Translator: Rogério Ângelo Reviewer: Maricene Crus
Hi, I'm Taly.
And I have a question for you today.
What would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail?
So?
Is it about the change you would like to see or to be in the world?
And the next question is, "Why not?"
What is the big fear of failing?
This big fear many times connects us to an illusion
that there is one right path.
That path that will take me to success,
to all my accomplishments,
then I spend my life
looking for that little door
that will take me to this path, to this only path
that will... make it all!
And, if I don't find it...
then, things get ugly.
You may assume that I don't agree with this idea.
Life, maybe, can be something different.
What would it be like if I told you
that there are paths,
and that I can make them work?
That it's not one path,
it's a long path and I will make it work.
Sounds cool, right? Supercute. OK.
I swear, for those who are sitting here,
that if I had thought about it before
- I'm 40 years old -
if I had known earlier
this that I want to tell you today,
I might have suffered less,
and, for sure, would have had more fun in life.
Knowing that maybe I have the possibility of building this path.
It might not be easy, I know,
some of you may be choosing your careers
which is a choice of a path.
And then, there are millions of options.
Formerly there were three, four options?
Nowadays, there are over 500 possible courses.
And, like the career, there are other choices.
And it can be tough.
There is no recipe.
I will not give you the formula.
But I would like to share with you
that there is a possibility for walking in this path,
so you won't have to suffer and find a little door,
that is having my North.
Knowing that I want to get there, deep down.
And then I can go this way, I can go this other way.
I can sometimes get lost, but I know I want to go this way.
And this is my north.
And this north, I will call life purpose,
what moves me.
Something that excites me,
makes me cry, and won't appear only as one path.
I can move on building this path.
My life purpose is what will move me,
what will make me leave my place, sometimes out of my comfort zone,
and go ahead.
Something that makes me generate changes.
And, in fact, this thing may seem very broad, right?
What is this "purpose", and what does it mean?
In fact, it's a great question about who I am, and what drives me in life.
But it might sound like a very broad question.
So, we can think about splitting this question.
Because the life purpose is like a mathematical equation:
what my talents are, what my values are,
equals purpose.
I know I said I didn't have a formula, OK?
But sometimes, in despair, a small formula
can help us move on.
So, the purpose would be what I will use,
those tools, those talents that I have, that I brought,
that I developed in life,
to achieve what is very important to me.
That which moves me, and I love, and I want to see in the world,
and I want to bring to the world.
Sometimes figuring out what my talents are,
may be a tough question.
Talents, many times are obvious for us.
And sometimes we associate talents to great things,
great artists, singers, soccer players,
who, for sure, have great talents.
But talents may also be small things
that are also great.
Tinga is a great soccer player,
but he has great talents besides his moves.
He is calm and he has the possibility to envision.
And I believe, faithfully, that we all have talents,
and more than one.
The idea is being able to connect with yourself
and being able to look at yourself and understand what you are good at.
What people are telling you,
"Go ahead, that's what you know."
Sometimes it's hard to tell
because we also have voices here that say, "No, not this."
We give training courses for this insight,
do workshops to think, to help people think themselves.
Once, there was a young man that I liked, a very special person.
And we were in this moment, thinking about purpose, talents,
and his sheet of paper was blank,
for a while.
I looked, and said, "Let's go. Let's understand what he's going through."
And I asked him,
"Why can't you write anything?"
And he told me he was sure he didn't have any talent.
All right, he could do some things,
but he didn't have any talent.
Of course I had a huge list of things I could tell him that were talents,
but he was the one who had to see that.
So, we started to talk and we realized
that he'd had a great explanation in life
that he wasn't good enough.
His father had been very strict, that looked at him strictly,
and nothing he did was good.
Nothing was enough.
So he learned that he wasn't enough.
At that point it would be very easy for him to play the victim
and say, "See? It's my father's fault."
But he wanted something different for himself.
He wanted to be protagonist in his life,
to take ownership of his path and say, "I can. It's hard, but I can do it."
So, we started to talk and he asked for help,
which sometimes is the most protagonist attitude one can have.
And he started asking people
what he was very good at, what was his cup of tea,
he asked his own dad, his mom, his teacher, his friends,
and he looked at himself, and allowed himself another explanation of who he was.
He looked at himself with gratitude, with love,
and understood that he, indeed, had good things.
And, yes, he had good things to deliver to the world.
And guess what happened?
He found his talents.
So this can be a reflection, sometimes tough, sometimes easy,
but, for sure, important,
because it's with this that I go to the world.
So, going back to that little formula.
Talents: what I'm really good at
I will use for what moves me,
for what is very important to me.
And these are my values.
What I love to do is based on the values that move me.
That can be work, can be effort, they're countless.
And I can only make this discovery looking back at my own life.
Observing what I love to do,
what sometimes makes me angry,
sometimes makes me move.
Or, sometimes, I'd love to move to change something
So if this reflection makes any sense to you,
at some point take this pause,
look at what you are very good at.
Allow yourself to understand that there are very good things
that you can do.
And figure out what is very important to you,
what you love, what you would like to be different.
So, going back to the beginning, why not?
Why not use what I know how to do very well,
to change what is very important to me?
And you know what?
Again: we won't always know what the path is,
how to achieve what is very important to me.
Maybe the choice is to try.
Is to go forward, building this path.
Because maybe life is to be this adventurer,
who goes through life searching, searching about himself,
wondering.
So, how about a pause?
To look at yourself, to know yourself, to connect with yourself.
I know that in today's world you can't pause,
we have to solve things fast,
we have to move on.
But not a pause to go to Tibet, for a year and meditate.
Sometimes you have this chance, great.
But it's a pause for certainties.
It's a pause for "having to know it all".
I learned, not too long ago,
that I had to know to be able to walk.
I couldn't give a step forward without knowing exactly
the consequence of what was going to happen.
And, suddenly, I found out something freeing.
And that I could walk to know.
And that not necessarily only to know,
I could walk to know, to feel,
and, also, to not know,
to ask myself questions.
How many times there are questions that transform us, that guide us?
The system is not ready for this.
Who has received a good grade for a good question?
In general, we are conditioned to giving good answers, not good questions.
But try.
A good question can open incredible paths.
Not having to know it all, opens the possibility to learn.
Learn from myself, learn from the world,
learn from life, learn to not know.
Learn to get lost.
Two years ago, I went to Chile for an incredible course,
of ontological coaching,
and it would be something...
it was a path that I didn't know if it would work out,
I was not sure, but it had to do with my North.
I was not sure about how much change would it be.
But I went there.
I took a book on the plane, maybe the best book I have ever read,
called "Teatro de la Caricia",
by a Swiss clown called Daniele Finzi Pasca.
There was a sentence in the book, almost at the end,
where Daniele says,
(Spanish) "En la vida hay que aprender a perderse para aprender a encontrarse."
"In life, we must learn to get lost in order to learn to find ourselves."
OK, I liked it, highlighted it, closed my book.
I arrived in Santiago around half past ten at night,
I took a van, went to my hotel,
got out of the van, looked around,
I could see only office buildings.
No hotel.
I was wondering, "What happened?"
Only then I realized!
I got the address that was in the email
from the girl with whom I had exchanged emails to book my reservation.
And I hadn't realized that maybe the girl was not at the hotel,
but she stayed in the office, from the hotel chain,
which wasn't the address for my hotel.
So I realized that it was 11pm
and I was in the middle of Santiago, lost.
I looked at the sky,
laughed and told my friend, destiny,
"OK, I got it!"
Life is this possibility of getting lost and finding yourself
And to find yourself, you must look inward,
and be connected to yourself.
Thank you.
(Applause)