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Every few months, it seems like I read another story about someone who has sold or donated nearly everything they own, reducing their total number of personal possessions to under 100 items.
There are lots of reasons for a person to want to do this. Maybe you’re moving across the country (or to a different country), and you need to pack light. Perhaps you’re trying to reduce your carbon footprint. Maybe you just watched a marathon of “Hoarders” and you’re feeling like it’s time to clean house.
Whatever your motive, if you want to try living with 100 items or less, you’ll need to start thinking about what items you can’t live without. Here are some tips for picking what to keep, and what to get rid of.
1. Inventory Everything
You can’t decide what to cut until you have a list of all of your possessions. This could take some time, and the amount of time it takes to catalogue your material goods might prove once and for all that you have way too much stuff.
Once you know what you have, categorize it. You can do this by room (bedroom, kitchen, etc), by frequency of use (seasonal items, everyday items, etc.), or by purpose (work-related items, entertainment, etc).
2. Only Keep Multipurpose Items
Don’t keep anything that doesn’t serve multiple purposes in your home. If it only does one thing (I’m looking at you, garlic press), ditch it to make room for something with more than one use.
A couch that converts into a bed is perfect for visiting guests. A coffee table can also serve as a desk or dining surface in a pinch.
3. Don’t Be Too Spartan
100-Item minimalism isn’t about denying yourself pleasure, it’s about finding pleasure in simplicity. So you should end up with items that make you happy and make your life easier.
For example, say you are a heavy tea drinker. If you took my advice above, you probably ditched your tea kettle, since you could use a pot or a microwave to heat water. But if good tea is important to you, then you should keep your favorite tea kettle, even if it’s a single-purpose item. Scaling back doesn’t mean denying yourself life’s little pleasures. There’s a difference between minimalism and frugality. Make sure you know which is which.
4. Obey the 12-month Rule
Ditch everything you haven’t used in the last 12 months. Skinny jeans, Christmas decorations, old wrapping paper, the fondue pot, that old sewing machine you think you can fix “when you have the time”. It you haven’t touched something in a year, chances are you aren’t going to need it any time in the next 12 months, either.
5. Re-purge
3 months after you donated or sold your “12-month” possessions, re-examine all your remaining possessions, and try and get rid of things that you don’t use at least once a month (or once a week if you are really trying to clean house).
Don’t be afraid of ditching something you might need in the future. Chances are, you have a kindly neighbor who can lend you a springform cake pan for the one weekend a year you actually bake. If you’re really on the fence about a number of things, consider putting some items in storage, and revisit the issue of keeping them in another couple of months.
6. Take Care of Business
If you work out of a home office, you might think that there are certain items that you can’t live without– a printer, a fax machine, a desk. And you’d be wrong.
Obviously, your needs will vary depending on what line of work you are in. But services like EchoSign make printing out contracts a thing of the past, you can send faxes for free online from sites like FaxZero, and you might find you’d rather use a laptop with a cooling lap desk than sit at a “real” desk all day.
According to Everett Bogue, author of Minimalist Business, “Most of the objects we assume are necessary to run a business aren’t needed anymore. I don’t own a desk, I don’t use paper, I don’t have business cards, I don’t rent an office….The benefit of choosing to live with less is that my business operating costs drop to nearly zero….When your overhead is nearly zero, you can start turning a profit immediately.”
The Bottom Line
Embarking on a quest to live with 100 items or less is a major decision, and sorting through all your possessions could take you months. But, if you have the patience and the will, you might find that living the ultra-minimalist lifestyle affords you the kind of physical and mental “breathing room” you could have never achieved otherwise.
Tucker is a writer and social media professional living in New England. When she's not staring into a tiny electric box, she engages in pointless acts of stupidity at BadBoozeReview.com and posts daily at MargeryJones.com
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New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly shares a portfolio of her wise and funny cartoons about modern life — and talks about how humor can empower women to change the rules. (Recorded at TEDWomen, December 2010, in Washington, DC. Duration: 6:43)
Watch Liza Donnelly’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 800+ TEDTalks.
On today’s launch of the TED Books imprint, TED’s Chris Anderson talks with the TED Blog about the big idea behind it — publishing short, vital nonfiction books to the Kindle platform. Read more about TED Books and our first three titles …
Tell me why the world needs TEDBooks …
The main reading choices we have today are to browse a newspaper or magazine, or to try to dig into a full-length book. TED Books offer a new choice: a powerful idea that can be absorbed in a single read of an hour or so. We think this is going to appeal to large numbers of people who are curious, eager to learn, but also time-constrained. The success of TED Talks has shown there’s a huge global appetite for ideas delivered in succinct form. We think that applies to reading just as much as listening.
What inspired you to start this project?
For several years, we’ve been pondering whether TED should be doing books. Books have of course long been the prime way in which “ideas worth spreading” are circulated. But we couldn’t quite come up with a publishing concept that could be made available to large numbers of our speakers and to other potential idea generators. However, seeing the explosive growth of e-book platforms like Kindle and iPad got us thinking. And the question that wouldn’t go away was: why are books the length they are? Is it because it inherently takes 300 pages to explain an idea? Or is it more to do with the traditions of book publishing in print? Was it possible that in today’s fast-moving world with so many demands on people’s time that there was an opportunity for a shorter type of book? One that could be absorbed in a single reading session, one that could allow many brilliant people who would have no chance of taking off a year to write a traditional book to nonetheless become authors? We had seen from our experience of TED Talks that by constraining speakers to 18 minutes, it was often the case that “less is more.” And as we shared the idea with trusted advisers in the TED community, we saw real excitement, and the sense that this was an idea whose time has come.
What’s next?
We plan to continue regular releases of new TED Books. Many will come from existing TED speakers who will dig deeper into the topics initiated in their talks. Others will come from new authors with ideas the world needs to know about. We view this as a thrilling new part of our “ideas worth spreading” platform and look forward to letting it reach its full potential. We will be exploring plans under which people can subscribe to every new release as it comes along. And for ways of hosting conversations around each book. Watch this space!
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Today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of TED Books, an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional books, TED Books run less than 20,000 words each — long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting. Books are available on the Kindle and Kindle Reader apps, and cost $2.99 each.
We launch with three titles from TEDTalks stars:
Nic Marks: The Happiness Manifesto: How Nations and People Can Nurture Well-Being
Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans: Homo Evolutis: Please Meet the Next Human Species
Gever Tulley: Beware Dangerism! Why We Worry About the Wrong Things, and What It’s Doing to Our Kids
“The success of TEDTalks has demonstrated that millions of people around the world are hungry to absorb new ideas,” said TED curator Chris Anderson. “But not everyone has the time to go out and read an entire book on an interesting subject. TED Books fill that gap. Their shorter format allows someone to see an idea fleshed out in a satisfying way — without having to set aside a week of reading time.” Read more of Chris Anderson’s thought on TED Books >>
TED Books are launching as part of Amazon’s brand-new Kindle Singles imprint. (Read their press release.) As Amazon told us: “Our goal with Singles is to allow compelling ideas to be expressed at their natural length. TEDBooks fit nicely within that mission,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle Content. “TED has a great history of bringing important ideas to a wider audience, and we expect TEDB ooks will add to that legacy.”
Read the full TED Books press release >>
Learn more about TED Books >>
Watch TEDTalks from these TED Books authors >>
Jake Shimabukuro strums monster sounds out of the tiny Hawaiian ukelele, as he plays a cover of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” A sensational performance from TED2010 — it’ll send shivers down your spine. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010, in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 7:08)
Watch Jake Shimabukuro’s performance on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 800+ TEDTalks.
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Way before the sun peeks over the horizon, a few chosen people awaken from their slumber and dive head first into their day. These chosen few accomplish a ton before the rest of us would ever consider rising from our nice warm beds.
Who are these juggernauts that have command over the morning hours?
In theory, your productivity level shouldn't differ if you rise at 4am or 11am. What matters is the quality of sleep that's giving your mind and body sufficient time to recover.
These early rising juggernauts, these unstoppable agents of productivity, they see things differently. They see these early hours as their chance to lay claim to their share of the day. They rise with purpose, act with determination, and achieve ruthlessly.
The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years. - Thomas Jefferson
This means that when you find a waking hour that will work best for you each day of the week, you should stick to it. This will allow your body to want to support you in your endeavor of waking up, and rise you out of bed feeling fresh as a daisy.
Eating like a pauper, meaning small light meals, in the evening allows us to go to sleep on an empty stomach. If your body is functioning normally, and you don't have stomach ulcers, going to sleep on a mostly empty stomach will allow you to sleep better. This nightly fast allows your body to take it's focus away from digestion and put it towards repair and rejuvenation of the body's cells.
As adults we may need more persuasion than 'not wanting to miss a thing'. This is why we take extra steps in creating fun, life changing goals, and scheduling specific ways of how we'll get a step closer to these goals during this coming day. What we all need is not necessary a cause we're willing to die for, but at least a cause we're willing to LIVE for.
A schedule complete with waking time, most important things of the day, eating and recreational allowances. Having a tight schedule allows me to live out my day with definitive purpose, while getting more done, having more fun, and not wasting precious moments of my life.
“Happy people plan actions, they don't plan results” - Dennis Wholey
The water in the morning does two things. One is it provides your first dose of water to get your mind and body going. Another function, as told to me by my endocrinology teacher (a very qualified person to say this), is that a dose of water in the morning triggers a cascade of physiological functions that engages your digestive system and causes you to excrete feces. You'll feel nice and light first thing in the morning!
"Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness." - Edward Stanley
There may very a variety of things you enjoy doing, so this will be custom tailored to the individual. The point is that when you have something you REALLY enjoy doing right when you get up, you won't be able to wait until that alarm goes off till you jump out of bed and get to it!
See, that's all it takes!
Blogging hasn’t started yet at the BPS Occupational Digest, but we’re looking forward to what Alex serves up. Watch this space!
Link to BPS Occupational Digest.
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There are several sections of the article which turn our research assumptions on their head, owing to the fact that some common principles of ethical research turn out to be based on quite a narrow view of human values.
The idea that donating tissue is simply a matter of individual choice is not a belief held by many communities who believe that all people are interconnected – making individual donations a group decision.
The article touches on an example from the Havasupai people and a similar situation was discussed in an All in the Mind interview with a Maori neuroscientist.
However, I was particularly struck by this part on confidentiality which is often assumed to be the bedrock of human research.
Confidentiality poses another ethical challenge to researchers working with indigenous peoples. Participants in academic studies are invariably anonymous, but in many Native cultures, not identifying oneself, one’s family, and one’s homeland is unacceptable. Anonymity, they believe, undermines the cultural fabric of the community, and is akin to stripping its members of their traditions and beliefs.
Link to ‘Cross-Cultural Neuroethics: Look Both Ways’.
Make room for guests by clearing the guest room!What you do at the end of the year sets the tone and direction of the new year. This year set your intention to take the 12 Months of Clearing Challenge. Commit to clearing your entire home of those things you no longer love or use.
Sound like a tall order? It is! But, it can be done following the 12 Months of Clearing Plan. Each month you focus on clearing one specific area.
January-Your bedroom closet
Why your bedroom closet? Your clothes are an extension of you. Ideally they should reflect who you are today. If you want to be clear about who you are and what you want, the best thing you can do is clear your closet. Also, once your closet has been tackled the rest of the bedroom will be much easier to clear. A clear bedroom can have a profound positive effect on your health because your body is exposed to its energy for at least 6 to 8 hours every night.
February-Home office
Eeeew!!!! Yuck!!! Why do the home office so early in the year? Normally I would recommend that you deal with anything that has to do with paper further along in the process of clearing because paper can shut you down faster than any other kind of organizing. But, the home office is usually the heart of organizing finances. It’s a good idea to be grounded regarding finances as soon as possible in a new year. If you have volumes of paper in your home office that you just can’t make yourself clear because of fear or overwhelm, consider getting help to do it from a friend or professional. Or, you could clump all paper to be gone through in boxes that you set aside until later in the year when you are feeling less overwhelmed and more confident about your ability to do it. Once the distracting paper is clumped, focus on clearing out other items (old software, manual, office supplies, etc.) and setting up the home office for ease of functioning.
March-Kitchen
The kitchen is the heart of the home. It is a high activity area. Working there will clear out old food stuffs that are past their expiration date and create a space where positive interactions are possible.
April-Garage
The garage is a clearing project many people like to avoid, probably because it’s a big, complex area and because it’s usually a dirty job. But, clearing the garage before the season when yard tools and recreational equipment will be used makes the process of accessing those items more appealing. And, why have that stuff if you can’t access it? Because the garage is a big job, break it down by section. For example, work on tools one weekend, recreational equipment the next and so on. Or, you could look for items from the entire garage to clear the first weekend. Then, the next weekend reorganize the items that are left. If the job is still too daunting, get help at least to get started. Once you’ve broken through the overwhelm you may be able to finish on your own.
May-Linen closet
Whew! May is an easy month because it’s the Mother’s Day month. Since women often take the lead with clutter clearing, I wanted to be sure that they get a bit of a break this month. Linen closets are usually not as challenging as other closets, unless you also keep toiletries in them. Clear out those nasty, ragged towels, unless you use them for bathing dogs. And, get real about the sheets! If they are looking paper thin, it’s time to invest in some new sheets.
June-Utility room
The utility room is another challenging place to clear. Like the garage it’s usually a multi-function work and storage space. That creates complexity. And, I’ve found that many people are seduced by cleaning products. They often have multiples of products that do the same thing. Decide which products you actually use and get rid of the rest! Also, make sure that all products are visible. If you can’t see an item, you won’t use it.
July-Bathroom closets/cabinets
Bathroom closets and cabinets are another haven of products that looked like just the thing for your hair or nails or teeth, but that in actuality were used just once or twice and never used again. I’m not sure why they don’t get thrown away immediately. Perhaps because they cost money or because you hope they’ll miraculously work better the next time. Clear out those stagnant items!
August-Children’s rooms
Unless your child is incapable of getting rid of things or is too young to make decisions, I recommend that clearing children’s rooms involve the children at some point in the process. Involving them is an excellent way to teach them not only how to do it, but that it must be done from time to time. They will learn that some of their belongings are temporary residents in their room. Once they have outgrown them, they should be released. Clearing a child’s room with them is also an excellent opportunity to teach them the idea of community service. They are blessed to have all they have. When they are done with their toys, books and clothes they then have the opportunity to pass them on to others who are less fortunate. August is a good time to clear children’s rooms because it sets a positive stage for the new school year.
September-Hall closets
Hall closets can become dumps for miscellaneous items. Check those spaces for what is actually used at some point during the year. Clear out faded flags, and hats, coats and gloves that never get worn. What about the boots that litter the floor? If you have games in your hall closet, are they still pulled out and played? How many vacuum cleaners do you have in there? Which one works best?
October-Attic
Like the garage, the attic is a huge daunting project. Feng shui teaches that the attic is the area of your hopes and aspirations. If you clear here, you get clear about what you want and you make space to get more of what you really want. Is it worth facing the nightmare up there? You bet! In many climates fall is the best time to clear an attic because it is neither too hot or too cold. If your attic is packed tight I recommend that you first look for big “Duh!”items. Those are the things that are no brainers for pitching–for example, the two Christmas trees you haven’t used in a decade. Clearing out those items will loosen up the space, making it possible to think more clearly. Once a few sizable items have left the space you’ll be encouraged by your progress and feel enthusiasm to release more. Put all small items and paper aside to deal with last. Don’t get bogged down with the minutia!
November-Guest rooms
Guest rooms either become dumping grounds, multi-purpose rooms or stagnant spaces for things that don’t matter much. The energy of every part of the house affects the energy of the whole and what happens in your life. Clear the dump. Clear and reorganize the multi-purpose room. Release those things you no longer love or use that made their way to your guest room. Clearing the guest room will make it possible to have loved ones stay with you during the holiday season.
December-Holiday decorations
December is too busy a time to do any big organizing projects. But, you will be pulling out your seasonal decorations. When you do, notice which items you use and what stays in the boxes. Pitch those decorations that haven’t emerged from their boxes in two years. Clearing your decorations down to just those that actually get used will make the prospect of decorating next year much more appealing.
Some of you may be wondering what you do during the month assigned to the garage if you don’t have a garage. Or, if you don’t have children, what do you do in August. What about the basement? I don’t have a basement (yeah!), so I didn’t include it. But, if you do have a basement, you can substitute it for clearing out children’s rooms if you have no children or the garage if you have no garage. You may also choose to tackle the basement instead doing one of the other areas that you know won’t be difficult for you to squeeze in during another month.
My intention in setting specific goals each month is to help you focus your organizing efforts. It’s very easy to be distracted by the noise of clutter all over the house. If you choose to take the 12 month challenge, commit to tackling and completing the one area each month. If the area is too big to do all by yourself, get friends, family or professional help to make it happen. And, remember that it’s ESSENTIAL that you maintain your day to day organizing processes and systems in addition to your monthly clearing project. If you don’t, you’ll be creating a new nightmare while you’re clearing another.
Having a monthly clearing goal will also help you pace yourself. Once you feel some of the benefits of clearing you may be tempted to do massive clearing all at once. Clearing too much too fast will shift energies too quickly. This can result in chaos in your life or physical illness.
What is most important is that you do some clearing each month. My suggestions are just that — suggestions. Feel free to tailor this plan to work with the realities of your climate, your energy and your family situation.
If you take this challenge, I would love to hear from you about your progress, challenges and how your life changes as a result of your commitment to clearing. Clearing your whole house will transform your life. It takes courage to take on this challenge. Be open and ready for big changes!
My passion is helping people discover the profound impact that environment has on performance. I want people to know they can change their lives by changing the spaces in which they live and work. Check out my blog, http://www.rockscissorspaperinstitute.com/blog, or my book, Rock Scissors Paper: Understanding How Environment Affects Your Performance on a Daily Basis at www.RockScissorsPaperInstitute.com/book.
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Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Music, expectancy and pleasure in the brain. The Frontal Cortex has an excellent piece on the neuroscience of error prediction and the music appreciating brain.
Science News reports on how a substantial minority of third to sixth graders think they’re best friends with a classmate who actually dislikes them.
Straight Outta Compton, a dainty mother hugger named Nice Cube. Prosocial song lyrics make kids less aggressive, according to a study covered by the BPS Research Digest.
Scientific American explains why you’re probably less popular than your friends. Although in my case, it’s largely because the majority of my friends are cooler than me. Even the imaginary ones.
The widely misreported ‘genetics of friends’ study gets an excellent write-up from Genetic Future.
Wired Science looks at at a secret service study on the psychology of assassins in the US.
A leading journal is under pressure to retract a notorious study on children, depression and antidepressant paroxetine. Neuroskeptic weighs the evidence in this heated case and gives its verdict.
New Scientist covers an intriguing concert for three harmonium players and a synaesthete that recently hit the stage in London.
There’s a fantastic piece on Addiction Inbox on the challenges of personalising addiction medicine when gene variants make anti-craving drugs a hit-or-miss affair.
The Guardian has a piece on the continuing stigmatisation of mental illness in the media.
A psychiatrist and addiction specialist is interviewed about why she finds Twitter useful over at Frontier Psychiatrist.
The Economist charts the rise of the cognitive elite. Sadly, not about a neurally implanted version of the 80's space trading computer game, as I had first hoped.
Another one of Eric Schwitzgebel and colleagues’ wonderful studies on testing the practical implication of philosophy hits the wires over at The Splintered Mind: do ethics professors respond as well as other philosophers to student email requests?
Medscape covers a new study finding that older surgeons have 1.5 – 3 times the rate of suicidal thinking than the average man in the street.
The over-interpretation of dreams. PsyBlog covers an interesting study on biases that makes us think certain types of dreams are more meaningful than others.
BBC News covers a case of alien hand syndrome and has a video of a patient being attacked by her out of control hand.
Are extraverts better leaders? asks Barking Up the Wrong Tree.
Yahoo! News reports how burglars broke into a home, found white powder, thought it was cocaine, and ended up snorting a deceased man’s ashes. A mistake I think we can all relate to.
Mr. Krueger's Christmas 25:50 MinsPrice:
Today medical scans produce thousands of images and terabytes of data for a single patient in mere seconds, but how do doctors parse this information and determine what’s useful? At TEDxGöteborg, scientific visualization expert Anders Ynnerman shows us sophisticated new tools — like virtual autopsies — for analyzing this myriad data, and a glimpse at some sci-fi-sounding medical technologies in development. This talk contains some graphic medical imagery. (Recorded at TEDxGöteborg, November 2010, in Göteborg, Sweden. Duration: 16:37)
Watch Anders Ynnerman‘s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 800+ TEDTalks.
At age 17, Ben Gulak invented an electric motorcycle that was named “Invention of the Year” by Popular Science. He’s now working on a snowmobile-ATV hybrid. Though being a full-time student and running two businesses has meant a lot of sacrifices — including his favorite TV show “Dexter” — Ben says the rewards are well worth it.Interactive Fellows Friday Feature!
Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Ben asks:
In your everyday life, what have you seen that could be redesigned to better the world?
Click here to respond!
Tell us about your inventions. What was your inspiration to create them?
The Shredder is a new kind of all-terrain vehicle. In a recession it doesn’t make sense to have to buy an expensive snowmobile that you can ride for three months of the year and an ATV that you can ride for four months of the year. I wanted to make something small enough that you could fit it in the back of any car. And I wanted it to be something you’d be able to ride all year, whether in snow, sand, or mud. Something that would be really all-terrain, all year.
With that in mind, my partner Ryan Ferris and I came up with this cool stand-up power sport vehicle. It’s almost like a skateboard that you ride. It’s really a crossover between extreme and power sport. That’s where the idea started. It turns out that it’s this really compact modular platform that the military is interested in, for a whole bunch of other applications, as well.
The Uno started off as a high school science project. I got the idea when my dad had a business trip to China and my mom and I went along. This was at a time when global warming was really taking front and center in the news. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had just come out, and they were talking about pollution almost every day. I was at more or less the epicenter where all this bad stuff was happening. I remember reading in the paper that everyday 20,000 new cars were hitting Chinese roadways. I thought for my next science fair project I wanted to do something green.
I thought, “I know about motorcycles, what about some sort of green motorcycle or electric bike?” I wanted to do something that was really going to stand out and make a statement that being green can be cool.
So in grade 12, I came up with this new kind of electric motorcycle. I wanted it to be something small enough to store indoors: you could bring it up to your apartment to plug in and charge, and then you could ride it around on the road. Instead of having a wheel in the front and a wheel in back, there are two wheels side-by-side, and you sit over top of it. It’s kind of a crossover between a unicycle and a street bike, and it’s all electric.
After the science fair, it got a whole bunch of attention. I decided to take a year off of school to keep developing it and see where it went. Popular Science named it “Invention of the Year” and put it on the cover of their June 2008 issue. I ended up raising some capital, moving to Boston and opening a small office in Cambridge. We’ve been working on it for the last two years down in the States, while I’ve been going to school at MIT.
Are the Shredder and the Uno for sale now?
Neither of the projects are for sale yet. We’re still developing the Uno, we’re still developing the Shredder.
When I was at TED last year, the Shredder was really just a proof of concept. I built the first prototype by taking a year off of school to work on it with my partner. Eight months later, we have a contract with the US Air Force to develop a military version. We’re planning on doing our first production run and actually selling the units over the summer, which is pretty exciting.
We were working on the prototype, and decided to post some of our videos online. By the next night, we had 50,000 hits, and then 100,000 hits, and within a week we had over 1 million YouTube hits. People started blogging about this thing as a new military toy, which is something we had never really thought about. It was always supposed to be an extreme sports vehicle. Suddenly, we have all this attention, and everyone was focused on it as a new military transport, a personal rapid response unit. At that point we decided we weren’t going to partner up with another company, we were going to do it ourselves.
All of this happened in the last two to three months, so it’s been really tough being a full-time student. I end up not sleeping very much.
At the same time, the Uno has evolved, too. Originally it had two wheels and it balanced a lot like a Segway: lean forward to accelerate, lean back to decelerate. One of the problems was turning this really cool science project into something that we can actually sell to the public and ride on roads.
Now, the Segway can only go 10 miles per hour for a very good reason: it’s unsafe at high speeds. We came up with this really clever transforming design. We’ve gone through three different design prototype phases. And this new one is the final version that I think we’re going to be able to sell in the next year and a half. So both the Uno and the Shredder are finally closing in on a point where I’m going to have something I can actually sell.
What first got you interested in engineering and design?
My grandfather was a design engineer and he had a full shop in his basement, so I really grew up in the engineering world. I used to do little projects with him in the basement, like little rocket ships and trains. Nothing super crazy … he always just wanted to build things with me. That’s where I got the bug for it.
In grade nine, when I had my first science fair project, I ended up actually building it with him in the basement. He passed away two months after that, and I inherited all the equipment. So for the next four years that I was doing these science fair projects and robotics competitions, I had access to all the machinery I needed. I also had 13 years of experience in working with them. So it really let me build some pretty cool things.
Which inventor from history do you most admire?
When I was younger I read Nikola Tesla. He’s someone who was born into the wrong century. He was so far ahead of his time. I think the work that he came up with was really amazing. If he had had more resources, he could have had an even bigger impact on the world.
And one of the people I really admire right now is Steve Jobs. Apple comes up with some really amazing products, but he also really cares about design aesthetic and consumer experience. When the computer industry first started, he was a visionary who saw a lot of potential, and has shaped the way the whole industry has moved.
What do your parents think of all your success?
It’s difficult … you can argue that I haven’t achieved anything yet. There’s a lot of potential for these projects, but nothing has actually happened yet. All the media stuff that has happened is very exciting, but it doesn’t really mean very much yet.
All my mom really wants is that I get my engineering degree. I think if I told her that I got rid of both the companies and was just going to be a full-time student, that would be the best news in the world for her.
But my parents are very, very supportive. I’ve created a lot of headaches for them over the years, and they’ve always had my back 110 percent, which has been pretty amazing. And I’ve taken a lot of time off of school and they have still supported me, which has been really good.
I imagine you could have been a handful as a child.
I never really did anything the normal way. Ever. It created a lot of problems. Even when I was little, I was getting in trouble for stupid little things in school. If I had an idea of how something should be done, or what I wanted to do, I always ended up finding a way to do it my way, and that created friction along the way.
In high school, I liked working on my science projects more than going to class. I would skip school to work on my science project. It was weird, because the projects were doing well, and I was winning lots of awards with them, so I couldn’t really get in trouble. But I wasn’t doing very well in science class, even though I was going to all these international science fairs and winning all these awards.
When you went on the reality TV series Dragons’ Den to pitch the Uno to a panel of venture capitalists, were you nervous?
Not really, actually. This was just my own ignorance at the time, but the Uno had just gotten all this publicity. I figured it should be easy to raise money. I was getting all these emails from people wanting to invest. So I thought if I go on the show, it doesn’t actually matter if I make the deal or not, because I have all this other interest.
Little did I know that the recession was going to start like a month later, and four of the five dragons would end up bailing. But it let me go on the show with a lot of confidence. That helped, because the publicity of the show really helped put the Uno on the global stage, and also gave it credibility as a business project.
It was dumb luck that it worked out so well when I was on the show, because I probably should have been a lot more nervous.
There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.
It’s funny that you ask that. I get a lot of entrepreneurs and inventors emailing me or contacting me on Facebook, saying, “What should I do?” It sounds really corny, but you have to follow your passion. You’re going to sacrifice social life, you’re going to sacrifice sleep — you’re going to end up making a lot of sacrifices to make it work. If you really, really love it, you just have to find a way to make it work, and it’ll pay off.
Don’t let other people tell you you can’t do something. If you really want something badly enough, just figure out a way. Go talk to people, make the phone calls. It takes a lot of time and effort. That’s where you really have to believe in what you’re doing. It can’t be sort of a part-time thing. You have to be 100 percent behind it.
What has the TED Fellowship meant to you?
The first time I walked into the International Science Fair in grade nine, it hit me that “Holy shit, there’s so much amazing stuff going on.” I was competing at a science fair for $7 million in prizes, and I was hooked. I realized I wanted to do Science Fair for the rest of my life.
TED was the same thing for me. I’d never been in an environment like that before, where you’re exposed to that many amazing ideas. Really cool people that are all doing their own interesting projects. And it was just the neatest brainstorming session I’ve ever been to in my whole life. If I could, I’d be back there this year. Unfortunately, the tickets are too expensive, and I didn’t want to apply for a Senior Fellowship yet. But I definitely want to go back next year, and it definitely had a huge impact on my life.
How do you manage being a student and running two companies? Do you have any time for fun?
I actually disconnected my cable at the start of the semester, because I was spending way too much time watching TV. “Dexter” was one of my favorite shows, and I would sit and watch a whole season in an afternoon. I realized that if I was going to do school and work, I couldn’t have a TV as well.
Originally, when I started all this stuff, I thought I wanted to be an engineer. I loved actually building the projects. Over the last two years, there’s been a big shift in what I do with my time. I focus almost all my time on the business side now, raising money, running the two companies. And I realized that I actually really, really love business. There are very stressful times, and it’s a rollercoaster. There are great highs and there are lows. But I really like the business side of the companies. It’s fortunate that I actually like doing that. That is my fun time.
Hmm, I realize how pathetic that makes my life sound … I do actually do some fun things. I was out at the Playboy mansion for Halloween. I’ve been there a bunch of times. I do some fun things occasionally, but I also work a lot.
You’ve mentioned that it’s important to you that your inventions improve the world.
Yeah, the Uno is an electric vehicle, so it’s sort of self-explanatory how it’s going to have a positive impact.
The Shredder is a little tougher because it’s a recreational vehicle. But one of the things that we’re finding out now, with the military, is that that it has applications for search and rescue. As a matter of fact, we’ve done tests where it’s towed stretchers and things. By working as a robot, you can send a stretcher into the field and have it bring back an injured soldier, without having to risk any more soldiers’ lives. We’re looking at using it in disaster zones and fire mitigation. So it has all these really altruistic applications as well.
Beyond these two projects, I’m not really sure what I’m going to do next. My investors would kill me if I came up with another project before something happens with one of these. But whatever I do, I want to keep doing things that have the potential to have a positive impact.
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The experiment, led by psychologist Brock Bastian, asked people to recall a time when they had behaved unacceptably and then rate their current level of guilt as they thought back.
The participants were then asked to do a dexterity task with one hand while either keeping their other hand either in a painful bucket of cold water or in a bucket of lukewarm water.
Participants who wrote about an unethical behavior not only held their hands in ice water longer but also rated the experience as more painful than did participants who wrote about an everyday interaction. Critically, experiencing pain reduced people’s feelings of guilt, and the effect of the painful task on ratings of guilt was greater than the effect of a similar but nonpainful task.
Pain has traditionally been understood as purely physical in nature, but it is more accurate to describe it as the intersection of body, mind, and culture. People give meaning to pain, and we argue that people interpret pain within a judicial model of pain as punishment. Our results suggest that the experience of pain has psychological currency in rebalancing the scales of justice—an interpretation of pain that is analogous to notions of retributive justice. Interpreted in this way, pain has the capacity to resolve guilt.
Link to DOI entry for study.
However, it does have this wonderful section where some of the more whimsical portrayals of ‘lunacy’ are discussed:
In the epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto, “Orlando Furioso” (1532/1992), when the paladin Orlando learns that his lover Angelica is married, he becomes mad and goes through Europe and Africa destroying everything in his path. The English knight Astolfo flies up to moon where all human intellects lost on Earth are collected and finds Orlando’s in a bottle, thus restoring him to sanity (Ariosto, 1532/1992).
In the seventeenth century, the term “lunatic,” especially in its more specific acceptation of “insane” as a result of some mental obsession, began to be substituted by the term “moonstruck.” Reflecting the popular association between the moon and the irrational, primitive, and dark side of the human mind, the adjective “moonstruck” makes its first appearance in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Link to summary and DOI entry for ‘lunacy’ article.
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In his TEDTalk (watch now), Charles Limb reviews his groundbreaking work studying creativity and the brain — by putting musicians inside an fMRI and watching as they improvise. For the past decade, he’s been working with jazz piano players, revealing astonishing new data about the way the brain creates art. And his research has recently branched into a new genre: hip-hop. He spoke to the TED Blog about his new study, and about his day job …
How did you decide to study hip-hop?
It kind of happened very naturally. I’m not somebody who’s listened to a ton of hip-hop; I was much more of a jazz guy, and I listened to a lot of classical music. But I work in Baltimore, grew up around New York and went to medical school in New Haven, and I always did feel that hip-hop is very much a street music, from the people, a grassroots kind of music exactly the same as jazz once as, a kind of iconoclastic music. In some ways, rap has replaced or assumed a lot of the same sociological functions to urban youth. There are a lot of interesting musical parallels between hip-hop and jazz: the rhythmic emphasis, the improvisation, the fact that the musicians are often formally untrained yet they’re incredible. The more I started thinking about jazz and the brain, rap seemed like a natural transition.
There’s never been a scientific study of hip-hop ever. It’s not the kind of topic that I can glean much from other studies or the existing scientific literature.
And I have to tell you, I’ve been having a ton of fun with this study, just experientially. When we were making our beats and our stimuli, trying to design the study, there’s no way to do this study without trying to rap yourself. It really transforms the lab!
Do you see a significant difference in brains between wordless music like jazz and music with words?
Well, I have to be careful, because we’re not done with the study yet. We’re still trying to recruit more rappers …
How are you recruiting rappers for the new study?
I have been slowly infiltrating the Baltimore hip-hop scene. There’s a well-known beatboxer named Shodekeh — he’s performed with the Baltimore Symphony — he and I got to know each other at a symposium at the Visionary Art Museum and we got to talking. I actually told him, “I’m thinking of doing a laryngeal study of beatboxing.” He connected me to one rapper, and just through word-of-mouth, I’ve been getting slowly connected with the scene. I’ve talked now with about 12 professional freestyle rappers, and we’ve studied about half of them.
Given the image Johns Hopkins has as this conservative medical establishment, in an inner city but not of it — the idea that there’s a lab that wants to study hip-hop, I think there’s something appealing to the community.
And I have to tell you how appreciative the musicians are. They really have a vested interest in seeing this research succeed. Because they have thought all along that what they’re doing is important. And they themselves have wondered all along: “Wow, how am I doing this?” They enter an altered state. And what they’re generating off the cuff is just remarkable. They are fascinated by understanding how they do what they do.
Actually, A Class said an interesting thing to me. We were finishing a study, and I asked him in a post-study interview, “Is there any last thing you want to say?” And he turned real serious and he said, “Hip-hop has a bad reputation. Just give us a chance. We’re really good people and we have a lot to say.”
As for other subjects, I would love it if we could get some really well-known freestyle rappers. If Eminem wants to be part of this study, I’d fly him over!
Why do you think your studies have captivated people they way they have?
Previously, there wasn’t a methodology for a study like this. Functional brain imaging is relatively new. When I started my first jazz study, the one in 2003, there was not a single other study I could compare with at the time, there was nothing. It’s one of those topics that will continue to develop.
Although I didn’t get the chance to discuss this during the TEDx talk, functional MRI is only one tool that we can use to study the brain, and like any other method, it has its advantages and disadvantages. By no means do I think that fMRI will reveal everything there is to know about how creativity takes place in the brain, but it is on the other hand a great place to start.
When I did my first jazz study, I really just did it for myself. I just wanted to know. I wasn’t trying to be a scientific innovator, I wasn’t really trying to make a point. It didn’t really matter to me what people thought of the results. So when it was published and the study received a startling amount of attention — I realized that more people wanted to know what I wanted to know. The topic of this research cuts across a wide range of fields, which is unusual for science.
It’s also important to emphasize that the lab and improvisation are not natural bedfellows, and that it’s hard to study music in a way that musicians find comfortable and realistic. In the end, I’m trying to perform modest scientific experiments on a big topic, rather than coax out artistic masterpieces from the researchers, although I’d love to study that one day as well! As a lifelong musician, I’m fully aware of all of the ideas, training, time, effort, and concentration that goes into a genuine creative act, and I try to be very careful and respectful of the arts in the science that I do. I hope this is something that artists will realize, because I think it’s important and difficult. This work is extremely easy to criticize, yet I think that some of the critics may miss this very basic premise on which I’m basing all of my work.
One of the biggest problems is that this type of research is difficult to fund. It’s not the kind of area that a lot of scientists are exploring. By nature, scientists are often less forward-thinking than artists — it’s a conservative field. And in this current funding climate, it’s not going to be easy to get funding to study creativity. It’s not disease-based. And obviously every time you’re funding something, you’re not funding something else. So there’s not a lot of support for this kind of research.
The idea that there is a “crisis in creativity” is in vogue right now, in conversations throughout the country about the failures of education in America. I suspect that what will happen is, a small group of researchers will take on these challenges from a wide range of disciplines. Many of the scientists that study these topics are really part-artist, internally. On one level, I personally care more about music than about science. I view it from the same lens as an artist would. And I think this is why my research may resonate with people. They see some artistic truth in it.
How has this project deepened your own enjoyment of music — or do you go home at night going, I am never going to listen to piano jazz ever again?
No, no, never. It’s funny you should ask, actually — we write our own music in the lab when we do a jazz study, so that the piece is nothing the subjects have heard before, and there are no previous associations. When we’re writing the piece to be memorized, I know that we (in the lab) are going to hear the piece literally hundreds of times. So I tell the lab members that whatever you write, make sure you can listen to it ad nauseam, over and over. And we actually have written some things that are catchy! In fact, I think that one of the jazz musicians played a research melody at one of his gigs. It kind of stuck in his head.
There are people who think art is going to be threatened by this type of analysis, but — no way. There’s so much complexity in music. And when I listen to music, I still listen like a musician. I can get cerebral, take a more analytical approach to music, but the emotional impact or significance of music — my enjoyment of it has in no way changed. In fact, it has grown. Like every subject, you fall in love with it the more deeply you study it.
But the first time I told my wife, I’m going to study jazz using functional brain imaging, she said, “You’re going to do what?” Of all the impractical things that you could do for your career. I trained my whole life to become a surgeon …
Your surgery career has some interesting, kind of poetic crossover with this work.
I’m an auditory surgeon, and I specialize in a surgery called cochlear implantation. I also treat all disorders of the ear, from chronic infections to cancer of the temporal bone. Cochlear implantation is a way to help deaf people hear again, and I study how people who are deaf and receive cochlear implants hear music. The summary is that they hear it really poorly. Pitch perception is horrible, timbre perception is horrible. We’re trying to understand why music perception is so poor and figure out how to make it better.
I’ve been really lucky. I’m studying something I’m fully obsessed with on a personal level. When I go to the lab, I literally cannot imagine anything I’d rather study than music. It’s exactly where I want to be. I’m thinking about the things I would think about on vacation. I know I am extremely lucky. And I don’t take it for granted.
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How do you find a balanced life when you’re overloaded with work?
How do you switch off work when you’re away from the office?
The answers to these very common questions are elusive. It’s never an easy thing. But once you do find this balance you’ll find enormous benefits: more enjoyment of life and better relationships and less stress and a better quality of life overall.
A reader recently asked:
“I’d love to hear advice on how people who work full-time jobs can still manage to attain a well-balanced life. Especially in roles that give you sales targets, monitor you, and can be very stressful. I know it’s best to switch off after working hours, but sometimes (as humans) it is tough.
In Hong Kong, part-time jobs don’t pay well here and are tough to find, and full-time jobs often require overtime and are very stressful (it’s the Hong Kong norm to squeeze out as much as you can from an employee). In this corporate jungle, a part-time would be a perfect job for me (say 9-3 everyday); however it’s very hard to find jobs like that – it’s just not how the job market here is in Asia.
So how does one keep their calm and be grounded and still make time & energy for family, friends, myself, hobbies, interests and let’s face it – sanity? How does one learn to ‘not keep goals’ when that is what is expected from 8:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m. 5 days a week? It’s tough to be 2 different people at work and outside of work.”
That’s a tough one. I should note that in many countries — including the U.S. — this is a common problem even if it’s not as pronounced as in Hong Kong (for example). We all face these problems whether we’re employees or self-employed or free-lancers or own our own businesses.
I’ve created a life where balance is intentionally built-in but it hasn’t always been that way. I’ve worked in the private sector (in the news industry) where they try to squeeze every bit out of employees and we were often asked to work longer hours without compensation. I’ve worked in demanding public service jobs where working into the night and weekend hours (again without more pay) were the norm. It wasn’t easy finding balance.
But don’t despair. Change is possible. These days I have created a life where I work less but on things I love. I make time for staying active and getting outside. I make time for playing with my kids and being alone with my wife. I find time alone for reading and walking and thinking. And as I do these things work isn’t always on my mind.
I have a few key tips that should help no matter what your work situation:
1. Set a time to shut off work. Working all day and night means you are nothing but your job. Your life belongs to your employer (or if you’re the employer then your life belongs to your employees or customers). Take ownership of your life — find variety and ways to burn off stress and find enjoyment in life! Start by setting a time each day when you shut off work. Whether that’s 5 p.m. or 5:30 or 6 or 7 or 9 p.m. Some of you can set it even earlier if you start earlier — say 4 p.m. or something like that. Set that time and make it happen. After that shut-off time you will not do work or check email or think about work.
2. Find something to immerse yourself in after work. What do you love doing besides work? Do you love to read or run or play sports or hang out with friends or play with your kids or build model ships or play games? If you don’t already have a passion then pick something that sounds fun and give it a try. It doesn’t have to be expensive — it could be as simple as hiking around your neighborhood or volunteering at a charity or helping friends with household projects. Schedule it as soon after work as possible. And while you’re doing it try to completely immerse yourself. Don’t think about work — only think about the after-work activity.
3. Learn to be mindful and present. It’s not easy to just switch your mind off work but it’s a skill you can learn over time. The way to learn this isn’t to try to block work from your mind — it’s to learn to bring your mind back to whatever you’re doing after work. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing: it could be household chores or exercise or talking with someone or taking a bath or eating. Whatever it is … that’s all you want to focus on. Your mind will inevitably slip into something else. That’s OK. Bring it back gently and without reprimand. Slowly with practice you will get better at being present. Which means your work won’t always be on your mind.
4. Take breaks at work. Not everyone will have this flexibility but it’s worth doing if you can manage it. Basically if you’re working for 8 or 10 hours you don’t want to do it non-stop. You need to find balance even at work. So at least once an hour get up and walk around. Get outside if you can and take a walk. Stretch and massage your shoulders and get your blood moving. Do some squats or pushups if you want to start getting fit. Talk to someone. Drink water. Eat fruits and vegetables. Your break just needs to be 5-10 minutes but it’s important.
5. Increase your skills while at work — to prepare for leaving work. If you are very skilled at what you do then you become worth more. In fact it’s often possible to quit your job and start your own business if you’re good enough. And it doesn’t take a lot of money to work for yourself — you can start a business with practically no money. I started mine while still working full time: my job funded my startup business. Even if you don’t go into business for yourself you’ll be worth more with a high skill level. So devote your work hours to learning and perfecting your work skills.
6. Find ways to increase your income while decreasing hours. As your skills increase your value increases. Slowly pick jobs or projects that earn more money per hour. This often means changing jobs but it might be a promotion or change in roles. It could mean starting your own business or becoming a consultant. If you already have your own business or work for yourself then you should slowly be picking jobs or business projects that pay more for every hour you spend working on them. By increasing income you can decrease hours and free up more time for yourself.
7. Learn that you are not defined by work. You can be happy without your job. Your value isn’t completely tied to your work. For example: I’m a writer but it’s not the only thing I am. I’m also a father and husband and know that those are my most important roles — not my role as a writer. I am more than that as well: I run and read and learn and help others and am constantly experimenting with life. I can do things other than my job and be fulfilled. So can you. And once you discover this you’ll free yourself to find a life outside of work. Then balance is simply a matter of logistics — you just need to make it happen by taking small steps.
Small steps is always the answer. You don’t need to be perfect at shutting off work or being present or pouring yourself into something after work. You just need to start doing it and in doing so you’ve already started down the road to balance.
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Read more about focus and getting great things done
in Leo’s book, focus.
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In the second part of our conversation with Dr. Deborah Rhodes (read Part One), we talk about the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and her partnership with the Panzi Hospital, which serves victims of sexual violence there. She tells the incredibly disturbing story that got her involved, and discusses what can be done to help American doctors contribute in a lasting way.
I also understand you recently returned from a trip to the Panzi Hospital in the Congo.
Yes, and that visit was also inspired by a patient story. A patient said to me, “Well, of course you know what’s going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” I didn’t. She knew of this hospital that served girls and women that had been raped as a result of this ongoing war, where rape has become one of the primary weapons of war. She described these women making their way, sometimes taking days walking, to try to get to this hospital, this place of refuge, where they could go because they had been raped so badly that they had incontinence as a result. She told me one specific story of a baby that was so haunting that I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
Several days later, a friend approached me and said, “I think you’d really enjoy meeting this woman, who is the UN special assistant for women and children affected by global warfare.” My jaw just dropped. “You’re kidding me.” She came in my office, and I said, “I feel like I’m sitting outside Dachau reading that sign that says ‘never again,’ and here it is, and we’re all looking the other way.”
I thought she was going to say, “We’re the professionals, we’re aware of the situation, we’re handling it, and there’s nothing you can do.” Instead, she said, “The situation in DRC is far worse than you can possibly imagine. I think the best thing you can do is get a group of doctors together and go over there, not only to help, but to bring attention to this problem.”
She helped me to formulate a plan and get the necessary approvals. And we arranged for a nurse-midwife at Mayo, Michelle Dynes, with expertise in global maternal-child health, to go to this hospital in advance of a larger team to assess how we might contribute. And then a nurse practitioner in urogynecology, Lois McGuire, offered to help me enlist a team of specialists to travel to DRC.
These were other doctors at Mayo?
Yes. So it was really quite an extraordinary team. In addition to myself and Lois, we were joined by a surgeon who specializes in urogynecology (Emanuel Trabuco); a surgeon who specializes in gynecologic oncology (Sean Dowdy); an obstetrician (Doug Creedon); and a pediatric infectious disease specialist (Phil Fischer) who had worked in the DRC a few years ago before the war broke out, and who spoke fluent Swahili and French.
We contacted the director of Panzi Hospital, Dr. Denis Mukwege, and asked him to send us a list of equipment that was needed, and we got quite a long list back, and we just set about trying to collect the things on this list. We contacted medical supply companies, and we collected surplus that wasn’t going to be used. Mayo has this wonderful warehouse of surplus materials that they very generously donate to humanitarian projects. I had no idea how I was going to get these over to the DRC, but a staffer at Mayo spent hours and hours of his time on the weekend and the evenings helping me pull this off. He was able to contact FedEx, and they agreed to ship our supplies over without payment.
That’s fantastic.
We were stunned. I think it would have been around $30,000 to ship it ourselves.
During the months of planning, I became friends with Eve Ensler, Eve Ensler, who has been a pioneer in bringing to light the issue in the Congo. She agreed that she would come with us.
She’s a visionary. She is somebody who is so trusted and so revered in that country that we had entrée to things that we never would have without her, but most importantly we had an automatic assumption of trust, because we were with her.
It turned out that the UN ambassador’s wife was there at the same time that we were. So all of us — the extraordinary doctors at this hospital, and the members in our group, and Eve, and Christine Deschryver — we were able to be there at this moment when there was immense synergy and ideas and problem-solving and future planning.
What we were able to accomplish in that time was a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to be done, but we were able to leave with an understanding of what our role can be going forward. We are actively working to continue this relationship that we’ve started with this hospital.
One of the things we witnessed most often over there was women and girls that had been raped who had fistula, or connections between their bladder and their vagina, or their bladder and their intestines. You could surgically repair the hole, as these Congolese doctors did more expertly than probably anyone, but their bladders were so shrunken and scarred from the trauma that they still didn’t have enough bladder capacity to maintain continence. So they were no longer leaking because of the hole, they were leaking because they didn’t have any storage capacity. The urogynecologist who went with us, Emanuel Trabuco, believes that there may be a lasting solution for this in a new material that can serve to expand the bladder. He is now working with the company that makes this material to see if they could supply it to us for this purpose. This might be the answer in restoring continence to this sizable group of girls and women.
The second thing is that this hospital does the most phenomenal work. We would go early in the morning over this treacherous route. The roads would be absolute chaos, filled with huge potholes, washed-out, and people diving and darting in front of the car at every turn, and no traffic lights or traffic signs, so traffic going in every which way direction. Then you’d get to the hospital, which is a beautiful refuge behind gates where women and children who’ve been raped actually can live while they’re waiting for the surgery. Many of them have been there for years because there’s no safe place for them to go. We would enter the gates of this hospital, and there would just be so many patients waiting patiently, quietly, in a line, to get to see one of the doctors there.
At first, I don’t think we quite understood the magnitude of what they were expected to be able to do in a day. It would make any doctor in the United States who’s ever complained about their workload feel ashamed. They did this day in and day out.
How many patients would they see in a day?
First, the physicians would gather for morning rounds to review all of the hospital admissions and to teach the large group of medical students. Then there would be rounds on the hospital ward -– one big room for women filled to capacity with so many beds. I saw mothers so ill they could hardly raise their heads, and their small children would be sitting beside them on the cot, playing quietly with whatever object could be made into a toy. Following rounds, an individual physician would have a clinic where they would see fifty, sixty patients in a clinic. And then you were done when you were done. You were done when the last patient was seen. It didn’t matter what time that was.
The problem is, they’re so busy working at breakneck speed every single day, that they don’t have the time, or the resources, to study the outcomes of what they’re doing. And documenting it is the best way to attract international grants and government grants.
So we realized that probably the best thing we could do, for the long term, is help them analyze and publish some of their outcome data. Our short-term goal is to have some of their doctors come here for research training, so that they can publish the results of the clinical work that they’re so incredibly good at doing.
We are going to commit to this in the long term. If we go and do a few things for a week and come home and then think “we’re done,” then we’ve actually done more harm than good. It’s very clear to me that the bulk of the work has yet to be done. Our team is very committed to continuing this work
I understand the original funding came from an anonymous donor?
Yeah, that was another big piece of the puzzle. When I was speaking with this woman from the UN, I asked if she had any ideas for getting funding for this. And she said that there were some celebrities who had expressed an interest in this issue. One of those was Ben Affleck.
And then I ran into this anonymous person, and I had a stack of materials on my desk, reading everything I could get my hands on about what was going on in the DRC. And he saw it and asked, “How are you going to fund all that?” And I said, “Well, I was going to see if I could write to Ben Affleck.” He just burst out laughing, “You’re sitting there doing all this research and doing all this work, and the best you can come up with is that you’re going to write to Ben Affleck?” And I kind of laughed because I realized it probably was absurd, but honestly that was my plan.
Thankfully, he thought there was a more direct route, and became our anonymous benefactor.
What do you need to be able to continue?
We’re going to need to have some kind of fundraising mechanism. Whether that’s giving talks, or writing grants to foundations to fund some of this work. That will be a very important next step, and those things take so much time.
Do you think there are ways of changing the expectations or the institutions here, in the United States, to make this kind of work easier and more routine for doctors?
Yes. There are some really good organizations already that facilitate American physicians going to countries where they’re in need of medical care. Many of them have a religious orientation, and that can sometimes be a delicate situation. Or some of them require a longer-term commitment, like Doctors Without Borders, which is an organization I greatly admire. I really only had a very limited amount of vacation time, and so I didn’t have a lot to work with, and that’s why I set out to do it without these established organizations. I’m sure there was probably an easier or more efficient way for us to get there, and I’m sure that others could have planned it more expertly than I did, but I just didn’t see any good alternative at the time.
Could this trip and the follow-ups could be a template, or even the beginning of an organization, for other doctors to make shorter-term commitments?
That would be great. But what I have learned is that — having a face-to-face visit initially is critically important, because that’s how we established relationships. That’s how we understood their needs in their own words, and got a better sense of how we could fit into that need — but what’s even more important is following through on many of the things that can be done well at a distance.
So the point is that transporting doctors to a remote part of the world is a very expensive undertaking, and that money is sometimes better spent — once you understand the topography — on activities that don’t require a lot of this travel.
On this latest trip you left a large amount of equipment.
Right, and some of it was new surgical equipment, and so a big focus was on ensuring that the Panzi team was comfortable with the new equipment. There’s an enormous need for newer, less invasive surgical equipment and for imaging. And we’re actively talking with some surgical supply companies to see if they would be willing to become our partners in this.
It sounds like a lot of the success was from various companies who were willing to donate equipment and effort.
It was, without a doubt. It was extraordinary generosity. In approaching people for help, I tried not to tell the story in any kind of sensationalist way, because the stories are horrible; they’re just horrible. You don’t want to get into a situation where the focus becomes the stories and not the solution. But even when I would just explain generically what I was hoping to do, I couldn’t get over how much it resonated with people. Every single person said, “I’ll help” and then did. There are certain things in human nature and human civilization that are simply intolerable. This is one of them. If you can get good people to be aware of what’s going on, you can turn the tide; you can be the tipping point, even when you don’t have any power. People will collectively contribute their time and their good ideas to help you. And that’s what we found. It was just astonishing.
The other thing that I would say is that I was not an activist. I was almost a pacifist because I was so busy with my existing work responsibilities that I just didn’t think that I could do anything more than I was doing. Certainly I would become moved by stories, or wish that I could do something when horrible things would happen, but it didn’t spur me to action like this did. I don’t know why I reacted in the way that I did; I almost felt like I couldn’t turn away — although I didn’t think I had time and I didn’t think I could really do it, it was as if I didn’t have a choice. So, what I would say is, just be open to the possibility that you will find your inner activist, and then just put one foot in front of the other and ask for help. That’s all that I did. I just tried to do one thing, and then the next day do one thing, and soon it truly did take on a momentum all its own.
Of course, now that I’ve been there and met these women and these girls, I’m in it for life.
– Interview by Ben Lillie
