🧭The Best Compass
You 2.0: Cultivating Your Purpose - Hidden Brain Podcast
Our life’s work has focused on helping young people navigate school, college, and careers. We’ve worked with students from a diversity of communities and colleges all over the United States and the world. When working with students, no matter their age and stage of life, we keep coming back to the same strategy:
Cultivate a sense of purpose.
There’s a reason Belle founded the Purpose Lab and Tim teaches a course, called “The Purposeful Life”: cultivating a sense of purpose is the best navigational tool we can equip young people with. Purpose isn’t just cliché or a nice thing to have, research shows that it can make us happier, healthier and more successful:
Having a sense of purpose predicts greater net worth and future income.
People with a sense of purpose are more satisfied with their jobs.
Sense of purpose is correlated with better physical health and improved subjective well-being.
Young people with a sense of purpose have better mental health outcomes.
Becoming healthier, happier and more successful? Sign us up for that! But it still begs the question:
What is purpose?
The word is overused and misunderstood. It’s ephemeral and abstract. Universally human, but uniquely personal to each of us. When asked “what’s your purpose?”, most people haven’t a clue. This week we share with you a helpful podcast that can serve as your purpose primer.
In it, Cornell University Professor Anthony Burrow differentiates purpose from goals:
Goals might be thought of as intentions that can be accomplished. Whereas purpose is always in front of you. So for example, a goal of graduating, I can accomplish that goal. I can set a goal of getting a job, but a purpose might be something like being a caring father.
Purpose is always in front of us. It’s a direction we want to head in, not an end destination. It’s an enduring aspiration rather than a specific objective. Purpose represents our intensely personal motives driving our goals. As a result, purpose is invisible to the outside world. Burrow explains:
Purpose is not synonymous with what the world sees in front of you...it’s not something you can crowdsource. It's an internal quest.
If you struggle with purpose, you are not alone: only 1 in 5 young people are actively pursuing a purpose.
Thankfully, Belle’s research team has interviewed those purposeful young people to understand what contributed to their purpose.
This research uncovered four essential factors that purposeful people share in common.
We'll reveal them in the next section.
Get Your Bearings: Do you have goals you are pursuing that are important to you? Why are those goals important? What would happen if you achieved this goal?
🦜Cardinal Direction
The Four P’s Of Purpose - The Journal Of Positive Psychology
We received fantastic feedback from readers on our last post (we love feedback--please keep commenting by replying to this email, or in the newsletter comments).
Some of you pushed back against our idea that “winning isn’t everything.” You keenly speculated that Simone Biles pulled out of the team competition to give herself and her team the best chance of winning. She sidelined herself in the name of winning.
There is wisdom here.
What we should have said is “winning isn’t the only thing.”
Winning for winning’s sake can feel empty and hollow. But when winning is connected to something outside ourselves, to a purpose, it transforms into something else entirely.
This is what purposeful people do: they tie their goals to something bigger. They do that by tying their goals to four specific factors. We call them the 4 P’s of Purpose.
People
Purposeful students described having inspiring mentor figures or role models. These adults not only modeled purpose in their own lives, they also served as catalysts and champions for students’ pursuit of purpose. Purposeful students connected their people to their purpose.
When Suni Lee won the all-around gymnastics gold medal, she shared how her parents helped her:
We both worked for this. He sacrificed everything to put me in gymnastics. Both my parents really have. This is my family's medal, my medal, my coach's medal.
When Javale McGee won a gold medal with the US Men’s Basketball Team, he was following in the footsteps of his mother:
One purposeful student Belle interviewed explained:
When I was worn out … (my mentor) was the only one that actually managed to give me some good encouragement.
Passion
Purposeful students followed their interests and engaged in the activities and tasks that they liked, not just felt obligated to do. They did things that they enjoyed the process of doing, like learning about the brain, drawing, or working with younger kids. They connected their passion to their purpose.
Suni Lee found her passion for gymnastics on Youtube as a six year old:
Once I started, I just couldn’t stop.. It looked so fun, and I wanted to try it myself.
In Belle’s study, a student explained:
I wanted to be a child psychologist because I’m really interested in how the mind works and how kids develop.
Propensity
Students found purpose in doing things they had a propensity for. Things that fit with their strengths and skills.
Obviously, Olympians have a propensity for their sports. The purposeful students in our study also had insight into their propensities and connected these to their purpose:
I’m really focused, and I’m really creative, so I try to see everything from every point of view. And I try to find creative ways to solve problems.
Prosocial Benefits
Finally, purposeful students were motivated by the desire to make a contribution in the world around them, be it a family, community, or larger societal need or cause.
You don’t have to be an Olympic champion to connect prosocial benefits to your goals. As one student explained:
My mom has four kids, and … it’s always been a struggle for her. Especially since only one of them went [to college] and finished. It’s a lot of debt for her, so I want to be the person to give more. I want to try and get [the debt] off her [shoulders].
Each of these P’s is a spark for purpose. While we can’t teach or give students their purpose, we can expose them to these sparks. The more we provide opportunities for them to connect to people, passions, propensities and prosocial benefits, the more likely they are to discover purpose for themselves.
Your job isn’t to create the fire. It’s to provide various sparks, and then fan the flames.
Get Your Bearings: What purposeful people do you know? Connect your students to them.
What are your students passionate about? What makes them so passionate?
What do they feel they are good at? What are the specific skills and strengths that have led to their success?
What positive impact do they want to make in the world? How do they want to help others?
🌴The Scenic Route
Because sometimes we need to slow down and enjoy the ride.