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]