Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede - 8

If you’re not positive energy, you’re negative energy.

—Mark Cuban

Several years ago, I went to the Hoffman Institute in Northern California to do their “process.” You can’t really go out in Los Angeles without hearing about the “Hoffman Process,” which is a week of group therapy where you “bury your childhood” and better understand your patterns. People are really fanatical about it. Ultimately, I had high hopes for finding forgiveness, but that’s not the moment that stands out for me.

I can naturally be quite lighthearted—I love to laugh, and I love to dance. I’ll dance until 6:00 a.m. if I’m left to my own devices. But on this particular day, a group of us were in a circle, and we were supposed to be doing a series of silly things. I was sober, it was the middle of the afternoon, and I just couldn’t bring myself to dance around with a bunch of people I’d only known for two days. I told the leader I was tapping out. “Nope, sorry, this is not for me.”

He approached me on the sidelines and said, “You know, Emma, you have four kids—you might need to learn how to play.” Now that was a gut punch.

I thought about that a lot in the weeks and months after. I don’t know if it’s because I felt saddled with responsibility so young, but I don’t remember ever playing. Kids would come around our cul-de-sac and ask me to come out and hang, and I remember feeling offended: As if. Please tell them to go away. I refused to even go to the door. My mum would urge me to go and hang with kids my own age, but I was definitely that child who only wanted to sit with the adults. I don’t know if I’m serious by nature, or I just skipped that part of childhood where you learn how to be carefree, but I couldn’t relate to the other kids. I’ve never been carefree; I don’t know what that would even feel like. But I have found ways to feel a lot of joy.

While you need to manage your anger and fear, you really can’t “manage” joy. And you can’t manufacture it either. In my experience, it comes unbidden and leaves just as fast. But joy is a better goal than “happiness,” which as a steady state seems unreachable. This insistent cultural idea that we’re supposed to be consistently content and happy, or put that idea of ourselves forward on social media, really holds us back, because it feels like we’re failing when it doesn’t feel as perfect as it looks.

What I’ve come to understand, though, is that while joy doesn’t come on demand, you must take responsibility for clearing the barriers that make joy hard to find. There are a lot of things in my life that threaten to take my joy away: I get calls all the time from people who want money from me (and nobody ever wants a hundred dollars from me; they want $10,000 or more); there are endless hurdles at work; I need to navigate a lot of business complexity both in and outside of the office. It’s in my hands to create my joy despite the basic reality that life sometimes makes it hard. For me, this comes down to habits, routines, and rituals that I know I can rely on for an infusion of joy: girl trips with my friends, family time with my husband and kids, getting good sleep, and taking care of my mind and body. No one has made me happier than I make myself. I take this responsibility very seriously.

I talk about the Rule of Thirds a lot because we live with a false belief that you can buy happiness—that money will solve your emotional problems and deliver you to a place where you wake up smiling and content. Money can solve a lot of problems, it’s true; specifically, money can solve all your money problems. And I’m a fierce advocate for women making more of it—but money doesn’t make everything easy or okay. You can believe me on this point: I’ve experienced all sides of the wealth spectrum. At many points in my early life, we were scraping pennies, while some members of my extended family were frequently quite flush (not always from the nicest or most savory sources). Those family members were typically the most miserable. Meanwhile, my father, who as a British telecoms engineer made about 35,000 pounds a year for the majority of his life, is joyful. He’s a happy, mellow soul—everyone in his house is mostly content and chill, most of the time. Now, to be fair, he wasn’t present in my early life. My mum was twenty-eight and single, with three kids under five, so I don’t know that joy was as easy to come by for her. But joy is not contingent on having everything dialed in. I was chatting with Mark Cuban recently on my podcast, and he told me the story of his first entrepreneurial venture, born out of a desire to get a reasonable place to live (he was sleeping on the floor in an apartment he shared with five other guys). “My attitude is if you’re happy when you’re broke, you’ll be happy when you’re rich. If you were miserable when you were broke, there’s no amount of money that’s going to change you from being miserable. When I was sleeping on the floor, I was still having fun.” 1

I have a pretty low bar for feeling like things are pretty good. I’m optimistic and inclined to see the upside. I wake up every day feeling thrilled to be alive and so happy to be in my bed in Bel Air. As it were, I could still be in Plaistow, or worse. I held a meeting with my business managers a few months ago—my holding company is called E13, which is the postal code for the area where I grew up. So we all looked on Google Earth to see from whence I came. As they peered around, I watched their faces in amusement. It’s one thing to say a neighborhood is rough, but it’s another thing to watch people experience it from afar.

“I thought I grew up in a terrible place, but most of these cars don’t have wheels? I don’t understand.” The woman who made the comment grew up in Long Beach.

“Yeah,” I responded, “that’s how it was when I was younger, too. People would just steal the wheels off cars, and these vans would stay abandoned on the street. It’s nice to know some things never change!” There’s a marked difference between my bedroom view as a child and my bedroom view now.

While I left Plaistow behind, it’s a huge part of who I am. I’ve made a new life and created an entire world for myself across the globe, in part because I’ve always understood that I’m responsible for my inner state. My happiness is on me. I’ve never looked for anyone else to make me happy. I don’t expect my husband to make me happy. I don’t expect my children to make me happy. And I don’t expect the outside world to make me happy. I’m the only person who can do this for myself. I control my thoughts, which we’ll turn to now.

Treat your emotions—including the hard ones—as important information. Your emotions are not your enemies. You get to choose how you respond to life; it’s a choice you get to make every single day, maybe the most important choice of them all. While it’s easier to be joyful when life is being kind to you, it’s up to you to decide how you’re going to show up in the world. It’s a skill to choose how you respond to whatever you’re feeling, but it’s one I practice every day.