I'm really lucky because I've had a lot of success in my life coming up with new ideas new innovations and putting them into practice actually being able to translate the the values. I have the beliefs that I have into reality into tangible products and services or tangible outputs and terms of new content new ways of putting those ideas into practice.
I think this means that I've had a unique opportunity to forge a path for myself and those that I care about those that matter to me in those that are important to me and this is such a privilege to to privilege role to have because I understand that it can be incredibly difficult to not only craft an individual identity to be able to be secure and who you are but then to also find ways of relating to others.
Such that you don't become a conformist but actually find ways of taking advantage of your and you're in the collective sum of individual identities and so that becomes very complicated and high level and very kind of meta but what I want to talk about today is is forging new paths as an individual and how we can kind of construct our own identities while at the same time relating to others in a way that's healthy.
And the way that takes advantage of all of our individualities and takes advantage of our kind of collective identities as a group one of the things I work with in innovation and work with especially in diverse teams is finding ways of having a collective belief system without losing individual identities.
I think in these environments it can become extremely easy to kind of everybody just defaults to the least common denominator and nobody kind of stands out nobody is able to kind of stand strong in their own. Belief systems in their own ideas in their own identities and this is absolutely critical for the successor failure of that team because good being able to forge a path forward is not constructed of bland vanilla kind of nothing average ideas or solutions forging a path beforeward means creating something that has vision and that has kind of purpose and we can't get there if we're all just trying to find a middle ground that we can do work together and that's not to say that this is an important and other aspects of life and things like, Government and other areas it's really important to find that kind of middle road but when it comes to working in teams when it comes to coming up with creating new ideas with forging a new path forward, we really have to kind of work against our own need to conform our own desires to conform with our own what makes us unique what makes us individuals.
And in any kind of collaborative atmosphere. I think this is going to come up and you'll have oftentimes this feeling of peer pressure from the other members of your team or the other benefits of your group to just kind of adhere or conform to whatever the vision the prevailing vision is at hand but I think that's a critical juncture to voice your own individual individuality to voice your concerns to voice your own perspective and ideas and to find ways of integrating those ideas and those perspectives not to.
Kind of start watering everything down but to make your solutions more poignant more purposeive so I think would it comes down to is we have to stop thinking about our group selves as somehow a filtered version of our individual cells but start thinking of our group identities as made up of a thousand different points of light or however many different members are part of your team.
I guess a thousand would probably be. Too many but say five points of light if you have five people on your team five individuals each with strengths and weaknesses that differ from the other members of your team and taking advantage of those strengths trying to find new opportunities taking those perspectives and creating value from those perspectives that's I think is a mark of a good team that is a mark of a team that can create a success.
