A Process for Finding & Achieving Your Unique Purpose | Robert Greene

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Robert Greene. Robert Greene is an author who has written more than five best selling books including the 48 Laws of Power, the Laws of Human Nature and Mastery. He did his Bachelor's training at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Robert Greene's books are both unique and.

Important for several reasons, not the least of which is that they explore the interaction between the psychology of self, self exploration and the psychology of human interaction, all rooted in history and modern culture and at the same time in a way that pertains to everybody. I first learned about Robert's work from reading the book Mastery, which to my mind is a brilliant exploration and a practical tool for how to think about and pursue one's purpose. Whenever I'm asked for book suggestions, I always include Mastery in my top three recommendations. During today's discussion we cover a wide range of topics including how to find and pursue and achieve one's purpose. We talk about the selection of a life partner as well as romantic and other types of relationships. We also discuss the topics of motivation and urgency and this concept of death ground which arose during our discussion of Robert's recent stroke. Robert's stroke rendered him certain limitations, but also has allowed him to explore how to write, how to exercise, indeed how to interface with life in general in new ways that allow him to continue to expand his sense of purpose. I'm certain that by the end of today's episode you will have gleaned tremendous amounts of new knowledge that will allow you to navigate forward on along the path to your purpose. Perhaps find your purpose if you feel you haven't done that yet, as well as to greatly enhance your relationship with yourself, with others, and indeed to the world around you. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Roka. Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality. I've spent a lifetime working on the biology, the visual system, and I can tell you that your visual system has to contend with an enormous number of challenges in order for you to be able to see clearly. Roka understands those challenges and has designed their eyeglasses and sunglasses accordingly so that you always see with crystal clarity. Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses are designed with a new technology called Float Fit, which allows them to fit perfectly and not move around even when you're active. In fact, whenever I'm wearing my Roka eyeglasses or sunglasses, I usually forget that I'm wearing them. I happen to wear Roka eyeglasses at night when I drive or if I'm reading at night, and I wear Roka sunglasses during the daytime if it's very bright, especially if I'm driving into sunlight. If you'd like to try Roka eyeglasses or sunglasses, you can go to roka.com that's r o k a dot com and enter the code huberman for 20% off your first order. Again, that's r o k a dotcom and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are tailored to your unique sleep needs. Now, sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance when we are sleeping well and enough mental health, physical health and performance all stand to be at their best. One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that your mattress is tailored to your unique sleep needs. Helix Sleep has a brief two minute.

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Robert, I'm so happy you're here.

I'm really happy to be here. Andrew, thank you so much for inviting me.

A short story in 2015 I was teaching a course to undergraduates. This was a big course. 450 students.

Where was this?

This was when I was a professor at University of California, San Diego. I was about to move back to Stanford, but the course was entitled Neural Circuits in Health and Disease. But there was a final lecture where I would do a lot of Q and A with the students about science, about careers, about career paths. And what I found was that many of the students had questions about not just science, but about how to learn and forage for information. And I recommended three books at the end of the course. Every year that I taught it. I taught it for four years. And one of the books was the book Longitude, which is a wonderful story about discovery of timekeeping devices at sea One book I'll leave as a mystery, not to be, not to be mysterious, but because it's a science book, I'll just tell you what it is. It's Principles of Neuroscience. So I thought that.

You don't know that one.

Yeah, it's a big. It makes a better doorstop for most than a book, but it's a wonderful resource if you want to learn about neuroscience and your book Mastery. And the reason I recommended Mastery is because these students were soon going to go into the great jungle of post undergraduate education. And, and for me, I found Mastery to be an absolutely transformative book in that it taught me so much about how to learn from others, how to expect certain types of interactions when one kind of assigns themselves to a mentor and vice versa. And it talked about some things that we'll get into in more depth today, but not the least of which is about identifying that unique seed that exists within all of us that can guide our best decisions in terms of finding our purpose. And so I usually end with a great debt of gratitude, and I'll probably do that again at the end, but I want to start with a great debt of gratitude. Mastery transformed my entire life. And in many ways, this podcast probably wouldn't exist were it not for Mastery, because it really embedded in me this idea that we all have a deeper purpose and it explains how to go about finding that purpose. So I tell you that, and I also will use that as a segue for asking you now, since I'm sure people's ears are pricked up to this. How do you find your purpose? Could you share with us what it is to find one's purpose and how early life events perhaps can cue us to what that purpose is for each of us?

Well, thank you for that marvelous introduction. I'm almost blushing. That's fantastic. Sorry. Well, you know, being a human being is not easy as opposed to an animal, because we're born and nobody gives us like, a direction. Our parents might be a little bit, our college teachers, et cetera, mentors, but generally we're on our own. And it's a very, very difficult process. You wake up in the morning and you don't really know what you're. What you can do. You could choose 12 different paths. It can be very confusing and very overwhelming when you find that sense of purpose, when you find what I call your life's task, Everything has a direction, everything has a purpose. Your energy is concentrated. It's not like you're just going down a single narrow pathway. It's not like life becomes boring, and it's just about discipline and solving problems. It's actually the most exciting thing that can ever happen to you because you never have that lost feeling. You wake up in the morning and you go, yeah, this is what I need to accomplish. People come at you with all kinds of distractions and boring and irritating things. You're able to cut it out. It's just the most marvelous piece of internal radar that you can have. So I genuinely wish that everybody can find that kind of internal radar. And so it's not easy. And I understand that there's no, like, instant formula, because we're all about instant formulas. It's difficult, and I want you to know that. So it's not like Robert can give me the answer in three minutes, no, I can't. But there's a process involved. It's not a mystery. You can follow a very singular process. The idea is you're talking about childhood. The way I like to frame it is when you were born. You are a phenomenon. You are unique. Your DNA has never occurred in the history of the universe going back billions of years. It will never occur in the future. Your life experience with your parents and everything that you experience in your early years going on up is unique. It's yours. You are one of a kind, right? So that is your source of power to waste. That is just the worst thing you can do in your life. And what the power is, is finding that uniqueness, what makes you you, and how you can mine that and how you can go deep into it and use that to create a career path, right? And so I tell people, when you're a child, when you're four or five or even younger, you have what the great psychologist Maslow called impulse voices. They're little voices in your head that say, I love this. I hate that. I like this food. I don't like when Mommy moves this way. I like when Daddy comes from here. You're very cued into who you are and what you like and what you don't like. And these voices kind of direct you in certain ways, right? And when you're very young, they direct you towards intellectual mental pursuits as well. And there's a book I recommend for everybody. It's Howard Gardner's Five Frames of Mind. It's helped me immensely. The idea is he talks about five forms of intelligence. Our problem is we think of intelligence as mostly intellectual, but there are many forms of intelligence. There's the intelligence that has to do with words. There's abstract intelligence that has to do with patterns and mathematics. There's kinetic intelligence. That has to do with the body. There's social intelligence. He has five of them. And the idea is your brain naturally veers towards one of them. It can veer towards two of them. That happens. But generally, one of them kind of dominates. Right. And it's like a grain in your brain, and that's going in a certain direction. You want to go with that grain because that's where your power will lie. So when you're young, if you go back and think about when you were four or five, you can maybe get a picture of some kind of direction or voice inside of you that was impelling you towards this. I know for me, it was words. I can remember when I was six years old, I was just obsessed with words. Just the letters in words. Almost like in almost slightly schizophrenic way. I would spell words backwards. I would take them apart. I would do anagrams. I love palindromes, right? So I had a thing about words and language. It's very primal. Some people, you know Albert Einstein, when he was four years old, his father gave him a birthday gift of a compass. And he was just mesmerized by this compass, the idea that there are invisible forces out there in the cosmos moving this needle. And he's obsessed with the idea of invisible forces. Steve Jobs, when he was like 7 or 8 or maybe younger, in Burlingame, California, his father, they passed by a store with technological devices in the window, and he was just hypnotized by the design of those devices and the glass tubes and everything. So he wanted to go in that direction. Tiger woods saw his father hitting golf balls in the garage, and he was just, like, screaming with joy. He had to do that. Right. You know, I could give you a million different examples of this. Of course, these are people who are famous. Obviously, we can go back and find that. It's easier. But what happens to you? And please cut me off if I'm going on too long.

No, please continue.

What happens to you is you're seven now, you're getting older, and you're starting to not hear that voice anymore. You're hearing the voice of your teachers telling you you're not good at this field, you need to get better at math. You know, you shouldn't be interested in these sports or anything. You should be going this direction. Your parents are starting to tell you this is the career they want, the direction they want you to go in. Right. You start hearing that more than your own voice. And as you get older, it gets worse and worse and worse. Then when you're a teenager, it's all about what other people are doing. Your peers, what's cool, what's not cool, you know, and that kind of is more. So all of these noise enters your brain and you can't hear that anymore. You don't know who you are. And so you go to college. You kind of maybe choose a major that seems practical, that your parents want you to go into. Maybe you kind of wander around, you're not sure, and then you enter the work world without that inner radar that I'm talking about. And, brother, you're lost, right? Where should I go? Well, I need to make money, right? And so you make a choice based on the need to make a lot of money. Not everyone, but some people do that. And I understand that need. We all need to make a living. But that can set you off on a very bad path because you're not connected emotionally. The thing is, when you figure out that primal inclination, that grain that's inside of you, then you have the energy to be disciplined, to go through boring tasks, to learn. You learn at a faster rate because you're emotionally engaged. When you're emotionally engaged in a subject, the brain learns twice, three times, four times as fast as when you're not. I always give the example. In college, I studied foreign languages, which was kind of a passion of mine. For three or four years, I studied French, and then I went to Paris, and I couldn't speak a word. It was useless because it didn't teach me anything practical, right? I was totally confused. And then. But I was in Paris and I loved it, and I wanted to live there, right? And I had a girlfriend, and I needed to speak French to her. And I can tell you, in one month, I learned more than those four years of university, because I wanted to, because I was engaged. My emotions were there. It was like I had to survive to learn French. Whereas, so most of us, we don't have a need, really, to learn this subject. We're half. We're paying half attention. But when you find that thing that really connects to you, you're paying deep attention, your emotions are engaged, you're learning at a much faster rate. Okay? And so the thing is, how do you find that when you're older, when you're 21? I give people a lot of help, and it's usually not so difficult. We can go through that process. It gets harder when you're 30 and you've been wandering around, but it's not impossible. I didn't really start find my exact path until I was 38, 39, to be honest. So there's hope. When you get 40 and you get 50, it gets more and more difficult. Right. And it's very sad if you wasted that seed of uniqueness that I'm talking about. And I tell people there are ways of going back and we go through a process like archeology, we have to dig and dig and dig and find those bones from your childhood that indicated what you were meant to do. But when you find your life's task, everything opens up. It doesn't mean you figured out, okay, I've got to aim for this particular job when I'm 28. That's not how it works. It gives you a sense of direction. You can try different things, you can experiment, you can have fun. When you're in your 20s, you're going to learn, you're going to learn skills, but it gives you an overall framework instead of, whoa, all this confusion, this chaos, social media, the Internet. I could go here, here, here, you're lost at sea. It gives you a very important sense of direction. A compass.

As you describe this, I have this image of, you know, you mentioned animals that presumably don't have a lot of flexibility in terms of the niches they can exist in. But the way I imagine this process is that as a human we're plopped into a environment. And here I'm using analogy where we don't really know if we are an aquatic animal, a terrestrial animal or an avian. Right. Or an amphibian, or an amphibian for that matter. And to make the wrong choice to be an amphibian who's trying to fly, although I'm sure they're out there in the animal kingdom, it's not just a waste of time, it's probably deadly. And not to over dramatize the failure of finding one's purpose, but I see it that way. Whereas perhaps we could just say that the process of finding one's purpose is to realize like, ah, you know, I'm an amphibian, I can go in and out of water, whereas a bunch of other creatures around me stop at the water's edge.

Right, right, right.

And this is really cool. And a bunch of these other things, like these flying things, that they can't actually even go in the water.

Right.

Some of them might, you know, be on the surface or dive into it, but they can't do what I can do. So the process of self discovery, it sounds like it's about restricting one's choices to a sort of wedge within the full landscape of options. And, you know, for me, I can certainly recall after reading Mastery, it helped me recall some early seed emotions that I experienced as a very distinct sensation in my body.

Can you describe that?

Yeah. Well, without making it too specific to my unique tastes, you know, as a kid, I loved flora and fauna. I love learning about biology, sure, yeah, no surprise there.

But animals and how they move in.

Particular, and fish, and going to a proper aquarium store for the first time for me, and going snorkeling for the first time was like, wow. And even as I describe it, it's almost like my body floats. I feel it in my left arm, of all things, and it feels like there's something to do about it. It's not just that I'm in observation of things that delight me. It's like there's an activation state created within me, like, I got to do something with this. And typically, it's tell everybody about it until they won't listen anymore. But oftentimes it's to also draw those things to think about them, and I just delight in them. It's a constant source of delight. And so seeds such as those, and there are a few other things in that landscape of flora and fauna, and learning about animals and biology, including the human animal, and then organizing information feels so satisfying to me. It's like a drug that. And so it just felt. Feels like this eternal spring of life. Right? And so for me, that's what it was. And in 2015, when I was teaching that course, the course I loved, but I was feeling a little bit astray in my scientific career. And then I read Mastery, and I realized, yes, I love running a laboratory. I love teaching. But there's something else for me, and it has to do. Not with a podcast. I didn't even know what a podcast. I knew what a podcast was. I was listening to podcasts at that time, but. But I wasn't on social media. I had no thoughts of having a podcast. But what I wanted was that feeling in its total number of forms. That's the goal. Get that feeling in as many forms as possible.

Right?

Is that about.

That's absolutely perfect, because the connection to what I'm talking about, it's not an intellectual thing. It's visceral. It's emotional, it's physical. Right? And you feel it in your body, and when you're doing it, it's like it's at your level. It's like you're swimming with the current, you feel it, things are easy, everything clicks together. There's a delight. Not everything is going to be delightful. There's going to be tedium involved, there's going to be moments of boredom. But you're able to withstand the moments of boredom because you feel that deep overall connection. So, yes, that's precisely what I'm talking about. I mean, for me, it's a little bit similar. Thing is, I said about words, but the other thing that I was obsessed with when I was a kid was early human ancestors. Don't ask me why. I just was so obsessed with our ancestors millions of years ago and how it's possible to be living here in the 60s or 70s with cars and everything, but to come to where we are now. And I wrote a short story when I was 8 years old about a vulture. It was written from the point of view of a vulture watching the first humans kind of emerge on the planet. I'm sure it was absolutely awful, dreadful. But the weird thing is, I'm writing a new book and all I'm doing in that book is going into early humans, and I feel like a kid again. I'm so excited, I'm so happy. So I can very much relate to your story.

You mentioned these five different forms of intelligence, or frames of mind as you refer to them, and I'm certainly aware that I lean towards a more intellectual interest. Although, as you pointed out, the excitement, the delight, is visceral, and the actions are actions, they're of the body. Ultimately, one has to draw, speak, write books, et cetera, to transmute that excitement into something real for people that are not as intellectually tuned, but maybe are kinesthetically tuned, for instance. I can only wonder what that's like. I'm not completely uncoordinated, but I don't think I have a kinesthetic attunement or frame of mind. But I, for instance, had a podcast listener mention that they think in feels that they literally experience thought as sort of a patchwork of bodily sensations.

Right.

And that thought for them is not of the stuff from the neck up, but only from the neck down, which to me was really intriguing. And so I only raise this because there have to be, as you point out, there's an infinite number of different sort of orientations based on our unique DNA and experience. But what do you think explains why these particular seeds, or as you point out, like the. The direction that the grain runs in the brain, I mean, it's partially going to be nature. It's Going to be DNA. But we're talking about this as if there's some exciting or awe inspiring or delightful thing that captures us. Can it be the other way too? Can it be one has a bad experience as a child in an intellectual environment and then decides, I'm going in. The things of the body feel good, things of the mind of intellect feels bad. And does it matter whether or not we are drawn to our purpose by recognizing what we love or what we hate or are both useful?

Oh, they're both very, very useful. You know, a lot of intelligence is non verbal. We think in terms of images. We're very much infected by the emotions of other people. So I know, for instance, my mother is very, very interested in history. She's obsessed with history and I probably absorbed her interest in history. I don't think there's a genetic gene for that interest, you know, so you're going to absorb things from your parents as well. So it's not all just genetic. But yeah, what you hate will pay a big. Will have a big thing. But the problem with doing that is if you go into a direction and you're in elementary school, et cetera, and, and they force you to learn math and you hate it, what it tends to do is it turns you off from learning in general. You think, I don't want to be disciplined. I don't want to go through anything because it's painful, it doesn't lead anywhere. It's not me, it's frustration. It turns you off from learning in general. So it's really, really important for a child to have the love experience as early as possible so that they can know what they hate and why they hate it. Right? And then they can rebel and they can go into that field. As opposed to, I hate learning, I hate discipline, I hate studying, I hate trying things over and over again. If you're kinesthetically oriented and you know, a part of me, I understand that because I love sports is you have to practice. It's gonna take a lot. It's not. You're not gonna instantly be good at something. Right. And that's gonna require a love of it. Right? But if your math experience, because I hate learning shit, you're not, it's going to transfer to sports. You're going to hate discipline in general. So it's very important for parents to let that child have at least glimmers of that love moment. I know for me, when I finished college and I entered the work world, I had to get a job. I got worked in Journalism, I hated it. I hated working for other people. I hated office politics. I hated all the egos. I hated the smarminess. I hated the lack of quality. It was all just about, you know, making money and getting things out there. And then I worked in Hollywood. I hated Hollywood. I hated working in Hollywood. That formed me very much, made me go in the direction that I went in, but only from the basis of I knew that I wanted to be a writer. So, you know, that's very important that it's not just hate. It can form you, but there also has to be that positive, deep emotional love of something that also is grounded in you in some way.

What you just said really highlights the fact that energy and motivation can come from either pressure, you know, desire for something or desire to get away from something. And earlier when you were talking about how we are so much more engaged and driven towards things that stir us emotionally and actually, we know, based on the neuroscience, as you know, too, I'm sure that only by the release of certain neurochemicals in the brain and body would our brain have any reason to change. Right. If you don't feel agitation and you can do everything that you're trying to do, of course your brain wouldn't change. Like, why would it?

Right.

That agitation is a signature of the neurochemicals that are saying, hey, something's different now.

Right? Right, right.

You might need to do something different, including rewire yourself. And that can come from positive or experiences.

Of course.

I'm obsessed with this idea of energy. I mean, we all want to have more energy and focus. And normally we hear about the concept of energy in the context of caloric energy, like what should we eat and when and how much, and we need to get sleep. But what you're really referring to is neural energy, like the engagement of ourselves that's, you know, sitting there ready to be engaged. But it requires the right experiential macronutrients. Right, the experiential micronutrients, as opposed to, of course, we need good nutrition, but that's not sufficient. It's necessary but not sufficient. So would you say that when we are, let's say, since a good number of our listeners are in adulthood, from our 20s on, that the things that excite us as adults that really generate some feeling of readiness or grab our attention are still informative toward guiding our decisions about best life and life purpose?

Well, what exactly do you mean by that? I mean, like, because there are things that excite you in a kind of a quick way, like you know, where you have to relieve some tension and there's entertainment and there's things that kind of give you pretty immediate gratification and there's the larger picture of something that will give you fulfillment over years to come. So you can feel that when you're older and you can pay attention to it. But a lot of the time is we're paying too much attention to the immediate pleasures of life, to what gives us instant gratification, and that's what we're grabbing for. So this is a much more kind of deeper process that involves that digging that I was saying. It's deeper than just kind of, I like this, I don't like that, you know, kind of thing. It's more something macro than just that. And so when you're in your 20s or in your 30s or your 40s, you want to be paying attention to yourself. And the problem with people in the world today is you're not paying attention to yourself. You're not inside your own head. You don't hear those voices. You don't hear what you love, what you like anymore, because, as I said, there's so many of these other distractions going on. And so you're always, like, attuned to what other people like, right? Because you're in social media. This is what people are following. This is what they're interested in. As opposed to disengaging, backing off from that and looking at yourself and going through the process of that's not me, actually, I don't really like that, you know. And so what you're talking about is, I think, very profound, is levels of frustration or anxiety are definite signals that you must pay attention to, that they're telling you, this isn't a good direction for you. This is a waste of time for you. And in general, I tell people, self awareness, being able to hear those voices to understand that your frustration is telling you something. And sometimes you just act on it without understanding it. But understanding why you're frustrated, why you don't like your career, why you're not happy about where you're going is the key to everything. It will open up. It will actually be able, even in your 30s, to return you to that childhood inclination. But if you can't listen to where those emotions come from, then they're useless. They're not teaching you anything.

As we all know, quality nutrition influences, of course, our physical health, but also our mental health and our cognitive functioning, our memory, our ability to learn new things and to focus.

And we know that one of the.

Most important features of high quality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high quality unprocessed or minimally processed sources, as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically all the cellular functions in our body, including the gut microbiome. Now, I, like most everybody, try to get optimal nutrition from whole foods, ideally mostly from minimally processed or non processed foods. However, one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough servings of high quality fruits and vegetables per day, as well as fiber and probiotics that often accompany those fruits and vegetables. That's why, way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, I started drinking AG1. And so I'm delighted that AG1 is sponsoring the Huberman Lab podcast. The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is, it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics and fiber to ensure optimal mental health, physical health and performance. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.comhuberman to claim a special offer. They're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.comhuberman to claim that special offer.

So it sounds like one of the goals is to engage in what I'll just call for the moment, unadulterated self referencing. You know, unadulterated.