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I'm your host, Elise Hugh. What does it take to live a life of purpose, especially when life can feel so uncertain. Physician David Faganbaum and

social entrepreneur Kia Williams know firsthand. They both transform their lives and careers

after facing extreme challenges. In this conversation, they joined Ted's Alexandra Tillman for a

candid discussion about what it takes to

identify your guiding purpose and overcome challenges in order to live your best life.

All right, David, Kia, thank you so much for being here. Let's jump in. Can you both share when you realized that life

couldn't just happen to you, that you had to actively start choosing a path forward? David,

I'll start with you. Sure. I might start back when I was a medical student. I had promised my mom that I would become a doctor in her memory when she passed away when I was 19 years old. And in my third year of med school, I was really on my way to making that progress, helping patients in my mom's memory. When I personally became critically ill with a disease called Castleman disease, I was so sick that I had my last rights read to me.

I spent six months in the intensive care unit,

and my doctors told me that we were out of options,

but they gave me chemotherapy seven different chemotherapies all at once,

and amazingly, those chemotherapies worked.

They saved my life, but what they also did is they opened my eyes up to this idea that none of those seven chemotherapies were made for my disease, but they saved my life. So when I relapsed a year later, my doctors told me we're out of options, you're going to die from this disease. So, well, wait a minute, didn't you give me these seven chemotherapies that weren't made for my disease and they worked? How do we know there's not another drug out there that could

help me? And so this sort of opened up my eyes. I eventually discovered another drug that could save my life.

But open my eyes up to this idea that even when the world thinks that there are no more options, when the

world thinks there's no more hope, sometimes there's a solution that's literally as close to you as your

neighborhood pharmacy. I think for me it was, yeah, when I was young, my family just fell apart.

And we were teetering at the edge of poverty.

And I remember going outside when I grew up in West Philadelphia.

I remember going outside one night and literally saying to myself, like,

I have to be the one that saves myself, that creates a new path for myself. And so I had always focused on school and trying to do well,

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