Meaning and Purpose: What’s the Difference

0:10 [Music] 0:23 hello welcome my name is emily reesh i am a design manager at the center for academic innovation 0:28 thank you for joining us today for the michigan online visionary educators event meaning and purpose in life what's the 0:34 difference and why does it matter the move series is hosted by the center for academic innovation 0:40 at the university of michigan an important part of our mission is to create a more inclusive and global 0:45 learning community we believe an informed peaceful and equitable society 0:51 is dependent on learners everywhere adopting a learning lifestyle this monthly series features experts 0:57 sharing insights tools and discussions on issues relevant to the lives of people around the world 1:03 many of our speakers may be familiar to you as they are the faculty behind some of our most successful and innovative 1:08 learning experiences available through michigan online for more information on our upcoming move series events 1:15 please be sure to check out the schedule at online.umich.edu forward slash move today we invite you 1:23 to submit questions for our panelists in the q a section as well as upvote the questions that are the most interesting 1:28 to you our panelists will do our best to answer their as many questions as they can 1:35 our event will be recorded and will be made available on michigan online now let's get started i'd like to 1:40 introduce you to paula caproni who's the jane dutton collegiate lecturer and lecturer of four in organizational 1:47 behavior and human resource management at the university of michigan stephen m ross school of business i'd 1:53 also like to introduce vic strucker professor at the university of michigan school of public health 1:58 and founder and ceo ceo of kumano paula and vic thank you so much for joining us today i'll turn it over to 2:05 you thank you emily thank you um welcome everybody we have 2:11 quite the global audience i'm seen in the chat all the high from here hi from there it's 2:16 we're um honored that you've joined us today and the other thing i thought of this 2:21 morning as i was reading the chats and i'm sure you did too vic thought wow you know me one of the 2:27 reasons you're here from around the world is that meaning is a basic human need 2:32 and it is universal and so we hope that much of what we say today is relevant to 2:38 every person and one thing we did was um trevor and 2:44 emily were kind enough to send us those questions they asked if you had any questions so they sent us this excel document with 2:51 i think it was over 100 questions that people sent in and so what we did is we went through 2:58 them and tried to categorize them and so i am going to be your mc the 3:03 master of ceremonies here which very humbly means i'm going to ask the questions and then i'll say vic or i'll take that 3:11 one so that's my role to give this some organization so that's how we're going to run this is 3:17 i'm going to put out a question i'll turn to vic you know or i'll answer 3:23 it and then turn to vic but for you feel free to ask questions as well 3:28 you know in the uh there's a q a or the chat we may not get to all your questions as 3:34 you can imagine there were over 3 000 people who signed up for this but we're going to try to get to some of 3:41 them all right we're good to go here we go oh one more thing i will say 3:47 bit just as by introduction of vic the way i describe your work is purpose and meaning 3:55 are central to your research and your teaching and your writing and you're consulting in your 4:00 business yeah it's absolutely what you do it goes with your 4:06 everything part of my purpose as part of your purpose and my purpose is very much how to help 4:13 people how to help anyone anywhere achieve the kind of success they desire in life 4:19 and of course meaning is absolutely central to that we all want to feel that we're living lives that 4:25 matter and so that's why the two of us are doing this together we're coming at slightly different 4:30 angles all right so to look at my notes here here's question one question one was 4:36 about definitions what is the difference between meaning and purpose 4:41 vic yeah sure um yeah and uh of course victor frankel wrote 4:46 this incredibly famous and and wonderful book called man search for 4:52 meaning and he said that meaning is uh one of our central drives that we have in our lives 4:59 and what most of us mean by meaning is that it's uh it's the things that are 5:05 important in our lives so things that are significant in our lives and when we talk about a meaningful life we're asking does our 5:13 own life have some degree of significance or some degree of importance to it purpose 5:18 is a little bit different and often we conflate the two we put the two together uh in the same sentence all the time as 5:25 if they're the same thing but they're not um purpose is a little more focused on 5:30 goals or set of goals around the things that are most important in your life so um and when 5:38 you have a goal or set of goals around those things that are important it becomes a central self-organizing 5:44 framework that guides the direction in your life literally day to day it guides how you 5:51 self-regulate your life what you decide to work on how you decide to work on it so those 5:57 they're slightly different and uh it's probably important to understand that and and just to give you a little background 6:03 on the research side there is one study uh that that 6:09 was created by a guy named neil kraus from the university of michigan actually and he looked at meaning in life and he 6:14 looked at purpose and he looked at which one predicted longevity and it turns out that 6:20 uh purpose in life was predictive of how long you live but meaning was not 6:26 and that's not to say meaning isn't important it's incredibly important but maybe just valuing things 6:32 uh is not enough maybe setting goals around the things that you value the 6:38 most so if my students are something that i value a great deal 6:44 that give me meaning uh which they and they do that's that's incredibly 6:49 important part of my work my students then i might set a goal around that to teach 6:55 every one of my students as if they're my own child that becomes a purpose in my life it's a goal 7:01 around that thing that gives meaning that is meaningful to me thank you 7:09 yeah where i'm going to take this well that was actually helpful to me too the difference because i think of meaning as 7:14 being being and purpose is being doing yeah well not bad 7:19 yeah and it's important to be doing in addition to the meaning yes so my quest the way i'm going to 7:27 take this question is a little bit different because people talk a lot about meaning at work 7:32 purpose at work but the other you may have seen especially if you're from the u.s if you're not from the u.s 7:38 you might say that's odd but in the us we talk a lot about finding passion at work be passionate 7:45 about your job if you find something you're passionate about to do for work it won't feel like work 7:50 i take a bit of a critical perspective on the language of passion and i'll end with i really do like the 7:56 language of meaning and purpose so if you're from the us in particular 8:02 maybe some other countries this idea of finding past year something you're passionate about my concerns one being that when we speak 8:10 that'll use the language of passion at work we can get so 8:15 involved in our work that we ignore other parts of our life like the people at home and the people 8:21 we love and taking care of our health which vic is very much so what you do as well they're taking 8:27 care of health so that's one drawback of it the other is um it creates a kind of 8:34 tunnel vision if we're so passionate we may not see a lot of wonderful other things that are 8:41 happening around us and so we miss a great deal of life 8:46 the other would be that when people say find your passion 8:51 that passion is often created it's not something you go out and look for you say ah there it is it's created and 8:58 sometimes it's just a lot of slogging hard 9:04 work right and people think passion is something you should always be feeling good about 9:10 and it sometimes isn't it just can hurt it can take time it can hurt um 9:17 the other would be some people at work think i'm gonna find my passion i'm going to do what i'm passionate about well if i'm always 9:25 doing just what i feel i'm passionate about i might not do the work that someone else needs from me 9:31 because it's not my passion so that outline they're waiting for their project they're waiting for that 9:37 thing that i don't care as much about but that matters to them i may not invest as much in it 9:43 and so my passion can take away from theirs 9:48 one is passion can be a luxury some people talk about passionate work being a luxury and i know vicki you'll have something to say about the meaning 9:55 with this that sometimes i just have to keep a job that's it i don't have the luxury of 10:00 thinking about meaning and vicki may talk about that more as well 10:05 and one thing that several of you said actually in your questions a few of you it was this idea of oh my gosh now you 10:12 know i have a job i have a family i'm managing all these things and i have to have passion for my job 10:19 too and somebody call a couple people called it purpose anxiety it's one more thing i have to do and the 10:27 pre the pressure of purpose i thought those were very well said so with all those critiques you 10:34 know i have a little bit of a background from critical theory that's where they're coming from and critical theorists would say also the language of 10:39 passion could be a form of organizational control that would i tread carefully on that one 10:45 because it's a way of having you internalize being at work all the time because i'm passionate about my work so 10:51 you don't need the external controls it's interesting well just last week i 10:57 was i have a purpose cast and during in that purpose cast i interviewed a woman b 11:03 bocalandro and she is a wonderful person who talks a lot about uh working toward a higher purpose in 11:10 your job trying to find that and she was going through uh uh security uh 11:18 at the airport and the person in front of her the security guard stopped and 11:24 said wait a second it's oh it's your birthday as you know reading reading the uh 11:30 driver's license and then he started singing happy birthday to her and then suddenly other people started 11:36 singing happy birthday to her and i guess that's what the security guard does all the time and i just thought what a wonderful way to 11:42 find passion in your work i mean security guards you don't usually see them being terribly happy 11:49 but some of them are some of them like kind of get into what they're doing and uh and you can 11:55 tell that they're actually enjoying what they're doing and they get passion from that so that's nice it and 12:02 yet i see in in high school especially a lot of high school kids saying oh i'm going to 12:07 follow my passion so i'm gonna go to broadway or i'm gonna do whatever and none of those kids that i knew who 12:13 followed their passion ended up doing what they were planning on doing and and it like you said paul it's it is 12:20 often hard work but gradually that hard work then pays off and you can become passionate because you've gained some skills you've 12:27 mastered some some things you see that with physicians for example yeah and i think that's a thing people 12:33 think of passion as just something lovely and beautiful and it just is without realizing that it's in a 12:40 it's the result of a lot of hard work often yeah and that's what it and so that's it 12:45 and so i like i know and my little piece here they'll go the next question is that i one of the reasons i like the language 12:52 of meaning and purpose rather than passion and people who use the word language of passion i know several 12:58 people it's very well intentioned and what i think they're talking about is meaning and purpose yeah 13:04 and not really thinking about the downsides of the language of passion but i like meaning and purpose because 13:10 it's not over the top it's realistic it says this is how life is you know we don't always even when we're 13:16 in love we're not always passionate but we are in love right and so it's sustainable because of that 13:23 passion may not be sustainable all right anything else vic or shall we go on to chris oh no that's great that's great 13:29 all right question number two what are the best and this is your thing i've read your work vic i do the work side of it but 13:36 overall benefits of having a sense of meaning and purpose yeah so um people with a strong 13:44 purpose in their lives in other words uh have goals around the things that are meaningful in 13:51 their lives that are important in their lives that they care about in other words what you you know you care about what 13:57 you care about you set goals around those things to work toward them every day 14:02 those people end up first of all living longer as i said before and they live a lot longer on average if this 14:09 were like you know quitting smoking it would be like that or an amazing diet and working out so you know 14:15 being in public health we've been so used to those health behaviors that are relevant and here's this 14:21 existential concept that turns out to be really important turns out at retirement if you cannot 14:28 repurpose your life if you can't find new purpose and direction in your life 14:33 seven years later on average and there are three studies of this now you are 2.4 times more likely to develop 14:41 alzheimer's disease and that is after statistically controlling for age race 14:46 and gender and income and education and health status and health behaviors you can't make this go away 14:52 um these people end up living longer and they seem to live better they're 14:58 much happier i think happiness is a byproduct of living purposefully you know the 15:04 people i know that try to just live happy life they end up being less happy 15:09 people who live more purposeful lives end up being happy it's a side effect people with stronger purpose in their 15:15 lives are also more resilient so we know that you know and obviously this is 15:20 a time when we need to be resilient but but for example people who are more 15:26 purposeful can plunge their arm into freezing cold ice water and keep it and hold it in there much longer than people 15:32 who have lower purpose people with strong purpose who are challenged by 15:38 stressors have cortisol just like everybody else popping up that stress hormone that pops 15:43 up just like non-purposeful people but then it goes down much faster if you're purposeful so you recover 15:49 faster if you are and we do a lot of research using mri we put people into 15:56 magnetic resonance imaging clamping their head down and scanning their brain while asking them 16:03 to start thinking to start thinking about their purposeful core values and more blood flow goes to the part of 16:09 the brain called the prefrontal cortex which is related to our executive functioning and our decision 16:15 making and our future orientation and it also down regulates uh and pushes down 16:22 the amygdala which is our ancient part of the brain which relates to fear and aggression 16:28 so when we are more purposeful we are actually thinking more with our 16:33 guru brain this part of the brain that's very very uh it's very human for one 16:38 thing it's you know very modern part of the brain um and and much less so with our reptile 16:45 brain our lizard brain and that's really important now people with a strong purpose when going 16:51 through difficult times are more likely to experience post-traumatic growth they may also experience stress there's 16:57 no doubt but at the same time they find meaning they find purpose they find growth they 17:04 find strengths they didn't know they had so all of these things we also know even physiologically people 17:11 who have a very transcending purpose in their lives express more antibodies 17:16 which is a good thing in a pandemic by the way more type 1 interferon again a good thing in a pandemic 17:22 less pro-inflammatory cells uh and we know that you know these pro-inflammatory cells 17:28 can can cause this what's called a cytokine storm which takes you to the hospital and you know 17:33 in the case of covid so i'm not saying that having a purpose protects you from covid we don't know 17:39 that but boy a lot of signs point in that direction people with strong purpose seem to have 17:46 really really stronger physiologies and that's important even our dna is 17:52 repaired better our telomeres the ends of our chromosomes uh get more fuel if we become more 17:59 purposeful so all those things i could go on and on paula i'm sorry uh but yeah it's it's really quite 18:06 impressive what purpose does yeah there was one one i didn't plan on saying this but 18:12 there was a study and i can't say but they studied longevity and one of the things that the questions 18:18 they asked people so they they studied people for decades and then they said you're kind of looking back on your life 18:25 um they asked a set of questions and one what had to do with taking care of other people or being 18:31 taken care of and one question was were you kind of i'm paraphrasing were you taking care of 18:36 a lot in your lifetime yeah did someone take care of you that did not predict longevity what did was did you take care of others 18:44 and they linked it to the telomeres and that's why i said absolutely they took care of other people we're 18:49 giving people we want to make contributions to others as a species regardless of where we're from so that's 18:55 transcending purpose seems to be much stronger than having a hedonic purpose and you know aristotle even said we have 19:02 what he called eudemonic purposes or eudaimonia which is uh focused on our god-like self our 19:10 inner our true self is greek for daemon is greek for true self or god like self 19:17 versus hedonian we all know about that and you know we and and aristotle said we have both that's fine 19:23 but he said if all we have is hedonic purpose then we're like and he's this 19:29 term uh grazing animals and while we all like to graze uh it it doesn't make sense he said to 19:38 just focus on those hedonic values one more study that's relevant right now 19:43 uh in terms of diversity equity and inclusion my colleague tony burrow is a researcher up at cornell university 19:50 he has shown white men big maps of two different cities and 19:58 i think maybe men and women i can't quite remember but these were all white adults and they weren't college 20:04 students showed them a big map and one map was very diverse had a lot of different ethnicities 20:10 in this city a map of a city the second one was a map of a city that had almost all white people in it but before he 20:17 showed them this he randomized them into two groups in one group he asked them what is your purpose in life what does 20:22 purpose mean to you the second group he asks them what is your typical day like your routine 20:28 so that's the control group the group that just wrote down their purpose was four times four times more likely 20:36 to want to live in the diverse city that's interesting it seems to prompt an 20:41 openness when you start thinking about your purpose and a transcending purpose it seems to prompt this uh openness less 20:49 defensiveness again you're amygdala this reptilian brain is not getting hyperactive 20:54 uh so it really is fundamentally important to us to have 20:59 a transcending purpose and i see a note here in the chat saying and see if i'm answering this correctly this idea what 21:06 is hedonic value that basically means the hedonic value is i'm focusing on 21:12 what feels good in the moment it might be it might be just the moment 21:17 it's not so much the savoring of them not savoring the moment as much but just doing stuff that feels 21:23 physically good is that that's how i see the hedonic that's exactly right yeah it could be uh 21:28 great food or wine or sex or a great vacation or whatever 21:33 is bringing people on hedonic value but we all we all love that we love 21:40 those things and that's great but if that's all we love then we are 21:45 like grazing animals so if we start thinking about compassion empathy love community uh things bigger 21:53 than ourself even companies who think more about you know that transcend revenue only and 22:00 shareholder value go beyond that and say you know we're part of a community we have our 22:06 employees to think about we have our our uh clients our customers to think about if 22:12 they start thinking about those things they end up making more money which is interesting so there's this odd zen-like aspect of purpose 22:19 when you're more purposeful and you have this transcending purpose you do better yourself 22:25 even as an organization and for the organization i do have one question the question that we were working on here 22:31 was the benefits of meaning and purpose there's been so much research on organizations in my field on the you 22:38 know the power of meaning and the power of purpose just a few here's some of the studies that are the most commonly cited 22:44 one is there was a study of more than 11 000 employees across industries the single strongest predictor of 22:52 meaningfulness was that the job had a positive impact on others 22:57 and so one thing i'll always ask students and in fact my dog i have two daughters and one says she remembers me saying 23:05 when you think about your job think about what is your contribution through your work what is your 23:10 contribution through your work and i'll always say that to students think about contribution as much as you think about career 23:16 another study that's been talked about a lot it was done in the alumni relations office where they ask for money you graduate from a 23:22 college i don't know about other countries in the u.s you graduate you get mail you get phone calls usually around the 23:28 holidays saying can you send us money can you send us money and you feel a sense of you know good obligation to give back 23:35 most people do but so these in this office of donor relations what they did was they divided 23:41 them into two groups in one group they said you know let's just try to make more money get more 23:46 people to send in money and the other what they did was they had the people the people doing 23:52 the phone calls meet a student who benefited from the scholarship 23:58 and she came in and said you know i'm a first generation college student and this scholarship i changed the 24:05 trajectory of my family it means so much to me and those who saw 24:10 that student increased um 142 percent in weekly phone minutes and over 400 24:17 in weekly revenue that was the only difference between the two groups it was just so much more meaningful the 24:23 other one all of us should care about as well radiologists people who read your you go into the hospital and 24:30 they take an x-ray and they tell you if you've got cancer or not they tell you if there's a tumor or not 24:35 okay here we go when radiologists saw a patient's photo included in an x-ray file they wrote 29 24:43 longer reports and made 40 cents for 46 more accurate diagnoses 24:51 does meaning matter yes it i mean to me we all would hope everybody please you 24:56 know all radiologists see my face see who i am it makes it more intimate more 25:01 purposeful and so i would say um another real benefit of meaning 25:07 and purpose knowing that you said them different that i personally find when you think about careers i have not 25:13 had even though i'm here as an academic and it looks like vic and i are kind of similar in our jobs we're not 25:18 he's a senior tenured professor i am a lecturer i chose that path i 25:24 started off on the tenure track and one of the things i in you know some family i'll talk about it maybe later 25:30 after my second child was born i thought you know what is i don't enjoy the research vic loves it um i don't enjoy it and i really enjoy 25:37 the teaching and i wanted to have more flexibility so i negotiated to go on the the 25:42 non-tenure track as a lecturer doing that my daughter's 27 now 129 27 25:48 and it's been an amazing amazing career it was the right one for me if i had 25:54 stuck to the job the 10-year job and didn't think more broadly what do i really want to 26:01 what contributions do i want to make and how can i make them it was through teaching i didn't need tenure track to do that so 26:07 one of the benefits of meaning and of purpose is it opens up your job possibilities you're 26:14 not stuck on one path and to me that's golden all right 26:20 let me see here next question and i love those studies you cited adam grant's study yeah a lot of them 26:26 are from adam grant good donors wonderful and and his book give and take talks a lot about these studies if 26:33 you're interested in a really really good book about transcending purpose his book and take is it nails it 26:40 yeah so now we're going to get cracked we're going to get more practical here i'm looking at the time as well and i'm 26:46 so i'm i'm not able to do this and look at the chat but every time i look at the job crafting i'm going there i this chat 26:52 they've been looking at it here it's amazing so great but we can't do both but i'm going 26:58 to ask for a copy of the chat later so all right so how do i create more 27:04 meaning and purpose in my work what advice is here's the question what advice would you give to help people 27:10 create more meaning and purpose in their work how can i integrate my purpose in my everyday life i'll start with vic but then i also 27:16 and i would do the job craft is what i would say but yeah well you know for me um in finding 27:23 purpose in general in your life or finding purpose in your work you start by asking 27:28 yourself what matters most to me um and you know if you're so many people 27:33 are just asking i can't get over the hump do i have to meditate in a cave in northern india for six months no you don't i mean although 27:40 that's a super cool thing to do by the way but um you don't need to do that it doesn't 27:46 have to somehow be revealed to you like some holy grail um what what happens is that you might 27:53 turn and find the person right next to you is uh a person uh that's 28:00 that's very valuable to you that you care about a lot when you think about the things that matter most to you in 28:05 your life you may realize they're not things that a lot of those things that are most 28:11 valuable are people uh or causes and uh so for me for example as i said at 28:18 work i had to think about it in my research which i do love paul i love doing research i know or um or my students and teaching 28:26 and i realized uh it is my students of all things of all the different things that i have 28:32 and at work and so i decided to set a purpose around that to teach every one of my 28:37 students as if they're my own daughter um and so it's as simple as that if you're 28:43 wondering wow what what where do i find the things that i value the most 28:48 well maybe even start with your smartphone you know i can look on my smartphone and uh you know just find right away 28:57 that i have my granddaughter on it and my granddaughter madeline and 29:03 because she matters a lot to me so maybe you have your dog on your smartphone maybe you have a work of art 29:09 on your smartphone or some work of nature just start there to begin with maybe 29:14 it's your horse who knows uh and what maybe it's your kids maybe 29:19 it's your spouse or your larger family your parents whoever it is maybe you start there and say how would 29:25 i set a goal around that person how do i care about what i 29:31 care about that's a modern philosophical question because so often we have so 29:36 many things just spreading our time out social media just spreads our time out to 29:42 almost nothingness now and and that's called nihilism by the way when we really you know we don't have any purpose or 29:50 direction in our lives unfortunately so purpose and direction means you start focusing 29:55 more effort more of your valuable resource called energy on those things that matter most in your 30:01 life so just begin with a list of those things write them down top five things that you care most about 30:08 and then think about causes think about who relies on you uh who relies on you at work who relies 30:14 on you at home those are ways to start this conversation with yourself and finally 30:20 what i consider very important the headstone test so if you were to die today and i know 30:27 that a lot of my students go i don't want to talk about that if you were to die today what would you want on your headstone 30:32 what would you want to be said at your memorial service a hundred years from now 30:38 what would you want people to say jonas salk you know who developed the polio 30:43 vaccine later in his life said we need to be good ancestors so how do we become a good ancestor what 30:50 do we want to think about so these are big existential questions but it starts the conversation 30:56 of what my purpose is because ultimately then you go wow i am here on this earth for this 31:01 very brief period of time to be this and those be goals 31:06 i'm here to be this i'm here to be that i'm here to be a great teacher i'm here to be uh you know a great spouse i'm here to 31:13 be a loving uh father etc whatever those things are they're different for every 31:20 single person it's like your fingerprint but whatever those things are you start with what you value the most 31:26 and you end with what would i want on my headstone if i were to die today what legacy do i want to leave is that 31:33 making sense makes sense to me even at an organizational level paula i 31:41 like to think of kumano our business you know what would happen if we were to 31:46 go to business today in other words if we were to die today what legacy would i want to leave 31:52 and that helps you form a mission and purpose of your company as well and one similar 31:58 to that when i teach and i do and one of the wonderful things i did since i got off the tenure track is i just do 32:03 so much executive ed and around the world i never would have had the time to do that if i was trying to get tenure two and do 32:09 the research you do both i think because i know we've worked together in different places but it just 32:15 um so one of the things i do when i teach and we talk about organizational vision and one of the questions i say 32:21 if your business went out of business or your organization went out of business what would be lost in the world wow 32:30 of going out of business and that's why you need to focus on results that's why you need to hire good people 32:36 it's the world would lose something from you well the other thing i you know a couple other things i would add here 32:42 how do you create meaning and purpose at work one is and i saw this in the chat a few people mentioned it is there is a 32:48 concept and i believe it came from our own um central positive organizations jane 32:54 dutton and other colleagues did on job crafting there are several people who are doing it now and job crafty means 33:01 basically how do you i've heard it how do you enjoy the job you're in so you can't move for a variety of 33:07 reasons right you can't just say i'm gonna go out and find a different job and it's not feeling as purposeful to me now 33:13 but how do i create purpose in my work and then it's just i won't be able to do 33:18 any justice to it in a minute which is about what i'll spend on it it's worth going online and reading some popular 33:24 press articles on job crafting then if you want to go back and look at the research but it says find opportunities to find 33:30 meaning and purpose in your job and you can say how do i tweak the tasks i do 33:36 right how do i tweak what i do every day without costing any value to the organization and in fact maybe bring 33:41 more how do i end up working with different people who are more aligned with what i it is my values right all without 33:49 costing the organization any about any of the financial values change the 33:55 perception of your job and one example would be why i love this and i don't know if you've seen this one 34:00 thick but it's worth finding you can find it online physician aleister martin so he's a 34:07 physician he works in emergency rooms he's also part of the center for social 34:12 justice in his hospital what he did and there's a short video 34:18 he and his colleagues set up he said who comes into the emergency room he wanted to increase voter registration 34:24 he said the three groups that tend not to register to vote low-income people of 34:30 color and young americans who tends to come to the emergency room low-income people people of color 34:37 young americans and certainly many more people but he said wait a minute we have the same clients here 34:42 as are the people we want to register to vote set up a kiosk so they set up a kiosk kiosk to register 34:48 to vote in the emergency room so clever so meaningful to him great example so 34:55 look up job crafting for the people here and the other thing is let other people 35:01 know how their work matters to you you know how it's not just saying thank you it's like you go somewhere and 35:07 you're having a bad day and someone just does a kindness you know say you know i really needed that i was having a bad day 35:14 thank you so much for that tell people how much their work matters to you either whether you're a 35:20 client a boss direct report remind them that it matters all right you know paula 35:25 just a couple weeks ago uh i'm i'm in northern michigan right now on lake michigan and uh 35:33 it's pretty rural area where i am and so we have a septic tank we don't have you know the standard huge system we 35:40 have the standard septic tank and it was you know so i called in the septic tank people 35:46 to drain it now that cannot be the coolest job in the world right i mean they open the septic thing 35:52 there's a horrible smell of sewage and then they take this thing and a big pipe and they they suck it all 35:58 out and put it in a big truck it's really stinky work and i was starting to talk to the 36:05 the person who managed these guys who were doing this and i said you know this is one of the 36:11 most important jobs ever that anybody could have in 36:16 public health getting the poop out of the water is like the number one public health 36:22 thing you could do and uh i said why do you work and why do you work why do you do this job 36:27 you said well for the money of course i said well you know what beyond the money 36:33 is the fact that you are doing public health work you're doing amazingly important work and was almost 36:39 like this light in his brain that turned on it was really interesting it was like 36:45 wow and by the end of the conversation he handed me his business card he said i'd love to get together sometime 36:52 and i just thought wow this is this works this idea of starting to reframe what 36:58 your job is really doing and what potential you have in your job uh that idea of job crafting incredibly 37:05 important paul i'm so glad you brought it off yes yes thank you thank you 37:10 the other one that said these are categories we're not answering all your questions there were so many good ones i thought this was when i read 37:16 all the questions you sent in i thought boy this is almost like one of the best books books i've read in a while just reading 37:22 the questions was so engaging but one that came up in different ways is what advice do you have for meaning 37:28 and purpose during life's transitions i'm going to take one big will take the other but there's a kind of transitions 37:34 that are universal things like um job transition kids grow up and leave 37:39 the house and all of a sudden you have an empty house retirement was a big one and then there's also the kind of things there 37:45 there's transition there's tragedies i'm going to just focus on the transitions part what all those predictable life 37:52 transitions have in common is that um there's something called the 37:57 liminal space i just learned about this this year and i don't it's just 38:03 wonderful it's an anthropo anthropologists talk about the liminal space and i'll read it says it's the quality 38:08 of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage 38:14 when participants no longer hold your pre-ritual state right but they've not yet begun the 38:20 transition to the new state so you're in the middle and there's two pieces of advice i've 38:25 had with this one was by professor herminia bera also organizations and management from 38:33 the london business school i read this years before i heard about the liminal space she talks about she studied 38:40 professionals who completely changed their jobs so you have a financial analyst who decides he wants to be or she wants to 38:46 be a chef and so how did they manage that transition and what she's brief i'm looking at the site says 38:52 reframing as a language but what she said is when people have these major life transitions 38:58 be comfortable be neither here nor there we tend to jump in and start planning 39:05 and i said no no no just be neither just be for a little while just be it feels like nothing's happening 39:12 but in fact consciously or unconsciously things are happening inside your head inside your body around 39:18 you just be for a big while because most of us just want to do 39:23 she says no just be so i use that myself and i've told this to students i've told it to my kids i'd tell them 39:29 just be comfortable being neither here nor there and then writing this down paula it's she's got a yeah it's so cool 39:36 it's so cool um and the other is be comfortable tinkering we all think of 39:43 planning and these trajectories we should be on she said no no no when you're neither here nor there 39:48 just kind of tinker maybe teach at a community college or hang out with a different group of people join a book club just do something 39:55 different but it doesn't have to be big and it doesn't have to be planned 40:00 it's a great talk about designing your life yeah and and this guy is a stanford 40:06 professor but he's an engineer he worked at apple and he talks about this kind of tinkering in your life 40:12 where you're adjusting things like if i look at this glass of water and i might go well you know 40:17 it's kind of nice but i think maybe it's too fat or too heavy or whatever i'm gonna tinker with 40:24 it how about your life can't you do that so it makes so much sense paula yeah 40:29 well people tinker in their gardens i know you have an amazing garden and i try and i also really like my garden too but it's 40:34 we sometimes think of these things as a waste of time but it's like things are happening and the other thing i tried recently 40:40 because you know i am kind of thinking about retirement here and thinking okay that's going to be a big deal and one of the things i did 40:47 recently i was in this beautiful space and i just thought you know i need new 40:53 words meaningful words to guide me not only as i make this transition but also once i'm there 40:59 and i came up with my words so think about this and i said these words would be beauty i want a 41:04 life of beauty a life of service a life of love love would have been first but i've got a lot of it so i said okay it's 41:10 harder to find beauty than love right now uh for me a life of peace and of joy and 41:15 awe if i have all of those things whatever i choose 41:20 as long as they fit those things i'm gonna be happy i'm gonna it's gonna be great and in fact i took it too far in a way 41:26 because i said not as i was sitting there i was thinking you know i almost made them my super heroes 41:32 so i can picture if i'm in a transition these five you know you've got your beauty you've got your awe you've got 41:38 your peace peace because it's stressful life is stressful and it just reminds me that they're following me through this i have a very 41:45 visual thing going on all right i'm passing this on to you and so this 41:51 is of tragedy meaning during purpose during tragedy several people asked about that yeah 41:57 well i loved what you said about the liminal space because i like i'm often asked uh 42:04 can you change your purpose of course you can you change your purpose every time you need a hallmark card you know 42:10 anytime you any time like for example if you graduate from high school or from college or you get married or 42:18 find a wonderful partner you get a new job or if you lose a job or if you get sick or if you retire all those times 42:27 might be these liminal spaces paula had talked about where maybe you're neither here nor there 42:32 and this is great language i love that um and maybe that's the time to start rethinking 42:38 what matters most in your life and to set new goals around those new things that matter most 42:44 for me i guess and this is something i mentioned in my coursera course 42:49 uh right up front i i hadn't actually done work in the area of purpose 42:55 until somebody sent me man search for meaning victor frankel's bookman search for meaning and they sent that to me 43:02 a month after my daughter julia had died she was a nursing student at the 43:08 university of michigan and she suddenly died very unexpectedly of a heart attack 43:14 and um just you know it kind of shattered me for quite a while i found myself out in lake 43:20 michigan uh one morning two miles out in a kayak at 5 15 in the morning 43:28 and uh thinking maybe i should just keep kayaking is such a beautiful smooth day on the water you know it's just 43:35 still slightly dark and i thought maybe i'll just keep going to wisconsin and which i never would have made of 43:42 course because it's 86 miles and you're not going to make that but i was kind of thinking about doing that 43:49 and then the sun came up and i don't know how else to say this but my daughter spoke to me and i don't know 43:56 how that happened but she was in me and she said you have to get over this and it wasn't like you have to get over 44:02 this i was like you have to get over yourself stop thinking about how bad off you 44:08 are right now and uh so i turned the kayak around and i came 44:15 back and i wrote down and i started looking at myself actually in this second person it was really 44:21 interesting i i i said vic you are in big trouble right now you're in very very bad shape and you hel 44:29 your profession is to help people that's what you do and so it's time to help yourself so i i 44:35 kind of literally was looking down on myself i felt and i said what would vic what should 44:40 vic do right now well vic should write down the things that matter most to him so i wrote down 44:46 my students i wrote down my wife i wrote down my children i wrote down quite a number 44:52 of things the arts uh especially local arts so i started writing these down and i said i need to repurpose my 44:58 life and the university of michigan was so nice they said you don't have to teach for you know a year if you don't want i 45:05 mean you've just lost your daughter this is a difficult time horrible time and and so i was grateful 45:12 for that but i called the university up that morning and said you know i've 45:18 changed my mind i'd actually like to teach as soon as possible and i'm going to teach every student as if they're julia my daughter and that 45:25 completely changed my life and then i started reading more about purpose and finding a purpose in your 45:31 life and it turned out to be this a really really powerful resource that people can develop you can 45:37 improve your purpose in life and when you do and you can find great fulfillment in 45:42 your life purpose through your work and i do but i find it through my life too through my community through my 45:48 family and so i have lived a bigger life over the last 10 years than i 45:54 ever have in my whole life i thank my daughter for that um that's a legacy she left me and that 46:01 day i was out on the water i'm getting a little choked up about it was father's day 46:06 and that that was her gift to me i get choked up every time i hear this 46:12 story i have to say and i do i i've always remembered the link you've made between when you've said 46:18 to teach every student as though they were my daughter it's like how to well my 46:25 students would say i don't always do that for one thing having a purpose is aspirational it 46:31 doesn't mean you're always going to do it but what it does mean is that you try to garner the resources 46:37 to give yourself the energy to do that so you try to sleep better you meditate 46:42 you do the things that it takes in order to have that energy and that those are public health things 46:47 so i thought this is a public health endeavor yeah yeah and i'm going to and this is 46:53 right now we're just running out of time and i want to get a couple of questions if we can but one thing i remember reading that you said 46:59 i don't remember where but if purpose was a pill we'd all take it we'd all take it and so 47:05 that's and it's free and it's free it's free 47:10 so let me look here um 47:18 there's so many questions here i'm trying to figure are these are these in or how do emily maybe you should read 47:23 the one that you think has the most yeah what's an awesome question emily there are a million of them 47:29 click on the questions to say yeah this one right to the top what do you have yeah um what about someone asked about 47:36 resources um or what are your insights and thoughts on purpose for teenagers young 47:41 adults why don't you go with this again this is 47:47 what you do all the time i think it's incredibly important for our teenagers 47:53 and young adults to be thinking purposefully but also to realize nietzsche talked about this and thus spoke 47:59 zarathustra he said he he had this wonderful metaphor that started with a camel 48:05 and said and it said the camel puts everything on his shoulders everything on his back in other words 48:10 educate me um and not just through classes not just through listening to paula and me but going out in the world and 48:16 learning how real people live learning about love and pain and sorrow and joy 48:22 all the things that people in different countries have um and and just learning about the world 48:28 i think that's why i think gap years are so important but anyway this camel goes out in this 48:34 metaphor and once the camel is fully laid and fully educated the camel metamorphosizes 48:39 into a lion the lion goes into the wilderness seeks out this dragon and on the dragon's scale on every scale 48:46 of the dragon are two words thou shalt in other words it's 48:51 every organization it's your parents resume they wrote for you it's everything all the pressures of everybody your 48:58 community everybody telling you what to do and the lion slays the dragon 49:03 the lion basically says i am my own person now i'm fully educated i can make my own purpose 49:09 i have to follow my own entertainment my own true self and once that happened once the lion 49:16 slays the dragon that the lion metamorphosizes one last time into a child 49:21 a child who's innocent and and you know you just think that his book was thus spoke zarathustra if 49:28 you ever saw the movie 2001 space odyssey the very end this star child is coming 49:34 out this new evolution of human consciousness and guess what they're playing thus 49:39 spoke zarathustra um by strauss it is that's what it was 49:44 all about that's what i think our teenagers and young people need to be thinking 49:49 that they are camels that they need to educate themselves before they form some firm purpose 49:55 educate yourself so that you have a deeper understanding of the joys and the sorrows of humankind 50:03 and where i would i would i'm trying to translate that into you know you know we've raised children and we're in education 50:09 i think of two things i that makes me think about one would be it reinforces this idea of 50:15 tinkering you're tinkering with life when you're young and some people get focused too early i've had students come to me and 50:21 say i'm in marketing because that's what my parents wanted me to be in 50:31 and then the other thing is one of the most significant predictors of success in life is conscientiousness 50:36 that means be responsible work hard do what you're supposed to be doing because people can overemphasize the 50:42 tinkering and not be responsible but if i think of meaning now i'm just making got this from this 50:48 conversation thank you everybody and is this idea of tinkering maybe is 50:53 finding the meaning you know like what really sticks when do i feel best about this and that tells me something about what i like 50:59 and the um purpose requires conscientiousness that means that you not only say this 51:06 matters to me but how do i make it happen in the world that's conscientiousness because i think 51:12 tinkerine without one of the things with young people they gotta learn to work hard they gotta learn to commit and if they 51:18 get too much on the tinkerine they may forget yeah but meaning is hard work 51:24 and and i would just say real quickly um if you can start thinking purposefully 51:29 as as a child even you're building a core in this metaphor of a tree you're 51:35 building a core that's strong and then with every succeeding ring on that tree every 51:40 new experience you have whether it's wonderful joy or horrible sorrow that tree has this 51:47 strong core and that's so important if a rock comes down that you know and smashes into the tree that 51:54 tree still has a strong core and doesn't get destroyed and that's so important it turns out 52:00 well brian i think the strong core and then i think we have to pass it on to emily and trevor but one thing it's 52:06 classic attachment theory some people may know it but basically means when you're rate with you know 52:11 whether it's employees in the workplace raising a family people need to feel two things one is 52:17 great love you need to feel loved and the other is you need boundaries 52:23 not everything is okay and that creates the sense of i can go out in the world i 52:28 have a sense of confidence this core in the world because you know you have this great love 52:34 and the sense of boundaries that is always your home it gives you this sense of i can go out and take risks so 52:40 all right we just i this is so much fun but emily i know you told us to stop i know 52:46 no we're so close to the end here i'm so sorry to cut you off but this was amazing thank you both so much 52:52 um your stories your personal stories are so interesting and thank you for sharing those and all of these insights 52:58 you've shared are just incredible i mean the chat has been so interesting hearing from our 53:04 um participants and hearing their personal stories as well so thank you everyone for joining in 53:10 um for any upcoming move topics and guests you can see those at online.umich.edu 53:17 forward slash move and for the latest course offerings events and conversations you can follow 53:24 michigan online on our social media channels on twitter facebook instagram and youtube 53:31 and if this particular topic was interesting to you and you'd like to learn more from vic and paula 53:36 i'd encourage you to take part in some of the courses we have online such as finding purpose and meaning in life living for what matters most 53:43 and the signs of success what researchers know that you should know thank you again for joining us and 53:49 learning with us today we hope you'll join us for our upcoming move events 53:55 thank you it's a joy it really was ola thank you emily thank you so much