Interview: The Power of Purpose and Ideals with William Damon

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize interview series. Today, I am thrilled and honored to be chatting with Professor William Damon, who is one of the world's leading thinkers on the psychology of moral development. He's been working for decades on the subject, and he's written a number of my favorite books. We featured three of them, including Noble Purpose, which I literally have within eyesight and reach on a daily basis. I often flip open to this for inspiration. And then another book called the Path to Purpose, which is a wonderful book in general and particularly for parents who want to help cultivate moral development and their children. I highly recommend that book. And then the third book that we've featured is called the Power of Ideals. This is the most recent of Professor Damon's books. The subtitle is the Real Story of Moral Choice. And he wrote the book with his wife and collaborator, Ann Colby, which I find inspiring in and of itself. Professor Damon, I really appreciate you and your lifetime commitment to your own moral development and giving your gifts to the world and taking the time to share your wisdom with us today. So thank you so much.

Well, thank you for what you do. It's so important to get the word out, and you do such a great job in communicating all of the things that you're interested in. So I want to give my thanks to you.

Well, thank you. And again, your scholarly approach to how we develop morality is so inspiring because virtue is a big part of what we do. We try to integrate ancient wisdom with modern science and demonstrate the fact that to be a eudaimon, to be, to live with virtue, is ultimately the summum bonum, the highest good. And your work has given me such a wonderful way to articulate that. And one of the things I'm excited to talk about is moral determinism vis a vis moral agency and commitment that your work has again shined a very bright light on for me and for our work. But let's start at the very top with the power of ideals. When you were thinking about how to name this book, I'd love to hear your thought process and how you arrived at the idea of the power of ideals. Can you share that with us?

We wanted to get across the main point that what you believe in, which of course can be summed up in the word, your ideals, the things that you really aspire to in the best of your life, in the best of your behavior and thinking, the ideals that you have that you reach for that what you believe in, what those ideals are, actually make a big difference long term in the choices that you make in life. And this may or may not sound obvious. I don't know. It is not obvious in my own field, the field of developmental science and psychology, because so many of the explanations have emphasized everything else that determines or supposedly determines a person's behavior. And we can talk more about that in detail. But the point that Ann and I were making when we chose the title Power of Ideals is that ideals matter. And in fact, we believe that long term, over the course of a lifetime, they're actually the most important thing in influencing the kinds of directions that your life will take.

Yeah, it's so powerful. And before we get into again moral determinism vis a vis moral commitment, I'd like to step back and actually talk about moral morality and moral commitment. And you start in the book of, hey, what's defining morality is a big challenge. But then you offer your own perspective on what it means to be moral and what morality is, and then you connect it to moral commitment. Can you do that for us now? And then we'll talk about. Connect it back to the power of ideals.

Of course. And I want to say that I don't take a very fancy or philosophically convoluted definition of morality. It's very fundamental. And I try to think about morality in a way that applies across cultures, applies to all the both heroic and ordinary things that we do in a life that, number one, promotes the good, is pro social, and number two, avoids harm, avoids antisocial behavior. And that includes a range of capacities in life that range from that kind of habits and as you say, virtues that you have every day that control your behavior, that give you responsibility and honesty and just everyday common decency to even the kinds of things that people like Rawls and Kohlberg and the more philosophical people have written about, which have to do with sorting out some of the most complicated, complicated ideas in life about what's fair about justice. And that takes a certain amount of reflection and contemplation and thinking. So when I write about morality, I include the whole range from behavior, virtues and habits to reflection, reasoning and thinking. And as I said, I try to do it in a way that I believe people all over the world would agree. It's not specific to Westerners or intellectuals or one religion versus another. It's common kinds of things like caring for people, like being honest, like being fair minded. And I could give you a list, but the list is very long.

Yeah, and not only is it exclusive to one, it's universal to all. I mean, this is the essence of all great philosophical and spiritual teachings is let's live with virtue, let's express the best within ourselves in service to something bigger than ourselves.

That's right. And as one example of how common these ideas are, I discovered not too long ago that what we think of as the golden rule in the Western Christian tradition, there is some equivalent to that in virtually every religion in the world. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which is basic perspective taking. You want to be treated in the way that you would like to be, that you want to treat people in the way that you would like to be treated yourself. And every religion has that. So the kinds of things that we talk about, which are very fundamental and basic, are widely shared across people. And as I said to me, it comes down to promoting the pro social, promoting the good and having a life of restraint so that you avoid the bad, you avoid doing harm in the world.

Fantastic. So that's morality. And now you also discussed moral commitment. Can you describe for us moral commitment, what that means?

Sure. Now moral commitment is something of course a long term dedication, that is not a one time deal. And that's a very important distinction between committed kinds of action over the long term and even heroic things that you do once. And it's important for a lot of reasons I'll just very briefly mention in my work the role that understanding moral commitment played. A lot of my work in recent years has been devoted to purpose. And you mentioned two of my books, Noble Purpose and Path to Purpose. And purpose is a very important capacity to develop in life. It's good for the individual and it's good for society when people develop purpose. Not all people successfully find a purpose in life. But those that do find resilience energy find. Even gerontology finds that people with purpose tend to be healthy in old age and vital throughout the lifespan. Purpose requires commitment. Purpose is a morally committed endeavor. And the reason it's important is that you don't give up on something. That's what gives you resilience. You take the far long term horizon, you stick with it and there'll be a lot of failures. In fact, people that we study and we'll talk about the moral exemplars that we study, very often they will say, you know, I dedicate my life to alleviating poverty. I know perfectly well, but by the end of my life there's going to be every bit as much poverty around as when I started. But that doesn't deter me. I am committed to this and that's what makes me who I am. So purpose and moral commitment are long term goals that are different in quality for the individual than for example, jumping in a river because you see somebody drowning. And that's a wonderful thing to do. I don't want to diminish that. That's heroic. It's important that people are willing to do that. But you wouldn't say my purpose in life is to jump in rivers and save drowning people. That doesn't do it for you. Because that of course only happens perhaps once in your whole life. If ever a purpose is something that you stick with. And it could be ordinary, such as raising a family, or it could be something very noble like dedicating yourself to health or anti poverty or any of the great moral causes of the world.

It's fantastic. So again, we have the power of ideals, we have morality, we have moral commitment vis a vis purpose and living for something bigger than ourselves over the long term. Let's juxtapose that with moral determinism. So can you walk us through kind of the new science in quotes of morality and how you see that and important limitations perhaps to that view that we can discuss?

Sure. And there are a couple of different versions of this so called new science, although it's not that new anymore. And I even think some of the people that have promoted it have kind of backed off from some of the extreme claims once they realized how they really don't match up with the way people really act and what really influences people. But basically the claim has been that what drives our behavior, and especially what drives our pro social behavior or what stops us from doing bad things are experiences that we've had early in life perhaps, or things that we've inherited, characteristics that have evolved over the course of human development through the eons or cultural rules that we've internalized in some way. And so we're not really in control according to this view. We're not really in control of our behavior. Our behavior is controlled by our biological heritage or by the culture we grow up in, or perhaps by things that our parents did to us when we were 5 years old or something like that. And so morality is not about in this view. It's not about reflection or making choices or doing anything that has to do with your own autonomous agency in life. It has to do with whether you've been properly evolved biologically, whether you've been properly raised, whether you've grown up in the right kind of culture. And this to me is a very thin explanation. I don't deny that it explains some things. I suppose that I know that for a fact. The studies of infants show that we have evolved empathic responses. So even a very newborn baby has some germ of empathy, will be upset when he or she hears a baby next door cry or something like that. That's true. So we do. We're not born as blank slates and we have evolved certain things and our cultures matter. What we've learned from our upbringing matters. However, the fundamental rudimentary things that we've evolved or that we've learned cannot come close to explaining the kinds of long term commitments. And we're back to the word commitment again, that people take on in life and the kinds of heroic choices or even ordinary choices of giving yourself to something that you believe in. And as I said, this can explain. We take on. We take on commitments freely when we decide to become a parent or a citizen or when we do our jobs in a way that's responsible. We believe in that, we think about that. We take that on. We're not driven by, by biological urges. The biological urges are much more general than that. They couldn't possibly help us do a responsible job or on our career or take on a citizenship duty or let alone sacrifice something for the sake of our family or our country or any of these great things that we believe in. And if you follow the lives of people that have really excelled in this, and this is where we get back to the book the Power of Ideals, you'll see if you look at a Nelson Mandela or an Eleanor Roosevelt, you couldn't come near explaining the kinds of trajectories their lives have taken and the kinds of great deeds they've done or great decisions they've made over decades of their lives. There's no way, even in an intuitive common sense explanation, there's no way that that could be explained by biology or culture. In fact, a lot of these people go against their cultures in the long run. They decide our culture isn't doing a good enough job, we have to improve it. You can't explain that by cultural inheritance.

Yeah.

So determinism, really, it doesn't make any sense if you look at real lives, number one. And it's a very thin explanation for some kinds of early behaviors that do need to be taken account of. So we do need to take account of our biology and our culture for sure. But that only gets us 100th of the way there to explain moral commitment Beautiful.

Thank you for giving us such a great overview of that. And then just to frame it, determinism is because of your biology, because of your environment. You do this. And as you said, it's a very thin explanation. Of course we need to account for these variables. But ultimately, there's a choice in between whatever stimuli we have in our lives and our response to it, we have an opportunity to exhibit agency, to demonstrate moral commitment. And then you use these beautiful moral exemplars. You mentioned Nelson Mandela and Eleanor Roosevelt. You have four others you feature in this book. You wrote another book decades ago called Some Do Care, which I loved as well, and featured some other more everyday heroes we may not have heard of. We named our daughter Eleanor.

Oh, no kidding?

Yeah. Our son's name is Emerson and our daughter's name is Eleanor, in part obviously inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt's moral exemplariness. Can you share a story about Eleanor Roosevelt and how she embodies the ideals the. That we're talking about and how she is just such a radiant exemplar of moral commitment?

Yes. And when I tell you one, I will tell you my favorite story. Although I have to say, choosing one story in her life, I don't want to diminish all of the things that she did that I'm not going to mention. I'm going to say something that I'm going to tell you something that she did later in her life. And of course, earlier in her life, she was a great pioneer of women's rights and. And racial justice and so on. But one of the spectacular achievements that she had in 1948, which was after her husband, Franklin had died, she was appointed by the UN to be head of a commission to develop a universal declaration of human rights. This was 1948. We had just come out of World War II and horrible bloodshed and human cruelty all over the world. And I think that was a window of opportunity for the world to step back and say, how can we do better than this? So the un, which was a newly formed organization, asked Eleanor Roosevelt to get together a committee to come up with a declaration of things that everybody could believe in. Principles, ideals. And it was really. This is really the power of ideals come to life. And. And this was a time that there was conflict all over the place. The Soviet Union was on the move with communism, and the Western capitalists were fighting against that. The Jewish people were moving into Israel, and the Arabs were at odds with the Jewish people. The Pakistanis and the Indians were fighting. So there was tons of conflict in the world. And people were not even on speaking terms in some of these countries. Nevertheless, Eleanor Roosevelt, through her amazing leadership, and it was very difficult, she managed to pull together all of the different factions, these conflicting factions around the world, and create a declaration of 29 articles that every country in the world signed off on. The Jews and the Arabs, the communists and the capitalists, the Muslims and the Hindus. All of these people agreed. And there were principles, there were principles of, as I said, common decency. Slavery should be outlawed everywhere. We should give everybody, everyone has the right to a homeland. Everybody has the right to vote somewhere, to be a citizen and participate these basic, basic human rights. And of course, this was not easy. There was a lot of conflict on the committee. People said it couldn't be done. She, it's not well known, but Eleanor Roosevelt was a. Had faith in the Christian version of faith. Every night she would say a Christian prayer before she went to bed. She felt under a lot of pressure and felt like a lot of people do when they take on these kinds of tasks. Discouraged at times, and everyone was telling her it couldn't be done. But she persevered. She showed the kind of leadership with humility. And that's one of the virtues that we highlight in the power of ideals. She was a listener. She listened carefully to people from every culture to make sure that she got this right. And that was the only way it could be done. Because when this was proposed, it had to be something that was acceptable to people all over the world. And the interest of the stands as a high point in human moral progress. And something like 95 countries have adopted that as part of their constitution. It's been enormously influential. It, it doesn't have an enforcement regime. Nobody takes people to court for not doing it. But it has a tremendous sense of persuasion and education. And it's been one of the great moral, influential moral beacons in the world. And this was Eleanor Roosevelt. Nobody else could have done this.

Beautiful. And then what are the qualities that she engaged in or the practices that she engaged in that we could engage in in our own way to do what, you know, we feel purpose driven to do. Can you describe some of the more powerful practices that we can apply in our lives today?

Well, one is to, to believe in something and to make sure that what you believe in is, is, is morally right. And so to give you one example, I mean, everybody, I think, has something they believe in, But a lot of people aren't discriminating against, being careful, against pursuing what they consider to Be good ends by immoral means. And that was one of the things that all of our moral exemplars, including Eleanor Roosevelt, was very careful about. So in other words, it's of course important to have justice in the world and to fight for equality, but to do that in a way that harms people, to do it through violence or through deceit or through any kind of immoral means is counterproductive. It actually can cause more harm than good. And the human story throughout history has been people that think they're advancing a noble cause by lying, stealing, killing, cheating, and doing all kinds of other things that end up. End up destroying exactly. Civilizations that they tried to help. So that's one point is to pursue beliefs that are noble, but pursue them in moral ways. Another is, as I mentioned with Eleanor Roosevelt, to do it in a humble way so that you listen to people and you consider that you might be wrong or you might be going about something in a way that isn't the ideal way, and so be a good listener. And then third, this is something that we all need to work on. It's very difficult. Stick with it. This is courage. You know, try to steel yourself to this. Steel your nerves to the sticking point, as Shakespeare said. And even when we're tempted to give up and when we conquer our fears and don't get discouraged and take the long view and consider that you may not see victory in your lifetime. You may not achieve your goal, but have faith. Have faith that pursuing that goal in the long run, perhaps after you're gone, will actually make a big difference in the world. You may not live to see it, but if you put your grain of sand on the pile, it does add up. Believe that. Have faith.

Again, so powerful. So then the three virtues that you describe in the book were just covered in different contexts. We have truth Veritas, which I want to talk about a little bit more. And then humility, being willing to listen and engage in the discussion and realize that you may or may not be right in your current view and be open to that evolving. And then the third being faith, which is going to be our source of courage and the grittiness required to persevere.

Very good. Exactly.

Yeah. And then you talk a lot about the moral means and the ends in noble purpose as well. So I loved your reflections on that. Yeah. Tell us one more story before we go into the virtues, if you can. So you mentioned Nelson Mandel. Can you share with us the other four? And then perhaps a favorite story that really motivated you and inspired you. In your own work.

Well, I'll tell you one story about one of the wonderful people. She was the earliest of our moral exemplars, Jane Addams, who was a great social worker and founded Hull House in Chicago, a great settlement house worker. And she pioneered a lot of. At the time, this was way back in the early part of the 20th century, in the early 1900s, she pioneered a lot of what now seems to be the conventional wisdom in social work, which is, for example, you don't. You don't just tell. You don't take a superior position to the people you're trying to help, the poor people or the immigrants. You get down among them and learn from them how to help them, and they will help you, too, in a lot of ways. And so she had a great way of structuring her social work and was a key mover of the progressive movement. Everything from doing away with the practice of child labor, for example, that was Jane Addams that pushed that and a lot of other things. But the story I'll tell, or the quick little piece of her story that I think is so important, and it illustrates the point that we made before about how agency is so important, is that early in her life she was actually quite depressed and was raised in a way. She was raised in a way that she had a lot of material comforts, but spiritual emptiness. And if that's. If the story of human development were that you are a creature of your upbringing, that you're dependent, that you will be who your parents tried to make you, or you'll be who your biology is, or you'll be who your culture is. Jane Addams would have gone on to have a bourgeois life of kind of emptiness and depression, but material comforts. And she would have sunk into a lifestyle like a lot of other people have done, like a life of quiet desperation, in a sense. But no, she started reading a lot. She was very influenced by Tolstoy, for example, and other people that other great spiritual writers of the time. And she decided to turn her own life around. And she said, in fact, she used the word purpose, which endears her to me, because she was somebody that helped me understand how important purpose is. And she said, my life is. I have no purpose in my life, and I'm going to change that. And so she took a trip to London, where she found out about the cutting edge social work there. Dickens had written a lot at the time about poverty in London. She was very moved by that, spent time there and then brought back to this country some of the insights that she had. So she is an example of somebody that turned her own life around by her thinking and her beliefs and her ideals and deciding this is what's important in life. This is what I believe in. This is what is worth dedicating my life to. So I love her as an example because in some ways it's so. In some ways it was so revolutionary, but in other ways it was so ordinary because a lot of people do that and all of us can do that. Everybody can do that.

Beautiful. And we keep on coming back to purpose. And I actually want to step back and talk more about that because when I think about the power of purpose and how not having a clear sense of purpose can lead to such a sense of despair, especially in our modern society that moves so fast, there are so many inputs that are just bombarding us constantly and kind of divorcing us from that higher version of ourselves and a true life of agency and purpose and meaning. I'd love to talk more about how do we and how does one who's listening to this or watching this get more clarity, discover our purpose and then to live that purpose with more integrity. Can you share some ideas on that?

Sure. And it's a very good question. And you're absolutely right that so many of the cultural messages we receive from everything from entertainment to the news media put us turn us in a different direction towards material aspirations or towards self protection or towards short term thinking. So you're absolutely right that it's something that does require. It does require some intentional effort. I think these days especially, and I'll just say as an aside, that's not always the case. There are times and in society and human history when there are more ready made purposes out there. I think World War II was one of those examples or the time of the so called greatest generation when it was so important to sacrifice for the country and it was so obvious what people had to do. But this is not a time like that where we have a lot of national unity and a sense of common belief and so on. So we really need to do this on our own. And I think that in our research, here's what we have found and I write about this in the Path to Purpose and more recently we've extended this work to people all through the lifespan. We find that first of all it's very important for people to try out something that is close to something that you believe that you have some interest in so that you will not have a hard time sticking with each of us have our own Particular interests and things that we're also good at doing, talents and capabilities. And there's an infinity of these across the human. Across, across humans. And it's an individual thing. Purpose is an individual thing. So think about what it is that you enjoy doing, what it is that you believe in, what it is that you find inspiring, and what it is you think that you could actually commit your time to and then join together with other people. We find that virtually all of the people that really are able to develop purpose in the long term have other people that they've observed contact with that have been examples of what a purposeful life looks like. This is very important for young people. And it can be anybody. It could be a parent, it could be a teacher for a young person, it could be somebody that is your boss on your first job, or even a media figure. But there's always somebody that gives you some flesh and blood living sense of what a purpose in life looks like. And find ways to join together in endeavors, activities, quests, ventures that are dedicated to something beyond the self, something bigger than or transcendent, something that will contribute to the world beyond the self. It doesn't have to just be one thing. People have multiple purposes. But I mentioned earlier that family can be a purpose vocation, your job can be a purpose, faith can be a purpose, civic engagement can be a purpose. And all of people can have more than one. They can have all of these things. And you don't always. Purpose is a long term dedication to something, but it doesn't mean it's forever. And as your children grow, for example, and they leave the house, hopefully you still feel purposeful about them. But probably it's not a great idea to do the same kind of day to day, minute to minute parenting that you do. When they were four years old, I think, you know, probably they, when they're grown and have their own family, they appreciate a little bit of space. So then you move on. And that isn't your front and center, day to day purpose anymore. And so you find something else, other things to dedicate. And so purpose is something that you all that you always reinvent, that you revisit it and take on new purposes as life goes on. And perhaps the older purposes, maybe they become a little less front and center or you find new ways to do them. So it's a living, creative kind of capacity. And the last thing I'll say about it is it takes a while. Purpose is the latest developing capacity that I've ever studied. And so don't get Too worried if it takes you a while to get there. Some people really don't find their purposes until they're well out of college or way past their first job. And they're in their late 20s, 30s, 30s, and so on. So don't be impatient. As long as you're moving forward, learning, trying out things, it will come.

Yeah. That's so inspiring. Oops, I'm hearing myself now. And that just changed. Let me see. Okay, that's better. We'll just edit this little part again. That is so inspiring. We can talk about that for a weekend, which is a separate chat I want to have with you afterwards about how, you know, we might be able to bring more of your wisdom into our community. But one of the things we talk about, we have a general community and then we have a group of coaches that we're working with now to coach others in the optimize ideas. And purpose is a big part of that, obviously. And living with eudaimonic virtue and embracing an everyday sense of heroism, you know, from the classic Greek idea of the word hero meant protector. Didn't mean tough guy or killer of bad guys. It meant protector. So our challenge to our community is that we all have. I would offer the sacred obligation to live with virtue moment to moment to moment, to be our best selves in service to something bigger than ourselves, in our families and in our work, in whatever capacity that shows up. And that that's a universal purpose that we all share. And then of course, there are unique individualized expressions of that, as you beautifully described, and that will in themselves iterate many times over the course of a good life. So again, I just. I love that and I'm looking forward to discussing that further. Yeah. So I'll leave it at that for now. But let me look at one of the quotes from. I think it was noble purpose. Yeah. I think you talked about the ultimate purpose formula and you shared the idea of what you love and what the world needs. Can you share that thought just to. Just to bring a point to that idea of finding what you're most interested in and what the world most needs. I thought that was such a beautiful way to capture it.

Sure. And I think that is the key to. That's why we do a lot of trial and error as we're growing up, because finding exactly that combination is not always easy. And it's fine to make. To make a lot of false starts, as I said before, as long as you're moving forward and learning a lot of things that we love doing and by the way, I am never going to proselytize against doing things you love. I think doing things that you. That are entertaining or things that are fun. Fun, go for it. You know, and let me say one other thing about this is that we find in the later parts of life, our research finds that people that are high on purpose, which means dedicating yourself to something beyond the self, are also high on self care and having a great time and just doing things that are totally for yourself, like going to a good movie or going to a party or, or reading a poem or listening to music or things like that, but with purpose. It is that combination of something that you both love and something that is contributing and a lot of things that you love. The world doesn't really need very much of which is fine, no reason to stop doing it. But that's not a purposeful achievement. So. And that's what, by the way, a lot of, a lot of people who, a lot of young people who grow up pursuing sports or entertainment, they actually consider, let's say, a young person that loves to play basketball. I love to play basketball when I was a kid. Now, if you're really, really good at it, you may entertain the idea that I could go on and become a pro basketball player. And that could be the case for a very, very few people. But at some point you have to figure out whether you have that gift to actually do something that is beyond just going out and having a great time playing basketball. Same thing with lots of things that are fun to do. Filmmaking. Every high school has at least a dozen very bright young people that imagine themselves being the next Steven Spielberg, let's say. And if you do the numbers, you know, the something like 50,000 people a year that want to do it, there just isn't room in Hollywood to do it. That's not to say that somebody or a few people can't do it and won't do it. But you have to sort that out. That's the point I'm making, is that you have to sort out whether the things you love actually have a future in the sense that, that there is a market for them in the world, that either you're good enough, you have that extreme talent, if it's a very selective kind of field, or if it's something that is just pure fun. You have to be honest with yourself and say, well, you know, this is not a purposeful activity for me. It's something I will do because I enjoy doing it. So part of developing purpose is testing yourself against the world and seeing whether you have something to offer that the world needs. That's going to be easier in areas that are somewhat less fun to do, obviously that are difficult, that have a lot of frustration and drudgery in them, that require a lot of hard grinding work. So that's some advice I always give young people, is that if you tackle things that really do require, that do require a lot of practice and skill, you're much more likely to find something the world needs. But it is exactly that combination that takes time. It takes time for us and each of us as an individual to find out what it is that we enjoy doing. Because if you don't enjoy it, you're not going to stick with it. So that's an important part of it. But in addition, that you actually have the talent and ability and you're willing to put the time in to develop the capacity, the skill to contribute something that the world needs.

Yeah, I love it. And the idea of iterating toward that as well and being willing to test different things and maintain the faith and the cour to continue to show up not expecting to find it on the first pass and then giving up when we don't have that. And I love your research that demonstrates that those highest on purpose are also those who are often highest on self care and taking care of themselves. We describe that as energy. So we say it all starts with energy of you need to be plugged into something bigger than yourself. So you actually have the capacity to sustainably have the courage to show up in your work and in your family in love dynamic. And then that takes the courage to step out of normal society and you don't need to be looking at your phone 24 hours a day and all those little mundane things that are actually opportunities to demonstrate our moral agency and to say I'm committed to something bigger than being entertained all day every day, you know, and finding ways to create the space to. To step outside of the culture that isn't giving us the same purpose that as you mentioned, the World War II greatest generation yet. If you step out just even a millimeter, you can see pretty clearly that the world needs a lot more of this virtue, you know, and a lot more of this conversation. So I just, I love some of those reflections.

And what you said was very important because it also suggested or indicated how this is a capacity and it's a developmental thing. You have to develop it over a lifetime. We're not born knowing how to do this. It takes the development of the right kinds of Habits. And, you know, when you develop the right kinds of habits, they become virtues. But this takes a while. It takes practice and repeated effort over a lifetime. And it takes insights about who you are, what you are interested in, what you are good at and what the world needs, which takes some education and getting out there and learning. So all of these things are not going to be. Do not expect that these things are going to come to you at age 10 or age 20 or anything like that. They're things you have to learn. You have to learn how to do them. And so they have to be. This is a capacity that must be developed. And the longer we live, if we keep growing, the longer we live, the better we are at doing it too.

It's so beautiful, and I love, just to echo your phrase too, that this is the latest developing capacity, really the sense of purpose, which is empowering, you know, and when we realize that, we can get out of the it needs to happen immediately sense of our culture and then put in the work, as you've mentioned a number of times, over the long run, while doing the things that are within our capacity now. And then Joseph Campbell comes to mind of the idea of a good life as one hero's journey, as he defined it, in those quests after another. So you're constantly spiraling up, you know, and entering that forest of the unknown where you thought this was going to be the purpose. Perhaps it was for a certain period of time. And then what? And then we develop the capacities to ideally be able to do more and more. Whether it's the Eleanor Roosevelt global impact or the Jane Addams, it's our own individualized, again, iterative, humble, constantly seeking the truth of where our joy and skills meets the world's needs.

Right? Yeah. And as you just said, and I like that Joseph Campbell quote, this is a long story. And that's one of the problems I have with some of our culture, especially the Hollywood kind of. There's a lot of instant gratification that is being suggested and promoted by a lot of the popular movies, for example, and things like that. You know, you solve the problem by taking out your weapon and shooting the bad guy. And then, then it's all over. You don't have to do anything else after that. And life is not about instant gratification. It's a long story. It's a long story that builds on prior achievements and sometimes it builds on failure, but you keep going. And so you look to the far horizon and don't expect instant results. And unfortunately, that's Counter cultural these days, but it's really the true way to live.

I love it. So then my coach, Phil Stutz, who's a leading psychotherapist and author of a book called the Tools, he says in addition to not being instantly gratified, you will never be permanently gratified. He says, you will never be exonerated. We all want to get to a point where we've done enough work, it should be over, it should be easy now. And so a huge theme in our work is get over that. That's actually the root cause of so much suffering that we're someday going to have it all figured out.

Well, you know, related to that, that's a lovely thought and in a very ethereal level. But related to that in a more mundane level is the concept of retirement, which we are giving a new look at. Because the idea that, well, I've done my life now I put in my time at the office or I've made my contribution and now I'm going to sit on a beach and drink drinks with little umbrellas out of them and things like that. It's kind of golden year retirement thing. It turns out that's not usually so good for people. What's good for people is to keep going, is to keep looking for things even after you leave your job. Look for other things to get involved in and be active in and contribute to. And it turns out that has health benefits. More health benefits, I believe, than sitting in that beach drinking those fancy little.

Drinks for multiple reasons. Right. That's so great. One of the things I like to chat about in general, and I'm specifically interested in hearing your thoughts on our business is called optimize. And I won't talk about the fact that we're a public benefit corporation, but the way that we're running our business is purpose driven. So whereas a C corporation has one purpose which is to maximize value for one shareholder group or stakeholder group the shareholders, ours is multiple stakeholder oriented society, partners, investors, customers and employees. So it's an exciting public benefit, purpose driven business model. But what I want to talk about now is the idea of optimize is from the Latin word optimus which means the best. So in our work we try to encourage our community to discover and live from that best sense of themselves and from that ideal driven daimon driven. We connected to Aristotle's idea of eudaimon good soul. And our joke is you need to high five that inner soul, that best version of you consistently. And when you do that, you live as A modern day hero. And again I shared the idea of the ancient etymology is protector. And we all have the opportunity not to run into a river once, but to live our own most heroic lives. Whether that's my wife breastfeeding our daughter, you know, two and a half years in and still going through the sleepless nights, that's a heroic thing no one will ever know about outside of our family. And the people who just heard me say that. But she's not doing it for that. But I would love to hear your ideas of what it means for you to be a modern hero in the most every day we can all be at sense.

Well, hero. You know, I always hesitate to use the word hero about myself, although I did like you kind of gave us all the way into that in that everybody can think of themselves as a hero. And so it's a nice idea. I guess I would if I were going to use it for myself in any case, I would put it in the context that, you know, honest, to be really honest, life is difficult for everybody. I mean life. I don't want to underestimate how many, how fortunate I've been and you know, I've lived a long life. I've had my health and a wonderful wife and family and all of that. So I don't want to say anything that makes it sound like I'm feeling sorry for myself. But I do want to say that life throws up a lot of stuff at everybody. At everybody. There's nobody that gets away without challenges and things to be worried about, things to be sad about, things to mourn. I mean, we've, we've all had either tragedies in our own life or people we love. We've seen tragic things happen to them, which hurts us deeply. And so I think what I believe, if I were going to use the word heroic, is that a heroic response to that saying. And I'm going to quote here, Viktor Frankl, who is the great, one of my great gurus actually, who developed a approach to psychology and psychological development that basically was try to see the positive in whatever you can find. And he wrote a book that was translated into English as Man's Search for Meaning, which was very inspiring for my own work on purpose. But the real title of that book that was mistranslated into English, the real title in German was nevertheless say yes to Life. And to me that is heroism for all of us. Frackl had a truly heroic story because he was thrown in a concentration camp during World War II and survived it by believing that he needed to come out and to show people a better way of thinking about their lives than some of the old fashioned psychology that Freud and other people had, had been preaching, which was much more deterministic. And Frankl was the great leader in saying no. What really drives you are your future aspirations and what you believe in, not what has happened to you outside of your control. So he believed in that message and he survived the concentration camp. But his message was whatever life throws at you. And for some people it's going to be much more horrible than other people. But for all of us it's a challenge. And it gets you, it can get you down, it can get you depressed, it can get you fearful, it can get you anxious. And there are times when you just, you can't avoid the fact that something tragic has happened. But nevertheless say yes to life. That's your response if you say, you know, I'm determined to make the best of things and to do the, to do my best under whatever circumstances the life I've been given present to me that to me is, is ordinary heroism is something we should all strive for.

That's just so beautiful and powerful. And I think of the very first lecture that we give with our coaches is something called Eudaimonology. And I jokingly say that we actually, I don't know who named it psychology, which is the study of the soul, of course, but if they just would have named it Eudaimonology, the study of a good soul, we wouldn't have needed to create positive psychology. We wouldn't have spent 100 years studying negative psychology.

That's great. That's great.

The very first thing that we teach them is Viktor Frankl's wisdom.

Oh, no kidding.

On stepping in between stimulus and response. And in that gap exists our freedom. And in that gap we have the opportunity moment to moment to moment in the most mundane things. In the response to the most, you know, mundane challenge of am I going to get up and go do the workout that I said was important to me to be physically fit for my family, et cetera, to the most challenging, devastating what Frankel went through. But that idea of it's not a step in the river once in your lifetime, it's a moment to moment to moment. Can you step in between stimulus and response. Be the best version of you right now. So I'm so moved by your description of that and the mistitle, mistranslation of the title. And the other thing I love about that book from my understanding is he published it anonymously. This had nothing to do with him when he published it. There was that humility and that purpose driven. This had nothing to do with his egoic anything. And in fact, he had to be convinced, right, to put his name on it at some level. And that, to me is another demonstration of he wasn't doing it for the extrinsic fame and the wealth and the all the other things that come with showing off. It was a very intrinsic. I truly want to serve the world as profoundly as I can.

That's very moving. He was legendary. I'll give you and your listeners a tip. If you ever end up in Vienna, go to the Viktor Frankl Museum, which it's a short walk from the Freud Museum, actually. And the Freud Museum is also enjoyable, but it's all artifacts. It's Freud's couch, where he used to, you know, treat people and pictures of his family. Frankl's museum has none of that. It's interactive. So you go and you type in a challenge or a problem and out comes an opportunity, things like that. So it's a wonderfully, incredibly inspiring experience, his little museum.

That's amazing. Well, now I need to connect it to another museum not too far from there, which you said something along the lines of playing your role well. So wherever you get placed in life, Frankl had his horrific situation in the concentration camps, but he played that role as well as he could. And when you said that, I thought of Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic philosopher who, at the Hungarian National Museum, I was introduced to Aurelius in a display there, bought Meditations in Vienna at a bookstore and devoured it. And his whole point was essentially the same idea of whatever life gives us, let's play the role well. And he doesn't use the phrase stepping in between stimulus and response, but the Stoics, of course, say there are things outside of our control and those within choose that's within and go from one service to God to another. That was his ultimate mission. And so I can't wait to go see Frankel's museum when the time arises. I still appreciate you, and again, your light and your work and your exemplariness. I should also say that the number one thing that we teach our coaches is to be what we call a radiant exemplar. And our whole approach is coach yourself first. Be a shining example of what's possible, because that ultimately is what the world needs more of. And then the theory and the practices and stuff will come as a byproduct of you being the coaches. We're certifying and training, being the exemplar and showing the world what's possible. And we live with virtue and again, that everyday sense of heroism. And once again, I just want to thank you for who you are and what you've done and how deeply you've inspired me. And I'm looking forward to chatting more about how we can potentially share you and your wisdom more with our community.

So thank you so much once again. Thank you for all you do. It's so important. Wonderful, great conversation. Thanks a lot.

Yes, thank you.

Okay, bye. Okay, bye. Okay, bye. Okay, bye. Okay, bye. Okay, bye. Okay.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize. Optimize Me. Hey guys, this is Brian with a quick little P.S. i'm really excited to let you know about an event we're working on. Plan is to make it the premier self optimizing event of 2020. We're calling it Optimize 2020. You the modern hero, basic idea, five days, 101 world class luminaries, 1 million people. You can learn more and get your tickets to the online and offline event at Optimize Me 2020. Again, that's Optimize Me 2020. Hope to see you there.