Lessons from Losing My Mind | Andy Dunn | TED

123,572 views ・ 2023-05-17

TED


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00:04
When I was 20, I was the Messiah.
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For about a week.
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And for those of you who haven't had the privilege of being the Messiah,
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I have to tell you something.
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It is awesome.
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(Laughter)
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Imagine, you are the person that's going to save the world,
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bring peace on Earth,
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and no one knows it yet but you.
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I arrived as the second coming my senior year of college.
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New Year's Eve, 1999.
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After a night of partying, I came to a stunning conclusion.
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I was Jesus 2.0.
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For the next 100 hours, I couldn't eat,
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I couldn't sleep,
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but I did spend a fair amount of time preaching my gospel
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at the Burger King in Evanston.
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Turns out, though -- and this may be a disappointment to my supporters --
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that I was in fact not the Messiah.
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I was just a 20-year-old Midwestern kid
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having a manic episode
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later diagnosed as a symptom of bipolar disorder type I.
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And it was very much not awesome for my family and my friends.
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And so what exactly is a manic episode?
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Typical symptoms include a lack of sleep,
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grandiosity, relentless optimism,
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high-risk behaviors,
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racing speech
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and ideas that are seen as delusional.
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Does that remind you of anyone?
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(Laughter)
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Because it sounds to me like an entrepreneur having a good day.
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(Laughter)
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And in fact, it is estimated
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that three percent of all of us have bipolar.
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A staggering number in its own right.
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For entrepreneurs, that number is 11 percent.
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And at the intersection ...
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Hi, mom, that’s me.
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The best of both worlds.
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And it's not just bipolar.
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According to a study from the University of California at San Francisco,
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entrepreneurs also over-index in ADHD,
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in depression and in substance use.
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And maybe this correlation between neurodiversity and innovation
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shouldn't surprise us.
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After all, to be an entrepreneur is to conjure things that aren't real yet.
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That sort of invention, that sort of vision
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requires more than a little bit of magical thinking.
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A vision that might seem fantastical to others at first
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is later deemed to be obvious,
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like, say, flying through the air in a huge metallic capsule
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at 30,000 feet and 575 miles an hour.
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For me, that vision -- get ready for it -- was pants.
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(Laughter)
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It's always been pants.
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OK, well, not exactly.
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My vision was one for a world
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where brands would be built internet-first.
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And so in 2007, I cofounded a menswear e-commerce company called Bonobos.
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Now I know what you might be thinking.
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Selling pants online is not that remarkable of a vision.
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But in 2007, it was improbable.
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Think about it.
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Amazon was barely focused on fashion,
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Apple had only just launched the iPhone.
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Mobile commerce and the App Store were just a twinkle in the eye.
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Facebook didn't have an ad platform.
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That's, by the way, where you acquire customers for a digital brand.
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And essential tools for digital storytelling,
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like Instagram and TikTok, didn't even exist.
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Instagram was three years away from being created,
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and TikTok was nine years away.
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Maybe that was a good thing at the time.
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Every venture capitalist we pitched said the same thing:
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"You guys are crazy."
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Which is an interesting word choice, if you think about it in this context.
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Against these odds, over the next decade
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we went on to raise 100 million in venture capital,
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to sell over a million pairs of pants,
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to invent an inventory-free retail store and open 60 of those,
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creating ultimately over 500 jobs.
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The company was acquired a decade after founding
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by the world's largest retailer by revenues,
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itself in its own process of digital transformation,
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for over 300 million.
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Building any brand now in internet-first is commonplace.
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It's table stakes.
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It's obvious.
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Maybe it wasn't so crazy after all.
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But there was a dark side to this success.
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Friends and mentors and other business leaders warned me
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that the entrepreneurial journey was filled with dramatic mood swings,
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highs and lows.
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They even call startups what?
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A roller coaster.
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And so my bipolar disorder was cloaked,
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not as symptoms of an illness or a condition,
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but symptoms of a job.
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I cycled through a couple of mood states.
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Dizzyingly productive periods of hypomania,
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a misunderstood [mood] state that is a diluted form of mania
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without the telltale psychosis that leads to a diagnosis of bipolar I,
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but all of the increased energy and creativity
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and ideation and joie de vivre
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and burning the candle at both ends.
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You can get a lot done when you’re hypomanic.
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Alternating with devastating periods of depression.
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For me, both mild and severe,
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often 50 or 100 days at a time,
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catatonic, can't get out of bed, disappearing on the team,
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unable to go to work.
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Sometimes undesiraous of living.
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And all of it was amplified by what was happening at work.
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A gutting co-founder divorce,
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a rotating door of executive turnover,
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maddening and expensive flights
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into shiny new objects and distracting ideas,
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often driven by hypomania,
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and a whopping cash flow burn rate that at times reached five million dollars
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a month.
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It's hard to do, actually, but but we did it.
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(Laughter)
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And all of it boiled over in 2016.
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I was leading a team of 400 people
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when the mania that I hadn't experienced
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since I was preaching the gospel at Burger King when I was 20
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came raging back.
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In a manic episode at my New York apartment,
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I rose from my bed, literally howling at the moon,
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convinced I was the president
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and Batman,
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which is actually a high-potential combination, if you think about it.
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(Laughter)
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And then the darkness really set in.
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I smashed my fist into a glass window pane.
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And worst of all, I struck my now-wife, Manuela,
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and pushed and kicked her mother, Leni,
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to the ground as they tried to protect me,
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to prevent me from running naked into the streets of Greenwich Village.
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When I saw ...
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When I saw Leni two weeks later,
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I thought it would be for the last time.
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And instead, she put her hand on my hand
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and she said something I’ll never forget,
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and something I hope all of you never forget.
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She said, "Andy, this is just like any chronic physical illness.
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All you have to do is see your doctor and take your medication.
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And if you do,
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and if Manuela wants to stay with you, then you have my blessing."
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And I started crying, as you might imagine.
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And Manuela did stay with me.
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But her love and commitment came with conditions.
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It was our rabbi who told us on our wedding day
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that the only unconditional love on the planet
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is that between parent and child,
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which was a disappointing thing to hear on my wedding day.
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(Laughter)
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I thought, you know, I was headed for the unconditional love thing.
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He said all other forms of love are conditioned.
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They are conditioned upon each of us treating each other well,
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which requires accountability and boundaries,
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conditioned upon an honest and transparent exchange of information and feelings,
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which requires disclosure and feedback,
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and conditioned upon each of us, individually,
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doing all in our power to be well,
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which requires initiative and self care.
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And this is not just in our personal lives.
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It's also at work.
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Now, Manuela and I are married with a two-year-old.
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(Applause)
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He's not two in that photo.
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That would be a very small two-year-old.
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(Laughter)
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And look, some days that feels like a miracle.
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From where I was to now, it feels like a miracle.
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And while Manuela's love is a miracle
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and Isaiah’s existence, his very existence, is a miracle,
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my getting well was not a miracle.
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It was very hard work and it still is.
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So I have got, and I'm proud to say,
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an Olympic regimen of mental hygiene and mental fitness.
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Let me play it to you.
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I see a psychiatrist two to three times a week
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for a 45-minute therapy session.
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Now, you would think therapy once a week is enough.
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But for me, I want my doctor to lay eyes on me every 72 hours
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so he can assess my mood.
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I've got five different medications that I take.
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One every day and the other four we titrate up and down
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depending on where I am.
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And then I've got a relentless focus on sleep,
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because sleep is for me, certainly, with bipolar,
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a leading or a lagging indicator of mood.
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And by the way, that might be all of us.
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And so every morning, the first thing I do
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is I send a Fitbit sleep report to a WhatsApp group
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that includes my doctor, my wife
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and the three people who have endured this with me the longest:
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My mom, Usha, my dad, Charlie, and my sister Monica.
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Here it is.
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Every morning, this is my statement of life.
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And what is it?
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It is a daily reminder to never forget what's possible.
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For all of our strengths have shadows, don't they?
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It doesn't take a lot of brainpower to bring to mind other entrepreneurs,
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leaders and visionaries
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who have caused great harm to themselves and others.
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Even society at large.
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And so what do we do?
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We admire their strengths.
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We even lionize them as individuals.
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But their shadows we ignore.
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And we do so at our individual and collective peril.
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I would know
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because for 16 years I ignored mine
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at great cost to myself and others.
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Why did I do that?
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Because I didn’t want to “be bipolar.”
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That's what we say of people who have bipolar.
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We don’t say someone “is cancer.”
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We say they have it.
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That's a first step to helping our friends
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and our loved ones and our colleagues,
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not by conflating their illness or condition with their identity,
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but by acknowledging it as just a part of their life story
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and then helping them confront it.
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At work, I think therapy should be more or less mandatory
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for people who lead teams.
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Second chances for unethical leaders should require great consideration.
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Assholes should just straight up no longer be accommodated.
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(Applause)
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Boards need to step up.
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And all of us,
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we need to raise our hands when we're not well
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and then seek and secure the help we need.
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I have been unbelievably lucky.
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My family, old and new, stuck by me.
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My board stuck by me,
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my executive team stuck by me.
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And I have access to wildly good health care.
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I love my psychiatrist.
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I call him my most expensive friend.
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(Laughter)
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And I have -- and how many people have you heard this from --
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I have medication that actually works.
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Because of all that,
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all that support and all that scaffolding,
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I am able to live and love and work with bipolar I.
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This shouldn't be a matter of luck.
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(Applause)
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And so I've got one more crazy idea.
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Maybe my craziest idea of all.
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We need to make mental health care fundamentally acceptable.
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Actually --
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(Applause)
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Hang on, this whole thing is going to land great.
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Actually affordable and universally accessible.
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Look, I want us to be delusional sometimes.
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I want to be delusional sometimes.
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I want people whose brains work differently,
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like mine does and like yours might,
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to be able to dream crazy dreams,
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to share crazy thoughts,
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and God willing or universe willing,
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bring those dreams to life.
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But we have to keep ourselves in check, don't we?
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After all, only messiahs are all-knowing.
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And entrepreneurs are not gods.
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Even when we think we are.
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We will be better humans,
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building a better future together,
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when we take stock not just of how we change the world,
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but how we treated each other and ourselves along the way.
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And the president and Batman both agree.
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(Laughter)
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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