How to Find Your Purpose | Robert Greene & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Being a human being is not easy unlike an animal because we are born and no one gives us direction. Our parents may be a little, our college professors, etc., mentors, but for the most part we are on our own. And it is a very, very difficult process. You wake up in the morning and you don't really know what you can do. You could 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 going down a single narrow path. It's not that life becomes boring and it's just about discipline and problem solving. It's actually the most exciting thing that can happen to you because you never have that feeling of loss. You wake up in the morning and say, "Yes, this is what I need to achieve." People come at you with all kinds of distractions and boring, irritating things. You can trim it. It is simply the most wonderful internal radar you can ever have. So I really wish everyone could find that kind of internal radar.

And so it's not easy and I understand that. There is no instant formula because we are interested in instant formulas. It's hard and I want you to know so Robert can't give me the answer in three minutes. No I can not. But there is a process involved. It's not a mystery. You can follow a very unique process. And the idea is that you're talking about childhood. The way I like to put it is that when you were born, you are a phenomenon. You are unique. Their DNA has never appeared in the history of the universe. If we go back billions of years, it will never happen again in the future.

Your life experience with

your

parents and everything you experienced in your early years is unique. It's yours. You are unique, right? So that's your power source. Wasting that is the worst thing you can do in your life. And the power is finding that uniqueness. What makes you you and how can you extract that and how can you dig into it and use it to create a career, right? That's why I tell people that when you're a child, when you're four or five years old or even younger, you have what the great psychologist Maslow called impulsive voices.

They're little voices in your head saying: I love this, I hate that. I like this food. I don't like it when mom moves like this. I like it when dad comes from here. You are very informed about who you are, what you like and what you don't like. And these voices direct you in a certain way, right? And when you are very young, you are also directed towards intellectual mental activities. And there is a book that I recommend to everyone. It's Howard Gardner's "Five Moods." He has helped me immensely. The idea is that it talks about five forms of intelligence.

Our problem is that we think that intelligence is primarily intellectual, but there are many forms of intelligence. There is the intelligence that has to do with words. There is abstract intelligence that has to do with patterns and mathematics. There is kinetic intelligence that has to do with the body. There is social intelligence. He has five of them. And the idea is that your brain naturally drifts toward one of them. You can veer into two of them, that happens. But usually one of them dominates, right? And it's like a pimple in your brain that goes in a certain direction.

You want to follow 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 years old, maybe you can get an idea of ​​some kind of direction or voice within you that was driving you toward this. I know that for me they were words. I remember when I was six years old, I was just obsessed with words, just the letters of words, almost in this almost slightly schizophrenic way. I would spell words backwards. I would disarm them. I would make anagrams. I love palindromes, right?

So I had a thing for words and language. It's very primary. Some people, you know, Albert Einstein, when he was four years old, his father gave him a compass as a birthday gift. And he was hypnotized by this compass. The idea that there are invisible forces in the cosmos moving this needle. And he is obsessed with the idea of ​​invisible forces. Steve Jobs, when he was about seven or eight years old or maybe younger in Burlingame, California, his father, they passed by a store with technological devices in the window. And he was mesmerized by the design of those devices and the glass tubes and all that.

That's why he wanted to go in that direction. You know, Tiger Woods saw his dad hitting golf balls in the garage and he was 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 is easier. But what's wrong with you? Please stop my conversation if I go on for too long. No, please continue, please. What happens to you is that you are seven years old. Now you're getting older and you're starting to no longer hear that voice.

You are hearing the voice of your teachers telling you that you are not good in this field. You need to improve in mathematics. You know, you shouldn't be interested in these sports or anything like that. You should go this way. Your parents are starting to tell you that this is the career they want for you or the direction they want you to take, right? You start to hear that more than your own voice. And as you get older, things get worse and worse. Then when you're a teenager, it's all about what other people do, your peers, what's right and what's not right, you know?

And that's more, so all that noise goes into your brain and you can't hear it anymore. You don't know who you are. And then, when you go to college, maybe you choose a major that seems practical to you and that your parents want you to study. Maybe you're wandering around, you're not sure. And then you enter the working world without that internal radar that I'm talking about. And brother, you're lost, right? Where should I go? Well, I need to make money, right? And then you make a decision based on the need to make a lot of money.

Not everyone, but some people do it. And I understand that need. We all need to make a living, but that can lead you down a very bad path because you're not emotionally connected. The point is that when you discover that primary inclination, that grain inside you, then you have the energy to be disciplined, to perform boring tasks, to learn. You learn at a faster pace because you are emotionally engaged. When you are emotionally involved in a topic, the brain learns two, three or four times faster than when you are not. I always lead by example. In college, I studied foreign languages, which was one of my passions.

For three or four years I studied French. And then I went to Paris and couldn't say 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 he had a girlfriend and he needed to speak French to her. And I can tell you that in one month I learned more than those four years of university because I wanted to, because I was committed. My emotions were there. It was like I had to survive to learn French.

Whereas, most of us don't really have the need to learn this topic. We are half-hearted, we are half-paying attention. But when you find that thing that really connects you, you're paying close attention. Your emotions are compromised. You're learning at a much faster pace, okay? And the question is, how do you find that when you're older? When you're 21, I help people a lot and it's usually not that hard. We can go through that process. It gets harder when you're 30 and have been wandering around, but it's not impossible. I didn't really start to find my exact path until I was 38, 39, to be honest.

Then there is hope. When you're in your 40s and 50s, it gets harder and harder, right? And it would be very sad if you were to waste that seed of uniqueness that I'm telling you about. And I tell people that there are ways to return and we go through a process like archaeology. 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 the task of your life, everything opens up. It doesn't mean you've figured out, okay, I have to shoot for this particular job when I'm 28.

That is 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 20. You're going to learn. You're going to learn skills, but it's going to give you a general framework instead of all this confusion, this chaos, social media, the Internet. I could go here, here, here. You are lost at sea. It gives you a very important sense of direction, a compass. As you're describing 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 humans, we're kind of fell into an environment, and here I'm using an analogy where we don't really know if we're an aquatic animal, a land animal, or a bird, right?

Or an amphibian. Or an amphibian, for that matter, and making the wrong decision, being an amphibian trying to fly, although I'm sure they exist in the animal kingdom, is not only a waste of time, it's probably deadly. , and I don't want to overdramatize the failure to find one's purpose, but I see it that way, whereas maybe we could just say that the process of finding one's purpose is realizing that, ah, I'm an amphibian, I can go. in and out of the water, while a bunch of other creatures around me stop at the water's edge, right? And this is really cool, and a bunch of other things, like these flying things, that actually can't even get into the water.

Some of them may be on the surface or submerged in it, but they can't do what I can do, so the process of self-discovery seems to be about restricting one's choices to a kind of wedge within the entire landscape of options, and in my case, I can certainly remember that, after reading "Mastery", it helped me remember some initial emotions that I experienced as a very different sensation in my body. Can you describe that? Yeah, well, without getting too specific about my unique tastes, when I was a kid I loved flora and fauna. I loved learning about biology.

Sure. Yeah, it's not surprising, but the animals and how they move in particular, the fish, going to a proper aquarium store for the first time for me and snorkeling for the first time was like, wow, and even as I describe it, it's almost as if my body was floating. I feel it precisely in my left arm and I feel that there is something to do about it. It's not just that I'm observing things that delight me. It's like it creates a state of activation inside of me, like I have to do something with this and usually I tell everyone until they don't want to listen anymore, but a lot of times, it's also to attract those things to them. think about them, and I simply delight in them.

It's a constant source of delight, and so seeds like that, and there are some other things in that landscape of flora and fauna, and learning about animals and biology, including the human animal, and then organizing the information is very satisfying to me. . . It's like a drug, and that's why it feels like this eternal source of life, right? And for me, that's what it was, and in 2015, when I was teaching that course, the course that I loved, but I was feeling a little lost in my scientific career, and then I read "Master's" and it hit me. Yes, I love running a laboratory.

I love teaching, but there is something else for me and it doesn't have to do with a podcast. I didn't even know what a podcast was, I probably knew what a podcast was. I was listening to podcasts at the time, but I wasn't on social media. I wasn't thinking about having a podcast, but what I wanted was that feeling in all its forms. That's the goal, to get that feeling in as many ways as possible. It's about... That's absolutely perfect, because the connection to what I'm talking about is not something intellectual, it's visceral, it's emotional, it's physical, right?

And you feel it in your body, and when you do it, it's like it's on your level. It's like you're swimming with the current. You feel that things are easy, everything fits, there is a delight. Not everything will be pleasant, there will be tedium, there will be moments of boredom, but you are able to endure those 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 kind of similar to what I said about words, but the other thing I was obsessed with as a kid was early human ancestors.

Don't ask me why, I was so obsessed with our ancestors millions of years ago, and how is it possible to live here in the '60s or '70s with cars and everything, but get to where we are now. And I wrote a short story when I was eight about a vulture, it was written from the point of view of a vulture watching the first humans emerge on the planet. I'm sure it was absolutely horrible, awful, but the strange thing is that I'm writing a new book and all I do in that book is delve into early humans.

And I feel like a child again, I'm so excited, I'm so happy. So I can relate a lot to your story. You mentioned these five different forms of intelligence or states ofCheer up, as you referred to them. And I'm certainly aware that I lean toward more intellectual interests, although, as you've pointed out, the excitement, the delight, is visceral. And actions are actions, they are ultimately of the body. You have to draw, talk, write books, etc., to transmute that emotion into something real. For people who aren't as intellectually attuned, but maybe kinesthetically attuned, for example, I can only wonder what that's like.

I'm not completely uncoordinated, but I don't think I have a kinesthetic attunement or mood. But, for example, one podcast listener mentioned that he thinks in sensations, that he literally experiences thought as a kind of mosaic of bodily sensations. And that thinking for them is not about things from the neck up, but just from the neck down, which to me was really intriguing. And I only mention this because, as you point out, there have to be an infinite number of different types of orientations based on our unique DNA and experience. But what do you think explains why these particular seeds or, as you point out, the direction in which the grain runs in the brain?

I mean, part of it will be nature, it will be DNA. Safely. But we talk about it as if there is something exciting, impressive, or delicious that captures us. Can it be the other way around too? Can it be, you know, that one has a bad experience as a child in an intellectual environment and then decides, you know, I'm going to get into body things to feel good? Things of the mind, of the intellect, feel bad. And does it matter if we are drawn toward our purpose by recognizing what we love or what we hate or whether both are useful?

Oh, they are both very, very useful. You know, a lot of intelligence is non-verbal. We think in terms of images, we are very infected by other people's emotions. I know, for example, that my mother is very, very interested in history. She is obsessed with history. And I probably absorbed her interest in history. I don't think there is a genetic, a gene for that interest, you know? So you're also going to absorb things from your parents. So it's not all just genetic. But yes, what you hate will matter greatly. But the problem with doing that is that if you go in one direction and you're in elementary school, etc., and you're forced to learn math and you hate it, what it tends to do is make you discouraged 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 is not an immediate frustration. It takes you away from learning in general. So it is very, very important for a child to have the experience of love as early as possible so that she can know what she hates and why she hates it, right? And then they can rebel and they can go into that field instead of, 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, part of me, I understand that because I love sports, you have to play them.

It will take a long time and you won't be good at something instantly, right? And that will require you to like it, right? But if your background in math, because I hate learning shit, you don't have it, it will transfer to sports. You're going to hate discipline in general. That is why it is very important for parents to let the child have at least glimpses of that moment of love. I know for me, when I finished college and entered the workforce, I had to get a job. I worked in journalism. I hated it. I hated working for other people.

I hated office politics. He hated all egos. He hated cajoling. I hated the lack of quality. It was just about making money and publishing things. And then I worked in Hollywood. I hated Hollywood. I hated working in Hollywood. That shaped me a lot, it made me go in the direction I took, but just from the base, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. So, you know, it's very important that it's not just hate. It can shape you, but there also has to be that deep, positive emotional love for something that is also ingrained in you in some way.

What you just said really highlights the fact that energy and motivation can come from pressure, you know, from wanting something or wanting to get away from something. And earlier, when you were talking about how we're much more engaged and driven toward things that move us emotionally, and we actually know, based on neuroscience, as you also know, I'm sure, that just by releasing certain neurochemicals in the brain and the body our brain would have some reason to change, right? If you don't feel agitated and can do everything you're trying to do, of course your brain won't change.

Like, why would I, right? That agitation is a signal from neurochemicals saying, "Hey, something's different now." Good good good. You might have to do something different, even rewire yourself, right? And that can arise from positive or negative experiences. Of course.