Innovation by Design: Breaking the Rules Inside the Lines

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Um, next up is Mike Smith. He is founder of The Bay and a self-described professional misfit. Um, he is a knack for finding room to innovate inside the

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rules schools already live with. So, here he is with um, innovation by design, breaking the rules inside the

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lines. So, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and uh, Mike, it you are good to go.

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Well, I'll get mine up. Good morning, everyone. I hope everyone's doing uh, doing well. All right, cool. Can everybody give me a thumbs up? You can all see that. We're cool. All right, sweet. Great.

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Looks great.

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Awesome. And there's never enough time, so I'm gonna fly through this and I talk a million miles an hour. And so if you haven't had enough coffee, buckle up because that's where we're headed. And

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so I'm just going to get cruising with it. And so I uh I started my journey. I I was one of those kids who went to college to play basketball. And then

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after basketball ended my senior season, I dropped out of college a couple weeks before graduating and I never went back.

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And then the college that I went to closed down during the pandemic. And so everything I'm going to share with you, I did without a college degree from a university that doesn't exist. And so

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the reason why I share that with you is so that you can understand there are multiple paths to get where we want to go, including in the education track.

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And uh the way that this is best described is, and I use this book a lot when I work with the youth that I work with. And it's this book called The

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Third Door. And The Third Door was written by this dude, Alex. And so I'll explain it to you briefly so you can understand. The third door describes this idea of success in life is like

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getting into like a nightclub. And you're all teachers. You had your nightclub days. Don't some of you are still in them. But there was this idea that like there's three ways to get into

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this place of success. And there's three doors. And there's the regular line. And the regular line is the predescribed path. And it sounds like this. You need the perfect grades to go to the perfect

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college to get the perfect job to have the perfect life. And you kind of need to follow the traditional rules that were set for you. And that's traditionally the route that most of us

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took and most young people felt like they here is the path that you need to be on. And so there's the regular line and you need the regular line. You want your doctors to go through the regular

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line. You don't want them to be like I hacked six years off of med school. Like let's do this operation. Like no one's that's not the move. And so you need the regular line. So there's nothing wrong

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with it, but it's the longest and it's the loudest and it takes uh it takes a pescribed path to get there. Then there's the VIP door. The VIP door is

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you're already rich, your parents already have the resources, you come from wealth, like the opportunities are already going to be available to you.

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You know, these kids and these folks in your communities who go through the VIP door. Um, and people like to have people have their opinions on the third door.

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Sometimes people are like, "Oh, gez must be nice and we get bitter cuz we're not in it." But the truth about the VIP line is that's the one that changes the most

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lives. I've worked with at risk youth for over 20 years and I know that it's the phrase it's not what you know it's who you know is the most true in that

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environment. And so when we say things like oh yeah 90% of our kids qualify for free and reduced lunch that sounds great on a grant application but for those

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kids statistically what changes a kid in poverty's life the most is did they meet a friend in a different social class and did that family unit help pull that

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family or that kid out of poverty. That was my story and that's most kids in poverty stories. You meet a friend through sports or some other activity and that friend's family shows you a

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different way. But then there's the third door. And the third door is down the alley past the dumpster around the corner. You got to knock on it and talk your way through. And that's for your

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creatives, your entrepreneurs, those kids who get C's in your class. You love them to death, but they're the troublemaker or the misfit or they talk too much. And they have a lot of charm

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and charisma, but they definitely don't maybe have like the punctuality skills or the finish their homework on time skills. Those kids are wired for the third door. And I'm going to share with

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you my little third door journey on how I went on to create some of the things that we did. And so I was a social worker uh 15 years ago working with

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homeless runaway teenagers. And I had to do the uh teen court in our community.

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So any kid who got an MIP or trespassing or truency or vandalism or something on their record that they wanted off of their record, they would go to teen

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court. And for two years, I listened to every teenager in Nebraska tell me I was like the person who was in charge of the restorative justice plans and putting

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those together. And so I would listen to our kids tell me what they did wrong for two years. And I realized something very quickly about Nebraska kids and crime.

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And that is that Nebraska kids are not very good at crime. They don't know.

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They don't get away with it. They're like too kind. They always tell on each other. And I was like, "You're not bad kids." And so I would ask them like, "What's the like why did you get in

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trouble?" And they would say the same thing. They're like, "Oh, there's nothing to do. Like we're really bored." And that was when I realized that we give kids terrible advice every day. And

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a lot of us adults love to tell kids, "Hey, go follow your passion." But the truth is, they're kids. They haven't experienced the world enough yet to have

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a passion. And passion and obsession are linked. Like they're the same word. So we tell kids to go follow something that they've never experienced. The truth is

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most of us don't have a passion. We have a hobby or a thing we like to do, but it's not even necessarily like a passion. And so following your passion

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to a 16-year-old or 17-year-old is not uh very helpful advice. And so what I tell kids all the time is don't follow a passion. Go chase a problem that you get

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excited to solve and go hunt that down every day because that's what work is.

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So if there's something that you want to fix or something that bothers you or something in this world that you think that you would love to spend your life trying to make better, go chase that

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because that's work. And so what I got excited about was creating third places for kids. Home is your first place.

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School is your second place. This there's nowhere to go and nothing to do.

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That was the problem I got excited to solve. So I Googled how to start a nonprofit. tore down a couple abandoned barns because I'm from Nebraska and we know how to do that. And we built the

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world's first ever nonprofit indoor skate park and I put this place inside of our local mall. This was in between a Sears and a Radio Shack. Rest in peace

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to both of those. But because I work for the kids and I have said that from the jump. And so this is the part of me that's painfully annoying. I don't work for a board. I appointed them. I don't

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work for a brand. They pay me to do uh what I do. And so what I always have said is I work for the kids and what they need and what they want I'm going

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to go get. And so this place couldn't stay open late enough, like we weren't able to be open past mall hours. So one night after 9:00, some of these kids got

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in trouble and I realized we needed to be open later. So we moved out of that location and into what is one of our current facilities. And this is a warehouse in Lincoln the size of a

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Walmart. It's home to a world-class skate park, recording studios, concert venues, coffee shops, podcast studios, fashion and design programs, content

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creation spaces. Like it's a complete youth center. the exact thing that everyone says, "Oh my god, I wish this place existed when I was a kid." Like, we went out and built the thing. But

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kids started skipping school to come to the bay. And so, at first, the skateboarder in me was like, "You're dang right. Like, we're so sick." But then all of these principles would get

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so frustrated that they would call me like, "Hey, is so- and so there?" And so, one day I was driving a bunch of kids back to school after they'd skipped school. And the kids said to me, "Oh,

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Mike, they go to school inside of our zoo. Why can't we go to school at the bay?" And because I work for the kids and my job is to solve their problems. I said, "I don't know, bud, but I'm going

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to figure it out." And it in Nebraska, we don't have charter schools. That's not like a big thing that we have to deal with. And so, we have some private schools, but they function pretty well

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with our public schools. And there's not this like huge war against charter and public and private, and we don't really have to deal with that. And so, we have things like focus programs and

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careermies, and those are kind of innovative public schools. So, there's a school inside of our zoo, there's a school inside of uh an aviation hanger, there's a school inside of a university.

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And so we in 2021 opened up Bay High. So this is home to a public high school now. It's be focused. So like business,

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marketing, infoch. These kids are all leaving with things like business plans and entrepreneurial tracks and opportunities to take other programs.

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And because we'd worked with so many youth, all of the kids who were past high school age when we opened up the high school were so mad at me because

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there was nothing for them. And my job again is to listen to these youth. So we created a program called Gap Year at the Bay. So, it's a federally funded

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workforce development program for 18 to 24 year olds who aren't enrolled in college. They can take certificated paths to get where they want to go.

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Graphic and design, AI certifications, design and construction pathways, coding, like all these really cool different unique things that you don't

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necessarily need a degree to do. We balded it all up and created a gap year program. So, kids take different tracks, they get teamed up with a mentor, they get paid internships. It's the whole

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bit. And it's all federally funded. And so inside of this place, you have everything from after school to during school to uh workforce education

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programs for adults or young adults. And then we created or we're in the process of opening our second facility. This is opening in 2027 in Omaha. It's a

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three-story parking garage. It's a massive facility. It's going to have all the same stuff that it'll uh it'll win awards and you'll see photos of it in a year and a half and you'll be like, I

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heard that crazy long-haired guy talk once. And so you'll catch all of this in 2027. How I got there wasn't because Nebraska was like, "Oh my god, skateboarding and music and fashion.

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Let's fund that." It was actually the opposite. We didn't get our first grant for eight years. These are all the locations that I spoke and events that I threw and like leadership workshops I

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hosted. And I literally talked it into existence and got to know every school and every school district you can imagine. Teamed up with Justins, created

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a TV show for schools called The Harbor TV, which I'll show you that at the end.

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And I literally dominated the education space for about 10 years. And then the last five I've spent creating things like the bay and trying to scale it. And

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every time I would go somewhere, people would be like, "How do we open up one of these in our town?" And for me to open up a giant facility in your town felt like an impossible lift. But I wanted to

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keep scaling the impact. And so I did this. This is what most of your schools look like at 3:15. It's empty parking

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lots, but where the most at risk kids are in our school are typically the kids who have to stay at school from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. because they need dinner or

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their parents can't pick them up yet. So they're stuck at school. Some of them show up at 7 a.m. and don't leave until 5:00 pm. And so knowing that those were our most atrisisk youth, I thought,

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"There's empty parking lots, but it doesn't mean we have empty schools." So reactivating those, I created what I jokingly call trailer parks. And so people are like, "What are you doing

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now, Mike?" And I say, "I'm trying to put trailer parks in the most low-income communities that I can possibly find." And then everybody looks at me sideways.

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And I'll show you what a trailer park is. The first one I did was in Englewood, California at their elementary school. And so all you need is a parking lot. It took me two hours

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to sweep that one, but you literally just need an empty parking lot and it's a mobile pop-up skate park that fits inside of a trailer that can be driven

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by a 15 passenger van or a truck. We custom built the park, the racks, the boards, skate school. We literally deliver the entire thing in a box. And

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so if you have kids in your community who are stuck doing boring programming after school that they don't want to do, we have a mobile pop-up skate park experience that is so simple that it literally takes up one parking space.

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That one we bolted to a tree so nobody could break into it right off of the side of this basketball court. But this program is now something that happens all across from Englewood to Compton to

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like Carson and that whole space in the downtown LA area. We've been able to team up with different skate brands to create trailer parks. So this is how one way we're scaling the impact of what we're doing. So that's my little story.

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During the pandemic, I went and got certified in design thinking so that I could bring more uh tactical things to people in moments like this versus just

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saying, "Hey, this is what I And so I'm going to walk you through some of the best like innovative mindsets, design thinking strategies or tips that I

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possibly can. So I hope in this next 20 minutes that we have, you walk away with some ideas about how you can do things differently, think innovatively in your

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space, or maybe create new things. And so we were able to create a public high school out of basically nothing because we had the space and we had the

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relationships with people to do it. And so I'm incredibly for education and incredibly for we're probably not going to innovate much around the education

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space besides the things that already exist. So creating some brand new thing for education isn't how it's going to get done. It's fixing what's already there and innovating inside of it

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because the infrastructure is already built. So we're going to keep cruising.

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So with this I want you to think you're an inventor. You're a designer. And so here's what I mean by this. Here's the ways of thinking. Here's how most of us got here. For whatever reason this

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typically ends up being the most offensive slide that I show. So I apologize in advance. But most of your mindsets that got you here today was one of these four. A lot of you are in this

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first bucket. You think like an engineer. Everything's got to be perfect. The plan's perfect. The strategyy's perfect. The approach is perfect. You have to have all the answers before you can possibly start.

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That's exactly how engineers think.

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Their fail rate is like less than a fraction of a percent. Imagine if engineers failed 10% of the time. We'd never walk into buildings or go in

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bridges because we'd be terrified that we would be inside of that 10%. So that's like the people who've never gotten a B in their life. A lot of you have never gotten a B. I haven't either.

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So, you're in good company. But the truth is is that when you're being a leader in a facility, you're trying to innovate, you're not going to get everything perfect. So, engineering and innovation don't necessarily always work

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hand inand grind and hustle. This is the we just need to do more and we'll get it done. We have to optimize and just do like more and more and more and more.

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This is what a lot of us did to get to our career space in life, but we know that it leads to burnout and it doesn't always work, especially not with the

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this next generation hopping into the workforce. They don't buy into this at all. academics. This is the classic. We tell kids to start from the end and work

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your way backwards. Or we think data is going to be the solve. Data is the slowest. Starting from the end and working your way backwards sounds great

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when you're getting your PhD or doing your dissertation or getting your masters, but it doesn't work on the moment or when plans change. In innovation, you have to be the first to

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it. You can't be the last. And data comes being last. And I'll show you more of that in a second. So design thinking, this is like the next big bucket. These are the folks who innovate the stuff

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that we use. So the people that invent things like the iPod or the iPhone or the apps and technology that we use, there's a structure and a system that

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they use to innovate and it's not just making things up as they go. So I'm going to show you a couple of these things, but the first thing that you have to recognize is what's called the

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ways of knowing. And this is going to be fun for the chat. My first question for you is going to be revolved around this.

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These are the four ways that we know something is true. If you teach kids or stand in front of young people and you're only hitting one of these buckets, you're missing uh connecting

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with the way people learn and understand and think. And so this is great for if you're actually someone who stands in front of young people or your staff and have to communicate. This is a great

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thing to keep in mind. Here's the four ways we believe something intrinsically is true. We all prescribe to one of these buckets stronger than the others.

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And so experience, you had to go through it. That was me. If someone tried to tell me what to do in the nonprofit space, but they didn't run or start a

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nonprofit, really wasn't that interested in listening to them. That's like you all not wanting to listen to someone talk about education who's never sorry

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who's never been in the classroom before. And so when you hear someone go up there and try to teach you the next trend in education, but they've never stood in front of students. Hard to make

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that land sometimes. Then there's evidence. I need the data to prove it's true. I need to make evidence-based, data-driven decisions before we can move. Well, the truth is is data is two

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years old. Oftentimes, it's typically not hitting the same kids. The kids that we're working with aren't oftentimes even the kids that we did research on.

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So there's we'll hit data in a moment.

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So some of you would really believe in data. Trusted source. My parent told me, my pastor told me, a coach told me, my mentor told me, I listen to this

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podcast. Even though none of us listen to podcasts, we just watch like vertical clips for 30 seconds and then say we listen to a podcast and regurgitate it.

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So some of us say that's the trusted source. There's that way. Then there's identity and intuition. And I'll pause on this one for a second because Gen Z is a great case study in this things

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that align with my worldview. That's how I know and believe things are true. When Gen Z started, at the top of Gen Z, so they're almost out of school, like the youngest Gen Z is like 15, 16 right now.

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Gen Z at the start was going to be the most inclusive, connected, aligned generation on the planet. And at the back of Gen Z, as they're about to enter

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completely into adulthood, Gen Z is the most divided generation of all of us.

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They dislike each other the most. They disagree with each other the most. They went from the most inclusive to the most exclusive. If you don't agree with their

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worldview, you're 100% out. And that's literally how Gen Z works today. Boomers don't work like that. Our grandparents, they don't even vote the same and they

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stayed married. They don't even like each other politically, but they stuck around and stayed married. Gen Z won't even speak to each other. And so, there's going to be a lot of massive

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reworking that that specific generation is going to have to do because that doesn't fly in the workspace as I'm sure all of you are experiencing. But that bottom one is how you know is worldview

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is what they prescribe to. But these are ways that we know things are right. So, here's what I want you to put in the chat because here's the interesting thing about being right and being a

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designer. Designers have to come up with 10 ideas so they can get rid of eight ideas so that they can keep two. So, designers are wrong 80% of the time and

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right 20% of the time. Innovators are wrong 90% of the time so they can be right 10% of the time. Most of us in here don't want to be wrong ever. So, if

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you're going to be a designer or an inventor, it's not how you act when you're right, it's actually how do you act when you're wrong. So, the question I have for all of you in the chat is which one of these do you prescribe to?

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Like, which one of these pills do you swallow and say, "Nope, I know it's true because I believe in this one." And I don't care how you act when you're right. What I want to know is how do you

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act? And what do you do when you know that you're wrong, 100% wrong? And if you have to say, "Well, if I know I'm 100% wrong, then I do this." You're

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already the worst. And so, you're not always right. Some of you are wrong. And if you're not sure how to answer this question in the chat, how do you treat your spouse when you know that you're wrong? That's the way that I would

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answer this or your kids. And so in the chat, the question I have for you is what do you do and how do you act when you're wrong? And which one of these do you typically prescribe to? So that's

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what I want you to see. We all think and prescribe to different one of these.

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Like I said, experience was mine. And here's how I act when I'm wrong. There's all different ways we act. Some of us, we feel so guilty that we try to make up for it right away. Some of us are like,

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"Well, I was only kind of wrong." Some of us are like, "Well, you were wrong, too, and let me point out all the ways you were wrong." Some of us are like rage baiters. we're like, "Oh, if I'm

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wrong, I'm taking the whole team down with me." And so, there's all different ways that we react, but talk about and think about the ways you react in the chat because it's incredibly important

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to uh know that innovation and being wrong are linked. So, I know I've mentioned data. So, for all my data dorks out there, let's party. And I want

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to say this, you can't start a public high school without data. So, I'm not an anti-data guy. We actually use the data to start the school. But, a lot of folks

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hide behind data to keep their jobs because it's incredibly safe. And so I'll show you data and innovation and the relationship that they have

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together. Data and innovation literally have like an exact inverse relationship.

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If you want high innovation, you are going to have low data. And that means you're early to the game. If you want a lot of data, you are not going to be

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innovative. And you get to decide which one of these camps you want to fit in.

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But nothing cracks me up more than the folks that try to say we're going to make data driven, fiscally sound decisions, while trying to be incredibly innovative. They just don't work together. Here's what an innovative

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organization feels like and you know what your company feels like or you know what your team or your department feels like. It feels like you're on the growth edge. There's a lot of belief. There's definitely risk. It's incredibly messy.

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You're trying to move fast and you're for sure going to lack resources. That's what a lot of our departments might feel like, but our entire school probably feels like this corporate thing that's

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in maintenance mode that's very fixed mindset. It's incredibly polished. We move very slow. We're making fiscally sound, safe decisions. you know which

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one of those feels like where you work and which part of which team you're on.

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So you get to kind of decide. Sometimes we are in an incredibly data-driven facility, but we might be in an innovative department and that's a fun

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place to be. But you just have to decide. And so these are where innovation and data work together. So if you're trying to think innovatively and you're basing your foundation decisions

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on data, you're already tardy to the party as I would say. So this is what your innovation window looks like and you know which one of these feels more

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like your organization. So, here's what breaking the rules inside the lines looks like. I've worked with groups like Vans, Red Bull, Liquid Death, all of these top marketing departments. And

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here's what everyone says is there's a fence and there's these boundaries. And your job, I always use it Jurassic Park as an example. They're on like the fifth

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Jurassic Park movie. We all know that there's that dinosaur that they're like, "Oh, you should never cross a T-Rex with like a velociaptor, but of course they do in a movie." And then they're like,

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"But we built this cage and it's never going to get out and don't worry." And what does that dinosaur do the whole movie? It like tests the cage and then eventually that dinosaur gets out and everything gets crazy. That's what

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innovation feels like. It feels like testing the electric fence and trying to find the spaces where you can push the margins. If you're just sitting in the

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middle waiting to get fed every week and just waiting for it to happen to you, that's not what innovation feels like.

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And so a lot of this stuff comes from innovative brands who are trying to push the rules. So I'll give you an example of breaking the rules inside the lines.

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Skate for change. When I was a social worker, I would skate around giving out socks and beanies and bottles of water to the folks in our community who were homeless or lacking resources and I

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would take kids with me. Then I would go speak about it and all of a sudden skate for change chapters popped up all across the globe. I started partnering with massive brands from like X Games and

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that was where the Red Bull sponsorships came from was just skating around giving out socks. I've given out millions of socks all across the planet and this was

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100% illegal to do in Lincoln's downtown. Here's a video of us with Red Bull's team getting pulled over by a police officer for simply riding our

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skateboards in our downtown area. So, for three years, I would get tickets, take them into our mayor's office, and be like, "We're really going to get tickets for giving out socks." Not only

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is skateboarding not illegal in our downtown anymore, we just had the grand opening on the best skate park in the Midwest, or one of the best skatep parks in the Midwest uh to open in the last

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couple years, is now a couple blocks away from this. So what used to be illegal in our downtown is now one of the activities driving people to our downtown. But this was the tipping point

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of it. We had to do something that was technically illegal before this ever became a possibility. And so sometimes you have to push the limits. Here's another example. Red Bull. Here's what

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cracks me up about schools and where we love to think. Red Bull surveyed this entire generation, gave them a bunch of words. What do you love? What do you

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hate? A top five word that Gen Z hates is tradition. They literally hate it.

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It's like a a disdain. Gen Z only takes its information from Gen Z. So, anything that's been passed down, they don't want it. A top five word that they love is

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nostalgia. That's why they're all wearing baggie jeans trying to look like we looked in the mid90s bringing analog back. So, while they love nostalgia, they hate tradition. So, if you're out

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there toing tradition, not nostalgia, you're already missing the moment. And so, the Red Bull rule, I would get flown around to do these really cool events with Red Bull and they kept I'd call and

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be like, "Are we flying to Orlando for this one?" They were like, "We don't do that one anymore. we're not doing that anymore. And I kept realizing they would change these events even though they were fantastic. And I was like, why are

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you not doing these events, they seem successful? And they said, it's called the Red Bull rule. They won't do an event more than three years in a row.

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They literally force themselves to change after three years. Imagine how different your schools would feel if you had an innovation rule where you can't teach the same thing that many years in a row. You can't have the same theme.

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You can't run the same experience. You can't have the same dance. That's why kids are bored to death and engagement is as low as it's ever been. you're competing with their phone, which is

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different every day, and then you're doing traditional things, which they quite literally don't care about. And so, one way we did that was I've skated across the state of Nebraska three times

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as a fundraiser, and I get credit for it anytime someone skates across anything now. I The last time I skated across anything meaningful was like 2014. I

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couldn't skate across town, let alone the state of Nebraska today. But now people, anytime someone skates across the country or the world or whatever, I get called and hit up and asked to

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consult and how do you do it? But we went from this little no-name nonprofit to I did this three times in a row and then the amount of copycat things that

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have happened since that and people paid attention is insane. But doing something for a couple years and then switching up the fundraising mechanism has worked incredible for us because it keeps people interested in what you're doing.

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Another fun rule is 30 minutes versus 30 days. If you know what liquid death is, maybe you were the one who fell for it and thought it was a beer can and got all offended by it. That was their exact

23:08

marketing plan. Or maybe you're someone who just likes the brand and understands what they're trying to do. But Liquid Death was all my friends. I was sponsored by them and a hundred of us

23:16

got fired on a phone call and the marketing director said, "We love all of you influencers, but this isn't what we're going to do anymore." And the

23:23

entire internet broke and is now copying Liquid Death. They fired influencers and decided they were going to hire Saturday Night Live comedy writers. And once a

23:31

month, they were going to put out one video at the start of every month and ride that video for a month, the good, the bad, the whatever. And what they

23:39

realized is it's easier to be relevant for 30 minutes than to try to be relevant for 30 days. So if you're constantly marketing or constantly putting stuff out, you're just noise and

23:47

no one's actually paying attention. We don't consume content like that. So we shouldn't expect parents and families to do the same. So you're much better off doing something loud and big once a week

23:56

or once a month. And so the way that I took that, I literally went and got a radio show because I didn't want to do a podcast. Everyone in my world has a podcast. Anybody can have a podcast.

24:05

That's not that special. And so I went to something that's hard to activate, which is a radio show. So once a month for two hours, I host a radio show. And

24:13

I turned the this coffee shop that's attached to the radio show into a skate park. And I attached it to our first Friday art walk. And this went from a

24:20

little tiny sports talk radio station to now culture happens down here once a month. And this thing has gotten traction. And the amount of folks that

24:28

this has brought in that would have never otherwise come to this radio station or coffee shop has been incredible. But I only do it once a month. And everybody thinks that I have some big radio show. And I honestly

24:36

forget that I do it because I only do it once a month. But it's so much easier to do something loud once a month versus trying to be relevant for 30 straight

24:44

days. The next kind of concept I want to show you is why does this matter at the end? I'll tell you why it matters at the end. I've sat at every single graduation that we've had and at our school, every

24:52

kid gets a chance to go up and talk about their favorite experience. And not one time in four years has one kid gone up and talked about the festival that we

25:00

let them put on and give them money to do it. Some awesome curriculum that we all spent days and years writing. It's hardly the activities that we planned.

25:08

It's almost always the funny, unscripted, fun thing that they got to do with a teacher or a friend or a thing inside of the space because they had the

25:15

freedom to do it. And what I've realized is is you have to make it fun. And so Nebraska's not short on old white guys that have a lot of value and insight.

25:23

This is one, but we're not allowed to use his photo, so we're not going to use that one today. So I have this other old white guy from Nebraska who I love, and his name is Jim. Jim has been collecting

25:30

bikes for the last 40 years. I went and shot a little movie with Jim and entered it into a motorcycle film festival. And Jim and I just got back from Lisbon in

25:38

the Lisbon motorcycle film festival last week. So, this 80-year-old dude who's collected bikes for his entire career and has met people all over the planet.

25:45

When he ended up in his local newspaper, here was Jim's quote. Unfortunately, I'm at the age group where you get the crosshairs on you. Three of his friends have died since we started this project

25:54

that were all going to be a part of it because he's 80 years old. So, we literally have lost some of his friends while we've started this whole thing.

25:59

But he said, 'Hopey everything lasts and I want to go out having as much fun as possible. If it's not fun, it's not memorable. There's this thing called

26:07

your experiencing self and your remembering self. Your brain remembers the experiences that are incredibly traumatic or incredibly fun. And almost

26:16

everything in between gets lost because our brains can only keep so much information. So, if you're throwing an event, you have a meeting, you're doing something, there's an activity, if there

26:24

isn't an intentional fun or an intentional, I call it misfit moment in it for us because it was what it is what it is. I'm always like, we need to be

26:32

borderline like breaking the law almost like getting away with what we can because that's the environment I'm in. I know yours is different, but if you

26:39

don't have these sort of planned misfit moments, they're not going to be memories or experience that these kids even even speak about down the road. And

26:47

so making it fun is definitely what I've learned from Jim and from every kid that we graduate with. So for Jim, we threw him a huge festival to celebrate this film festival and towed skateboarders in

26:56

on motorcycles and had like this insane spectacle of an event and created Yeah.

27:00

pure chaos around it. And the quote from our Red Bull guy was, "I can't believe you can get away with this in Nebraska." And so we're continuing to push the limits and try to do incredibly fun

27:09

things because it gets you these opportunities and experiences. They're going to be core memories that people talk about for forever. But what happens is is you build you build culture that

27:17

people want to be a part of. Everybody talks about this like how do we build culture? How do we make it like make our staff care? Make our kids care. And I

27:25

immediately go to do you do anything that would get them excited to would they choose to be a part of your culture if they weren't forced is what I typically ask people. And the answer to

27:33

that more often than not is the kids would absolutely not choose it. They would not choose to participate in the things that we're doing because it's not something that fits what feels like

27:41

their culture. But that's not true down at the bay. They pick it every day. They choose it all the time. We have to extend our hours to midnight because they're picking it later than what we we

27:50

even could staff. And so the truth is is creating culture often comes from what are the activities and things that you're doing and would kids choose to be there if they didn't have to? The answer

27:58

is no. Switch up what you're doing. And so the way you go with this is what incredibly painfully boring things can

28:04

you make fun. There is uh so many boring things that happen throughout the day that is e easy little layups. And I'll

28:11

give you an example in our world. If you have a nonprofit or you've ever had to do an event, you know you have to do the thing where you put out the table with the banner in the backdrop behind you

28:19

and you have a bunch of pens and candy and you hope people come talk to you and you try to sucker them in and the conference like gives you a stamp so they interact with you and nobody wants to be a part of it. What we do is so

28:28

cool that I couldn't stand being a part of that and I like couldn't handle it.

28:32

So I did it once. We had like one tablecloth and one backdrop and then I was like never again. So anytime we would get asked to show up to something my job was to make it pure chaos. And so

28:41

in Nebraska on our first day at the University of Nebraska, big red welcome.

28:44

There's like 24,000 college kids that come and all the people in town, all of our vendors and our fraternities and sororities and orgs and groups and companies set up tables and backdrops

28:53

and banners and all the kids walk around and get free stuff. And so you get one parking space is how it worked. So with the University of Nebraska, I said, "Can I have two?" So they gave me two parking

29:02

spaces. So I built the halfpipe you see on the left that fit exactly into those two parking spaces. dropped it on the University of Nebraska's campus, invited Red Bull to show up because I knew Red

29:10

Bull wasn't allowed. Red Bull got there and the cops showed up immediately and said, "Hey, they're not allowed on campus." I knew that was going to happen. So, I got on the megaphone and

29:18

said, "Hey everybody, Red Bull just got kicked out, but there's 5,000 cans of Red Bull. You better get them before they're gone." And the place got swarmed so hard that the cop car couldn't get

29:26

out. That was year one. We absolutely were the most memorable thing year one.

29:30

Year two, they said, "The ramp's great, but don't do the Red Bull thing again." Said, "No problem." So, I hired this pro skate team to show up. And because they put us next to a building, skaters

29:38

started jumping off the building into the ramp. Cops showed up. Year two, marketing, pure chaos. Great. We won year two. Year three, they're like, "Mike, we love you, but it's too chaotic

29:46

with the ramp." And I was like, "All good. If you're not going to let me go out, then I'm going to go up." So for 300 bucks, I rented a scissor lift, stuck a DJ on top of it, put her straight up in the air, and she sat up

29:54

there shooting t-shirt guns out over the top of the crowd, and we built a little coffee shop below it. We are officially what you can do and what you cannot do when it comes to setting up a booth at

30:03

the University of Nebraska's Big Red Welcome. But we just took an incredibly painfully boring thing, your booth that you have to set up in an event, and rethought it and thought, how can we

30:11

make this the most possible fun that we can and we used our own unique uh flavor to get it there? And so, if you're trying to increase culture or improve

30:20

things at your school or staff meetings or when you're working with your your department meetings, make the painfully boring things fun because that's the

30:29

stuff that's actually memorable. And so, that's all I think. Yeah, that's all we got for time. And I said I wanted to finish on time. And so the mindset I want you to have is you got to kind of

30:37

ride it like you stole it. And if you've been a part of an innovative team, you know what I mean. You're either the group of people who are like doing the chasing or you're the ones that are being chased. And it feels like this.

30:46

And I'll leave you with this as my last slide. If you know you're in an innovative space, if first they call you a lunatic, then they start to listen, then they follow, then they copy what

30:55

you do, then they take credit for what you do like it was their idea to start with, and then you go repeat and create and do something else. You're all in this somewhere. You're either the

31:03

lunatic, they're listening, they're following, or you're past that, they're copying and taking credit. And for some of us, we're the ones copying. We're the

31:11

ones calling others lunatics. We're the ones not listening. And so, you've got to kind of decide where you want to be on the innovation loop because we're all in that some somewhere. So, I'll leave

31:20

it at that. I think we're at 11:21 and that's the time I've got for today. So, I want to give you some resources like I said I would. I created a TV show that's free for schools called The Harbor TV.

31:29

There's like 160 episodes of this uh career development show. So, I've had everybody from like Tony Hawk to Kelsey Ballerini to tons of famous people and

31:37

musicians and artists and athletes and skaters. They come on and talk about different topics that might be hard to cover in the classroom. And I'm creating

31:44

10 more videos uh in the next year. And so, very cool free resource that you can have access to. And I'll put a slide up that gives you this. I'm going to send all this to you so you have it. But the

31:53

free resources for videos and other things that I've created like leadership curriculum is on the left. And if you were ever interested in teaming up uh

32:00

and working at your schools or orgs or doing something like that, um I love doing trainings and professional development with schools, especially when there's more than 30 minutes of

32:08

time because it's uh hard to cram it all in. So, I'm going to leave it at that because I'm a couple minutes past time and I'm gonna kick it back over to the team. But thank you all so much for

32:16

listening. I hopefully I didn't talk too fast and uh all I got