The little risks you can take to increase your luck
I've spent nearly two decades observing what makes people luckier than others and trying to help people increase their luck. You see, I teach entrepreneurship, and we all know that most new ventures fail, and innovators and entrepreneurs need all the luck they can get.
So what is luck? Luck is defined as success or failure apparently caused by chance. Apparently. That's the operative word. It looks like it's chance because we rarely see all the levers that come into play to make people lucky. But I've realized, by watching so long, that luck is rarely a lightning strike, isolated and dramatic. It's much more like the wind, blowing constantly. Sometimes it's calm, and sometimes it blows in gusts, and sometimes it comes from directions that you didn't even imagine.
So how do you catch the winds of luck? It's easy, but it's not obvious. So I'm going to share three things with you that you can do to build a sail to capture the winds of luck. The first thing you want to do is to change your relationship with yourself. Be willing to take small risks that get you out of your comfort zone. Now, when we're children, we do this all the time. We have to do this if we're going to learn how to walk or talk or ride a bike or even quantum mechanics. Right? We need to go from someone one week who doesn't ride a bike to, next week, someone who does. And this requires us to get out of our comfort zone and take some risks. The problem is, as we get older, we rarely do this. We sort of lock down the sense of who we are and don't stretch anymore.
Now, with my students, I spend a lot of time giving them encouragement to get out of their comfort zone and take some risks. How do I do this? Well, I start out by having them fill out a risk-o-meter. Now, it's basically a fun thing we developed in our class where they map out what risks they're willing to take. And it becomes clear very quickly to them that risk-taking is not binary. There are intellectual risks and physical risks and financial risks and emotional risks and social risks and ethical risks and political risks. And once they do this, they compare their risk profiles with others, and they quickly realize that they're all really different.
I then encourage them to stretch, to take some risks that get them out of their comfort zone. For example, I might ask them to do an intellectual risk and try to tackle a problem they haven't tried before; or a social risk, talking to someone sitting next to them on the train; or an emotional risk, maybe telling someone they really care about how they feel.
I do this myself all the time. About a dozen years ago, I was on an airplane, early, early morning flight on my way to Ecuador. And normally, I would just put on my headphones and go to sleep, wake up, do some work, but I decided to take a little risk, and I started a conversation with the man sitting next to me. I introduced myself, and I learned that he was a publisher. Interesting. We ended up having a fascinating conversation. I learned all about the future of the publishing industry. So about three quarters of the way through the flight, I decided to take another risk, and I opened up my laptop and I shared with him a book proposal I put together for something I was doing in my class. And he was very polite, he read it, and he said, "You know what, Tina, this isn't right for us, but thank you so much for sharing." It's OK. That risk didn't work out. I shut my laptop. At the end of the flight, we exchanged contact information.
A couple of months later, I reached out to him, and I said, "Mark, would you like to come to my class? I'm doing a project on reinventing the book, the future of publishing." And he said, "Great. I'd love to come." So he came to my class. We had a great experience.
A few months later, I wrote to him again. This time, I sent him a bunch of video clips from another project my students had done. He was so intrigued by one of the projects the students had done, he thought there might be a book in it, and he wanted to meet those students.
I have to tell you, I was a little bit hurt.
I mean, he wanted to do a book with my students and not with me, but OK, it's all right. So I invited him to come down, and he and his colleagues came to Stanford and met with the students, and afterwards, we had lunch together. And one of his editors said to me, "Hey, have you ever considered writing a book?"
I said, "Funny you should ask." And I pulled out the exact same proposal that I had showed his boss a year earlier. Within two weeks, I had a contract, and within two years, the book had sold over a million copies around the world.
Now, you might say, "Oh, you're so lucky." But of course I was lucky, but that luck resulted from a series of small risks I took, starting with saying hello. And anyone can do this, no matter where you are in your life, no matter where you are in the world -- even if you think you're the most unlucky person, you can do this by taking little risks that get you out of your comfort zone. You start building a sail to capture luck.
The second thing you want to do is to change your relationship with other people. You need to understand that everyone who helps you on your journey is playing a huge role in getting you to your goals. And if you don't show appreciation, not only are you not closing the loop, but you're missing an opportunity. When someone does something for you, they're taking that time that they could be spending on themselves or someone else, and you need to acknowledge what they're doing.
Now, I run three fellowship programs at Stanford, and they are very competitive to get into, and when I send out the letters to those students who don't get in, I always know there are going to be people who are disappointed. Some of the people who are disappointed send me notes, complaining. Some of them send notes saying what could I do to make myself more successful next time around? And every once in a while, someone sends me a note thanking me for the opportunity.
This happened about seven years ago. A young man named Brian sent me a beautiful note saying, "I know I've been rejected from this program twice, but I want to thank you for the opportunity. I learned so much through the process of applying."
I was so taken by the graciousness of his message that I invited him to come and meet me. And we spent some time chatting and cooked up an idea for an independent study project together. He was on the football team at Stanford, and he decided to do a project on looking at leadership in that context. We got to know each other incredibly well through that quarter, and he took the project that he started working on in the independent study and turned it, ultimately, into a company called Play for Tomorrow, where he teaches kids from disadvantaged backgrounds how to, essentially, craft the lives they dream to live.
Now, the important thing about this story is that we both ended up catching the winds of luck as a result of his thank-you note. But it was the winds that we didn't expect in the first place.
Over the course of the last couple of years, I've come up with some tactics for my own life to help me really foster appreciation. My favorite is that at the end of every single day, I look at my calendar and I review all the people I met with, and I send thank-you notes to every single person. It only takes a few minutes, but at the end of every day, I feel incredibly grateful and appreciative, and I promise you it has increased my luck.
So first, you need to take some risks and get out of your comfort zone. Second, you need to show appreciation. And third, you want to change your relationship with ideas. Most people look at new ideas that come there way and they judge them. "That's a great idea" or "That's a terrible idea." But it's actually much more nuanced. Ideas are neither good or bad. And in fact, the seeds of terrible ideas are often something truly remarkable.
One of my favorite exercises in my classes on creativity is to help students foster an attitude of looking at terrible ideas through the lens of possibilities. So I give them a challenge: to create an idea for a brand new restaurant. They have to come up with the best ideas for a new restaurant and the worst ideas for a new restaurant. So the best ideas are things like a restaurant on a mountaintop with a beautiful sunset, or a restaurant on a boat with a gorgeous view. And the terrible ideas are things like a restaurant in a garbage dump, or a restaurant with terrible service that's really dirty, or a restaurant that serves cockroach sushi.
So they hand all the ideas to me, I read the great ideas out loud, and then I rip them up and throw them away. I then take the horrible ideas and redistribute them. Each team now has an idea that another team thought was horrible, and their challenge is to turn it into something brilliant.
Here's what happens. Within about 10 seconds, someone says, "This is a fabulous idea." And they have about three minutes before they pitch the idea to the class. So the restaurant in the garbage dump? What does that turn into? Well, they collect all the extra food from Michelin star restaurants that was going to get thrown out, and they have another restaurant at a much lower price, with all the leftovers. Pretty cool? Or the restaurant that's dirty with terrible service? Well, that turns into a restaurant that's a training ground for future restauranteurs to figure out how to avoid all the pitfalls. And the restaurant with cockroach sushi? It turns into a sushi bar with all sorts of really interesting and exotic ingredients.
If you look around at the companies, the ventures that are really innovative around you, the ones that we now take for granted that have changed our life, well, you know what? They all started out as crazy ideas. They started ideas that when they pitched to other people, most people said, "That's crazy, it will never work."
So, yes, sometimes people were born into terrible circumstances, and sometimes, luck is a lightning bolt that hits us with something wonderful or something terrible. But the winds of luck are always there, and if you're willing to take some risks, if you're willing to really go out and show appreciation and willing to really look at ideas, even if they're crazy, through the lens of possibilities, you can build a bigger and bigger sail to catch the winds of luck.
Thank you.
Why the secret to success is setting the right goals
We're at a critical moment. Our leaders, some of our great institutions are failing us. Why? In some cases, it's because they're bad or unethical, but often, they've taken us to the wrong objectives. And this is unacceptable. This has to stop. How are we going to correct these wrongs? How are we going to choose the right course? It's not going to be easy.
For years, I've worked with talented teams and they've chosen the right objectives and the wrong objectives. Many have succeeded, others of them have failed. And today I'm going to share with you what really makes a difference -- that's what's crucial, how and why they set meaningful and audacious goals, the right goals for the right reasons.
Let's go back to 1975. Yep, this is me. I've got a lot to learn, I'm a computer engineer, I've got long hair, but I'm working under Andy Grove, who's been called the greatest manager of his or any other era. Andy was a superb leader and also a teacher, and he said to me, "John, it almost doesn't matter what you know. Execution is what matters the most." And so Andy invented a system called "Objectives and Key Results." It kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? And it's all about excellent execution. So here's a classic video from the 1970s of professor Andy Grove.
John Doerr: That's Andy. Yes. No. Simple. Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, are a simple goal-setting system and they work for organizations, they work for teams, they even work for individuals. The objectives are what you want to have accomplished. The key results are how I'm going to get that done. Objectives. Key results. What and how. But here's the truth: many of us are setting goals wrong, and most of us are not setting goals at all. A lot of organizations set objectives and meet them. They ship their sales, they introduce their new products, they make their numbers, but they lack a sense of purpose to inspire their teams.
So how do you set these goals the right way? First, you must answer the question, "Why?" Why? Because truly transformational teams combine their ambitions to their passion and to their purpose, and they develop a clear and compelling sense of why.
I want to tell you a story. I work with a remarkable entrepreneur. Her name is Jini Kim. She runs a company called Nuna. Nuna is a health care data company. And when Nuna was founded, they used data to serve the health needs of lots of workers at large companies. And then two years into the company's life, the federal government issued a proposal to build the first ever cloud database for Medicaid. Now, you'll remember that Medicaid is that program that serves 70 million Americans, our poor, our children and people with disabilities. Nuna at the time was just 15 people and this database had to be built in one year, and they had a whole set of commitments that they had to honor, and frankly, they weren't going to make very much money on the project. This was a bet-your-company moment, and Jini seized it. She jumped at the opportunity. She did not flinch. Why? Well, it's a personal why. Jini's younger brother Kimong has autism. And when he was seven, he had his first grand mal seizure at Disneyland. He fell to the ground. He stopped breathing. Jini's parents are Korean immigrants. They came to the country with limited resources speaking little English, so it was up to Jini to enroll her family in Medicaid. She was nine years old. That moment defined her mission, and that mission became her company, and that company bid on, won and delivered on that contract. Here's Jini to tell you why.
JD: And Jini's story tells us that a compelling sense of why can be the launchpad for our objectives. Remember, that's what we want to have accomplished. And objectives are significant, they're action-oriented, they are inspiring, and they're a kind of vaccine against fuzzy thinking. You think a rockstar would be an unlikely user of Objectives and Key Results, but for years, Bono has used OKRs to wage a global war against poverty and disease, and his ONE organization has focused on two really gorgeous, audacious objectives. The first is debt relief for the poorest countries in the world. The next is universal access to anti-HIV drugs. Now, why are these good objectives? Let's go back to our checklist. Significant? Check. Concrete? Yes. Action-oriented? Yes. Inspirational? Well, let's just listen to Bono.
So with Jini we've covered the whys, with Bono the whats of goal-setting. Let's turn our attention to the hows. Remember, the hows are the key results. That's how we meet our objectives. And good results are specific and time-bound. They're aggressive but realistic. They're measurable, and they're verifiable. Those are good key results.
In 1999, I introduced OKRs to Google's cofounders, Larry and Sergey. Here they are, 24 years old in their garage. And Sergey enthusiastically said he'd adopt them. Well, not quite. What he really said was, "We don't have any other way to manage this company, so we'll give it a go."
And I took that as a kind of endorsement. But every quarter since then, every Googler has written down her objectives and her key results. They've graded them, and they've published them for everyone to see. And these are not used for bonuses or for promotions. They're set aside. They're used for a higher purpose, and that's to get collective commitment to truly stretch goals.
In 2008, a Googler, Sundar Pichai, took on an objective which was to build the next generation client platform for the future of web applications -- in other words, build the best browser. He was very thoughtful about how he chose his key results. How do you measure the best browser? It could be ad clicks or engagement. No. He said: numbers of users, because users are going to decide if Chrome is a great browser or not. So he had this one three-year-long objective: build the best browser. And then every year he stuck to the same key results, numbers of users, but he upped the ante. In the first year, his goal was 20 million users and he missed it. He got less than 10. Second year, he raised the bar to 50 million. He got to 37 million users. Somewhat better. In the third year, he upped the ante once more to a hundred million. He launched an aggressive marketing campaign, broader distribution, improved the technology, and kaboom! He got 111 million users.
Here's why I like this story, not so much for the happy ending, but it shows someone carefully choosing the right objective and then sticking to it year after year after year. It's a perfect story for a nerd like me.
Now, I think of OKRs as transparent vessels that are made from the whats and hows of our ambitions. What really matters is the why that we pour into those vessels. That's why we do our work. OKRs are not a silver bullet. They're not going to be a substitute for a strong culture or for stronger leadership, but when those fundamentals are in place, they can take you to the mountaintop.
I want you to think about your life for a moment. Do you have the right metrics? Take time to write down your values, your objectives and your key results. Do it today. If you'd like some feedback on them, you can send them to me. I'm john@whatmatters.com.
If we think of the world-changing goals of an Intel, of a Nuna, of Bono, of Google, they're remarkable: ubiquitous computing, affordable health care, high-quality for everyone, ending global poverty, access to all the world's information. Here's the deal: every one of those goals is powered today by OKRs.
Now, I've been called the Johnny Appleseed of OKRs for spreading the good gospel according to Andy Grove, but I want you to join me in this movement. Let's fight for what it is that really matters, because we can take OKRs beyond our businesses. We can take them to our families, to our schools, even to our governments. We can hold those governments accountable. We can transform those informations. We can get back on the right track if we can and do measure what really matters.
Thank you.
Why you should make useless things
Hello. My name is Simone. You know how people tell you if you get nervous when onstage, picture people in the audience naked? Like it's this thing that's supposed to make you feel better. But I was thinking -- picturing all of you naked in 2018 feels kind of weird and wrong. Like, we're working really hard on moving past stuff like that, so we need a new method of dealing with if you get nervous onstage. And I realized that what I'd really like is that I can look at you as much as you're looking at me -- just to even things out a little bit. So if I had way more eyeballs, then we'd all be really comfortable, right? So in preparation for this talk, I made myself a shirt.
(Rattling)
It's googly eyes. It took me 14 hours and 227 googly eyes to make this shirt. And being able to look at you as much as you're looking at me is actually only half of the reason I made this. The other half is being able to do this.
So I do a lot of things like this. I see a problem and I invent some sort of solution to it. For example, brushing your teeth. Like, it's this thing we all have to do, it's kind of boring, and nobody really likes it. If there were any seven-year-olds in the audience, they'd be like, "Yes!" So what about if you had a machine that could do it for you?
I call it ... I call it "The Toothbrush Helmet."
(Robot arm buzzing)
So my toothbrush helmet is recommended by zero out of 10 dentists, and it definitely did not revolutionize the world of dentistry, but it did completely change my life. Because I finished making this toothbrush helmet three years ago and after I finished making it, I went into my living room and I put up a camera, and I filmed a seven-second clip of it working. And by now, this is a pretty standard modern-day fairy tale of girl posting on the internet, the internet takes the girl by storm, thousands of men voyage into the comment sections to ask for her hand in marriage --
She ignores all of them, starts a YouTube channel and keeps on building robots. Since then, I've carved out this little niche for myself on the internet as an inventor of useless machines, because as we all know, the easiest way to be at the top of your field is to choose a very small field.
So I run a YouTube channel about my machines, and I've done things like cutting hair with drones --
To a machine that helps me wake up in the morning --
(Alarm)
I'm not an engineer. I did not study engineering in school. But I was a super ambitious student growing up. In middle school and high school, I had straight A's, and I graduated at the top of my year. On the flip side of that, I struggled with very severe performance anxiety. Here's an email I sent to my brother around that time. "You won't understand how difficult it is for me to tell you, to confess this. I'm so freaking embarrassed. I don't want people to think that I'm stupid. Now I'm starting to cry too. Damn." And no, I did not accidentally burn our parents' house down. The thing I'm writing about in the email and the thing I'm so upset about is that I got a B on a math test.
So something obviously happened between here and here. One of those things was puberty. Beautiful time indeed. But moreover, I got interested in building robots, and I wanted to teach myself about hardware. But building things with hardware, especially if you're teaching yourself, is something that's really difficult to do. It has a high likelihood of failure and moreover, it has a high likelihood of making you feel stupid. And that was my biggest fear at the time. So I came up with a setup that would guarantee success 100 percent of the time. With my setup, it would be nearly impossible to fail. And that was that instead of trying to succeed, I was going to try to build things that would fail. And even though I didn't realize it at the time, building stupid things was actually quite smart, because as I kept on learning about hardware, for the first time in my life, I did not have to deal with my performance anxiety. And as soon as I removed all pressure and expectations from myself, that pressure quickly got replaced by enthusiasm, and it allowed me to just play.
So as an inventor, I'm interested in things that people struggle with. It can be small things or big things or medium-sized things and something like giving a TED talk presents this whole new set of problems that I can solve. And identifying a problem is the first step in my process of building a useless machine. So before I came here, I sat down and I thought of some of the potential problems I might have in giving this talk. Forgetting what to say. That people won't laugh -- that's you. Or even worse, that you'll laugh at the wrong things -- that was an OK part to laugh at, thank you.
Or that when I get nervous, my hands start shaking and I'm really self-conscious about it. Or that my fly has been open this entire time and all of you noticed but I didn't, but it's closed so we're all good on that one.
But one thing I'm actually really nervous about is my hands shaking. I remember when I was a kid, giving presentations in school, I would have my notes on a piece of paper, and I would put a notebook behind the paper so that people wouldn't be able to see the paper quivering. And I give a lot of talks. I know that about half of you in the audience are probably like, "Building useless machines is really fun, but how is this in any way or form a business?" And giving talks is a part of it. And the arrangers always put out a glass of water for you onstage so you have something to drink if you get thirsty, and I always so badly want to drink that water, but I don't dare to pick the glass up because then people might be able to see that my hands are shaking. So what about a machine that hands you a glass of water? Sold to the nervous girl in the googly-eye shirt.
Actually, I need to take this off because I have a thing -- (Googly eyes rattle) Oh. (Clanking) I still don't know what to call this, but I think some sort of "head orbit device," because it rotates this platform around you and you can put anything on it. You can have a camera; you can get photos of your entire head. Like it's really -- it's a very versatile machine.
OK, and I have -- I mean, you can put some snacks on it, for example, if you want to. I have some popcorn here. And you just put a little bit like that. And then you want to -- there's some sacrifices for science -- just some popcorn falling on the floor. Let's do the long way around. (Robot buzzes) And then you have a little hand. You need to adjust the height of it, and you just do it by shrugging. It has a little hand. (Hand thwacks) I just bumped my mic off, but I think we're all good. OK, also I need to chew this popcorn, so if you guys could just clap your hands a little bit more OK, so it's like your own little personal solar system, because I'm a millennial, so I want everything to revolve around me.
Back to the glass of water, that's what we're here for. So, I promise -- I mean, it still has -- it doesn't have any water in it, I'm sorry. But I still need to work on this machine a little bit because I still need to pick up the glass and put it on the platform, but if your hands are shaking a little bit, nobody's going to notice because you're wearing a very mesmerizing piece of equipment. So, we're all good. OK. Oh no, it got stuck. Isn't it comforting that even robots sometimes get stage fright? It just gets stuck a little bit. It's very human of them. Oh wait, let's go back a little bit, and then -- (Glass falls) Isn't it a beautiful time to be alive?
So as much as my machines can seem like simple engineering slapstick, I realize that I stumbled on something bigger than that. It's this expression of joy and humility that often gets lost in engineering, and for me it was a way to learn about hardware without having my performance anxiety get in the way. I often get asked if I think I'm ever going to build something useful, and maybe someday I will. But the way I see it, I already have because I've built myself this job and it's something that I could never have planned for, or that I could --
It's something that I could never have planned for. Instead it happened just because I was enthusiastic about what I was doing, and I was sharing that enthusiasm with other people. To me that's the true beauty of making useless things, because it's this acknowledgment that you don't always know what the best answer is. And it turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works. And maybe a toothbrush helmet isn't the answer, but at least you're asking the question.
Thank you.
The surprising science of alpha males
Well, I have known many alpha males in my life, chimpanzee alpha males, and I'm going to talk about what an alpha male is, because I think we can all learn a lot from our close relatives where we have alpha males.
And as an example, I want to give you Amos, a male that I knew who was a young male and he was alpha male, he was very popular, but he got sick and he lost his position because, you know, chimpanzee males they can spot from a mile away if you are weak and they went for him, and he lost his position, and then he got sicker and sicker until at some point we had to isolate him. The group lived on a grassy island, and we had to isolate him in a cage, but we cracked open the cage so that the rest of the chimps still had access to him. And what happened was most touching. Other chimps would bring food to him, they would bring wood wool to him, which is this thing that they use to sleep in and build nests out of, and females would put the wood wool behind his back. He was leaning heavily against the wall, and the way we do with pillows to patients in a hospital, they were putting that stuff behind his back. And I thought, this is the way to go for an alpha male. He was loved and respected, and everyone was taking care of him, and this is not always how it goes, because some males don't end so well when they lose their position.
So Amos was an example of a male who was liked as a leader, and I think the term alpha male, if you look it up on the internet, you will find all these business books that tell you how to be an alpha male, and what they mean is how to beat up others and beat them over the head and let them know that you are boss and don't mess with me and so on. And basically an alpha male for them is a bully. And I really don't like that kind of description, because I am actually partly responsible for the term "alpha male" because I wrote this book "Chimpanzee Politics," which was recommended by Newt Gingrich to freshmen congressmen. I don't know what good it did, but he recommended that book to them, and after that the term "alpha male" became very popular. But I think it is used in a mischaracterization. It's used in a very superficial way that doesn't relate to what a real alpha male is. And so I'm here to explain what that is. The term itself goes back actually much further. It goes back to the '40s and '50s, research on wolves, and basically the definition is very simple. The highest ranking male is the alpha male. The highest ranking female is the alpha female. Every primate group has one alpha male, one alpha female, not more than that, there's only one. And I will explain how that goes.
So first, the body language. What you see here is two male chimpanzees who are the same size, but one is walking upright, has his hair up, has a big rock in his hand, and he's the alpha male. The other male is pant-grunting to him, is being submissive to him and bowing for him, and that is the sort of ritual they need to go through many times a day in order to have a stable relationship. I'll show you a video from the field. What you will see here is a female pant-grunting to an alpha male and you will see how that goes. The male is approaching, she grunts at him.
(Chimpanzee grunts)
He has all his hair up and he displays.
I'm actually standing far too close. A chimpanzee is far stronger than I am, and I just was not very prudent, this particular video.
So what you saw him do is he was lifting himself up and standing on two legs, and putting his arms out. That's called the bipedal swagger. It's a very common posture in high-ranking males, and it's very recognizable because humans do this kind of stuff.
Humans do this all the time. And what I really like about this particular picture is the two old guys to the side. This is very chimpanzee. In chimpanzees, we have usually old males who are over the hill, who cannot be alpha male themselves anymore, but they start playing games and forming coalitions, and behind the backs of others. And they become extremely influential, and you may actually have old males who are more influential than the alpha male himself.
Just as an example, the three males that I used to work with most at the Dutch zoo long ago, where I worked, and the middle male here is a 17-year-old alpha male. The male whom he is grooming on the side is twice as old, and this old male has made him the leader. So you can imagine that that old male has an enormous amount of power, because he has made the alpha male alpha male. The male on the right is individually the strongest male. In captivity, you can test it out, and you can know that this male has no trouble with either one. He has only trouble with the combination of the two. And so the coalition formation that goes on in chimpanzee society makes it much more complex than you think. It means, for example, that the smallest male in a group can be the alpha male. You don't need to be the biggest and strongest male. The smallest male, if he has the right friends and keeps them happy, or he has female support, he can be the alpha male.
So the coalition system makes everything complex, and I'm always waiting here in the US for the primaries, the end of the primaries, because that's a moment where you need to demonstrate unity. Now let me first show you how the unity is shown in chimpanzees. What you see here is two males on the left who are standing together. You also see the big canine teeth that they have. And they're standing together and they demonstrate to the rest of the group, "We are together. We are a unit." The males on the right are walking together in synchrony. That's another way of demonstrating that you are together. And so demonstrating unity is extremely important in a coalition system, and as I said, in the primaries always I'm waiting for that moment because then you have two members of the same party who have been fighting with each other, and they need to come together at some moment. And it leads to very awkward situations. People who don't like each other need to embrace each other and stand together, and that's absolutely essential for the unity of the party, and if you don't do that, the party may fall apart. And so if it doesn't go well, like in this particular case --
then the party is in deep doo-doo because they have not demonstrated unity. So that's a very important part of the coalition system, and that's something that we share between humans and chimpanzees.
Now, how do you become an alpha male? First of all, you need to be impressive and intimidating and demonstrate your vigor on occasion and show that you are very strong, and there's all sorts of ways of doing that. But other things that you need to do is you need to be generous. So, for example, males who go on a campaign to dethrone the leader, which may take two or three months where they're testing all the coalitions in the group, they also become extremely generous. They share food very easily with everyone. Or they start to tickle the babies of the females. They're normally, male chimpanzees, not particularly interested in infants, but when they are campaigning like that, they get very interested in infants and they tickle them, and they try to curry favor with the females.
So in humans, of course, I am always intrigued by these men who are candidates and hold babies up like this. This is not particularly something that babies like --
but since it is a signal to the rest of the world, they need to hold them in the air. And I was really intrigued by, when we had a female candidate in the last election, the way she held babies was more like this, which is what babies really like. But she of course didn't need to send the message that she could hold a baby without dropping it, which was what the man was doing.
So this is a very common tactic, and male chimpanzees, they spend a lot of time currying favor with all sorts of parties when they are campaigning.
Now, what are the privileges and the costs of being an alpha male? The biggest privilege is females. Food is really irrelevant. Male chimpanzees can go a week without food if there's a female in estrus and they're sexually interested in her. Food is secondary to sex. And so the male chimpanzees -- and we evolutionary biologists, of course, we have an explanation for this, is that sex leads to reproduction, and reproductive success is the measure of evolution. That's how everything evolves. And so if males can enhance their reproductive success by being high ranking, you get automatically the ambition to be high ranking in the males. So that's the privilege. The costs, one cost is of course that you need to keep your partners happy. So if you come to power with the support of an old male, you need to let that old male mate with females. If you don't do that, that old male is going to get mad at you, and you're going to lose him as a partner. So there's a transaction going on. If you become alpha male this way, you need to keep your partners happy. And so that's one of the costs.
The second cost is that everyone wants your position. Alpha male position is a very important position, and everyone wants to take it from you, and so you constantly have to watch your back. You have to be extremely vigilant. For example, you have to disrupt the coalitions of others and that's what male chimpanzees do quite a bit. Divide and rule strategies, they have. And so that's a very stressful situation, and we actually have data on this. The data comes from the field, from baboons not chimpanzees in this case, where they did fecal samples on the baboons and they analyzed them for glucocorticoids. And what you see here is a graph where you see that the lower ranking the male baboon is, the higher is his cortisol level in the feces, but the alpha male, as you see, has just as high a level as the lowest-ranking males, and so you may think that being alpha male is nice and dandy and is wonderful, but it's actually a very stressful position, and we can demonstrate that physiologically.
Now, what are the obligations? And here, for me, it gets really interesting, and it deviates very much from your typical image of the alpha male. The alpha male has two sorts of obligations. One is to keep the peace in the group. We call that the control role, to control fights in the group, and the second is to be the most empathic, the consoler in chief, basically, of the nation, so to speak.
So first of all, keeping the peace. This is a male who stops a fight between two females. Two females on the left and the right have been screaming and yelling at each other over food, because food is very important for the females, and so he stops the fight between them and stands between them like this. And it's very interesting to me that alpha males, when they do this, they become impartial. They don't support their mom or their best buddy. No, no, they stop fights, and they come up for the underdog in general. And this makes them extremely popular in the group, because they provide security for the lowest-ranking members of the group. And so they become impartial, which is an unusual condition for a chimpanzee to be in, because they're usually very fond of their friends and so on, and these alpha males who are good at this, they can be very effective at keeping the peace in the group.
And the second thing they do is they show empathy for others. Now, I do an enormous amount of research on empathy, and I don't have time to go into it, but empathy is nowadays a topic that we study in rodents and dogs and elephants and primates, all sorts of animals. And what you see here is two bonobos. The one in front has been beaten up in a fight. The one in the back puts her arms around her and consoles her. This is also actually how we measure empathy in young children, by looking at how they respond to distressed individuals. And high-ranking males, they do a lot of this. High-ranking males provide an enormous amount of comfort in the group, and they go to places where there are earthquakes or hurricanes and they provide comfort. The pope does this. The presidents do this. All the leaders in the world have to do this job. The queen does it and so on. They all have to do this job, so providing consolation, and that's a very important task. And males who are good at these two, keeping the peace and providing comfort, they become extremely popular leaders, and there's actually some self-interest involved in it. They don't do it just for the group, because it also stabilizes their position. The more popular a male becomes as alpha male and the more the rest of them respects them and looks up to them, the better their position is defended in case it's going to be challenged by somebody else, because then, of course, the whole group is going to support that male because they want to keep a leader who is good for them. So the group is usually very supportive of males who are good leaders, and it's not supportive at all of bullies. And when bullies lose their position, they may end up in a very bad situation there.
This is data actually on the consolation behavior. This is data on consolation in chimpanzees, and you see for the medium- and low-ranking individuals, the females do more of it than the males. This is basically the whole community. And this is true for all the mammal studies on empathy is that females have more of it than males. But look at the alpha male. The alpha male does far more than anybody else. And so that's the data on alpha males being the consoler in chief, basically.
The last thing I want to say is something about alpha females. This is a picture of Mama, the alpha female in the Arnhem zoo where I used to work, who is now all over the internet, I think a hundred million clicks at the moment, for a video of her dying at the age of 59, which happened last year. And Mama was an absolute centrum of the group. So she was not physically capable of dominating the males. She ranked below the males, but she was the center of the community, and if there was big trouble in the community, everyone would end up in the arms of Mama. And so she was a very important figure. And so I don't want to minimize the position of alpha females in the chimpanzee group.
And then we have a species that is equally close to us as the chimpanzee, the bonobo. We often forget about the bonobo, but the bonobos have a matriarchal society and the alpha individual is a female, generally. Generally, it's a female who is at the top of the community, and we know much less about how this is done and how they get to that position, and what they do with it, because we know much less about bonobos in general. But I do want to emphasize that the alpha in a group doesn't need to be a male, and that actually in one of our close relatives, it is a female.
So the message I want to leave you with is that if you are looking at men in our society who are the boss of, let's say, a family or a business or Washington or whatever, you call them alpha male, you should not insult chimpanzees by using the wrong label.
You should not call a bully an alpha male. Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male. An alpha male has all sorts of qualities, and I have seen bully alpha males in chimpanzees, they do occur, but most of the ones that we have have leadership capacities and are integrated in their community, and, like Amos at the end, they are loved and respected, and so it's a very different situation than you may think.
And I thank you.
Is the world getting better or worse? A look at the numbers
Many people face the news each morning with trepidation and dread. Every day, we read of shootings, inequality, pollution, dictatorship, war and the spread of nuclear weapons. These are some of the reasons that 2016 was called the "Worst. Year. Ever." Until 2017 claimed that record --
and left many people longing for earlier decades, when the world seemed safer, cleaner and more equal.
But is this a sensible way to understand the human condition in the 21st century? As Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, "Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory."
You can always fool yourself into seeing a decline if you compare bleeding headlines of the present with rose-tinted images of the past. What does the trajectory of the world look like when we measure well-being over time using a constant yardstick?
Let's compare the most recent data on the present with the same measures 30 years ago. Last year, Americans killed each other at a rate of 5.3 per hundred thousand, had seven percent of their citizens in poverty and emitted 21 million tons of particulate matter and four million tons of sulfur dioxide. But 30 years ago, the homicide rate was 8.5 per hundred thousand, poverty rate was 12 percent and we emitted 35 million tons of particulate matter and 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide.
What about the world as a whole? Last year, the world had 12 ongoing wars, 60 autocracies, 10 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. But 30 years ago, there were 23 wars, 85 autocracies, 37 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 60,000 nuclear weapons. True, last year was a terrible year for terrorism in Western Europe, with 238 deaths, but 1988 was worse with 440 deaths.
What's going on? Was 1988 a particularly bad year? Or are these improvements a sign that the world, for all its struggles, gets better over time? Might we even invoke the admittedly old-fashioned notion of progress? To do so is to court a certain amount of derision, because I have found that intellectuals hate progress.
And intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress.
Now, it's not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you. Most academics and pundits would rather have their surgery with anesthesia than without it. It's the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class. If you believe that humans can improve their lot, I have been told, that means that you have a blind faith and a quasi-religious belief in the outmoded superstition and the false promise of the myth of the onward march of inexorable progress. You are a cheerleader for vulgar American can-doism, with the rah-rah spirit of boardroom ideology, Silicon Valley and the Chamber of Commerce. You are a practitioner of Whig history, a naive optimist, a Pollyanna and, of course, a Pangloss, alluding to the Voltaire character who declared, "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."
Well, Professor Pangloss, as it happens, was a pessimist. A true optimist believes there can be much better worlds than the one we have today. But all of this is irrelevant, because the question of whether progress has taken place is not a matter of faith or having an optimistic temperament or seeing the glass as half full. It's a testable hypothesis. For all their differences, people largely agree on what goes into human well-being: life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, happiness. All of these things can be measured. If they have improved over time, that, I submit, is progress.
Let's go to the data, beginning with the most precious thing of all, life. For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30. Today, worldwide, it is more than 70, and in the developed parts of the world, more than 80. 250 years ago, in the richest countries of the world, a third of the children did not live to see their fifth birthday, before the risk was brought down a hundredfold. Today, that fate befalls less than six percent of children in the poorest countries of the world. Famine is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It could bring devastation to any part of the world. Today, famine has been banished to the most remote and war-ravaged regions. 200 years ago, 90 percent of the world's population subsisted in extreme poverty. Today, fewer than 10 percent of people do. For most of human history, the powerful states and empires were pretty much always at war with each other, and peace was a mere interlude between wars. Today, they are never at war with each other. The last great power war pitted the United States against China 65 years ago. More recently, wars of all kinds have become fewer and less deadly. The annual rate of war has fallen from about 22 per hundred thousand per year in the early '50s to 1.2 today. Democracy has suffered obvious setbacks in Venezuela, in Russia, in Turkey and is threatened by the rise of authoritarian populism in Eastern Europe and the United States. Yet the world has never been more democratic than it has been in the past decade, with two-thirds of the world's people living in democracies. Homicide rates plunge whenever anarchy and the code of vendetta are replaced by the rule of law. It happened when feudal Europe was brought under the control of centralized kingdoms, so that today a Western European has 1/35th the chance of being murdered compared to his medieval ancestors. It happened again in colonial New England, in the American Wild West when the sheriffs moved to town, and in Mexico.
Indeed, we've become safer in just about every way. Over the last century, we've become 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car crash, 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job, 89 percent less likely to be killed by an act of God, such as a drought, flood, wildfire, storm, volcano, landslide, earthquake or meteor strike, presumably not because God has become less angry with us but because of improvements in the resilience of our infrastructure. And what about the quintessential act of God, the projectile hurled by Zeus himself? Yes, we are 97 percent less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning.
Before the 17th century, no more than 15 percent of Europeans could read or write. Europe and the United States achieved universal literacy by the middle of the 20th century, and the rest of the world is catching up. Today, more than 90 percent of the world's population under the age of 25 can read and write. In the 19th century, Westerners worked more than 60 hours per week. Today, they work fewer than 40. Thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity in the developed world and the widespread adoption of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves and microwaves, the amount of our lives that we forfeit to housework has fallen from 60 hours a week to fewer than 15 hours a week.
Do all of these gains in health, wealth, safety, knowledge and leisure make us any happier? The answer is yes. In 86 percent of the world's countries, happiness has increased in recent decades.
Well, I hope to have convinced you that progress is not a matter of faith or optimism, but is a fact of human history, indeed the greatest fact in human history. And how has this fact been covered in the news?
A tabulation of positive and negative emotion words in news stories has shown that during the decades in which humanity has gotten healthier, wealthier, wiser, safer and happier, the "New York Times" has become increasingly morose and the world's broadcasts too have gotten steadily glummer.
Why don't people appreciate progress? Part of the answer comes from our cognitive psychology. We estimate risk using a mental shortcut called the "availability heuristic." The easier it is to recall something from memory, the more probable we judge it to be. The other part of the answer comes from the nature of journalism, captured in this satirical headline from "The Onion," "CNN Holds Morning Meeting to Decide What Viewers Should Panic About For Rest of Day."
News is about stuff that happens, not stuff that doesn't happen. You never see a journalist who says, "I'm reporting live from a country that has been at peace for 40 years," or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists. Also, bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day. The papers could have run the headline, "137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday" every day for the last 25 years. That's one and a quarter billion people leaving poverty behind, but you never read about it. Also, the news capitalizes on our morbid interest in what can go wrong, captured in the programming policy, "If it bleeds, it leads." Well, if you combine our cognitive biases with the nature of news, you can see why the world has been coming to an end for a very long time indeed.
Let me address some questions about progress that no doubt have occurred to many of you. First, isn't it good to be pessimistic to safeguard against complacency, to rake the muck, to speak truth to power? Well, not exactly. It's good to be accurate. Of course we should be aware of suffering and danger wherever they occur, but we should also be aware of how they can be reduced, because there are dangers to indiscriminate pessimism. One of them is fatalism. If all our efforts at improving the world have been in vain, why throw good money after bad? The poor will always be with you. And since the world will end soon -- if climate change doesn't kill us all, then runaway artificial intelligence will -- a natural response is to enjoy life while we can, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
The other danger of thoughtless pessimism is radicalism. If our institutions are all failing and beyond hope for reform, a natural response is to seek to smash the machine, drain the swamp, burn the empire to the ground, on the hope that whatever rises out of the ashes is bound to be better than what we have now.
Well, if there is such a thing as progress, what causes it? Progress is not some mystical force or dialectic lifting us ever higher. It's not a mysterious arc of history bending toward justice. It's the result of human efforts governed by an idea, an idea that we associate with the 18th century Enlightenment, namely that if we apply reason and science that enhance human well-being, we can gradually succeed. Is progress inevitable? Of course not. Progress does not mean that everything becomes better for everyone everywhere all the time. That would be a miracle, and progress is not a miracle but problem-solving. Problems are inevitable and solutions create new problems which have to be solved in their turn. The unsolved problems facing the world today are gargantuan, including the risks of climate change and nuclear war, but we must see them as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting, and aggressively pursue solutions like Deep Decarbonization for climate change and Global Zero for nuclear war.
Finally, does the Enlightenment go against human nature? This is an acute question for me, because I'm a prominent advocate of the existence of human nature, with all its shortcomings and perversities. In my book "The Blank Slate," I argued that the human prospect is more tragic than utopian and that we are not stardust, we are not golden and there's no way we are getting back to the garden.
But my worldview has lightened up in the 15 years since "The Blank Slate" was published. My acquaintance with the statistics of human progress, starting with violence but now encompassing every other aspect of our well-being, has fortified my belief that in understanding our tribulations and woes, human nature is the problem, but human nature, channeled by Enlightenment norms and institutions, is also the solution.
Admittedly, it's not easy to replicate my own data-driven epiphany with humanity at large. Some intellectuals have responded with fury to my book "Enlightenment Now," saying first how dare he claim that intellectuals hate progress, and second, how dare he claim that there has been progress.
With others, the idea of progress just leaves them cold. Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry, teaching kids to read? Boring.
At the same time, the most common response I have received from readers is gratitude, gratitude for changing their view of the world from a numb and helpless fatalism to something more constructive, even heroic.
I believe that the ideals of the Enlightenment can be cast a stirring narrative, and I hope that people with greater artistic flare and rhetorical power than I can tell it better and spread it further. It goes something like this.
We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a process that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness and at times astounding stupidity.
Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our ingenuity and experience. We are deepened with the capacity for sympathy, for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration. These endowments have found ways to magnify their own power. The scope of language has been augmented by the written, printed and electronic word. Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism and the narrative arts. And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of reason, intellectual curiosity, open debate, skepticism of authority and dogma and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality.
As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature. We penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, including life and mind. We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, exploited or oppressed by the others. From a few oases, the territories with peace and prosperity are growing and could someday encompass the globe. Much suffering remains and tremendous peril, but ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived.
We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing. This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is true, true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have. As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true and which ones false, as any of them might be and any could become.
And this story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity, to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being, for it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering and knowledge is better than ignorance and superstition.
Thank you.