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- [00:00]
Jim VandeHei
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Elise Hu
You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. As a journalist, businessman and co founder of Axios, Jim Vande Hei spends a lot of time thinking about world happenings that are beyond his control. And yet he offers us a challenge. What if for the next 10 minutes you stopped worrying about everything you truly can't control, like AI politics or for some, your email inbox, and instead focused entirely on you?
- [00:37]
Jim VandeHei
You control you. That became my mantra and that became my map for life. You control your reactions. The best advice I ever got was five words. Do the next right thing.
- [00:52]
Elise Hu
In this talk, Jim confronts the idea that we're stuck because of things happening to us in life. He explains why he thinks we're actually more in charge than we might think. Through some personal stories and small, actionable steps, Jim shares why we're all capable of rethinking and embodying you control you. That's coming up right after a short break. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and more@applecard.com this episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. If you've been feeling overwhelmed by climate headlines lately, here's something worth your time. A show focused on solutions. It's called Planet Visionaries, hosted by Alex Honnold. Yes, the climber from Free Solo, now turning his attention to protecting the only planet we've got. What makes this show stand out is the people you'll hear from. Scientists, explorers and storytellers who are actually building a better future and making it feel tangible, human and possible. One conversation features coral restoration leader Tituan Bernacote, along with legendary oceanographer Sylvia Earle, sharing what it really takes to restore our oceans. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening to this podcast. This episode is brought to you by Duck AI. AI can be incredibly useful, but sometimes it gives me pause to think that my chats might be saved somewhere forever. Between work stuff and embarrassing personal Questions? A lot of us share more with AI chatbots than we realize, and information shouldn't come at the cost of your Privacy. That's why DuckDuckGo built Duck AI so you can chat privately with the same AIs you might already be using, like ChatGPT or Claude, and protect your data from hackers, scammers and data hungry companies. There's no account required, it's completely free. Plus it's from DuckDuckGo, known for protecting your data, not collecting it, so you can chat freely without worrying about your AI conversations getting stored or exploited. If you want to use AI without giving up your privacy, visit Duck AI Talk today. That's Duck AI Talk, a private way to chat with AI from DuckDuckGo, where AI is always optional and private. And now our TED Talk of the Day.
- [03:53]
Jim VandeHei
I want you to spend the next 10 minutes being absurdly self indulgent, which is advice I would almost never otherwise give people. I want you to not think about the things you can't control. AI politics, your parents, your social media feed, your Tinder alerts. By locking in on you for the next 600 seconds, I'm very confident that you're going to walk away with what I think is the single best hack for longevity, purpose and living the type of lives that we want to live. First, who is this middle aged dude preaching a gospel of self indulgence? Well, the 20 year old version of me I'm very confident was a much less impressive version of you. Three years into college, I had a 1.491 grade point average that I was dragging around. I was smoking a pack of Camel Lights a day. I was drinking prolifically at night, I was delivering pizzas in my diesel VW Rabbit. I was remarkably unhealthy and I was remarkably unremarkable. Within a decade I'm interviewing presidents, I'm covering the White House for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Soon after I'm starting and running companies. First Politico, then Axios. So what the hell happened in those dark times and in now some very good times, I've really tried to become a student of what does it take to be successful and what makes great success people great, what brings them real success? And there is a commonality to all of them that all of them maniacally focus on controlling life's variables. That you can control you, control you. That became my mantra and that became my map for life. When I watched these people, whether they were teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, every day they were maniacal about constructing their success and constructing their greatness piece by piece, day by day, on their terms. If we're being honest, a lot of us just surrender to others or to other things. We say, well, we can't do that because of my parents, my childhood, my circumstances, my DNA, my crappy luck. We just can't do it because we're under control of others or other things. And it's just BS and it's just not a good way to live. You control you. It's just a much better, brighter way to live. And so I want to walk you through five different things that you can do that are free, that you can start today, and that are available to every single person in this room. You control today. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, you have scores of decisions to make that only you make. Do you doom scroll or do you meditate? Do you eat Lucky Charms or do you eat a healthy breakfast? When someone snaps at you, do you snap back or do you show a little bit of grace at night? Do you get hammered or do you get some sleep? You make each one of those decisions, and every one either leads to happiness in feeling better about yourself or sadness in feeling like crap. Nobody wants to feel like crap. So how did I get from the DC or from Oshkosh and my 1.491 to DC and then having some success? It was studying other people who were smarter than me, who were better than me, who were more talented than me, who were better read than me, who just knew a lot more than me, who were healthier than me. And then I tried to copy them. If they read a book I hadn't read, I read it. Or if they used a word I'd never heard in Oshkosh, I wrote it down on a piece of paper and I would work it into my vocabulary. If they were fitter than I were, I'd try to copy their habits. I started to take control of what we can control. You control you. You control your reactions. The best advice I ever got was five do the next right thing. Do the next right thing. It's really hard to be a good person. It's hard to be moral. It's hard to do all the things right. It's pretty easy to do the next right thing. And if you do that, if you do things that would make you proud, your parents proud, your kids proud, your friends proud, you do that and then do it again, suddenly you're a pretty good person. And then if you do it in bad times, you could Become a great person. My personal Motto the last 15 years is when shit happens, shine. Meaning in the worst of times, when really bad things happen, that's when I really want to do the next right thing. That helped me through one of the hardest periods of my professional life. I had started Politico as my baby. It's emotional and you know, like a lot of these startups, it was a success and then there was turmoil and I felt like I had to leave. And it's emotional and I could have said and done things that would come back to haunt me. And every minute of every day during that period, I thought, I'm going to do the next right thing. I'm not going to do things that are going to come back and hurt me or haunt me. And it helped me get there. 3. You control your reality. That might sound weird, but you do what you read, what you watch, what you listen to, that forms your reality. Your podcasts, your YouTube channels, your newsletters, your friends, it's all a reality shaping machine. The inputs affect your outputs. If you're inputting a lot of misery, a lot of doom and gloom, a lot of trivial stuff, you might be a doomy and gloomy kind of person and kind of trivial, but change that. If you control your reality, all you got to do is realize, listen. There's more good, high quality information available to everybody in this room than at any point in humanity. It's all free and it's not even close. If there's something you're curious about, you can Google it or chatgpt it. If you want to know what Elon Musk thinks or Mel Robbins would advise or Taylor Swift feels, there's probably a podcast or a video or an interview with them. You can search that, you can change the inputs, you can put healthy, edifying content into your mind. Have a better reality that you then share with other people. 4. You control how you're seeing. This one might seem a little too absurdly self indulgent, but it's actually a magic trick. You control how you're seen when you're in a group setting, especially if it's tense or it's emotional. Think about how other people are experiencing you. The way I do it is I almost envision myself having this out of body experience, watching me through the eyes of others. Our own eyes deceive, our own eyes lie. But if you look at how other people feel and experience you, then you know the impression that you're leaving, that you want to leave. And it really helps you, I think, be the person you want to be and have other people experience you as the person that you want to be. This technique helped me through. It was probably the hardest period of my life, but the most wondrous period of my life. It's about seven years ago, and we adopted a teenage boy, and I had two teenagers already at home, and he had lost his parents. He was a rough part of his life, and he's a young guy doing what you do when you have a rough period of life. And I remember thinking, you know what? He's gonna be watching me. My kids are gonna be watching me. My wife's gonna be watching me. If I show love, if I show forgiveness, if I show persistence, if I show grit, that's going to echo through how they experience what we're going through. And if I'm rattled or I'm pessimistic, it would have an opposite consequence. And that process, I really believed, had a very small part in turning my son into this amazing, thriving, grateful college athlete today. And I think that applies to all of us. The fifth thing that you control is you control your destiny. You control where you're going. One of the things I hate the most is when I run into people, and they just feel like a bobber or a log on a river, and you just have to go with the current. It's not true. You get to control where you go. You can control if you want to go against the current. If you want to go upstream, that is fully in your control. And I want to end today with a writing assignment. Not that you need to do right now, but maybe do it later today or later this week. I want you to imagine yourself on your deathbed thinking about your life, and did you live a life that you were proud of? Did you live a life that you could feel? You know what? I did it my way. I did it the right way. And write down the three things that it would take for that answer to be yes, that was it. I lived the life I wanted to live. Then write down the three things that it would take to do that between now and then to actually achieve the life that you want to achieve. That's your North Star. That puts you ahead of 95% on Earth in terms of taking ownership of what you want to do with your own life. Man, I'm blessed. I grew up with. I had four grandparents who lived in my hometown. I have two parents who are still alive. I have an amazing wife, three wondrous children, and tons of really great friends and colleagues who've poured a lot of knowledge and a lot of love into my life. Richard Powers, in his book Bewilderment, says, maybe the purpose of life is about leaving little pieces of ourselves behind in others. And I hope today that I've left a little piece of what all those people poured into me with you, and that you can leave little pieces of yourself in many others. And you can do it because you control you. So get er done. Thank you. Thank you.
- [14:48]
Elise Hu
That was Jim Vande Hei speaking at TED Next 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Songmarniewong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balaurazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feedback. Thanks for listening.
- [15:35]
Jim VandeHei
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- [15:54]
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- [16:25]
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