It was never meant to be a TED Talk

So start with why. Wasn't supposed to be a book, and it wasn't supposed to be a TED Talk. It was born out of my own pain, my own journey. I had what appeared to be a superficially good life. I was living the American dream. I started my own business. I had a little marketing consultancy. We did good work, we had great clients, well liked, you know, things were fine, but I completely fell out of love with my own work. And people gave me stupid advice like, do what you love. I'm like, I'm doing the same thing and I don't love it anymore. You know, follow your bliss. Thank you.

It's perfectly true. It's just not actionable. And so I was very embarrassed by the fact that I didn't want to wake up and go to work anymore because superficially, everything was okay. So I didn't talk about it. And all of my energy went into pretending that I was happier, more successful, and more in control than I felt. And that is exhausting. And it wasn't until a dear friend of mine came to me and said, something's wrong, did I come clean and explain to her what I was going through. And it lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. And all of that energy that was going into lying, hiding, and faking, I redirected in finding a solution to rediscover my own passion. And there was a confluence of events, and I'll spare you the gory details, but there was a confluence of events. And I made this discovery based on the biology of human decision making, that every single one of us knows what we do. You know the products you sell, you know the job you do. Some of us know how we do it. Call it your unique selling proposition, or the things that you think are your strengths. But very few of us can clearly articulate, whether corporately or personally, very few of us can clearly articulate why we do what we do. What's your purpose, cause or belief that underlies everything. I knew what I did. I knew how I was better than everybody else. But I couldn't tell you why I was doing it. And I realized that missing piece was the source of my malaise. I became obsessed with understanding my why. And the most important thing was I learned how to help other people find theirs. And I just started helping my friends. And my friends started making profound life changes. And they would invite me to talk about it with their friends. I would literally stand in someone's living room and talk about this thing called the Y. And I would help people find their why. For one Hundred bucks on the side. True, true story. And people just kept inviting me to talk about it, and I just kept saying, yes. And somebody said, you should write a book. And I shrugged my shoulders and said, okay. And before you knew it, it sort of became a thing. And I think the reason that both the TED Talk and the book gained such sort of organic popularity, because it was driven not by marketing, it was driven by. By people saying, you should read this or you should watch this. It's completely organic.

Is because I think it resonates. I think it's a deeply human thing. It wasn't designed to be. To fill some market opportunity. It was something that was deeply, deeply personal to me and remains so.

And the key takeaways were, you need to start to understand what you do.

You need to know why you do what you do, and have that be the foundation for everything that you do, whether as an individual or as an organization. Yeah.

You know, it's funny because.

When we thought about this event today, my team actually asked me that question.

What's your why?

What's my why?

It's a very difficult question to answer. Not because we don't know it, it's because. And this is the biology of it. It exists in the part of the brain that doesn't control language. Our neocortex, which is our Homo sapien brain, is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and the language. But it's our limbic brain, that sort of old mammalian brain, which is responsible for all of our feelings. It's also responsible for all of our decision making, but it has no capacity for language. That's why we have gut decisions. I know all the advice I'm getting tells me to do X, but it doesn't feel right. I think I'm going to do Y. And you ask all the most successful leaders or entrepreneurs, what's your secret? They'll all say the same thing. I trusted my gut. Now, there's no part of your stomach that makes decisions. What they're attempting to say is, I couldn't put it into words, but I could feel. And so we have a sense of our why. And if you have the confidence to trust your gut, it goes, you know, we've all done it, we've all ignored it, and we've all followed it. The opportunity to put that why into words makes it no longer simply a feeling that only you can follow. It now makes. It puts into words that A gives you greater confidence in those decisions. It serves as a filter. But more important is you can share it with other people. People so that they understand the context of why you're making the decision. Even though all the data and vices. We should do the opposite.