183 - William Damon: How to Live a Purposeful Life

0:15William Damon:Welcome to the Stanford Psychology Podcast, where leading psychologists come to share their most recent work. My name is Katia, and today I'm very excited to be joined by William Damon. He is a professor of education at Stanford University and is one of the world's leading researchers on human development across the lifespan. He also pioneered the scientific study of purpose in life. In this episode, we explore how we can make our own lives more purposeful and expand purpose beyond ourselves.

1:07William Damon:Hi, thank you so much for being here. I'm very excited to speak to you today. I would love to start off by asking, do you have any guiding values that guide your everyday life or work as a researcher. And yeah, can you talk a bit about that?

1:25Katia Kriakova:Probably the number one value is curiosity. I've always been interested in finding out about things I don't know very much about, which are a whole lot of things in the world. And I think one of the things I have always prided myself on is being a good listener because I am genuinely interested in people and all the way from what they're doing to what they're interested in to how they got to be the people they are, which is why I finally got into developmental psychology. So I think that that's what's kind of guided me is when I find something that I am curious about and I don't really understand and I want to know more about it, that drives my attention and eventually my work.

2:22William Damon:That's very meaningful. And I love how that also connects to your interest in developmental psychology. Can you talk more about what experiences have led you to have these values in the first place? And how has that also taken you into the field of psychology? Sure.

2:37Katia Kriakova:Well, actually, it all started pretty long ago when I was a first-year student in high school, a ninth grader. And I was not a very good student at that time. I never found, at that point, I had not found anything in the classroom that really interested me. I did the work that I was supposed to do and passed my courses, but nothing really captured my attention. But what interested me was I did some writing for the school newspaper. Luckily, our school had a newspaper, and I was very interested in sports at the time. So I covered soccer games, actually, is what they assigned me to do, and usually the most unimportant ones because I was not a good writer.

3:27Katia Kriakova:I hadn't learned to do anything very well. And one of the games I covered was a game of our junior varsity against a group of immigrants from Eastern Europe at the time who were terrific soccer players, much better than we were. And they wiped out our team. But I hung around afterwards. And, again, I was very curious about them and what their experience had been in coming to this country. And they talked about their journeys to America and their high hopes for becoming American citizens and everything from the idea of democracy and freedom to getting rich. I mean, these were, at the time, 14 - and 15-year-old young kids.

4:17Katia Kriakova:And I was just fascinated by that. And I wrote that up for the school newspaper rather than very much about the lopsided victory in soccer that they had. And a lot of my friends read that and talked about it. And that was the point that I remember. I still remember that to this day that I said, you know, this is a pretty interesting thing to do, finding out things about the world, new things, writing about them, and informing people about them, and passing the word, learning something myself and passing that along. So I think that's when I kind of decided to become a researcher of sorts. I had no idea it would be psychology.

5:04Katia Kriakova:It could have been journalism. It could have been anything. But as I then went through high school and college, I got interested in psychology as a particular field and applied my desire to do research and writing to that field.

5:21William Damon:That's so incredible. I didn't know that. And it's amazing that you had that curiosity to go deeper than what it was supposed to be about in the first place.

5:30Katia Kriakova:Yeah, I think that's right. As I said, that's one of my driving values, and that really has shaped a lot of my direction in life.

5:44William Damon:After that first experience talking to them high school, freshman year, how did you take that curiosity further now that you knew that this was interesting to you? What were your next steps?

5:54Katia Kriakova:Yeah, well, the next step, actually, as I said, I got interested in psychology, and over the summer between high school and college, somehow, and I can't remember who gave me this book, but somehow I was given a book by Edward Boring, I think, who had written a lot of books about the science of psychology. and I read that over the summer and I thought wow you know people can actually write about human nature and human beings from a scientific point of view because we had not had any courses like that in high school in those days psychology was not taught in high school so it was that book that helped me discover psychology as a field and that excited me that you could be take a kind of a systematic scientific view of the things I was interested in, which is people.

6:52Katia Kriakova:And in college, I took a bunch of psychology courses. And it was really after college, I had a two-year job in between college and graduate school, working partly with the Bureau of Child Welfare in New York. And I had some observations of children, adolescents, kids growing up from actually from very underprivileged backgrounds because we were doing social work. But I was amazed at how much they knew about the world and how talented they were. And when I got to graduate school, I said, you know, this is something I'd like to study more and try to understand the potential of young people to develop knowledge, to develop character, to develop motivation, and how you might understand that and how you might even contribute to that educationally.

7:49William Damon:That's so wonderful. For people who don't have a background in psychology, can you define what purpose is and how did you start studying that once you figured out that this was a really good area to study.

8:02Katia Kriakova:Sure. Purpose is a long-term goal, but not just any kind of long-term goal. There are lots of goals in life. Purpose has a particular characteristic of being highly meaningful, being an active goal when you're actually committed to doing something, and having a beyond-the-self component, where you're trying to contribute something to the world, make some difference in the world beyond the self. And the reason I got interested in it is that over the years that I had done observations of young people growing up, observations, I did a study once of extraordinary adults who were highly committed to the world, people who had worked in civil rights or worked for environmental movements or worked for peace and justice and a lot of highly moral causes.

9:13Katia Kriakova:And what I noticed about them was that they had a deep sense of commitment that went beyond the self, that was something that organized their lives in a way that gave them strength and courage and energy and also a feeling of well-being. So it wasn't a trade-off. It wasn't as if they were being self-sacrificing or altruistic or saying, you know, I'll just give up my life for these noble causes. It was really a win-win for them. They were very fulfilled people. They had a sense of great satisfaction and gratification in life, along with their important contributions to society. So I decided that whatever this commitment was, it was good for the world and good for the self.

10:09Katia Kriakova:And I eventually figured out that the best word to use for that was purpose. and a few people had done a bit of work on purpose, particularly Carol Riff, the social psychologist, had done some work in psychology on it, but usually it was part of a larger agenda of well-being and so on. And what we did at Stanford when I really started getting into this was look at purpose itself as a capacity and look at it in a developmental sense. How does it grow beginning with in early life and throughout the whole lifespan? How does it develop? And I think that's what we at Stanford brought to the subject was the developmental approach to purpose.

11:05William Damon:I'm really excited to ask you more about how this purpose develops. But before that, I want to talk about your recent paper, The Psychology of Purpose. a comprehensive approach. And within this, you examine lots of different definitions of purpose. Can you share why is it important to have a clear definition of purpose, both in research, and is it also important for individuals who aren't in research to have a clearer sense of what purpose means?

11:36Katia Kriakova:That's a really good question, especially the second one. Because, yeah, I'll start with that. In the vernacular, purpose is used all kinds of different ways. And that's fine. And, you know, I'm not at all trying to control the way everyday language works and people will use words the way they want. And every big word has a million different meanings. I mean, love has, you know, you could say, I love ice cream. And that's different than I love my children or I love my family. So these are different kinds of uses of the word. And all of the big words are going to be used in different ways. But in science or in systematic practice, like medicine or education or something like that, you do want to have one word for one meaning.

12:24Katia Kriakova:And you don't want to have the word mean different. If a doctor writes a prescription for aspirin or something, you don't want that word to mean something different to the druggist than it does to the doctor. So it's important in science and practice to have a clear definition. And the field of purpose research has just blossomed in the last 20 or 30 years. I mean, it's been around in philosophy and theology forever, but psychology kind of discovered it in the late 20th century. and in the 21st century, there have been thousands of studies of it. But different labs have defined it in somewhat different ways.

13:11Katia Kriakova:So I decided to confront this and actually review all the different ways that purpose has been used in psychological science. And basically, I found three types of ways. One is people that look at, quote, sense of purpose. And that's simply a mental thing. It's somebody saying, yes, I feel like I'm purposeful. And that's a way of measuring somebody's cognitive belief that they are purposeful. And one set of studies in some labs simply look at that. And that's pretty easy to assess. You can do that with a survey and just ask them, do you have purpose in life? Or do you have a sense of direction?

13:58Katia Kriakova:And that's all you need to do. But then there are people that look at purpose as a capacity that includes active commitment, not just saying, I believe I have purpose, but what are you doing? Are you doing something that's committed, that you're sticking with it? And so there's a whole group of people that do that. And then finally, there's a group of people like myself in our lab that put an additional dimension on it, which is saying that it has to be something beyond the self. It's not just all about me. so saying that you know i have a purpose of wanting to let's say have a healthy diet or lose weight or or make a lot of money or something like that we would consider that to be a long-term goal but we believe that you need to distinguish the kinds of long-term goals that are somewhat transcendent that go beyond the self that attempt to contribute something to the world and that's what purpose captures.

15:04Katia Kriakova:And the reason I'm convinced that that is important as part of the definition, there are actually two reasons. One is the way people have written about purpose over the centuries, long before psychology got into it, going back to Aristotle and all the philosophers and theologians. That always includes a transcendent beyond the self dimension. So if you really want to understand purpose the way it's been understood by the intellectual community and the scholarly community in philosophy and theology, you need to include that. And secondly, and this is an important point, is that if you don't do that, you don't need the word purpose.

15:51Katia Kriakova:You can just talk about long-term goals. but if you include the beyond the self dimension then you have something that gives purpose a unique designated definition that is different and that captures other things psychologically and i'll just give you one example um it captures the idea that you're not being just self-absorbed that it's not all about you and that has important mental health consequences among others being self-absorbed is a mental health risk where for anxiety depression and so on clinical psychologists will tell you that so purpose is a way of preempting that of of dedicating yourself to something beyond the self that helps you not just think about yourself all the time so that's why in our lab and the people that line up with the work that we're doing and there are quite a few people around the world that do use both our definition and our measures, we include a beyond the self dimension to purpose.

17:00William Damon:I absolutely love this dimension of going beyond the self, and it's so important not only for yourself and your own well-being, but for the world around you as well. For someone who is listening to this and is maybe thinking, well, I should probably do this, I maybe am focusing too much just on my own self. How can they close that gap between what they're currently doing and maybe what they want to do is to be more purposeful and to extend that purpose beyond themselves?

17:27Katia Kriakova:Yeah, and that gets to how purpose develops, how people find purpose. And generally, we see the following steps in the development of purpose. First of all, people identify what it is that they are interested in, because if you're not interested in it, you're not going to do it. You can't make yourself do something. You can't be purposeful about, let's say, computer programming or artificial intelligence if you're really bored by the whole process, even if you think it's important. or anything else, cooking or any medicine or biology. So first of all, it's important to identify the sparks of interest that fascinate you.

18:22Katia Kriakova:Everybody in every age has some spark that they enjoy thinking about doing and so on. So that's number one. Number two, identifying things that you have at least some potential to be competent at so that you can contribute something. And again, people do have a range of talents, and everybody has something they're talented in, but not everything. you know if you're if you're you know five feet too tall let's say uh probably you're not probably you're not going to actually um be a very dominant basketball player uh it's just you know you're or if you're tone deaf uh and you can't tell the difference between different notes on a scale you know you're not going to really be a singer uh or a musician uh you may enjoy music and so on and all that's fine, but that probably would not be a good pathway to a purposeful commitment in terms of your contributing to the world.

19:28Katia Kriakova:So you need to identify what your potential talents are along with your potential interests. And then thirdly, what does the world need? What can be improved in the world or corrected in the world? And that can be any domain at all. It could be

19:51Katia Kriakova:artistically, I can make the world more beautiful, or musically. One of our subjects thought that was from the Stanford Jazz Workshop, and he thought that the jazz scales were really boring. This is something he could improve by creating new scales. Or medicine. We've seen a number of our subjects who go into medicine because, for example, their grandmother died of cancer. And maybe I could do research on oncology or be a practitioner, a doctor to ease people's pain, or a teacher to educate people because I believe that learning is important. So what does the world need and what can you contribute to it?

20:37Katia Kriakova:And in order to do that, what are you interested in doing and what are you talented enough that you can actually make a difference in this area. So that's how people find purpose. And then finally, there's one other thing that we find that most people that become fully purposeful have some exposure to, which is find some mentor, somebody that actually is an example or an exemplar of this purposeful commitment that you can learn from. because most of the purposeful people that we have studied have somebody out there in the world that they have admired or learned from and so on. And those are the elements of purposeful development.

21:23William Damon:So going specifically looking at that first step of finding out what is interesting to you, do you have insight while doing this research on how these interests develop in the first place?

21:33Katia Kriakova:A lot of them begin pretty early. in childhood or at least adolescence through exposure. And that's a place that parents and teachers can help a lot because if a school is offering students a wide enough range of choices of subject matters and extracurricular kinds of activities, ranging from everything from sciences to the arts, that offers the student an opportunity to test out, am I interested in this? Am I interested in science? Am I interested in history? Am I interested in theater or in music? And so that's something that schools can do, expose, and I'm a big believer in open curricula where you give students a broad range of assignments and encourage students to pursue their individual interests.

22:48Katia Kriakova:And parents can help their children identify what it is that lights that spark of interest. and beyond that, you know, as you go through life, this is where I think being open-minded and sampling a lot of different kinds of activities in life, taking part-time jobs, travel, find out about the world and see what is it that, as I said, that lights that little bit of spark of energy and interest.

23:33William Damon:And for someone who finds so many things interesting, and it could be hard to choose, how do you find purpose that is sustainable within maybe one of those things, or is it possible to include many different interests and a purpose? How would you describe that?

23:53Katia Kriakova:Yeah. Well, first of all, the only way to really find out if this suits you is by actually doing something. So, you know, for me, as I mentioned, what got me excited was learning that I could write about things in a way that imparted knowledge to other people of things I had discovered. But I had to figure out, was I able to learn how to write? Because when I started, I was a terrible writer. When I started writing those sports stories for my high school newspaper, I was not a good writer. So I had to figure out, is this something I can do? And it took a lot of practice. There's a whole set of studies in psychology that show that what's called deliberate practice where you intentionally try to learn something and practice it over and over again, deliberately.

24:51That is the way to figure out, is this something I'm interested and capable of

24:56Katia Kriakova:doing? And it's a way of learning. So that series of studies have been widely replicated in our field in psychology. So I recommend deliberate practice to both test out and to hone the abilities that you're trying to do. And then as for your question about can you do several things, you know, purpose, one thing I emphasize is that purpose doesn't have to be singular. You know, a lot of people do have primary purposes, and they could be vocational, But there are lots of purposes in life, and people can have multiple purposes. And, of course, in life, not all purposes are vocational. People have family purposes.

25:46Katia Kriakova:They're dedicated to their partners, to their children, to their families, to their parents. People have, a lot of people have purposes of faith. They're purposeful in wanting to serve a higher power. God or whatever higher power they have identified for themselves. People have civic purposes of wanting to be good citizens. So people can, and you don't have to just pick one. You can have a vocational purpose, a family purpose, a civic purpose, a faith purpose, all of those things. So it's not a choice that is mutually exclusive of other choices. You can pursue more than one purpose.

26:32William Damon:That sounds even more exciting that you can have many different things that are purposeful in your life. One of the parts of your definition of purpose is actually being committed to it over time. When we're on this journey of becoming more purposeful, would you describe it as creating it or finding it, or would you describe it some other way? How do you go about describing it?

26:55Katia Kriakova:Yeah, it's a combination. So that was a very well-directed question because it isn't one or the other. It's not that there are ready-made purposes out there and you kind of fall into it and become just like everybody else that's pursuing that, especially in today's very complex society. you know perhaps if you know decades or centuries ago you were born in a fishing village and had no outside communication with anything else and your dad had a fishing boat and you you knew for sure that you would go and take over that fishing boat when you grew up that was more of a ready-made vocational purpose but even then i would say that the younger person is going to do it in his or her own way.