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)
