Make the impossible possible, app developer and Georgia Southern University mechanical engineering student Francis Okechukwu urged listeners Friday during The Creative Coast’s 2014 TEDx event.
More than 250 people gathered at the Jepson Center, 207 W. York St., to gain insight into growth and evolutions in fields of business, media, education and the arts.
Okechukwu, who runs a successful app development company in his home country of Nigeria, motivated the audience in focusing on the adversities he faced in creating his start up, such as unreliable Internet connections and the unpopularity of the iPhone in Nigeria.
“To make the impossible possible,” said Okechukwu, “you must be ready to fail.”
According to Okechukwu the more one tries, the more one will persevere and push through failure and realize success, like when his friends told him that his app company, Servotronics Technology, would not survive the once Blackberry-dominated climate of Nigeria.
Now as a student at Georgia Southern, Okechukwu is sharing this knowledge in working with biomedical engineering students to build medical equipment that can synchronize with apps on mobile devices.
Meanwhile, Rex Gale, national account director of sales with BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina said now is the “time to let go.”
Past decisions and events can affect current emotions and automatic reflexes, but with reflection, one can make decisions that don’t sit in the past but focus on the future, according to Gale.
“What happens in the past carries emotions that can affect what happens in the future,” said Gale. “You need to let go.”
He said reflection makes for better decisions.
This was the fifth year of TEDxCreativeCoast, or TEDxCC, a local and self-organized event under the TED brand, an acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Design and a global nonprofit that holds conferences on topics ranging from technology to business to social issues.
This year’s TEDxCC featured 16 speakers, with online streaming parties in Savannah and Charleston, S.C., as well as individual online streaming via LiveStream.
The theme of Creative Coast’s 2014 TED talk was “Exploring Revolution.”
For Dottie Kluttz, the founder of Hospice Savannah’s Storykeeping Program, this meant engaging in the power of storytelling.
While her work with the program entails interviewing hospice patients and collecting their stories to preserve an oral history for future generations, she said organizations have stories, too.
“If you want to change your organization,” said Kluttz, “you’re going to have to change its story.”
In the end, stories still create powerful connections between people, even with society’s constant communication through email and social media, Kluttz said.
“The shortest distance between two people,” said Kluttz, “is a story.”
