William Damon || The Path to Purpose

the podcast. Doctor Damon is director of the Stanford Center and Adolescence and he's also a professor of Education at Stanford University. Doctor Damon's current research exports how young people develop purpose in their civic, work, family, and community relationships. He examines how people learn to approach their vocational and civic lives with a focus on purpose, imagination, and high standards of excellence. Doctor Damon also has written widely about

how to educate for moral and ethical understanding. Doctor Damon's most recent books include the Power of Ideals, Failing Liberty one oh one, and The Path to Purpose. Helping our Children find their calling in life. What a great honor it is to chat with you today. It's my pleasure. Wow. I want to start off by asking how you define

the word purpose. Good question, because that's something that we spent actually about a year really thinking through and reading philosophy and theology and seeing how the word had been used throughout history. So there are three important components to the definition that we developed. One is that purpose is a long term goal. In other words, it's not an immediate or quick or momentary impulse to do something. Trying to find a parking place in town this afternoon is

not a purpose, it's a goal. But wanting to become a doctor so that you can cure people, or wanting to become a scientist, or wanting to raise children in a wholesome family, all of those are long term purposes. They continue, they take a while, and they require commitment. So that's number one. It needs to be a long term goal. Number two, it has to be something that is meaningful to the person. So nobody can give you a purpose and tell you you have to do it.

If a teacher tells a child do your homework tomorrow, or work really hard and get a good grade in this course, if the child doesn't particularly want to do it and only does it because the teacher is forcing her or him to do it. That's not the child's purpose. It's a command, and of course sometimes in life we do need to follow commands, but that's not what we call purpose. Purpose. It has to be owned, it has to be something that person buys into and really wants

to do himself or herself. And the third component of purpose that's essential is that it's not all about me. In other words, it's not just something that is about self happiness or preservation or self protection or self advancement. It's something beyond the self. It's something that attempts to accomplish something that's a broader consequence to the world, beyond

the self. When you get all of these things working in tandem, you can say that a person is purposeful, is driven by a purpose that the person has committed to. I really like that. And how do values play a role in this definition or the idea of authenticity. Well, I think there are a lot of values that can be part of purpose, but purpose is a very general concept and there are no particular values that define purpose. It depends on what you're trying to accomplished. It depends

on what position you're coming from. So people of all stripes of life, with all kinds of beliefs that differ from one another, can have purpose. Okay, So I guess maybe what I'm asking is like, do you need to have a set of firmly rooted values before you can have a purpose or is it possible to have a purpose and pursue it without actually having to think so much about what are my core values? Et cetera, et cetera. Well,

that's a good question. I don't think you need to use the word values or work through that in an intellectual reflective manner. But for sure, purpose requires commitment. So that's in itself a reflection that you really are driven by something you believe in. And so purpose does require some kind of a sense that I'm going to go to the mat for this, I'm going to stick with it. I'm going to even if it's difficult or frustrating or hard,

I'm going to keep going. So in that sense, yeah, a person needs to have the kind of integrity to say I'm going to follow through on my commitment and stick with it day after day until I really try to accomplish what I'm after. Good, good, good, I really like that so, and I like the kind of your use of the word integrity there. It's like integrity to getting closer to that aspiration, that higher level aspiration, not necessarily integrity in the sense of integrity used differently, you know,

in the field in different ways. But I kind of am digging in a way you use that. So I know that you, as I have been influenced by Victor Franco and you quote him in your papers and things of that nature, but you talk about how purpose is not the same thing as meaning, and he kind of lumped those two things together. Could you maybe unpack a little bit about the distinction between the two, And sure he influenced you, Yeah, sure, Well. Frankel was the first

person long ago. He wrote his famous book in the mid twentieth century, and he was really the first person to write about how important it is for all of us in living a good life to have something beyond ourselves that we believe in, something that we commit to. And it was a very different point of view than a lot of the psychoanalysts and people who had been writing at the time, who really believe that what we need to do in life is cure our neuroses and

deal with our conflicts. And Franco in a sense was one of the first positive psychologists. He was somebody that says, no, we're driven by our forward looking aspirations in life. And he of course wrote the book in German. It's been

translated as Man's Search for Meaning. The title of the book that he wrote was actually Nevertheless, say Yes to Life, so he can see it was very much a positive psychology point of view, and his whole point of view is that no matter what life throws at you, no matter how difficult things are, you can always turn that around and find something positive in it and something to learn from, something to be grateful for, and something to

aspire to. So he actually did write about purpose, and the book got translated in English as Man Search for Meaning. Of course, meaning is a component of purpose, and it's a very important component. Purpose, as I said right at the outset needs to be meaningful, but it does need to be something more than that, because, for example, I can go to a movie or listen to a song on the radio, or read a poem, and all of these things are meaningful, and that's great, and people should

do meaningful things. But that's not a purpose. Going to a movie is not a purpose. A purpose is really when you commit yourself to accomplish something. It does need to be meaningful, but it needs to be more than that. And Frankel actually did write about that. That is the way he wrote about it, and he inspired a lot of people, including a lot of people in the positive psychology movement. Mike Chick, sent Mahi, Marty Seligman, all of

those great psychologists were inspired by Frankel's book. Yeah, and Michael Steger's work as well. Absolutely, he's going to be on the podcast in a couple of weeks. Yeah. Yeah, So it seems like what you're saying is what he really meant by a meaning was purpose. Like when he used the word, that's really what he was kind of referring to. Yeah. I mean he didn't even use the word meaning because he was writing in German. I think

the German word is speck or something like that. Well, would that be translated to Then he really used the word goal, something like a goal, And as I said, the way he was writing about it, he meant the kind of long term, committed goal that we've written about. Cool. I just find this so interesting. I didn't know that he never you're saying, he never actually used the word

meaning in any of his writings. It's kind of well, as I said, he wrote in German, and the title of the book is not even man search for meaning. Frankel was a psychiatrist and he was not a researcher, so he didn't have empirical studies of how purpose develops,

or developed mental studies or any of that. And that's what we started doing about fifteen years ago, is picking up on Franco's ideas, ideas by Carol Riff, who had also written about purpose from an American point of view, and we started doing work on the development of purpose. So we were interested in how, especially young people acquire

the capacity to be purposeful. And we even looked at some brain research that showed that the kind of neurological capacities develop around the period of puberty and a little later when people can look forward enough to have these long term goals. I'd love to see some of that research, by the way, if you can give you the run, Yeah, well that's a research by Ron Dahl and people like

that have done that work. And one of our graduate students who's now a professor University of Alabama him and Hahn has done that kind of work too, So I want to Unpackseling a little bit. So when Victor Rackley, at least he's translated saying that he have a will to meaning yeah, this basic drive, this basic fundamental drive, to really understand and wrap my head around what that

drive is. Do you think it's a drive to sort of have some sort of like a longer term striving of some sort that benefits the greater good, something outside yourself. Do you think that's the core sort of drive there. It's a number of things. It's one thing is to make sense out of your life and answer the question why, And he did right about that. Why are we here? Yeah?

What's the purpose of our lives? And to do it in a way that gives you a sense that you have made a difference in the world, that you've accomplished something, you've left something behind that at the end of your life you can look backwards and say, you know it mattered that I am alive. Yeah, it mattered, you know.

It's Rebecca Goldstein has talks about the need to matter, right, and that's all the mattering instinct, The mattering instinct exactly, and all of this cluster of ideas are really all saying the same kind of thing, which is that in contrast to for example, Sigmund Freud, who by the way, lived very near frankal in Vienna. In contrast to Freud, we don't just react to negative things in our lives and try to repair damage. That's not our main motivation

in life. And Marty Seligman has written beautifully about that. We are driven really more by a forward looking aspiration to become somebody that we are proud of, to be the kind of person we want to be. Marty Suliman calls it prospective thinking, the idea that it's really the future that drives us, at least our visions for the future, our hopes and wishes for the future, much more than our past and all of the traumas and so on that we experienced when we were young. Yeah, for sure.

And you know, Abraham Maslow talked a lot about that as well, the humanistic psychologists talking about that the point of life is kind of a value driven life, right,

as supposed to happiness, right, right, Yeah, that's right. I think that the history of psychology throughout the twentieth century and now in the early part of the twenty first century, is moving further away from that deficit kind of model that we're always trying to recover from damage and more towards this idea that what we really care about in life is mattering, is making a difference, is becoming the kind of people that we want to be and contributing something,

contributing something to our families, to our faith, serving God, and these more positive aspirations are really what drive us in the long run, not every minute, not every minute of our lives, and of course they're always difficult periods in life that we have to deal with, but in the long run, over the years and years, it's these positive visions of what we want to accomplish in our lives that really make our choices, that really help us decide what to do from in a long term sense.

That's right. So, yeah, I know, very beautifully put in clearly this is important. Yet you found in your work that only a small subset of people today, young people particularly, actually demonstrate each of these components you're talking, well, well, not each of the components. I think that's an important point.

What you're referring to is that we find about twenty percent of young people up until what the age twenty two demonstrate all of those components, in other words, are fully purposeful, but a much larger number has begun the journey has one of the components, if not the others, and a lot of those young people after age twenty two begin moving more towards becoming fully purposeful. So it's

a movie, not a snapshot. And of course, youth is a very dynamic period of life, and these young people are growing and maturing, and purpose is a late developing capacity. Becoming fully purposeful is something that occupies a lot of our adult years, actually, so it's not to be expected that the early twenties most of the population will have figured it all out. Right. It's a lifelong process, for sure. It is people and also people as they move on

through life. They may be purposeful during a certain period of life, and then let's say they retire from their job or their children move on out of the house, and they need to look for new purposes because they no longer are working on what was purposeful for them before. So it is absolutely a lifelong quest. I really appreciate you, know your perspective on purpose, and you're sort of positivity in the sense that there's a lot that we can

build off of that young people already have. But I also noticed that the field of psychology has been sort of recognized the importance of purpose for positive youth development for many years, and I was wondering, why you think that hasn't, you know, at least in the past, been

a priority. Well, I think one thing is that nobody has until recently, until the recent wave of research, which I think began really with Carol Riff's work and then accelerated with the work we did in our lab, is that nobody had found a really good way to measure purpose, to operationalize it, and to actually find evidence for it

among people of all ages. And once we in our lab at Stanford developed the definition and developed an interview and a survey, it's amazing how many people have begun using that, And I know that other people have also developed their own measures too. Kendall Bronc at CGU has a measure of it. Mike Steger, who you will be speaking to, has a measure of it. So now, in the last ten years, there have been studies cropping up

all over the world. There's a number of studies going on in Brazil, in Finland, in China, I mean all over all kinds of places, Japan, Southeast Asia, Canada. So you're right that it's taken a long time. It's taken basically until the twenty first century for psychology to really look at it. But psychology is a field that cares a lot about measurement, that revolves around being able to actually find evidence for something and look at it under

a so called microscope. Of course, we don't use microscopes as a figure of speaking, but now that that's been done, have been in recent months and years, there have been a number of studies and there will be a lot more. It's an accelerating area of interest right now, and especially a lot of younger scholars. Tony Burrow at Carnell just lots I could give you. I could give you forty names of younger scholars who are beginning to do work

in this area now. Yeah, And if I may be so bold as to say, I'm starting to do some research on it myself. Wonderful and kind of just have found that it's part of a you know, what was talked about with self actualization was really was meant by that was you know purpose, you know, like not self actualization, but actually something beyond the self actuals, do you know what I mean. Yeah, Yeah, that's a really good point.

I totally agree with you that. You know, now, in those early years when Maslow was writing and so on, I think people hadn't really found a way to distinguish

issues of the self from issues of broader interest. And you're absolutely right that purpose really is the concept that he was looking for, and that's the right handle on the way to study this phenomenon that we're talking about, which is really one of the most central things in human development, the search to find the kind of life that you want to live that you think is important and meaningful and purposeful. Yeah. Absolutely, So, you know, there's

so many related allied constructs to purpose. One that I thought was interesting is the notion of resiliency. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how they're kind of really close cousins. Yes, And I'm really glad that these are really good questions and gets to the roots of our work. Resilience was actually line of research by people like Bonnie Bernard and so on

that preceded our labs work. On Purpose, and it does get to a lot of the same things, which is that it's the idea that resilience means that you stick to things, you have grit to whose Angela Ducerus's word back, and you do this in a way that is extremely healthy. In other words, it's almost a marker of mental health that you have resilience, you have the capacity to recover from difficulty, injury, challenge, insult, and so on. And that

work was very valuable. But what we did and when I wrote the book The Path to Purpose, what I tried to make clear was that the concept of resilience, as valuable as it is, only takes you part way there, because it's all predicated on the idea that you have some challenge or difficulty that you need to recover from.

And that was in fact the way that psychologists like Emmy Werner used it, and Bernard and so on, very important valuable work that did describe an important psychological strength, but it did not get to the idea that sometimes a lot of our motivation is not based on covering

from damage or difficulty. It's simply based on something that we are eager to do again, a pro social positive something that we do with zest and vigor and hopefulness and optimism, and not even arising from some difficulty we've been through, but just arising from our natural will to live a full life and to do exciting things and to have new experiences, and to accomplish something, to get something done, to be masterful, to matter in life. So

resilience doesn't really capture that. Resilience captures the part of it that is very important, and it is what Fronkel wrote about a lot, which is the part that says, Okay, we have the capacity to make it through hard times. That's really important. But purpose says, yeah, not only do we have the capacity to make it through hard times, we also have the capacity to aspire, to achieve, to simply go for it because we simply want to do it. And so that's why when I wrote The Paths to Purpose,

I really emphasized that positive aspect of it. Good you really are a positive psychologist, as well as other kinds of pats as well. Yeah, yeah, well I do. I think it was a great direction for the field to go in. And I'm grateful to Marty Seligman for getting that ball rolling, because I do think it's a more accurate vision of human nature that had been really not appreciated by a lot of the early psychological theorists. Yeah, and the humanistic psychologists tried, but oh yeah, they weren't

totally successful in maintaining a movement. Well it's a young field, you know, it's I mean, you've got to remember the whole field only started what one hundred and fifty years ago or less? Yeah, so you know point, it has a long way to go. Still. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah's so funny. That's you're right, And I think about that, like to me, that seems like such a long time ago. But the whole scheme of the universe that's not really or science. I'll mean, look at chemistry is what two

thousand years old? So you know, the great point, really great point. So I have a question because I know something in one of your paper is so interesting how you said that purpose seems to be expressed differently among youth than it does seems to be expressed among young adults or adults, you know, And I was wondering if you could see what's the different flavor there that you've

seen in your research. Well, some of it is very easy to explain because young people spend their time in different contexts, and so for a young person who spends most of his or her life in school, or at least most of his are awaking life, purpose will be expressed in the kinds of things that happen in school. Usually, So a young person might have a lot of academic purpose because he or she wants to learn biology so that he or she can go on to become a

doctor someday or something like that. Or the student might be fascinated or love basketball and want to be captain of the basketball team and be very purposeful about that by helping organize the team, making sure that the basketball is brought home after the game, organizing rallies with school spirit. So there's a lot of ways that a young person can be purposeful in a school context, or maybe on

a part time job. We see young people being purposeful about even let's say working for a fast food restaurant and saying, you know, I'm here not just to flip burgers, but to put a smile on the customer's faces. That's a very purposeful way to orient that, or about the young person's family. I'm going to read to grandma because she's lonely, or help my mom take care of my

little sister. So there's a lot of ways that young people can be purposeful, but they're different than when somebody is let's say thirty years old, and let's say embarking on a new career in finance or law or whatever, and there are whole different kinds of responsibilities and commitments, or starting his or her own family and you want to raise your kids in a way. Obviously, a fourteen year old is not going to be worrying about raising their kids. That's not going to be one of their purposes.

But a forty year old is, or in many cases. So it's just that young people are different lives than adults and different places where they spend their time, so the kinds of purposes they pursue are going to look different. But the young person's purpose. When a young person is purposeful about let's say, being a captain of a basketball team or something, that's going to help the young person become purposeful about adult kinds of responsibilities that he or

she is going to encounter later in life. So there is a developmental capacity that's being formed in those early years.

I like that, and I agree with those differences. But I think there's another element that you talk about in your writing that I was trying to get at, which is perhaps a dark side in the sense that a lot of young kids like to show off, you know, their kind of sense that when they have a purpose, it's more of like a look at me kind of purpose, whereas when you get older, there's a more maturity there, there's a more sense of you know, just I guess maturity.

Could you maybe talk a little about what you've seen there. Yeah, I think that's a very good point. Young people are young, and you know, when they're young, when they're young and not fully mature or not completely responsible, that's what they are. And it takes a while to bump up against other people in life to learn the kind of habits that

you're talking about. And I think one of the one of the habits or virtues that you're talking about is humility, the idea that you know, I can aspire to do things really, really well and accomplish a lot, but in the world's perspective, you know, I don't have to be too conceited about it. I don't have to say go around saying hey, I'm number one, I'm the greatest, or

anything like that. You can do it with some sense of perspective and not just in a way that, as you said, is just to show off how great you are. And that's something like many things in life that we learn over the years that you're not born by You're not born knowing these things. You develop this kind of capacity to be a person of a person that gets along well with other people. Yeah, I really like that. You know. We both are advisors to an organization called

the Future Project. Oh yeah, yeah, and you know, I hear your name talked about a lot over there. They love you. They're a really great organization and a core thing they're trying to do is to help kids find their purpose and then realize it, you know, through these projects or through these dream teams and things. Yeah like that. But you do see I do see that element a little bit amongst a lot of the students of this

really grandiose like these kids do it big. I mean, on the one hand, it's really darn impressive, you know what youth can accomplish, and we, you know, we can really support that. On the other hand, I see some students kind of get ahead in themselves a little too bit, a little a little bit, you know. I think for a lot of young people it's good to have a certain healthy ambition. And you know, there's a quote from Christopher Marlow. I think if your reach does not exceed

your grasp, what's heaven for. It's the idea that you know, it's fine to aspire and to think I can reach the stars and try to accomplish a lot, especially when you're young. So I wouldn't discourage that. I think that in the end, we all need to be realistic and as you said earlier, not be conceited and go around just bragging with empty kind of an empty hat. But I think for a young person to really feel, you know, I can do it, I can do it. I'm going

to really go for it, I think that's fine. It's ambitious. There's nothing wrong with ambition for a young person and go for it, you know. And I think the Future Project does encourage young people to really try to accomplish their dreams. That's why they call them Dream Directors. The Future Project they put essentially guidance counselors into schools that they call Dream directors, and they really help individual young kids find something they believe in and really go for it,

and I think that's just great. Yeah, it really is great. And you know a lot of these kids get transformed with the purposes like a transformative thing in their life from iopathity and you know, low attendance school attendants, and that it permeates the rest of their being exactly exactly. It's the best antidote to depression or laziness or anxiety, all those things that young people feel when they don't have a reason to aspire and when they can't answer

the question why am I here? Anyway? Having a purpose is a great way to cut through all that and just do stuff that you really end up enjoying because you believe in it. Absolutely. So let's dive into your science a little bit. You've developed in some methods for assessing purpose and its development. Could you maybe talk about

some of the methodologies you've used. Sure. Well. My method of choice is always an interview because it gets in depth as to what a person is really believing and what they are moved by and why they find what they're doing interesting. You can ask them a lot of probing questions and get quite individualistic about the method of course, interviews take a long time, so we use them mostly for discovery when we're trying to uncover something new. We have a survey that you can give to large numbers

of young people that's much easier to administer. It can be taken online, it can be scored in a very simple computer based way. It doesn't have to be coded through extensive labor, intensive reflection and so on. So it depends on what the purpose of the research is. If it's for discovery, we tend to use interviews. If it's for testing out hypotheses, we tend to use the survey method.

And then we have little performance measures built into some of the surveys where students are asked to actually demonstrate purpose by doing things such as writing a proposal to do something or pretending to do a YouTube video that would make a pitch for something they believe in, and it's a way to assess how much they really are committed to a certain idea. So we have these kind of triangulated way of measuring purpose, ranging from interviews to

surveys to performances. Oh gosh, I love that it's so important for the field, which is so heavily reliant on self report measures, you know, and Angela Duckworth is doing some work trying to figure out some objective ways of measuring grit, and I bet your work could really inform that. Yes,

hers informs us too. And we did a project with Angela on a range of capacities, including grit and purpose, and in that we experimented with, as you said, ideas that measurement, ideas that would not simply self report but actually demonstrated performance and capacity that way. So, yeah, Angela is a great methodological visionaries in the field. I think, Oh, yeah,

for sure. She's a dear friend of mine. Yes, my office was next to hers for four years the Positive Psychology Center, So I feel like I got a lot of grittier just by association. It's funny how that works. Yeah, So I digged up the papers from nineteen ninety two that I really like. Colby and Damon. You did work on moral commitment among living moral exemplars. That's just something I'm so interested in, is moral exemplars and have people

to look up to, you know. And you distinguished between some criteria of moral and purpose commitment versus non moral commitment or purpose. Can you talk about some of the distinguishing characteristics you noticed between the two. I think this is a lot of relevance for today as much as it did in nineteen ninety two. Yeah. Well, of course, the people we looked at and got to know were amazingly inspiring people because they really had dedicated their lives

to incredibly difficult challenges. I'll just give you one example of a woman that I spent quite a bit of time with getting to know her. A woman named Susie Valadez, who was an evangelical Christian who had decided at a fairly early age that she would dedicate her life to serving young children were born into poverty and everything from getting them medical care, to good education to their spiritual growth. And she was at the time when I was interviewing her,

she was in her seventies. She would go for fourteen hours a day, go go, go, absolutely full of energy, full of joy. She was charismatic. Everywhere she went. She would brighten up the people around her. The children loved her, and she was somebody that was dedicated to the issue really of charity for very impoverished people. Even though she knew that with her whole life's work, she wasn't going to solve the problem of poverty in the world by

any means. But she could help some individual people, in fact a number of them in large numbers, and that kept her going despite how hard it was and despite how many very hard, sad lives she witnessed. So that kind of and that's what we really call moral when you just really help people out in a way that is meant to be something that improves their lives, especially

lives that are very, very challenged. And what we learned from it is that the people that do this kind of work really do have a purpose in the sense that that is who they are. The purpose is so defining that when they accomplish their goal. When Susie Valadees saves a child's life, there's no distinction in her mind between doing good for that child and doing good for herself.

That is what Susie most wanted to do. That brings Susie fulfillment, joy, happiness, And it's that merger, that merger of kind of self and the morally right thing to do that characterized these morally outstanding people that we witness That's why they had so much energy, They were so courageous, they had no fear because they just believed in what they were doing so much that it became it transformed them,

it became who they were. Yeah, between you know, you're either selfish on the one hand, or you're helping others and the other, which is really a false dichotomy that we've kind of put up in place. You can be fully from the self and be one in the world at the same time and help others. They don't want to be at odds with each other. Exactly, exactly, Yeah, really really like that. Just a couple more minutes here.

I want to be respectful of your time. I will not ask you the other forty five questions that I've prepared for you, I promise, But well, let me ask you. Let's just talk about the business world for a second, because you do you don't only talk about the young children, but also talk about how having a sense of ultimate responsibility in the workplace is important. So what do folks

like Max dupri Catherine Graham, and John Gardner have in common? Well, they were all leaders for one thing, and they were leaders who and you just used the phrase, was willing to take ultimate response, ultimate responsibility for what they were doing in life. So they were very successful. I mean, that's why they were leaders, that's why people looked up to them in whatever they did. They were absolutely revered.

But their success was marked by a sense that, you know, I don't want to only be successful in the eyes of the world. I also want to be successful in the sense that I could look myself in the mirror every day and say, I am proud of who I see that I did the right thing. So I got success on the high road. I didn't do it by cutting corners, or by cheating, or by doing things that I'm embarrassed about because they were shady. I did it in a way that I can be proud of. And

they took ultimate responsibility for what they did. And if they thought that something that they were asked to do could help their success, but it would actually not be something they were proud of, they didn't do it. They wouldn't do that way. Max Dupre, who was the CEO of Herman Miller, a great furniture company. They did business all over the world, and a lot of parts of the world that they did business in. Some of his competitors would do business by bribing or something like that

officials of the country. They were in in order to get access and that might give them an edge up. And Max Duprie absolutely refused to do that. He said, no, we're going to be successful the right way. We're going to be successful. Our company is going to do the right thing and do it in the high road. And it was he did it. He succeeded. He did succeed in doing that and in a way that he never had to feel embarrassed by it. Well, you're inspiring me right now to want to be a better person. So

I can imagine all our listeners in USB's them as well. Wow, I'm folks inspired that, I'm like tongue tied. Okay, So let me ask one last question today. And this is a topic of one of your books, so I thought maybe it'd be worth asking this question. How are we leaving young Americans unprepared for citizenship in a free society? Well, I think we're not teaching history well enough number one,

or at all. I mean, I think that's the most important thing that from what I see from the reports of test results by I believe if I have this right, The American Enterprise Institute just one a series of studies of this and other researchers of all the subjects that students test poorly on, like math, which we're all very aware of American students really need to be better in math.

History is actually the lowest American history and I think that learning about the great tradition of our country, our great American tradition, and learning to be proud of that, that I think would inspire young people to be more attached to our society and be very positive about their participation at the community level, so that they get involved with their neighborhoods, they help out all the way to

becoming informed citizens in every sense of the word. So I think that would be my number one recommendation, which would be to take the study of history more seriously at the high school level. Wow, that seems quite important, and that is something that is quite unique of bone humans.

I saw a Jane Goodall documentary last night that it just came out that really inspired me, and she said, you know, humans have this unique capability for language which should not be understated because it allows us to keep the kind of the record of our mistakes and ourselves. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Yes, that's right, that's right. We have histories and we learned from them, and we need to help young people learn from them by actually teaching from history in a good way, in a way that

they're interested in it. Beautiful, beautiful, Hey, thank you so much for your time today, and you genuinely inspired me in this time. Say I feel like goosebump, So thank you so much for thanks so much. I really enjoyed it, Scott, and best of luck to you and to your book that I know you're working on and all that. So thank all the best to you. Thank you too. Okay, thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you

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