When Change is not a Choice: Armen Berjikly at TEDxYerevan (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Experience Project founder, Armen Berjikly’s TEDx Talk: When Change is not a Choice at TEDxYerevan Conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio: When Change is not a Choice by Armen Berjikly at TEDxYerevan

TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning. I want you to imagine for a minute someone else’s shoes. I want you to imagine that you went to bed feeling completely fine, health-wise, mentally, doesn’t matter, and you woke up the next day.

You woke up and one of your eyes, your left eye, let’s pick your left eye, isn’t working quite right. It’s blurry, its color is gone, pictures look a little bit like what’s behind me. And what you start to do, as most normal people do, is immediately panic, right? Something is wrong with you, you rub your eye, it doesn’t go away. You wash your face, it doesn’t go away. You talk to some friends and you say, “Have you ever woken up and your eye doesn’t work?” And they look at you like you are from Mars. And the go, “Ah, you should probably get checked out and keep distance from me.” That didn’t make you feel any better.

About 3 in the morning you end up on the web, you search on Google for “eye not working”, you end up on a website, probably like WebMD, or some other sort of heavy-handed resource. And that’s the worst idea, because no matter what symptom you have, any of those websites convince you that you’re going to die in 24 hours. Your leg hurts, you have gangrene, you have headache, you have a brain tumor. “Go see doctor now?” Right?

So, you ultimately do go see a doctor. This isn’t going away and you are a little concerned. And you go — and you go through a series of tests, and they’re somewhat embarrassing, or painful, or costly and usually a combination of all three.