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

Summary

作为人类并不容易，与动物不同的是，我们出生后没有明确的指引。虽然父母、导师会提供一些帮助，但大部分时间我们是独自面对生活的迷茫与压力。找到人生目标后，一切都有了方向，精力也更加集中。我们每个人都独特，找到这种独特性是关键，它能引导我们形成职业生涯，并带来持续的热情和动力。无论是来自于兴趣或是厌恶的情感，都能推动我们去发掘内心深处真正的渴望，激发学习与成长的动力，让我们更接近生命的本质与意义。

Takeaways

• 😀 人类比动物复杂，因为没有明确的生活方向。
• 💡 找到人生目标后，所有事情都会有方向和目的。
• 🚀 追求人生任务时，生活会变得充实和兴奋。
• 🧭 人生的内在雷达可以帮助我们过滤干扰和分心。
• 👶 每个人出生时都是独一无二的，这种独特性是力量的源泉。
• 🌱 孩童时期的兴趣和倾向是发现自我使命的线索。
• 📚 加德纳的五种智能理论指出，不同人有不同的智力倾向。
• 🧠 情绪参与能加速学习，有助于更快掌握新知识。
• 🛤️ 即使在人生迷茫时，通过挖掘童年的兴趣，可以重新找到方向。
• 🔄 恨和爱都能激励我们，但更重要的是找到热爱的事物，以获得持久的动力。

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Outlines

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Keywords

💡人生任务

人生任务是视频的核心概念，指每个人在生活中需要找到的目标或使命。一旦找到了这个任务，生活的方向就变得明确，精力也更集中。视频中强调，找到人生任务后，能让人充满动力，即便面对无聊的任务，也能有坚持的力量。

💡内在雷达

内在雷达是比喻每个人内心中的一种指南，帮助我们在面对人生的众多选择时找到方向。当一个人找到人生任务后，这个内在雷达会帮助他过滤掉生活中的干扰，集中精力追求重要的目标。

💡童年记忆

童年记忆在视频中被描述为人们寻找人生任务的关键线索。小时候的兴趣和爱好，往往是一个人天赋的最初表现。视频提到，随着年龄的增长，这种童年的声音会被老师、家长和社会的声音取代，使人迷失自我。

💡五种智力

五种智力是指哈佛大学教授霍华德·加德纳提出的多元智能理论，涵盖语言智力、逻辑-数学智力、身体-运动智力、社会智力等。视频强调，每个人的大脑都倾向于某一种或几种智力，而找到这方面的倾向有助于确定人生的方向。

💡情感参与

情感参与指当一个人对某件事有深厚的情感连接时，他会更专注、更有动力去学习和追求。视频中强调了情感参与在学习过程中的重要性，它使得学习变得更快更有效，能帮助人们克服枯燥和困难。

💡独特性

每个人的独特性是视频中反复提到的概念，指的是每个人的基因和经历都是独一无二的，应该珍惜和挖掘这种独特性。找到自己的独特性并将其转化为职业道路，是视频中的重要主题。

💡探索过程

探索过程指的是发现人生任务和个人天赋的漫长旅程。视频提到，这不是一个可以在短时间内解决的问题，而是需要不断的尝试和探索。通过反复挖掘童年记忆和人生经历，人们可以慢慢找到自己的方向。

💡学科倾向

学科倾向指每个人在童年时期对某些领域（如数学、语言、运动等）自然产生的兴趣和能力。视频中提到，一旦发现了这种倾向，便应该顺应它，因为这是个人力量的源泉。

💡外界干扰

外界干扰指来自家长、老师或社会的声音，这些声音往往会使人忽略自己的内在声音。视频中描述，随着年龄增长，外界的影响变得越来越强烈，最终让人失去对自我天赋的觉察。

💡内在声音

内在声音是指人们内心深处的喜好和厌恶，这种声音在儿童时期尤为明显。视频提到，这种内在声音可以引导人们走向他们最自然的天赋领域，但随着外界干扰的增多，这种声音往往会被淹没。

Highlights

Understanding the challenge of being human: We’re born without clear direction, unlike animals. Finding purpose is difficult but crucial for a fulfilling life.

Life’s task: Once you find your life’s task, your energy is focused, giving everything a sense of direction and purpose.

The power of uniqueness: Every individual’s DNA and life experience is unique, and discovering and using that uniqueness is key to personal power.

Impulse voices: As children, we have internal voices guiding us to what we love and hate. Recognizing these early interests can point toward our natural inclinations.

Howard Gardner’s Five Frames of Mind: Intelligence is not just intellectual but can be verbal, mathematical, kinetic, or social. Finding which type dominates you can lead to your true power.

The danger of losing your inner voice: Over time, external influences drown out your inner voice, making it harder to discover who you truly are.

Making choices for money: Many choose careers for financial security, which can lead to a disconnect between work and emotional satisfaction.

Emotional engagement accelerates learning: When you're emotionally engaged in a subject, you learn faster and more deeply.

Going back to childhood: To find your life’s task, look back to childhood interests and emotional experiences.

Sense of direction: Finding your task doesn’t mean narrowing down to a specific job but gives you a general direction and framework.

The importance of visceral emotions: Purpose is not just an intellectual pursuit but a visceral, physical experience that aligns your actions with your emotions.

The role of hate: Disliking certain fields or environments can also help guide you towards your true path by pushing you away from things that don’t resonate.

Finding joy in repetition: When you love what you do, even tedious tasks can become bearable, as you’re connected emotionally to the bigger goal.

Negative experiences can shape your path: Disliking certain jobs or environments can be as formative as loving them, as they push you toward your unique journey.

Learning and adaptation are driven by agitation: Agitation and the release of neurochemicals signal the brain to adapt and rewire itself to overcome challenges.

Love and frustration both fuel purpose: Emotional engagement in what we love or even what frustrates us can become key motivators for finding our purpose and driving change.

Transcripts

Being a human being is not easy as opposed to an animal

because we're born and nobody gives us like a direction.

Our parents might be a little bit,

our college teachers, et cetera, 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 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 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 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 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

'cause 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 these 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 in 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

'cause 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 'cause 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.

Whereas, so most of us, we don't have a need really

to learn this subject.

We're half, 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, whoa, all of 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, right?

Or an amphibian. 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,

whereas 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, right?

And this is really cool, and a bunch of these other things,

like these flying things,

that 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. Yeah, no surprise 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 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 an activation state created within me,

like I got to 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 probably, 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 that things are easy, everything clicks together,

there's a delight.

Not everything is going to be delightful,

there's going to be tedium involved,

there's going to 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 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 going to be nature,

it's going to be DNA. For sure.

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, 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,

a gene for that interest, you know?

So you're going to 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 immediate 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,

'cause 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, you know,

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, you know, 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,

you know, 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.

Of course.

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