Read the full transcript of Dr. Marjan Modara’s talk titled “Redesigning Your Life After 50” at TEDxManamaWomen 2023 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Process of Reverse Engineering Your Life
DR. MARJAN MODARA: There is a process in engineering called reverse engineering. It’s used when you dismantle, deconstruct a product in order to know its information and how it got to be where it was when you saw it last. So before coming here today and telling you how I redesigned my life, I had to deconstruct the past 15 years of my life to show you the process that I had to go through to get to where I am here today, standing in front of you all.
When we were young, growing up, we were told to have a good life and be successful, we had to be going through a certain path. To be successful, we needed to go to school, get a degree and get a good job, want a fantastic husband, have children, raise them the same way as we were raised for them to be successful, then retire and then spend whatever years we have left on this earth taking care of our grandchildren.
Now I started the journey on the right track. I was always at the top in my class. I received a scholarship. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship and go off to a great university, graduated as an architectural engineer, secured a government job, married a very understanding, handsome guy, had raised three children, wonderful children, and my daughter brought the fourth one into the family.
The Unexpected Twist in My Journey
Now you would say I was off to a great start, right? Until 15 years ago when my journey had a twist in it. The cliche happy life and success suddenly took another turn. I was turned down to be a CEO of the organization I was in at the time because of my gender, because I was a woman, or I am a woman. They wanted a man.
So I decided, you know what? It was time to leave the corporate life and see what life had arranged for me going forward. I was 47 and I was lost. Looking back, I believe that the turning point was when I started redesigning my life, although I didn’t know it then. That was the turning point.
In my own eyes, I was a failure, thinking that to be successful and have a good life and be happy, I needed to prove to myself and to everyone around me that I was good enough to make it as a CEO. My pursuit of a new job started then because I believed I had to get a job to have an identity, that the job was my identity. I thought that because I had not made it to the top level in a corporate world, I still had to prove to everyone that I was worthy of making it to the top. There was something unfinished.
The Search for New Purpose
On the other hand, I wasn’t getting employed now, because guess what? I was overqualified. I couldn’t just sit alone and do nothing, so I went back to school. I got my first master’s degree. I waited two years. Now I was overqualified and I had a lot of degrees. What can I do? Okay, I’ll go in and get another degree. I got my second master’s degree. It was halfway through the second master’s degree that I got the chance to get into a PhD journey, and then I dove in.
Now on the other side of the story, what was happening in the community? When I started studying again, society was like, “Why? You know, you have a good husband, you have a good life. You have great children. Why do you want to go back to school? Just relax and enjoy life.” But what about me? I was asking them. That’s it? That’s not what I want, okay?
That was the first shift in my journey. What other people think that I should be doing in my life is not in their hands, it’s in my own hands. And believe me, my children were the ones who made me realize that. But still, I was a failure in my own eyes, okay? I had to prove to everyone that I had to have a C-suite position, and that being part of a corporation was what gave me identity. I was still looking for that identity.
Finding Meaning Through Isolation
So I was deeply now drowned in my research, and it’s a very lonely phase, okay? And one becomes isolated with the research and with their own thoughts. It was in this isolation that I started wondering, what was I really looking for? What would give meaning to my life and make me happy or happier?
The seeking of meaning in life led me to dive into how our thoughts make us trigger feelings inside of us, and then become these individuals who think the whole world is against them, or become a better version of themselves.
Now that was 12 years ago, and I started redesigning my life and how I wanted, not the society, how to live going forward. It was a design that incorporated a lot of work, okay? The fields of mental and physical body had to come together, okay? Physical by working on my thoughts, and physical by working on my body to become fit, because I started reading, listening to podcasts, and learning from others and from the researchers how they did it, so that I would know how to do it myself.
Systems, Not Just Goals
But reading alone doesn’t get you there, right? It doesn’t understand us. Atomic Habits by James Clear says to stop paying so much attention to your goals and start working on the systems, on the habits that you have to do every day in order for you to get there.
Be mindful of your systems or habits, and put them in order, acting upon them.
I ask myself, what is the life that I want to look forward to? Is it one with fame, money, and status, or one full of enjoyment, satisfaction, and joy, and purpose? So I needed to understand those terms. It’s nice to read them, it’s nice to see them out there, but you have to understand them and how to get there.
What is the meaning of life? What is the bigger purpose or picture? Why did God create me? I came across a positive psychology literature with the notion that if you can make connection between three things and make it a coherent story, you will get to what meaning in life is. The increase in meaning comes from connecting three things. What is your theory of work? And by that, we don’t say, not the job you want, but why do you work? What is it for? What is work in service of?
Building New Habits and Perspectives
The first thing that kept coming back again and again was that, okay, my life on this earth is shorter than what I had already accumulated so far. I knew that longevity needs a sound mind and a healthy body. I started researching, reading, attending workshops on ways to calm my thoughts, while at the same time working on my body and started an exercise routine.
Exercise became a routine. It was in my daily life and not a seasonal option where we just want to lose a few kilos because we have this wedding coming up and have to get set into that dress and then forget about the diet and the exercise and go back to the ordinary life. It becomes a habit.
David Burnett and Dave Evans, in their book, Designing Your Life, they say we get stuck on a class of problems that are bad problems and they call it gravity problem. Now, what is gravity problem? There are things that we cannot change. It’s not in our hands, okay? And we simply, it’s just the circumstances that are out there and we cannot solve it. Once we accept it’s a gravity problem and we cannot change it, we have to see what we want to do with it. Is that a circumstance we can work on or do we need to do something else?
Now what was my gravity problem? My gravity problem was being stuck in getting a job as a CEO, being in the C-suite level. It depended on many things though, out there, it wasn’t in my hands. And if you all know, there is a lot of waspa involved and if you don’t have it, you will not get it. So it was the end of that story.
And then I started trying different scenarios. Arthur Brooks, author of, oh, I’m stuck still with those pictures. Arthur Brooks says, there is change in our intelligence when we move from our 40s to our 50s and to our 60s. And he calls, and they call it, that it goes from fluid intelligence to crystallized intelligence. Now what do they mean by crystallized intelligence? It rewards the ability to use ideas and then much more so
That what we take and do, we rephrase it, and then put it out there and share it with others, instead of the fluid intelligence, which is in our younger years. Turn that crystallized intelligence into other-focus, not self-focus, that’s what he means. That is when I started focusing on the stories of others and not on my story.
I opened a space for training. That’s when I was lost. So I opened up a space for training and workshops and sharing knowledge, and a whole new world opened up for me. I started seeing youngsters in the community who are doing amazing things that we don’t know about and started talking to them.
COVID hit and in my isolation I discovered Brené Brown and her 25 years of research of vulnerability and how vulnerability is beautiful and that we are enough. As we are. And I don’t need to get that C-suite job that I was looking for all this time. I was enough.
The Path to Happiness in Later Years
And the data, now this is very interesting. There is another data that says when we reach our 70s, the population breaks into two categories. One group keeps getting happier going towards the end while the other group becomes less happy going towards the end.
What can I do to give me a bigger chance to be on the upper branch of the 70s going towards the end? Today I’m 62. I have redesigned my life looking forward to living one day at a time with gratitude and a lot of love and with the world, showcasing myself to the youngsters as someone to look forward to when they get to my age. And become something like me, I hope.
I also want my generation to look at me and start believing that our lives are built by us and not the society. I started my own podcast and interviewed individuals with beautiful stories and shared them with the community.
The most critical shift happened exactly a year ago in October when I started going on adventure trips with beautiful young souls. I met them for the first time and saw who I truly am through their eyes. At 62, I am the first female in this region to summit Mount Kilimanjaro.
With them I realized how strong I am mentally and physically. I discovered the magnitude of my strength and the identity I was looking for through their eyes. I now teach at the university as an assistant professor and share my life knowledge and experience with the students. Not just teaching them books but adding my experience to it which makes it a lot more.
The most important relationship in life is the one you have with yourself. When you become comfortable in your own company and at peace with yourself and with everyone around you, any other relationship is a plus not a must. And then I started having meaning in my life.
The Algorithm for a Successful Life
The algorithm for having successful content life is work for it by learning about it. Apply it. Practice it in your life. You cannot learn something just reading a book or listening to a podcast or an interview or seeing others do it and you don’t.
Stop paying so much attention to goals. Start paying attention to the habits, to the systems. Be more mindful of your systems and put priorities in order. Your priorities. Then when you get it, share it with everyone else.
I want to engage more and more with conversation with the community around me to believe that working on their mental and physical health is the thing that will get them gracefully and being at the same time fit.
A Call to Action
I want you to believe that we are all work in progress all the time and that happiness or “happierness” as Oprah Winfrey coined it—she said we become happier everyday. It’s a journey and not a destination.
I want you to get curious. Talk to people. Go on adventures and design a well-lived enjoyable life. I want you to plan where you want to be in your life in 10 years time by working at it in 5 years, 1 year, 1 month, 1 week, day by day. Need to do what you need to do today. What systems you need to put for you to live day by day and live working on that system. That is intention without attachment.
As Simon Sinek said, “The goals are finite but our system and habits are infinite.”
I want you to condition yourself according to your strength, purpose and meaning in life and not what society defines for you. I want you to condition your mind towards growth mindset and believe that we are all unique and we are all work in progress.
I want you to believe that happiness is a journey not a destination. I want you to have the goal of being on the upper branch when you get to your 70s.
We all come to this world crying, but let us leave with a happy smile and love in the hearts of everyone that we have around us. Thank you. Thank you.
