The topic of career. And layoffs has been buzzing around a lot lately for good reason, and it's a great time for us to think about what success means. And there's a great Ted Talk that I saw about our definition of success, and it was by a woman named Laura Gossner Ottinghead, and she has a phrase called wonderhel, which basically is what's on the other side of success. It's this next step, it's this next thing
Auhona Dutta
@aspeakstoday · 1:22
I think it's more of a mental concept. I don't think it's accomplishment itself, but the feeling of accomplishment. You can win the Nobel Prize, but if you don't feel good about it and you don't feel that you really did something, I don't know. If you'd call yourself successful, on the other hand, you can just find love and you'd be like, okay, I'm successful because I'm happy and what I want
So I think the Buddhist words of wisdom here, so to speak, are that, of course, we can acknowledge as human beings that it's natural for us to have desire and to desire being successful in some aspect of life, whether it's a relationship, whether it's a career, a business, any number of things. But it is the attachment that the clinging and attachment of that particular desire, of that success that has the potential to create what the Buddhists would refer to as suffering
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:09
I think both of you really hit on two very important aspects of being happy because you are aware of the trappings of aspiration, of drive and ultimately success and the feelings of what that might mean for others different than what it might be experienced by you. Yeah. Both excellent points and yeah. And anchoring my own mind with those two points just challenges me and makes me realize that it's all up to us to feel good in any given moment of our lives. And we're assessing where we are
Laura Gassner Otting
@heyLGO · 4:35
Hey. So I'm really excited to be trying Swell for my first time. This is Laura Gassner Otting. I appreciate, Deborah, you bringing me onto this platform to talk about wonder how my upcoming new book so I think it's very easy to think that success doesn't bring us happiness because we're constantly being told by the external world that we should be doing more and more and more. Bigger, better, faster, more is the only way to do it
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:05
Laura, it's so good to hear your voice. God, I really love what you just said. You know, I grew up grew up many of my formative years were in Silicon Valley. I was there from 91 to 2018, and I saw some, like, encroaching disease come upon people all around me where, of course, we can study greed all day long and what what greed does to people and their focus
Laura Gassner Otting
@heyLGO · 4:22
It's such a good question about how do we be okay with taking a step back, taking a time out, getting on the merry go round instead of the roller coaster, right? So I'll tell you a personal story to answer this question. When the pandemic first began, I found myself, like a lot of people, not sleeping, stressed, uncertain, chaos. I didn't know what was happening
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:19
Hey, Laura, what's so great about your reply is it just brings forward the power of story when it comes to teaching ideas. And the more personal we get with our stories, the more universal they seem to land in people's hearts. I mean, the more they have impact, because you take the time to bring us closer to your reality and your resonates
Laura Gassner Otting
@heyLGO · 4:33
So we have these people and we think, I'm going to do it not because of them, but despite them. And so we're trying to prove and prove and prove and go and go and go and strive and strive and strive with these big five year plans when really we don't stop to ask, do I actually care about those plans? Or am I just doing it because I'm searching desperately to fulfill and please somebody who's never going to even care if I do it?
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:59
And my wish is that we can continue this conversation in different conversations, in other words, in different Swells. So I would love to be able to bring you back for for topics that come up, especially when they're relevant to news items. And also, I look forward to perhaps you creating a conversation on your own from your own Swell cast, because it's a great place for people to really iterate and take a breath and think