TED Fellows Friday - Meet Adital Ela

Fellows Friday is a weekly series on the TED Blog that profiles one TED Fellow each week. We have asked the Fellows to answer our question below to share their knowledge and advice with other social entrepreneurs, innovators, and changemakers who are coming up with big ideas that can change the world.

Adital Ela, founder of S-Sense Design sustainability design studio in Israel, believes in listening. She listens to indigenous philosophy, and incorporates it into sustainable design; when helping a community, she first listens closely to their needs; listening to her body's inner voice inspires her dancing. Working from a foundation of listening, she bridges different worlds, finding beautiful, sustainable solutions.

Stephanie: There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?

Two weeks ago I spoke at the TEDxHolyLand event. It was a collaboration between Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab speakers. At the end, an interviewer said to me, “A lot of people criticize this conference because it’s not going to have a huge impact. So why even bother?” My answer was, “I don’t believe in huge actions.”

By that, I mean that you have to realize what you can do, and focus on doing what you can do, and allow it to grow. When you start from the mindset of “I want to change the world,” many times it’s too huge. By the time you have all the capabilities and capacity to do it, you’re already tired or frustrated. When you try to analyze what are your strengths, what are your abilities, what are the small steps that you can do, and allow them to grow, allow them to affect other people, allow them to naturally become bigger, I think it works much better.

Many times I find that social entrepreneurs and environmental entrepreneurs, etc. have aims that are very big. Of course it’s difficult to focus on just one thing with the world crying for attention. But I think if we are wise enough to analyze what we can actually really do, and then with that, find collaborations and action plans and so on -- and grow from our positive experiences and from our positive impacts -- we can have much more successful and empowering processes.

Read the rest of Adital's Fellows Friday interview here.