Translator: Cihan Ekmekçi Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
I know that was my wife over there.
(Laughter)
I'm going to talk to you today about the idea of pursuing perfection,
and how our environment affects our perception of what is perfect.
This idea, which has always been around,
has become increasingly poignant with the evolution of social media
and our desire to portray our life as a wonderland.
You see, rarely does anybody go to Instagram
to post a picture of the mess that is our daily life.
(Laughter)
Admit it, it's a mess.
Instead, people are constantly searching for the perfect light
to take the perfect picture, in the perfect place,
having the perfect time.
We then share these pictures,
hoping that people will validate our experiences of -
the perfect meal.
God, that looks so yummy.
The perfect body.
Thank you, Kim Kardashian, for posting that on National Women's Day.
Seriously.
(Laughter)
The perfect vacation.
We've become conditioned to share only our best yet completely unrealistic selves
as a way of keeping up with the virtual Joneses.
This desire isn't realistic, it isn't healthy,
and I believe we are setting ourselves up for failure.
A recent parody that played on this Instagram phenomenon
was called Socality Barbie.
I'm not sure if anybody saw this.
She was created by a Portlander named Darby Cisneros.
It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
With the help of a doll, she'd satirically reenacted the most perfect moments,
at the coast.
(Laughter)
I didn't know Haystack Rock was so small.
At the coffee shop,
I'm not kidding.
My wife actually saw somebody draw a cat face in her coffee froth once.
That was actually kind of incredible.
With her favorite friends -
Loot at the quote,
"We took a break from technology this morning.
It was only for 10 minutes, but it was exactly what we needed."
(Laughter)
Hashtag OMG.
(Laughter)
Ice cream just looks better in front of a concrete wall.
(Laughter)
This is my favorite:
"Waking up at 10 a.m. was so worth it
to get that perfect light and the perfect fog."
(Laughter)
After capturing the attention of over a million followers,
she decommissioned the account.
She made her point.
To quote her last post,
"I started Socality Barbie as a way to poke fun at all the Instagram trends
that I thought were absolutely ridiculous.
Never in a million years did I think
it would receive the amount of attention that it did.
Because of that, it has opened the door to a lot of great discussions
like how we choose to present ourselves online,
the insane lengths many go to to create the perfect Instagram life."
Why are we trying to create a perfect Instagram life?
This made me think.
Rewind 15 years ago to my first "Instagram" post,
Joey Heisman.
For the better part, of six months, I had over a million views a day.
A ten-story billboard in New York city
at the top of Penn Station across from Madison Square Garden,
as a way of attracting eyeballs.
And for six months during 2001, that is where I sat.
Overnight, I became a media sensation in the largest media market in the world.
Some people were thrilled that a player from a west coast school, not named USC,
was receiving this type of national attention.
Some people were furious
that someone would have the audacity to promote themselves in a way
that was so in your face and over the top.
But most of all, people were just curious.
Who I was and what I had done to deserve this larger-than-life attention.
Why was I standing over everyone else?
And why did I deserve the highest recognition in college football?
It created an idea that I was bigger and better than everyone else.
It created the idea that I was someone who was completely in control
of everything that happened on the football field.
And I believed it.
And that would eventually become a problem.
This campaign was part of my experience at the University of Oregon.
I had my wonderful life from 1999 until 2002.
I was a kid that helped turn a local team into a national college football power.
And with every win came another member of the media.
And with every member of the media came another headline,
and with every headline came another story,
another chance to buy into this idea that was created for me:
Perfection.
I was the quarterback for the Oregon Ducks,
and during my time, we won a lot of football games;
27 of the 30 games that I played.
But it wasn't always that way.
The year prior to my arrival on campus,
the Ducks failed to reach a postseason bowl game,
and never in their history had they won more than nine games.
The goal of our freshmen class
was to take this program to heights that it had never seen
and not let anything, opponent or teammate,
stand in our way.
That wristband used to be white.
When you win 27 games, you don't wash it.
(Laughter)
It was lucky.
We achieved this goal, winning both 10 and 11 games respectively,
in a season for the first time ever.
And when our time at the University of Oregon was finished,
our senior class had won more games than any in school history.
As the quarterback, I was the face of that team.
Since it seemed like all our team did was win,
I believed that that was all I was capable of.
And the media was more than happy to continue that narrative.
What inevitably came was something that everybody in life faces,
but something that I was absolutely and completely unprepared for:
Failure.
In 2002,
I was selected by the Detroit Lions ...
(Applause)
I was selected by the Detroit Lions,
with the third overall pick in the NFL draft.
And in my four years in Detroit,
we never finished the season with the winning record.
You see, up until this point in my career, I had never experienced losing.
Sure, we lost a couple games.
But continued losing at this scale
flew in the face of everything that I had come to believe.
According to everything I had done up to that point,
I didn't lose.
If I worked hard and prepared the way that I knew I was capable of,
everything worked out.
They'd write a nice little newspaper article about it afterwards.
When you're taken third in the NFL draft, you're generally taken by a team
that was one of the worst in the league the year before.
And with rare exception,
that team will continue to be bad even after drafting you.
(Laughter)
Believe it or not, it takes more than one player
to turn around the fortunes of a franchise.
The script was no different for me.
In my first year in the league, we lost 13 of our 16 games,
but, that was OK, that was to be expected.
It was what followed that rocked me.
For a variety of reasons, we continued to lose.
And after each loss,
I went back to practice, and I worked harder.
I studied more, I watched more game film.
Because according to my story,
when I work hard enough, everything just works out in the end.
So the more we lost, the harder I worked.
And when we still lost, I began to doubt myself.
And when I doubted myself, I played poorly.
And when I played poorly, we lost.
And when we went into a loss, I went back and I worked harder.
And when we still lost,
I figured that there must be something wrong with me.
Because, you see, at that point, losing wasn't just losing on the field.
When I lost, I lost in life.
Because -
losing wasn't part of my story.
Losing -
Losing wasn't perfect.
I set myself up for a crash.
Because football became how I defined myself.
It wasn't what I did. It became who I was.
My perception of myself had become tied to the number of touchdowns I threw.
My value as a human being was connected to the final score.
My happiness was a direct result
of whether or not I lived up to the perfection,
this image that I had bought into.
If it was only about my performance,
that's one thing.
But part of the reality I was trying to live up to
was that of the infallible leader.
I was the quarterback
capable of bringing any team back from the depths.
And I, and I alone, had the power to bring together a group of guys
to do something that they had never achieved before.
Remember, they didn't put the rest of my teammates
on that "Instagram" post in New York.
So I believed it was my job to be all things to all people
and inspire my teammates to achieve success
that they had never achieved before.
I tried to tailor my leadership style -
and, frankly, the way I acted -
to what I thought each teammate wanted.
I tried to feel everyone else's idea of what a leader should be.
And in the effort of trying to please everybody else,
I lost myself.
I felt like a failure.
I was embarrassed
because I was letting everybody else down.
I was ashamed
because I was squandering an opportunity
that so few people get.
I struggled with depression because -
my world was crashing.
I dreaded going out in public because I didn't want to -
I was scared.
I would face the same jeers that I faced in the stadiums on Sundays.
I'd wear a hat to the grocery store
because I just didn't want to have to talk to people
and tell them about what a failure I was.
I tried to pretend that it wasn't getting to me,
or that this was merely one -
long speed bump.
But all I was doing was masking the fact
that I was scared, and I felt like I was completely out of control.
I needed help.
And I had no idea how to ask for it.
Through the urging of our general manager, I sought the help of a psychologist.
I had visualized being on a brown couch and just complaining a lot.
(Laughter)
My perception was a little bit wrong.
My psychologist was a man named Greg,
and it's safe to say that Greg was a little bit outside the box.
(Laughter)
And while our sessions often happened
on walks through the University of Michigan campus
or on the golf course,
he made a really interesting point.
In order to play well again,
I had to stop caring about other people's perceptions.
Well, this concept is, you know, OK, at first.
When you think about it, it's brilliant.
You see, when I stopped caring about how many likes I got,
I was able to remove the unnecessary burden
of trying to be perfect for everybody.
And when I stop trying to be perfect, I was able to relax and just play.
And when I played loose, I played well.
And when I played well, we won.
And woo, when we won, the poetic irony is, "Hey, everybody likes me again."
(Laughter)
When I removed the burden of perfection, something else happened.
I began to find myself,
and more importantly, like myself again.
People didn't like me because I lived up to some idyllic expectation of perfection.
They liked me because I was me.
I was genuine,
just kind of a dork, you know, I was real, I was unique.
The moment I tried to live up to this perceived expectation of perfection
is the moment I lost what was real
and started chasing what I thought other people wanted me to be.
And the moment I started chasing something else
was the moment I lost what made me so great in the first place.
You see,
people gravitate to individuals who they know are truthful and genuine.
And when you're trying to be like somebody else,
you're not living the truth.
I am not in the NFL hall of fame.
I am not even in the same zip code.
(Laughter)
But right now, I could not be happier.
(Applause)
I have the love of an incredible family.
And because of that, I know that I don't have to be perfect
and I have permission to fail.
I've learnt that what makes you a wonderful person isn't being perfect.
What makes you wonderful
is giving an incredible effort and then falling short.
Because when you fall short, you're given the opportunity to learn.
So, the next time you face a situation,
you'll have grown and developed the necessary character
to become a better person.
Nice story.
How does it relate to you?
It's simple.
How many people opened up their social media account at lunch time
and checked how many likes their posts got?
Anybody? Yeah.
(Laughter)
Like our friend, Socality Barbie, pointed out,
social media has given everybody -
even a doll, everybody -
the opportunity to experience the unique feeling of being a star.
Overnight, you can have a million sets of eyeballs watching what you do.
And while all of this exposure has created a ton of opportunities,
it's also opened the door for everyone to the potential pitfalls
and pressures of living a public life.
Be careful.
When you desire to live in a world that's constantly looking for perfection,
overpowers your desire to live in a world that is real and genuine,
you're setting yourself up for failure.
You're setting yourself up for the same feelings of shortcomings and inadequacy
that I experienced.
So, the next time you're adjusting the filter on your camera
while you're taking a picture of your cinnamon roll at breakfast,
(Laughter)
or you're retaking your selfie because your lips just didn't look pouty enough -
(Laughter)
just pause,
think about what you're doing.
I would encourage you to keep that imperfect picture.
Embrace it. Love it. Own it.
Because it's only through these imperfect moments
that we are really and truly able to learn
how wonderful life can be.
Thank you.
(Applause)