A Practical Guide to Taking Control of Your Life | Cate Hall | TED

Five years ago, I was a prisoner in my own life.

I was hopelessly addicted to drugs.

Every morning I would get up, go buy drugs,

and then spend the rest of the day using, barely conscious,

until I passed out again at the end of the night.

I spent months at a time like that.

I don't have a lot of memories from that time,

but one thing I do remember very clearly is this incredible sense of awe

and resentment I felt just watching normal people do normal things.

I would see somebody meeting a friend for lunch,

and it would seem inconceivable to me that anybody could be that free.

They could just decide what to do with an afternoon.

This talk isn't about addiction per se,

but I'm telling you this

because I really need you to understand where I'm coming from,

how trapped I was, before I tell you that my life is amazing now.

I'm clean, first and foremost.

(Applause) I'm married to an incredible man,

and we get to do all sorts of fun projects together.

And I'm CEO of Astera Institute,

a multibillion dollar private foundation that's pioneering a new approach to supporting innovative science

and technology.

(Applause) What I do want to talk about today is how I got from

point A to point B.

What changed?

It's not that I got smarter or that I started trying harder.

I think what changed was even more fundamental.

It was developing a sense of personal agency,

which I think about

as the capacity to both see

and act on all of the degrees of freedom we actually have.

It's about being able to find the hidden doors in the walls of life.

I want to argue

that when it comes to living a satisfying

and meaningful life,

agency is actually much more important than the things we usually think about

as critical to success,

like intelligence and hard work, both of which are next to useless if misapplied,

and which are becoming less

and less important as we increasingly outsource them to machines.

I saw a quote recently from Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator,

that I really liked.

He said, "Intelligence is on tap now, so agency is even more important."

For all of the freedom that addiction took from me,

I think it actually gave me an unnatural advantage

when it came to cultivating agency.

And that's because while agency has many mothers, one of them is certainly desperation.

Addicts call this the gift of desperation, actually.

The willingness to do whatever it takes to change your life,

to embarrass yourself by standing up in front of a roomful of strangers

and say,

“My name is Cate, and I’m a drug addict.”

Or to lock yourself away for months.

Or to take medications that will put you in the ER if you drink.

By the time I went to rehab, I definitely had the gift of desperation.

I lost my job, most of my friends.

For a time, I'd basically lost the ability to walk.

And so when I left,

I walked into a halfway house and a complete mess of a life.

But in a way, I think that was actually good.

Because I felt like I had nothing left to lose.

And that made me fearless and hungry.

I started saying yes to everything,

every connection someone was willing to make in hopes it might lead to something

that would help me get back on my feet.

I remember just going for volume.

It didn't matter if I could tell how something would benefit me.

That's how I ended up meeting most of the people I've worked with in

the last four years.

Losing my sense of pride also helped me learn really fast.

I had brain damage, which meant that I didn't always understand things,

and I couldn't pretend that I did either.

So I got good at saying, "I don't understand what you just said.

Can you explain it to me?"

in situations where before I might have just nodded along.

Side note: people love to explain things.

(Laughter) It's a total win win.

Now I have great news,

which is that you don't need to ruin your life

and then rebuild it in order to learn to be more agentic.

I do think it helps to be some kind of desperate,

but there's always something to be desperate for.

I felt that during COVID,

as friends and I watched low-income countries struggle with vaccinations

because they lacked adequate cold chain storage.

So we created a company that created a shelf-stable vaccine,

and we let that desperation drive us into clinical trials in under six months,

faster than any start-up in history.

I felt another kind of desperation early on in my marriage,

when it seemed like there was an invisible wall between the two of us.

So in desperation, I learned how to resolve the emotional barriers

that made it difficult for me to connect with people.

I don't think agency is innate.

But I do think most people learn it through sheer luck.

If it's not the luck of desperation,

then maybe it's just the luck of seeing somebody highly agentic operating up close.

I also think, though,

that it can be learned systematically and by many more people.

I want to share some of the tactics I've learned for becoming more agentic.

First, assume everything is learnable.

I gave the example of learning to connect with my husband,

but I could have just

as easily spoken from personal experience about learning to be more optimistic

or curious.

I think most traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite learnable.

If you both believe

that they are and put the same kind of effort into learning them

that you would anything else.

Second, court rejection.

We spend our lives carefully avoiding it,

but if you're only aiming for things you get you're doing yourself a disservice.

In fact, sometimes you have to aim for things

that feel unreasonable to make sure your instinct about what's reasonable is right.

Last time I was applying for a job, I told a couple people:

"I'm thinking about starting an organization much like your own.

Can I run yours instead?"

(Laughter) A little delusional, maybe.

But the thing is, sometimes delusional works.

Third, seek real feedback.

Pretty much every one of us has something holding us back

that we're completely blind to

and that's obvious to other people.

Don't you want to know what that is?

The single best way to find out is to give people a way to

tell you anonymously.

I know that might sound scary, it was to me at first,

but it can also be exhilarating.

I have an anonymous feedback box linked to my Twitter profile,

and it has honestly been life-changing,

not just in terms of the specific feedback I've gotten,

but in knowing that I'm not trying to hide things from myself anymore.

If I could go back in time five years

and talk to the person

that I was then

and tell her that I would one day experience

that kind of freedom,

to not have to hide things,

to do whatever I feel like with my afternoons, to be basically happy.

I would not have believed it.

But that is the power of personal agency.

No matter how stuck you are,

if you can learn to locate the doors hidden within you,

you can unlock inconceivable kinds of freedom.

Thank you.

(Applause)