Latest / Encore Living / T.G.I.TED - Anne Lamott and A Bird by Bird Approach to Life's Challenges #146

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T.G.I.TED - Anne Lamott and A Bird by Bird Approach to Life's Challenges #146 · Encore Living

• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Those are the words of author Anne Lamott from her TED Talk called 12 Truths I Learned from Life and Writing.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: I share three of those truths today.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Welcome to.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Every Day a new thought.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: I'm Thor Chalgren, and every weekday I bring you a new thought, a new perspective.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: And it's Friday, which means it's TGI, ted.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Thank God it's TED.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: And every Friday I look at a TED Talk that has inspired me, that I enjoyed, and I bring a couple of points from that TED Talk to you and also urge you to watch that TED Talk.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Today I look at a TED Talk given by author Anne Lamott.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: You may have heard her.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: She's famous for a book called Bird by Bird, which anyone who's probably ever taken any writing class has at least heard of.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: The book Bird by Bird and I'll describe how that book came to get that title in this episode and also share with you three points that she makes in her talk that I really loved.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: I'm also doing this to celebrate my own TED Talk, which is out now.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: You can watch it.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: I'll put the link in the description below and also put the link for Anne Lamott's TED Talk below.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: So the first of the three points that I want to share about this talk, which, by the way, is so good you guys, you have to watch this talk.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: As I say, there are 12 truths that she shares.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: She says she's at a point in her life when she gave this talk as she was 61.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: So she's kind of ruminating on things that she's learned through her life and some of them are quite profound and some of them are sort of like just fun and delightful and nonsensical.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: And that's what makes the talk so fun is that she is sharing things that are profound, but she's also sharing things that are just kind of like okay, that's an interesting thought, but I love it, and so did the audience.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: This is that she gave this talk to the TED conference.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: So this is not a TEDx talk, but to the big TED conference.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: A lot of people in the audience and people love this talk.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: So the first one that I enjoyed I'm going to quote her here.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: She says every writer you know writes terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: That's the secret of life.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: She says that's probably the main difference between you and them.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: They just do it.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: They do it by prearrangement with themselves, they do it as a debt of honor, they tell stories that come through them one day at a time, little by little.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: That's her quote about basically writing, and I think it applies to a lot of things in life, because if we break it down and do it little by little, it's much easier.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: She shares in here a story about how her book got the name bird by bird, and it's she was talking about when she was growing up.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: Her older brother had a term paper do in fourth grade and he had to write about birds and the paper was do the next day and he put it off.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: He's sitting down, he doesn't know what to do and his dad gives him this advice.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: His dad says just take it bird by bird.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: He said read about pelicans, then write about pelicans in your own voice, then read about chickadees and then write about chickadees in your own voice.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: The point his dad was making is, when you break it down and just do it bird by bird, you'll be able to take what seemed like a big, complex project and make it smaller and, as Anlamot reminds us, keep your butt in the chair.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: The second point that I love, and this is one of her sort of nonsensical ones, but really, when you think about it, it has a lot of practicality.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: She says everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you, and I think this is so great because how many of us you know, when it comes to things like tech support, some things not working we go huh, why is that?
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: Like, just the other day, I was doing something with my phone and it wasn't behaving the way I expected it to, so I turned the phone off, waited a few minutes and then turned the phone back on and, go figure, it works.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Also, as Anne Lamott points out, this is great advice for us Unplug yourself If you're stressed, if you're frustrated, if you're tired, exhausted maybe you've been working too hard Unplug yourself, take some time for yourself and you'll probably come back to whatever you're working on with a new sense of vigor, a new sense of purpose.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Great advice.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: And, like I said, she has a lot of ones like this that you kind of don't expect.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: You're thinking they're all going to be these profound thoughts, and many of them are, but it's so much funnier when she has these ones and I really love.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: From a presentation standpoint, she's brilliant because she'll give you one of these and then there's a pause in the audience is like expecting there to be something more to it and then there's not, and it's so funny.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: So I love the way that she sort of makes the point don't take yourself too seriously.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: The last point that I want to share from Anne Lamott's TED Talk is don't compare yourself to others, she says, and I'm going to quote her here.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: They are much more like you than you would believe.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: So try not to compare your insides to other people's outsides.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Don't compare your insides to other people's outsides.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: I love that because it makes us realize that what we're feeling on the inside is absolutely different from what other people are demonstrating on the outside.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: It may look like they have everything going on, but you don't know.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: So why would you compare what you know about yourself to what you can only guess is going on with them?
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Too often on especially social media, we compare where we are on our journey to someone else on their journey, and a great point to remember is that our beginning may be there and we don't know where they are on their journey.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: We only know where we are and, like Anne Lamott says, everyone has their own issues, even the people who seem like they have it all together.