No, it's a special day. We should celebrate and appreciate it. I'm going to do a little bit of it. This is Hagen. He enjoys playing football with friends, watching horror movies, and occasionally he practices a piano. He's very good at piano. He can play all the songs in his great eighth anthology, forwards, backwards, and sideways. He'll do that perfectly too. He's regarded as the best piano player in his school, and okay, I lied. He doesn't really practice occasionally. He practices six hours a day. Now that might seem like a lot to you, but it's the same amount of time. You, you, and you spend on Facebook. Nothing. How good at Facebook are you? That's how good the piano, Han Bin is. There's a problem though. Although he's technically brilliant and plays his decent exactly like famous recording, the famous pianist, he's not going to become nearly as successful as A. He wants to be. B. He can be. Or C. He should be. Now here's why. Han Bin looks at what he's passionate about, the piano, as if it was fixed. As if it was like a wall that if you pushed hard enough and for enough time, would give waves or riches and happiness and success and magical power. But sadly, that's not how the world works. You can't treat talent as if it was constipated and just push excellence out of it. In order for him to truly excel in what he's passionate about, the piano, he has to look at it from a fundamentally creative perspective. And something that he has the power to change. So he can't just look at it as something to work our hard on. He has to be able to make his mark on piano. Now my buddy Wesley and I, we were the environment guys. We were passionate about the environment. How many of you think you're passionate about something? Anything, you know, like a sport and activity, a cause, whatever. You can go on and raise your hands. Appreciate it. Great. So then you guys know what I'm talking about. When I say the passion feels different. Passion is not the same as a lot of any other emotion. It's deeper and more visceral, yet still intellectually detached. Passion moves us in strange and profound ways. Now Wesley and I, right, we started the local environment action force for leaf. It was a student-led initiative that acted forcibly upon the local environment, hence local environment action force. Our first project involved saving electricity in our humanities law. See in our school, light bulbs are rated in three. So whenever you want light for reading, writing, arithmetic, texting, whatever else you do in classrooms, you don't get one light, you get three. In addition, these rooms have full length windows. So there's ample natural light. Wesley and I, we thought, sure, it's important to have well-led classrooms, but this is ridiculous. So we just went around and yanked out the third of the world. We thought we owed it to the environment, not ourselves. Now in my opinion, the best way to be passionate and to stay passionate and motivated is to immerse yourself in whatever you love and to do it with a creative energy. Now most of us know that truly marvelous things can only be born out of passion. But we often forget that being fresh and creative is a large part of being passionate. I mean, what's the point in trying to change the world if not changing it in a new and special way? Immersion, it opens us up to the richness of our surroundings. It opens us up to new ideas, you perspective. And immersion doesn't only mean doing what you love 24 hours a day. It doesn't mean playing piano 24 hours a day or trying to convince your neighbors to switch to LED lighting 24 hours a day. By the way, LED lighting, it's energy efficient, very practical, great, you should all switch to it. So yeah, immersion, it opens us up to new ideas. So back to leaf, my little force of ego worries. In hindsight, I found the most incredible part of leaf was the fact that I could do it with one of my best friends, Leslie. We could talk about leaf all the time. And this made us, this opened us up to new ideas because we could talk about leaf all the time. We could discuss any crazy idea no matter how unexpected the it popped up. We could keep our eyes and ears peeled for new and exciting things, knowing that if something jumped at us, we could incorporate it into one of our ideas. It kept us, this kept us spontaneous and hungry. And we knew that we knew that we had to find new diverse inspiration in order to make people surprise in order to teach them something new about the environment. We thought that anything, an avant-garde art project, a new idea for school and body, a baby monkey writing on a pink backwards. They're all useful to recall as in somewhere or another, even the baby monkey. One of the favorite parts of leaf was the fact that every Friday we get together in the library, we sit down in front of a computer and we do leaf stuff. Now this in my mind was the best part of leaf because we could just, we sat down and trolled the web for absolutely any new idea. It came our ways. Anything we couldn't incorporate into our project. So we learned that the best idea is to go to the most unlikely of places. And in order to be surprising, in order to teach people something new about the environment and about themselves, we had to be receptive to new ideas. We still did all the research. We still read all the articles and we still pitched to the cynics who couldn't care less about carbon offset or phone recycling. But our minds were open, knowing that even those very cynics could provide some sort of insight into saving the environment. Now in one of our projects, we had to find a striking way to close the library door. I mean, has this annoying locking mechanism where if you opened it up, it would just get stuck. And then people, being people, would just walk in and out thinking, oh, it's open, how convenient. Not realizing that precious energy was being wasted on the aircon. So Wesley and I, we decided that we needed to stop this. We got one of the arts, your members of our of our of leaf to create one of those cheesy US Army uncle Sam posters with a twist. She created an enormous plastic hand and just stuck it to the poster. So next to the library door, we just have this flat poster with this creepy, eerie hand pointing out at all the plastic bags urging them to close the library door. And made people stop and made people stare, but then something wonderful happened. People started closing the library door. It was amazing. I mean, it was amazing. This is why we need to harness creativity, along with passion. I mean, doing things better than it's ever been done before is why we need to harness creativity passion together. Sometimes we need to do something totally unique that no one has ever done before. But sometimes we need to do something totally unique that no one has ever done before. Other times we can do something a little different. And we know that it can be equally effective. Now immersion doesn't only apply to these massive ideological concerns like saving the environment or anything. And then it also comes up the benefits of immersion that is how creativity feeds passion and see versa. It also comes up in improvisational theater. Now I did improv for a while, which is basically drama made up on the spot. And for our performances, we get themes or locations. So we might have to do a scene in a toilet, or we might have to do a scene in incorporate lost love into it. And if we weren't totally immersed in the scene for those three minutes, our ideas would stutter and our scenes would choke and fail. Now the main strategy in a program is to say yes to every idea, to accept and commit to every new idea. No matter how numerous it was. So if someone just pulled out a pineapple in the middle of the scene, we have to commit to it. We have to commit to the pineapple. We have to be like yes, a pineapple, but a perfect addition to this funeral process. So yeah, if we weren't totally immersed in the scene, totally immersed in the pineapple, we are doubt would stop us from using the idea we had in the scene and using the full potential. We have to trust as improvisers that magical thing that is fascinating. We have to trust that if we were passionate about the scene, the idea would come. Now passion, as you've seen, is useless without creativity and creativity falters. It's not backed up by passion. I'd like to leave you with this. If we don't embrace open-mindedness, passion and creativity together, we'll never be able to live in a world where people can speak freely without fear of punishment. Where companies and organizations actually care about the impact they make on the world, and where stale, worn out, principally, can be moved aside and replaced by newer, fresher ones. Building a better world starts with caring about the things that are in this, and this begins with immersion. Thank you.