Translator: Mohand Habchi
Reviewer: Queenie Lee When I was four years old,
I decided to go to an Ivy League college because I'd heard somewhere
that they were the best. I remember this because my family
moved into a new house in Denver, and the locks on the door said "Yale,"
and I knew this was a sign. (Laughter) So for the next 13 years,
I got all the A's. I joined all the teams.
I joined all the clubs. I ran for all the positions. My best friend and I,
we were president and vice president of a French club
with only one other member, (Laughter) that's all that was needed
to put it on our resumes. (Laughter) I took SAT practice tests every weekend, and I took the real thing three times
until I got a perfect score in math. My mom was often telling me to slow down,
but I was doing everything right, right? Well, I didn't get into Yale, after all, although technically,
I think I'm still on the wait list. (Laughter) But I did get into Brown,
which was my second choice. Okay, so, secretly, I had actually
fallen in love with Colorado College when I was visiting a friend there, but I always had this fantasy
of flying off on an airplane to my prestigious new East Coast life, wearing a hoodie with a logo
that impressed people. (Laughter) "Whoa. You go to Brown?
You must be really smart." So I went. At Brown, I kept working although I wasn't even exactly sure
what I was working for anymore, it's just, that's what you do. I got a degree in computer science, and I went to work
at Microsoft when I graduated. And I was there for two years
before I went for a job at another company
few people had heard of, although the ones who had often said, "Why are you going to work at Facebook?
MySpace has already won." (Laughter) It wasn't long before I'd walk around
in my Facebook hoodie, and people would say "Whoa. You work
at Facebook? You must be really smart." While I was at Facebook,
I came up with an idea to solve a problem. Here was the problem. Let's say, I posted this awesome photo. I might get five or ten comments,
and that would feel great. If I'd gotten a job promotion
or changed my relationship status, I might get 50 comments although most of them
would say the same thing, "Congratulations!
Congratulations! Congrats!" I started to notice that if people didn't have
something new or clever to say, they wouldn't say anything at all. They might come up to me in the hallway and tell me they liked
something I'd shared. OK, wait a minute. How much more validation
might I be missing out on? (Laughter) So I proposed the idea
for the awesome button. It's a button that would live
on every Facebook status, every photo, every note, every link; people could click it without having to
think of anything to say. Friends could validate each other
with that much more frequency and ease. (Laughter) We actually worked
on this project for nine months until we got it exactly right, finally launching
the Facebook Like Button. (Applause) I read that as of August this year, there have been 1.13 trillion
instances of Facebook Like. 1.13 trillion. Does anyone
even know what that means? I looked it up on the internet and apparently, there are
1 trillion seconds in 30,000 years. That's 30,000 years
of one person telling another person, "I like that. Good job. Keep going." (Laughter) As Elizabeth Gilbert said in her TED talk, "It's exceedingly likely
that my greatest success is behind me." (Laughter) So wait, what do I do now? I did all the things right. You tell me what success
looks like, and I'll do it. You tell me it's a good school,
I'll go there. You tell me it's a good job
and I'll do that. You tell me it's leadership and management
and trainings and certifications. You tell me it's leverage and scale
and impacting and changing the world, and I'll do all of that. You tell me it's saving for retirement
and drinking filtered water and eating kale. It's being healthy enough,
active enough, and spiritual enough, and conscious enough, and compassionate
enough, and humble enough - (Laughter) And I'll do all of that. I will do whatever it takes
to feel like enough. There is nothing wrong
with any of those things in and of themselves. But in my case, they gave me
a validation that I depended on it. I needed it. From the first time I got that first A
and the teacher said "Good job!" I was hooked. I understood
the game, and I was going to win. The problem was the more approval
I got, the more I need it. It's kind of like that first time
your photo gets 50 likes, and now everything less
feels like kind of a failure. (Laughter) Why didn't they like it? (Laughter) Don't they like me? It must be Newsfeed.
They changed something. (Laughter) I finally reached a breaking point. I finally realized that the way
that I had always been making decisions, it wasn't sustainable, and the reason I knew that was because of how hard
I had become on myself. I was always pushing, always striving,
always evaluating, always comparing, and yet, I was always coming up short. So, I knew something had to change, and I decided to start asking
some better questions. What do I care about? What actually matters to me? If wasn't worried about
what other people thought, what might I be doing? What actually lights me up? As I explored these questions, I started drawing these little
stick-figure illustrations about what I was discovering
and posting them on Facebook, obviously. (Laughter) It was a way for me to make sense
of what I was learning and share it with my friends. Eventually, I left Facebook. Since then, I've started
and ended two business. I've become and unbecome a life coach
about three different times. (Laughter) I've lived in five houses
and four neighborhoods. I've had six-ish relationships. I've traveled to eight countries. I've tried on about 12
different spiritual traditions. And yet, through all of that
searching and change, I kept finding that each week, I had something new
I wanted to draw about. People often ask me how I made
the crazy leap from tech to art, and the best answer I can give is
there was no leap. I never planned to be an artist,
it's just what I've found myself doing when I wasn't telling myself
I should be doing something else. For me, there is no push in it. No plan. No agenda.
It's just what I'm drawn to do. (Laughter) As it turns out, following my heart
hasn't meant some grand act of faith. It hasn't meant coming up with
some big future vision and then constantly compromising
the present in order to get there; although, I've tried that several times
and have fallen flat on my face. Now I practice following my heart by gentle, honest,
in-the-moment listening. Sometimes the listening
tells me to take a nap. Sometimes it tells me to draw.
Sometimes it tells me to cry. The listening tells me
when to take a job or not take a job. To visit my mom or the ocean. The listening will tell me
when to take a chance or when to dance. (Laughter) The listening tells me when to say yes,
when to say no, and everything in between. Now this, what I'm talking about,
it is simple but it's not easy. It requires assiduous,
dedicated attention. It often asks for ruthless and sometimes incredibly uncomfortable
honesty with myself and with others. And it needs endless compassion for the difficulty of learning to trust
the validation that comes from within. I found it nearly impossible
to find my inner knowing when I'm constantly calibrating
my preferences, my passions, my purpose, based primarily on what I think
others are thinking of me. It is awesome to create
and share things that people love. It's what I do! It's also awesome to appreciate,
celebrate and validate one another. I just like to pay attention to when I start to depend
on that feedback, that becomes my notification
to switch the focus. So now, I draw comics for my job. My new A+ stands for alignment. And this is my favorite sweatshirt. (Laughter) I can't tell you
where any of this is going. I can't tell you my plans
because I really don't have many. All I know is that when I let go of the need for external validation, and when I finally allow myself
to just do what I do, and be who I am, and like what I like, I finally feel ... I finally know I'm enough. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers)
