3 Questions That Determine Who You Really Are

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Three questions borrowed from Terry Crews, Jeff Bezos and Viola Davis

  Mel built this solo episode from clips she found going down a YouTube rabbit hole: Terry Crews on Shannon Sharpe's Club Shay Shay, a 2001 Jeff Bezos interview for the Academy of Achievement, and Viola Davis on a red carpet. Each person's question targets a different area: how you work, how you decide, and how you treat yourself.

• 02

  Question one: if someone paid you a million dollars to do this, how would you do it?

  Terry Crews asked himself this while sweeping floors as a janitor in Los Angeles after leaving the NFL, close to tears and fighting depression. He called it a little game to get through the depression; Mel argues it is a way to play life to win. Any difference between how you'd do the task for a million dollars and how you're doing it now reveals untapped capacity you can choose to use at any time.

• 03

  Honesty about where you coasted is the fuel

  Crews admits he never really liked football, saw it as a way out of Flint, Michigan, and didn't fully apply himself. He describes eating the cake, staying up late, showing up late to the interview and then blaming others. Mel uses this to own her own pattern of not throwing herself into college, law school and job after job, then blaming something else.

• 04

  Repeating the question turns excellence into a habit

  Crews didn't use it once. He applied it filing papers at the Veterans Administration and working security on movie sets, ironing his clothes and checking his flashlight batteries 'as if someone gave me a million dollars to watch this parking lot.' He says it reversed the bad attitude he had in the league and felt like an imaginary reward, so it didn't matter what others said.

• 05

  How you do anything is how you do everything

  Mel's point is that how you sweep a floor is how you show up at an interview and how you get back up after rejection. Showing up with excellence at the thing you're aiming for often opens a door you didn't know was meant for you.

• 06

  Question two: at 80, will I regret not doing this?

  Bezos called it the regret minimization framework: project yourself to age 80, look back, and minimize regrets. He knew he wouldn't regret trying to take part in the internet even if he failed, but not trying would haunt him every day, which made the decision 'incredibly easy.' He put it as a 100% chance of regret if he didn't try and basically 0% if he tried and failed.

• 07

  Long-range thinking cuts through short-term confusion

  Bezos left his Wall Street firm mid-year, walking away from his annual bonus, which Mel notes is often most of a year's pay there. He said such short-term factors can confuse you; Mel says they can actually drive the decision. In a later interview with his brother, Bezos added that our biggest regrets are usually acts of omission, paths not taken, like loving someone, never telling them, and watching them marry someone else.

• 08

  Trying and failing isn't a regret

  Mel calls this time traveling: things that are confusing in the middle make sense looking back. Once you commit, obstacles become things to figure out rather than reasons not to act. Her claim is that you're proud of yourself for the risks you take, even the ones that fail.

• 09

  Question three: who is going to be the love of my life today?

  Asked by BuzzFeed for relationship advice for young people at a 2023 Hunger Games premiere, standing beside her husband Julius, Viola Davis said what she tells her daughter: you are the love of your life. She added that loving yourself, creating boundaries, advocating for yourself and being honest with yourself is the seed for good friendships and relationships.

• 10

  It's measured by behavior, not feeling

  Mel turns Davis's line into a morning question and a nightly gut check: who was the love of my life today? You know the answer by how you behaved: speaking kindly to yourself, caring for your body and needs, not chasing people who don't choose you, holding boundaries. She hopes nine times out of ten it's you, because how you treat yourself sets the bar for every other relationship.