If You Feel Lost in Life, Listen to This One Conversation to Find Purpose & Meaning

33:41They might not like their job. Fine. But they all deliberately work to get there. But the folks in the fast food restaurant, they never want to be there. That's not their final goal. They are deferring something else. Right. What's so humbling and powerful about that is that everybody you know, you see, you realize there's another dream. And when you work enough hours, it becomes really, it looms large. And you start to really want to find ways to find out that dream. You know, you have these kind of probing conversations. What do you do before this? What are you doing after this? You do a night class?

34:22All of a sudden, these spaces open up in these restaurants and corporations that were not meant to be there. They're kind of subversive utterances. And so to me, I think what I mean by the hardest thing in the world is to live only once, is to live according to your values. Again, dignity and what you owe to yourself, your family and your community, however that means to you. and wrestling yourself away from the standards of ultimate success or what have you. You know, like I am lucky to be a successful author and a professor, but I live in New England still because nine of my family members still live there.

35:06They're all refugees. They came with me. I don't have enough generational wealth to liberate them from the working poor. So my family still work at Amazon warehouses, nail salons, and I'm there. You know, I've had job offers in lovely places, Paris, Germany. I said, as soon as they come in, I said, there's no way. Because I got to take my aunt to her doctor's appointment. I got to do her taxes. I had to help my cousin go into a psych ward once in a while, right? And that's not a burden to me. And I want to make that clear. You know, that's a privilege. I get to. It's a privilege to be able to sacrifice.

35:44I get to help them because when I was growing up you needed your tooth extracted chaos you know you had to call a loan shark you have to we had to call a grocery a local Vietnamese grocery store to borrow money from God knows who to don't ask don't tell right and just to get like little things done so it was like the end of the world when those things happened and now I can every emergency my family has I can take care of and I'm proud of that. And to me, if that's what I'm done doing with my one life that I'm given, then I'm really, really proud of that. And I think having the courage to break away from the social expectations of count and then realigning what counts for you.

36:32It's hard work though. It took me 20 years and I'm like, this is still new to me. This is a new feeling, right? I don't want folks to have this understanding that I just like, I've always had this, like I'm developing it as we speak. I am so blown away. And thank you. Thank you, Ocean, for sharing that. And thank you for being here. I need to take a quick break, even though I don't want to take a break from this conversation. So I can give a chance for our sponsors to share a few words. And I also want to give you a chance, a chance to share this conversation and the wisdom that Ocean is unpacking for us with other people in your life who need to hear this.

37:12And there are four people that I've been thinking about as we've been talking for the last couple minutes that I am going to be sharing this with right now. And don't go anywhere. There is so much more wisdom that we're going to unpack with Ocean Vaughn when we return. Stay with me.

37:39Welcome back. It's your buddy Mel Robbins, and you and I have the honor of sitting with one of the most acclaimed literary figures and writers alive today, bestselling author and professor Ocean Vaughn. And we're talking about how to find purpose, meaning, and the quiet strength to keep going if you're feeling lost in life. So Ocean, what I'd love to have you do is if you could speak directly to the person who's really resonating, because I know so many people will, and maybe they're in the job, and they thought they'd only work at the restaurant for two or three years, and they're just getting by, and they're starting to feel that dream of a different life slipping away, what do you want them to know i think for me um you you have a myth of yourself and you know the myth for myself was to be a business person because that's just what i thought more money was so like when i was 15 i thought i was working in a tobacco farm for cash it made it was no Uncle Sam, no taxation, under the table,$9.50 an hour, way better than minimum wage, which is$7.15.

38:55And it was so interesting. We lived in HUD housing, Section 8. And my mother sat me down one day and said, son, I crunched the numbers and you need to get a job. You're about to be 16, but you got to just work at McDonald's. So can you imagine what happened to like American Dream, upward mobility, do what you want, follow your destiny, right? No, no. I'm like, what? Excuse me? And she's like, no, no, no. Like, you can't even be the manager. Like, you need to just be minimum wage because if you make any more, we'll be kicked out and we won't be able to afford an apartment on the open market. So, upward mobility could harm, could render you homeless.

39:40And then it clicked. I said, oh, no wonder every other teenager in my neighborhood is a drug dealer. Because if you're a child to a single mom, and there were daughters and sons in that too, if you're a child to a single mother and you want to help her out to get a job, if you get too much money, you're going to lose your housing. So what are you going to do? Sell weed on the side, get cash, put it on the mattress. Mom pays the light bill with her checks, you take her to the grocery store. And I have seen folks do that. And I don't condone drug dealing. I've seen folks do that and move out and move on and stop that and have relatively economically successful lives.

40:27I've seen folks do that and end up in jail and die. So it's just a complete crapshoot. And so I went into the farm as a way to help my mother. But I had this myth that I would go out and be the one who has a degree. I was going to study international marketing and really be the superhero of my family. And then I got to the school in New York to study. And I studied for just four weeks before I dropped out. And all that myth of who I am to myself crumbled. And I often say this, and not in any tongue-in-cheek way. I said, I became a writer out of failure. And more so, I became a writer out of shame.

41:17I could have went home to my mom and said, Mom, I tried. I can't do it. I'm not cut out to go to chase J.P. Morgan, like all my colleagues are with their suits. I don't have a suit. We have one suit. It's called a funeral suit. That's all I had. I didn't even bring it. I was optimistic going to New York. I said, I'm not going to bring my funeral suit. I went to enough funerals. So that's all I had, you know, and I didn't even concede that you had to wear a suit for an internship. I was so out of place that I just, I felt like a fool and I didn't have the wisdom I had now. I was, I couldn't show up to that place and just see how much of an outsider I was.

41:55So I dropped out and I roamed the streets, couch surfing, doing open mics. And someone would say, why don't you, why don't you just go home? And if I went home, my mom would say, sit on down. I save you a seat at the nail salon. Pick up the filer. Let's get to work. But I didn't do that because I was too ashamed to go to her and say, I failed you. I'm the only one that knows English. I'm the only one that can read. I'm the only one that could potentially have a college degree. And I'm going to come back empty-handed. I could not live with myself. So I stayed in the city. I stayed in Penn Station for two weeks trying to figure things out.

42:32Meaning you actually slept in Penn Station. Penn Station, yeah. Right under Mascar Garden. It was the warmest place. But Penn Station is open 24 hours and you can stay near the Long Island Railroad. And, you know, eventually I became a student at Brooklyn College and I pursued a degree in literature. But it was because I was too ashamed. I would prefer to be homeless than go home and say, Ma, all your dreams? Because I knew she had, I knew, even though she said, don't worry about it, I knew she had dreams for me. I couldn't face her and say, all that is over. So shame is a powerful thing. If you can transform your shame into action and then motivation, it could be the foundation for you to alter your sense of self.

43:23What would you say to a student that came to your office hours? and, you know, Professor Vaughn, I am so full of shame. I do not belong here. I have really screwed up. And the shame is not motivating them in a positive direction. It is drilling them into a hole. So if you had a student sitting in your office hours who was really pummeling themselves with shame, what would you say to them? Every semester. Every semester this happens? Oh my goodness, especially in the creative arts. We have students who come from all over the world. You know, some of the most exciting work in anglophonic literature right now is coming out of India and Nigeria.

44:15And I have a lot of students from India and Nigeria. And boy, you know, imposter syndrome runs very, very deep. And here they are in NYU. They're following their dreams. Meanwhile, these are the most successful ones. They're like ticking the boxes of their dreams. They're not dropping out. Nothing has gone awry and they still feel this. And I relate to that immensely. So for me, I told them, I said, look, I share the same shame and doubt that you do. But you believe, I have a sense that you believe that there is a kind of comfort that and agreeability to being in the center of power, right? In institution.

45:01That's what people, normal people have. They don't feel like they're imposters. They feel like they belong here, that they should be here. But I tell them, I said, the day that I feel that I belong in institutional power is the day my creativity dies. I never want to feel comfortable here. And we turn that into a pathology. We say, you are ill, you have a syndrome. But I refuse to believe that. To me, it's an immune system. I have imposter immune system. What does that mean, imposter immune system? It means that when I'm in the center, I don't believe that being in the center alone is anything valuable or dignified.

45:48You have to still have conduct. You still have to have behavior and ethics. And also that when you realize, you go into these spaces and you realize, actually, what I learned back there in my hometown that I thought I was escaping from was much more useful for me than what I'm seeing here. That this charade, right, of power and belonging is truly a hallucination. there's people who feel comfortable here because they have been given this path their parents gave them this path their grandparents gave them this path that they were following a trajectory that was carved for them so of course they feel like they belong but do you really want that?

46:36do you want that path for yourself? because that's also the denial of your own creativity you need that kind of friction that vigilance well I think what you're getting at is applicable to anybody. Yeah. Because let's say you get a divorce and now you're single and your friend group disappears. And as you start to insert yourself into other social groups or you see old friends, you will feel that separateness and you will feel that sense of, I don't belong here. And if I listen very closely, what you're saying is that that separateness and that friction is a very important and necessary ingredient to you being able to do the work to grow into or to be the person you're supposed to be.

47:32Whether it's the friendships you've outgrown or the places that you are never going to quite feel like you belong in or the work you need to do to build the skills so that you don't even think about it anymore because you now have the skills to belong. And so I think it's applicable to all of us. I'm wondering if there's one thing that you would recommend to begin seeing the beauty in your life, even if you're really struggling right now, especially if they've related to a lot of the various things that you've gone through, what would the one step forward you would want somebody to take? At the end of my semester, in every class, I have my students do something very simple, and I do it as well.

48:21And you'd be surprised that many of them have never done it. And what I do is I tell them, think about your intention. Why are you here? Why did you sacrifice so much? And I tell them, go back to that person that first found this art. The person who read a poem and said, just like Emily Dickinson said, my head is taken off, right? And then decided that they want to do that for other people. Write a work that transforms and affects people's lives that way. Maybe it was just two years ago. Maybe it was 10 years ago. Maybe they were just seven or 20, go back, find that person and collaborate with that person.

49:08Bring that person into the room. Because often in our linear progress in professional life, we often think our older self is not smart enough, naive, leave them back there. But bringing that person in the room and asking that person, how are you so strong? and how was that intention so powerful that you didn't even know how to get here. You didn't know how to get to NYU, but you sent me. You, my younger self, sent me here like that little pebble in the pond. I am the ripple. You are the pebble. I'm the ripple that have come from you. So I need you. When I am inundated by the pressure, when I'm asking, why am I doing this?

49:57What is it for? What's the point? Why am I in this rat race? When I'm about to give up, when I'm fading, I need to bring. So I tell them every time you write, every morning you wake up, bring that person, have them sit right next because they know more than you do. They got you here without even knowing what a professor is, without knowing what the New Yorker is, without knowing what a curriculum vitae is, right? They just had that boom and you were on the journey they set. So what you need to do is say thank you to that person. So at the end of the class, I tell all my students, at the count of three, you say thank you to yourself aloud.

50:41And you need to say that every day because no one else is going to say that for you for this journey. So we close one, two, three. Thank you, Ocean. And it's an amazing thing. Thank you, Ocean. Thank you, Mel. Saying that to yourself. I am the ripple, you are the pebble. I felt this huge chill when you said that. This idea that your younger self was the pebble. Yeah. That had an intention, whether you're present or not to it, that set in motion this ripple that created the you that you are today. If the person listening does not know what their intention is, they do not know what age or what scene of their life that pebble was cast, is there anything that they can do that could help them find that center of intention to begin with?

51:47I think paying attention to the world and yourself and, again, seeing what you owe. Eventually, you know, Simone Vale says the most generous thing we can ever give is attention. And I think paying attention to the world often, we think it's about giving attention. But, in fact, we are also discovering ourselves when we look carefully at the world. And I never knew I was going to be, you know, when I was growing up, it was factory worker, nail salon. the army, job corps, right? Or long haul trucker. Those were the things, or jail, right? Those were the things that was available and what was happening around me.

52:31And so I never, no one ever said you can be a professor. In fact, I didn't even know poets were something you could become. I thought it was like preordained by the government. I thought like the president signs like a list you get in the mail and say you get to be a poet then they give you a cabin in Vermont you go there you scribble away then you send your piles of paper to Barnes and Noble and they go out in the back they make a book and they wheel out a card of books how would how else would it happen and so the idea that one could be a poet is a complete journey of failure, of objection, of shame.

53:14And so I'm 37. Half of my life have been in nowhere land. Absolute loss, absolute objection. And I would never have told you that I was going to be a professor or write books. To me, I am miraculously in the whipped cream of my life. And I've been in it for 20 years. I've been able to do what I love, but it was not a life that I thought I could afford in any sense of the word. So the pebble, if I'm really, like, I just felt like I should say the pebble is though, that deep intention buried within you to be in the whipped cream of your life, to know the truth that there is something that is meant for you, that there is power, that there's dignity, that there's beauty, and the sense that you were going to figure it out.

54:16And it was something much more materially fundamental in that I wanted to take care of my family. I knew I was the only one. I looked long and hard at their life and I said, all right, they've been in the factories. I mean, I went back to that moment with me and my mom at her bedside when I was 10. And when she said, I'm sorry, we're so stupid. That was the pebble? I didn't know it then. So it wasn't be a poet. I say that to my students that were in poetry class, right it gets too existential beyond that right but for me that was the pebble it was whatever i was going to do to take care of my mother and my brother and my aunts that was what i was going to do and when i realized that i could take care of my mother and be an academic and a poet then that was when it was like seventh gear i became kind of ruthless in my pursuit of my craft because i knew it was something that would then support my family.

55:24That was my motivation. So now I say, oh, I was given that. My objection was a motivating factor. Without them, I don't think I would have worked as hard. I would not work as hard for myself. I'll tell you that, Mel. I would not study as hard. I would not read as much books. I would not write as many drafts without the pressure, knowing that they really depended on me to get them a better life. Thank you for sharing that because it was so helpful to see that your pebble actually wasn't this epiphany, I want to be an artist or a poet, that your pebble was something so much more deeply connected to your value.

56:17of taking care of your family. And that shifted for me, the way I think about I am the ripple and my former self is the pebble. The intention is the power and it's there. And I really, I got a lot out of that story. Thank you. Thank you. I know we could talk for hours, but I have to take a quick pause so I can give our sponsors a chance to share a few words with you as you're listening. And if what Ocean is sharing with you is resonating with you, it's stirring something inside you, don't keep that to yourself. Share this episode with somebody in your life who deserves inspiration, who deserves support in finding purpose, meaning, and the strength that they need to keep going, especially when life is really hard.

57:06And when we come back, we're going to go even deeper. I know you don't think that's possible, but it is. So stay with us because Ocean and I are going to be waiting for you when we come back.

57:27Welcome back. It's your buddy Mel Robbins. And today you and I are spending time learning from and being inspired by one of the most acclaimed writers alive today, Professor Ocean Vaughn. And he's here teaching us how to find purpose and meaning even when you feel lost in life. So Ocean, I have this question I've been waiting to ask you because you've been a professor for 11 years now. Yeah. What is the thing that's really holding your students back more than anything right now from being themselves? The fear of humiliation. We call it cringe culture. We can call it, you know, fear, authorial hesitation, whatever you want to call it.

58:10I've had the great luxury of being a professor only to Gen Z. My entire career has been educating Gen Z from the very oldest now to the very youngest. I've watched this generation grow and I've watched the horrible public precarity that they have to navigate. You know, when I was a kid in the 90s, you do something silly and your class makes fun of you. Worst case, your school makes fun of you. And then after summer break, all is forgotten, right? And then you're kind of cleansed by the amnesia of summertime. But now you do something out of the norm, as much many children are inclined to do. Your kids, your brain is developing.

58:57You can be filmed without your permission. and a week later, an entire country that you have never stepped into is laughing at you. And then years later, you become a meme, a symbol that is completely extracted from your personhood. So the meme is one of the most brutal realities of our 21st century mode of communication because it transforms a human being with a historical life and a personality into a communication object, into a sign, which now serves somebody in a group chat. So by the time I get them, I teach a graduate program. So they're 22, 23. And we get the ones who have already committed themselves to our practice.

59:50So we get the ones that are kind of professionalizing. But without fail, every year, the first day of class, you can see by the body language in the room how deeply beaten down and afraid my students are for being a poet. So I tell them that the classroom is a laboratory of failure. This is a place to fail. This is a place to be embarrassed. and I'm not going to critique you for the first few weeks and we're not going to critique each other. We are a culture obsessed with static truths. We have a word for a bud and then a word for rose. Rose bud, rose. But there are infinite moments in between.

1:00:41There's a moment where the rose just starts to tear and if you zoomed in enough, you don't even know what you're looking at. It's still a part of it, but we don't have a word for that. And to me, so much of life actually exists in this liminal, monstrous, undefinable space in between the two definitions of rosebud and rose. And so I tell them, I said, you are now in the space between the rosebud and the rose. That's what these 14 weeks are. We don't have a word for that. Sorry. Doesn't matter, though. So normalizing the idea of failure as a necessary procedure of growing as a human being and not using judgment as a punishing tool of progress.

1:01:26What a lot of students want from the classroom is a factory. They've been taught that. I'm going to go to NYU. I'm going to feed my weak poems into the NYU factory. And a professor and my peers are going to fix everything, right? It's all about this false idea that if I just keep working, a finished brand new, you know, T-model Ford poem will come out at the end of it. And it's a completely false fantasy. So it's introducing to them the larger reality that all of this will come through error and errancy. But in fact, error and errancy is part of being alive. And not only that, but part of innovation.

1:02:12That's the daring, daringness. And when I set that up as the re-elaborate that as what the classroom is for, you see the body language change. You know, and I'm like, oh, there you are. There you are. What I love so much about your work and about the way that you think and the way that you talk about your experience is you have this unique ability to dig deep into these subtle moments in people's lives. And I feel like you've got this ability to really normalize what is a experience that so many people feel but don't have the words to describe. And the message that your work carries in it is the opportunity for all of us to not only create that space for ourselves wherever you are right now, because being in a moment in your life where you don't feel like it's going anywhere.

1:03:15and you are feeling like this is really what it's going to be? Am I really making my life count? Especially as you get older? Yeah. I think everybody's had that experience. And imagine being raised by someone like that. Imagine being surrounded and multiply. If you're in a community like that or a family, everything you said multiplied by eight or nine. Everyone around you feels the same way, right? And the deep resentment, the deep sadness. But also, again, my stepdad worked at Stanadyne. He worked at a place called Stanadyne. He made a screw his whole life. For like 30 years, he made this screw that went into gas pumps.

1:04:06And that company shut down. It went overseas. So he's an uneducated refugee from Vietnam. Spent seven days in a boat and went to a refugee camp. Then came to Hartford, met my mother. And he spent 30 years making a screw. Now he doesn't make a screw anymore. What does he do? So he goes to work at Colt, which is a gun factory, and also in Connecticut, Newington. And he makes a smaller screw that goes into the Colt Magnum. And gas pumps and guns is the most quintessential American story. Every day after work, he hung up his uniform in our living room on a thumbtack. We didn't own it, so we could not put anything on the walls.

1:04:51We couldn't paint it. We had to get permission. It's a bureaucratic nightmare just to paint your walls. He hung his shirt there because on the right chest is that N-G-O-C, his name, with the diacritic stitched in beautiful blue thread. and every time someone come over, he would point to that. I said, I work at Standard Eye. I have healthcare. That's how low the bar was, right? It's like, and we're still feeling that bar. It's a big thing to say, I have healthcare. It's a big thing to say, I have a salary. It's a big thing to say, I belong to a place with a uniform. They believe in me enough to give me a uniform with my name on.

1:05:36I looked at that for years. Similar to how you described your family in the farm. And I saw that and I told myself, that can't be my American life. This man works from 3 p.m. to 12 a.m. I never see him. I look into his room. I see a tuft of black hair out of his blanket. That can't be me. But if you asked him, how did you spend your American life? He's retired now. He would have said, that is his absolute triumph. that was he lucked out right he would tell us this he said I he would convince me to go work and he said gosh it's amazing this is it not everybody and he wasn't wrong he was not wrong so I think that's why I wrote this book because I think everyone around me wanted stories about poor people who got out of their situation so that the reader feels good I just was not interested in writing a novel where, like, to make rich people feel good about poor people, right?

1:06:42Or, you know, it's all worth it or creating poverty porn to build sympathy. I say, no, this is just American life. And in fact, we want the story of escape. Our history books are filled with stories of escape, of revolutions, of people who overthrew things. But history itself is predominantly people who are stuck. Stuck in marriages they never want to be in. Stuck in wars they did not choose to fight in. Stuck in coal mines they never thought they'd be in. And some of them stuck in lives they never chose. None of us are chosen to be born. But we stay. We stay around because we realize there's love here.

1:07:22That's what I'm interested in. None of us chose to be here. None of my characters chose to be there, but they stay because they discover love. And it doesn't make poverty better. It doesn't make it even tolerable, but it gives your life a kind of significance when you realize that if nothing else, if nothing else, nothing improves, which for the most part in this book, spoiler alert, nothing much does, you are still capable of giving and receiving love. And that's no small thing. To me, it's a huge, significant part of one's life, especially after watching my mother die. You know, when she was, we knew it was terminal, she spent months bedridden.

1:08:16Breast cancer, most likely from all the chemicals she breathed. It has eaten into her spine, stage four metastatic. into her brain, you know, from diagnosis to death was seven months. And when I asked her, what do you want? What do you need? What was your life? She just told me the smallest moments. I remember when we used to go get chicken nuggets after work and we sit in the parking lot. That was nice. I didn't even remember that. That's completely her memory. And then when she said it, I said, oh yeah. gosh I haven't thought about it all this time and I couldn't believe she held that it was such an edifying moment 2019 I started this book in 2020 seven weeks after she died and I thought oh gosh it's not about the big things it's not it's about eating freaking chicken nuggets in a McDonald's parking lot with your son and I thought if I am a writer worthy of my salt i have to use what i've learned and my skill and talent to hold that let me if nothing else in my one life the hardest thing is to live only once let me use what i've developed all these decades to make that shareable with a reader because i just wasn't seeing it in the media that I was told I should consume.

1:09:51Well, it absolutely comes through. Thank you. It absolutely comes through. And, you know, it reminded me of a lot of periods in my life where I was rushing through it, hoping to get somewhere else and, you know, help me slow down and like really reflect on what was right there. And sometimes you need the other person to say it because you don't know. Yes. And how incredible if my only contribution to your beautiful podcast is just to get people to change the way they say hello. That would be amazing. You pick up a phone and instead of saying, hi, how are you? Good, good, good. Just say, hey, what's the last thing that made you joyful?

1:10:38I wish I knew that a lot sooner. I would have very different conversations with my mother and the friends I lost to the overdoses and suicide. I would do it all over, but you learn things so slow. But every time we pick up the phone, we have the opportunity to switch the gears. It's always in our hands because we're just holding one at a time, one feeling at a time. Well, I also think that this is an enormous invitation to ask yourself that question. when was the last time that you felt joyful um so i i play in a queer basketball league with my brother i'm trying to imagine that by the way um yeah it could be hard it's hard for me to imagine until i'm there you know well i immediately went to costumes and of course and i was thinking of the scene in the book, which is one of my favorite scenes where one of the characters, BJ, has this dream of becoming a regional champion in wrestling.

1:11:46And everybody piles into a car and goes to her match and things go horribly awry. But you feel the love of friendship as they surround her in this moment where she's basically humiliated. And so I thought of costumes and the energy. It's very similar. Yeah. Hopefully not a lot of humiliation. Oh, well, it depends. It depends. You know, joyful humiliation. The body humbles you, especially at 37. But I play in this league with my brother and I've always feel so much joy because I never thought that you could participate in a very competitive, historically very competitive cutthroat. I grew up with streetball, N1 mixtapes, skateboarding culture.

1:12:42And it was beautiful, but it was also filled with hyper-masculine aggression and toxicity. And being in a queer, and when I say queer, I mean like, you know, all genders, all bodies, all experiences, all hair colors, like hats, bring it like cost, like you, you're on it. You got the right image. Like it's, you know, we look like a beautiful athletic carnival and it's amazing. And I look forward to it every Sunday. A beautiful athletic carnival. That is a mouthful of amazingness. That's all I'm going to say. Tell that to the NBA. But just moving my body next to my brother felt so much joy. And I think it's, I'm proud of him.

1:13:33I think he's the one that I go to first when I do that meditation. Is my brother okay? He's always, we're 10 years apart. So I'm like a weird gay brother, father. you know um but you you embrace it you don't it's not a nuclear family what's a nuclear family it's just family it's what you owe to me like that's this book is about who owes who what and i what do these characters do for each other they pile into a van off the clock and they go watch their manager wrestle at a bar to catastrophic, you know, results. And then they say, you're still our manager. Because that's what I witnessed, you know, and that's what we remember.

1:14:28You know, if we're lucky, if we are so lucky, we will get a deathbed. A lot of people don't get a deathbed. And when we get that deathbed, we will remember these moments when people were kind to us when they offered us grace and attention. And I wanted to just, what a miracle to have the technology of the sentence, put that in a book, and then just throw it in the world and say, do you get it? Do you get where I'm coming from? And then unbeknownst to me, so many people saying, me too. So do you think the thing that you owe one another is kindness and grace and attention? All three. Kindness, grace, and attention.

1:15:14Absolutely. Because kindness, it's thrown around a lot, right? It's like, oh, be kind, be kind. But what I love about it, I love kindness even more than the other word that gets trafficked a lot, which is empathy. Because empathy can still be static. In a way, it could also be dangerous and render us complacent. to me kindness is such a a powerful testament to what it means for us to act on our debt to each other kindness is now empathy via action and a lot of times growing up we knew there was we're not going to get anything back right away because we couldn't you know the characters in this book don't have anything to really give each other but each other You know, there was a line from, I believe it's the Bible.

1:16:12It's a religious text. I don't know if it's the work of St. Augustine or the Bible where the line was, we are given ourselves. That is the gift of life. Is that we are given thisness. and you know I'm not a Christian but I really love that idea that oh I'm taught by this country that I'm out I need more I need to go out and grab more but this myself was already this invaluable gift and then to then gift myself to others through service and kindness I love that statement given to ourselves because you know a lot of people are searching for purpose and i've always thought purpose is when you recognize that you've been given to yourself yeah but your purpose is then to give yourself to other people in service in kindness to give other people the dignity and grace that you have to give.

1:17:27Yeah. Empathy as an end game is a trap. It's about how it can be put into action. Empathy is a procedure into the solution that we all really hope for. You have shared so much today. And one of the things that I would love to ask you is, for the person who's listening, who wants to build a meaningful life, one that has room for joy, for connection, for dignity, for grace, what do you hope they take from this conversation today and from your work? I hope people realize that if they don't already, that a meaningful life is not a life that you use to prove to yourself or others that you are valuable.

1:18:23A meaningful life is finding the power and the value where you are. And I say this, and I know for some it might sound like a bunch of, you know, hullabaloo. But I say this as someone who, if nothing else, I'm someone who have trespassed these class layers by no plan of my own. I went from the projects as a refugee, and now I'm in billionaires' mansions begging for funding for my students. So now I see a whole different world. And I say this because I think it's easy to fall into the trap of, oh, my achievements are me. They're just what I do, right? And to me, it's like, you're told that you got to go up, go up the mountain and there'll be a light that will heal everything.

1:19:21And that's what you're told as a little kid. And it's interesting because like, being from the working poor, we were so naive. Our parents were so naive about education and professionalization because they were never a part of it. So they thought it was a panacea. They actually gave it more credence than it deserves. That if I can just get you there, the there will take you. It'll take care of itself. And little did they know that there's nepotism, greed, payoffs, nefarious shenanigans. And in a way, it was just another wasteland. and that's been my experience. You go up the mountain and then there's a plateau and then there's an award ceremony and then you look around and say, oh gosh, there's a lot of skeletons here.

1:20:11It's just smoldering. And then they said, whoa, no, no, there's another level. Right this way. Keep on working. And you get up that one. You say, okay, maybe I'll see things differently from up there. And you get up to that platform and you say, oh my gosh, it's a graveyard. are. There's bitterness, envy, jealousy, hatred, pettiness, everything I thought I was escaping down there. It's still here, but even here, there's nowhere else to go. It's either you go up or you get pushed off, right? And eventually, I realized that it wasn't about going all the way up. It's about using that as a way to build a life for yourself and then coming back down.

1:21:00How do you come back down from the mountain? My whole life changed in the past five years, realizing that. Because I'm like any American, I was told, go on, move on up. Go, go, go, go. Get them, get them. One award, great. That will launch you. These are strategic. You get an award, Now you can apply to a tenure track job. Then you have to do service. You go to your deans and look at all the awards I got. Can I get a raise? You know, then can I get a load off my teaching so I can do research? Can I get research fund? So all these strategies, they're not nothing. But then eventually you look around and you said, when is it going to end?

1:21:36And now I realize if I don't come off this mountain and find my people, my brother, my aunts, my family, I'm going to be in. I'm going to be buried up there. And that was the most liberating thing. You can go into these spaces now and I say, I don't belong here, but I have work to do here. I love the visual and the metaphor of coming down the mountain. Yeah. Because for me, it feels like grounding back into ourselves and into the things that are truly meaningful that we take for granted, into the beauty that is right in front of your life instead of thinking that more of anything other than what you said.

1:22:23If you have safety and if you can pay your bills and you have something that you can wake up and do that adds a little value to your life, even if that means you wake up and you drive your grandmother to her doctor's appointment, then where you are, you have enough. And if you can start there, you actually are grounded into your values. And that's where your power is because you know who you are when you can do that. So I love the metaphor of like dropping down. Do you feel that's where you are now? Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. A hundred percent. Like everybody always asks me, oh my gosh, you know, the book and the podcast and the this, and, you know, what's more?

1:23:08And I'm like, more? Yeah. Like I have more than I ever thought I would ever have. I want more time. I want to be present with the people I love. My parents are getting older. I'd like to spend more time with them and they don't live near me. I am more certain of what's important in life because all the things that you see right now happened after I almost lost everything that was important. Yeah. And you don't forget what it's like to roll two tomatoes back across a dirty grocery store conveyor belt. And you don't forget what it's like to think that your family's about to be torn apart or you're about to lose the house or whatever.

1:23:55And so I am more certain of who I am and what matters and that gift that you have been given ourselves during this lifetime, that it's the most powerful place you could possibly be. And so I got so much out of your book. I have loved meeting you and talking to you. And Ocean Vaughn, what are your parting words? And you should try to scare yourself, but don't be scared of yourself. It's important to scare yourself. It's okay to scare yourself, but don't be afraid of yourself. And I think we could talk a lot about ambition and craft, but the core of it is a daringness. Try. Risk. Don't be afraid to be humiliated.

1:24:48Don't be scared of yourself. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your beautiful and life-changing work. Thank you for writing. Thank you for everything that you are doing to help us find joy, even in those moments where we are deeply struggling. Your work really matters. It's made a huge impact on me. And I know that our conversation today is going to make an enormous impact on the person who's listening right now and who they share it with. I'm so, so honored. Thank you. I hope so too. Thank you so much. You're welcome. And I also want to thank you. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our conversation today.

1:25:44Thank you for watching on YouTube. I am certain that you are as moved by what we discussed as I am. And I just wanted to tell you, in case no one else tells you today, as your friend, I love you. I believe in you. And I believe in your ability to create a better life. And I hope one of the things that you'll really take away from this is that you already have a beautiful life. you already have so much that you can be joyful about. You have so much that you can be thankful for. And when you hold space for that joy, when you hold grace for yourself, your life instantly becomes a little better exactly where you are.

1:26:31Alrighty, I'll see you in the very next episode. I'll be waiting to welcome you in the moment you hit play.

1:26:41I'm so excited. Bri, are you ready, hon? Okay, how are you feeling? Good? I'm good. Oh, great. You seem really good. Thank you. I'm so happy you're here. Me too. I feel even better now meeting everybody. Okay, you ready? Okay, here we go. But I don't know what the word abjection is. It took me a while. That's a new one.

1:27:07Abjectcation, abject. Objection. Oh, my God. I play in a queer basketball league with my brother. I'm trying to imagine that, by the way. And so you can look at your enemy one day. And I'm not that great at it. I think some of the monks... I was going to say, have you gotten there? I'm like, oh my God. I've gotten little glimpses. I think the monks are much better than us. Thank you for that. Thank you. All right. Awesome.

1:27:36Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. this is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode. Sirius XM Podcasts.