Read the full transcript of Goal setting expert Bridget Hilton’s talk titled “The Keys To Living A Rich Life” at TEDxTemecula 2025 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
What Have Been the Most Valuable Things in Your Lifetime?
BRIDGET HILTON: I asked 20,000 people around the world a simple question. What have been the most valuable things in your lifetime? And not one person said money or possessions. Which is interesting because then I asked Google what was valuable, and it showed me images of piles of diamonds and some weird gold eggs and toilet paper made from $100 bills.
So why did I embark on this seemingly random pursuit? Because I had a hunch that we’d been sold a lie about what makes life truly rich. And I wanted to prove it not just to the world, but to myself. Because I didn’t start off with some high minded philosophical quest on how to live the best life. Trust me.
Growing Up in Flint, Michigan
Growing up in Flint, Michigan, a place known for a water crisis and Michael Moore movies, I actually only had one ambition, and that was to become a rich and famous rock star. And when I say rich, I mean like mansions and Ferraris and arenas full of adoring fans. I’m talking about like MTV Cribs level, like Fresh Prince of Bel Air, kind of rich.
So every day I would listen to the radio non-stop. I knew every lyric, every chord change, every fact about the bands, and every night I would stare up at my posters on my ceiling, dreaming of touring the globe and hearing people scream my name. I mean, I was obsessed. My email address was literally rockstarwannabe@Aol.com. That’s true.
But then reality started to hit and I was rejected from my school talent shows. The guitar I had saved up for was stolen. And then I overheard someone say I was the worst singer in my choir class. Damn.
Pivoting to Become a Music Mogul
So I thought maybe the lifestyles of the rich and famous were slipping away and I needed to pivot. So I made a new plan. I’ll become a music mogul instead. I’ll own the record label. I don’t need to be the best guitar player or singer ever to do that, so it should be pretty easy, right?
Not so fast. I knew exactly zero people who had done anything in the entertainment industry. Everyone said I was being unrealistic and I lived in a place that wasn’t exactly Hollywood. So at age 14, I embarked on my rock n roll fantasy by taking every music related job possibly imaginable.
I passed out thousands of flyers in the freezing cold. I fetched coffee at radio stations, sold band t-shirts out of vans, worked security at a venue in Detroit, and I even skipped my high school prom to clean up trash at Lollapalooza for $5 an hour. Also, nobody asked me to go to prom. But that’s not the point of the story today, okay?
And after five years of that hustle, I finally landed a job in the mailroom at a record label, earning a whopping $20,000 a year. And at the time, I was living in my car and on my friends’ couches. So to 19-year-old me, $20,000 sounded like winning the lottery.
And my awesome new job consisted of tasks such as setting up fan meet and greets for a young Taylor Swift, and asking local strip clubs to play the new Nine Inch Nails song. And even being on the receiving end of an office eviction notice after a very loud visit from Kanye West. And then sadly, my office actually did shut down, but not because of Kanye.
So I set my sights on Los Angeles, where the label’s headquarters was, and I hoped to get a peek into the sex, drugs, and rock n roll experience that I had dreamed of. And what I found there was a little bit more Microsoft Excel and cubicles than I had anticipated, but it was still pretty great because I got to work on hundreds of records and see thousands of shows.
And at night, after the concerts were over, fans would come up to the bands that I was working with and they would tell them things like, “Your music saved my life” and “I walked down the aisle to your song”, and even “I named my baby after your album”.
So I was watching these artists become something bigger than themselves, and I realized maybe it’s not the actual fame and fortune that I’m seeking. I was watching them make meaningful impact on millions of people’s lives, and I thought that would be cool if I could make an impact someday.
A Viral Video Sparks an Idea
And one day in my office, I came across a viral YouTube video of a 29-year-old woman named Sloane who was hearing for the first time thanks to a special kind of hearing aid. When I saw this video, it got me thinking about how I wouldn’t be the same person without music. My life would look completely different.
So I sent the video to my friend Joe, who watched and listened to my idea, which was to start a headphone and speaker company that would give the proceeds to giving people hearing aids around the world, just like in the video. It would be the world’s first social good electronics company.
And Joe jumped on board instantly, and we high fived in lieu of a more formal business agreement. And I quit my dream job, the one I worked so hard for. Cashed out my life savings, my 401K from Universal Music Group had accumulated $5,000. So turns out that working with superstars doesn’t mean you have the bank account of one. It’s good to know.
Launching Listen
And two weeks later, we jumped on a plane to China without really any idea on how the electronics industry worked to source products for our new social enterprise, which we called Listen.
When we came back, we filled my apartment with as much inventory we could buy. Then we handmade our own packaging from boxes from the local craft store, and then we cobbled together like a first draft of our website, and then… and then we prayed to every God that we could think of.
And then everything just went perfectly. We sold the company a couple years later to Apple for $3 billion. I’m just kidding, just kidding, just kidding. That was Doctor Dre and Beats. That wasn’t this.
A Different Kind of Rags to Riches Story
This is not a rags to riches story about making billions of dollars from selling headphones, but it is a different kind of rags to riches story, because almost exactly a year after seeing that video of Sloane and dreaming of doing the same thing, Joe and I found ourselves in a school in Peru with a young girl named Maria.
And Maria’s parents told us that it was her biggest dream in life, to be able to hear so she could communicate and fit in with the other kids. But they had struggled for years to make this happen, and they’d heard of our mission from a relative who saw it on the local news, and they thought “this could be our chance”.
So they hopped on a bus hundreds of miles away and came down to meet us. Maria sat there in this hard plastic chair in front of me, and she was nervous and full of anxiety and hope, and I was in charge of fitting her hearing aids.
I pushed one into each of her ears. And then what happened next was just one of those moments in life that bursts at the seams. Maria’s eyes went wide and a look of pure wonder flashed across her face. She could hear for the first time, and her parents cried as they collapsed on the floor in relief. And so did we.
Because what had started off as this far fetched dream just a year prior to this, had turned into the closest thing to a miracle that we had ever seen. And little did we know, this was just the first day of the greatest experience of our lives.
An Epic Adventure Helping 50,000 People Hear
Because after this, we got to travel for the next decade, helping over 50,000 people hear for the first time. From small villages in Uganda to the streets of Mumbai to the jungles of Sri Lanka. We saw 40 countries in all 50 states and all seven wonders of the world, and we did epic adventures along the way, like going trekking with gorillas and learning how to trapeze and dancing with the northern lights.
And along the way, this ripple effect started happening, where we started inspiring other companies to add in social good programs to their business. And those people did things like plant millions of trees and fund cancer charities and help animals get rescued.
And of course, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, right? That’s just the highlight reel. Along the way, we faced financial challenges and mental health battles and a cancer crisis and loss of friends and family. And honestly, like a whole lot of other things that I had to buy a whole bookshelf full of self-help books for and Listen never became the biggest brand in the space.
And we never, you know, raised a ton of VC capital or sold the company for $1 billion. But I felt like an experiential billionaire. And that was worth more to me than any number in a bank account could ever be. Because money is a means. It’s not a meaning, it’s not a purpose.
Money Is Not What’s Most Important
And I’m not up here today to tell you to quit your job and go hug trees and hiss at people who wear designer clothes. Everybody loves money. Everybody knows that money is important, but it’s not what’s most important. Because if it was, you would go to the hospital and you’d see people on their deathbed asking to see their wallet one last time. You’d go to the cemetery and walk along and see tombstones that said, “died with 10 million in the bank”. But you don’t, because that would be crazy, right?
And this is stuff that we all know. The problem is that we don’t act like it while we still have time. It’s like a glitch in our psychological code. And I know this for a fact now, because as our experiences with Listen transformed the way that we thought about wealth and success and living a rich life, we started wondering how do others define their rich life?
The Three Keys to Living a Rich Life
And for that, we embarked on a three step journey. First, we started asking our friends and family questions like, “what have been the most valuable experiences of your life?” And they told us stories like cross-country road trips with their grandchildren, and finally writing that book and learning how to cook and getting married and raising a family.
And then they said, “no one’s actually ever asked me that before, and I’ve never even thought about what truly matters to me. I’ve been too busy maintaining my life to think about that kind of stuff.” But life isn’t created to be maintained. Life is created to be experienced. So that gave us the first key to living a rich life, which is figure out what is truly valuable to you.
Next, we sought out the advice of the people with the most life experience those in hospice and in retirement homes. And we asked them about their regrets. Overwhelmingly, they told us that they regretted the things that they did not do, not the things that they did.
And so I said, “why didn’t you do the thing that you most wanted to do in your life?” And they said, “well, I just thought I would get around to it someday. I thought that I would have more time. And then I gave myself excuses like, I’ll just do that when I get promoted. I’ll do that when the kids are older. I’ll do that when I retire. And then someday never came.”
And that gave us the second key to living a truly rich life, which is we have to stop making excuses and start taking radical responsibility for our dreams, because someday is not a day in the calendar.
Finally, we conducted one of the largest surveys of life experiences ever done with over 20,000 participants worldwide. And we asked them questions like, “what would you do if you knew that you had one year left to live? What about one day left?” With one year people would embrace nature and family and new experiences. With one day they would seek forgiveness, mend relationships and tell the people closest to them how much they loved them.
So when their priorities or when their time became very short, their priorities became crystal clear. So out of all the people we talked to, from friends to retirees to survey participants, the most fulfilled people shared one trait: they created urgency. They lived life on purpose. So the third and final key to living a rich life is don’t wait. Time is our greatest currency.
A Different Definition of a Rich Life
So fast forward to today. I’m standing here in front of you, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that I am not a rich rock star or a mogul that I dreamed of being. I don’t drive a Ferrari or live in a mansion, and the only fans that I have are the ones keeping us cool in here today, because those dreams are no longer mine. I’m a different person now with a different definition of a rich life.
So even though you just heard my story, this isn’t about me. This is about you. And this is about all of us. What makes us rich is the lives that we touch, the relationships that we have, the dreams that we follow. And doing things that really, truly matter to you. So how will you build your rich life starting today?
