Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Denise RQ
In the fall of 2006, my life stopped making sense.
I was a year away from graduating with a degree in physics,
and I just realized I really didn't want to be a physicist.
Normally, this wouldn't be a big issue,
my life stops making sense on a regular basis.
The only thing I've always wanted to do is to write science fiction,
I've always wanted to write about giant robots.
But being a science fiction writer
for most people is the same as being unemployed,
so I had always looked in other directions for a career.
A few years I might do physics, then I might do economics,
I might do theater, I might do dance, all sorts of things,
and normally, I'm OK with that,
I really enjoy switching from field to field.
But this time I had a problem.
I had traveled all the way to the United States to go to college,
I had taken on enormous student loans, I was about to graduate,
and I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.
So I thought about it and decided there was only one thing that made sense,
I would go to Wall Street, become an investment banker,
and get filthy rich.
As it happened, some other people came up with the same idea.
(Laughter)
So it wasn't that easy.
It took months and months, and hundreds of e-mails,
and hundreds of phone conversations, and all this running around,
and in the end, I got one interview, one chance to make it work.
The bank flew me to New York,
and I got interviewed at this big, gray, cold corporate office.
Hour after hour, they asked me personal questions,
they asked me finance questions, they asked me math questions,
the annoying sort they ask you in school,
like there are 11 dwarfs sitting around the table,
and three of them have red caps, and seven of them have green caps,
and what is the average number of dwarfs who'd get up for a bathroom break.
I don't know, this sort of stuff I really hate,
but I dealt with it all,
and at the end of the day, I was feeling pretty good.
But then, I had to sit down with this top banker, this big shot guy,
I'm going to call him Chuck.
Chuck took one look at my resume, and he said, "You know what?
I really don't think you're made for Wall Street.
I mean, look at this, one day, you're doing economics,
the next day, you're doing physics, then you're doing theater,
you're all over the place, we need people with more focus."
I was scared.
I mean I'd spent all these months, all this time getting to this point,
and now this one guy was telling me I was not going to make it.
But I thought about it, and I told him, "Actually, it all makes perfect sense.
All my life, I've wanted to be a banker, so I studied economics,
but my analytical side was kind of weak, so I did physics,
and I realized that my people skills could use some work,
so I added acting to round that out."
He said, "OK, I suppose I see how that makes sense,
but it says here that you are a science fiction writer.
How does a science fiction writer fit into Wall Street?
What kind of sense does that make?"
At that point, I took a risk.
I looked at him, and I said, "You know what?
Being a science fiction writer
is what lets me take these pretty unconnected things
like economics, and physics, and theater
and put them together in a story,
and convince you that I was heading to Wall Street all along."
(Laughter)
He spent quite a while thinking about that.
(Laughter)
But then he laughed
- I really think he was just watching to see
what my reaction would be if he kept quiet -
but then he laughed and said, "You know? That is what I do every day."
And he helped me get hired.
I spent four years on Wall Street.
They were the years of the financial crisis,
it was was a pretty unpleasant time to be there.
I was on this trading floor, the size of two football fields,
with thousands of people
when the Dow Jones fell 700 points and everybody was panicking,
when Lehman Brothers collapsed, and there was screaming and yelling.
But the days I really remember - and this happened all the time -
I'd be sitting there at my computer, and I'd hear this sound,
and it would be people clapping very politely.
I'd look up, and there would be some poor guy with a cardboard box
just walking off the floor,
smiling and nodding at everybody, and shaking hands,
but you knew that this guy had screwed up and gotten fired
- or let go, as they say politely -
and probably, his career was over because in this environment,
if you were a mid-range or a senior banker,
and if you screwed up and lost your job, getting a new job was very difficult.
It was you had to screw up once, and you could literally lose your career.
But here is the interesting thing: over my time on Wall Street,
I followed Chuck's career, this big shot who hired me.
The first year I was there, he lost money, and he didn't get fired.
So I was like, "How is this possible?" I asked people, "What happened?"
Apparently, Chuck convinced his bosses,
"Yes, this was a tough year, it was a hard year,
but I have a really great product coming.
It's coming online next year, we are going to make so much money,
we all are really going to make millions."
And he convinced everybody, so they they let him stay on.
The next year, Chuck lost money again, and again he didn't get fired.
So I asked, "How is this possible?"
Apparently, he said,
"OK, yes, this year we spent, we worked really hard,
we set up our new product, we hired the best people in the industry,
now we are really ready, poised to make money.
Now the important thing is we have to keep the team together,
we can't lose anybody."
So not only did he not get fired, he got his team paid bonuses.
(Laughter)
A lot of other people who had not made money
- or rather, who had made money - did not get paid bonuses that year,
but he got some bonuses, so he could keep the team together.
Now, the third year, he lost money again,
and he got fired. (Laughter)
You can only tell stories so long,
eventually, you have to actually do something.
Now, I don't know if he was just a manipulator,
if he was just lying to make some money,
or if he really believed in his product, and it just didn't work out.
Storytelling of this sort can be used for good and for bad like any tool,
but I do know that he wasn't lying,
he really did use storytelling in everyday life.
He was a master at this essential storytelling skill
which was taking events that had happened to you
and separating them from the meaning they had.
Whatever happened to him,
he found the best possible story to tell about that,
the most useful story to him.
This is a skill that is really useful in business,
it's really useful in personal life, and also in writing,
so to illustrate that, I'm going to talk about giant robots.
A few years into my Wall Street career,
I decided to make my childhood dreams to come true
and finally write that book about giant robots.
Here is the plot, it's really very simple.
Giant robots take over the world,
this kid discovers he has superpowers, and he goes to fight the giant robots.
Not much to the plot.
Now, the first impression when you hear something like that
is probably like a Michael Bay's sort of movie, like action,
giant robots crushing across town, exterminate, exterminate,
that sort of thing,
lots of special effects; you could just imagine stuff blowing up,
and that is one way you could tell a story.
But there is another way, there is many other ways.
For example, you could tell a giant robots' story à la Hemingway.
You know that there are these battles,
it's all happening, but you never see them.
What you see is the morning before the giant robot battle,
when this kid is sitting with his mom, and he is eating pancakes,
they talk about the pancakes, and they talk about the weather,
and they never mention the battle or anything,
but you know what they are thinking about.
Then, later, you see the scene where you see this giant robot
sitting or standing in a field of wild roses,
and this bird lands on his shoulder, and it is all very peaceful and beautiful.
We never see the battle,
but it's this beautiful art house sort of giant robot novel.
You could that.
What I ended up doing was a combination of the two,
but even that isn't the last choice.
I could have made it a comedy,
a hard science fiction, all about engineering,
there are so many choices.
With the same plot, with the same events,
I can tell any number of different stories.
It's one of my favorite things about being a writer.
But the beautiful thing is we don't have to be writers to do this.
Every day stuff happens to us,
and we tell stories about what happens to us,
and we have this very same freedom.
If we learn to use it, it brings enormous benefits.
The stories we tell to others, that is pretty easy,
that is what Chuck did.
Bad things happen to you;
if you can spin a good story
and sell everybody else on how this is an opportunity,
obviously, you benefit
in a professional sense and in a personal sense.
But really even more important to me are the stories you tell [to] yourself.
Every day things happen to us, good things and bad things,
and we tell ourselves stories about what happens to us.
Most of the time on autopilot, we do it automatically,
and these stories form our identity, they form our idea of who we are.
Let's say, when we lose some money in business,
we might think of ourselves as failure in business;
I fail a test in university, I'm such a bad student.
We make these automatic judgments;
something happens, and we decide what the meaning is.
There is a lot of value to be gained by becoming a storyteller
and realizing that there is a difference
between the things that happen to us and what they actually mean.
If you remember, back in 2006, I realized physics wasn't working out,
so I kind of rechecked my life and moved on to finance,
I became this banker, I changed the story of my life.
Now, this funny thing happened.
It was 2011, and I had spent four years on Wall Street.
I had a good career, I made a reasonable amount of money,
I had paid off those student loans.
If I kept going,
I could probably go on to be quite rich and have quite a stable career.
But here is what was happening: I spent all day in the office working,
and then, because I was a writer, I went home and I wrote all night,
I spent all day inside
with hardly any social contact apart from my colleagues,
I was spending my 20s locked in various rooms,
and at some point, I just realized,
"This isn't working for me, this doesn't make sense for me anymore."
My life had stopped making sense again.
You know, that was kind of a tough moment, it was a bit depressing to be honest.
Because like everything I've done in my life,
it seemed to me like I was never able to stick with anything.
I did it for a few years, then I lost interest,
and I did something else for a few years, and I lost interest in that.
It just made me feel like I was failing in a professional sense,
I couldn't find something
to really keep me going like other people,
I couldn't find a single passion, a single career to keep me going.
But in this moment when I was feeling low and really bad about my life,
I took a step back and asked myself,
"OK, so if this was happening
in my giant robot novel or some other novel,
if a character was in the situation
where they switch from field to field and they can't decide what to do,
would I as a writer look at that
[like] that's the end of the story, so sad, what is he going to do?"
[For] a writer, that would never be the end of the story,
it would just be a turning point,
it would be leading up to some climax of decision making,
some internal change that will have to happen
in the main character on the way to an ultimate triumph, hopefully.
When I thought about it this way, it made me think,
"OK, let's take a step back and see;
you have the events of your life, and you have the meaning."
So the events that I could see
were that I kept switching from field to field,
nothing kept my attention very long.
My instinctual reaction about the meaning had been
that I just couldn't stick with anything, that I was failing professionally.
But there are other stories you can tell about this,
and once I realized that, everything sort of moved into place.
All my life, I had wanted to be a writer.
I never thought it was realistic, but I had wanted it all my life.
Now, when I thought about that,
it made sense that I would switch from field to field
because writers need lots of inputs for their writing.
After all these years, I hadn't actually failed,
I had gotten a lot of different areas, well, not exactly expertise,
but a lot of areas of experience I could go on and use in my writing.
And these last years on Wall Street
weren't just about another area of expertise or experience,
they finally gave me those financial, real life skills to support my dream.
Using this, I could finally go on and make my dream a reality,
focus on what I've always wanted to focus on.
Now, when I had this realization, it was really this huge sense of relief.
Just as I realized that I no longer felt like I've failed,
I saw how my life made sense from a different angle.
But this is not just about psychology, like these stories we tell ourselves,
it's not about making yourself feel better.
They have a measurable impact, they give us new paths forward.
The very next day after I had this realization,
I went to my boss and told him
that I was quitting and I was moving back home to Latvia to write.
The very next day, not in a week, not in a month,
because I saw that this made sense, this new story made sense.
For the past few years, I have lived here.
Now, with a decision this big, you can never say
if it was the right one, it was the wrong one,
you can't compare with what might have been
if you would have acted otherwise.
But I can say that these have been really happy years,
that I'm really satisfied with the story I've been living here,
teaching business classes to make a little bit of money
and focusing on my passion which is writing.
They have been really good years,
and I've been able to find this opportunity
by looking at the story of my life, realizing it didn't make sense,
and then understanding
that the story of my life wasn't the only possible story of my life,
that I could find a different one
that made more sense to me, that felt right to me.
And that is what I did.
Now, it's easy to make this sound like all neat and wrapped up,
"Oh, great, he figured out the meaning of his life and yay!"
Of course, life doesn't work this way.
I have like most people crisis of doubt and various worries
on a regular basis
about where my life is going and what I'm doing.
But I use this tool now.
When I have these worries or doubts and my life stops making sense,
I remind myself to think about giant robots
because I really think it's a good mnemonic for life.
We may all have to fight giant robots,
but we can each decide what giant robots mean to us.
Thank you.
(Applause)