William 'Bill' Damon - Crafting Purpose and Resilience

We give an overarching feel for your work first before i go into my is telling you have copious amount of notes here way too much to fill the hour but i thought we'd give the origin of your work on purpose where it's brought you since, including the work that you've done on your own purpose now which led to the latest book that you wrote about your, Evolution of purpose or how purpose educed for you from your own relationship with your father etc maybe we give that

as a kind of a context builder and then we'll get stuck into this book that you launched a couple of decades ago,

. Bill Damon: Well, you mentioned a couple of things. Purpose has been the master concept that I've, explored and studied and that's directed my work for the last 20 years. And that grew out of a couple of engagements that I had. One was a collaborative set of studies that I did with my dear friends Howard Gardner and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is a dearly departed friend. He passed a couple of years ago.

Howard fortunately is still around and we got interested in in the late 1990s and early 2000s in studying what we called good work, which basically is work that is both successful and ethical. And of course, there's lots of work that is successful, at least in a material sense, that is not ethical. And there's, There's some ethical work that isn't successful and so on.

But our presumption is that if, if anybody in business or the professions or any other leading field could actually choose the kind of career they want to have, of course, they'd want to they'd want to be successful and they'd also want to. They'd want to feel proud of what they're doing, feeling that it's contributing to the public good. And so those are the people we took a look at, the people that really had that kind of track record. And the book we put out was called Good Work.

I won't go into all of that, but I will say that my own angle on it, that what I learned from it, each of the three of us had our own particular set of insights. My own insight was that All of the people we interviewed and got to know, and these are people who were lawyers and doctors and journalists and educators and people in business across the whole spectrum of leading fields.

The people who we, found, were good workers, were people who really had a deep, deep sense of what their field accomplishes, what the public mission of their field was. And they could be quite eloquent about describing it. The journalists would talk about how work in journalism was important to give people the information they need to make good choices about their lives and about their citizenship. And they give lots of examples of that.

And they had role models, pictures of people like Ed Murrow on their wall and so on. And the lawyers talked a lot about justice and the people who were in education, talked about learning. They all had their idea about exactly what their field could do for the public mission. And after we finished that project and that, and the book got around quite a bit. to, was being used, was used in professional education programs and so on.

I began thinking, well, as a psychologist, what is the psychological representation in the human mind of a public mission? In other words, as people in everyday life don't always go around thinking, well, what's the public mission of my life exactly? That's more of a work thing. But in everyday life, what is the psychological equivalent of doing good work in all of the arenas that we operate, which include family, include art, and sports, and citizenship, and faith, and and work?

And that's where I came down on the word purpose the concept of purpose, which I, it occurred to me, this is what the individual, the individual version of a public mission of a field is. And so I got very interested in everyday people, not just leaders in businesses and professions and so on, but just folks living their lives. Having children, going out, to the neighborhood and getting to know their neighbors and friends. Going to church, or going to, a an art exhibit.

Or taking their child out to, a, sports event, or something like that. And I started a series of studies about, How people develop purpose, who has purpose, and that, of course, coincided very much with my interest in adolescence because, in fact, the adolescent years is when most people begin to discover something that begins to look like purpose in life. So that, that's the professional history of my interest in purpose.

And At this point, I've looked at the development of purpose all through the lifespan, because it doesn't end with adolescence. People continue finding new purposes in life all the way up to late life, even after they've stopped working or stopped, or their children have moved out of the house. You still need purpose in life. And so that, that's how I developed my interest and, and and my research program on this topic. on this topic.

This episode is not for i don't want people to tune out and go oh it's for parents or it's for teachers, it's for everybody it's for mentors it's for people it's for you for your own purpose for those people listen to us to understand yourself as aristotle said first know that i self to understand perhaps. What instilled purpose in you some mentor along the way in your life may have said something to you all this information.

Is in this book but Bill before we even go near the book let's mention where this work on purpose brought you because.

Your most recent research was into family businesses and how purpose can be instilled in past almost like a relay race button from generation to generation thought we share maybe a thought on that but also then your own personal experience because your latest book touches on your own purpose and how that emerged for you over time.

But a grandparent and a parent and a, Children are all brought into a family enterprise, and it could be anything from a restaurant to a huge corporation that's the largest enterprise in a particular country. And we were interested in this because a lot of these families struggle. They struggle because often they are not on the same page with the younger generations.

And there's a surprising amount of conflict even among businesses that are quite successful and it's a challenge to think about how to keep them, keep the businesses going over the generations and also how the businesses can keep oriented to doing public good.

Because all of these if they have their choice they not only want to be successful, they want to feel, they want to feel proud of what they're doing, and they want to feel they are serving the public in some way, either by the product that the business is creating, or by employing a lot of people, Or by services and so on. And so these are the aspirations that families have. And to get right to the, point, a lot of the families that we got to know had been talking about values.

Well, we wanna have, we all wanna have good value. And I would go in and say values is a weak concept. We can all say, well, I value this or I value that. But how do you really know that you're going to walk the walk, not just talk the talk? And in order for that to happen, this is where the concept of purpose, I think, is helpful. Because purpose is an action based concept. It's not only a belief. It's not only saying, well, I have a sense that I care about something.

It's good to have that sense that you care about something, no doubt about it. But what are you doing about it? What are you actually doing that might involve Even some sacrifice. It certainly involves commitment, commitment means that you stick with it. You stick with it. Even if things get tough. If if you have a problem that, that arises in, in, in the case of a business that arises because there's some change in the, in the marketplace or something like that, are you tempted to.

Give up your, your goals or or do you stick with it? Do you actually stick with it and keep plowing ahead? That's what purpose does. Purpose is means resilience. It means commitment. It means effort. And so we would, speak with a lot of the families and we've written a number of articles about family business. We emphasize that, of course everybody wants to have good values, but you need, you need more than that.

You need to develop purpose among the family and share purpose and make sure the younger generation. And so that that was the application of my work on purpose to family business. And I had some wonderful collaborators on that project. It was a multinational project that included Europe the UK. Asia, Africa, and we got to know families all over the world. And and I thought it was one of the interesting applications because it was a place that nobody had really gone before.

And introducing the idea of purpose to these family Enterprises, I thought was a kind of an innovation that at first surprised people and then they got it. They understood why it's important.

Now you mentioned my own my own life story. And so, just as I found challenges out in the world of folks that were having difficulties with things. I took a look at my own life. And as you said Aristotle said, know thyself. And that's that's pretty fundamental. And I had to admit that there were large sections of my own life that I had avoided. I have a personal story. I'll say it very quickly, but this is what I wrote the book about.

A personal story of a father who disappeared from my family before I was born. He was, of the generation of Americans that served in Europe in World War II. And he was, at first, he was in the army. He was in Germany and then was transferred to England for a while and then never came back, and my mother never heard from him. We didn't know what happened to him. And during my whole childhood and most of my early adulthood, I assumed like everybody else that he was killed in action and missing.

My mother would always say he was missing in World War II. And I accepted that and never thought about it very much. But then when I was a young adult, I discovered differently. Somebody said no a relative said, No, your father is still alive, he just died. Abandoned your family. He never came back at that point. I tuned out. I didn't wanna hear anything about this. I felt he must be a, a no account irresponsible guy. I don't want identify with him.

I don't want, I don't want to get to know him or learn where he is. And just to, to get to the point very quickly. And if folks are interested, they can always read the book. My daughter, one of my daughters, when I, after I turned 60, this is pretty late in life one of my daughters, who was maybe 30 or 35, got interested in this grandfather that nobody ever talked about and did a bunch of research.

And found out a number of things that just at that point in my life made me feel I better get serious about this and really find out what happened and how he influenced my life. And the book is called A Round of Golf With My Father, because one of the things she discovered, by going through oral histories, he was, he ended up being a fairly distinguished diplomat serving in Thailand. And she discovered that he was a great golfer.

Now I love golf, and yet I am not a great golfer by any means, because I never had lessons. And that was the one area that I started getting bitter about. I started getting resentful. Because, I figured I had a good life, I had a good run in life, I did fine in education and career. I had a wonderful family with three children and so on. But I never really learned how to play golf very well, but I do love playing the sport.

So that was the canary in the coal mine, this feeling of resentment that I had about why couldn't this guy ever have come around at least once to teach me to play golf. So I did a lot of psychological explorations of my own life, and I used a process called the life review, which I write about in the book. And basically the idea is you look back at your life and you Unpack all of the resentments and things that didn't go right. You try to figure out what did I learn from them?

And, and this is where purpose comes in, you think about the things that did give you satisfaction in life and the accomplishments that you had throughout your life that you can bring forward with the new understanding. And recognition that you've achieved by going through your life in a life review manner, including the parts of your life that you actually regret or that you have, resentful feelings about. In this case, it had to do with my father, which I had never admitted to.

So rather than, rather than deny or bury those resentments, which is what I had done in my life, you think about what you can learn from them and how they can contribute to your purpose in life moving forward. So that's what the book is about. It's called A Round of Golf with My Father, The New Psychology of dealing with your past to make peace with your present. And it, it ends with a, a kind of a, dramatic round of golf.

My father had been dead for quite a while, but when I started doing my explorations, I found a. Cousin that I'd never met from my father's side of the family who found in his old family garage My father's set of golf clubs and he Sent me the golf clubs in the golf clubs was a scorecard at a country club in massachusetts I went back I played a round of golf against his scorecard And that was the kind of epiphany of the book where I felt I had actually resolved a lot of these issues

and bonded You bonded with my dead father. It helped me forgive him. Even though he did some harm to my mother it helped me understand him better and, and, and forgive him to the extent that I could and make peace with that that difficult part of my past.

Can be damaging are often also the creation of you in some way they they push you in certain directions and sometimes you can never understand how and i wondered as you recounted the story find in some ways perhaps some of your characteristics some of your purpose has come from this in some way or something some flickers. may make sense to you now that didn't before

And I think a lot of that sense came from my father's service in World War II. And, As I as I dealt with some of the difficulties I had growing up without a father I had to, I had to make up for that myself. I had to learn how to, in a sense, operate without that kind of guidance, and that made me stronger. I think Hemingway famously said, life breaks everyone at some point, but, a lot of people, who survived that, are strongest at the broken pieces.

And I, I felt that that was true, that in learning to do things for myself I developed a lot of strengths that I, that I would not have developed without without a father absence. And also the importance of the past.

A lot of my work on purpose, Purpose is a very forward looking concept. The future draws you into it in purpose. You, you have purposeful dreams and visions, and you then rise to the occasion and, and move ahead. And so it's very forward looking. But I, In the process of doing all that work on purpose, I think I had underestimated how important it is to also come to terms with the past.

And that's the other thing that this episode with discovering my father and what his absence meant to me, was that it gave me a sense of how important it is, not only to think about the future and where you want to go, but also where you where you've come from and how that has shaped you in ways that give you strengths as well as, as well as the kinds of experiences that feed your visions.

So just as I've quoted Hemingway, I also quote William Faulkner in the book who said I thought this was a wonderful psychological insight. He said the past. is not dead, it is not even past. And I thought that was a very profound sense, that it is part of who we are. And I had been denying that through my life.

So I learned a lot through this episode, and hopefully that has improved my it certainly improved my peace of mind, but hopefully it's also improved my work and my capacity to Go out and work with families on purpose and so on.

Maybe give us an overview and then I'll try and direct it where it's helpful for audience from a parenting perspective, from a leadership perspective, et cetera, but maybe open up with that idea of the rudderless. Society in some ways

And it doesn't have to, I always want to emphasize this right at the beginning, it does not have to be heroic it can be there are obviously people in life that have done amazingly heroic challenges of finding cures to cancer or finding a ways to, help People come to peace in the world and so on but purpose can also be quite ordinary as ordinary as raising a child or doing a humble job, not, not a heroic job the kind of job that a teacher or a a custodian does or, or, or anybody.

But once you have that, once you have a sense that what, You are doing is a benefit to the world beyond the self. Not only to you, not only to your own self interest, but also it matters to the world. And once you have a sense of that, it gives you a direction. It gives you, it directs your efforts, from day to day. And that sense of direction. It's like a ballast. It's it's not, it's not only a rudder that gives you the right direction.

It also keeps the ship steady because it helps you bounce back from difficult circumstances, from failures. Lots of people with purpose confront failures all the time. Either, whether it's in business or in a social cause, somebody with a purpose to, help alleviate poverty in their community, Of course you're not going to a hundred percent succeed. You can spend your life trying to alleviate poverty and, should know full well that there's still going to be poverty at the end of your life.

Nobody is, has that kind of power, but you can still do a lot of good. You can help a lot of people who are without means and it gives you a direction and a steadiness and an ability to bounce back from challenges, from failure. And that's the resilience part. So, that is one of the, one of the benefits of purpose. And of course, not everybody has purpose and not everybody has purpose all through their lives.

And people who feel purposeless often feel that they're drifting and drifting is, the opposite of moving in a steady direction. where the rudder comes in. That's where the ship's rudder.

So how you saw this book, which is so relevant to today's youth. I'm too many of those you have grown up in the meantime since you wrote it because.

Some of the stuff that you even talk about in the path of purpose like some people's realities have been scripted by their parents some of the youth who even got into college it was their parents who pushed them and wanted them to succeed so it's reflection on them and that could lead to disappointment, can lead to depression in many cases later on for people there's a lot in there but maybe you'll bring us on the evolution of your work since the moral child in nineteen eighty eight.

Now we take videos in a second and and so on. But this was this was when videotapes were still being developed and and at that time that. Innovation even though it seems archaic now, that video innovation enabled people to discover that babies, even babies, have empathic responses. If a baby will get upset, if the baby is, around other babies that are crying and upset, or a young, a very young child will be upset if he or she notices His mom crying for some reason, or the opposite.

If somebody's happy, the joy is shared. And so that empathy, which we discovered is actually present at birth is part of our constitution. And so a lot of the moral child was. Written to elaborate that idea about how prepared young people are. And so it gives adults who are interested in in encouraging young encouraging the children to be compassionate, to be honest, To be respectful.

All of the virtues that that I believe every parent, wants their children to have, in fact, there was a survey in the late nineties that 98 percent of American parents wanted their child to be truthful and honest. Which does make you wonder about the other 2%, but 98 percent is a large, is a very large result. And so parents want their children to be virtuous, and they have a lot to work with. And that was what The Moral Child was about.

Was how the natural inclinations of our species open up, a lot of opportunities. to give children responsibility, to give them guidance, to give them instruction. It's not, you don't have to beat the child down. The child is prepared to do this. And, then you mentioned my next book Greater Expectations. And that was about a social problem that we still have, I think, which is that, and this is what you mentioned, I think, a couple of minutes ago.

When parents micromanage the child's life, as I said, children, as I mentioned from my work on the moral child, children have their own constitutions and interests that that, that lean them towards, pro social behavior. They're empathic, they, they're cooperative, they like being with other people they develop friendships very easily.

And when parents feel that they need to write the script of life for the child, often, they're, they're, doing more harm than good in a lot of ways because they're not giving the child the encouragement to develop the child's own perspective on life.

Children certainly need guidance and they need feedback and children make a lot of mistakes and they do need to be corrected and disciplined if they do something that is dishonest or, or hurtful, but they, they don't, they don't need to be, They don't need to be watched every minute of every day and protected against every experience. They need to go out and experience the world on their own. They need to learn from their own experience.

And Greater Expectations, the very title, indicated that we needed, that we need to expect a lot of children. That children have a lot of abilities, both inborn and they develop a lot of abilities. And they can handle. Responsibilities, for example. So one of the points I made in greater expectations is one of the helpful child rearing methods. It's a very old fashioned method which has gone in decline in recent decades of asking children to help out around the house.

We used to call that chores. And it can be certainly not. Child labor, it can be help water the plants, or help shovel the snow, or empty the dishwasher, or, or Perhaps make your own bed. These kind of practices, in a lot of contemporary homes are not practiced anymore. And in fact, there's data on that. There was a study of, I think it was an Australian study, but it applies to certainly the United States, and I'll bet the UK as well, that, in one generation, there's been a decline.

In the older generation, something like three quarters of children were expected to do something helpful around the house for their parents, and now less than a quarter of families at the expectance of children, and I don't think you're doing children any favor, , because it's giving them a sense that they can matter, they can make a difference, they can do something, and, and we appreciate their help.

And again, I'm not talking about very difficult child labor, I'm talking about gestures of responsibility. So that's an example of how of what I wrote about in greater expectations, and that leads up to the idea of How do you get young people to be prepared to develop commitments in life? Commitments to something that is beneficial to others. So it's not all about me.

Because I think the big danger of child rearing and of development is that people can become To self centered and being self centered actually is not a route to happiness. When you're very self centered, it's actually something of a mental health risk. You're anxious all the time. You're worried all the time.

Am I, am I happy? Am I protected? Am I safe? And getting past the self to dedicate yourself to something to others to some non sibby, non self engagement. That's what purpose is about. In fact, in Rick Warren's book on purpose called The Purpose Driven Life, he has one of the great first lines, in, in books anywhere. The first line is, it's not about you. And I thought that was a great, a great line. His book is about faith. And I think it's quite a good book.

Our work is, about more secular of engagements, but it shares that same perspective that it's not about you. It's about what you can do for both yourself and for others. And that's what purpose is about. It's good for the self and it's good for society. It's good for others.

So this why you whatever your why is helps you get out of the bed go out training and those horrible dirty days where you don't want to do it because you have this, we have this deep down reason why you're doing it and i'm actually can blind you to any kind of challenges that are in your way because because you're just so driven

Of course, the why question is absolutely central to purpose in, in every arena, including, including education. If children or students know why they are studying a subject, they're going to be purposeful. They don't know why. Why am I taking chemistry anyway? Why am I learning these formulas? That's almost a recipe for being non purposeful if you don't have a clue about that.

And there's one other sports saying, at least in American sports, I don't know if, if if, again, this is across the Atlantic, but, it also gets to some of the power of purpose. And that is the saying that the best defense is a good offense. And if you think about that of course, it's not 100 percent true.

You also need a defense, but if you're playing football or something and you're always keeping the ball down the other side, down the field of the opponent's goal, you're going to have a pretty, you don't have to worry about defense too much because, because you're, you're on the attack and, and that's the spirit of that saying is that.

The best defense is a good offense, but it's exactly the spirit of purpose that if you're going for something, if you're dedicated to something, especially with young people, if they're dedicated to something beyond the self, they're not going to be hanging around getting into trouble all the time. Believe me, they're going to be out there trying to do, accomplish what they believe in. So in development as well, I think the best defense is a good offense.

And. One of the best things sports give you is an excuse it gives you an excuse to go no i've training later on and then one day he came back and he told me it happened he's like the thing you said happened and he was actually delighted and he was one of the last that was offered it and he said he looked at all the other faces and they were all looking gone on now i should have said no i wish i didn't get before him and i thought it was great that.

To your very point, I realized how lucky I was 'cause I got into sports or , I was definitely trying throughout my youth and it always was a reason to go. You didn't go out on a Friday night or whatever it was that you're like, oh no, I have a match tomorrow. Or you go to bed early. And the benefit of that was huge. And even the halo effect around your other friends. 'cause then you inspire others around you and then they come with you and maybe they're wandering a bit without purpose, but

I wanted to bring it back to a couple of things because i don't want to bring it to only sports because you mentioned different domains where purpose can be found for people religion for example is one or other purposes i'd love to share that,Bill, I i thought it sure i jumped way out of my notes here something that i thought was brilliant and this was where, you visited a small town that was concerned about the way many of its young people had been spending their time.

And this was amidst type scares back at the time and you visited a fast food joint and you found this fast food joint was brimming with purpose i love you to share this story cuz i don't want people to think that this only counts for organizations or families. This of purpose counts everywhere and so much so that this small fast food joint serving you know questionably good quality food was making people into purpose entities and sending him off into the world i love you to share this story.

But I will say that, as a place for a young person, To work. And that's what we discovered, as you mentioned, when we went out into these just ordinary American communities, in one of them we interviewed a, a teenager who had a summer job working flipping burgers in a I won't mention the name of the, of the chain, but in one, in one of the very popular, famous chains. And he told us, which sounded very surprising, that this job had changed his whole attitude about work.

He went, he went there, he got the job to get some money, some money so he could go out and have a good time, so he could go out and party with his friends on weekends and so on. And that was his only motivation. And he figured it would just be a grubby job that he would, couldn't wait to get back to his partying with the, with the money that he earned, but he said that he had a manager who took him aside one day, and he said, and the manager said So, your job is not just to flip burgers.

Your job is to put a smile on the customer's face. And think about those people who are coming in here. These are hard working people. They don't have a lot of means. And this Occasion. This, this meal that they're coming in, they bring their children and they have these, these happy meals where they get little toys and all of that. This is the high point of their day. This is the high point of their day with their family. And think about that.

Think about them and their lives, which are not easy lives and what this means to them. And think about how you can add a spark to those lives. And this young boy I imagine he was 16 or something like that, he said, when he began doing that, And feeling this joy of sharing, goodwill with these customers these, these hardworking customers. He said it changed his whole attitude about what it meant to go to work. And he developed purpose.

Through that mentoring, the mentoring of the fast food manager. So this happens anywhere. It happens in, in, in places that that are, are far from elite or nutritionally correct or anything like that.

So he said everybody's purpose wasn't the same, same like you have the business purpose, but they cascaded purpose down the organization and totally changed the entire business. And it, I just thought it was really important. And, and then I sent it also, Bill, just to show you where, where.

I wanted to show you how your book can affect people and how it can cascade throughout the world i sent it to a guy called rasmus Ankersen who is a very successful manager football clubs and he was involved in the danish football club years ago and he talked about how they found it very difficult to spot talent it's young ages so how did you spot why did that kid make it.

Like the, the, he was always puzzled by this kid who went on to be the, the star and the captain of Denmark, and they didn't see it. They, they actually only took him into the club because his dad was a, was a janitor in the club or was the groundskeeper. And they wanted to keep him . So they let his son train with the academy and then the sun goes on to be this amazing player. And I sent him some of the excerpts from your book because I, I was like on the, the invisible.

thing here and i was one of those kids as well Bill tell you i was a very average very very average athlete and i went on to play for the two best clubs in the world to the best of the world and i think often times. Like how you were shaped by your experience with your father that some experiences in my childhood etc instill this purpose to prove myself almost and i thought what if that was the missing ingredient was the purpose.

Where you can't see that you can't see what that kid is thinking you can't see how that kid is training that little bit harder than other people or it's in a work environment doing that little bit extra work, that purpose is the secret ingredient here thought i use that as a segue to introduce your landmark study.

you did this study to find out were the common denominators of these kids that you had studied to find out what was driving these that was different from the ones that weren't there, you'll share this as a high level cuz that's all the time we have for

There are Mozart's that actually do. And I'm convinced that it's because it, the ones that make it are the ones that actually find a commitment and, and, and, and a deep a deep belief in what they're doing. And so that gets to, your question of what are the patterns and the patterns of young people who find purpose. And as I said earlier, not everybody does find purpose, especially early in life.

But gradually over the years, more and more people do, but, but it's still not a majority of the population. But people that, do find purpose. Number one, get to know what their interests are. What, what is it that they actually have some gut sense that they feel comfortable and enjoy doing it? If you if, if, if, You wanna become a computer scientist or something like that. You, if you, you need to actually enjoy the, the work of programming and, and math and, and all of that.

Or if you if you wanna be a musician, you, you you have to like music. So number one, there is getting to know what it is that you have a sense of enjoyment, a sense of joy about doing number two. What is it that. The world needs what is it that you're, that you're capable of doing, that you're, that you're good enough to do, that you can make a contribution. And sometimes it's very obvious. If you're, again if you're tone deaf, for example and some people are, in fact, I am too.

I can, I cannot get, I can't sing on key. I can tell you that right now. So I'm, I'm even though I happen to love music, by the way, I love listening to it, but I'm just not. So if I wanted to become a singer, a jazz singer or something like that, it would be ridiculous. No matter how much I love, I do love jazz music, but that, that's something I have to learn about myself, what I'm capable of doing. And I I couldn't be a, a better singer. I couldn't be a basketball player.

I'm not I'm barely, I was six feet tall at my, at my height and at the highest and now I'm 5'10 or something or 5'11. So you get to know what you're able to do to contribute. So what do you enjoy doing? What are you capable of doing well so that you can make a contribution? And, and thirdly, what does the world need? What, what is there in the world that can be improved or added to? And again, there, there are a whole bunch of things that that are particularly pressing that you believe in.

And what is it that you believe in that, and, and the world has a lot of needs, so it's not hard to find them, but you have to have some sense that what you're doing is relevant in some way. And then finally, the last point is that young people who are on the road to purpose, on the path to purpose will, will be more Find somebody in their lives or somebody in the public who is a role model, somebody that is a living instantiation of the purpose that they want to develop.

And that's very helpful too. What does it look like in flesh and blood? It could be a parent, it could be a teacher, it could be a boss like that McDonald's manager. Or it could be somebody in the public, but there should be some actual sense of, it's not just abstract, this is what it looks like in real life. So those are the four points that we found in common among all the young people with developed purpose.

They had the interest, they had the capacity in that area to actually do something, they had some sense that this is what the world needs or this is what can improve the world, and they had some role model or somebody they could look to that, that, that could give a living sense of what it looks like to have this kind of purpose.

So the, the young people Bill that you had in your survey express dedication to purposeful categories, as you call them, and there was a descending order. And I thought we'd share this because. For people to know that it's not just about work or sport there's other places that you can find purpose and i thought we'd share that and then we'd share the categorization of people that you talk to because you categorize what type of difference.

These youth that you'd studied, but when I looked at that, I said, that categorization of people, like for example, dreamers or dabblers, that remains with people throughout their lives. And it also remains with organizations. I found as well that actually organizations in an innovation sense can be dabblers or dreamers. And I'll explain all that in a moment, but first let's share these categories, these purposeful categories, as you call them.

People find purpose in dedicating themselves to their families, whether it's the younger generation raising children, or taking care of their parents and grandparents, or their siblings. Or even creating a non kinship family. So there are lots of types of families, but dedicating yourself to the welfare of your family is certainly an important, very common sense of purpose around the world. And then there's faith.

In in our studies and I think in the United States generally, other surveys also, have found about 15, 1 5, 15 percent of the population, being devoutly faithful, that faith would be the number one purpose religious faith for that segment. And even for the ones that are not religiously devout. devoutly faithful, it still could be a purpose for people who have purposes in other directions. These are not mutually exclusive.

You can have you can have your your primary source of purpose, your work, and your faith can be an additional source of purpose. So it's not, we're not consigned to just having one purpose in life. And then other categories that were a bit less common, but still have substantial portions of the population included art sports, Entertainment providing entertainment for people and civics that, dedicating yourself to the community in some way.

The welfare of the community could either, either be in an organ in an organized way. I want to be. a member of city council or the school board, or a way that's less formal. I want to get a group of people together to clean up our neighborhood park or something like that. all of those are sources of purpose. Family, work, faith, art, music, sports civic purpose, and so on. And as I said, people can have multiple purposes. Some people have a single minded main purpose.

Others have, have several purposes. They, they have, they work and they also want to support their family with their income from their work. And that's a dual purpose. Or, well, and they may be, they may also be people of faith. So you can have more than one purpose.

a square peg in a round hole and they don't they're not succeeding and they'll feel that inside and if you can move them into where they truly belong, are they maybe have joined your company not because they want to be because they think this is what their parents want of them, all these kind of things play out not so positively in the future if you don't deal with them early but i thought the

And let's, let's make that work rather than have this be a source of conflict. So in family business, this is a, this is a big deal.

So one of the watch outs I took from it is that sometimes a kid will say something to you and you're gonna going, oh, that's a good idea. Why don't you make that into a business for yourself, And you're going, that's, that's not the way either. Like, because then you're making it into a self-serving.

I'm you're you're seeing things through your own lenses in your own life as well all that's in the book i thought a very important thing to share, was something i teed up a moment ago and these were the four groups, that you broke people into this national sample which you called the disengaged, and non purposeful the dreamers the dabblers and the purposeful and as Bill describe this to us think about people in organizations as well because they exist in every facet of

life think of organizations themselves as Bill tells us about these categories.

So the profiles can look somewhat different. Some of them are anxious, depressed, have given up. Others are, think they're quite happy and hedonistic and why bother looking for goals anyway. But for whatever reason, they're very difficult for educators to work with to promote purpose among because they're not, they're not looking for it. They don't see any reason for it or they've given up on it.

And as I said, it's a disturbingly large minority of the population, as many as 25 percent in any group we've looked at. The other groups of course, one of the groups are the fully purposeful, and in youth meaning up to about the early to mid twenties, we only find about one in five of young people have really figured it out. And are fully, fully purposeful. And that's why I always say to parents, Don't get impatient, because it's not even a norm to be fully purposeful by your early 20s.

If your child is, that's great, but have patience, and also to the young people sometimes, Gee, I haven't found my purpose yet. Well, don't worry about it, as long as you're moving towards it. Which brings up the other two categories that you mentioned. And these are categories of young people that have actually made some progress towards finding purpose, but they haven't, gotten all the way there.

And one people that we colloquially, we give them these snarky nicknames, and I, I hope they're not offensive to people, but, they're, they're ways of summing it up in colloquial. call the dreamers which means people that actually have purposeful beliefs and they have the intention and they. They can be quite noble beliefs. They can really believe in, Gee, I want to, I want to do something in my life to help the environment.

Help clean up the environment or mitigate climate change or something like that. Or, or maybe artists. I want to create beautiful artworks or become a filmmaker and they have all kinds of ideas about it, but they actually have not done anything to in an active sense that shows any commitment to it. So it's all in the, it's all in the head. They're, they're talking the talk, but not walking the walk.

And a lot of them will then find activities that will, that will Help them fill in the activity component and then they will become fully purposeful. But that has not happened yet, and it may not happen for years or even a decade or two. So I always want to emphasize that, that you have to be patient. But those are the dreamers. And then, People that we've called the dabblers.

And again, I don't mean anything snarky by it really because these are good kids who have their days full of activities and they're doing what Teachers and parents, have advised them to do, maybe they're taking piano lessons, maybe they're doing some sports, maybe they're doing lots of homework. So they're, they're good kids and they're doing a lot of stuff, but they have not owned any of the Activities that they've done. They don't really believe in any of it.

So there's a perfunctory nature to what they do And they do it because they're supposed to do it or maybe they're doing it because they want to build a good record To be admitted to a university And that's not really a purpose in and of itself unless unless you understand why your university education is important To help you accomplish something that is purposeful. But just to get into a high status university is not in itself what we consider to be a purpose.

Because it's, again, all about you and it's not, it's not anything, trying to accomplish anything meaningful. So, the people we call the dabblers have, young people, they have full, often plate of activities. But, What they are missing is the vision, the dream, the belief. And so these other two categories the dreamers and the dabblers, hopefully a lot of them will fill in what's missing in their lives. The dreamers, the activity, the dabblers, the vision.

Not all of them will, but a lot of them will, and that's why a lot of them move towards purpose in the population. Takes place in the late twenties or all the way up into the thirties and sometimes later than that for a lot of individuals.

And if you look on the Stanford website and you type my name in you'll get an email address that you can send an email, but I will see it. It actually goes through my assistant, Lisa Staton, but she's very good at promptly showing them to me and that kind of thing. So Stanford University, look on the website, search my name, and there is an email address there that I'm, and I, I do. It gives me a lot of gratification.

I love hearing from people who have benefited in any way possible from anything I've said or written or done. So, I certainly enjoy it and I welcome, I certainly welcome communications from people, I'm not, I'm not able to give advice to people or something like that on on any kind of a individual level because I don't presume to have the answers to to life. But but I'd love to hear from people and, and if people enjoy my, my presentation. reading what I have to say, that that's just great.

It gives me a lot of gratification and fulfillment in what my purpose in life has been, which is to try to find out things about the world and share them with people that are useful. well it gives me great pleasure and purpose to amplify your message as well Bill and i just wanted to share this last quote you write in the book that the research is clear. While absorption in purposeful tasks may be strenuous, it also brings a deep sense of satisfaction, wellbeing, and exhilaration.

The paradox is that the exertion of hard and often thankless effort in service of a purpose with little thought of personal gain is a surer path to happiness than the eager pursuit of happiness. For its own sake absolutely beautiful i thought it would be a beautiful way to sign off author of the path to purpose William Bill Damon thank you for joining us,