Learning to Love Your Life with Adam Markel

What if you decided to love your life? Adam Markel discusses this concept as something that completely changed his life for the better. Markel discussed a pivotal moment in his life where he ended up in the emergency room with symptoms that he assumed were indicative of a heart attack. While he did not have a heart attack, this event made him take notice of his life as an attorney and the stresses that came with that.

Over the course of a few years, Markel was able to transition from the life of an attorney to the life of a CEO at his own company. However, soon those same stresses reappeared and made him once again take stock of his life and his choices. His family was worried about him, and his company was making a change that didn’t include him. So, what did Adam Markel do? He looked back on his experience as a lifeguard and his life as a lawyer and realized that “You can’t fight the currents, and when you do, you get worn out, that Is how people go down.”

Faced with another career choice, Markel made the choice to embrace the pivot. He embraced the fear of the unknown and founded a new company created to build work cultures focused on inspiration rather than exhaustion.

Throughout his Ted Talk Markel discusses various encounters that he’s had since opening his new company on the basis of his love your life mantra. He asks everyone a simple question: what if you decided to love yourself, no matter what? Markel makes the point that you don’t need to keep proving yourself, which is a tough but useful framework for law students and attorneys to recognize.

We wanted to bring you Markel’s Ted Talk for our Wellness Wednesday tip for this week because burnout is very real, and we all need to be able to recognize it when it hits. His mantra is something that can help us take stock of our lives and our futures while focusing on the positive and truly loving our lives.