When my friend Lis implored me to come to TEDxBoston, I demurred. Sure, I’d already requested the day off of work and TED talks are pretty great, but I’m busy with a ton of projects. Plus, did I really want to spend a summer day off inside a convention center listening to speeches?

Eventually, I caved. With some speaking gigs of my own coming up this fall, I figured it couldn’t hurt to do some homework.

Well. At TEDxBoston, I got a lot more than I bargained for.

The tagline for the event was “Revolutionary Ideas Start Here.” This plays off of both my city’s history and its present, as much hype is made of the “innovation economy” and Boston’s new Innovation District, to which TEDxBoston’s location was adjacent. And there is a lot of innovative stuff and revolutionary thinking going on in Boston. But it has little to do with the hype. The real innovation and revolutions that matter come from the empowerment of a single idea, of connecting someone’s vision to the resources and people that can help it grow. That was the recurring lesson I heard at TEDxBoston.

(EDIT: You can now watch videos from the TEDxBoston talks online.)

There were a lot of powerful moments and compelling insights at TEDxBoston. Some of my favorites:

• Designer Eric Mongeon, author of 4 by Poe, talked about fear and the creative process. The root of fear, he explained, is uncertainty, and uncertainty is created when our picture of reality of upset by the experience of reality.
  • He cited The Vortex: a vicious cycle of research, rejection and refinement that helps us feel busy all the time, but doesn’t actually move us closer to our goal. Doing != making
  • Why do we allow ourselves to get caught in The Vortex? Because we are afraid to risk being wrong, so we end up “hiding in the homework.”
  • There are three ways we deal with fear: maintaining the picture, protecting the picture and ultimately modifying the picture.
  • Bringing a commercial element into the project can create accountability, and the involvement of others’ forces us to face our fear. It may not alleviate the anxiety, but it does make us move forward in spite of it.
• Author and Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen was supposed to speak, but he suffered a stroke very recently. Bravely, his daughter Ann took his place, choking back tears almost the entire time. She discussed deliberate versus emergent (or cumulative) strategies. A deliberate strategy is a set of guiding principles for both small and large life decisions. Does our emergent strategy — how all of our cumulative decisions add up — align with this, or get in the way of it? If we haven’t already, we should establish a deliberate strategy for our lives. Don’t wait to do the things that matter, Christensen said. “The future doesn’t get easier.” It’s up to us to take control of our own lives.
• Bill Warner, founder of Avid and most recently the Anything Goes Accelerator Lab, spoke of the need to use your head, but to follow your heart.

Some of the other amazing ideas discussed at TEDxBoston:

• Dave McLaughlin of Boston World Partnerships got us started by talking about how establishing horizontal relationships between vertical groupings can help build idea infrastructures. He drew the distinction between kittens and railroads. One is nice, and one is essential. Do we want a kitten infrastructure or a rail infrastructure. Ideas, thus, are essential.
• Seth Priebatsch, CEO of geosocial gaming company SCVNGR, talked about how the past decade saw the development the social (connective) layer, while this new decade is seeing the beginning of development for the game (influential) layer. He shared four of the seven game dynamics that, combined with mindshare, are the building blocks for the construction of this new layer:
  • Appointment dynamic: performing at action at a predefined time (e.g. happy hour)
  • Influence and status (e.g. American Express black card, report card grades; he joked that if a valedictorian was instead called a “white knight paladin level 20,” people would work harder)
  • Progression dynamic (e.g. LinkedIn profile progress bar, SCVNGR)
  • Communal discovery: working together to achieve something (e.g. the old Digg model, McDonald’s Monopoly challenge)
• John Harthorne of the MassChallenge startup competition had one of the best lines of the day: “Why Massachusetts? Because we’re awesome… When Massachusetts gets sad, we stop being sad and start being awesome again.”
• In just ten minutes, Cesar Hidalgo of the MIT Media Lab almost got me to understand economic theory. He spoke in terms of Legos, putty and monkeys hopping from tree to tree to explain global economic development.
• Muhan Zhang, a recent Boston Latin High graduate and musician who plays the erhu (a traditional Chinese string instrument), talked about blending the best ideas of our ancestors with our brand new ideas in order to innovate the past.
• John Werner of Citizen Schools made the case for finding more ways to bring citizens into the schools and have everyone become an educator (like jury duty, but education duty), sharing their knowledge in order to enrich and inspire kids and show them where their ideas and talents can take them.
• Bill Walczak of the Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester talked about the history of the organization and how it has redefined what success means for its organization over the years. The real disease to combat, he said, is poverty. Poverty is the root of teen pregnancy, drugs, violence, diabetes, and so much more.
• Architect Sapir Ng discussed his vision for turning an abandoned, historic railway tunnel into an underground theater space that would connect various parts of the city, both vertically (above and below ground) and horizontally (the Theater District, the Boston Common and other areas around Tremont Street). The Boston Globe covered the project in April.
• Scott Kirsner, a technology writer for The Boston Globe and author of Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age, talked about the need to keep all the smart young people we recruit to New England for school in New England. Those smart young people, he said, are the great renewable resource in the region, and we have to do more for them. What can we do? Work harder to connect them to the innovation happening in the city and help them build their dreams right here.
• Frank Reynolds, founder of InVivo Therapeutics, recovered from paralysis (in part by teaching himself neuroscience from his bed) and founded a company that is pioneering new therapies for people with spinal cord injuries.
• Larry Lessig of Harvard Law School delivered a powerful presentation that drew the connection between the corruption of government with rampant influxes of campaign cash and the corruption of our kids’ bodies by childhood obesity.
• By getting connected to a world outside their own, Vibha Pingel of Ubuntu at Work talked about how women living in poverty in India are gaining skills, running businesses and getting better opportunities for themselves and their children. She talked about two kinds of “small worlds” — the good kind, where we learn about mutual acquaintances we never knew we shared, and the bad kind, inhabited by these women in India where without initiatives like Ubuntu at Work they may never find a path to a better life.

At the end of the day, I felt several things:

• Pride for my city and all of the amazing things happening in it
• Enlightenment for gaining exposure to ideas and topics outside of my normal circuit of interests
• Affirmation in the value of connecting and empowering people and their ideas

Revolutionary ideas may start here, as the tagline goes, but they require all of us to help bring them to fruition.