How to Set the Right Goals in Life

How do you make really good goals that will lead you to more purpose? More meaning and thus more happiness in your life now You've probably heard people use purpose and meaning synonymously purpose and meaning of the same thing They're not they're not synonyms despite which you actually might find in the Miriam Webster dictionary Purpose is an answer to the question. Why am I doing what I'm doing? Where am I going with my life? Others opinions are not the right thing to motivate you. I want other people to think I'm cool That's the fast way to get depressed my friends. How should you choose proxy goals in life that will help you Find more purpose and I want to give you the four rules for doing it based in science Hey friends. Welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about the science of love and happiness How you can get more of those things and how you can bring more of those things to other people? This is your first time watching well Thank you and if it's the the the 20 something time that you're watching I appreciate that and off a lot I hope you're enjoying the show and learning a lot I hope you're sharing these ideas with other people because that's really what my mission is all about not just to be a teacher of the science of happiness But to create a lot of teachers of the science of happiness. That's how we can have leverage and and make the world a better place Today I want to talk to you about your goals in life How do you make really good goals that will lead you to more purpose? More meaning and thus more happiness in your life I want to tell you today about the amazing science of setting goals and if you do it right and stay away from if you problems Your life can really change now as always if you have some feedback on this Please do write to me office hours at orthobricks.com. That's the email address or or whatever you've got on your mind Leave it in the comments wherever you're watching or listening to this show and and we watch those regularly and and and we'll Feed back and perhaps we'll actually look at your question at the end of one of the episodes We usually take two or three questions at the end of each episode So please do keep feeding back. Please keep giving us your thoughts Give us your criticisms give us all of it and make sure that you like and subscribe because that's what makes the algorithms Smile on us and deliver this information to more people and it's how we can lift other people up as well Hey friends a lot of you know that I keep a very high protein diet That's important for me in my 60s because I want to maintain a good level of muscle protein synthesis And I don't always have time to eat as much protein as I want from whole foods That's the ideal, but it's just not manageable all the time for that reason. 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That's why I'm doing it and it's what I'm carrying when I'm on the road So head over to davidprotein.com/Arthur. They got a special offer for you If you buy four cartons, they'll give you the fifth carton for free You're gonna love that and you can also find David protein in stores by looking for the store locator. So enjoy Well, let's get on to the main act today, which again is your goals in life Why do goals matter and and to answer this question we have to go back to the basic arithmetic of happiness? If you've been a long time watcher of the show while you haven't been a long time watcher or listener of the show because it hasn't been on that long But if you've been watching and listening for the beginning you know that happiness is is kind of like a meal with three macro nutrients It has three component parts. The three macro nutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of enjoyment. The pursuit of satisfying accomplishments and achievements and the pursuit of the why of your existence The meaning of your life. Those are the three things I work with people on and and I have all kinds of diagnostic tools go to my website Or the bricks.com You'll actually find a bunch of surveys that you can take that shows you where you're strong and weak You can take something called the that the happiness scale right on my website and it'll tell you where you need more work Do you need to be thinking more about enjoying your life more about your satisfaction and your accomplishments or more about the meaning of life? You can find out more about that now by far the biggest crisis that we have in happiness today is meaning and that's what I've been writing about for the past five years The crisis of meaning explains the explosion I believe of depression and anxiety especially for people under 35 years old So let's define meaning we're getting toward goals Meaning it's a combination of coherence and significance and purpose coherence is why things happen the way that they do If you don't know why things happen the way they do or you believe that things don't have a reason for happening You're going to struggle with the meaning of your life. Now, think about it this way coherence is the answer to the question why do things happen and people answer that in a lot of different ways Some people rely on their religious beliefs about why things happen the way they do the hand of God For example, some people turn to science the laws of nature for example, some people mix those two things I'm a traditionally religious person and I have a background in science religion in science together Some people who really struggle with this they they explain why things happen the way they do coherence in life with conspiracy theories people who down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories typically is because they're seeking coherence And they're seeking coherence because they want more meaning when somebody's talking to you about every kind of crazy conspiracy theory You can be dead sure that the real problem is that they're lacking a sense of meaning in their lives Okay, that's the first part is coherence the second element of meaning the meaning of life Which is so important to happiness is significance. Why does my life matter another reason that people lack meaning in their life It's because they don't have good love relationships. They don't have a good relationship with their family For example, they don't have close friendships and and when people are less likely to get married and have kids and people are more likely to say Nobody knows me. Well, well, they're going to feel less significant to other people and that's going to Compromise their sense of meaning and make them feel less happy and that explains a lot of what we see today But the last element is what I want to talk about for meaning which is purpose Now you've probably heard people use purpose and meaning synonymously purpose and meaning of the same thing They're not they're not synonyms despite which you actually might find in the Miriam Webster dictionary Purpose is an element of meaning. Let me define purpose Purpose is an answer to the question. What are my goals in direction in life? And then of course leads to the word I just said which is goals if you want to have a sense of purpose You need to have goals things that you're moving toward and why do you need that because you need to know if you're making progress in your life That's the truth and and everybody knows it in their own experiences And so when people don't have goals they feel like they're aimless They're doing a random walk and their life they're going in circles and and that's horrible for Purpose it it it basically eviscerates purpose Which means that you don't have meaning and if you don't have meaning you're not going to have happiness Goals are a central ingredient and having a happier life So that leads to the big question today Maybe you've asked yourself what are the goals that I should actually adopt? How do I understand how to get the right goals because you know You can get all kinds of goals and if you get the wrong goals, you're going to go the wrong direction That's not so good for purpose either and you've seen a lot of people do that. Haven't you? So a vibe So how can you get the goals that science shows and common sense actually validates will lead you in the right direction So you can have a happier life. That's what we really want to talk about today That's the question that we're talking about now when we talk about big goals big goals sometimes people They get kind of mystical about it and they'll invoke these extraordinary stories A people who get just called almost like the voice of God I mean for the longest time people would talk about this in the incredible story of saint Teresa mother Teresa of Calcutta Who is an amazing figure? I mean almost everybody knows the story of mother Teresa She was an Albanian None who at the age of 36 had this call from God to go serve the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta Now she had already gotten this call to religious life to be a nun But then she got what she believed was a call within a call. That's what she called it the call within a call Really from God directly she believed to to serve the poorest of the poor which she did Until she was in her 90s and and and she did it in almost total obscurity Until a journalist by the name of Malcolm Muggeridge a British journalist discovered her and wrote about her and then did a documentary film and this she became super world famous even winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 That calling that call that she felt that that those goals that were bestowed on her by By the voice of the divine That was sort of the gold standard on how to get your goals, right? But I got news for you You're probably not mother Teresa and neither am I we need a more tangible strategy for finding our purpose by finding the right set of goals So that's what I really want to talk about Now here's the first thing to keep in mind you can't find your purpose directly and the reason is because purpose in life Is not something that you you see right in front of you you can kind of define it But you have to pursue goals that are really tangible that are what we call proxy goals for your intangible purpose in life Now proxy goals mean that they're a proxy for the thing you're really looking for but they're really tangible and you can see them Here's how to think about this you all know the story of the three wise men That are going toward Bethlehem to find the baby Jesus even if you're not religious You're not a Christian or anything like that. You know the story of the three wise men from the east You know that they were following the star of Bethlehem the star of the sky They're going toward the star of the sky because they had been promised that it sits over the Christ child and Bethlehem over the stable And if they just go to the star and they keep following it they will find what they're really really looking for Your purpose is the stable in Bethlehem but you can't see it directly especially from a couple of countries over What you can see is the star which is in the sky now the the three wise men they didn't want the star They were following the star because they thought it was a proxy goal for the thing that they really wanted Which was the stable now. I'm not going to belabor this point But you get the point that I'm trying to make we're all looking for our stars of Bethlehem But it's not the star per se big mistake the people make. I think these are my goals And so I'm going to be looking for these goals and when I get those goals per se it's going to be really really great That's not right that becomes an actual problem as a matter of fact Then I'm going to talk about that here in a second But the truth is that that if we get the right proxy goals they will be sitting over the purpose that we seek Now what we want to answer is what are the characteristics of these proxy goals You see I'm backing up and backing up so I can get to these really really practical considerations That's what I'm trying to do here. How do you find the right proxies that are most likely to sit over your particular purpose That's what I want to talk about here. Let's first start off by By by talking about what great goals and life proxy goals are and and by the way Let's be more tangible in the star of Bethlehem in your life when you were in high school You were trying to get maybe I was trying to get good grades, right? You were probably if you're watching office hours You're probably kind of a striver and so you were trying to get good grades It wasn't literally the letters on your report card That's not what you were actually trying to get there was some purpose behind it Which was having a better future a better trajectory and and that the proxy goal of the good report card was kind of the star sitting over the stable Lots and lots of things work this way that you've actually done in your in your life For example, a certain number in your bank account for example a certain number of internet followers It's not the internet. It's not the social media followers per se. It's what that actually represents That is more related to your purpose But you know where I'm going with this which is that if you have the wrong proxy goals They're not going to be sitting over the stable. Are they? You know, it's actually perfectly possible that the three wise men from the east would be following a star that was sitting somewhere over the water And too bad wrong goals wrong goals wrong purpose wrong purpose no meaning no meaning No happiness So it really starts with having to write proxy goals now. What do we know about what you should set as your Very tangible goals in your career and your love life and your and your ambitions and all of that What do great goals look like now to begin with here's one thing that actually shows up in the literature again and again and again And this is what psychologists call self-concordants now once again This is what we always do in academia You take a simple idea and you put fancy words around it and you get tenure Okay, so self-concordants means that that these Proxy goals align with your internal values. This is really important I mean, this is a very important idea actually from from the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung psychiatrist Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung Who is a partner in kind of a protege of Freud until they broke apart and and and the idea of one of the great ideas of happiness of Carl Jung Was this concept that that you need to know your values and then you need to live up to your values So there's two reasons people are unhappy young thought number one is they don't know what they believe Or number two they know what they believe, but they're not living up to those beliefs They're not living up to those values and we see this around us all the time good like I don't know I don't know what right and wrong are or or I do know but I'm I'm I know right but I'm living wrong Those are the two great recipes for Jung for being unhappy. Okay, back to proxy goals Proxy goals these things that you're looking for in your life these things you're trying to achieve in your life the tangible things You can touch you're trying to get Those things really need to align with your values and they need to align with your interests that self-concordants Let's start with not the best practices doing that. Let's start with the worst practices in doing that Let's talk about the mistakes the people make and then I want to talk about what you actually need to do the rules for finding the right Proxy goals for you the things that you want to get that will actually lead you to where you want to be in your life Bad goals have free basic characteristics in common and what am I basing this on? I'm basing this on a big literature and social psychology and behavioral social science That shows that when people are are looking for goals that have these characteristics they tend to get less happy not happier That's a dead giveaway you're going in the wrong direction Okay, that's how I'm basing this and I'll put this stuff into the show notes as I always do if you're if you're a nerd like I am For actually looking at the underlying scientific literature go to the show notes. You're always going to find what you're looking for Number one number one characteristic of a bad goal for you is what's called an extrinsic motivation Once again fancy way of saying something pretty simple an extrinsic motivation is one in which you're being motivated by outside forces and not by inherent internal satisfaction So there's two kinds of motivations in life for things that you do extrinsic these are things from the outside and intrinsic things that are really Internally motivating to you Love and happiness is an intrinsic motivation money and power is an extrinsic motivation Now there's tons of literature on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivations and and it couldn't be clear There's a really important study that came out of the University of Rochester In which they were looking at graduating seniors and they asked what are your goals for success in the next couple of years About half of the students said they had extrinsic motivations I want you know make more money than my peers. I want to you know I want to get ahead in the world's eyes The other half said I had intrinsic motivations. I want to have better relationships. I want to have closer friendships I want to stay close to my family. Well it turns out almost everybody gets what they're what they're gunning for Careful with your goals Because you're going to get your heart's desire probably at least your proxy heart's desire people who had extrinsic goals Money and power were significantly less happy than intrinsic goals Love Relationships So that's really what I'm talking about here the first big mistake in your goal setting your proxy goal setting It's going to take you toward your purpose in life Take you toward your calling is looking for extrinsic stuff is looking for the world's adulation about the opinions of others as opposed to actually how you feel Let me give you a really easy example of this Let's say you've got a goal in your New Year's resolution of wanting to lose weight Okay, a lot of people want to lose weight and they say has come January first I'm going to hit the gym every day and I'm going to eat higher protein and more fiber and I'm going to lose a bunch of weight. There are two reasons for this two kinds of motivations extrinsic and intrinsic the extrinsic motivation is I want people that think I look nice and a bathing suit The intrinsic motivation is I want to feel better. I want to be around when I so I can see my grandkids for example in other words one intrinsically is about love and how the satisfaction that you inherently get and the other is the opinions of other people the way that they look at your body Now you know already what I'm talking about because the literature clearly shows us that if you're extrinsically motivated in the proxy goal which is seeing the scale go down And again the problem isn't that the numbers on the scale are changing that's a proxy goal for what you're looking at If it's all extrinsic for the you know the two hours that somebody's going to see you around the pool next July That's a pretty crummy goal your nearest resolution is most likely going to fail But also you're just going to be less happy with that That's a less satisfying goal that leads to less life satisfaction than you otherwise have As a matter of fact This really leads to this whole truth which is that others opinions are not the right thing to motivate you you shouldn't be motivated by other people's opinions because those are extrinsic goals I want other people to think I'm cool that's the fast way to get depressed my friends it really is And so that's what I want you to consider and I'm going to come back to this When we get to that some other characteristics of lousy proxy goals Number one is extrinsic they should be intrinsic Okay, number two here's another kind of bad goal It's based on avoidance now this is another social science concept And again, I'll put really interesting stuff in the show notes A good paper I'm going to put in from early who's In from 2023 evaluation of happiness through goal setting training In psychological reports fantastic article that goes over a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here Avoidance goals are those based on negative motivations. I don't want something to happen Versus what we call approach goals and it makes sense. I'm avoiding something negative Versus I'm approaching something positive. Approach goals are looking for something that you want Versus avoiding something that you don't want. Avoidance goals they tend not to be successful You're unlikely to attain them and even if you do you're not going to like the result Those aren't good proxy goals. They're not going to get you to something that gives you a sense of purpose A sense of meaning in your life There's a lot of things that we don't like about our future But if we're motivated by those goals per se and trying to become successful It's a kind of a depressing way to live So for example, you say I want to get a good job out of college That the approach reason for that goal would be because You know, I want to do something meaningful that's rewarding to me And I want to be able to support my family going forward And so getting a good job out of college actually helps me to To live those positive dreams. The avoidance version of that is I don't want to be unemployed I don't want to be living in my mom's basement And so you see how avoidance and approach are really related to each other Some people really tend toward avoidance motivation And if that's you, you got to work on this Because if you set up a bunch of proxy goals for what you're trying to do in life Then your purpose in life is avoiding stuff Is not having stuff happen to you in your life And I'm sorry, that's not the secret of happiness as you already know, and this is a Certainly, I have it that we need to break that a lot of people need to break Why do I want to get more education? Well, because I want to learn a bunch of cool stuff And I want to set myself up to be able to use it in in service of others Verses, I want to get a good education because I don't want to be a total loser for the rest of my life Approach versus avoidance who get that Okay, so second bad set of proxy goals are based on avoidance The third problem, and maybe the biggest problem, which is kind of like the first one But you'll see a slightly different, is goals that are positional Positional goals are those based really on the opinion of other people Which is an extrinsic kind of motivation, but it's a special kind of extrinsic motivation Positional goals are that in which your view of yourself is based on what other people think When they look at you, you can't live this way That's what we call social comparison and there's an old belief, I don't know if it's true It's credited to President Theodore Roosevelt He said, they say, that social comparison is the thief of joy It's true, isn't it? I bet every single one of you have felt that That if a folly, I could just not care what other people think of me Well, actually, you don't want that either We are still evolved to be a kin-based species living in a hierarchical grouping of people A band is what anthropologists call us In a place to see, we live in groups of a bands of 30 to 50 individuals And they were hierarchically based and you want to rise in the hierarchy Because you're more likely to get food and mates, etc You're born this way, you're born with these motivations You were evolved to feel these things And so the result of that is that you actually care what other people think That's a normal thing Furthermore, you don't want to actually go around hurting people or offending people And that's a good motivation to be sure But to be really motivated to have proxy goals for your success And life to find your purpose in the basis And what some stranger thinks about you Or for that matter what a friend thinks about you That's a really terrible way to live if you actually want to be happy Yet as so much comes out of this, by the way And at some point, I'll do a whole social comparison episode Because it's so interesting what the researchers find on this, for example One of the best ways for you to enjoy your vacation left Less is to take pictures, a kid you're not Why? Because most of the time these days people are taking pictures Not to enjoy it later Which is by the way dubious on his face Because if you're taking pictures right now So that you can enjoy your vacation in the future When right now will be in the past That time travel is making it so you don't enjoy this moment You're actually not alive right now when you're doing that That's bad enough, but it's even worse in modern times When you're taking pictures of your vacation Why? Because you want to post them to social media Why do you want to post your vacation and fix this social media So people look at and go, oh Well, that's awesome You want somebody to have a high opinion of you Or maybe even to envy you That's all positional in your motivation That's a proxy goal that's positional That's not going to lead you to a greater sense of direction and life And purpose that's constructive that's nutritious And so therefore you're not going to get the sense of meaning that you seek But these are the things to avoid Don't do extrinsic stuff Don't do avoidance stuff And don't do positional stuff is what it comes down to That's those are the things to avoid Now of course you need me to tell you what to do As opposed to what not to do So that's what I want to talk about now What should you do? How should you choose proxy goals in life That will help you find more purpose And I want to give you the four rules for doing it based in science Here are the four rules for you to set your goals Now I hope you're setting goals There's tons of research out there That shows that when students have very very specific goals About their studies About their careers About their jobs About their relationships That college students Because he always do these studies on college students Because they'll do anything for 20 bucks That when students have goals Very tangible goals They do better in life Provided that they that they follow the rules So here's the rules Rule number one Focus on people not things Remember the intrinsic goals that we were talking of before They're sort of the the world's idols And you've played this game with me a bunch of times Have you been watching this show? Remember we've got a game called What's My Idol This comes from the incredible work of Optomas Aquinas, the medieval philosopher Catholic saint who who took the words of Aristotle Took the works of Aristotle and brought them to this medieval audience And so that's the reason that we more or less That many people believe that we read Aristotle today Because of Thomas Aquinas And he believed that we that what we really want Or what we're really motivated for is God Now again, agree or disagree But that comes from an ancient body of thought St. Augustine whom Thomas Aquinas He was a thousand almost a thousand years later Than St. Augustine 900 years later But St. Augustine had this very very famous quote that you may have heard The very beginning of his book, The Confessions He said you made us for yourself, O Lord And our hearts are restless Until they rest in you In other words, we're not going to find satisfaction According to Augustine Until we find the divine Okay now Again, if you're not religious Don't be stuck on that What they're what he's really talking about here In the in the global sense Even beyond theology Is that we need a virtuous purpose That won't give us a sense of metaphysical meaning And to do that we got to have the right goals We got to have the right things That we can actually see in touch in life That's what they're really talking about Aquinas urged us to be very careful About the things versus the people The things or he put them in four categories Money, power, pleasure, fame Those are the four idols And if you've been watching the show You see me play this with some of my guests on the show What's my idol? It's important for you to know your idol Because that's the proxy goal That will beguile you And send you in the wrong direction According to St. Thomas Aquinas And according to modern behavioral and neuroscience So these guys got it right Back in 1265 And we're just catching up as scientists in the year 2025 Which is great Because it all kind of hangs together You can triangulate on these ideas In a really productive way So number one, focus on people and love Not on things Happiness, my friends, is love And everything I talk about the show It comes down to love It comes down to relationships Love of the divine Love of your friends Love of your family Love romantic love with your spouse Love of the whole world To the way that you earn your daily bread Happiness is love Happiness And through love is always intrinsic Never extrinsic It's always approach-motivated Never avoidance-motivated And it's non-positional You can have more love I can have more love It's not the kind of thing where Where you're having love in your life Because you want somebody to envy you for your love Because that's the reason you have it It's actually not love Is it? So that's number one Is based on love Two, rule number two Your best proxy goals in life The things you can see in touch At least sitting over the stable in Bethlehem Sitting over your purpose These depend on your inner direction This is sort of related to this positional idea Your inner direction Your calling What you are meant to do Now I know you're asking the question right now Like, Brooks, how do I find it? How do I find this inner direction? How do I find this calling? And the answer is You need to be quiet To find it, to find your inner direction The biggest militating force against inner direction Know what it is? It's your device We have gotten And I've talked about this a hundred times on the show already I'll talk about it seven billion times more If I have a long run In this podcast We distract ourselves relentlessly We have these anti-boredom devices Because we don't like to be alone with ourselves We don't like to be alone in our heads But the result of that is that we don't have an inner stillness We have all kinds of weird questions About purpose and meaning That your grandparents never had Your grandparents never said Hey, you know, I had a huge panic attack behind the mule today And there's a reason for that The reason for that is that their life might have looked kind of boring But they had the inner stillness that their brains needed That their brains were designed to have As such, there's a kind of an irony, isn't it? That your grandparents, your great-grandparents Their lives were from moment to moment Actually, actually kind of boring But their lives weren't boring at all And for a lot of young people today Moment to moment, there's never any boredom But their lives overall are kind of boring You ever wonder why we have that irony? This is why The reason is because we don't have the stillness We don't have the peace And in so wiping that out We miss the inner direction We miss the still small voice That actually helps us understand What it is that we're looking for The things that actually They look like a faithful star of Bethlehem They come to you when You're called deep down How do you do it? Well, silence And fewer devices to be sure But prayer And meditation Inserts not of A solution to a problem, a technical problem But a sense of understanding Now, there's more coming on this If I'm sounding a little bit vague I promise I'm not going to be vague forever Because this is what I've been writing about most intensively And I'm going to have whole shows on this On finding your inner direction So stay tuned That's what Mother Teresa found, by the way Well, Mother Teresa called about, talked about the call And the call, well, the first call came because That she had in prayer and meditation Desirmed that she was to be To have a religious vocation to become a nun And the second one came when she discerned some more That it wasn't just enough to be a nun for her That she needed to go to serve the poorest of the poor Because she believed that the poorest of the poor And Calcutta were the face of Jesus Now, how did she find that? She didn't find that by, you know, going online I mean, there wasn't online in those days She did that by spending a bunch of time in prayer I mean, hours and hours and hours and weeks and months And years in prayer Well, she found her inner direction And you can do that too Number three is that the process of putting goals together And the process of approaching your goals Remember, approach goals, not avoidance goals The process of approaching your goals That should be wonderful too You should be super into the journey toward your goals In other words, the wise men going toward Bethlehem They needed to really have a great old time on that trip You're one of the wise men or women And you need to have a good time on that trip Because it's a to find a good proxy goal It's when you actually enjoy pursuing It's a bitter goal that you hate pursuing all the time And I see people like this all the time look as specialized in you, strivers And how many people that talk to are like they don't like school But they stay in school for a super long time Getting the best possible grades that they can grinding it And grinding it and grinding it That's a sign of the wrong proxy goals If the journey toward the goal isn't enjoyable If it isn't inherently satisfying If it isn't actually part of the goal itself That's a problem And that's a sign that you've got You've got some problems in the goal itself Do you like the journey? And by the way, you kind of enjoy the journey Because arrival, even at the goal itself, isn't the source of ultimate life satisfaction I've written a lot and talked a lot about the arrival fallacy The arrival fallacy is that in which you think that since progress is so awesome That when you get to a particular goal, you'll be happy for the rest of your life That's wrong, emotions don't work that way You've heard me talk about how the limbic system of the brain works Emotions are transient, they're there to give you alarms and signals about positive and negative things They're going to help you or hurt you It's important to understand that emotions are not there So that when you hit a goal, you'll just be happy for the rest of your life No, no, that's not going to be it at all And people who don't understand that For example, I've met a lot of professional and really skilled amateur athletes And they suffer in their training And it's not an enjoyable suffer in any way They don't like the journey But they think that if they get the Olympic goal, it's going to be great And then they do and they fall into a bad funk They fall into a clinical depression It's very common that Olympic gold medalists suffer from a depression After they win their Olympic gold Why? Because they suffered from the arrival fallacy They thought when they arrived at the goal that everything was going to be great You better enjoy the journey as well and that's part three Here's the fourth You need to stay flexible It's funny because people get dogmatically attached to particular goals Proxy goals to be sure Because they think that since my meaning doesn't change So therefore my purpose doesn't change And my purpose doesn't change My goals don't change And they get so stuck on the goals themselves to get so dogmatically Almost religiously attached to the goals But they haven't figured out that goals change over the course of your life My goals have changed a ton You know, early on, all the way through my 20s My big goal was to become the best possible classical French horn player I could be And that's how I made my living I played in the Barcelona City Orchestra which was great, except when it wasn't And that was my goal to be a really great French horn player Because I thought that that was a proxy goal for my purpose in life And then I figured out that that had to come anachronistic It was overtaken by psychological and family events And my beloved wife Esther She helped me understand that there are other things that I could do And other goals I needed to pursue And so I went to school, I went to college And then I went and got my PhD And then my proxy goal was to get my PhD and become an academic Like my dad and like my grandfather The family business as it were And then over the next 10 years my proxy goals toward greater purpose Were all about being a really good teacher and really good researcher And then I left that and I ran a company for 10 years And then I left that and I started doing what I'm doing Now my proxy goals are not the same and you need to stay flexible Because life circumstances and your interests are actually going to change Is your purpose in life going to change? I hope your mission doesn't change very much at all actually But the way that you get to it is going to change Sometimes you're in a plane, sometimes you're in a car Sometimes you're in a boat, sometimes you're going around about And you have to stay flexible If you don't stay flexible, you'll dogmatically go in a particular direction And it might get where you want to go in it Might not All right, now I hope that's useful But let me just kind of go over it one more time And what the rules actually are You're setting your goals in life Yeah, the stuff you can see in touch That is to say In 10 years I want to see x, y, and z And to do that in five years I need a, b, and c And to do that in one year I need one, two, and three Good, set those goals Absolutely set those goals But set those goals around the following parameters They're based on love Not stuff Number two, they're based on your inner direction Which you're getting by paying attention to the still small voice From meditation or prayer or whatever method works for you Three, the journey toward those goals is a happy one If you're really enjoying it along the way And last but not least You're staying flexible because those things actually need to change Over the course of your life Because if you're a healthy person you're going to change as well I hope this has been useful And your goal setting exercise Let's take a few audience questions before we close This one's coming in for YouTube This is a hard address at L-Y-L-Y hyphen M-D-2-Q-K I should have named one of my kids that Comparing eating heavy protein breakfast With fasting without breakfast And this is going back to my morning protocol Probably that was a popular show Comparing eating heavy protein breakfast And fasting without breakfast Which one is better to increase my happiness? The answer is yes It really depends on you And that's why I talk about my morning protocol You got to find yours And the way to do that is treating your life like a laboratory You need to experiment You need to keep data You need to pay attention There's a way that that works It really depends on who you are So for me it's a high protein breakfast About three hours after I wake up A big bowl is a 60 to 70 grams of protein Three hours after I wake up My friend Tim Ferris, whose podcast they do from time to time He likes to skip eating all the way into lunch every day And he's often in ketosis So he's doing a lot of intermittent fasting And it makes him feel phenomenal and happier than it was And we have different physiology So you got to figure out your own way Experiment on yourself This is from Joe Calvi This came in over email At the beginning of your podcast You say it's your mission to teach us To teach others to be happier As a parent How can we teach our kids to be happier Well, you got to yell at them and wag your finger I'm kidding The answer is pretty simple You model it Kids are funny I mean, I can go to my students And tell them stuff I can never tell my adult kids We're the same age And I tell my students Like, here's what you really ought to do My students would be like, yeah, it's awesome Good, thanks professor I tell my kids that And like, yeah, dad Why? Because of the nature of the relationship I mean, my kids love me And my students don't love me Obviously in the same way And yet there's this distance That actually creates kind of an authority That you don't have with your children necessarily And so when you're teaching your kids You model it The most important thing that you can do And there's a lot of research on this That shows that it almost doesn't matter what you tell your kids All that matters is what they see Model it for your kids If they're seeing you practicing good happiness hygiene Especially if they're seeing you struggle And how you deal with your struggle They won't forget that And it might not be absorbed in 15 minutes It might take 15 years But trust me, I've seen this And there's an extraordinary thing The payoff is unbelievably satisfying But what that means is You need when it comes to your happiness And the pursuit of your happiness You need to be the person you want your kids to become Because you are Third, this comes from Haya And the source was actually a live event Graduating from school Feels like my first real life crossroads How do I navigate it while staying happy Here's the answer Times between Equilibria Colleges in equilibrium Your new city and your new job is in equilibrium The time between those things is called Liminality for psychologists It's a liminal space Liminality just means Between And those times are really really uncomfortable Because they're really uncertain But what you find in the research Is that that's where the greatest creativity and growth occurs Is when you're between things Those times are super super sacred They're unbelievably productive times in your life Don't waste them And so what that means is That when you understand this You need to lean into the discomfort of uncertainty That's your job When you're between things You're going to be between things And there's a tendency to say Like, let me get rid of the uncertainty As quickly as possible And take the first thing that comes along That's always a mistake Because what you're trying to do Is to not miss an opportunity What you're trying to do is to get rid of the liminality And the liminality is your friend The liminality is your teacher That uncertainty is what you really need Lean into that discomfort And do that through knowledge Do that through the knowledge of what we talk about I talk a lot about that in my book from Strength to Strength Which came out in 2022 It's a whole chapter About the time between the tides The tide coming in The time going out It's kind of this magic time between tides When the tide is going out super fast And it's about to change That's called the falling tide That's when the fish bite And you get the metaphor That I'm trying to get across here So think about it that way I've actually made that metaphor In the past episode of the show So thanks for that And good luck I know it's uncomfortable But that's the point We're done for today Let me know your thoughts At [email protected] Please like and subscribe On Spotify, YouTube and Apple Leave a comment I'll read it And follow me on all my socials On Instagram On LinkedIn, on any other platform On all the platforms And order the meaning of your life My new book The meaning of your life Finding purpose in an age of emptiness Or you'll be talking a lot more about that In coming episodes And if you've read it You'll get a lot more out of the episodes When you see them in the first place So I'll see you next week Have a wonderful week Set great goals And bring the fruit of those goals To other people Thanks for watching (gentle music)