Lael Stone

Welcome to Humans Being, I'm Lael Stone, and my humanness for this week is all centered around how nothing is wasted.

And what I mean by that is, we go through life and we do these random jobs, or we have these...

uh extraordinary circumstances or events that happen and then as you get older you begin to see just how relevant they have been in the grand landscape of your life and i'm at this point in my life where you know i do a lot of working online with people i um you know i do events i public speak i

you know, have written books, all these kinds of things that I've done.

And I'm realizing and reflecting that so much of what I did when I was younger has actually shaped where I am now.

And I haven't talked about this a lot.

People who maybe have followed me for a while may know this, but the first company I ever created and started was when I was 20 years old and it was called Wishlandia and it was a children's entertainment company.

And my job was to go into kids' birthday parties and entertain them.

So I'd dress up as a fairy, a mermaid, God knows whatever they wanted.

And I'd have to walk into a room of like 25 screaming five-year-olds and capture their attention and entertain them for a good hour or so.

And it was hard work, but it taught me so much about connection.

It taught me all about how to capture an audience.

It also taught me about the power of play because my job was to be there to play, to entertain, to be with children in their most beautiful, raw state.

And it's so funny as I go from that job, I then moved into birth and then after working in birth, I moved into parenting, then I moved into sex education and then a school and then the work I do now.

And I often think back to those days of Wishlandia and the hundreds of home videos that I am sure I am on from when people used to film their kids' birthday parties and how that was such a valuable experience for me, how it also still...

Well, it also still guides what I do now in being able to talk to people or understand play and healing with children and families, but also the, you know, being able to speak, being on stage, knowing how to read an audience, all of that I really do feel came back from those early, early years.

And I know many people probably have heard Steve Jobs talk about, in one of his famous talks, he talks about how everything has a place, and he talks about when he did this calligraphy class, or something about fonts that he did when he was at university, which then actually shaped what he did when he created Apple, and how that was a really powerful part of his story as well.

And so it's really got me thinking about how nothing is wasted.

All those things that we do often shape where we end up being.

So that is my humanness for today, the paths that we walk, the things that we do and how they impact where we end up in life.