And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection?
And so you have to be careful about leaving your front lawn open, which is basically your Facebook wall, so that people don't write on it in the middle of the night -- because it's very much the equivalent.
So, not exactly what I was hoping for, but off I went -- up the stairs, down the hall, past the 'real' firefighters, who were pretty much done putting out the fire at this point, into the master bedroom to get a pair of shoes.
So as I look around this room at people who either have achieved, or are on their way to achieving, remarkable levels of success, I would offer this reminder: don't wait.
And I know that there are -- if I could put a little plug here -- there are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question, and I put the suggestion up, for what it's worth.
These guys down on Wall Street, Marco Polo and Cherokee Nation, they're eight microseconds behind all these guys going into the empty buildings being hollowed out up around the Carrier Hotel.
I know that the abscess that grew around my wound after the operation, the 16 ounces of puss, is the contaminated Gulf of Mexico, and there were oil-drenched pelicans inside me and dead floating fish.
I bet most of us have experienced at some point the joys of less: college -- in your dorm, traveling -- in a hotel room, camping -- rig up basically nothing, maybe a boat.
We're smarter, we're more flexible, we can learn more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space.
I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often.
One of the weird things that's happened is, after the TED explosion, I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country -- everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies.
When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones, sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died.
So, my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and beyond.
So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space.
So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail, " came into my office. I really didn't know her at all.
I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens and dozens of them. I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere.
When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53% don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78% by the time that they're 17.
I promise you there are several people listening to me right now who are currently being abused or who were abused as children or who are abusers themselves.
A couple of months later, I was in Manhattan, and I tweeted for a crash pad, and at midnight, I'm on the Lower East Side, and it occurs to me I've never actually done this alone.
So one year ago, I was just a boy in the savanna grassland herding my father's cows, and I used to see planes flying over, and I told myself that one day, I'll be there inside.
He had this shoebox that he carried with him everywhere containing nine comic books, two G.I. Joes painted to look like Spider-Man and five Gobots. And this was his treasure.
The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy.
Because we are at the present moment in the middle of a change of consciousness, and you will be surprised if you -- I am always surprised when I hear how many times this word "gratefulness" and "gratitude" comes up.
I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking.
The fact that some of the victims carried personal items such as toothpaste and a toothbrush is a clear sign they had no idea what was about to happen to them.
While working at Toyota, all I knew was how to make cars until I met Dr. Akira Miyawaki, who came to our factory to make a forest in it in order to make it carbon-neutral.
These issues include female illiteracy, which is quite high in the region; educational reforms; programs for dropout students; and political activism among university students.
When we think about the dreams we have, and the dent we want to leave in the universe, it is striking to see how big of an overlap there is between the dreams that we have, and projects that never happen.
I hope some of these insights can maybe help you have a slightly higher success ratio, and thus make something great come to the world that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
As those who enjoy reading will know, books have an extraordinary power to take you out of yourself and into someone else's mindset, so that, for a while at least, you look at the world through different eyes.
So you can have one company stacked inside another company, stacked inside another company, making it almost impossible to really understand who is behind these structures.
So if you accept that your number one task as a speaker is to build an idea inside the minds of your audience, here are four guidelines for how you should go about that task: One, limit your talk to just one major idea.
Now, some of you may be thinking, "That's all very nice to enjoy language learning, but isn't the real secret that you polyglots are just super talented and most of us aren't?"
So the question that we had is: How can bacteria, these primitive organisms, tell the difference from times when they're alone and times when they're in a community, and then all do something together?
So again, we think bacteria invented that, and you've just evolved a few more bells and whistles, but all of the ideas are in these simple systems that we can study.
After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses, " he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."
Some people say you shouldn't even work on the insurance policy because it might make you lazy, that you'll keep eating because you know heart surgery will be there to save you.
It's exactly equivalent to taking one 325 milligram aspirin tablet, throwing it into the middle of Lake Tahoe, and then stirring it up, obviously with a very big stick, and waiting two years or so until the solution is homogeneous.
And once those vessels invade the cancer, it can expand, it can invade local tissues, and the same vessels that are feeding tumors allow cancer cells to exit into the circulation as metastases.
So like Fox Mulder on "X-Files, " who wants to believe in UFOs? Well, we all do, and the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains.
And this gap between the West and the rest has created a mindset of the world, which we still use linguistically when we talk about "the West" and "the Developing World."
But there is a continuous world from walking, biking, driving, flying -- there are people on all levels, and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle.
And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system -- speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier -- and in this one single consumer electronics store, there are that many stereo systems.
This boy here in the middle of central India -- this is in a Rajasthan village, where the children recorded their own music and then played it back to each other and in the process, they've enjoyed themselves thoroughly.
And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection? 