Daniel Pink- Common Experience

On October 21st, this past Wednesday, I got the chance to see Daniel Pink, author of the common experience book A Whole New Mind, speak to the Texas State campus. Though I was sitting on the floor of the absolutely packed LBJ ballroom floor I learned much from the Skype like system that allowed us to hear and see Pink speak from Evans Auditorium just down the stairs of Alkek. With his dark colored suit and technicolor striped tie Pink looked nothing like I had envisioned and told us things that I hadn't necessarily expected from him either. For instance, he attended law school and graduated in the top 90% of his class possible (his words, not mine). He hates the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words", not necessarily because it's wrong but because the writer in him says this is improbable. He insisted that because he is a writer he is in love with metaphors and spoke in them frequently. And while these were all interesting facts about a man that none of us had ever met and were very unlikely to in the future, it was the facts that he spouted next that weren't about himself at all that really captured my attention.
In the not so distant future India will have a larger industry than America; Ryan Daniel the accountant will face competition from Turbotax, like so many other jobs in the country being replaced with technology. While anyone who read Pink's book could have told us the same things, it was also the things that weren't in A Whole New Mind that gave us something to think about. For example, 460,000 cell phones are discarded every day. 88-89% of the world has a cellular device, a cellular device which carries around more power than existed in the entire world than when Pink's grandparents were his age. Scary but true.
All in all I enjoyed Pink's presentation. It was informative as well as creative, and his audience interaction, though in Evans rather than the LBJ ballroom , kept everyone entertained at the very least. I'd like to hear him speak again for sure.