It’s time to take your pen back. Take that pen that was writing your narrative and start writing it yourself!
Bedros Keuilian: I’m 44 now, and it wasn’t until I was about 40, 41, that I felt like I can take the pen back and realize there’s a lot more blank pages going forward and write how this narrative’s supposed to go.
Andy Carter: It’s so powerful.
Bedros Keuilian: Right? And that, to me, was my biggest epiphany, and that, you know, if any of your tribe members are listening to this, if I can give them that 20-year advantage by saying, “Look, take the pen back now…”
Bedros Keuilian: I had this weird epiphany one day on an airplane. A lot of my best epiphanies come in on airplanes, and I realize why. My phone’s off. I’m tired of reading whatever book I had with me. And so we have time to kind of think and process, throw out shit, right?
Bedros Keuilian: And so the epiphany was that, you know, we might put ourselves in a box of, I’m introverted, or I’m always going to have fat genes. I’m supposed to be fat, because you know, I come from the Armenian culture, and I’ve got, you know, fat parents and fat siblings or whatever.
Bedros Keuilian: But I realized that really, when we’re born, we’re given like a book with blank pages. The only thing is, when we’re born, someone else has the pen, because we’re babies and that, the person with the pen says, “All right. Well, I’m going to dress little Andy in this. And blue is going to be his favorite color.”
Andy Carter: That’s our rule book that we come with.
Bedros Keuilian: And they go, “Well, you know what? I’m afraid of spiders, so, ooh, I’m going to teach Andy to be afraid of spiders.”
Andy Carter: That’s right.
Bedros Keuilian: And, you know, I’m afraid of heights. No, that’s dangerous, Andy. Don’t go near that.
Bedros Keuilian: And now you very quickly realize that all these weird fears and doubts and habits and behaviors are all inherited because someone else was writing the pages of my book. “Don’t run, you’ll get hurt,” because they ran and they got hurt. You know, “don’t take that risk because I lost money. You might lose money.” And at some point, because, obviously, as babies and children, we’re supposed to have the pen in someone else’s hand, and of course, they feed us. They change our diapers. They put clothes on us. We can’t make those decisions.
Bedros Keuilian: But as we get older, and I noticed, and this is the epiphany that I had is we spend our first 20 years with the pen in someone else’s hand.
Andy Carter: Agreed.
Bedros Keuilian: And everything they’re writing is through the filters that they’ve experienced the world through. And then at some point, we realize, “Wait a minute. I think I feel a little differently.” We spend the next 20 years, from about 20 to 40, trying to unravel things.
Andy Carter: Agreed.
Bedros Keuilian: And it wasn’t … I’m 44 now, and it wasn’t until I was about 40, 41, that I felt like, I can take the pen back, and realize there’s a lot more blank pages going forward and write how this narrative’s supposed to go.
Andy Carter: It’s so powerful.
Bedros Keuilian: Right? And that, to me, was my biggest epiphany, and you know, any of your tribe members listening to this, if I can give them that 20-year advantage by saying, “Look. Take the pen back now. Work through your problems now, and you decide what your narrative is. You decide if you’re extroverted or introverted. They don’t.” That’s the answer.