Name: 【TEDx】Go with your gut feeling | Magnus Walker | TEDxUCLA
Uploaded: 2015-01-06T03:42:51.000Z
Duration: 19 min 6 s
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Hello, my name is Magnus Walker and I was born in 1967, in Sheffield, England.

Past simple

I left school at 15 and I came to America at the age of 19.

Well, eight weeks ago I didn’t know what a TED talk was,

and to be honest, I don’t know why I’m here today.

But I do appreciate the opportunity to be with you guys

and share my story, my journey, my hopes and my dreams.

And I, having left school at 15, you know, for me I didn’t really have any future.

and that represented the land for opportunity for me.

And in those past 28 years I’ve been able to build 3 things,

and also a restored raced driven and collected quite a lot of classic Porches.

and I’ll talk about that in detail in a little bit.

But all 3 of those things share one common bond,

I had no education in them and I didn’t really think I would end up in that particular field.

I didn’t really know where I was going.

But all three of those things have a common thread, a common bond.

And that common bond for me really is freedom.

I suppose, uh, live my life to the fullest and do whatever I wanted to do.

So, coming out to America really was a journey, and I’ll start my journey in 1977.

1977 in England was sort of a special year.

We had this, uh, punk rock thing going on

and we also had this Royal Jubilee thing going on.

But for me, it was the start of a very memorable moment.

My father took me to the London Earls Court Motor Show in 1977.

And back then I fell in love with this car, it was a white Martini Porsche.

Now, any kid growing up anywhere in the world in the late 70s early 80s,

chances are you probably had a choice of 3 cars on your wall:

Porsche Turbo, Ferrari Boxer, or Lamborghini Countach.

I even wrote a letter to Porsche when I was 10 years old.

And essentially said to them, hey, I want to design for Porsche,

And they wrote back to me and said, well call us when you’re a little bit older,

which I thought was pretty funny and they sent me a sales brochure

and 35 years later they’d end up writing me a letter back,

but I’ll get to that story a little later on.

So I’m this young kid growing up in Sheffield.

Sheffield was a grim northern steel town as shown by this picture right here.

You know, there wasn’t necessarily many Porsches on the road,

So I filed that dream away, I had the poster on the wall,

and I was watching Motorsports as a kid also in 1977.

England had the James Hunt, he was a Formula 1 world champion.

And we also had Barry Sheene, he was a two wheel motor GP champion back then.

So even though I didn’t grow up with any sort of fancy cars,

my father was a salesman, I grew up in a working class background.

I did have this dream early on, and somehow this dream involved Porsche.

I also, back then, was a pretty competitive middle distance cross-country runner,

sort of a solo sport guy, and I used to love getting out there and running.

I became quite competitive. I joined this club called the Ellen Show Harriers.

They had this guy called Sebastian Coe set quite a few world records,

and ran at the ’80 and ’84 world Olympic games

Around that same time, I also fell in love with something called heavy metal music.

Now growing up in Sheffield there are a lot of rock bands you know, may it being a sort of slightly depressed grim, northern city,

but there was a lot of music and a lot of fun.

So, fell in love with Porsche, doing some middle distance cross country running,

and I decided at the end of the 5th year I would leave school.

I left school in 1982, basically with 2 O-Levels and no real future.

By that time, I’d also figured out I could go drink in a pub.

So for some reason that was great for going to clubs and having fun,

but wasn’t so good for a middle-distance cross-country runner athlete.

but there was the little thing that stuck with me was the passion and sort of the drive

and I think till this day, those memorable moments from earlier on are still with me.

I’m still running around, I’m still chasing around, I’m still running after my goal.

So, I bummed around on the dole for a little bit,

And, uh, I started to hear this comment quite a lot – cut your hair and get a real job.

Well I was on the dole working construction, living at home, no car, taking the bus places.

I’m not gonna cut my hair, but maybe I should think about getting a job.

So I actually took a year longer in leisure and recreation study course sports management at a college.

And I heard about this thing called “Camp America”. Well what was Camp America? I didn’t know,

But apparently Camp America sent kids to work at a summer camp in the United States of America.

Growing up as a kid, of course, I watched a lot of American TV.

Most of the shows I loved centred around action and cars – Starsky and Hutch, Dukes of Hazzard, CHiPs.

So I had this American dream and it involved Evel Knievel .

And long story short I took a leap of faith and I applied to Camp America.

It was a little bit of a strange feeling, and I had these strange feelings in the past,

and somehow when my gut tells me to do something it generally is a good thing.

So by pure luck I suppose I was accepted into Camp America, got on a,

a flight to New York, took a Trailways bus from New York,

that’s the bus I took, to Detroit. Now Detroit was great, it was somewhat similar to Sheffield,

former industrial city, also happened to the sort of, automotive hub of the United States.

30 minutes north on a summer camp working with, in a city,

underprivileged kids, that happened to be from Detroit.

Cuz you know, I’m this heavy metal guy from Sheffield, north of England,

So I adapted pretty quickly on this summer camp

and when that camp was over, I got back onto that Trailsway Bus,

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【TEDx】Go with your gut feeling | Magnus Walker | TEDxUCLA

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