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What's Important
The following is an excerpt of an address delivered by Dean Kamen, President, DEKA Research and Development Corporation, and Founder, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) during the Big Conversations speaker series at Olin College.
I have virtually no prepared remarks, which isn't that unusual. I never did homework very well. I don't even have a specific theme. I'm here to have a conversation with you.
Einstein once said that wisdom is knowing “what's important”—which is the title of this talk. What's important changes over time both for individuals and for society. I want to talk first about what I hope is important to the students who are here: education.
I was not a good student. I decided at a very young age that I like to do things my way, and that doesn't put you in teachers' good graces. I didn't get very good grades. The year I was supposed to leave high school and go on to college, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) had announced a revolutionary idea at the time, particularly among engineering schools, called The Plan. The curriculum was essentially project-based, and students had a lot of freedom. I decided to try it.
Within months after I got there, I had to decide between getting what I thought was the best education and getting a diploma. I went for the education. Among the faculty members were a few who were incredibly bright and insightful, great teachers, people who wanted to work with students. I started hanging out in their offices, asking them questions. They'd send me off: “Go read this, go study that, and then come back.” Within a few months I pretty much knew which ones would be willing to be my personal tutors and advisors. I spent the best five years of my life as a freshman there, talking to these people. By far the most important thing I did at WPI was to develop an understanding of basic principles, how the natural world works. And then try to understand a little bit about how people work—that's much more difficult.
After a few years, I had spent a lot of time with physics and math professors, people in the various engineering departments. I finally decided to leave. I never graduated, but I've always thought I got an extraordinary education, if you measure the right things—if you measure what's important.
I knew very early that I didn't want to get a job. The word bothered me. I decided to learn physics and engineering and work for myself inventing things. While I was at WPI, I was also turning our parents' little basement into a giant manufacturing complex. My older brother, who was in medical school, would come home and say, "I need this, and this, and this"—he was studying some really brutal stuff: pediatric cancer, leukemia in babies. Well, I didn't have any background to solve the medical problem, but I could certainly build the equipment he needed.
Over the years, I built more and more specialized pieces of equipment out of my parents' basement. It would get written up in various medical journals, and that would bring me more customers. Eventually, with some of the WPI faculty and students who had been working nights and weekends with me, we set up a company. We built thousands of specialized pumps and also some broad-based pumps, like wearable insulin-delivery pumps for diabetics. That captured the attention of the big companies, because there are 16 million diabetics walking around. We sold that business and there I was.
Then I started another company, DEKA, to work on the kinds of problems most people wouldn't want to work on—either because they don't see a business opportunity or they think the technical challenge is too risky. Things like the IBOT came from this. The disability community of the United States and the world is much more substantial than most people think. You don't see a lot of disabled people because, notwithstanding the Americans With Disabilities Act, it is so difficult to get around. It's just too difficult for them to go where everybody else goes, to do what you all do—taking for granted that you can get up that curb or step. So I decided to work on a way to restore that mobility to people with disabilities.
I never did a sophisticated business or financial analysis. I didn't hire marketing people or do focus groups. I just imagined: I'm sitting in a seat and, for whatever reason—Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, a car accident—I can't get up. We can put people on the moon, cross continents in five hours, put people a mile under the ocean—and when somebody loses the ability to walk, we put them in a wheelchair? Their eyeballs are at 39 inches and a curb is as good as the bars on a jail cell? I don't think so. A person is not a sack of potatoes to be moved around.
We set out to figure out how to give people, maybe not as much mobility—but dignity, the ability essentially to stand up. To do it, we had to build a balancing machine that could also walk up a flight of stairs. We did it. We finished the first version of the IBOT many years ago, and licensed it to the world's largest medical products company, Johnson and Johnson. My business model at the time, although I didn't know that's what it was (everybody needs a business model these days; nobody just makes stuff) was to create a valuable product through technology and invention and insight, and then license it to a company that was good at manufacturing, service, and distribution. Large companies are very efficient conduits to the people who need these products and services.
It always seemed to me that the world would be a better place if people made decisions to work on problems that matter. If it was a 'big thing', we ought to try working on it. FIRST was another 'big thing' that I believe is important, and worth trying.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was conjuring up FIRST, the dismal, depressing statistics showed that in the United States essentially all minorities, particularly women, by the time they're 12 or 13 years old have for various reasons pushed out of their consciousness at least the option of becoming an engineer, scientist, or inventor. In our great American culture that grew out of entrepreneurs and inventors, why couldn't we create an institution that would help move the culture toward giving all kids an opportunity to see what's possible for them, giving them some sense of what really is important in life?
It's the responsibility of adults to let kids know what's important and what's possible. But in our culture, kids are bombarded with the NFL, the NBA, Hollywood and entertainment. That was the only kind of stuff kids could see young adults doing, and so that's where kids put their energy and passion—unless they were lucky enough to have people in their lives who could say, "Those things are fun, they're distractions, they're amusements; but they aren't what you build your life on. It's not sustainable, and it won't in the end be gratifying."
FIRST follows the sports model. To start it, we enlisted the nation's great companies and institutions to do for “smarts” what the Olympic Committee does for shot-putters. Eleven years ago, I got people from 20 or 30 companies to help as mentors with the first robotics competition. I knew them from my businesses. They knew I'm a walking human irritant, and it would be easier to just participate one year, and I would go away. But by last year 17 cities held regionals, and we took 500 companies to Disney's Epcot® Center for the national competition.
At the end of last season, our board told me, “Dean, you've had ten years of compounded growth. We can't sustain it.” But this year we did 23 regionals and had 800 companies participating from the United States, Britain, Canada, and Brazil. Our event is too big to hold at Disney this year, so we're taking over the Astrodome and the Reliance Center in Houston.
The reason that Senior Olin Partner, Woodie Flowers, and I and now tens of thousands of serious people dedicate so much time and donate so many resources to FIRST is because it's important. It gives kids a sense of what's possible in a culture so deluded by nonsensical distractions that before they're 15 years old, they're being cheated out of ever being able to catch up and participate. Why do I personally do this? I have one extra criterion for what I'll put my time into. It has to be something I don't think other people are doing, at least in the short term.
You know, one reason I was excited the first time I heard about Olin was I thought, hmm, maybe they'll attract students who, for whatever reason, have figured out at an early age what really is important. Maybe they'll have a faculty that's dedicated to the right things. If I could have designed a university environment when I was 18, it would probably have been pretty close to this one. I encourage both the faculty and the students here to ask yourselves every day, “What's important?” Make sure that you stay true to what a university is supposed to be about.
Students can buy textbooks anywhere and read them; they don't need the faculty for that. The reason for collecting students in one place is to give them access to a faculty. Most faculty members at most institutions don't see that as their highest priority, which is too bad. If you want to do research, there are loads of places to for that. If you've chosen to be a professor, you have some pretty strong obligations to what is, to me, the most important thing adults can do if our society is to move forward. Students can benefit from your skills and history, your experience, insights, and failures. You should be helping students focus more quickly on what really is important. To me, that's the perfect model of the university.
As students, the only thing you're missing compared with some adults is the judgment to know what is important. You certainly learn faster than adults do. You have more energy and are carrying way less bias. You started out standing on the shoulders of even taller giants than the adults did, so you skipped over a lot of nonsense and you're more current and comfortable with most technologies. And you have more time left. So in every category you win, and I'm jealous.
After you figure out where you want to put your energy, you educate yourself. Faculty members can provide valuable guidance and advice, but nobody can teach you anything. Not your parents, not the teacher. Learning is very personal, very frustrating. We all do it our own way—we read it and get frustrated, and reread it, get more frustrated, break a pencil and read it again, especially if it's something important. The important stuff that's undone is hard, or else it would have already been done.
If you're lucky enough to get an education, you'll have some tools that give you extraordinary power over other people, and you've got to be careful how you use them. It would be good and maybe a little humbling to remember that. Just think every day about what's important, and how to use some of what you have learned to benefit humanity. The world will be a much better place.
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