The Science of Connection and Why We Underestimate Others | Nicholas Epley - EP 760

24:24Those are going to be high on that spectrum, on the warmth spectrum. People are going to react to that generally pretty positively, as long as your warmth and your positive intention is clear. But if you're thinking about your competency, just by regression alone, just by noise alone, you're going to underestimate how positive that's going to go. And indeed, you find that people are overly concerned about their competency in conversations. You're more capable of doing this than you think. So I think that's a big one. And that cuts across lots of social interactions where what you're doing is meant to be is inherently warm and friendly.

24:59So that's one. Another one is that interaction itself has a magnetic quality to it that generally pulls us together when we're trying to connect with other people in positive ways. And that magnetic pull is what psychologists sometimes call reciprocity. There's a back and forth. Sometimes responsiveness, right? You reach out to somebody, they respond back to you. They can respond back to you in a particular way. And social interaction, live social interaction, conversation in particular, is full of reciprocity and responsiveness. So when I'm talking with you, you're nodding back and forth at me.

25:35You're smiling at me. If I reach out to say hello to you, what do you generally say back to me? You say hello back to me, right? I wave at you. You generally wave back to me, right? But what we find in our work is that people tend not to recognize the power of those dynamic processes, those magnetic qualities that pull us together. Instead, we tend to treat people more like marbles, not like magnets that have some connection to each other when they start interacting, but rather like marbles. They underestimate how positive a conversation, which has these interactive dynamic qualities that go back and forth, will actually be, right?

26:13Something like an email, right, which doesn't have those properties, probably isn't going to be as positive as talking because it lacks some sense. So I think that's a second one. It's not that we underestimate how positively all interaction is going to turn out. It's that we underestimate how positively interaction that goes back and forth is going to be that has those dynamic properties. And then the last thing is that it's hard to learn this. That is, it's hard to learn how social interaction is actually going to turn out because our beliefs can govern the data that we get about it. So one of my former colleagues here, Robin Hogarth, who passed away just a couple of years ago, sadly, Robin Hogarth had this brilliant distinction between kind and confusing learning environments.

27:02He actually called them kind and wicked, but I'll call them confusing here. A lot of cognitive science demonstrates that we're amazing at learning if we have really good data to learn from. Hogarth referred to these as kind environments. Kind environments are when my beliefs aren't affecting the experiences that I have, right? So I take a test. I've got a bunch of beliefs about answers to these questions, and I get feedback on all of them, and I learn which ones are right and which ones are wrong, okay? That's a kind learning environment. And there we can learn brilliantly. But much of social life is actually a confusing learning environment, where our beliefs dictate the experiences that we have in ways that cut out a lot of the data that we actually need to learn well.

27:47So if I believe talking to you, John, on the plan is going to be fun and enjoyable. You're not wearing your headphones, right? Or at least if you are wearing your headphones, I say hi and you say hi back to me. We start a conversation. If I think it's going to be pleasant, I'll try. And then I'll learn whether it's pleasant or not, right? But notice if I'm pessimistic, if I'm doubtful about how this is going to go, I won't reach out to you and I might never find out that I was wrong. So our approach-oriented tendencies, our optimism can get calibrated, but our pessimism cannot. Pessimism, avoidance-oriented beliefs, tend to be miscalibrated because we lack the data.

28:27We don't actually get the data we need to tell us whether our fears are on the mark or off. Nick, I want to go back to something you just talked about, reciprocity. I saw that Sonia Lieber-Mirsky blurbed your book, and I had a great conversation with her and Harry Reese about this exact topic. And I love how in their book, they use the concept of a relational seesaw to describe how reciprocity is working or not working. And their work reminded me a little bit of Dan Gilbert's work, who I know you have studied. Dan's a good friend of mine, a longtime friend. And when I look at Dan's work, some of the stuff that he talks about is we're not great at predicting what will make us happy.

29:13Do you think social connection is one of the biggest blind spots to our happiness? I would have a hard time naming another. It's certainly the biggest, most consistent one, I think. So Dan's work focused a lot on failing to appreciate how our own minds operate. That crops up in lots of different ways, very specific, precise ways. His work is fabulous. The social stuff, though, is where most of our happiness actually sits. So if I want to know how happy you are in your life, how positive you're feeling in your life, how good your life is, I really want to know about what your relationships are like, because that explains a huge amount of the variance.

29:57But other people's minds are hard to understand, harder to understand, perhaps even than our own minds. And if we're consistently overly pessimistic about how interactions will go and we avoid the moments that would actually bring us opportunities to connect, turn strangers into acquaintances, acquaintances into friends, friends into good friends, right? Sometimes good friends into lifelong partners, then our social lives will suffer for it. And there's no better way, I think, to have a life that's less good than it could be than making your relationships worse than they need to be. I make the claim in the book that the choice that we have to reach out and engage with other people or hold back, all of social connection or much of social connection, at least, is a choice we make.

30:45It doesn't just happen to us. It's a choice we make about whether we reach out and engage with other people or hold back and avoid them. and how you make that choice. Maybe the most important choice you make over and over again in your life because it dictates so much of your happiness, your health, and your success in life. And if you get that choice wrong, you're overly avoidant, you live a lonelier life than you need to, then I think that's a huge mistake and one that I think we could do better with. I think this is a place where we can intervene in our own lives to live a little more wisely and to live better.

31:24It's hard not to think of your work and look at the work of Bob Waldinger and the Harvard Advanced Study of Advanced Aging. And I think it's interesting because these small moments that you are talking about, they happen to us every single day. But how much of our life are we missing, do you think, based on your research, just by staying silent? Boy, that's a good question. This is going to vary across people. I don't really know. One thing that I encourage people to do, and we've actually run a little research on this, is to do a choice audit in your life. And then you can find out. A choice audit is one where you think back over like yesterday, or at the end of a day, you think back over the course of your day.

32:06And you think about, you try to identify moments where you had the choice to reach out and engage with somebody or to hold back and not. Sometimes the choice is invisible, like you're commuting in your car on the way to work. You might not think that you could have used that opportunity to call your kid or call an old friend, right? Or call a coworker, a colleague. I taught this winter in downtown Chicago to our MBA students in the evening, and I would leave around 9.15. and I always took that opportunity on the drive home, not to just sit there and listen to music, Sticks or Alice in Change, which might've been lovely, but rather to call my son, who is a big Alice in Chains fan, my oldest son who's out in Oregon.

32:53And the time worked perfect. So every week we got time to talk with each other or to call my dad. So I think you can in your own life do this choice audit and each hour think about, was there a moment where you could have chosen to engage? Sometimes they're small things. Like when I come into the office in the morning, I've made a habit of walking to my office with my head up, smiling and saying hello to people. And there's a five minute walk around the office on my way up here that now has me waving at Keith, who's got the biggest smile in the building. He's one of our custodial staff. He's just a wonderful guy saying hi to Mario in the morning, saying hi to Maria in the elevator on the way.

33:35My colleague Eric Hurst was here this morning, said hi to him. It didn't slow me down at all on the way in. It got here just the same amount of time. But those are little moments where I chose to engage. And it made me get to my office this morning in a little better mood. I think if you go over the course of your day, my bet is that when we ask people to do this, and they were awake on average somewhere 14, 15 hours a day, varies a little bit, depending on how much folks are sleeping. On average, they were finding about seven to 10 moments over the course of their day where they could have been a little more social in little ways or small.

34:13Right. That's about half of your day. Maybe you're missing on average. It doesn't necessarily mean that taking every one of those moments is a good idea. It doesn't. But it means that some of those moments you could take and those moments would be better. So I'm not going to say how much any given listener listening to us here now could make their day a little better, but I think most listeners could take a choice on it and then test some of those moments. Would that moment be better? Do it themselves. Yeah. I just want to touch on something you just said. When I was at Lowe's, one of my favorite leaders, I thought he was one of the best I've ever worked with, was a gentleman named Steve Szilagyi.

34:53And at the time, Steve was a senior vice president, ran all the distribution centers. So had 30 ,000 employees, big job. And I remember every time you would ever meet him, he would always have this huge smile on his face, which is something I think we should always do with our kids. That's social mirroring. And you would greet him and you would say, Steve, how are you doing? And he would always say, I am outstanding. And I asked him about it one time when we were on a trip and he said, I used to do like everyone else said. I used to say, I'm doing okay. Or I would just say it's good. But he said, I realized when I started saying it's amazing, or I'm knocking it out of the park, or something that was positive, it would make him feel more positive.

35:41And he said, after a while, it completely changed the trajectory of his day and all his interactions. So I started to practice as well. And it actually worked because when you go into any environment and you're smiling and you're optimistic, you're going to expect better reciprocity from it. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Absolutely. So there are a couple of things going on there, but I think the big one that's, so some of it is just doing this yourself, but I think if you just did this office, did this in your office on your own, it wouldn't feel as good, right? What makes that feel good walking around with a smile to other people is that they tend to smile back to you.

36:19It's that social component that makes that good. So saying that you feel outstanding all on your own when you're alone in your office, that might have a little boost. But when you greet somebody with that, it's likely to be more positive for sure. And at least it's worth calling out. Maybe you don't want to make that up all the time, but at least it's worth calling out in the moments where you do feel really good to be willing to say it. Nick, I'm going to butcher this name. So you'll have to probably correctly, but I want to bring in Aj Young's rejection experiment. Jia Jiang. But you describe how he expected rejection, but instead found surprising kindness.

36:57What struck you the most about that? One really fun thing about writing a book is you meet all these interesting people who are doing all these interesting things. I met Claire Foyer, who is the founding member of the New York City Subway Social Club, which is super fun. And Dave Fleischer, who is a community organizer are out in LA who practices deep canvassing. And after a talk I gave at Princeton one time, one of the clinical psychologists, Eric Nook, who himself was just a ray of sunshine, that guy's fabulous. Eric came up to me and said, oh, you've got to talk to this guy, Jia Jiang. And Jia, so I read up on him and his life, and then I reached out to him.

37:38He reached right back to me, And we had some fabulous conversations. So his story is that he, and this was probably 20, I don't quite remember when it was. I want to say 2014 or 2015, but that may be wrong. You certainly find out when you look online. He was an aspiring entrepreneur who was terrified of rejection, as we all are, right? One of the reasons we find that people are reluctant to try talking to strangers is that they think other people don't want to talk to them, right? So if somebody is not talking to you, you infer that they don't want to talk to you and therefore you might be rejected.

38:12And so Gia knew that in order to be a successful entrepreneur, he needed to be able to go out and pitch to people, be comfortable hearing no's. And he had learned of this cognitive behavioral therapy technique, really inspired by Stefan Hoffman, who's a German psychologist who I also have had a lovely opportunity getting to talk with and know to. and Stefan pioneered this practice known as exposure therapy, which was a real revolutionary step in cognitive behavioral therapy to actually put people in the situations that they're afraid of to show them what reality is actually, which is usually more optimistic than you're imagining.

38:48So Jia had heard of exposure therapy and he decided his fear of rejection was so big, so severe, he couldn't do the standard routine of 30 days in a row of doing, of getting rejected, exposing himself to opportunities to be rejected. He needed a hundred days. So he set out, he decided that he was going to make one outlandish request each day for a hundred days in a row, sure that he would be rejected every single time. And he videotaped these experiences, posted them on a blog, which went viral. The videos are fabulous. You can find them at rejectiontherapy.com. And so he set out to be rejected a hundred days in a row.

39:27And we studied his videos. We just watched his videos to see what happened. Now, there's a well-known phenomena known as the underestimation of compliance effect by Frank Flynn and Vanessa Bones, two fabulous social psychologists, Frank at Stanford and Vanessa at Cornell, where psychologists have learned, they've learned, that we underestimate how willing other people are to comply with our requests. And we found, Xuen Zhao and I, learned that this underestimation of compliance effect is driven, at least in part, by underestimating how willing and happy other people are to help you when you ask them.

40:05Zhao went into his hundred days of rejection, being sure that he was going to get rejected every day. What he actually experienced, though, were our effects. so on the first day he goes out and he asks a security guard if i remember right if you can borrow a hundred bucks that security guard at a bank if i can borrow a hundred bucks a security guard says chuckle status says no i can't do that and and so he's off to a good start he gets rejected but then he notes the rejection wasn't actually that bad like the guy chuckled he was nice about it he didn't pull a gun on him or yell at him right it was pretty nice on the third day though he starts to have trouble he really starts to experience our effects he goes into a Krispy Kreme donut store in Atlanta Georgia and he walks up to the counter and he asks the woman working there Jackie Braun is her name she asked he asked Jackie could you make me a display of donuts in the shape of the Olympic rings right and he thought Of course they're not going to do this.

41:11This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. Nope. Jackie stops what she's doing. She gets out a piece of paper and she gets down into her thinker pose and she starts contemplating what do the rings actually look like? She's drawn them. Just give me a minute. I'll come back. 15 minutes later, she comes out with this box of amazing donuts in the shape of Olympic rings. His voiceover to this video is saying something like, and this is why humanity is worth saving. And if you look over the course of these hundred videos, Joe is asking people to do ridiculous things. He goes into a private airport. He's never flown a plane in his life.

41:49He asks, can I co-pilot a plane with somebody? Sure. That gets done. He walks, he's in Texas. He walks up to somebody's house, knocks on the door. He's got a soccer ball. Ask, would you be willing to take a picture of me playing soccer in your backyard? No problem. Done. Walks up to somebody's house with a pink rose. Ask, can I plant this rose in your front yard? You betcha. Planted right there in the front rows. He goes up to a Southwest Airlines flight, asks the guy who's managing the boardings, can I do the security announcement to the plane? They say, well, by FAA regulations, we can't do that.

42:23But you're welcome to talk to the whole plane if you want before we start. And so there he is on the plane, making an announcement to the entire plane. Over the course of his 100 crazy requests, he's actually accepted more often that he's rejected. He's accepted 51 times and rejected only 48 times, if I remember the 49 times, something like that. There were a few that were ambiguous. So there were like six, 51 and 40, 51 acceptances, 48 rejections. And then he got carried away a few days and he asked multiple requests. So he ended up making more than a hundred requests. Some were ambiguous. They couldn't do the thing he asked for the Southwest Air of the Line planes, but they did something similar.

43:04And what we also found was that the tone of the rejections actually were generally positive, both the acceptances and the rejections. Only seven out of the 105 times was the tone that Jia got when we watched the videos and coded them ourselves. Were they negative in any way? And even those were very mild, right? So Jia went into this experience thinking he was going to develop thick skin and therefore be able to handle rejection. He came to handle rejection, but not because he developed thick skin, but because he better understood what other people actually like. He learned that other people are kinder than he had expected them to be.

43:47I'm so glad you brought Vanessa up. We were talking about the psychology behind our choices that we make when I interviewed her. And I want to get to that because it's a core part of your book. I just wanted to ask one other question for you. I've had Johan Hari on the show, and we talked about how disconnection he feels is the root of all suffering. And then I had Julian Holt Lundstedt, who was talking about loneliness and its impact on us. Do you think what we're really experiencing isn't just loneliness or disconnection, but that we're surrounded by people and we still feel invisible? Well, that is very much what the subjective experience of loneliness is.

44:31And loneliness, as my late colleague and friend, John Cassioppo documented, is driven by some social cognition errors of the kinds that we're documenting in precise detail. People who are extremely lonely often think others don't want to interact with them and therefore they get more withdrawn. And as that cycle continues, you get more and more withdrawn until you get to a point where perhaps you could live so completely alone that you die at your own home alone and not be found for two years, right, as happened in Italy. So yes, by loneliness, what we mean is that subjective experience of feeling that you're not actually connected with other people.

45:13And there is tragedy in that. So avoiding other people when it's dangerous for you, legitimately dangerous and scary, and other people legitimately don't want to talk to you. That's one thing. There's wisdom there. But what we're finding is misunderstanding, underestimating the power that we have to actually reach out and connect with other people in ways that are both big and small. And that part is a bit tragic. And I think the ultimate message of our research, at least for me, the way it has impacted my life, is that it's fundamentally emotionally empowering. Jia Jiang told me that he feels like he has a superpower.

45:53So many of the people I talked to when writing this book had that same word. They said they feel like they have a superpower. They're not held back by fears of reaching out and engaging with other people. They learn that other people are friendlier than they might have thought. They learn the power that they have themselves to create positive social connections. If you hold back and avoid other people, they'll avoid you too, right? And if those bars, those fears that are keeping us from reaching out to other people are mistaken, they're not steel bars, they're more like pasta noodles. If you don't ever push on them to find out that you might be wrong, you're keeping yourself overly lonely.

46:32And so what I've learned, at least over the course of my life, and the message I see from our research is that these gaps between our beliefs about how these interactions will go and how they actually go, afford us, I think, a lot of wisdom. Because it's between those gaps where wisdom lies. Once you realize the power you have to create positive social connection, it changes the way you live your life. And if you're feeling lonely, it gives you some insight on what you might be able to do to repair that feeling a little bit, to connect with other people in more positive ways. I think it's fundamentally empowering.

47:06Let's talk about these small choices. I first heard the term microchoice when I was talking to Michelle. Now I'm drawing a whole blank. She's a behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan. Anyway, since I talked to her years, it's probably been five years ago, I have continually heard people, Katie Milkman, Vanessa, other people talk about the power of microchoices. And when you talk about this gap that we're facing, why is it these small choices that have the greatest potential to improve our lives? Yes, there are a few things. One is that our happiness responds really to the frequency of events, not as much to the intensity of them.

47:56So Ed Diener documented this decades ago that the intuition here, I think, is pretty clear. Happiness, that positive feeling that we have going through the course of our day is a mood and it rises and falls. It's like a leaky tire. It's got a hole in it. And the way to keep the tire filled up is to just keep pumping it up. So those moments do matter. The way to have a good day is to string a bunch of good moments along. The way to have a good week is to string a bunch of good days along. The way to have a good month is to string good weeks along. on the way to have a good life, string good months along.

48:27So that's one, frequency matters. The other is that our emotional response to events is what psychologists often call scope insensitive. The intensity of our emotional reaction isn't necessarily that sensitive to the magnitude of the event we experience. So the little thank you note that I get from a student out of the blue, that hits me at just the right time, right? Can make me feel great for the rest of the day, a nice conversation I have on the morning to start the day can lift me up, can get me to a level that some, a big event might get me up to, right? I take this amazing trip. That makes me feel great too, right?

49:04But I'm already at the max of the scale. Sometimes even with just the smaller things too, can make me feel really good. Where there's, if you want to think about this in a business school, so sometimes I think about it this way. If you want to think about the return on the investment of your choices, of your actions, where the big return is on the small things that you can do easily, routinely, that you can make a habit. The little conversation that I have on the train in the morning when I come in, I can do that easily every day. It doesn't really cost much for me. That can lift my mood every day.

49:36The little walk, the positive walk I have to the office can brighten that mood every day. The compliment I can pass along to somebody very easily can lift their mood in a way that lasts for hours or maybe even the rest of the day. And those things are not hard to do. And so you can get the frequency from small, easy things that you need to make it a habit, to make it something easy to do and therefore sustainable. The big things, those are hard, right? The big trip you take is expensive and it's costly. It's infrequent, right? You know, the scholarship that you create for a student to go to school, that costs a lot of money.

50:15You can't create a thousand of those, right? You ought to create some. You ought to pay attention to how much to doing big things too. but it's hard to get a lot of reps on those. And so it's not that you shouldn't think about doing the big things too, you ought to. But if I come home with flowers for my wife, she feels great, right? She feels great. We could fly to Paris too, but she feels great when I do the little things as well. And it's the little things we can do more much quite easily. And that's the margin we have, I think, to really make a difference in our lives on a routine basis. That's why they matter.

50:52Nick, I want to make sure I ask this question. I want to talk about secrets, adaptation, and comparison. So one of my favorite episodes I did years ago was with Michael Slapian, who does a lot of work on secrets. And I read, you referenced him in the book, but one of the people I talk about the most on this show is Tom Gilovich, who I've never met. I've always wanted to have him on the show, but I always talk about his research on regrets. But he also talks about the enemies of gratitude. So how do things like adaptation, secrets and comparison quietly block connection that we don't even realize in our lives?

51:28So Tom Gilovich was my PhD advisor, and he is as amazing a PhD advisor and friend as he is researcher and scientist. Tom has the real genius that really impactful behavioral scientists have, which I've tried to take on as much as I can in my own work, of being able to look out in the world and identify the problems that are really interesting to solve. And Tom has a this is more of a talk than anything where he put together research identifying why is it that that we don't feel grateful as often as we could. And in my book, I spend a lot of time talking about why we don't express gratitude when we feel it.

52:09But the other barrier to expressing gratitude is that you don't feel it in the first place. And one that he highlights is adaptation. Right. So you adapt to almost everything. Right. Your mood returns back to baseline. And that's an enemy of gratitude because when somebody does something really great for you, right, you get a scholarship to go to college, right? They fund your college or somebody, an amazing high school teacher in my life, Craig Aune, high school band teacher, really changed my life in a positive way. I think about him a lot now. Once that positive thing happens, you get used to it.

52:42And when you get used to it, that gratitude, then you don't feel as much. You feel it right away when a positive thing happens to you. but after it's over, you can go back to baseline. Adaptation is often a really good thing for us when we're dealing with negative stuff, right? You can get over pain, but when it's a positive thing you'd like to be feeling, adaptation's a problem. The second thing he documents is adversity, that our life has headwinds and tailwinds, he knows, right? There are things, blessings that we have to be grateful for, and then there are things that get in our way that are problems, adversity that we face.

53:18The problem is any cyclist knows, as Tom has described, because he is a cyclist himself, is when you're riding down the trail and the wind's at your back, you don't really feel it. And that's unfortunately true of many of the blessings in our lives. The benefits that we have, the fact that, for instance, my parents have had the best marriage I think I've ever seen in my life for more than 50 years. I was raised in a very loving home. that can be massive benefits in life. But you don't think about it every day. It's a tailwind. And so the things you have to be grateful for are often tailwinds that you overlook.

53:52The things that get in your way, the things you have to be frustrated for are the things you have to deal with, right? And so we're highly sensitive. Our mind tends to go to the frustrations and the adversity that we have. It's not surprising that every basketball team or sports team on the planet talks about all the adversity they had to overcome on their way to some championship. For sure, you're focused on the things you have to get through. Our adversity is something we have to attend to. But unfortunately, for feeling gratitude, it makes it easy to overlook all the blessings that you had.

54:21The fact that your players didn't get injured, right? The fact that you had a good family upbringing. The fact that I had a wonderful PhD advisor like Tom. Those things can be easy to overlook because they're tailwinds. And the last one he notes is comparison. And comparison, that gets to be a problem, by the way. You asked at the beginning of this about book promotion and publishing. Lots of other people have wonderful books. You work so hard on yours, right? You think, oh my gosh, this was so much effort. And then everyone else is coming out with books at the same time and they seem to be doing better than you, whatever, right?

54:52So you have done this thing that almost no academic does, very few actually do. And instead of feeling great, the experience is, oh, I'm not doing enough, right? It's because you start comparing yourself with other people. and often you make upward comparisons, right? And so that can stifle gratitude. Tom demonstrated this with Olympic medalists. It turns out the silver medalists feel worse than the bronze medalists because the silver medalists are thinking, ah, I could have won a gold, right? That comparison hurts. The bronze medalists are thinking, I could have won nothing here. And that makes them feel great, right?

55:29Our subjective experience is really a lot about construal and interpretation, interpreting how we're experiencing And unfortunately, the thief of gratitude, as Teddy Roosevelt once said, can sometimes be a comparison. I want to close out today by reminding the audience that what we've been talking about today is Nick's book, A Little More Social. And they're books that I get that I speed read through. And I was so glad I got this arc because when I took that long trip to Colorado, I got to take this on the plane and read it cover to cover. And what I really learned from this, and I hope listeners are taking away, is that if you want more connection, you need to be wisely social.

56:11And it starts with small, consistent shifts. And what I really took away is you don't need more time or more people. You need to make different choices, as we just discussed, in the moments that already exist. Nick, where is the best place people can learn more about you and the amazing work that you do at the University of Chicago? Well, the best is reading the book. I poured everything that I've learned over the last roughly two decades of my research into that book. That is the place where we put it down. And I put it down in a way that I'm hopeful readers will find interesting. Otherwise, you can find me online at nicolaseppoli.com.

56:47And I've also been playing around recently with LinkedIn and having some fun there, sharing stories about what it's like to live a little more social life. And so you can find me there, too. Awesome. Well, it was such an honor to have you, Nick, today. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, John. This was great fun, as I knew it would be. That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Nick Epley. And what stood out most to me is this. We often think a better life comes from bigger goals, bigger changes, bigger breakthroughs. But Nick reminds us that some of life's most meaningful transformations begin in moments so small, we often overlook them.

57:22A question, a compliment, a thank you, a conversation with a stranger, a little more social. And maybe that's the deeper lesson. Connection isn't accidental, it's designed one micro-choice at a time. Because every time we choose curiosity over withdrawal, warmth over hesitation, connection over silence, we aren't just changing a moment, we're shaping a life. And perhaps even more than that, we're reminding another person that they matter. And that insight leads directly into the final conversation in our Purpose by Design series. because if today was about how we design connection with others, our next episode asks, how do we design alignment within ourselves?

58:00This Thursday, I'm joined by Dapika Chopra. And it's a beautiful way to close out this series because across this month, we've explored purpose through meaning, through identity, through mattering, through systems, through wise effort, and today through connection. And with Dapika, we bring it all inward into intention, into self-trust, into becoming. It's a powerful closing conversation and you won't want to miss it. We've lived through right now, you have lived and gotten through all of your hardest days in X amount of decades of being here on this planet. And that in itself is the fabric and makeup of what, you know, how we increase and cultivate more optimism to help us with our journey and navigating through the other struggles that might come our way or what we can expect for the hope that things will get better or go well.

58:51And optimism is so rooted in that idea of anticipation and expectation. And again, rooted in your personal historical resiliency story. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone you want to reconnect with. Leave a five-star rating or review on Apple or Spotify and explore more tools and insights at theignitedlife.net. Remember, purpose is rarely built in giant leaps. It is designed through a thousand small choices. I'm John Miles and you've been PassionStruck.