The Secret of Starting Over: Edward Hartwig (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Edward Hartwig’s talk titled “The Secret of Starting Over” at TEDxAmRingSalon conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

A Sudden Decision

Last week, I decided to leave my job. It happened rather unexpectedly, to be honest, and late at night. And at the time, my wife wasn’t home, and so when she did get home, she came to the door and she said, “How was your day?” And I said, “I left my job.”

And she said, “Really?” And I have to explain the situation, because there’s two things you need to know. One, my wife is extremely gullible. And over the years, I may have taken advantage of that for my own personal amusement here and there.

And two, I was smiling the entire time I said it. So I don’t think that she believed a word of what I was saying. So for about three minutes, it went like this. “Really?” “Yes.” “Really?” “Yes.” “Really?” “Yes.” Until it finally sunk in that I wasn’t kidding.

A New Perspective

The next day, I was having lunch with a friend. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. We were kind of catching up, and so I told him the story. But I added, “You know, this morning when I woke up, I thought I would have regrets.” I made the decision almost instantaneously. But I didn’t. I felt great. I’ve never felt this good in my life.

Now, to be honest, this isn’t the first time that this has happened. Over the last 20 years, the time which I’ve been working, I’ve started over a few times. I’ve been a plumber and a carpenter. I’ve been a bike mechanic and a salesperson. I’ve been a researcher and an editor. I’ve been an investigator. I’ve been a trial attorney. I’ve done crisis management. I have planned logistics for events like this, although not as well.

A Life of Change

I have been a diplomat for my country. And so during that time, I’ve also moved a few times. In fact, I’ve lived in eight U.S. states, touching all four borders and a couple in the middle, and I’ve seen almost every single one of them, except Alaska, unfortunately.

In the last decade alone, I’ve moved three times to three different continents, and I’ve learned three different languages just so that I could do that. It hasn’t been as crazy as it sounds. There’s always been a reason why, and that’s, for lack of a better explanation, that I’m really flawed.

I have lots of things that I need to get better at. And so when I do get presented with an opportunity to try something I haven’t done before or correct something I’ve done wrong, I do my best to take on that challenge. So for years, we’ve been moving around, fixing all my flaws.

I was a terrible student. So I moved from my hometown, where there’s a Big Ten university and class sizes of 200, to a small little town in Iowa so that I would be under the watchful gaze of only ten people in a class and forced to do my work. I was still a terrible student, but I learned a lot more than I would have otherwise.

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Discovering Purpose

From there, I would go on to work four or five jobs vicariously hustling and getting by until I realized I needed a sense of purpose in my life. I didn’t know what to do, so I went to law school. And there, I learned to seek out people to serve.

And for a few years, I was a public defender, working in Louisiana, California, Wisconsin, and eventually in Boston, Massachusetts, where I settled down for what had to be the longest time we’ve been anywhere in a long time, 15 whole months. I loved my work as a public defender, and I really learned very quickly that doing something that was more important than myself was a true part of who I was.

But when the State Department came and offered me a job, I knew I would have to accept. Not only was I a bad student, I was a terrible language student. I also had never been abroad, not meaningfully. I’d traveled to different places, and I’d seen different things, but I’d never lived abroad. I’d never immersed myself in a foreign culture. And so I knew that I would take the job, and we did. We moved to Washington, D.C.

Overcoming Challenges

From Washington, D.C., we would move to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, later to Ethiopia, and then on to Austria. To explain how I’ve taken on these challenges and learned things through work and reinventing myself, it’s probably best if I tell you a few short stories.

I thought I loved service. I thought I was a service-oriented person, but I didn’t really realize the extent of that until October of 2010. At the time, my wife and my daughter and I were living in Ethiopia, and I was sick. I was very sick.

In fact, I’d been sick for so long that my wife eventually forced me to go to the doctor and get a second opinion. And I did, and I got the blood test. And they said, “We’ll call you tomorrow,” which was a lie, because I hadn’t made it back to the car in the parking lot before they called me and told me that I would have to fly out of Ethiopia and seek medical treatment someplace else.

Twelve hours later, I was on a plane to Pretoria. In that 12-hour period, I did everything I was supposed to do. I called my parents and told them what was going on. I played with my little daughter Ella as much as I could, and I told my wife everything was going to be fine.

A Moment of Truth

And for her part, she put on a good show and agreed. But once I got to that seat on that airplane, that airplane and that seat were the worst moment of my life.

I sat down, put on my belt, strapped in, and there I was.

It wasn’t a nice, new, shiny airplane. It was one of these old airplanes with the carpeting that came halfway up the wall, the thick cushions that were musty and slightly greasy with the hair oil of all the people that had sat in that seat before me. It was horrible. I couldn’t move. And when I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do the robotic things that had kept me going. And so I started to think. I started to think, “Why am I going to Pretoria? Why not London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna?”

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Well, I said, “Oh, that’s easy. Those flights leave 5 to 10 hours later in the day in Ethiopia.” And then I realized that that 5 to 10 hours represented the biggest difference between whether I was probably going to live or probably going to die.

Facing Mortality

Then I started to think about my family, my wife, my daughter, would I ever see them again? My wife was six months pregnant. Would I ever meet my unborn child? Would I ever know whether she was a boy or a girl? And then I completely broke down.

The stewardess woke me up by shaking me. I had arrived in Pretoria, and I was looking around. And of course, you know, when they shake you and wake you up, they say, “Are you okay?” And robotically I said, “Sure, I’m fine.” Which is a complete lie. And I looked around the airplane, and I was the only one there. Everyone else had gotten up and gotten off.

But the second I undid that belt and stood up out of that chair, I went back about doing all those robotic things that were getting me by. I would have, in the end, a 40 degrees Celsius fever for 17 straight days with medication to control it. My liver had failed, which had caused my kidney to fail, which had caused me severe heat dehydration, so severe that the dehydration was actually the problem and not the multiple organ failure.

The Fight for Life

In addition, a few opportunistic infections had planted themselves, one of them deep in my lungs. The first thing they did at the hospital was put me on an IV drip, and I was on that drip for six days with no other treatment. 100 milliliters an hour. It was the slowest IV drip in history. 10 hours for one bag. Drip. Drip. Drip.

I got so frustrated and angry that I actually grabbed a doctor at one point, and I said, “What’s the problem if I’m so dehydrated? Just turn up the volume. Get this thing moving. Let’s do 500 milliliters an hour. Let’s do 1,000.” And he grabbed my hand and he pushed me back down to the bed and he dropped the Afrikaans that he had been using and he said quietly in English, “I’m afraid if I do that, your heart might explode.”

I would spend two weeks in that hospital and a week in South Africa recovering. It would be three months before I got a diagnosis and another month after that before my liver would be healthy enough to process the cheap and easy drugs that it took to kill the typhus that had infected me.

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Now, remember, up until this point, I had quit a dozen jobs at least. And none of those had ever tried to kill me. But I didn’t quit. And it was through this experience that I realized that I actually believed that representing my country and the work that I was doing was worth dying for.

Reflecting on Change

So, how do we make these decisions to start over? For me, it’s about challenging myself and learning more about who I am. Over years, I’ve developed a hierarchy of what I’m willing to do and what I’m not. Moving? Easy. I’ll move anywhere for a job. Rank? Title? Influence? These things also mean very little to me.

Purpose? Service? That’s extremely important, as you might imagine. But I draw the line at family. The one consistent thing in my life for the last two decades has been my wife. She was there with me in high school. When I was a punk kid, she was too. She made me care about education when all I wanted to do was coast. She supported me as a public defender, even though I didn’t make any money, and she didn’t always support the outcomes of what I did.

She was there in Ethiopia and for every other move. She took me to that doctor, and more importantly, she kept us together long enough to get me on that plane. So, a week ago, when I was presented with this problem at work, it was my own fault. I had made a mistake. I had taken a gamble. I thought I had it under control. And the consequences weren’t that bad.

A Choice for Family

I was given the option, move, leave your wife, because my wife has a job that she cannot leave, for just a year, or leave. And I left. Because that’s the deal. It’s not written down. It’s not said. It’s experienced together in life. Change, no matter what anybody tells you, is never easy. No matter how many times you move, no matter how many times you start a new job, it sucks.

Learning a new culture, learning a new language, fitting in, making friends, trusting people, being trusted, learning new skills, starting over is hard. And it doesn’t get any better, no matter how many times you do it. What does get better is the decision to start over.

Deciding, making that choice, and moving on and being comfortable with it, for me, has been a product of all those years of testing the limits and knowing what I’m willing to do and what I’m not. Thank you.