In this talk, Shabnam Moghrabi, CEO of SoulPancake, shares how the concept of joy reshaped her personal and professional life. She begins by describing her upbringing as the first‑born child of immigrant parents, her early struggle with perfectionism, and her decision to study journalism—a blend of idealism and cynicism. While working in real‑estate media in 2008, she hears Rainn Wilson announce a new venture, SoulPancake, that mirrors a thesis she wrote years earlier, sparking feelings of betrayal during a period marked by a broken engagement, layoffs, and personal low‑self‑esteem. A family pilgrimage to Israel, prompted by her Bahá'í faith, turns her frustration into resolve, leading her to aggressively pursue a role at SoulPancake. She negotiates equity in exchange for delivering content within a month, pulling together a team while still employed full‑time. Reflecting on that turning point, she identifies three tools that sustain her joy: detachment from outcomes, practiced gratitude, and avoiding comparison. She illustrates how these principles guided her through 65 investor meetings and ultimately the acquisition of SoulPancake by Participant Media. The talk concludes with a call to listeners to adopt small, joy‑focused habits to shift from an "Eeyore" mindset toward a more optimistic, resilient outlook.
Chapters
Hi. My name is Shabnam Moghrabi, and I'm the CEO of a company called SoulPancake. SoulPancake is a media company. We were founded by Rainn Wilson, the actor who played Dwight Schrute on The Office. The US Office, not the British Office. I have to say that because there's always Brits in the audience. And our mission is to create positive, uplifting, inspiring content that We distribute digitally to about 10 million fans on social, have amassed half a billion video views on that content, and we create content for television, for branded engagements, and ultimately human connection through storytelling. Sometimes it's really thought-provoking, sometimes it's very deep, but ultimately it's always about joy. So the story I'm going to tell today is about how joy transformed my own personal life. Because I believe joy is a very powerful force, and I think sometimes when you say the word joy, people look at you like you're a Pollyanna, like you're a little bit naive, maybe a little dumb, and you are oblivious to the realities of the world. How can you talk about joy and look at the messiness of life and the messiness of world and any way, shape, or form be taken seriously? But I believe that joy is very powerful, and so my story starts with how my family perceives me. And my family and friends kind of perceive me as a little bit more of an Eeyore than a Tigger. I definitely am the person who's like, when a bad grade, when I got a bad grade in high school, it weighed me down. I really struggled to like, you know, compete with all the other people in class, and I was always like, oh, there's so much that I need to do and achieve, and it's so hard. And I think part of that comes from being the firstborn child of immigrants, I think when you grow up with immigrant parents, part of your brain carries the struggle that they brought with you— with them, and part of your brain also has this idealism of changing the world and the opportunity that lies ahead of you. So that balance of idealism and cynical reality of the struggle led me in college to major in the only possible field, journalism. So, you know, idealism and cynicism combines really well for that field. So I studied journalism, and I worked a couple of jobs, and then I went to grad school. And I went to grad school, and when I was in grad school, I wrote a thesis. And I wrote my thesis about the need for media to create a platform or a place where philosophical and spiritual topics could be cool again. I felt like media had kind of sidelined philosophy and big questions and thoughtful things to the sidelines, and it just wasn't cool to talk about philosophy and spiritual topics anymore. So I write this thesis, and I put it away in my parents' garage. Fast forward 7 years later, and I'm living in Washington, D.C. It's 2008, and I'm working at a magazine company, and I happen to be running a team that creates content in the housing industry, in real estate, home design, development, and so on. And I remember vividly one day, it was fall, November of 2008, and I'm driving down Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. The trees are all sorts of beautiful colors, And I'm driving to work, and I hear on the radio an interview on NPR with this actor from "The Office," Rainn Wilson. And he's talking about this site that he and some friends are going to launch called SoulPancake, and they are going to tackle life's big questions, and they're going to make philosophical and spiritual topics cool again. And I thought, "Oh my God, Rainn Wilson stole my idea." And I was really upset. Now, to understand just how upset I was, you kind of have to understand where I was in my life at this time. And low point doesn't even begin to describe it. That period of my time, that period of the fall of 2008, entailed a number of factors going on in my life. I was engaged to be married, and I had actually called off my engagement a few weeks before hearing Rainn on the interview. So I was very depressed, I was very unhappy, I was feeling like, you know, my personal life was a bit of a shit show. In addition to that, and let me tell you guys, one of the hardest things I've ever had to do is call that off and like call people and say, "Yeah, that's not happening anymore." Oof, yeah. So that was happening. Simultaneous to that, again, this is 2008 and I'm working in the housing industry. So simultaneously to that, I had been called in by my boss and told you basically had to lay, I had to lay off half of my staff. And those are some painful conversations to bring in people who work hard and you're telling them that they no longer have their livelihood. Those are some rough conversations. Simultaneously to that, it was my 10-year high school graduation, you know, reunion. So I was spending most of my nights at this point going home after work, lying in bed, eating a pint of Ben Jerry's Chunky Monkey, sitting on Facebook, looking at all of my high school classmates and my nemeses and saying, "Oh, look at what they're doing, and look at how awesome their lives are right now." And of course, that day I hear, Rain's interview, it just was the bottom of the low. I was like, "And of course this celebrity has taken this idea I had and he's running with it." Now, at that time, that specific day, I went home and I got in bed with my chunky monkey, and I got a call from my mom. My mom calls me and she's like, "Hey, Shabby." She's the only person in my life who calls me Shabby. "Hey, Shabby." And I'm like, "Hi, Mom." And she says, "How are you?" I'm okay, I'm good. What are you doing? As I'm eating my Chunky Monkey. Working, I'm working. And she goes, so I'm calling because I've decided we're going on a family trip in December. And we're gonna go on a holy pilgrimage, the whole family all together. Side note, I'm a Bahá'í, that's my religion, and a lot of our holy places and temples are in Haifa, Israel, so it's often a place that Bahá'ís go. So my mom calls me and says, "In December, we're all going, we're getting on a plane, we're all going to Israel, and we're going to do this holy trip together." And I'm like, "Huh? No, I don't want to do this, Mom. This sounds awful. This sounds like the worst thing that I've ever heard of." And my mom proceeds to put on her immigrant guilt hat and says, "But Shabnam, but Shabnam, your dad and I were getting older." "you and your sisters, you're going to get married and have your own families soon, and then you're not going to want to do anything with us. This is the only time that we can all go on this trip together." And I'm like, "Ah, when's the dates, Mom?" So I proceed to go on this trip in December. So I get on this plane and I go to Israel, and my whole family is dutifully praying and meditating in these temples, and I'm sitting in the corner arms crossed, and decidedly not praying or meditating or doing anything but thinking about my life. And all that went through my head is, "Why, God? Why me?" How many of you have had that? That, like, "Why me?" moment, right? So I'm sitting there stewing, and after a couple days of this, thinking about what's going on in my life, I realized that my frustration had turned into conviction. And my anger had turned into resolve. And I came out of those couple of days of having reflected and thought about what was going on in my life, and I came out and I decided I was going to find a way, no matter what, to be a part of SoulPancake. It felt like it was my professional soulmate, and I had to be involved. So I got back to Washington, D.C., and I started emailing, Facebook messaging, texting, calling, carrier pigeoning anyone I could who was in L.A. who might be able to put me in touch with Rainn Wilson. Samuel L. Wilson and his team. So eventually, through so many connections, a friend of a friend of a friend put me in touch with the guy who was working with Rainn on SoulPancake. And I get on the phone with him and I say, "Hey, I would love to help with what you're doing at SoulPancake." And he says, "Oh, yeah, awesome. What do you do again?" I said, "I do content. I'm a journalist. I'm working as a magazine editor. I do content. I'm a storyteller." And so he said, "Awesome. Well, we have all these bells and whistles and all this technology that we've built. We've got a group of people who are willing to contribute, but we don't "we don't really have any content and we launch soon." And I said, "Okay, well, when do you launch?" And he said, "We launch in about a month." And if you've ever worked in the content space, that is no time at all. So I basically said, "Well, give me some equity in the company and I will get your content up and running." And I turned around and spent the next 4 weeks calling in favors, organizing the strategy and getting everyone pulled together, writing content, being up all hours of the night, 'cause I was still working a full-time job, and getting SoulPancake launched. That was 8 years ago. Now I tell this story because, and the reason that it relates to joy, is because the shift that I've seen in my life since that moment has been a markedly different approach to life. And from going from that very, very bottom low that I was in, where I felt like the world was against me and nothing was going right, that Eeyore mentality, I wouldn't say I've become a full-on Tigger, But I've made a lot of progress towards it. And there are 3 tools that I keep going back to again and again that came up in that period of transition for me. The first one is I had nothing to lose. So I was super detached from the outcome. I was super detached. Rainn was going to make SoulPancake whether I was involved in it or not. It was going to happen whether I reached out or not. And I had nothing to lose in reaching out. So I was super detached from any potential outcome that was going to come. The second toolkit, the tool that I was able to take from that is how powerful gratitude is. That I essentially, every time I reached out to someone and asked them to connect me to someone to help me get in touch with Rainn, I felt so grateful that they had taken the time to do it. And when the team at SoulPancake said, "Yeah, come on in, help us," I felt so grateful for that opportunity. And to this day, every project we work on, everything that comes across my desk, I feel so grateful that I get to do something where I work at a company that I see as my professional soulmate every single day. And the third thing that I learned in that process is how important it is to not compare yourself to other people. I was spending my nights literally on Facebook stalking ex-classmates. Like, it was a bad period. And it wasn't until later that I came across a quote that's attributed to Theodore Roosevelt that I realized just how important that is. The quote is, "Comparison is the thief of joy." I love this quote. It's one of my favorite quotes. "Comparison is the thief of joy." And I realized that in all of my life leading up to that moment, I was always so attached to the outcome. But what if it doesn't turn out exactly the way I wanted it to or expected it to? I wasn't grateful for the great and amazing things and people I did have. And I was comparing myself every single day to what was going on with other people. And so I've since that time taken those 3 elements and I've implemented them in every part of what happens with SoulPancake. Last year we were acquired. By Participant Media, which is a film company here in Los Angeles. And the process leading up to that was super arduous. I had more than 65 meetings with potential investors and strategic partners, and I was told no over and over and over and over again. But that same toolkit that got me to SoulPancake in the first place got us to the successful exit. Because I wasn't attached to the outcome, I was so grateful for every meeting we had, even when they said no, because I was able to tell our story And I didn't compare ourselves to what every other company was doing, when they would get investment, when they would sell. I said, "That's their story, but I'm not gonna let it deprive me of mine." And so if I can leave you with anything, especially those of you who are a little bit more Eeyore than you are Tigger, you can find small ways to bring a little bit more joy into your life like I did. Thank you very much.
