I spent this past weekend at TEDxSMU. To get to attend the live event you have to apply (okay no big deal), fill out a form (name, address), answer the essay question (ANSWER THE ESSAY QUESTION!?!). I haven’t answered an essay question in oh, since college. Oh, and 130 people are going to be selected. No pressure there…

So I filled out the form, wrote my essay and waited to receive the email that says “TEDxSMU invites you to TEDxSMU 2011: Disruption”. Woo Hoo! I’m in. I click to attend (you have to go through Eventbrite to pay) – ah, another TED test. You have 15 minutes to finalize your registration, including choosing three icebreakers (words or short phrases). Yikes, who knew just registering would be so challenging!

Okay, I finally make it to The Dee & Charles Wyly Theatre (where it was held). An amazing group of people; everyone is friendly. I run into people I know almost immediately. We head in and I am lucky enough to get one of the coveted FatBoy beanbag seats right up front and the show begins.

Absolutely amazing speakers. I can’t mention them all but a couple stood out for me – Elise Ballard, Peter Brown and Kate Canales from frog (okay, okay – the girl from ribit liked the speaker from frog – get the amphibian jokes out of the way now…).

Elise talked about her journey to start what became her book: epiphany True Stories of Sudden Insight. She started with an epiphany of her own that changed her life and then she began asking others if they had ever had an epiphany. She then began taping people’s stories and before you know it she had a book, a web site and a new career.

Peter Brown, of Peter Brown Architects took us on a journey through the design of Dallas, Texas. Having grown up here in Dallas (yes, I’m a native Dallasite!) it was a trip down memory lane, as Peter showed postcards of my past – hotels with “modern features”, Neiman Marcus fortnights (does anyone remember fortnights – where Stanley Marcus traveled to far away countries like Japan and turned his stores into a foreign land for a week, where we could taste the food and see the culture…), and the foresight of Raymond Nasher, who built Northpark in 1965 as the largest climate controlled mall in the world. Nasher built the mall with an eye to design as anyone who has been there can tell you, from the art sculptures inside and out. Which all led up to Peter showing us the latest school he designed, the Hector Garcia Middle School. It is gorgeous and still qualifies as a LEED certified building.

And then there was Kate Canales from frog. Kate spoke to us about interesting things she has seen and just had to take pictures of: like the restroom with a sign to the left of the door that said Women’s, a sign on the door said Women’s Room and then someone had taped a piece of paper on it that say Women Only. As Kate said, you wonder what happened to prompt the handwritten sign…. She also showed us a sign she found while looking for someplace to hang some of her clothing in a hotel she was staying in. The sign said (and I am paraphrasing) ‘Do Not Hang Anything on Sprinkler Head. It Will Break and Cause Flooding.’ Kate suggested that if they had spent money on adding hooks people could hang clothes on, rather than signs…. Some designs solutions are just so simple they have to be overlooked!

We learned about many other things: helping to teach children in underserved countries by teaching them where they are, not by trying to get them to schools. That if we use lignin to produce plastic bags, it will cost the same, but they will biodegrade in 150 days and still cost the same as traditional plastic bags! Not to mention how Chef Homaro Cantu took us on a “flavor tripping” experience where he made bitter dark chocolate sweet and lemons less sour!

Going to TEDxSMU was an awesome and inspiring experience. I learned a lot and I’m looking forward to the videos of the event being available on the TEDxSMU web site so I can go back and see if I missed anything!

If you get the chance to go to a TEDx event, go. You will meet awesome people, learn valuable lessons. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to do down front, sitting in a FatBoy!