planned for months and months,
traveled halfway across the world
to literally go save lives.
As we got there in the country,
we went to our first village,
that we expected to have a large turnout
for people that needed help.
As we got there,
we packed our supplies up,
we were in a very primitive area,
we were on dirt floors,
we had no electricity,
be like buckets to spit in,
we had headlamps on.
This is as primitive
as dentistry can get.
We were thrilled,
we brought supplies and medicine
to be able to treat hundreds,
if not thousands of people.
So we got our clinics set up,
we're ready for action,
we go out to this courtyard
where we're expecting to have
hundreds of people there.
To our surprise,
12 people were waiting for us.
Well, we had five surgeons there,
within an hour or two,
we were able to treat all 12 people.
We were quite disappointed.
I'd come all this way,
I'd talked to all these people
into having this great experience.
Biggest village we were in, 12 people.
So we decided what to do, go to the next
village or stay here for another day?
We weren't quite sure what we should do.
Our guide, who lived
in the country there, said,
"I think you have
to give this one more day.
Let's show up tomorrow,
and let's see what happens.
Let's not unpack the trucks,
if nobody is there,
then we'll just move on
to the next village."
So we got up early
the next morning, about 6 o'clock.
We head out to this village, we open
the compound door there to the courtyard.
As we drove in there were probably
over 300 people waiting for us.
Our guide looked at us
and got very emotional.
He said, "I knew this would happen."
Let me tell you something that maybe
you don't know about Mali Africa.
In Mali Africa you can't afford
to get a tooth out.
If you're so desperate
and in such a bad shape,
what you do is you go to a bush doctor.
A bush doctor has no formal training,
he has no equipment,
he has no anesthetic,
no medication, no nothing.
So what you do
is you go to his little place,
you lay on a table or on the floor,
someone will sit on your feet,
other people will hold your arms out,
and he will then take a couple of sticks,
place them in your mouth,
to prop your mouth open.
He will then take a dirty pair of pliers,
probably a pair of pliers
you have in your garage at home,
and he will literally
rip the tooth out of their mouth.
No anesthetic, no comfort,
no compassion, no mercy,
no medication, no stitches,
no cleaning up the infection, nothing.
I would suggest to you,
that's probably one of the more
painful things you could experience.
He said, "So here's what happened,
here's what their experience
is with dentistry.
Yesterday, 12 desperate people
showed up to get help,
and what happened afterwards
is they went back in the village
and they told everybody,
"These guys do something
where you can't feel it,
and they're nice, and they're kind,
and they had medicine,
and they cleaned out the infection,
and they put sutures on us,
and they gave us all these things
that take care of ourselves."
Twelve people walked out into a village,
so the next morning 300 people showed up.
My friends, let me suggest this to you.
Every single one of us
has infection and pain,
that's going to destroy us,
if we don't get help.
Every single one of us.
The challenge is, we don't know where
to find safe places to get the treatment,
and even worse, we've all
been exposed to "bush doctors."
People that don't have the skills
and talents and the ability to help us,
and consequently how many people
have you reached out,
or how many people
have tried to reach out to you,
to correct you or help you
without the proper skills and tools?
They can do a lot of damage,
and they can be really painful.
I've had the opportunity to be involved
in lots of different things in my life.
I've got nine kids.
I know what kids are struggling with,
I run a private high school,
where we deal with all kinds of ideas
and new ways of looking at education.
I've had the opportunity
to work with young adults.
I've interviewed probably
over 8,000 young adults,
and I will tell you,
there's a common pattern
that occurs that destroys your lives.
And I've found four simple steps
that I want to talk to you about briefly
of how we can accept the fact
we all need help,
with our pain, with our challenges.
And how can we do that
in a safe environment,
and how do we have
the right kind of people to help us?
The first step is, you have to learn
how to discover truth.
Discover truth about you,
about who you really are,
what your potential is,
what your talents are,
what your gifts are.
How do you do that?
When I was a kid I had a speech impediment
and they kicked me out of school.
I went to Stanford University,
when I was 5 years old
because I couldn't speak.
I went to speech therapy for 10 years.
I had a teacher when I was 12 years old,
who would have me read out loud,
I would get to a word
that I could not pronounce.
She would have me say that word
over and over, and she would laugh at me,
and she would keep doing it
until she made me cry.
And then she'd tell me to go on.
One day I refused
to let her do that to me.
I kept trying to say that word,
and I kept trying to say,
and I wasn't going to go on
until I got that word down.
And she said to a 12-year-old boy,
"You are probably
the stupidest kid I've ever taught."
Who are you allowing to define you?
You have to ask those questions.
I refused to let people
like that define me.
Those are the bush doctors of our lives.
Who's defining who you are,
and how do we define ourselves?
Is it by our grades at school,
is it by the occupation we have?
The car we drive? The girlfriend,
boyfriend we have? How skinny we are?
How smart we are? How pretty we are?
How are you defining yourself?
I would suggest you need to find ways
to properly define yourself.
And that's going to require
the help of other people,
to help you see your talents
and your successes.
Here's what happens when you start
to discover who you are.
When you start to figure out
that you've got purpose and meaning
and you start to define
your lives properly,
here's what happens,
personal responsibility.
When you start to see who you really are,
and the contribution you can give,
it does something to you, and no longer
can you blame a speech impediment,
or your math teacher, or your parents.
You start taking personal responsibility
to obtain what you know in your heart.
That's who you are.
How well does this world
take personal responsibility?
Not very well.
If you are brave enough
to take personal responsibility,
here's what is going to happen next.
Personal responsibility, understanding
who you are, will always demand this.
It will always occur.
When you start to see who you are,
the second step is,
truth will invite you to change.
That's what personal
responsibility does, it says,
"OK, here's where I'm at, here's
where I need to be, where I want to be.
So now I have to start
changing things in my life."
See, we get the principal
of change backwards,
because if you're not dialed into
your potential to who you are,
good luck changing.
You will not have the motivation,
the potential to change.
So, when you start to change
how well do you think we take correction?
Wow! You see we've all had too many
bush doctors in our lives, right?
Because we don't take
correction very well.
Most people take correction
and they get hurt, they get discouraged,
they get offended,
they rebel, they fight against it.
Very few of us have the ability
and the capacity to embrace correction.
I would suggest to you,
you won't want to embrace correction,
unless you really understand the quest
you're on, the journey you're on
to become who you know
you need to become.
Here's the brutal part.
Once you take personal responsibility
because you've discovered truth.
Step one, discovered truth.
Step two, you're going to allow
personal responsibility
to change you, correct you,
you're going to be open to that,
and embrace that.
What's step three?
It's the most brutal step of all.
Step three is, you're going to fail.
It's part of the process.
We don't understand that sometimes.
The failure is a critical part
of the process,
because when you're
trying to change things,
are we talking the color of your hair?
No, we're talking about
destructive patterns in your life,
that are going to be hard to change.
You go out and start
changing those things?
It's not going to change overnight.
It's going to take time,
it's going to require multiple attempts
of trying to overcome things
before we can claim victory.
So, failure is part of the process.
Look how damning this process is, though,
because if you're listening
to the wrong voices
saying you're the stupidest
kid in the world, and then you fail,
your failure will reinforce
the wrong definition of you,
and you see how people
start to spiral out of control.
So, are we OK in accepting
failure in our lives?
Now, I would suggest to you,
it is impossible to discover truth,
it is impossible to embrace correction,
it is impossible to accept failure
unless we have this fourth one.
The last step is maybe
the most critical of all.
You have to have mentors in your life.
Not bush doctors, mentors.
And I'll tell you, I've worked
with your age long enough to know,
this is something that is dying
with your generation.
You don't have mentors.
And you think about people that have
really had an impact in your life.
Are you searching for mentors?
Are you asking people that you respect
and look up to, to mentor you?
You get my e-mail address tonight,
and you call me or e-mail me next week,
and say, "Can we go out
to lunch and talk?"
Do you have the guts
to start talking to people
that you can trust are not bush doctors,
that would truly be interested
in helping you?
I would suggest to you, you don't have
a choice when it comes to mentoring.
You're going to be mentored.
The choice is, which mentor
are you going to listen to?
Are you going to listen
to the Obi-Wan Kenobi's in your life,
these great mentors that can
pull the best out of us?
Or you going to listen
to the Darth Vader's of your life?
Because they're there and you're listening
to one or the other of them.
In conclusion, to maybe bring this home,
You don't wake up fabulous.
It doesn't happen that way!
It's a process, it's a journey,
and you've got
to be embracing in these steps
of accepting or discovering truth,
embracing correction, accepting failure,
and searching for mentors.
I played high school football.
I grew up in California, and in California
my football team had a coach
that was probably one of the most
unkind men I've ever met.
He was a bush doctor, OK?
In our team in football, if you tried out
for the team, you made the team.
There were no cuts,
and he didn't like that.
Just the cool guys, and the athletes
and all those stereotypes,
all those definitions.
They're the ones that should be playing.
So he doesn't like it
that everyone can try out for the team.
So my senior year,
the summer of my senior year,
we're starting our summer training,
and three guys moved into the neighborhood
and they tried out for the football team.
They all made it.
These guys were new to the area,
they were all big overweight guys,
never played football before.
And here they come
in the first week of practice.
And I can already tell, because I've seen
this coach destroy people,
because what he would do
is that he would crush them
so they would do what?
Quit! OK?
There are many people
out there like this, sadly.
So, I watched this coach
yell at these guys,
"They're the slowest ones
running the laps,
they're not doing this right,
not doing that right."
He's calling them names,
making fun of them.
He's getting other players to start
kind of picking on, teasing on them.
First week of practice,
Friday morning comes.
Two guys out of those three
didn't show up that morning.
It killed me! I thought, "Ah! That coach
just destroyed two more people.
So then on Friday,
the one guy who showed up
he was about 320 pounds,
his name was Wes.
He shows up for practice that day
and we start doing up-downs.
You know what these stupid things are
that dumb jocks do, right?
They run in place, the whistle blows,
they jump to their chest
and then they bounce back up.
Not sure of the purpose of all that,
but that's what they do.
(Laughter)
We're doing up-downs
and if you don't do the up-downs
in a certain period of time,
then you have to do them over again.
And these are hard to do.
So, guess what?
320 pounds, who do you think
the last person off the ground is? Wes is.
Now you can see what's going to happen.
So this coach said,
after we did ten of them,
"Thanks to Wes for being
the last guy up off the ground,
we're all going to do ten more of them."
We start doing ten more.
"Thanks to Wes, we're all doing ten more."
And I heard him
start calling him some names,
and I heard him start making fun of him.
Pretty soon the other members of the team
started doing the same thing,
yelling at him, making fun of him,
"Get your 'blankety-blank'
up off the ground."
Wow! I sat there on the very last row
with Wes right in front of me,
running in place,
watching the destruction of somebody,
watching the power of a bush doctor.
And then I saw something
that was absolutely incredible,
this concept, an idea,
that we all need to be mentors.
See, if you want to be healthy,
if you want to be well-balanced,
you've got to be doing two things,
You've got to have mentors
in your life that you learn from,
and then you have to turn around
and be mentors to other people.
That's the proper balance,
that's when you'll discover
great happiness and joy in your life.
So I'm back there. I should
have done something, but I didn't.
Instead, the star running back
of the team on the front row,
he runs around to the back
right next to Wes.
I'm wondering what will happen.
Is he going to call names?
Hit him on the back of the head?
What's he going to do?
I'm hearing him as we're running in place,
I hear the star running back
look at Wes and say,
"Wes, don't you dare quit!"
The whistle blows,
we all jump to the ground.
And guess who's the last person up?
The star running back.
He lay on the ground until Wes got up,
and he did that 10 times.
And every time Wes got up,
I heard him say...
when the star running back got up,
I heard him say to Wes,
"You quit! I quit!"
I watched an interesting dynamic
occur with my coach.
All of a sudden, he's in a dilemma
that if he keeps pushing this,
if he keeps being a bush doctor,
he's not just going to lose Wes,
he's going to lose
the star player of the team.
Within the next couple up-downs
I watched our entire team
starting to chant, "You quit! I quit!"
By the time we got to the tenth one,
the whole team was yelling,
"You quit! I quit!"
And the whole team laid on the ground
until 320 pounds of Wes stood up.
That's the power we can have
in people's lives.
But you have to engage in life,
you can't let people crush you.
You got to figure out who you are,
and when you figure that out,
take the personal responsibility
and run with that.
When you run with it, you got to know,
change is coming, correction is coming,
look for it, embrace it, welcome it.
Understand when the change comes,
you'll have to start doing harder things
in your life, and fail at that.
And please find mentors
that will help pick you up off the ground.
Please find mentors that will say,
"You quit, I quit."
Find mentors that will help you
understand how to accept truth,
how to embrace correction,
because you don't wake up fabulous.
Thank you.
(Applause)
