Being a human being is not easy, as opposed to an animal, because we're born and nobody gives us a direction. Our parents might be a little bit, our college teachers, etc., mentors, but generally we're on our own. And it's a very, very difficult process. You wake up in the morning and you don't really know what you can do.

You can choose 12 different paths, it can be very confusing and very overwhelming. When you find that sense of purpose, when you find what I call your life's task, everything has a direction, everything has a purpose, your energy is concentrated. It's not like you're just going down a single narrow pathway.

It's not like life becomes boring and it's just about discipline and solving problems. It's actually the most exciting thing that can ever happen to you, because you never have that lost feeling. You wake up in the morning and you go, yeah, this is what I need to accomplish. People come at you with all kinds of distractions and boring and irritating things.

You're able to cut it out. It's just the most marvelous piece of internal radar that you can have. So I genuinely wish that everybody can find that kind of internal radar. And so it's not easy. And I understand that there's no like instant formula, because we're all about instant formulas.

It's difficult. And I want you to know that. So it's not like Robert can give me the answer in three minutes. No, I can't. But there's a process involved. It's not, it's not, you know, a mystery. You can follow a very singular process. And the idea is you're talking about childhood.

The way I like to frame it is when you were born, you are a phenomenon, you are unique. Your DNA has never occurred in the history of the universe. Going back billions of years, it will never occur in the future. Your life experience with your parents and everything that you experienced in your early years going on up is unique.

It's yours. You're one of a kind, right? So that is your source of power. To waste that is just the worst thing you can do in your life. And what the power is, is finding that uniqueness. What makes you you and how you can mine that and how you can go deep into it and use that to create a career path, right?

And so I tell people when you're a child, when you're four or five or even younger, you have what the great psychologist Maslow called impulse voices. They're little voices in your head that say, I love this. I hate that. I like this food. I don't like when mommy moves this way.

I like when daddy comes from here. You're very cued into who you are and what you like and what you don't like. And these voices kind of direct you in certain ways, right? And when you're very young, they direct you towards intellectual mental pursuits as well. And there's a book I recommend for everybody.

It's Howard Gardner's Five Frames of Mind. It's helped me immensely. The idea is he talks about five forms of intelligence. Our problem is we think of intelligence as mostly intellectual, but there are many forms of intelligence. There's the intelligence that has to do with words. There's abstract intelligence that has to do with patterns and mathematics.

There's kinetic intelligence that has to do with the body. There's social intelligence. He has five of them. And the idea is your brain naturally veers towards one of them. It can veer towards two of them. That happens. But generally, one of them kind of dominates, right? And it's like a grain in your brain that's going in a certain direction.

You want to go with that grain because that's where your power will lie. So when you're young, if you go back and think about when you were four or five, you can maybe get a picture of some kind of direction or voice inside of you that was impelling you towards this.

I know for me, it was words. I can remember when I was six years old, I was just obsessed with words, just the letters in words, almost like in this almost slightly schizophrenic way. I would spell words backwards. I would take them apart. I would do anagrams. I love palindromes, right?

So I had a thing about words and language. It's very primal. Some people, you know, Albert Einstein, when he was four years old, his father gave him a birthday gift of a compass. And he was just mesmerized by this compass. The idea that there are invisible forces out there in the cosmos moving this needle.

And he's obsessed with the idea of invisible forces. Steve Jobs, when he was like seven or eight or maybe younger in Burlingame, California, his father, they passed by a store with technological devices in the window. And he was just hypnotized by the design of those devices and the glass tubes and everything.

So he wanted to go in that direction. You know, Tiger Woods saw his father hitting golf balls in the garage, and he was just like screaming with joy. He had to do that, right? You know, I could give you a million different examples of this. Of course, these are people who are famous, obviously.

We can go back and find that. It's easier. But what happens to you-- and please cut me off if I'm going on too long. No, please continue. Please. What happens to you is you're seven, now you're getting older, and you're starting to not hear that voice anymore. You're hearing the voice of your teachers telling you, you're not good at this field.

You need to get better at math. You know, you shouldn't be interested in these sports or anything. You should be going this way. Your parents are starting to tell you, this is the career they want for you or the direction they want you to go in, right? You start hearing that more than your own voice.

And as you get older, it gets worse and worse and worse. Then when you're a teenager, it's all about what other people are doing-- your peers, what's cool, what's not cool, you know? And that kind of is more-- so all of this noise enters your brain. And you can't hear that anymore.

You don't know who you are. And so you go to college. You kind of maybe choose a major that seems practical that your parents want you to go into. Maybe you kind of wander around. You're not sure. And then you enter the work world without that inner radar that I'm talking about.

And brother, you're lost, right? Where should I go? Well, I need to make money, right? And so you make a choice based on the need to make a lot of money. Not everyone, but some people do that. And I understand that need. We all need to make a living.

But that can set you off on a very bad path because you're not connected emotionally. The thing is when you figure out that primal inclination, that grain that's inside of you, then you have the energy to be disciplined, to go through boring tasks, to learn. You learn at a faster rate because you're emotionally engaged.

When you're emotionally engaged in a subject, the brain learns twice, three times, four times as fast as when you're not. I always give the example in college, I studied foreign languages, which was kind of a passion of mine. For three or four years, I studied French. And then I went to Paris and I couldn't speak a word.

It was useless because it didn't teach me anything practical, right? I was totally confused. And then, but I was in Paris and I loved it and I wanted to live there, right? And I had a girlfriend and I needed to speak French to her. And I can tell you in one month, I learned more than those four years of university because I wanted to, because I was engaged, my emotions were there.

It was like I had to survive to learn French. So most of us, we don't have a need really to learn this subject. We're paying half attention. But when you find that thing that really connects to you, you're paying deep attention. Your emotions are engaged. You're learning at a much faster rate, okay?

And so the thing is, how do you find that when you're older? When you're 21, I give people a lot of help and it's usually not so difficult. We can go through that process. It gets harder when you're 30 and you've been wandering around, but it's not impossible. I didn't really start find my exact path until I was 38, 39, to be honest.

So there's hope. When you get 40 and you get 50, it gets more and more difficult, right? And it's very sad if you wasted that seed of uniqueness that I'm talking about. And I tell people there are ways of going back and we go through a process like archeology.

We have to dig and dig and dig and find those bones from your childhood that indicated what you were meant to do. But when you find your life's task, everything opens up. It doesn't mean you figured out, okay, I've got to aim for this particular job when I'm 28.

That's not how it works. It gives you a sense of direction. You can try different things. You can experiment. You can have fun when you're in your 20s. You're going to learn. You're going to learn skills. But it gives you an overall framework instead of, oh, all this confusion, this chaos, social media, the internet.

I could go here, here, here. You're lost at sea. It gives you a very important sense of direction, a compass. As you describe this, I have this image of, you mentioned animals that presumably don't have a lot of flexibility in terms of the niches they can exist in. But the way I imagine this process is that as a human, we're plopped into a environment.

And here I'm using an analogy where we don't really know if we are an aquatic animal, a terrestrial animal, or an avian, or an amphibian, for that matter. And to make the wrong choice, to be an amphibian who's trying to fly, although I'm sure they're out there in the animal kingdom, it's not just a waste of time.

It's probably deadly. And not to over-dramatize the failure of finding one's purpose, but I see it that way. Because perhaps we could just say that the process of finding one's purpose is to realize like, ah, I'm an amphibian, I can go in and out of water, whereas a bunch of other creatures around me stop at the water's edge.

And this is really cool. And a bunch of these other things, like these flying things, they can't actually even go in the water. Some of them might be on the surface or dive into it, but they can't do what I can do. So the process of self-discovery, it sounds like it's about restricting one's choices to a sort of wedge within the full landscape of options.

And for me, I can certainly recall after reading "Mastery," it helped me recall some early seed emotions that I experienced as a very distinct sensation in my body. - Can you describe that? - Yeah, well, without making it too specific to my unique tastes, as a kid, I loved flora and fauna.

I loved learning about biology. - Sure. - I didn't know what else was there. But animals and how they move in particular, and fish, and going to a proper aquarium store for the first time for me, and going snorkeling for the first time, it was like, wow. And even as I describe it, it's almost like my body floats.

I feel it in my left arm of all things. And it feels like there's something to do about it. It's not just that I'm in observation of things that delight me. It's like there's something, there's an activation state created within me, like I gotta do something with this. And typically, it's tell everybody about it until they won't listen anymore.

But oftentimes, it's to also draw those things, to think about them. And I just delight in them. It's a constant source of delight. And so seeds such as those, and there are a few other things in that landscape of flora and fauna, and learning about animals and biology, including the human animal, and then organizing information feels so satisfying to me.

It's like a drug that... And so it just feels like this eternal spring of life, right? And so for me, that's what it was. And in 2015, when I was teaching that course, the course I loved, but I was feeling a little bit astray in my scientific career. And then I read Mastery, and I realized, yes, I love running a laboratory, I love teaching, but there's something else for me.

And it has to do not with a podcast, I didn't even know what a podcast... I knew what a podcast was, I was listening to podcasts at that time, but I wasn't on social media. I had no thoughts of having a podcast, but what I wanted was that feeling in its total number of forms.

That's the goal, get that feeling in as many forms as possible. Is that about... That's absolutely perfect, because the connection to what I'm talking about, it's not an intellectual thing, it's visceral, it's emotional, it's physical, right? And you feel it in your body, and when you're doing it, it's like it's at your level, it's like you're swimming with the current.

You feel it, things are easy, everything clicks together, there's a delight. Not everything is gonna be delightful, there's gonna be tedium involved, there's gonna be moments of boredom, but you're able to withstand the moments of boredom because you feel that deep overall connection. So yes, that's precisely what I'm talking about.

I mean, for me, it's a little bit similar thing is I said about words, but the other thing that I was obsessed with when I was a kid was early human ancestors. Don't ask me why, I just was so obsessed with our ancestors millions of years ago and how it's possible to be living here in the '60s or '70s with cars and everything, but to come to where we are now.

And I wrote a short story when I was eight years old about a vulture, it was written from the point of view of a vulture watching the first humans kind of emerge on the planet. I'm sure it was absolutely awful, dreadful, but the weird thing is I'm writing a new book and all I'm doing in that book is going into early humans.

And I feel like a kid again, I'm so excited, I'm so happy. So I can very much relate to your story. You mentioned these five different forms of intelligence or frames of mind as you referred to them. And I'm certainly aware that I lean towards a more intellectual interests, although as you pointed out, the excitement, the delight is visceral and the actions are actions, they're of the body ultimately.

One has to draw, speak, write books, et cetera, to transmute that excitement into something real. For people that are not as intellectually tuned, but maybe are kinesthetically tuned, for instance, I can only wonder what that's like. I'm not completely uncoordinated, but I don't think I have a kinesthetic attunement or frame of mind.

But I, for instance, had a podcast listener mention that they think in feels, that they literally experience thought as a sort of a patchwork of bodily sensations. And that thought for them is not of the stuff from the neck up, but only from the neck down, which to me was really intriguing.

And so I only raise this because there have to be, as you point out, there's an infinite number of different sort of orientations based on our unique DNA and experience. But what do you think explains why these particular seeds, or as you point out, like the direction that the grain runs in the brain, I mean, it's partially gonna be nature, it's gonna be DNA.

But we're talking about this as if there's some exciting or awe-inspiring or delightful thing that captures us. Can it be the other way too? Can it be, you know, one has a bad experience as a child in an intellectual environment and then decides, you know, I'm going in the direction, things of the body feel good, things of the mind, of intellect feels bad.

And does it matter whether or not we are drawn to our purpose by recognizing what we love or what we hate, or are both useful? - Oh, they're both very, very useful. You know, a lot of intelligence is non-verbal. We think in terms of images, we're very much infected by the emotions of other people.

So I know, for instance, my mother is very, very interested in history, she's obsessed with history, and I probably absorbed her interest in history. I don't think there's a genetic gene for that interest, you know? So you're gonna absorb things from your parents as well, so it's not all just genetic.

But yeah, what you hate will have a big thing. But the problem with doing that is if you go into a direction and you're in elementary school, et cetera, and they force you to learn math and you hate it, what it tends to do is it turns you off from learning in general.

You think, I don't want to be disciplined, I don't want to go through anything because it's painful, it doesn't lead anywhere, it's not me, it's frustration. It turns you off from learning in general. So it's really, really important for a child to have the love experience as early as possible so that they can know what they hate and why they hate it, right?

And then they can rebel and they can go into that field, as opposed to, I hate learning, I hate discipline, I hate studying, I hate trying things over and over again. If you're kinesthetically oriented, and you know, a part of me, I understand that because I love sports, is you have to practice.

It's going to take a lot of, you're not going to instantly be good at something, right? And that's going to require a love of it, right? But if your math experience, because I hate learning shit, you're not, it's going to transfer to sports, you're going to hate discipline in general.

So it's very important for parents to let that child have at least glimmers of that love moment. I know for me, when I finished college and I entered the work world, I had to get a job. I got worked in journalism, I hated it. I hated working for other people, I hated office politics, I hated all the egos, I hated the smarminess, I hated the lack of quality, it was all just about making money and getting things out there.

And then I worked in Hollywood, I hated Hollywood, I hated working in Hollywood. That formed me very much, made me go in the direction that I went in, but only from the basis of, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. So that's very important that it's not just hate, it can form you.

But there also has to be that positive, deep emotional love of something that also is grounded in you in some way. What you just said really highlights the fact that energy and motivation can come from either pressure, desire for something or desire to get away from something. And earlier when you were talking about how we are so much more engaged and driven towards things that stir us emotionally, and actually we know based on the neuroscience as you know too, I'm sure that only by the release of certain neurochemicals in the brain and body would our brain have any reason to change, right?

If you don't feel agitation and you can do everything that you're trying to do, of course your brain wouldn't change, like why would it, right? That agitation is a signature of the neurochemicals that are saying, "Hey, something's different now." - Right, right, right. - You might need to do something different, including rewire yourself, right?

And that can come from positive or negative experiences. - Definitely, of course. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)