My TEDx talk ‘root’ started in Israel…Nazareth actually.

So picking up where the last blog left you hanging, I trace back the ‘root’ of the Passion formula TEDx talk to a business trip I took in late April, 2013 and on a long flight home from Tel Aviv I started typing…and typing…and typing. Previous to that flight home I was on a two week business trip first to the UK, then Ireland, then Spain and then the last leg was Israel. I ended in Israel for that I was invited back to speak at our local partners conference — a humbling honor for sure. It was my second time to the state of Israel, the last time I was there was in December 2011 and during that visit I took a day with my colleague & dear friend Ron to visit the holy city. He does an amazing ‘3 religions in 3 hours’ tour of the holy city…can you tell he’s had lots of business visitors over the years?! 🙂 Here are two pics from that enlightening 3 hours.

That ‘11 trip opened my eyes and I was not only humbled to speak, but I learned a lot, met some amazing people and took away the lesson to not believe everything you see on the news about Israel or the entire region for that matter.

Anyways, back to April 2013 — to just be invited back to speak last year was amazing and my hosts (Ron, Sarit and Zachi) who are always kind to me, love my ‘accent’ and do amazing conferences. They also line up a number of direct meetings with local customers when I visit. These local customer visits typically involves us going around the country to see folks operations and thus an enormous amount of time spent in cars. Now this is where it all started for that I trace back the origination of my TEDx talk to one of those customer visits.  It was an early morning meeting that was relatively long drive from Netanya to Nazareth, so 4 of us paired off from the larger team (Ron, Sarit, Terry and myself) left the serene beauty of the hotel (pic of this below), drove up the coast then went east into Nazareth.

Yeah I think Nazareth has some history…some famous guy spent his childhood there…but anyways it was a very cool city to visit but the focus was work and not tourism. We arrived at the customer which made cooking oil and soap, basically the Crisco & Dove of Israel, and it was interesting (smelly) and great meeting.

What I found more interesting was the small talk car conversations after we left the plant. I remember the chats going a bit philosophical on the drive to Tel Aviv for dinner and they centered around the amazing diversity at the customer meeting, how they got there and how journeys are not liniear. We had 4 people from the customer in that meeting and they were a mix of women & men from varying religious backgrounds plus our mix of nationalities and backgrounds.

Later that night when we got back into Tel Aviv we had our send off dinner at Ron’s brothers Yair’s restaurant. BTW — it has amazing food and a great name for you history buffs out there ‘Elba Restaurant’ (article here about them here: http://bit.ly/1nnQsJR ). We met up with some of our other colleagues from the conference and just as I thought there was diversity in the Nazareth meeting — this dinner table was on a different planet! The rundown of people’s origin countries were: UK, Canada, Israel, Argentina, Turkey, Kazakhstan/Russia & Czech Rep. Great meal, great wine and the stories/conversations really stuck with me.

We heard many…I remember it being one of those 3 hour dinners…but the story that stuck in my head was of one from a guy who grew up in the Patagonia region of Argentina. His zig zag life journey from there to Canada then to the US to lead a GE business unit, then to a dinner table in Tel Aviv just stuck with me. It’s an amazing story and I could tell he just doesn’t’ talk about it much…he’s a master leader and loves to enable others drawing their stories out — not telling his, so I could tell it was a bit uncomfortable for him…but the wine was flowing and it was great hearing it and also everyone else’s stories.

I didn’t think much of all of this until ~2 hours into my 16+ hour journey back home.  The car conversations and that dinner sparked a fury of thoughts that I just had to write down…plus I was bored back in coach not sleeping on that LONG leg from TLV to JFK. Some of the headlines in the notes included:

* did everyone at that dinner table just get lucky? no one got to that table without hardships…or a lot of drive.

* The wine was fantastic and I love israeli salad, i think it’s called cucumber salad; but regardless it’s awesome. gotta find it at home…

* how the fuck did i get here. did I get here because of me? does anyone really decide what they do? or do people just get lucky.

* who invented hummus…wow that was a huge debate!

* how does a guy from Patagonia go to being a business leader in GE or an engineering guy from Israel be a part owner in a restaurant?

and about 1000 more words exploring these thoughts. Then I fell asleep…

Now you have to understand something. I’ve got probably 100 of these documents, which I call ‘Thought documents’ that i’ve done over my life…and sometimes they don’t make sense, as you can tell by some of the headlines above. They are really scattered on a bunch of different computers, in evernote and now I’m using google drive…some of them are simply stored in my head. Many of them I’ve never revisited and could be equated to ‘drunk ramblings by kyle’…in this case on the flight I wasn’t drunk, but trust me i’ve done some when drunk and they are just amazing 🙂

At any rate, the more I wrote my thoughts down the more I seen parallels to my own life story whereas none of people I was referencing have ended up doing what they set off to do when they were younger…and they attributed their zig zag lives to other people being involved and ‘pulling’ them. I summarized this thought document around the disruptive concept that: People just don’t decide what they do in life — others do that for them. If you were at the TEDx event, have watched the replay, or read my opening post on the blog — you’ll know I didn’t focus on this…just know it started out with this bold statement and morphed into the passion formula, which will take more blog posts to explain.

don’t worry, i’m almost done this marathon post 🙂

After getting back and being a zombie for the week after, I spent the remainder of the spring and most of the summer not thinking of this stuff. I was distracted by the mountain of work I had every week…and just considered this another ‘thought document’ which was in my unorganized life long pile. It largely didn’t come back into my psyche until the first week of September when our daughter, Tayvia, was going into pre-school. My wife and I wanted to articulate how much we appreciated Patricia, our home daycare lady, and how she’s really helped us raise Tayvia from just 6 months to 4 years old while my wife and I both worked challenging careers. Patricia is like a 3rd parent to her and a parental peer, mentor & advisor to us — all in all an amazing woman…and we wanted to tell her that.

This is when the passion formula concept started to get ‘honed…and I still had no clue I’d end up doing a TEDx talk on it.

More to come on the journey…this was a long post and I promise the upcoming ones will be shorter!

Be sure to follow @Passion_Formula in twitter and follow the blog via email.

Catch you next week. (Next post is up, read now!)

— Kyle