LISTENING ACTIVITY

Name: __________________________________________________________

STEFAN SAGMEISTER: THE POWER OF TIME

What to do?
 Fill in the blanks to complete the text of the video and then read it.

I run a design ________________ in New York. Every ________________ years, I close it for one year to pursue some
little ________________, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular ________________ year. In
that year, we are not available for any of our ________________. We are totally ________________. And as you can
________________, it is a lovely and very ________________ time.

I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two ________________, music and ________________.
And we created videos and ________________ for many musicians that you know, and for even more that you've never
heard of. As I realized, just like with many, many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. And I get, over time,
________________ by them. And for sure, in our case, our work started to look the same. You see here a glass eye in a
die cut of a ________________. Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. So I decided to
close it down for one ________________.

Also is the ________________ that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives ________________, then
there is another 40 years that's really reserved for ________________. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15
years for ________________. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and
intersperse them in ________________ those working years. That's clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even
more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back into the ________________ and into
________________ at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.

There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who defined his work into three different levels. And
they rang very true for me. I can see my work as a ________________. I do it for ________________. I likely already
look forward to the weekend on Thursdays. And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. In a
________________ I'm definitely more engaged. But at the same time, there will be periods when I think is all that really
hard work really worth my while? While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn't be
financially compensated for it.

I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for ________________. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City.
Looked for something ________________ for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing because I
knew them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful ________________ I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. Sri
Lanka still had the civil war going on, so Bali it was. It's a ________________, very ________________-oriented society.

I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away. There is wonderful inspiration coming
from the area itself. However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were
definitely around heavily. And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround
my house, and attacked me during my morning walks. So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. Every single
dog on one tee shirt. As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message on the back of the shirt.

Just before I left New York I decided I could actually ________________ my studio. And then just leave it all to them.
And I don't have to do anything. So I looked for ________________. And it turned out that all the furniture that I really
liked, I couldn't ________________. And all the stuff I could afford, I didn't ________________. So one of the things that
we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. This one, of course, still works with the wild ________________. It's not quite
finished yet. And I think by the time this lamp came about, I had finally made peace with those dogs.

Then there is a ________________ table. I also did a coffee ________________. It's called Be Here Now. It includes 330
compasses. And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy,
always centering on them. Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of ________________. I also started
________________ for the first time in my life in Bali. And at the same time, I'm extremely aware how boring it is to
hear about other people's happinesses. So I will not really go too far into it.

Many of you will know this TEDster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually, I got it through the TED book club. I think it
took me four years to finally read it, while on sabbatical. And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while
he was on sabbatical. And I'll show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals.

This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best ________________ in the world with his restaurant
north of ________________, El Bulli. His restaurant is open ________________ months every year. He closes it down for
five months to experiment with a full ________________ staff. His latest numbers are fairly impressive. He can seat,
throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations.

If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it's 12.5 percent of my ________________. And if I look at
companies that are actually more ________________ than mine, ________________ since the 1930s is giving all their
engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want. There is some good successes. ________________ tape came out
of this program, as well as Art Fry developed ________________ notes from during his personal time for 3M.
________________, of course, very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal
projects.

Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a ________________? That's about five percent of everybody. So I'm not
sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up. Talk to them about if it was successful or not. I've found that finding
out about what I'm going to like in the ________________, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done
it much better than myself envisioning it.

When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book. And then I
told as many, many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on.

In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. I had thought that I should do this without any plan,
that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for ________________ generation. It was not. I
just, without a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work ________________, those I all said no to, but other little
requests. Sending mail to ________________ design magazines and things like that. So I became my own
________________.

And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a ________________, divided them into
chunks of time and then made a ________________, very much like in grade school. What does it say here? Monday, 8
to 9: story writing; 9 to 10: future ________________. Was not very successful. And so on and so forth. And that
actually, specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical, worked really well for me. What came out of it? I really got
close to ________________ again. I had ________________. Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually
successful. Because of the improved ________________, we could ask for higher prices.

And probably most ________________, basically everything we've done in the seven years following the first sabbatical
came out of thinking of that one single year. And I'll show you a ________________ of projects that came out of the
seven years following that sabbatical. One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly
overrated. This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very, very few strand of companies,
and not for everybody else.

We were asked to design an ________________ for Casa da Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in
Portugal. And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn't use the ________________, I failed at that. And
mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto, where he talked about a
conglomeration of various layers of ________________. Which I understood after I translated it from architecture
speech in to regular English, basically as ________________ making. And I understood that the building itself was a logo.

So then it became quite ________________. We put a mask on it, looked at it deep down in the ground, checked it out
from all ________________, ________________, ________________, ________________, ________________,
________________ and ________________. Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a
piece of software, the Casa da Musica Logo Generator. That's connected to a scanner. You put any image in there, like
that Beethoven image. And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa da Musica Beethoven logo. Which, when
you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy, because the visual ________________ of the logo and
the actual ________________ is exactly the same.

So it will always fit together, ________________, of course. If Zappa's music is performed, it gets its own logo. Or Philip
Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers, who all performed there, get their own Casa da Musica logo. It works the
same internally with the president or the musical director, whose Casa da Musica portraits wind up on their business
cards. There is a full-blown orchestra living inside the building. It has a more transparent identity. The truck they go on
tour with. Or there's a smaller contemporary orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title.

And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the ________________and create advertising out
of it. Like this Donna Toney ________________, or Chopin, or Mozart, or La Monte Young. You can take the
________________ and make typography out of it. You can grow it underneath the skin. You can have a poster for a
family event in front of the house, or a rave underneath the house or a weekly program, as well as educational services.

Second ________________. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language of ______________
for promotional purposes, which was fine with me. On one hand I have nothing against selling. My parents are both
salespeople. But I did feel that I spent so much time _________________ this language, why do I only promote with it?
There must be something else. And the whole series of work came out of it. Some of you might have seen it. I showed
some of it at earlier TEDs before, under the title "Things I've Learned in My Life So Far." I'll just show two now.

This is a whole _________________ of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this _________________ in
New York. It says, "Self-confidence produces fine results." This is after a week. After two weeks, three weeks, four
weeks, five weeks. And you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite. These are some _______________
visitors sent to me.

And then the city of _________________ gave us a plaza and asked us to do something. We used the stone plates as a
_________________ for our little piece. We got 250,000 coins from the central bank, at different darknesses. So we got
brand new ones, shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. And with the help of 100 _________________, over
a week, created this fairly_________________ typography that spelled, "Obsessions make my life worse and my work
better."

And the idea of course was to make the ________________ so precious that as an audience you would be in between,
"Should I really take as much ________________ as I can? Or should I leave the ________________ intact as it is right
now?" While we built all this up during that week, with the 100 volunteers, a good number of the neighbors surrounding
the plaza got very close to it and quite ________________it. So when it was finally done, and in the first night a guy
came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many ________________ as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors
called the ________________.

And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom, came, saw, and they wanted to protect the artwork. And they swept it all
up and put it into custody at police headquarters. I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see them sweeping right
here. That's the police, getting rid of it all. So after eight hours that's pretty much all that was left of the whole thing.

We are also working on the start of a bigger ________________ in Bali. It's a movie about happiness. And here we asked
some nearby pigs to do the ________________ for us. They weren't quite slick enough. So we asked the goose to do it
again, and hoped she would do somehow, a more elegant or pretty ________________. And I think she overdid it. Just a
bit too ________________. And my studio is very close to the monkey forest. And the monkeys in that monkey
________________ looked, actually, fairly ________________. So we asked those guys to do it again. They did a fine
job, but had a couple of ________________ problems. So of course whatever you don't really do yourself doesn't really
get done properly.

That film we'll be working on for the next two years. So it's going to be a while. And of course you might think that doing
a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile. Then you can of course always go and see this guy.

Video: And I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive.
Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you.
#: 3M
A: AMSTERDAM / AFFORD / ARCHITECTURE
B: BARCELONA / BORED / BOOK / BOTTOM / BETWEEN
C: CAREER / COUPLE / CONCEPTUALLY / COMPANY / CHEF / CRAFT / COFFEE / CHAIR / CLIENTS / CLOSED / COINS
D: DESIGN / DOGS / DESIGN / DIFFERENT / DESIGN
E: EAST / EXPERIMENTS / EASY / ENERGETIC
F: FUN / FOREST / FUTURE / FURNITURE / FLORAL
G: GRID / GOOGLE / GALLERY
H: HAPPY / HIERARCHY
I: IDEA / IMPORTANTLY / INTERN / INFORMATION / IDENTITY / INSIGHT
J: JOB / JAPANESE / JOB
K: KNOWLEDGE / KITCHEN
L: LOVES / LEARNING / LOVED / LOGO / LEARNING / LIKE / LOGOTYPE / LANDSCAPES / LOVELY
M: MONEY / MEANING / MONEY / MEDITATING
N: NATURE / NORTH
O: ORNAMENTAL
P: POSTER / PICTURES / PROJECT / PIECE / PACKAGING / POSTER / PLAN / POLICE
Q: QUALITY
R: READABILITY / RENOVATE / REQUESTS / RETIREMENT
S: SOUTH / STUDIO / SOCIETY / SCOTCH / SEVEN / SIDES / SHAPE / STICKY / SABBATICAL / SEVEN / SUCCESSFUL
T: TITLES / TIME / TOP / THINKING / TABLE / TYPE
V: VOLUNTEERS
W: WONDERFUL / WORKING / WALL / WEST / WORKING
Y: YEAR