I have a vision for each one of you, and the vision I have for you is that when you wake up in the morning, your blood is singing at the thought of being who you are and doing what you do; that as you go through the day, you can literally sink to your knees in gratitude at the tremendous good fortune that's been bestowed on you; that as you go through the day, you become radiantly alive several times.
And if your life isn't like that, I'd like to humbly suggest that you're wasting your life.
A life is too short to be wasted.
So what I propose to do in the next 17 minutes -- I've used up one minute already -- is to give you a set of powerful tools which can get you started on being there.
Is that of interest to you?
Audience: Yes.
Srikumar Rao: OK.
This is a conference on happiness, but even if it wasn't a conference on happiness, would it be right if I said that in some way, shape, fashion or form, you're devoting your entire life to being happy?
Everything you do -- your job, family, children, relationships, whatever -- is a quest for happiness.
Correct?
I'd like you to think about the following: What do you have to get in order to be happy?
We're just going to spend a minute on this.
What do you have to get in order to be happy?
Anybody, quick?
When I conduct this experiment, a bunch of stuff comes up: vast wealth, trophy spouse, good health, lots of travel, time, etc, etc, etc.
Right now, if you were to think about it, you probably have a list of, "Here's what I need to get in order to be happy."
I would like you to consider this: anything that you can get -- let me repeat that -- anything you can get, you can un-get.
Is that correct?
So, vast wealth can make you happy.
Vast wealth can disappear tomorrow.
A number of people in the financial sector have discovered this already.
So whatever you get that can make you happy can go away.
Where does that leave you?
Not a very nice place, right?
I have a different proposition to suggest to you.
What I have to suggest to you is that there is nothing that you have to get, do or be in order to be happy.
Let me repeat that: there is nothing that you have to get, do or be in order to be happy.
In fact, happiness is your innate nature.
It is hardwired into you.
It is part of your DNA.
You cannot not be happy.
Now, all of you are very polite, and in some of the other forums I speak in, such as top business schools, they're not so polite.
And invariably, somebody articulates what many of you are thinking, which is: "If happiness is my innate nature, how come I am not experiencing it?
How come I am experiencing my life sucks?"
(Laughter) And the answer to that is actually very simple.
You have spent your entire life learning to be unhappy.
Let me repeat that: you have spent your entire life learning to be unhappy.
And the way we learn to be unhappy is by buying into a particular mental model.
A mental model is a notion we have that this is the way the world works.
All of us have mental models, we've got dozens of mental models.
We've got mental models on how to find a job, how to get ahead at work, how to pick a restaurant to eat at, how to have a movie to go to ... dozens of them.
The problem isn't that we have mental models.
The problem is that we don't know that we have mental models.
We think this is the way the world works.
And the more we invest in a mental model, the more it appears that this, in fact, is the way the world works.
But it isn't: it's just a mental model, and the mental model we have that we buy into so strongly is that we have to get something so we can do something so we can be something.
Like, we have to get a great deal of money so we can travel to exotic places so we can be happy.
We have to be in a relationship so we can have great sex so we can be happy.
All of this is a variation of the if-then model.
And the if-then model is: if this happens, then we will be happy.
If I were to get a better job, if I were to get more money, if my boss would have a heart attack, if only I was married, if only my wife would leave me -- (Laughter) if only I had children, if my children would grow up and go to college ...
It doesn't matter what it is.
The whole notion is if this happens, then I will be happy.
And right now, the only thing that's different between the persons in this audience is what is the particular "if" that you are focusing on?
And the only thing that's different between you now and where you were 10 years ago is what is the particular "if" that you were focusing on?
Think about your life 10 years ago.
Spend a minute doing that.
Ten years ago, if you remember clearly, there were certain things you wanted.
Is that correct?
Odds are pretty good that many of those things you wanted 10 years ago you now have.
Is that correct?
Where has that left you?
In exactly the same place, right?
What we don't realize is the model itself is flawed.
The if-then model -- "If this happens I will be happy" -- the model itself is flawed.
But instead of recognizing that it is the model itself that's flawed, what we do is spend enormous amounts of time changing the "if."
"Oh, well, I thought if I became CEO it would help, but now I realize it's not that I want to become a CEO.
I want to become the billionaire CEO, and then I will be happy."
You've got your own variation on that.
But it's the model itself that's flawed, not what you put on the "if" side of the equation.
I can demonstrate that to you.
Can any of you recall a time when you were confronted with a scene of such spectacular beauty that it took you outside of yourself into a place of great serenity?
Maybe a rainbow, a mountain range, a valley, the sea.
And if you remember that -- raise your hands if you could.
Virtually all of you could, right?
Have you ever wondered why that happened?
The reason that happened is that somehow, for some reason, at that instant, you accepted the universe exactly as it was.
You didn't say, "That's a beautiful rainbow, but it's kind of off to the left, and if I could move it 200 yards to the right, it would be ever so much more beautiful."
(Laughter) You didn't say, "That's a beautiful valley, but the tree in the foreground has too many crooked branches.
So if you gave me a chainsaw and 20 minutes, I'd make it ever so much better."
Oh no, the rainbow off-center was just fine.
The tree with its crooked branches was just fine.
And the moment you accepted the universe just as it was, your habitual-wanting self dropped away, and the happiness which is your innate nature surfaced, and you felt it.
And I know you felt it because now, even now after all those years, you can still remember it.
The problem is that your life right now, with all of the problems that you have -- more precisely, all of the problems that you think you have -- is equally perfect.
But you do not accept it.
In fact, you're spending all your time striving with might and main to make it different.
You are not accepting it.
And when you're not accepting it, you're buying into the if-then model: if this happens, then I will be happy.
And it's the model itself that is flawed.
So let me show you how you can get out of that, or at least you can begin the steps towards getting out of that.
I'd like to share with you that action.
We all live our lives because we want to achieve something, correct?
You know, we are here and we want to have something.
Alex wants to have a successful conference.
You know, many of you want to have great programs for your companies that are very successful.
You want to progress, have more money, all of that, is that correct?
Each of those is an outcome; you would like something to happen.
Now, I'd like you to think about the following: actions are within your control, not entirely, but to a large extent.
The outcome is completely out of your control.
OK?
Actions are within your control.
The outcome is completely outside your control.
Have any of you recognized that when you have a goal and you start to work towards it, some of the time you don't achieve your goal, and some of the time what you get is the exact opposite of what you wanted?
Has that happened to any of you?
Like there was a friend of mine who said, "Gee, you know, I have not been paying a lot of attention to my wife, and this has to change."
So the next time we went on a business trip, he bought a very expensive dress for her.
And this was his way of showing, you know, I care for you, and nice things would happen.
And when he presented the gift to his wife, her immediate reaction was, "After 20 years of marriage, you don't know my size?"
(Laughter) "And furthermore, don't you know I never wear this kind of thing?"
And the next thing you know, he had a full-blown marital spat.
Has that happened to any of you?
You've taken action for a particular outcome and the outcome you got was the exact opposite of what you wanted?
Happens all the time.
Well, we live in a world where what we think of, what we invest in, is the outcome.
We define our life in the following way: here I am, here is where I want to go, these are the steps I have to take in order to get from where I am to where I want to go, and if I succeed, life is wonderful.
And if I don't, then I have failed, life is no good, life sucks.
True?
False?
That is how we live.
We invest in the outcome, and as I've just pointed out, the outcome is frequently different from what we would like, and sometimes the diametric opposite of what we would like.
You invest in the outcome and you are guaranteed to have more than your share of frustration, angst and all the rest of the stuff that makes life suck.
There is an alternative.
And the alternative is that you do not invest in the outcome, you invest in the process.
And the best way to describe that is a quote by John Wooden.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with John Wooden.
He's very well-known in the United States and certainly among basketball fans.
He's the only person ever to make the basketball Hall of Fame both as a player and as a coach.
And what he told his entering team -- he led UCLA to an unprecedented number of victories and finals in the NCAA -- and what he used to tell any new team is he never spoke about winning.
He always said, "When it's over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of?
And if you did the best that you were capable of, the score doesn't matter.
But I would suspect that if you did the best that you were capable of, you will find the score to your liking."
That is investing in a process.
What we do is the exact opposite.
We invest in the outcome.
This is what I want -- oh, I want it so desperately, because if I get it I will be happy.
And you try with might and main, to do whatever you can, but you are always focusing on, "This is the outcome."
Now, focusing on the outcome is fine.
It gives you direction.
Investing in the outcome means that you make the achievement of a particular outcome dependent for your well-being.
And that is a surefire recipe for failure.
What you can do is something else.
You can invest in the process.
That is, once you have determined, here is where I am, here is where I want to be, and that's fine, you focus on the outcome only to the extent that it gives you direction, and then you invest yourself completely in the process.
You say, here are the steps you want to take, and you put everything into it.
And if you succeed, wonderful.
And if you don't succeed, still wonderful, because now you have a new starting point, and from that new starting point, you select another outcome and keep going.
And when you do that, you will find that every day is a blast.
Let me give you an example.
And if you have children -- raise your hands if you have children.
Have you ever seen a small child learn to walk?
What happens, and this happens typically between 11 and 13 months, is the child gets up and she sees everybody walking, she wants to walk, she gets up, she falls down, she starts crying and momma runs up and comforts her, kisses the place, makes it well.
She tries again, falls down, mommy runs up again.
After some time, mommy feels tired and no longer runs up and the child stops crying, and then she gets up, takes a step and doesn't fall down, and then she takes another, and a beautiful smile comes on her face.
And very soon, generally within 24 hours, she's walking all over the place, upsetting your living room arrangements.
And you know you've gone to a new stage of parenting.
Right?
Now, imagine what would happen if each time the child fell, she would say, "Oh my God, I failed again.
I'm never going to learn to walk."
And you have to get counseling for her to help her deal with feelings of inadequacy and not being able to achieve and fail yet again.
How long do you think it would take her to learn to walk if you had to do that, if every three times she fell down, you had to get a counselor to counsel her and so on?
Sounds funny, doesn't it?
But that is exactly what we're doing.
What the child is doing is focusing on the process.
She's investing in the process, not in the outcome.
What we do is the exact opposite.
As we grow up, we lose the ability to invest in the process, we start investing in the outcome.
By definition the outcome is outside of our control, and if that's where we spend all of our emotional energy, we are going to get drained as we do.
But if, on the other hand, we said, "Here is the outcome, I am going to invest in the process and give it every single bit I could," every day is a blast, and you're well on your way to achieving the vision that I outlined to you.
The question that I get all the time, is people say, "Professor Rao, but nothing makes me passionate."
So I say, "OK, what would?"
And they invariably come up with, you know, here is a list of things.
Here's my job and here's how much it pays, this is the kind of person my boss is, the kind of people my colleagues are, and here's how my customers are, here's how much I travel, here's how big my office is, how deep the carpeting is, how many windows I have -- a bunch of parameters.
And what I tell them is what I want to share with you, because all of that stuff -- first of all, it doesn't exist.
But second, even if it did and you were plugged into it, it would not take more than six months for you to be the same sorry, miserable self there as you are now, because passion exists inside you.
It does not exist in the job.
And if you don't find a way to ignite it within you right where you are, you are not going to find it outside.
But if you do find a way to ignite it where you are, then you will find that the external world rearranges itself to accommodate the new person that you are becoming.
And as you do that, you will find that miracles happen on a regular basis.
Persons come up whom you're delighted to meet.
New people enter your life.
It's just a breeze, because all you do in your life is you take journeys.
You came here to this conference; you went on a journey.
You hang around the water cooler, talking about how terrible your place of work is; you went on a journey.
You watch "Desperate Housewives," you go on a journey.
You go on a journey where 40-something women are having affairs with 19-something gardeners while the husbands are playing around with models.
All you do is go on journeys.
There's nothing wrong with that, but just ask yourself, "Is this a journey I want to take?
Does this take me to a place I want to spend time?"
And if you start doing that, you will find that your life changes.
The kind of people you meet, the things you talk about, the movies you go to, the books you read -- everything changes.
And you begin all of that by focusing on the process.
Invest in the process, not in the outcome.
Thank you.
Zika fever: our newest dread disease.
What is it?
Where'd it come from?
What do we do about it?
Well for most adults, it's a relatively mild disease -- a little fever, a little headache, joint pain, maybe a rash.
In fact, most people who get it don't even know they've had it.
But the more we find out about the Zika virus the more terrifying it becomes.
For example, doctors have noticed an uptick of something called Guillain-Barré syndrome in recent outbreaks.
In Guillain-Barré, your immune system attacks your nerve cells it can partially or even totally paralyze you.
Fortunately, that's quite rare, and most people recover.
But if you're pregnant when you're infected you're at risk of something terrible.
Indeed, a child with a deformed head.
Here's a normal baby.
Here's that infant with what's called microcephaly.
a brain in a head that's too small.
And there's no known cure.
It was actually doctors in northeastern Brazil who first noticed, just a year ago, after a Zika outbreak, that there was a peak in the incidence of microcephaly.
It took medical doctors another year to be sure that it was caused by the Zika virus, but they're now sure.
And if you're a "bring on the evidence" type, check out this publication.
So where did it come from, and how did it get here?
And it is here.
Like many of our viruses, it came out of Africa, specifically the Zika forest in Uganda.
Researchers at the nearby Yellow Fever Research Institute identified an unknown virus in a monkey in the Zika forest which is how it got its name.
The first human cases of Zika fever surfaced a few years later in Uganda-Tanzania.
The virus then spread through West Africa and east through equatorial Asia -- Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia.
But it was still mostly in monkeys and, of course, mosquitoes.
In fact in the 60 years between the time it was first identified in 1947 and 2007 there were only 13 reported cases of human Zika fever.
And then something extraordinary happened on the tiny Micronesian Yap islands.
There was an outbreak that affected fully 75 percent of the population.
How did it get there?
By air.
Today we have two billion commercial airline passengers.
An infected passenger can board a plane, fly halfway around the world before developing symptoms -- if they develop gonzalezmaria@example.com.
Then when they land, the local mosquitoes begin to bite them and spread the fever.
Zika fever then next surfaced in 2013 in French Polynesia.
By December of that year, it was being transmitted locally by the mosquitoes.
That led to an explosive outbreak in which almost 30,000 people were affected.
From there it radiated around the Pacific.
There were outbreaks in the Cook Islands, in New Caledonia, in Vanuatu, in the Solomon Islands and almost all the way around to the coast of South America and Easter Island.
And then, in early 2015, there was an upsurge of cases of a dengue-like syndrome in the city of Natal in northeastern Brazil.
The virus wasn't dengue, it was Zika, and it spread rapidly -- Recife down the coast, a big metropolitan center, soon became the epicenter.
Well people have speculated that it was 2014 World Cup soccer fans that brought the virus into the country.
But others have speculated that perhaps it was Pacific Islanders participating in championship canoe races that were held in Rio that year that brought it in.
Well today, this is only a year later.
The virus is being locally transmitted by mosquitoes virtually throughout South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands Until this year, the many thousands of cases that have been diagnosed in the US were contracted elsewhere.
But as of this summer, it's being transmitted locally in Miami.
It's here.
So what do we do about it?
Well, preventing infection is either about protecting people or about eliminating the mosquitoes.
Let's focus on people first.
You can get vaccinated.
You can not travel to Zika areas.
Or you can cover up and apply insect repellent.
Getting vaccinated is not an option, because there isn't a vaccine yet and there probably won't be for a couple of years.
Staying home isn't a foolproof protection either because we now know that it can be sexually transmitted.
Covering up and applying insect repellent does work ...
until you forget.
(Laughter) So that leaves the mosquitoes, and here's how we control them now: spraying insecticides.
The protective gear is necessary because these are toxic chemicals that kill people as well as bugs.
Although it does take quite a lot more to kill a person than to kill a bug.
These are pictures from Brazil and Nicaragua.
But it looks the same in Miami, Florida.
And we of course can spray insecticides from planes.
Last summer, mosquito control officials in Dorchester County, South Carolina, authorized spraying of Naled, an insecticide, early one morning, as recommended by the manufacturer.
Later that day, a beekeeper told reporters that her bee yard looked like it had been nuked.
Oops.
Bees are the good guys.
The citizens of Florida protested, but spraying continued.
Unfortunately, so did the increase in the number of Zika fever cases.
That's because insecticides aren't very effective.
So are there any approaches that are perhaps more effective than spraying but with less downsides than toxic chemicals?
I'm a huge fan of biological controls, and I share that view with Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring," the book that is credited with starting the environmental movement.
In this book she tells the story, as an example, of how a very nasty insect pest of livestock was eliminated in the last century.
No one knows that extraordinary story today.
So Jack Block and I, when we were writing an editorial about the mosquito problem today, retold that story.
And in capsule form, it's that pupae -- that's the immature form of the insect -- were irradiated until they were sterile, grown to adulthood and then released from planes all over the Southwest, the Southeast and down into Mexico and into Central America literally by the hundreds of millions from little airplanes, eventually eliminating that terrible insect pest for most of the Western Hemisphere.
Our real purpose in writing this editorial was to introduce readers to how we can do that today -- not with radiation but with our knowledge of genetics.
Let me explain.
This is the bad guy: Aedes aegypti.
It's the most common insect vector of diseases, not just Zika but dengue, Chikungunya, West Nile virus and that ancient plague, yellow fever.
It's an urban mosquito, and it's the female that does the dirty work.
She bites to get a blood meal to feed her offspring.
Males don't bite; they don't even have the mouth parts to bite.
A little British company called Oxitec genetically modified that mosquito so that when it mates with a wild female, its eggs don't develop to adulthood.
Let me show you.
This is the normal reproductive cycle.
Oxitec designed the mosquito so that when the male mates with the wild female the eggs don't develop.
Sounds impossible?
Well let me show you just diagrammatically how they do it.
Now this represents the nucleus of a mosquito cell, and that tangle in the middle represents its genome, the sum total of its genes.
Scientists added a single gene that codes for a protein represented by this orange ball that feeds back on itself to keep cranking out more of that protein.
The extra copies, however, go and gum up the mosquitoes' genes, killing the organism.
To keep it alive in the laboratory they use a compound called tetracycline.
Tetracycline shuts off that gene and allows normal development.
They added another little wrinkle so that they could study what happens.
And that is they added a gene that makes the insect glow under UV light so that when they released it they could follow exactly how far it went how long it lived and all of the kinds of data for a good scientific study.
Now this is the pupal stage, and at this stage the females are larger than the males.
That allows them to sort them into the males and the females and they allow only the males to grow to adulthood.
And let me remind you that males don't bite.
From there it's pretty simple.
They take beakers full of male mosquitoes, load them into milk cartons, and drive around the city, releasing them guided by GPS.
Here's the mayor of a city releasing the first batch of what they call the "friendly Aedes."
Now I wish I could tell you this is an American city, but it's not.
It's Piracicaba, Brazil.
The amazing thing is that in just a year it brought down the cases of dengue by 91 percent.
That's better than any insecticide spraying can do.
So why aren't we using this remarkable biological control in the US?
That's because it's a GMO: a genetically modified organism.
Notice the subtitle here says if the FDA would let them they could do the same thing here, when Zika arrives.
And of course it has arrived.
So now I have to tell you the short form of the long, torturous story of GM regulation in the US In the US, there are three agencies that regulate genetically modified organisms: the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the USDA, US Department of Agriculture.
Took these folks two years to decide that it would be the FDA that would regulate the genetically modified mosquito.
And they would do it as a new animal drug, if that makes any sense.
Took them another five years going back and forth and back and forth to convince the FDA that this would not harm people, and it would not harm the environment.
They finally gave them, this summer, permission to run a little test in the Florida Keys, where they had been invited years earlier when they Keys had an outbreak of dengue.
Would that it were that easy.
When the local residents heard that there would be genetically modified mosquitoes tested in their community some of them began to organize protests.
They even organized a petition on the internet with this cuddly logo, which eventually accumulated some 160,000 signatures And they demanded a referendum which will be conducted in just a couple of weeks about whether the trials would be gonzalezmaria@example.com.
Well it's Miami that really needs these better ways of controlling insects.
And there the attitudes are changing.
In fact, very recently a bipartisan group of more than 60 legislators wrote to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell asking that she, at the Federal level, expedite access for Florida to this new technology.
So the bottom line is this: biological control of harmful insects can be both more effective and very much more environmentally friendly than using insecticides, which are toxic chemicals.
That was true in Rachel Carson's time; it's true today.
What's different is that we have enormously more information about genetics than we had then, and therefore more ability to use that information to affect these biological controls.
And I hope that what I've done is aroused your curiosity enough to start your own inquiry -- not into just GM mosquitoes but to the other genetically modified organisms that are so controversial today.
I think if you do that, and you dig down through all of the misinformation, and the marketing on the part of the organic food industry and the Greenpeaces and find the science, the accurate science, you'll be surprised and pleased.
Thank you.
(Applause)