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5 Practical Ways to Take Control of Your Life | Jim VandeHei | TED - Video học tiếng Anh
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5 Practical Ways to Take Control of Your Life | Jim VandeHei | TED
5 Practical Ways to Take Control of Your Life | Jim VandeHei | TED
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0:03
I want you to spend the next 10 minutes being absurdly self-indulgent,
0:08
which is advice I would almost never otherwise give people.
0:12
I want you to not think about the things you can't control.
0:16
AI, politics, your parents, your social media feed,
0:20
your Tinder alerts.
0:21
(Laughter)
0:22
By locking in on you for the next 600 seconds,
0:26
I'm very confident that you're going to walk away
0:28
with what I think is the single best hack for longevity, purpose
0:33
and living the type of lives that we want to live.
0:37
First, who is this middle-aged dude preaching a gospel of self-indulgence?
0:44
Well, the 20-year-old version of me,
0:46
I'm very confident, was a much less impressive version of you.
0:52
Three years into college,
0:53
I had a 1.491 grade point average that I was dragging around.
0:58
I was smoking a pack of Camel Lights a day.
1:01
I was drinking prolifically.
1:03
At night, I was delivering pizzas in my diesel VW Rabbit.
1:08
I was remarkably unhealthy, and I was remarkably unremarkable.
1:13
Within a decade,
1:14
I'm interviewing presidents,
1:17
I’m covering the White House for The Wall Street Journal
1:20
and The Washington Post.
1:22
Soon after, I’m starting and running companies. First Politico, then Axios.
1:27
So what the hell happened?
1:29
And in those dark times and in now, some very good times,
1:34
I really tried to become a student of what does it take to be successful
1:38
and what makes great people great?
1:41
What brings them real success?
1:45
And there is a commonality to all of them.
1:49
That all of them maniacally focus on controlling life's variables
1:56
that you can control.
1:57
You control you.
2:00
That became my mantra,
2:02
and that became my map for life.
2:05
When I watched these people,
2:07
whether they were teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs --
2:10
every day, they were maniacal about constructing their success
2:14
and constructing their greatness
2:16
piece by piece, day by day, on their terms.
2:21
If we're being honest,
2:22
a lot of us just surrender to others or to other things.
2:28
We say, well, we can't do that because of my parents, my childhood,
2:32
my circumstances, my DNA, my crappy luck.
2:38
We just can't do it
2:39
because we're under control of others or other things.
2:42
And it's just BS.
2:44
And it's just not a good way to live.
2:46
You control you,
2:48
it's just a much better, brighter way to live.
2:51
And so I want to walk you through five different things
2:54
that you can do that are free,
2:57
that you can start today
2:58
and that are available to every single person in this room.
3:02
You control today.
3:06
From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed,
3:09
you have scores of decisions to make that only you make.
3:13
Do you doomscroll, or do you meditate?
3:16
Do you eat Lucky Charms, or do you eat a healthy breakfast?
3:20
When someone snaps at you, do you snap back,
3:22
or do you show a little bit of grace?
3:24
At night, do you get hammered, or do you get some sleep?
3:29
You make each one of those decisions.
3:31
And every one either leads to happiness and feeling better about yourself,
3:35
or sadness and feeling like crap.
3:37
Nobody wants to feel like crap.
3:39
So how did I get from Oshkosh and my 1.491
3:44
to DC and then having some success?
3:47
It was studying other people who were smarter than me,
3:51
who were better than me, more talented than me,
3:53
better read than me,
3:54
who just knew a lot more than me, who were healthier than me.
3:57
And then I tried to copy them.
3:59
If they read a book I hadn’t read, I read it.
4:01
Or if they used a word I’d never heard in Oshkosh,
4:03
I wrote it down on a piece of paper, and I would work it into my vocabulary.
4:07
If they were fitter than I were, I'd try to copy their habits.
4:11
I started to take control of what we can control.
4:14
You control you.
4:17
You control your reactions.
4:19
The best advice I ever got was five words:
4:22
Do the next right thing.
4:25
Do the next right thing.
4:27
It's really hard to be a good person.
4:29
It's hard to be moral.
4:31
It's hard to do all the things right.
4:33
It's pretty easy to do the next right thing.
4:36
And if you do that,
4:38
if you do things that would make you proud,
4:40
your parents proud, your kids proud, your friends proud,
4:43
you do that and then do it again,
4:44
suddenly, you're a pretty good person.
4:47
And then if you do it in bad times,
4:50
you could become a great person.
4:52
My personal motto of the last 15 years is:
4:54
When shit happens, shine.
4:56
Meaning, in the worst of times, when really bad things happen,
5:01
that's when I really want to do the next right thing.
5:04
That helped me through one of the hardest periods
5:07
of my professional life.
5:08
I had started Politico, it was my baby.
5:10
It's emotional.
5:11
And, you know, like a lot of these start-ups, it was a success.
5:14
And then there was turmoil, and I felt like I had to leave.
5:19
And it's emotional.
5:20
And I could have said and done things
5:23
that would come back to haunt me.
5:24
In every minute of every day during that period, I thought,
5:27
I'm going to do the next right thing.
5:30
I'm not going to do things that are going to come back and hurt me or haunt me.
5:34
And it helped me get there.
5:36
Three, you control your reality.
5:41
That might sound weird, but you do.
5:44
What you read, what you watch, what you listen to.
5:47
That forms your reality.
5:50
Your podcasts, your YouTube channels, your newsletters, your friends.
5:54
It's all a reality-shaping machine.
5:57
The inputs affect your outputs.
6:00
If you're inputting a lot of misery,
6:03
a lot of doom and gloom,
6:05
a lot of trivial stuff,
6:07
you might be a doomy and gloomy kind of person and kind of trivial.
6:12
But change that.
6:13
If you control your reality,
6:16
all you got to do is realize, listen, there's more good,
6:19
high-quality information available to everybody in this room
6:23
than at any point in humanity.
6:25
It's all free, and it's not even close.
6:28
If there's something you're curious about, you can Google it or ChatGPT it.
6:32
If you want to know what Elon Musk thinks
6:34
or Mel Robbins would advise
6:36
or Taylor Swift feels,
6:38
there's probably a podcast or a video or an interview with them.
6:42
You can search that, you can change the inputs.
6:45
You can put healthy, edifying content into your mind,
6:49
have a better reality that you then share with other people.
6:54
Four, you control how you're seen.
6:58
This one might seem a little too absurdly self-indulgent,
7:02
but it's actually a magic trick.
7:05
You control how you're seen.
7:07
When you're in a group setting,
7:08
especially if it's tense or it's emotional,
7:12
think about how other people are experiencing you.
7:16
The way I do it is I almost envision myself having this out-of-body experience.
7:20
Watching me through the eyes of others.
7:23
Our own eyes deceive.
7:25
Our own eyes lie.
7:27
But if you look at how other people feel and experience you,
7:32
then you know the impression that you're leaving,
7:34
that you want to leave.
7:37
And it really helps you, I think,
7:39
be the person you want to be
7:41
and have other people experience you as the person that you want to be.
7:45
This technique helped me through
7:47
what was probably the hardest period of my life,
7:50
but the most wondrous period of my life.
7:52
It’s about seven years ago, and we adopted a teenage boy,
7:56
and I had two teenagers already at home.
7:59
And he had lost his parents,
8:02
it was a rough part of his life.
8:03
And he's a young guy doing what you do when you have a rough period of life.
8:07
And I remember thinking, you know what?
8:09
He's going to be watching me,
8:11
my kids are going to be watching me,
8:13
my wife's going to be watching me.
8:14
If I show love,
8:16
if I show forgiveness,
8:18
if I show persistence, if I show grit,
8:22
that's going to echo through how they experience what we're going through.
8:26
And if I'm rattled or I'm pessimistic,
8:29
it would have an opposite consequence.
8:32
And that process, I really believe,
8:35
had a very small part in turning my son into this amazing, thriving,
8:40
grateful college athlete today.
8:44
And I think that applies to all of us.
8:47
The fifth thing that you control is you control your destiny.
8:51
You control where you're going.
8:54
One of the things I hate the most is when I run into people
8:57
and they just feel they're like a bobber or a log on a river,
9:01
and you just have to go with the current.
9:04
It's not true.
9:05
You get to control where you go.
9:07
You can control if you want to go against the current,
9:11
if you want to go upstream.
9:13
That is fully in your control.
9:16
And I want to end today with a writing assignment.
9:19
Not that you need to do right now,
9:21
but maybe do it later today or later this week.
9:24
I want you to imagine yourself on your deathbed,
9:28
thinking about your life.
9:30
And did you live a life that you were proud of?
9:33
Did you live a life that you could feel,
9:35
"You know what? I did it my way."
9:37
I did it the right way.
9:41
And write down the three things that it would take
9:43
for that answer to be: “Yes, that was it.
9:45
I lived the life I wanted to live."
9:48
Then write down the three things that it would take to do that
9:52
between now and then,
9:53
to actually achieve the life that you want to achieve.
9:57
That's your North Star.
9:58
That puts you ahead of 95 percent on Earth
10:01
in terms of taking ownership of what you want to do with your own life.
10:07
Man, I'm blessed.
10:09
I grew up, I had four grandparents
10:11
who lived in my hometown.
10:13
I have two parents who are still alive.
10:16
I have an amazing wife, three wondrous children
10:19
and tons of really great friends and colleagues
10:22
who poured a lot of knowledge
10:25
and a lot of love into my life.
10:27
Richard Powers, in his book "Bewilderment," says,
10:30
maybe the purpose of life
10:32
is about leaving little pieces of ourselves behind in others.
10:36
And I hope today that I've left a little piece
10:38
of what all those people poured into me, with you,
10:42
and that you can leave little pieces of yourself in many others,
10:46
and you can do it because you control you.
10:49
So get ’er done.
10:51
(Cheers and applause)
10:52
Thank you.
