I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me.
And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal.
The other volunteer who had arrived just before me -- let's call him Lex Luther -- (Laughter) got to the captain first and was asked to go inside and save the homeowner's dog.
And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "Oh, I know that like the back of my hand."
(Laughter) This could be similar to the campaign organized by homosexuals a few years ago, although heaven forbid that we should stoop to public outing of people against their will.
She came racing up to me, engulfed my whole camera -- and her teeth are up here and down here -- but Goran, before I had gotten in the water, had given me amazing advice.
But in fact, it turns out that some time around 200, 000 years ago, when our species first arose and acquired social learning, that this was really the beginning of our story, not the end of our story.
Had we chosen this option, sometime around 200, 000 years ago, we would probably still be living like the Neanderthals were when we first entered Europe 40, 000 years ago.
And it's the dilemma that this Chinese man faces, who's language is spoken by more people in the world than any other single language, and yet he is sitting at his blackboard, converting Chinese phrases into English language phrases.
It's not as though, as I try to suggest, it's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don't have religion and then you're cut off from all these very good things.
But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change.
So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard, and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to..."
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.
(Laughter) I do have too many 8-inch heels which I never get to wear, except for earlier, but the free stuff that I get is the free stuff that I get in real life, and that's what we don't like to talk about.
I become the hat after my own gigs, but I have to physically stand there and take the help from people, and unlike the guy in the opening band, I've actually had a lot of practice standing there.
They were just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, "Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you're interested, they're for sale."
Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons.
I'm a man who's trying to live from his heart, and so just before I get going, I wanted to tell you as a South African that one of the men who has inspired me most passed away a few hours ago.
And the first guests we ever got were a philanthropy group from your East Coast, and they said to Solly, on the side, they said, "Before we even go out to see lions and leopards, we want to see where you live."
I remember running a trip together with a friend named Kobi -- Jewish congregation from Chicago, the trip was in Jerusalem -- and we took them to a refugee camp, a Palestinian refugee camp, and there we had this amazing food.
It was several months ago that I gave my very first major public talk, at the Forbes "30 Under 30 Summit" -- 1, 500 brilliant people, all under the age of 30.
We've heard interviews often in which a guest is talking for several minutes and then the host comes back in and asks a question which seems like it comes out of nowhere, or it's already been answered.
Now, he became very relevant in my life pretty recently, because the people of TED reached out to me about six months ago and invited me to do a TED Talk.
Couldn't have done it 20 years ago when the idea of having any language you wanted in your pocket, coming from your phone, would have sounded like science fiction to very sophisticated people.
A few years ago, I was thinking about this, and I went to "The Sunday Sport, " a tabloid newspaper I don't recommend you start reading if you're not familiar with it already.
Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago, 100, 000 years ago all of this happened very, very quickly.
Now, I do most of my speaking in front of an education crowd -- teachers and students, and I like this analogy: It shouldn't be a teacher at the head of the class, telling students, "Do this, do that."
And what happened a month ago was that the Chinese company, Geely, they acquired the Volvo company, and then finally the Swedes understood that something big had happened in the world.
And the national TV station was injuncted five minutes before it went on air, like out of a movie: injunction landed on the news desk, and the news reader was like, "This has never happened before. What do we do?"
I think we all, if we don't look at the data, we underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economic change.
With respect to marriage and family: there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could, and then you started having kids as soon as you could.
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I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. 