The three words that saved my life | Blake Mycoskie

Elise Hu (0:00)

A heads up before we begin, this episode includes discussion of suicide and depression. Please take care in deciding whether and when to listen.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. On paper, Blake Mycoskie is a glowing success story. You may know him as the founder of TOMS Shoes, a company he started while living out of a few bags of clothes on a docked sailboat. And built into a global brand. He made more money than he ever imagined and gave away more than 100 million pairs of shoes. But unbeknownst to anyone else, even those closest to him, he was struggling.

Blake Mycoskie (0:43)

I had become so lost, so hopeless, and so depressed, that I made a plan to end my life.

Elise Hu (0:52)

In his talk, Blake shares the deeply personal, vulnerable story of how reaching out and telling his loved ones the truth saved his life. And the healing that followed showed him just how common that kind of pain really is, and how much shame still keeps us from talking about it.

Blake Mycoskie (1:08)

When someone experiences anxiety, or depression, or a mental illness, we treat it like a shocking failure.

Like something went wrong. But think about physical illness. We expect colds. We expect broken bones. We plan for them. We talk about them. But mental illness, we whisper, we isolate.

We pretend that we are fine. And I'm telling you that silence is deadly.

Elise Hu (1:42)

Having the space and safety to talk freely about his internal struggles allowed Blake to discover a core truth that reshaped how he sees himself. Now he's devoting his life to sharing that message. Your sense of worth is inherent. It's not something you have to earn. That's coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk of the day.

Blake Mycoskie (2:14)

When I started TOMS Shoes, I lived on a 45-foot sailboat in Marina del Rey. I didn't have much, a few bags of clothes, a bike, a surfboard and a laptop. That was it. And those were some of the happiest years of my life. I woke up to the ocean rocking me. I made coffee barefoot. I felt clear, inspired and alive. Now, let's fast forward 20 years. TOMS had become a global brand. Our one-for-one model had given over a hundred million shoes to children in need around the world. And personally, I had made more money than I ever thought was possible. And yet, 23 months ago, I had become so lost, so hopeless, and so depressed, that I made a plan to end my life.

And I chose that boat as the place to do it on.

Not because I wanted to die there, but because I didn't want my family to be the ones who found me.

Knowing that I was going to say that today, here on this stage, is definitely the hardest part of preparing for this talk.

Thankfully, I did not act on that plan. Instead, I reached out to my friends and my family, and I told them the truth. Not that I was stressed, not that I lost my purpose. I told them I wasn't OK. And that decision saved my life.

I then met an incredible psychiatrist who helped me really slow down and understand how I got there. Not just what I was feeling, but why. We then spent five months weaning me off four different medications I had been put on when I was misdiagnosed as bipolar. Five months. And during that time, the anxiety did not get better, it got worse.

And the racing thoughts in my head almost became unbearable. But eventually, my mind started to settle, and something became impossible to ignore. There was a core wound underneath it all. A very, very old one. And it said this, you are not enough.

The truth is, I had never felt that I was enough. Not as a kid, not as an athlete, not as a founder, not as a human. And when I looked honestly at my life, I saw something that was really painful. Everything I had done for the first 48 years was an attempt to earn my worth. Becoming a championship tennis player, starting multiple businesses, building TOMS and becoming the poster child of conscious capitalism. I mean, there were the magazine covers, the stages just like this one, the awards and the accolades, because I believed that achievement would quiet that voice. Instead, it made it louder. And it got so loud inside my mind that I didn't want to be alive anymore. But one day, during a deep healing session with my therapist, something finally shifted. I began to see my life not as a success story, but as a strategy. A strategy to earn worth.