If You Want to Have Life-Changing Conversations, Ask These Tough Questions | E74 | Topaz Adizes
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Your mind is a faithful dog. It will chase any stick you throw.
Topaz Adizes. Today, we're talking to an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, Edmund Hillary Fellow. And you are right now on a mission to create powerful human interactions in the digital age.
I don't know even if I like humans. We do some terrible things. But I love humanity. And what is humanity? Humanity is not what's in us. It's what's between us. If you see yourself in a negative mode, beating yourself up, you're asking a disempowering question. Should I fire this person? Should we launch the product or not? Should I leave my job and start a startup? Okay, wait, change the question. Create a better, more specific, constructive question. And then the answer becomes obvious.
How do you create the questions that actually start creating results?
you
Topaz Adidas. Today, we're talking to an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, Edmund Hillary Fellow. I mean, your work, Topaz, was selected for super prestigious festivals like Cannes and Sundance and so many more. And you are right now on a mission to create powerful human interactions in the digital age. How did this become a calling? How did you get started, Topaz?
I got started in my parents' divorce as a four-year-old. I got started feeling disconnected from the two people I love the most and who did not seem to find a way to connect. That's where this pain became hunger. And then in my 20s, I studied philosophy and was trying to find how I can contribute. And I was really interested in cinema and the camera and talking to people to ask questions, to have conversations. to feel a sense of connection to other people. And I would think, yeah, it's because when you're a kid and your parents get divorced and your world falls apart and you're looking for that sense of connection. That was my experience for me. And so then here I am in my twenties with a camera and I realized the camera is a bridge. It's a door opener. You show up to someone with a camera and you ask a question. In some sense, it gives you a door opener. It's a bridge. And so I became a filmmaker for 15, 20 years.
And then the last 10, 11 years with my experience design studio called The Skin Deep, I'm really interested in how the experience, the emotional experience of being human is shifting. And that's what I've been, my team and I have been exploring for the last 10, 11 years.
I want to talk about the skin deep and the end, but let me take you back in time for a second to pause and thank you for sharing. Talk to me a little bit about what came about, because again, it probably didn't process enough or you felt you didn't talk to them enough. What came to you there and why did that become such a big motivator for you to open these conversations and to figure out the real truth now?
I don't know, the makeup of my personality, along with that experience of a feeling of lack of connection. So I went in the opposite direction. I searched for connection. I searched for intimacy. And, you know, my 20s and 30s, as I was exploring my own romantic relationships, I could feel the reverberations of the divorce in my own patterns, in my own way of thinking. how did I circumnavigate around people emotionally? And I'm talking about the intimacy. And I think in 2014, when you looked around the world at the time and you saw how technology was shifting so much politics, it was shifting the financial currencies with cryptos coming out and dating. I mean, people were using dating apps and it was really coming.
And I was single at the time in New York and I just saw how technology was shifting the way we were relating to one another. But at the core, like if we go to the seed, I believe for me, at least in the current understanding of my life and the current vantage point of looking back, is a sense of disconnection as a young child, trying to make sense of this huge world. And I think that there's a book that I read was super helpful for me. I don't remember the author, but it's The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce. And it was super helpful for me because the underlying idea is that for those children who are the children of divorced families, in the back of your mind, you have this sense that everything will end.
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