How to be an adult – and how to raise one (w/ Julie Lythcott-Haims) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Sometimes with friends, I play this game where we try and pinpoint what our internal age is. I don't mean our actual biological age, but rather how old we feel on the inside. I have some friends who are definitely extremely elderly.

They're ones who love an early bedtime. And they love an early bird special. They like to eat dinner while the sun is still high in the sky. And personally, for me, I feel like I am 10 years old on the inside. I'm just, like, so excited to be here and to get to run around and to read chapter books and to learn facts.

Now, your internal age, it may or may not change, but on the outside we all do age. We all age in the same direction and at the same pace. And that comes with real challenges. Usually, challenges that we do not have a roadmap for how to address. And without formal instruction, we all have to figure out on our own what it means to be an adult.

For you, that might mean anything from learning how to budget your money, to navigating relationships, to developing agency and self-regulation. Or maybe, maybe for you being an adult means something completely different, like having fresh berries in your refrigerator. I know that for me, whenever I see fresh berries in someone's fridge, I think, “Oh wow. That is an adult.”

Regardless of what being an adult means to you, figuring out how to be an adult is what today's guest, Julie Lythcott-Haims is an expert in. If you're a parent looking for wisdom on how to impart skills to your kids, Julie has you covered with her book How to Raise an Adult. Or, if you're a young person trying to figure this out on your own, Julie wrote a follow-up called Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, so she's got your back too. Here is a clip from Julie's TED Talk.

[00:01:44] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I’ve got two kids, Sawyer and Avery. They're teenagers, and once upon a time, I think I was treating my Sawyer and Avery like little bonsai trees. That I was gonna carefully clip and prune and shape into some perfect form of a human that might just be perfect enough to warrant them admission to one of the most highly selective colleges.

But I've come to realize after working with thousands of other people's kids and raising two kids of my own, my kids aren't bonsai trees. They're wildflowers of an unknown genus and species, and it's my job to provide a nourishing environment, to strengthen them through chores and to love them so they can love others and receive love. And the college, the major, the career, that’s up to them. My job is not to make them become what I would have them become, but to support them in becoming their glorious selves.

[00:02:59] Chris Duffy:
We will be back with more from Julie on how to become your glorious self and how to help your kids to do that too right after this.

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[00:03:11] Chris Duffy:
And we are back. Today, we're talking with Julie Lythcott-Haims about how to become an adult, whether you are a young person figuring that out on your own, or a parent trying to help guide your child.

[00:03:22] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I'm Julie Lythcott-Haims, and I'm so delighted to be here. I'm an author. I'm a mom. I'm a former Dean of Freshmen at Stanford, and I'm pretty much just rooting for all of us to make it.

[00:03:37] Chris Duffy:
You did this TED Talk that was for parents and now you've got this book, Your Turn, which is about how to be an adult. So, what's the relationship between those two?

[00:03:47] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah, absolutely. My TED Talk was based on my years as a Stanford Dean where I was watching the encroachment of parents into the lives of university students. Helicopter parenting had finally arrived at the university level, and I was deeply concerned with what those well-intended behaviors were doing, in effect, to undermine student agency. And so my TED Talk emanated out of fierce, um, empathy and compassion for young people who are being raised with this heavy hand, this micromanage-y parenting style.

And so my third book, Your Turn, How to Be An Adult is the companion offering. If the TED Talk is trying to help parents retool so they don't undermine their kids, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult is this compassionate offering to anybody who's feeling, “I can't adult, I don't want an adult, I'm scared to adult. I don't know how.”

This is me not critiquing them like many do. “What's wrong with that generation?” No, no, no. This is me saying, “Yeah, I get it. I get it, and I'm here for you.”

[00:04:46] Chris Duffy:
Yeah. You know, something that I've heard you say is that if everyone in a generation is saying that they're really struggling with how to enter this next phase of what it means to be an adult, how to leave childhood, that that's not an individual problem, that that is a societal failing, and that that's how you're viewing it, which I think is so different from a lot of the kind of condescending talk of like, “Ugh, this generation, they don't know what they're doing.” What can we do about it on an individual level as we experience it ourselves?

[00:05:12] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Well, let's name a couple of the systemic issues. One is macroeconomics. We have crafted an American society where wages and salaries have not kept up with the cost of living, and so you emerge out of high school or you emerge out of college or trade school and you emerge into a workplace environment where these two mathematic variables don't line up.

That's not the fault of a, of a generation, right? Another societal-macro thing is how a lot of young people were raised, which was with this overly helpful, lovingly-intended parenting style where they managed your every move. They watched your every move. They cleaned up your mistakes. They made choices for you.

They did the tough things for you, and so you literally have not had the chance to practice in a lower-stakes way through childhood, the things that are now the higher-stakes version of that stuff in adulthood. So, we can't change those things anytime soon. But I think if an individual young person can be aware of those macro things that are impediments or obstacles in their path, and take a deep breath and say, “You know what? Boy, that sucks. But neither of those things is my fault. They are truths of my environment, but I'm still in charge of me, and in the face of the awareness of those things, I can say, ‘Well, yeah, that sucks, but what am I gonna do about it? What am I gonna do to learn the things I fee less capable of doing? How am I gonna reach out to my network and ask for support as I make my way forward? Maybe I'm gonna uproot myself from the San Francisco Bay area where I grew up because I can't afford to live here, even though I did all the right things. You know, I'm gonna go move to a part of the country that is actually hospitable to young adults who are trying to make it.’”

The individual has profound, profound choice and agency, and that's a little bit of an ableist and a, and a class-based statement I just made. Obviously, if you're financially struggling, if you have significant special needs, maybe what I've just said isn't really available to you, but in the main, I want people to hear, like, “Look, this life is up to you. And yes, there are obstacles, but guess what? You are powerful and you can figure this out.”

[00:07:24] Chris Duffy:
And from the parent side, what's one thing that you think parents should be doing differently to empower their children to feel like that and to, to learn those skills?

[00:07:32] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I look, I'm a parent. Let me get that out of the way. I have a 23-year-old and a 21-year-old. I'm not some expert who's critiquing parents without fundamentally critiquing what I've done in my own house to micromanage my own kids. So I've, I've learned these lessons firsthand. Each one of us as parents needs to really get this fact. One day we'll be dead and gone and to survive as mammals, we are supposed to have taught the younger generation, our offspring, how to do everything for themselves. And we don't teach them to do for themselves by doing it for them. We teach them by explaining it and getting out of the way and watching and wincing a little as they kind of sort of do it and sometimes screw it up. That’s our job.

And so as parents, we have to be asking, what are the next three things I want my kid to learn this weekend, this semester, this year? And at every agent stage, it's a different set of skills from, you know, walking into a store and asking a question, being able to take public transportation, being able to make a meal. You know, these are basic things that we've deprived our kids from learning how to do, and we've gotta delight in their learning. Instead of fearing that they're gonna be imperfect at it today, we have to delight in the learning process, which makes them able to do it themselves tomorrow.

[00:08:48] Chris Duffy:
You've talked about how sometimes parents approach their children as though they're a project that they're trying to perfect so that they can then brag to their other parent friends about it rather than as a human that you're trying to set up for success in life. True success in terms of, like, resilience and the capacity to learn and to grow.

[00:09:08] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah, so what you're hitting on is ego—this sense that “My child is my project, my pet, the evidence of my worth as a human, as a parent. So, therefore, I need to make sure that when they're on the soccer team or they're taking this math test or whatever, that I need to curate that situation so that I make sure they achieve the highest level of measurement on this thing, because it all reflects on me.”

And what that really gets to, Chris, is we as parents are so insecure. It's like we have filled our life with, “I'm raising this child, and that will be the evidence of my worth.” As Carl Jung said, the greatest harm to a child is the unlived life of the parent. When we are centering our child as the project in our life, it puts so much pressure on them and it says to them, “All that matters in my life is you. So don't screw up.”

Can you imagine how that makes a kid feel? We've gotta go get really good therapy, get really right within ourselves about what am I so afraid of? Why am I so worried about what my peers think of where my child places in school next year? You know what? What is unwell in me that if I do the work to heal it means I will be a healthier parent? Which is what my kid deserves.

[00:10:29] Chris Duffy:
It's also fascinating to me how those pressures, which sometimes feel like they're just about the personal, right? The relationship between a, a parent and child, they translate into some of the biggest issues that are facing this country, facing the world, right? When you think about things like segregation, when you think about things like, uh, the wealth gap, right?

These are forces where when you think about like, “I have to make my child's life perfect.” And that is the only thing, the score of that, often it plays into these huge social ills. And when we think about it in the other way, even just on the micro-level, it plays into these unrealistic standards for the self.

It plays into, uh, you know, uh, stress, mental illness, uh, a lack of well-being. Um, all of these, like, big issues can come from this, like one thing which is viewing the world as though it is a, a zero-sum game in we're trying to get a score through our children.

[00:11:23] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah, that's beautifully put. And if I may, I wanna bring Lori Gottlieb into this conversation. She's a psychotherapist in LA, and she's done a TED Talk and has an amazing book. And I was in conversation with her when I was writing Your Turn. I said, “Help me understand what you're seeing in your, uh, psychotherapy practice when it comes to adulting or the inability to adult.”

She said, “You know what, Julie, when a person has been so attended to in childhood… Your parents brought you anything you forgot. You were so busy studying, they brought you dinner to your laptop. They just served, served, served, rescued, you know, were just always there. It’s, of course, lovingly intended, and yet it sets up a pattern where this young person comes to believe that love looks like the other person drops everything to show up for you.”

So in her psychotherapy practice, she’s got these young adults who are out there in the world, they're trying to, you know, succeed at a job, succeed in relationship, and they come to her and they say, “Well, I dropped him, or I dropped them. I dropped her. You know, like, I'm not with them anymore.”

“Why?” Lori says, and the client says, “Well, we got into a fight, and they just wouldn't see it my way.” So, shrug shoulders, hands in the air. I dropped him, I've moved on. She says they don't know how to be in relationship with another human who also expects to be heard and seen and supported and validated, right? If they've been taught that the person who loves you drops everything to serve you, they will not be able to succeed in relationship with other humans.

[00:12:52] Chris Duffy:
Some of the way that we're approaching it in the, the conversation so far, I can imagine if you're a parent and you're feeling like, “Oh gosh, it's yet another thing that I'm doing wrong.” But, but I think the bigger picture is that, like something that I've heard you say is that a parent's worth today is defined by the sentence, right? Like, “I stayed up all night to help Sarah finish her biology project,” and, and why would we define a parent's worth like that? Why? Why does that happen, do you think?

[00:13:17] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Oh my gosh. Peer pressure. You know, once upon a time, a, a small number of parents stayed up all night with a glue gun, bragged about it the next day as they clearly demonstrated their child's project, which was better than the other kids’ work because a parent helped. You know, that used to be the absurd parent who did that.

Now, when I go to communities around America talking about this stuff. And I say, you know, “Nobody here but people near here are doing their kids' homework,” everybody laughs ‘cause they know it's happening in their community, in their house maybe. And so it's become the way to demonstrate you care instead of, “No, I expect my kid to do their own homework cuz that's the only way they're going to learn and I'm okay if they get a B or a C or whatever today because I want them to work harder and work with their teacher and become the student who can actually earn the grade for excellence themselves without my hands having to be anywhere in it.”

[00:14:13] Chris Duffy:
A very relevant thing that I know you've thought about a lot is you look at this from the perspective of the young adults who maybe are recognizing that they need to have a hard conversation with their parents, but they're not quite sure how to do it. So what advice would you give them as they're trying to broach this with the people who are raising them?

[00:14:29] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah. What I tell kids is basically I've got a six-step method. I advise kids with these six steps, and what it begins with is ask for the time you need. Say, “I have something serious on my mind. Can we set aside time to talk?” Which will freak them out, but make them listen. And then when you are in that prearranged time, open with gratitude. Because your parents love you and are trying to do the best. They're not trying to ruin your life. Like, “I love you and I know you love me,” or “I know you've worked so hard and sacrificed so much for me,” and frankly, this will further set your parents back. They'll now be completely worried and, and that's terrific because you've got their attention, which is how then the actual substance of the conversation is going to more successfully unfold.

[00:15:15] Chris Duffy:
Sometimes I have this feeling that there are families that have issues and they need to work them out. And then there's other families that don't have issues because they're doing it right. And I think one of the real clear reminders here is that no matter what, whether you have, you know, a healthy, loving family, whether you have a family that has some like real issues, we always need to set these boundaries and to have conversations about these things because it's, it's kind of impossible to get through becoming an adult without needing to have these sorts of conversations.

[00:15:46] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
So let's put it this way, humans are complicated. Human interaction is complex. We get better and better at it as we grow and know ourselves, as we get better at articulating our wants at drawing boundaries, but also getting better at listening to what other people need and what's really animating their anger. Underneath that is fear. Animating their wild emotion. Underneath that is insecurity. The more mature we get, the more we are able to appreciate, kind of approach human conversation with that sort of finer tune dial and uh, what I'm describing is the work—the delicious, confounding, frustrating, necessary work of being a human.

And, so whether your family is deeply problematic and you know, your life is filled with trauma or it feels like a fairly functional family, but there are still some issues and situations that crop up, wherever your reality may be on that spectrum, it’s worth it. It's worth doing the work to unpack, to know somebody better, to know somebody more clearly, to be in deeper relationship with them accordingly, or to be able to draw that line and say, “You know what? Peace out. I love y'all, but y'all got some stuff to work on.”
I mean, that’s my final piece of advice for young people. If after having this mature, thoughtful conversation, your folks are still insisting that they have the right, effectively, to treat you like a dog on a leash, and they will always yank you back, you have the right to snip the leash and say, “You know what? I'm gonna go do my thing, and when you've done doing your work, if you wanna come back to me, I will be here. But this is my life and I am no longer going to let you dictate the path.”

[00:17:31] Chris Duffy:
What is the value of independence to a young person?

[00:17:35] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah. You know what? Instead of independence, Chris, I'm gonna use the word agency. This is a term out of the field of psychology. It was discovered slash labeled by Professor Albert Bandura at Stanford quite some time ago. And this is the fundamental knowing within the human psyche of our own existence.

I know I exist. Why? Because when I act, something happens, or when I fail to act, there's a consequence. Our psyche needs to see the cause and effect in order to know of our existence. So you might be able to intuit that when we over-help as parents, which I have done with my kids, I'll admit it. Or when we're always watching to make sure every step goes well or when we force them to an outcome ‘cause they have to be a doctor, or they can't come home from college, you know, we are interrupting what would otherwise be the natural development of self-efficacy.

So you called it independence, I'll call it agency. We need to demonstrate to ourselves that we can do stuff, not only to get the thing done, not only to build the skill and be stronger for next time, but because this is the very foundation of our mental health and wellness.

[00:18:44] Chris Duffy:
Outside of parenting methods, there, there are a lot of other social pressures and societal pressures that young adults are facing right now. Can you talk about what some of those challenges right now are?

[00:18:53] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
So this 21st-century man, it's a trip. Uh, societal factors like widening income inequality, systemic racialized violence, uh, climate catastrophe looming, um, a lack of faith in our democracy here and, and democratic systems here in the United States.

COVID, I mean, let's not, let’s not overlook. We are emerging out of a pandemic. For young people, there are incredibly valid and real threats, and it is not unreasonable to wanna go hide in the corner in the face of it all. However, what I would offer, if I may, to anyone feeling that way, in addition to it being valid, don't you forget how much agency you do have and can build further in yourself. Okay?

We all, most of us, I would wager, are descendants of people who went through an even worse set of circumstances at some point over the history of our ancestry. So you come from people who survived. You come from people who survived long enough to give life to the people who gave you life, and you can draw upon that strength and remind yourself, “I am capable,” and there's nothing like people who have the bit between their teeth. “I'm frustrated by this. I wanna pour my heart into this. I wanna pour all my energy into this.”

I mean, this is a ripe time for problem-solving of these most seemingly intractable problems. I am so certain that Gen Z and whatever we're calling the people who come after them, and millennials, let me not overlook them, they’re just getting to be middle-aged now, so I don't think of them as super young anymore. Right? There is every indication that this generation, these generations, are going to take us forward in ways that are beautiful and that blow our minds.

[00:20:48] Chris Duffy:
I am gonna blow your mind right now with the fact that we're gonna take a quick break for some ads, but we'll be right back with more from Julie right after this.

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[00:21:06] Chris Duffy:
And we are back. We're talking with Julie Lythcott-Haims about what it means to be a grownup and how to navigate life. Here is a clip from Julie's course on how to become your best adult self.

[00:21:18] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I am not wiser than you. I've been broken, sad, scared, bewildered, worried, and ashamed. I try to help humans make their way in life. Your life is completely up to you, and I'm not gonna try to tell you what to do with it. In teaching this course, this is just me farther down the path of life, and I'm turning around and shining a warm light back at you so that you can see things more clearly.

[00:21:50] Chris Duffy:
You, for many years, worked with first-year students in college, and I know that that one of those, especially for students where it's the first time that they're living away from home, one of the real beauties of that can be getting to share and compare amongst other people of your age about what your parents are like. So I'm curious how you've seen those conversations play out in helping, uh, students or young people, in general, to start developing some of that agency or independence that we've talked about.

[00:22:22] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Well, the first thing I gotta say is, yeah, I was a Dean of Freshmen and I chose that work because I have a heart for freshmen. And by that I mean I have a heart for people who are new, lost, bewildered, scared, worried they won't make friends, worried they won't measure up. And Chris, I think that's ‘cause I moved a ton as a child. I was always the new kid. Not only that, I was the Black kid often in an all-white environment. So I just have this compassion or empathy for those who might, you know, be on the margins.

[00:22:53] Chris Duffy:
You brought up some of your own background and your own childhood. You, you wrote a memoir all about this called Real American, a, a really beautiful and an award-winning book. How has your own background and your own experience of growing up influenced the way that you think about trying to help young people today as they become adults of their own?

[00:23:17] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah. Couple things come to mind. I'm 55. I'm the child of a African-American father and a white British mother who dared to fall in love when, and get married and have me when it was illegal for them to be married in 12 or 14 of these United States. So I came into this life in, inherently transgressive.

I was out of bounds. I was, uh, not contemplated favorably by the rules of society as a mixed-race child. And nobody put it in those terms to me when I was a child, but I could sense that some people thought something was wrong with me, and it’s given me tremendous compassion for the, the many, many humans who are discarded or treated as the other, uh, by society.

I'm a parent. I'm a mom. I am deeply interested in my own children thriving and, um, wanna know what I do to, to aid and help. And have also learned the hard way that sometimes I'm pushing them from behind or pulling them from the front. I'm trying to live that life for them. I'm sure I've got it all figured out, and I just want them to follow like tiny ducks behind me.

I've learned that with the best of intentions we can, we can undermine someone else being on that, on that life path. I think those are, are a couple of the things that animate my, my fierce interest in all of us being able to make our way unfettered by the opinions or overhelp of others.

[00:24:43] Chris Duffy:
Something that I hadn't, I wouldn't have thought about before listening to you talk about all these is how grown up you felt coming from, uh, a mixed race background, that there was this impossibility of fitting into the, the perfect box of expectations. And so much of your work right now is trying to communicate to young people that if they feel that they do not fit into this small, perfect box of what you're supposed to look like, that that is also okay. And it seems like there is a connection there, perhaps.

[00:25:16] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
You are 100% right. I never fit into a box, so therefore I'm deeply interested in anyone else who's either forced into a box or trying to get into a space and is told they don't belong. It is definitely, um, animating my compassion for others. And look, I went off to law school to help humans.

I knew I wanted to help humans. I knew I wanted to be, you know, one of those who would speak up for those whose voice was trampled upon or discarded. And yet, even though I went to law school to be that type of lawyer, like a civil rights lawyer, public interest lawyer, I was so insecure as a young Black woman.

I now know at 55 that at 25, I was so insecure in that space that even though I went to law school to get a degree to go help humans, like be a public defender, I came out of law school knowing, in my own head, I need to get a corporate law offer to prove to all the people I fear are judging me and think I don't measure up, I need to prove to them that corporate America wants me and I'm gonna go be a lawyer in Silicon Valley.

And Chris, I did that work and I was good at it. They told me and they mentored me and they were kind to me and sure, Lord knows they paid me well, but I had a knot in my stomach every Sunday because the work was not work I loved, and I learned it's not enough to just be good at it or just to be pleasing others. I was pleasing others, okay? I was applauded. But my spirit was telling me, “This is not why we're here, Julie, on the planet,” and I pivoted from that work to being a dean at a college to try to help young people figure themselves out sooner than I had, give themselves permission to be that self.

What are you good at? What do you love? Both are necessary in order for you to really be on a path in life that's going to feel rewarding, meaningful, joyful. And I'm speaking here a little bit to the Japanese concept of ikigai which I didn't know of as I was formulating this, you know, way of being with students, but I'm just acknowledging I'm not the only one who preaches this stuff.

Mary Oliver's poem, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is, you know, in, in the realm of poetry, is offering the same opportunity. If you're willing to ask yourself, “What is it I'm good at? What do I love? Who am I?” and then give yourself permission to be that person, that is when life is a magical enterprise.

[00:27:39] Chris Duffy:
So this is a question that's a selfish question. It's a question that I really struggle with, and I'm really curious to hear how you think about. Emotionally, intellectually, I'm convinced. I'm totally convinced by what you say about how we have put all this pressure to be in these one or two very narrow definitions of success that only if you get to this handful of the most successful exclusive schools is, are you actually have done well in high school and will you do well in life?

And I, I get, I, I buy that that's not true. And yet when I think about myself as a person and when I think about what I would want for a future child of my own, it's hard to, it’s hard to reconcile that with some of the advantages that I know come from going to one of these, you know, extremely exclusive places and then getting one of these extremely exclusive jobs, right?

The same things that create all of the stress and this impossible bar, it’s easy to see the rewards of them. So how can I push back on that in myself? And how as you, you know, someone who went to these prestigious institutions—you taught at Stanford—how do you push back on the idea that your path or that path is the only successful one in yourself?

[00:28:56] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I wanna just offer you compassion around that, and for that future child you might have, I love that you're already thinking about doing that work. I wanna push back on the sort of the, it's easy to see the rewards and advantages. Yeah. It does look like there's some rewards and advantages that come with attending a big brand-name school.

But do we know that the people who aren't at that big brand name school are not experiencing a set of rewards and advantages that are deeply satisfying and meaningful? Um, there are so many great colleges, most of which don't have big brand names. So what I preach is fit and belonging. Go to a place, you walk the pathways, you feel like “I can be myself here and I can be valued for who I am”.

Because that means you're gonna lean into the opportunities that are gonna lead to the grades and lead to the letters of rec and so on that you crave, which are gonna lead to the opportunities outside of college. Um, there's research that shows that it's about whether you were mentored where you went to college, not the brand name of the school that determines whether you were successful, but were you at a place where one person, faculty or staff mentored you, gave a darn about you.

And great mentoring happens at places well below the top tier. So we should be seeking those opportunities to be mentored and uh, and make our college choices accordingly. Um, there's a lot of people who attended, who had a brand-name life who, who are deeply miserable. The brand name doesn't make you better at being in relationship.

The brand name may lead to the greater likelihood that you can land that really lucrative job. But if you don’t feel joy in that job, doesn’t matter how much money they're gonna give you. Um, you feel miserable. There are a lot of people who feel the imperative to be in a brand-named life who in fact have it, but discover, “This is not who I am.”

And these sort of shiny trappings of success are really thin and hollow. It's like, do you want an Instagram life or do you want an actual life? An actual life is well-lived when you know, we, we find work that we love, we find people who love us as we are, and we pursue those things. Uh, really without regard to the brand names attached to the places we have gone to school or the, or the work that we do.

[00:31:09] Chris Duffy:
It's such a good point. It's really an important reframing for me to hear too. And, and I think it also, it brings up for me the idea that, like, no matter how many of the brand name life pieces that you can stack up, eventually something is going to not line up, right? Like, no one could live the Instagram life 24/7 for their whole life. And when that falls down, this is the, these are the things that actually matter.

[00:31:35] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
So let me tell you what would break my heart at Stanford, and it applies to any school where this could happen. I would hear from students who'd say, “Well, I wanna be a third-grade teacher, but you know, everyone's telling me to go for the Ph.D. and be a college professor.” Or, “You know what, I wanna be on the frontline saving lives. I really see myself as an EMT in the back of an ambulance, but I'm being told like, yeah, go for the, you know, go all the way, go to med school.” Um, or, “you know what? My dad wants me to work on Wall Street, but I just love being in the wilderness and really would rather go to forestry school.”

And these kids were feeling that being a forestry person, being a wilderness naturalist, being a, an EMT, being a grade school teacher were unacceptable pursuits because someone in their life that they felt was judging them or conditioning love upon these choices was telling them that's not good enough. And I saw it as my job to validate that choice.

The world needs wilderness naturalists and third-grade teachers, and Lord knows it needs EMTs. Why not you? And yeah, maybe you can't afford to live in the most expensive region of the country and do those things ‘cause maybe they don't pay a lot. But when you love the work, the work becomes part of the compensation. So go find where you could do that work and still pay your bills, and you will lead a life of joy. And even if your family never really gets it, to hell with them. It’s not their life, it's yours.

[00:33:00] Chris Duffy:
Well, it has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for making the time to be on the show.

[00:33:04] Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I have loved it. It has been an honor, and thanks to everyone who listened.

[00:33:11] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you to today's guest, Julie Lythcott-Haims. Her books are called How to Raise An Adult and Your Turn. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly comedy newsletter and information about my live shows at chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED Side by Daniella Balarezo, Whitney Pennington Rodgers, and Jimmy Gutierrez, who seem at least from the outside to fully understand how to be adults. Every episode of our show is professionally fact-checked. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles. They are both motivated by the joy of the truth.
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