Mick Ebeling is a renowned social change maker and CEO of Not Impossible Labs — a multiple award-winning social innovation lab and production company, founded on the premise that nothing is impossible. Mick's story starts from the Hollywood hills, where his commercial film production company developed animation and visual effects for many blockbuster films, including 'Stranger Than Fiction,' 'Kite Runner' and James Bond's 'Quantum of Solace.' But it wasn't these films that brought international acclaim to Mick's contribution to humanity; it was his work with Tony, and later, with Daniel Omar.
Mick Ebeling was a successful entrepreneur in the American film industry when he first learned of Tony 'TEMPT' Quan. Tony was a legendary graffiti artist in Los Angeles who was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) that left him 'entirely paralyzed but with his mind completely intact, confined to his bed and only able to move his eyes.' To help Tony, Mick organized a group of hackers, engineers and artists to invent the world's first low-cost eye-tracking device that enables individuals with paralysis to communicate and create art using only the movement of their eyes. TIME magazine called it one of the "50 Best Inventions of 2010," and the device is now part of the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Mick Ebeling has since sparked a movement of pragmatic, inspirational innovation, harvesting the power of technology and story to change the world. He has been named one of the Top 50 World's Greatest Leaders by Fortune Magazine, received the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian of the Year Award, and listed as one of the World's Most Influential Creative People by The Creativity 50's.
Thank you for your work and thank you both for this wonderful discussion. Walking into my afternoon with inspiration.Elaine Stark
Mick, your humility and perseverance is inspiring. Thank you Hitendra and Mick for the gift of this conversation todayEsha Bawa
Magnificent Intersections episode. Blessed to have attended. Gave us a very important business direction!Subhasis Banerji
In this episode of Intersections, Prof. Hitendra Wadhwa has a conversation with Mick Ebeling on the topic “How to Achieve the Impossible — and Make the World Happier”.
What gets some people to dream big, and then to translate their dream into reality? How can technology accelerate our pursuit of the impossible in today's time of transformation? What limits some of us from pursuing goals very dear to our hearts that others may consider impossible? When the odds are overwhelming and our skills are limited, what kind of superpowers can we tap into to turn imposing challenges into miraculous, life-changing stories?
The episode "How to Achieve the Impossible — and Make the World Happier" offers key insights on:
Greetings and a warm welcome back to Intersections, where our aspiration is to dissolve the boundaries between life and leadership, between inner and outer, between science and spirituality, between east and west, between profit and purpose, between materialism and mysticism. Because it is when we dissolve those boundaries that we just never know what emerges as new possibilities, and what a wonderful opportunity we have today not just to dissolve those boundaries, but break and shatter many of those boundaries with the guest that we have for our show today.
And so let us now welcome into our midst, Mick. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you so much.
It is such a thrill.
That was pretty amazing the way the scientific community came together to bring some vaccines in record time, wasn't it? That's kind of an example of your impossible being made possible.
It is. It shows the power of what happens when people are unified around a common purpose and common goal.
I love the theme of people being unified at a time like this when there are so many otherwise divides, where even within families, people are at times not in a position to talk to each other because of certain social or political differences. And your work is just so uplifting because I can't imagine a single person on either side of the aisle not being drawn to invest in causes like this.
I love that you're leading with politics on this because I find politics, I find racism, I find so many of these things just ridiculous. We can spend so much time focusing on things that are just meaningless. Does it matter that you don't look like me? Does it matter that you think one way and I think another? I believe the quest that we have on this planet is to regain the appreciation of one another as human beings, and the problem is that we all grow older. We have things that happen to us, and they start to mean something, and we get influenced by outside sources. And I think it goes back to that innocence we had as a child. And I think our entire life, we're meant to try to recapture that innocence in that belief and that optimism.
I find that beautiful. I'm often striving to win in the MBA and corporate worlds to infuse the possibilities of love being the energy that we can all embrace in an unconditional, universal kind of way, but I'm just teaching. And you're doing it. You're living it. So I love you. Do you think if you watch movies, do you laugh and sometimes cry when bad things happen? And what does this show about the human condition, the ability to connect?
What's funny is that it's pre-March 2020. I used to travel all the time, going out and talking about the work I did. And I was fascinated that I would cry like a baby on planes watching movies, and sometimes the movies were not credible. It'd be one thing if it were a real tear-jerker. But I would think, why am I doing this? And I enjoyed it. And I mean, I did a little bit of research. There are many psychological theses when you're enclosed in a capsule, and you're very vulnerable. Your life and the power that you have over your life has been put in the hands of somebody else, and you're sitting next to people. That elicits a more emotional response, which explained a lot to me because I'm crying like a baby.
I also wondered if what happens is that we get very focused on that person's story. We pay attention, which we often don't do in daily life. And we do it without judgment. There's standing in judgment of your character or who you are. You want to hear the amazing story.
We can all improve on the art of listening. It's so hard for us to quiet our voices. I think it's our knee-jerk response as humans to want to relate it to us constantly. I believe we are loving and inquisitive creatures, but we're also insecure and somewhat selfish creatures trying to figure out how this relates to us. And I think that one of our journeys in life is to figure out how we think to deflect that to learn from other people.
Thank you. I mean, in addition to all the beautiful things you're doing, this capacity to be able to step back from that doing and analyze the instincts and the habits of thought and speech and action that make you who you are and then be able to teach those, I think is a wonderful gift. But that's something we value in this Intersections community. And you've just given us something very learnable here, this idea.
I just want to make sure I said that I'm not necessarily good at that. It's easy for me to say and have a conversation with you about that. But to actually execute, that does it. Do what I say, not always what I do.
I appreciate that. It reminds me of a moment when Oprah Winfrey once asked Nelson Mandela, how do you feel about the fact that people consider you're this amazingly larger than life figure with all the noble things you've done. And he said I'm not a saint unless you think of a saint as a sinner who never gives up.
I love that. That's great.
So I see that humility in what you just shared with us as well. You spoke about listening. I want to come back and talk about that theme with you when you share the story of you and Daniel. Let's come back to that because I think that would be a beautiful story to share. Before we get there, just one quick sort of like maybe thing that I'm very curious about that I don't know actually about your life story, which is that you were excelling at your exams. You were living the good life in a fairly glamorous industry of Hollywood, producing incredible animation and visual effects and design work and getting one company to be very successful and starting another one. What got you to make that pivot and pull away from the limelight to go in a different direction?
Well, I truly believe that life is a serendipitous and accidental journey. You have to embrace that path and expect those right turns and those surprises that come up and then react appropriately. And as you said, I had a successful production company, and things were going great. We were at the top of our game. Offices all over the world, working with just incredibly brilliant, creative people. And then an accident happened. A friend of mine hijacked a date night that my wife and I were going to go on and took us to a gallery event, exposing us to this artist who had ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. And that led to the creation of a very intricate and interesting journey that led us to create a device that would allow him to communicate and specifically draw, again, using only his eyes. I can't tell you how many roadblocks we ran into along the way. I can't tell you how unqualified we were to create that. There's no reason we were supposed to pull that off, but because there was something about my connection with this artist named Tony. It overcame any of the reasons it shouldn't be done. We created this thing.
We created this thing that shouldn't have been done. And it worked. And he was able to draw again. And then we went home after this wonderful night where everybody saw this thing, and it worked. And then we woke up. We always joke that we woke up the next day, and it was Time magazine's top 50 inventions of the year. And there was such momentum behind it that we just looked around. And what the heck is happening right now? There was an uncontrollable momentum that we had no role in fostering and causing. And the realization that we could use technology for the sake of humanity, capturing this technology and turning it into something that accomplishes and achieves and overcomes that absurdity, that basically, that's the premise of Not Impossible and that that was the origin story of how Not Impossible got started.
Well, that's something so instructive about what you just said. We're all looking for a purpose. We're all looking at trying to figure out what we want to be when we grow up. I had been on that quest for a while until I finally found it for myself, too, with the blessing of a higher power about ten years ago. But what I see in your story is how it can be sparked unexpectedly, just in a certain random moment that you had no idea was coming your way. And also, when it gets sparked, maybe all you want to do is take that first step, which is what you did. And you just never know what will lead you, what doorways of insight are going to open with the outside because it doesn't look like you had this big grand top-down vision. It's just that you did something which led to something. And then ultimately, gradually, it seems like the vision, but Not Impossible Labs, have emerged at the right time. And now perhaps you can look back and feel like its sounds are also organized and well thought through. But it was an evolution, is that right?
One of my favorite scenes says if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. And I'm still grappling with how to articulate this, so forgive me if I kind of step on myself a little bit, but I truly believe in setting goals. I truly believe in having aspirations. I truly believe in working towards accomplishing those goals. But I also truly believe in knowing that sometimes it's not going to happen the way you think it will happen. And embracing that spontaneity and embracing the right turn or the roadblock is a good thing. And it's more about the pursuit and the persistence towards the outcome that you think is the right particular pathway or journey. How do you grapple with that concept of the fact that we are emotional, responsive, reactionary creatures? How do you craft that in a way that still accomplished great things in this brief time that you're here on the planet?
I mean, there is something in the spiritual traditions of the world. I mean, I come from India, and there one of the beloved scriptures is the Geeta and one of the messages of the Geeta, which I think is quite consistent with what I've heard from theologians and other faiths as well, is this notion of nonattachment to the outcome means that you sow the seeds. You do your best to tune in and do what you think is right based on whatever that inner voice is telling you and the guidance you're getting. But then you don't have rights to the fruits of your labor, and that's something which will emerge at the appropriate time, the right way. And you have to operate with a sense of almost liberation from that attachment to how much I've been able to achieve today or tomorrow. I see a little bit of that in what you've said, that you do your goal setting, but then you have to be able to just sort of like go with the flow. Is that right? And just see things emerge and then adapt to them as they're coming.
I think that one thing that drives us here is this concept of egoless innovation. And I think that on our journey as humans, we're collaborating. Whether we like it or not, we're collaborating all the time. Just by going to the coffee shop and grabbing a coffee, we're collaborating with that person to get a coffee. When you realize that, how you react, I think, is equally as important as the intention of why you're doing something. It puts us in a pretty amazing position of power. And it's why, quite frankly, I think it's why I love the fact that life, too, not impossible was one of us as a producer.
Our job as a producer is just to react and solve. So that was a muscle that I got to work out a lot prior. And quite frankly, was the reason why I think Not Impossible is what it is today that that's kind of baked into our culture as to how do you react in the most intentional and powerful and purpose-driven way that also allows for spontaneity, because that's, I think, where a lot of beauty in life lies.
Wonderful. You have so many lessons and stories. And we've been focusing more on the lessons. But let's get to a couple of the stories because I know they will be so enriching for our audience as well. Can you talk about sort of what happened after the Tony moment? You took on this beautiful cause. You had an incredible breakthrough. It got great recognition out there. You started to see this as something more enduring than just that one beautiful first act. And then you met Daniel.
So I was out to dinner when we had decided to start Not Impossible Labs. And that was a result of an email. I was thinking about it and sleeping on it, and meditating and praying about whether or not I should use this discovery of using technology to help people and solve absurdities. And I made the decision, no, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to stick with my day job. I'm going to stick with my company. And things were going great. And almost the moment I made that decision, I got an email from the artist, and the artist said that was the first time he drew anything. For seven years, I feel like I've been held underwater, and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so I could take a breath. And that was this moment of like, well, it looks like I don't have a choice anymore. How do you say no after you get an email like that? So that was the start of Not Impossible Labs. And then that began this exploration of what is not possible. How do we make it sustainable? Because I don't believe in this concept that doing good is relegated to a tax code.
People think, oh, I'm going to do good. I need to start a non-profit. I'm going to work for a big charity. I believe that we need to take this concept of doing good for the world into everything we do. And so that was one of the things that I set out to do with Not Impossible Labs. And in this exploration, I met a friend of mine for dinner, and he told me about this doctor named Dr. Tom Catena, who is this brilliant doctor based in the Nuba Mountains. And he is a missionary doctor who's the only guy within a hundred-mile radius in this little ribbon of mountains between Sudan and South Sudan. And his stories of the people that he helped were inspiring. But he talked about one particular situation where he had to save a young boy's life. And this story was like, wait for a second, why is this guy performing so many amputations? And the reason why is that the current reigning president of the time was President Omar al-Bashir, who, for context, is the guy who brought you the atrocity of Darfur, the genocide of Darfur. And so, he was regularly running this campaign of terror over the people of the Nuba Mountains. And what he would do is he would have his cargo planes roll fifty-five-gallon drums filled with jet fuel and shrapnel out of the back of the planes. These things would hit the ground like giant Molotov cocktails and spray shrapnel everywhere. And that's what would kill people or maim people. And there was a story in this article that I was reading about a young boy named Daniel, who was out tending his family's goats and cows in the middle of this open field. He heard the bombers come as they came every day. And he had no place to run, no place to hide, no foxholes to jump into. And he saw a tree, this lone tree, and he went and got behind the tree, and he wrapped his arms around the tree, and the bomb went off not far from where he was. And because his body was behind the tree, his body was protected from the blast, but because his arms were around the other side, it blew off his arms. When this boy named Daniel, this 12-year-old boy woke up, the first thing he said was, if I could die, I would, because now I'm going to be such a burden to my family. I didn't know how to process that. How does a 12-year-old boy become a double amputee? Never be able to throw a ball or play or dress or feed himself again. But his first reaction is, I wish I could die because I don't want to be a pain to my mom and dad.
This mantra that we have is that when you see something absurd, it has to change. I can't stand this. I can't just look away and go about my life. We call it 'to commit and then figure it out.' And that's what we did on the rider. And then this is what we did with Project Daniel. I said I didn't know, but I had to do something. And so we repeated what we did with the rider, which is we invited all these brilliant people into our house. We realized Daniel is just one of 50000 amputees left in the wake of the bloodiest war Africa has ever known. As a result, we flew into an active war zone in Sudan with 3D printers, laptops, and spools of plastic.
The concept of project Daniel was hatched on July 11th, and on November 11th, Daniel used his hands for the first time in two years. But it's never about just one person. If we could teach the locals to do it themselves, then project Daniel could live on long after we left. And it did.
It's so powerful and so beautiful. Thank you. And thank all of the people on your team for doing such beautiful work. You have an enormous heart. And sometimes, when I interact with people who are also very heart-based, I find that they struggle a little bit with the burdens they take on from the world around them. And how do you deal with that when you're not just a good listener, but you're also a good listener when you're listening to the stirrings of your heart in a moment like that with Daniel because you're feeling from within and you want to do something about it. Given the scale and diversity of challenges in the world, how do you allow yourself to lean in on some of them and still protect your heart, still have the energy to do the good work without not feeling that heaviness and that burden?
It's a good question. The saying is that it's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Wouldn't it be a great thing to finish your life with something that you loved and tried without restraints instead of trying to maintain it? Let's talk about the practicalities of that. I believe that it's the act that you put forth in trying to exhibit love or attempt to try to help people. And I think that's one of the things that we try to do. We may know that we can't help everybody. But that's why we use the story as a vehicle to scale those we try to help. We do that by telling the stories of the people that we are trying to help through our not impossible initiatives. And we also launched a program a couple of years back called Not Impossible.
And so it's funny because I just looked at the feed, and one of our award winners from this year is a brilliant and passionate gentleman by the name of Subash Banerjee. You should go to our website, and you can see his story. But this is one thing that I believe is worse or better off from not being vulnerable. From not exhibiting love? Something that I will take to my grave is, and this is one of those things that it was just a moment in time, but years back, I was in New York City, and I was running about as you do in New York City.
It's about celebrating other people who live an impossible life and have an impossible mindset, and are trying to use technology for the sake of humanity, which is one of the things that we do. I had a meeting here and a meeting there. And I'm on a conference call, and I'm playing this role of adults, as we do, where things are very important, very serious. And I'm walking down the street on a call, and I remember I looked over to my left and against a building. There was a homeless gentleman who was clad in very old and ragged clothes, and he had bags over his feet for shoes. And it wasn't winter, but it was still cold. And I remember I was on a call and I looked over, and I saw him. And then I was walking. So, boom, I lost his eyes, and I kept walking. And I was on the call, and I got about two blocks down. And I just couldn't deal with it anymore. I couldn't get the image of his face out of my head, and so I think I pretended to get disconnected from the call. I think I just hung up, and I made the decision. I want to try and just connect with him and try to get him maybe a sandwich or get him some food because hunger is something I'm very passionate about that I can talk a little bit about later. And so I went back, and he was gone. And it might have been, I don't know, five minutes total from the time walking forward and then turning around and walking back, and he was gone. And that inability for me to go back and simply hand someone a sandwich that I had taken me too long to make the realization that I should do something has always haunted me in a very powerful way.
That reminds me that if you see something that needs to change or someone who needs help, the time to do it is now that you need to do it now, not wait and ruminate and think and process and dissect and strategize. You need to exhibit that help or that assistance or that love, as you said now. So that informs, I think, a lot of how I think about what we do and how we do is that, and this is one of our core values. Impatience is one of our core values because if we are all impatient about the work and the good that needs to happen in the world, imagine what can happen if we all share that common trait of impatience.
It's beautiful. There are a couple of things you've said there that I want to unpack for the benefit of our audience. You talked about how you lean into that moment. You do it with impatience in the sense of urgency now and then. While it is true that you may not be able to do that for everyone, there is this other vehicle that you created through which to propagate this ideal out there and bring others into the movement, even those that are doing good work on their initiative without necessarily taking resources from you. And I like that because I'm drawn to studying some of the great reformers and nation builders and innovators in history. And one of the things I see with them is what you've said, which is there's a qualitative and then there's a quantitative. The qualitative is what they're able to do themselves. But then, on the quantitative side, there are some ideas they put out there. There are some examples they put out there.
Some models they put out there, maybe some life principles, et cetera, which others then absorb into their ethos and DNA. And so they have this larger impact more indirectly at times, just like what they're putting out there. There are a few things that you're putting out there. One is like, guys, you can be super successful in what you're doing and more of the mainstream capitalist system. But you can also spread your wings and go and do other beautiful things. And that's a great example that you're setting. Then the other one is this notion of this universal, expansive heart, which is amazing, and we see that. By the way, you have such a wide net for all of humanity that I am feeling a great sense of joy, that we are bringing in a little bit of a global family here for you today. The other part of me thinks what we can learn from you, which I'd like to dissect for a few minutes, is that it is not impossible, but sometimes these courses look like or but other people have probably attacked this issue. There are experts out there who probably know more about this than I do. What can I add to this mix? And you've taken on some of these causes, which supposedly I mean, just that the Daniel story you said. Fifteen thousand dollars for a typical prosthetic, and you brought it down to a hundred dollars. Who would have even thought that was possible? How do you get yourself and your team into that stage when nothing is impossible?
All right. Let's talk about the science of the impossible. Everything that surrounds you or everybody right now looks to the left, looks to their right, looks up, looks down. Think about the things you can touch, that you can taste, that you can feel everything that surrounds us. At one point, it was impossible. Think about that. The computer screen that you're looking at, the phone that you're texting on the spoon that you're eating your morning cereal with the glass that you bought at the store, that you're drinking your coffee or your tea out of, every single thing that surrounds us at one point was impossible—the most mundane to the most complex. So if you think about inverse logic. And if you think about the progression of history as an index of how we will continue to evolve as a species, then doesn't that also mean that if everything possible today was impossible first, that everything impossible today, if you base it on stats, if you base it on history, if you base it on science, if you base it on everything that we've seen throughout the history of our species, that everything impossible today is on the trajectory of going from impossible to.
It's just the natural progression of things. So you can talk about something we're doing right now. Twenty years ago was like burning at stake. There's no way we can do that. There's no feasible way that that could be done. That's crazy. Well, so then what about teleportation? What about robotic surgeries? Think of the things that it's just a natural progression of how we evolve as a species. And we have to get out of the way of thinking in this constraint of time. These things are going to be possible. Maybe not in our lifetime, maybe not in the next generation's lifetime. Maybe it's a couple of generations. But do we really feel that we're so narcissistic and self-centered that when we encounter something impossible now, we feel like, oh, that's going to be impossible forever? There's no way that that's ever going to change? No. So when you kind of grasp it with that perspective, you see yourself as a pawn, as a player, as an advocate, as a catalyst towards making that progression. And part of that progression is the effort and the exertion of energy towards trying to progress things from impossible to possible. And maybe that little exertion of energy in February 2021. Sorry that that's going to have an effect five, 10, 50 years from now because there's something that you will do to do that. So back to your question, once you grasp that, you see yourself in this both powerful and humble light, as this is my role while I'm here in this very tiny amount of time on this planet. This is my role in trying to catalyze and try to push things forward. And that's what we try to do here. We tackle things with this exertion of energy like this is our role, this is our job to do this. And if this inspires someone else to do something or inspires someone else to have an idea, then we win. Everybody wins.
That is such incredible learning that I think that's all we take away from this conversation with you today and put it into action in our unique situations. It would be transformative for everyone listening to the show I want to quote you. You said at one point to build on what you've just offered us here, that we enter every absurdity that we are solving, every impossibility that we are trying to make. Not impossible, truly even no clue on how we are going to solve it? No clue. How are we going to solve it? That's powerful. No degree, no diplomas or credentials that enable us to be able to address this issue. We say that the credentials for someone who is in Norge are impossible to remember. One is you have to breathe the air. And the other is you have to pump blood. And if you have these two things and the belief that it can be sore, that you're going to be able to play a role in solving it, and those are the credentials you need. I mean, wow. How empowering.
Anyway, thank you for what you're bringing to the world. You dream the impossible. You embrace the impossible. You pursue the impossible. But how do you ultimately make the impossible possible? There's got to be more to the secrets of the accord that ultimately build a bridge between the impossibility of today to the possibility of tomorrow.
I mentioned that there's this egoless approach to solving the problems that we tackle. We believe in the convening of brilliant minds, and we believe that brilliance is in abundance, right. It doesn't necessarily mean brilliance is not classified to the initials that you put behind your name. Diploma credentials can inform you, can enhance your perspective, and can propel your solutions. But it is not the only solution. And if those degrees or diplomas of credentials act as means to curtail or to put down other new original ideas, then you get voted off the island in the not impossible world. So we love to convene the minds of brilliant thinkers we call misfits, geniuses, and mad scientists. And that ranges from people who are truly credentialed experts to completely tangential people in terms of their thinking. But when you combine that mixture, then you create that potion and that stew of passionate, brilliant minds. That's what leads to two things being able to be accomplished. And we believe that passion and conviction surpass intelligence or training any day of the week.
Now, we have an abundance of knowledge at our fingertips called the Internet. We can source the pragmatism and the practicality that we might need. But that passion and thought and unique perspective on how to change that or adapt that or modify that, that's what we look for. So that's, I think for us, how we go about doing. What we do is about convening those brilliant minds. This is a recurring theme of how we do it. We always keep that one person in mind. And that helps many mentalities is that when you focus the mission on helping one person and then it quantifies everything down, it gives us a clear benchmark. It gives us a clear North Star for everyone to focus their energy on. And the other thing it does is a back to the egolessness that I led within this conversation.
Our agendas are easy to get to seep into the conversation, except if there is a north star of a human being on the other side, that kind of removes that noise. Because it's not about you being right, it's about helping that one other person. So help one, help many of us. But how do we really make it work for one? Then in solving for one and then telling the story powerfully about that one person, because the story is such a critical component of how we operate it. Not impossible. That's what lends to many people being able to be helped.
Even while you're charging us with something that will put many of us out of our comfort zones and pursue something vastly beyond perhaps what some of us may have done, it seems to come from a very fluid and natural place for you. There's a question being asked by one of our listeners, Elaine. Right. And she's saying, have you had to confront a fear of failure? What would failure look like for you, and have there been moments in this journey where you've seen yourself hit certain constraints and are going to have to try to work out some of those gaps?
Sure. Failure. I love the conversation about failure, because failure just in the mere word, has this connotation of not achieving, of not living up to not accomplishing. And for us, failure is something that we celebrate. Failure is something that we feel is so important to the journey of solving something. Failure is integral to the process of creation. And so actually, in my book, there is a chapter dedicated to this concept, and the chapter is fail, fail, fail, fail, succeed, repeat as necessary. That for us is when we experience failure. Let's talk about two things: fear and let's talk about failure. So let's talk about failure first when we experience failure. We feel that, Okay, great, this is fantastic. We're one step closer to what's going to be solved because we know that there is a finite amount of failures that we can accomplish that will start to get us to that core solution of what that might be, so we celebrate. Okay, we failed. What did we learn from that next? We failed again. What did we learn from that? And then that assembly of all those different learning points that are a result of failure, that's what leads us to our final results. Everyone has heard this anecdote about how many light bulbs or failures happened before the light bulb was invented. But it's true. If you see failure as a part of the journey, as a mile marker in terms of the race, then that's a whole different perspective.
The other thing about failures is that I encourage large-scale organizations to institute a celebration of failure, have an award show for failure, have recognition and acknowledgments and praise around failure and not just the failure, but the learnings around those failures. Why is that? Because that's how you instigate an innovative culture. When people realize, oh, it's not about not failing and succeeding, it's about succeeding and the journey to get to that success is what will lead to it. So it's really funny when I'm having conversations with CEOs, and I say, so do you guys give awards every year? Yes. And do you celebrate them? Yes. And the other is their prizes or trips or whatever? Yes. Great. What if you did that for the best failures and people go, whoa, holy cow. That didn't think about it that way. But people grasped the fact that you have to embrace failure to get there. And then the second part is fear. Every single time. That we embark on this journey, we embark. We know. And we are scared that we're not going to be able to pull it off. Fear is part of the journey. But that's a driving force. And what we always say here is that if you're scared, if you feel like you're over your head, if you feel like you're not the one qualified to do it, and there are so many more people in the world who are better than you that could do it. And you have that fear, where you feel like I'm not the one that's supposed to do this to other people. You're in exactly the right place, exactly the right place. Because when you channel that as a driving force of like to say this has to be done and I'm going to now assemble other people in other minds and other thoughts and other opinions to try to propel this forward, there's huge power in channeling that fear into action. And that's something that we have to do all the time because we're, as you said earlier, and as I will affirm, we are never the most qualified people to tackle the things that we tackle.
That's beautiful. I remember hearing I forget who it was from, but something about how courage is not the absence of courage is the commitment to act despite the fear. And I think you're calling it courage is the capacity to channel the fear into some purposeful action, isn't it? That's beautiful. Mick, in that quest towards finding success in the wake of what may be several failures along the way, there's another quote from you that I want to read to us. You said I believe in that seeing, and this is your quote, right, that the harder you work, the luckier you get. We work hard. And I think that because of that and because we stay focused on our values and our ideals. This is the key.
I have a question for you. This is something that I'm drawn to investigating more of my research and putting out there in my leadership teaching. The question you're being asked by one of our listeners on a very similar theme, which is, do you believe that there is something in the laws of nature that are out there? Right. If you were doing things with a good heart in the service of humanity and you're striving and tuning in and kind of doing your best, that somehow conditions in the universe conspire to then support you at the right time with the right breakthroughs in a way that couldn't be maybe predicted or rationally arrived at. But something happens then. And do you believe in a higher power behind all of this?
I believe in that. And I don't think that there is any denying of the fact that the harder you work, the more you put yourself out there, the more earnest and well-intentioned and driven you are. Borderline maniacal on trying to solve one of the things that are the absurdities you're trying to absolve. That is just there's a movement, there's a power, there's a momentum, there's a magnetism that kind of drives you forward. And that goes back to that whole thing I was talking about earlier is melding this world of being goal-driven and allowing the world to happen simultaneously. I feel that once we grasp that our purpose in life is to drive and push forward and try to create a better world, that when you try to do that, the universe responds, the world responds. You can believe in a higher power or not. It doesn't matter. But there's just this propulsion that takes place. And my dad used to tell us every year, my dad and my mom and my brother and I would go on the same vacation growing up, the same vacation. And that might sound boring to some people. But for us, it was brilliant, right?
There was this comfort in this regularity that we really enjoyed. But we would always go camping, and we had a trailer, and we would go to the same campsite every single year. And every time we would get ready to pack up after we would stay, we'd usually go for about two weeks. And at the end of that two weeks, my dad would have us pick up the campsite, but I mean, meticulously pick up the trash to the campsite. Now, none of that trash was ours because we would keep using the trash bag the whole time we were there. But we would go through, and then he'd make us go to the surrounding campsites and pick up the trash there. And it used to piss my brother off because we're like, this is it. We don't even smoke. And we're picking up cigarette butts from the campsite. Why are we doing this? And his whole approach was if everybody left the campsite cleaner than when they found it. Then the entire campground would be an amazing place. And that's kind of our theory on the world, that is not impossible. And my theory is that if everybody left the world just a little bit better, then when they found it. Wouldn't that equal out the world be left in a much better place? And so that is for us really embodies another component of how we think about the impossible.
Oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. It comes so close to the story about Abraham Lincoln. He was once consumed with depression and the passing of somebody he loved, and he was engaged to her. And then she died, and he was beside himself in grief. And then what made him recover from that was kind of like this very realization that he said, like, I cannot die without first doing something to make my people make my country better than what it is. So what a powerful idea. This is a quote from someone I have deep respect for. He was the spiritual master of my spiritual master Yogananda. His name was up there. Sure. And he said something like, he said, wisdom is not assimilated with the eyes, but with the atoms. Then your conviction of a truth is not merely in your brain but in your being. Then you may vouch for its meaning. And I think that's what you brought to us is a tremendous sense of conviction about these powerful beliefs that you have not just necessarily espoused and put out there, but you have deeply practiced in your DNA. And I'm curious. You have kind of given us a glimpse perhaps into it, a little bit. What were the most formative forces in your life?
Well, I mentioned them to my parents, right. I think that you can't refute the influence that people have as you are kind of progressing through life as a child. And back to that whole example of being naive as a child. You believe that anything is possible. As you grow older, you're ground down with experiences or failures that you interpret as just as a failure. You kind of get grounded. All of our edges come down. One of the statistics that I think is so revealing is that a toddler can hear the word no. 200 to 300 times a day as a toddler. Think about that. Think about if there was something that you heard that many times a day now, given the fact that when the toddler picks up a knife, the mom goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So you get 10 of those two hundred right off the bat. But you were ground down as adults. And I think that if there are people who play roles or there are things you read or study or watch that inform you and give you kind of all of a sudden sharpen those edges a little bit or they'll take you out of that rut of thinking the way that that's the world has to work. I think that's what's really important. And so my dad was my dad and my mom. We're both really important in that. And I went to a Jesuit high school in Phoenix, Arizona, and there were some key people there who played a role in our life, in my life. But I think that there's also Muhammad Ali played a role in my life. And I never met Muhammad Ali until the very end of his life. But by studying him and how he overcame the stories of other people, you can draw those.
That's why the story is so powerful, is that you can draw inspiration, and then other people can be role models and influence your life, whether they or not. And I think of you as a spiritual leader. I love that quote about the atoms being so, so important and so critical in terms of who you are as a person. And there is a quote by Saint Francis of Assisi that I learned from Dr. Tom when I was in Sudan. And Dr. Tom is the epitome of this. And I think that's really kind of our quest as humans here is that your actions speak so loudly.
The words become meaningless from what you say. And if we constantly exhibit a desire in our lives and actions in our life that point to that desire of trying to help other people, to trying to solve problems, but not just talking about it, the world is full of pundits. And social media is rife with people who can comment but not do. The world needs more doers as people who are out there actually doing this stuff. And to me, I take inspiration from those people that do it. I take inspiration from the people and the not impossible words that we celebrate. I take inspiration from the people who are putting themselves out there. And I mean, really, at the end of your life, if you look back, I always kind of go back to when I'm on my porch and I'm rocking back and forth, and my teeth are in a jar and a cup next to me, and I'm thinking back on my life.
Do you think about the things that you wish you would have done, or do you think about the things that you've done? So you might as well give it a shot? Just to have attempted to do some things in your life, be it from jumping out of an airplane and doing something fantastic and adrenaline-ridden to try and to feed someone or help someone. That, to me, is how life is supposed to be led. And how if you think of yourself in that retroactive form or the retroactive pov, when you look back at your life, then that kind of writes the story that you want to be your life.
We're running out of time on what is otherwise such a rich journey and story here that I'd love to unpack more of with you, perhaps before I turn the audience to a couple of references we can give them on where they can go to learn more about your work. You could end this conversation just for a brief moment about hunger. You mentioned how you've been very drawn to wanting to kind of help address that in your own best way. And that is a very innovative project that not impossible lives that you all took on around, just kind of like helping the hungry get access to food, which is so beautiful. Perhaps if you could just close it out, that little kind of story about what you've done around hunger.
Sure. So everything that is not impossible is about seeing an absurdity and saying that's not right. That has to change. Let's do something about it. And so what we did is over the course of time, putting our whole life, we would just this concept of food insecurity and hunger was just like a rock in our shoe. And finally, a couple of years back, who said, all we have to do something about this, this concept that there's plenty of food in the world, but people are still going hungry, especially in this country. So we started this journey of just trying to discover what it is, how does it work? Why is this? Why does this exist? And we interviewed a bunch of kids that are at a group around the corner from us, literally just around the corner from where I'm shooting right now called Safe Place for Youth. And we interview them and talk to them. These were kids that were sleeping in their cars that didn't have a consistent form of food or a place to live. And we asked them what is it that you prize most? And their answer was a cell phone. And we thought that was remarkable, that someone would want to have a cell phone more than food, clothing, water, shelter, and the reason is that it's connective tissue.
It's a way to communicate with another human being. It's a way to have an opinion. I don't know where you slept last night. It doesn't know what kind of clothes you have. It doesn't know your skin color or who you pray to, or who you sleep with. It's about just an opinion. And it's an equalizer. And whether you live in a mansion or whether you sleep in a car, everybody has that commonality in that ability to have a voice. So we took that as a key data point, and we crafted a solution that leverages the cell phone as a means by which to feed people. And in its most simplistic form, what we did is we said, what if we were to create a way that the cell phone became the vehicle to being able to get proximate food, that's convenient to that person, and that's nutritious, and that does not require any major behavior change, because one of the things that we believe in it not impossible, and that there is a kind of an undermining or an underpinning in terms of how we think around the solutions we create. Is this concept frictionless? How can we create a frictionless solution? And so what we did is we created a text-based enterprise software that we deploy on the side of the non-profit or the community-based organization of the church, the school, the government, the city, the Boys and Girls Club, the YMCA doesn't matter.
They already have a constituency of people that they know are food insecure. They're able to ingest the phone numbers of those people into the software, into the platform. That person is then able to text the word hungry at Windows throughout the day. And that starts a chatbot that enables them to first say the word hungry seconds, enter their address. It prompts them to enter your address because now we can manually geo-locate them. We draw a fence around that person so that we know that that's where they're located. And then we offer them restaurants. We offer them the choice, their choice of restaurants that they might be able to go to. We tie into the restaurant's menus through a partnership we have with postdates. So we have a near-infinite number of restaurants that we can point them to.
They choose the restaurant and then they choose a healthy meal option. They just choose a meal option. They don't know that it's a healthy meal option because we curate the meal options. They choose the meal option. And then that person is able to go into the restaurant. And they get to walk in with dignity and grab a meal just like everybody else and walk out. So if you look at what we've created, the non-profit, the community-based organization, or the government has to do nothing except ingesting phone numbers. That's so there's no friction there. The restaurant, one of the things we're most proud about, restaurants don't even know they're participating because it comes in just like any other post-made order. And then the person has to text. There's no downloading of an app. There's no new behavior that we're asking them to adopt. They just text the way that they would text anyway. So Friday, we went to the pilot markets because we'd been doing this since April. When we saw what was going on with Covid, we knew that we had to respond to the growing food insecurity.
On Friday, we just crossed over one hundred thousand meals, all via text message. And so this is something we are so passionate about because we believe that whether it's one hundred thousand or a million or ten million or more, it's just an automated system that distributes the supply chain instead of having to go to and make migration to one place to get fed. Now, you have a choice. You have a near-infinite choice of where you can go. You have agency over what you eat. The name of the restaurant at the time, everything. And so we've created this frictionless system that we believe and our mission around not impossible is to end it, especially with our hunger initiative, is to eliminate food insecurity. And it's very, very attainable for us. So we flashed up a lot on the site. If you want to know more about it, you can go to. Not impossible. And I could talk for three more hours about this right now, but I will pass it back over to you, man.
That guy is so joyful to see such richness and possibilities in the world through your eyes. There's one thing you said which just struck a chord with me, deep chord. I saw a documentary made by a good friend of mine, John Petrie, who might be watching the show. And I know she's going to be celebrating your work. She spent about 10, 15 years serving Mother Teresa and making a documentary on her, which was very critically acclaimed, a beautiful window and glimpse into that incredible scene and social reformer's life. And one of the key things I discovered in that film is her greatness, not necessarily just as much. And just doing that noble and beautiful work for a part of society that we tend to painfully so at times, just kind of like just look sideways and away from. But in the dignity, respect, love, and admiration that she infused in that work for them, they felt that they were doing a favor. It's your duty to those sisters, the missionaries of charity who are doing good doing that work for them. And I think it was something of the Nobel Prize Committee acknowledged in her work that actually what you have brought to this work is a certain sense, which is dignity and nobility in who you are serving. Anyway, so I saw that in what you just said, that you have designed this so intricately and so thoughtfully that it's not just about like having them get the food but having had this these brothers and sisters of ours be able to operate and go in and engage in that experience with a sense of dignity and a sense of equality with everybody around.
I'm going to invite you to make some closing remarks for us just as a way to give us a final gift in what has been such a bountiful fair. And just before you do that, though, let me just recognize for all of us here that, look, I mean, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much more to make a story that can meet our eye today. And so, I want to encourage you to go to the Not Impossible Labs website so that you can see more of the good work happening there, perhaps engage and participate and offer up partnership opportunities for some of the things that make it intimate. And the other is that for a more a quick deep dive into the mixed story, his vision, his ideas, I really encourage you to access his book. Not impossible. The art and joy of doing what couldn't be done.
First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. Typically when I have conversations, we're talking about the mechanics, like the technology around what we're doing. And this was a much more, I think, emotional and, quite frankly, spiritual conversation. So I really appreciate that. Thank you. And you're a wonderful interviewer here, a wonderful kind of host. So thank you very much for being so gracious. The number one question that people ask is how can I get involved, how can I do it? What can I do? And there are two pragmatic answers. Go to the sites, check things out. If you're passionate about the hunger initiative that we're launching and want to get involved with that, we're going to launch a campaign the months ahead about people donating one meal per month. Right. Something very attainable, something almost forgetful. Right. It's an expensive cup of coffee. It's about seven bucks a meal. If that's something that you feel passionate about and want to go out and tell your friends about, try to create this momentum around that.
By all means, please go do that because we feel like we can really take a massive step towards eliminating food insecurity if we just kind of quantify it down into one meal per month. And building on that back to the help, one helps many, which really informs so much of how we think. The thing that I would say to everybody here is that if you see something that's absurd, if you see something that just bothers you, that just stirs something up inside of you, just understand that you have the potential to make a change. You have the ability to go and do something. Right. We are the absolute epitome of people who are unqualified to go do it. But for the fact that we say that we have to go and do it. So when you see these absurdities and when you're out there in the world, the question that I would ask you to contemplate for yourself. Is this who you are? Not how do I solve all of the hunger, nor do I saw, how I solve all of these issues, but how do I solve this for one person? Because if we solve it for one person, this is kind of a tongue-in-cheek example if everybody in the world solves the problem for one person. We've solved those problems, right? They're all solved. So ask yourself the question, who is your one? And given the story that I showed you earlier, another way to say it would be who your Daniel is? So thank you guys very much. Thank you for inviting me.
I'm reminded of a quote from Rumi. Are you familiar with Rumi at all?
I'm not.
Rumi is one of the best poets in modern times. Although he himself didn't live in modern times, he was a mystic from the Sufi traditions, the more devotional forms of Islam. And so he has a quote which is coming to my mind right now as I experience this privilege of having this conversation with you and drawing out some of your live audience, which, as he said, he said, you're not a drop in the ocean. You are the whole ocean in a drop. And that is how I feel about you and your team and the beautiful things that you're putting out there that you have shown that you are the whole ocean and a draw. But actually, what you're also doing is you're helping us all feel like that's who I am, too. I have this ocean of possibilities or what I can manifest to go on my own hero's journey. So thank you so much for all the noble and beautiful things you're doing, particularly for helping all of us feel that this is an invitation that life is giving us as well. So grateful.
Thank you. I really enjoyed today. Thanks for inviting me. And I love that. I'm going to keep that quote on top of my head.
And all the best and all that you keep doing in this beautiful, luminous life path that you're on. So. All right, my friends, thank you as well for joining us today. It's been such a rewarding journey, isn't it? Do share your thoughts and comments here with us if you like, and we will pass on your stories, your comments, your ideas. All right. And so if you read or write to me and you also share more here and chat in these last final moments. Right. Very grateful to have you with us. And we will see you again very soon. Take care. Godspeed.
