Understand the Culturescape | Vishen Lakhiani

So goal setting is nothing new. We've been doing it for generations. But there's a major flaw with how goal setting works. I mean, let's look at the world today. According to various statistics, half of marriages fail, one third of Americans are clinically obese, 54% of people, according to a Gallup Poll, dislike their jobs. How did we get this way? Why is it that despite the fact that we live in a modern world where we have access to so much information and knowledge, a lot of people have college degrees, we still end up in lives that seem often so mediocre and sometimes unfulfilling? Well, I believe it has to do with how we are programmed to see and set goals. So the first thing you have to understand to see how we got here is how we originated as the human species in the first place. In the book Sapiens by Yuval Hariri, the author talks about what made man, made Homo sapiens different from other sapient groups that existed at that same time. For example, Neanderthals were stronger. They had bigger brains. But Sapiens, which is us, survived. While Yuval Hariri said it had to do with a gift we developed called language. You see, apes could point to a tiger and go, look, tiger. But sapiens evolved the ability to use language to create complex ideas. Our ancestor living on a tree could turn to a fellow ancestor living on a tree and go, hey, Bob, don't go by the river till noon because I saw a tiger there. Let's wait till that bastard leaves to hunt, then we'll go grab a drink. You see, language allowed us to construct a world within our heads. It allowed us to create mythologies, stories, rules, governments, cultures, tribes, villages, and to make the way we interact with other human beings more and more and more complex until we arrived at the world we are today. But what you got to understand is that many of the constructs of the world today are devised and existing in an alternate world. We, as human beings, live in two worlds. There's the physical world that we can't deny, the world of absolute truth, the fact that I'm sitting on a sofa and it's brown and I'm wearing a blue sweater. But there's also the world of language, a world that exists solely in our heads. This is the world of relative truth. This is the world where things that we cannot physically touch but exist as understandings in our head play ideas, such as calories you can't see and touch a calorie, but we know eating too much of them might not make us fit Ideas such as companies. What is a company? Technically? Anybody can go register a piece of paper, sign a document, and boom, they have a company. Yet these understandings, these words, allow us to create complex organizations. Take the word God. We have so many different definitions of God. It exists nothing more than a syntax in the human brain. Yet people can run and live their lives based on this understanding. So words help us create our world. But here's the problem, right? What language delineates, you can see what there is no word for we do not see. So we tend to program and craft our lives based on the words which we associate with. And sometimes these words can lead us into a trap. Traps such as college, degree, career nine to five, money. We end up setting goals to attain these ideas, which are nothing more than language constructs. Some of them may not actually lead to happiness. Some of them might actually lead us far astray from what our hearts truly want. So when we are training a young person to understand what is success in life, we give them a mental model which sometimes looks like this. Get good grades, get into a good university, study hard, get good grades, pass those standardized tests so that you can get a 9 to 5 job, work hard at the company, save for a wage until you can someday retire, and then you can enjoy life. Look at the number of words in that model. Grades, school, college, degree, retire, career, nine to five. Now ask yourself, do those really make you happy? None of those are actually things that lead to direct human happiness. You see, happiness isn't about those things, but those are what become our goals. Happiness, however, has little to do with that particular path. Happiness is the end result of being human. Happiness is about experiences. It's about love. It's about doing things that really excite you. But rather than ask people to aim straight for those things, we set them forth on a particular path. Now, this is what happened to me. I grew up in a family where getting good grades was very important. So from the time I was a teenager, I was told, you need to become a computer engineer because that's where the money is. Study computer engineering. My grandfather, I remember him telling me, don't Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. Become a software engineer, because you could someday be like Bill Gates. So I ended up working really hard in school. I got into the University of Michigan, which was one of the best computer engineering schools in the United States. I slogged and studied hard in a subject matter I had no interest in. College for me, was fun, but it wasn't incredibly fun like many other people. I worked at a major that I was struggling with because it just wasn't my forte. So college was drudgery for me. I did okay. In my junior year, I got picked to be one of the 1% of American college graduates in the field of computer science that got the lucrative Microsoft internship. Legend has it that only 1% of interviewers made it. And there I was, finally at Microsoft. I was 22 years old. It was 1998. And I remember Bill Gates invited all of us new hires into his home for a barbecue. So there I was in the home of Bill Gates, the richest man in the world. The man my grandfather had told me about, the man my grandfather said I should strive to emulate. And he was an incredible man. He was there with a barbecue, serving burgers to us young graduates. And there was a mob of people around him, shaking his hand, talking to him about his vision of the world. And I was just six feet away. But I couldn't approach Bill because deep inside, I realized that I had simultaneously hit the goal I had always wanted for the past five years. But I also realized that I was miserable. I hated my job. I wanted to quit. I just couldn't get myself out of bed every morning. It had nothing to do with Microsoft. I just realized I was in the wrong career. And so 11 weeks later, I quit. I just quit cold turkey. I left Microsoft, went back to school, tried to figure out what I should do with my life. And I went on a whole different path. But you see, I wasted five years of my life pursuing a degree I had no passion for, getting into a company and doing a job. That didn't excite me because I was following what the world said I should do rather than what my heart really, really, really wanted me to do. Steve Jobs had a beautiful way of saying it. Watch this video.

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your. Your life is just. To live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same.

I love those words. Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. Once you learn this, you will never be the same again. This is what happens when you realize that the culturescape exists to keep you safe. But in this world, we no longer need to fear tigers by the riverbank. You don't need safety. What you want is, is a life that's truly meaningful, exciting, and that takes you straight towards happiness. See, when you follow the rules of the culturescape, the rules that were designed to keep us safe, you end up living a rather stagnant life. In today's world, we no longer need to fear tigers by the riverbank. And so, if you follow the rules of the culturescape, the traditional ideas of goals and what it means to live a successful life, you might end up living a life that looks rather like this. Slow, steady growth until you stagnate. And this is why so many people wake up one day at the age of 40 or 50 or 60, wondering, what on earth did I do with my life? I believe life shouldn't be like this. I believe life should be like this. Live a life that isn't safe. Don't worry about the culturescape. Life should be something where we are perpetually growing. And when you do that, you're giving yourself permission to make unsafe bets. In my case, to quit a job at Microsoft. But you will find that very often, when you follow what your heart truly craves, when you follow the visions that are going to come to you as you do this exercise, you will be guided into a life that's really extraordinary. There will be bumps along the road. You will hit those oh, crap moments. But there'll also be beautiful upward trends where you attain new heights in your life and you live a life that's genuinely rich and extraordinary. This is what we mean by extraordinary, by design.