How to Find Your Purpose | Robert Greene & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | Being a human being is not easy, as opposed to an animal, because we're born and nobody
00:00:07.120 | gives us a direction.
00:00:09.260 | Our parents might be a little bit, our college teachers, etc., mentors, but generally we're
00:00:14.080 | on our own.
00:00:15.080 | And it's a very, very difficult process.
00:00:18.680 | You wake up in the morning and you don't really know what you can do.
00:00:22.080 | You can choose 12 different paths, it can be very confusing and very overwhelming.
00:00:27.300 | When you find that sense of purpose, when you find what I call your life's task, everything
00:00:31.760 | has a direction, everything has a purpose, your energy is concentrated.
00:00:36.300 | It's not like you're just going down a single narrow pathway.
00:00:39.860 | It's not like life becomes boring and it's just about discipline and solving problems.
00:00:44.260 | It's actually the most exciting thing that can ever happen to you, because you never
00:00:47.800 | have that lost feeling.
00:00:49.380 | You wake up in the morning and you go, yeah, this is what I need to accomplish.
00:00:52.800 | People come at you with all kinds of distractions and boring and irritating things.
00:00:57.760 | You're able to cut it out.
00:00:59.280 | It's just the most marvelous piece of internal radar that you can have.
00:01:03.120 | So I genuinely wish that everybody can find that kind of internal radar.
00:01:08.600 | And so it's not easy.
00:01:10.760 | And I understand that there's no like instant formula, because we're all about instant formulas.
00:01:16.040 | It's difficult.
00:01:17.040 | And I want you to know that.
00:01:18.040 | So it's not like Robert can give me the answer in three minutes.
00:01:21.040 | No, I can't.
00:01:22.300 | But there's a process involved.
00:01:24.240 | It's not, it's not, you know, a mystery.
00:01:26.880 | You can follow a very singular process.
00:01:29.960 | And the idea is you're talking about childhood.
00:01:33.760 | The way I like to frame it is when you were born, you are a phenomenon, you are unique.
00:01:40.160 | Your DNA has never occurred in the history of the universe.
00:01:44.240 | Going back billions of years, it will never occur in the future.
00:01:47.680 | Your life experience with your parents and everything that you experienced in your early
00:01:52.140 | years going on up is unique.
00:01:54.260 | It's yours.
00:01:55.260 | You're one of a kind, right?
00:01:57.920 | So that is your source of power.
00:02:00.220 | To waste that is just the worst thing you can do in your life.
00:02:03.780 | And what the power is, is finding that uniqueness.
00:02:07.780 | What makes you you and how you can mine that and how you can go deep into it and use that
00:02:13.460 | to create a career path, right?
00:02:16.060 | And so I tell people when you're a child, when you're four or five or even younger,
00:02:21.740 | you have what the great psychologist Maslow called impulse voices.
00:02:26.500 | They're little voices in your head that say, I love this.
00:02:30.560 | I hate that.
00:02:31.560 | I like this food.
00:02:32.660 | I don't like when mommy moves this way.
00:02:34.660 | I like when daddy comes from here.
00:02:37.020 | You're very cued into who you are and what you like and what you don't like.
00:02:40.660 | And these voices kind of direct you in certain ways, right?
00:02:45.260 | And when you're very young, they direct you towards intellectual mental pursuits as well.
00:02:51.020 | And there's a book I recommend for everybody.
00:02:53.580 | It's Howard Gardner's Five Frames of Mind.
00:02:56.740 | It's helped me immensely.
00:02:58.700 | The idea is he talks about five forms of intelligence.
00:03:03.420 | Our problem is we think of intelligence as mostly intellectual, but there are many forms
00:03:08.220 | of intelligence.
00:03:09.640 | There's the intelligence that has to do with words.
00:03:11.780 | There's abstract intelligence that has to do with patterns and mathematics.
00:03:15.740 | There's kinetic intelligence that has to do with the body.
00:03:18.580 | There's social intelligence.
00:03:20.100 | He has five of them.
00:03:21.700 | And the idea is your brain naturally veers towards one of them.
00:03:26.580 | It can veer towards two of them.
00:03:27.820 | That happens.
00:03:28.820 | But generally, one of them kind of dominates, right?
00:03:32.060 | And it's like a grain in your brain that's going in a certain direction.
00:03:36.500 | You want to go with that grain because that's where your power will lie.
00:03:40.820 | So when you're young, if you go back and think about when you were four or five, you can
00:03:45.420 | maybe get a picture of some kind of direction or voice inside of you that was impelling
00:03:51.340 | you towards this.
00:03:52.540 | I know for me, it was words.
00:03:56.640 | I can remember when I was six years old, I was just obsessed with words, just the letters
00:04:00.640 | in words, almost like in this almost slightly schizophrenic way.
00:04:04.380 | I would spell words backwards.
00:04:05.840 | I would take them apart.
00:04:06.840 | I would do anagrams.
00:04:07.840 | I love palindromes, right?
00:04:10.220 | So I had a thing about words and language.
00:04:12.420 | It's very primal.
00:04:14.880 | Some people, you know, Albert Einstein, when he was four years old, his father gave him
00:04:19.340 | a birthday gift of a compass.
00:04:22.100 | And he was just mesmerized by this compass.
00:04:24.660 | The idea that there are invisible forces out there in the cosmos moving this needle.
00:04:29.900 | And he's obsessed with the idea of invisible forces.
00:04:33.060 | Steve Jobs, when he was like seven or eight or maybe younger in Burlingame, California,
00:04:37.740 | his father, they passed by a store with technological devices in the window.
00:04:43.120 | And he was just hypnotized by the design of those devices and the glass tubes and everything.
00:04:48.500 | So he wanted to go in that direction.
00:04:51.020 | You know, Tiger Woods saw his father hitting golf balls in the garage, and he was just
00:04:55.460 | like screaming with joy.
00:04:56.700 | He had to do that, right?
00:04:59.040 | You know, I could give you a million different examples of this.
00:05:01.980 | Of course, these are people who are famous, obviously.
00:05:04.860 | We can go back and find that.
00:05:06.900 | It's easier.
00:05:08.180 | But what happens to you-- and please cut me off if I'm going on too long.
00:05:11.700 | No, please continue.
00:05:12.700 | Please.
00:05:13.700 | What happens to you is you're seven, now you're getting older, and you're starting to not
00:05:18.700 | hear that voice anymore.
00:05:20.460 | You're hearing the voice of your teachers telling you, you're not good at this field.
00:05:24.260 | You need to get better at math.
00:05:26.100 | You know, you shouldn't be interested in these sports or anything.
00:05:28.900 | You should be going this way.
00:05:30.180 | Your parents are starting to tell you, this is the career they want for you or the direction
00:05:34.020 | they want you to go in, right?
00:05:36.300 | You start hearing that more than your own voice.
00:05:38.540 | And as you get older, it gets worse and worse and worse.
00:05:42.420 | Then when you're a teenager, it's all about what other people are doing-- your peers,
00:05:46.700 | what's cool, what's not cool, you know?
00:05:48.940 | And that kind of is more-- so all of this noise enters your brain.
00:05:54.220 | And you can't hear that anymore.
00:05:55.460 | You don't know who you are.
00:05:57.220 | And so you go to college.
00:05:59.940 | You kind of maybe choose a major that seems practical that your parents want you to go
00:06:05.980 | into.
00:06:06.980 | Maybe you kind of wander around.
00:06:08.820 | You're not sure.
00:06:09.940 | And then you enter the work world without that inner radar that I'm talking about.
00:06:13.740 | And brother, you're lost, right?
00:06:15.980 | Where should I go?
00:06:16.980 | Well, I need to make money, right?
00:06:19.920 | And so you make a choice based on the need to make a lot of money.
00:06:23.820 | Not everyone, but some people do that.
00:06:26.340 | And I understand that need.
00:06:28.460 | We all need to make a living.
00:06:30.260 | But that can set you off on a very bad path because you're not connected emotionally.
00:06:35.780 | The thing is when you figure out that primal inclination, that grain that's inside of you,
00:06:40.980 | then you have the energy to be disciplined, to go through boring tasks, to learn.
00:06:48.460 | You learn at a faster rate because you're emotionally engaged.
00:06:52.080 | When you're emotionally engaged in a subject, the brain learns twice, three times, four
00:06:57.140 | times as fast as when you're not.
00:06:59.620 | I always give the example in college, I studied foreign languages, which was kind of a passion
00:07:05.380 | of mine.
00:07:06.800 | For three or four years, I studied French.
00:07:09.980 | And then I went to Paris and I couldn't speak a word.
00:07:13.860 | It was useless because it didn't teach me anything practical, right?
00:07:16.860 | I was totally confused.
00:07:19.000 | And then, but I was in Paris and I loved it and I wanted to live there, right?
00:07:23.540 | And I had a girlfriend and I needed to speak French to her.
00:07:26.620 | And I can tell you in one month, I learned more than those four years of university because
00:07:30.860 | I wanted to, because I was engaged, my emotions were there.
00:07:34.700 | It was like I had to survive to learn French.
00:07:38.780 | So most of us, we don't have a need really to learn this subject.
00:07:43.060 | We're paying half attention.
00:07:44.900 | But when you find that thing that really connects to you, you're paying deep attention.
00:07:49.460 | Your emotions are engaged.
00:07:51.080 | You're learning at a much faster rate, okay?
00:07:54.260 | And so the thing is, how do you find that when you're older?
00:07:58.220 | When you're 21, I give people a lot of help and it's usually not so difficult.
00:08:02.940 | We can go through that process.
00:08:04.820 | It gets harder when you're 30 and you've been wandering around, but it's not impossible.
00:08:09.280 | I didn't really start find my exact path until I was 38, 39, to be honest.
00:08:16.360 | So there's hope.
00:08:17.640 | When you get 40 and you get 50, it gets more and more difficult, right?
00:08:21.100 | And it's very sad if you wasted that seed of uniqueness that I'm talking about.
00:08:26.080 | And I tell people there are ways of going back and we go through a process like archeology.
00:08:29.920 | We have to dig and dig and dig and find those bones from your childhood that indicated what
00:08:34.680 | you were meant to do.
00:08:36.460 | But when you find your life's task, everything opens up.
00:08:39.680 | It doesn't mean you figured out, okay, I've got to aim for this particular job when I'm
00:08:44.080 | 28.
00:08:45.080 | That's not how it works.
00:08:46.160 | It gives you a sense of direction.
00:08:48.040 | You can try different things.
00:08:49.520 | You can experiment.
00:08:50.520 | You can have fun when you're in your 20s.
00:08:52.440 | You're going to learn.
00:08:53.440 | You're going to learn skills.
00:08:54.500 | But it gives you an overall framework instead of, oh, all this confusion, this chaos, social
00:08:59.160 | media, the internet.
00:09:00.160 | I could go here, here, here.
00:09:01.660 | You're lost at sea.
00:09:03.040 | It gives you a very important sense of direction, a compass.
00:09:07.380 | As you describe this, I have this image of, you mentioned animals that presumably don't
00:09:14.780 | have a lot of flexibility in terms of the niches they can exist in.
00:09:17.780 | But the way I imagine this process is that as a human, we're plopped into a environment.
00:09:24.160 | And here I'm using an analogy where we don't really know if we are an aquatic animal, a
00:09:30.220 | terrestrial animal, or an avian, or an amphibian, for that matter.
00:09:36.520 | And to make the wrong choice, to be an amphibian who's trying to fly, although I'm sure they're
00:09:41.120 | out there in the animal kingdom, it's not just a waste of time.
00:09:47.500 | It's probably deadly.
00:09:49.860 | And not to over-dramatize the failure of finding one's purpose, but I see it that way.
00:09:54.940 | Because perhaps we could just say that the process of finding one's purpose is to realize
00:10:00.500 | like, ah, I'm an amphibian, I can go in and out of water, whereas a bunch of other creatures
00:10:06.400 | around me stop at the water's edge.
00:10:09.140 | And this is really cool.
00:10:10.660 | And a bunch of these other things, like these flying things, they can't actually even go
00:10:13.740 | in the water.
00:10:14.820 | Some of them might be on the surface or dive into it, but they can't do what I can do.
00:10:18.660 | So the process of self-discovery, it sounds like it's about restricting one's choices
00:10:23.660 | to a sort of wedge within the full landscape of options.
00:10:28.660 | And for me, I can certainly recall after reading "Mastery," it helped me recall some early
00:10:35.140 | seed emotions that I experienced as a very distinct sensation in my body.
00:10:40.180 | - Can you describe that?
00:10:42.180 | - Yeah, well, without making it too specific to my unique tastes, as a kid, I loved flora
00:10:49.180 | and fauna.
00:10:50.180 | I loved learning about biology.
00:10:51.180 | - Sure.
00:10:52.180 | - I didn't know what else was there.
00:10:53.500 | But animals and how they move in particular, and fish, and going to a proper aquarium store
00:10:59.040 | for the first time for me, and going snorkeling for the first time, it was like, wow.
00:11:03.420 | And even as I describe it, it's almost like my body floats.
00:11:05.940 | I feel it in my left arm of all things.
00:11:08.460 | And it feels like there's something to do about it.
00:11:10.500 | It's not just that I'm in observation of things that delight me.
00:11:13.980 | It's like there's something, there's an activation state created within me, like I gotta do something
00:11:18.020 | with this.
00:11:19.020 | And typically, it's tell everybody about it until they won't listen anymore.
00:11:23.900 | But oftentimes, it's to also draw those things, to think about them.
00:11:27.240 | And I just delight in them.
00:11:28.300 | It's a constant source of delight.
00:11:29.700 | And so seeds such as those, and there are a few other things in that landscape of flora
00:11:34.580 | and fauna, and learning about animals and biology, including the human animal, and then
00:11:41.140 | organizing information feels so satisfying to me.
00:11:44.160 | It's like a drug that...
00:11:46.380 | And so it just feels like this eternal spring of life, right?
00:11:52.140 | And so for me, that's what it was.
00:11:54.680 | And in 2015, when I was teaching that course, the course I loved, but I was feeling a little
00:11:58.580 | bit astray in my scientific career.
00:12:01.020 | And then I read Mastery, and I realized, yes, I love running a laboratory, I love teaching,
00:12:06.200 | but there's something else for me.
00:12:08.420 | And it has to do not with a podcast, I didn't even know what a podcast...
00:12:11.820 | I knew what a podcast was, I was listening to podcasts at that time, but I wasn't on
00:12:17.040 | social media.
00:12:18.040 | I had no thoughts of having a podcast, but what I wanted was that feeling in its total
00:12:23.300 | number of forms.
00:12:24.500 | That's the goal, get that feeling in as many forms as possible.
00:12:27.820 | Is that about...
00:12:29.500 | That's absolutely perfect, because the connection to what I'm talking about, it's not an intellectual
00:12:36.260 | thing, it's visceral, it's emotional, it's physical, right?
00:12:39.960 | And you feel it in your body, and when you're doing it, it's like it's at your level, it's
00:12:44.660 | like you're swimming with the current.
00:12:46.700 | You feel it, things are easy, everything clicks together, there's a delight.
00:12:50.940 | Not everything is gonna be delightful, there's gonna be tedium involved, there's gonna be
00:12:54.640 | moments of boredom, but you're able to withstand the moments of boredom because you feel that
00:13:00.060 | deep overall connection.
00:13:02.580 | So yes, that's precisely what I'm talking about.
00:13:05.180 | I mean, for me, it's a little bit similar thing is I said about words, but the other
00:13:10.420 | thing that I was obsessed with when I was a kid was early human ancestors.
00:13:16.820 | Don't ask me why, I just was so obsessed with our ancestors millions of years ago and how
00:13:22.500 | it's possible to be living here in the '60s or '70s with cars and everything, but to come
00:13:28.260 | to where we are now.
00:13:30.300 | And I wrote a short story when I was eight years old about a vulture, it was written
00:13:37.180 | from the point of view of a vulture watching the first humans kind of emerge on the planet.
00:13:42.100 | I'm sure it was absolutely awful, dreadful, but the weird thing is I'm writing a new book
00:13:47.540 | and all I'm doing in that book is going into early humans.
00:13:51.420 | And I feel like a kid again, I'm so excited, I'm so happy.
00:13:54.640 | So I can very much relate to your story.
00:13:57.780 | You mentioned these five different forms of intelligence or frames of mind as you referred
00:14:02.060 | to them.
00:14:04.420 | And I'm certainly aware that I lean towards a more intellectual interests, although as
00:14:10.700 | you pointed out, the excitement, the delight is visceral and the actions are actions, they're
00:14:15.540 | of the body ultimately.
00:14:17.700 | One has to draw, speak, write books, et cetera, to transmute that excitement into something
00:14:23.700 | real.
00:14:25.380 | For people that are not as intellectually tuned, but maybe are kinesthetically tuned,
00:14:30.980 | for instance, I can only wonder what that's like.
00:14:34.660 | I'm not completely uncoordinated, but I don't think I have a kinesthetic attunement or frame
00:14:39.980 | of mind.
00:14:40.980 | But I, for instance, had a podcast listener mention that they think in feels, that they
00:14:49.560 | literally experience thought as a sort of a patchwork of bodily sensations.
00:14:56.980 | And that thought for them is not of the stuff from the neck up, but only from the neck down,
00:15:03.460 | which to me was really intriguing.
00:15:05.640 | And so I only raise this because there have to be, as you point out, there's an infinite
00:15:10.360 | number of different sort of orientations based on our unique DNA and experience.
00:15:15.080 | But what do you think explains why these particular seeds, or as you point out, like the direction
00:15:23.280 | that the grain runs in the brain, I mean, it's partially gonna be nature, it's gonna
00:15:27.160 | be DNA.
00:15:29.440 | But we're talking about this as if there's some exciting or awe-inspiring or delightful
00:15:35.880 | thing that captures us.
00:15:38.000 | Can it be the other way too?
00:15:39.240 | Can it be, you know, one has a bad experience as a child in an intellectual environment
00:15:45.640 | and then decides, you know, I'm going in the direction, things of the body feel good, things
00:15:51.000 | of the mind, of intellect feels bad.
00:15:53.800 | And does it matter whether or not we are drawn to our purpose by recognizing what we love
00:15:59.720 | or what we hate, or are both useful?
00:16:02.720 | - Oh, they're both very, very useful.
00:16:06.680 | You know, a lot of intelligence is non-verbal.
00:16:11.440 | We think in terms of images, we're very much infected by the emotions of other people.
00:16:16.960 | So I know, for instance, my mother is very, very interested in history, she's obsessed
00:16:22.720 | with history, and I probably absorbed her interest in history.
00:16:27.200 | I don't think there's a genetic gene for that interest, you know?
00:16:31.180 | So you're gonna absorb things from your parents as well, so it's not all just genetic.
00:16:36.660 | But yeah, what you hate will have a big thing.
00:16:40.160 | But the problem with doing that is if you go into a direction and you're in elementary
00:16:46.120 | school, et cetera, and they force you to learn math and you hate it, what it tends to do
00:16:50.760 | is it turns you off from learning in general.
00:16:53.180 | You think, I don't want to be disciplined, I don't want to go through anything because
00:16:58.120 | it's painful, it doesn't lead anywhere, it's not me, it's frustration.
00:17:01.960 | It turns you off from learning in general.
00:17:04.480 | So it's really, really important for a child to have the love experience as early as possible
00:17:10.560 | so that they can know what they hate and why they hate it, right?
00:17:14.420 | And then they can rebel and they can go into that field, as opposed to, I hate learning,
00:17:18.940 | I hate discipline, I hate studying, I hate trying things over and over again.
00:17:22.840 | If you're kinesthetically oriented, and you know, a part of me, I understand that because
00:17:27.360 | I love sports, is you have to practice.
00:17:31.200 | It's going to take a lot of, you're not going to instantly be good at something, right?
00:17:35.440 | And that's going to require a love of it, right?
00:17:38.400 | But if your math experience, because I hate learning shit, you're not, it's going to transfer
00:17:43.600 | to sports, you're going to hate discipline in general.
00:17:46.640 | So it's very important for parents to let that child have at least glimmers of that
00:17:51.440 | love moment.
00:17:52.760 | I know for me, when I finished college and I entered the work world, I had to get a job.
00:17:59.760 | I got worked in journalism, I hated it.
00:18:03.360 | I hated working for other people, I hated office politics, I hated all the egos, I hated
00:18:08.520 | the smarminess, I hated the lack of quality, it was all just about making money and getting
00:18:14.480 | things out there.
00:18:15.960 | And then I worked in Hollywood, I hated Hollywood, I hated working in Hollywood.
00:18:20.400 | That formed me very much, made me go in the direction that I went in, but only from the
00:18:25.140 | basis of, I knew that I wanted to be a writer.
00:18:28.140 | So that's very important that it's not just hate, it can form you.
00:18:32.840 | But there also has to be that positive, deep emotional love of something that also is grounded
00:18:38.840 | in you in some way.
00:18:40.960 | What you just said really highlights the fact that energy and motivation can come from either
00:18:45.800 | pressure, desire for something or desire to get away from something.
00:18:51.960 | And earlier when you were talking about how we are so much more engaged and driven towards
00:19:00.100 | things that stir us emotionally, and actually we know based on the neuroscience as you know
00:19:05.380 | too, I'm sure that only by the release of certain neurochemicals in the brain and body
00:19:11.060 | would our brain have any reason to change, right?
00:19:13.460 | If you don't feel agitation and you can do everything that you're trying to do, of course
00:19:16.940 | your brain wouldn't change, like why would it, right?
00:19:19.140 | That agitation is a signature of the neurochemicals that are saying, "Hey, something's different
00:19:24.280 | now."
00:19:25.280 | - Right, right, right.
00:19:26.280 | - You might need to do something different, including rewire yourself, right?
00:19:29.440 | And that can come from positive or negative experiences.
00:19:32.120 | - Definitely, of course.
00:19:33.600 | (upbeat music)
00:19:36.100 | (upbeat music)
00:19:38.680 | (upbeat music)