Why You Should Never Suppress Your Authentic Self | Julia Porter-Robinson | TEDxIndianaUniversity
we do indeed live in times of great disruption and transformation in my work for you I I get to work every day thinking about what this means for the future of work I'm a creative I'm a branding leader so I get to spend all day thinking about how does transformation affect work and this you've been living on Mars you may have heard that automation and the robots will replace us all if you believe the rhetoric very lucky I have a really interesting job when I worked some extraordinary talented people but it wasn't meant to be like that when I was seven years old if you told me I was gonna be a global branding leader for a professional services firm I wouldn't have understood you and even if I had I would have almost certainly have started to cry I grew up in a remote and rural part of England on the east coast called Lincoln chef and Lincolnshire there man still is more about agriculture than culture this was a 1970s it was shall we say a tech absent era not like the childhood my children are enjoying and I'm paying for with broken screens every other day so there wasn't much to do but I was blessed with a father who was a gifted pianist although he hadn't been able to afford a piano for many years so when a Singaporean concert pianist rolled into the town next to ours I say town I hope we're talking village like no 700 people lived in my village it was an exciting moment certainly for my dad he rushed out and bought tickets and said Julia we're gonna go and see a concert pianist doing anything else today so I was taken to this concert and the things I remember mainly are that for 99% of it I was unbelievably stultifyingly bored it seemed to go on forever this man you know the the novelty wore off quickly he's huge hair not Duncan well so relieved when it finished I remember feeling like goodness and get out of here and to my horror he walked back on again and sat down oh please let this be over but he then spent four minutes playing a Prelude by Rachmaninoff which transported me and my little seven-year-old brain to a place that I didn't know existed I was overwhelmed I was overjoyed I jumped out of my seat and I clapped like a maniac and in that moment I changed my life ambition from prima ballerina to concert pianist which was quite an announcement considering I was growing up in a house without a piano my mum was quite pleased because I was a clumsy and physically unimpressive child some would say still as an adult and in a tutu I was borderline dangerous my father didn't need much encouragement to empty their small savings destined for a new washing machine and before we knew it we had a piano installed in our home and I began lessons and pretty soon it became clear I was quite good I was actually very good I was a bit precocious and I was a bit of a brat but I was I could play the piano and my dad and I would spend hours together as he taught me shouted at me prodded me and turned me into a quite a good little musician I let through the grades and by the age of 14 I could play that piece by Rachmaninoff that that man had played that night when I was so bored and I was still fixed on my North Star I was going to be a concert pianist no messing with that my father died two days after I took the last piano grade I lost my companion and I lost my inspiration I almost lost the man who would bully me into working a bit harder and this burned me on even more actually to do a diploma that he'd never had the chance to do and then I was at London University doing a bachelor's Irv on a batch of honors in music and I was a master class scholar at an International Music Festival my goal seemed almost Within Reach I was still fixed on becoming a concert pianist and then something I could have done with knowing when I was about 18 was pointed out to me and that was I wasn't gonna be good enough feedback is a gift not good enough to be a concert pianist good pianist on a good day very good but not gonna be a international concert pianist sorry about that Julia nowadays I can't help thinking that people would perhaps challenge that or get a second opinion but I didn't I just accepted it okay not good enough so in that moment I went from aspiring concert pianist who failed a concert pianist without a job because while everyone else had been applying for internships and grad programs I was busy in the practice room for eight hours a day wrestling with Bartok and whoever else totally absorbed in my mission to become a concert pianist so this left me with something of a problem no job graduate career late eighties not a good situation to be in my mother with characteristic British understatement described this as being in something of a pickle actually a bit of a catastrophe my first experience of uncharted waters so I converted my student job into a full-time job and I was a gorilla in a theme park walked around in her green her outfit I wasn't all glamorous sometimes I was a pirate on the ship that sailed the stagnant sea and walk the plank twice a day if the amusement of children and in between times I was teaching piano were talking I don't like children a situation that was remained unchanged even having two of my own and I was an accompanist for often ungrateful soloists and I became a sort of emergency on-call pianist for a theatre group whose resident pianist Arthur had appendicitis or some sort of over alcohol consumption during the interval this was not the glittering career I'd expected or hopeful it really couldn't continue and so sometimes in life we talk about disruption as is something that it's done to us but I decided to disrupt myself and I announced to the world of music that I was leaving the world of music took this in its stride by the way and there was no great loss to the international piano scene and so it was that in 1997 when the rest of the UK was mourning the tragic death of Princess Diana I somehow got through the door of a job interview for a recruitment business everyone was very distracted in the UK that week I remember it distinctly I don't wish to diminish the grief that the nation felt but for me it was a huge opportunity the lady who interviewed me only asked me two things could I get along with people yes I was a professional pirate and could I be left to get along with things on my own yes I'd spend seven hours in a practice room eat just a piano she gave me a job which was by the I can't even slightly reckless because I couldn't actually do anything didn't matter at suit and she was couldn't walking and I had a desk and it became very clear to me that I was a very late start I was surrounded by 22 23 year-olds they were much smarter than me better educated than me and you how to do their job so I had a lot of ground to make up and I did I really did make up some time pretty soon I was getting promoted Wow just getting along with people and doing things as I was left to it and then I got a headhunted then I was working for Arthur Andersen suddenly I've got a team meeting really important now my life has transformed I've gone from failed concert pianists to reasonably successful executive corporate woman about town being pretty pleased with myself didn't have a piano got rid of that never in for it anymore too busy party busy jetting around being important being busy and certainly hadn't played the piano a very long time but I only seem to care about that I didn't seem to bother me I was okay I was doing alright until one day I was at some family gathering or other and I was only drinking alcohol as you do at family gatherings and I overheard somebody saying yeah I think Julia used to play the piano of it and it stopped me dead in my tracks really that someone can describe me as someone who used to play the piano a bit did they don't know that I could play the rapt manonoff payload in c-sharp minor' when I was 14 did they not know how hard I'd worked and how many hours I've spent training on this instrument did they not know I was a failed concert pianist can screws was they didn't I didn't even bother to mention what I'd done my degree in on my CV I didn't talk about it wasn't relevant didn't have value I wasn't going to impress anybody who cares that you have failed concert pianists and then a few months later at work I was confronted by a Hungarian child in the colleagues house in Hungary for some reason he had a piano he wanted me to play it with him I have no idea why I must give off some kind of piano vibe but he kept coming up to me and his English was way better than my Hungarian so it was forced to sit at the piano and I couldn't play I couldn't play couldn't get my fingers to do anything gone all that work gone and in that moment I realized I'd done something really rather terrible I had discarded and destroyed arguably the most interesting thing about myself I couldn't help thinking what my dad say Julia what have you done so when you're in that situation what are you gonna do how could something so familiar to me be so completely alien how could I end up in uncharted waters with the piano the only thing I really knew right from the beginning of my life pretty much so I set about rebuilding my technique and believe me if you leave something to rock for long enough it really will rot I'd done a great job it was rubble I couldn't play baa baa black sheep anymore but I wanted to play that myself again I promised myself that I would get back to playing that rat manonoff I wasn't to be a concert pianist didn't matter I just needed to get back to that piece took me a while my kids weren't happy my dogs weren't happy no one was happy noise my hands weren't happy and I discovered that my hands 14 years of neglect they weren't doing so good turns out I've got a little bit of arthritis creeping in all those hours in the practice room ironically I damaged my joints so now I've got agency now I'm playing whenever I can doesn't matter that I'm busy doesn't matter that I'm flying around as a motor I've got kids whatever else is going on I make time because who I really am is a piano player and in an age of total disruption and transformation the only thing we really can be sure of is who we really are so I'm gonna play the rap man enough for you in a minute I'm sorry about that and I play it for you because actually instead of thinking myself as a failed concert pianist I should have thought of myself as an almost constant pianist do I introduce myself as that no that would be crazy I'm a piano player I also work in branding for a living so my question to you is this are you absolutely sure that you are true to yourself or have you lost sight of any of your passions and talents because you confuse them with not having commercial success or academic value and if you have what you're going to do about it thank you you [Music] you [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Applause]