“Not Impossible” is based on this infatuation that I have of looking at things that are impossible, and it’s an obsession — looking at things that are impossible and figuring out how to make them not impossible. This path of not impossible came about because of a very important event in my life called “date night.” On Thursday nights when I’m in town, my wife and I get a sitter, and we go out on a date. On this one particular date night, we went out to a gallery event and were exposed to this artist named Tony “Tempt” Quan.

He is a street artist, a graffiti artist. And this benefit was just an incredible night because a friend of ours hijacked our date. We show up at the event, and the energy there was incredible. It wasn’t like your typical kind of boring gallery-type event. We went through the night, and we met Tempt’s father and brother. It was a wonderful night. We went home.

We followed this guy and stayed in touch. We found out after convening with his father and brother that Tempt had been diagnosed with ALS and had been lying motionless in a bed for seven years, and the only way that he could communicate was with a piece of paper. They have a piece of paper with the alphabet on it. They’d run their finger along it, and when his father or brother or caretaker would get to a letter, he would blink, and they would write it down. And that’s how they would communicate.

Now, learning about that from me is absurd, right? I live in Los Angeles. We have a GNP greater than most developing nations, and there’s a dude 13 miles from where I live talking through a piece of paper. And the reason is because he doesn’t have enough money for health insurance, doesn’t have enough money to pay for his medical bills. Being that I’m a father and a brother, and I’m looking at a father and a brother telling me this story, I said to them, “Listen, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to get your brother one of those Stephen Hawking machines.”

We’ve all seen the videos of Stephen Hawking, right? He has the machine where he moves his eyes, and the cursor moves across the screen. I said, “I’m going to get you one of the Stephen Hawking machines, and I’m also going to actually figure out how we can hack that. Instead of moving the cursor back and forth and selecting letters, let’s figure out how he can move the cursor back and forth. That could be the stylus or the pencil, and that will allow him to draw again.” And so they went, “Oh, that’s amazing.” And we finished up our meeting and breakfast, and they walked down.

As soon as they walked out the door, I thought, What the heck did I just do? What? Why did I just commit to this? I’m a producer. I’m making films and television commercials and animations. I’ve got no business committing to something like that. But what I learned on that day, and this is a fundamental premise, is that it’s a foundation of how we operate Not Impossible. That is, when you see something that’s absurd, and we’re talking about this from a human standpoint — no degrees or diplomas or credentials or education — meaning you pump blood and breathe air. You see something that’s absurd, and you commit.

Then you figure out how you’re going to pull it off, right? And I might sound a little flippant or reckless. So, I started the network, and my wife and kids and I ended up moving out of our house to a little place in the back. We invited all these makers and programmers and hackers to our house. They pushed all the tables and chairs against the walls, and we started to try to figure out how we would do this.

We started coming up with all different ways to map the surface of the eye. In the end, we came up with this thing called the EyeWriter, and it’s a cheap pair of sunglasses from the Venice Beach boardwalk. I live in Venice Beach, and that’s a locally grown sustainable product in Venice Beach.

So we’ve got plenty of those. We knocked the lenses out and duct-taped a wire to the front, bent it around, and then zip-tied a web camera so it focused back on the pupil. The web camera would track the pupil, and, as it would move back and forth, that would do it. It took us a while to get it together — about two solid weeks of no sleep. So, we took it to Tempt’s room. We took it to his room on the fourth floor, and we kicked his bed so that he could see down into the parking lot.

We may or may not have broken into the used car parking lot downstairs from the hospital. We set up a gas generator with a wireless signal to a big projector like the size of this on the side of a building. [visual] The signal went from his room down to the projector, and, with his family and friends gathered in the parking lot, we watched this artist who’d been lying motionless in a bed for seven years draw again for the first time.

It was awesome. It was incredible. Watching my kids be born and watching Tempt draw are up there with some of the most amazing things I’ve seen in my life. Then we went home; we went out to celebrate. We went and got beers afterward, but we went home, right? Then we woke up the next day, and it was one of Time magazine’s 50 Best Inventions of the year for 2010. All this press started piling on about this being one of the great health inventions of our time.

It’s now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We’re looking around like, what the heck just happened, right? We’re just these kind of dirt-bag producers from Venice who wanted to help this dude, and all of a sudden this thing goes bigger than anything we’d ever touched before. It made me think that maybe we’d struck a nerve here. Maybe this whole technology thing to help people, there’s something there.

So I started to contemplate: Maybe I’ll stop what I’m doing, and I’ll focus on that. I’ll focus on using technology to help people. I thought about it, slept on it, prayed about it and talked to friends and family about it. In the end, I said, “You know what? I got lucky. I’m going to ride this one out. I got my Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame. I’m going to enjoy this, but I’m going to go back to my day job. I’m going to go back to doing what I was doing as a producer.” Almost the minute I made that decision, I got an email from Tempt that said, “That was the first time I had drawn anything for seven years. I feel like I’d been held under water and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so I could take a breath.”

Now, let me ask you: If you’re deciding to or not to do something and someone sends you an email like that, do you really have a choice anymore? Right. So that was the launch of Not Impossible Labs, and Not Impossible Labs is based on that premise. Our mission has changed the world through technology and story. And what technology used to be for me is this world of graphics and design and animation and characters. And now the world I play in is still technology but with what we call “technology for the sake of humanity.” What that means is, how do you see an absurdity, something that is a human absurdity, in the world? And then how do you figure out a way to dog-pile on that with software, hardware, duct tape and zip ties — usually there’s duct tape and zip ties along the way — and figure out how to create a solution for that?

And then how do you make it accessible for people? It’s got to be accessible. That’s the fun; that has to be. Change the world through technology and story. We just heard a speaker talk about the power of story, right? Story is how we pass on information. It’s about communication and experiences. I don’t know if they flashed my last name up here, but it’s not Gates. It’s not Buffett. It’s not Bezos or Bezos, because you’ve got to say two of them now. We use story that way to scale because we know that if we can tell a powerful story, that’s the way people can find out about it. So the lens that we look through when we’re telling this story is a lens called the Help One, Help Many philosophy.

And so what that means is we don’t try. Like Buffett can go tackle on these massive issues. Gates can tackle malaria, and Bono can tackle poverty. We tackle the problem of one, and then we tell the story powerfully about that one person. And in telling that story powerfully about that one person, that gives our solution a chance to scale and go bigger.

We start every problem, every initiative, every absurdity that we tackle by asking ourselves the question, “Who is the one? Who is that one person who, if we solve for that one person, could give rise to helping many people?” All right, so Not Impossible is cruising along. We still don’t know what the heck we’re doing, right? There’s not really a way. I’ve got both hands on the wheel. I’ve got my production company, but that’s fading down.

I’m still trying to figure out Not Impossible. So, I’m out to dinner, and a friend says, “Hey, listen, because I know you’re really passionate about that Not Impossible thing, you’ve got to check this guy out named Dr. Tom. Go research this guy after dinner.”

I went home, and I researched this guy, and I found out that this guy is a naval surgeon who became a missionary doctor. He’s based in this region called Sudan, which is an East African country. There’s this area called the Nuba Mountains, and he’s the only doctor within a 1,500-mile radius. He delivers babies, pulls teeth, draws blood — he’s the only guy. He’s this incredible modern-day Mother Teresa. And he’s just really passionate about what he does. So I’m reading this guy’s story. I dig in a little bit, and it talks about the one thing that this doctor hates to do is to perform amputations, which begs the question, Why is this guy performing amputations? I dig into that a little bit, and what I learn is that, at that time, the reigning president, Omar al-Bashir, was running a campaign of terror over the people of the Nuba Mountains. Just to put it in context, al-Bashir is also the guy who brought you the genocide of Darfur. That’s the character of this guy.

What he does is, he’s got these 55-gallon drums filled with jet fuel and shrapnel. He rolls them out of the back of these old Russian Antonov cargo planes. They hit the ground, and they spray shrapnel everywhere, and that either kills you or maims you. And that’s why Dr. Tom’s doing so many amputations. So, I’m reading this thing, and I’m scrolling through. It’s late at night. The family’s asleep, and I’m scrolling through the article, and Dr. Tom talks about this one particular case about a young boy named Daniel who was out tending his family’s goats and cows.

Daniel heard the bombers come. They came every day. He had no place to run and no place to hide. So he went and got behind a tree. He wrapped his arms around the tree, closed his eyes, and the bomb went off not far from where he was.

Because he was behind the tree, his body was protected from the blast. But because his arms were around the other side, it blew off his arms. So your response was exactly my response. Here’s the crazy thing. The image is gut-wrenching. What got me more was that when this 12-year-old boy — my 12-year-old was asleep just down the hallway from where I was reading this article — woke up, the first thing he said was, “If I could die, I would.” Here’s the problem that got me. Daniel said, “Because now I’m going to be such a burden to my family.”

What 12-year-old boy deserves to be a double amputee? But what 12-year-old boy wakes up and says, “I wish I were dead. I don’t want to be a pain to my mom and dad”? So I was like, “All right. I don’t know what. I don’t know how. That’s absurd. Here we go, rinse and repeat.”

My wife said, “Are we moving out of the house again?” “Yup, we’re moving out of the house again.” A bunch of crazy people moved in. We started to hack and program and go through the process of figuring out how we were going to solve this thing. In the end, we came up with a bunch of different solutions. I hopped on a plane and landed in the refugee camp. We landed in the refugee camp, and four months to the day that I went out to dinner with that friend of mine, and he told me about Dr. Tom, this happened. [visual] Daniel fed himself for the first time in two years.

There’s this thing in me that loves to see things that are supposed to not be done, be done. Daniel is just one of 50,000 amputees left in the wake of the bloodiest war Africa has ever known.

We flew into an active war zone in Sudan with 3D printers, laptops, spools of plastic and the goal to build Daniel an arm.

The concept of Project Daniel was hatched on July 11, and on November 11, Daniel fed himself for the first time in two years.

But it’s never about just one person. If we can teach the locals to do it themselves, then Project Daniel could live on long after we left. And it did.

We’re now working on a bunch of crazy stuff. We get obsessed about things, and we just dive into it. One of those things is hunger, which I know is something that your group is very passionate about. We interviewed a bunch of kids in our local Venice Beach area and asked them, “What is it that you prize most?”

They told us cellphones more than food, clothing, water or shelter, which is a really interesting thing since these kids can’t eat a cellphone.

We said, “How can we use that cellphone to feed people?” So we created this super basic text-based CRM tool, and I’m proud to say that in the pilots that we’ve launched, especially one in St. Louis last year, we fed 12,000 meals in 90 days to kids with text messaging, something that we’re really excited to deploy in cities.

We have a really hardcore business model, though. We want to give it to charities; we want to give it to schools; we want to give it to organizations so they can better deploy their funds to feed people through a piece of technology that the majority of the world has in their pocket.

The reality is we’re living longer. We live longer. There are a lot of attributes and side effects of that, and one of those things is that we need to be able to get around. The problem is wheelchairs and mobility devices. They’re difficult, they’re heavy, they’re expensive, and they’re ugly too. So we came up with a modular, affordable but, most importantly, an aspirational mobility device that, even if you don’t have insurance, is cheaper. This device is cheaper than if you have insurance and get a refund. And most importantly for us, this thing is fast as hell. Let me tell you. You can get around. You don’t have to slow down your game at all when you get older. This is something that I became obsessed with.

Who here is connected in some way, shape or form to someone who is deaf? OK, so a decent amount of people. For those of you who don’t know, the thing about being deaf, and especially with music, is that the deaf experience music. They’ll go and stand in front of speakers, and they’ll just receive the vibrations like this. [visual] If you’re deaf, it doesn’t mean that your brain doesn’t work clearly, which is how you hear. The process of hearing happens in your brain, not in your eardrums. It’s just that the signal needs to get up to the brain. This is just a log on the road. So we figured out a way to actually get the signal of music to the brain and get around the part that’s not working. We hacked together some wearable technology of wristbands, ankle bands and a vest. We broke music into separate parts. We projected guitars to the wrist, drums to the ankles, bass to the base of the spine and vocals to the middle of the chest.

We created this thing, and we took it out to an event called South by Southwest, the big music festival in Austin. We took it out to the deaf community there. We had about 30 people in the deaf community who went to a concert, and they were over the moon. They were absolutely over the moon about this thing. They could experience this thing. In fact, they threatened us afterward and said, “We’re not giving this back to you.” Right? And so I said, “This is amazing. We’ve created this new way not just for the deaf but also for people who can hear.”

There’s a unified way to experience music, so we were really fired up and excited about this. Then our chief mad scientist, the guy with the aluminum foil hat, said, “Hey, do me a favor. A friend of mine’s father is a famous jazz pianist. He has Parkinson’s, and his right hand shakes uncontrollably, so he’s unable to play the piano anymore. And this guy played with the greats — Gillespie, Baker. This guy’s incredible. He said, “Do me a favor. If you could send me those vibrating wristbands, I’ve got this theory that I’m playing with.” And we said, “Sure.” So we sent him the wristbands. He took them to Joe, and he put the wristbands on him.

Joe said, “No, no, no. Yep, this is perfect. That pitch.”

It stopped his Parkinson’s tremors cold. And we said, “Hold on a second. We just wanted to help the deaf experience music. Have we now come up with a nonpharmaceutical remedy for symptoms of Parkinson’s? That’s not too bad.”

This is the story of Joe [video]:

Joe: “When I’m lying in bed, sometimes I think about those performances, how good they were and how bad they were. I just fell out of bed and couldn’t walk. We went to the doctor. She did the test, and she said, ‘You’ve got Parkinson’s, early Parkinson’s.’ You just get tired of fighting it.”

Ebeling: “When you stopped playing music, did you ever dream about it at night?”

Joe: “Absolutely. I mean that this is my life. Oh there it is. I don’t understand it. My hands stop shaking. That’s incredible. It’s the first time I’ve ever had anything that could help me play.

Since that time, we’ve taken this thing out, and we’ve done clinical trials. This is the before; this is the after. [visual] This is the before. And this was the after. [visual]

I asked earlier if you know someone who was deaf. Let me ask a new question: Who here is one, two or three degrees separated from someone with Parkinson’s? Look around the room. It’s amazing how many people are affected by this. So I’m happy to tell you that in Q4 of this year we will be releasing this product to the market. I’m also going to tell you that you’re not going to find anything about this on our website because we’re going through this bureaucratic organization called the FDA, and we really want to make sure we don’t mess it up.

You’re not going to see much. We’re going to have information coming about this in Q4, and I’ll make sure I let all the MDRT people know so they can get the word out to you guys. Here’s the thing. Here’s the question: Why do we pull all this stuff off? You ready?

I’m going to drop knowledge on you right now. You ready? Here it comes. Because we shouldn’t, right? We shouldn’t pull this stuff off. If I walked into your office looking like this and told you I’d come up with a nonpharmaceutical remedy for the Parkinson’s tremor, you would call security. I mean, I’d be escorted out of the building. But I write about this. The reason we figured this stuff out is because we approach every problem with this beautiful limitless naiveté. Then we find our one person whom we’re going to solve for, and then we just say, “Geronimo.” We just jump in.

I want to leave you with this quote by Horace Mann, one of my favorite quotes: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Be ashamed to die.

Horace is breaking it down pretty clean for us. If you’ve done good, you can go. If you haven’t, you need to stick around a little bit longer, right? So my question to you is this: What’s your victory? What’s the story that you’re going to tell with your life? How are you going to use your skills, your intelligence? Can we all just establish something right now? If you’re in this room, staying at a nice hotel, at a beautiful conference, can we all just establish that we have a blessed life? Will everybody agree to that? OK. So what are you going to do with that blessing? What are you going to do with the blessing that you’ve been given in your life?

How are you going to leave this world a better place? How are you going to leave it better for your kids, your grandkids? What are you going to do with that? And then there’s that whole spirit of Help One, Help Many that I talked about at the very beginning. This is a question I really want you to think about throughout the rest of the day, as you travel back to wherever you’re from.

I want to ask you: Who is your one? Who is that one person? Church, school — you drive by them, walk by them on your way to work. Who is that one person? If you were to address a problem in one person’s life, maybe, just maybe, it stops with that one person, but I’d be willing to bet that it starts with that one person and leads to many more after that. So, the question I ask is, Who is your one? Or maybe in the context of some of the stories I’ve told you today, the question is, Who is your Daniel?

Mick Ebeling is a film, television and commercial producer, philanthropist, technology trailblazer, author, entrepreneur and public speaker who has won every major creative and advertising award. He is the CEO of Not Impossible Labs, a multiple-award-winning social-innovation lab and production company whose mission is to develop creative solutions to real-world problems. Named one of Ad Age’s “Top 50 Most Creative People,” Ebeling has worked with a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies to share the important message of creating “technology for the sake of humanity.”