Here is the transcript and summary of Ken Hughes’ talk titled “Time Bending – 365 Ways To Unlock Creativity And Innovation” at TEDxUniversityofNicosia conference. In this TEDx talk, Ken explores the concept of Time Bending, which is the process of bending the time you already have to make more out of your life. He encourages the audience to imagine the end of their life and revisit the photographs of all the days that passed to unlock creativity and innovation.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Ken Hughes – Leading Shopper & Consumer Behaviouralist
Good afternoon. As a playologist, I’d like to encourage you all to look deeper to find that spark of creativity that lies within us all and let it out.
I want you to imagine for a moment that you are dead. It’s not the most inspiring way to start a talk, I know. You follow that white light, through, you come out into a warehouse, an empty hangar, and on the ground in front of you are thousands of Polaroid photographs lined up one after the other in a row. Each photograph represents a day of your life, a life just ended.
And now you walk. You walk along those photographs, looking at the various memories. You remember your first day at school. I’m not too sure I quite understood school; I think I thought I was emigrating.
FIRST KISS
So you walk on, and you walk past your first kiss. This one isn’t me, by the way, this is a stock image. I didn’t hire a photographer to hide in the trees to record my first kiss – I wish I had. So you walk past all these big days: the day you graduated university, the day you got married. You remember all these big days as you walk along these rows. And even there’ll be some memories that you walk past, each day that you remember. There’ll be small things like the day your eight-year-old son and his friend took your brand new Converse runners and filled them with mashed banana for a joke.
These days will stand out to you. And on your walk – my point is this: each photograph on the floor in front of you is a unique day. The photograph is the thing that happened on that day that was different to every other day of your life. Different from before and from after: the new thing that you learnt, the new experience you had.
And in the early years as a child or a teenager, the pictures are quite interesting because when you’re young, you’re adventurous; you flirt with risk. But I want you to think about those rows that represent your late 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, the days that become a routine, days slipping into weeks, into months, into years. You do the same thing every day: you get up, you go to school or college, your work, you come home, you sit on the TV.
These days, think about the photographs, and how many of those photographs are black. Blank because you didn’t do anything that day that was unique that you had never ever done before. Think of the rows and rows of photographs as you walk along that are completely blank. A life that could have been full of all sorts of new experiences, new skills, new people, new places, but it was just a routine life. A life lost to the routine.
It’s a little bit depressing, isn’t it? And such are the thoughts of a man facing his midlife crisis. This year I turned 40. Now, I know I don’t look it; I drink the blood of virgin unicorns every morning at dawn.
MIDLIFE CRISIS
But nevertheless, half my life is potentially over. Now at the same time, while I’m having my midlife crisis, my father, who is a healthy 73, he’s having his – I guess you could call his end-of-life crisis. It’s the same as mine except he is more concerned with things like when the day does actually come, how many fireworks I’m going to be able to sneak into his coffin before it’s sealed for the crematorium. Because he thinks this will be great fun. He’s that kind of guy.
TIME IS A MENTAL CONSTRUCT
So we got talking about time last Christmas, and he was having a conversation with me that started with, “I remember being 65, and now I’m 73, I have no idea where the last eight years have gone.” He said that time seemed to be moving much faster now that he was older, and I started to laugh. I thought, “What? You’re blissfully retired. All you do every day is drink coffee and do some gardening. Surely your days stretch out in front of you slowly, and time drags.”
But apparently not. He said that no, time slips past faster and faster, the less you do, oddly, the faster time passes. For most of us, time is a mental construct really. You look back on a week or month or year that just passed, and really it’s your memories that you are using to decide how effective that time was.
So I wondered if that was true. If my father was right, and he usually is, what would happen if you reversed that? If you filled your days and your weeks with new things, could you, in fact, slow down time? Just take an average day. An average day has a start and an end.
So think about it as two fixed points, like two pins in a cork board, the morning and the night. And take a piece of string, and run that string from morning to night, and let’s take that as your average day. And on to that average day, we will put things. We put things that we do every day: we get up, we have our breakfast, we commute to work or college, we spend the day in the office, and even the things we do on occasion, maybe every week or two, like that yoga class or soccer training, these are things that are routine in our lives.
So eventually, each day, each week becomes this quite predictable straight line.
Morning to night, day after day, week after week. And I started to think, I wonder if you took something new, a brand new experience that you’d never ever done and dropped that pin into that notice board, that’s a new point that that string has to go round on that day. So you clearly are going to need a longer piece of string. Same fixed points, morning and night. Your day hasn’t actually got longer.
But what you do within that day, you are going to bend time. And that’s the concept. I give you Time Bending: bending the time you already have, stretching time, to make more out of your life. So on the first of January this year, I set out to complete a 365-day experiment. Could I spend an entire year where every single day I did a new experience, something that I have never ever done before? Could I bend time? Could I stretch time?
So I decided to keep a journal, and every day I had to have written something in that journal that I had done that day that was unique and I’d never ever done before. And that challenged me. And If I lost just one day along this year, I failed the entire experiment. At the beginning of course, it’s quite easy. We all have things that we’ve wanted to do in our life that we have yet to do. It’s like your bucket list. Those are the first things you do. It’s easy, so eventually I learnt to cut my daughter’s hair.
MOUNTAIN BIKING
I then went on that mountain bike extreme course that a friend of mine has been asking me to do for years, and I never went with him, so I did it. I finally did that half-marathon that I had been threatening to sign up to for years but I never had. So I just did it. Then I spent four weeks with a physiotherapist because it turns out that you can’t do a half-marathon on 10 days’ training, who knew?
But I’d never been to a physiotherapist before. New experience! Herniated disk, new experience! So, the weekends are easy because the weekends you have the time already. So you go to the local reptile zoo, and you find your hand shooting up when they ask for someone to hold the tarantula.
You go on a basket-weaving course to learn how to weave baskets. You let your children and their friends paint you green from top to bottom, and you take part, uninvited, in the local Saint Patrick’s Day parade. You know? Why wouldn’t you? Why would you need an invite?
So, these are easy; these are big things and these are weekends, because you have the time. But the trick of the experiment is to do this in your normal life, your Monday to Friday, your home, your office. These are the days that are harder. You’ve got to look for things to do that you’ve never done before. So one day you’re in a hotel, and they run out of pain au chocolat, so you decide, “OK, I’m going to make my own pain au chocolat with croissants and chocolate cereal from the breakfast table for the kids. “
Small things. You take the DVD that your wife has done all the time for aerobics. You’ve seen her do it hundreds of times, but you’ve never done it, so you do her aerobics DVD. You make shadow portraits from the 18th Century because you read it in a book. And this one, you watch your six-year-old daughter paint your toe nails, and you say, “How did I get to be 40 and never had my toe nails painted?”
And this one, she painted my toenails and no joke – this is one of the best things I did all year! For two weeks I woke up every morning, swung my legs out of bed and laughed! It was like having M&Ms for toes! And I put my socks on and I — Thank you.
It gets better. I put my socks on and of course you’d forget. Of course you’d forget. And you go about your business, you’d work all day, and at the end of the day you take your socks off and go, “Ha! M&Ms!” And for two weeks I smiled and I laughed twice a day, and I thought to myself, “You know what? This is it, this is what life is about! “
We need to be reminded on a continuous basis to live a better life, to live a life that could be more full. And when you open a packet of biscuits you could just eat them, or you could build a Jenga Tower and play biscuit Jenga. How many people have played biscuit Jenga in your life? Probably never, and now you all will. These things are so simple, and what you learn about yourself is that you can live a life that’s closed or you can live a life that is open, open to a world of possibilities around you.
Now I would never walk past a notice board without stopping and reading what events are on in the community that I can go to. I was the only man in the Zumba class last week. What’s on? What have I not done yet? What can I do? You’ll be surprised how much there is to do in your life, in your own community, in your own home. You just need to open yourself to all these possibilities.
So yes, I’ve walked on fire, I’ve done big things, I’ve eaten frogs’ legs which I’d never done before, I helped deliver a new born lamb, which was beautiful. When the first winter snow fell the first thing I thought about was taking all my clothes off and rolling naked down the hill.
And what you realize is that you feel so alive when you open up to all these experiences. When you start to look at the world as a new place to do things, you are amazed at what the world can offer you. And you become addicted. Every day I had my new experience. Many days three or four experiences, I became addicted to it. What was interesting is as I became addicted, so did others. People watching me on social media or having conversations with me got sucked in.
Time Bending is infectious. It’s like gravity; it’ll pull you in. So when I sent a message to a friend saying I was going to the beach to do some beach art, suddenly we had five, 10, 15 people all coming with me. When I posted the video of the spray-cream challenge on my face, about six or seven people did the same that day up on Facebook. You know, I have signed up for a 5K mountain run, which, by the way, they call a sport. it is not a sport, it’s torture. Three or four friends came with me. Haven’t spoken to me since, but that’s another story.
When I went flyboarding, everyone who saw the video thought, “Where can I do that? I want to sign up for that, too! ” So people got sucked in to this idea. And you’d be amazed how open other people are also. We had a dinner party where we asked all our friends to wear their wedding dresses one last time.
How many women in the room, in the world have a wedding dress they have worn once and never again? And you give people an opportunity, and suddenly, no problem! Bring it on! And you’ll, again, realize, during this experiment, just how often you say no. Do you know how often you all say no in life every day? People say, “Can you come to this” or “I’m doing that,” and you say, “Yeah, I’d like to, but hmm, I don’t know or I don’t, hmm, know. ” You hesitate.
When you are a Time-Bender, you have to say yes. Because this could be the day that passes, that nothing happens in your life, and you fail the experiment. So you say yes to everything, to anything that comes your way to make sure that this one day you don’t fail. Now, this is dangerous, because your friends learn this, that you will do anything.
And then on your suggestion wall on Facebook, they start making you do things. Like Shane, who suggested that I drink my own urine out of a champagne flute. Or I was made get a tattoo. I don’t like tattoos; I have a tattoo. I was made wax a part of my body that has never even seen the sunlight. If you ever want to know, the face of a man getting the crack of his ass waxed, this is the face you make when you get your ass waxed.
The photographs at the other end are not available. And your eight-year-old son also learns this and tells you to go grocery shopping wearing nothing but a towel. I think I’m the only person in the world to be barred from Marks food and vegetable shop. The lesson I learnt is that it’s not a good idea to leave your eight-year-old old son with your fate in his hands.
But what you also learn by doing this experiment is that life is great fun. When you say yes to everything, play will find you. And I mean play in real play. Real play actually doesn’t really have a purpose. Real play is just for play’s sake. Kids know this automatically. They know it naturally. And somehow we unlearn it as adults.
So you say yes to everything. Play will find you. And what’s interesting about this experiment is I suddenly realized that this is how you permanently foster play in adults. We all know that play is really important. OK? We all know that Play leads to creativity, which leads to innovation. There’s been lots of books, articles, some fantastic TED talks in the past on play and the importance of play leading to creativity. Small business knows this; big corporations know this.
And as I played on, I thought, do you know what? Everyone wants creativity; everyone wants innovation. They want this to lead them to success. But really what we need to do is understand how can we foster that creativity, how can we foster an everyday sense of play? How can we make the people who work in our hospitals, in our schools, in our small businesses and corporations more playful every day so we can fuel this creativity? How can we make them play at everyday level?
And the problem with most corporations and their attitude to creativity and play is that they fail at doing it because they try to enforce it on their employees. It’s play on their terms. They send you off to the woods to shoot each other with paintball guns, or they put a snooker table in the canteen and call it, “Hey! Play!”
But it doesn’t really change things. And I think a corporation or an organization can’t actually be responsible for your sense of creativity and play anyway. Just like they can’t be responsible for your happiness or your health. I mean, they can encourage, they can facilitate, but the actual spark of who you are in terms of creativity and play, it has to come from you, inside yourself.
So if we are going to solve problems in new ways in the world, if we are going to challenge norms and push boundaries, then it needs to start with you, the individual. You can’t hope that a corporation will do it for you. It also has to last. This can’t be just a book you read or a TED talk you watched or a one-day workshop you went to. If we’re going to be creative, it has to be a permanent thing. It has to become a philosophy for who you are, and permeate your every moment, your everyday life.
This is what I became interested in. 100 days into my experiment, I practically heard it click inside myself. I had a perspective shift on the world that will never go away now. It is now who I am. It has changed my personal life, I’ve laughed more, I’ve learned more, I’ve had more fun, I take more risks. It fuels your relationships, your sex life, you take risks which then filter into business life, and in your business life you take more risks. You become open to opportunities, you solve problems in new ways.
And risk, of course, is the heart of innovation and creativity. Nothing ever happens unless you take a risk. A year ago I wouldn’t have expected that I would walk across broken glass or that I would go on Europe’s tallest roller coaster. I hate roller coasters. But you just say yes.
Who would have thought that I would have pierced a friend’s ear? I had no idea of what I was doing. I still don’t! yes But you just say yes. You go from being a guy who says, “Oh, maybe, I’m not too sure,” you go to being a guy who says yes. You say yes to everything.
And here I am on day 318 of my experiment. My new experience for today? Quite easy. My first TED talk. But you don’t have to follow me on the 365-day version. 100 days of your life, three months, 12 weeks is all it will take for this perspective shift. So I’m travelling the world now recruiting Time-Benders, agree to live a life less ordinary. A life in colour instead of the black and white.
So go home and write your list, 20 or 30 things. They can be small things, they don’t have to be jumping on off planes. Small things that you’re going to do. Ask your family and friends, they’ll give you another 20-30 ideas. Ask the internet, you’ll get 2,000 ideas.
Keep a journal; it’s a good way. Keep a journal every day, challenge yourself into, “What did I do? What did I do today that was different, that was unique?”
How can we expect to solve problems in new ways if we do the same thing every day, if we take things for granted? I travel a lot. I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms. Hotel rooms can be quite boring places. This is what you get. This is not how I slept last night. How I slept last night was like this.
Don’t take what’s given to you for granted. And again, this was a hotel two weeks ago around Halloween. This is how I arrived. This is how I left the hotel room. What rule? Is there a rule that says you can’t decorate your own hotel room? I’d love to have seen the face of housekeeping when they opened the door. “What the heck!”
So I’m curious. You have to change things all the time. Look at the workspaces that we work in, look at your own workspace. Think about your own workspace. Why do you think that you’re going to be suddenly be creative one day if you sit in the same chair, same desk in the same corner, in the same office every single day? You have to change your workspace every two or three weeks. Change the art, change the decor, change the building. Change where you work. How are you going to be creative if you keep things the same?
What’s interesting – once you open up, once you start this experiment, what you learn is that it becomes a habit. You actually don’t need the journal anymore. You don’t need the challenge of having to do something every day because you will do two or three or four things every single day regardless. Who would have thought that if you went into your dentist and asked him, instead of him cleaning your teeth, that you were going to clean his, that he would say yes?
The world will say yes to you. Time Bending. The world is a playground. All you need to do is step up and play. Thank you.
SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:
Ken Hughes’ talk, “Time Bending – 365 Ways To Unlock Creativity And Innovation,” is a captivating exploration of how embracing new experiences and playfulness can lead to increased creativity and innovation in our lives. Here are the key points from his inspiring talk:
Imagining Life as a Series of Photographs: Hughes begins by encouraging the audience to envision their life as a series of photographs, each representing a unique day or experience. He prompts us to reflect on the significance of these photographs and the potential for enriching our lives with memorable moments.
Time as a Mental Construct: Hughes challenges our perception of time, highlighting that as we age, time often seems to pass faster. He discusses how time is a mental construct and emphasizes the importance of using our memories to assess the quality of time we’ve spent.
The 365-Day Experiment: The core of Hughes’ talk revolves around his personal experiment, where he committed to experiencing something new every single day for an entire year. He set out to prove that by embracing novelty and stepping out of our comfort zones, we can stretch and bend time, making it feel more fulfilling and meaningful.
The Power of Play: Hughes underscores the significance of play in fostering creativity and innovation. He suggests that playfulness can lead to more open-minded thinking, improved problem-solving abilities, and a willingness to take risks.
Saying “Yes” to Opportunities: Throughout his experiment, Hughes learned the importance of saying “yes” to opportunities and experiences that came his way. He encouraged the audience to adopt a similar mindset, accepting invitations and seeking out new adventures.
Infectious Time Bending: As Hughes embarked on his 365-day journey of Time Bending, he found that his enthusiasm and commitment to trying new things inspired others around him. People began to join him in his quest for new experiences, spreading the Time Bending mindset.
Playful Corporate Culture: Hughes discusses how organizations can benefit from fostering a culture of play and creativity among their employees. He advises that corporations should encourage individuals to embrace playfulness and innovation from within, rather than enforcing it.
Keeping a Journal: To track personal growth and maintain a record of daily experiences, Hughes recommends keeping a journal. This journal serves as a reminder of the commitment to living a more open and adventurous life.
Changing Your Workspace: Hughes suggests changing your workspace every few weeks to stimulate creativity. A change in environment can lead to fresh perspectives and innovative ideas.
The World as a Playground: In conclusion, Hughes encourages the audience to view the world as a vast playground filled with opportunities for creativity and innovation. By saying “yes” to new experiences and embracing playfulness, individuals can unlock their creative potential and live a more vibrant and fulfilling life.
Ken Hughes’ talk leaves us with the powerful message that we have the ability to bend time and make the most of our lives by infusing them with novelty and play. By adopting the Time Bending philosophy, we can foster creativity, embrace innovation, and create a life full of memorable moments. It serves as a reminder that the world is brimming with possibilities, waiting for us to explore and enjoy.
