Guidance from your future self | Mark John Stewart | TEDxMcMasterU

[Music] [Applause] [Music] if you're sitting in this audience or if you're watching this video that I'm certain that you have an ambition to get more of life no matter how much you've achieved you want to find ways to give back to your community you want to raise a great family you want to have an impact in the world you want a new job you want to launch your own business you want to leave a legacy maybe all of these today I'm here to talk to you about one question you can ask yourself whenever you're making a decision to help you create the life that you want my hope is that when you walk away from this talk you'll feel inspired but you also feel ready to live a more intentional and successful life so for me the first time I began to connect the ideas of taking action now to see an outcome later was when I was 8 years old at my school having cool shoes was a really big deal have you had some Nikes or some Reebok pumps you were on top problem for me was 8 year old mark I didn't have cool shoes so I was 8 years old I went to my parents and asked him to buy me some expensive shoes now we came from a lower income neighborhood so their priority was really to put food on the table and a roof over our head so that was a big no but I really wanted cool shoes so I got a job 6 days a week I would deliver newspapers every day after school and on Saturdays now I got to be honest it was rough I mean everybody else was out playing after school in the winter I was freezing cold back then you had to collect money from people for their newspapers so there I am 8 years old going door-to-door and shaking people down for $5.00 a week I mean they gave us this big blue cart to pull the papers in and had these big plastic wheels I want to make all this noise as we go down the street so all the other kids would come around and they'd make fun of me sometimes they'd steal my car to run away with it we had to call the police when they take my papers it was rough but i toughed it out I kept delivering the papers after a few months I had some money in my pocket so I asked my dad to bring me the shoe store downtown we went there I went to the shelf and I grabbed the most expensive pair of Nikes and I bought them I was feeling good I'd earned these shoes I warmed to school I felt a little bit cooler but looking back what I learned from this experience was that there's always a way to get whatever you want in this world you might just have to sacrifice on the way and you have to realize it might take some time to get there so now I'm a consultant and a university struktur an entrepreneur I do a lot of charitable work and what I love about it is that I get to do what I want and I get to do it my way so I get approached all the time by people who are looking for insight on how to live a life that's more in alignment with their values and there's always a gap this is where you are now this is where you want to be and in between is what you have to do to get there now sometimes that in-between is clear and sometimes it's not if you need know that you need a specific degree to get a specific job the path is so much straight forward you go out there go in school you work hard you study you graduate your network and you hustle your way into that job but when we're talking about something as big as living a successful life it's a little more ambiguous there's so many complexities life moves so fast we know that setting goals can help but how do we make great decisions even though we don't have every element of our life and our future mapped out for me it's by regularly asking the one question that I promised you at the beginning of this talk I asked myself this all the time five years from now what decision will I wish I made today if you go to work right now and you're not inspired by your job but you can't leave because you got to pay the bills five years from now what decision will you wish you made today you might not be able to leave your job today but today you can enroll in night class and start learning new skills and prepare yourself for a new career today you could just update your LinkedIn profile so that recruiters are looking for you people with your skill sets you'll pop up today you could go out there and register a business online start working on it and maybe in a couple years you can be your own boss it works for small decisions too if it's lunchtime you can get a healthy salad or fried fast-food now of course future you says will get the healthy salad because if you keep it up in five years you look good you feel healthy everything's rockin but part of you says no big deal what's one meal gonna do you know I think James clear said it best in his book atomic habits he said every action you take is a vote for the type of person that you want to become any dillard wrote how we spend our days is how we spend our lives what we do with this hour and that one that's our life if the person that you want to be five years from now is running a non-profit or saved up enough money for a comfortable retirement or has raised great children then that person would start doing those things today not four years from now if I talk to you about the type of person you want to be in five years not one of you would say I want to be the type of person who spends all day scrolling their phone looking at social media but why do we spend our time like that and I think the trick is that little bit of time that one hour it seems so insignificant and I think that's why it's important to remove ourselves from looking at a narrow box of an hour and look at a bigger span of something like five years of our lives think about this you know that 20 hours you spend binge watching that series on Netflix imagine you spent 20 hours writing handwritten notes to everybody that's made an impact on you in your life you could write a hundred notes in 20 hours imagine how meaningful would be to those people imagine how appreciated they feel imagine how much you would deepen your relationship with them you know networking guru Jordan Harbinger says if you want to be able to rely on relationships in the future you have to start cultivating them today I talked to students about this all the time of course it's important to study while you're in school but just as important is to make sure you're getting out there networking connecting with people learning what work is like in the real world and making positive impressions here's why when you're about to graduate and you see that dream job posted at the company you really want to work for you're the one who can call up the person you met for coffee a year ago and get some extra insight and get a referral for an interview but you can't do that after the job is already posted you have to start planting the seeds now that you want to harvest later on you know in business we say you can't always be working in your business you also have to work on your business when you're working in your business you're doing the same thing day to day and you're mostly going to stay in the same spot when you're working on your business you're creating a new vision and a new structure for you to grow and to evolve and to come in more alignment when I was in my mid-20s I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my life so I went back to school to do a master's in business administration at McMaster University now even though I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do I had an idea that this was going to give me business skills and I realized that almost everything is managed in some ways from hotels to hospitals to banks to government in other words I told myself even though I don't know the final destination I'm pretty sure that in five years this path will have set me up for success that turned out to be correct less than a decade later I completed my MBA I'd had some great jobs I started a business and I found myself on a plane headed to Liberia so for those of you who aren't as familiar Liberia is a small country on the west coast of Africa it's got a population about 5 million people between 1989 and 2003 Liberia was devastated by two civil wars which tore the country apart physically and psychologically even as Liberia struggled to revive itself from these horrible experiences Ebola struck in 2014 and 2015 and overwhelmed the healthcare system that was already operating far past capacity now during the war a young boy fled the country he managed to spend his teenage years on refugee camps in Ivory Coast and in Ghana and he was lucky enough to come to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee in his early 20s his name was Leo Johnson and we were connected by a mutual friend now even though Leo was a refugee had only been the country for a few years himself he was already trying to help others and actively organize in the community to get support for other newcomer youth in school and to help them succeed in life and he also had a vision that one day he was going to go back to Liberia and find a way to help rebuild his country so at this point cool shoes weren't that big a deal for me anymore I was looking for more meaning and more purpose in life so I joined him we created an organization called empowerment squared together with other volunteers we spent thousands of hours in the community doing grassroots work and building the organization and I was glad that years back I chosen to go back and do my MBA McMaster because now with those business skills I was putting them to use building an organization that was going to change the world so we became more and more successful Leo's the executive director I was the chair of the board we began hiring paid staff soon we were helping hundreds of youth and families in Canada every single year with things like academic mentoring programs free sports and recreation scholarships to post-secondary education and skills training for adult no comers so with the organization getting established in Canada is ready and it was time for us to turn our attention overseas when I landed in Liberia for the first time it was almost overwhelming here we were seeking to make change in a place that had no reliable supply of electricity or water a completely broken education system major sanitation issues almost no access to healthcare extreme poverty low rates of literacy every challenge you can think of but we took the same philosophy that I've been talking to you about today and we brought it to our work in Liberia we said if we're gonna make a meaningful change in Liberia in five years and for that it's to come what do we need to do today and how can we list others in this nation-building work so we hit the streets and the villages and the government offices and the slums we connected with people like Daniel Henderson Daniel's the Liberian who founded a nonprofit called change for Liberian children youth focused in Kerry's burg we use the resources of my marketing company to help him to tell the story and expand their fundraising efforts you can see in this picture here one of our visits to Kerry's burg we traveled there and we hold leadership training workshops for members of the community to talk to them about the resources they do have like arable land tons of sunlight and a resilient spirit all of which can be combined to create two agricultural exports which can help generate economic value for the community we work with people like Alma Harris um as an entrepreneur she founded a company called exquisite which imports products the country that aren't currently there and she's helping serve underserved local markets she's a role model for other entrepreneurs across the country this year we broke ground on the Liberian Learning Centre a major project of empowerment squared this is going to have the country's first comprehensive post-war library and Learning Centre it's going to have co-working spaces business incubation programs sports and recreation and event facilities this is yossel Avila Yasir returned to Liberia during the epicenter of the Ebola crisis and risked her life to work as a nurse on the frontlines of the crisis today she's about to graduate with her master's degree in public health from Harvard University and right now we're working with her on plans for massive transformation of Liberia's health care system well we didn't stop in Liberia we traveled to Ghana we work as mentors with the youth bridge foundation they host an event called the African youth and governance conference which brings together young leaders from across the continent and from across the world for intensive leadership training and discussions on how to create a brighter future for the continent this is a picture of one of our annual pilgrimage to the Braham refugee camp in Ghana the same refugee camp that Leo spent many of his teenage years at we travel here because we're working with camp leadership and people living on the camp to find a way they can take concrete steps to safely repatriate themselves to Liberia after decades away from their home country we went south we traveled to the Royal Bafokeng nation in South Africa and we hosted the baffling Business Summit we brought together business owners from across the nation to identify opportunities to work together and to seek opportunities to pursue local and national markets so at this point now we spoken to thousands of leaders and we mentor people every day especially young leaders who have a belief that there's always a way to create a brighter future for themselves now I'm sharing these examples because it's important to understand that no matter what your circumstances are or where you are in the world this is possible you can create capacity today and take steps today to create a brighter future for yourself for your family for your community and even for your country but I'm also sharing these examples to explain that the reason I have the privilege to do this type of work is because of decisions that I made in my past it's those countless hours that I spent developing professional skills that have put me in a position to travel to these places and do work that has high impact and actually creates social and economic value it's an intentional decision that I made years back to become a full-time entrepreneur that allows me the capacity that spend months at a time out of the country it's late nights that I spend basically every day after I finished my client work working on strategy and marketing communication for empowerment squared to help push the organization forward and find ways to create more impact it's all these decisions put together over the years that have created the platform that I stand on to do my work today because here's the thing you can't achieve the big things if you don't do the small things because the big things are just a set of small steps all put together and the more small steps you take the further you can go but you can't take any steps if you're sitting on the couch and I'm sure that future you doesn't want current you spending all your time on the couch today and that's not to say that our future self is more important than our current self it's just that we're living with our current self every moment and we think about our future self a lot less and that's why that five-year question is so important before I finish I have to make an appeal I started this talk by saying I wanted you inspired and ready to live a more intentional and successful life but it's not all about you or me we're all here together right now this world is facing climate change food insecurity growing inequality mental health crises corruption armed conflict the list goes on now I'm not here to be doom and gloom there's so much innovation and beauty in the world as well but what I am trying to say is that we have an incredible need for leadership in your family in your community and across every corner of this more interconnected world so the decisions that you make today they are important if five years from now you're healthy you're more skilled and educated you found passion and purpose and you've identified ways that you want to bring about the change you want to see in the world then you're empowered and you're in a more powerful position to lead and to influence we need you and we need your ambition so I can't wait to see you again in five years hear what everything you've achieved and see everything that you've become thank you [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 338,812

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Business, Achievement, Humanity, Start-up

Id: BffPMIAELFY

Length: 17min 23sec (1043 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2020