The secret to mastering life's biggest transitions | Bruce Feiler

Elise Hu (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hue. Today's episode of TED Talks Daily is presented by Walmart Business. Most of us picture our lives moving in a straight line, school, then career, family, retirement, each stage arriving right on schedule. But writer Bruce Feiler spent years discovering that almost no one actually lives that way. After traveling around the US and collecting hundreds of life stories from people in all 50 states, he kept finding the same thing. Our lives are full of disruptions, and every so often, one of them cracks everything wide open.

Bruce Feiler (0:41)

One in 10 becomes what I call a life quake, a massive burst of change that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal. The average person goes through three to five of these events in the course of their lives, their average length, five years.

Elise Hu (0:57)

Do the math, Bruce says, and that means we could spend up to 25 years, half of our adult lives, in transition. In this talk, he shares the framework he built from a thousand hours of interviews and makes the case that navigating change isn't just something that happens to us. It's a skill we can learn.

Bruce Feiler (1:13)

A life transition is fundamentally a meaning-making experience. It's what I like to call an autobiographical occasion, in which we are called on to revisit, rewrite, and retell our life story, adding a new chapter for what we learned during the life quake.

Elise Hu (1:31)

Bruce's own turning point began with a phone call about his father and a single question that changed everything that came after. He argues that no matter how bleak the story gets, you can't give up on the happy ending because you control the story, you tell about yourself. That's coming up.

Bruce Feiler (1:54)

I used to have a saying that phone calls don't change your life until one day I got a phone call that did. It was from my mother. Your father is trying to kill himself. He's what?

My dad was a son of the American South, a Navy veteran and civic leader. He was never depressed a minute until he got Parkinson's. Six times in 12 weeks, my dad attempted to end his life. We tried every solution imaginable. Until one day, I had a thought. Maybe my dad needed a spark to restart his life story. One morning, I sent him a question. Tell me about the toys you played with as a child.

What happened next changed not only him, but everyone around him, and led me to reimagine how we all make meaning, purpose and joy in our lives. This is the story of what happened next, and what we all can learn from it. I want you to stop for a second and listen to the story going on in your head. It's there, somewhere, in the background. It's the story you tell others when you first meet them, the story you tell yourself every day. It's the story of who you are, where you came from, where you're going. It's the story of your life.

What we've learned from a generation of brain research is that story isn't just part of us, it is us in a fundamental way. Life is the story you tell yourself. But there's something that research hasn't much answered. What happens when we misplace the plot of that story? When we get sidetracked by a pitfall, a pothole, a pandemic? What happens when we feel burned out and need a fresh start? What happens when our fairy tales go awry? That's what happened to my dad that fall, to me around that time, to all of us at one time or another. We get stuck in the woods and can't get out.

This time though, I wanted to learn how to get unstuck. Like my dad, I was born in the American South. And for years, I had what I now think of as a linear life. I went to college, I started writing, I did it for no money for a while, I had some success, I got married and had children. But then, in my 40s, I was just walloped by life. First, I got cancer as a new dad of identical twin daughters. Then I almost went bankrupt. Then my dad had that suicide spree.

For a long time, I felt shame and fear about these events. I didn't know how to tell that story. I didn't want to tell that story.

When I did, I discovered that everyone feels their life has been upended in some way. That their life is somehow off schedule, off track, off kilter. That the life they're living is not the life they expected. That they're living life out of order. I wanted to do something to help. Over three years, I crisscrossed the country, collecting what became hundreds of life stories of Americans in all 50 states. People who lost homes, lost limbs, changed careers, changed genders, got sober, got out of bad marriages. In the end, I had a thousand hours of interviews, six thousand pages of transcripts. With a team of twelve, I then spent a year coding these stories for 57 different variables, looking for patterns that could help all of us in times of change. I called this the Life Story Project. And here's what I learned.