Watch and read here the full transcript of Thrive Labs’ founder Priya Parker’s TEDx Talk: How to Quit Your Life (and Reboot) at TEDxUHasselt conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here: how-to-quit-your-life-and-reboot-by-priya-parker-at-tedxuhasselt
TRANSCRIPT:
There are many people in this world who are doing jobs out of fear. I know this, because privately they tell me so.
Now when you hear about people working in fear, images of child labor or prostitution rings may come to mind. But I’m not talking about those kinds of jobs. I’m talking about jobs people willingly take, even work incredibly hard for. I’m talking about some of the most prestigious jobs in the world: investment banking, management consulting, financial services, corporate law, private real estate, even computer programming.
Now when you ask most people: Why would somebody take this job? They might say well, they have desire. They desire power, like many of us. They desire money. They desire prestige. Other people might say they’re really intellectually curious. They want to be stimulated by other smart people. They want to build their skills; they want to build their drive, they want to build their capacities.
But what people often don’t take into account in their calculations is how much the choice to stay in many of these jobs is simply driven by fear.
I’m here today to talk to you about that fear. When I first started working with my clients, I was actually quite surprised by many of their fears. I mean what does an investment banker have to fear? When I spoke to a lot of them in interviews and in workshops many of them behind those glass and steel towers showed that they felt a lot more like this person: “I’m afraid of getting to a semi retirement point 30 years from now and having regrets that I didn’t follow certain passions.
What does a management consultant have to fear? The next mid-term review with a client. Maybe. But in my experience they’re actually worried about something rather different. Many people related with this: “I’m staying in consulting because there’s a fairly limited downside and upside and rather than swing for the fences with a very real chance of falling flat, but also a very real chance of doing something important”.
What does a corporate lawyer most afraid of? Losing the next case, perhaps. But actually many of them agreed that they felt a little bit more like this: “My biggest fear is that my idealism doesn’t match my choices”. These are what people tell me when I work with them.
Now I’m clearly not talking about people who love their jobs. I’m not talking about consultants who are fascinated by their cases. I’m not talking about consultants or finance people who are working on public sector opportunities that they’re extremely passionate about. I often get a lot of heat because people think I’m taking down entire industries and I’m not at all. I’m only talking about and only talking to the swing voters, if you will, the hundreds of young people I meet that tell me how much they hate their jobs and quotes like this: “in the process of working at this job I am quite unhappy, because I’m killing myself doing my best at something I don’t really want to do”.
But why should we care if a lawyer is unhappy? Frankly in this economy, he is lucky to have a job. Why should we care if an investment banker is worried about whether or not her life is meaningless or worthwhile or what she’s doing is worthwhile? Well, because it might not be. And not because there’s anything inherently wrong with investment banking. But because if it’s driven by fear, there’s many more things she could be doing with her talent and her energy and her brains that might be more meaningful to her and might be more meaningful to the rest of us.
The irony here is that the fears and anxieties of some of our best and brightest aren’t just a private problem. They’re a public one. If you’re an amazing computer programmer you could spend your time creating credit default swaps for a bank, or you could be analyzing epidemiological data and helping prevent the next plague or predict the next plague.
But the thing that stops you is fear and the thing that fear prevents is progress — your own as well as for the rest of us. But I haven’t come here today to be a social critic. I’ve actually come here today to offer a few ways forward to help you quit your life and fortunately reboot.
My name is Priya Parker and I run a company called Thrive Labs that works with people with these kinds of fears and studies the nature of these fears to gather some insights and see how you can overcome them, and how you can quit your life and reboot.
Here are seven of them: The Obituary Test, The Passion Comic Strip, The Backward Elevator Test, The Life Sentence, The Dwindling Cash Experiment, The Habit Of Helping Others and seventh, The Farewell Party Invite. A lot of the experiments that I’ve developed is based on experiments I’ve learned and built on during my graduate work at MIT and Harvard. I call my sessions with clients labs. And in these labs we try quirky experiments based on the best research on neuroscience, business management, conflict resolution and the arts. To see if we can make big change feel small and achievable.
The driving question of every lab is this: What is the biggest need in the world that I might have the passion and the capacity to address? Now there’s two sides of this question. First, the internal: What is my passion? What drives me? What makes become alive? And second, and very importantly is the external: What is actually happening in the world? The goal of every lab is to align the internal with the external.
The Obituary Test
Here are seven of the most effective tools I’ve seen to help you quit your life and reboot. The first: take the Obituary Test and make sure you pass. Now what this means is literally to write down a 600-word obituary in the style of your favorite newspaper. A recent interview in The New York Times Magazine interviewed a guy named Jonathan Butler. He was a former banker and he’s now started one of the most popular flea markets in Brooklyn which is where I live. And in his interview he said this: “I am ambitious about making a lot of money but none of that stuff passed the Obituary Test. I didn’t want my obituary to read that I had been a vice president of Merrill Lynch for 40 years”.
If you want to figure out what to do with your life, work back from your death. Rather than asking what kind of career do I want to get and building your life around that, ask the question: how do I want to have lived and start from there?
The Passion Comic Strip
Tool number two. The Passion Comic Strip. One of the biggest fears that people tell me often very quietly as it’s a dirty little secret is that they’re afraid they have no passions. And if they actually really dug they’d find that they’re just kind of bland. So draw a comic strip. Even if you’re not sure what you’re passionate about, I guarantee that there’s somebody in your life, likely people who have known you for a long time who do, interview five to ten people in your life, again somebody that’s known you for a long time like your grandparents or your parents possibly and ask them this question: When have you seen me most alive? Just simply. When have you seen me most passionate? How have you seen me develop my passions or let them go over the course of my life? And then draw it out in a comic strip form.
Drawing this out does a couple of things. First, it taps into a different part of the brain than writing does. And second, often seeing images is a lot more powerful than seeing words on a page. It’s a lot more memorable. Also drawing a comic strip if you’re anything like me it will end up in stick figures and you’re guaranteed not to take yourself too seriously in the process of quitting your life and rebooting.
Get Comfortable With Discomfort
Tool number three: get comfortable with discomfort. Quitting your life is not only incredibly scary. It’s also hugely awkward for yourself and for everybody around you. So one of the things I tell people is to literally build your discomfort muscles. And here are three ways to build them. First, the next time you’re in a bank or in a grocery store and you’re standing in line waiting rather than texting on your phone or tweeting, start singing and just see what happens. You don’t this thing really loudly but sing audibly and as people start looking around trying to figure out where it’s coming from, just continue to sing and notice what happens as your heart starts pounding. But hold it.
Tip number two: take yourself out to dinner alone. For some people this isn’t very scary but for many people you’ve probably never dined alone in a restaurant on purpose if you’re not on a business trip. So make a reservation, go to a restaurant and without reading material, without a telephone, without a phone and without apologizing to the waiter why you got stood up, have a full dinner alone and just see how it feels.
Tip number three: this is one of my favorites, it’s from a woman named Olivia Fox Cabane. And this is the Backward Elevator Test. So you walk into an elevator. Normally when you walk into an elevator and there’s other people there. There’s a prerogative, you turn around and you all stare at the door. What I want you to do is to walk into an elevator and when everybody else turns around and say this is the door, just keep facing the back. And you’ll notice very quickly how uncomfortable everybody else gets and also how awkward you are.
Now why am I telling you to do these strange little hacks, because they’re actually building your muscle the discomfort. And in my life and in my work the people who are able to actually quit their life and reboot is not that they don’t feel fear, they’ve just simply found ways to manage it to feel and notice the anxiety and keep going.
Give Yourself A Life Sentence
Tool number four: Give yourself a life sentence. Organizations have mission and vision statements and the best ones live by them. Historically many of us got our values through institutions that we belong to over the course of a lifetime. But for a variety of reasons a lot of those institutions play a smaller role now or are falling away. Therefore it’s even more important to start thinking from the inside: what do I value? What is my purpose if I had one? And what do I most want to show up being?
So a life sentence has three parts. The first: what are the qualities or values that I want to bring with me regardless of whether at my family or at work. Second: what is it that I actually do? And third: to what end? Why? When I work with people they say that this is both the hardest practice to do. It often takes us three or four grueling hours to word craft it out and then a few weeks for them to go back and test it out themselves but also that it’s one of the most effective and powerful in terms of making decisions. Because it allows you to have a filter, if you — should I take this job or how is this relationship for me? Does it take me closer or further away from my life sentence?
One comedian client I worked with after a series of labs came with the sentence and I asked his permission if I can share it with you all, and he said yes: “With integrity and passion, I use comedy and storytelling to expose the truth, acknowledging its significance, drawing in others and inspiring them to be the world they want to see”. He used the sentence to quit a prestigious job, launched his own company and started TV show. Now this life sentence takes a lot of work and so one of the tips I would say is to try to do it with somebody who knows you, because it’s hard and it takes a lot of time by yourself.
The Dwindling Cash Experiment
Step number five: the dwindling cash experiment. So one of the fears that comes up over and over again and one of the largest reasons people cite for not changing is because of fear of income volatility or money. Part of this process of changing is to make explicit many of the things that are often implicit in our heads. So income volatility or basically simply how much money is enough money is a question that’s often sort of going on in the back track of your mind.
So what the dwindling cash experiment is it’s a way to basically make explicit and actually test out experiment what it’s like to live on four different incomes. So this is how you do it. First, look at your bank statements and figure out how much money you spend on average every month, not how much money you make, how much money you spend. Then take it out in the bank, put it in an envelope, maybe hide under your mattress. And what you’re going to do is this: over the next four weeks to live on different percentages of that money incrementally. So what does that mean? Say for example, you spend $4000 a month or €4000 a month. And so in the first week you take out 40% of that, so $1600, identify how much money, whether it’s rent or lattes, everything that you spend on. For the really bold people here move out of your apartment. Airbnb is one very easy way to sublet your apartment and actually go and see what it’s like to live in hotels or in basically different levels. But otherwise you can stay in your apartment but basically in one week in the first week spend $1400, go to restaurants, go to stay in hotels, give your friends presents, it may be more than that, maybe less than that.
In the second week, spend 30% of that entire amount. In the third week spend 20% and in the last week spend 10%. So if you spend normally $4000 a month and the last week you’re spending $400 in that week, roughly $60 a day, including rent if you’re going on the bold version.
Now why would you do this? Because actually living on different incomes, strangely enough, is usually knowledge we lack. And part of this process is to basically find out what it is that you’re comfortable with and what it is that you can live on. Once you’re done with this experiment, build out a financial model and decide how much you actually need to quit your life and reboot.
The Habit of Helping Others
Step number six: help somebody else. Identify five of your friends who do the most interesting work that you know, ideally work that’s different from yours, and ask them if you can spend an hour with them, problem solving their stickiest problems and their business. This does two things. First, it builds the habit of looking around and saying how can I help? What can I solve? What are the problems out there? And second, it actually helps you to understand what are the problems that actually you care about and what are you good at solving?
The Farewell Party Invite
The step number seven. Set a withdrawal date and send out invites for the farewell party. If I was going to send it out far in advance when they’re withdrawing from a country they invaded for all the world to hear, surely you can send out invitation to seven of your closest friends and tell them when you’re going to be quitting your life and importantly rebooting. Social accountability in peer groups are actually often one of the most under-tapped resources we have, so tap into them, so ask them to hold you to account and make sure you have the right peer groups which is a lot harder.
So these are seven tools that can really help the swing voters with radical change. I frame it as quitting your life and rebooting. Because in my experience you often have to step back from your life a little bit to be able to see clearly.
Now very fortunately I’m not the only one working on this problem, groups like Echoing Green, The Future Project, The Bold Academy, Escape the City are all thinking critically and creatively on how to reallocate talent to problems that matter.
And in closing, this is my urge to you: don’t avoid thinking about meaning just because it scares you. Changes in the universe are very hard to make but they’re even harder to make if you don’t spend time thinking about what most matters to you. If you think about history and you look back in history understanding the costs of not doing this, imagine what would have happened if Leonardo da Vinci hadn’t stuck — had clung to his Plan B, or if Einstein had remained the patent officer?
Changes in the universe basically need time and need space and need risk. And so what I would urge you to do is to think about what matters to you, think about what makes you come alive and think about what’s actually happening in the world. And then think critically and deeply about how you want to dive in. Otherwise you might be cheating the future on all you have to give.
Thank you.
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