How to Be a Better Human - A practical guide to taking control of your life | TED Talks Daily

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

The real lever of a meaningful life isn’t intelligence or hustle — it’s personal agency, says Cate Hall, former Supreme Court attorney and once the world’s top-ranked female poker player. Sharing her journey from the throes of addiction to leading a multibillion-dollar foundation, Hall shares tactical wisdom for increasing your ability to see and act on life's hidden degrees of freedom, showing how even the most trapped among us can discover a path to fulfillment.For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscriptsHow to Be a Better Human is nominated for the Signal Award for Best Advice & How To. Vote here!Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Hulu original series, Murdoch, Death and the Family, dives into secrets, deception, murder, and the fall of a powerful dynasty. Inspired by shocking actual events and drawing from the hit podcast, this series brings the drama to the screen like never before, starring Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and Jason Clark. Watch the Hulu original series, Murdoch, Death in the Family, streaming October 15th on Disney Plus. Is your business struggling to keep up? When the world moves fast, relying on yesterday's technology will slow you down. Erickson powers your business with 5G and AI Enterprise solutions. From local franchises to global companies, Erickson helps businesses like yours to operate smoothly, stay protected, and keep growing every day.

Speed up and stay ahead. Visit us at ericson.com slash enterprise. Not a billionaire, not a problem. You can still do something legendary by leaving a gift to charity in your will. Even 1% in your will can change the game for a cause you care about without taking away what you or your family need. It's a powerful way to make your mark. Anyone can leave a legacy.

Willpower shows you how. Learn more at willpower.ca. Hey, everyone. This week, we are sharing an episode from Ted Talks Daily. This episode features former Supreme Court attorney Kate Hall. And TED Talks Daily shares thought-provoking ideas from the world's leading thinkers across all disciplines. So if you enjoy this episode, which I know you're going to, and you want to further expand your horizons with new ideas every day, I cannot recommend more strongly that you check out more episodes of TED Talks daily wherever you get your podcasts. And now, on to the talk.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. 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. Five 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.

This 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. I'm married to an incredible man, and I get to do all sorts of fun projects together, and I'm CEO of Astaire Institute,

a multi-billion-dollar private foundation that's pioneering a new approach to supporting innovative science and technology. What 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. I saw a quote recently from Gary Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator that I really liked. He said, intelligence is on top now, so agency is even more important.

For 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. I'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. Losing 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. I 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. But 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. Second, 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 of 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. Don'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. If 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, I would not have believed it. But 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. 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 Estefanoz, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonzica Sarmar Nivon.

It was mixed by Christopher Faisi Bogan, additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Bellarezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea. for your feed. Thanks for listening. Hey, it's Greg from the Side Note podcast, and I'm here to tell you about the new Google Pixel 10, which for those of you who know me, no pixels are my favorite phone, so I was delighted when I was gifted one. Now the Google Pixel 10 comes with Gemini built in. It's essentially like an AI

assistant that's there to help you at any time. It can go through. through my inbox and summarize it for me, which has been super helpful. I also struggle with meal prepping and it can make custom recipes based on the food that's in my fridge. Recently, I use it to help me plan a trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Day one, start your day in old San Juan. Grab a coffee and light breakfast at a local cafe. Again, the Google Pixel 10 has Gemini built in, so it helps me get things done faster, learn new things, and find inspiration seamlessly. Learn more about the Google Pixel 10 at store.com. The Hulu original series, Murdoch, Death in the Family, dives into secrets, deception, murder, and the fall of a powerful dynasty.

Inspired by shocking actual events and drawing from the hit podcast, this series brings the drama to the screen like never before. Starring Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and Jason Clark. Watch the Hulu original series, Murdoch, Death in the Family, streaming October 15th on Disney Plus. This podcast is brought to you by Wise. for international people using money around the globe. With Wise, you can send, spend, and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Plus, Wise won't add hidden fees to your transfer. Whether you're buying souvenirs with pesos and Puerto Vallarta

or sending Euros to a loved one in Paris, you know you're getting a fair exchange rate with no extra markups. Be smart. Join the 15 million customers who choose Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit Wise.com. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you.