by Happy Today!
Ted Talks is one of those things I watch a few times a month. It helps to keep me focused while also allowing me to learn new perspectives on a variety of subjects. This week I came back across a speech given by Stacey Abrams who was a gubernatorial candidate in the state of Georgia. If you don’t know who she is, that itself tells you that she did not win the election. She lost.
During the election she rose to some notoriety as a political darling but in the end, she wasn’t successful in achieving the goal she set out for herself. After her loss, she was forced to figure out what she wanted and needed to do next in her life.
This speech includes a quote that I keep in my planner as a reminder of a time in which I too and felt a loss of something I wanted in my life.
“I’m going to move forward, because going backwards isn’t an option and standing still is not enough.” – Stacey Abrams
She gave her TEDTalk a few weeks after her loss and it is highly relatable to what many around the world are going through today. The speech was entitled – 3 Questions to Ask Yourself About Everything You Do.
Here are her 3 questions:
- What do you want?
- Why do you want it?
- How are you going to get it done?
These questions are not new and many motivational speakers have mentioned them a time or two in the past. It was Stacey’s delivery which made these three simple questions seem just a little different.
Below is a summary of the jewels within the TEDTalk by Stacey Abram:
1. Am I honest about my ambition?
“It’s easy to figure out that once you didn’t get what you wanted, then maybe you should have set your sights a little lower. But I’m here to tell you to be aggressive about your ambition.”
“Do not allow set backs to set you back.”
2. Let yourself understand your mistakes but also understand their mistakes. Once you understand what happened, be honest with yourself.
“Make sure you want it because there is something not that you should do but something that you must do. Something that doesn’t let you sleep at night unless you are dreaming about it. Something that wakes you up in the morning and gets you excited about it; or something that makes you so angry, you know you have to do something about it.”
3. Figure out what the why is for you.
“Jumping from the what to the do is meaningless if you don’t know why. Because when it gets hard, when it gets tough, when your friends walk away from you, when your supporters forget you, when you don’t win your first race – if you don’t know why, you can’t start again.”
4. Look for your successes within your failure.
“There are successes that tell me how I can get it done. But they also let me know that the obstacles are not insurmountable they are just a little high.”
5. There are three things that hold us back
Finances. – “I understood that finances are often a reason we don’t let ourselves dream. I can’t say that you will always overcome those obstacles, but I can tell you that you will be damned if you do not try.”
Fear – “It can be energizing because once you, because once you know what you are afraid of you can figure out how to get around it.”
Fatigue – “Sometimes fatigue means that we accept position instead of power. We let someone give us a title as a consolation prize, rather than realizing we know what we want and we’re going to get it even if we’re tired. That’s why God created naps.”
“Fatigue is an opportunity to evaluate how much we want it. Because if you are beaten down, if you have worked as hard as you can, if you have done everything you said you should, and it still doesn’t work out; fatigue can sap your energy. That’s when you go back to the why of it.”
Hopefully this talk will help you move closer to the why of your life. May her words encourage you to answer those 3 simple questions:
What do you want?
Why do you want it?
How are you going to get it done?
Til next time,
“I’m going to move forward, because going backwards isn’t an option and standing still is not enough.” – Stacey Abrams
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