5 Practical Ways to Take Control of Your Life | Jim VandeHei | TED

0:03 I want you to spend the next 10 minutes being absurdly self-indulgent,

0:08 which is advice I would almost never otherwise give people.

0:12 I want you to not think about the things you can't control.

0:16 AI, politics, your parents, your social media feed, your Tinder alerts.

0:21 (Laughter) By locking in on you for the next 600 seconds,

0:26 I'm very confident that you're going to walk away

0:28 with what I think is the single best hack for longevity,

0:33 purpose and living the type of lives that we want to live.

0:37 First, who is this middle-aged dude preaching a gospel of self-indulgence?

0:44 Well, the 20-year-old version of me, I'm very confident,

0:47 was a much less impressive version of you.

0:52 Three years into college,

0:53 I had a 1.491 grade point average that I was dragging around.

0:58 I was smoking a pack of Camel Lights a day.

1:01 I was drinking prolifically.

1:03 At night, I was delivering pizzas in my diesel VW Rabbit.

1:08 I was remarkably unhealthy, and I was remarkably unremarkable.

1:13 Within a decade, I'm interviewing presidents,

1:17 I’m covering the White House for The Wall

1:19 Street Journal and The Washington Post.

1:22 Soon after, I’m starting and running companies.

1:25 First Politico, then Axios.

1:27 So what the hell happened?

1:29 And in those dark times and in now, some very good times,

1:34 I really tried to become a student of what does

1:36 it take to be successful and what makes great people great?

1:41 What brings them real success?

1:45 And there is a commonality to all of them.

1:49 That all of them maniacally focus

1:53 on controlling life's variables that you can control.

1:57 You control you.

2:00 That became my mantra, and that became my map for life.

2:05 When I watched these people,

2:07 whether they were teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs— every day,

2:11 they were maniacal about constructing their success

2:14 and constructing their greatness piece by piece, day by day, on their terms.

2:21 If we're being honest, a lot of us just surrender to others or to other things.

2:28 We say, well, we can't do that because of my parents,

2:31 my childhood, my circumstances, my DNA, my crappy luck.

2:38 We just can't do it because we're under control of others or other things.

2:42 And it's just BS.

2:44 And it's just not a good way to live.

2:46 You control you, it's just a much better, brighter way to live.

2:51 And so I want to walk you through five

2:53 different things that you can do that are free,

2:57 that you can start today and that are

2:59 available to every single person in this room.

3:02 You control today.

3:06 From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed,

3:09 you have scores of decisions to make that only you make.

3:13 Do you doomscroll, or do you meditate?

3:16 Do you eat Lucky Charms, or do you eat a healthy breakfast?

3:20 When someone snaps at you, do you snap back,

3:22 or do you show a little bit of grace?

3:24 At night, do you get hammered, or do you get some sleep?

3:29 You make each one of those decisions.

3:31 And every one either leads to happiness and feeling better about yourself,

3:35 or sadness and feeling like crap.

3:37 Nobody wants to feel like crap.

3:39 So how did I get from Oshkosh and my 1.491 to DC and then having some success?

3:47 It was studying other people who were smarter than me,

3:51 who were better than me, more talented than me,

3:53 better read than me, who just knew a lot more than me,

3:56 who were healthier than me.

3:57 And then I tried to copy them.

3:59 If they read a book I hadn’t read, I read it.

4:01 Or if they used a word I’d never heard in Oshkosh,

4:03 I wrote it down on a piece of paper, and I would work it into my vocabulary.

4:07 If they were fitter than I were, I'd try to copy their habits.

4:11 I started to take control of what we can control.

4:14 You control you.

4:17 You control your reactions.

4:19 The best advice I ever got was five words: Do the next right thing.

4:25 Do the next right thing.

4:27 It's really hard to be a good person.

4:29 It's hard to be moral.

4:31 It's hard to do all the things right.

4:33 It's pretty easy to do the next right thing.

4:36 And if you do that, if you do

4:39 things that would make you proud, your parents proud,

4:41 your kids proud, your friends proud,

4:43 you do that and then do it again, suddenly, you're a pretty good person.

4:47 And then if you do it in bad times, you could become a great person.

4:52 My personal motto of the last 15 years is: When shit happens, shine.

4:56 Meaning, in the worst of times, when really bad things happen,

5:01 that's when I really want to do the next right thing.

5:04 That helped me through one of the hardest periods of my professional life.

5:08 I had started Politico, it was my baby.

5:10 It's emotional.

5:11 And, you know, like a lot of these start-ups, it was a success.

5:14 And then there was turmoil, and I felt like I had to leave.

5:19 And it's emotional.

5:20 And I could have said and done things that would come back to haunt me.

5:24 In every minute of every day during that period,

5:27 I thought, I'm going to do the next right thing.

5:30 I'm not going to do things that are going to come back and hurt me or haunt me.

5:34 And it helped me get there.

5:36 Three, you control your reality.

5:41 That might sound weird, but you do.

5:44 What you read, what you watch, what you listen to.

5:47 That forms your reality.

5:50 Your podcasts, your YouTube channels, your newsletters, your friends.

5:54 It's all a reality-shaping machine.

5:57 The inputs affect your outputs.

6:00 If you're inputting a lot of misery,

6:03 a lot of doom and gloom, a lot of trivial stuff,

6:07 you might be a doomy and gloomy kind of person and kind of trivial.

6:12 But change that.

6:13 If you control your reality,

6:16 all you got to do is realize, listen, there's more good,

6:19 high-quality information available to everybody in this room

6:23 than at any point in humanity.

6:25 It's all free, and it's not even close.

6:28 If there's something you're curious about, you can Google it or ChatGPT it.

6:32 If you want to know what Elon Musk thinks

6:34 or Mel Robbins would advise or Taylor Swift feels,

6:38 there's probably a podcast or a video or an interview with them.

6:42 You can search that, you can change the inputs.

6:45 You can put healthy, edifying content into your mind,

6:49 have a better reality that you then share with other people.

6:54 Four, you control how you're seen.

6:58 This one might seem a little too absurdly self-indulgent,

7:02 but it's actually a magic trick.

7:05 You control how you're seen.

7:07 When you're in a group setting, especially if it's tense or it's emotional,

7:12 think about how other people are experiencing you.

7:16 The way I do it is I almost envision myself having this out-of-body experience.

7:20 Watching me through the eyes of others.

7:23 Our own eyes deceive.

7:25 Our own eyes lie.

7:27 But if you look at how other people feel and experience you,

7:32 then you know the impression that you're leaving, that you want to leave.

7:37 And it really helps you, I think, be the person you want to be and have other

7:42 people experience you as the person that you want to be.

7:45 This technique helped me through what was

7:48 probably the hardest period of my life, but the most wondrous period of my life.

7:52 It’s about seven years ago, and we adopted a teenage boy,

7:56 and I had two teenagers already at home.

7:59 And he had lost his parents, it was a rough part of his life.

8:03 And he's a young guy doing what you do when you have a rough period of life.

8:07 And I remember thinking, you know what?

8:09 He's going to be watching me, my kids are going to be watching me,

8:13 my wife's going to be watching me.

8:14 If I show love, if I show forgiveness, if I show persistence,

8:20 if I show grit, that's going to echo

8:24 through how they experience what we're going through.

8:26 And if I'm rattled or I'm pessimistic, it would have an opposite consequence.

8:32 And that process, I really believe,

8:35 had a very small part in turning my son into this amazing,

8:40 thriving, grateful college athlete today.

8:44 And I think that applies to all of us.

8:47 The fifth thing that you control is you control your destiny.

8:51 You control where you're going.

8:54 One of the things I hate the most is when I run into people

8:57 and they just feel they're like a bobber or a log on a river,

9:01 and you just have to go with the current.

9:04 It's not true.

9:05 You get to control where you go.

9:07 You can control if you want to go against the current,

9:11 if you want to go upstream.

9:13 That is fully in your control.

9:16 And I want to end today with a writing assignment.

9:19 Not that you need to do right now,

9:21 but maybe do it later today or later this week.

9:24 I want you to imagine yourself on your deathbed, thinking about your life.

9:30 And did you live a life that you were proud of?

9:33 Did you live a life that you could feel, "You know what?

9:36 I did it my way." I did it the right way.

9:41 And write down the three things that it would

9:43 take for that answer to be: “Yes, that was it.

9:45 I lived the life I wanted to live." Then write down the three

9:49 things that it would take to do that between now and then,

9:53 to actually achieve the life that you want to achieve.

9:57 That's your North Star.

9:58 That puts you ahead of 95 percent on Earth in terms

10:01 of taking ownership of what you want to do with your own life.

10:07 Man, I'm blessed.

10:09 I grew up, I had four grandparents who lived in my hometown.

10:13 I have two parents who are still alive.

10:16 I have an amazing wife,

10:18 three wondrous children and tons of really great friends and colleagues who

10:23 poured a lot of knowledge and a lot of love into my life.

10:27 Richard Powers, in his book "Bewilderment," says,

10:30 maybe the purpose of life is about

10:33 leaving little pieces of ourselves behind in others.

10:36 And I hope today that I've left a little piece

10:38 of what all those people poured into me, with you,

10:42 and that you can leave little pieces of yourself in many others,

10:46 and you can do it because you control you.

10:49 So get ’er done.

10:51 (Cheers and applause) Thank you.