Life Crisis? Start a Business | Bailey Richert | TEDxHarrisburg

thank you I was sitting across the lunch table from a colleague when he asked me what I was going to do next you see it was 2013 and I was preparing to take my Professional Engineering licensing exams the terminal' certification for civil and environmental engineers and he said to me you basically have two options you can either leverage your new license for a higher salary at your current company stay and continue doing the same kind of work or you can leverage your license for a higher salary at a different company move and continue doing the same kind of work I have to be honest that neither one of those options really made my heart beat faster as far back as I could remember this marked the beginning of my quarter life crisis oh dear now I know what some of you are thinking how is it possible that any twenty-something who still has all of their hair and this incredible waistline stressed out to the point of a life crisis well please consider the rapid change and many life defining decisions that we go through in our 20s we graduate from college we got our first job we move to a new town we get our first place we find a significant other and we got to pay for that wedding on top of the mortgage for our first house then we have a dog two kids on the way all before we're 30 it's no wonder that three decades ago a person's first experience with depression would normally happen in their late 40s to early 50s what we would call the midlife crisis but today the average age of major depression onset is mid 20s and all of the studies that I have read consistently claim that the majority of mid to late 20-somethings in some cases 75% or more have gone through what they would consider a life crisis anecdotally I know this to be true from conversations that I've had with my peers once I started opening up about what I was feeling I realized that I was not alone in experiencing this we 20-somethings are groomed to believe that there is a particular path to success we continue down that path for so long never raising our heads even once to see whether or not the destination towards which we're headed is really where we want to be going and by the time we arrived we realized well maybe it wasn't maybe we left our dreams and aspirations on the side of the road somewhere in favor of stability and our parents approval and maybe we're just getting a little bit too old to become the person that we really wanted to be and maybe it's just a little bit too late and we're in too deep into this life that we've created for ourselves to make major change and then well the medical term for it is we freaked out I should know my own quarter life crisis was marked by incredibly physical and visceral reactions like high levels of anxiety and panic attacks but it was also marked by a lot of quiet retrospection I began to ask myself a lot of questions that I know the people in this room have asked of themselves as well like how did I even end up here is this really all there is am I doomed to sit in this cubicle for the next 50 years until I either retire or die I mean is this career my life's work really helping me to achieve my life's purpose is it these questions are big abstract existential even and I could not wrap my head around them let alone answer them concretely and even if I could honestly I'm not sure I would have known what steps to take next you see these big questions aren't actionable in fact they're the opposite they're paralyzing because God forbid if we should answer them incorrectly and take the wrong steps forward we might find ourselves back in the same spot a couple years from now having yet another life crisis well eventually your life crisis is going to come to a head you've got to do something about it and for most of us that's going to be a pretty superficial action we'll put a patch on our problem we'll make a change which really changes nothing you know the stereotypes that I'm talking about here you buy Ferrari because it makes you feel young and desirable or you get a divorce because obviously it's your significant others fault for traffic you in this position or you cut off all of your hair and diet a funky color to prove that you're still rebellious and different from everyone else around you well in 2013 I could not afford a fancy sports car I am not married and I happen to be very partial to this natural brunette hair color of mine so a dye job was not an option no I had to find a different patch for my problem my patch was to start a business to become an entrepreneur yeah in retrospect I think the Ferrari would have honestly been way more fun and maybe cheaper but hindsight is 20/20 no I decided to become an entrepreneur but please have no delusions about this I want to be very clear I did not become an entrepreneur and start a business because I thought it was going to help me work through my life crisis or give me a way to solve any of my problems No I started a business because I was looking for an excuse an excuse to quit my job an excuse to move to a new town an excuse to feel bold I didn't become an entrepreneur and start a business because it was my purpose or my goal I became an entrepreneur because I was looking for a way to get back my freedom and autonomy in life I was sick of asking my boss for permission to go to the dentist and if I'm being completely honest I just wanted to get the heck out of Dodge but the funny thing though is that entrepreneurship became way more than just a patch for my problem it actually was a journey of personal self-discovery which ultimately helped me to end my quarter life crisis and here is exactly how through the course of starting my own business I was forced to ask myself a lot of questions about how I wanted to run that business anything from where I want to toast my website online to what colors I wanted to represent my brand purple by the way I was making concrete decisions every day and moving my business forward well naturally some of those questions dealt with the integration of my business operations and my personal life so a perfect example would be where is the best place for me to establish my business and that really where I want to live it is through these actionable questions that entrepreneurship gave me the practical context for working through some of my larger more abstract issues in small meaningful steps that ultimately allowed me to end my quarter life crisis now while it is my hope that every single person in this room would go home and start a business of your own so that you might understand what it is I'm trying to convey here today I recognize that not everyone here has aspirations to become the next fortune 500 CEO but that is okay because what I have done is I have identified six of the most important actionable questions that I was forced to ask myself in the course of starting my business which ultimately helped me get to a better state of mind it is my sincere hope that these questions will act as a tool so that if any of you are going through your own life crisis when you're at home alone sitting on your bed asking one of those big abstract questions like what am I doing with my life you will put that out of your mind and instead you will turn to these questions and you will ask them and you will find those small meaningful steps that you need to take in your own life to get to a better State so without further ado our very first actionable question is all about enthusiasm what it is what is it that you get incredibly unapologetically excited about what would you spend all of your time doing for no other reason that it makes you really happy during a life crisis we are confronted with the harsh truth that our day-to-day lives have become pretty boring pretty monotonous and we no longer dedicate any time to those activities which really bring us true joy well one of the cool things that I think about entrepreneurship is you can pretty much start a business about almost anything and if you want your business to succeed it should definitely be something that you're really excited about so for me some of those things are teaching speaking writing coaching now I'm not going to lie to you running my own business is a lot of work but it's also more fun than any other job that I have ever had because every single day I get to do some of those activities that I really find joy in so if you're going through a life crisis I ask you to think about some of those activities that you really find joy in and to find ways to incorporate them into your everyday life not just on special occasions our next actionable question is all about knowledge what do you need to learn you know during a life crisis our mind spends a lot of time thinking about negative thoughts and it's really hard to get that worry out of our heads but I don't know about you whenever I'm learning something new diving in and trying to obtain a new skill especially if it's something that I'm excited about harkening back to question number one then I find I'm no longer spending time on those negative thoughts but rather I'm reading books and I'm also watching tutorial videos on YouTube when you're an entrepreneur there are a lot of new things that you need to learn and at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey you could have found me up at all hours of the night figuring out how to self publish my own book and reading blogs about sales tax now those were not nights spent lying in my bed tossing and turning and going to a very dark place there are things in life that we all should know by now we need to know or we want to know so whether it's a new language a new instrument learning how to code or it's something else entirely dedicate yourself to learning something new during your life crisis our third question is all about community who do you really want to spend your time around during a life crisis is incredibly important to surround yourself with people who understand what you're going through who will support you and whose company you genuinely enjoy but I think that if we're being honest with ourselves that's not always our nine-to-five co-workers entrepreneurship provides you with an opportunity to actually curate a community of people in your life that you want to have in your life versus just having to have people in your life because you happen to work at the same company when I was working my nine-to-five I was surrounded by a bunch of brilliant engineers but they were all men and they were all about 30 years older than me I really wanted to have more women more 20-somethings more creative type of people in my life and entrepreneurship gave me a great path to being able to find them through my partners my vendors my clients and even my competitors so I implore you if you're in the middle of a life crisis then take a judicious look at who is in your community whose company do you really desire that you don't have that you really want go out find them and make them a part of your community our next question is all about empowerment what are some short-term goals that you can accomplish today that will help you build back up that self-confidence in yourself that you have lost that you are going to need in the future inadequate not good enough those are some of the feelings that we have whenever we're in the middle of a life crisis and as an entrepreneur I have felt them to thinking that I didn't even deserve to be in business like I should just quit but I will never forget the day that I made my first sale to a total stranger somebody that I didn't know but a book that I wrote and I am convinced that they read it but I harnessed the empowered feeling that I had and I made a new goal to sell ten books and I achieved it so I made a new goal to sell a hundred and I achieved that and the pattern goes on during a life crisis it is incredibly easy for us to get obsessed with those long term goals that we're supposed to have that 10 year plan but I know that there are short-term goals in your life that you could be tackling right now that will help build back up that self-confidence you lost somewhere along the way so whether it's running your first half marathon or singing that solo in church on Sunday figure out one of those short-term goals that you can tackle you can conquer you can look at and say I did that harness that empowerment and then leverage it for your future opportunities speaking of future opportunities what groundwork can you lay today that will help you get those future opportunities when they come around now trapped is a word that I often hear people say when they're in the middle of a life crisis they feel like they can't get out of their current circumstance and go after what they really want because there are things that are holding them back maybe they want to take a new job which is ultimately going to pay less but they can't because they have a mortgage to worry about or maybe they want to move to a new city but they have a family they need to consider now being an entrepreneur teaches us that we need to be prepared for any moment that our next big break is right around the corner and so maybe if you do want to move in the future to be more mobile you need to start downsizing your possessions or maybe if you want to get a new job you need to acquire a new skill or put in place a new revenue stream what is some of the groundwork that you can lay in your own life to help you leverage those future opportunities when they come around and lastly legacy in the middle of a life crisis it's pretty easy to stay focused on me it's on yourself it's pretty easy to say well my life my predicament my future but what we end up doing is creating a bubble of self-pity around ourselves that's pretty difficult to break through but we don't live in a bubble we live on a planet with seven billion other people and I can pretty much guarantee you that almost everyone has a life that is harder than yours now I don't say that in any way to belittle or negate the feelings that you go through during a life crisis but I will be the very first to admit that during a life crisis we tend to get a little bit self-centered and the thing that I have noticed about self-centered individuals is that they do not leave very charitable legacies entrepreneurship is all about taking the focus off of ourselves and putting it on others at its core entrepreneurship is all about service because we have to walk in somebody else's shoes and understand their problems if we have any hope of creating a product that can alleviate their pains now just like an individual has a legacy companies have legacies too they're called brands I think that each one of us can think of a couple brands in our head which ultimately have positive legacies based on customer service and also good works but I think that we can all name a couple of brands that we look ill upon because of their single focus on profit making whenever I started my business from the very beginning I said to myself that I wanted to create a brand known for customer service and the positive impact that I was going to have on other people's lives and I want the exact same thing for my legacy in life and the only way I know to achieve that in both cases is through service so in the middle of your life crisis when you find yourself saying me myself and I just a little bit too much that I hope that you will think about your legacy and go out and serve the world now in the middle of my life crisis I was absolutely convinced that it would never ever end and I certainly wouldn't want to ever go back and live through it again which is why I know that people listening to me today who are going through their own life crises are going to think I'm crazy when I say that now that it's all said and done I'm actually really glad that it happened and I'm not the only one who thinks that according to one study 80% of respondents who had been through a life crisis actually said that they looked upon the experience with favor because ultimately it helped them helped us carve our own paths to success our life crises were catalysts for change but we know the change doesn't come without action so I hope today our exploration of these actionable questions will aid you to make progress out of your own life crises and well if it doesn't I'm sure Ferrari would love to have your business thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 77,364

Rating: 4.8646822 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Business, Change, Life, Life Development, Women in business

Id: ybZp0Fi-Hws

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2016