here you have your future it’s your
crystal ball
it’s not a magic crystal ball you can’t
actually see the future in it but I hope
through what I say today that I will
help you to create a better future for
yourselves we’ve talked about all kinds
of futures but now what I want to share
with you is your personal futures I’ll
start with telling you a little story
many years ago I fainted at a party and
it changed my life
I’d never fainted before facking
experience in itself but I felt fine I
came to immediately and I felt fine
afterwards my wife insisted that I go
for a CT scan afterwards just in case
because I’d hit my head and after her
repeating that 15 times I agreed had we
went to the emergency room
I had the various tests the doctor comes
out and he says you don’t have any
cranial damage and I looked at my wife
knowingly and I said of course I knew
that you made me go here he said but you
have cancer
so if I hadn’t fainted and if I hadn’t
listened to my wife which I do
completely now I wouldn’t be here today
so what is the message in all of this
the questions that I’m going to address
basically are what can you control in
your life and how do you create your own
future whether you believe my
life-saving event was chance serendipity
or providential it focuses on how we
unbox our futures how do any of us
respond as a person to any event that
determines our futures as gives us what
you’re saying we can’t control our
futures but we can control how we
respond an important part of this that
I’m here to remind you of is that we all
take our lives for granted every day we
forget what a precious gift life is and
we should live each day as if it were
our last because you know what
these days we’ll be right so I ask you
what do you cherish and does the way you
live your life match what you cherish
I’ve learned to do that and that’s why
I’m here
let me talk a little bit about why we
fail to create our futures I coach
executives in corporations and I had a
client a number of years ago as I was
interviewing him he said I’ve come to
work on the same train every day I’ve
worked in the same office every day and
I’ve gone on home on the same train
every day for 25 years and then he said
and I hated every minute of it and I
went yeah psychologists are supposed to
be very balanced but I didn’t so the
question I ask him is the question I ask
you now is that what you really want
what do you want and how will you make
it happen every day we have an
opportunity to create a different future
and if we don’t use those opportunities
we will fail so I encourage you stop
think and perhaps most important feel
how would you change to create a better
future speaking more about what happens
to us each day that affects what will
happen to us in the future think of
something that happened to each of you
in the past good or bad that shaped who
you are today and the question I posed
to you is did you shape it or did it
shape you my cancer did not shape me it
helped me shape my world today because I
thought deeply as I’m laying in a
hospital bed after the surgery then I
could have succumbed to a fateful end or
I could decide to expand my world and by
the way the major expansion in my world
is Lia tava and there’s why today I feel
cone astok
so let me talk a little bit about how
our personalities shape our futures and
I’ll just give you a couple of examples
and I would encourage you to ask
yourself these questions as I’m
describing it are you an optimist or a
pessimist if you’re an optimist do you
expect positive things to happen and
they become what we often call
self-fulfilling prophecies likewise if
you are a pessimist you create negative
self-fulfilling prophecies that all
helps create your future are you bold or
fearful if you are bold you make
mistakes but you open yourself to new
worlds if you are fearful you find
safety in the status quo and don’t make
the changes you may need to make are you
intuitive or analytic both are valuable
qualities if you are intuitive you go
with that which helps you move most
quickly if your analytic you need
everything to make sense and plan
everything in an orderly fashion
they’re both paths to an end but they do
lead to different directions
next are you assertive or passive if
you’re assertive you push things forward
if you’re a passive you wait for things
to happen and as a result your future
happens to you every aspect of your
personality shapes your future so why
are we afraid of the future
and we all are well first of all because
it’s the least controllable aspect of
our lives okay we never know how long
we’re going to live we never know
exactly what is going to happen every
day week ago when I came here I
developed a bronchitis that’s why I’m
singing in a different tone today and as
each day approached coming to TEDx I was
thinking am I going to be able to talk
here well fortunately with lots of tea
I am so how does thinking about the
future occupy us well we all fantasized
we think about well maybe we’ll do this
maybe we’ll do that from some of those
fantasies become
plans which are important as long as we
realize the biblical expression that man
plans that God laughs our images of the
future are shaped by our experiences of
the past so what is our personal future
and it’s the most tantalizing of all
questions because we don’t know how long
we will live or when we will die but we
should live with an assumption that we
have a lot of time ahead of us and we
don’t know what unexpected events like
my cancer will change the trajectory of
our lives think for a moment how long do
you believe you will live and why do you
believe that I will tell you when I was
in graduate school more years ago than
any of you can count I was asked to
because it was a doctorate in psychology
to complete my own death certificate my
obituary as it was I predicted that I
would live till the age of 56 well guess
what I’m almost 74 that prediction was
based upon my unhappy worldview at the
time if anybody has been in a doctoral
program you know how easily that creates
an unhappy worldview so let me tell you
what some of the researchers told us
about what we can expect and it
basically is around the stages of adult
development in our 20s and some of you
may be in your 20s is certainly a young
audience I found one person that was
close to a contemporary of mine in your
20s it is all about striving finishing
your education going on for further
education creating a career for yourself
and experimenting and by the way to me
that’s the most important part of 20s
people in their 20s often think I can t
have this figured out I’m already an
adult no that’s wrong what I encourage
people to do is experiment throughout
their 20s for that matter to experiment
throughout their lives but particularly
in your 20s okay then we move to the 30s
and that’s a period that we see as great
growth as very
procreative period that is both
literally in terms of building a family
for many of us and figuratively in terms
of building our careers then we come to
our 40s our 40s is called midlife and
it’s also become told called becoming
one’s own person why is that because it
seems to be human nature no matter what
your background intellect whatever that
you step back and look at the first 20
years of your adult life and say what is
this all about what am i doing and is it
the right thing am I my own person or am
I just following a set of rules and
guidelines if you successfully resolve
those questions into your 50s you begin
to live life much more on your own terms
and as a result you could be more true
to yourselves and do what you want with
less fear because fear is the enemy
there’s no question about that then we
reach our 60s and 60s is a period of
making choices major choices include do
we want to retire or continue to work
I’ve chosen continuing to work and what
haven’t we done that we want to do while
we can and that choice was mainly driven
by one my cancer and two by Leah Tova I
say that my body lives in Chicago but my
heart lives in Leah to foe now we
reached the 70s my decade and I can only
tell you it’s a period of great great
richness why is that after all these
years of life you should and you will
develop a level of perspective that
you’ve never had before and you will
feel your truest sense of self so how do
people build the future the first
question is how far in time you’re
willing to look I don’t mean that you
have to plan every day every year every
decade going forward but a simple way of
understanding it is how is your current
age different from what you expected it
to be did you expect to be doing one
thing and you’re doing another did you
expect to have achieved a certain thing
and you’ve either achieved more or less
in other words is your life better or
worse than you expected and why now the
important part about creating your
future is by looking at the patterns of
our behavior in the past you know
Einstein said at least supposedly he was
the one that said insanity is doing the
same thing and expecting a different
result
unless we change our patterns then we
will always behave in the future as we
behaved in the past so I would ask you
to think about how do you usually treat
people and the corollary to that how do
they usually treat you
what are your relationships like are you
happy with them however they evolved
over time and how do they need to evolve
I see three types of response to moving
into the future one is resistance I
don’t want to go there I don’t want to
think about it
people will say my high school years are
given as iam years were the best years
of my life I think that’s one of the
saddest statements that exist another is
stagnation well this is working out ok
for me so I might as well just continue
down the same path once again then your
future is shaping you you are not
shaping your future and the third
response is embracing the future what’s
ahead how exciting can it be I can tell
you because I am where you will
eventually be that if you embrace the
future it leads to wonderful change so
what more can I tell you from a personal
perspective about shaping your future
first of all and I say this without ego
I’m one of the happiest people you were
ever meet
I wasn’t always okay and I say this
knowing that the majority of my future
is in the past okay
but knowing all of that past enriches
every one of my days so I’m not saying
that life is always happy or easy mine
certainly hasn’t been but what I want to
tell you is how I have learned here
penis the first thing I can say is that
it has been by a strong long and loving
relationship the second it has been by
building a family not that I expect
everyone should build a family although
given some of the population changes in
Liat of I think you should work hard on
that by taking risks okay if you don’t
risk anything you think you’re not going
to lose but actually you lose the most
by doing what you love I was very
fortunate to discover and it wasn’t
immediately it was in my late 30s what
it was that I truly loved in terms of my
career and it has so much carried me
along with a wind of absolute joy that I
encourage you that in every way but I
finding new passions throughout life I
first came to liova in the 90s I’ve been
coming here regularly since then and I
will tell you and I don’t do this to
curry favor with the audience
liova is my passion okay and I do so
much while I’m here another concept is a
Hebraic concept it’s called tikkun alum
and it means healing or repairing the
world so much of the joy that I get out
of life is by doing things in my small
way that can help make the world a
better place so a few days ago I
contributed greatly to the opening of
the Samuel black Art Museum in Vilnius
and through that opening this artist who
portrays the absolute pain of the
Holocaust much as like the brown eye
blue eye presentation that we saw before
will stand as a permanent monument for
not just the Lithuanian people but I
believe the people of the world to not
make that mistake again
by forgiveness so one of the hardest
lessons I ever learned
all of us experience where somebody does
us some wrong okay you don’t forget that
it’s impossible to do that but learning
how to forgive is critical and why is it
critical because unless we forgive the
person we do more pain to ourselves that
we do the other person if we think about
revenge in our selves against the other
person we’re constantly dealing with
that pain if we let go of that and go
into the future by forgiveness then we
don’t experience that another thing that
makes me so happy is by sharing what I
have and what I know with others this
being one example of it hopefully it is
helpful to you in some way
also by controlling what I can and
accepting what I can and then finally by
letting go you can’t change the past
that all you can do is learn from it and
change yourself Viktor Frankl who was a
famous psychiatrist who survived the
concentration camp said everything can
be taken from a man but one thing the
last of the human freedoms to choose
one’s attitude in any given set of
circumstances in other words to choose
one’s own way so how should you be
changing your futures first by doing
what you’re afraid to do second by
making immediate change if this is the
straight path ahead of you and if you
make a change right now over time that
will be a huge change if you wait until
this time to make the change it will be
a very small change and by engagement in
that retirement I have nothing against
retirement but what I do feel is the
root word in retirement is tired and no
one wants to be tired of their lives so
continual engagement is critical to this
process how do we make our futures as
positive as possible we acknowledge that
change is part of life
we accept change in our emotions about
it and we do the best we can to reframe
this
to reframe the situation to see the
positive so how do I want to leave you
well I’ll leave you with a suggestion /
recommendation whether right now or
after today think about something you
want to change about your life big or
small
write it down put it where you will see
it on a daily basis tell someone close
to you to create accountability for it
and put it in your calendar to review
every year this will motivate you and if
you continue to do it it will drive your
future possible then lastly and probably
most important I wish you a very happy
future thank you
crystal ball
it’s not a magic crystal ball you can’t
actually see the future in it but I hope
through what I say today that I will
help you to create a better future for
yourselves we’ve talked about all kinds
of futures but now what I want to share
with you is your personal futures I’ll
start with telling you a little story
many years ago I fainted at a party and
it changed my life
I’d never fainted before facking
experience in itself but I felt fine I
came to immediately and I felt fine
afterwards my wife insisted that I go
for a CT scan afterwards just in case
because I’d hit my head and after her
repeating that 15 times I agreed had we
went to the emergency room
I had the various tests the doctor comes
out and he says you don’t have any
cranial damage and I looked at my wife
knowingly and I said of course I knew
that you made me go here he said but you
have cancer
so if I hadn’t fainted and if I hadn’t
listened to my wife which I do
completely now I wouldn’t be here today
so what is the message in all of this
the questions that I’m going to address
basically are what can you control in
your life and how do you create your own
future whether you believe my
life-saving event was chance serendipity
or providential it focuses on how we
unbox our futures how do any of us
respond as a person to any event that
determines our futures as gives us what
you’re saying we can’t control our
futures but we can control how we
respond an important part of this that
I’m here to remind you of is that we all
take our lives for granted every day we
forget what a precious gift life is and
we should live each day as if it were
our last because you know what
these days we’ll be right so I ask you
what do you cherish and does the way you
live your life match what you cherish
I’ve learned to do that and that’s why
I’m here
let me talk a little bit about why we
fail to create our futures I coach
executives in corporations and I had a
client a number of years ago as I was
interviewing him he said I’ve come to
work on the same train every day I’ve
worked in the same office every day and
I’ve gone on home on the same train
every day for 25 years and then he said
and I hated every minute of it and I
went yeah psychologists are supposed to
be very balanced but I didn’t so the
question I ask him is the question I ask
you now is that what you really want
what do you want and how will you make
it happen every day we have an
opportunity to create a different future
and if we don’t use those opportunities
we will fail so I encourage you stop
think and perhaps most important feel
how would you change to create a better
future speaking more about what happens
to us each day that affects what will
happen to us in the future think of
something that happened to each of you
in the past good or bad that shaped who
you are today and the question I posed
to you is did you shape it or did it
shape you my cancer did not shape me it
helped me shape my world today because I
thought deeply as I’m laying in a
hospital bed after the surgery then I
could have succumbed to a fateful end or
I could decide to expand my world and by
the way the major expansion in my world
is Lia tava and there’s why today I feel
cone astok
so let me talk a little bit about how
our personalities shape our futures and
I’ll just give you a couple of examples
and I would encourage you to ask
yourself these questions as I’m
describing it are you an optimist or a
pessimist if you’re an optimist do you
expect positive things to happen and
they become what we often call
self-fulfilling prophecies likewise if
you are a pessimist you create negative
self-fulfilling prophecies that all
helps create your future are you bold or
fearful if you are bold you make
mistakes but you open yourself to new
worlds if you are fearful you find
safety in the status quo and don’t make
the changes you may need to make are you
intuitive or analytic both are valuable
qualities if you are intuitive you go
with that which helps you move most
quickly if your analytic you need
everything to make sense and plan
everything in an orderly fashion
they’re both paths to an end but they do
lead to different directions
next are you assertive or passive if
you’re assertive you push things forward
if you’re a passive you wait for things
to happen and as a result your future
happens to you every aspect of your
personality shapes your future so why
are we afraid of the future
and we all are well first of all because
it’s the least controllable aspect of
our lives okay we never know how long
we’re going to live we never know
exactly what is going to happen every
day week ago when I came here I
developed a bronchitis that’s why I’m
singing in a different tone today and as
each day approached coming to TEDx I was
thinking am I going to be able to talk
here well fortunately with lots of tea
I am so how does thinking about the
future occupy us well we all fantasized
we think about well maybe we’ll do this
maybe we’ll do that from some of those
fantasies become
plans which are important as long as we
realize the biblical expression that man
plans that God laughs our images of the
future are shaped by our experiences of
the past so what is our personal future
and it’s the most tantalizing of all
questions because we don’t know how long
we will live or when we will die but we
should live with an assumption that we
have a lot of time ahead of us and we
don’t know what unexpected events like
my cancer will change the trajectory of
our lives think for a moment how long do
you believe you will live and why do you
believe that I will tell you when I was
in graduate school more years ago than
any of you can count I was asked to
because it was a doctorate in psychology
to complete my own death certificate my
obituary as it was I predicted that I
would live till the age of 56 well guess
what I’m almost 74 that prediction was
based upon my unhappy worldview at the
time if anybody has been in a doctoral
program you know how easily that creates
an unhappy worldview so let me tell you
what some of the researchers told us
about what we can expect and it
basically is around the stages of adult
development in our 20s and some of you
may be in your 20s is certainly a young
audience I found one person that was
close to a contemporary of mine in your
20s it is all about striving finishing
your education going on for further
education creating a career for yourself
and experimenting and by the way to me
that’s the most important part of 20s
people in their 20s often think I can t
have this figured out I’m already an
adult no that’s wrong what I encourage
people to do is experiment throughout
their 20s for that matter to experiment
throughout their lives but particularly
in your 20s okay then we move to the 30s
and that’s a period that we see as great
growth as very
procreative period that is both
literally in terms of building a family
for many of us and figuratively in terms
of building our careers then we come to
our 40s our 40s is called midlife and
it’s also become told called becoming
one’s own person why is that because it
seems to be human nature no matter what
your background intellect whatever that
you step back and look at the first 20
years of your adult life and say what is
this all about what am i doing and is it
the right thing am I my own person or am
I just following a set of rules and
guidelines if you successfully resolve
those questions into your 50s you begin
to live life much more on your own terms
and as a result you could be more true
to yourselves and do what you want with
less fear because fear is the enemy
there’s no question about that then we
reach our 60s and 60s is a period of
making choices major choices include do
we want to retire or continue to work
I’ve chosen continuing to work and what
haven’t we done that we want to do while
we can and that choice was mainly driven
by one my cancer and two by Leah Tova I
say that my body lives in Chicago but my
heart lives in Leah to foe now we
reached the 70s my decade and I can only
tell you it’s a period of great great
richness why is that after all these
years of life you should and you will
develop a level of perspective that
you’ve never had before and you will
feel your truest sense of self so how do
people build the future the first
question is how far in time you’re
willing to look I don’t mean that you
have to plan every day every year every
decade going forward but a simple way of
understanding it is how is your current
age different from what you expected it
to be did you expect to be doing one
thing and you’re doing another did you
expect to have achieved a certain thing
and you’ve either achieved more or less
in other words is your life better or
worse than you expected and why now the
important part about creating your
future is by looking at the patterns of
our behavior in the past you know
Einstein said at least supposedly he was
the one that said insanity is doing the
same thing and expecting a different
result
unless we change our patterns then we
will always behave in the future as we
behaved in the past so I would ask you
to think about how do you usually treat
people and the corollary to that how do
they usually treat you
what are your relationships like are you
happy with them however they evolved
over time and how do they need to evolve
I see three types of response to moving
into the future one is resistance I
don’t want to go there I don’t want to
think about it
people will say my high school years are
given as iam years were the best years
of my life I think that’s one of the
saddest statements that exist another is
stagnation well this is working out ok
for me so I might as well just continue
down the same path once again then your
future is shaping you you are not
shaping your future and the third
response is embracing the future what’s
ahead how exciting can it be I can tell
you because I am where you will
eventually be that if you embrace the
future it leads to wonderful change so
what more can I tell you from a personal
perspective about shaping your future
first of all and I say this without ego
I’m one of the happiest people you were
ever meet
I wasn’t always okay and I say this
knowing that the majority of my future
is in the past okay
but knowing all of that past enriches
every one of my days so I’m not saying
that life is always happy or easy mine
certainly hasn’t been but what I want to
tell you is how I have learned here
penis the first thing I can say is that
it has been by a strong long and loving
relationship the second it has been by
building a family not that I expect
everyone should build a family although
given some of the population changes in
Liat of I think you should work hard on
that by taking risks okay if you don’t
risk anything you think you’re not going
to lose but actually you lose the most
by doing what you love I was very
fortunate to discover and it wasn’t
immediately it was in my late 30s what
it was that I truly loved in terms of my
career and it has so much carried me
along with a wind of absolute joy that I
encourage you that in every way but I
finding new passions throughout life I
first came to liova in the 90s I’ve been
coming here regularly since then and I
will tell you and I don’t do this to
curry favor with the audience
liova is my passion okay and I do so
much while I’m here another concept is a
Hebraic concept it’s called tikkun alum
and it means healing or repairing the
world so much of the joy that I get out
of life is by doing things in my small
way that can help make the world a
better place so a few days ago I
contributed greatly to the opening of
the Samuel black Art Museum in Vilnius
and through that opening this artist who
portrays the absolute pain of the
Holocaust much as like the brown eye
blue eye presentation that we saw before
will stand as a permanent monument for
not just the Lithuanian people but I
believe the people of the world to not
make that mistake again
by forgiveness so one of the hardest
lessons I ever learned
all of us experience where somebody does
us some wrong okay you don’t forget that
it’s impossible to do that but learning
how to forgive is critical and why is it
critical because unless we forgive the
person we do more pain to ourselves that
we do the other person if we think about
revenge in our selves against the other
person we’re constantly dealing with
that pain if we let go of that and go
into the future by forgiveness then we
don’t experience that another thing that
makes me so happy is by sharing what I
have and what I know with others this
being one example of it hopefully it is
helpful to you in some way
also by controlling what I can and
accepting what I can and then finally by
letting go you can’t change the past
that all you can do is learn from it and
change yourself Viktor Frankl who was a
famous psychiatrist who survived the
concentration camp said everything can
be taken from a man but one thing the
last of the human freedoms to choose
one’s attitude in any given set of
circumstances in other words to choose
one’s own way so how should you be
changing your futures first by doing
what you’re afraid to do second by
making immediate change if this is the
straight path ahead of you and if you
make a change right now over time that
will be a huge change if you wait until
this time to make the change it will be
a very small change and by engagement in
that retirement I have nothing against
retirement but what I do feel is the
root word in retirement is tired and no
one wants to be tired of their lives so
continual engagement is critical to this
process how do we make our futures as
positive as possible we acknowledge that
change is part of life
we accept change in our emotions about
it and we do the best we can to reframe
this
to reframe the situation to see the
positive so how do I want to leave you
well I’ll leave you with a suggestion /
recommendation whether right now or
after today think about something you
want to change about your life big or
small
write it down put it where you will see
it on a daily basis tell someone close
to you to create accountability for it
and put it in your calendar to review
every year this will motivate you and if
you continue to do it it will drive your
future possible then lastly and probably
most important I wish you a very happy
future thank you
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