Who do you dream of becoming Success starts with finding yourself

we’ve had a wonderful lineup of speakers

today

that i’m honored to be able to follow

and i’m also thrilled to be back at

queen’s

it’s been quite a few years since i

graduated and if i’m being honest

knowing that next year’s class will be

wearing a jacket that says 2024

as a con 14 grad makes me feel a little

bit old

oh you might chuckle now but wait until

you come back and you see the 2034 grabs

but really i thrilled to be back i love

having the opportunity to engage with

young leaders

and one of the questions that i get

asked the most by young leaders

is how can i be more successful

and usually i start by telling them to

sit down because it’s going to be a

while

and we’re laughing because we know that

success is complicated and it’s nebulous

but today i want to explore some of the

lessons i’ve learned

when it comes to the way that i approach

success

and i want to start by focusing on the

factors that we actually get to control

because there’s a lot of things that we

don’t there’s factors of luck

being in the right time we’re the right

place with the right people

and also having access to certain

privileges and opportunities

so if we focus on the things that we do

get to control

like how hard we work or what we focus

on

or the habits that we develop and we

look at

everything that’s out there all of the

advice from experts and successful

people

what we really quickly start to realize

is that while there’s also a lot of

advice some of it

is contradictory take the most mundane

example

like what time you woke up this morning

for most of you it will probably have

been around seven or eight i’m guessing

to be here with us today

but if we want to emulate the practices

of successful people

what time are we actually supposed to

get up

if you ask tim cook the ceo of apple

he’ll tell you that he swears by getting

up at four in the morning

to get a head start on the day like many

other silicon valley

executives but if you ask ariana

huffington

the founder behind huffington post

she’ll direct you to an article

called sleeping your way to the top and

no it’s not what you’re thinking

she writes about is the importance of

actually getting enough sleep

because we’re more productive and we’re

less likely to make mistakes

when we’re well rested so who’s right

how do we figure out what time we should

get up

and more broadly how do we figure out

what pieces of advice

when it comes to success will actually

work for us

and as it turns out the answer to that

is rooted in the way that we define

success because if you pursue a leader’s

advice who defines success differently

from you

or is pursuing something entirely

different it’s less likely to work for

you

so how do most people define success as

it turns out if you ask people

almost universally they’ll start

by telling you about the things that

they want to have

i’ll be successful when i have 10

million dollars

i’ll be successful when i have a ferrari

i’ll be successful

when i become a ceo or have a perfect

family

or have time to travel and so on and so

forth

and as people elaborate on their answers

they’ll include the things that they’re

going to do

things like getting a phd or asking for

promotion at work

but if you ask people to actually dig

deeper into what success

actually means to them although everyone

is pursuing something different

almost everyone answers with who they

want to be

that they want to be more impactful or

innovative

or creative or driven

and so the way that we define success as

it turns out

is very much linked to who we want to be

and so perhaps the question that we need

to ask is one that we ask ourselves

which is what is it that matters to us

my contention is that if you can define

what matters to you

what brings you purpose and joy what

you’re passionate about

the things that fulfill you if you can

define what matters

and you can connect that to your career

and more broadly to your life

then you can bring something to the

world that is powerful and unique

and that’s never been more true than in

my experience as an entrepreneur

a few years ago i attended president

obama’s global entrepreneurship summit

as a ceo of my own tech company

and if you ask me how i felt beforehand

i would have told you i was thrilled

i also would have been lying because

really i was terrified

i was fairly new to entrepreneurship i

was very young i’d only left school a

few years ago

and i hadn’t even started out by wanting

to be an entrepreneur

i had started out with a little project

inspired by my work at the un which grew

into a few more projects

which over the course of a few very

short months became a company

and i was mostly terrified that i would

get there and people would discover

i wasn’t a real entrepreneur

as it turns out when i got there

i found out that everyone was a lot like

me that everyone had had a couple

sleepless nights

but also that most people don’t start

out

by wanting to build companies they start

out by answering questions

they start out by defining what matters

in other words they start out with a

purpose

and that’s true of some of the best

innovators

and founders and organizations of our

time

think about some of the influential

companies that you know

jeff bezos for example started with the

purpose

of making it easier for us to buy and

sell quite literally anything online

when he created amazon mark zuckerberg

started with the purpose of making it

easier for us to connect with our family

and our friends

when he built facebook brian chesky

started with the purpose of making it

easier for us to travel

and today on airbnb you can book a villa

in tuscany

in a cooking class in hanoi with a click

of a button

and what all of these founders and

organizations have in common

is they have a purpose they started with

the things that mattered

not just to them but to the world and in

doing so

they were able to bring something to the

world that was powerful and unique

and also remarkably valuable all three

of those examples are companies that are

worth over a billion dollars today

and this concept isn’t just limited to

our careers but it applies to our lives

as well

as it turns out when we set goals

without understanding why they matter to

us

we’re really terrible at actually

keeping them think about the number of

new year’s resolutions that you give up

on at some point during the year

maybe even now as we approach the end of

january

and if you’re feeling a little bit

guilty about that well chinese new year

was yesterday so you can reset them

but you’re also not alone marketing

shows that about

six weeks after the new year in

mid-february

there’s something called a drop-off

point it’s when we actually see people’s

behavior start to change and they give

up on their new year’s goals

so for example one of the most common

goals is to get healthy

and about six weeks in what we see is

gym usage declines from january

and fast food sales rise in other words

we give up on being healthy about six

weeks in

we say well we haven’t made it to the

gym and we’re not being that healthy

and we really want fries

so as it turns out setting goals without

understanding why they matter

makes them really difficult to actually

achieve

but what happens if we bring the two

together

there’s two people in my life who do

this really well my friend chris

and his wife mel and they’re great

at integrating the things that matter to

them holistically throughout their lives

and they’re very successful personally

and professionally as a result

and one of the ways they do this is

actually through a spreadsheet

and it’s a model i’ve adapted to my own

life as well

so the spreadsheet lists three things

the first

is all the things that matter to you so

some of mine include

my friends and family my career and my

health

and then you list why each of those

things matter to you

so if we take the last example my health

matters to me because i can do my best

only when i’m healthy whether i’m giving

a ted talk

or surfing in bali and then under each

of those categories

you can list your goals and the reason

that it’s important to know why we have

those goals

is when we revisit our goals it allows

us to revise accordingly

so you might start the year by saying

you’re going to go to the gym three

times a week

and then partway through february what

you realize

is that you’re actually really stressed

and what you need

is just to get more sleep because that’s

important too

and so by being intentional in defining

the things that matter

why they matter and revisiting and

revising our goals as often as we need

to

we can be successful in fulfilling our

goals and also

integrating our purpose into our lives

and we’ve seen the importance of purpose

both in our careers and our personal

lives

but what if you don’t know what your

purpose is what if you don’t know what

matters

what if you’re not sure what you’re

passionate about or what fulfills you

and i’ve been in that exact position

before a couple of years ago

when i started at queen’s maybe a few

more than i’d actually like to admit

i wanted to become an accountant and i

had started out

with the intention of pursuing my cpa

and that was my five year plan my five

year plan

lasted about five weeks when i actually

started to do accounting

i realized that it wasn’t for me but

what i learned from that experience

was that sometimes the best way to

figure out what you like

or even what you don’t like which is

equally important

is just to go out there and try it the

same way

you won’t know whether or not you like a

new food until you take your first bite

and as it turns out the advice that we

commonly receive

to just do what we’re passionate about

is terrible advice

it’s well intentioned but it’s terrible

because

passion and purpose and fulfillment

are things that we build they’re

something that we create

they’re not intrinsic to who we are nor

do we just discover them along the way

and the belief that we can is incredibly

damaging

because it limits our capacity and our

willingness to try new things

which is exactly what we should be doing

according to

executive coach jen lofgren if you’re

not sure where to start

start by doing everything that you’re

remotely interested in

absolutely everything try fencing for a

weekend

go to a conference on sustainability

take a class

because over days and months and years

the things that you stay

interested in the things that you

actually care about

they become a sense they become the

things that matter to you

they become the things that fulfill you

and i want to note

that this process of discovering what

matters only works if you do the things

that you’re genuinely interested in

even if only remotely and not if you do

things because you think you should

because we have a tendency to do that

and that tendency actually gets drilled

into us

very early on in our lives it actually

starts

with our education so really on in your

early on in your life if you liked arts

or history or music you might have been

told

to adapt your interests because math was

more important

or english and even as you pursue higher

education and you’re told it’s your time

to explore

there’s a certain pressure to have the

right portfolio

of grades and extracurriculars and

internships

that will allow you to continue in your

education

or to enter the job market

so what do we do with that pressure what

do we do

if we want to do something different i

think what the answer is

is courage we need to have courage in

order

to do things that are different from our

peers to explore the things that matter

even if it feels like we’re the only

ones who are interested in it

and to have the courage to forge our own

path

and that’s not something that’s easy but

if you can do that

you get two extraordinary benefits the

first

is that it’s actually easier to be

successful because you’re not competing

for the same things as everybody else

and when you have something that makes

you unique

as we saw earlier that can be remarkably

powerful

the second is that you find where you

belong

which is very different from fitting in

where you adapt who you are and what

your interests are

but by embracing who you are and

embracing the things that matter to you

you find people who share your values

where the only thing you

need to do to fit in is just to show up

that’s what belonging looks like so why

don’t more of us do this

i mean it sounds really great right

and i think the reason that a lot of

bright ambitious people

don’t pursue their own paths is that

they’re afraid

they’re afraid that if they do they’re

going to fail

and so we pursue the things that we

think we should be doing because we

think that it will guarantee us success

or at the very least we can reduce our

risk of failure

the problem with this approach it

is that there’s no way to guarantee

success and there’s also no way to avoid

failure

because absolutely everything in life

that is worth pursuing

whether you want to cure cancer or fall

in love

or build a company anything in life

that’s worth doing

has some risk of failure and so i think

we need to take a different approach

we need to be kind enough to ourselves

to be okay if we fail

and to allow failure to be an option

because if failure is not an option

neither is learning or creativity or

growth

or innovation and so if we’re all going

to fail

what can we do about that the best way

i’ve found to face failure

is to never face it alone it’s to ask

for help

and to keep asking for help until you’re

able to build a network

until you have mentors peers friends

and family that you can go to

when you hit a tough patch when you have

questions that you don’t know how to

answer

when you need a little help figuring out

what that next step is

as you forge your own path

what it comes to i think is this

when people ask me how can i be more

successful

what they’re really asking me is how can

i

be more because that question

is driven by a desire for success but

often

an equally strong fear of failure

and so many of us start our journeys by

trying to be more than who we are

because we’re afraid that who we are

is not enough that we’re not enough

to do the things that we want to or to

achieve the things

we want to have and so we spend a lot of

time and energy

chasing a mythical best version of

ourselves browsing the self-help section

doing the things we’re supposed to

and along the way we forget to discover

who we already are we forget to discover

what matters to us

the very things that are actually

ironically the very foundation for

success

and so if you want to be more successful

i think you need to start by recognizing

that you are enough that who you are

as you are is already enough to bring

something to the world that’s powerful

and unique

and valuable and that it’s true no

matter who you are

or where you come from or where you are

in your journey today

it’s true even if you feel like you’re

failing right now

if you’ve failed your last midterm you

haven’t heard back from any of the

internships you’ve applied to

or if you’re about to graduate and you

still have absolutely no idea what you

want to do with your life

and i can say that with a little bit

more confidence now

because i’ve experienced all of those

things at some point during my time at

queen’s

and none of that stopped me from getting

to where i am today

what i’ve learned is that so long as you

have the courage to pursue what matters

to you

to dare to do the things that you want

to courageously and to embrace who you

are

and to be kind to yourself along the

journey you’ll discover that you

already have absolutely everything you

could possibly need

to leave your mark in the world and i am

so excited for all of you to discover

what that will mean for your lives thank

you

[Applause]