From Addiction & Rock Bottom to Redemption & Purpose - Rich Roll (4K)

At what age did you start sorting your life out?

(exhales) That's a good question. I think the moment where I began to really look inward and take stock and inventory of my life, legitimately for the first time, was probably when I was 31 and found myself in a treatment center in rural Oregon. Uh, faced with confronting a decade plus, uh, problem with drugs and alcohol, uh, nowhere to escape, just a bunch of counselors and a bucolic countryside, and 100 days to really start to understand why I had ended up in this place, which certainly was not the plan for my life, I can tell you, uh, and what I was gonna do about it in order to create a new life for myself that would be more in alignment with a truer version of who I was. I didn't know the answer to that question, but that's where that very long journey probably began, consciously.

It seems to me that a good chunk of your story is a series of reinventions.

Yes. I think that we are all reinventing ourselves all the time. I've said this before, but I think the great delusion that we walk around with is that we are in some kind of perpetual stasis. We are the way we are, the world is the way that it is, this person behaves this way, they're always gonna behave that way. Uh, but the reality is that everything is changing all the time, from the subatomic level all the way to, eh, you know, the vastness of the universe. There is no stasis. Everything is in flux and in, and is in motion. Um, the question is how much are you directing that change versus, uh, reacting to the world around you? Um, and yes, my life has been punctuated by a couple kind of significant Rubicon changes or, or reinventions, uh, to be sure. Um, but I'm always in the process of trying to evaluate where I'm at, where I wanna be, where I wanna head to. Uh, but yeah, I've had a couple sort of, uh, moments in my life that, uh, were sort of s- uh, line in the sand moments for sure.

Yeah, you have this really famous tweet talking about all of the things you've done successfully and the fact that you didn't do them before a particular age.

Mm-hmm.

I hadn't started my podcast until... I hadn't run my first endurance race until... I didn't write my first book until... And I think in a, an age where social media allows us to see successes from people very young, um, it gives a good bit of solace to people who, uh, feel like "I'm 40 now. I've missed... I'm in the, I'm on the back nine and I haven't even started swinging the golf club yet."

I know what that feels like. You know, I was that guy. Certainly, you can always reinvent yourself. There's always hope, there's always opportunity. I think now more than ever, with all the tools that are available to people to craft their own career paths, to find ways to support themselves through, uh, pursuits that, that they're curious about or that light them up, I think this is a real golden age in terms of that. Uh, but that didn't exist when I was your age or when I was younger, and I grew up in a very traditional household. Education was paramount, expectations were set very high, and I learned early and often how to play that game of upward mobility. I was an awkward, insecure kid who had difficulty making friends, but at some point I locked in on the sport of swimming, and that's a whole story I'm happy to go into. And what I learned in the swimming pool transferred into the classroom and I became a better student. I had always struggled in school, but by the time I graduated from high school, I was top of my class and got very good at playing the game of getting into all the colleges and going to the right place and getting the right job without ever any self-reflection on what it was that I wanted to do or what excited me or what was unique about me or how I wanted to show up in the world or express myself. Uh, I was just trying to excel, and that path was very narrow at the time. Like, go to this school, get this job, show up early, work late, you know, sort of climb that corporate ladder. Went to law school, was on the partnership track at a law firm, did all of that and had to basically suffer an existential and health crisis e- as a reckoning in order to look inward on myself and reflect upon the, the reasons why I made those decisions, why they were leading me astray, and begin the process of opening the aperture of my vision to, to allow space for something new and different.