A practical guide to taking control of your life | Cate Hall

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. What do desperation and freedom have in common? In this deeply personal talk, entrepreneur Kate Hall shares her own journey from her battle with addiction to CEO and how the gift of desperation, as she calls it, led her to finding once inconceivable kinds of freedom and purpose in her life. She reminds us, no matter what you're struggling with, if you can learn to locate the hidden doors within, you can unlock incredible happiness and freedom.

0:48Five years ago, I was a prisoner in my own life. I was hopelessly addicted to drugs. Every morning, I would get up, go buy drugs, and then spend the rest of the day using, barely conscious, until I passed out again at the end of the night. I spent months at a time like that. I don't have a lot of memories from that time, but one thing I do remember very clearly is this incredible sense of awe and resentment I felt just watching normal people do normal things. I would see somebody meeting a friend for lunch, and it would seem inconceivable to me that anybody could be that free, that they could just decide what to do with an afternoon.

1:38This talk isn't about addiction per se, but I'm telling you this because I really need you to understand where I'm coming from, how trapped I was, before I tell you that my life is amazing now. I'm clean, first and foremost.

2:00I'm married to an incredible man, and we get to do all sorts of fun projects together. And I'm CEO of Astera Institute, a multi-billion dollar private foundation that's pioneering a new approach to supporting innovative science and technology.

2:18What I do want to talk about today is how I got from point A to point B. What changed? It's not that I got smarter or that I started trying harder. I think what changed was even more fundamental. It was developing a sense of personal agency, which I think about as the capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom we actually have. It's about being able to find the hidden doors in the walls of life. I want to argue that when it comes to living a satisfying and meaningful life, agency is actually much more important than the things we usually think about as critical to success, like intelligence and hard work, both of which are next to useless if misapplied, and which are becoming less and less important as we increasingly outsource them to machines.

3:09I saw a quote recently from Gary Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator, that I really liked. He said, Intelligence is on tap now, so agency is even more important.

3:21For all of the freedom that addiction took from me, I think it actually gave me an unnatural advantage when it came to cultivating agency. And that's because, while agency has many mothers, One of them is certainly desperation. Addicts call this the gift of desperation, actually. The willingness to do whatever it takes to change your life. To embarrass yourself by standing up in front of a room full of strangers and say, my name is Kate and I'm a drug addict. Or to lock yourself away for months. Or to take medications that will put you in the ER if you drink. By the time I went to rehab, I definitely had the gift of desperation.

4:05I'd lost my job, most of my friends. For a time, I'd basically lost the ability to walk. And so when I left, I walked into a halfway house and a complete mess of a life. But in a way, I think that was actually good. because I felt like I had nothing left to lose, and that made me fearless and hungry. I started saying yes to everything, every connection someone was willing to make in hopes it might lead to something that would help me get back on my feet. I remember just going for volume. It didn't matter if I could tell how something would benefit me. That's how I ended up meeting most of the people I've worked with in the last four years.

4:52losing my sense of pride also helped me learn really fast i had brain damage which meant that i didn't always understand things and i couldn't pretend that i did either so i got good at saying i don't understand what you just said can you explain it to me in situations where before i might have just nodded along side note people love to explain things it's a total win-win Now, I have great news, which is that you don't need to ruin your life and then rebuild it in order to learn to be more agentic. I do think it helps to be some kind of desperate, but there's always something to be desperate for.

5:34I felt that during COVID, as friends and I watched low-income countries struggle with vaccinations because they lacked adequate cold chain storage. So we created a company that created a shelf-stable vaccine, and we let that desperation drive us into clinical trials in under six months, faster than any startup in history. I felt another kind of desperation early on in my marriage when it seemed like there was an invisible wall between the two of us. So in desperation, I learned how to resolve the emotional barriers that made it difficult for me to connect with people. I don't think agency is innate.

6:16But I do think most people learn it through sheer luck. If it's not the luck of desperation, then maybe it's just the luck of seeing somebody highly agentic operating up close. I also think, though, that it can be learned systematically and by many more people. I want to share some of the tactics I've learned for becoming more agentic. First, assume everything is learnable. I gave the example of learning to connect with my husband, but I could have just as easily spoken from personal experience about learning to be more optimistic or curious. I think most traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite learnable, if you both believe that they are and put the same kind of effort into learning them that you would anything else.

7:07Second, court rejection. We spend our lives carefully avoiding it, but if you're only aiming for things you get, you're doing yourself a disservice. In fact, sometimes you have to aim for things that feel unreasonable to make sure your instinct about what's reasonable is right. Last time I was applying for a job, I told a couple people, I'm thinking about starting an organization much like your own. Can I run yours instead? A little delusional, maybe. But the thing is, sometimes delusional works. Third, seek real feedback. Pretty much every one of us has something holding us back that we're completely blind to and that's obvious to other people.

7:54Don't you want to know what that is? The single best way to find out is to give people a way to tell you anonymously. I know that might sound scary. It was to me at first. But it can also be exhilarating. I have an anonymous feedback box linked to my Twitter profile, and it has honestly been life-changing, not just in terms of the specific feedback I've gotten, but in knowing that I'm not trying to hide things from myself anymore.

8:25If I could go back in time, five years, and talk to the person that I was then, and tell her that I would one day experience that kind of freedom, to not have to hide things, to do whatever I feel like with my afternoons, to be basically happy.

8:51I would not have believed it.

8:56But that is the power of personal agency. No matter how stuck you are, if you can learn to locate the doors hidden within you, you can unlock inconceivable kinds of freedom. Thank you.

9:21That was Kate Hall speaking at TED 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.