Transcriber: Roni Cavalcante Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I was lying in bed on a Saturday night back in 2018,
and this was during a time
that I was in a deep hole of mental and emotional burnout.
I was overworked and overwhelmed,
and as I was lying there haunted by my never ending to do list,
it suddenly occurred to me that ...
it didn’t really matter what I did or didn’t do
because I remained driven by an insidious feeling
that I was just never doing enough.
I turned on “Saturday Night Live,” and the comedian John Mulaney was hosting,
and let me just say
I did not expect a stand up on SNL to shake me with a life-changing epiphany.
But here we are.
In his opening monologue, he said,
“Everything moves too fast now.
The world is run by computers. The world is run by robots.
And sometimes they ask us if we’re robots,
just because we’re trying to log in and look at our own stuff.
You spend a lot of time telling robots you’re not a robot.
Think about that for a second.”
(Laughter)
It was at that moment I finally understood.
I realized that for every step technology takes toward becoming more human,
we take a step to meet it halfway.
Speed, efficiency, optimization -
these aren’t just the traits we expect from our devices.
These have become the qualities that we demand from ourselves.
We want the life hacks, the smart pills -
anything to squeeze out that last drip of focus.
Technology was supposed to set us free,
and yet many of us have chosen to imitate it.
Each day we get online
clicking photos of stop signs and bicycles just to confirm “I’m not a robot.”
And yet each day, so many of us get online
and compete in this never ending game of robotic productivity.
Now, I don’t believe that the problem is our ambition.
The problem is that in this blind march toward getting things done,
we’ve lost sight of the things worth doing.
I know it isn’t like this for everyone.
We all know those people who accomplish more than anyone else,
yet they never seem stressed or overwhelmed.
I know: I hate those people too.
(Laughter)
But I used to watch them from afar and wonder, “How do they do it?
What do they know that I don’t know. What is it that I’m missing?”
And what I discovered after a few years of research and lots of trial and error
is that what these seemingly superhumans have figured out
is that you don’t need to be superhuman at all.
And yet hidden in the same traits that separate us from technology,
is our human nature.
Now, it’s important to mention
that there was a time when society needed humans to be machines.
The industrial revolution rewarded
those who could work harder, faster, and longer than others,
but that’s no longer the world we live in.
And I believe that one of the reasons many of us are burnt-out and disconnected
is we’re still trapped
in this old world definition of what it means to be productive and useful.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “Never confuse movement with action,”
which updated for the new, post-industrial world would be:
“Never confuse movement with meaning.”
As humans, we need meaning in the work that we do to feel truly satisfied,
but the problem with searching for meaning through endless productivity
is that we already have robots that can work 168 hours a week.
We already have machines that can weigh the odds and see the probabilities.
What the new world really needs
is for more humans to get back to that which separates us from technology.
Creativity: the round trip ticket to elsewhere and back again.
Must be human to ride.
Only humans can escape reality through a secret hatch in the mind
to leave with real world problems and return with other world solutions.
Technology will never replace human creativity
because codes and algorithms are built on what’s expected to happen.
Creativity is the unexpected.
As humans, we have the power of curiosity, imagination, and empathy.
We have the capacity for courage.
The greatest gift you and I will ever share with the world
won’t be born out of robotic thinking or aimless productivity;
it’ll be born out of our true human nature.
So we all have these traits inside of us.
The question becomes: How do we put them to use?
How do we cut the fat on movement to make way for more meaning?
I spent two years researching different ways
to change my relationship with work and productivity,
and today I want to share three strategies
that have had the biggest impact on my life:
The first strategy is what I like to call “never empty the well,”
I want to go back to Ernest Hemingway for some more wisdom.
In his memoir on life in Paris, Hemingway wrote:
“I had learned already to never empty the well of my writing,
but to always stop when there was still something in the deep part of the well
and to let it refill at night from the springs that fed it”
Now, if you’re like me, you learned a long time ago
that the greatest sin of high performance is to leave anything on the table.
We celebrate those who can burn the midnight oil
and leave it all on the field,
so it’s no surprise that when we persevere past an empty energy tank
that we feel as though we’re somehow winning the game.
The problem is that when we walk away from our work
drained, dazed and confused,
our subconscious is keeping score.
The bad form that we finish our day with gets internalized in our minds and bodies,
and that feeling of trying to draw water from an empty well
becomes forever attached to the work that we do.
So these all night work sessions and heroic stretches of output,
they might produce results,
but the brain drain that you feel when you walk away will follow you home
and hit you right back to your desk the next day.
And that's what Hemingway understood.
He knew that anyone could learn to outlast the others,
any robot or machine can work around the clock.
The key to staying human is to walk away before you’re cooked.
It takes a cool Hemingway-like confidence to tell the muses:
“We’ve worked enough today. I’m sure I’ll see you around tomorrow.”
The second strategy I’d like to share today is called “find your wabi-sabi,”
and for this, we need Miles Davis,
the man whose name is forever attached to jazz music.
Again and again,
Miles Davis and his trumpet reinvented what jazz music was and what it could be,
yet despite his years of dedication and study,
he struggled to ever master his instrument.
His tone was cracked and restrained,
often out of tune with what was happening around him.
He constantly missed notes, and his dexterity was considered feeble.
Miles also played with a shyness
that lacked the traditional bravado of his heroes and peers.
But over time,
it was these mechanical limitations that became his greatest asset.
Unable to wail in the high end, he was forced to play with vulnerability.
His soft tones gave him little to hide behind,
and those missed notes - they created emptiness and tension.
His playing created drama,
and it was his imperfections that resulted in a style that was his and his alone.
It was his imperfections that forever changed jazz music.
The Japanese call it wabi-sabi:
the beauty found in the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It’s our wabi-sabi that points us
towards the things that only we can do in the way that only we can do them.
And more important to our success
than doing the good, the great, or the perfect
is pursuing the personal quirks and tics that make us unique.
Now of course, when it comes to discovering what makes us special,
we’re often the last to know,
but the good news is that no one has to work extra hard at becoming unique.
You’re already you.
You already have your own unique set of fingerprints.
The key, like so much of life, is becoming aware.
So to turn your wabi-sabi into a compass, you just have to start with one question:
“How am I different? Not better, just different.”
Because it’s once you answer that question that you become free to ask,
“How can I be different and better?”
And if you struggle to answer either of those questions right now, don’t worry.
Like Miles Davis himself once said:
“Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself”
So now that we're avoiding perfection
and walking away from our work before we're drained,
what are we going to do with some of that extra time?
Well, we're going to waste it.
The third and final strategy I’d like to share today is to “waste more time.”
Now, it was when I was in my deepest pit of burnout,
and I was behaving more like a stressed-out cyborg
than a living, breathing human is that I hated this idea of wasting time.
And in order to avoid the guilt that came with doing nothing,
I constantly looked for ways to stay busy.
By show of hands, how many people here have ever had to turn down
an exciting invitation or opportunity because they were just too damn busy?
All right, lots of hands.
I see people without their hands up squirming in their seats a little bit.
It’s OK.
You know, when I look back on this time,
I realize now that much of my busyness
was really just frantic movement in a collared shirt.
Busyness was the safety rail that I put around my comfort zone.
It was a disguise that I wore to look at myself in the mirror
after a long week of emotional avoidance.
I discovered that it was a lot easier for me to say,
“I’m too busy”
rather than “I’m scared, and I don’t know where to start.”
And don’t worry, this isn’t a call to just banish busy work altogether,
but we need to accept that busy work often gets in the way of meaningful work,
and the bigger problem is that too much busy work
actually prevents our brain from knowing what the meaningful work is.
This is why I believe that we all need more unfocused, unscheduled idle time.
Idleness breeds insight because clarity is a result of mental digestion.
I’ll say that again:
Idleness breeds insight because clarity is a result of mental digestion.
Living in a perpetual state of busy, however, limits that digestion.
No one’s going to have their best ideas when they’re locked and loaded
on task execution day after day or week after week.
And the mind that is never left to meander or to waste time
is a mind headed for burnout.
So my challenge to you all today, then,
is to embrace those lazy afternoons where the agenda can be blank,
where your mind is free to run off leash through unscheduled and unfocused time,
and then please, for the love of true productivity,
go do the things you’ve always wanted to do if you weren’t so damn busy.
We’re living in a time where the old-world skills are becoming obsolete,
and the future no longer belongs to those who can outwork the others.
It belongs to those who are the most creative, empathetic, and courageous.
It belongs to those who can stay human.
And it’s by realigning ourselves with what it means to be human
that we can reclaim meaning in the work that we do.
Because when productivity is aligned with meaning,
it doesn’t lead to more burnout and overwhelm -
it leads to more joy, pride, and connection.
It leads to a greater excitement for life.
And it’s by sharpening the skills of human nature
that we can create lives we don’t need to take a vacation from.
And we can rediscover the things worth doing.
Because when technology does finally steal away that last chore or mindless task,
when robotic arms descend to cook our meals, drive our cars and do our jobs,
will you remember just what to do with ourselves?
It's time to leave the hustle and grind to the machines.
It’s time to confirm once and for all,
“I am not a robot.”
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)