Practical Steps for Finding Your Purpose | Dr. Jordan Peterson & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I love this idea, or what you just said, that it doesn't even so much matter the direction

00:00:09.600 | as much as the commitment.

00:00:11.160 | A colleague of mine at Stanford who I respect tremendously, Anna Lembke, who wrote the book

00:00:15.920 | Dopamine Nation, she's the head of our Dual Diagnosis Addiction Center.

00:00:19.440 | She was the one who really, truly deserves credit for bringing dopamine into the public

00:00:23.880 | discussion over the last few years.

00:00:25.320 | She initiated that, talking about how big inflections in dopamine that are very fast,

00:00:29.760 | that aren't preceded by effort, aka drugs of abuse, behavioral addictions, et cetera,

00:00:34.280 | leave us below baseline with our dopamine.

00:00:36.600 | And then people will engage in more of the behavior, and it drives us further and further

00:00:39.440 | and further.

00:00:40.440 | That's kind of the principle of it.

00:00:42.840 | I was talking to her about how people get sober, and the conversation turned to how

00:00:48.480 | do young people find their purpose.

00:00:50.320 | It was very interesting.

00:00:51.960 | She said, "Let's talk about finding purpose.

00:00:54.340 | Everyone nowadays wants to know what their purpose is."

00:00:57.440 | She said, "The way you find your purpose is by going out onto your front lawn and seeing

00:01:00.960 | if the leaves need to be raked."

00:01:02.760 | Sounds familiar, right?

00:01:04.200 | You find purpose by figuring out how you can be of use at progressively larger and larger

00:01:10.460 | spheres away from yourself.

00:01:13.240 | And in doing that-

00:01:14.240 | And the present.

00:01:15.240 | And in doing that, you start to hear the calling, and you find your purpose.

00:01:18.480 | And as you said, you don't-

00:01:19.600 | Or it reveals itself to you.

00:01:21.040 | It reveals-

00:01:22.040 | And it's the same thing.

00:01:23.040 | Right.

00:01:24.040 | Yeah.

00:01:25.040 | So I think you two would enjoy a conversation at some point.

00:01:26.040 | Thank you very much.

00:01:27.040 | Well, this is an important thing to return to, because people are often curious about

00:01:30.640 | what to do practically.

00:01:31.640 | It's like, okay, first, this is what Jacob does.

00:01:35.640 | Jacob, in the Old Testament stories, he eventually becomes Israel, right?

00:01:39.640 | And so that's his name, and Israel means we who wrestle with God.

00:01:44.200 | Now Jacob is a bad guy when the story starts, and he leaves his home, and the perverse influence

00:01:50.280 | of his mother, and his criminal, betraying past behind.

00:01:55.600 | And he decides that he's going to aim up.

00:01:59.120 | And that night he makes an altar, and he makes a sacrifice, and that night he has a dream

00:02:03.760 | of a staircase that reaches up to heaven, which is now what he's walking up, right?

00:02:08.920 | And so he finds his purpose, he finds his adventure, as a consequence of his decision

00:02:19.600 | to be better.

00:02:20.600 | Okay, so now you want to find your purpose, okay.

00:02:24.040 | First thing you have to do, you have to review how wretched and miserable you actually are,

00:02:32.440 | and you have to face that.

00:02:34.080 | And then you have to think, I'd rather not have that, and it has to be true.

00:02:39.040 | And then you have to aim up.

00:02:40.600 | Now you don't know what that means, because you're pretty scattered and dissolute, but

00:02:45.340 | at least you got the damn intent in mind.

00:02:48.260 | And then you have to be willing to make the sacrifices, right, along the way.

00:02:52.720 | Okay, then what happens?

00:02:54.640 | Well then, the pathway will reveal itself to you in increments.

00:02:59.200 | Calling?

00:03:00.200 | Is there something around here that I could fix, that I would fix?

00:03:04.320 | That's a great question.

00:03:05.440 | Is there something at hand that I could fix, that I would fix?

00:03:09.960 | It might be something low, because especially when you first get going, you're not good

00:03:13.520 | for anything.

00:03:14.520 | So you might have to start with something pretty trivial, but it doesn't matter, because

00:03:18.240 | you start getting better.

00:03:19.640 | Is there something that bothers me?

00:03:21.400 | That's conscience, that I could set right in some small way.

00:03:24.480 | Well, that's there for everyone, right?

00:03:27.200 | In the midst of the most catastrophic mess, that pathway, you might even say, look, the

00:03:32.320 | more mess around you, the more unstructured possibility you have at hand.

00:03:36.920 | And it's true.

00:03:37.920 | It's like, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about this.

00:03:41.880 | I know how difficult that is, but it is the case that the more mess at hand that you can

00:03:47.600 | see, the more opportunity that's there, because if you can see that it's a mess,

00:03:54.480 | then you can see the pathway to cleaning it up.

00:03:58.640 | So do it.

00:03:59.840 | Do it.

00:04:00.840 | See what happens.

00:04:01.840 | That's the adventure.

00:04:02.840 | What's going to happen?

00:04:04.800 | In my class, my Maps of Meaning class, I used to have students do this as a project.

00:04:10.880 | And one of the projects was, find something around you, in your neighborhood, wherever,

00:04:15.560 | in your family, that isn't set right, and see if you can set it right.

00:04:19.760 | Just write down what happens.

00:04:21.720 | Well, one student in particular, he decided his mother had died, and the family kind of

00:04:26.280 | fragmented.

00:04:27.680 | And so he decided he would try to take on the role of mother, be responsible for the

00:04:33.280 | household operating.

00:04:35.040 | Well, it grew him up like mad, as you can imagine.

00:04:38.280 | He ran into all sorts of weird resistances, because his family was upset that he was doing

00:04:43.600 | what mom used to do, and he just had a tremendously complex adventure as a consequence of his

00:04:49.440 | willingness to pursue this.

00:04:51.640 | It was obviously necessary, because the alternative was that his family was going to fall apart.

00:04:57.080 | That's there for everyone.

00:04:58.080 | You say, well, my circumstances are so difficult.

00:05:00.600 | It's like, fair enough.

00:05:02.160 | So are everybody else's, by the way.

00:05:04.680 | But that means there's a lot of mess.

00:05:07.760 | Fix it a bit.

00:05:09.040 | And that's ridiculously entertaining and unpredictable.

00:05:13.600 | And that in itself is a great deal.

00:05:15.240 | You have no idea what's going to happen.

00:05:17.160 | Just like you didn't know what happened when you started the podcast.

00:05:19.680 | Why did you start it?

00:05:22.640 | For me, I felt a compulsion to share what I knew, but because during the pandemic, everyone

00:05:30.040 | was so focused on vaccines and lockdowns that no one was talking about the reality that

00:05:35.600 | everyone was facing, including, sorry, Josh Gordon, I know him through time, our director

00:05:43.040 | of the National Institutes of Mental Health.

00:05:44.880 | Not a single thing out there about, hey, folks, if you're going to be indoors this much, get

00:05:49.520 | some sunlight in your eyes in the morning, or else you're going to have trouble sleeping.

00:05:52.360 | Trouble sleeping equates to mental health issues, stress, uncertainty.

00:05:56.080 | My lab was working on ways to regulate stress through deliberate breathing, through other

00:06:01.400 | mechanisms.

00:06:02.400 | Well, I want people to have tools, zero cost tools to deal with their stress, to help them

00:06:06.920 | regulate their circadian biology, because those wick out to countering the negative

00:06:12.960 | forces that were on us, which are social order was disrupted.

00:06:16.560 | People are at home.

00:06:17.560 | So it was a desire to give people tools that I knew existed, that I was knowledgeable about.

00:06:22.280 | And I had a long standing kind of growing compulsion that I wanted to talk about neuroscience

00:06:28.040 | because it's so darn cool.

00:06:29.680 | Right.

00:06:30.680 | Okay.

00:06:31.680 | So there was a lot of energy behind the mission, but then there was a calling.

00:06:35.240 | The calling was from hearing about people's suffering.

00:06:37.200 | It's like, well, of course you're not sleeping well.

00:06:39.000 | I mean, not only are there a million things to worry about right now, people aren't working,

00:06:42.840 | et cetera, but you're not getting sunlight in your eyes.

00:06:45.400 | You need to get outside.

00:06:46.440 | You need to, you know, and then there's the whole socialization thing and whatever people's

00:06:50.360 | circumstances, there are things that they could do.

00:06:52.680 | And so I felt that calling and my conscience told me that I have the knowledge.

00:06:57.240 | So why would I cloister with it at home?

00:07:00.640 | It's like, what good is that?

00:07:02.320 | So I just started blabbing on the internet.

00:07:04.120 | Right.

00:07:05.120 | Right.

00:07:06.120 | That's why.

00:07:07.120 | Yeah.

00:07:08.120 | Well, that's a perfectly, you know, you can think, well, that's a logical extension of

00:07:11.360 | your subsidiary calling to be a teacher and a professor.

00:07:15.440 | You're already a researcher.

00:07:16.440 | You're already a professor.

00:07:17.640 | So you're investigating and transmitting knowledge like, well, looks like you could do that on

00:07:22.400 | a broader scale.

00:07:24.080 | And the technology is there.

00:07:25.360 | Why not explore that?

00:07:27.320 | That's a perfectly reasonable, and you can see the interplay of calling and conscience

00:07:30.880 | there.

00:07:31.880 | That's a lovely way of characterizing the voice of the divine, which is how it's characterized,

00:07:36.760 | repeated.

00:07:37.760 | Elijah.

00:07:38.760 | Elijah is the prophet who is, appears with Christ when he's transfigured on the mount

00:07:43.320 | in the New Testament.

00:07:44.320 | It's Elijah and Moses.

00:07:45.920 | Elijah is the first person in human history who identifies the divine with conscience.

00:07:50.800 | That's his contribution.

00:07:51.800 | That's a major psychological revolution.

00:07:54.720 | Right.

00:07:55.720 | It's an unheralded transformation in understanding.

00:07:59.960 | It's like, it's not the storm, it's not the forest fire, it's not the earthquake, it's

00:08:05.000 | not the God of nature.

00:08:07.280 | He's the originator of the phrase, the still small voice.

00:08:10.680 | Right.

00:08:11.680 | It's like, the notion that your conscience is the voice of the divine, my God, there's

00:08:17.920 | virtually no discovery.

00:08:21.040 | There's no proposition more revolutionary than that.

00:08:24.240 | And so that's why Elijah is a prophet of, you know, primary status.

00:08:28.320 | And I just see no reason at all not to take that claim seriously.

00:08:31.800 | It's like, you come up with an explanation for your conscience.

00:08:35.920 | It tells you things you don't want to hear.

00:08:38.680 | So how is that you?

00:08:40.160 | I mean, you have to gerrymander the definition of you for that to be you.

00:08:46.160 | Right.

00:08:47.160 | Right.

00:08:48.160 | Right.

00:08:49.160 | Right.

00:08:50.160 | Right.

00:08:51.160 | Right.

00:08:51.160 | you

00:08:53.220 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Practical Steps for Finding Your Purpose | Dr. Jordan Peterson & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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