Find Inner Alignment & Connect with Your Life's Purpose | Sara Walker EP 397

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11How do you think we should ask the question about what our purpose is and finding our purpose? I always like Joseph Campbell's Follow Your Bliss. Like this idea that like you should follow the things that make you intrinsically happy. And I also do this with my students at ASU. Like my first way of like mentoring them is to try to find out what their core passion questions are. And then how do we find problems to work on that are aligned with who you are intrinsically and what you're interested in? Because I think, you know, if you want to unlock human potential, you have to have people working on things they love.

0:42Before you, like, try to think about a career or anything else you want to do in your life, you have to think about how it makes you feel moving in a direction you feel like you want to be moving. People think science is this, like, technical thing that, like, you're just doing calculations or something. But the way that we do science in the space I work in, generating new explanations and new ideas is much more creative. It's pretty emotional because you're basically trying to find out how reality works and think about it and interrogate it and like parse it down to some concepts that you can talk to other people about and then bat those ideas around and try to build, you know, a theory and an experiment to test it.

1:16It's a really hard thing to do. And so I find like with students, if they don't really care about the problem, it's too hard to do that kind of work. It's too hard. Yeah. You might be able to talk about it for a little bit, but you're not going to be able to deal with the years of research. Right, right. But if you love the problem, the rest of it's easy. What's your thoughts on the law of attraction? Or having an idea and seeing something in your imagination and actually manifesting it or creating it, you know, with the speed that it comes quicker. What are your thoughts on that? You know, I have a very strong sense of purpose about wanting to work on these problems.

1:49And I find this kind of interesting alignment with other people that have shared sense of purpose and the kind of collaborations and creativity that comes out of that. You get excited from that. Yes. And in some ways, if I was going to rationalize that in terms of physics of life, that makes sense to me because things will come together that have the knowledge to generate the potential space. There are some explanations for things that we feel that maybe are very coincident with kind of things that might generally be features of life in terms of how we feel fulfilled in our lives and how we feel a sense of purpose.

2:20And ultimately, like if you're trying to explain what life is, you're trying to explain how the universe acquires purpose and how is the universe a creative place. And I think the universe is generating itself. In standard physics, the universe just exists and everything exists all at once. There's no time, right? But in this physics that we're building for life, the universe is generating itself at every moment. And we are actually part of that generation mechanism. So it's expanding. It's expanding in the space of possibilities. I think people don't appreciate how much can be generated on this planet.

2:48So chemistry, like people underappreciate how big chemical space is. So physical space, the physical size of the universe, we can see out, we can see Hubble. You know, like you can see the most distant galaxies. But if you want to look at chemical space, small molecules, let's say, you know, you have amino acid is like the basic building block of a protein. You put two of those together, really tiny molecule, just that size molecule. There's estimated to be 10 to 60 possible molecules. There's not enough resources in the entire universe to make every small possible molecule. And on Earth, we have the generative capacity because we have human chemists.

3:19In fact, we now have robot chemists to explore chemical space at speeds that we can't explore it. And so there's this space of possibilities that are accessible on this planet because of our technology and because of biology that are not accessible anywhere else. Or you want to think about the space of all possible technologies. That space is actually exponentially large. It's crazy. And if you could change a combinatorial space to a physical space and there was actually a way of mapping them mathematically, that would be quite hard. But I think Earth is bigger in the possibility space than the rest of the universe we've observed.

3:46You mean like the possibilities of what a human could create in their life? What is possible for every human to create in their own life? I don't know. Maybe it's unlimited. Some people think it's unbounded. What limits us the most? Is it the physical elements? Is it our mindset? I think it's our mindset. I think we hold ourselves back a lot. Collectively, at the planetary scale, what are humans doing? And also individually. It's easy to emotionally hold ourselves back. If we thought about things rationally, we can make a lot of progress. But emotions are important, too, because they can be a guide to, like, how things subjectively feel and kind of steer trajectories.

4:23What can we do from all your research and discoveries and knowledge? What can we do to improve our mindset so that we are more unlimited than we are limited as humans? I think the thing for me that's most interesting is the role of imagination and imagining a positive future. I mentioned I work at ASU. I remember a few years ago we were starting a science and imagination initiative. The whole idea was to get scientists and science fiction writers together, but it was with a specific purpose because most of our, you know, fantasy and science fiction writing was built on apocalyptic narratives. And the idea was, unless we can write about positive futures, positive science fiction futures, how is humanity actually going to build them and envision them?

5:01You mentioned about like the power of a human mind. I think people really don't recognize how much information is in front of you all the time. People emphasize so much their conscious brain. I'm one of these people that recognizes my subconscious does everything. It's like my conscious experience is just reported, like just talking with you. But like almost all my thinking is in my subconscious brain. And I'm like, I have a healthy relationship with my subconscious brain. If I don't know how to think about something, I push it down. I let it stew down there. And ideas pop up when they're ready for me to try to figure out what to do with them.

5:29How important is it, do you think, for human beings to learn how to love themselves? I think that's critically important. It makes me sad when people don't love themselves. because I think to myself, every human is like this amazing configuration that has like, in some sense, unlimited potential of what they can do in the universe. And so I think loving ourselves is really important to realizing that potential. I didn't travel much when I was young, but like later in life, like all of the people I've met and, you know, in some sense you become an amalgamation of all the people you meet. And so I think if you're feeling like you don't know what your sense of purpose is, that you maybe haven't talked to enough people, because like people are amazing, you learn so much from them, And there's so much happening in the world right now.

6:07I like learning from everyone I meet. I think that's been really powerful for me. You know, something we saw in the last few years is people weren't prepared for the amount of weight of challenges that were to come in human society. 2008, 2009, that time I was not prepared for the economy. I didn't have any money. I was, you know, financially bankrupt. I was physically injured. All these things I felt like I wasn't prepared. Whereas a year before, I thought like I was on top of the world. I was a great athlete. I was playing professional football. But then I wasn't prepared for the challenges to come.

6:40And when that happened, and I went through a couple of years of adversity, I said, I want to make sure I'm prepared for when this happens again. Make sure that I'm ready for it. It may affect me in some ways, but it's not going to cripple me. A lot of people, I don't think, are prepared in their lives for that. And I don't think you need to say the world's going to be crazy and I'm a pessimist. But it's when something happens in life, am I physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, spiritually training myself to be ready? I really resonate with that. And I think a lot of us are running in what I would call survival mode, where it's like dealing with the instantaneous problem.

7:17And because we're so overloaded with those short term problems, we don't have enough time to plan ahead. I personally have been spending the last few years of trying to get out of survival mode. Really? Yeah. I have two kids. They're six and nine. I went through divorce a couple years ago, but their dad has bipolar disorder. And that whole process was really hard for me because I didn't realize I was living in survival mode the whole time. You know, he's a wonderful person. It was just like the circumstances and what you get yourself into and then how much you don't realize you're doing and that you don't even have any capacity for any long-term visions or any resiliency or anything like that.

7:48It's hard to think about the future when you're living in survival. Yeah. It's very hard. So I have empathy for that because I've experienced that and I know a lot of people are going through that. how do you think we can get out of survival mode in order to plan for a greater future for our lives? I've been trying to learn how to say no to things. It's huge. It's really good. And also set boundaries. I'm a people pleaser. I'm always trying to make everybody happy and always trying to do everything for everyone. And I realized that that was really limiting my potential to actually do what I need to do and to also fulfill my purpose.

8:20And even to the detriment of people in my personal life. you know because like if you're saying yes to everyone you're saying no to something it's interesting because the pandemic i would say yes to meeting and saying hi to everyone yeah going to events and all these different things and now i'm just kind of like i've got a few core people i want to spend my time with and i'm way more selective of events i say yes to yes you just got to learn to let go of the fear of missing out yes exactly you know and realize you're going to take care of your own stuff first that's exactly right and the quality of your time becomes so much better because you know you're choosing it too right

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9:51Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.