Pod Insights TED Radio Hour What can you control in this chaotic world? About this episode When it feels like the world is on fire, it's hard to know what's in your control and what's out of your hands. This hour, TED speakers explain ways you can reclaim your agency. Guests include financial advisor Matt Pitcher, sociologist Anindya Kundu, journalist Jennifer Wallace and design thinking professor Bill Burnett.
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Transcript 8,523 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:52 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm Manoush Zomorodi. There is a fantasy that hundreds of millions of us each year indulge in. We buy lottery tickets.
1:03 Speaker 02 These numbers could change your life.
1:05 Manoush Zomorodi? Because if you didn't have to worry about money.
1:07 Speaker 03 I just won 250,000.
1:10 Manoush Zomorodi? You could do everything you always wanted to do, be the person you were meant to be.
1:15 Speaker 03 I just won 250,000. I think everyone plays the lottery in the hope that it could be them that wins. It feels like it's gonna be amazing.
1:28 Manoush Zomorodi? Matt Pitcher is a financial advisor, and he has heard this many, many times.
1:33 Speaker 03 So I run a wealth management firm in Hampshire, here in the UK. And we specialize in dealing with people who suddenly get money.
1:43 Manoush Zomorodi? Yes, for the past 20 years, Matt has advised people who have actually won the lottery in the UK. It's a service actually set up by the Lotto Company. They put the new winner in touch with a financial advisor.
1:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's right. So they give their winner two weeks to kind of go on that emotional roller coaster. And at the end of the two weeks, they'd bring them into an office and sit them down with myself and a lawyer to go through perhaps all the things to bring them back down to earth.
2:14 Manoush Zomorodi? And you know that old saying, be careful what you wish for?
2:18 Speaker 03 Everyone's got a vision of what it's like to win the lottery in their head when they're playing. The reality, of course, is very different.
2:28 Manoush Zomorodi? The world feels particularly chaotic right now, and it can make you wonder how much of your future is in the hands of luck, circumstance, or people who don't care what your plans are. When do you and don't you have agency? Well, today on the show, ideas about seizing what's in your control and making the most of what you have. Which brings us back to Matt Pitcher. Over his career, Matt saw how the literal luck of the draw, winning the lottery, prompted people to do what they'd always wanted to. And for some folks, this was very straightforward, like the guy who bought the car of his dreams.
3:10 Speaker 03 Out of all of the winners I ever met, he had the clearest vision of what he wanted. He was after a lime green Lamborghini and somewhere to house it. But he wanted to house it where he was, build a house where he could live with the car. And actually, he lived over the car. So the car had the ground floor. He had the first floor and he could look through. He had a little window in the floor and he could sit in an armchair and look through at the car.
3:37 Manoush Zomorodi? The winner didn't have a driver's license and had no plans to get one. He just wanted the car. But for other people, deciding what to do with the typical win of about a million pounds was more complicated.
3:50 Speaker 03 Every winner was completely different in their reaction and where they got to. Some people were, by the time they came in, they'd kind of processed it already. Some people were very, very far back on their emotional journey. They were still in turmoil. And in some cases, we had people come in with family members and just the maelstrom of emotion in the room when you've got children who don't know if they're going to receive some of the win, but they're in the same room talking about what the plan is with the win. You know, so many different reactions from different winners over the years.
4:31 Speaker 03 Two thirds of adults in the UK play the lottery at least once a year.
4:37 Manoush Zomorodi? Matt Pitcher continues from the TED stage.
4:40 Speaker 03 That's over thirty six million of us. Nothing else really unites us in those kind of numbers. So we must be doing it because we want to win, right? Because we think that that money is going to change our lives for the better.
5:00 Speaker 03 Well, let me take you back several years. It's a boiling hot summer's day. And I'm sat in an office with broken air conditioning.
5:11 Speaker 03 I have very unwisely chosen to wear a dark suit. And I can feel sweat starting to run down my tight shirt collar. Sat opposite me is the most miserable man I have ever met.
5:27 Speaker 03 This man has just won the lottery.
5:32 Manoush Zomorodi? In your talk, you describe meeting a man, a winner, who actually didn't feel lucky at all. Can you take me back to that meeting? What was the story he told you?
5:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, so that was probably the toughest meeting I ever had. And when I started advising lottery winners, you'd very often go into your local corner shop, where you'd probably bought your ticket in the first place. And you would ask the person behind the counter to actually check your ticket for you. The person who you probably see every day for a pint of milk and a loaf of bread.
6:04 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
6:05 Speaker 03 And the problem with that, in a small community, in a village community, it always leaks out that you've won the lottery. And in his case, it had, and it had quickly. You know, and so within two weeks, he had been approached by neighbors, by family members, asking for a share of the winnings. And this was a community they'd lived in for years. They loved the community, they were about to retire. And by the time actually he met with me, he and his wife had decided that the only way they could cope with the pressure they were under now was to move out of the area that they were living in.
6:41 Manoush Zomorodi? It brought out the ugly side, it sounds like, of of some people around him.
6:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, absolutely. And and broke relationships for him, which were ones that he he valued, I think. And actually, I think the key point for him and his wife was that they financially, they were about to get to the point where everything was right, where they'd done all of the things that we tell people to do. They'd saved into the pension. The expenditure was under control, mortgage was paid off. They were ready for that next stage of life financially. They'd done all the right things. And then actually, this injection of money just completely destabilized their situation.
7:20 Manoush Zomorodi? Do you think they had regrets that they played the lottery at all?
7:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, so it sounds odd to say, and I know it's hard to have sympathy for someone in this kind of situation, but but yes, yeah, he absolutely did because it it disrupted his life. And it was a life that he was very happy with. And actually, I don't know if he knew how happy he was with his life until his life was disrupted by by the win. The one positive that they took away from it was that when they did rebuild, they rebuilt with purpose, knowing what was important.
7:52 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, because I think we have these visions of being like our true selves, if only financially we would be set free in some ways. But you've learned it's not that simple.
8:04 Speaker 03 It it makes you reflect on your own life and and where you're seeing value and purpose in your own life. Because actually, for a lot of these winners, they end up realizing, not necessarily immediately, but over time, they end up realizing that a lot of the things that are truly important to them are things that they they could have achieved without the money if they'd have just focused on what it was that mattered. You know, things which actually, well, most of us have been gifted with anyway, without a lottery win. And I'm reminded of that every day.
8:36 Manoush Zomorodi? Did you ever have to coach people to decide which thing to spend their money on? Because as you say, like, it's a lot of money, a million pounds. But it's not like they can, everyone could quit their jobs, buy a huge house, travel the world. There have to be some choices, I would think.
8:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we did have to do that quite a lot. There's a very famous winner in the UK who won 10 million when he was 19. And he spent that money within 10 years. By the time he was 29, he was back in a, in a sort of a minimum wage job.
9:14 Manoush Zomorodi? No way.
9:14 Speaker 03 He's pretty well known because the, the tabloid newspapers in the UK followed him for the whole of the 10 years whilst he was spending the money very visibly, very publicly.
9:24 Manoush Zomorodi? On what? How do you blow through that?
9:27 Speaker 03 On, on his favorite football club, on cars. Again, cars are often a very good way of getting rid of money quickly. And on houses, fail business ventures, you name it, you know, he, he did it. And actually now he says he's, he doesn't regret anything about those 10 years and that he's glad the money ran out because he's not sure he'd be alive if, if he'd have won anymore, given what he was doing to his body. But yeah, we, so we did have to coach people. So I had a couple who, young couple in their early twenties who didn't own a home and, and who loved going on holiday. And they wanted to buy a house that would be the forever house, so the family home in the countryside. But they also had the dream of, of having nice holidays every year.
10:11 Speaker 03 And unfortunately, mathematically, they couldn't have both. And so I spent a long time coaching them to, to accept the property, which is the one they went for. They went for that family home, they bought it. And unfortunately, as the years went on, the holiday budget just crept up and crept up and what was left of the winnings slowly shrunk and shrunk. Until I think by the time they're in their early 30s, about 10 years, they'd actually run out of the money to pay for the nicer holidays. Now that is, I mean, again, it's, you know, maybe for the audience, it's difficult to be too sympathetic, but for them, that's really hard because in your twenties, if you've had a decade of going on very nice holidays.
10:53 Speaker 03 You've then probably got another, what, fifty, sixty years where you're not going to be going on nice holidays anymore. And you've got used to it for a decade. So that is tough.
11:02 Manoush Zomorodi? That's my lesson to my kids. Don't upgrade because once you do, it's hard to go back.
11:07 Speaker 03 It's very hard to go back, always.
11:10 Manoush Zomorodi? Are there questions that you give people? Do you tell them, you know, ask yourself this? Come back after you've given it some thought.
11:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, so a really good one, actually, is to think about when you've been your happiest. And then think about, well, what was the essence of what I was enjoying about that moment? Because actually, you can pursue those moments. And very often, when you get people to answer that question, they won't say, oh, it was when I bought a house or bought a car or got a pay rise or a promotion. They'll say, well, it was, well, inevitably, it's very often, it was when I was spending time with someone else. They'll tell you a memory they've got of a time with someone else that was enjoyable, that was full of, of love or passion or just happiness, joyfulness.
12:02 Speaker 03 And actually, you can replicate those moments for free. Frankly, that, that doesn't need money. Money can help you to work less, to create a bit of time to, to be able to pursue those, those moments and that happiness. But that's all it boils down to.
12:20 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
12:22 Speaker 03 If you speak with people towards the end of life, and particularly if you ask about regrets, they will always say, I regret not spending enough time with friends, not spending enough time with my loved ones, spending too much time in work. You know, it's the consistent same things over and over again for those that are in long-term care or, or hospice care. And, and it's the same with winners. Once they realize that they haven't got so many financial limits on their ambitions anymore, they suddenly realize that actually, buying lots of things is not going to bring them any long-term pleasure.
13:00 Manoush Zomorodi? When we come back, the Lotto winner who made the most of every cent and how you can too, even if you don't hit the jackpot. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. Stay with us.
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14:34 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. On the show today, ideas about agency, when we can take control of our lives and when we can't. So we were just talking to financial advisor Matt Pitcher, who has worked with lottery winners to help them manage their money. And he has seen firsthand how money was not the shortcut to fulfilling their dreams.
14:58 Speaker 03 A lottery winner isn't going to give you that if you are not already in a place where you understand what you're passionate about or where your values lie. It isn't. It's just going to make you a wealthier version of you today. So if you're a really deeply unhappy person, you just become a wealthier, deeply unhappy person. It isn't a fix. Money is not a fix. It's a tool that we can use to make things better for ourselves, but you've got to understand that point first.
15:31 Speaker 03 So our last winner for today is the one that stuck with me the most vividly over the years. They were a young couple who worked full-time to support their young family.
15:45 Speaker 03 They didn't want to spend it on an exotic car, but actually planned to spend half of the win on their home and they gave up their jobs and lived on the other half.
15:57 Speaker 03 Eighteen months later, well, they'd blown through the entire fortune. They had to return to their jobs and their old lives pre-win. But actually, this one isn't a cautionary tale.
16:14 Speaker 03 In this case, what I haven't told you is they had a young son who was severely disabled and needed round the clock care. They spent the money adapting their home to make their son's life more comfortable with his disability. And then the second thing they did with the money was just pop it in the bank account and he gave up work and lived on, on the cash that they had left over from the win. And, you know, the, the money went in that eighteen months, they, they burnt through it very, very quickly. But their son was so ill that he, he actually died at the end of the eighteen month period and, and dad went back to work pretty much straight away.
16:53 Speaker 03 And for me, it was the best investment that I've ever seen anyone make, an investment in time. You know, again, it, it always comes back to time, doesn't it?
17:04 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
17:04 Speaker 03 He had time with his son for the final eighteen months of, of his life. Um, and that's something that without that win, they never would have achieved.
17:15 Manoush Zomorodi? The, the element of chance in all of this for good or pain, you know, the chance that their son was born with this eventually fatal disability, the chance that there was that they won the lottery, just it's, life is very much out of our hands in a lot of ways.
17:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, if the win had happened eighteen months, two years later, it would have been of no use whatsoever to, to that particular family. Um, and potentially if it had happened earlier in their lives, actually may not have had such a profound impact on them. Um, it came along at exactly the right time and it was amazing to just be a part of that, even, even for that brief snapshot, um, that I was involved.
18:02 Manoush Zomorodi? So as we look forward to this new year, for many, many people, it's a financial look. It's, you know, I want to get out of debt, or I want to finally make enough to go on that vacation, or get a job where I, well, get a job for a lot of people. It's a tough market out there. As a financial planner who has seen people in these extraordinary circumstances, is there any advice you can give to our listeners as to maybe a mindset or this idea of like where they can have agency and where maybe they can't? I don't know.
18:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, look, so I think it's important for all of us to start from an assumption that we're not going to win the lottery. So let's deal with what's in front of us. Often a useful exercise is to think, okay, well, if I'm sat here next year and I'm reflecting back on the year I've just had, what would have made me feel like that's a meaningful year, a year well-lived? I think it's important first and foremost to plan out and be intentional with the experiences and the people that we're going to spend time with. And if you want to have some financial goals as well layered on top, great, but don't start with
19:23 Speaker 03 those. That may sound odd from a financial planner, but start with the time goals first of all. The time is the thing that we're all given as a budget, and that is a budget that a lot of us spend very, very freely on nonsense like scrolling on our phones, frankly.
19:43 Speaker 03 Look, I've not lived a perfectly calm and meditative life as a result of dealing with lottery winners, so I don't know anyone who has. But it has taught me to try and wherever possible achieve a balance. So a balance with the time I give to my family, the time I give to work, and the time I give to friends. I'm perhaps a little bit more planned out than some of my, some of my friends when it comes to making sure.
20:09 Manoush Zomorodi? I would hope so.
20:10 Speaker 03 Yeah. It's that time planning, isn't it? I think it's the intentionality. I tend to be the one who will proactively contact friends to just carve out a bit of time to spend in relationship with them, maybe more so than the other way around.
20:26 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Matt Pitcher. He's the founder and managing partner of Altor Wealth Management. You can see his full talk at ted.com. So on this episode, we're talking about agency. And it happens to be a subject that academics have been debating for years.
20:46 Speaker 05 Agency is a kind of a founding idea in the discipline of sociology.
20:51 Manoush Zomorodi? This is sociologist Anindya Kundu.
20:55 Speaker 05 One of the founding conversations we have is asking, what is more influential in determining a person's life? Is it a person's character, which is sort of an amorphous concept? Or is it these social sociological structures, which are also kind of hard to pin down?
21:11 Manoush Zomorodi? One answer to this debate came from psychologist Angela Duckworth, who believed the biggest factor for determining someone's trajectory? Whether they had grit.
21:23 Speaker 05 And it basically means that there is an immense power to having long-term passion and perseverance for certain goals.
21:31 Manoush Zomorodi? Duckworth explained more on the TED stage in 2013.
21:36 Speaker 06 One characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.
21:50 Manoush Zomorodi? And the concept struck a nerve. Soon grit was everywhere. There is a new buzzword in education. Foundations funded research. The MacArthur Foundation fellows. Duckworth wrote a book called Grit. And schools raced to develop grit in their students.
22:06 Speaker 06 That grit may be just as important to teach as reading and math.
22:11 Speaker 05 And a lot of schools where you see high levels of poverty were very quick to adopt grit as a sort of cultural value. They believed would help their students succeed.
22:22 Manoush Zomorodi? Back then, Anindia was teaching at NYU and getting his PhD. He was researching agency. And the idea that grit was the key ingredient for a student's success, it seemed simplistic.
22:36 Speaker 05 Angela's work was convincing, but some of her early research was relatively homogeneous. You know, she studied West Point cadets who made it through beast barracks. She studied spelling bee finalists, high academic achievers, to kind of figure out what was a part of their success. But in so doing, the recipe of success that was being lost was that, OK, these young people all may have had some sort of similar life experiences or supports. And, you know, from my work, what I was seeing was a one-digit difference in a young person's zip code where they're born or where they grew up can lead to 15 years difference in life expectancy. And another huge predictor of youth success is parents' level of income.
23:18 Speaker 05 And so those sociological factors were not necessarily a part of this widespread adoption of grit.
23:25 Manoush Zomorodi? OK, but rather than keep your critique of grit to yourself, you ended up going very public with your pushback.
23:31 Speaker 05 Yeah. And so what I ended up doing was with one of my mentors, his name is Pedro Noguera, we wrote an op-ed published in MSNBC called "Why Do Students Need More Than Grit?" The op-ed got a lot of traction, and we basically presented an example of a young person. He did everything he was supposed to, but he was undocumented. And because he was undocumented, he wasn't able to go to college. So you can have a lot of grit to succeed academically, but if the structural conditions around you are not also supportive of that grit, then you can only go so far.
24:05 Manoush Zomorodi? What did Angela Duckworth think of the article that you wrote? Did she have an opinion?
24:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, very much so.
24:15 Speaker 05 You know, the op ed had come across her radar. She also had a similar visceral reaction.
24:21 Manoush Zomorodi? In her podcast episode, Angela Duckworth describes her first impressions of Anindia.
24:26 Speaker 06 I was just like, who is this kid, like, who's critiquing my research? I wish I could tell you that it didn't hurt my feelings. I didn't feel emotional, but that would be a lie.
24:37 Speaker 05 I was an early-ish, mid-doctoral student, and Angela, her career was basically on the rise.
24:44 Speaker 06 I remember thinking, well, this is a PhD student, and I'm already a professor. And the right thing is not to be intimidating. So I said, you know, I'd like to hear more.
24:55 Speaker 05 We had a long, lovely conversation, in fact. And then I took a leap of faith, and I asked her to be on my dissertation committee.
25:04 Speaker 06 I read his thesis. I provided input. I don't know that I changed my mind, but I did feel like I had been incomplete. There was a kind of widening of my perspective.
25:16 Speaker 05 And honestly, what has transpired since then is a really fruitful mentor-mentee relationship.
25:23 Manoush Zomorodi? Anindia ended up writing his PhD thesis on the difference between agency and grit, and why grit is just one part of student success. To demonstrate this difference, he studied a group of young people who had succeeded professionally completely against the odds.
25:40 Speaker 05 These are people who have come from immense socioeconomic disadvantage, having had contended with incarceration, or substance abuse, or various forms of trauma. Because the data everywhere shows that if you've come from these backgrounds, it's very unlikely that you're going to transcend the circumstances of your birth. If you're born in the lowest kintile in the American economic spectrum, there's less than a 10% chance that you're going to make it towards the top. And so I wanted to study these outliers, if you will, that were able to become academically and professionally successful despite having come from these really challenging backgrounds. Because I figured, you know, they clearly would have grit,
26:22 Speaker 05 but they've also had some other supports in their lives that have helped them, which I was hoping would... Eventually help us to understand what does agency look like.
26:32 Manoush Zomorodi? What he found was that the environment was crucial to any psychological resilience.
26:37 Speaker 05 Right. Grit is kind of a psychological concept where it's just like, I'm going to grit my teeth and kind of grind through this challenge. Agency is more of this holistic idea of like, okay, well, if I get knocked down, is there someone around me that can help to pick me up? Is there a space where I can feel like I belong and really bring out the strengths and the things that I'm hoping to work on? And so, agency allows us to kind of grapple with the structural conditions and figure out how can we maneuver around them.
27:09 Manoush Zomorodi? And Nidia Kundu continues from the TED stage.
27:12 Speaker 07 Tyreek was raised by a single mother, and then after high school, he fell in with the wrong crowd. He got arrested for armed robbery. In prison, Tyreek was actually aimless at first as a 22-year-old on Rikers Island. This is until an older detainee took him aside and asked him to help with the youth program.
27:32 Speaker 05 And so after months of kind of prodding and pushing, Tyreek eventually reluctantly said, yes, I'll go to one of these sessions. And then in seeing how much these younger detainees were looking up to him, he sort of realized that, hey, my life is also just starting, in a sense, and maybe I can still turn things around. And so, he started taking college credit classes. He started going to the library more, and he started developing discipline and keeping a more strict schedule. And so, when he got out of prison, he was just a couple of credits short of a college degree. He went on to get a master's in social work, and today, he's actually on the front lines, kind of leading campaigns against mass incarceration.
28:16 Speaker 07 And Vanessa, Vanessa had to move around a lot as a kid. She was raised primarily by her extended family because her own mother had a heroin addiction. Yet at 15, Vanessa had to drop out of school and she had a son of her own. Well, she happened to find a program called Vocational Foundation that gave her $20 biweekly, a MetroCard, and her first experiences with a computer. These simple resources are what helped her get her GED. Eventually, she was able to go to community college, and that's the pathway that allowed her to become accepted to one of the most elite colleges for women in the country. And she received her bachelor's at 36, setting an incredible example for her young son. Some people might hear these stories and say, "Those two definitely have grit."
29:01 Speaker 07 What's more important is that they had factors in their lives that helped to influence their agency or their specific capacity to actually overcome the obstacles that they were facing and navigate the system, given their circumstances. We should only think of them as exceptional, but not as exceptions. Thinking of them as exceptions absolves us of the collective responsibility to help students in similar situations.
29:29 Speaker 05 Even though agency can seem like it's an individualistic pursuit, one of the foundational elements of agency is that it really requires social support.
29:40 Manoush Zomorodi? I worry that somebody listening to our conversation will think like, "Well, this is lovely, but, you know, we have seen that there is less funding going into social safety nets, into community programs, into support for education, after-school organizations." This is a pipe dream.
30:01 Speaker 05 Sure. I myself kind of struggle with that. But what ends up happening, and I would say that this is likely by design, all of these competing social forces that push down on us from the top, we start to feel weaker and we start to feel like we have less capacity to make positive change. And what that leads us to do is to retreat and then feel like what we need to do is just look out for ourselves and hoard our resources and not share them.
30:27 Manoush Zomorodi? So, looking forward as we go forth into 2026, what are some things we can do to claim our agency, small things we can do?
30:37 Speaker 05 So the first thing I would say is that we have to kind of understand that collectivity is a really important essence of having agency. But then there are also things that individuals can and have to do to feel agency in their lives. And so we sometimes have to audit our structural environment and understand, OK, how is my neighborhood working? What are the institutions, a library, or a gym, or a school, or a community college that I have access to? Who are the different people that can kind of help me to get ahead? Psychological research shows us that a mentor could be someone who literally just leaves us a kind note, helping us realize that we're on the right path.
31:20 Speaker 05 But we also need to create these structures and institutions where more people can see themselves as belonging. And sometimes that takes one person to kind of stand out. And sometimes it could take like a group of people being like, OK, this is something that isn't working as well as it could, and we should go and try to make a positive change.
31:39 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, it sounds like basic societal cohesion.
31:42 Speaker 05 Exactly. I love that you said that because social cohesion is something I think about a lot. It's actually a topic I'm writing about in my next book. And what I would say right now is that if we think of society as an organism, it's like a living thing with different parts and cells, what we're dealing with right now is almost like an autoimmune condition, where we don't really see our commonality in someone else. And so what that has us do is retreat inward, but that's also furthering the problem. And so to kind of combat that social discohesion, I think we really need to put forward these institutions, places where everybody can go, and everyone can belong, and everybody can kind of remember that we're all in this together.
32:27 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Anindya Kundu. He is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Florida International University. He's also the author of Transforming Educational Leadership: Non-Traditional Narratives to Promote Equity in Uncertain Times. You can see his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, agency: what we can control and what we can't. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Don't go away, we'll be right back.
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34:08 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, ideas for reclaiming control over your life, for having agency. We've looked at how to prioritize what's important to you and the social support that can make all the difference. But what happens when you feel like nothing you do matters?
34:29 Speaker 08 I think a lot of the reason people feel like they don't have agency or feel like their actions don't matter is because they are so disconnected from their impact.
34:40 Manoush Zomorodi? Journalist Jennifer Wallace has spent almost a decade reporting about what makes people feel their actions make a difference. And through hundreds of interviews, she's realized something that may seem counterintuitive at first.
34:55 Speaker 08 I'm telling you that the fastest way to feel like you matter again is to remind someone else why they do. And we all have that capacity. It takes one action. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying when you are really lonely that it is easy to open your mouth. But what I want you to know is that almost everyone is walking around this earth with a sign around their necks saying, tell me, do I matter?
35:23 Manoush Zomorodi? Okay, so I want to start with the word matter. I mean, there are so many different times I think people use that word. But tell me about why you chose it as part of your sort of investigations over the last few years.
35:39 Speaker 08 So mattering is not my idea. It's been studied since the 1980s, but it's been locked away in the ivory tower. So mattering, as researchers define it, is the idea that I feel valued by my family, by my colleagues, by my friends and my wider community, and that I have an opportunity to add value to the world around me. Researchers who study it say, after the drive for food and shelter, it is the need to matter that drives human behavior for better or for worse. What the scientific research makes clear is that to thrive in life, we need to know we matter, that is, to feel valued
36:24 Speaker 08 and to have an opportunity to add value to the world. Jennifer Wallace continues from the TED stage. When we feel like we matter, we show up fully. We want to connect, we want to engage, we want to contribute. But when we are made to feel like we don't matter, we often withdraw. Some of us might turn to substances or self-harm to try to alleviate that pain. Others lash out in anger, road rage, online attacks, political extremes. These are all desperate attempts to say, I'll show you I matter.
37:03 Manoush Zomorodi? You have some beautiful examples in your book of people struggling to feel like they matter. And the one that really spoke to me, I guess because I'm a New Yorker, you described a scene on a train that really I have seen myself. I wonder if you could tell that story.
37:20 Speaker 08 Yeah, so I was commuting back from Connecticut for an interview. It was rush hour and all the commuters on Metro North were settling into their seats when all of a sudden a young man in his 20s burst into the car. He was shouting and flailing his arms, heaving with anger. And you look around at the car and you see the passengers kind of lowering in their seats, whether it was because they were afraid, or perhaps because the pain that he was exhibiting was almost too much to witness. And then suddenly, the conductor from the train came into the car.
38:02 Speaker 08 If you can picture this, the angry gentleman was probably 6'3", 6'4", very large, and the conductor was maybe 5'6", 5'7". He walks up to the man, and very calmly, he says to him, "Is everything okay? Do you need anything?" The angry man, all of a sudden, you could see his shoulders lower, almost in disbelief. The conductor said, "Here, come, let's find you a nice seat." And then the gentleman sat down and he said, "Do you have your ticket? Could I have your ticket?" You could imagine how a conductor could have rushed into the car, right, and thrown the man out for being so disruptive. But he did the opposite.
38:47 Speaker 08 He spoke to the man, instead of the problem. What I realized, when I was looking out my window, was that the young man was not just yelling, he was reaching out. "Do you see me? Do you hear me?" And what that conductor did is that he answered those questions with kindness and compassion, instead of judgment.
39:12 Manoush Zomorodi? So just recognizing someone's existence, that can be enough when it comes to mattering.
39:18 Speaker 08 Yes. When people feel seen, valued, and needed, they begin to believe that they can influence the world around them, and they feel more motivated to do it. We are so often, living our lives on autopilot. We have so much incoming, and so much output demanded of us, that just to get through our to-do list, we're often just kind of heads down, grinding it out. But agency, it's not about controlling everything, right? It's about remembering that we still have things in our lives that we can control, and that we matter enough to act on those things.
39:57 Manoush Zomorodi? And what if someone's like, how do I even begin to do this for myself?
40:02 Speaker 08 What I want you to know is that you are one action away from feeling like you matter again. So taking it back quickly to the train car story about the conductor who calmed the angry man. When I got off the train, I went up to the conductor and I said, I was so impressed by how you handled that situation, how poised you were, compassionate you were. You showed us all this really valuable lesson that we are all going to take with us, having witnessed that. And what I tried to do in that small moment was to connect the actions of that conductor, to connect him to his impact, to say what you did there mattered.
40:47 Speaker 08 And just so you know, everyone could use that positive feedback. In my research, I found that the places where we live and work can either fuel this crisis of mattering or be a key to solving it. I visited a factory in Phillips, Wisconsin, where each workstation had a card that talked about how the piece being made fit into the final product. On that card was a photo and a story of the person who would one day use it. That story card was a powerful reminder to workers that they weren't just assembling parts. They were building something meaningful.
41:33 Speaker 08 To matter, we need to feel valued, but we also need a chance to add value.
41:40 Manoush Zomorodi? We started this conversation with you talking about the roots of mattering in psychology, going back to the 80s. Where is this field going now?
41:53 Speaker 08 Well, what's exciting is that researchers have been studying it since the 80s, but it has really picked up in the last 10 years or so, as more and more researchers are realizing that it is at the root of so much of the pain we are seeing today, the loneliness, the disengagement in the workplace. What is hopeful about mattering is that it is so actionable. As opposed to belonging, you can't really necessarily make someone feel like they belong, but you can make someone feel like they matter.
42:29 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm.
42:30 Speaker 08 Researchers have found that there are ingredients to mattering. Feeling significant, feeling appreciated, feeling invested in, feeling depended on. Those are four key ingredients for us to feel like we matter and what we can do to sort of foster that sense of mattering in the people around us.
42:51 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm.
42:51 Speaker 08 You know, we don't have to be overwhelmed with the idea of having a big purpose. Instead, we could break it down by living our day-to-day lives purposefully. So it could be something small, like a neighbor who just went through surgery offering to walk their dog, or an elderly neighbor who you know doesn't get out very much. The next time you go to Costco or grocery shopping, you could say, let me know what I could pick up for you.
43:18 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm.
43:18 Speaker 08 In these small little acts of finding a genuine need and meeting it, we build back our sense of mattering.
43:26 Manoush Zomorodi? And by finding these moments, we'll start to feel like we have some modicum of control over our lives.
43:33 Speaker 08 Exactly. In my mind, agency is the feeling that you can take meaningful action in your life. It's the feeling that I have options. I can make a positive difference in my own life and in the lives of others. And what I've come to realize is that agency grows out of mattering. We all have a role to play when it comes to making the world a better place. It is a very personal experience, but it's also relational, and it has the power to connect our disconnected world. Affirming each other's worth, it's not just the right thing to do. It is the glue that holds a healthy society together.
44:18 Speaker 08 And we need this now more than ever. As AI erases jobs that once gave people a sense of identity and purpose, millions more will face this crisis. The job ahead for us is not just to keep up with machines. It's to protect what it means to be human, to feel valued, and the responsibility we have to remind others that they are valued too. What I have learned in these hundreds of conversations is this, that deep down, we are all searching for the same thing, to know who we are and what we do make a difference in this world.
45:02 Speaker 08 We want to know that our lives, our very existence, matters.
45:08 Manoush Zomorodi? That was journalist Jennifer Wallace. Her book is called Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose. You can watch her talk at ted.com. To end our show about recognizing and seizing your own agency, we want to share a talk by designer, writer, and professor Bill Burnett. So Bill is the head of the Product Design Program at Stanford University. And for years, he has taught a class called Designing Your Life. The premise is to teach his students to approach their lives like design projects, treating themselves like designers of that project. And he says that this shift in perspective can help you design
45:53 Manoush Zomorodi? a more meaningful life for yourself. Here's an excerpt from his 2017 talk.
45:59 Speaker 09 I'm here to help you design your life. We're going to use the technique of design thinking. Design thinking is something we've been working on at the D School and in the School of Engineering for over 50 years. And it's an innovation methodology, works on products, works on services. But I think the most interesting design problem is your life. So that's what we're going to talk about. We think no plan for your life will survive first contact with reality. Reality has a tendency to throw little things at us that we weren't expecting, sometimes good things, sometimes bad. So we say, just have a bias to action. Try stuff. So I'm going to give you things that people have written back to us, who've read the book or taken the class and said, hey, these were the most useful, these were the most doable, they were the most helpful.
46:42 Speaker 09 And we're human-centered designers, so we want to be helpful. The first one is this notion of connecting the dots. The number one reason people take our class and we here read the book is, they say, you know, I want my life to be meaningful. I want it to be purposeful. I want it to add up to something. So we looked in the positive psychology literature and in the design literature, and it turns out... That there's who you are, there's what you believe, and there's what you do in the world. And if you can make a connection between these three things, if you can make that a coherent story, you will experience your life as meaningful. So we do two things. We ask people, "Write a work for you. What's your theory of work?" Not the job you want, but why do you work?
47:26 Speaker 09 What's it for? What's work in service of? Once you have that, 250 words, then, this one's a little harder to get short. What's the meaning of life? What's the big picture? Why are you here? What is your faith or your view of the world? When you can connect your life view and your work view together in a coherent way, you start to experience your life as meaningful. That's the idea number one. Idea number two, I do a little thought experiment with my students. So we say, "Let's have some ideas. We're gonna ideate your future, but you can't ideate just one. You have to ideate three." And it's transformational. We give them this little rubric. One, the thing you're doing, the thing you're doing right now,
48:11 Speaker 09 whatever your career is, just do it. So that's Plan One. Your life now goes great. Plan Two, I'm really sorry to tell you, but the robots and the AI stuff, that job doesn't exist anymore. The robots are doing it. We don't need you to do that anymore. Now what are you gonna do? And everybody's got, you know, everybody's got a side hustle or something that they can do to make that work. And three is, what's your wildcard plan? What would you do if you had enough money and you didn't care what people thought? Anything from, "I'm gonna go study butterflies" to "I wanna be a bartender, you know, in Belize." What would you do? And people have those three plans. Now what happens when they do this is, one, they realize,
48:56 Speaker 09 "Oh my gosh, I could actually have imagined three completely parallel lives. They're all pretty interesting." Two, they rarely go, become a bartender, you know, in Belize. But a lot of times, the things that come up on the other plans were things that they left behind somehow. And so they bring them back and they put them in Plan One. They make their lives even better. Sometimes they do pivot. But mostly, they just use this as a method of ideating all the possible wonderful ways they could have a life. Now, in our model, the thing you do after you have ideas is you build a prototype. We have met people who've quit their job and suddenly done something else. It hardly ever works. You kind of have to sneak up on it. Because in our model, we want to set the bar really low, try stuff, have some success, do it again.
49:40 Speaker 09 So when we say prototype in our language, what we mean is a way to ask an interesting question. What would it be like if I tried this? A way to expose the assumptions. Is this even the thing I want? Or is that just something I remember I wanted when I was 20? You know, William Gibson, the science fiction writer, has a famous quote, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." So there is someone who's a bartender in Ibiza, he's been doing it for years. I could go meet him and have a conversation, he or she. Talk to people and try stuff. It's the last idea. You want to make a good decision well. It's a hard thing, particularly nowadays when we have so many choices. So we have a process. Gather and create options.
50:23 Speaker 09 Once you get good at design, you're really good at coming up with lots of options. You've got to narrow those down to a working list that you can work with. It's just a process, mindful of process. Collect, reduce, decide, move on. That's how you make yourself happy. It's simple. Get curious. Connect the dots to find meaning through work and life views. Do three plans, never one. Prototype everything in your life before you jump in and try it. And choose well. There's no point in making a good choice poorly. Choose well, and you will design a well-lived and joyful life. Thank you.
51:00 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Bill Burnett. He's the co-author of the book, Designing Your Life, and he heads the Life Design Lab and the Product Design Program at Stanford University. You can watch his full talk at ted.com. Thanks so much for listening to our show this week. If you liked it, if you have something to say about it, please leave us a comment on Spotify, or you can also just rate us on Apple. We love hearing from you. This episode was produced by Matthew Cloutier, Hersha Nahada, Phoebe Lett, and Fio Giran. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Monteleone, James Delahoussaye, and Rachel Faulkner White. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Damian Herring
51:43 Manoush Zomorodi? and David Greenberg. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hylash, and Daniela Bella Rezzo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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