Full text of Canadian author Justine Musk’s talk: Wounded People Tell Better Stories at TEDxSanFrancisco conference.
“Show me who you love, and I’ll show you who you are”
Listen to the MP3 Audio here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Justine Musk – Canadian author, & former wife of Elon Musk
I am here, because of a question that someone asked me in the summer of 2014. And the question went something like this: ‘Justine, as someone who is married to the entrepreneur Elon Musk, you know, Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, you have presumably interacted with some of the greatest names in the business world. So, as an observer, what are some of the big things that you’ve noticed that sets them apart from us mere mortals?’
Because I’m a writer, I like to watch and take notes, I’m the kind of friend who inspires people to say ‘Justine, please don’t put this on your blog’. So, I always say ‘no, of course not, I’m saving it for my fiction’.
But this question lived inside of me for several months. And I was surprised at what I wanted to say and what I’m going to say to you here right now, I am impressed and deeply moved by just how dysfunctional and messed-up we all manage to be as human beings.
So, even the most golden among us, I mean they have stellar careers but if you look at the other areas of their lives, you’ll see where their demons manifests themselves. Their forms of self-sabotage, you know, their wounds.
But what they do better than us mere mortals is that they tell better stories about who they are, not just to us. Although, part of genius is your ability to communicate it and make it relevant to others, but to themselves about who they are, where they come from, where they’re going because we are made up of stories.
And the best stories don’t tell us how awesome we already are, they tell us who we can be, you know, they inspire and empower us and they call us out to our higher better selves.
They’re also obsessed with what they do. They don’t really bind this whole idea of something we call life work balance and maybe they’re on to something, because life work balance was originally a term that anthropologists used in the 1800’s. They were studying the happiness level of these tribes and their conclusion was that the thinner the line between what you did for work and what you did in the rest of your life, the happier you were.
So, it actually wasn’t about balance. It was about integration but we live in a culture where we’ve made this very sharp division between work and home, private and public and we’ve assigned men to one sphere and women to the other.
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So, when this term surfaced again in the 70s in the UK and in the 80s in the United States, well, what else was going on in the culture? Women were moving en masse from the private world to the public world, so suddenly this balance was in question.
But maybe it’s time to question the question which forces both men and women to choose often between friends, family, love and a really kick-ass career that engages you, demands your best work, stimulates you.
But there’s another story rising to counter this and it’s called ‘finding your passion’.
How do you find your passion? We don’t seem very good in knowing how to do this, and Einstein said ‘a problem cannot be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it’. So, maybe we should go back and take a look at passion, the original meaning of passion, which means to suffer.
Religious scholars used the term in the 12th century; they were talking about the suffering of Christ. And when Western Europe put some, you know, reenacts Christ’s final days, we call them passion plays because it’s a very particular kind of suffering, it’s willful, it’s voluntary, it’s done for reasons and make other people think you are absolutely out of your mind.
But we confuse finding your passion with finding your bliss, you know, something that Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist is very well known for saying. It’s a great soundbite, you know, follow your bliss, awesome, sign me up.
But it was part of a larger point he was making, that if you connect these moments of authentic happiness, they will meet you to something bigger than what makes you happy which is something what you are willing to suffer for.
And we throw around the term so casually, you know, ‘I have a passion for lasagna’. You’re like ‘really? You’re willing to suffer for lasagna?’ In my head, I can hear people saying ‘Yes, Justine. I’m willing to suffer for lasagna’.
When I was 17, I took up Taekwondo because I wanted to be a badass. And in Taekwondo, they teach you how to break boards by focusing on a point that’s just behind the board. And I think it’s a lot like that with passion, where it’s not the activity per se but it’s the value behind the activity, so the same activity can mean different things to different people.
You know, you value the freedom to express yourself through your amazing pasta or you value the community you create by gathering people around your amazing pasta. And so it’s this value that connects to the essence of who we are and who we want to serve, our soul or as I like to think of it, our inner freaks.
You know that word on Namaste at the end of yoga class, when they make you say that and, you know, the light in me honors the light in you, I like to think of it as ‘the inner freaking me honors inner freaking you’.
The ancient Romans called it your genius.
And we are used to thinking of that word, meaning a very rare and exceptional individual of amazing ability but according to the ancient Romans, we all had one and your genie was your true inner shape but it doesn’t reveal itself all at once. You have to track it over time through whispers and glimmerings and clues and it might not be what you expect.
You think you’re tracking a lion and it turns out to be a unicorn with a Mohawk or maybe a short-haired miniature dachshund.
I would not have chosen to be a writer. I would have chosen to be a rock star. I mean, I don’t know what you would get if you cross Lena Del Rio with EDM with David Bowie but that would have been me. But in fourth grade, after every creative writing class, Mrs. Russov would say ‘children, who would like to read your story aloud to the class?’ And the kids would say ‘Jenny’ as I was Jenny back then, yeah. Jenny. Get Jenny to read her story.
Yeah, so the same kids who bullied me and excluded me on the playground, they would be wrapped when I was up there at the front of the classroom reading my story.
So, it gave me a different way to think of myself as other than the kid who, you know, always had the desk that was like vomiting notebooks and papers and who couldn’t return a library book to save her life, who couldn’t pay attention in class, in high school had a lot of trouble going to class.
But my writing got me through. In fact, my writing got me a four-year scholarship to a pretty good university where I met a young Elon Musk. In my mid-thirties after I had sold three novels to traditional publishers, I was diagnosed with ADHD, attention deficit disorder, which often goes undiagnosed in young girls because we’re not hyperactive and bothering people, we are just staring out the window.
And my therapist said to me that writing is my brain’s way of processing and organizing incoming stimuli. In other words, I use narratives to do what other brains do naturally. So, my writing is my brain’s strategy to compensate for a place that doesn’t quite work like I should.
And it occurred to me that if this part, this broken part had been fixed when I was a kid, my writing would have disappeared along with that.
So, we can’t choose our passion any more than we can choose our wounds and we can’t choose our wounds any more than we can really choose who we are attracted to over and over again.
You know, how people always describe, you know, the perfect partner the person that they’re looking for but they keep showing up at dinner parties and events with someone who was very much not that.
I had a friend who would come to my house and would throw his head back and he would say ‘I’m so tired. Abby’s blonde, crazy, Russian woman named Svetlana, why won’t they leave me alone’. So, I said well stop asking them out.
But passion has its own logic and actually it’s called repetition compulsion, where we are unconsciously driven to recreate a certain situation or relationship from the past in an effort to resolve it. So, desire pulls us out of ourselves towards what we need to learn in order to become whole, you know, to master our past.
You know, mastering that people think it’s about dominance, you know, that to control something you have to like dominate it. But mastering is about learning something, knowing something just right down to the bones, right down to the source code and then developing this fingertip feel for how to manipulate that source code, which of course changes everything and, you know, that’s magic. I consider that genius.
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of 10,000 hours to become world-class at anything. Turns out that’s at the low end, that can take 15,000 to 20,000 hours not just to practice with something called deliberate practice, which is difficult and mindful and requires constant feedback. It’s not fun so most people don’t do it.
I mean, 15,000 hours, who has time to do that for something that doesn’t put food on the table? Well, here’s one answer, affluent suburban high school teenagers who have no social life. When I was in high school, we called them geeks. It was not a compliment.
But geeks, you know, what is a geek? Somebody who is obsessed with learning something, mastering a skillset or a body of knowledge would rather do that and develop social skills. I was a geek. I was a writing geek. My motto was ‘I like to party. In my party, I read books’.
When I was a kid, one of my earliest memories was being chased around this yard by older kids, boys who had handcuffs and they grabbed me and they put my arms behind my back and they told me that they were going to force me to eat a birthday cake made of Dapsone.
And so I was watching this boy come towards me and he had the pill in his hand and I was terrified. I think it was like, you know, four or five and so I kicked out at the pill and I splattered poop across these kids. And, you know, it was summer, they were wearing bathing suits so it was on the bare skin. And I didn’t know what to do.
So, I kicked the pill again and I remember one kid saying ‘you know, Jenny’ because I was Jenny back then, you know. ‘Just because you put it on them didn’t mean have to put it on us too’. So, I turned around and I ran home and then I heard this voice, um, I said ‘and don’t you come back, Jenny Wilson’. And I turned around and it was Mrs. Brown and she was posed in the middle of the front yard and all the kids were like posing around her. It was like this, you know, vignette and she was like shaking her fist at me.
And I have had such shame around that memory that I had not spoken a word about that to anybody for over 30 years. So, I think I told my therapist and maybe I told my sister and now I’m telling you guys, but we create a parallel world to escape the world that rejects us or the world that we find too painful to live in.
But some people are so good at doing this and master such an amazing skill set that they take their world and they infuse it into our world and they change the world. And these are the people we call visionaries, you know, people who move between worlds, between states of consciousness.
And the thing is we have such shame around just the idea of being a victim in any way because when I was a kid, I was something… and I just found out this recently, I was something called a pure victim because I was a kid who was bullied and I did not bully other kids in return or I didn’t fight back. So, I just didn’t have an enemy. I mean, who wants to be called a pure victim. Victims are like, you know, they’re losers, they’re weak, they collude in their own, you know, degradation. I mean, that’s how we seem to think of them or they’re manipulative, you know, people play the victim mentality.
But the original meaning of the word victim actually means somebody who was sacrificed to the gods. So, you could see a victim as someone who’s been to another world and back and has stories to tell, because the passion means to suffer, compassion means to suffer with. And it’s those stories that bridge one world to the other world that open up our worlds and create change.
I had a son who died at 10 weeks. It was called, it’s his related incident and I went to Bernie man, I think six times after that happened and I had a ritual I would do towards the end of my stay there. I would check out across the playa and always had to be on foot; that was my rule. And I go to the temple of loss, which was where people brought mementos, things from their past that they wanted to let go or release.
And I never brought anything there but I always found a place in one of the walls and I would write Nevada, Alexander. He was a good baby. And then they went to the temple on fire and that ritual was incredibly comforting to me. And I think it’s because when you take your story and you put it out into the world, it joins with other people’s stories. It becomes, you know, this community where we can learn from each other because what our story is but delivery vehicles for wisdom.
So, and we need freaky stories because you might have noticed that the geeks who rule the world tend to kind of look the same and it’s because they look enough like the status quo so that we’re comfortable with them, so that we allow them to stretch our sense of what is comfortable.
So, we’ve gone from freaks and geeks to geek chic and I would like to think that we’ve gotten to a place where we are comfortable enough with geekiness that we will accept it, you know, no matter the color or the gender that it comes in. But this won’t happen if we keep hearing the same stories over and over again.
So, to wrap up, I hope you leave this event today and you’re kind to your inner freak, those dark wounded places in you that hold your source of shame and you notice those moments when we’re most broken down that we’re most open to what that inner freak is trying to tell us.
So, if you can take that story and find out how to tell it and maybe it’s through painting or writing or coding or the company that you create but you can throw it onto the communal fire let it burn really brightly. And there will be times when you fail and you feel despair and lonely and wonder what the hell you’re doing and you should have gone to work in a bank or Starbucks or whatever, and that’s okay.
Because that’s just how the story goes. So, tell it and tell it again and tell it again because we are made up of stories and scars and our scars are our stories. So, go change the world. Namaste.
