Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I grew up watching movies.
For my family, the movie theater was our church.
I experienced wonder and imagination
watching Star Wars and Flight of the Navigator.
I learned about injustice from Platoon and The Color Purple.
Blockbuster Video was this story factory
just churning out the infinite spectrum of the human experience.
Because for as long as I can remember,
whenever I see a movie or a trailer,
and all the images and music combine just perfectly,
my eyes suddenly fill with tears, and I lose my breath for a second.
It feels like connection,
connection with something greater than myself,
a soul-connection.
And in college, I saw a documentary called Crimes Against Humanity,
and the images of Holocaust and war broke my eighteen-year-old heart.
How can the world be so full of wonder
and yet so broken?
And in the empty space of an answer, I invented a mission.
My new mission was to move to Hollywood and make movies that change the world.
And as soon as I got to LA, I was told, "You have to fake it till you make it."
So I immediately got 250 business cards printed off vistaprint.com for $4,99 ...
(Laughter)
and I networked my ass off.
And soon, I was an assistant to an assistant.
(Laughter)
I told anyone who would listen
about my dream to make movies that change the world,
and if it was easy to help me, they would.
Then, I earned my very own assistant title
as an assistant to a director at Sony Pictures.
And every day when I drove in through those huge iron gates,
I felt like I was in Oz.
And then I found out that I was in Oz because they shot The Wizard of Oz there.
(Laughter)
I was literally at the end of the Yellow Brick Road.
And the first thing I learned was, "There's no such thing as the word 'no,'"
and, "If I don't know the answer to something,
I'd better find someone who does."
Also, much to my disappointment,
faking it isn't over after making it.
You know, faking it worked, for a little while.
A few years later, I found myself watching the premiere of my very first film
at the Sundance Film Festival.
It led to an all-night bidding war where the studios were pitching us.
I had the honor of making five films in six years,
with directors I deeply admired.
One of them was for HBO's documentary
about kids risking their lives to emigrate over the border from Mexico.
And that film went on to be nominated for an Oscar and win an Emmy.
The mission was working.
I just had to keep my head down and keep up the hard work.
So David Foster Wallace has a great quote.
He says, "There's no such thing as not worshiping.
Everybody worships.
The only choice we get is what to worship.
And the compelling reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing
is that anything else you worship will eat you alive."
And that is exactly what happened to me.
I worshiped work and external validation.
There's no such thing as work-life balance.
Work was my life; it was the love of my life.
I took pride in the amount of e-mails I received
and the amount of meals I skipped.
My boss called me "Pistol Pete."
(Chuckling)
I was just one of the boys, and I liked it.
I was unstoppable.
Phone calls to my family only lasted a few minutes,
sitting in the car in traffic.
They called them drive-bys.
But I didn't care, I was on a mission.
I measured success in the amount of films made and sold
and this immeasurable metric of how much good I thought I could do.
Believe it or not, I was actually a producer for a company called Good.
And of course, it was never good enough.
The potential that I was always hustling to reach
only seemed to get further and further away.
All that ambition that had fueled me to this point
was starting to burn out.
I hit rock bottom.
I was terrified.
It wasn't like I was a producer potentially failing a job.
I was a parent failing a child.
And my mind was brutal and punching me from the inside,
"Depression is for lazy people. Get your shit together. Get back to work."
I thought that if I worked hard enough,
if I was good enough,
then I would earn some sense of freedom and fulfillment.
I didn't.
And today, corporate executives like Eugene O'Kelly of KPMG
and the former CFO of Google
are telling me to get out of the workaholic closet.
And then, at the other end of the spectrum,
I've got powerful women like Marissa Meyer and Sheryl Sandberg
telling me to get back in it.
In this system we have built,
we are forcing ourselves to choose between our well-being and our work.
I mean, when we're kids, we're asked what we want to be when we grow up,
not who we want to be or how we want to live.
And at the age 29, I realized I had no idea how to answer those questions.
So I did what any good middle-class, Wasp woman would do:
I divorced my job, read Eat, Pray, Love ...
(Laughter)
went into debt and flew to Asia -
It was like I had been in this mini war trench,
this cozy career trench, for seven years.
It was decorated with awards and external validation,
and now, all of a sudden, there's this ladder and I can see the sky.
And when I climb up and out, I realize I'm surrounded by trenches,
trenches of beliefs.
And I wanted to jump back in a new one as soon as I possibly could.
I tried a yoga trench,
I tried a Buddhist trench,
I shaved my head -
I really wanted a boyfriend trench.
Because who am I without one?
If I can't prove my value or my worth to you,
do I have any?
And when I got back to Los Angeles,
it was clear that the belief system that I had left with no longer felt true.
It was like I was entering this second puberty
where my mind instead of my shins was growing without my consent.
And that is when the soul-hijackings begin.
So, a soul-hijacking is when you find yourself in a room
that you never would have imagined yourself in
had it not been for some supernatural force pushing you there.
And I found myself in a room like that as a student of spiritual psychology.
Now I call it "AA for judge-aholics."
(Laughter)
And essentially, it's a master's program
where we dig into the underlying assumptions for life,
our operating systems, if you will.
You know, what is my childhood and genetic-conditioning code?
How is it working for me, or not working?
So it went a little like this.
Month one:
"Everyone in here is crying and 'feeling their feelings,'
which is like the Holy Grail around here.
You know, I'm good!
I'm 30. I know how to get vulnerable.
Right?"
Month two:
"This is taking forever.
Who has time for all this self-grow stuff anyway?
I mean, you guys are all in here crying and whining like little babies
while people out there work and give back and do something.
I should be doing something."
It was in month six
that I discovered that my consciousness operates a little like a car,
and different aspects of my ego take turns at the steering wheel.
So it could be anyone from Darth Vader to Yoda.
(Laughter)
And the trick is knowing who's driving
and whether or not they should get into the back seat.
And it was in month nine
that I discovered who was driving the car of my consciousness.
Here's how it happened.
My facilitator,
"So, what's coming up for you?"
"What's present for me is what's always present for me,
which is this persistent loneliness!
I can't therapy it away, I can't screw it away,
and I'm sure I won't be able to process it away
with this smiling new-age clown sitting here loving me."
(Laughter)
"So getting spiritual,
more loving and free and less judgmental,
it means I'll tap into some unlimited source of energy, right?
That, unlike my ego, is light and bright and infinite?
If I get spiritual, I'll be better.
I'll be a better daughter to my sick dad, I'll be able to take my mom to Bali,
I'll volunteer more, I'll just be better, like Martin-Luther-King-Junior better?
Because getting spiritual means digging into my own shit until I find God, right?
Because somewhere deep, deep down
through the sewage pipes of ridiculous conditioning,
there's some infinite ocean of loving or something?"
"I hear you are using a toilet metaphor."
(Laughter)
"Would you like to give your bowels a voice?"
(Laughter)
You've got to be kidding me.
(Laughter)
So she has me moving to another chair to essentially talk to myself,
and I'm supposed to focus on my gut and breathe.
So I focus on my gut and I breathe and I judge -
And I breathe and I judge -
And I breathe, and then, suddenly, this comes out of my mouth:
"Finally!
Ooh! You are so stubborn!
OK, now you're just going to sit and silence your mind.
You are not Superwoman.
You are sad and lonely and afraid just like everyone else.
And it's okay.
It's okay.
Your parents just got a divorce,
your dad is dying,
and you have a broken heart.
Please stop trying to be Superwoman.
You are a woman.
That is enough.
Please, let that be enough."
The deeper I looked, the more abandoned parts of myself I found,
all of the soft, playful, innocent, girly, emotional parts.
All the parts that made me vulnerable
were the parts that made me human and whole.
I had banished them somewhere along the way
to project an image of what I considered successful and good.
The aspect driving my car, the car of my consciousness,
was a wannabe superhero with white knuckles.
And I was buckling under the belief
that the world was broken and mine alone to fix.
Healing became like dating.
I tried everything once.
I learned that I had to authentically feel everything I was feeling,
no matter how crazy or weird it was,
in order to move forward.
The only way out was through,
and faking it was no longer an option.
I also learned that genetic code is telling
and more easily navigated when conscious.
For example, I come from a line of six generations of Lutheran ministers,
which may have something to do with this deep sense of guilt
and this idea that if I just work hard enough,
I'll earn a ticket to some form of heaven.
And the real shift came
when I started to value the radical concept of taking care of myself,
of putting my oxygen mask on first.
Only then did my dependence on external validation wane
and my experience of inner fulfillment grow.
And fulfillment, I'm discovering, is the space just outside of the trench,
where nothing determines the value of me or you.
But given we're humans, and we're creating the beliefs we carry every second,
I am updating my operating system with a new belief:
that my value is consistent and inherent, regardless of anything external,
and that my work can be play.
It took a little time for the old code to be replaced by the new,
but when it did,
I fell in love with the world again,
and even with movies.
And I still ask myself the question:
how can the world be so full of wonder and yet so broken?
But in the empty space of an answer,
instead of inventing a mission, I'm learning to listen.
And I'm supporting others in listening.
I support people in discovering their version of whole
and how to match their innate talent with what the world needs.
So what about you?
Who is driving your car?
What do you worship?
What are the beliefs that make up your operating system?
And if they're leading you anywhere but love,
please consider rewriting your code.
Because be it a birth, a death,
life transition, falling in love, heartbreak,
life is asking us and often demanding us to feel and heal and learn.
And don't take my word for it.
Run your own experiment; find out what works for you.
Observe what brings you pain.
Observe what makes you come alive.
Find the thing that makes you vulnerable.
And let your soul hijack you.
Then, perhaps from this place,
this more human, connected, vulnerable place,
we can build systems of work and life that support us all.
Thank you.
(Applause)