Name: A Practical Guide to Taking Control of Your Life | Cate Hall | TED
Uploaded: 2025-08-31T05:25:26.000Z
Duration: 8 min 40 s
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Past simple

Five years ago, I was a prisoner in my own life.

Adverbs of frequency

Every morning, I would get up, go buy drugs and then spend the rest of the day using, barely conscious, until I passed out again at the end of the night.

I don't have a lot of memories of that time, but one thing I do remember very clearly is this incredible sense of awe and resentment I felt just watching normal people do normal things.

I would see somebody meeting a friend for lunch, and it would seem inconceivable to me that anybody could be that free, that they could just decide what to do with an afternoon.

This talk isn't about addiction, but it's about how we can help each other.

This talk isn't about addiction per se, but I'm telling you this because I really need you to understand where I'm coming from, how trapped I was, before I tell you that my life is amazing now.

I'm married to an incredible man, and we get to do all sorts of fun projects together.

And I'm CEO of Astera Institute, a multibillion-dollar private foundation that's pioneering a new approach to supporting innovative science and technology.

What I do want to talk about today is how I got from point A to point B.

It's not that I got smarter or that I started trying harder.

I think what changed was even more fundamental.

It was developing a sense of personal agency, which I think about as the capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom we actually have.

It's about being able to find the hidden doors in the walls of life.

I want to argue that when it comes to living a satisfying and meaningful life, agency is actually much more important than the things we usually think about as critical to success, like intelligence and hard work, both of which are next to useless if misapplied and which are becoming less and less important as we increasingly outsource them to machines.

I saw a quote recently from Gary Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator, that I really liked.

He said, intelligence is on tap now, so agency is even more important.

For all of the freedom that addiction took from me,

I think it actually gave me an unnatural advantage when it came to cultivating agency.

And that's because while agency has many mothers, one of them is certainly desperation.

Addicts call this the gift of desperation, actually.

The willingness to do whatever it takes to change your life.

To embarrass yourself by standing up in front of a room full of strangers and say, my name is Kate and I'm a drug addict.

Or to take medications that will put you in the ER if you drink.

I definitely had the gift of desperation.

For a time, I'd basically lost the ability to walk.

And so when I left, I walked into a halfway house and a complete mess of a life.

But in a way, I think that was actually good.

Because I felt like I had nothing left to lose.

Every connection someone was willing to make in hopes it might lead to something that would help me get back on my feet.

It didn't matter if I could tell how something would benefit me.

That's how I ended up meeting most of the people I've worked with in the last four years.

Losing my sense of pride also helped me learn really fast.

I had brain damage, which meant that I didn't always understand things.

And I couldn't pretend that I did, either.

I don't understand what you just said, can you explain it to me?

In situations where before, I might have just nodded along.

Side note, people love to explain things.

Now, I have great news, which is that you don't need to ruin your life and then rebuild it.

I do think it helps to be some kind of desperate, but there's always something to be desperate for.

I felt that during COVID, as friends and I watched low-income countries struggle with vaccinations, because they lacked adequate cold chain storage.

So we created a company that created a shelf-stable vaccine, and we let that desperation drive us into clinical trials in under six months, faster than any startup in history.

I felt another kind of desperation early on in my marriage, when it seemed like there was an invisible wall between the two of us.

I learned how to resolve the emotional barriers that made it difficult for me to connect with people.

But I do think most people learn it through sheer luck.

If it's not the luck of desperation, then maybe it's just the luck of seeing somebody highly agentic operating up close.

I also think, though, that it can be learned systematically, and by many more people.

I want to share some of the tactics I've learned for becoming more agentic.

I gave the example of learning to connect with my husband, but I could have just as easily spoken from personal experience about learning to be more optimistic or curious.

I think most traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite learnable, if you both believe that they are and put the same kind of effort into learning them that you would anything else.

We spend our lives carefully avoiding it, but if you're only aiming for things you get, you're doing yourself a disservice.

In fact, sometimes you have to aim for things that feel unreasonable to make sure your instinct about what's reasonable is right.

Last time I was applying for a job, I told a couple of people,

I'm thinking about starting an organization much like your own.

A little delusional, maybe, but the thing is, sometimes delusional works.

Pretty much every one of us has something holding us back that we're completely blind to and that's obvious to other people.

The single best way to find out is to give people a way to tell you anonymously.

I have an anonymous feedback box linked to my Twitter profile, and it has honestly been life-changing, not just in terms of the specific feedback I've gotten, but in knowing that I'm not trying to hide things from myself anymore.

If I could go back in time five years and talk to the person that I was then and tell her that I would one day experience that kind of freedom, to not have to hide things, to do whatever I feel like with my afternoons, to be basically happy,

But that is the power of personal agency.

No matter how stuck you are, if you can learn to locate the doors hidden within you, you can unlock inconceivable kinds of freedom.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

A Practical Guide to Taking Control of Your Life | Cate Hall | TED

assume

incredible

instinct

pretend