Transcript:

Hi, I’m Nick and I’m designing my own pair of customer hearing-enhancing wearables in my bedroom. I wish that I had some hearing wearables that I actually wanted to have when I was younger. The amount of social pain I would have avoided but had done wonders for my self-confidence. Now I wasn’t bullied for wearing hearing aids because I didn’t wear hearing aids but the amount of embarrassing situations I found myself in because I wasn’t wearing them.

So there was once when I was in a school assembly and I had to give a speech and at the end of the speech I’m still standing in front of hundreds of kids. One of the teachers over here said something to me and I couldn’t quite hear what they were saying so I asked him to repeat it and she said it again.

I still couldn’t hear what she was saying. And in this moment you're thinking I could get her to repeat for a third time what she said or I could just hope it was a yes or no question. And so I just went. Yeah. After a couple of seconds everyone just started laughing. It turns out that she had said something like, “Nick, you can go sit down now.”

I’ve had so many situations like this and it was so bad in work presentations, in social situations and you’re not feeling embarrassed because you can’t hear. You’re feeling embarrassed because when everyone else can hear it feels like you look too stupid to understand what people are saying.

So you end up avoiding situations where people are not going to see the best version of you. And that’s what this project is about. It was never really about being able to hear better. It’s about being able to be the best version of yourself when you’re interacting with other people. Now I’ve shared one of my embarrassing stories and I know that lot of people have got plenty of embarrassing stories because of their hearing too.

So if you have one, leave it in the comments below.

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