‘Saying yes to playing with my children likely saved my career’: Shonda Rhimes

African-American television producer, screenwriter, and author Shonda Lynn Rhimes is the showrunner behind successful series like Grey’s Anatomy, Bridgerton, Scandal and Inventing Anna, among others. For someone already so established and successful in her career, what can she likely need to push herself further?
In a TED talk about six years ago, Rhimes talked about the transformative capability of saying ‘yes’ to things that scared her, an experiment she carried out over a span of a year. She referred to saying yes to being on live TV, acting, public speaking and eventually said that it was a question from her toddler Emerson that “affected my life in the most profound way”.
She even said that besides having “a magical effect on me, on my children, on our family”, it has also had a “stunning side effect, and it wasn’t until recently that I fully understood it, that I understood that saying ‘yes’ to playing with my children likely saved my career.”

Rhimes elaborated on the magnitude of her work, the shows she produces, the thousands of people employed for it, the millions who watch it worldwide and what it takes to keep things going. Then she added that with accomplishments in her work, “A hum begins in my brain, and it grows and it grows and that hum sounds like the open road, and I could drive it forever.” She also explained how the more she works, the more she accomplishes, the more she needs to work, the more ‘hum’ resonates in her brain.
But, “then the hum stopped. Overworked, overused, overdone, burned out.” She poignantly noted: “I was doing the same things I always did, all the same titan work — 15-hour days, working straight through the weekends, no regrets, never surrender, a titan never sleeps, a titan never quits, full hearts, clear eyes, yada, whatever. But there was no hum. Inside me was silence.”‘
“So what do you do when the thing you do, the work you love, starts to taste like dust?”, she asked.
She then steered the monologue to Emerson, who when Rhimes is “on my way out the door, I’m late”, asks “Momma, wanna play?’ And I say yes’.”
Rhimes said that even though that is “nothing out of the ordinary”, “yet, it is extraordinary, because in my pain and my panic, in the homelessness of my humlessness, I have nothing to do but pay attention. I focus. I am still.” She also added, “Play is the opposite of work. And I am happy. Something in me loosens. A door in my brain swings open, and a rush of energy comes. And it’s not instantaneous, but it happens, it does happen. I feel it. A hum creeps back.”
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