Turn setbacks to your advantage

Advice for graduates (and anyone, really)

I gave a speech to graduates at Williams College the other day, where I talked about the many self-inflicted setbacks I have endured, and the immortal words of the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein: “Don’t waste your suffering.”

Here’s the full transcript. I would love your feedback.

Thank you for having me here today. And congratulations. Graduating from an extraordinary institution like Williams is a huge achievement.

I’ve sat through plenty of commencement addresses where you get a few funny jokes and some gauzy inspiration, all of which you forget by dinner. If I’m honest, I’ve actually delivered some commencement addresses that fit this description.

But I’m keenly aware that this is a deeply uncertain time. You are heading out into a rapidly changing world, with a tight labor market and lots of questions around AI, climate, and the state of our democracy. If you’re feeling anxiety, I get it—and I share it.

So rather than serving up platitudes or moral instruction from some old guy who already has a job, I’m going to try to give you evidence-based strategies for navigating this complex environment, strategies that I learned after doing very dumb things in my own life. So, that’s my plan today: embarrassing stories and useful tools.

Let me frame this up with a concept from psychology called the Escalator Myth. This is the assumption that our lives will be an unbroken glide path toward perpetual success. It can be very easy, especially at an elite institution like this, to fall prey to this fallacy. Because, for many of you, life has been a series of wins, powered by your own hard work and good luck. The Escalator Myth can be exacerbated when you’re in a context like Williams, where you might look around at your peers and assume that everybody else is just breezing from one win to the next.

(As an aside, I have to admit that I only partially understand this dynamic, because I didn’t go to Williams; I went to Colby, obviously a vastly inferior institution.)

But the truth is, life is not an escalator. You will have setbacks. Everybody does. What I want to argue today is: you can use these setbacks to your advantage—to learn, grow, and propel yourself forward. As my longtime friend and meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, often says, “Don’t waste your suffering.”

To illustrate my point, I’m going to tell you about two major, self-inflicted setbacks from my own life.

The first involves my career as a television news anchor. You may be aware that there used to be a thing called television, and on it, there were news programs.

When I graduated from college, I decided to enter the TV news business. And for a while, I really was on a kind of escalator. Right out of school, I got a job as a reporter in Bangor, Maine. I quickly moved to larger cities, like Portland, Maine, and eventually, Boston. Then, when I was 28 years old, I got a job in the big leagues, at ABC News, aka “the network,” the national news.

Shortly after I got to ABC, there was a massive, global story: 9/11. In the aftermath of the terror attacks, I volunteered to go overseas to cover whatever was going to happen next. I spent many years in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. I also spent cumulatively about a year in Iraq.

So, by my early thirties, I had been on an escalator for a while. I had earned my stripes as a combat correspondent; I was climbing the ranks at ABC; I was even getting the chance to anchor major broadcasts.

But then, the escalator collapsed. On a warm June morning in 2004, I had a full-blown panic attack, live on Good Morning America, in front of an audience of more than 5 million people. I was in the middle of delivering the headlines when my lungs seized up and I lost the ability to speak. Which is pretty inconvenient when you’re trying to anchor the news. If you Google “panic attack on TV,” it’s the number one result.

After the panic attack, I went to see a psychiatrist. He asked me a series of questions to try to figure out what had triggered my on-air meltdown. One of his questions was: Do you do drugs? I kinda sheepishly said, Yes. At which point the therapist leaned back in his chair and gave me a shrink-y look that communicated the following sentiment: OK, dummy, mystery solved.

Let me pause and give you a little backstory here. In the summer of 2003, after I had spent six months in Iraq, I came home and got depressed. I didn’t actually know I was depressed, but I was exhibiting some classic symptoms: I was having trouble getting out of bed and I felt like I had a low-grade fever all the time.

That’s when I did something toweringly stupid. I started to self-medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine. I was never high on the air, but the therapist explained that my ambient drug use changed my brain chemistry and made it more likely for me to panic.

Sitting there in the therapy office, it all came crashing down. I realized how the reckless behavior in my personal life had jeopardized the career I loved so much. I felt foolish, ashamed, and scared.

To be clear, when you’re at the bottom, it’s not often immediately obvious that there might be an opportunity embedded in the disaster. It’s also not often obvious what exactly to do next. But I knew I had to do something. So I made two decisions. First, I quit doing drugs. And second, I agreed to come see this psychiatrist every week, indefinitely.

Gradually, doors started to open for me. The deeper I got into working with my own mind in therapy, the more curious I became about other ways to work with my mind. And that brought me to meditation.

I initially had a bad attitude about meditation. I was raised by ex-hippies right here in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. A childhood of forced nature hikes, granola, and involuntary yoga made me wary of anything New Age-y.

But then I saw the research that suggests short, daily doses of meditation can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, and literally rewire key parts of the brain associated with stress and focus. Even more intriguingly, I saw the evidence that meditation can help with anxiety and depression, which I had struggled with since childhood.

I started meditating, and it made a real difference. Specifically, I found that it really helped me not to be so yanked around by the voice in my head. I’m referring here to the inner narrator we all have. The voice that chases you out of bed in the morning, and yammers at you all day long. It has you constantly wanting stuff, not wanting stuff, judging people, comparing yourself to other people, and thinking about the past or the future instead of paying attention to what’s happening right now. When you’re unaware of this nonstop conversation that you are having with yourself—and which, if it were broadcast aloud, would get you locked up—it owns you. You act out every thought, every neurotic obsession, as if it were, in the words of my meditation teacher, a tiny dictator.

I was so enthusiastic about meditation that I even wrote a whole book about it called 10% Happier. When the book came out, one of my colleagues, a legendary news anchor named Barbara Walters, looked me in the eye and told me not to quit my day job.

But the book got so popular that it spawned a podcast, a meditation app, and more books. All of which allowed me to retire from the news business and focus full-time on helping people improve their mental health.

And none of this would have happened had I not hit a low point with the panic attack. In the moment, I thought my life was over, but it turned out to be a massive opportunity.

But again, life is not an escalator. So even though my panic attack spawned a whole new career, it didn’t mean that my life became a nonstop parade of rainbow-barfing unicorns.

Which brings me to embarrassing story number two.

Four years after 10% Happier came out, I had an audacious and, in hindsight, incredibly dumb idea. I wanted to get a sense of how I was doing after my years of meditation and self-improvement, so I signed up for something called a 360 review. It’s a diabolical tool used in corporate environments. An anonymous survey of your bosses, your peers, and the people who work for you. The goal is to get a panoramic sense of your strengths and weaknesses.

In my zeal for self-improvement, I opted for the colonoscopy version of a 360 review, where I included not only my colleagues, but also my wife, my brother, and two of my meditation teachers. In all, 16 people gave anonymous interviews, and I received a 39-page report filled with blind quotes.

I knew there would be tough stuff in there — that was the point. But I was so clueless about how bad it would be that I had a camera crew present as I read the report, with my wife by my side.

It started off reasonably well. The first 13 pages were dedicated to my strengths. People called me smart, hard-working, and caring.

But then came 26 pages of beat-down. People called me self-centered, emotionally distant, stubborn, dismissive, and even sometimes “authoritarian.” It was so brutal that at one point my wife got up and went to the bathroom and cried.

Before I tell you what happened next, let me pause for a second and acknowledge what you might be thinking. If this guy was Mr. Meditation, how could he be such a jerk? And if he was still screwing up, what hope is there for me?

I actually think this story should, in a strange way, be reassuring. Personal growth is nonlinear. (In other words, it’s not an escalator.) Even if you are doing a lot of the right things, including meditation and therapy, you will still make mistakes. Perfection is not the point.

Okay, so… back to the story. On that fateful day when I was reading my 360 review, I didn’t have any of the perspective I just gave you about how progress is messy. I was yet again in the fetal position, curled up in shame and fear. I thought maybe I needed to quit the meditation game and go back to TV news, where it’s safe to be a jerk.

But eventually, I decided: no, this is actually an opportunity. I’m going to lean in and try to address the issues that were identified in the report.

My initial approach was to engage in a mad dash to fix all of my relationships. I was fortunate, in that I had the resources and personal connections to work with all sorts of experts, therapists, and coaches. But honestly, even after doing a lot of work, I still found myself getting unnecessarily snippy and defensive with people.

So, at wit’s end, I went on a nine-day silent retreat to practice a kind of meditation that is supposed to boost your capacity for warmth. It’s called “loving kindness,” which initially sounded to me like Valentine’s Day with a gun to your head.

Making matters worse, my teacher kept insisting that if I wanted to be less of a jerk to other people, I needed to start by being nicer to myself. The notion of self-love sounded barftastic, the kind of cliche that you get from influencers and spin instructors. In fact, the teacher said that anytime I noticed myself suffering, I should put my hand on my heart and say, “It’s OK, sweetie.” Hard pass.

However, a few days into this retreat, I was really struggling. I was down on myself about the 360 and my lack of progress. It was getting dark in my mind. So, in desperation, I did it. I put my hand on my heart. And while I didn’t call myself sweetie, I did talk to myself the way I would talk to a good friend. Dude, I know this is hard, but you’ll get there.

And I hate to admit this, but it actually helped. Turns out, there’s real science here. You might believe that you need an internal cattle prod in order to get anything done. But this can lead to what a friend of mine calls a “toilet vortex.” You’re brutal to yourself, which impacts how you treat other people, which makes you feel even worse, and down you go.

Studies show that if you can switch from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach, you are more likely to reach your goals. In other words, the thing we’re doing to keep ourselves safe is actually holding us back.

Think about it. A good coach doesn’t let you off the hook. They will point out your mistakes. They’re just not jerks about it.

For me, learning self-love—as cheesy as that may sound—became the unlock for an upward spiral, the opposite of the toilet vortex. When I stopped criticizing myself so much, my relationships improved. And because relationships are the most important variable in human flourishing, I got even happier, and up I went.

Three years after that horrible 360, I got another one. And it was completely different. People talked about how much I had changed, how I had become so much more open-minded and warm.

Yet again, I read the report with my wife by my side. But this time, no camera. When she finished reading, she said, “Congratulations, now you’re boring.”

Okay, so those are two embarrassing stories from my life. Let me end with three concrete takeaways:

1. Find ways to self-regulate. For me, therapy and meditation have been key. For you, it might be nature and exercise. But find what works for you to calm your nervous system, and try to make sure you do it with some consistency. This is a great way to manage life’s ups and downs.

2. Learn how to talk to yourself. Most of us have a brutal inner dialogue. I find it both amazing and reassuring to know that it’s possible to rewire your inner talk-track. We all have the capacity to be a supportive friend to other people. Turns out, you can direct that towards yourself. And if you want to supercharge it, put your hand on your heart. (I always make sure no one is looking when I do this, but it genuinely helps.)

3. Don’t waste your suffering. I’ve told you my embarrassing stories, but as you move through the world, you will have your own. When your escalator malfunctions, after taking whatever time you need to lick your wounds, see if you can eventually wake up and remember that there is always an opportunity hidden in the wreckage. I’m not trying to romanticize suffering or argue that everything happens for a reason. I’m saying pain is inevitable, but growth is possible.

I am genuinely rooting for you as you head out into a complex and fascinating world. I hope you find it encouraging to consider that while so much is out of your control, training your mind is fully in your control.

If I can do it, anybody can.

Thank you.

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