TED Talks Daily - 5 practical ways to take control of your life | Jim VandeHei

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

You can't control the world — but you can control you. That's the mantra that took Axios CEO Jim VandeHei, a once "unremarkably unremarkable 20-year-old," all the way to launching companies and interviewing presidents. He breaks down a career's worth of observations into five deceptively simple things you can control, and explores why mastering them can change the trajectory of your life.Learn more about our flagship conference happening this April at attend.ted.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. As a journalist, businessman, and co-founder of Axios, Jim Vandahai 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. 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. 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. And now our TED Talk of the Day. 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 camelites 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 Axis. So what the hell happened? And 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 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 of my parents. 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 everyone 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 Oshosh and my 1.491 to D.C. 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 words. 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 can become a great person. My personal motto of the last 15 years is when shit happens, shine. Meaning in the worst of times, when really bad things happen, that's what 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 Politica, was 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. me and it helped me get there. Three, 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 podcast, 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 do, 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've 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 chat-chip it. If you want to know what Elon Must 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. Four, you control how you're seeing. This one might seem a little too absurdly self-induced. 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 a 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 going to be watching me, my kids are going to be watching me, my wife's going to 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 her done. Thank you. Thank you. That was Jim Vanda High speaking at TED Next 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.

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 Green, Lucy Little, and Tonica, Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisi Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your first. feed. Thanks for listening.