At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi everyone! My name is Tony Zhou, and I am a Longitude Fellow from the University of British Columbia. Today, I have the pleasure of presenting this sound byte by Russell Sheppard. Russell is a lawyer and owner of Spruce Notary & Legal, and has enjoyed a successful career throughout Canada in education, administration, and coaching lacrosse. He will be sharing experiences from his first-job-after-college as a teacher in Kugluktuk, Nunavut, where he initiated and coached a lacrosse team that infused optimism and hope in the community. His story was recently adapted into the 2018 film The Grizzlies, which is available on Netflix.

When I got to University of Saskatchewan to do a teaching degree, I was introduced to a sessional lecturer named Al Lucic, who’s, you know, a pioneer of lacrosse in Western Canada, I would say. Al’s passion for the game was totally infectious. I loved coaching. And once I picked up a stick and went out with Al, and you know, he kind of got our skills going, I realized that I just love the game of lacrosse. So I started to coach in Saskatchewan while I was in the university, and then shortly after that, I got my first major teaching job up in the Arctic Circle.

I had an interview, obviously over the phone, and then a job offer came in. I was a social studies teacher. And one of the things I realized very quickly was I knew nothing about this area of my own country. Little bit of shame on me for not knowing that. But I had been brought up in a home that was very open and welcoming and multicultural and it really intrigued me, this opportunity to go to our north to work with students that I knew nothing about, in a culture I knew nothing about. And just to try that adventure out. And so in 1998, I jumped on the plane, and in August, and with shorts on in plus-20 degrees in Saskatoon and landed in you know, minus four and snow in in Kugluktuk, Nunavut. I was 23. I was gonna go for a year and see how it went, and one became seven.

I’ll never forget flying in because I just remember the vast tundra – no trees, lakes, and rock, but how beautiful it was. It was absolutely stunning flying in there. When I landed, I had a great support network with some of the teachers that were there, and the phrase I was told right away was that, “These are great kids, just some of them aren’t great students.” And that phrase really sticks with me today, you know, the students in general and Inuit people, you know, where I call home now in Kugluktuk, were very welcoming, and very family oriented. And very supportive of people coming into their community and working with them. Now, that doesn’t happen overnight, you have to take some time and put some time in and actually care. But once you’ve earned that opportunity, it’s an unbelievable experience. And like I said, it’s why I still call that area of Canada home to me.

I didn’t introduce lacrosse right away outside of physical education. We had a very difficult second year, with suicides in the community. It was very defeating in many ways. It was a very hard year, but wasn’t horrible. The resolve in the students was and Inuit people and community members going through these difficult times was unbelievable to watch. It was unbelievable to see how they were able to deal with death, and sudden death. And to see that inner strength, it was really inspiring in some ways, which is why I think I made the decision to come back. I came back and that summer, introduced lacrosse. The decision was to come back and actually change what was happening in our school. Well, why don’t we create an environment where students want to come to the school? Why don’t we turn the culture of the school to be something that is inclusive, but also exclusive, and exclusive being for people who wanted to be there. It was the cool thing to do. And so we came back that fall in October, and the Kugluktuk Grizzlies was born. The one thing I love about the movie is how they flipped me into the student. I think at the end of year two, I realized I was the student on this ride, and I’m going to see it out and see what I learn.

[The sound byte of Mr. Sheppard is a clip from his interview with the Canadian Lacrosse Foundation on the Lacrosse Legends show and featured with his permission.]

Tony Zhou, Longitude fellow, University of British Columbia:

At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m a Longitude fellow, Berk Alp Yakici from Rice University, and today, I will be presenting a sound byte from Jim Whitehurst, the president of IBM. He will be speaking about open source and collaboration.

Hi, I’m Jim Whitehurst, president of IBM. I wrote pages of a set of interrelated problems, from climate change, to shrinking environmental ecologies driven by pollution and climate, to global poverty. But I’m also optimistic that the 7 billion people we have, and that many minds working together, can solve these problems in the 21st century. But that also requires that we find ways that we can work together. And that’s where open source comes in. Open source is a way for people to come together to work together to create single solutions.

A lot of people think of open source as crowdsourcing, getting millions of people together, and each throws out an idea one of those ideas is likely to be good. But open source is deeper than that. It’s not about getting a million people to throw ideas up and hoping one’s good. It’s about millions of people working together, to fuse ideas, to take three really good ideas to make great ideas, and taking 10 great ideas to make extraordinary leaps forward. And so as we think about how we solve these problems, it can’t be any individual company or country or institution on their own. It’s going to require us all working together, and the power of the model of open source is about how we can work together, how the best ideas win, how ideas fuse together; these are going to be a part of that solution. So I’m pleased that IBM and Red Hat have been a key part of open source and will continue our leadership, and we look forward to working with institutions around the world as we look to solve these problems.

[To hear more of Jim’s views on culture and open leadership subscribe to his newsletter, “An Open Conversation with Jim”]

Berk Alp Yakici, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I am Karen Martinez Perez, Longitude fellow from Rice University, and today I will be presenting a sound byte by Rosey Edeh, a three-time Olympian and CTV Morning Live Anchor in Canada. She will be speaking to us about optimism, and how her competitive spirit has helped shaped this mindset for her, on and off the track.

I grew up in a household with my immigrant parents working hard. And then it was just my mom. So then it was eventually a single parent home. And she was working real hard. But as a kid, my mom always said, “You guys, just after school, you’ve got to find something to do. I don’t need you in the house just hanging around. So just find some after school activity.” I immediately gravitated to track. Because with track, you don’t really try out, you know what I mean, you just kind of show up. And if you keep showing up and just manage to get through the training, you will find some event. They’ll put you in something. Really, track is for everybody.

So I started running track in high school. I mean, even before that, we had this thing in Canada where they do this physical fitness activity over the span of like a few months. And if you reach all the goals, there’s like a 50-meter dash. If you run it between this time, and then if you do a number of push ups and sit ups, and so on and so forth, they keep score. And then at the end of this whole program, if you score in like the gold, then you get this badge and it’s like an Award of Excellence. Of course, I aimed for Award of Excellence, not gold, silver, bronze, but like above that. So that’s how I started off with sport and athletics, getting that award every year. And I excelled at it.

For me, whatever the race is, I have this burning desire to compete. Like I think, “That’s the most important thing.” When you find, you know, high performance athletes, it’s like that drive to be competitive, to compete, to be out there on the field to lay it all out there. It’s not really something I can tell you, “This is how I learned how to be competitive.” You know, for as long as I can remember, I was just competitive.

Growing up in this competitive world of sport, going into university, and having to perform, was just nothing new to me, that kind of pressure. It’s there. You know it’s there. Sometimes it gets a bit uncomfortable because you’ve got like a couple of assignments due plus you have regionals. But again, it’s almost like you’re just being groomed for it as you grow up in that world of sport and competition, and winning and losing. It’s not like I won every race either, right? It was just competition. It wasn’t as if I was head and shoulders above everybody else. But every track meet was game day. It’s like “Let’s go. Let’s make this happen.” It’s exciting. I couldn’t imagine going through life without those kinds of butterflies that you get before a competition. It’s just me, that’s a part of who I am. That consistent kind of pressure that I felt to perform and to compete shaped me into the individual that I am now. So when I am on live television, I take moments of challenge, and it’s not an, “Oh, no, this is terrible moment.” It’s an, “Oh, yeah. Okay, time to go into this mode,” which is to save the show, which is, you know, comes from the competitive side in me, that Olympic side where it’s, you put in all the work. You know you have what you need to compete and to compete well because you put in the work, so there’s no need to panic. It’s just, go out there and compete. Go out there and race. That’s it.

Karen Martinez Perez, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I am Theodore Vadot, Longitude fellow from Rice University, and today I will be presenting a sound byte by Marc Sabbagh, the Chief of Staff for Safety & Citizen Services at Accenture Federal Services, and he will be speaking to us about risk-taking and using art as a creative outlet.

I like doing creative things, writing, reading, you know, creating new ideas and stuff. So a few years ago, I was like, “Let me just try painting.” And then, I felt abstract art was like the lowest risk. So I started taking a class. And my first paintings were really terrible, I’m pretty sure. Looking back, part of me that I see at work too, is that I like too. I like challenges like that. So I kept at it.

My teacher is very open to guiding and giving advice, and so he’s helped me over the past three years sort of advance and develop a sense of personal style. And I would say, initially, it was an outlet, you know. Day to day, you’re on a project, you’re doing work, maybe looking at Excel, or dealing with people, project management type stuff. I wanted something that was a little different side of my brain to do. So it was a nice release for that. And, you know, I think about some other types of painting that are representational, and it’s still uses your mind a lot, whereas abstract painting can be more expressive and, and creative. So it was an outlet.

As I’ve grown, I’ve realized I do a lot of presentations, and slides, and deliverables. Now thinking back, there’s some creative aspect to that, where you put things on a slide and see how the eye moves, you know, around a presentation or a deliverable. There’s that aspect to some of the work I do. But I think one of the biggest and most interesting things that my teacher has talked about that impacted my work is around risk taking. The way he frames it in abstract art, it’s a series of risks, because you’re dealing with a blank canvas, you’re starting to maybe not know where you’re going and being uncomfortable a little bit, and initially just playing, and then you start thinking and contemplating your work, and then you resolve it. But in that time, there’s a lot of back and forth. And there’s risk involved with, like, what if I just do this and totally change it, and then you adapt. And so I’ve taken that back to work because it to me, it’s making decisions, like that’s the same thing, when you’re making a decision. Sometimes there’s risk involved. But being fearless and taking that risk, I’ve seen that, in art, you know, it’s just a canvas, you cover it up, you go back, you navigate, but it’s important to make a decision and take a risk. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be stuck. So I’ve been really applying that mindset at work, and just saying, you know, “If I do this, it’s not the end of the world,” because I pivot, and then, you know, I take that decision with the good and bad, and work with what I’ve got, and, adapt and say, “This has helped actually lead to a better outcome, and resolution.”

When we’re looking at art, we sometimes see that we mostly see the end result. And we don’t know all the work that that was in in progress to get to that final product. And that happens at work, too. So I’ve been really taking that sort of mindset back at work and encouraging people as well. To take risks and not see it as a “Be all, end all,” thing. Like, if they change a project, it’s fine. If you want to learn a new technology, do it. And maybe it won’t work, but maybe it will lead to your best role and career yet.

Theodore Vadot, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I am Longitude fellow Jesse Annan van der Meulen from Rice University, and today I’ll be presenting a sound byte by Audra Herrera Hansen, co-founder and CEO at Gradspyre. She’ll be speaking to us about setting your own course, and following your inner desire.

I sometimes think about the summer before 6th grade with my friend Gladys. Gladys’s family lived in the bottom half of a duplex just a few minutes away from my parents’ place, and we would spend time in their backyard, which was situated on a hill. We would follow each other around the backyard, as if hiking on a narrow trail, while we circled around trees and jumped from rock to rock. We would pass the time by just talking about anything that came to mind: music, movies, our families. One time, I told her I wanted to go to Harvard Law School. Even now, I am not quite sure why I said Harvard specifically. I had probably learned of it on TV and thought if it’s a good place to go then that’s where I should aim to go.

“You can’t do that,” she said. A natural resistance bubbled in my stomach and rose up my throat, but before I responded, she added, “We don’t know anyone who has done that.” I let out a breath. She was partly right; we didn’t know anyone outside of our teachers that graduated from college, not to mention Harvard Law School. But after some thought, I did not feel deterred, only concerned that Gladys might have been holding herself back from her own dreams.

I wish I could say that I was always confident that I was going to meet my goal, but I wasn’t. Looking back, it was not so much about reaching a specific goal, but about feeling inspired and feeling like I had a purpose I was willing to work hard for.

I am grateful to say that I did get into Harvard Law School. The day I was sworn into the Texas bar, I could see how proud my dad was, and I will never forget the joy I felt from that. I joined a Houston law firm and worked there for a few years, but eventually, I felt an inner desire to branch out and do something completely new to me: start my own business. It was mentally hard to do this during COVID, when everywhere I looked there seemed to be scarcity and uncertainty, but a couple months ago, I decided to take the leap. Currently, I am creating my own student loan tracking app, Gradspyre, which is basically the tool that I wish I had when I was paying down my student loans from undergrad and law school.

Although I am loving the ability to set my own course as an entrepreneur, it has been a very challenging experience learning the world of mobile app development, graphic design, social media, marketing, business, and more. For this reason, I have to make sure that I take care of myself. It is a lot easier to have the energy and mental clarity to work towards my goals when I have had proper sleep. I am regularly exercising, and I make time for calls with family and friends. I also regularly think back to the times that I have overcome obstacles, and how a seeming failure led to something wonderful and unpredictable. I do not know what my life will look like in five or 10 years, but I feel confident that I have something to contribute to the world, and I will be able to handle whatever the future holds.

Jesse Annan van der Meulen, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

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I am Quint Smits, Longitude fellow from Tilburg University, and today I will be presenting a sound byte by Jon Kimura Parker, a Canadian pianist and professor at the Rice University Shepherd School of Music, and he will be speaking to us about one of the biggest turning points in his life. It’s quite a wholesome story; have a listen.

In 1995, I was still living in New York. That was a sort of time when I was out of school, performing a lot, travelling the world a lot. There was a war in Bosnia, and there was a peace accord in Dayton, Ohio. It was called the Dayton Peace Treaty. It was signed in early mid-December of 1995. So that’s part of the backstory.

There was a man that I had met once, he was on the board of an orchestra that I played with somewhere, and I’d talked to him at a reception, and I barely knew the guy. He was the vice president of an American relief organization based in Connecticut called Americares. He called me up a couple of days before Christmas and he reintroduced himself and told me about the company. He said they had gone into Bosnia 35 times during the war, delivering food, medicine, and clothing. Now that the peace treaty had been signed, the Sarajevo Philharmonic, an orchestra that had disbanded for a couple of years because of the war, had announced they were going to play a New Year’s eve concert to celebrate the new peace. And Americares was doing an airlift over New Year’s Eve, and so they apparently contacted the orchestra and said, “We would like to bring in, as a symbolic gesture, a soloist for your concert.” And he said to me, then, he says, “And we think you’d be the perfect guy.”

I was 35 years old, I was single, and I didn’t have any particular reason to say no, except it sounded vaguely terrifying, but he said “We’re good at being safe.” So, I agreed. I mean, I thought about it for two days, and I agreed. So, a couple of days after Christmas, we flew over and it was exciting for me because I’m not a daredevil person at all, with C-130 military transport planes and all this stuff. We arrived in Sarajevo. We were taken to the hotel, and everything was chaotic. We had a rehearsal, and I played a Beethoven Emperor Piano Concerto with the Sarajevo Philharmonic on New Year’s Eve. CNN was there. I mean there was tons of media. I met all these media people at a media party. Anyway, we played the concert and this very elderly lady, Bosnian woman, came backstage afterwards, and she was looking for me. She didn’t speak any English, so she found our translator, and the official translator came over with this lady and said, “She wants to tell you something.” And I said, “What?” And this lady said, “During the slow movement of the concerto,” (And this is a very, very beautiful nocturne like slow movement, incredibly atmospheric and contemplative in a special sort of way. It was one of Beethoven’s most beautiful moments) and she said that during that movement, she realized that a couple of minutes had gone by and she had actually realized that she had not been thinking about the war, like it had actually gone out of her head. And she just wanted me to know, and she said just, “Thank you,” and that was it. And I was just sort of stunned, and it took me literally a couple of days to process that, but I thought that really is why I would want to be a musician. It’s not that I would want to be technically the best player there ever was. I mean, I always want to improve myself, I always want to aspire to that high standard, but that isn’t at the end of the day why anybody should be a musician. You should be a musician because it affects people very directly. People have emotional responses to music that they don’t actually always understand. And that was a turning point, because at that point I was going through a state of, you know, kind of analysis and self-criticism and like, “Am I really good enough to be doing this?” and all that. And it just didn’t seem relevant anymore. It just didn’t matter. I thought, “That’s not the point.” If I’m so lucky that I have a chance to play a concert and people are actually going to have a response like that, then obviously that’s a special circumstance, but that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing, and that became a very big turning point, without question.

Quint Smits, Longitude fellow, Tilburg University:

At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I am Callum Parks, Longitude fellow from Rice University, and today I will be presenting a sound byte by Jim Jubelirer, the Owner of Jubelirer Results Group, and he will be speaking to us about progress and its rate of exponential growth.

My name is Jim Jubelirer. I’m the owner of Jubelirer Results Group based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I have a workshop entitled Exponential Mindset and why now is the best time in human history to be alive. Wait, now’s the best time in human history to be alive? Look at all the news. Look how bad things are. Look how many people are struggling? Yes, the pandemic has been hard. And in no way do I mean to minimize that. But when you look at the facts and the data across the world about the rate of progress in human history, you see that the long arc of human history bends towards progress, and people do want to have a better life. Let’s look at the last major pandemic that people talk about the Spanish Flu of 1918. It killed the equivalent of 60,000,000. 60 million people worldwide. Far, far more deadly than the current coronavirus. What’s happened in the 100 years since that pandemic? Around the world, income has tripled, and human longevity has doubled. People are living twice as long. Right now, the race to find vaccines and get everyone vaccinated is the single largest public health project in human history by many orders of magnitude. So yes, there are inequalities. Yes, there are risks, but at the same time, we become blind to all the progress that’s happening, simply because we don’t see it. Why is that? In part, it’s because our minds are hardwired to be on the lookout for threats from the environment. It’s how we’ve survived as a species. That’s called the negativity bias, and news, entertainment and politics take advantage of the negativity bias to capture our time, our attention, our money, and our votes. If it bleeds, it leads. Did you know that violence is at an all time low, human to human, inter-country civil war, between country war, state sanctioned war, terrorism, etc, are at an all-time low. But you wouldn’t know that because every night there are stories about violence and mayhem. So over time, we get a distorted picture of the progress that’s happening.

Progress itself is growing at an exponential rate. There’s something called Moore’s Law, which was developed by the inventor of the semiconductor chip, that states that computer power doubles every 18 months. And that’s been true for 50 years. And when you apply Moore’s Law to things like solar energy, a solar energy is basically just a computer chip, it’s a silicone chip. It’s also doubling every 18 months. So if you go out 10 years from now, the ability to produce electricity from the sun is going to be virtually free. Entire new industries are going to exist that we don’t even have today. So I do say now is the best time in human history to be alive. One million people a day are getting access to the internet for the very first time, all over the world, but particularly in developed countries. And when people join the online world, they escape poverty, they escape repression, they get educated, they become literate, they lift their standards up. More people have left crushing poverty this century in the past 20 years than in the whole of humanity up till this century. So exponential progress is increasing at an exponential rate.

Callum Parks, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

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My name is Shvetali Thatte, a Longitude fellow from Case Western Reserve University, and today I will be presenting a sound byte by Michael Milona, an assistant professor of philosophy at Ryerson University. Today, he’ll be talking to us about hope and optimism, the difference between the two, and how they’re important to our lives.

Hi, everyone. My name is Michael Molina. I’m an assistant professor of philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario. Here, I’d like to talk about hope and optimism. I’ll say a bit about what they are, and how there are important differences between the two.

The major theme in my own research is that it often makes sense to hope even when you can’t be optimistic. It can even make sense to be a pessimistic hoper. Now, questions of hope and optimism tend to arise in difficult circumstances. For example, many of us have had to confront daunting medical diagnoses, either our own or that of a loved one. In my own case, from early in life, I watched a loved one struggle with an ongoing illness. The illness was multiple sclerosis, or MS. And despite the suffering brought by this disease, they always managed to avoid the temptation to despair, and something like hope and/or optimism, sustained them. To offer a more global example, humanity currently faces the rising threat of climate change. The odds of avoiding disaster seem bleaker as time passes. And as some climate activists argue, fear and panic can sometimes seem preferable to hope and optimism. But a crucial point to notice is that hope and optimism aren’t the same thing.

A person who’s optimistic expects things to go well. For example, if you’ve got an upcoming exam, and you predict to make an A on it, even if you’re not absolutely certain, then you’re optimistic. But maybe you don’t expect you’ll make an A. Perhaps you fell asleep before you’re able to finish reviewing all your notes. But you’re a clever student and you think somehow you got an A. You’re not optimistic at this point. But you’re nevertheless still holding on to hope. So hoping for something only requires desiring that thing because you believe it’s at least possible.

Now, the empirical research suggests that being high in optimism has numerous advantages. For example, optimism has benefits for physical health, emotional wellbeing, and relationships. The trouble is that whether one is optimistic can depend heavily on factors over which one has little control. If the odds that things will go well are low, then optimism can be difficult to cultivate or sustained, at least while avoiding irrationality about what the odds really are. By contrast, the possibility of rationally holding on to hope can be present even in the face of incredibly low odds. For example, even if the chances of averting a given disaster are, you know, say 2%, it might make sense to continue hoping. This could be especially true if there are still actions one could perform that make the disaster less likely. So even if some people can continue to move forward without hope, others who give up hope may risk falling into a state of hopelessness or despair. And despair not only feels bad, but it can deflate our motivation to act at all. So if we want to hold on to hope, how might we do that? I’ll close with a handful of tips.

First, be as flexible as you can when you’re hoping. So a highly specific hope to become, say, a Harvard professor is difficult to fulfill, one which is likely to be dashed. But prioritizing a more open ended hope to find a career educating minds can be fulfilled in a number of different ways. It’s easier to sustain.

Second, gain conceptual clarity. Recognize that a hope can coexist with lots of negative feelings.  Hope and fear, for example, tend to go together. When we fear something, we hope that what we’re afraid of doesn’t happen. And when we hope for something, we fear that what we hope for doesn’t happen. Hope is always energizing, but it isn’t always something that is cheerful.

Third, take action, whether that means planning, or doing. Hope itself can cause us to act, but you can also try to fake it until you make it. Small steps can be what kindles a more lasting hope.

Last but not least, look to the past. History is full of unexpected twists and turns, some for the worse, and some for the better. On a positive side, we might point to the fall of the Berlin wall or the Nelson Mandela story. Hope is comfortable in that space of uncertainty. These tips hardly guarantee that you’ll hold on to hope but there are strategies available to those who seek to maintain it perhaps even hoping against hope.

Shvetali Thatte, Longitude fellow, Case Western Reserve University: