Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Yesterday, Kate Stone charmed the assembled TED audience with her tales of failing exams, living on a sheep farm in Australia, and developing genuinely interactive paper. Today, she shared three simple skills she’s learned along the way–and described why she thinks these are actually critical life skills.

1. Know how to dig a hole.

Stone was instructed to dig a hole for a cattle grid during her time farming sheep in the Outback of Australia. “You know how to dig a hole?” the farmer asked her. Pfft. Of course she did. Turns out, she had no idea. “He came back and just looked at how far I’d got. I thought I was doing a really good job, digging out the top soil, and working across the space that needed to be a hole.” Incorrect. Turns out, the most effective technique involves making the deepest hole possible, and then letting the surrounding earth cave in so you can shovel the earth away, nice and easy. Why is this relevant? “If you want to make change, if you want to make anything happen, you can either convince the whole world you’re right or you can affect a few people deeply,” she explains. The latter is easier. “If you’re right, they’ll tell some people who will tell more people. Focus on something deeply; let it infect everything else.”

2. Learn how to ride a motorbike.

Asked by one farmer who employed her whether she knew how to ride a motorcycle, Stone again led with a bald-faced lie. “I said I could, when I’d never ridden a motorbike in my life.” She wrote off at least four bikes on that particular farm, she confesses, though she argues that the terrain was hardly conducive to a beginner. “I swear I fell off every single day,” she says cheerfully. Sounds awful; so why is this a life skill? It’s all about your focus. “I have a distinct image of going down this little hill, I’d see a rock in the road and I’d think ‘I’m going to hit it! I’m going to hit it!’” she laughs. Invariably, she’d hit the rock and fall. But one time, she saw two rocks and couldn’t figure out which one to look at, so she stared at the gap. Herein lies the lesson. “Where you look is where you go. If you only see the way forward, you don’t see the obstacles. If all you look at is the obstacles, you’ll fall off.”

3. Figure out how to pour from a barrel of oil.

“With big oil cans, the holes are at the side on the top,” Stone describes. “The intuitive way to pour from it is to pour with the hole at the bottom.” But then the air can’t get in, so you invariably end up with a big mess. The first time she did this, her farmer boss asked her what on earth she thought she was doing. “Twist the barrel around, have the hole at the top so air can go in the top half and oil can come out the bottom half and you pour it out nice and easy. It made me realize that, quite often, the way you do something appears to be counterintuitive. Doing things the way you think you should do them is often the worst way possible.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Kate Stone loves paper, and she loves technology, so she resolved to combine the two, which she shows us in a magical demonstration on the TED stage. But first, three key moments that got her to where she is today:

1. An obsession with technology: As a child, she hid switches behind the wall in her bedroom, ran wires underneath the carpet — and hid an FM transmitter inside a carved-out book. She used the book to eavesdrop on her parents, though she says she was more interested in the idea of technology hidden within a generic object than in what her parents were saying. “I liked the idea of an everyday object doing something different,” she says.

2. Successfully failing exams: “As a sort of reward,” she says, her parents shipped her off to Australia, where she ended up working on a remote farm in the middle of nowhere, deep in the outback, mustering sheep, gathering them from paddocks, and bringing them back to the homestead. “I thought sheep were pretty stupid, because they didn’t do what we wanted them to do,” she says. “But they weren’t stupid at all. We’d put them where they didn’t want to be, and they didn’t do what we wanted them to do.” So she mastered tricks to guide the sheep to the places they didn’t want to visit.

3. Physics is just like farming: Exams or no exams, she later headed to Cambridge to study for her PhD in physics, where she realized that moving electrons was akin to moving sheep. Told she couldn’t possibly move electrons individually, she determined to prove her detractors wrong. By adapting the conditions in which she was working, she made her theories work.

Now Stone works in printing, and she determined to use conventional printing techniques to make paper and card interactive. Once again she was told it couldn’t be done, and once again she resolved to overcome the naysayers. Nearly bankrupting herself, she bought a printing press and learned to print, figuring out a way to make regular old paper genuinely interactive. ”It’s pretty simple really,” she says, though it’s clearly nothing of the sort. “It’s things that have been done before but brought together in a different way.”

She’s brought some examples with her, including a large interactive poster that can determine a viewer/user’s favorite type of cake. Or interactive newsprint, for which a reader can connect wirelessly to listen to music in a record review, or eavesdrop on a press conference. The third project was a poster to influence people to use energy more wisely. “If your energy usage was trending better, leaves would appear,” she describes. “If they didn’t, there’d be graffiti and the leaves would fall off the trees.”

And now, the moment of truth, the live demo. Stone is clearly nervous as she approaches a poster pinned up nearby. It has a drumset printed on it, and she taps one of the drums gingerly. Yes! It works! It’s truly charming, and she taps on all of the drums, including the high hat, a few times for good measure.

More confident, she moves to her grand finale, a set of DJ turntables and a mixing board printed onto a neat square of cardboard. She plays us a piece of music recorded by her 15-year-old niece Charlotte, manipulating the volume and effects of the music as she does so. “I’m not a DJ, I’m not a musician,” she says. But it’s clear she’s rightly proud of her invention. “I love bringing technology together, having fun, being creative,” she concludes. “It’s not about technology. It’s about creating a great experience.”

The speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name to read a full recap of their talk:

In his film “Mars et Avril,” Martin Villeneuve brings his sci-fi romance graphic novel to glorious life.

Andrew McAfee studies how information technology affects businesses and society.

Dong Woo Jang turns an unusual stick of bamboo into an archer’s bow — an exploration of his cultural heritage and a metaphor for his perfect world.

Jinsop Lee is an industrial designer who believes that great design appeals to all five senses.

Barb Stuckey makes food for a living — and wants to help you taste things better.

Yu “Jordy” Fu‘s dream is to make this world a better place through art, design and architecture.

Jacky Myint designed the boundary-breaking news feature “Snow Fall” for NYTimes.com.

At Novalia, Kate Stone and her team use ordinary printing presses to manufacture interactive electronics, which combine touch-sensitive ink technology and printed circuits into unique and cost-effective products.

A paper on carbon nanotubes, a biology lecture on antibodies and a flash of insight led 15-year-old Jack Andraka to design a cheaper, more sensitive pancreatic cancer test.