She Created the Like Button, But Comics Were Her Salvation
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2017
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You know that little button on Facebook you click to "like" something? Well, as one of the early employees at Facebook, today's guest, Leah Pearlman, came up with that idea.
Actually, its original incarnation was the "awesome button," but what's more interesting is why she created it. And, what was going on in her life that led her to want it, both for herself and the millions of others flooding the platform.
Turns out, Leah was leading a double life. Publicly, she was a fiercely smart, driven technologist as the hottest startup in Silicon Valley. But, privately, she battled near-debilitating perfectionism that led to a decade of bulimia. On any given day, she'd move between helping to build a revolutionary company, and purging in the women's room.
Until, one day, tragic news about her father, and the way she caught herself dealing with it, led everything to fall apart. She was forced to bring her dark side into the light and find a way through. And, from that emerged something she never saw coming.
Having been a devout "art-atheist" her whole life, drawing became her salvation. She began to share her simple illustrations and they touched a nerve. Thousands of people began to share them. That led her down an entirely different path in her career and life. Many of her Dharma Comics have now been published in a book entitled Drawn Together, as an offering to help others find wisdom, hope and transformation in simple moments.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I think sometimes there is so much to be grateful for and I experience that and I've learned |
| 0:08.8 | that has absolutely nothing to do with the level of pain. |
| 0:12.8 | They just can both be true and somebody who has had all the comforts in life can be suffering |
| 0:18.0 | a great deal internally and somebody who has none of them can be incredibly joyful and |
| 0:22.4 | grateful and they just have to put my attention on the fact that those are just two different. |
| 0:28.4 | They're unrelated things. |
| 0:33.4 | Today's guest, Leopold Man, grew up in Denver, Colorado. |
| 0:37.4 | One of my favorite places actually as a kid, incredibly motivated academically and also put an incredible |
| 0:44.6 | amount of pressure on herself to excel and perform. |
| 0:47.6 | That led her into a pretty dark place that she kept secret for the better part of a decade of her life. |
| 0:53.6 | During that same decade, she ended up going to university and then being one of the early team members |
| 0:59.2 | at Facebook where she actually proposed what became the like button, which ties in in a really |
| 1:06.0 | powerful way with the need to be liked on a very personal level. |
| 1:09.6 | That led her to a moment of awakening a couple of years into that position that actually |
| 1:15.4 | sent her out of the world of technology and deep into the world of exploring her in herself |
| 1:20.3 | and into artistry, something she had thought for the vast majority of her life was just not worth anything. |
| 1:28.3 | That journey also led to a new book called Dharma Comics that we're going to dive into and where that whole thing evolved from. |
| 1:35.3 | I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. |
| 1:42.3 | So good to be hanging out with you. |
| 1:44.3 | Thank you. |
| 1:45.3 | Thanks. So you came in from Berkeley. |
| 1:47.3 | Yeah. |
... |
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