SOLVED with Mark Manson - Finding Your Purpose, Solved

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

This is the episode I’ve been waiting to make for a long time. Purpose has been at the core of everything I’ve written and done for over a decade—and in this episode, we go all the way down the rabbit hole. From Viktor Frankl surviving Auschwitz to the myth of “finding your one true purpose,” we break down what purpose really is, why you feel lost without it, and how you can build it into your life. We also get uncomfortable (in the best way) and talk about the dark side of purpose—how it can burn you out, trap you in toxic ambition, or become an excuse to ruin your life. And I have a very special announcement to make: Today, I’m launching a new app called Purpose. It’s an AI-powered mentor for personal growth. You talk to it about whatever you’re facing—stress, decisions, conflicts, goals—and it helps you make sense of things. Purpose listens, reflects back what matters most, and turns big challenges into small, actionable steps. The more you use it, the more personalized and helpful it becomes. Get started in the app with a free course on finding your purpose at https://purpose.app/solved We also put together a free companion guide for this episode with takeaways and tools to help you get your sh*t together once and for all. Download it here: https://solvedpodcast.com/purpose Chapters: (17:20) CHAPTER 1: Foundations: What Is Purpose? (45:34) CHAPTER 2: Philosophical & Historical Perspectives on Purpose (1:31:26)CHAPTER 3: The Psychology of Purpose (2:08:13) CHAPTER 4: The Four Stages of Life (2:31:33) CHAPTER 5: The Dark Side of Purpose (3:07:25) CHAPTER 6: Finding and Cultivating Purpose (3:36:56) CHAPTER 7: Finding Purpose in Work (or Not) (4:09:14) CHAPTER 8: Practical Tools and Frameworks (4:24:48) CHAPTER 9: The 80/20 of Living with Purpose Follow Mark Mark’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose. Dot app. Drew, I am extremely excited for this episode. I honestly, this is the episode I've most been looking forward to since we started this podcast. As you know, I've been writing about purpose my entire career.

It's been like a huge focal point of everything I've done is like just purpose. Everything comes back to what your purpose is. Oh. We're doing purpose? Dude, don't fuck with me here. I thought we're doing porpoise. I've got 60 pages and notes on sea mammals, Mark. I got a whole segment on platypuses.

Dude. What are we? Sorry. You're not a dad. I'm not a dad. You can't be making these jokes, Drew. You have to wait till you're dead. I've been thinking of this all week.

How can I work a porpoise joke in? And I got it off right away. I'm proud of you. It's out of my system. I'm proud of you. It's out of my system. The audience is proud of. The three people who have not turned the podcast are very proud of you right now.

Sorry. Sorry. Anyway. Drew, what do you think the best transition is from porpoises into the Holocaust? That's on you. That is on you. That's why you make the big bucks. I've got this whole intro about Victor Frankl surviving Auschwitz, and you're hitting me with sea mammals.

Platypuses. Platypuses. Is it platypie? I don't know. All right. We'll get. Not even sure. They're not really even.

We'll get back to everybody on that. Welcome everybody to the Solve podcast, the most over-researched and over-explained. podcast in the world about sea mammals, as well as the most important psychological and philosophical topics of our lives. The goal, as always with the Solve podcast, is to go so deep and be so thorough on a single subject that if you finish this episode, you will never have to read or listen to anything on that subject ever again. It will be solved in your life. And as discussed, today's episode is on purpose. something I am very excited about and something that I have been writing about my entire career. Thinking about it for a long time.

Yes. I'm excited for this one. Yes. Yes. Purpose is hugely important in our lives. I think it's, you know, I often open these episodes by kind of commenting on whether the topic is overrated or underrated. I would say that these days purpose is probably properly rated.

I think it has become a huge topic on the top of people's minds. You see tons of content out there around it. lots of books being written about it and I think it's fair I think it's well deserved and well needed so if I may open with my Holocaust story

excellent sake no I do want to talk about Victor Frankel because he is in many ways I think the godfather of kind of the popular conception of purpose in our lives, the importance of finding a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, like some sort of higher calling up until the 20th century, you know, as we will see once we get into

the episode, the concept of purpose, it was a very, it was mostly religious for the most part, for most people. And then if you were an intellectual or academic, it was a very philosophical question. But it really wasn't until the post-war era with people like Victor Frankel and Jean-Paul psychotherapist that came after them, that you start to see this idea of purpose, purposeful living, finding a life purpose, the importance of living with purpose, enter into the mainstream. And today, I would say it's kind of, it's just dinner table conversation at this point. It's like, oh, what's your purpose? Like, what are you doing that for? Where are you finding meaning these days? Or maybe that's just my dinner table. I don't know.

So Victor Frankel, for people who are not aware, was a psychiatrist born in Vienna, Austria, 1905. He studied under both Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, probably the two most formative psychologists in the history of psychology. And he was a very promising young academic clinician. He was very prolific. He was writing lots of journal articles and doing a lot of interesting research. but unfortunately he was a Jew in Vienna in the 1940s. And so the Nazis came in, they caught him and his family, and soon he got swept away to Auschwitz.

Now, he survived the Holocaust. His entire family passed away, including his pregnant wife. He came out of Auschwitz and then immediately wrote what is maybe, in my opinion, like one of the best and most important personal development books ever written, Man Search for Meaning. It's part memoir of his experience during the Holocaust, and then it is part his theory on what he later called Logotherapy. But basically, it is a therapeutic approach through finding meaning in one's life. And this was particularly important or seismic at the time because up until this point, everything was very Freudian. or Adlerian, which Freud argued that humans are driven towards pleasure and away from pain,

and Alfred Adler argued that people are driven by power and status, whereas Frankel said that people are primarily driven by a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. And his argument came from his time in the concentration camps, where he said that over the years he observed that the people who seem to lose a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives, that they lost a reason to survive were the ones that died next. This didn't matter how young they were, how fit they were, how well adapted they were to the prison work, how sick they were, healthy they were. It was the ones who gave up, who lost the sense of hope or a reason to carry on that went

next. And Frankl himself attributed the only reason that he survived, despite being a little bit older and more frail and less physically fit than a lot of the other prisoners. The only reason he survived is that he decided early on that he did not want to leave his wife a widow. He didn't know that she had passed away. And so he chose to believe that she had survived. And that belief that she was surviving and that he had to survive for her is the thing that helped carry him through. There are a lot of interesting nuggets in that little story that we're going to come back to

because it's a great case study for a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about in this episode about what purpose is and what it means. So Frankl has this incredible harrowing story that is kind of a backdrop to his philosophy. It's one of those philosophies that I think has been so impactful. It's kind of become the water that we swim in. Like we don't realize how much of an effect it's had on popular Western culture, the self-help industry and the personal development industry. Some of his basic tenets, aside from the will to meaning, is that there is an inherent freedom and responsibility in every individual. He said that even when everything is taken away from you, one retains the last of human freedoms, which is the ability to choose one's attitude and reaction to any given circumstance. He talked about the responsibility of one's choices, the responsibility of you are choosing what to find meaningful and important in your life.

Therefore, there's a responsibility that comes with that choice in each and every moment. Fans of my work are this is going to sound very familiar. And then, of course, suffering is inevitable. Every single one of us suffers throughout our lives. Every single one of us deals with hardship, deals with tragedies, deals with trauma. But we all have an opportunity to find meaning in the suffering, to find purpose in the suffering. And it is that ability to find purpose in our suffering and our sacrifice. that gives us a sense of meaning and importance in our lives.

He often quoted Nietzsche, who we'll also be talking about quite a bit in this episode. Nietzsche's famous maxim, he said, those who have a why to live can bear almost any how. Victor Frankel also argued that when people lack meaning, they experience what he called an existential vacuum, which is a sense of emptiness and apathy that comes with a lack of direction or a lack of clarity of what matters. I think everybody has probably experienced this at one point or another in their lives. You see it a lot with, you know, say, university students who graduate and they don't know what to do next. They have all these opportunities in front of them, but it's not clear which one's worth pursuing or which one's worth taking. And so they just feel this kind of dread and emptiness and confusion over what to do and what is really like a very high quality life problem.

you see this a lot in midlife crises. You know, the people who get the good job and have the nice career and they buy their first house and they get to 40 and they look around and they're like, oh shit, is this it? Wait, this is what I've been chasing this whole time. You see it a lot too when people reach a level of financial security for the first time. You know, it's like when you go through your entire life and every major decision that you're making is, for money to pay rent, to buy food, the moment you get to the point where you don't have to be motivated by that anymore, it can actually be a very distressful time

because you don't know what to care about or what to pursue, what your purpose is anymore. So this existential vacuum, the important thing about it is that when we experience it, we tend to assume that something is wrong with us, that we're lost or confused or, or, broken in some way. But the truth is that the existential vacuum precedes growth.

It means that if you are experiencing an existential vacuum, if you're experiencing a lack of purpose in your life, that is because you are in a moment where your psychology is nudging you towards becoming something else. It means it's time to change yourself and transform into some new version of yourself, some greater version of yourself.

Now, Frankel made the very astute point that modern life seem to exacerbate existential vacuums in people. It seemed to make it easier and more likely for people to experience existential vacuums

and I would argue that that has only become more common in the last 20 or 30 years. We'll talk quite a bit about that later in the episode as well. You know, Frankl's School of Thought Logotherapy,

it hasn't really stuck around as a modality. Like you don't really, like you can't get on psychology today and go find a logo therapist like it's just not really a thing, but it's interesting how much his ideas have permeated the culture, how much it's permeated self-help and, you know, pop culture in general.

It's had just an outsized effect on everybody. And I think the fact that people like us can make a podcast about purpose and millions of people will tune into it is just a testament to the fact that like this is such an inherent and important part of our lived experience and everything that we care about. I mean, in many ways, it is at the core of what we do with our time here on Earth. So it's hard to think of anything that is more primary than talking about finding purpose in one's life. So here at the outset of the episode, I think the most important takeaway is just that purpose,

It's not optional. You have to have something in your life that you're working towards. You have to, as I say in my work, you have to give a fuck about something. You have to care about something. You have to find something that's important. It's a psychological need that is just as important, if not more important than things like love or pleasure or happiness or life satisfaction. Now, in this episode, we are going to get into the nitty-gritty of both the philosophical history of purpose of finding purpose in one's life, which is very deep and quite complex.

And I had a lot of fun nerding out to this and revisiting some old philosopher friends that I had not read in a long time. And there's also quite a bit of psychological research on this as well, which we're going to get into. And of course, we're going to talk about how to find purpose, whether even the verb find is the correct verb in terms of increasing the amount of purpose that you experience in your life, the importance of purpose, how purpose changes and evolves throughout your life, and of course, all of the potential pitfalls and setbacks. As we go, we're going to destroy a lot of the common myths and cliches that arise around purpose. No, you don't find your purpose

out there as if it's like under a rock or something. I think a lot of people miss that you can have many purposes in your life. It's not like you have one single calling that you have to pursue no matter what. The truth is, is that many things can add a lot of meaning and value to your life, and those things will change as well. There are certain things that provide a lot of purpose, say, when you're young, that they stop feeling important or useful when you're old and vice versa. We will also talk about the hidden downsides of purpose, which I'm really excited about this, because this is definitely something that nobody talks about. Nobody. Nobody. There are actual real costs and side effects to purpose. There are many forms of purpose. There are many forms of

purpose can actually be destructive in some ways, can be antisocial in many ways, can even be unhealthy, psychologically speaking. So I'm very excited to dig into that. And then, of course, more importantly, we are going to talk about the existential vacuum. I would say the existential vacuum these days, most people would kind of consider it like a mild depression or a kind of a generalized anxiety about life. but it's basically that feeling of like not knowing what matters and not knowing what to do with oneself.

So the front end of this episode, as usual, is going to be dedicated to just getting a very deep understanding on the topic. What's the philosophical lineage of meaning and purpose in life? What is the psychological research and literature on finding purpose in one's life? and then of course what are some of the biological or neurological manifestations of this topic and then in the back half of the episode

we're going to get into all the practical how to nitty gritty five step process you know how do you live with more purpose in your life how do you live with a greater sense of meaning and feel like you are spending your time well because ultimately that's what it comes down to

are you spending your time well And of course, I have a huge announcement in this episode, which I'm not going to spoil quite yet, but there is a lot of exciting stuff that's been going on behind the scenes. A lot of my purpose in life from the past year, I'm going to be sharing with listeners. And so stay tuned to that because it is, it's an exciting announcement, but it's also, I'll be transparent. It's a little bit complicated. as important, purposeful things often are.

So we'll be talking about that. And then finally, as always, if you want a companion PDF guide for this episode, if you want to follow along, see a summary of all the things that we talk about, all the notes that we go into, you can download it for free at solvepodcast.com slash purpose. You can check our work and get all of our citations,

book recommendations. All of that stuff is in there. It is absolutely free. So please don't feel like you're trying to drink out of a fire hose. If you want to take this piece by piece and follow along at your own pace, that is available to you. Anything else before we jump into it, Mr. Drew Bernie. I can't follow that up. I think that's, you set it up really well.

Let's do this. No porpoise. I'm excited to talk about sea mammals. How long can a porpoise hold its breath, you know? I don't know that. No. You didn't research. You did not research a goddamn thing.

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All right, Drew. So purpose is a very abstract thing. And I think we we often confuse it with other terms. It's all very like lofty and kind of heading the clouds type of thing. So how do we define purpose? Like what are what's the ground level here that we can start working off of before we dive deeper into the episode? Yeah, sure. So you're absolutely right. Purpose is very abstract as talked about in very vague terms. There's a billion dollar self-hubhouse. help industry around finding your purpose. There's commencement speeches, TED talks. All of them kind of like push us all to, oh, go find your calling or the one true purpose you have in life. And it gets conflated with all these other terms that we'll talk about. And that leads to a state

of confusion. So if we want to get into some of the definitional stuff, first what I want to do is kind of talk about like the deeper structure of purpose. And that kind of, there's three parts to it. One of them is a direction. Like you have, it points you in kind of a longer term mindset and orientation. So you have a direction that's associated with your purpose. You kind of know the direction you want to move in. You might not know exactly the next step you need to take or exactly all the specifics. But you're like, I generally am going to go in this direction, right?

Purpose helps you figure that out. It's very active, though, too. So there's an action element to it. Purpose is, it's not really, it's not necessarily motivation itself, but it can feed into your motivation. So there's like an active verb tense of your purpose. Right. So there's no, you can't have a sense of purpose just sitting on the couch thinking about stuff. Exactly.

You have to be doing things. It's super, super active. Not only do you live out your purpose through action, obviously, but you also figure it out through action as well, as we're going to see a whole bunch. So there's a very active element to it. The third element is an element of contribution or personal significance. Okay. So your purpose generally feels like you're you're contributing in some way, whether that's to immediately the people around you, greater society, the world, the universe, whatever. It has some sort of personal significance and contribution element to it. Okay. So that's kind of like the deeper structure of it to start making it a little bit more concrete. Yeah. Okay. I feel like the importance piece or the significance piece is like the complicated one. It's a very complicated one. Because it's it's the directional piece. I think that's kind of just being able to imagine some future that you want that's different than the present.

Right. Right. So it's just something that. Yeah. Something that you'd be happy if things were like that. And then the action obviously is that you are actively participating in creating that future. But so many of us spend so much time actively participating in creating a future that we don't really give a shit about. And that's where I feel like most people get lost.

They're like, what is worth giving a shit about? What is worth giving a shit about? What is worth actually going through the trouble to pursue? Yeah, that's huge. And before we get into what purpose isn't. Okay. Like, let's just laid out that it's purpose. Like you said, this is going to be really hard to figure out what the right verb is here,

but it's not necessarily found. Maybe it's built. Maybe it's discovered. Maybe it's, I don't know exactly what it is. but the whole finding your purpose thing, I think that also throws us off quite a bit, as we'll see. Okay. Yeah.

So let's just put a pin in that and let's get into some of what purpose isn't. Okay. What is purpose? What purpose is not? Okay. Given that deep structure that we're going through the direction, the action, the contribution slash personal significance, we can distinguish purpose from a few different things,

such as purpose is not passion. Okay. This one I think people get confused about a lot. They're like if whatever I'm passionate about that should be my purpose. I'm passionate about X or Y and that's that's my purpose in life. I'm passionate about music or art or you know accounting, whatever it is. And they're like, that's my purpose in life. They're not the same thing.

Passion is kind of like this emotional state that we have. And it's great. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with passion and being passionate about something and using that to pursue purpose. But it's not the same thing as purpose. Yeah. Purpose is more, like I said, it's the directional, the scaffolding, the architecture by which you live your life and live out your purpose through this architecture that you've built.

The passion on the other side is like this could be a fleeting emotional state. You don't want to build your purpose on that. Yeah. I feel like passion is probably necessary but not sufficient. Like you need. Yes. The purpose is like the intellectual component and then the passion is the emotional component. Yeah.

So it gives you the framework. Yeah. Yeah. I experience no purpose. playing video games. It's just something fun that I really, really enjoy doing. So yeah, it's that meaning component. It's that significance component

again. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Purpose is not meaning. Okay. It's very much related. It's a part of meaning. Psychologists usually use meaning though as kind of an umbrella term. Yeah.

That includes purpose as part of as one of the components, right? Purpose is kind of like what are the goals the actions and the direction of my life, right? But then there's also that sense of significance that does your life and the things you're doing does that have inherent meaning to it? And then kind of coherence, can you tell the story around it? That gives our lives meaning.

So if you have a story that you can tell that seems personally significant and there's like an underlying purpose to it, that's meaning. So don't confuse those two things. Yeah. And then finally, very, very relevant to this podcast is that purpose is not the same thing as values. They're very related. They inform one another. They're very important, both very, very important to living a fulfilled life, but they're not the same thing, right? Values are kind of like what we find good, right, worthy of our attention, right? We did a whole episode on values again.

So go back and check it out. Check that one out. It's the first episode of the Solved podcast for a reason. It's very, very foundational. It's just not the same thing as purpose. You know, You can't, you can't really achieve a value. Your value is just kind of with you throughout your life and it's something you, you aspire to, right? Yeah. Whereas your purpose, again, it gives you, it gives your life direction and it might just be for a shorter period of time, whereas your values are more enduring.

Yeah. For the most part. So it's like the value would be creativity. You never achieve creativity. Right. There's always, there's always more creativity to be had. Whereas your purpose might be to spend your life, creating art.

You know, it's something that is definable, achievable, something that you can look at, you can measure, you can look back and be like, that happened or that didn't happen. Whereas creativity, it's like, well, who's to say what's creative and what's not? Or it's much more, it's like a principle. Right. That you. Yeah. And creativity can be achieved through many, many different purposes.

Through many of routes. Right. Right. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there's just a, there's a lot of confusion.

People, when they mix those things up, especially the people. passion one and I think the values too you mix those things up you get a little bit confused and you're like that's when you're oh if I'm not passionate about this thing one day and it must not be by purpose so I'm out right and it's no you need to be able to distinguish between those two and kind of use them in the correct way that they're they're supposed to be used in order to achieve those outcomes and that's a good point I mean we're going to come back to this a little bit later but I think passion is something that should always feel good or for the most part it should usually feel good. Like you're doing it because you just intrinsically enjoy it and are motivated to do it.

Whereas purpose, as we will discover, by definition, requires some degree of struggle and sacrifice. Like things kind of need to suck to feel for something to feel purposeful. Right. And that's usually the problem where people get, people get caught. of. Yeah. They're like, ah, this hurts. It's not my passion. It's not my purpose.

Yeah. No, there are two different things. Yeah. Two very different things. Okay. Yeah. Relatedly then, let's go over a few of the myths and misconceptions, which I'm sure these are going to come up and more will come up throughout the episode, but some of the big

ones right off the bat. The first one I want to talk about, the one big purpose myth. Like, we all somehow have one big purpose in our lives that we're supposed to go out mind, discover, build, whatever. And if we don't, then there's something wrong with us. Like, it's just you're lazy because you haven't gone out and found your purpose. You are stupid because you haven't thought about it enough. You're not introspective enough, whatever it is.

You haven't experimented enough. You haven't taken enough risk to figure out what your purpose is, all of that. The one big purpose myth, this, I mean, this can get pretty toxic as well. Because, again, if you don't feel like you have that, you feel like there's something wrong with you. When actually there's like, anything can be a purpose in your life. And not only that, but sometimes like, as we'll see, I think, purpose can be dictated by things that are outside of your control at sometimes too, right?

And so it's definitely, and we're going to get into the how it changes over the lifespan and everything like that, but purpose is dynamic. It changes. It changes based on your circumstances, based on your personality, based on your life stage, based on all of these different things. And so, I don't know. I feel like I've changed my life purpose at least a couple of times in my life

and I'm okay with that now too. I feel like the one big purpose thing is it's kind of like people who marry their high school sweetheart. Like they marry the first person they date and then they stay together for 70 years. Like yes, it happens. But for most of us,

it's going to be a messy, complicated, like multi-decade path. And we're going to go through multiple relationships. We're going to go through multiple purposes. is, you know, we're going to have breakups and divorces and change our mind. And it's, that's, that's the norm. It's the, the one true purpose for life is, is actually the exception. Right.

Related to the one big purpose myth, though, too, is like if you don't have a purpose, you don't have a clearly defined purpose, you're somehow behind, you're somehow defunct, you're somehow, there's, you're, you're flawed in some way. And it's like, I don't know, like, I think the whole idea of purpose, it's a very, It's somewhat of a human invention to some degree, right? Like, I think you said this in one of the articles you wrote one time too. It's like you're, you can't, like, maybe you were put on this earth to be a drummer, but the drum hasn't been invented yet or, you know, a guitarist or whatever.

But they're like, if you were born in the prehistoric times and there was no drums or guitars around, whoa, you missed your, missed your purpose. And like the idea that makes absolutely no sense, right? last one. This one, I think, is going to hit a chord with a lot of people. The myth of finding my purpose will fix everything. If I only knew my purpose, then I would have this bottomless well of motivation. If I only knew my purpose, I would be rich and famous and attractive, right? Because I would just have that bottomless well of motivation. I would work towards my goals nonstop 24-7. The moment I woke up to the moment my head hit the pillow,

right, it will fix all of the pain and suffering in my life. And as you've already mentioned, no, actually having a strong sense of purpose is probably going to subject you to more pain and suffering in your life. Yeah, it's just going to make pain and suffering meaningful. Yeah. Which is, yeah, I think this is the delusion that happens. When people are stuck in that existential vacuum, they think, like, well, if I can just find something meaningful or if I can find a purpose, I'll get out of this and I won't suffer anymore.

no, no, no, no, you're still going to suffer. It's just that suffering is going to feel worthwhile. Yeah. And that's what changes. I want to throw a myth onto this list is that you have to, your purpose has to be your job. I see this a lot with a lot of people who are like, I have a job. It's fine. I like it.

But it doesn't feel very meaningful. Like it's not my purpose. And so like should I quit my career? And I think this is. this is something that is very unrealistic for a lot of people. You can have a great life and find purpose outside of your vocation. Like you don't have to be in love or passionate about everything you do all the time. Like you can have, you can find purpose in a lot of different areas of life.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have a whole segment on work and purpose. Yeah. If you can, if you have to find it there, if you don't, we'll get into that. But I think that's a really good one to flag right away, especially. I don't know with our generation, we went wild with that one. It was like, no, work has to be meaningful and purposeful. You know what's interesting? So I actually, I pulled some survey data on purpose. Oh, yeah.

And they found, in terms of the generations, they found that millennials were the most preoccupied about it. Does not surprise me. Yeah. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a little bit more blazee about it. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, similar to Gen X and, and, uh, baby boomers. But like, it, you basically see this trend. end of like baby boomers like don't really think about it a whole lot gen x thinks about it a little millennials thought about it a tonne. That was all we thought about yeah and then gen z is kind of back to like yeah yeah I saw some of those research numbers too something like depending on the survey it was anywhere from like 60 to 75 percent of the survey showed that millennials said they would give up more money for a job that felt purposeful and meaningful to that which was yeah that was a big generational shift from previously I didn't know about the gen z

Yeah, the Gen Z is coming back the other way, which is interesting. So just a quick few numbers I'll throw out there. So the majority of Americans, 57%, asked themselves, how can I find more purpose and meaning in my life, on at least a monthly basis? About 40% of them said that they asked themselves on at least a weekly basis. This is up quite a bit from 2011 from like 10 or 15 years ago. So this question is becoming more salient and important in people's lives. 81% of Americans believe that there is an ultimate purpose and plan for their life, which is interesting.

You could maybe construe that as a belief in the one true purpose. Wow. More than two and three Americans, 68%, say that a major priority of their life is finding their purpose. Here's the super interesting part. As Americans consider finding purpose, most believe that they have actually found it. 59% say that they have found some degree of higher purpose in their life, with 28% saying that they have found none. What's super fascinating is that when you break this out by religion, it is all the religious people saying they found it. And it's secular people by and large struggle with it a lot more.

Interesting. Which, pageing Friedrich Nietzsche, we will be coming back to that. That's right. Yeah. Okay. So we have all of that. So kind of the working definition I want to go off of anyway. Maybe we changed this a little bit throughout.

But one I came up with for what is purpose. It is a dynamic, values aligned, other impacting life aim that organizes your goals and actions across time. Okay. That's not too bad, right? Yeah. You could definitely be more jargony than that. So, yeah, not bad. It would not be...

The other impacting. Yeah. But I was like, yeah, that's a very bad. Okay. We would not get accepted to an academic journal. It's way too readable for that. No, no, no, no. But it's dynamic, like we already mentioned.

It can change over time. Changes, yeah. It's values aligned. It's informed by your values. Yep. Okay. Other impacting, that's the personal significance contribution side. Yep.

Okay. And it organizes your goals and actions over time. Yeah. Okay. Across time builds that coherence that you have, a story of your life in an impactful way that that you think is personally significant. are important in some way. Yeah.

Okay. I like that. That's a good one. Again, I keep coming back to, like, in my head, I just keep coming back to the word mission. It's like, what's your life's mission? Yeah, okay. To be as less, even less jargony than that is. I mean, that's probably an oversimplification.

Sure, sure. It's, um. There's all sorts of connotations with that, though, that I think you're right, really do capture, like, with the essence of what a purpose really is. Yeah. It's mission in your life. There's action. There's, yeah.

And like, and without going diverting too far down the, the linguistic rabbit hole of like why finding, the term finding your purpose is like so misleading for so many people. I just think like life's mission is actually, that kind of nails it to a greater extent. You know, Robert Green even calls it your life's task, which I kind of like, that's even more specific. Yeah, yeah. Which can change over time too. Maybe you have a task at one point in your life that needs to be taken care of. And then the next task and the next task and even more clinical almost. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, anyway. We'll, we'll. We'll dig further into that.

Okay. All right. Before we get going then, so let's say you do start to get some of this figured out. What are some of the benefits in your life that you might get out of having a clear sense of purpose? Yeah. Okay. More chicks. More chicks.

More chicks. Chicks. There might be something to do that, actually. Yeah. Actually. Let's start though with the health benefits. Okay. Okay.

There are a number of studies that show. If you have a clear sense of purpose and meaning in your life, you live longer. Okay. That could almost be like all the other episodes we've done on kind of health. And any health component, it always comes down to, yeah, okay, having a sense of purpose and a sense of meaning and relationships with others. And don't take our word for it. Go read Victor Frankel and his account of surviving Auschwitz. like in his opinion, a sense of purpose was like the top factor on the people who survived

and the people that did. And one of the kind of interesting things, though, that came up with this was that when you have a clear sense of purpose, they tend to influence health behaviors is what it is. So that's one of the mechanisms by which you live longer. So when you have a clear sense of purpose, like you get better sleep at night. This totally makes sense to me, by the way, because I personally found when I, I'm a when I have a large degree of purpose in my life, I start thinking about my health in a different way, because my health becomes part of the mission.

Right. Right. So it's like if I'm going out and drinking all the time and I'm like sleeping like shit and not taking care of myself, I'm less effective to accomplish my purpose. And because there's a moral component and a value component of purpose, it's not just like a New Year's resolution. it feels like I'm doing something not unethical, but it's like I'm failing in some like very profound way. Yeah. You know,

whereas like if I just have this goal of like lose 20 pounds and I fuck up and eat a bunch of Doritos, I'm kind of like, eh, whatever. But it's like if I have like a fucking purpose, a sense of purpose that I need to be healthy for, it can be very powerful. It's funny,

I went on this marketing podcaster named Chris Doe And I went on his show. And he and I were talking about this. And he was asking me, he was like, I'm never motivated to work out, but I never miss a day at the gym. Why? And he was kind of challenging me, like, as if he was going to prove me wrong or something. He's like, I hate working out. I'm not passionate about fitness, yet I never miss a week.

And so then I asked him, I said, well, why do you keep going? And he said, well, all the men in my family died early. I have three little kids. I don't want to die before they're grown up. And I'm like, ding, ding, ding. There you go. You're purpose driven. Yeah.

Of course you don't miss a day. You actually give a shit. Yeah. You actually give more of a shit than a lot of the like vein meatheads that are there to like get their biceps bigger or whatever. I heard a similar story recently to somebody in their 60s. It was an article that I'd read that they decided to find like they've never worked out in their life. Like not regularly anyway. You know, they go on walks here and there or whatever.

But in their mid-60s, they started to eat right, get better sleep, work out. It's because they had grandkids. I want to be here for another 20 years. I'm like, I want to see my grandkids go to college. Yeah. And they were on a path that was not going to be. And I'm like, yeah, I don't like working out. No, I don't like any of this.

But there was just something more important. It doesn't get rid of the suffering. It makes it worthwhile. Yes, exactly, exactly. There's also a couple other things, too. some biological regulation around this for longevity as well. At lower systematic inflammation, some of the immune markers that they found anyway,

they found just a better profile with those. Your cortisol rhythms are better regulated. Again, I think that's a lot of the health behaviors. You sleep better, you eat better, and you all of that. I'd be curious if that's just correlation. Yeah, I'm sure it is, honestly. But yeah, there is definitely,

it kind of rewires your stress response, you're less reactive and more responsive to stress in a more adaptive way as well. Part of that is probably physiological, part of it's psychological, and some probably bidirectional causation there as well. Purpose and resilience, though, that's the next one. Having a strong sense of purpose

strengthens what psychologists call a reappraisal loop. Okay, again, it's kind of like what we just mentioned, if you have a purpose and you have a goal in mind, then all the struggles and everything are immediately reframed with that purpose in mind.

So that's the kind of the mechanism by which that occurs. Because we've talked about cognitive reappraisal so many episodes. It's cornerstone of CBT. It's very much the cornerstone of stoicism.

And it is very, very important for mental health. It makes sense that purpose supplies that reappraisal. I can see how it can make it easier because when you have a, let's say you hit a challenge or an obstacle in your life, if there's no overarching purpose for what you're pursuing, it becomes very hard to create coherence or meaning around that obstacle. It just feels like the universe just through a bunch

a roadblock in your path. Right. And you're just like, well, shit, I guess there's nothing I can do. Whereas if there's some sort of higher purpose, you can, it, it gives you. It gives you. you of structure, again, that framework, that architecture to create a narrative where that obstacle is like part of the journey itself. And that's like a very abstract and philosophical way, but- So yes, I think that's right. I think you know that saying when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yes.

It's usually in kind of a negative computation, you're like, oh, it's cognitive bias and you just see everything is one type of problem and you try to solve it with the solution you think you have. I think this is like the healthy version of that. Yeah. When you have a clear purpose, then when the nails do pop up and the chaos does pop up, you have that framework. Yeah.

Like we talk that purpose is your framework. It's that cognitive architecture for dealing with the chaos of life. Yes. Right. And so that is a very resilient mindset to take on. Yeah. It gives you, it gives you raw material to reframe everything as in your favor. Right.

Right. So it's like, it's like, oh, light got delayed. Good. I can get more prepared. for the business event that I'm going to. I can do more research on who's going to be there. Another health benefit or another benefit in general is having a clear sense of purpose leads to better cognitive functions even too.

This one's kind of interesting. We'll get into a little bit of neuroscience of it here in a little bit, but it's not just kind of emotional. It's also that cognitive scaffolding I've been talking about. So studies show that higher purpose predicts. better executive functioning and memory too. I think a lot of it, honestly, is that you just have lower cognitive load

when you have that clarity. Like that sense of clarity, it doesn't require that your mind's all over the place. You're a little more focused. You have your boundaries set. You know what to tune out. You know what the focus on. Exactly.

You know what matters. You know what doesn't. Right. Neuroscientches, they call this coherence, goal coherence is specific in this case. but it you know purpose is kind of like this mental organizing schema that you have this framework that you have and it just it lightens kind of all the distractions and the chaos and everything and again it's it's a filter for you to to to filter all the noise out yeah so just you you're you're you're better cognitively functioning memory all of that kind of stuff which i thought that was i don't know i thought that was kind of interesting from that performance as well purpose and performance so like creativity engagement You're just going to be more engaged in your work.

You're going to be more creative. You're going to have more energy if you have a clear sense of purpose and you know what you're doing for that purpose. Employees who find a lot of purpose in their work, they're more productive. They're happier with their jobs, all of that. It's not the only, again, it's not the only source of meaning and purpose that you can have from your work. But this is one benefit you might experience by finding a purpose. And the last one, purpose and morality. I think a lot of this actually comes from more from like social connection though.

When you find purpose, it's kind of infectious and people gravitate towards you or you want to engage with more people when you have this. It makes you more social, but it also makes you more empathetic. You're more pro-social when you do have that kind of like deep purpose that has that sense of significance and coherence around it and the people around you. And not only that, but like, you know, your brain circuits, the reward circuitry in your brain are more active generally, and it's usually as a social component. As we'll see, there's a lot of overlap with purpose and sociality. And it just makes you like a better more social person as opposed to like an asocial asshole who's like, fuck the world.

Like, you know, I'm going to just hermit down here. So those are kind of like the five big categories anywhere of benefits of purpose that you might see if you can get some more clarity around all of this. It's funny because half of those are a little bit counterintuitive or you wouldn't assume at first glance. I think most people are familiar with like the improvement for resilience and the improvement for motivation and productivity. Like purpose is obviously good in all those cases.

But yeah, the pro-sociality before I did the research for this episode, I might have found that surprising. but when we get into the philosophy, I actually don't think that's surprising. And then the health stuff is just interesting. I feel like the health habits are like a downstream effect of just having a mission. Yeah, yeah.

It's not just, oh, you find your purpose and all of a sudden you're healthy. No, it's that it influences all the health behaviors in your life. Yeah. But again, that's a part of purpose is very action-oriented. You live it all out, and the way you live it out permeates like everything in your life if you can really.

get this nailed anyway. Yeah. Okay. So in the previous section, you talked about the three elements of purpose, which is direction, action, and significance. We talked about how direction and action are kind of the simpler parts of that equation, right? It's direction.

It's like, do I know which way I should be working towards, like, what I should be looking at, what I should be paying attention to? Action is, am I actually doing things? Am I moving towards it? And then significance, significance is the complicated one. Like, what is significance? Like what how do we know if something's important or not? How do we know if it's going to be meaningful?

How do we know if it's worth our time and energy? And that's what I want to really dig deep into in this section because A, that's what philosophers have been wrestling with for 2,000, 3,000 years. And B, I think it's it's if you solve that, the action and direction pieces actually become fairly straightforward and easy. This is going to be a solved first. I'm very excited about this. So long-time listeners know that literally every solved episode up until now,

early in the episode, we start with Aristotle and we're like, goddamn, Aristotle got it right. Once again, Aristotle, whether it's happiness, friendship, procrastination, values, pretty much every single time Aristotle nailed it on the head. I'm happy to report that this is the first time Aristotle did not nail it. Oh, really? This is, yes. We're going to see, I am positive.

I am positive and I have about 500 years worth of enlightenment figures backing me up. So it's skeptical. We're going to go on a little bit of a philosophical voyage here as we discuss life purpose and life meaning. And it's going to start with Aristotle, but we will eventually see that he was only partially correct. He got a piece of the equation. He did not get the entire equation. Okay, all right. So I'm excited about this.

It's about fucking time. That he didn't get something right. Let's see. I'm skeptical. Let's see. Let's see. So Aristotle, I think he did introduce the way that philosophers, at least Western philosophers, have always thought about purpose and meaning in your life, which he had this concept

that he called telos. And telos was in ancient Greek, it meant like the old. ultimate end or the ultimate aim of something. So in the Nikomachian ethics, Aristotle wrote, he said, every art, every inquiry, every action and choice seems to aim at some good. Hence the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. That is not the cleanest pros I've ever read on this podcast. But for anybody who has actually struggled through the Nikomacian ethics, you will not be

surprised that Aristotle's brilliance was also met in his lack of. gravity. But basically Aristotle makes this point that every living creature seems to have some ultimate aim that it exists for. He uses the example that an acorn's ultimate aim is to grow into a large oak tree. And he said similar to the acorn, all of us are acorns that have some larger purpose that we are meant for and that we are always driving towards and some good in our lives that we are trying to create for ourselves and for the world.

Now, Aristotle's view of Talos or each individual's ultimate aim, it was not unique or special in the ancient world. The Stoics pretty much took after him, and they very much saw each individual's purpose was to live in harmony with nature, that there was some ultimate good, some virtue that they were supposed to embody. And then even in the Eastern philosophies,

whether it's the Buddhist concept of Dharma or some of the Hindu ideas, there is this constant focus on returning to your true nature of that your goal in life is not to become something that you're not, it's to actually reveal or discover who you truly are and who you're meant to be. There's kind of this predestined, predetermined ideal of who you are, and the world distracts you, confuses you,

life maybe throws a bunch of dirt on top of it and it's your job to go digging for it and to realize who you were supposed to be all along. In Aristotle's sense, it's through your actions, through living virtuously, and then in Eastern philosophy and spirituality, it's more of an internal process

through meditation and mindfulness and insight of realizing your true nature and realizing who you actually are. Now, this idea of life's ultimate purpose. In philosophy, it's known as teleology, which is based on Aristotle's word of telos. And when you go through the Western canon, philosophers spend a lot of time thinking about teleology. I think the language that you see pop up the most that's kind of become the most standard, I would say, through the history of Western philosophy, is you see a lot of this

discussion of means and ends. And I think this is a useful framework. work, not only of thinking about this question of like the philosophical definition of what is your life's purpose, but I think means and ends are a useful tool for thinking about your own actions and your own motivations and trying to deduce like what your ultimate purpose is and all the things that you do. So what are means and ends? Means and ends are actually quite simple. A means is something that you are motivated to do conditionally. It's I'm going to do this thing because I think it's going to get me something else. Right. So it's like, I prepare for this podcast because I want it to be successful and make me a bunch of money. And that, in that example,

the podcast is the means. The money is the ends. Now, the money might be a means to some other end, right? Why do I want to make a bunch of money? Well, I want to make a bunch of money because I want to buy a really cool card, a bunch of cool shit. Okay. Now, the money is a means to buy in a bunch of of shit is the ends. Why do I want to buy a bunch of fancy shit? Well, maybe my family's never approved of me and they think I'm a loser and a failure and I need to prove them wrong. Okay, well, now that's the ends. So you work through this chain of means and ends until eventually you arrive at something that philosophers call the end and of itself, right? So why do I want my family to approve of me and to love me? Well, because I just want my family to approve of me and love me.

Approval and love, yeah. There's nothing beyond that chain. That is the end of the chain. That is my ultimate aim. That's the end and of itself. That is my telos. That is my purpose. Whether I'm aware of it or not,

that is the purpose that I've chosen for myself. And everything is you work backwards through that chain, everything else is motivated downstream of that ultimate purpose. Now, throughout the ancient world and ancient philosophies, there was kind of the sense that that ultimate, aim, that end of itself, that telos that we're all working towards, is to some degree predetermined. It's just baked into us.

There's not really anything we could do about it. We're either successfully working towards it or we are failing to work towards it. And in the case of Aristotlian philosophy, if you're failing to work towards it, then you're not living virtuously. And if you're working towards it, then you're working virtuously. So basically what Christianity did is they took what the ancient Greeks and the Stoics said. about each individual having an ultimate aim or an ultimate purpose in their life.

And they just said, yeah, God chose that for you. And if you're not working towards that, you're failing God. Like a lot of things in early Christian theology, they just kind of took stoicism and replaced virtue with God. Let me see if I got this right. In both cases in the ancient philosophy, as well as when the major religion started to take over, there was no sense of you get to choose any of this, right?

No. Like, this was somehow provided to you. you either by the cosmos or by God or there's no sense that you get to choose any of this. It's the natural order. So pre-Christianity, the sense was this is just nature. Right. And you can either live aligned with your nature, which is living virtuously, or you can defy your nature. Okay. Which is going to cause suffering and which is living unvirtuously.

Okay. And then when Christianity came around, they're like, you know, God clearly chose you to do this. That's why you're doing it. And you get no say in the matter. Okay. Right. You're already kind of pointing towards the thing that's wrong about this. And that is that there's a lot of circular reasoning going on, right?

So if you think of, if you go back to Aristotle, he's basically saying your ultimate goal in life is to live within the confines of your nature, of who you are, and to not be distracted or deterred from living out. who you are. Well, what is your nature? Who decides who you are? Well, Aristotle would say, well, that's your aim. That is your purpose is to find that and live it out. So you get this kind of circularity that starts happening of like, okay, living a good life means living virtuously, but living virtually means living a good life. Or like living a good life means living up to your inherent nature, but living up to your inherent nature requires you to live a good life. So it's like, okay, you're just kind of defining the thing you want by the thing that gets you there.

Gotcha, yeah. You're begging the question, yeah. It's, yes. So it kind of stops making sense. And this is actually what the Enlightenment philosophers start noting and pointing out, which we're going to get to in a second. Okay, okay. I do want to point out, though, what I do think they got right.

Because I do think the thing that the ancient philosophies in early Christianity got right has maybe been lost a little bit in the modern world, which is that I think what Aristotle and the Stoics were probably observing is that some people seem naturally suited for certain lifestyles or vocations over others. Right? Like people have different talents. People have different skills. People have different natural interests. And I think what they probably observed is that when you try to defy those natural talents and interests, you probably just make yourself suffer. Right. So if you are if you have like a real natural gravitation and talent for music and you just keep telling yourself like, no, I shouldn't do music. I should go do this other thing. You're probably going to make yourself suffer. And under the Aristotlian framework, like, that makes sense. Like, it's living outside the dictates and confines of your nature is, you know, to not pursue the thing that you're interested in and talented in. You are probably having to deny parts of yourself. You're probably having to numb yourself in certain ways. You're lacking courage in many ways. You're lacking wisdom and temperance and all these ways.

These are all the Aristotlian virtues. And so Aristotle would say, you are living unvirtuously by not, not pretty. pursuing the thing that is of your true nature. So there is a nugget of truth here. Right. And there is I think it's built off of a very important observation that I'm going to come back to

towards the end of this story. Because I do think it is super important and I do think a lot of the later philosophers, a lot of the modern philosophers either missed it or just kind of discount it. So put a pen in that, your natural talents matter, your natural

inclinations and interest matter. for sure. That's the thing that they got right. The thing they got wrong, I think, is just that your purpose is predetermined. And I think this is where this mainstream notion of you have this magical purpose out there and it's your job to go find it as if you're like, I don't know, looking for a lost child in the woods, you know? Like it's, but it doesn't really work that way. As we're going to discuss ad nauseum, like purpose is, it's a complex thing. It evolves. It's a moving target.

You can have multiple purposes. You can find purpose in many, many places. So this idea that it's like you have this one predetermined set purpose in your life and it is determined by God or by nature. And you're either living in alignment with it or out of alignment with it. That's overstating things quite a bit. So we get into the Enlightenment. And like I said, the circularity of the Aristotlian argument and the Christian argument quickly starts to make itself apparent. So it begins with Descartes, who himself, by the way, was very religious and very devout.

He made the point that it is impossible to read God's will into nature. And this is a very, I think this is a subtle but brilliant point, which basically what Descartes said was just because an, Acorn always becomes an oak doesn't mean that's what it's supposed to do. Just because it's what's always happened doesn't mean that that's what should happen. And Spinoza followed this up closely after by pointing out that many ends, many callings or purposes that people define for themselves are really just reflections of what they want. like you can who is to say that like if I spend my life pursuing music

who's to say that that's necessarily my nature couldn't it just be that like I really like music if I like music is that my nature like did God make me that way or did I make me that way like Spinoza argued that it's

much more likely that people just like things for whatever reason and once they like it they kind of backward rationalize this teleology on top of it. This is my favorite thing and I do it all the time. So clearly this is what I was meant to do. Okay, right.

And I think there's a lot of truth to that, which I'm sure we're going to talk about quite a bit as well. Then you get to Hume. And I think Hume just really obliterated this whole thing. He kind of took what Descartes alluded to and he really dug into the core of the philosophical issue. And he made a point that to this day has not been resolved within philosophy. And to this day, you see a lot of very prominent thinkers fall victim to it, which is called Hume's guillotine. It's also known as the is aught fallacy.

And basically, the is ought fallacy is that just because something is a certain way doesn't mean it ought to be that way. That basically you cannot derive a should from an is. you cannot make a moral statement simply based on a factual observation. These are almost like two domains, two separate domains

that can never be bridged to each other. And it's funny because for centuries, philosophers, thinkers, scientists, even people as recent as like, you see Richard Dawkins do this all the time, Sam Harris does this all the time, where people, like, for instance,

Sam Harris has a whole moral framework that is essentially just based on research, showing that people are happier in certain situations than others. And so he's like, because we know people are happier in this situation than that situation, that means this situation is more moral. And there is something instinctual inside of us that says, yeah, yeah, that feels true. But then if you actually philosophically sit down and say, okay, who's to say that happiness is more moral than unhappiness?

Because I can think of a lot of times that I was unhappy and it was actually good for me. So this is the guillotine. This is like you can't bridge that chasm. Like it's you can't, you can't derive moral truths from scientific observation. Like it's just, it's not possible. And the reason this matters for teleology or finding one's purpose is it comes back to like, let's say it is absolutely in your nature to be the best of something in the world.

That doesn't necessarily mean you should do it. For instance, Bobby Fisher, by many accounts, is considered the most talented chess player of all time. Like he had this, he was a prodigy, he had a meteoric rise. I believe in terms of adjusted Elo rating, he is the highest rated chess player in the history of chess. He became world champion at an incredibly young age. And like a year or two later, he was like, fuck this shit, I hate chess. And he never played again. Now, is Bobby Fisher defying his nature?

Is he committing, like, a moral crime? Is he defying God? Like, God gave him more chess talent than anybody who's ever lived. And he was like, yeah, I'm good. I don't want to play chess. There's still a modern debate around, like, do we do things because we like them? Or do we like things because we do them? Yes.

So that's the modern reflection of it as well. Yes. Yes. And that's not resolved. No. Yeah. There's still debate about that. No.

Yeah, I guess if any listener was hoping for an extremely clean cut, like, here are the five steps to life purpose. That's not what we do here. It's solved. Ironically, it's called solved because, spoiler, nothing is solved. We will give you more questions and answers, it's for sure. Yes. Spoiler alert, nothing in human psychology is solved.

So teleology is just, it's so fundamental to, philosophy. Like, if you think of the most cliche philosophy question ever, it's what's the meaning of life, right? Which is essentially like, what is my purpose? Why am I here? Literally every single philosopher has wrestled with this and made arguments toward for certain things, against certain things, come up with different ideas. And yeah, Hume's point is basically, I mean, Hume was of the Spinoza's school thought, which is he was like, look, the things you value is just because you like them. It's because you feel good. Like, that thing you think is so. important and has this cosmic significance, you just like it.

He argued that all value, he called them sentiments, but all values were sentiment based, that there really was no morality beyond just like what makes us feel good and what makes us feel bad. And it's funny because I don't personally believe that, but like I don't have an argument against it. I don't know how you refute that. So Hume shows up and just demolishes any idea that. we can know what our purpose is.

And it's funny because like a hundred years go by and nobody seems to really understand the implications of this until you get to the 19th century. Until you get to Nietzsche and Kirkegaard. So Nietzsche, who is his most famous statement that he ever wrote, and by the way, Nietzsche, like, he was a bit of a troll. He knew what he was doing. He wrote God is dead. And at the time, I mean, this was just unimaginable for somebody to write this and publish this in the mid-1800.

Such heresy, right, yeah. But if you actually go read the passage where he writes, God is dead, he is saying something extremely profound and important here. So I'm going to read the entire passage. Everybody keep in mind that Nietzsche was very dramatic and a little bit over the top in his writing. So he wrote, this is from the gay science. God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives.

Who will wipe the blood off of us? What water is there to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement? What sacred games shall we invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? Such a badass. I want to break this down a little bit because there's hidden inside this hype

are some very, very profound statements and observations about human psychology and human nature. And it's completely misunderstood by the hell last before. It is. It is. So God is dead. He remains dead. We're the murderer. So what Nietzsche is referring to here is that the Enlightenment. meant rationality, the industrial revolution, the advance of technology. He's making the point that it's like, God's not necessary anymore.

Like, we've abandoned God, that God is no longer the center of our life. It's not the organizing principle or the organizing explanation behind everything. And keep in mind, he's making this as a social observation. This is not a moral statement. He's simply observing. He's like, we have all this technology going. Everybody's getting educated. And clearly people are not taking religion very seriously anymore,

at least not nearly as seriously as they used to. And ironically, he's arguing here that this is a problem. This is going to be a big problem for people. So he says, what was holiest and mightiest of all the world that has yet owned, has bled to death under our knives, who will wipe the blood off us? which again, if you think about what God is, God is the alleviation of all of our guilt. It is the forgiveness for everything we've done wrong,

for all the bad decisions that we've made, for our need to relinquish responsibility for the repercussions of all of our shit decisions and our wasted potential. You know, God cleanses us of that, alleviates us of that. And what Nietzsche is saying is that if he is no longer the organizing principle,

if he is no longer the telos of everybody's life, we need to find another way to do that. Like how are we going to clean the blood off ourselves if we don't have God to do it? He says, what water is there to clean ourselves with? And then he says, what festivals of atonement? What sacred games will we have to invent? Which, this is the ritual aspect of it.

It's like if we have lost the rituals of church and holidays and the sacraments and Easter and all of these things, he's like, we have to create something in their place that have the same psychological and social significance that these things have. And if we don't, we're going to be completely lost. And he says, is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? He's saying, can we handle this psychologically? Must we ourselves not become gods to appear worthy of it?

And that is like the core of Nietzschean philosophy, which is this idea that without God determining the universe for us, we have to learn how to determine the universe for ourselves. And this was his answer to it, is that if there is no fixed purpose or meaning in your life, it is your job to go create it. It is your job to decide for yourself who you are, who you're going to be, to decide. what you are meant for, you get to decide what your nature is, essentially.

Like you become almost your own personal God in a way. Yes. Yes. And that is very much... As far-reaching consequences. As very far-reaching consequences. I think there are probably

healthy and unhealthy ways to read into that. I think the healthy way to read into Nietzsche, which is the way I read into him, is that he's kind of the first person that I know of,

at least, who is saying that you have a moral responsibility to improve yourself. You have a moral responsibility to decide your own life for yourself. And if you don't, if you're too scared to do it, that's pathetic. Kind of like the Frankel concept, I think it's taken root in mainstream thought without us really realizing. Like I think for a lot of us in the West at least, like that is kind of our default

of assumption now. Like if you can't decide what your life is for yourself, then you're kind of failing on some level. You know, like if you're sitting around on the couch waiting for somebody to tell you what to do with your life, something went wrong. Right. And that was a novel concept 150 years ago. And it was a radical concept, a very radical concept. His point too is that without a clear moral framework in religion to organize society, that we're going to be going to be to inevitably invent new religions and new sources of purpose for ourselves. And Nietzsche was never, to my knowledge, he was never super explicit about what these new religions would be. But he kind of hinted at him.

Like, a lot of Nietzsche is kind of, it's like reading between the lines. Like he was so flowery and dramatic with how he talked about everything that like sometimes you had to look at what he was implying rather than what he was like explicitly saying. but I do think the, you know, a lot of people believe that he predicted the political radicalism of the 20th century and basically how politics has become the new religion for most people around the world. Right. So like communism, fascism, nationalism, nationalism too. Yeah. Yeah. And so would you say then what was. part of his argument. So you said, you know, we all have this responsibility now, moral responsibility to choose our lives and to make the meaningful. And if we don't, you said, you know, you're pathetic if you don't.

But also you're opening yourself up to that kind of, like somebody else is going to come in and give it to you. Yes. Yes. Okay. So Nietzsche was like his worldview was very dog eat dog survival of the fittest. Yeah. You know, he had this concept of the will to power, which was.

that is exactly what you just said. It's like if you don't have the will, the power to take control of your own life, somebody who does is going to take control of it for you. And by the way, he had no sympathy for you. Right. He was like, that's your fucking fault. Right. I think he also probably realized how ugly that could get.

Yeah, sure, replace religion, but what are you going to replace it with? Yes. Be very, very careful what you replace it with. Yeah. He really believed that the solution to, I guess you could call it a moral relativism or just kind of this like lack of teleology was something that he called self-overcoming. He also called it a reevaluation of values. You know, we talked in the values episode about how we all grow up, depending on our parents, our family, our environment, the schools we go to, the religions we

grow up with. Initially, our values are kind of installed in us. Like we don't, you don't choose what your values are when you're a kid. You just adopt what the people around you, particularly your parents' value. And then at some point in a adulthood, you have to stop and look around and be like, do I actually care about this? Because I kind of don't. And then like learn how to let that go and replace it with something you actually do care about. So Nietzsche, for Nietzsche, this was this was the self-overcoming. This was the process of, you know, he called it becoming an overman or a Superman or Ubermensch. But it was basically somebody who had decided for themselves what their own moral code was.

decided for themselves what their own purpose was, why they were alive. You know, Viktor Frankl often quoted Nietzsche and was very, very inspired by Nietzsche. Nietzsche said, once you figure out what you stand for, what you give a fuck about, then you become unstoppable. Because then you know what's worth suffering for. You know what's worth paying attention to. You know what's worth ignoring. You know which people are worth building a relationship with. You know which people are worth not building a relationship with. It all comes back to those personal values. So that's the charitable interpretation of Nietzsche.

I think the people who kind of look at him with shock and horror, it is because there's, like, he's kind of encouraging people to just throw away all of their moral intuitions and decide from first principles what's right and wrong. And he was, he also detested sympathy. And I think just most people's moral intuition is to be sympathetic towards people who suffer and people who are less fortunate than the most. themselves. He unapologetically saw that as weakness. He saw that as basically he said sympathy is you're taking on dead weight. You're just slowing yourself down from doing what you need to do. It's not like he encouraged people to go hurt other people. He was actually extremely critical of a lot of the political movements of his time. And interestingly, he was extremely critical of nationalism and racism. which was pretty radical at his time.

And that's something that you wouldn't necessarily associate with him. But because he saw that as just also another form of weakness, another form of stupidity. But yeah, he didn't, he thought sympathy, you know, giving all your assets away to the poor. Like he just saw this, he saw it as weakness and he detested it. Not only that, but correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he see sympathy for yourself was also not,

He didn't, he never, he, he didn't want you to indulge in that either, right? Yeah. Like, at the, like, he never drank, he didn't drink alcohol. Yeah. Like, alcohol and drugs were like, no, none of that because it keeps you from the pain of life. Yeah. You need to feel that pain. So he didn't, it was, self-sympathy wasn't in his repertoire either, right?

Yes. And the irony of Nietzsche is that he kind of talked a big game. Like, you know, when you read him, he's like puff, chest puffed. puffed out, you know, fuck them all. You do you, man. Like, fuck them if they can't handle it. Like, he was that type of guy. Like, wait, he's like that, the philosophy version of that guy.

Right. But when you actually read about his life, like, that guy suffered more than almost anybody. Yeah. Like, he, he was so debilitated and crippled by disease, like injuries, chronic pain, massive, like, neurological issues, like all sorts. He was bedridden for. most of his life. And it's funny too, because when you read accounts of his social life, all of his friends, most of his friends were women.

He was a very feminine guy. He was very into music and poetry and he was very witty and he loved dinner parties. And like, he was like the complete opposite of the person he was telling you to be. He was like the equivalent of like the liver king, like telling you like, you know, be a man, like hit the gym, you know. And then he like, as soon as the camera goes off, he's like going. and hanging out watching like real housewives with his with his girlfriend. Yeah.

Not to say the liver king did that, but it's just kind of like, I don't know why he came to mind. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stopped. knocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon.

It's the family and friends event at Shoppers Drugmark. Get 20% off almost all regular priced merchandise. Two days only. Tuesday, April 28th and Wednesday, April 29th. Open your PC optimum app to get your coupon. Before we get into the 20th century and into kind of who the philosophy that I think really solve this issue of purpose. There is another

really important thinker that we need to touch on and that is Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are kind of seen as the two founders of existentialist philosophy, which is like the modern continental philosophy and it's also the philosophy I most identify with.

But it's interesting. Kierkegaard and Nica saw the exact same problem and came to essentially the opposite conclusions. So Kierkegaard made a really startling an interesting observation, which as somebody who's not religious, I find endlessly amusing,

but I think anybody who's religious might find it a little uncomfortable. So Kierkegaard made the point. He said, look, if you're a Christian, and you actually believe the things that Christianity says are true, you believe that the Son of God came down from heaven,

visited us on earth, forgave all of our sins, was killed, resurrected, performed a bunch of miracles. He said, this is so fucking incredible.

You should literally spend no time doing anything else. If you actually believe this, like this is so absurdly important compared to everything else that your entire life should revolve around it.

You should be so committed to this idea that there's no time in space for anything else in your life. But because obviously 99% of Christians or people of any religion are not really

that committed to it, they've got all sorts of other things going on, they've got jobs and families and social lives and hobbies and all this other stuff, he really looked down on them. He thought it was, he thought it was hypocritical, essentially. And it's an amusing observation, but

at the core of it is actually something very profound. And what's profound about it is this, is that Kierkegaard's argument was, if there's no predetermined purpose for your life, if there's no predetermined, like, if you can essentially adopt any purpose you want, then whatever you choose, you have to commit hard. Like, you can't dabble. And this is definitely, this is definitely going to come up in some of our conversations around, like, what people, why people struggle with purpose today. Kierkegaard's point was like, you can't dabble on a purpose. You can't dabble. You can't. just be like, you know, dip your toe into water and be like, you know, maybe I'll be a professional musician. And no, it's hard. Like, his point was like, if you decide that something is the central focus of your life, your telos, you have to be all in, all fucking in.

Like, there's no way back. And this is actually where, he, Turekigard is actually where the term leap of faith comes from. He wrote this incredible book called Fear and Trembling. And the book is actually about the age. Abraham's story in the Bible. He really dissects it in just a very fascinating way. So as the story goes, Abraham was the most loyal and faithful servant of God. And God wanted to test his faith, which, by the way, is very insecure of God. You know, come on, dude. Like, have some trust in your relationships. Anyway, another podcast. But he wanted to test Abraham's faith. And so he sent an angel down

and delivered a message and said, asked Abraham to sacrifice, kill his favorite son. And so Abraham collected his son, started climbing up a mountain and was going to kill him for God. And Kierkegaard, and then at the last minute, God's like,

whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, J.K. L.O.L. We're good, bro. Thanks for coming. Which, by the way, God, that's pretty toxic. That's, uh, there's some gaslighting going on there. I can just see the comments already.

This is, oh boy. Anyway, another podcast. So Kierkegaard makes the point that whether Christianity or not, whatever it is you choose in your life, you need to approach it with an Abraham level of commitment. Like you are willing to throw yourself, throw everything you care about into it with abandon. To get purpose, you have to commit. And to commit, you have to be willing to give up a lot of important things in your life. That's actually what makes it meaningful. That's actually what makes it purposeful.

So now we have two elements. We have natural talents and inclinations, right? Leaning into what you are predisposed to and not being distracted from that. Second, we have, it's full on commitment. You don't half-asset. You're giving things up. You're sacrificing, your struggle. you're making a leap of faith.

You're doing the thing without knowing if it's going to pay off or if it's worth it. Now we come to the third element. So we talked about Frankl at the top of the show. Frankl was extremely inspired by these 19th century philosophers, most importantly Nietzsche. But I want to talk about a guy who came a little bit after him, who I've written about quite a bit in my books,

a guy named Ernest Becker. So Ernest Becker was a very eccentric academic. And as someone who was in academia, you knew very well that eccentricity is not very much rewarded. Being somebody who thinks outside the box and is quite creative is not exactly rewarded in academia. But Ernest Becker was, he was this oddball. He would teach an anthropology class and spend the entire time talking about psychology. And then he would go to a psychology class and spend the entire time talking about history. and then he would go to a history class

and spend the entire time talking about anthropology. And he would invent games and wear costumes to his lectures. And he was really big in the Zen Buddhism. So he would like put Zen Coens in his exams. And like which for people who aren't familiar what his Zen Cohen is, it's literally a question without an answer. Like there is no answer to the question. Like what is the,

what was your name before you were born as a popular Zen Cohen? The whole point of them is that they don't have. an answer. So he was just this oddball and he kind of got kicked from institution to institution going from university to university throughout his entire career really struggled. He was very prolific. He wrote a lot of papers and a lot of books. But he really struggled through his career. And then around age 30, I think I want to say in his early 30, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I guess, you know, the impact. of that diagnosis, combined with, I suppose, the focus that it forced on him, he wrote a book

on his deathbed called The Denial of Death, and it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. It's one of the most celebrated books of the latter 20th century. It is philosophically profound, psychologically profound. It's a monumental work. It's one of my favorite books ever. knowing the context and circumstances, you have this guy who's just like a polymath and is on his deathbed,

forced the focus and leave one final message for the world and like this is what he leaves. And basically here's what Becker's argument was in denial of death. So Freud in his work argued that humans are primarily motivated by just very animalistic instincts. There's the pleasure principle, it was the avoidance of pain, and also Freud talked quite a bit about the death instinct.

But it's interesting because in Freud's analysis, you know, the death instinct was usually secondary or tertiary to the things like sex and repressed sexual feelings and whatever, stuff about your anus and your mom and weird Freudian shit. All the fixations. Yeah. Yeah. Becker said that he was right about the death instinct, but that is actually what's driving.

everything else. So Becker's argument was that as soon as we become self-aware, the thing that is unique about humans and of all living creatures is that we are aware that we're going to die. That as soon as you have this awareness of self, as soon as you have an ego and an awareness of self and a theory of mind, it is inherent that accompanied with that that you understand one day you're going to be dead. And because you understand that you're going to be dead, that is terrifying. It's like, and most people just avoid it, repress it, bury it, distract themselves from it. And Becker argued that all the stuff that Freud described and attributed to sex and sexual repression, it was actually an avoidance of death. It was all, it was, you know,

all the addiction and compulsion and drama and distraction. Like, it's really what we're doing is distracting us from the fact that, like, we have a very limited. amount of time, we don't know what we're doing, and we don't know if what anything we're doing is going to matter. And those thoughts are so overwhelming that we just, we can't live with that day to day. Becker was of the same school of thought as Frankl, and that like, ultimately we're driven by searching for a sense of meaning, that we want a sense of purpose in our lives, that that is at our core what matters most to us. And, but Becker, And Becker's theory around it was that we had these things called immortality projects.

And Becker said that the things that we find meaning and purpose in, the reason they feel so meaningful is because they're going to outlive ourselves. So the reason you care so much about raising a family is because that family is going to be around when you're gone. The reason you care so much to create a piece of art, to write a book, to create a movie, is because that piece of you is going to be around when you're gone. You can go down the line and look at pretty much everything people care most about, whether it's a nationality, a political movement, a charity, family, relationships, creative works. Yeah, careers. Careers.

Money. Really what we're trying to, he argued what we're trying to do is build things that are going to last when we're gone. Because it's if you can point, if you can lay on your deathbed and point the things and be like, that's going to stick around, that's going to stick around, that's going to stick around. I left my mark there. I left my mark there. I left my mark there. You can die in peace. And he knew this because he was on his deathbed when he was writing it.

And it's like he caught this glimpse of, of. a truth of a human condition that like is really only noticeable in your final moments and then conveyed it to the rest of us. So this is the third piece, which is contributing to something that is bigger than yourself, giving yourself a way to something or someone or some group of people. And I think these three factors are that significance piece that we were talking about earlier. You know, we're talking about direction, which is like knowing which way to face, having clarity on what matters. There's the action, which is like you're moving towards it.

But then there's the significance. And I think the thing that makes something significant or not, it's are you uniquely suited to do it? Is it something that you see? And this is where people, I feel called to do this, right? Right, okay. It's like, I can give this great contribution to the world. But because I'm one of the few people with these skills and talents,

it now feels like a calling to do it. Like I was put here to do this because I love, look around and I don't know anybody else who can do it. So are you uniquely suited to do this? Are you willing to suffer and sacrifice for it? And then third, are you contributing to something or someone long after you're gone? If you can nail all three of those things, you have a massive amount of significance in your life, which means that you have a lot of purpose in your life. I just spent a lot of time talking about all these philosophers. It's funny, though, I think the best quote, and all my research for this episode, the single best quote I found for purpose

actually came from Picasso. Okay. And he said, the meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away. Okay, I've heard that one before. That's a good one, actually, yeah. Okay, so one more time with the recap, so there's the three things again. Give us from those.

Yeah. So the significance piece. What makes it meaningful? what makes a pursuit meaningful. First one is, are you naturally inclined or positioned to do it? Is there something unique about you? Second, are you willing to struggle or sacrifice for it? Are you willing to give other things up?

And third, is it contributing to something greater than yourself? Are you leaving your mark on the world? Are you creating something that future generations are going to benefit from? Okay, yeah. Like, you nail those three things like that's, the feeling of significance and importance is going to be extremely high. So that's the philosophical lineage of purpose. But why don't we talk about the modern psychological research on purpose, the scientific approach to purpose? What can science teach us, Drew? Yeah, so let's just let's start the brain. Okay. Okay. And what neuroscience

has found, kind of some of the neural correlates of purpose, right? If somebody with a stronger sense of purpose, we see there's like a strong connectivity going on between the reward pathways in your brain and kind of the longer term planning. So there's like this association that happens. You're like, oh, I can plan for future rewards better. I see more into the future. I have a more future orientation about the world and my life when I have a strong sense of purpose. So not only are you more motivated for when you do have a clear purpose, but you also experience reward more. Interesting. That comes from that sense of purpose and and, and, and, and, towards that purpose.

It's interesting just to bring back that chain of means and ends. Yeah. Like if you think of somebody who's very short-term oriented, they're really only thinking through the end and of itself is like very immediate. It's like, I'm hungry, I'm going to eat. And like that's it. Whereas if you think about purpose, it tends to be very deep into that chain. So it's like I'm working really hard because I need to make money.

I'm making money because I need to raise a family. I'm raising a family because I want to have a life full of love and compassion and affection. And like that is like a very long term. There's like multiple links in that chain. Each of those links requires a lot of time and effort and energy. And so by definition, it like requires you to think on like a multi-decade timeline, which I could totally see why that would reorient your reward system within your brain. Right. Yeah.

That future oriented mindset that you get from that. there's also, I've seen some of this and I don't know, I haven't dug real deep into it just yet, but I've seen a few things coming out saying people who are more kind of short-term focused are operating within the amygdala and there's some

debate about what the amygdala is actually doing for the longest time everybody says it's the fear center, it's the, you know, it's alarm center, whatever it is, but it's actually more of a filter for what you're paying attention to and it's usually more short-term oriented. Whereas when you do have more of a clear purpose, You have less uncertainty about what you want to do in your life.

You go more towards this longer-term mindset. Yeah. And so that's, I mean, that's really kind of what's going on in the brain is that these reward centers, that, you know, dopaminergic reward centers. And dopamine, again, it's like it's seeking, it's looking, it's, it's, it's, it's going out and seeking. Yeah, it's the pursuit. Neurotransmitter. Right.

It's the pursuit. And there's strong connectivity, again, with the future planning, the temporal cortex, or the, the frontal cortex and executive functioning is stronger in individuals who have this. Now, there's maybe a little bit of a chicken and an egg there, but still a pair of it. As with all things, brain. There's probably a feedback loop, honestly, is what's going on. Like we talked about in the resilience episode, you can build resilience. You build a more resilient brain by doing things that make your brain more resilient.

There's a little bit of circularity there. So it sounds like, fundamentally speaking, the first thing that a sense of purpose does for you is it creates a greater long-term orientation, which again, passes the common sense check. Like if you're very mission oriented, if you feel like you have like some deeper or higher calling in your life, if you're thinking about an immortality project, like we talked about earlier, something that's going to outlive you

that's going to be passed on to the next generations, by definition, you are thinking in very long time horizons. So I guess the next question is, what are the repercussions of being more long-term oriented? Right. Yes. And one of the big things we find is that you're more, your brain's more efficient. You're more cognitively efficient. You have this architecture, this cognitive architecture around your purpose, around the direction

you want to go, around the actions you need to take. And it's very clear, it's much clearer to you what you need to do. So there's not like all this noise going on in your mind and your brain and your life, really that is distracting from that purpose that you have. You're like, no, this is my purpose and everything else is easily pushed to the side. Yeah, it's much easier to block out distractions. It's much easier to say no to things. It's much easier to not deal with people's bullshit if you have a lot of clarity on what your purpose is. You're also efficient, like in the cognitive reappraisal of setbacks and obstacles that do come along.

So when there is friction that's put in front of you any sort of obstacle or whatever, it's much easier for you to reframe that as well with that singular purpose in mind. mind. So you just get more efficient with dealing with, dealing with stress in your life, dealing with obstacles, dealing with the bullshit, dealing with distractions too. A lot of that is just, it goes away and you're just much more efficient or cognitively, neurologly, everything. It just starts to align that way. So yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. So when I think about this, your brain being more efficient, your mind being more efficient when you have a singular purpose. You brought up in the past, something I thought of as kind of a parable.

parallel here, you talked about one of the unexpected benefits of getting married, right? There's a connection here, I swear. Yes, yeah, no, I see it. I see it. So I think one time you told me it was like, it's like running Photoshop in the background on your computer that slows everything down. It increases all that cognitive load because you're like, you know, you're always looking, where's the hot girl, you know, or does she like me?

When you get married, like all of that doesn't matter anymore. And you get this like singular focus that you have. Yeah, I often compared it to all my single guy friends. I always told them, I was like, you know when your browser has like 38 tabs open and like every page loads incredibly slowly, getting married is like closing all the tabs but one. Yeah. And suddenly the browser is like running super fast and efficiently and everything is loaded really quickly. What I didn't realize is that there was just a certain percentage of my brain. CPU was constantly spent processing, you know, what women thought about me. What women are in the

room. Who could I meet? Who could I talk to? Who could I flirt with? And once I made that decision with my wife, it was like all of those questions just got turned off and that all that processing power in my brain got freed up to focus on other things. It's funny because there's a lot of survey data and research on how married men actually end up performing better in their career. So it's when men get married, they get a boost in their career. And then when they have kids, they get a second boost in their career. And there's a lot of theories around why this is, because you don't see this in women. And there's a lot of pundits who have different ideas and hypotheses and whatnot. But like, one of the things that just from my experience of getting

married is I just have, like, I have more focus. Like, I'm not, I'm not thinking about like trying to find a party this Friday night. I'm not, I'm not, like, worrying about, like, what I should text the girl I'm dating.

You know, it's like, you just, there's like this peace and calm that comes with a stable relationship, uh, that allows you to turn everything else off and just focus on what's, what's happening in front of you.

It's, it's the, the freedom through limitation. Yes. And the same thing happens with having a life purpose that you can clearly define and look to. It's like, there's freedom.

I, I'm free from all of these other things now. Yeah. free from having to think about this. I'm free from having to worry about and wonder about that purpose anxiety. Yeah. Right? All of that gets, it gets shed. Yeah, it's, it's, I've, I've had an analogous experience in my career. Yeah. Because early on in my career, you know, when, when it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it wasn't even clear if this was a career or not, if I was going to need to go find a job at some point. You know, as an

entrepreneur, you're always thinking about like, what other businesses could I start? What sort of industry could I get into. I hit a point maybe five years ago where I just kind of realized I'm like, this is my life. This is my mission. This is my purpose. I'm a lifer now. Like I'm going to be in this industry until the day I'm dead. And again, there's a liberation that came with that. A freedom of like, I don't have to worry about this shit anymore. I can just focus on being as excellent as possible at this one thing. Yeah. And I think we'll talk about this. I'm sure more too, but just the whole, you know, paradox of choice that happens right now.

We have all these different avenues, and this is part of the problem. When you were talking about more like in ancient traditions and more religious societies, ancient religious societies, where this was provided for you, that was, there was a cognitive shortcut for you. You didn't have a choice.

Yes. If you were the son of a farmer, you were going to be a farmer. If you were born a slave, you were going to be a slave. Like there's no decision-making or uncertainty around. it. Whereas today, the fact that we have so much optionality, you know, we talked about

Kierkegaard's leap of faith. Right. Right. Like the more options you have, the, the harder it is to take that leap with any single thing. Because you're, to commit to any single thing, the more, the more opportunities you're giving up as a result. Right. Like, it's, it's much easier to decide to marry a per, like, if you grow up in a small town and there's like literally only two suitable partners for you to marry, making a decision is probably not that hard. You just go with the one that you like more. Whereas if you live in like New York City in the age of bumble and hinge and tender and everything, like, and you're literally on a date with a different person every three days for a decade, it suddenly becomes extremely difficult to make that leap and that commitment

towards somebody because you're giving up so much possibility and opportunity. So that's just one of the ways that I think the modern world complicates purpose. and how purpose is actually the antidote in many ways. Or I would say commitment is in many ways the antidote to the paradox of choice and the issues that come with the modern world. And the side effect of that is that you do feel a sense of purpose. And I think, not to get too off onto a tangent, but I think a lot of people, they're afraid to make those commitments

because they want to feel the sense of purpose first. Oh, yeah. Like, they're like, I want to know that this person is going to be my partner for the rest of my life before I make the commitment. And it's like, no, no, no, you make the commitment and then they become your partner for the rest of your life. The same thing with a career. Like it's, you don't sit around and wait for your career purpose to show up on your doorstep and be like, oh, this is the thing I should do for the rest of my life. No, you decide this is going to be the thing that I'm going to do best. I'm going to dedicate my life to.

I'm going to give myself to. and then the purpose happens as a result. Right. It's very active, yeah. The sacrifice has to happen first. Okay, okay, yeah. You can't wait for it. All that to say, I wouldn't trade.

I would rather have all this optionality and the purpose anxiety and be able to choose my purpose, you know, rather than, you know, like, that's a good problem to have. I'm not saying, oh, we should all go back and just be given a purpose. That's not right. Yeah. So it's funny because purpose, I feel like purpose has shown up in almost every single episode that we've done.

Yeah. Very briefly. It's like a character in a movie that's like in the background. like in multiple scenes. You know, we did an episode on procrastination and productivity and purpose shows up there of like if you're working on something that has a high degree of purpose feels very important to you, you're probably going to procrastinate less, you're probably going to work on it much harder, you're going to be more consistent with it.

We talked about it in terms of emotional regulation, like having a sense of purpose. Like if you have some sort of greater sense of purpose in your life, you're going to, it's going to make it easier to manage your emotions because you're going to have that, you can't afford to just fly off the handle and indulge your anger or your sadness or your anxiety. You're like, no, no, I have to keep my shit together because I've got this really important thing that I'm working towards. It shows up in resilience. Like we talked about both on the resilience episode and on the Stoicism episode, how that like that zooming out practice of like when you zoom out and get wider perspective, both across space and time, your problems feel more insignificant. You get context. You realize you're like, oh, this isn't the end of the world. Like, I'm probably going to be fine. And I think purpose helps you do that because if you are thinking on the time scale of an entire lifetime or the next generation, it's you're nudging your brain into consistently thinking about on a long, like that zoomed out perspective. And so if

something doesn't go your way or a setback shows up or somebody's like really mean to you, sure you'll be upset, but like you have that perspective to understand like this doesn't really matter. Like it's it's not really going to deter me in the long run. Right. Yeah. Well, and just as you brought that up, that is kind of where I was going with this was that, you know, once you have that longer term orientation and you have that cognitive efficiency, you are better able to be more emotionally regulated and resilient. And the research bears that out as well.

Psychologists kind of call this a cognitive anchor that you have. And when you do have this clear purpose, you can anchor on that purpose when shit hits the fan, which it inevitably will. Again, purpose doesn't get rid of your pain and you're suffering. It probably introduces more into your life. But you now have a much better reason for that. It makes it worthwhile.

It makes it worthwhile at that point. And then this shows up in physiological outcomes too. lower cortisol levels, reduced inflammation, higher heart rate variability, which is a sign of resilience as we talked about in that episode. Adaptive stretch responses are much more attuned. Yeah. So it's, you have this whole kind of cascade that happens when you do define a purpose and you're like, you're kind of locked in on it. Yeah. Right. Can we talk about ego identity? I want to talk about ego. We can talk about ego identity, yes, because that's, yeah. I'm so excited for the ego identity.

Yes. Purpose. Purpose does. give you a it is kind of like the foundation of a like a healthy ego almost yeah uh it's it's one part of it you have a much more coherent identity yeah and you have a purpose because you're like this is who i am this is where i'm going and this is what i do yes on a day to day basis it's funny because i didn't really think about this until uh i started thinking about critically about kind of aristotle like the you know i talked about in the philosophy section about how aristotle in the Stoics were very focused on your living out your nature

like embodying your true nature or whatever and how I feel like there's a nugget of truth in that but that's incomplete and how like the later philosophers recognize that no you need some form of higher purpose or something beyond yourself to kind of dedicate yourself or throw yourself into and it's interesting because if you actually look at Freud's definition of the ego

his definition of the ego is that the ego mediates between two opposite needs or influences. Your animalistic nature, so your natural innate desires and will, which is the id on one side,

and then the super ego on the other side, which is your social conscience, and your feeling of duty and obligation to the people around you. And the ego is basically constructs your sense of self, like who you understand yourself to be, in a way that satisfies both

of those sides. Now, if we come back to that definition of life purpose that from Picasso, it's like the meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away, it's kind of like the ideal ego is to build your identity around something that A, leverages your natural innate talents or dispositions, and then B gives it away to people in a way that it's going to outlive yourself. And it's like it satisfies those two sides perfectly. it gave me nerd chills and I got really excited when I started thinking about it. But the other thing, and this is a little bit more practical, and you brought this up when we talked about meaning earlier, and Freud talks about this too, is that one of the innate needs of an ego is to maintain coherence. Like you have to have a coherent narrative of who you are across time.

So the you, the Drew who lives today is you have some narrative in your brain that connects it to Drew from 20 years ago and Drew when you were a child and Drew 10 years from now. And that narrative is, it's very like sacred and special. It's like something that we protect the same way we would protect our physical body. In many ways, purpose is part of that narrative. It's like a huge chunk of that narrative that drives self-coherence. If I decide, like, I am a personal development writer and I'm dedicating my life to improving the mental health of people around the world, which is, that is what I feel like my purpose is. Not only does that define that narrative that creates coherence across my entire lifespan, but it becomes far of my identity. Like when I show up in a room, that's who I know myself to be.

And that's how I understand myself. And that's how I define myself, which is, it's important for, for me. mental health, to have those self-definitions and feel good about them. Right. Well, and you mentioned it there, though, too, but not only is it giving you an identity, you take that identity into other places. You take that into other groups as well, which is kind of, this is the next part, which is the social aspect of it, right?

You find purpose through belonging, and your belonging to that group also informs your purpose. There's a two-way street there as well. right. So once you kind of define who you are and you get that identity and you have a healthy ego around it, then you go searching for other people or you naturally just gravitate towards them or they do you, right? And this is where that kind of community aspect comes in. This could also be like, I think this is a great way. I don't think it's a coincidence that we're going through a period where people feel so lost and at the same time so lonely. Yes. Right? Absolutely.

We talked about this on the friendship episode. We talked about this in friendship and resilience too. Yes, you have to have stakes. Yeah. You can't just make friends, like, you can't just go to a gym and, like, work out with a guy and be friends. Like, you have to have stakes in the same thing. You have to care deeply about the same thing. And I would say that, like, that's purpose, right?

It's like. Purpose through identity. Yes. You become friends with people who share, who are, like, on the same path as you or share a mission with you or deeply care about the same things as you or feel that they're a stakeholder in the same things as you do. Right. You are. And I want to highlight, there's, it's a two-way street.

Yeah. You get, you, you, you have some inkling of a purpose or you have a clearly defined one either way and you go and you associate with these people and you're, it energizes you and energizes that sense of purpose you have. You know, the last time I was in town, I went to this podcaster thing, you know, and I was reluctantly going. Yeah, you grumbled about it quite a bit. I'm not, I'm not in the networking.

I'm not a, I grumbled by it. You're like, I don't want to go network. And I'm like, dude. It's like 10 podcasts, the 10 people who do the exact same thing you do. You aren't chopping out the bit to come either. So I just want to say. But it was definitely, and it was one of those things too where we've talked a lot about like, you know, get out of the house. Yes.

I went and it was fantastic. Yes. And like I obviously, I love podcasting. I love the podcasting industry. I went in there. I got to talk to people who were going through the same things I was going through. We were, we had the same problems. We had the same gripes about the industry.

Yeah. We had when you all knew the same lingo, we could talk about the same people. And there was just an energy to it. And you're like, and I left there feeling like, oh, this is, yeah, this is why I, this is one of the big reasons I do that. You get, you get this feeling of like, these are my people. Yeah, yeah, you absolutely do. And it's an amazing feeling. It's, it's hard to find it.

But when you do find it, it's like such a great feeling. It really is. Yeah. And I just, again, I don't think it's a coincidence that people feel lost and lonely at the same time. Yeah. And that's a huge reason why. You think about it in other areas, too, like an environmental activist. It's probably a quintessential kind of archetype of this.

But, you know, if you're really into environmental protectionism, you're going to go out and find groups in your community that are doing the same thing. Or you're raising money and going to fundraisers. And there's this whole social aspect to it. And you all feed off of each other. And it helps develop your purpose around this. So I'm glad you mentioned that because I want to go on a little bit of a sidebar here. because one of the things that I uncovered

in my research for this episode that I can't stop thinking about is the religiosity. Like consistently when you look at surveys around a sense of purpose, religious people report a much higher one, generally very high sense of purpose. Kind of a whole thing, right?

Secular people report consistently a much lower sense of purpose or a lack of purpose. And I have two comments about this. think one, you just mentioned activism or even alluded to political activism. I don't think it's revolutionary or relatively new. I mean, I've been talking about this for 10 years, but I think people, this Nietzschean idea of like people replacing religion with politics.

I think a lot of people, I think one of the reasons why so many countries are so politically polarized and divided is that people are, people feel that lack of a sense of purpose. feel a lack of something greater than themselves in their lives. And politics is like one of the easiest things that they can latch on to. I know David Brooks, who's a friend of the show, has described this as politics is the, is like the empty calories of purpose. It's like the Snickers bar. It's like it tastes really good.

You feel really good when you're indulging it, but it's bad for you. It's very corrosive because ultimately politics is conditional. It's inherently conditional and manipulative. And if you put your entire identity and purpose into it, it can turn very toxic. I'm going to talk more about that in the next section about what toxic purpose is because it's actually a thing. But it's, I just want to introduce that idea. It's interesting because I became very curious about this idea that religiosity predicts purpose. and kind of coming back to, like, knowing what we know about the psychology of it, coming back a little bit to the philosophy.

You know, why is that? Why do religious people feel so much more purpose in their lives when they're not necessarily doing more? Like, they're not professionally more successful. Like, may not be more introspective even. They don't have more friends. Like, they're doing many of the same things that everybody else is doing. And it turns out the famous French sociologists. Emil Durkheim, I actually wrote a book about this back in 1912.

It was called The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. And he had a theory around this, which is that religion had three core social functions. There was a social cohesion component, which is basically getting everybody on the same page at the same time, giving people stakes in the same thing. There's social control, which doesn't really need to be explained. But then most importantly, it was a provision for meaning and purpose. So we talked about in the philosophy section that for something to feel significant, it needs to, A, feel like there's something unique about you for it. B, there needs to be stakes or sacrifice, and then C, it needs to be, it needs to feel like it's going to outlive yourself. I think religion hits all three of those in a very profound and meaningful way.

Number one, each religion comes to you and says, you are special and unique and God loves you just the way you are. there's whatever you are doing, whatever you are called to do in your life, God has decided that you are the only one who can do it. Number two, religion asks something of you. It asks you to make a leap of faith. By definition, you're asked to make a large commitment and be willing to sacrifice and struggle and give things up for it. And then number three, there's a promise of an afterlife. Of like, if you do these things, you are going to live on after your death and you are going to, you know, you'll be immortalized in your faith. and the things that you've chosen to do.

And so in many ways, it's almost like, I feel like religion is, and this is where all the religious listeners are going to get mad at me and call me an angry, angry atheist. But guys, like, as I've joked before, I'm like the most pro-religion atheist that you'll ever meet. It's almost like the religions have like molded themselves perfectly to the psychological need of purpose. they memetically evolved to fulfill all of these itches that we feel existentially inside of us. And so it doesn't surprise me that, like, it's just anecdotally, you know, I grew up in Texas, I grew up in the Bible Belt.

I know a lot of very religious people. I grew up with a lot of really religious people. I can't tell you how many people who like have had absolutely nothing going on in their lives. And then you talk to them and they're like, yeah, God's got a plan for me. I'm good. Jesus is looking out for me. And I'm like, dude, you're living in your truck. Like you just kick the meth habit.

Like your parents aren't talking to you. Like God's got a plan. You know, so it's fascinating that, you know, whereas if you talk to like a wealthy, highly educated secular person out here in California, they feel complete. They've got so much going on in their life. They're like amazing job, amazing friends, all sorts of activities, they're politically active, and they feel lost.

They're empty. And they're like, what's this for? I don't know what I'm doing. I'm so burnt out, you know? And I was going to say, maybe we'll do an episode on religion one day. And I just like, I saw, I heard, I heard that distant echo of a thousand screams going, no. Yeah. But it just, it feels.

And besides, like, nothing would be worse for us from a PR standpoint than publishing an episode called Religion Solved. But it's just religion just keeps coming up in all these episodes. And I do think there is something so psychologically and philosophically important about religion. I mean, obviously the vast majority of the planet is religious. It's one of the few cross-cultural, unanimous human experiences. It is, clearly there is something extremely fundamental about it in our lives. And I really do feel like there is something that whatever that is that is fundamental to our lives.

Like it is a lot of it is very much around meaning and purpose. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned something along the way there briefly, but I want to double click on a little bit. It's that religion asks something of you. I think, you know, for religion was kind of waning. Yeah. I think at least in a lot of Western cultures for several decades. and what you saw was the church in a lot of ways,

a lot of different churches anywhere, we're starting to try to bend over backwards a little bit to accommodate things. Like, oh, you don't got to dress up. Yeah. You don't have to, we don't have to stand up and sing if you don't want to. We're going to play rock music.

We're going to make this like real easy for you. And it just kept going down and down and down. Yeah. We've seen a reverse in that trend. More people are going back to religion now. And I think it's because a lot of churches figured this out. It's like, no, we're going to ask something of you. We're going to ask you to give up some of these things.

We're going to show you that you need to sacrifice something. Yeah, and maybe we're just projecting or it's wishful thinking, but there does seem to be a shift, a very subtle shift in the population recently of like, I think people are craving being asked of, right? So much of modern life for decades has just been, we're going to remove all the friction from it. We're going to make it so everything's going to be so easy and convenient and immediate. it and you're going to be satisfied all the time. And I think we're finally hitting that point where we realize how empty that is. And how addicted we are to it.

And so I think I've definitely, like, I feel myself craving that in my own life of like, no, I want a sacrifice for something. I want to, I want to struggle for something. Like I said, maybe it's wishful thinking, but I'd like to think that there's a little bit of a, I've definitely noticed it among like my peers and cohorts and stuff. Like there's an attitude shift that's happening. We were just talking when we took a break here about how more people are really into health now. Yeah.

That's a very purposeful activity. It's becoming cool. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think there is, I think people are realizing, yeah, that that whole instant gratification, remove all the friction, convenience, convenience, convenience, at all cost. I think we're starting to realize that, oh, there's actually not a whole lot of purpose and meaning in that. Yeah. So being asked, being asked to do something.

and being asked to sacrifice something, it's kind of like, oh, oh, we forgot about that, didn't we? Think about it too, just think about how different, like our internal lives probably are from even just like 100 years ago or 200 years ago. Different planet. Completely different, like mental landscape that we live in right now. And a big part of that, you know, religion took up a lot of that mental space,

but I think it was because of the kind of, it asked certain things of you and limited you in certain ways. And yes, there was a lot of problems with it too. Yeah, we'll get into the toxic purpose. I'm actually very excited to get into the toxic purpose because not really even known, much less discussed. So there is that element to it. But yeah, there is a lot of healthy purpose.

It's funny because to go back to the happiness episode, we talked about how there's kind of three components of happiness. There's pleasure, satisfaction, and then meaning or purpose. and the pleasure is super immediate and short term. So the pleasure, it's, you know, eating good food or scrolling on TikTok or watching a funny movie. Satisfaction is kind of medium term. It's, you know, what have I done recently? Am I proud of something I'm working on?

Do I feel good about my social life lately? It's kind of like anywhere from a few months to a few years in time span. And then there's meaning and purpose, which is extremely long term. It's something that you look back over decades and look ahead decades and ask yourself, how meaningful is my life? How meaningful is what I'm doing? And I think a very crude way to summarize what's been happening in culture is that we have been optimizing for pleasure and satisfaction so much that we are either complicating or sacrificing

any sense of sense of long-term purpose. And the problem with focusing on the short and medium term all the time is that they become treadmills. The same way that a good meal is satisfying until you're hungry again. Even life satisfaction.

Like it's the car you buy this year is only going to be satisfying until the next thing you want. And the promotion you get at your job is only going to be satisfying until you want the next promotion. And you just end up on this constant hedonic treadmill that never ends. And once you see that game you're playing,

it's just demoralizing. You're like, what's the point? Like, what am I doing all this shit for? And then, yeah, you start to see the wisdom of, you know, Bubba in Texas living in his truck who's like, God's got a plan. I'm staying on the path. Praise Jesus. So, you know, Arthur Brooks talks a lot about, you know, you want to find more purpose and meaning your life? Put down your phone. Yeah. For one. Because, and there's part of that, it's like you're crowding out, this goes back to kind of the cognitive efficiency too. Yes. You're crowding out all of the introspection, all of the kind of internal stressors that you might have that would push you into, oh, go try this, oh, figure this out. So there's that

that ties back into the immediate ratification culture too. But yeah. I was just going to say, yeah, I think one way to look at that too is that it's just like a simply a function of your brain's energy. Yeah, 100%. The efficiency thing. Yeah. Like having a being long term oriented, it requires more brain power.

It requires more. It's like it uses more parts of your brain. So it's metabolically more demanding, which requires more energy and effort, which requires more energy and effort, which requires you. Whereas like, yeah, it's scrolling on TikTok. It's easy. It's comfortable. And, but your brain can't do both at the same time. Yeah.

Okay. So that, this was supposed to be a psychology section. And it really is. We started with the brain. Yes. And we wound up on God, I guess. Wish. Do we need to go back to religion?

People are going back to there. There is a resurgence a little bit, a bit of a revival, if you will. Are there, a, a lot of a, Like, I feel like we've been experimenting with secular ways for a few decades, well, for a long time, really, but especially in the last few decades. Mm-hmm. Is there a non-religious way to go about this for people who are turned off by religion? I don't know. Yeah.

I'm with you there. Yeah. I don't know. You know, Blaze Pascal wrote about a God-shaped hole inside every man. And it's funny because a lot of atheists like to kind of scoff at that. and they're like, well, you can just go volunteer and, you know, join your local PTA group. And it's like, no, dude, it's not the fucking same thing. It's not the same thing.

So I really don't know. I lean towards no. I do think that there potentially is some opportunity for some sort of secular religion that's not corrosive. You know, there's a lot of kind of ideas around stuff like transhumanism and the kind of technological. almost sci-fi type stuff of making humanity interplanetary. Like I honestly think like one of the reasons Elon has been so successful is that he has this way of taking what seems like science fiction ideas and bringing like a like a religiosity to it.

Yeah. Of like this isn't just sci-fi. Like getting the Mars isn't just sci-fi. It is actually arguably the most morally important thing we can do for humanity. and it's, it's, and there's like almost a religious level of faith in it. I do think like, okay, now we're getting way off topic, but the big takeaways here is that the core value of purpose is it forces you to think long term. And the fact that you're thinking long term, it's going to make you more efficient, more

motivated, and productive, better emotionally regulated, more resilient. you're going to get pretty much all the benefits that you could want from anything is downstream of a strong sense of purpose. And it gives you an identity, an ego identity for yourself and a social identity. It's going to help you filter who are the people you're going to get along with, who are your connections, you know, where are you going to get your sense of connection and belongingness in the world? And as you pointed out, I think it's the,

Loneliness epidemic may very well be just a second order effect of a purpose epidemic. Yeah, definitely. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available full leather seats and wood accents. Under the hood, the available 201 turbocharged horsepower engine gives it a fun to drive edge. The refined Tiguan. You deserve more style.

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In many subjects that we've covered, age is, I'd say a minor factor, not a major factor. But I do think when it comes to purpose, age is a huge factor. Like, an average 16-year-old and an average 60-year-old are going to have extremely different senses of purpose in their life and are going to be motivated by different missions and different things. So I have this old framework. You're very familiar with it. I wrote an article, my God, at this point, probably 12 years ago, called Four Stages of Life. So I got very into developmental psychology as a hobbyist in my. 20s.

She's weird. Which, as 20-year-olds do, I got really excited, started reading a lot of Robert Kagan and Lovenger and Jean Piaget. And I actually, I find developmental psychology fascinating. I would say it is the most theory crafted segment of psychology because there's a lot of very fun theories and frameworks about how people age and mature and develop. But there's, it's almost impossible. to empirically test or verify

a lot of these frameworks. So it's a lot of theory crafting, but it's a lot of fun. So any psych nerds out there who just want to geek out on like really fun theories, check out some Robert Kegan or Eric Erickson. So I wrote this article back when I was really inspired

by all the developmental psych, and it's loosely based on Eric Erickson's framework. And Erickson had these eight levels of identity definition. He basically saw, human development in terms of the growth and establishment and the tensions that define the ego throughout life. And he believed that these tensions played out in a predictable order across one's lifespan. So to start out, stage one of life is mimicry.

And if anybody who's been around a young child, they mimic everything you do. Every movement, everything you say, if you're playing a game, they want to play the game. If you're messing around with a tool or an item in the living room, they want to mess around with it. And this is very much just how humans learn. It's our instinct on how to learn skills and understand information is very much just based on mimicking each other. Now, this mimicry, it extends well into, I would say, adolescence in the sense that we want to be like other people. We want to dress like other people. We want to listen to the same music that other people listen to.

most of our identity is very much defined by fitting in, being one of the crowd, being liked by our parents, by our teachers, by our friends, and not feeling out of place in any such way. Now, obviously, some people never really leave this phase, but this is the earliest in the first phase of life, and it serves a very practical role, which is that you have to learn how to fit in the society when you're young before you can start deciding who you're going to be individually. So that's phase one. And ultimately, the goal is to be self-sufficient and autonomous. And this is, this correlates to Erickson's stage of the trust versus autonomy tension in the young ego. You feel safe in that exploration. Right, right. You feel supported,

like you're not going to alienate the people around you. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And what's interesting about this is that in this first stage of life, I would say your purpose is really just the approval of others. Yes. And as we're going to get to in the next session, the approval of others is a fucking terrible purpose to have in your life. It is, it is by many definitions quite toxic. And I would say that most toxic people, the reason that they're toxic is because they're stuck in that first stage of life.

They're stuck in that like, I just want everybody to like me fit mindset. Right. More to come on that. Okay, okay. So if you are able to start exploring your identity and trying out different things and experiencing, you know, your autonomous self.

You get into young adulthood, and this is the second stage of life. And I called this stage self-discovery. Eric Erickson defined it by the tension between a unique identity and then role confusion. And so basically it's the tension, the inherent tension that we all experience between self and society, between I want to be a total individual, I want to express myself the way I want to express myself. I don't want to have to answer to anybody. I don't want to have to be defined by anybody. But shit, I want to have friends.

I want to have a partner. I do want to get along with people. So I can't just be a total asshole. And I think most of us go through this phase in our 20s and early 30s. And this phase is very much defined by exploration, right? So you've now earned the psychological ability to be autonomous. You've earned the ability to potentially disappoint other people, be disapproved by other people, be disliked by other people.

It doesn't feel good, obviously, but you're okay with it. You understand that that's just the price of exploring who you are and who you want to be. And so this phase is very much defined by exploration, just getting out there, trying new things, testing out yourself, pushing yourself, trying to find where your own limits are, investigating your interests, seeing where your talents are, trying to understand really who you are as a unique individual.

And this stage is incredibly important for a number of reasons. I think first of all, it's important because as we talked about earlier, so much of the significance of having a purpose in life is feeling that you are somehow uniquely suited for this pursuit. That there is something unique and original about you

that calls you, quote unquote, calls you to this mission or this purpose in life. You can't know what is unique about you until you've explored lots of things, until you've gone out on your own and tried a bunch of crazy ideas. So it's extremely important in that sense. And then I'd say secondly, it's important because you have to explore a lot of different paths and a lot of different options to really know what's worth committing to, What's worth taking that leap of faith? What's worth investing yourself and sacrificing for?

You see this a lot, like, people who get married in an extremely young age, like people who meet their spouse when they're like 15 or whatever, and then get divorced at 40, they go fucking crazy. And there's a very logical reason for this. Like all their 40-year-old friends are looking at it. They're like, what are they doing? They're like going out and taking drugs and go to the club. And holy shit, what happened?

But it makes a ton of sense because you need this exploration phase in your life. It's that 40-year-old person who has been married, been with the same person since they're 15. They don't know what they like. They don't know who they are. They don't know who they have chemistry with, who they're actually compatible with. So they need to go do all that exploration that the average 20-year-old does. Right. to them be able to confidently commit to something else.

Yeah, you have this line in there. It says we start to ask at this stage, this discovery stage, we start to ask, what do I want? And the answer is not always something pretty. And if you think about that, like, if you ask that when you're 20 versus when you're 40, yeah, it just gets uglier and uglier if you don't, if you don't answer that earlier in your life. But it's, again, it's a part of normal development. And so it is. It is.

It is. It is. And I would say, too, that, you know, if you have a loved one or a child or a friend who's in stage, like the best thing you can do is just support their exploration. It's kind of the same thing as stage one. Support their exploration, but also encourage them to pay attention to the things that are maybe worth sacrificing for. Because the trap of stage two is that you get shiny object syndrome, right? There's always some new exciting adventure to go on and some new novel thing to try, particularly people who are very high

and openness to new experiences in terms of personality are very susceptible to getting trapped in stage two. They're always just chasing the next high, the next adventure, the next sexy experience, and they never stop and really think about like, what should I go deep on?

What should I really invest myself in and try to give myself over to? Right. And the problem with these fun sexy experiences is that there's a diminishing returns to them. It's like the first time you go on a big trip abroad is life changing. But like the 12th time you go, it's just another trip. The first crazy party you go to is incredible and unforgettable.

The 200th you go to is just another Friday. So it's all of these high novelty, high excitement experiences. There's a severe diminutive. finishing returns to them and like a drug, you end up needing more and more and more to experience the same joy, the same excitement, the same thrill, and all that. So eventually you get to a point where you're like, I need to invest in something. I need to go deep on something. I need to give up my other options and really commit to something, commit to someone,

commit to a place, a vocation, a relationship. And this is where you get into stage three. I call this the commitment stage. Eric Erickson called this the intimacy versus isolation tension. He also talked about the generativity versus stagnation. That's more like later middle age. But generally stage three is like probably like late 20s or early 30s through I'd say your 50s or 60s.

And this is this is when it's this is really when you're like, I know who I am. These are the things that I stand for. these are the things that I care about. These are the things that I'm good at. This is what I'm giving my life to. And I would say stage three, if the purpose of stage one is social approval and the purpose of stage two is self-exploration,

the purpose of stage three, this is where you finally get that larger purpose outside of yourself. That it's like, okay, I've explored all the options, I know what I'm uniquely suited for, and I know how I can serve the world, or serve somebody outside of myself, let me give myself to that. And so I would say that really, like, healthy long-term purpose really just shows up in stage

three. You know, stage one is all about safety. Stage two is all about fun. But safety and fun are both unsustainable. Like, you can't guarantee those things in the long run. And so eventually you arrive at stage three and you're like, okay, what is more important than my own safety and my own fun? That's really a profound moment, I would say, in each person's psychological development.

So here, this is where we get into the tradeoff for purpose is sacrifice. You have to give up all of the things that you could have been and you could have done. All of those sexy opportunities and potential selves that you are exploring in stage two, once you get to stage three, you kind of have to let them die. You have to let them go. I think some of this, too, I mean, these stages aren't purely mapped to ages, but I do think simply being alive longer shows you

that like it is so hard to accomplish a single dream. And I think once you get into your 30s and 40s, you realize how much energy and effort and time it takes to even like get close to one thing you deeply care about, that you really look, you look around, you're like, okay, I'm going to have to let go of some of these other dreams that I've held on too, because otherwise I'm just going to drive myself crazy.

This phase is also very much about building. You're building a career. You're building a family. You're building a community. You're maybe building towards a cause or some form of activism that you care deeply about. You're really trying to make your dent into the world, so to speak. And this is when you're just investing. as much energy as possible.

And basically, to sum it up, the tradeoff for meaning is sacrifice, and you have to give up what you could have had for what you must commit to. Now, eventually,

when you're in this building phase, this stage of commitment and giving yourself to some greater cause, you eventually hit a point where you start running out of energy and your marginal contribution to whatever you're working towards

gets less and less and less. You get older, you get more tired. The world is moving quicker. Things are more complicated than they used to be. And you start to realize that like, hey, I don't have a ton of time left. Maybe it's time to slow down a little bit. And this is where you get into stage four, which is legacy. And essentially, once you've built something, the question then becomes, how long is this going to last once you're gone?

and this is where really contemplating your mortality starts to kick in on a real level. Like by this point, you're near retirement age. You've probably had some friends who have passed away. You've had a number of family members who have passed away. You're really thinking about the last couple decades of your life. What are you going to do at that time? You potentially have kids and grandchildren by this point. and you start to become deeply concerned about the future,

the future generations after you're gone. It's really shifting from, instead of thinking about like, how can I change the world in some way, how can I support the things that I've already changed? Yeah. How can I maintain the work that I've done and make sure that like it's going to be okay

when I'm not here anymore. I like that immortality project we talked about, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. You're focused on that at that point, yeah. And it makes sense. I mean, it's, if you spent, by this point, you've spent your whole fucking life, giving yourself to something, whether it's a career or a cause or a family.

And you just want to make sure it's going to be okay. You spent all this time, all this energy, all the stress. You literally gave your life to it. So, yeah, it's really important that you feel like it's going to be okay when you're gone. So this is stage four. And in Erickson's framework, he had two different tensions that kind of defined this. One was generativity versus stagnation, and then one was integrity versus despair. There's a tension inside each person of like, did I do a good job or did I waste my time?

And it's, I would say, the purpose that defines this phase is really that immortality project, just making sure everything lives on. Now, an important thing to keep in mind is that transitioning from one stage into the next is is usually not fun. Because to transition from one stage to another, it means that previous stage has to fail you in some way. And so we talked about Victor Frankel's existential vacuum. You basically have to experience an existential vacuum.

It's basically the thing that is giving you purpose for so many years has to stop giving you purpose. And it forces you to look around and ask yourself, oh, shit, how could I do this better? Let's re-evaluate all of the things that I care about and really think deeply about what I'm doing with my time. This is why you often see two people progress from one stage to another because of a severe negative event, whether it's a trauma or a death of somebody close to them or a loss of a relationship or a loss of a career. There needs to be, to some degree, a death of your identity to free up the space to create the new. the new purpose and the new sense of to move on to the next stage and start focusing on creating

the next version of yourself. So it's these stage transitions, they're not pretty, they're not fun, and it's it's experiencing the loss of purpose in one's life so that you can go build a new purpose. It is necessary, but it is, it's often very painful and bleak in the moment. Yeah, I've had like several people in my life recently, you know, lot of us are, a lot of people in my life, I think, are in some sort of transition. I don't know if they're transitioning between phases necessarily or just deepening the phase that they're in. But a lot of it does come down, you know, when you're in your 30s, 40s, maybe you've had a couple kids, maybe you've had a relationship, maybe you've had a relationship that's failed

at that point. And I've had several people come to me lately and like, I don't, like, who the hell am I? Yeah. And at this point, too. And I'm like, oh, you're going through a transition. You're transitioning and you're into a new phase of life that, um, It needs a definition and a purpose. And that's a good thing. Like, this is not helpful. Nobody likes hearing that. Nobody likes hearing that.

But I'm like, no, no, no, this is a good thing. This is, you know, we talked about Kazimir's Debrowski at one point. He talks about this positive disintegration. And if you can achieve positive disintegration, which is, you know, yeah, your identity fails you from the last stage. Yes. That you, there's this opportunity. Like, that's where the growth happens is in this mess.

Yes. Right. And of course, it doesn't help a lot of people to hear that. Although some people have come to me and they're like, Oh, actually, no, that's okay. It's good to know that other people are going through this too and all of that and it's normal. I think some of it is how it's framed. So to get on my soapbox for a minute, one of my biggest issues with the self-help industry is that they package and frame transformation and significant personal change as this like as a party.

Right. As there's like fucking confetti falling from the ceiling. We're going to celebrate you here. It's like the new you. And it's like streamers are going off and dance music is pumping through the speakers. And it's like, no, man. That's not how it works. That's not how it works.

Like significant life change is not a party. It's usually grueling, painful and often very bleak and confusing. And the way I've described it sometimes is that people forget or they don't realize that if you are going to make a significant personal change, that means that you have to lose part of your identity first. And losing any part of your identity means that there's going to be some component of grief. There's pain there in that process. It's like you're literally watching a piece of yourself die. And so you have to grieve it. You have to miss it.

You have to go through the confusion and the anger of like, who were you? Why did you spend so much time on that thing? Maybe there's some shame or some regret. And then you have to go through the confusing process of looking for the next phase of your life or the next identity that you're going to inhabit, the next purpose that's going to define you for, for the next stage of your life. And that's very confusing and daunting and overwhelming. And there's a lot of uncertainty of like, am I doing the right thing? Is this, should I, this be what I care about?

Am I wasting my time again? So on and so forth. So it's a personal change is not a fucking walk in the park. And it's definitely not a dance party. And it definitely doesn't come from strangers massaging you in a conga line while taking ayahuasca. So now that we've established that later. Yes.

Yeah. More at nine after the news. Yeah. Yeah. I think though a big takeaway from this, and from this article, you know, it's one of my favorite articles you ever wrote, but it's this, again, this is a normal process and like your purpose is going to change over time. So those people who have come to me and they're like, you know, I've been a parent,

I've been a spouse, I've been whatever in their job. jobs too for all this time. And now I don't know who I am. And they think that like I've wasted the last whatever 10, 15 years. I'm like, no, no, no, that was part of the process. That was your purpose for that time was to like raise your family, to love your kids to, you know, dedicate yourself to a spouse. And even if it didn't work out, like that's not a waste. It's not a waste. That's just part of the process. And I know it's painful to hear. And I think what I've observed tends to happen with people like that is, is like when you're in that existential vacuum, you do. feel like it was a waste. Like, I definitely felt this. When I came out of my, I went from stage two to stage three in my early 30s. And I, I had a very long period of multiple years being like, I wasted so much fucking time. I partied so much. I did so much stupid shit. I, I wasted my time chasing so many girls. Like, and I felt like a pretty deep level of regret and even a little bit of shame around it. I was like, man, what was wrong with me? Like, what a fucking waste? But eventually, eventually, I think once you kind of get comfortably into the next phase

and comfortably situated with your next purpose, you start to realize that like, oh, wait, no, I actually, I gained a lot of experiences. I built skills. I have an understanding of the world that I can use now, that was very unique from what I did then. And so I think, you kind of, you almost have to like, and actually, I think coincident, it's been a long time since I read Debrowski, but I believe in Debrowski's framework, he talks about how part of the process is you have to disassociate from your former self. You basically, you almost have to disown your former identity and be like, fuck that guy. I'm never talking to him again to build the new identity.

But then once the new identity is successfully built and you feel secure in it, then you can kind of invite the disowned part of yourself back in and reintegrate it and be like, you know, you weren't so bad. You're all right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It was more like, let it all go. You see this a lot too. I would say generally speaking, the people who just exited a phase of their life tend to be the most judgmental and critical of other people. Oh, yeah. So if you, yeah. So it's, you know, people who just quit all the partying tend to be extremely.

judgmental of people doing all the party. And much more so than the people who never partied at all. It's very interesting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you get that beginners kind of like, oh, the beginner's expertise is like, what I call it? You think you know everything when you start, when you find something out new. And it's like, no, actually, you're, yeah, you've got a long ways to go yourself.

But yeah. Yeah. So now we've come to the juicy chapter. Juicy. The very juicy chapter. The dark side of purpose. I'm excited for this because I, again, I feel like nobody talks about this. You don't, like, everywhere you read about purpose, it's just rah, ra, find your purpose.

You're meant for something great. You know, oh, my God, this is so meaningful. Hug. There's a dark side to purpose. And I would say there are two ways that purpose can become unhealthy for an individual. And we're going to cover them both in quite a bit of detail here. So the first one I want to talk about is I personally think of it as like burnout, but I think it's actually much deeper than that. So what often happens is that people find something that they're

very passionate about, that they, it gives them a lot of purpose and meaning. And they give too much of themselves to it. Like they go too hard on it. What ends up happening is that they actually end up destroying a lot of other parts of their lives. I'll give you a couple simple examples of this. So one of the best bodybuilders ever, I think he won Mr. Olympia eight times. This is a guy named Ronnie Coleman. Absolutely massive dude. Like if you ever want to just like gawk at a dude who is gigantic and lifting massive weights, there's tons of videos of him on YouTube of him kind of at his peak in the early 2000s,

just like being a fucking monster. The guy won Mr. Olympia eight times was the best bodybuilder in the world, arguably the best bodybuilder who's ever lived. And it's crazy because he can like barely walk now. He's had so many hip and knee replacements and surgeries. that he has to walk with crutches. He's like all like bent out of shape. He struggles to get into a car, get out of a car, get up on stage.

His body is completely destroyed. And it's to me, it's kind of a cautionary tale of going to all in on something. Right. Like it's this guy is, he's probably lowered his life expectancy by multiple decades by how hard he pushed. himself in the gym and how many steroids he put into his body and how much he damaged his bones and scaled a little structure and everything. You see this a lot with athletes. You see it quite a bit with performing artists as well. My wife is a huge Lady Gaga fan. And if you've ever seen Lady Gaga Live, she puts on an amazing stage show. She does all sorts

of acrobatic stunts and crazy shit. But there's an interesting Netflix documentary about her. And it's crazy. She is in pain like 24-7. Like she's got all sorts of joint issues, hip issues, back issues. And it's just from all the crazy stage show stuff that she's done, the amount of touring that she's done. Like the intense dancing. Like she has a small frame. And she just puts herself through so much for so many years.

She's basically wearing herself down. So these are like some celebrity examples. But I think you see this quite a bit. you know, the workaholics who just love their job, so they stay at the office until 10 p.m. every night and they never see their family and kids. You know, there are people who are so obsessed with a hobby that they spend all of their money on it, all of their savings on it. I had a friend who basically blew his savings on a bunch of classic cars and fixing them up

and souping up their engines and stuff. And it was completely irresponsible. Right, right. He's like, he's now paying the financial consequences for that. So you see, you see this take many, many forms that purpose, when left unchecked, you can go too hard on it. Over-identify with it, right? You can over-identify with it. You can invest too much of yourself into it.

And I think the best way to think about this is that is that you want to diversify your sources of purpose in your life. life that you, the same way you don't want to put your entire life savings into a single stock, you want to like spread it out over, over many, many different stocks and mutual funds and bonds and all this other stuff to minimize volatility in your, in your financial life. You want to diversify where you invest your purpose in your actual life to minimize emotional and psychological volatility, right? So you want to, you don't just want to get all of your purpose and meaning from your job. You also want to get it from your relationships.

You want to get it from your health and your hobbies and your pursuits and your community and maybe a cause that you believe deeply in. Because otherwise, like, A, you're actually, at some point, you're just going to go too hard. You're going to start hurting yourself. And B, you are opening yourself up that, like, if all of your purpose eggs are in your career basket and suddenly the CEO shows up one day and it's like, guess what? Your job's replaced by AI. Yeah, you're not going to have a good time.

It's going to be pretty rough. There's still going to be a certain type of person out there that's going to say, but yeah, but Mark, that's the cost. That's the cost of you. That's the price you have to pay for this, right? And I get, yeah, to a certain degree it is, if that's like the level of fame or success or whatever it is that you want. But I still don't think you like, people still don't grasp the full cost of that.

Like over a long period of time, just another more extreme example, too, of this one that I found was this artist named, I think it's Paul Gaguin or Gagwin or something. He was a French finance guy back in that, I think it was the 1800s or something like that. And, but he loved painting. He loved he was an artist. He had a family, had a wife, he had kids. There was a market crash that happened. and he said, fuck it, I'm done with finance. I'm going to go be a painter.

And so he left his family, went to Tahiti and started painting there. While he was there, he got into several different relationships with a bunch of teenage Tahitian girls. Okay. But he made amazing art. He's like, no, this is my purpose to be a painter. I'm going to leave everything. I'm going to blow up my entire life and go do this thing. These paintings that he has now, they're in some of the most famous museums in the world.

He's considered one of the best artists of the last couple centuries. And that's how he achieved. That's the cost. So he left behind, like he didn't send money back or anything like that to his family. They were in financial ruin when he left. He blew up his life. Dead beat dad. He was a deadbeat dad.

But he followed his purpose. He found his purpose. He followed his passion. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, it's funny because there have been interviews of Ronnie Coleman. And he, people say, like, do you regret pushing yourself so hard?

And he was like, I regret not pushing myself harder. Yeah. And like, he has zero regrets. And it is funny because most of the people like this, they're like, it was worth it. Like, yeah. Michael Jordan. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, they wouldn't take it back. Right. Which is interesting. And I do think it kind of lends itself to just the fact that is not stated enough that anybody who achieves extraordinary success is not a balanced person. By definition, they are not a balanced person. Yeah. Like to reach that level of achievement in any.

profession or dimension. Like you have to be all into an unhealthy degree, I think. I struggle with this a lot. As you know, I'm a workaholic. It's funny because once I get really into what I'm doing,

I struggle to find time for other aspects of my life and I also find it difficult to justify spending time in other aspects of my life. So to use myself as an example, first of all, I love what I do. Absolutely love it. I enjoy it almost every day.

I feel like I really have found what I am uniquely suited to do. Like I do have this cluster of unique skills and talents that can serve the world in a very, very useful and special way. And that is deeply fulfilling. I feel like an immense amount of privilege just to be, have a platform like this and have an audience like this and have this opportunity to, have this opportunity to, like share these ideas and help people and and and hear their stories and all this stuff. It's like it's an extremely powerful thing. And it's funny because I'm also a workaholic. So because I have such a great purpose and such a strong mission and it and I can look out and say I'm helping the world, it's so fucking easy to justify working a 14 hour day or ditching my friends on the weekend to, you know,

outline another podcast or whatever. And it's, it's tough. I have to like really watch myself. So the big announcement that I teased at the top of the show, and I've mentioned it a couple times here, I started a second company this year and it was either insane or brilliant or maybe both. But I've burnt myself out so hard this year. Worked way too hard. A lot of my gripes about, you know, my lack of social life is probably directly traceable to the fact that I I am working on two companies at the same time. It's funny because that the second business felt so important and so necessary that I couldn't not do it. And ironically, the name of that business is cold purpose.

So just to give people a little bit of context here, I personally, I see my purpose in life as improving the quality of personal development and mental health advice. by and large, you're very familiar with this research, but most people are not. By and large, best modalities that we have, all the best therapies, all the best interventions, all the best, like, group therapies and medications and everything, the hit rate is terrible. Like, it's imagine going to a doctor and being prescribed to medicine and then asking the doctor, is this going to fix my problem? And he says, well, 40 to 45% of the time it does. Oh, but 10% of the time it might make it worse.

That's basically our best therapy right now. After 100 fucking years, that is our best psychological intervention that we have found. So there is still so much work to be done. And that doesn't even get into like all of the fucking grifting and scummy advice and cheesy bullshit that exists in the self-help industry. So I am extremely passionate about this mission and this cause. Like I said, I feel like I am uniquely suited and in a unique position to have real impact on this. And so I've thrown myself into it. I've like given, basically given my life to it at this point.

About last year, I started realizing, I started running into a lot of people in my life who were doing therapy on chat GPT. And I became very interested in it. and also a little bit skeptical. And so I started messing around with chat GPT and Claude and Jim and I and asking a bunch of life questions and whatnot. And it's super interesting because on the one hand, the AI does have a lot of great information. Like, it is, it is, the AIs are essentially trained on the entire corpus of psychological literature. Like, it's all in there. I've checked.

It's all in there. Every major piece of research, all the latest findings, all the studies and data sets, it's all in there. Not to mention like literally thousands and thousands of hours of therapy transcripts as well. So the information is in there. The problem is that the wisdom is not. So famously, Chad GPT will just kind of kiss your ass and validate whatever you feel. It will reinforce delusions. It will encourage you to not question your assumptions.

it won't challenge your beliefs. It's basically a yes man. And if you take somebody who is experiencing like very real issues and struggles in their life, being a yes man is not always helpful. In fact, it's often not. So I became extremely excited about the potential of what AI could do in this space. I felt like if you could fix the psychophancy, the yes manning, if you could actually get an AI to like challenge you and and dig into your assumptions and

force you to think about uncomfortable things that you don't necessarily want to think about, the potential would be incredible. Here's the biggest problem in all of this space in general is that what is generalizable and scalable, you know, like the sort of stuff that we do on this podcast and that I do in my books, you have to generalize it for a broad audience. And so the potential impact it can have on each individual person is extremely limited because ultimately it's not personalized. The things that work the best, which is essentially a really good therapy modality

with a really good therapist, is extremely personalized. And that doesn't scale because it's like 10% of the therapist drive 80, 90% of the results, and there's just not enough therapists. And there's definitely not enough good therapists. So the thing that really works doesn't scale, and the thing that scales really works just a little bit. If you train the AI to give excellent personalized advice, that can scale across millions and millions of people. So I became extremely interested in this topic and eventually met my co-founder Raj. Raj has been building AI businesses for over 10 years.

He's had multiple successful exits. He's extremely passionate about this issue, this space. And so we started working in February and the result is purpose, which is an app. It's coming out this week. I'm extremely excited about it. I feel very good about it. You know, some of the early results in beta tests and stuff that we've done with people has been incredible.

At one point when we were beta testing, we actually created a metric to track what percentage of our beta testers had cried during, while using the app. And it was at, I think at some point it got up to like 20% or 25%. Weird staff. There was one point, there was one point I came home and my wife was crying. And I was like, what's wrong? And she was like, I was talking to your app. I was like, okay.

But it was good. I mean, these are good cries. Sure. These are good cries. It were extremely excited. It's not perfect. There's still a lot of work to do. but like the early results are extremely good

since this is the launch announcement. There is, if people go to purpose.app slash solved, we are offering a free course on finding your purpose if you sign up for the app. The reason I'm bringing all this up, by the way, is that as we've kind of discussed a little bit in this episode, I think almost all, like most of the problems that we're experiencing in in the 21st century

are downstream of a lack of purpose. I think the loneliness epidemic, I think a lot of the anxiety and depression issues, I think a lot of people's insecurities and a lot of the political extremism, like I think a lot of this stuff is just downstream of a lack of purpose. And the frustrating thing throughout my career

is that because purpose is so personal, because values are so personal, it's so hard to scale useful, advice and interventions across lots and lots of people. That's why the focus of the app has been purpose. It is essentially an AI trained and optimized to help people find their purpose. When you onboard, the product tries to learn your personality traits, your talents, your interests, as soon as possible. And then through conversation, it tries to understand the context, the world that you're living in, the situation you're in. And then it also learns and understand

your values as soon as possible. And basically the AI is trained to take, here's the person, here's what they care about, and here's their life situation, get them into alignment with their values as soon as possible and challenge any belief that is interfering them from doing that.

Because as most of us know, our inability to live out our values, it's not because we don't want to. It's because we have some bullshit or false assumption or nonsense in our heads that is like we're preventing ourselves. We're sabotaging ourselves in some way. So the goal of the app is to remove that self-sabotage.

Like I said, purpose. Dot app slash solve if you want to check it out. The whole reason I brought this up in this section is because I have probably fallen into this year. I've watched my social relationship suffer. I have watched my personal and family relationship suffer. I funded this company with my own money. So I've watched my bank account suffer.

and my own mental health and stability has suffered quite a bit. And it's funny because every step of the way, it was so easy to justify everything with, I'm in this unique position, I have this unique platform. This is such a unique and special opportunity to solve of huge major issue in the world. I would regret it if I didn't do it.

And like Ronnie Coleman, I will sit here and tell you I don't regret doing it. Yeah. As we talked about, purpose requires sacrifice and it requires struggle. And the more purpose you indulge, the more the greater the sacrifice and the greater the struggle. So that's not to tell people like don't do these things. But I think it's important to just understand like, I think I'm wired in such a way

that like I'm probably wired like Ronnie Coleman. Like I'm like, I'd rather do it and not regret it and suffer. for a decade, then, you know, then sit around in my 50s and 60s with a very well-balanced life and lots of friends and family around me wondering, I wonder what I could have done if I worked more. That's the other side of the cost, though. It is. It is.

Yeah. Because I feel like I have much more balance in my life than you do. And it, I mean, it bears out in the results as well, though, too. But, I mean, I get a lot of purpose out of my work, but I also have a lot of very good relationships that I get purpose out of, like, all of that. But, yeah, there is always too. In the back of my mind, I'm like, well, you know, if I give a few of these things up, I could do this over here. Yeah.

So I think the lesson really out of this is just that awareness. Yeah. Like, you're going to choose one of those paths probably. And there's just cost and benefits to each. Yeah. And yeah. Congratulations. Like, I've been seeing all this year kind of, you know, this has been behind the scenes for the most part.

And I've seen when you had struggled with it. but you just kept going. It's just like, God damn, he's a machine. And that's when it comes in where I'm like, maybe I should be doing more too. But I like to put it in perspective. It's awesome. I'm super excited for it too.

And congrats on it. This is going to be really cool. So yeah. Thank you. Purpose. App slash solved. Yes. Go do it.

Go check it out. Free course on purpose included if you sign up in the next two weeks. Go check it out. There is one more aspect of this, this side, this dark side of purpose. that I want to talk about. So if it's not regret, it will be burnout. And I, as you know, I've burnt myself out multiple times throughout my career. Even if you're locked in, even if you're all in, even if you're like, I don't care,

it's worth it. At some point, you run yourself into the ground. And I think people who overinvest, you know, again, who don't diversify their purpose, I think the most practical argument for diversifying your purpose, across your life other than, you know, minimizing volatility is that the different sources of purpose sustain each other, right? So if you've got a great social life, you've got a great place to go unwind and feel supported so that when you come back to work, you're energized and fresh. If you've got good health habits and good hobbies and interests and you're super

active, like that's going to fuel your ability to, you know, think harder about problems and solve more issues and work with more people. And so what I, the problem I often run into and many people run into when you're all in on just one thing is that you burn yourself out. You don't get those places to recharge. You don't get that emotional support when you need it. You're not making time for your health and your habits. And so you have to be very, very careful about that.

That's one thing that, like, it's funny. It's been really good with Raj, my co-founder. for both of us it's not our first company and so we've both like made a lot of these mistakes before and one of the things he and I have talked about is that dude if you feel yourself burning out like just you don't even have to say anything you know go take three days four days right

if you if you're not going to the gym or not sleeping well like for the fuck sake go home go home go to the gym like it's we both we've both done this to ourselves before and so we both both understand that like you have to take care of yourself outside of work. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to keep coming to work. So I have been a little bit better about it this

year. Like I would say that I've, you know, I've maintained some degree of like fitness and health routine. And I have managed to like sneak a weekend off here and there and, you know, a little mini vacation once or twice. But yeah, it's been hard. I'm very excited to be on the other side of this launch. No, good, good. Yeah, and there's people on our team too. I've had to have this conversation with him as well. There's people who just like, I'll work all night and all weekend and I'm like, stop. Please just I don't need you burning out and again presenting us. Like stop. We can post a video a day late. It's not the end of the world. So there's some like part of purpose is being able to rest and and have the perspective. Yes, absolutely. All right. The second dark side of purpose. This is what I've been calling talk. toxic purpose or alluding to his toxic purpose. This is going to be the spicier one.

And I don't want to fall too deep into it. We've got some episodes coming up on boundaries and relationships in the next couple months. I think we're going to get much deeper into it there. But toxic purpose, I think the crudest way to put it, and this is going to sound awful, but Stalin had a very strong sense of purpose. Hitler had a very strong sense of purpose. Right.

Ted Bundy probably had a strong sense of purpose. Purpose can be utilized, like pretty much anything in psychology, purpose can be used for good and it can be used for bad. It is ethically neutral. Obviously, it's more sustainable and healthier when your purpose is a healthy form of purpose. But when people experience a lack of purpose and they're presented a toxic and unhealthy form of purpose, they will take it. It is ultimately, it's a vacuum that needs to be filled in our minds. And if the only thing that can fill it is very toxic and unhealthy, we'll fill it with something that's toxic and unhealthy.

So first, to define what toxic purpose is, I think it's probably useful to go back to philosophy for a moment. So we talked about this idea of means and ends. So there's this long chain of means. You know, you do X so you can achieve Y and you want to achieve Y so you can get Z and then Z is ultimately the end of itself. That's actually your purpose. That's the thing that you deeply care about. So philosophers, as I said, pretty much everybody in the Western canon at some point has commented in some shape or form on teleology or this chain of means to ends. And to me, I think probably the person who did it in the most profound way or the way that has impacted me personally the most.

is Emmanuel Khan. And Kant's a funny guy because Kant tried to, basically Kant took the observations of Hume and Spinoza and Descartes before him and acknowledged that, yes, you cannot derive a should from a is. And yes, just because something is occurring in the natural world, like you can't really say that it therefore should occur in the natural world, that it's morality is a, It seems to be untethered from physical observable reality and there's not really anything we can logically deduce from these observations. But he wasn't deterred.

So Kant still believed that there should be some objective morality. And he spent a lot of time and wrote a lot of books trying to argue that there was. And I think today he is probably one of the two or three most significant moral thinkers in Western history. Now, Kant had a lot of ideas. They were called categorical imperatives. I'm not going to go too into them right now. They are pretty nerdy and abstract and philosophical. But there is one in particular that I think is particularly profound.

And I was very drawn to it because as somebody who really started their career and dating relationship advice and forming healthy relationships and maintaining healthy relationships, when I came across this idea of Kant's, I was like, holy shit. That explains everything. That explains every toxic interaction, and it explains every healthy relationship in like a single sentence. And that single sentence, Kant called the formula of humanity. And he basically said this.

He said that one of these categorical imperatives, one of these objective truths of morality, is that you never treat another human being as a means to any other end. You always treat human beings as the end and of themselves. Essentially what that means is that you never use people for any other gain. It is people are always the ultimate end goal. Everything is for the sake of another human being or for yourself.

And this idea is so incredibly powerful because like all of our moral intuitions flow downstream of it. For example, let's say I lie to you and convince you to give me $1,000. I think everybody would agree that that is morally not good. I should not do that. Kant would point out that the reason that is morally wrong, that we all seem to agree that I shouldn't do that, is because in that case, I am using you as a means to the $1,000, which is my ends. Whereas if I'm being honest with you, I am treating you as an end and of yourself. Stealing. If I steal something from you, I'm using you as a means to an end to get the thing that I'm stealing from you.

And this flows down to basic communication as well. If you look at manipulative behavior, if you are trying to convince somebody to do something for you, if you are trying to influence somebody to feel guilty to give you more affection or validation, if you are gaslighting somebody into thinking that they're wrong, all of these things are examples of using a person as a means to some other end. A simpler way of thinking about it is that healthy, in healthy relationships, people treat each other unconditionally. There is no if then within the relationship.

It's like, I am here for you, and I respect you, and I like you, and I'm going to try to be as transparent and honest as possible, and I'm going to look for a win-win as much as I can. In an unhealthy relationship, you're saying, I'm going to say what I need to say to get what I want from you. I'm going to try to convince you that this other thing is true so that, you, you're going to You'll do something that I want to do. I'm going to try to impress you. I'm going to flatter you to try to get things out of you, to try to get affection from you.

All these things feel icky because I'm using you as a means to some other end. I'm treating you conditionally. I'm only liking you because there's something else I can get from you. Now, I bring this up because purpose functions the same way. If in pursuing my purpose, I am treating people as a means to the end of my purpose, that's unethical and that is a toxic form of purpose. purpose, right? So the reason Hitler is such a fucking awful person is because he used people as a means to his end. The reason Stalin and Mao were such awful people is that they used

millions of human beings as a means to their end. And you continue to see this. I think the most egregious abuses of this come from political ideologies and extreme political activism. And I would say that political extremists, the reason their purpose is so toxic is because they don't have a diversification of purpose, right? Like if you think about some crazy political extremists who's like blowing up cars and threatening politicians and trying to start a war, he probably doesn't have many good relationships. He probably doesn't have many hobbies or interests. He's probably like doesn't have anything else going to. His career is probably a dead end. right? So his only source of meaning and purpose in life comes from his political activism

and as a result, he's become so extreme and unflexible in that activism that it becomes toxic. He starts to use other human beings as a means to satisfy the ends of his purpose, and that purpose is now damaging and harmful not only to himself, but to other people as well. Now, these are some extreme examples of a toxic purpose. I would say to bring it back down to of like more of a day-to-day level. The principles here that we can derive is that a purpose becomes toxic when it is inflexible,

when it's undiversified. When somebody is a dream that they can't let go of, you know, use the example of Paul Gagwin, the artist, right? Like it's, that's an example of a toxic purpose, that he is willing to blow up everything else in his life, including his family,

including his kids, including the lives of teenage Tahitian girls. to fulfill his purpose. I would say purpose becomes toxic when people are not willing to change their mind or change their perspective on it. They're not willing to downgrade the thing that they find purposeful or meaningful.

I would also say that anytime validation, attention, or approval from others is your primary purpose in life, it is by definition toxic because to achieve constant validation and approval from others, you have to manipulate them. You can't control them,

So you have to manipulate them, which is therefore treating other human beings as a means to your ends, to your purpose. This is true of business as well. If you look at Enron, right, they're like calling up scamming old ladies out of their electricity bills to, you know, fix their bottom line. If you look at people, you know, crooked politicians, insider trading, like, it's all the same shit. It is a undiversified, inflexible sense of purpose that is not putting humans at the center of it. It is not putting the well-being of humanity at the heart of it. And anything else you put there is, it's bad things are going to start to happen. David Foster Wallace has this great segment of his famous commencement speech that I absolutely love.

Anybody who is not read it or listened to it should go listen to it. But he talks about that pretty much anything you make the most important thing in your life is going to destroy you in some way or another. If you prioritize your vanity over everything else, like being the best looking person, if you try to be the smartest person, if you try to make the most money, if you try to have the nicest things, if you try to impress the most people, like all of these things will eventually destroy you. And I would argue it's because none of them have other human beings as the telos, as the ultimate end goal of your purpose. And you see this with religions. Religious extremism is the exact same thing. It's inflexible. It's undiversified.

And it doesn't have people at the heart of it. Anything you do that doesn't have people at the heart of it is going to eventually backfire in some way or another. There's this idea in the psychological research, too, people who researched Collings purpose of other-oriented versus self-oriented purposes. And at first glance, you would think, well, the self-oriented ones are more selfish and all of that, right? Actually, either one of these can be a toxic purpose. You can have an other-oriented purpose, much like Hitler and Stalin had other, like

Germany or France, you know, Russia. That's their other-oriented purpose, right? And yet they used other people as a means to an end. I think they came to the same conclusion. Those researchers have come to the same conclusion, though, that you can have an other or self-oriented purpose, and as long as you are treating other people as an ends in and of themselves, then it's okay.

So you can be working on Wall Street and finance, which is a very self-directed, self-oriented purpose, but say you mentor all the people around you, and you're a positive influence in that, and the money you make is invested in good. companies and not like these smarmy companies you were talking about, right? There is a way that that can still happen. On the other hand, though, too, like another example of this is like another example of

politicians on a smaller scale, like corruption. A lot of times is motivated by a strong purpose for it while I was trying to help my family. My mother was sick. My kid. I need to send my kid to college. I need to send my kid to college. You need to all this. I have a purpose for that, right?

But what you're doing is using other people. you're using them as a means to that end. To help the people closer to you. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a no-no. I like that you brought up this self-directed purpose as well because I think if you look at stuff like body dysmorphia or anorexia or, you know, the people who get like 60 forms

of plastic surgery and just have plastic in their face, all of these things are, even though they're self-directed, they are using themselves as a means to some other end, right? It's like, I am the means to the end of itself, which is beautiful. or being extremely fit or, you know, being skinny or whatever it is. And it's... You use yourself. You use yourself. And the same way it's unethical and harmful to use others to some arbitrary end,

and it's unethical to use yourself to an arbitrary end as well. Square knows that in hospitality, efficiency is everything. That's why their system lets you take payments. Track sales, handle inventory, manage staff, send invoices, and keep up with finances all in one place. Fly through orders with zero mistakes. Get the data you need and keep everything working together. So you're ready for whatever's next.

Learn more about their customizable plans at squareup.com. All right, Drew, as we move into the back half of the episode and we start getting into more of the practical tips and the how-to, before we get started, I do want to remind the listeners and the viewers that if you want to get a free PDF with the full summary of this episode, all of our sources and citations, all of the practical takeaways and exercises and things you can do to add more purpose into your life.

Go to Solvpodcast.com slash purpose. You can download it for free. It is right there. Ready to be taken. Ready to be taken. And of course, if you want guided, personalized assistance, implementing greater purpose into your life,

check out the Purpose app. It's at purpose.com. If you sign up in the next two weeks, you will get a free course on finding more purpose in your life. We're just giving away all the things, Drew. We're just giving them. That's free stuff.

It's just, we're just giving them away. Just giving them the people. Here, have some purpose, my man. Good luck to you. That's not how it works, but. Is it? All right. Well, I guess we'll do our best.

All right. We'll do our best. So what I'd like to do now is let's start with the assumption that somebody just feels a complete, utter lack of purpose. They feel lost, they're adrift, they don't know what they want. Maybe they've just gone through, like, they're in one of those rough transition phases, you know, that just came out of a breakup or a career change or move to a new place.

And they're asking themselves, what the hell matters to me? What am I doing here? What am I spending my time on? What do I care about? So in this section, I'd like to just go through five simple strategies that people can adopt. and use to cultivate more purpose in their life and experience more purpose in their life. And then at the end of the section, I'll talk a little bit about the differences between what it feels like to have purpose in your life and what it feels like to not have purpose

in your life. Because one of the things that I definitely notice is that people who have never really felt a whole lot of purpose in their life, they don't know what it feels like. Yeah. So even if it hits them in the face, they don't know what it is. So I do think it is useful to kind of talk through what it actually looks like. So at some point, we must all admit the inevitable, which is that life is short and not all of our dreams are going to come true. So we have to care about the few things that actually truly matter in our lives.

I think the first way to do this is by fostering a sense of curiosity. Like look at where your mind kind of naturally leads you over and over again and take it seriously. because what I've noticed with a lot of people is that people don't let themselves be curious. They're like, oh, well, I'm not supposed to do that. So why would I go sniffing around over there? You know, my parents told me I have to be a doctor. So I'm like, what am I doing attending Comic-Con? Like, if you're interested in it and you're curious about it and you're excited in it,

just start indulging your curiosities. Because curiosity is like a leading indicator that there's some. something useful or important there. There's some like natural inclination inside of you that needs to be explored and investigated. Yes, it goes back to the developmental psychology. We talked about the childhood kind of experience that you have. I pointed out there that if you have an adult who does support your interests, you learn from an early age. Oh, it's okay to be curious. It's okay to. So many of us do not get that though, where it's more like, no, no, no, you have to take this path.

You have to. That's not practical. That's not. It's not the homework that was assigned to you. It's not part of your chores. You shouldn't be interested in this. You should be interested in this thing over here. So that curiosity, I think a lot of times, is just kind of tamped down from a very young age, and you have to rediscover that a lot.

Absolutely. In case it needs to be said, there is absolutely nothing you should or should not be curious about it. 100%. Yeah. If you're curious, just go fucking do it. Reserve all judgment around. Yeah, just go do it.

Just go do it. Yeah. Strategy number two is experimentation. And I think this is mostly, this is a very important mental shift for people. Most people will look at something and they think to themselves, well, if I try to do that, I'll probably fail. And that will be embarrassing. So I'm not going to try to do it. I think it's more useful to look at things in terms of experimentation.

Like, let me run an experiment. And the point's not to succeed at it or not fail at it. The point is to find out if I like it or not. Like, just do things for the information. Do things for the understanding of like, is this, did this feel worth the time or did it feel like a waste of time? Because even if you discover that something was a waste of time, that's still valuable because now you know not to do that anymore. Yeah, you're really good at this. Do you feel like you're good at it, I guess?

Yes, I do. Because I feel like I'm not good at it. And one thing I've learned working through, like, you've dragged me along a lot of these things, you know? And I'm like, oh, it's not until like the third or fourth step in this experimentation process that you're like, oh, this is what I like about it. or this is what I hate about it or whatever it is. Yes. So it's like people, you get into it, you experiment around these things, you think I'm passionate or have a purpose around something.

And then if it doesn't work right away, then you just stop. But you're more just like, no, keep going. There's something else here. Yeah. Keep going. Keep going. I would say it's very intrinsic in the content business, right? Like so when I started a YouTube channel, I didn't know anything about YouTube. I didn't know anything about video.

I didn't know anything about like what made a good video, what a good topic was, how to talk on video. So I'd say there was like a year or two of just trying stuff. And most of it failed pretty spectacularly. Like we tried a bunch of zany YouTube ideas that were a little embarrassing and kind of fell flat. Some of them, but some of them were awesome and some of them were a ton of fun. And either way, you get information from it. This is something, you know, my wife grew up, she grew up very poor in Brazil and there was basically no, it was very much enforced in her from a very young age that you don't have the luxury of having curiosity about things and you better, like anything you do, you better do it right because there's almost no margin

for error here. If you fuck up, that's it. You're not going to get another shot. So my wife has, it still has this very ingrained in her. And it's funny because so many of our conversations is like, her not wanting to do something because she doesn't think we're going to do it well or it's or or it's or that it's even going to go well and I'm always like yes But then we'll have the information then we'll know whether we should Invest in it or not or we should try to get good at it or not yeah you you really don't know as until you try

One of the things that I wrote before related to this is beliefs or theories actions are experiments in your emotions are feedback So life is like a form of science and the objective is growth. It's not to do things correctly. It's not to be liked. It's not to be the most successful person. The objective is growth. And the way you grow is by trying things, learning from them, and observing how you feel. Because I would say that generally what you're looking for is something that you really enjoy doing even when it's not working out. Even if you're kind of failing at it. Yeah. You're like, oh, this is fun. How can I get better? Like, it, it, It's, I've often described it as like the shit sandwich you enjoy eating.

Like it's like, hmm, yeah, I kind of like eating this. Like this sucks. I'm terrible at it. But it's kind of fun too. I kind of like being terrible at it. Like that, look for that feeling. That's the sweet spot. Yeah, there's a musician Jason Isbell.

You know Jason Isbell? He's a musician guitarist. And he said this too. He's like, I just loved playing guitar even when I was lousy at it. Yeah. So even when you're lousy at something, And if you just keep going, I found this in my life too. It's like, there's something that I'm just like, keep going.

Even I'm bad at it. Yeah. I'll do it over and over and over again. If you can find something, you'll do over and over and over again, even if you're bad at it. Yeah. Like, that's a really good sign anyway. It is a good sign.

So these first two strategies are very much in line with that first component that we talked about, like find what you are naturally inclined to do, find what you're naturally talented or gifted at, which is just an incredibly valuable thing, even outside of purpose. It's useful to, like, it's really useful to know, like, what you like doing and what you're, what you're good at doing for practical purposes. Kind of looking at the other component, you know, what is something larger than yourself that you can contribute to? The third strategy here is just connect with more people and connect deeper with those people. Stop thinking so much about happiness or being liked and think more in terms of just meaningful experiences and relationships. Find meaningful activities and meaningful people that you can do.

those activities with. And if you nail those two things, then the happiness just kind of happens as a side effect. It's not something you have to go find in and of itself. And I would say that the purpose starts to happen as a side effect as well. Because if you are suddenly surrounded by a lot of people that you really care about, you're going to find things that you can do for them. You're going to find ways that you can be useful, you can be helpful, you can add value. And ultimately, a huge component of purpose is just like finding ways to add value.

Yeah. Yeah. I think a big point here. two is like get specific about who that is, about who those people are. The research team found a really cool example, Florence Nightingale, who, you know, she was this, she was a head nurse, and she really revolutionized the nursing industry back in like the 1800s. It was like during the Crimean War, she set up this like nursing facility that just revolutionized

how we think about care ever since then. And one of the points she made about it was like to other nurses, like to have a strong sense of purpose to show up. and it was during wartime too. So it was like really traumatic. She's like to be able to sustain yourself through that, be very, very specific and have a specific person in mind or the specific people in mind that you're going to,

that you're going to impact. That has like it gives you a really strong connection to purpose there. Interesting. Yeah. So it's like she was like the soldiers, not only just the soldiers, but like all the families of the soldiers and everything like that. Like she encouraged people to go out and meet them. Yeah.

I've seen this recently too. You know, I've met several people. people who fans of the podcast and stuff like that and when you have that personal connection to him there's like this sense of purpose that there's a sense of oh like responsibility and duty that comes out of it yeah that gives you a very strong sense of purpose around it it makes it real it makes it super real yeah when you see somebody you're looking them in the eyes right this is this is a common piece of advice for writers as well is it like imagine a person that you're writing for right like think of somebody in your life that you were specifically speaking to and telling this story or

sharing this idea or giving this advice to because it makes it, yeah, it makes it more meaningful as you're doing it. And it also probably just makes it you better at it. Right. Yeah. I think it's a way to connect your passions to purpose too. Like there's a distinction between passion and purpose, right? I used to follow this guy, Paul Jarvis. Did you ever know Paul Jarvis? Yeah. You know with this book called Company of One. He was a freelance designer. He built some really cool websites for people. His passion was design and web design in particular. But his purpose was using that passion to go help like small businesses, like yoga instructors or usually solo entrepreneurs kind of help achieve their dreams. And he was very, very specific. So he had this newsletter

too and he'd write about these people in very specific ways. And he made that connection between his passion and a purpose of like, I'm helping people who help people. Yeah. So again, having that personal connection. It really can like sustain. you through a lot of, you know, when you, obstacles in front of you or whatever it is that pops up. It just gives you, it just gives more life to that. Yeah. That purpose. Yeah. Just really think about the humans. Yeah. And again, it comes back to the formula of humanity, right? It's like, think about the humans at the end of the process. Like it's, you could sit in a, in a empty cubicle and be miserable thinking, you know, as an insurance adjuster or whatever. But you could think about,

Like, I'm actually doing the math that protects people's livelihood when disaster strikes. Yeah. You know, like, there's just always a way to reframe these things in a way that feels more meaningful and purposeful. Right. Strategy number four is integration, which is basically taking the struggle and pain in your life and finding something meaningful in it. People don't really like to do this. This is not a Sunday walk in the park. This is usually where therapy comes in. It is incredibly important. One of the things that I often say is that if you can find a lesson in your pain or your tragedy,

then it becomes impossible to regret it or wish that it never happened. I think it is incredibly powerful to find some sort of transformational meaning and anything difficult that happens to you. And I often think that often our purpose is found in that ugly stuff that we don't want to go revisit. Again, if we come back to those three factors, you know, it's what are you naturally inclined to do? What can you contribute to that's greater than yourself? But like, what are you sacrificing and struggling for if you can find some greater reason? If you can make that connection between your sacrifice and your struggle and some greater outcome that can deliver a lot of purpose to your life.

And the funny thing is, is that you can rationalize this stuff after the fact, right? Like, it's not like, you know, most of the examples that we've talked about here, it's been people who are sacrificing in the moment as they're pursuing the thing that is, that is purposeful and meaningful. You can create that purpose and meaning after it's happened. So, for example, you know, years ago, I did some volunteer work at a prison in New York. And I remember one of the guys who was like one of the head educators, he was a former convict. And he had gotten educated in prison, got his high school diploma, and then actually got a university degree through the mail.

And he said that it was completely transformed his life. Like just education itself was really what got him onto the correct path so that when he got out, he could have like a normal functional life in the outside world. And so he decided that he was going to use his prison time and that chunk of his life that he had. sacrificed and lost to being incarcerated and make it meaningful by giving back to the guys who are in prison. So essentially, like, the way he put it to me is he was like, I come back here to make sure that more guys get out of here like I did. It's kind of like you want to pull up the guy behind you.

You don't want to just like climb out of the hole yourself. You want to like turn around and help the guy behind you up as well, help him get out the same way you did. Yeah. Yeah, I think this is actually a, really, this has been really common for me anyway, like finding purpose after the fact. Yeah. Like a lot of time, I've, one of the things I think is, I find a lot of purpose in is helping

other people. We've talked about this before, you know, one of my values is benevolence and helping other people. And a lot of times, it's not until after I've done something. I'm like, oh, actually, I found a lot of meeting in that. It wasn't, I didn't feel like I was doing it with a huge sense of purpose, more just like, I'm going to help this person. This is just what I do type of thing.

And you look back and you're like, oh, that's, that's a, you're like, oh, that's a big part of who I am and what I do and my purpose. So I think that's actually way more common than having the purpose setting out very consciously going and doing it. You can just find purpose in a lot of things you've already done. I think it's interesting too that, you know, an Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the structures that they have in the group is that once you've been in the group for a long time and you've been sober for a long time, you become a sponsor for other people who just joined the group. We talked earlier about that, that like sense of regret, you know, like that, like I wasted so much time. I, I, I was so stupid. It allows you to take

that time and find a use for it, right? So it's, it's, it's the older alcoholics who are trying to help the, the people who just showed up. It's now allowing them to take all those years of mistakes and wasted time and find some utility for it and make it valuable in some way. And then finally, number five, I don't, I think the easiest way to describe this is just do hard shit. I know that's a very crude way of saying it, but it's, purpose is not compatible with comfort. We've already established that. There's some degree of sacrifice and struggle involved. So why not actively pursue that sacrifice and struggle? Just do the hard shit. Not because it's fun, but because it will actually make the win mean something. It'll be far more meaningful and

gratifying when you do achieve it. And you'll feel like you fucking earn something. Like it's, it will mean something. It's, I don't. know, things that come to us easily, it's just human nature. Things that come to us easily end up being very forgetable and we tend to take them for granted. Whereas the things that we feel like we worked for or that we earned in some way, we adopt them as part of our identity. And because they get adopted as our identity, they feel incredibly powerful and meaningful for us. Yeah. Yeah, another one of my favorite articles you ever wrote was, find what you love and let it kill you, which is a Vukowski quote.

Bukowski wrote that. But in that one, you said, finding meaning and purpose is not a five-day spa retreat. It's a fucking hike through the mud and shit with golf ball-sized hail pelting you in the face. And you have to love it. You have to laugh about it. To show the world, you're gleaming bruises and scars and say, I stood for this. That, yeah.

What a great writer. What a good writer you are. That's amazing. Yeah. You wrote that before. I even started working for you. So that's been a very long time since you wrote. that and that was like oh okay this is the reality of it and the reality of it is is that

finding meaning and purpose is not a five-day spot retreat at all no because you go through that it means more to you just like you just said it's like if it's easy then everybody's going to do it and it doesn't have a whole lot of purpose to it right okay I mentioned this earlier too Robert green in the book mastery talks a lot about that that phase like getting curious about things yes he usually says yeah go back to like when you were a child yes for him It was words and he's a writer. It was words and he just thought words were amazing, these amazing magical things to him, right?

It's funny. I'm glad you brought that up. You see this pop up a lot with people. That there are things that they used to do for fun as a kid, but then at some point school just kind of beat it out of them of like, well, no, that's not going to get you a good grade, so stop doing it. And it's funny because I remember when I was a kid, I used to sit in my room and write stories for fun.

It was just my idea of like a fun Saturday afternoon was just writing all these interesting. interesting stories and stuff. Yeah, but you get older and then you think, oh, that's childish. Yeah. You know, like, that's what got beat into us. Is that childish dreams are childish dreams, leave them alone. Yeah. And it may not be like, it's not necessarily the dream that you need to pursue, but think

about that activity. Right. Like what was, what was so interesting or intriguing about that activity and like, why can't you just go explore it again? So, yeah, strategy number one, curiosity, strategy number two. treat life as an experiment, pursue information rather than being right or wrong

or successful or not a failure. Strategy number three is connections, build connections with people, be useful for people. Strategy number four is integrate past struggles and then strategy number five is do hardship, pursue difficult things. The last thing I want to talk about

in this section is just kind of, what is the difference between living a purposeful life and a life devoid of purpose. Yeah. Yeah, where does that look like? I came up with some dichotomies that I think illustrate this extremely well. So the first one I have here is obligation versus option. And I would describe this as like generally people who don't feel a whole lot of purpose in their life.

Everything feels like an obligation. Like, oh, I've got to get up at 8 a.m. Yeah. I got to get to work by 9. Oh, I got to turn in this report for my boss. Oh, I got to meet my sister for lunch or whatever. Like, everything is like, I have to. They're making me.

I have to do this. Whereas when you're living with a lot of purpose, it's I get to. I get to go to work at nine. I get to prepare this project for my boss. I get to see my sister for lunch, right? It's like it feels like something that you chose. and you're happy with that choice. You're very, like, proud of that choice.

The second thing I've got here is bare minimum versus absolute maximum. So generally speaking, if people who are not feeling a whole lot of purpose in their life, they're just trying to get by. They're like, I just want the paycheck, man. Like, I just want the paycheck and an easy Saturday and, you know, I just want to chill with the boys, maybe watch some football. It's the bare minimum. If you have a lot of purpose in your life, you're constantly thinking about how can I use my time well.

I want to get the most I can out of this. I want to achieve the most I can at this in a limited amount of time. I want to see the people I care about, spend as much time with them as possible. You're always thinking about like, how can I maximize the time that I'm using? How can I get the most out of this? The next one I have here is tolerating versus engaging. You know, if you I feel this a lot with friendships.

I feel like I'm tolerating my, like if I, the people I spend time with that I don't see a whole lot of purpose of spending time with them, I feel like I'm tolerating my time with them. Like it's just like, well, this is what I got to do.

You know, it's the husband of my wife's friend, so whatever. Whereas when I do feel a lot of purpose in my relationships, it feels very engaging. I'm like looking forward to spending Sunday with this person or I've got a bunch of really interesting things that I want to talk to them about or you know something reminded me of them yesterday and I'm curious what they would have thought about it. Similarly with relationships I have I put here two-faced relationships versus transparency or vulnerability.

I would say you could potentially even define a meaningful relationship by the amount of vulnerability that is in it. essentially if you feel like you're having to censor yourself around someone, if you're having to alter yourself, change yourself, pretend you're somebody you're not, that is by definition not a meaningful relationship. There's not much intimacy there. You are probably using them for a means to some other end. And you're probably tolerating having them in your life for the most part. Whereas when you are very transparent, honest, vulnerable, you have a deeper connection, you have more intimacy. It's going to make the relationship feel more meaningful. You're likely aligned in values or in pursuits in some way. So you might share a purpose with this person.

It's just going to feel much more powerful. And then finally, the last one I came up with was pain avoidance versus pain indulgence. Oh. Not just endurance. Indulgence. Indulgence. Okay. Because again, I think it's, you know, when you're doing something without purpose, you're trying to get by. You're just trying, you're like, I just want this to be as easy as it can be. I want to sacrifice as little as possible. I want to suffer as little as possible. Like, let's just try to get through this.

Whereas when you're doing something with a lot of purpose and it's meaningful to you, again, you're just trying to, how can I squeeze as much juice out of this as possible? And at least with me personally, I find my disposition towards it is like, how much can I take? Like, how much can I give to this?

How many hours can I work? work. How many Saturdays can I work? How long can I go before I need time off? Like that, that's always my main question. It's never like, oh, how can I get through Monday? Like, if you're asking yourself that, like, that's a, that's a fucking red flag. Right. Right. Yeah. I think running through all of these, is that all I got? That's all I got. Okay. Through all these, I think what you could notice is that you could have two people who do almost the exact same thing. Yes. And yet, their experience of it is completely different. One example, I was recently talking to a family member

who worked for, it's like a fertilizer company, and there was these two truck drivers who delivered fertilizer. And one of them was just like, you know, did the bare minimum skate and buy, you know, would just deliver shit, get home, like as soon as five o'clock, man, he's gone, whatever. This other guy just loved his job. And he was delivering fertilizer in a truck.

He loved people. He loved talking to the people. He'd go everywhere he delivered, He knew what was going on with everybody all the time because he would interact with them. He liked being on the road. He liked driving. He liked all of these things.

And he saw it as an opportunity to experience his life in a way that was full of purpose. And I mean, fertilizer is actually a very important thing. It is actually. Obviously, too. So he connected that with a greater purpose. Another example, this is an old research study, I think from the 50s or 60s,

where they interviewed the janitorial staff at a hospital. And they found that the same space, split there. There were some people who just showed up and they were just there for the paycheck and clocking in and clocking out. Others of them saw, no, part of my job is helping people stay healthy. The cleanliness of this hospital is obviously very, very important. And so I'm going to take my job very, very seriously. Not only that, they would interact with some of the patients and find a lot of purpose out of that, too, just that social connection that they had. But they connected that their everyday, you know, wiping a table down, disinfecting something. This is

helping somebody. And so it's just a completely, like they have this from the outside looking in, it looks like they're doing the exact same thing. And yet, one of them is much happier, much more purpose driven and much more fulfilled than the other. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's a big takeaway here. Yeah, I think there's an aspect of like pursuing excellence in this. Like if something feels meaningful to you, you want to do it the best to your ability. You want to see how high your potential is. You want to see how well you can do something. Whereas if it feels meaningless, then you're just kind of like, yeah, dude, Give me the paycheck.

Right. I love this point. And I didn't know you were going to bring it up. And so I actually had to run out and grab my phone because I wanted to look up. There's this amazing quote from Martin Luther King about this. That's so fucking good. And he said this. He said, if a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep the streets as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry.

He should sweep the streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street. sweeper who did his job well. That's good. So maybe another another strategy here is just pursuit of excellence. Yeah. Like just do things as well as possible because there is something intrinsically meaningful about that, about like mastery of something. You know who nailed this first?

Who? Aristotle. God damn it. Got a quote. You've heard this quote before. Excellence is not a single act, but a habit of mind. Yes. The first time I heard that, it was my high school football coach.

Yeah. He was actually, he was an English teacher, too. He was a really smart guy and he was a football coach. But he brought that up. The way he related it to us, he said, that means if you're going to wipe your ass, you're going to wipe your ass, the best that you absolutely can. You're not going to stop until your ass is clean. Same thing where you're out here on the field. Like this was, you know, this was, yeah.

So that was powerful. That's very, very moving, actually. Maybe a better example for my own life that I had, though, too. So I worked when I'm from a summer job when I was in high school, I'd go work for the the city parks department. Right. And it was you were, you know, we run of weed eaters basically for half the time and then doing all the shit jobs that the full-time guys didn't want to do, you know, clean bathrooms and just stuff like that. My supervisor, though, he like really, he was a very, I think a very instrumental figure in my development in a lot of ways because he would say, look, this is this is your town. This is where we live.

Take some pride in your work. Yeah. Yeah, you're out there running a weed eater or you're scrubbing a toilet. But like, this is where we live. This is, take some pride in the place that you live and work and other people will interact with you. Yeah. And so I took that to heart, definitely. And he was a really good guy, you know, even though he was just working for the street and parks department or whatever it was.

He took a lot of pride in his work because he saw a lot of meaning and making his town beautiful and a good place to live. Yeah. I think this segues really nicely into a conversation about purpose at work. Because I think this is probably the biggest area of life that people associate purpose or lack of purpose. Yes. Especially today, yes. And I think a lot of people, it's become very trendy. I know in the corporate world to like find mission and meaning and a sense of purpose for everybody. They probably do that because they just know that workers who have a sense of purpose work a lot harder and better. And that's good for the bottom line.

But it is also healthier. It makes for healthier and happier workers. So let's dig in a little bit on what is purpose at work and how can we find it. I mean, to start off with, and we've kind of alluded to this a little bit, but there's different kind of orientations you can take towards your work and yet still find purpose in them. Researchers have kind of come up with these three different orientations to work. One's a job orientation, a career orientation, and a calling orientation. Okay. So job orientation, you see your work as a necessarily. It's a paycheck. It's a means to another end, basically. Stability, survival, taking care of your family. The purpose kind of lies outside of the job, but yet you're using that job in a purposeful way still. I think, you know, this was definitely for a long time, you know, like in the 50s and 60s especially, it was like, you know, a man went off to work to provide for his family and he found a lot of purpose and meaning in that, right?

you find other purposes a lot of times you will find more purpose outside of work than to whether it is through your family or through hobbies or relationships of some kind i don't think there's anything wrong with that yeah i think we need to be a little bit more amenable to that because not everybody can be you know a singer or a painter or living your dream living your dream all the time like you're yeah knowing what your dream is necessarily and maybe that job just provides you uh with kind of the foundations of other purposes in your life. Yes. Okay.

I for sure, I've definitely, I've written about this and I have seen it in a lot of people in my life. Like I have multiple people in my life who don't love their job. They don't find a ton of meaning in their job, but they like their job. And they have tons of purpose in other areas of their life and they're perfectly happy. So I think this is one of the things millennials kind of just got inflated expectations about. 100%. Yeah.

Yeah. There's also a lot of people too who find like the relationships at work, the meaningful part, right? It's like, yeah, I don't really like the job, but I really like the people there. Yeah. Like I hear that a lot. And that's awesome because if you can have like a good friend at work, that's one of the best predictors of job satisfaction. Yes. It's not the work itself.

It's not the people. Yeah. The career orientation, this one's kind of interesting. It's what you see work is kind of achievement and you get, you get purpose out of the achievement, not necessarily the job itself. So you like the job because it's. a ladder for your advancement, right? And or, um, there's, there's mastery to it or there's maybe some recognition that you get out of it and you, you find some purpose out of that. Obviously, you don't want to anchor too much your, your purpose to external sources like this, but there's

some people who just like the growth. You just like growth that's like a value of theirs. And whatever job they're in, they're like, okay, I'm going to work my way up through the ladder or whatever it is. It's a corporate ladder or just job advancement in some kind. These are the kind of people where if they do hit a dead end in their career, then that usually throws them into some sort of, you know, positive disintegration loop. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully it's the best that they can come out of that. But these are, again, it's not that like they don't see the work as the purpose itself.

It's more like the process that they're engaged in. Okay. And then this last one is the calling orientation. This is the one that gets all the attention, right? Your work is your identity. It's your service. It's your contribution. It's intrinsically meaningful to, like, you just derive a lot of.

of purpose from the work itself. And it does have this larger contribution aspect to it. Like I said, again, this one gets all the attention. It's great if you can find that. Yeah. I just think it's much more rare than people want to believe. Because a lot of times, and we'll get to this too, a lot of times it's like maybe what you're very passionate and find a lot of purpose and doesn't pay well, right?

Yes. Like, there's that whole aspect. And we'll get into that. but those are kind of the three orientations we can take towards our work and still find purpose in some way. You know what this reminds me of and I hate to bring it back to him?

It reminds me of Aristotle's framework for three friendships. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. It's true. Friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure and friendships of virtue, right? And it's like the utility friendships is like you're just doing it to get something.

The pleasure friendships is like, you generally enjoy being around the person but it's like not super deep. And then the virtuous friendship is like you, there's like a deep respect for that person. And it's, it sounds like this framework is the same thing with jobs. Like, job of utility, job of pleasure and job of virtue, which is, you know, you, you feel called to it. It's intrinsically motivating. Yeah. You admire it for its own sake. And the lesson from that was you can, you, you can, you, all three are good. Yes.

Obviously, like, if you can get to that calling phase of that virtue phase, sure, that's great. But I mean, a job for, of utility has a lot of utility. Yeah. Right. And your life or a job of pleasure or advancement. Well, and like with friendship, you know, Aristotle said that you can't get to level three until you go, you know, you got to start at utility. And then you discover that you like it. And then as you like it, you discover that it's very meaningful and important. And it's the same thing with jobs.

Like you take a job because you need the paycheck. But then hopefully you take one that you find you really enjoy and like a lot. And then as you enjoy it and like it, it starts to become meaningful and you get really good at Right, right. I think there's also like a personality dimension to this, obviously, too. I think there are just some people, like you talked about, what was a weightlifter's name again? Ronnie Coleman and yourself. I think there's just a personality thing towards it where it's like, I got to go all in on this and I'm going for my calling. And then there's some people who they're like that I don't derive, either I don't, there's not a calling or a passion that's going to pay me well. And so I can't engage in that because of my personality. or it's just not the kind of person that they are. And so they find other sources of meaning and it could be within their work or outside of their work.

I saw this a lot with people I went to music school with. You know, it was music school. It's such a tough environment. Because first of all, most people drop out. But even the people who don't drop out, there's kind of this understanding, like everybody kind of looks around and there's an understanding of like,

okay, like those 10 guys are going to make it. The rest of us are going to fight for whatever, are left over. And you can see, like, some people are very comfortable with that. They're like, I'm happy to be a starving artist. I don't really need to make a bunch of money. You know, I'll tour in a van for the rest of my life. And then some people are like, nope, nope, going to go teach high school or going to go teach

graduate school or whatever or work in a church or, you know, find something stable and dependable even though it's not their like ultimate dream. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, having that purpose, having purpose in your work, it's obviously going to make you more productive. It's obviously going to probably be better for you in the long run. But again, there's these different ways you can find purpose and work. It doesn't just have to be the calling side of it, too, right?

There's also, when we tack on to the darker side issue, just a little bit here, though, too. You've got to watch out a little bit because a lot of these, especially if it's like a creative, industry or something that is just a lot of people think it's a very purposeful or meaningful work. A lot of employers can sometimes like take advantage of that. Yes. They will be like, well, you don't need the money. Disney. Yeah.

Oh, you get to work for Disney. Yeah. You get to work for a TV out here in L.A. It's like you get to work for a TV show. Therefore, we get to pay you like shit and treat you like shit. Dude. Because it's purposeful and meaningful to you. Since we started hiring video production people out here in L.A., like I can't tell you

how many people have come through who used to work for Disney particularly on the Star Wars and the Marvel franchises. Really? It's like slave labor. It's like not even exaggerating. It's like slave labor.

A lot of these guys worked on crews and were PAs and stuff on a Star Wars film. Getting paid almost nothing. Working 12, 14 hour days, like no overtime, getting treated like shit. And they told me they're like,

yeah, it's every, like everybody would kill. to work on a Star Wars film so you're so replaceable that you have absolutely no leverage whatsoever. Right. And apparently this is pretty commonplace on some of those like those huge franchises

with massive fan bases. And it's, it's sick. It's really fucked up. Yeah. Scott Galloway talks about this a lot. He's like, unless you're getting really bright lights early on about some of these industries like acting, you know, writing,

painting, whatever. Unless you're getting those, probably look for something else. You know, and you can still find purpose and meaning in those things. You can still do your artwork or your creative projects on the side. That's great. And we'll get into a little bit of how we do that outside of work. But I think you have to be really, really cognizant because you are replaceable in a lot of those industries, unless you're getting these like, okay, you're super talented athlete or creative artist in some way. Be careful with that. I don't want to discourage people from pursuing those things, obviously, but just know that there is a huge cost there.

Yeah, and there are, there are notable exceptions. You know, it's, uh, John Coltrane, like, didn't start playing saxophone until, like, his mid-20s. And, um, I think Morgan Freeman didn't start acting until he was like 40, you know, like, so there are, Wethers was same, yeah. Yeah, there are exceptions to this rule, but the rule is, is that if you, if you haven't made it within the first few years, like the odds are massively stacked against you.

And it's just, it's just because, like, talent rises to the top extremely quickly in, in most creative fields. And, and so it's,

like you said, it's not to discourage people from trying, but, like, I get this question quite a bit, coincidentally from musicians. Yeah. You know,

it's usually musicians and they're mid to late 20s, and they're like, I've been grinding for 10 years, and it's not really going anywhere. Should I give up? And I'm always extremely honest with them. I tell them, I'm like, look, I'm not going to tell you whether they give up or not,

but I'm going to be extremely honest in that if it hasn't happened yet, it's probably not. Make of that what you will. Yeah. Chris Rock said, follow your passion if they're hiring. Right? Right. Which is, I mean, you know, he's a little bit tongue in cheek, but also a little bit truth to that. Yeah.

I think with work, though, you know, take those, work as utility, work as pleasure, work as as passion. There's probably different phases in your life where you have to go through that. You know, like, I grew up from humble means and there was just a point where it's like, I need to. You need money. Achieve financial stability. That was my purpose. Yes. For several years.

Yes. My purpose was just get this taken care of. And so I showed up to work. I had purpose in my work, whether I liked it or not. I had some shit jobs for a while. Yeah. You know, but my purpose was to achieve some sort of financial stability so that then I could, from that place of security, then I could be a little bit choosier.

Yeah. Okay. So I think that's one thing people need to realize is that like, oh, should I completely, like I have no savings, I have no nothing, whatever. Should I follow my passion? well, you know, there's probably like some degree of you need to, you need some sort of, you need to be able to make this decision from a place of stability. Yeah.

For a lot of people. Again, that's personality based. Yeah. Well, and I think this is, this is an excellent time to bring up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yeah. Right. Like, it's, it's, I mean, everybody's very familiar with that pyramid. Funny story is that Maslow never actually published that pyramid.

It was actually, it was in one of his notebooks that he kind of just scribbled and like, I don't know, a fever dream or something. and then, you know, a bunch of corporate consultants took it way too far. Right. But there's not actually a ton of empirical validity behind it, but it is a framework. I think it isn't just people find it intuitively true. Sure. There's a book by a good friend of mine, which I highly recommend.

It's called Transcend by Scott Barry Kaufman. He's a professor at Columbia, really an old friend of mine, brilliant guy, and he is the biggest Abraham Maslow fan on the planet. And so Scott reimagines Maslow's, hierarchy into like a sailboat metaphor. And on the bottom, the boat portion of the sailboat, you have the, what he calls the security needs. And then the sale itself is the growth needs.

And so the boat portion is, it's like everything is necessary but not sufficient. It's the whole goal of those needs is just that prevents you from sinking. So that's where you have your physiological needs, your safety needs, and your like basic self-esteem and belongingness. needs. And so if you don't have those, you're going to start sinking and nothing else matters. So you have to get those three things set and secure before anything else. But then once you have those things, once you are financially secure, once you are safe, once you do feel like some degree of confidence and stability with yourself, then you can focus on the growth needs,

which is the sale. So those are exploration, love, and then at the very top of the sale is purpose for what Maslow called self-actualization. And I love to... I love the sailboat analogy because Scott's point is that the boat portion is what keeps you afloat, and then the sail is what makes you move forward. And so if you have a sense of love in your life and you have a sense of purpose in your life and you feel free to explore as you as you may, that's what makes life feel very meaningful and vibrant and full of joy and purpose. There's emotion to it. Yeah. Yeah. But it's that's not even possible if you don't have those basic foundational needs in place.

ship. If you're not going anywhere, it doesn't matter how big you're sailing. And it doesn't matter how much wind there is. If you, if you're broke and physically unsafe, it doesn't matter. Yeah. It reminds me to of David Brooks's book, Second Mountain. Yeah. He talks a lot about, a lot of us spend half of our lives usually about like climbing one mountain to realize, oh, there's another mountain that we need to climb and that mountain is the meaning and the purpose and all of that. But without, for most of us, without those first, that first, that first kind of a trek up that first mountain and securing that, securing the boat, mixing metaphors pretty badly. Without that, it's really hard to achieve that second mountain. Yeah, and Brooks says you can't

even see the second mountain. Right. You have to be on the peak of the first mountain to even see that there's a second mountain. I go back to the people in my life, there's several people in my life around me right now who are going through this. And I've pointed them to that. And I'm like, oh, you're ready for the second mountain. Dude, I've recommended that book so many times, so many times. And the other beautiful thing about that analogy, too, and this relates to Victor Frankl's existential vacuum is that Brooks says that to get from the top of the first mountain to the second mountain, you have to descend into the valley. There's a saddle there, right? Yeah. Where you feel lost and aimless and dark, and you don't know where anything is and what you're doing anymore. And it's, yeah. Yeah, two great books, two great metaphors. Two friends of the show. Yes. All right. Work, we put a lot of emphasis on it to find,

meaning. There's ways you can find meaning in your work without it being the purpose itself. We've already talked about that. But what about like other sources of meaning outside of work? We've we've danced around some of these already. I feel like I have several different purposes across my life. And so I can talk a little bit about that. But you know, there's there's non-work related sources of purpose that we can kind of dig into a little bit. Yeah. I think the biggest one by far is children. Oh yeah. Yeah. Family and children. Yeah. Yes. Family and children is by far the biggest one. What's interesting about that is that for the majority of people, vast majority of people, not everybody, but the vast majority of people, that is hardwired.

That kicks in. It's what humans do. Yeah. It makes sense. It makes sense. It makes sense. It's the whole reason we're here, literally. But it's, I can't tell you how many parents I've talked to that they're like, yeah, this.

the second my kid is born, everything else gets downgraded substantially in terms of importance. Like all this other stuff I thought I cared about. It's like, don't care anymore. Don't have time for it. A lot of my cousins were all around the same age. And one of them has a few kids, he's had kids pretty young. And he's just, he told me he's like, when you have kids, he's like, you would not believe how quickly you become last in your life. And you're so okay with it.

Yeah. You're totally okay with it. Yeah. And that's a huge component of purpose. It's like there's just something that's way bigger than me, way more important than myself. Yeah. And the, and the sacrifice and struggle is real. It's, you know, a lot of kids are great. A lot of kids are easy. And a lot of kids are not. Little dickheads. A lot of kids are really. Let's not sugarcoat it. Yeah. Like a lot of kids are not. No, I've got a, I have a few people in my life who have little dickhead kids. Sorry. If you want to put it that way, Drew, I was going to say they were... I like kids, but there are some dickhead kids in there. There are some things.

I mean, but they're also like, I mean, there are kids with developmental challenges. Okay, sorry. Yeah. With, like, mental health challenges of, you know, learning disabilities. Okay, okay. I can just see the shame on your face. I mean, you know, I'm watching. No, I feel like an asshole.

And, yes, some of them are dickheads. Some of them are just awful. But they're still kids. But yeah, I mean, I have a few people in my life who have very difficult children for various reasons. And it's tough, man. Like, it's tough watching them. Like, they are struggling a lot, mentally, emotionally, physically in some cases. Like, they, parents give up so much.

It's, again, if you think about that, that equation, you know, it's like when you're parent, you are the only, you are uniquely situated and positioned to raise this child. You are their only father or their only mother. When you are contributing in something far greater than yourself, something that's going to outlive yourself. It is by definition, an immortality project for you. And you are suffering and struggling and giving up so, so, so much for that child. you can see why it is overloaded on purpose and then also

in many cases simultaneously devoid of happiness or pleasure. It is a deeply stressful and hard time for many parents, not all parents. And I think too, again, we get into that diversification

issue. A lot of parents burn out. A lot of parents lose themselves. They stop getting a sense of purpose from their career or from their friends or from their hobbies and interests. And it's, and they suffer the consequences of that. They, they get burnt out from it. Yeah, I think especially now where it's like to be, there's this whole idea in the Zite

guys right now that to be a good parent, you have to be just like all in all the time. All the time. You know, pay for everything, all the activities for them and show up to everything and all of that. Whereas, you know, I think at one point, I don't know, getting into this old man shaking my fist, but you know, when we, when we were growing up, when we were growing up, and it was already changing by this point, actually. But, you know, it was your parent, you would go to places, your parents would go to their friend's house. Yeah. And you were expected to just behave and,

you know, shut the fuck up. Shut the hell up. Yeah. But now it's like, oh, if you're not doing every little thing for your kid, you're, you're buying this. Yeah. And I think a lot of people, I know a lot of people in my life anyway, who, you know, they've gone through some of that. Their kids are starting to get a little bit older, at least a little more independent. And they don't know who they are because they've put so much time and effort into that. And I don't know. I think there's, it goes a little bit back to what we were talking about. Like, you're talking about with the, the educator and the prison. Yeah. It's one of those things where you look back on it and you find all the purpose in it. We talked about this in the happiness episode too, where, you know,

parenting, you have the experiencing self and the remembering self. And oftentimes parenting is, the purpose and the value and the meaning you get out of it is very much after the fact. It's in the remembering self, not in the experiencing self. But that can get hijacked a little bit too. Like I was just saying, you can get way too far into the experience during parenting. You overindex on it. Yeah. And yeah, that causes a whole bunch of problems.

Yeah, I do think there's this toxic culture of parenthood that's going on right now. It is kind of sick like, you know, I, I think one of the reasons that parents overdo it or feel like they need to overdo it is the fear of judgment from other parents. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But those other parents are also overdoing it because they're afraid of being judged by other parents. And so you get this Mexican standoff where like everybody's miserable and everybody wishes they could have a little bit of their life back.

But they don't want to do it because they don't want to look like the shitty parents in their neighborhood or at their school. And then secondly, like from what I've observed, like this just. It's just true. It hits women much harder than men. Yeah. Yes. And we could spend a lot of time on the reasons for that, but I think everybody would agree that just women, there's way more expectations around women to spend more time with their kids and to identify as a mother much more than guys. Generally, men find a lot more meaning and purpose in their work and will, like, they can justify maintaining that because somebody in the household needs to invest a lot in their career.

I just know that from working in this industry for a long, long, long time, middle-aged women are kind of the bread and butter consumers of personal development advice. And probably the most common story that you hear from them is I've spent the last decade plus being a mom, I'm stretched thin. I don't know who I am anymore. I just give, give, give, give, give. I feel like nobody ever makes time for me. I don't even know what I want anymore, you know, etc, etc. And it's, to me, that's like a classic case of this, you know, the dark side of purpose. Like you over index on one source of purpose.

You go all in on it. You lose that diversification. You stop making time to take care of yourself. You stop prioritizing other things in your life. And, you know, you get five, ten years down that road. You don't even remember who you are anymore. And you're burnt out, you're sick of everything, and you just want to go sit on a beach somewhere and drink margaritas into a stupor.

Right. Yeah. Leave your family and move to Tahiti. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So go read the second mountain.

Yeah. I think that's my advice there. Yeah. Okay. So outside of family, there's a few other things, a few other sources that are common anyway, service, volunteering, social contribution within your community. You and I talk about this all the time. We're over-indexed on the global, under-indexed on the local.

And people underestimate this. It feels like even when we talk about this, it feels like we're talking about a chore. Yeah. It feels like I'm telling people like, you know, if you do your dishes more often, you'll be happier. Like, it's just like nobody wants to hear this. But the research is overwhelming. and and you, I experience this myself. Like when I do go out and do something or do something charitable or give back in some way,

I'm always blown away at how good it feels and how meaningful it feels. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know about you, but the older I get, the more I think about this kind of thing. Because there comes kind of, I think the older you get, there comes a little bit of a responsibility mindset that comes in to mind anyway. You're like, oh, you know, you've been growing up and everybody else has been taking care of these things. And you start looking around and like, oh, we're the ones who have to take care of these things now.

I'm the one who has to take care of my community. I'm the one who has to take care of whatever problems or issues are going on around me. There's a responsibility that you have. And so if you can connect that to a greater purpose, you know, just like there's a great food bank where I'm from. And they have a fantastic food bank and just giving a little bit of money to them. helps a lot. But going down and like helping them pack food or organize things and stuff like that, you get a lot more. Yeah. It's great to give them a check. That's fine. Donate to them. That's awesome. But like when you actually get in there, again, it goes back to those who are the exact people you're

helping and you see these people face to face. Wow. Yeah. Like it's, it's insane. Yeah. It's funny. So Kant's formula of humanity. He didn't write it as a suggestion. He didn't say like, hey, this is the right way to live. You should try to live this way. He actually wrote about it. He used the word duty. He said that we all have a duty, like a moral obligation to make people the end and of itself.

And everything else becomes a mean. Like he's like, this is not optional. Like if you're not doing this, you're fucking up. Yeah. And as you just, you kind of alluded to it there that there's kind of this sense of like, you know, hey, I'm, I'm an adult now. and things are going pretty well, and a lot of people help me, and you look around, and you feel

like there is some sense of obligation of like, I should be doing something, I should be helping in some way. Kant would say, yes, you have a duty to do things with humanity as an end and of itself. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I just go back to, like, nobody else is going to do it. Somebody else will do it, and there might not be the way you want to do it. So the contribution side, too, is like, like, I'm leaving my... mark here as well.

So there's that. Your immortality project. It is an immortality project for sure. The last kind of area, I actually want to get your take on this. I want to know like hobbies, leisure activity. People, you can find purpose in these, I think to some extent, but how much and how important and how enduring is that purpose do you think? So like, for example, I talk about this all the time, woodworking.

I love making things and building things. I don't, I see it more. is just kind of like a passion and even a little bit of a therapeutic outlet for me. Sure. You know, it gets me away from screens. It gets me moving. It gets me creatively engaged in physical ways. I'm not sure if I find a ton of purpose.

Sometimes I'll like, I use those skills to help other people and that's purposeful to me. So maybe that's one avenue by which you can turn those types of activities into more purposeful things. But what do you think about like leisure and hobbies and I think it can have a marginal amount of purpose to it? I don't think, I'm kind of with you. I don't think it's a major contribution. And I think when it is a major contribution of purpose to somebody's life, it's actually because the hobby or the pursuit is, it's a vehicle for something else. It's either like how you keep in touch with your friends and family.

I'll give you an example. So as you know, I grew up in a small town outside of Austin, in Texas. My family is fucking obsessed with football. I joke to people. I'm like, yeah, my family's love language is football. Yeah. It's crazy. I think if you charted my text messages with both my parents and my brother,

it would spike in September each year and then crater in February every year because it's just like completely in parallel with football season. It's just what everybody talks about. It's what everybody does. I just went to a family reunion in Austin. And what we do? We spent the entire Saturday sitting around watching football together. Like that's all we did.

for the entire day. So I do love football, but football feels when I think about it, and I think about the teams I cheer for, I don't really give a shit about the teams. It's the connection that I have with my family, right? It's my dad's favorite team, or it's my mom's favorite team,

or it's my brother's favorite team, and like, oh, we went to a game together that one time, and we had so much fun. It's like, that's what's meaningful about it. I think the social connection is you know hobbies and interests can be one pathway to that and I will say the other way you can derive some sense of purpose and meaning from from hobbies is again that pursuit of excellence right it's like if you get really good at something yeah and you put a lot you really really put in the effort to get good at that thing I do think that can be that can feel meaningful to you it's definitely in a other category or tier as some of this other stuff. Like you're never going to be more proud of your woodworking than you are of your kid probably. Right.

Yeah. But like you can be very proud of your woodworking. This is where again, where people like they'll confuse the passion for a purpose. And I think this is where they get bogged down as in like their hobbies and greater projects and all of that. And I there's nothing wrong with those. I think absolutely pursue those. For me, like I said, there's like a mental health aspect to it almost, you know. And kind of it helps me practice mindfulness in a lot of ways and mastery.

and all of those things. But if you can't, like, kind of transmute it into a larger purpose around whether it is connection or helping others or whatever it is. Yeah. I think there's limited utility to it. I will say this, you know, as you know, I took a sabbatical in 2022. Yeah. Took about six months off.

I basically did nothing but leisure activities. I was so miserable. Were you? I was bored out of my fucking mind. I was like. I haven't talked to you a whole lot about that. I remember that. I was like, what is going on?

I, so first of all, I, I burnt myself out so hard. And then I started taking time off. And yeah, by the second, I mean, the first month was really nice. I was just like, I just slept and played video games and traveled with the wife. But yeah, by the second month, I was, I was bored out of my mind. I was like, what am I doing? What am I doing with my life?

I started doing shit around the house. I was like desperate to find something useful to do with myself. And it was definitely that lack of purpose. Like I just, I just felt aimless. You probably needed that. I did. You know, you needed some wandering. Yeah, I think I did.

A lot came out of that that was very useful. And maybe that's another strategy that we would add to the previous section, which is, which is just actually abstaining from something will tell you how much it matters to them. Like there have been many points in my life where like I thought something was important. and then when I stopped doing it, I didn't miss it. Right. And then there are other times where it's like I stopped doing something and I missed it horribly. Right. And I was like, oh, okay, that actually meant a lot to me.

I would say things like creating things for me. Like that's one of those things. If I stop doing that, I go nuts. So I know that that's something I need to be doing. Same. Yeah. Same. So we've covered strategies to achieve more purpose in your life.

Let's go through like some actual tools and frameworks. So like some actual things that you can do and try. I would say the first thing is, this is going to sound really boring, but assessments, you know, coming back to that equation of like really understanding yourself and what you are predisposed to be good at or inclined to do, I do think it's useful to do various personality assessments, skill assessments, talent assessments. And also, most importantly, a values assessment. We talked about this back in the values episode at the beginning of the podcast, but just going through a values questionnaire and just be. being forced to sort through what you actually care about the most. And the purpose app itself,

to create an account, we make you go through a series of assessments and answer a number of questions just so we can get a baseline reading of like, okay, this is this person's personality, this is what they care about, this is what they find important. So I would say if you're completely lost,

like have no idea where to start, start with some very basic assessments, questionnaires, try to get a little bit of understanding for yourself, and what you actually like. Yeah. Yeah, I think the values one is huge. I think it's where you really should start.

I don't know. I've gotten a limited utility out of like, find your passion or your purpose tools or whatever. Yeah. The values one is what's helped me the most, though. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

The next thing I'll say, there are a couple frameworks that you can think about that are potentially useful. You know, so there's this great, there's this great Venn diagram that comes from Japan called Ikigai. and it's basically, if you imagine four circles that all overlap with each other. One is what you love to do. One is what you're good at.

One is what the world needs. And then one is what you're good enough to get paid for. Ideally, the Iki guy is finding the intersection of all four of those things. And I think most people can probably find the intersection of two or three of those things in their life. So if you can find two or three of them, then you know how to work towards the fourth. There's another tool that's widely used in life coaching. In fact, the official Institute of Life Coaching Certification recommends the use of this tool for all coaching clients. It's called the Wheel of Life. It's basically just an assessment of how satisfied you are in each domain of your life and where you feel like you need to do the most work. And then ideally you fill out the wheel of life consistently over time and then you see the tradeoffs that are happening based on the decisions that you're making. Again, we use the Wheel of Life in the Purpose app. It is part of the onboarding experience,

and it is something that we follow up with the user with consistently. Just because it shows so much. It's funny how much people lack awareness of where they're at in their lives. But like, you might be feeling anxious or depressed or lonely or whatever. But when you sit down and start actually giving a one to ten rating on every single category of your life, you will naturally spot some patterns and some inconsistencies that maybe you weren't quite aware of. What are some of these categories? I guess they take you through.

What are the big categories? I've never done this one before. It's very simple. So it's, I believe the standard one is it's nine or ten categories. So it's like career, family, social life, romantic relationship, learning, hobbies, community, health. So it's like a whole 360, like comes out of from every angle. I really like that. Yeah, total 360.

I really like that. Yeah. Because like we talk about it, it's like, it's not just work, right? It's not just your relationship. It's all of these things. Yeah. And it's, as somebody who's done it a few times myself, like, it is crazy because, like, because it's crazy.

Like, if you ask me on any given day, like throughout my life, like, how are things going? I'm like, oh, pretty good. You know, could be better, but also pretty good overall. You're a seven out of ten. I'm a seven out of ten. I'm a seven out of ten. I'm an eight out of ten. But what happens when you do the Wheel of Life, you start noticing like, okay, wait, I'm a 9 out of 10 here and a 10 out of 10 here and a 5 out of 10 here.

And then an 8 out of 10 and a 9 out of 10 and an 8 out of 10. And you're like, whoa, okay. Yeah, I never actually stopped and thought about like I'm a 5 there. Why is that? And again, when you track it over time, you start to innately kind of see where you're making the tradeoffs. You're like, okay, I'm a 10 in these two categories and I'm a 5 in these two categories. and I actually see exactly where the time and energy is being removed from these categories and put into these categories. So it can be very useful.

So another tool that people can use is like a purpose statement or a purpose manifesto. It's basically a written exercise and there are some forms of guided versions of this that you can do. But it can be as simple as simply stating like a life mission for yourself. it can be as explicit as just writing out the top three most important values of yourself. It can be as official as creating a life constitution. I've talked to people who've done all these things, and it can be useful to varying degrees. In business, one of the things that I think people who don't run a business don't think about a whole lot,

this is actually a huge topic within a business. Like if you're the CEO or on the exact team, like you spend a lot of time thinking about what are our values, what's our purpose, what's our mission, and like what are the things that we're optimizing for and what are the things that we're willing to give up or sacrifice to optimize for those things. And in the context of business, it's like very much just a practical. Like you can't do everything. You can't be everything. What is your mission? Like what is the thing that defines why your business should exist? Okay, great, you've defined that.

How is that helping your customers or helping the world? Okay, great. Now, let's define all of the values and sacrifices that you're willing to make. CEOs spend a lot of time doing this and thinking about this. And business consultants charge a fuckload of money to help CEOs do this. But it's funny because you don't really see this happen in people's personal. Like, people don't think about this from, like, their personal life. They don't, they don't do it with themselves, and they don't think in those terms with themselves.

And I think it could potentially be useful. Is there, sometimes it gets to be almost this magical aura around writing things down. Yes. Right? What, you've heard you recommend it before. Yes. And I, when if there's something important, I'll write things down too. What is it about just like getting it out of your head and onto paper or whatever?

I don't think it's anything special about the paper. I think it's the language formation that happens. The thinking process. The thinking process. Like, I think it's when you write, you are thinking differently than you are if you're just sitting silently contemplating something or even speaking something. Like, there's something about writing. There's something about the permanence of it, the formality of it. That, like, it really makes your brain stop and think, like, okay, what is the most concise?

and meaningful way for me to encapsulate this feeling and this intention into words. Yeah. And then the process of doing that, like somehow creates clarity and direction and understanding in a way that other things don't. Okay. Yeah. And on top of that, too, I think what I found anyway is the things I go back to that I've written, you talked about the permanent aspect of it.

Yes. When you go back to it, it's almost like you can transport yourself back to when you were thinking that way. Yes. And remember, especially around things like important things like purpose, right? Yeah. If you write it down a couple months later, you come back to it, you're kind of reminded of, oh, this is how I felt.

This was my motivation at the time. You're reminded of that past self. Yes. It can either act as a reminder, like a refresher. Or it can show you progress, right? You're like, oh, I used to think that way. That's funny. Things have changed so much.

How have they changed? And then you kind of go through the exercise and write again. But it's funny, I mean, coming back to the business point, I mean, it's a lot of business books and advisors and stuff. Like they recommend going back to your mission and values repeatedly, like repeating them ad nauseum just because people forget. People get distracted. They're like, they get caught up and hitting that quarter's bonus or getting that month's paycheck. And like people forget why they do things and what the original intention was to do those things.

I also think something as abstract as purpose in philosophical. philosophical is purpose. Like, you really do, like the writing aspect of it, like really does help you pin it down, like put a nail in it. Actually, not to promo too much of my own shit, but there is a subtle art journal and we do one of the, there's five sections in the subtle art journal. And one of the five sections sections is a series of written exercises on how to build more purpose in your life. And actually a lot of this is another tool that I will list. here, which is a time audit. So we used to offer years ago, we used to offer a free PDF that was a time audit. And it was basically a time audit is exactly what it sounds like. You sit down, you write out how you're spending each of your days, how much time you're spending on each thing. And then you go back and you rate from one to ten how important or fulfilling that activity

feels to you. And then you do the math and add everything up. And usually you're shocked or appalled at how much time you're spending. on shit that doesn't really matter and how little time you're spending on the stuff that really does matter. So time audits can be extremely useful and very valuable. You can, again, there's plenty of them out there, plenty of them online. Ours are probably still on the website. Probably somewhere, yeah. I don't know. I actually recently went a little while back, I did it just because we were working on the podcast and we're trying to grow it. And I was just

like, I felt like I was stretched so thin. I didn't. I was like, am I not being efficient? It was not what what is going on. And so I did this for like, I think about a week, a work week anyway. And yeah, it was eye-opening. Yeah. It really, I mean, it was just, there was so many things I was getting distracted with. Yeah. And you're like, oh, that is outside of the purpose, why I'm doing this.

So it's 100%. It can be very, very clarifying. Yeah, I used to, I used to do one every New Year's. Yeah, yeah. And then I would also do it with, you know, I'd kind of frame my goal setting around how I would be using my time. You know, the funny thing about purpose is that when you really boil down to it, it is simply using your time. Yeah, yeah, it's how am I going to use my time?

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's using it, how should I use it? Yeah, it's like, it is that simple. It's just that feeling like your time is being used well. That is what a sense of purpose is, is that it's, it's, it's, it's being spent well. So another simple tool or exercise people can do is something called purpose setting. everybody knows what goal setting is. It's been around for decades. Most people know about the best practices for goals, smart goals.

Purpose setting is something that's a little bit more recent. Researchers, McKnight and Cashton came up with it in 2009, and they defined it as simply like, again, coming back to the means and ends chain, it's like, okay, set your goals and then look at the goals and then just ask what is the why behind that, right? Like, what is the purpose that unites those goals and creates like a kind of a coherence between those goals.

And what is the end and of itself that the goals are working towards? So, and I think this is just a valuable habit, mental habit for people to get in regardless of what they're doing. Like, anytime you have, you're motivated to pursue something or you have some goal or something you care about, just ask yourself why. Like, you want to lose 20 pounds. Okay, why? Well, I want to, I'm going to see my. X and I want to impress them. Okay, why?

Well, I'm kind of insecure about my relationship and the fact that I'm still single and, you know, I want to make a good impression. Well, why? Because I don't feel good enough and I, I'm insecure. Fuck you. I don't want to play this game anymore. Sounds fun, Mark. Yeah.

Sign me up. Yeah. No, I get it. But yeah, it's, it's, I used to call this back in the day, I used to call this the Y game, which is just like keep asking. why until the answer becomes circular, right? And it's like, okay, why do you feel insecure and inadequate? It's like, well, I don't know.

I just feel insecure and inadequate. It's like, okay, cool. Now you found the root motivation. You know, now how do you tie that to a sense of purpose, right? It's like, is losing 20 pounds really gonna change that? Probably not. Yeah, yeah. What will?

Okay, cool. Yeah, okay. So when me and the team where we were researching all these different, you know, tools and methods and all of this going through it. Like I said, I've kind of found limited utility in a lot of these, and I wasn't really ever sure why. But I think we kind of found a little bit of a reason at least. And if you're going through this and this all sounds overwhelming, there's all these different tools. First, what you can do is go to purpose.

Dot app slash solved. And you can take the purpose, find your purpose test there for free. But also if you're just, there's kind of some of these tools match your personalities differently. Like there's all these tools out there that people are like, oh, this is going to help you find your purpose. and you go and take them, you're like, that didn't really help me. It's probably because it just doesn't really match your personality or the way you approach things. We kind of found these three different ways that people relate to this information, and then you can match yourself with this tool. So, for instance, one of them, if you're more of an autonomy-driven person.

So you're really looking for, like, exploration and autonomy and choosing in your life, then you're probably going to do a lot better with, like, these open-ended reflections. So you talked about journaling and just here's a few prompts now write about them for. a while, that's going to help you a lot more. On the other hand, if you're more of like a competence-oriented person, maybe you're one of those people who are with like your career focused and achievement and you like growth, these frameworks like the Iki guy or the wheel, the wheel of life, those are better because you have this like framework in front of you and you're very structured in your thinking anyway.

You start optimizing for it. Exactly. One we did, kind of didn't talk about through this though, is like relatedness focus, people who, those people who want to get more purpose out of their relationships and their social circles, look at frameworks that tie more of like the personal and social side to purpose and use those kinds of tools. So I think there is like a, there's a fit that you have to find with these, which is why when people are like, oh, this is, here's the framework's going to help you find this out. I'm skeptical. And like I said, I've found limited utility in a lot of those.

I mean, this is what we're trying to solve, right? Like it's, it's, you know, with the, with the purpose app, like it is, it is such an individual and. personal thing. Exactly. That our hope is that with a properly trained AI and with, you know, an ability to really personalize and challenge people on what they care about, we can create a one-size-fits-all solution for it. So that's what we're going for.

Yeah, super excited for it. That's, yeah. Check it out. Check it out. Purpose. That app. Let's go. All right, Drew.

We are coming to the end here. As always, we do a. an 80-20 section for every solved episode, which is basically now that we have bombarded you with hours and hours of information and tips and insights and exercises and things that you can do to improve purpose in your life, what is the 80-20? What are the few things that move the needle the most? I will kick it off and I will say, I personally think really following your curiosity, like learning to listen to yourself. And this comes all the way back to. Aristotle, where I think his intention with his framework around Talos was this idea of

like people living out their true nature. It really what he was referring to is this, is that like you are naturally inclined towards certain things. You have a natural aptitude towards certain things. And so you are likely going to flourish the most in this world if you are leaning into those things that you are inclined to do and not trying to force yourself into something that you're not inclined to do. Yeah.

It's like the built in passion there. It sounds so simple, so simple, but so many of us get derailed and distracted by the people around this, the world around this, you know, certain pressures, financial pressures, parental pressures. It can actually be extremely hard. And if you are the person who has spent your entire life doing things to please others, it can be a very daunting task to suddenly wake up one day and be like, oh, shit, I don't know who I am. I don't even know what I like. where do I start? And this is where you start. Just start following your curiosity.

Right. And probably go back to that Arthur Brooks advice. Get off your phone. Can't hurt. Oftentimes we have such a disconnection between that little voice in our head, right? And not to get too cheesy here, but you're so disconnected from it. And just modern digital tech is really good about letting you indulge that distraction. Yeah.

So it's like being able to sit with some of those. those uncomfortable feelings and get curious. Yeah. Okay, so another one we could talk about the two, which we just talked about, was getting this down on paper, writing it down, or using one of these systems at least, right? And that's just for some clarity around this. So you know what you're curious about.

Now, how do I translate that into a practice? Yeah. Or even just a direction that I want to take steps to, right? And really, I think there's kind of two questions you could answer and maybe come back to repeatedly, what contribution do you want to make and what kind of person do you want to be? Yep. Those two right there, if you can continuously ask and answer those and that might change over time, that's fine.

But I think getting clear on that, that incorporates a lot of your values, a lot of your passions, if it will be in a direct, gives you a direction as well. So use these frameworks that we just talked about. Write this down in some way. or get it out of your head in some way. Yeah. And be able to use a framework or at least some sort of system that helps you out with this. Yeah.

And I think the most important thing, too, is that once you do have that realization of what you care about, what mission you're on, what you really want to do, start taking action. Yeah. Yeah. It's purpose is not, you don't. It's active. You don't achieve purpose sitting on the couch thinking about it. Like, you need to get out in the world and actually do it. And this is something that we spend a lot of time on in the app as well.

It's like the sequence that the AI is trained to go through is, you know, figure out the person's values, what they care about, figure out what they're struggling with, and then determine where the misalignment is between what they care about and what their actual actions and experiences are and then getting those into alignment. And often that can be a drastic change in your life. Often it can be extremely simple. It can be something as simple as like, you know, just stop drinking on week nights. and get up an hour earlier. You know, it's, I think people as all, like what tends to happen with people is that they assume when they want to change something

in their lives, they assume that they need to make this drastic, dramatic change and completely alter everything about their life. And it's like nine times out of 10, you'd be surprised how far a small change gets you. Yeah, it's one change, but it has a dramatic effect.

Yeah. Yeah. Along those lines, setting some boundaries. Okay, so we got a boundaries episode coming up. but when you have a purpose, a clear purpose in mind, I think it's, one, it's easier to set some boundaries around your time and your energy. And it's also much more apparent of where in your life you need to set those, right?

So if you do, if you're going to set aside some time to work on whatever, maybe your career is your passion or is your purpose at this point. Set aside, you're like, okay, I'm going to work on this or business, whatever, this amount of time I'm going to do it. everything else is, it's pushed out. Yeah. So getting good about setting boundaries. Maybe there's some people in your life too. We're going to talk about this in the boundaries episode, I think. Yeah, next month we're doing boundaries.

I'd say the big piece of this is setting expectations. Expectations. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. It's like in my case this year, you know, I went to my wife and we had a long conversation about the second business and everything. And with her, it was just like, okay, here's the expectation. Like, I'm going to be working weekends.

I'm going to be working some nights. You did it with us too. Yeah, yeah. I said expectations with all y'all, and it's important. Like it's let other people know where you're at and then also protect that once when it's challenged. It was, I mean, and it was very clarifying for us, I think, too. Like, it was good when you saw, you're like, these are the days I'm not going to be available. And so even if I was, like, frustrated, I couldn't do something.

I'm like, well, that's what he said. Yeah. He already told me what to expect. It wasn't like I was upset about it. There might have been frustrating parts about it. Like, I wish I had more Mark's time or whatever. But I understood it. Yeah.

Right. I understood what was going on and why you were doing it. So, yeah, expectation setting, I think, is a way to look at that. Totally. And then the last piece, I think, is just that this is an ongoing process. Like, you never really finish thinking about it. You never really finished talking about it. Life changes.

We went through the four life stages. Yeah. You know, you're natural, you are naturally predisposed towards certain purposes based on what stage of life you're in. You're going to have certain biases towards certain missions and purposes depending on what your natural aptitude is, what your environment is, what's going on in your life, who the people are around you, what they care about. It is, it is a moving target. And because it's a moving target, you also need to be willing and able to move. and also keeping track of the things in your life that are moving and changing. So it is an ongoing process, and it is last promotion, I swear to God,

it is one of the reasons why I'm so bullish on the potential of AI to be able to solve very deeply personal issues like this, because unlike a therapist or unlike a coach or unlike a, a friend. Hey, Ida doesn't forget. It doesn't judge. It doesn't condescend to you.

It doesn't pretend like, oh, it wasn't listening. It knows. It remembers and it has context all the time 24-7. And I think it's the sort of thing that if we can get the LLM to a place where it is as good or better than a human, it's going to be a superior solution for for a lot of problems and for a lot of people. So the last time I'll shout it out this episode, at least. Go to purpose.app slash solved. We are giving away a free course on finding purpose in your life that the course

corcifies this entire episode. It takes you step by step through everything we've talked about and lays out all these exercises and tools that we've, and frameworks that we've discussed in a way that can help you find greater purpose in your life. You will get it for free. If you sign up for the app and sign up for an annual plan, it is an offer that only lasts for the first two weeks of December. So please go check it out.

Purpose. App slash solved. It's my gift to you. It has been my purpose this year, pun intended. And it is, it's been a labor of love. This is a business. I didn't have to start. My co-founder did not have to start.

Like, we are financially in a good position. I certainly didn't, like from a time and mental health perspective, I certainly didn't have to do this. So I've given a lot to it and I believe very deeply in it. And I think it's going to be, I keep telling people, I'm like it's, it's 20, 30 years from now, it will potentially be the best thing I ever did. If it works, like basically, right? Like, I'm hopeful that that's how it's going to turn out. I'm very proud of it. but we also still have a lot of work to do.

So please check it out, use it, enjoy it, learn from it. 20% of you will probably cry when you talk to it, but it'll be good tears. That's awesome. That's a game, Mark. Thank you. Thank you. All right. We are at the end.

What did you learn, Drew? What's your big takeaway from this one? So, yeah, kind of leads in what you could finish with a little bit ago. purposes of moving target, it's a changing thing. One of the things that too, I actually, there was a little trepidation with me going into this one because I'm like, oh boy, I got to be able to articulate a purpose. And then we got into a lot of this and I'm like, oh, look at all this. It's okay to have multiple purposes. And there's all these different sources of purpose.

And that to me was like a real big, it was a relief, honestly, because I've talked with you about this a lot. It's like I'm fascinated by everything. I'm I I think things just catch my attention and I have shiny object syndrome sometimes you know I want to be able to do and everything like competence is kind of a core value of mine and I want to be able to do things well um but it was really good to go back and be like okay no actually my values one of them is competence sure um another one is growth and learning um and then benevolence too those are like kind of three core values of mine and I can there's I already in my life I have areas of my life that fulfill those purposes or fulfill those values in a purposeful way, I should say.

And I'm a lot more at peace with that. Like, I'm okay with being a little bit of all over the place. Like, I'm okay with that. There's not just one way to do purpose. And there's not just one big purpose that you have. There's more than one way to do purpose and have purpose in your life. There's not just one big purpose that you have to have. Some people are like that.

And that's great. And the outcomes are going to be different. Sure. But, yeah, I'm a lot more. piece with like, yeah, I have several purposes in my life and I get to act them out all the time. How lucky am I? Yeah. I really did come to terms with that, to come to peace with it.

Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. So you don't feel like you have like an overarching mission or? I mean, I think if anything, if the one thing that ties it all together, it's like the benevolence aspect, it's the helping people. So if I can find a way, like if I'm like, for instance, this was one thing I thought of was like with my passions, like woodworking or something like that.

If I can use that because I love woodworking. like DIY stuff and like if I can help and I end up helping you a lot of my friends in that way and I do get a lot of like meaning and purpose out of that and so if there's anything that's just like an overarching theme it's being helpful to others I also I'm just in a I'm in a very very fortunate position and have been in a lot of ways and even the the things that were stacked against me turned into benefits for me and I just feel like I have some sort of goes back to that duty in that sense of, sense of duty that I have to use my, all of my gifts and my talents and the, and the privileges that I have to help other people out. And that, like, I just,

I get an immense amount of purpose out of that. I've also realized, another thing I realized along with that is that out at some, someday I'm going to have, that's not going to work anymore. Yeah. I watched, for instance, my, I think my grandfather was, uh, uh, like this. He was a very helpful guy. He wanted to help and he was like, he was a real handy. He was a really handy guy. He was always going around his neighbors and helping them out for free. And he was, he got a lot of his identity and a lot of purpose in life from helping people. And as he got older and his physical health, you know, he was in his 80s when he passed away. His physical health was draining and it really, really, it ate at him. Yeah, it ate at him.

So I realized I was like, oh, that like I'm going to have to deal with that someday. Yeah. And it comes back to that diversification. Yeah. Yeah. I think for me, it's funny because I think I kind of had the opposite experience as you prepping for this episode as I said at the top of the show like this topic has been my wheelhouse for most of my career it's

it's funny out of all like there are many things that I've written about throughout my career that I felt like I needed to really research to understand and then there are certain topics that I just feel like I intuitively understood like there are two or three topics that like even when I went and did the research and looked up the papers, I was like, yeah, I kind of already knew that,

like, just intuitively. And purpose has been one of those topics for me. And I think for me, the most profound aspect of this episode was digging into the dark side of purpose. It's something that's always sat in the back of my mind, you know, that that statement of like, well, Hitler had a pretty good strong life purpose, you know, like, how did that work out? I've never really let myself explore that and like why that's there and how easily people can fall into it. And it's interesting and also kind of exploring the burnout aspect, the lack of diversification. This is my biggest takeaway is that for whatever reason, I seem to go all in on single things. Like my entire life, I've been like this.

I think there's something inherent about my personality that, it's really hard for me to diversify. I'm like the opposite of you in that sense. Like it's like even you put a gun to my head and tell me to diversify my purpose. And it's like my brain just doesn't know how. Yeah. I'm like, sorry, dude, I got a mission. It's and I look at, you know, I've, I've been very public, but, you know, I've struggled with depression on and off throughout my life.

I pretty much every five or six years like clockwork, I go through a pretty dark phase. And I look at it and I think it's what it is is it's like, I'm not. diversified in terms of purpose and so at some point that sense of purpose fails like every every source of purpose fails at some point or is lost rather and and then when it's lost like i haven't diversified so i'm lost i just kind of fall into the abyss and and then i have to go through this process of like clawing my way back out thinking about what i care about pursuing my curiosity reaching out to people like going through this whole kind of ugly confusing process And I've done that repeatedly my entire life.

And I guess just this episode, like, it tied a bunch of those strands together. It's like, okay, this topic has come very naturally to me throughout my career because I think I have such a roller coaster experience with it. Yeah. Okay. Like, I'm either all in on purpose and it's like, and I'm really good at it. Like, when I do have a purpose, when you're in it, yeah. I'm really good. like I will shut everything.

Like, I'm the not give a fuck guy. Like, I don't care what you think. I'll embarrass myself. I don't fucking care. Like, I'm on a mission. But then when that mission's over or it fails, I'm lost and I flounder. And so prepping and doing the dark side section, like, I guess it illuminated a lot of my own tendencies and helped me understand myself a little bit better.

You were so excited to do that section. I was like, what? You get like the crazy eyes and everything when we were prepping for this. I was like, all right. That makes sense now. It makes sense. Yeah, it was therapeutic.

It was very like, okay. Because I mean, I'll be honest, like everything else in this episode, like, is pretty old hat for me. Like, I've been talking about pretty much everything in this for a decade. And I just built a fucking software product based on a lot of this. So it's all very fresh in my head. But like the dark side stuff was like,

it was fun to finally get to explore that and then also kind of understand some of the some of the aspects of myself and the struggles that I've had throughout my life um in terms of that so very illuminating yeah yeah and i think it's one that's probably another big takeaway though too is that that existential vacuum you know you go through it every five six years whatever it is it's a signal yeah right uh i know when you're going through it it feels really shitty it feels like everything's over. And it's supposed to feel shitty. Yeah. It's supposed to motivate you to go do something. Yeah. And that, I think, treat like that, not as in, oh, God, I failed. Yeah. I fucked this all up. It's, it's, it's, it's weird because it's like when you're in it,

it feels like everything's over. But it's, um, you know, as Frankel said, it's, it is, it's actually a signal of a new beginning. Yeah. It means, it means that a new self needs to be built and constructed. Right. From the ashes. Don't waste that opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening. As always. You made it. to the end of the show, which is not a small feat with this podcast. We appreciate you sticking with us. Please, please, please.

If you get a lot out of this show, leave us a review and follow us whatever platform you listen to us on. It helps us with the algorithm. It helps us get out to more people. If you have a question or comment on the show, you can send it to Mark at Solvpodcast.com. As always, the free PDF guide is available

at Solvpodcast.com slash purpose. And this is a very special episode because we are launching the purpose app. You can go to purpose.app slash solved. You can, and if you sign up for an annual subscription, you will get a free purpose course. And anything else, am I forgetting anything else? I always feel like I'm forgetting something, Drew. We probably, now, I don't think you did. Okay.

Thank you for listening, everybody.