The One You Feed - Purposeful Living: Strategies to Align Your Values and Actions with Victor Strecher

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

In this episode, Victor Strecher discusses purposeful living and strategies to align your values and actions. Vic shares his imperfect journey back to meaning and to living for what matters most after losing his daughter. He explores what it means to be purposeful versus just having a purpose, how energy and vitality play a role in living out our values, and why purpose isn’t just for the privileged.For the first time in over three years, I’ve got a couple open spots in my coaching practice. If you’re a thoughtful business owner, creator, or leader feeling stuck in scattered progress or simmering self-doubt, this might be the right moment. Through my Aligned Progress Method, I help people move toward real momentum with clarity, focus, and trust in themselves. If that speaks to where you are, you can learn more at oneyoufeed.net/align.Key Takeaways:The significance of purpose in life and its impact on well-being.Personal experiences of loss and grief, particularly the impact of losing a loved one on understanding purpose.The distinction between values, purpose, and meaning, and how they interconnect.The role of energy and vitality in living a purposeful life, including factors like sleep, mindfulness, and nutrition.The concept of mortality salience and its influence on identifying core values and priorities.Practical methods for discovering and articulating one’s purpose, such as the headstone test.The accessibility of purpose for everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status.The relationship between purpose and happinessEncouragement for self-reflection and intentionality in daily life to align actions with personal values.If you enjoyed this conversation with Victor Strecher, check out these other episodes:How to Create a Life Strategy for Meaningful Change with Seth GodinHow to Shift Your Emotions: Moving from Chaos to Clarity with Ethan KrossFor full show notes, click here!Connect with the show:Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPodSubscribe on Apple Podcasts or SpotifyFollow us on InstagramSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sleep, presence, activity, creativity, and eating, or space. It's just a simple moniker that I use. Did I give myself space today? Did I sleep? Was I present? Was I active, creative? Did I eat well? And after a while, you can become your own researcher. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.

Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Today's guest, Dr. Vic Strecker, author of Life on Purpose, lost his daughter Julia and in his darkest hour found himself paddling into the freezing waters of Lake Michigan, not sure if he would ever return. But what happened next wasn't a miracle cure. It was the beginning of a long, real, and often imperfect journey back to meaning and to living for what matters most. In this episode, Vic and I unpack what it means to be purposeful versus just having a purpose. How energy and vitality play a role in living out our values and why purpose isn't just for the privileged.

I'm Eric Zimmer and this is The One You Feed. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle III Murder at the Grandview, the latest installment of the gripping Audible original series. When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the Grandview shadows. Joshua Jackson delivers a bone-chilling performance in the supernatural thriller that will keep you

on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. bone-chilling performance in the supernatural thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. Hi Vic, welcome to the show. Thank you Eric, really looking forward to this.

You have a book called Life on Purpose, How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything, and an app called Purposeful about building purpose. And so we're going to talk about how important purpose is, how to build it, how to find it, how to not get overwhelmed. That's a big question. But before we get into all that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandchild who's talking to their grandparent. They say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us

that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start

off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Oh man, it's such an amazing parable, Eric. And I've heard other people's interpretations of it on your show and I really enjoy listening to that part. For me, I guess I don't want to judge the bad wolf too much, because I think that we do live with this good wolf and this quote bad wolf inside us. But I often look back to evolution to help guide me in thinking about why people do things that we don't understand or may think are bad versus doing things that we think are good. And we have different parts of our brain that have evolved that may make some of the things

and behaviors we engage in seem bad. And you know, we might even call that hedonic, you know, maybe really focus on a part of the brain that relates to our reward center. Like we may eat too much ice cream all the time or engage in addictive behaviors, heroin addiction or alcoholism or many other things. And this is our reward center. And we might say that our reward center

is related to immediate gratification, immediate rewards. Well, that was evolutionarily developed. I mean, you know, when we're cave people, we probably smelled that roasting mastodon and went, awesome roast mastodon. I love this. It's not by chance that we have these things in us. No, it's not by chance.

No. And you know, even Aristotle talked about it in his famous book, Nicomachean Ethics. You know, his big question always was, what makes us happy and what is happiness? And he said, well, there are probably two forms of happiness. One is hedonic happiness, where, yeah, we've got this immediate pleasure, whether it's great food or great wine or great sex or great vacations or whatever those things are. And he said, that's okay. He said, we all have that. It's all part of us. We love those things. Makes sense. And yet if that's all we are, it's like, and I'll quote him, it's like we're grazing animals.

And while we all like to graze, he said there's something much bigger, and that's being in touch with our inner daemon, this true self or true God or angel that lives in us, whatever you want to call it. The Greeks called it the daemon, and he said eudaemonia, the root word being daemon, being in touch with that makes you truly happy. So I view those as the good wolf and bad wolf. We live with both of them. We can live with both of them, in fact. And one might be much more hedonic and focused on immediate rewards. But if that's all we are, we are like grazing animals. And we want to be something bigger.

And that's what Aristotle talked about. I love that interpretation. And as I think about purpose in relation to the parable, I think there's two things that go into feeding the good wolf, which to me is just shorthand for living a good life, or not shorthand, but you know, story form of leading a good life. I think there's two parts and one is knowing even which wolf you are feeding in any given moment. And then the second is the ability to do it. And without

some degree of purpose, or at the very least values that cohere in some way, it's really hard to know. It's really difficult to judge a situation where you're like, well, what should I do? Should I do this? Should I do that? And I found that some degree of purpose and values helps us make that decision. What I'd like to do before we go too far into this is is hit a couple of words and have you sort of talk about what you mean when we use them. The first would be the word I just used values. The second would be purpose and the third would be meaning and these things are

often interchanged with each other and they're related in some way. But talk to me about how you think of these three words. Thank you. Well, they are related but they're different. And I want to touch on something you just said that we're often conflicted. We have different values, which we all do as we were just talking about. And I view almost our behaviors and our emotions as being the branches of a tree. And if we go up one branch, it's really like, let's say, for example, we're really exhausted. We've had a hard day. And the first thing we want to do when we get home is have a cocktail.

And, you know, we might go, that's great. And yet we have two kids who really want to play with us. They got home from school and they want to play with their dad. And they're going, dad, please play with me and I want a cocktail too. If I have a strong purpose, I'm going to know which branch to go up. Because as soon as I go up one of those branches, it's going to be more difficult to jump across the entire tree to that other branch. And as soon as I move down that branch, there will be other branches that open up that kind of unfold. If I go down the cocktail branch, the next branch might be another cocktail, of course, and the next branch might be sleeping on the sofa or kind of vegging out in some

way and ignoring the kids. And the other way might be playing with the kids, maybe walking around the block or playing a little football or whatever with the kids that you're going to do. And that moves into other branches. And even without any judgment, you might say, well, you know, I might have a purpose which focuses on one branch or the other. One of the things we find in neuroscience and my colleague, Yuna Kang, who is at the University of Pennsylvania when we did this research, looked at purposeful people, put them into MRI and compared them against people who were not purposeful, and basically gave them messages that would induce conflict. And she found that there's a part

of our brain, a region of our brain that really gets more blood flow when it's very conflicted. The purposeful people didn't get that blood flow. They knew what to do. They were not conflicted. So what you bring up right up front is we're conflicted all the time. Purposeful people though know what to do. And you might say there is a bad wolf of drinking and drinking and drinking more. Well, one might say that. Or maybe there's a good wolf that says, I'm going to play with the kids. I'm actually not going to judge that. I'm just going to say, whatever your purpose is, is something that developed with you over time. Now you may grow

really tired of the purpose that's drinking and drinking, and it may not be good for you in the long run. In fact, we have found that we have found that certain types of purposes are really not good for you in terms of depression down the road, more anxiety down the road, even illness, physical illnesses. So let's get back to defining those words, because I think very few people would think of the drinking that they do after work as a purpose. They would think of it as a hedonic desire. And I think your point about conflict is real. I mean, there's a reason that the show is what it is. It's because that conflict, I understand very well. And I think that we face it all the time. We face conflicts between what we want and what we value. We face conflicts

between even things that we value, it's there. To me, it's part of life, but having something to steer by helps. So, okay, definitions. When I think about purpose, I think about really a self-organizing framework of my goals. And it's built around my core values. So my core values, those are the things that matter most in my life. In fact, if I'm wondering what is a value that I have, you might even open your smartphone, look at the wallpaper, the first thing you see, and that might be a core value of yours. Maybe it's your dog, maybe it's your spouse,

maybe it's your kids, your grandkids, maybe it's a work of art, maybe it's actually a saying or quote. There are a lot of things that you might end up valuing very deeply, but it might also be, you know, a glass of wine, you know, this bottle of wine that you had and thought was awesome, or this beautiful, you know, person that you think, oh, that would be, you know, a great trophy spouse for me, whatever, you know, there are hedonic and there are eudaemonic values that we all have. And the question is, do I create purposes around those hedonic values or do I create purposes around these eudaemonic or what I might even call

self-transcending values? Am I just completely focused on self-enhancing values, my attractiveness, making a lot of money, having fame, all of those things, or am I more attracted to things like love and compassion, kindness, things like that, that are transcending myself? So, I believe that you can have purposes that could go in either direction Okay, other researchers disagree with that not all other I mean some agree with what I'm doing what I'm saying But some say no a real purpose is a transcending purpose. Yeah, I'd say well not everybody has a transcending purpose But they certainly have a purpose to become rich for example or to Be like inebriated a lot. I mean, that's, it sounds like a weird

purpose, but I could see people's purposes moving in this direction. Yeah, I think it's in how you define it. I mean, certainly, when I was an addict, it wasn't exactly a chosen purpose. But if you looked at my life, all of my energy went there. And I think about this a lot, because there's there's two schools of thought here. One is that how you spend your time shows what you value. Very much. Feeding it, as you said. And I think this is where we just are probably different on terms a little bit, right? Because I think that you can value something and not have the skills or capacities to live into it.

So I may really value my son and yet every day, every night after work, to use your example, I'm having the cocktails. And it's because in my framework, in my view of the world, it's because I don't have the skills and tools to live according to my value. So it's not that I value alcohol exactly. It's that I'm in the grips of this hadonic desire. So for me, I would sort of call that desire or hijacked desire. And that's okay. Yeah, yeah, I'm not opposed to that either. I think that what you're talking about is the difference between having a set of core values and a purpose and being purposeful. Okay.

So being purposeful means that you are aligning yourself with your core values and your purpose. And it's simple enough to say, oh, I have written out a statement of my purpose. Great, now I can go to Disney World. Well, no, it's a matter of having a purpose. And I actually we have found that writing a statement really helps. It really builds strength around that, that purpose. And people almost always the purposes that we read, and I've read literally 10s of 1000s of purposes, they're almost always self transcending, there's something big. And then the question is, do you live into them? And that's something that I try to help people do, because it takes energy to live into this purpose. You can say, I want to do these nice things, I want to, one of my purposes, for example, Eric, is to teach my

students as if they're my own child. And this came from the passing of my own daughter, and when that happened, it changed my life. But to do that, since I have hundreds of students, it's hard to treat every one of them as if they might be a child of yours. And so what I try to do is take better care of myself, and I'm a professor in the School of Public Health and School of Medicine. And my job is to help people stay healthy and engage in these behaviors.

And I find that probably the most motivating way to do that is to help people find a stronger purpose and direction that motivates change. I love that distinction between having a purpose and being purposeful. That's a handy little way to think of it, right? Because yeah, you can have a set of values or purposes that you simply can't live into. And we'll get to this later in the conversation where you give some ideas about not only how to define the purpose, but how to live into it. But I'd like to pause here for a second because the book opens with a scene of

you on Lake Michigan and you just referenced your daughter's passing. So I'm wondering if you could sort of tell us that story and how you got to purpose being kind of your life's work. Sure. And to be honest, I never really thought about purpose in my own life or other people's lives. I never thought it was something that you would want for better health necessarily. I was helping people manage their stress or quit smoking or change an addiction

or manage their diet better, whatever. And that was my focus. I'm a behavioral scientist and I help people think more about the future and their own possible selves in the future and try to take better care of themselves in doing so. My daughter was born healthy and then she caught a chicken pox virus

when she was six months old out of the blue. And you know most people get that and it causes a fever and a rash or something for a day or two. This virus attacked her heart, and it actually destroyed her heart. And her only hope was to get a heart transplant. And she became one of the first children

in this country, in the world, to get a heart transplant. And she wasn't the first, but in that early wave. And we didn't know what would happen to her, but we decided that we would, not knowing, and her chance was probably about 50-50 that she would make it to even six years old. And when she got this heart transplant, we sat around our dinner table,

what I like to call the gathering place, as a family, and we said, well, what's a good life? You know, what would be a good life for Julia? And we decided if she could have connections, if she felt like she belonged not just to this family, but to other people and connected with other meaningful activities, endeavors, in other words, living a big life. And so we helped her live a big life. She needed another transplant when she was nine, it turns out, and she almost passed away at that time. I write about that in my book. And then she ultimately did pass away when she was 19. She wanted to be a nurse. And getting her second heart transplant, she really fell in love with nursing. She thought

of all the people really cared about her so deeply, it was nurses and she wanted to be one, she wanted to give back. And so her first semester, we were on spring break, we decided to take her and her older sister to the Caribbean for a break. She was always cold because her heart didn't work all that great. And she turned to us one evening as she was going back to her room and she said, I'm so happy dad that I could die now. And we thought it was just a very positive thing. And I don't think she knew she was going to die. But those were her last words. And she passed away of a sudden heart attack that night. And when that happened, you know, of course, we grieve and

sure you've done podcasts around grieving and that process. But I remember we went to a therapist, and it was a marital counseling therapist as well as a grief therapist. And I came in being the smart professor and I, you know, said, well, this therapist, I, you know, I've read the stats on this 80% of families who lose a child break up, and I don't wanna break up. And she kinda laughed gently and smiled, and she said, well, you know, Vic, 50% of couples break up without this happening.

And I went, oh, you're right. But she said, but if you start judging the other person's grief, you will break up. So if you say you're grieving too fast or too slow or not big enough or not small enough, you have to allow a person to go on their journey. And you have to do that independently, but also connect with one another. And so my wife, who's a sculptor and a gardener, did more sculpting and gardening and stayed in Ann Arbor where we live.

I went to Northern Michigan to a cottage on Lake Michigan and started eating and drinking myself to death, basically. I started just drinking all the time I was eating. I just lost control because I didn't care. I just simply didn't care. I was nihilistic. It didn't matter. I had no purpose.

And people were almost like, I was like in a castle, and they were knocking on the castle wall, please, you know, they're sending me books and everything. You know, one morning very early, I had a very, very vivid dream. And I woke up at five in the morning from this dream. It was, I'd read some poetry from the Persian poet Rumi the night before and it said that your dreams at night have secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. And it's a beautiful poem and I read through this poem and I thought, wow, that's amazing. And that morning then, at five in the morning, I wanted to go back to sleep because I had a vivid dream with my daughter Julia in it and she was saying goodbye to me, I wanted to go back to sleep because I had a vivid dream with my daughter Julia in it. And she was saying goodbye to me and I wanted to go with her actually, because

I didn't care. And I remembered the poem and I woke up and I hopped out into my kayak and I still had my boxers and t-shirt on from sleeping and I know that's too much information. But I just jumped into this kayak and started paddling out into ice water like a slurpee. I mean, it was incredibly cold outside, like probably 40 degrees. And if I'd fallen in, I would have died for sure. I didn't wear any sort of life preservation. And I just kept paddling out at least a mile and towards two miles when the sun came up. mile and towards two miles when the sun came up. And when the sun came up, I don't know how to explain this as a scientist, I felt my daughter in me. I don't know how else to explain this, but I felt my daughter in me and I felt Julia saying, you've got to get

over this, dad. And it wasn't like you have to get over this. It was like you have to get over this, it was like you have to get over yourself, your grief. Because if you don't, you're going to die. And I was thoroughly contemplating continuing on to Wisconsin, which is 84 more miles. And of course, I wouldn't have made it and I didn't care because it's beautiful morning, it was still dark. But when the sun came up, I realized I had a choice to make. And it was this really amazing thing that suddenly here, you know, I'm at this crossroads of my life thinking about either, you know, my life will end or my life is going to have to change significantly and here my daughter visits me. Turns out to be Father's Day.

I didn't even realize that until I'd come back. And I did come back and I just looked down on myself and started saying, Vic, you have to fix yourself or you're going to die. And you have a choice. You can do that if you want. You can die if you want. But if you don't, you're going to have to change. And that's what your profession is, how to help people change. So I just simply kind of instinctively pulled a sheet of paper out and started writing down the things that mattered most to me. My family, of course, our older daughter, Rachel, our friends. But right away in line three, I wrote down my students. And I called the university almost right away when I wrote down my students.

I said, of course, that matters so much. My research does, but my students matter. And so I called the university and said, it was so nice that you gave me this semester off and maybe even next semester of teaching because losing your daughter is a hard thing. And I am understanding that now, but it's not the advice that I need. The advice that I need is to go back and teach, and I'm going to do that. And I'm going to teach every one of my students as if they're my daughter. And it completely changed my life.

I don't even know how to express it. It suddenly was from darkness into sun. And I started teaching with a vigor and a passion and a love for my students that I've never experienced before and I got it back a thousand fold from my students that was the most amazing thing. I started doing research about this idea of purpose and I luckily I know some wonderful neuroscientists I know some some people who do what's called epigenetics research and all these amazing researchers and start connecting with these people. Ethan Cross, for example, this wonderful psychologist, I know you've had him on your show. One of the most important ways of coping with stress is to look down on yourself and try to fix yourself.

Talking to yourself in this third person, he said, what you were doing is exactly what I recommend. So this changed my life. Obviously there is heartbreak at the center of the story. And then there's a couple of really beautiful things in it. I think it's really beautiful that your daughter got to go happy like that. I mean, what a gift. I'm not saying that your daughter going is a gift. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying within that. I mean, what a gift. I'm not saying that your daughter going is a gift.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying within that. I know exactly what you're saying, Eric, and it was a gift. It was. Yeah. And then secondly, this idea that you were able to see your purpose and sort of rededicate yourself. One of the things that I think a lot about though is the nature of stories like that and then the messier reality of what it looks like moving forward. And so, in my book, I talk about a moment where I made it, they told me to go to long-term treatment, I said no, then I made a decision where I said yes, and my life changed in that moment. Was that an epiphany?

Did you have some sort of sudden realization? Did values shift? I had a sudden realization that I was going to die or go to jail for a long, long time. I mean, yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. And that moment, however, would be worthless if it weren't followed by a thousand moments of making the right choices.

And I'm curious for you, like you're still deep in your daughter's grief. So I'm assuming that yes, you now had a purpose that energized you and this was a difficult period of time to go through. I just always want listeners to kind of have an accurate view of what things are like, even when you have sort of an epiphany like that. So true, Eric. And it does now I'm going to shift to being purposeful. Because as soon as you start saying I'm going to teach my, you know, students as if they're my own daughter, Julia, or I'm going to do X, Y, or Z as a husband or a family member or friend or a communitarian or any of those things that become, you know, self transcending purposes in your life, you go, wow, I could relapse really fast. And unless I start thinking about what it's going to take to do that, and there's this unless I start thinking about what it's going to take to do that. And there's this amorphous concept called energy or vitality

that probably is one of the most important elements of our lives. We don't talk about it enough, don't think about it enough. We don't use it as outcomes in our research. We don't say what gives you more energy. But of those studies that have looked at that, we know that sleeping better gives you more energy, being present or mindful. Med better gives you more energy. Being present or mindful, meditation gives you more energy. Physical activity, oddly enough, you think it drains you of energy, it gives you more energy. At the

end of the day, try walking around the block, you know, and you'll have more energy afterwards. Creativity, try making a haiku after this podcast. Just whip off a haiku for a loved one. You will have more energy. And then finally, eating well, eating carefully. Not eating monster meals at one point in time, getting sloggy, but maintaining a certain amount of glucose through the day gives you more energy.

So sleep, presence, activity, creativity, and eating, or space. It's just a simple moniker that I use. Did I give myself space today? Did I sleep? Was I present? Was I active, creative? Did I eat well?

And after a while, you can become your own researcher. We've actually taken this and extended it into this application called Purposeful. And Purposeful actually looks at this in a much deeper way and helps you become more purposeful over time by taking on new areas, we call them growth areas, but these are areas that you might wanna grow in that give you more energy and vitality that in turn help you become more purposeful.

Cause it's not just about having purpose although that is important. The energy thing is I think so important. It is really one of the things that I see most often in myself and in people I've coached and and people have been through our programs is that when there is no energy it is very hard to be purposeful, whatever that purpose is. And it can also be very difficult. The challenge, and I love space, I agree with all of those things and I think that's a great acronym and kind of defines the way I try and think about my days, is that even some of that requires energy to even do some of that. That's sort of the cruel paradox, you know, it's like the old, you know, for me, exercise is the best thing I know to do for depression. And yet, it's the hardest thing to do when I am I am depressed. because lack of energy leads very often to failures of what we will colloquially call willpower. I want to circle back to that perhaps later because that's sort of a deep thing

I think a lot about. But we can just use it in a general sense, meaning the ability to make the right choice at the right moment. Energy is critical in the ability to do that. In my book, Life on Purpose, I devoted the second half of the book to space. Each of those, I put a chapter in for each one because I thought it was so important that it's not just about finding your purpose, although that is not simple for everybody,

and it's something I hope we can talk about, how to find purpose. But being purposeful, bringing your best self every day, being aligned with your purpose, those are such important elements of living, frankly, a happier life. We talk a lot about happiness. I'm sure you talk about it a lot on your podcast. But happiness is not necessarily sipping martinis

on the beach every day or playing golf every day or having a trophy spouse or all of those things, being wealthy. Those things after a while start petering out. That 400th round of golf is far less important or that amazing meal you just ate becomes kind of rote after a while and you start complaining more. This is what Aristotle was talking about, but being purposeful, having a purpose and living to that purpose actually has been shown so clearly to make you deeply happy. Let's get into finding purpose. And again, that is a big word.

You know, people like life's purpose. And when I hear life's purpose, I very often, particularly before I knew more about breaking things down into little pieces, I would hear that and I would think about it for a second, I would get completely overwhelmed, and I would just disengage and go do whatever. So talk to me about how we can take this question that is really big. It's an important question. And how can we deconstruct it into something that the average person has time and energy to do? Great. Okay. So when we ask people and we've asked literally tens of thousands of people, do you have a purpose? Do you have a sense

of purpose? And if you have a purpose, can you write it down actually? And people, 60% of people can write down their purpose. Usually, it sounds like a hallmark card, you know, I want to change the world. I want to, you know, simple phrase, you know, I'm going to fly like an eagle or whatever. That to me is not a purpose. A purpose to me is, it's really helping you organize your goals in your life. And when you think about organizing your goals in your life, you think about different domains of your life.

So maybe we start with domains, which domains are important to you. So maybe your family domain is important, it is to most people. Maybe your work where you spend most of your waking hours is important to you. And if it's not, maybe you can figure out how to create more purposeful work in what you do.

And by the way, if you watch this show called Dirty Jobs, it's all about that, it's all about finding purpose, no matter how dirty the job is, how horrible it is. So you don't necessarily have to be a doctor or something to have purpose. You can have purposes, I believe, in almost any job in your life. So I believe in work purpose, that's very important. You could have a community purpose. And also maybe you have a personal growth purpose yourself. So think about different domains. Once you've

thought about those domains, you might start thinking about the things that are most important within those domains. You might think about people who rely on you within those domains. You might even think about your legacy within those domains. In other words, what would you want set at your memorial service or carved on your headstone if you were to die around different domains do you want to be the richest person in the cemetery most people don't but if you want to be remembered jonas all could this you know develop the polio vaccine said we should all be good ancestors. I love that phrase because maybe thinking back 200 years, people are walking by your headstone and going, that was an awesome person. Oh my goodness, look at that person. That leads to greater purpose. So what we call mortality salience and psychology, do you want to, you know, and most of my students, when I have them think about what would be

in their memorial service, they go, oh, no, I don't want to do this. It turns out to be a fabulous way to start thinking more carefully about your purpose in life. But who relies on you? What causes do you care about? What do you wake up for in the morning? Those things energize, they create more energy as well. So, it goes both ways. Yeah, that memorial exercise is a really powerful one. And interestingly, I interviewed somebody, I don't know, a couple months ago, Saul Hill Bloom, I believe, who added a spin to it that I had never heard, which was also imagine who the people are in the front two rows.

Because that points to who's most important to you, right? I really like that. The thing about that exercise that's so powerful is, if you do it, you do get a much clearer sense of what's important. It's difficult, mainly, my experience has been because most people come up against the fact that the person, what they once said about them at their memorial and what people would say about them today, there's a gap. And that gap is painful. The gap is painful, but that knowledge is where,

you know, we talk about energy, right? That's where the energy comes from. The energy comes from, in many ways, going, oh, I wanna be over there, I'm over here. This is important. You said something really interesting from this other person you were interviewing, who's in the first two rows at your memorial service.

I wanna also add who is sitting in the very farthest back, like who's standing against the wall, who just came in, who knows they don't know anyone there, but knows that this person who died touched them in such a deep way. And they're not connected to anybody else there, but they really, this person touched them in some way. It's one of the most remarkable things

that I find in my work right now through my book, Life On Purpose, or through the app Purposeful. When I get emails from people thanking me for changing their lives, and I'm sure you get that as well. And it may be from India, it may be from some other place around the world. And that's the person in the very back or if it's out in a cemetery, a person standing by a tree, but not part of the crowd just going, I'm here because that person touched me so deeply. deeply. Thank you for taking the time to do that because that is an interesting element of the mix. Right? For you, you're wanting to treat each student as if they were your daughter. The vast majority of those people are going to pass through and disappear out of your life. Exactly. Yes. That doesn't mean, however, though, that you didn't have some positive impact on them. And so I really like that framing sort of both. And I think that actually brings up

a value tension that a lot of us can get into, right? And that value tension is there's the people closest to me who deserve, want, and sometimes clamor for our attention and time. And then there might be some purpose that's out there reaching all the students. And I think those are two values that often come into a tension that many of us feel a lot. I'm so glad you brought this up, Eric, because think about these values in concentric circles. My inner circle might be my family. And when I ask people about purpose a lot and what their purpose is, very often they'll just go, my family, of course, you know, I

want my family and their kids and their kids and their kids to be well off. And so that's where I'm giving my money and that's why I'm working. That's fine. No opposition to that. But what about those people who start extending it out to people who may not even know them, to the disadvantaged, continuing to go further and further out? I mean, if you even read the Bible and read about the Good Samaritan, you know, the Good Samaritan stops next to a person who's been beaten up and robbed and naked and, you know, puts this person on their donkey, walks the, you know, walks the donkey over to an inn, pays the innkeeper for a night there, clothes him, feeds him, and never knew who he was. I mean, you could go further and further in this concentric circle to that person on the side of the road. What would you do even if you met an alien who

was beaten up by like a true alien from a different planet? Would you pick them up? You know, that's what ET in a way, the movie ET is all about. And it took a child to accept ET, but they had to hide ET from the parents and all the adults because they would be afraid and probably kill ET so That I love this quarantine period though might make sense I think a quarantine period might be warranted a kind quarantine I'm not saying you kill ET right, but I might be like hey, I'm gonna I care about you I'm interested in you, but I'm going to let you stay over there for a little while while I gather some information.

Make sure you don't destroy the world. Exactly. This idea of gradually moving out in concentric circles of the things that matter most. And after a while, you realize that the things that matter most are actually not things. They're people or they're living things that you can help support. Maybe it's pets or other things. How far do you move out in that? To me, those are some of the most interesting people that I meet.

Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight? Breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday I send weekly Bites of Wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show, things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose, into bite-sized practices you can use the same day.

It's free, it takes about a minute to read, and thousands already swear by it. If you'd like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at oneufeed.net slash newsletter. That's oneufeed.net slash newsletter, and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show.

So what's your purpose? You've given us one part of it to teach every student as if they were your daughter. Is that the whole thing or do you have do you have more to it than that? And if so, would you be willing to share it? Yeah, of course. I have a personal purpose, which is to continue to grow, but also to have fun in my life. I don't want purpose to seem like it's kind of not fun because part of this is having a lot of fun in my life and I enjoy my life. I have a hedonic side to my life and I don't shy away from that. I don't apologize for it. I love those nice things as well, good food or, you know, wine or whatever those things are. At the same time, as Aristotle said, I don't want to be a grazing animal. I want to do things bigger than that. So I want to be a communitarian and I pick certain causes that I

really am very, very deeply involved in and work on. Many are with seniors, so I'm very active with senior populations, very active with student populations, and I love those groups. I want just generally in terms of life to help people get out on the dance floor of life. And that may sound weird, but I think back to when I'm in this eighth grade sock hop, I'll never forget this. And I was a very shy person, so I was always a wallflower. And the idea of a wallflower is you're just standing

on the side of the wall and you're waiting for somebody else to ask you to dance, but they're waiting, maybe, for you to ask them to dance. So you're never going out on the dance floor. And finally, I'll never forget in eighth grade, there was this song that came out. It was Edgar Winters Frankenstein. It had this great guitar riff.

Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh. And I just loved it. And it was like one of the first electronic pieces. And as soon as it came out, I thought, I love this song. I really want to dance. And so I got the courage, asked this girl to dance. We started dancing in the middle of this giant electronic riff.

And I'm like dancing like this, my eyes are rolling to the back of my head and I'm spinning around kind of. And I opened my eyes and the entire dance floor, everybody is circling me. And the girl I'm dancing with says, are you okay? And it was very embarrassing obviously at the time, but now I realize that's part of my purpose

to get out on the dance floor and dance your dance and not care what other people say or think. And if they think that you're having this seizure, well maybe that's your own joy that you're having this seizure, well maybe, you know, that's your own joy that you're expressing. And as soon as I learn that about myself, that I should stop caring so much about what other people think and care about what I think, care about my core values and live authentically to that. My purpose deepened and it does involve many concentric circles that go way, way out helping people and it involves working very hard to develop and maintain energy.

I'll turn 70 this year and I just feel, you know, we've done research asking people what's your age and then what is your perceived age? How do you feel? People with strong purpose on? Average feel they are six years younger than their actual age and we recently did research looking at what are called Epigenetic clocks and our epigenetic clocks are looking at how our DNA actually Expresses proteins that are positive for you or negative for you? Do these proteins cause inflammation or are they antiviral proteins and things like that?

And we found that people's biologic or epigenetic clocks are much longer if they have a strong purpose. And the fascinating thing about that is these epigenetic clocks, many elements of them may well be transmitted to your offspring, to your children, which is really strange. I never learned that in high school, but our epigenome may well, many parts of it may be passed on to our offspring. That is incredible. So what I'm doing in my own life in trying to build from the tragedy of our daughter

may hopefully benefit my offspring. So I want to come back to finding your own purpose. You've got an app, Purposeful, and so people can check that out, which I assume guides you through finding a purpose as well as living into it. Yeah, they can go to Purposeful.io and they can get a free trial of this it for a month. I mean, just try it see if you like it. But yeah, people we have found significant reductions in depression and anxiety improvements in your ability to manage emotions just, you know, working with Ethan Cross, this great psychologist, we've really found some improvements from them. Ross, this great psychologist, we've really found some improvements from them. Assuming someone doesn't do that, we've talked about finding, you know, values from a list. These would be things like kindness or compassion or justice. We've talked about the headstone test as a way of sort of thinking about what you want

people to say to you. Another is to identify people you want to emulate. Pick a guide is what they call it in acceptance and commitment therapy, which is also can be a very helpful one. And then it says to assemble all this and identify goals that matter across the different domains, assemble all these valued goals into an overall life purpose. And that's where I'd like to spend a couple minutes because there's a lot swirling around there, right?

I can be like, all right, these five people are important to me as well are the listeners of the show and the students that come through my program. I value all of that. I value compassion. I value this. I have a goal to do that. Right? There's all this stuff. And part of what I think gets overwhelming for people is that before we know it, we've got so many things that we value that we can't end up valuing any of them, right? We used to say in project management, if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. Great point. It's a great point. And so how does someone narrow this down to a statement that can, as we talked about in the beginning, can orient them when they're facing the two wolves or their various decisions? I'm not a believer that you're going to write a statement and you're suddenly going to know what to do at every juncture in your life. Like life, it just isn't that simple.

But we can have something that's orients us a little bit more. How do we go from all these various methods into something that looks like a purpose that we can write down and try and live by? I love your question, by the way. Thank you for asking it. Often we can have what I call purpose conflict, where, you know, you have lots of purposes and they can clash with one another. This is where self-reflection comes in, frankly. There's a part of the brain that we look at when people are considering their core values, and that's the part right behind your eyebrows.

It's called a ventral medial prefrontal cortex. We have more of this than any other animal. It's part of the prefrontal cortex, and we have more of that than any other animal by threefold. I mean, it's large amounts of this. It's a very modern, very human part of the brain. It relates to decision making and reflection. But the interesting part is part of that ventral medial

prefrontal cortex is also associated with the self. Who am I? And so the self-reflection is true self-reflection. It's asking this question, who am I? And so the self reflection is true self reflection, it's asking this question, who am I? You might even go deeper than that. If you think about this metaphorically as the roots of the tree and our behaviors, our emotions are the branches of the tree. The roots of the tree may be our core values, which develops into a purpose which moves into and defines what the branches are going to look like but you may go even deeper than the roots of the tree and say what's feeding that is it toxic what's feeding your values is

it influencers who are telling you by this or by that or who's wearing what or Making sure you're keeping up with the Joneses, whatever those things are. Is it toxic? Is it nourishing? Is it very helpful? What is that? It could be a religion for some people. It could be a philosophy.

It could be, for example, a stoic philosophy or an existential philosophy. So what are the things? It could be your family that's feeding this or friends, people who you rely on, people who are wonderful mentors to you as you were implying here. So I like to go back to that element. What is the reservoir that's feeding into these values? Because once you have those values and it's very strong and then the tree starts straying over somewhere, there's a tendency, not for the root system to shift underneath the tree, but the tree to rebound back over the roots. That's called, by the

way, in psychology, cognitive dissonance. We tend to rebound back to where our core values are. So making sure those core values are rooted in something that's nourishing is very important. I hope that's not too vague and I'm happy to get into greater specificity about that if you like. I don't think it's too vague, but okay, I have a way let's try and let's try and firm this up just a little bit in one particular thing. So let's say that I take the headstone test, right? And I imagine what I want people to say. Would I then, one way of establishing a purpose would be to take

those basic statements and put them into one coherent statement that I then try and live by? Yeah, I think so. So, in this headstone test, it could be what's on your headstone, it could be what people say in memorial service. And this is something my book talks about a lot. So if people say this was such a generous person, or this person was such a kind person, or this person got me thinking in a new way, or this person who died made me a more curious person. I always brought up questions. Then, you know, in thinking about that, it's almost like, in your writing a book, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got

in writing my book, Life on Purpose, was write your book review now. Write what you'd want book reviewers to write about your book now because it shapes how you want people to think about what you want people to think and what you want people to feel about your book. Well, you can do that with your life as well. So you pick through these different pieces and say, is that something I want? Do I want to help make people more curious about life? And if you say,

yes, then you go, okay, I now have a purpose. That is something that I'm going to do. And I'm going to start figuring out how to become purposeful to help people become more curious. So you work through that. And that's leading a life of great purpose. Yeah. You know, for me, I have two sort of orientations that go. One is I just have a general, it's sort of just like a life sort of rule that I try and take, which is to leave every person, place or thing better for me having been there than before I got there. It's a great purpose. Right. It's just very simple. And again, it's not like I do that all the time, you know,

but it's an orientation. And then the second is I just have sort of three words, you know, kindness is one, curiosity is the other, and health is the is the third. And there's a lot of things tucked under them, right? So when I look at kindness, I'm like, okay, well, that includes my son being kind to my son, you know, how I treat other people, there's a lot of stuff under there. Under curiosity is like my love of adventure and my love of learning and my – but when I sometimes am at a place where I'm like, okay, I can't decide what to do, I sort of say, well, what would these tell me to do? And then health, mental and emotional and spiritual health. So oftentimes, that's what I'm sitting on the couch. I don't really feel like doing anything. I don't feel good. And I'm – what should

I do? I look at those values and I'm like, Oh, okay, well, health tells me get up. And so for me, it's those those sort of three words, and then that one statement that act as general steering devices. I love that, you know, when we talk about people who tend to lean forward, you know, they're gonna still be blown over backwards. And know, when I say I'm gonna teach my students as if they're my own child with hundreds of students, just as you say, many, many, many of those students will go by and maybe not like me or not feel that I help them in that way, or go through and never tell me that, that, you know, I changed their life in some way.

One has to accept that and it's totally fine. It's an orientation, like you said, and being more intentional as you wake up. That's something that I try to do in my intervention work. It's something I hope my book helps people with, something I hope our app helps people with. When you wake up in the morning, you very often look at the weather, say what's the weather gonna be like, and you say, oh okay, it's gonna rain so I better wear a raincoat. But do we wake up and go, I need to be inspiring today, or I really need to be thoughtful today, or I need to be very calm today, I need to be at certain things and you map that back to your purpose and you say okay this is a really important thing

for me to focus on and that focal area then I may need a little help I may need a tip or two or maybe I don't maybe I just know I better really focus on my meditation this morning but maybe I need to learn a new meditation and that's why we have built the things that we've built to help people make those kind of changes to be purposeful every day, to bring their best self every day. Not that they will succeed, but that's the intention and, as you say, the orientation one has. I'm going to throw this out too. I'm looking at that awesome I'm going to throw this out too. I'm looking at that awesome hairdo that you have, this mohawk.

And I'm just going to throw this thing out. I have a feeling that you also are a person who wants to express themselves in a creative way, in an independent way, and say, I'm my own person. I'm not going to let other people judge me. This is who I am. And I'm working on building. I'm not going to let other people judge me. This is who I am. And I'm working on building. I'm a sculptor. I'm not a sculptor. I'm a sculptor. And I'm sculpting myself in a way that I want to do that because this is my life and it's no one else's. And

I have this brief period on this planet. And here's what I am working on. And it's a never ending process. Am I off base in that? No, I don't think you're off base. I don't think a lot about expressing myself at this stage in my life. It just I'm just doing it. You just have an awesome. Okay. Well, here's the story on the Mohawk. Some listeners will have heard this. If I was to let my values list go a little bit longer, one of the ones that would be on there very close is freedom. In one way, I mean freedom like, you know, we all mean it, but I mean it more specifically, which is freedom from in AA,

we used to say bondage of the self, which is thinking about myself all the time. But that also translates into freedom in a lot of different ways. I value it. And the Mohawk came about, it was one year after I left my my my previous career in software, and had been doing the one you feed for a year full time. And I thought, well, what can I do today? You know, like, how do I celebrate this? And I thought, I'm just gonna get a stupid haircut that I wouldn't have gotten anytime in the last X number of years because it just might have been a career limiting move, maybe, I don't know. But I wouldn't have done it. And so I went and got a mohawk, think I'll get it and tomorrow I'll cut it

off. And now something like five years later, I still have it. So to me, it's sort of like the freedom hawk, right? It's the it's the symbol for me of this freedom that I've worked really hard to kind of carve out. That's great I I love that expression of freedom What you've just said and it tells me a lot about you. It tells me more about your purpose about what you value What you try to live to every day. So Yeah, in other words, I guess what I'm getting at too is sometimes finding a purpose might involve asking friends more about what, or acquaintances, what they think about you and getting that

360 feedback. One of the complaints that is often lodged in today's world towards things like purpose or meditation or personal growth is that it is only for people who are essentially wealthy enough to have time to do it. And you sort of take that head on in the book. I'm not saying that of course wealth doesn't contribute to the choices we have. I mean all those things have an element of truth in them and something like purpose transcends well beyond that. So share with me your thoughts on that. Yeah, you know, Viktor Frankl is one of my true heroes. He went through three concentration camps in World War II, he lost his family. He was a camp physician to prisoners.

So one of the reasons he is still alive was that he could treat other people. But he also was a great observer of human beings. And he found that people who lost their purpose would tend to get sick and then they would die. And it wasn't as much the other way around. They wouldn't just get sick and then lose their purpose and die. They would lose their purpose and direction and then they would just, you know, without any direction, they would start going

away. And he started talking with Abraham Maslow a lot. And Maslow has this famous hierarchy of needs where, you know, very basic safety and shelter, things like that, moving up through support from other people, moving to this concept of self-actualization. And you know, Maslow talked about peak experiences and things. And Victor Frankl said, you know, actually having a sense of purpose is at the very basis of our needs. It's essential for our needs. And I tested that out with a good friend of mine from Uganda who created Teach for Uganda.

He actually grew up, they called many people like this an AIDS orphan where his parents died of HIV and as a kid his grandmother raised him. His grandmother actually walked and bused him 300 miles to Kampala, to the palace of, you know, the person who runs the whole country and knocked on the gate basically and asked for an education. And eventually, I think it took about a month for him to finally see the wife of the president of Uganda. And basically, he's by himself, he's five years old, and he's going, I would like an education. And he got an education. And from that, he created Teach for Uganda. I asked James Aaron Nateway, that's his name, wonderful, by the way, wonderful cause, wonderful charity, Teach for Uganda. But I said, is purpose just for people who

have everything else? And he laughed. He said, I know you people in the West may think that, but purpose gives poor people hope. It's essential for people who have nothing else. It's the thing that people need. You might even argue in a bigger way that purpose is essential for life itself. Life exists until it doesn't and you die and then entropy occurs. Entropy is suddenly the dissolving of all the elements of your body and what purpose does is keep all those working. It keeps them all together. Whether you're a paramecium, an amoeba, or you're a human being. Purpose, and purpose is at different levels, obviously, but purpose is what keeps us alive. It's absolutely fundamental, I think. Absolutely. It's not just for rich people, and I've talked to many,

many wealthy people about their purposes, and that's great. One thing that's surprising is how many wealthy people don't have purpose, or have a purpose that's been so hedonic and so focused on making money or those hedonic things that they're terribly unhappy people and you go, oh, you poor unhappy rich person, how can you care about that person? You understand that. But at the same time, you have to realize they're very unhappy because they don't have this transcending purpose. And you meet a lot of people in all walks of life who have tremendous transcending purposes, and regardless of their circumstances, they can be happy people. And I think they improve their lives through this, too.

Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to spend a couple more minutes in the post-show conversation and we are going to talk about miracles, God, and the afterlife. Oh, okay, great. It was a fascinating part of your book and watching you as a scientist wrestle with some things that seemed unexplainable. So, we're going to head towards that. Listeners, if you'd like access to this conversation as well as ad-free episodes a special episode I create each week just for you where I present a teaching a song that I love a poem that I love and if you'd like to

support the show because we can really use it go to one you feed dotnet slash join Vic thank you so much for coming on it's been a real pleasure talking with you I so appreciate talking to you as well. Your questions, as I've heard in other podcasts of yours, are very deeply educated, informed, thoughtful, and fun to answer. So thank you. I felt like I wanted to interview you as well. Well, maybe another time. Thanks, Vic. Okay, good deal. Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before

bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection, and links to former guests who can guide you, even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose, and habit change. Feed your good wolf at oneufeed.net slash newsletter. Again, oneufeed.net slash newsletter. Thank you so much for listening to the show.

If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.