Episode 13 – Ed Boyden On Constructive Failure

What this episode covers

“I often ask people to think about aiming for a constructive failure.” says Ed Boyden , Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute & Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, “It is probably going to fail, but you will know what you need to do next. I think from that comes wisdom.” EPISODE CREDITS Guest Starring Ed Boyden , Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute & Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology TED Talks by Ed Boyden: Produced & Hosted by Adam Greenfield Executive Produced by Patrick Yurick , Instructional Designer – MIT OGE Executive Produced by Heather Konar, Communication Director – MIT OGE Special thanks to the following editors who provided us invaluable feedback that aided in the development of this show: Christopher O’Keeffe , Co-Founder of Podcation Kristy Bennet , Manager – MIT Women’s League Jennifer Cherone , Phd Candidate – MIT Burge Laboratory Erik Tillman , Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education. MUSIC & SOUNDS “All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License ( http://freemusicarchive.org ) “Open Flames” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. “Stingray – Dangerous Thought” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ EPISODE SCRIPT Print The Script Here ADAM GREENFIELD Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate student researchers. My name is Adam Greenfield and one of my favorite quotes is by the ancient poet Ovid, and it goes “Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim.” That translates to “Be patient and strong; one day this pain will be useful to you.” I bring this up because in this episode, we’re going to be hearing terms like “constructive failure” and “principle of applied laziness,” things that require patience and perseverance while going through inevitable failures in both communication and elsewhere in life. But as you’ll also hear, it’s more than that. It’s how those failures benefit you and make you a stronger, better communicator in the end. Now, I don’t know many people who have done a TED Talk. In fact, I only know one person and you’re about to hear from him. ED BOYDEN I look back at talks I gave before then and thought, “wow, that wasn’t very good.” ADAM GREENFIELD

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