TEDx- The Emotion Behind Invention

After talking much in this first portion of class about our own personalities, strengths, and weaknesses, I have began to acknowledge my lack of emotional intelligence. While I hope to be a doctor one day, I clearly have a drive for people and helping them as best as possible, however my bedside manners are very sub-par.

With a recent diagnosis of my mom, she has been very back and forth with her own emotions which has been hard for me to grasp, because I can barely understand my own emotions. I tend to ignore them. However, thinking about all of this, emotion is important in so many ways. Emotion is the driving force behind so much that we do every day. For me, my emotion lies with my studies and research and moving the face of medicine one day. Others find emotion in teaching our younger generations, or writing books or painting pictures. These are all dependent on our own selves, but our passions seem to be where we put all of our emotions, whether good or bad. If I had a bad day, I can focus on a recent science paper I want to read, and other person may go shoot some pictures in the woods. However we handle those emotions sort of show us what were supposed to do with our life.

Emotions can definitely get in the way if you do not handle them properly. Some people react poorly to their bad emotions while some let their feelings get in the way of their goals and aspirations. My research professor is very good at forgetting the goal and letting his emotions and other's feelings get in the way. But really, emotions are an essential driving force in everyone.

After thinking more about my EI, or lack thereof, I found a Ted Talk that is slightly slow, but it is about Dean Kamen, an engineer who helped build the first modern prosthetic arms. In this talk, you can see the emotion in his eyes. The respect and admiration he has for soldiers who have lost limbs drove his motivation, and he completed his first prosthetic arm in only 15 months. This had fine motor skills, different rotations, and was incredible for 15 months. I think Dean is a perfect example of having the right amount of emotions. He had a passion and a reason for what he did, but he did not let his frustration of seeing young kids without limbs effect his moral or his thought process. He just knew he wanted to help.

After a recent interview at Brigham and Women's for a potential job, I met with a doctor who is a leader in inflammatory response medicine. He has described all of the modern-day inflammatory mediators and helped to figure out what to target to relieve people of their pain. He has a hallway filled with covers of medicine journals his work was the cover for. His drive is incredible and he is now the head of a project consortium.

I think my ignorance to how powerful emotions are in the innovation process is incredible and I am excited to learn more on this subject and how to harness mine to be as successful as the people mentioned above.