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1-800-Contacts. How do you make really good goals that will lead you to more purpose, more meaning, and thus more happiness in your life? Now, you probably heard people use purpose and meaning synonymously. Purpose and meaning are the same thing. They're not, they're not synonyms. Despite what you actually might find in the Merriam Webster dictionary, purpose is an answer to the question, why am I doing what I'm doing? Where am I going with my life? Others opinions are not the right thing to motivate you. I want other people to think I'm cool. That's the fast way to get depressed. My friends, how should you choose proxy goals in life that will help you find more purpose? And I want to give you the four rules for doing it based in science. Hey friends. Welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about the science of love and happiness, how you can get more of those things and how you can bring more of those things to other people. This is your first time watching. Well, thank you. And if it's the, the, the 20 something time that you're watching, I appreciate that an awful lot. I hope you're enjoying the show and learning a lot. I hope you're sharing these ideas with other people because that's really what my mission is all about. Not just to be a teacher of the science of happiness, but to create a lot of teachers of the science of happiness. That's how we can have leverage and, and make the world a better place? Today I want to talk to you about your goals in life. How do you make really good goals that will lead you to more purpose, more meaning, and thus more happiness in your life? I want to tell you today about the amazing science of setting goals. And if you do it right and stay away from a few problems, your life can really change. Now as always, if you have some feedback on this, please do write to me. Officehoursoursorthorbricks.com that's the email address or, or whatever you've got on your mind. Leave it in the comments wherever you're watching or listening to this show, and we watch those regularly. And we'll feedback and perhaps we'll actually look at your question at the end of one of the episodes. We usually take two or three questions at the end of each episode. So please do keep feeding back. Please keep giving us your thoughts, give us your criticisms, give us all of it, and make sure that you like and subscribe because that's what makes the algorithm smile on us and deliver this information to more people. And it's how we can lift other people up as well. Hey, friends, a lot of you know that I keep a very high protein diet. That's important for me in my 60s because I want to maintain a good level of muscle protein synthesis. And I don't always have time to eat as much protein as I want from Whole Foods. That's the ideal, but it's just not manageable all the time. For that reason, I'm always looking for supplements that can actually get me where I need to go. With respect to my macronutrient profile, a bunch of my friends were telling me that David Protein is a really good source. The reason is because protein bars in general, they're handy, they're convenient, but they can be very high in calories and they can actually be really high in carbohydrate, especially in the form of sugar. David Protein, I heard, was better. And sure enough, it's got a great profile. It has 40% more protein and 57% fewer calories than most of the protein bars you find out there. 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, 0 grams of sugar. That's actually quite a feat to put that together. And by the way, they taste great. I started buying David protein bars and now I'm pleased that they're sponsoring this show as well. So whether you're on the go or hitting the gym, if you're trying to meet your protein targets, David protein is a good way for you to do it. That's why I'm doing it. And it's what I'm carrying when I'm on the road. So head over to davidprotein.com Arthur, they've got a special offer for you. If you buy four cartons, they'll give you the fifth carton for free. You're going to love that. And you can also find David Protein in stores by looking for the store locator. So enjoy. Well, let's get on to the main act today, which again, is your goals in life. Why do goals matter? And to Answer this question. We have to go back to the basic arithmetic of happiness. If you've been a long time watcher of the show, well, you haven't been a long time watcher, listener to the show because it hasn't been on that long. But if you've been watching and listening from the beginning, you know that happiness is kind of like a meal with three macronutrients. It has three component parts. The three macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of enjoyment, the pursuit of satisfying accomplishments and achievements, and the pursuit of the why of your existence, the meaning of your life. Those are the three things I work with people on, and I have all kinds of diagnostic tools. Go to my website, arthurbrooks.com you'll actually find a bunch of surveys that you can take that shows you where you're strong and weak. You can take something called the. That the happiness scale right on my website, and it'll tell you where you need more work. Do you need to be thinking more about enjoying your life, more about your satisfaction and your accomplishments, or more about the meaning of life? You can find out more about that now. By far, the biggest crisis that we have in happiness today is meaning. And that's what I've been writing about for the past five years. The crisis of meaning explains the explosion, I believe, of depression and anxiety, especially for people under 35 years old. So let's define meaning. We're getting toward goals. Meaning is a combination of coherence and significance and purpose. Coherence is why things happen the way that they do. If you don't know why things happen the way they do, or you believe that things don't have a reason for happening, you're going to struggle with the meaning of your life. Now think about it this way. Coherence is the answer to the question, why do things happen? And people answer that in a lot of different ways. Some people rely on their religious beliefs about why things happen the way they do. The hand of God, for example. Some people turn to science, the laws of nature, for example. Some people mix those two things. I'm a traditionally religious person and I have a background in science, religion and science together. Some people who really struggle with this, they. They explain why things happen the way they do. Coherence in life with conspiracy theories. People who go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, typically it's because they're seeking coherence, and they're seeking coherence because they want more meaning. When somebody's talking to you about every kind of crazy conspiracy theory. You can be dead sure that the real problem is that they're lacking a sense of meaning in their lives. Okay, that's. The first part is coherence. The second element of meaning, the meaning of life, which is so important to happiness, is significance. Why does my life matter? Another reason that people lack meaning in their life is because they don't have good love relationships. They don't have a good relationship with their family, for example, they don't have close friendships. And. And when people are less likely to get married and have kids and people are more likely to say, nobody knows me well, well, they're going to feel less significant to other people and that's going to compromise their sense of meaning and make them feel less happy. And that explains a lot of what we see today. But the last element is what I want to talk about for meaning, which is purpose. Now, you probably heard people use purpose and meaning synonymously. Purpose and meaning are the same thing. They're not. They're not synonyms. Despite what you actually might find in the Merriam Webster dictionary. Purpose is an element of meaning. Let me define purpose. Purpose is an answer to the question, why am I doing what I'm doing? Where am I going with my life? What are my goals and direction in life? And that of course leads to the word I just said, which is goals. If you want to have a sense of purpose, you need to have goals, things that you're moving toward. And why do you need that? Because you need to know if you're making progress in your life. That's the truth. And everybody knows it in their own experiences. And so when people don't have goals, they feel like they're aimless, they're doing random walk in their life, they're going in circles. And. And that's horrible. For purpose basically eviscerates purpose, which means that you don't have meaning. And if you don't have meaning, you're not gonna have happiness. Goals are a central ingredient in having a happier life. So that leads to the big question today. Maybe you've asked yourself, what are the goals that I should actually adopt? How do I understand how to get the right goals? Because, you know, you can get all kinds of goals, and if you get the wrong goals, you're going to go the wrong direction. That's not so good for purpose either. And you've seen a lot of people do that, haven't you? So have I. So how can you get the goals that science shows and common sense actually Validates will lead you in the right direction so you can have a happier life. That's what we really want to talk about today. That's the question that we're talking about now. When we talk about big goals. Big goals. Sometimes people, they get kind of mystical about it, and they'll invoke these extraordinary stories of people who get just called almost like the voice of God. I mean, for the longest time, people would talk about this in the Incredible story of St. Teresa, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was an amazing figure. I mean, almost everybody knows the story of Mother Teresa. She was an Albanian nun who at the age of 36, had this call from God to go serve the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. Now, she had already gotten this call to religious life to be a nun, but then she got what she believed was a call within a call. That's what she called it. The call within a call really from God directly. She believed to serve the poorest of the poor, which she did until she was in her 90s. And she did it in almost total obscurity until a journalist by the name of Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist, discovered her and wrote about her and then did a documentary film. And then she became super world famous, even winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. That calling, that call that she felt that. That those goals that were bestowed on her by. By the voice of the divine, that was sort of the gold standard on how to get your goals right. But I got news for you. You're probably not Mother Teresa, and neither am I. We need a. A more tangible strategy for finding our purpose by finding the right set of goals. So that's what I really want to talk Now. Here's the first thing to keep in mind. You can't find your purpose directly. And the reason is because purpose in life is not something that you. You see right in front of you. You can kind of define it, but you have to pursue goals that are really tangible, that are what we call proxy goals for your intangible purpose in life. Now, proxy goals mean that they're a proxy for the thing you're really looking for, but they're really tangible, and you can see them. Here's how to think about this. You all know the story of the three wise men that are going toward Bethlehem to find the baby Jesus. Even if you're not religious, you're not a Christian or anything like that. You know the story of the three wise men from the East. You know that they were following the star of Bethlehem, the star in the sky. And they're going toward the star of the sky because they had been promised that it sits over the Christ child in Bethlehem, over the stable. And if they just go to the star and they keep following it, they will find what they're really, really looking for. Your purpose is the stable in Bethlehem, but you can't see it directly, especially from a couple of countries over. What you can see is the star which is in the sky. Now, the. The three wise men, they didn't want the star. They were following the star because they thought it was a proxy goal for the thing that they really wanted, which was the stable. Now, I'm not going to belabor this point, but you get the point that I'm trying to make. We're all looking for our stars of Bethlehem, but it's not the star per se. Big mistake that people make. They think these are my goals. And so I'm going to be looking for these goals. And when I get those goals per se, it's going to be really, really great. That's not right. That becomes an actual problem, as a matter of fact, and I'm going to talk about that here in a second. But the truth is that, that if we get the right proxy goals, they will be sitting over the purpose that we seek. Now, what we want to answer is, what are the characteristics of these proxy goals? You see, I'm backing up and backing up so I can get to these really, really pract. That's what I'm trying to do here. How do you find the right proxies that are most likely to sit over your particular purpose? That's what I want to talk about here. Let's first start off by talking about what great goals in life proxy goals are. And by the way, let's be more tangible. In the star of Bethlehem in your life, when you were in high school, you were trying to get. Maybe I was trying to get good grades, right? You were probably. If you're watching office hours, you're probably kind of a striver, and so you were trying to get good grades. It wasn't literally the letters on your report card. That's not what you were actually trying to get. There was some purpose behind it, which was having a better future, a better trajectory, and that the proxy goal of the good report card was kind of the star sitting over the stable. Lots and lots of things work this way that you've actually done in your. In your life. For example, a certain number in your bank account. For example, a certain number of Internet followers. It's not the Internet, it's not the social media followers per se. It's what that actually represents that is more related to your purpose. But you know where I'm going with this, which is that if you have the wrong proxy goals, they're not going to be sitting over the stable, are they? You know, it's actually perfectly possible that the three wise men from the east would be following a star that was sitting somewhere over the water and. Too bad. Wrong goals. Wrong goals. Wrong purpose. Wrong purpose. No meaning. No meaning, no happiness. So it really starts with having the right proxy goals. Now, what do we know about what you should set as your very tangible goals in your career and your love life and your, and your, your ambitions and all of that? What do great goals look like? Now, to begin with, here's one thing that actually shows up in the literature again and again and again. And this is what psychologists call self concordance. Now, once again, this is what we always do in academia. You take a simple idea and you put fancy words around it and you get tenure. Okay, so self concordance means that, that these proxy goals align with your internal values. This is really important. I mean, this is a very important idea actually, from, from the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung, psychiatrist, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who was a partner and kind of a protege of Freud until they broke apart. And the idea of one of the great ideas of happiness of Carl Jung was this concept that you need to know your values and then you need to live up to your values. So there's two reasons people are unhappy. Jung thought, number one is they don't know what they believe. Or number two, they know what they believe, but they're not living up to those beliefs. They're not living up to those values. And we see this around us all the time. People like, I don't know. I don't know what right and wrong are, or I do know, but I'm. I know right, but I'm living wrong. Those are the two great recipes for Jung for being unhappy. Okay, back to proxy goals. Proxy goals, these things that you're looking for in your life, these things you're trying to achieve in your life, the tangible things you can touch, you're trying to get. Those things really need to align with your values, and they need to align with your interests. That's self concordance. Let's start with not the best practices in doing that. Let's start with the worst practices in doing that. Let's talk about the mistakes that people make, and then I want to talk about what you actually need to do, the rules for finding the right proxy goals for you, the things that you want to get that will actually lead you to where you want to be in your life. Bad goals have three basic characteristics in common. And what am I basing this on? I'm basing this on a big literature in social psychology and behavioral social science that shows that when people are. Are looking for goals that have these characteristics, they tend to get less happy, not happier. That's a dead giveaway you're going in the wrong direction. Okay, that's how I'm basing this. And I'll put this stuff into the show notes as I always do. If you're. If you're a nerd, like I am for actually looking at the underlying scientific literature, go to the show notes. You're always going to find what you're looking for. Number one. Number one characteristic of a bad goal for you is what's called an extrinsic motivation. Once again, fancy way of saying something pretty simple. An extrinsic motivation is one in which you're being motivated by outside forces and not by inherent internal satisfaction. So there's two kinds of motivations in life for things that you do extrinsic. These are things from the outside and intrinsic things that are really internally motivating to you. Love and happiness is an intrinsic motivation. Money and power is an extrinsic motivation. Now, there's tons of literature on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivations, and it couldn't be clear. There's a really important study that came out of the University of Rochester in which they were looking at graduating seniors, and they asked, what are your goals for success in the next couple of years? About half of the students said they had extrinsic motivations. I want, you know, make more money than my peers. I want to, you know, I want to get ahead in the world's eyes. The other half said I had intrinsic motivations. I want to have better relationships. I want to have closer friendships. I want to stay close to my family. Well, it turns out almost everybody gets what they're, what they're gunning for. Careful with your goals because you're getting at your heart's desire, probably at least your proxy heart's desire. People who had extrinsic goals, money and power, were significantly less happy than intrinsic goals. Love, relationships. So that's really what I'm talking about here. The first big mistake in your goal setting, your proxy goal setting. It's going to take you toward your purpose in life, take you toward your calling, is looking for extrinsic stuff, is looking for the world's adulation about the opinions of others as opposed to actually how you feel. Let me give you a, a really easy example of this. Let's say you've got a goal in your New Year's resolution of wanting to lose weight. Okay? A lot of people want to lose weight and they say as come January 1st, I'm going to hit the gym every day and I'm going to eat higher protein and more fiber and I'm going to lose a bunch of weight. There are two reasons for this. Two kinds of motivations, extrinsic and intrinsic. The extrinsic motivation is I want people that think I look nice in a bathing suit. The intrinsic motivation is I want to feel better. I want to be around when I so I can see my grandkids, for example. In other words, one intrinsically is about love and how the satisfaction that you inherently get and the other is the opinions of other people and the way that they look at your body. Now you know already what I'm talking about because the literature clearly shows us that if you're extrinsically motivated in the proxy goal, which is seeing the scale go down. And again, the problem isn't that the numbers on the scale are changing. That's a proxy goal for what you're looking at. If it's all extrinsic for the, you know, the two hours that somebody's going to see you around the pool next July, that's a pretty crummy goal. Your New Year's resolution is most likely going to fail. But also you're just going to be less happy with that. That's a less satisfying goal that leads to less life satisfaction than you'd otherwise have. As a matter of fact, this really leads to this whole truth, which is that others opinions are not the right thing to motivate you. You shouldn't be motivated by other people's opinions because those are extrinsic goals. I want other people to think I'm cool. That's the fast way to get depressed, my friends. It really is. And so that's what I want you to consider. And I'm going to come back to this when we get to some other characteristics of lousy proxy goals. Number one is extrinsic. They should be intrinsic. Okay? Number two, here's another kind of bad goal. It's based on avoidance. Now this is another social science concept, and again, I'll Put really interesting stuff in the show notes. A good paper I'm going to put in from Ehrlich, who's in from 2023. Evaluation of happiness through Goal Setting Training in Psychological Reports. Fantastic article that goes over a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here. Avoidance goals are those based on negative motivations. I don't want something to happen versus what we call approach goals. And it makes sense. I'm avoiding something negative versus I'm approaching something positive. Approach goals are looking for something that you want versus avoiding something that you don't want. Avoidance goals, they tend not to be successful. You're unlikely to attain them, and even if you do, you're not going to like the result. Those aren't good proxy goals. They're not going to get you to something that gives you a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning in your life. There's a lot of things that we don't like about our future, but if we're motivated by those goals per se and trying to become successful, it's a kind of a depressing way to live. So for example, you say I want to get a good job out of college. The approach reason for that goal would be because, you know, I want to do something meaningful that's rewarding to me and I want to be able to support my family going forward. And so getting a good job out of college actually helps me to, to live those positive dreams. The avoidance version of that is I don't want to be unemployed. I don't want to be living in my mom's basement. So you see how avoidance and approach are, are, are really related to each other. Some people really tend toward avoidance motivation. And if that's you, you got to work on this because you, if you set up a bunch of proxy goals for what you're trying to do in life, then your purpose in life is avoiding stuff, is not having stuff happen to you in your life. And I'm sorry, that's not the secret of happiness, as you already know. And this is a, certainly a habit that we need to break that a lot of people need to break. Why do I want to get more education? Well, because I want to learn a bunch of cool stuff and I want to set myself up to be able to use it in, in service of others versus I want to get a good education because I don't want to be a total loser for the rest of my life. Approach versus avoidant avoidance, you get that? Okay, so second, bad set of proxy goals are based on avoidance. The third problem, and maybe the biggest problem, which is kind of like the first one, but you'll see is slightly different, is goals that are positional. Positional goals are those based really on the opinion of other people, which is an extrinsic kind of motivation, but it's a special kind of extrinsic motivation. Positional goals are that in which your view of yourself is based on what other people think when they look at you. You can't live this way. That's what we call social comparison. And there's an old belief, I don't know if it's true. It's credited to President Theodore Roosevelt. He said, they say that social comparison is the thief of joy. It's true, isn't it? I bet every single one of you have felt that, that, you know, if only I could just not care what other people think of me. Well, actually, you don't want that either. You know, we are still evolved to be a kin based species living in a hierarchical grouping of people. A band is what anthropologists call us in a Pleistocene. We lived in groups of bands of 30 to 50 individuals and they were hierarchically based. And, and you want to rise in the hierarchy because you're more likely to get food and mates, et cetera. You're born this way, you're born with these motivations. You were evolved to feel these things. And so the result of that is that you actually care what other people think. That's a normal thing. Furthermore, you don't want to actually go around hurting people or offending people. And that's a good motivation, to be sure. But to be really motivated to have proxy goals for your success in life, to find your purpose and the basis of what some stranger thinks about you, or for that matter, what a friend thinks about you, that's a really terrible way to live if you actually want to be happy. Yeah. So much comes out of this, by the way. And at some point I'll do a whole social comparison episode because it's so interesting what the researchers find on this. For example, one of the best ways for you to enjoy your vacation less is to take pictures. I kid you not. Why? Because most of the time these days people are taking pictures not to enjoy it later, which is, by the way, dubious on his face. Because if you're taking pictures right now so that you can enjoy your vacation in the future, when right now will be in the past, that time travel is making it so you don't enjoy this moment, you're actually not alive right now when you're Doing that, that's bad enough, but it's even worse in modern times when you're taking pictures of your vacation. Why? Because you want to post them to social media. Why do you want to post your vacation pics to social media? So people look at it and go, huh? Well, that's awesome. You want somebody to have a high opinion of you or to maybe even to envy you. That's all positional in your motivation. That's a proxy goal. That's positional. That's not going to lead you to a greater sense of direction in life and purpose. That's constructive, that's nutritious. And so therefore you're not going to get the sense of meaning that you seek. So these are the things to avoid. Don't do extrinsic stuff, don't do avoidance stuff, and don't do positional stuff is what it comes down to. Those are the things to avoid. Now, of course, you need me to tell you what to do as opposed to what not to do. So that's what I want to talk about. Now, what should you do? How should you choose proxy goals in life that will help you find more purpose? And I want to give you the four rules for doing it based in science. Here are the four rules for you to set your goals. Now, I hope you're setting goals. There's tons of research out there that shows that when students have very, very specific goals about their studies, about their careers, about their jobs, about their relationships, that college students, because you always do these studies on college students because they'll do anything for 20 bucks, that when students have goals, very tangible goals, they do better in life, provided that they follow the rules. So here's the rules. Rule number one, focus on people, not things. Remember the intrinsic goals that we were talking about before? They're sort of the. The world's idols. And you've played this game with me a bunch of times. If you've been watching this show, remember we've got a game called what's My Idol? This comes from the incredible work of Thomas Aquinas, the medieval philosopher, Catholic saint who took the words of Aristotle, took the works of Aristotle and brought them to this medieval audience. And that's the reason that we more or less that many people believe that we read Aristotle today because of Thomas Aquinas. And he believed that what we really want, what we're really motivated for is God. Now again, agree or disagree, but that comes from an ancient body of thought. St. Augustine, whom Thomas Aquinas, he was a thousand almost A thousand years later than St. Augustine, 900 years later. But St. Augustine had this very, very famous quote that you may have heard the very beginning of his book, the Confessions. He said, you made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. In other words, we're not going to find satisfaction according to Augustine until we find the divine. Okay, now again, if you're not religious, don't be stuck on that. What he's really talking about here in the global sense, even beyond theology, is that we need a virtuous purpose that will give us a sense of metaphysical meaning. And to do that, we got to have the right goals, we got to have the right things that we can actually see and touch in life. That's what they're really talking about. Aquinas urged us to be very careful about the things versus the people. The things, or he put them in four categories. Money, power, pleasure, fame. Those are the four idols. And if you've been watching the show, you see me play this with some of my guests on the show. What's my idol? It's important for you to know your idol because that's the proxy goal that will beguile you and send you in the wrong direction according to St. Thomas Aquinas and according to modern behavioral and neuroscience. So these guys got it right back in 1265, and we're just catching up as scientists in the year 2025, which is great because it all kind of hangs together. You can triangulate on these ideas in a really productive way. So number one, focus on people and love, not on things. Happiness, my friends, is love. And everything I talk about in the show, it comes down to love. It comes down to relationships. Love of the divine, love of your friends, love of your family, love, romantic love with your spouse, love of the whole world through the way that you earn your daily bread. Happiness is love. Happiness and through love is always intrinsic, never extrinsic, it's always approach motivated, never avoidance motivated. And it's non positional. You can have more love, I can have more love. It's not the kind of thing where you're having love in your life because you want somebody to envy you for your love, because that's the reason you have it. It's actually not love, is it? So that's number one, is based it on love. Two, rule number two, your best proxy goals in life, the things you can see and touch, that at least sitting over the stable in Bethlehem, sitting over your purpose. These depend on your inner direction. This is Sort of related to this positional idea, your inner direction, your calling, what you are meant to do. Now, I know you're asking the question right now, like Brooks, how do I find it? How do I find this inner direction? How do I find this calling? And the answer is, you need to be quiet to find it, to find your inner direction. The biggest militating force against inner direction. You know what it is? It's your device. We have gotten, and I've talked about this a hundred times on the show already, I'll talk about it 7 billion times more if I have a long run in this podcast. We, we distract ourselves relentlessly. We have these anti boredom devices because we don't like to be alone with ourselves. We don't like to be alone in our heads. But the result of that is that we don't have an inner stillness. We have all kinds of weird questions about purpose and meaning that, that, you know, your grandparents never had. Your grandparents never said, hey, you know, I had a huge panic attack behind the mule today. And there's a reason for that. The reason for that is that their life might have looked kind of boring, but they had the inner stillness that their brains needed, that their brains were designed to have as such. There's a kind of an irony, isn't it, that your grandparents, your great grandparents, their lives were from moment to moment actually, actually kind of boring, but their lives weren't boring at all. And for a lot of young people today, moment to moment, there's never any boredom, but their lives overall are kind of boring. You ever wonder why we have that irony? This is why. The reason is because we don't have the stillness, we don't have the peace. And in so wiping that out, we miss the inner direction. We miss the still, small voice that actually helps us understand what it is that we're looking for. The things that actually, they look like a faithful star of Bethlehem, they come to you when you're called deep down. How do you do it? Well, silence and fewer devices to be sure, but prayer and meditation in search not of a solution to a problem, a technical problem, but a sense of understanding. Now, there's more coming on this. If I'm sounding a little bit vague, I promise I'm not going to be vague forever because this is what I've been writing about most intensively. And I'm going to have whole shows on this, on finding your inner direction. So stay tuned. That's what Mother Teresa found, by the way, when Mother Teresa called about, talked about the call and the call well, the first call came because that she had, in prayer and meditation, discerned that she was to have a religious vocation to become a nun. And the second one came when she discerned some more that it wasn't just enough to be a nun for her, that she needed to go to the serve the poorest of the poor because she believed that the poorest of the poor in Calcutta were the face of Jesus. Now how did she find that? She didn't find that by, you know, going online. I mean, there wasn't online in those days. She did that by, by spending a bunch of time in prayer. Long. I mean, hours and hours and hours and weeks and months and years in prayer. So she found her inner direction. And you can do that too. Number three is that the process of putting goals together and the process of approaching your goals. Remember, approach goals, not avoidance goals. The process of approaching your goals. That should be wonderful too. You should be super into the journey toward your goals. In other words, the wise men going toward Bethlehem, they needed to really have a great old time on that trip. You're one of the wise men or women, and, and you need to have a good time on that trip because you're. It's a, it's a. To find a good proxy goal. It's when you actually enjoy pursuing. It's a bitter goal that you hate pursuing all the time. And I see people like this all the time. Look, I specialize in you strivers and how many people I've talked to are like, they don't like school, but they stay in school for a super long time, getting the best possible grades that they can, grinding it and grinding it and grinding it. That's a sign of the wrong proxy goals. If the journey toward the goal isn't enjoyable, if it isn't inherently satisfying, if it isn't actually part of the goal itself, that's a problem. And that's a sign that you've got, you've got some problems in the goal itself. Do you like the journey? And by the way, you got to enjoy the journey because arrival, even at the goal itself is. Isn't the source of ultimate life satisfaction. I've written a lot and talked a lot about the arrival fallacy. The arrival fallacy is that in which you think that since progress is so awesome, that when you get to a particular goal, you'll be happy for the rest of your life. That's wrong. Emotions don't work that way. You've heard me talk about how the limbic system of the of the brain works where emotions are transient. They're there to give you alarms and signals about. About positive and negative things that are going to help you or hurt you. It's important to understand that emotions are not there so that when you hit a goal, you'll just be happy for the rest of your life. No, no, that's not going to be it at all. And people who don't understand that. For example, I've met a lot of professional and really skilled amateur athletes, and they suffer in their training, and it's not enjoyable suffer in any way. They don't like the journey, but they think that if they get the Olympic gold, it's going to be great. And then they do, and they fall into a bad funk. They fall into a clinical depression. It's very common that Olympic gold medalists suffer from a depression after they win their Olympic gold. Why? Because they suffered from the arrival fallacy. They thought when they arrived at the goal that everything was going to be great. You better enjoy the journey as well. And that's part three. Here's the fourth. You need to stay flexible. It's funny because people get dogmatically attached to particular goals, proxy goals, to be sure, because they think that since my meaning doesn't change, so therefore my purpose doesn't change, and my purpose doesn't change, my goals don't change. And they get so stuck on the goals themselves, they get so dogmatically, almost religiously attached to the goals that they haven't figured out that goals change over the course of your life. My goals have changed a ton. You know, early on, all the way through my 20s, my big goal was to become the best possible classical French horn player I could be. And that's how I made my living. I played in the Barcelona City Orchestra, which was great, except when it wasn't. And that was my goal, to be a really great French horn player. Because I thought that that was a proxy goal for my purpose in life. And then I figured out that that had become anachronistic. It was overtaken by psychological and family events. And my beloved wife, Esther, she helped me understand that there are other things that I could do and other goals I needed to pursue. And so I went to school, I went to college, and then I went and got my PhD. And then my proxy goal was to get my PhD and become an academic like my dad and like my grandfather, the family business, as it were. And then over the next 10 years, my proxy goals toward greater purpose were all about being a really good teacher and a really Good researcher. And then I left that and I ran a company for 10 years, and then I left that and I started doing what I'm doing now. My proxy goals are not the same and you need to stay flexible because life circumstances and your interests are actually going to change. Is your purpose in life going to change? I hope your mission doesn't change very much at all, actually. But the way that you get to it is going to change. Sometimes you're in a plane, sometimes you're in a car, sometimes you're in a boat, sometimes you're going roundabout. And you have to stay flexible. If you don't stay flexible, you'll dogmatically go in a particular direction and it might get where you want to go and it might not. All right, now, I hope that's useful, but let me just kind of go over it one more time of what the rules actually are. You're setting your goals in life. Yeah. The stuff you can see and touch. That is to say, in 10 years, I want to see X, Y and Z. And to do that in five years, I need A, B and C. And to do that in one year, I need 1, 2, and 3. Good. Set those goals. Absolutely. Set those goals. But set those goals around the following parameters. They're based on love, not stuff. Number two, they're based on your inner direction, which you're getting by paying attention to the still small voice from meditation or prayer, whatever method works for you. Three, the journey toward those goals is a happy one. You're really enjoying it along the way. And last but not least, you're staying flexible because those things actually need to change over the course of your life. Because if you're a healthy person, you're going to change as well. I hope this has been useful and your goal setting, exercise. Let's take a few audience questions before we close. This one's coming in from YouTube. This is a hard address at L y l y hyphen md 2 qk. I should have named one of my kids that. Comparing eating heavy protein breakfast with fasting without breakfast. And this is going back to my morning protocol, probably. That was a popular, popular show. Comparing eating heavy protein breakfast and fasting without breakfast. Which one is better to increase my happiness? Love it. The answer is yes. It really depends on you. And that's why I talk about my morning protocol. You gotta find yours. And the way to do that is treating your life like a laboratory. You need to experiment, you need to keep data, you need to pay attention. Is the way that that works. It's it really depends on who you are. So for me, it's a high protein breakfast about three hours after I wake up. A big bolus of 60 to 70 grams of protein three hours after I wake up. My friend Tim Ferriss, whose podcast they do from time to time, he, he likes to, you know, skip eating all the way until lunch every day. And he's often in ketosis, so he's doing a lot of intermittent fasting. And it makes him feel phenomenal and happier than it was. And we have different physiology. So you got to figure out your own way, experiment on yourself. This from Joe Calvi. This came in over email. At the beginning of your podcast, you say it's your mission to teach us to teach others to be happier. As a parent, how can we teach our kids to be happier? Well, you got to yell at them and wag your finger. I'm kidding. The answer is pretty simple. You model it. Kids are funny. I mean, I can go to my students and tell them stuff I could never tell my adult kids who are the same age. And I tell my students, like, here's where you really ought to do it. My students would be like, yeah, it's awesome. Good. Thanks, professor. I tell my kids that and like, yeah, dad, why? Because of the nature of the relationship. I mean, my kids love me and my students don't love me, obviously, in the same way. And yet there's this distance that actually creates a kind of an authority that you don't have with your children necessarily. And so when you're teaching your kids, you model it. The most important thing that you can do, and there's a lot of research on this that shows that it almost doesn't matter what you tell your kids. All that matters is what they see. Model it for your kids. If they're seeing you practicing good happiness hygiene, especially if they're seeing you struggle and how you deal with your struggle, they won't forget that. Now, it might not be absorbed in 15 minutes, it might take 15 years, but trust me, I've seen this, and it's an extraordinary thing. The payoff is unbelievably satisfying. But what that means is you need, when it comes to your happiness and the pursuit of your happiness, you need to be the person you want your kids to become, because you are. Third. This comes from Haya, and the source was actually a live event. Graduating from school feels like my first real life crossroads. How do I navigate it while staying happy? Here's the answer. Times between equilibria, colleges in equilibrium, your new city and your new job is an equilibrium. The time between those things is called liminality. For psychologists, it's a liminal space. Liminality just means between. And those times are really, really uncomfortable because they're really uncertain. But what you find in the research is that that's where the greatest creativity and growth occurs, is when you're between things. Those times are super, super sacred. They're unbelievably productive times in your life. Don't waste them. And so what that means is that when you understand this, you need to lean into the discomfort of unce uncertainty. That's your job. When you're between things, you're going to be between things. And there's a tendency to say, like, let me get rid of the uncertainty as quickly as possible. I'm going to take the first thing that comes along. That's always a mistake. Because what you're trying to do is to not miss an opportunity. What you're trying to do is to get rid of the liminality. And the liminality is your friend. The liminality is your teacher, that uncertainty is what you really need. Lean into that discomfort and do that through knowledge. Do that through the knowledge of what we talk about. I talk a lot about that. In my book From Strength to Strength, which came out in 2022, there's a whole chapter about the time between the tides, the tide coming in, the time going out. There's kind of this magic time between tides when the tide is going out super fast and it's about to change. That's called the falling tide. That's when the fish bite. And you get the metaphor that I'm trying to get across here. So think about it that way. I've actually made that metaphor in a past episode of the show, so thanks for that and good luck. I know it's uncomfortable, but that's the point. We're done for today. Let me know your thoughts@officehoursotharbrooks.com Please like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube and Apple. Leave a comment. I'll read it and follow me on all my socials, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on any other platform. I'm on all the platforms and order. The meaning of your life. My new book, the meaning of your life. Finding purpose in an age of emptiness. We're going to be talking a lot more about that in coming episodes, and if you've read it, you'll get a lot more out of the episodes when you see them in the first place. So I'll see you next week. Have a wonderful week. Set great goals and bring the fruit of those goals to other people. Thanks for watching.