Reviewer: Mirjana Δutura Thank you. So, I'm 10 years old,
and today is going to be a great day because today my mom
is going to take me to the beach. And so, we scramble to the car, and we drive down
and stop at the traffic lights, and we all reach over in unison,
and we lock the doors. And as we drive along
the coast road to the beach, a bus bears down towards me, and above the driver's head
is a big sign that says, "Whites only." As we arrive at the beach, there's a big fence
down the middle of the beach, dividing the beautiful
white big sandy section and a small little black rocky section. I turn to my mom, and I say, "Mommy, why is there
a fence down the beach?" And she says, "Honey, that's to keep the white people
separate from the black people." So, I'm 10 years old,
and on this journey alone, I've already learned
that black people are dangerous because they might hijack our car and black people need to be kept separate. I'm 10 years old,
and I'm already a racist. Now, fast-forward 18 years, and my life is starting
to look pretty rosy. I'm a music producer. A song I wrote has risen to number one on the South African Top 40 charts
and stayed there for six weeks. I've just fallen in love
with a beautiful woman, but underneath my thin veneer
of the appearance of success, I felt really numb inside. Have any of you ever felt
numb inside before? You had that feeling? Thank you. But of course, I wouldn't tell
any about that. When people asked me how I was doing,
I'd say, "Hey, I'm fine. How are you?" to prevent them from really discovering
the deep resignation I had about my life. Now, around about that same time, during the transition from South Africa's
apartheid government to our democracy, it became really hip to be seen
as what we called a "New South African," somebody who was a liberal white
South African who embraced the change. I proudly wore the badge
of being a New South African until one day a mentor of mine
came up to me, and he said, "Bruce, how many
black friends do you have?" And immediately,
I lied to him and said, "Three" because I couldn't actually think of one. He said, "You mean to say out of 38 million black people
in this country, you only know three of them?" And at that moment,
it hit me what a hypocrite I was. Here I was wearing
the liberal "New South African" badge when in fact, I was still a racist. When my black house cleaner came to clean, I'd get really uncomfortable
and couldn't wait for her to leave. When I'd leave
my recording studio at night, and I saw black people
loitering around the car, I'd wait in reception
even for half an hour until they left before I got into my car. So, I decided to do something about it. I decided I was going to get
to know my culture and conquer my fear of black people, and I rented a house
in the black ghetto called Gugulethu just outside Cape Town
in an area called the Kak Yard, which directly translated
from Afrikaans means the crap yard. So, imagine the scene: I'm driving down the street at 10 o'clock
on a Monday morning two weeks later to move into this new house
that I've never seen before. And the street's deserted except the two men sitting,
drinking beer on beer crates, and I open the door to my new house, I am thinking, "Wow, several steps down
from the house I used to live in, right, which was that one." But I'm pretty grateful because I could have been living in that
with no running water. So, I go out to my car
to unload the boxes off my car, and as I do, a crowd has started
to gather around the car. I'm thinking, "Oh, man,
now I'm in trouble." There must've been 10 to 15
black people standing there, and a woman comes forward to me, and she says, "Umlungu,
what are you doing?" Now, "umlungu" means whitey
in their local language, which is called Xhosa. I said, "I'm moving in?" Now, if there ever was a textbook picture for what the facial expression
of confusion looked like, her face would have been
in the book right then. You couldn't hear a pin drop
as she translated this into Xhosa. And then one of my favorite
African expressions for disbelief, which is "Ao!" (Laughter) And they were shaking their heads. I could see them thinking, you know,
"What on earth's going on?" So, she says, "Why are you moving in?" Now, at this point, I'm thinking, "Things are going to go a lot smoother
if I just kind of say, 'I wanted to get to know my culture, so I came to kind of
get to know you guys for a bit. Please don't hurt me. I'm not dangerous.'" Right? But I knew what would happen if I did. I would never conquer
my fear of black people, and I'd always be that hypocrite pretending to be a liberal
New South African. So, I took a deep breath, and I said, "Well, I recently discovered I'm a racist,
and I'm terrified of black people, and I've come here to conquer my fear." Total looks of disbelief all around. (Laughter) And more "Ao!" (Laughter) I can see them thinking
why this crazy white guy would a) even visit the Kak Yard, b) rent a dilapidated house
as the only white guy for five miles, and then c) admit he was a racist. You understand I was kind of asking
myself the same question. So, the woman comes forward, and she says, "Umlungu, can we help you
carry your boxes into the house?" And I'm thinking, "Oh, no, now
they're going to steal everything I own." (Laughter) If I say no, they're going to be offended,
and, you know, they might get upset, reject me from the community,
maybe even kill me. But in that moment,
I caught my racial conditioning. This was the exact thing
I'd come to conquer, to get past, so I said, "Sure. Why not?" So, one by one, they take the boxes off my car,
load them into the house. Nothing, of course, gets stolen. Instead, a party ensues
like nothing I've ever experienced before. This is me on the right-hand side,
drinking Umqombothi, and Umqombothi is an African beer
brewed in paint cans that you drink out of paint cans. Tastes disgusting. If you're ever offered it, do not say yes. (Laughter) But this party ensued
like none I'd ever experienced: I was hugged, I was kissed,
I was questioned, I was fed, I was poured alcohol and generally treated
like a prodigal son returning home - the exact opposite experience
of what I had been expecting. And that evening, I went to bed
a little tired and a little drunk, but I couldn't sleep because I was kept awake
by the sound of gunshots and the sound of police sirens and the sound of screams
from the house next door, and I fully expected in every moment that somebody was going
to beat down my door, steal everything I own, put a gun to my head and pull the trigger. I woke up the next morning,
and obviously, that hadn't happened. So, I went outside
and did what everybody else did, which is take breakfast
onto the street and eat because in the Kak Yard,
everything happens on the street. And as I'm eating,
a little boy walks up to me, with a backpack on his back,
on his way to school. He walks up to me, sees me,
stops in his tracks, looks up, and he says, "Umlungu, you live here?" I just kind of nod my head
and wait to see what he does, and then he looks down to his feet again, and he says two words I'll never forget. He looks up at me and says, "Welcome home." And at that moment, 28 years of racial conditioning evaporated and took my numbness
and resignation with it, and then he walked off. That's him. After a month, I couldn't leave. I ended up staying six months
as the only white man for five miles amongst 100,000 black people
in the Kak Yard, and my life changed forever. Did my depression
and my numbness disappearing have anything to do
with being a racist? Who knows? But what I do know for sure is that when I started sharing the truth
about who I really am, I could no longer present the mask
to the world called, "Hey, I'm fine." And the numbness
had nowhere to live anymore. And today, I've flown to Las Vegas to share with you what I've learned
over the last nine years about what it takes
to live a life filled with aliveness. So, I'd like you to join me
in taking a deep breath for a moment. (Inhales) And out. (Exhales) Thank you. So, let's look
at this concept of aliveness. I want you to consider that every one of us in this room
right now in this moment has something we're hiding
about who we are, what we've done or how we feel: a secret that perhaps
we're too afraid to tell. For me, nine years ago,
it was being a racist. For a friend of mine, it's that she'd kissed another man
and hasn't told her boyfriend yet. And for you, it might be something
completely different, big or small, but whatever it is, if I've learned one thing, it's that the secrets we hide
have a devastating impact on our life. When we hide secrets,
we're forced to lie about who we are, and we present ourselves to the world
as something that we're not, and when we do that for long enough, we lose touch with who we actually
authentically are. And the aliveness that we once felt
as children gets replaced by numbness. Imagine you've got a hosepipe
that's twisted, and you're trying to water a garden -
no water comes out. If you don't untwist the hosepipe, the garden eventually
wilts and dies, right? Now, your secrets
act like a twist in the hosepipe that allows aliveness
to flow through your life, and unless we untwist the hosepipe by exposing ourselves
and sharing our secrets, we'll always live with some form
of a garden that's wilting, some form of numbness. So, let's look at aliveness
a little bit deeper. If you think about it, if we were born to live, L-I-V-E, then surely being alive, A-L-I-V-E, is what it's all about, right? The dictionary defines "aliveness"
as having life, living, not dead, or lifeless. It's that feeling you get when you go up to somebody
you really, really, really like and ask them out on a first date. How many of you guys know that feeling? Right, heart beating like crazy. It's that feeling you get
when you do an extreme sport or when you take a risk or you do something that scares
the living crap out of you. It's that feeling that most people
are tempted to buy when they come to Las Vegas
to gamble money in the casino, that temporary rush of aliveness. So, if we're born with this innate ability
to experience being alive, how come we don't experience
it all the time? Because we've become so good
at looking outside of ourselves to get our fix of aliveness that we've forgotten
we can self-generate it in any moment. We look from TV, we look to get it from the Internet,
extreme sports, sex, drugs, rock and roll, whatever it is. And as long as we're looking
outside of ourselves to get our fix of aliveness, it's always going to be fleeting:
here one second, gone the next. Joseph Campbell actually says it
a lot better than I can. He says, "We're so engaged in doing things
to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value. The rapture that's associated
with being alive is what it's all about. So, I want to share with you a story. I got an email from a man recently,
and he writes to me - I've written it down on the paper
because I was never going to remember. He writes to me, and he says,
"Bruce, I've been married for 23 years, and I've not made love to my wife
in the last 18 years." He says, "We have the outward appearance
of a perfect marriage, but I'm riddled with inner turmoil. I respect my wife,
but I'm too afraid to hurt her, so I continue in the marriage
but feel like a fraud. I've never been faithful, and I think I'm addicted
to falling in love." He's talking about that feeling
of being alive he's addicted to. "I often think of suicide
as my way out of my marriage. I realize I've pretty much lived the sham throughout my entire life
for fear of being judged. Please help me." Now, he is a smart, aware man
willing to consider suicide before he's actually
willing to reveal his secrets. And I think his story really illustrates how as a society, we've become
so conditioned not to own up to who we are and to what we've done for fear of being judged. I could really relate to him because in my marriage,
I cheated on my wife for three years, and for three years, I never told her -
something I'm not particularly proud of. At the end of the marriage, I actually came clean
and took responsibility for what I'd done. We got divorced, and I believe one of the only reasons
we're still very close friends today is because I shared my secret
and I told the truth. But in John's case,
he was unwilling to share his secret. He was too terrified
of the consequences of sharing a secret. But the irony is, is that very often the consequences
of keeping our secrets to ourself far outweigh the consequences
of actually sharing our secrets. In John's case, the consequences of keeping a secret, it was having him
want to commit suicide, right? In my case, I could've never predicted that a week after I shared with my wife
I'd been cheating on her for three years, she met the man of her dreams
and is still with him today. I could've never predicted
that five weeks later, I would end up
fulfilling a childhood dream and moving to an island in the Caribbean
where I still live today. My point is - well, I reached out to John firstly,
and I said to him, "Look, I'm willing to support you,
give you some coaching for free for as long as it takes if you share with your wife
what you've done because when we share
our truth with others, we empower them to find their own peace," and I never heard from John again. The lesson here is that, like anything worth having,
self-liberation comes at a price, and the price is getting
out of your comfort zone. And the thing that's going to stop you
from getting out of your comfort zone and experiencing the freedom
and the rapture of being alive, which Joseph Campbell talks about, is telling yourself, "But I don't have
'any secrets' I am hiding." And maybe you don't. Maybe you are one of the few people
who's transparent and transformed, and there may be a few in the room, but I'd like you to consider this: professor of psychology
at University Massachusetts, his name's Robert Feldman,
he's an expert in deception, and his research shows that when two people
meet each other for the first time, they lie on average three times
every 10 minutes. So, if at times
we're lying 18 times an hour, I invite you to consider that perhaps we're all liars
to some degree and we all have secrets, and the best we can do
is not to try and stop lying. The best we can do, if we're all liars, is to tell the truth
about where we've lied and openly and honestly
take responsibility for what we've done. So, I'd like to tell you the truth. Right now, the secret I'm hiding from you is
I'm really terrified of giving this talk. I really want you to like me. I want to impress you. I have mentors in this audience
who I deeply want to impress. I want to have this talk on TED.com, and secretly, I'm hoping
that the speakers that are following me are quaking in their boots now, thinking, "How am I ever
going to follow Bruce's talk?" (Laughter) Yeah, I'm a jerk. So, do I risk, you know - when I'm exposing myself,
am I risking you thinking I'm a fraud? Perhaps. But in being authentically who I am,
do I feel more alive? My heart's beating
at a million miles an hour. Can I connect with you in a deeper way? Absolutely. And this is the invitation
I want to extend to you: that you begin sharing the secrets that you're hiding from the people
you love in your life with them, and get in touch with this. Joseph Campbell said that,
"Experience the rapture of being alive." I saw this happen in South Africa in 1996 during the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was designed to heal our nation
of the wounds of apartheid. And victims of gross, you know,
acts of human violence were invited to come up
in this kind of road-show format, taken around the country, and share what actually happened to them: share their stories and share these beautiful
and touching and moving, often horrendously violent stories, and they were televised. And then the perpetrators of these crimes
were invited to come up: murderers, people who'd beaten people to death
were invited to come up and confess and request amnesty. And sometimes the murderers would actually meet
the parents of their victims, and throughout this process,
our nation healed, and aliveness returned to South Africa
as our secrets were exposed, that we never had before, so much so that
this is our tourist slogan now. South Africa: alive with possibility. This isn't an advertisement
for South Africa. This is an advertisement for your life because you too can regain
that rapture of being alive. You too can hold your own
truth and reconciliation commission in your own life, and here's where I recommend you begin. I recommend you begin
with your big secret first - the one that scares the crap
out of you to share, the one that robs you
of aliveness the most. Maybe you're angry with a friend, and you haven't found
the courage to tell them yet, and there's distance
between the two of you as a result. Maybe you've lied
to somebody close to you, and, you know, you haven't found
the courage to tell them yet, and the love you once felt
for them is fading away. Maybe you're still in the closet
about being homosexual. Or maybe you're hiding an addiction, and your secret double life is preventing you from connecting
with people in a meaningful way. Maybe you've had an abortion
and haven't told the father of the baby. Maybe you've cheated
on a lover, like I did, and haven't owned up to it yet, and intimacy you once felt
in your relationship is gone. Or maybe it's none of those things,
big or small, whatever it is for you. To lie and keep secrets
is a fundamental part of being human. And lying and keeping secrets
does not make you a bad person, and sharing your secrets
and cleaning up your lies, certainly, doesn't make you
a good person, right? It just allows you
to be authentically yourself and create a life worth living
from being who you are. Now, I'll be the first to admit that telling nothing but the truth
about who you are, what you've done, how you feel, it's a radical stand to take. So, a word of warning: this course of action
isn't for the faint of heart, right? Things may get a lot worse
before they get better when you begin sharing the secrets
you've been hiding from the world. You may be ending up on the receiving end
of a lot of pain and a lot of anger when you first share those secrets. But I want to promise you something: if you open your heart and take responsibility for having kept
those secrets over the years and sit with the people who you've upset
until they're complete, I promise you an aliveness
will return to your life like you've never experienced before, and it won't be just
a fleeting, temporary fix that most of us are looking for
outside of ourselves. It'll be a way of being
that stays with you. So, if you have no interest
in self-liberation, please don't remember a word I said, and very please, don't share
your secrets with anybody, because once you do, a world without numbness awaits you,
a world filled with aliveness. So, the question I want
to leave you with is, What's your secret, and how honest and open and real
are you willing to be if sharing it would bring
you back to life? Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers)
Very good video. There are good parts around 8:27, 12:57(and more,) but I recommend you watch it the whole thing if you have the time.
Be very careful though. Admitting to your JW bigot parents about not believing any more can harm you if you are a child. Protect yourself first.
Nice, good to see one of my countrymen do something about racism as well π
I wasn't sure where this was going at first and how it applied to JW PIMOs - GREAT VIDEO! I think it also relates to me as POMO df'd person because I tend not to share much about my background with others but when I do I'm nearly always met with kindness and compassion.
Beautiful video, at first I was a tad bit oblivious, but the sharing of secrets part got me hooked on. I like it and it gets me to think even more. Thank you u/exjw-