The power of persistence, creativity,

and respect | Matthew Griffin |

TEDxTacoma
Start by violating a rule here TED talks right I can I can honestly say that the TED talks
have changed how I live from what I eat to how I view education to how I relate with my
children I really like brain a brown stock on vulnerability or she says if you admit your
vulnerabilities at other people you create connection and therefore you're stronger so
right now around this world there are hundreds of people that are depending on me to
get this right I'm very nervous all right so my name is Matt Griffin I'm an Army Ranger I
spent the first few years of my young adult life on the very forefront of U.S foreign policy
and I did that because I wanted to make a change in the world I wanted to do good
things for other people this is Afghanistan this is a Chagall valley whether you know it or
not Afghanistan's a very beautiful country and the only thing that's more beautiful than
the terrain is the children that lived there so me and 50 of my brothers were about 20
miles up this valley hunting al Qaeda in 2003 and we're standing at a courtyard one
morning and there's this little girl and she's peeking through the window to stare at the
Americans that were standing in her village and after a few minutes she got up enough
courage come stand in a doorway to stare at all the steely-eyed barrel-chested freedom
fighters right and I reached in my pocket I gave her a pencil and she gave me a smile and
ran off I said educated crowd here but I'm just going to ask is anybody ever been in a
fistfight right you know that sound when somebody takes one to the face and everything
act kind of echoes in their nasal cavity and their mouth and you know they're not going
to survive that hit well I heard that sound and I poked my head out the door the
courtyard and they came from that little girl her older brother was standing over her
with that pencil in her hand and his hand and when she got it to her hands and knees
she didn't look at him she looked at me it was my fault does anybody else in this room
have the feeling that Afghanistan is going to be another Vietnam that it wasn't worth it
all the pain the sacrifice and the hardship yeah I felt that way for a very long time too so
once I departed the military in 2006 I started traveling the world trying to serve my
country in other ways I was in Asia Africa and all throughout the Middle East and I have
this idea that happened in Afghanistan now this is a TED talk so I know you guys want to
see information to back up ideas so if you'll bear with me for a few slides we'll get back
to the pretty pictures all right so this is the GDP of Afghanistan per capita between 1960
and 1978 as you can see there's a steady kind of upward trend that you would expect of
any nation there's a couple dips in there that are directly tied to some people I'm not
going to go into it because you're going to see a little trend right here so this is the GDP
per capita of Afghanistan between 1979 and 2001 and it didn't occur to me until I put
this slide together that that is the euro is born and that is the Euro I was commissioned
in the artillery I've never seen a straight line depict an economy of a country in a
downward trend over two decades but it happened during our lifetime now since this is
a did you know did you know since 2001 the GDP of Afghanistan per capita has increased
by a factor of 6 6x in just over a decade can you imagine our economy being six times as
big and 2025 now let's see it all together here that's what it looks like that pretty cool
first time I saw this slide I was dumbfounded like god this is awesome it's working right
we're doing something good right yeah tons of years of conflict but there's conflict but
look at what we're doing for that country this is why it happens persistence creativity
and respect now for the visually impaired that's a loaded 44 container on a 20 foot truck
and there's ten guys that are on the cab on the container on the boom right that is
persistence creativity and a healthy respect for physics all right so now I've seen this
graph I'm seeing this data I'm on the ground I'm watching all of these people work and
these guys are so hungry they're persistent they are creative and they respectful of the
opportunity that has been provided to them so I'm watching this happen and I think I
have to think to myself is there any other time that this has happened in the world right
so go back look in little history now up until 1945 or so Europeans had a very healthy
and reliable relationship where they would use lead as a currency of exchange but every
25 to 50 years right and it wasn't until they had a conflict that was so devastating so
crushing so debilitating to where they had to stop and rethink of how they acted toward
one another instead of exchanging lead they exchanged ideas technology art music food
all things that are more valuable than war that's what it looks like on a graph there's
Germany Austria France and the UK countries that were just hell-bent on killing one
another I'm now completely dependent on one another you can see it they work
together right so this idea that I had happened at a combat boot factory right across the
street forum' we took this picture so I'm standing in there and there's 300 guys and girls
and they're working to make combat boots in Afghanistan it was amazing they were
supporting thousands of family members they were supporting their community they
were helping defend their country and the feeling of despair that I had for so many years
during all of my deployments and years after the military started to go away and it was
replaced by another feeling and it was a feeling that turned into action the feeling was
still hang with me here I was stoked so Stoke is defined as a very strong emotion that
encourages our insights what I saw there from all the data looking back at history and
watching it happen in front of you I was encouraged I was incited into action and a small
group of people we bet that we could manufacture stoke that's what it looks like all right
so you've sat through all these talks now you got a long-haired guy with beard and
wearing flip-flops and you just told you the Stoke is in the shape of a flip-flop so we get
this look quite often yeah if a thoughts out to you it's pretty funny so the concept is very
simple we were going to take a handful of Special Operations veterans and we were
going to deploy back to countries affected by conflict we were going to take military
capacity that was established to manufacture tools for war and we were going to
manufacture commercial products for peace and then we were going to ship them all
over the world we're going to help a whole bunch of people along the way I started in
2012 started with a handful of people I turned it to ten then one hundred a thousand
and tens of thousands this is what it looks like now so did you know that the United
States and Colombia established a free trade agreement and this agreement was
established to help a country recovering from decades of a narco financed insurgency
does that sound familiar this is our factory in Colombia working at full capacity right
sourcing all their materials locally there's vertical Stoke in Colombia did you know that
during the Vietnam War the United States dropped between 250 to 280 million
landmines on Lao or Laos that's a b-52 load of munitions every eight minutes for nine
years on a country where run-up war with and right now there are tens of millions of
those land mines on the ground threatening its people this guy he's an artist he's in one
of 20 families and what they do is they take the scrap recovered from the ethical
clearance of landmines and they melt it down and they turn it into jewelry and into
spoons and other products that are shipped all over the world that fund more land mine
clearance that's allow a Stoke did you know that roughly 15% of women in Afghanistan
or literate 15% think of how easy it is to radicalize a child who has no education because
his mother did not understand the value of an education this is a woman owned and
woven operated Factory in Kabul Afghanistan running at full capacity making sarongs
and scarves and each piece they manufacture help puts a little Afghan girl in school right
now there's a little girl in school who is stoked to be there did you know I just spread
some Stoke right so once you hear this story you cannot hear it you're now part of a
community of people that know that it's not only a good belief an idea it works you can
manufacture peace through trade if we are persistent if we are creative if we are
respectful for one another we can put down our differences we can solve our problems
and we can depend on one another well Committee on Armed Forces thank you.

Made By:
- Juan Jose Garcia Alvarez
- Jose Miguel Marin Ramirez
Grade: Nineth.