Elizabeth Day is a world-renowned podcast host, she's a best-selling author, she's a successful journalist I felt like a failure, but I probably wasn't, it was what I'd been told to feel I've had countless failed relationships, and then it sucks, like heartbreak, there is no pain in my heartbreak I now realise I learnt something very instructive from each one of those relationships, and from the fact that they ended It taught me something that I needed to know about myself Infertility and miscarriage is not a mishap, like for people who experience it, it's a tragedy over which they have no control And the idea that I was exploiting it to make a full-time career out of it was so insulting Because I know how fucking painful and traumatic it is to go through Being vulnerable, something I think we all find incredibly hard to do And after hearing my guest's story today, I had tears in my eyes maybe three or four times And that's because she is willing to be vulnerable and honest and open about her truth, her trauma And the things she's learned from her most testing times Elizabeth Day is a world-renowned podcast host, she's a best-selling author, she's a successful journalist Honestly, she's quite frankly one of the most wonderful, smart, lovely people I've ever had the privilege of doing this podcast with In fact, today, one of the issues I had with this podcast was we agree on so much That it's hard to play devil's advocate with her, it was hard to challenge her views Because so many of them represented mine, it felt like she was reading out of my book I think that's powerful because she helped me build on my ideas And some of these ideas are controversial, for some people maybe too controversial It is remarkable how much societal expectations can cripple your chance of happiness And I genuinely believe that if we had more people in the world, like Elizabeth Who were willing to say what she says today, then maybe that wouldn't be the case Without further ado, I'm Stephen Butler, and this is The Driver's CEO I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself One of the things that I wrote recently, which After doing a little bit of reading about your story and your journey, really, really resonated with me Was this idea that Society's expectations of how your life is supposed to be going will fuck you up And when I think about, you've written this amazing book called Philosophy About failure, I was thinking, what is, objectively, what is failure And my conclusion was that failure is like a byproduct Of social expectations, as is success So, could you talk to me a little bit about how Social expectations have made you feel Like a failure? Of course, yeah, I Realised I had to define failure after I had launched a podcast called House Fail, and after I'd written a book called House Fail And then I kept getting asked this very reasonable question And I realised I'd never come up with a satisfying definition for me So the definition I came up with in philosophy is that failure is what happens When life doesn't go according to plan, which totally taps into what you just asked me about Because then you need to start to think, well, where does the plan come from? Is it genuinely my plan? Is it genuinely what will make me happy?
Or is it what I've been told I should expect my life to be? Because when I looked at some of my metrics for how my life should be And I put that in quotation marks, it kind of came from like 1980s rom-coms And patriarchal society and conditioning And the idea that I'd been raised in the 80s to be a nice, pleasant, pliable girl Whereas boys were enabled to be mischievous And that was seen as kind of cute and charming And that led to me being an inveterate people pleaser Which I know is something that a lot of people have in this kind of industry And it also led to me imagining that I wanted to be married and have children And that's what I tried to do And in my 30s I did get married to the wrong person I ended up getting divorced And I tried but failed to have babies And went through various fertility treatments that were emotionally devastating in various ways And it got to the point when I was 36, divorced, didn't have children Where I really did feel like a failure And the reason I felt like a failure is because that's what society had conditioned me to believe of myself Because actually, after I got over the pain and the grief caused by that seminal relationship ending And by all of the IVF and coming to terms with my first miscarriage and all of that I actually felt strong for having withstood it And I actually felt kind of liberated too Because I had no plan for the future And having no plan for the future can be terrifying And it can also be this enormous opportunity to change your life And to redefine it according to who you really are Once you've stripped back that pretense So that's one way in which I felt like a failure But I probably wasn't It was what I've been told to feel So I want to pick around this a little bit Because I can resonate with this tremendously In fact, that's why my book has the name it does Is because I was conditioned as a black kid who was broke To believe that the thing that would make me a success Was becoming this happy sexy millionaire with a range over me So I wrote the front page of my diary That even if that's a kid from Africa Who in Africa had nothing but was, you know, my family were happy Bring that kid into a context Where the context is telling me that unless you're this You should feel like shit That's why as a kid I was like Well I need to be a happy sexy millionaire To be fair, if I ever had something else It would have been white, straight hair I was relaxing my hair chemically From the age of about 12 to about 16 So my hair was straight But I want to go back to this point about society telling you What you should want Did you ever figure out what you actually wanted? That's such a good question Also thank you for sharing what you just did Because I know Yeah, you believe like I do The vulnerability is the source of connection True connection And that was really beautiful I think I have figured out who I am now But I sit here as a 42 year old Having only just figured that out And the reason I figured it out Is because of all of those things that went wrong Those relationships that ended, imploded The jobs that weren't right for me That was what prompted me to do the soul searching And I'm a big believer in things happening for a reason The universe unfolding as it's intended Even if you can't make something meaningful As and when it's happening Because it's traumatic and it's devastating I tend to believe that there will be some meaning in there You are using this video Let's tune together and to get it For other For other Or agencies on the vamos