276. Dead End Goals: Are Your Ambitions Actually Leading You Toward Meaning?

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Many of us are searching for the meaning of life, but what is the meaning of meaning? My name's Matt Abrahams and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I'm thrilled to be rejoined by Arthur Brooks of Harvard's Business School. Arthur studies and teaches courses on leadership, wellbeing, and happiness. He has authored numerous books, including Building the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with Oprah Winfrey, and he has his own podcast, which I really enjoy, called Office Hours with Arthur Brooks. Arthur's newest book is The Meaning of Your Life. Welcome, Arthur. I'm really glad to be talking with you once again. Congrats on your new book and on your podcast. I and our listeners have benefited from our first conversation. I look forward to the second one. 

[00:00:53] Arthur Brooks: Thank you, Matt. It's wonderful to be back on the show. 

[00:00:55] Matt Abrahams: Thanks. Shall we get started? 

[00:00:56] Arthur Brooks: Yeah, let's do that.

[00:00:58] Matt Abrahams: A lot of your work focuses on helping strivers, of which I am an A plus specimen. Can you start by defining what you mean by a striver and why folks like me struggle with things like fulfillment, meaning, happiness? 

[00:01:12] Arthur Brooks: The, a word that has entered the American lexicon over the past 10 years is slacker. People hear about slackers, you know, and everybody worries about their adult kids slacking and living forever in the basement and all that. And I got that. But that's actually not the biggest problem that I see. I mean, I teach at a fancy business school like you, and we don't, there's no slackers at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford or the Harvard Business School, there's no slackers. And what I came to understand is that to not be a slacker isn't enough. On the contrary, I see a different kind of pathology among my students who are just absolutely addicted to success, very, very afraid of failure. They have a propensity toward workaholism, and that's what I call the striver syndrome.

[00:01:51] And so when I say striver, I say with a certain amount of admiration. But I also understand that for you and me, as senior striver's, and the junior strivers that we teach, it's not always an easy life. It's actually not the best way to live necessarily. And part of the reason is because happiness, which is, we've talked about before, is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. For strivers, the enjoyment of life can be really quite low. Satisfaction with accomplishments is through the roof, but enjoyment can be really quite low and they don't understand how to pursue proper leisure. They often marginalize relationships. And so I have to talk to strive about how to learn how to be fully alive, how to be happier people. That's why I specialize, I'm the striver whisperer. 

[00:02:32] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. And I appreciate being called a senior striver because you're right. My students, I see them on the same path that I'm on, and I'm trying to encourage them to take time, to smell the roses, to connect with people. And yet, for me personally, it's so hard to do. Let's take a step back and ground ourselves in the terms that we're using. When you were previously on, you defined what you mean by meaning. Can you remind us of the three components of meaning, and then you added, in this new book, this notion of presence and searching, and I'm hoping you can help us understand how those fit into the equation.

[00:03:03] Arthur Brooks: Yeah, for sure. So psychologists, and philosophers for that matter, they really break meaning into three deep questions. The what is the meaning of life is really three why questions of life. Number one is why do things happen the way they do, which is the idea of coherence. You have to have a concept of why things are actually happening around you. Some people, their sense of coherence comes from their religious faith. Some people it comes from science. I personally am a traditionally religious person and I'm a scientist, so great. And as was my dad. My dad was a PhD biostatistician. He thought that God created the distribution of events.

[00:03:38] I asked him one time, I said, dad, what are miracles? And he said, long tail events. 'Cause he thought that God created randomness, which is one of the beautiful things about the universe, he thought. The second part of meaning is purpose, and purpose and meaning are not the same thing. We use them interchangeably, but that's not right. Purpose is a sub component of meaning, which is goals and direction. It's the question, why am I doing what I'm doing? Where am I going with my life? And you have to have an answer to that. If you don't, then you're just going in circles. You're wasting your time, you're frittering away your time.

[00:04:09] Which is why leisure, properly understood, is so critically important because you're just sitting on a beach and chilling or getting drunk or scrolling. TikTok reels. That means there's no purpose. The reason it makes you depressed is because it gives you a sense of purposelessness, which takes away your sense of meaning. The third part is significance, which is like, why does my life matter? To whom does my life matter? And if you don't know, or there is nobody for whom your life matters, you're gonna feel insignificant, and that's gonna make you feel horrible. It's gonna make you feel completely bereft of meaning, which is why people need love.

[00:04:43] People need love so much because they need to answer the significance question and significance question is really part of meaning. Okay, then the next part that you asked about is how do you measure this? In this case, there's really interesting measurements to break the search for meaning into two parts, how actively you are at searching for it and how successful you've been in finding it. So the first part is literally called search, and the second part is called presence. And you know, based on a bunch of very well validated, scientifically constructed survey, which is in the book by the way, and on my website, people can find out how actively they're searching and whether they've been successful in finding the presence of meaning in their lives.

[00:05:19] And they can actually get a score on that. And I can tell a lot about a person on the basis of this. And so what I find that I've got a pretty good sense of presence of meaning in my life. I should, I'm 61. But I'm super high in search, which is why I'm a behavioral scientist because I'm always looking about what could be actually better out there, which is not necessarily the most optimal way to live, but everybody who reads this book, they'll know what meaning is and where they are in their search. And that's really important because if you're looking for anything in life, if you're looking for California, you better know what California is and you better know where you are right now or you're not gonna get there. 

[00:05:54] Matt Abrahams: So the presence and search anchor you where you are today, but serve to motivate you for where you can be in the future.

[00:06:02] Arthur Brooks: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot of people that'll find that they're seeking, seeking, seeking, seeking, but their presence is really low, which is why they feel that they're at loose ends. Other people, they find out that the problem is that they've been scrolling and drinking and playing video games, and that doesn't count as seeking as it turns out. And once they understand that, boy, oh boy, it can be a real game changer for how they're spending their time. 

[00:06:22] Matt Abrahams: I think a lot of the value of the work that social scientists do is help people understand where they are so that they can then move forward and change as they need it. So meaning is coherence, purpose, and significance. You distinguish between the me self and I self. What is the difference between these two and how do we move from one to the other? I found this distinction really fascinating. 

[00:06:45] Arthur Brooks: Yeah, no, that actually comes from the work of William James, the father of modern psychology. What William James talked about, and this is one of the ways, a little bit further down in the book, about actually how to find the meaning of your life, is to get out of the concentration on yourself, which is the me self, and getting interested in the outside world, which is observation of the outside world, also known as the I self. And William James correctly pointed out that you're two people. You're somebody who's looking out and you're somebody who's looking in at the same time. We're the only species really able to do this because we're the only species that's truly self-conscious.

[00:07:16] That's why homo sapiens, with its enormous prefrontal cortex, 30% of our brain by weight actually can achieve consciousness in a meaningful way. And that consciousness is the blessing of maybe knowing the divine and the curse of deeply knowing yourself. Your golden retriever doesn't know it's alive. Doesn't know it's going to die. Doesn't really know anything about tomorrow because it doesn't have anything really except the I self and all the ways that it looks like it's self-conscious and behaving neurotically, that's just a simulation. It's just figured out that you're gonna be nicer to it if it acts a particular way, and maybe you'll give 'em a treat. It's what it comes down to. But the fact is that most other animals, they only have the I self.

[00:07:54] And that's, by the way, the other reason that your golden retriever is happier than you is because it doesn't have any me self, it's not self-conscious. It's not thinking about itself. There's no social comparison. It's like, yeah, I don't know. I have a shorter tail to the golden retriever next door. It just doesn't care is what it comes down to. So we need to be more like the golden retriever and spend more time in the I self, but we have to do that on purpose. And in so doing, looking out, experiencing the world, getting out of our heads, at getting out of this self-consciousness, then we're in the right hemisphere of our brain and then we start to think about questions of meaning, and life just feels more meaningful. 

[00:08:31] Matt Abrahams: So what drives us to the I self? Is it curiosity? What's the pull away from the me self? 

[00:08:37] Arthur Brooks: The pull away from the me self, generally speaking is what we call transcendence. And transcendence means transcending yourself either upward, toward the divine or toward greater knowledge, awe, music, beauty, or transcending yourself by serving other people, which is a really important thing. And you know, one the best ways to stop being miserable and to find more meaning is to go serve somebody.

[00:09:01] Matt Abrahams: So it's really thinking about getting outside of yourself through transcendence upward, or, I like how you said, you know, with those around you. 

[00:09:08] Arthur Brooks: We'll call it vertical and lateral transcendence, there are different ways to do it. So transcendence is one of the great and ancient techniques of finding meaning. And the reason that we now know is because it intensely places you in the right hemisphere of your brain where questions of meaning can be adjudicated. 

[00:09:24] Matt Abrahams: So that's why meditation, religion,

[00:09:27] Arthur Brooks: Prayer, worship, totally. Philosophy, studying the stoic philosophers with great seriousness. This does it. The brahma muhurta, waking up before dawn and walking without devices. Why studying the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Standing in awe of nature. These are different ways for you actually to transcend. 

[00:09:45] Matt Abrahams: All of those require a quieting and slowing down as well.

[00:09:49] Arthur Brooks: For sure. And the way that you quiet and slow down is stop looking in the mirror. And the devices are nothing more than mirrors. Mirrors are a reflection of the self. They're me self devices. And by the way, literally one of the things that I recommend to people, don't look at yourself in the mirror at all until noon. Not one time until noon. And the truth is everybody does this, but there's a lot of research on the fact that the more you look in the mirror, the more miserable you get because you're most aware of your flaws. The truth is that almost nobody really needs to look in the mirror before they go out, and it's like no one cares. And the less that you do actually use the physical methods for engaging intensely in the me self, the more you'll be in the I self and the happier you'll be, especially in the early hours of the day.

[00:10:30] Matt Abrahams: Right, and I think we also all need to turn off that self view and all the remote virtual tools that we use. 

[00:10:35] Arthur Brooks: Oh, totally. 

[00:10:36] Matt Abrahams: You talk about this idea of proxy goals and the value that they serve. What are proxy goals and why should we keep them in mind? The one that really resonated with me is it's about you and not how others see you.

[00:10:49] Arthur Brooks: Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's a, and it's about you. That's, you need intrinsic goals, not the extrinsic goals of how other people see you. So proxy goals are funny. I mean, we're recording this right before Christmas. But I know it's gonna be played later, but it's on my mind 'cause Christmas is coming up and you know, the ancient tradition of the three wise men. And the three wise men, what they were looking for in the ancient story, whether people are religious or not, they all know the story, they were looking for the baby Jesus and the state in Bethlehem. But they couldn't see him.

[00:11:15] They needed something that would actually indicate that he was there and that was the star of Bethlehem. Keep going for the star and you'll find the baby underneath the star. That's what they had been told, right? The star was not what they wanted. That was a proxy goal and almost all of the big complex meaning filled things in life you can't see 'em. You can't see 'em directly. You can just perceive them and you believe that they're there, which means you gotta get proxy goals. If you wanna find meaning, you have to have proxy goals and you better choose good proxies. A big problem that people have, especially our beloved strivers, is that they have horrible proxies, money, power, pleasure, fame, Instagram followers, prestige.

[00:11:56] Those are really bad proxy goals for the meaning of life. And so I talk about what are the characteristics of proxy goals, and you named one of 'em. They have to be things that are inherently satisfying as opposed to that which actually brings you some sense of luster from the outside world. People really, really, uh, they're, they're gonna envy me a lot if I get this car. Sorry, that's a terrible proxy goal for meaning. You're never gonna find it. That's the star of Bethlehem is if it were out over the ocean, whoops, bad proxy is what it comes down to. And so that's kind of how to think about, you know, are my proxy goals really sitting over the stable of Bethlehem or not?

[00:12:31] Matt Abrahams: I really resonated with this idea of trying to figure out what the proxy goals are because many of mine are taking me in the wrong direction. And I really appreciated you delineating not only what proxy goals are, but the criteria by which you should establish them. It was very helpful. 

[00:12:49] Arthur Brooks: That's great, and that's the chapter on calling. Because finding your calling, everybody, they say they want to do it, but one of the biggest reasons that people don't find their calling, and by the way, finding your calling is one of the greatest ways to find the meaning in life. The way that you find your calling is not saying, okay, I'm gonna go see my calling suddenly, no, no, no. You follow the right proxy goals, your calling is underneath them, is how it comes about. And that means, for example, intrinsic satisfaction, not extrinsic rewards. A classic case. 

[00:13:16] Matt Abrahams: So it's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You gotta find the right rainbow. I asked our members of our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community to submit a question they'd like me to ask to you. You're beloved by them. And here's what I really liked. In a world that constantly prioritizes metrics of success, money, status, power, how can individuals reconcile the internal quest for meaning with the external pressure to constantly achieve? How do we stop using purpose as a tool for career advancement and begin using our career as a tool for purpose?

[00:13:50] Arthur Brooks: You know, it's, that's actually one of the reasons that you find that people who are in not fancy careers, they have a greater sense of meaning than people in fancy careers, than people who don't go to college have less of a crisis of meaning than people who do go to college. This is absolutely true because we're, um, again, there's the matrix of the screens in front of us, but there's the matrix that is our lives. The machine-like character of our lives. And so one of the things that I strongly recommend to these people is it gets back to an early part of our conversation, is to make sure that a really big and healthy part of your life is you getting better at things that are not worldly achievement. Becoming excellent at things that the world is not gonna clap for you for.

[00:14:30] And excellence, I mean, strivers are gonna strive. That's just the way it's actually gonna be. But are you truly great at meditating in a way where you understand yourself much better? Nobody's gonna pay you for that. Nobody's gonna write you up in the paper about that. You're not gonna get a trophy for that. Are you better at practicing your religion? Are you learning things that you don't need to know for work? Nobody's gonna pay you for that. The whole point is however, that to start to think about excellence out of the world of these extrinsic rewards. That's really what it comes down to and start spending time doing that, and it will be so inherently satisfying and meaningful that you'll never go back.

[00:15:07] Matt Abrahams: It strikes me that doing those things just to do them for those intrinsic rewards, many of those things are very humbling as well. I've studied martial arts for decades, and the more I do it, the more I realize I don't know. And it is in that humbling that I do find meaning and groundedness.

[00:15:24] Arthur Brooks: For sure, absolutely. And we're not encouraged to be humble about the thing that people are paying us for, but the truth is that the stakes, they feel lower for other things. It's actually okay for me to, I can say to my wife, honey, I wish I were a better husband. I wanna be a better husband. I'm not the husband that I actually should be. And there's just this refreshment that comes from the acknowledgement that we're human in these particular ways. And when we're very, very fine, very special work machines, we're not gonna find occasions to do that. 

[00:15:52] Matt Abrahams: Yeah, there's a humility and a vulnerability that I think really helps when you find those intrinsic activities. As we draw to an end, I typically end by asking everybody three questions. One I create just for them, and then two that I've asked everyone. But since you were on our show previously, and people can learn your answers by listening to episode 181, I thought I'd ask you one question and then follow up with a rapid fire activity that I called this or that. Are you up for this? 

[00:16:19] Arthur Brooks: I'm so up for this. 

[00:16:20] Matt Abrahams: Okay, so let's start with the question first. One of the things I appreciate so much about what you do is that you provide specific guidance on things we can do, practical, tactical activities, questions we can ask, surveys we can take, meditations we can reflect on. Can you share one or two of these activities that you have personally found really helpful that you have deployed or continue to deploy that really have benefited you, that, that hopefully can benefit us as well? 

[00:16:47] Arthur Brooks: Yeah. One of the things that I do when I'm working with people for the first time is I'd have them take a test on what's called their affect profile. And affect profile is the intensity of positive and negative emotion. When people experience a lot of intense negative emotion, and half the population is above the median in negative emotionality, it's just the way it is. Most strivers are above average on negative emotionality. Management of negative emotion requires protocols and discipline. It requires actually active management, not elimination. Again, one of the things that we've done in the self-care revolution is telling people that there's something wrong with their sadness and anxiety.

[00:17:22] So number one is having discipline and protocol in your life that is actually all about self-management. So for me that's really, really important and I've talked about and written about this an awful lot. It's gotten some attention, as a matter of fact, and I have a morning protocol and an evening protocol. The morning protocol is to manage negative affect and to increase productivity. And the evening protocol is to manage negative affect and enhance sleep. And that's one of the things that our practice very assiduously and very seriously. 

[00:17:51] Matt Abrahams: And I encourage people to listen to your show, or to read your writings, to learn about your protocol. I have tried to mirror some of it. The 4:00 AM waking up is a little hard, but the exercising in the morning, I have certainly adopted.

[00:18:02] Arthur Brooks: Yeah, you don't make the perfect the enemy of the good, and I recommend that people actually figure out their own protocols. I just give mine as an exemplar of a place maybe to start. 

[00:18:10] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. And finding something that you can live with and do repeatedly is really helpful. Alright, you are the first guest I've ever done this with. I've had it done for me and I found it really insightful. So I'm gonna provide you pairs of choices, and I'd like you to quickly choose the one that you gravitate towards most. So if I were to say summer or winter, you would say, 

[00:18:28] Arthur Brooks: Winter. 

[00:18:28] Matt Abrahams: Okay. And then after I give a few of these, I'm gonna pick one to ask you a little bit more of. So I've got a couple pairings. Ready to go? 

[00:18:34] Arthur Brooks: Ready. 

[00:18:35] Matt Abrahams: Zoo or aquarium? 

[00:18:37] Arthur Brooks: Zoo. 

[00:18:37] Matt Abrahams: Suitcase or backpack? 

[00:18:39] Arthur Brooks: Suitcase. 

[00:18:40] Matt Abrahams: Theater or library?

[00:18:42] Arthur Brooks: Theater.

[00:18:43] Matt Abrahams: Time or money? 

[00:18:44] Arthur Brooks: Time. 

[00:18:45] Matt Abrahams: People or ideas?

[00:18:47] Arthur Brooks: People.

[00:18:48] Matt Abrahams: Point it out or let it go?

[00:18:50] Arthur Brooks: Let it go.

[00:18:51] Matt Abrahams: Tell me about that last one. 

[00:18:53] Arthur Brooks: So, my natural tendency is to point it out, but Matt, I've been married 34 years and I've found that pointing it out does not give me the best possible life. And so appropriate self-management means that my tendency is to point it out, but my choice is to let it go and life is a lot better usually. 

[00:19:12] Matt Abrahams: My answer to that is exactly the same. I think part of our profession has pointed out, and yet part of our peacefulness in our life might be let it go. Arthur, you have helped us rethink many things, from the meaning of in our life to how we can strive for happiness, and just in general how we can create protocols to help ourselves. Thank you for your time and thank you for revisiting us and best of luck on your new book. 

[00:19:34] Arthur Brooks: Thank you, Matt. I appreciate it so much. Thank you for your work and all you're bringing to the world outside of the classroom and to, to the whole world through this show. I love it. 

[00:19:44] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about communication and meaning, please listen to our miniseries on happiness and wellbeing. Those are episodes 179 through 182. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to the Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider joining our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning community for Ask Matt Anythings, AI coach Matt, learning quests, book talks, and more at fastersmarter.io/learning. That's fastersmarter.io/learning.