 All right, welcome to the show, Bell and Tim. We're so excited to have you. So excited to be here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, really excited to be here. Absolutely. We'd love to kick off a little bit, starting just the book, How to Navigate Life, how this topic came up for both of you and why it's such a passion and why you decided to write the book. I think it's often true that we write about the things that we are struggling with or on our minds a lot. And we talk about these two mindsets in the book that really reflect our own upbringings. So for me, I grew up with parents and a family that were immigrants from China who did everything in their power to get us to the United States so that we could have an education in the U.S. And we believed in the education meritocracy. I did everything in my power to make good on their sacrifices. And part of that meant like really just trying to please and live up to the people around me. And so it's a little bit of a story around my own experience of performance mindset and trying to live up to the expectations of others versus learning to listen to my own heart. Yeah. For me, I think growing up, I was not a very good student at all. I was not on that track. I grew up with hippie parents from rural Vermont. And I kind of just cruised through life. But I was very much the kid who I was like, why are we learning this? Why are we doing this? You know, I was questioning everything in front of me. And then if I wasn't getting a good answer for why we were doing what we were doing in high school, college or beyond, I was a kid who was just not going to do it. And so I think for a long time my, you know, parent or teachers thought that was just me being a wise ass. But it was me actually learning about like, I need to know the purpose of something before I do it. And then, which is funny because I was never into school, but it led me to be a school counselor and go work with low income first year students, go into mentoring. But I think a main reason we wrote this book is that we have never taught young people or people how to decide what to do with their lives. We've never taught them how to decide on what college to go to, what career that they should pick, where they should live. We've never taught them, we tell them all the time what to do, but we've never taught them how to decide. And so that was the aim of the book was how can we do a decision making framework that gives people the tools they need to make huge life decisions. Well, we can certainly understand that. And probably one of the first statements that happens when we begin our classes is, why are we not teaching this in school? Why did I not learn this in school? And we, it's just an inside joke because we hear it so often. And I certainly can relate to the asking questions on any time I'm told to do anything, give me a salad to me, give me a good purpose of why I'm doing it. I'm happy to do it, but there better be a good reason. And if there isn't, then I become very mistrusting very quick. What I find fascinating is for us, a lot of times we're working with adults. So they've gone through what I call the box checking phase. So they went to the great school. They got the job to impress their parents. They bought the house. Maybe they even got married. And there comes a point in your life after checking boxes where you're still not happy. You haven't found that purpose. And you're asking yourself, what exactly am I doing? Why am I here? And then they end up on our doorstep working with us. But to your exact point, you know, this is something that does not get distressed in schools and does not set up our students for success. And now we're working more and more with parents who are like, Hey, I don't want our kids to fall into the same trap. So I know, Belle, you mentioned one of these mindsets, but I'd love to start unpacking the three mindsets and where we go wrong and how we can get on track to navigating life. So the first mindset, the performance mindset, the one that I said that I was living earlier in my life, and I still struggle with, it's a sort of an ongoing process really, is all about this mentality that life is a zero sum game. And you have to beat out everybody else and get to the top first. And if you're not the winner, then you're a loser. And so the stakes are high. It's a very fear driven, anxiety driven mentality. And I have seen for all the years that I have been mentoring young people into the workforce that leads to a great deal of anxiety and depression. And frankly, it undercuts performance because of the anxiety and the lack of soulful connection to the goals in front of them. There's a sense of just emptiness around getting up in the morning. So it's a mindset that does not necessarily lead to, it definitely doesn't lead to mental health and it doesn't lead to the best performance either. Well, what I've noticed in school, obviously we get tested. We get graded. We take standardized tests and there's always this score attached to it. So the performance mindset becomes reinforced in the way that we're actually educating our youth. And then you get your first job and, well, there is no score. And there is no winner at work. You have to collaborate. You have to participate in the team. You have to showcase the soft skills, the emotional intelligence to get into the leadership roles. And that's often where we find a lot of our clients with that performance mindset start to fall short and think negatively about themselves or inner critic comes up and they don't actually take action towards those core values. Yeah, I love hearing what you're saying about how you see it showing up in your workplace. Definitely see it early in school and into the college years where the whole setting is setting up people to have the performance mindset. They weren't born with it. And Tim can talk a little bit about how most young people are born with a lot of passion and they know what they love. But we kind of beat into them this performance mindset and we give them every reason to believe that life is a zero-sum game and that they have to perform this way. So I think a big, big issue is just societal messages that we give to people as they're being socialized in school and into the workplace. How much of that do we think comes from the link of parents who haven't been able to achieve certain goals in their lives? And then, of course, now they see their children as their second opportunity to make this happen. Well, one is a societal issue. It's this feeling of there's so much fear, uncertainty and doubt in the world today that, one, a lot of well-meaning parents are feeling that if my kid isn't getting into the very, very best college, if he or she is not the top of their class, they're literally not going to make it in the world. And so that is for a variety of reasons, but like literally everyone is feeling that. But to your point, we call what we call the college and career navigation crisis where more and more people are going to college than ever before. The young generations today are more educated than they've ever been. But a recent research report came out that said 75% of people who went and graduated college regretted the path that they took. They would not go on the same educational pathway. 51% of adults who went through college are, they regret the college they went to, the major they chose, or the career that they went into. And those people are now parents who are like, I just went through all this regular morale. I made all of these mistakes and it's coming from a good place. But they're like, I'm in helping my students not make the same mistakes I did. They're inadvertently putting so much pressure on them, which is going to lead to that same levels of mental health and unhappiness that they're so working so hard to get their kids to avoid. And you touch on the admission scandal in the book with the most educated, wealthiest, resourceful parents are still falling into this trap and figuring out ways to cheat to get their kids ahead. Even the kids who were involved in the admission scandal on their own were already successful in a number of other areas and didn't want the path that these parents were putting them on. And I just find that so fascinating because when we think about admission scandals and we think about the pressure with parents, we often think of it as the people who don't have as many opportunities fighting to get to the top. We don't view it as the people who are already at the top trying to further entrench their position based on where their students perform, where they end up in school. And I'm so glad that you use that example in the book because it illustrated this perfectly. In fact, AJ was following this closer than I was and I remember him telling me about it. And I remember it being a topic, but it wasn't something that I was took much interested in. And in your book, I realized that she had millions of followers and sponsorship deals. I mean, she was already raking in money. And of course, the video that she made, it was obvious that she was only saw school as an opportunity to party and mingle and meet people. So I was floored by it. You know, it's interesting because I think it really speaks to that human beings are wired to be protective of their children. It doesn't matter if you are severely disadvantaged or if you are extremely, extremely privileged, you're still wired to respond to your baby's cries within five seconds. You know, there's that research that shows that that's what mothers do. We can't even stand our child suffering for five seconds. And so I think that that's just a really like a big equalizer because, you know, when I read this story about the scandal, I too was, you know, my first, my first instinct was to be judgmental and be like, Oh, see, this is exactly why this educational meritocracy is not really a thing. But then I just thought, you know what, we're all kind of like that. Like if we have an opportunity to help our kid out, we are tempted to use it even if, you know, maybe we don't, you know, commit crimes, but we come up to the edge of it, you know, we will do as much as we can to help our child succeed. And so I think it just really speaks to there's a lot of fear out there. We worry about our kids, we worry that they aren't going to have the opportunities and the success that we that we wish for them. We might be worried that they won't even be as successful as we were in our generation. And then we worry also about their mental health. So that drives a lot of the bad decisions that we make in helping our kids out. Absolutely agree. And I feel that with these examples here, these illustrations and those stats, I mean, 51% are not happy with where they went to school, what they majored in, you know, we often in our classroom ask, well, what did you want to be when you grow up? And it kind of becomes like a silly trope, right? Like we, we had this passion, we had this real interest. And then all of a sudden our parents or our school teachers, based on where we tested or some other areas that they felt was a better path to success, they guided us, they shaped us, they pushed us, sometimes they cheated their way to get us on that path. And then we end up unhappy as adults, we end up passionless, purposeless. And all of the anguish that goes along with that. And we have some older clients who come in the classroom and say, man, I wish I would have learned this when I was in high school and in college, I wish I would have had this emotional intelligence to make these better choices for myself. But it is really difficult when school is set up to sell you this path, your parents are reinforcing this path. And it really only starts to feel like that's the only way to success. And I know we've talked about it on this show, certainly with the housing crisis and what's going on with inflation and millennials carrying all the student debt. Now even the choice of going to college becomes a much different calculation than it was for our parents and generations before us. So I'd love to sort of shift gears a little bit and just talk about what is going on in this higher education space specifically. Because I know that with all the regret that we're hearing around where they went to school, what they studied, well, what might be the answer? Like how do we start to change course if we're now raising kids who are about to start college or we realized ourselves, we made some mistakes in these choices. Yeah, I'm really glad that this is what we're talking about here because I think this is one of the biggest challenges that young people and parents face today. And so the problem comes back to, again, I used to be a school counselor. And so I had parents and families coming in, making these post-secondary decisions. And we literally never teach students and parents how to choose what college to go to. And also, why do you want to go to college in the first place? And so in lieu of that, of not knowing how to pick from 4,500 different colleges across the United States, what do people do instead, they say, well, how do I choose? I'm going to try to get into the college that is hardest to get into. So the number one driver of how they pick is selectivity. And this is something in higher education, we've also propagated this message. And when we say you should go to the school that it's the hardest to get into, it means that, well, if you get into Harvard, then that must say something about you as a person. And then employers are going to recognize that you are super talented and ambitious. And they are going to hire you because you have that logo on your bachelor's degree. And we all know that is not correct. And the sad part is, is that, so we've told parents and young people that the value of college is the name of the school that you go to. But the research is actually very, very compelling and clear. It's not where you go to college that matters. It's what you do in college, which we can get into, but you all know this. And it's basically it comes down to college is really valuable when you are meeting new people, you're building social capital, you're building your network of people who can provide opportunities and resources, and you're building your human capital, you're experiencing new things where you're building new skills. And the really sad part is that college still, if you go in with the idea of building relationships and building human capital, it can be wildly, wildly valuable. But because young people have never been taught that they're going to college, they're not building relationships, they're not taking advantage of all their resources. And they're graduating with a degree they don't want with a whole bunch of debt. And they're saying it's not worth it. So it's fundamentally comes back to not teaching people how to decide how to navigate college. Glad you brought that up because the other side of the equation that doesn't get talked about this is the responsibility of these colleges. So they're also gaming the rankings and the selectivity so that they can rank high enough to be one of those locals that people chase after. We all know the IVs, but the tier below that, there's so much competition to be the most selective to be on those list of the magazines that the parents buy. And there's a whole gamesmanship that's going on behind the scenes to get on those ranking lists that really have nothing to do with the actual success of the graduates after school. It has nothing to do with are they actually shaping young adults to be successful in life? It's are they hitting these statistical numbers? And are they checking the right boxes for the reviewers to rank them to win this competition? So we have competitions from the parents trying to help the kids into school, and then we have competitions between the colleges. And then there's a whole other competition after. You look at whether it's big law, you look at consulting firms, they only take the top tier. So then even if you pick a major that you'd love to collaborate and build this social capital, you still feel like if you help a classmate, they're going to get that coveted consulting spot above you. They're going to get into med school above you. I studied pre-med and trying to share notes and understand concepts and group settings. Like that was a battle. That was combative because, well, hey, if you rank ahead of me, then you're going to get that last spot that I'm not going to get. So even in school, once you're in school, they're not setting up this collaboration to build the social capital, to build the soft skills, the EQ that we really need for postgraduate success. That's so true. I think of it as there are the espoused values of colleges and universities and then there are the ones that are enacted. So almost any university or college will say that they're all about collaboration and community and taking one for the team and that they're about social justice and these loftier kinds of values. But when you survey students which we're doing right now and you ask them what are the values of their institutions, that's not what is being reflected to them. They see institutions that are about focus first on yourself and really achieve and produce in a way to set yourself apart from the rest of the herd. And so I think that we are sending our students very, very mixed messages about what we say we care about and yet how we're socializing them to be. I think that is in every institution at this point, there is a lot of mixed messages from the top down. There's like a lot of different societal factors happening. I kind of think about it as we've kind of created this educational system that no one is happy about but everyone feels like they have to play the game. And so I kind of think because I'm a public educator, I've been in it. We work at a college and it's kind of, we've under invested in higher education on the federal and state levels for a long, long time. And so that's created this world in which they need to go out and recruit students and admissions becomes much more of this competitive game. And then those rankings work. No one likes those rankings. You go to a college, no one likes them, but they work because parents are the ones looking at it and it becomes this reinforcing self-fulfilling prophecy. And again, it becomes back to, we need to start talking to parents like you two are doing with your education and your is about, well, what is the role of college? What role do you want it to play with in it? Because yeah, so it's just changing the narrative on it. Being on the inside and recognizing this one mindset, performance mindset, a lot of people in our audience might feel, might not recognize their feeling. What are some of the signals, the questions that you're seeing from students and then young adults around how this performance mindset has led them astray? And what can we start to do to get back on track with the right mindset? So over and over again, I see students come into my office who are taking a course that has our purpose curriculum in it. And they come in distraught because thinking of a specific example of a student who was pre-law and she had chosen that particular track because it was associated with financial security in her mind. And she comes from a family where it's very important that that was needed. And through the course of the semester, she recognized that it wasn't sitting right with her to be pursuing this field that really wasn't what she felt called to do. And so I asked her, if you didn't have to worry about financial security, and you knew that people would approve of your choice, and you knew that you were guaranteed success, what would you choose to do? And she said, well, what I'm really interested in is something in human services like social work. But I've heard you can't make a living doing that. So I said, okay, what is it about human services and social work that you're interested in? And now we were having a fruitful discussion. She was saying, well, I could use my relational skills. I'm interested in doing nonprofit organizations. And here are the reasons she had so much passion as she was talking about this vision of herself that she felt she couldn't pursue. And from there, I said, okay, now let's add back in the external pressures of financial security and so on. How could you be doing some of those things that you're so passionate about, but in a way that still meets the needs that you have around financial security? Well, today she's doing a double major as a master's in social work and an MBA, getting ready to launch her nonprofit organization. So I think that one really important thing for students is they recognize that the road that they're on, the path they're on is not leading them in the direction that feels like they're calling. It feels like they're living somebody else's life and it starts to take a toll on them. It starts to affect their mental health. It starts to cause them to feel very empty about and hollow about the path they're on. Yeah. So performance mindset is on one end of a spectrum where that is the idea that the goal of life is to be successful. We all here know everyone knows that, you know, so we have a lot of people right now saying rejecting the performance mindset and they're saying, what's the point of being successful if I'm going to be miserable? And so we see it in the great resignation. We see it with people quitting their jobs. We see it everywhere. We're seeing people go to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and they're adopting what we call a passion mindset. And this is what I grew up with for a very long time. So the passion mindset says the goal of life is to be happy. And so if you believe that the ultimate thing in life is to be happy, there's a very simple formula you live by, which is you want to maximize positive emotions and you want to minimize negative emotions. And so, and this makes sense, right? Like you're like, okay, we do that. And so what's funny, and that was me for a very long time. Like I said, I was not a very good student. I was just chasing the next high. I was doing the only thing that I wanted to do. And if I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it. I'm guessing there's a little bit of that story in you as well, Johnny, or? Yeah, Tim, I'm laughing because not only not only that, my parents were hippies as well. My dad grew up on a farm. And he then after the service, he went into factory work, but he played in bands on the weekend. And as a child, you know, you're hearing the instruments, you're seeing all the people come to the house. I'm watching my parents get dressed up to go to the club to see my dad perform at a very young age. And all of those things just completely consumed me. And of course, for me after high school, it was followed my passions to play music. And I will say, I wouldn't have come to the place that I am now if I didn't follow that path. And that path allowed me to do some incredible things and discover a lot about myself. But here's the thing. And now I talk to a lot of young men every day. And there's a common theme with young men about 27, 28, 29. And this happened to me. So when I'm talking to them, I have so much fun discussing this. Because at that age, if you followed your passions, you start looking at 30. And that number is significant, because now you have 10 years of following your passion. And you have to look at 30 going, okay, I've done this for 10 years. And I am not happy with where I am at this moment. And I realize that if I don't make significant changes, there is a, it's highly probable that I'm going to rehash my 20s in my 30s. And for some men, they're like, well, I guess that's just life. And I'm going to have to learn to be content with that. That wasn't the path for me. And for myself, it was I want more, I need to be farther along. I have to find something else. And at this time, the internet is going off. Social media is just bubbling. I mean, it was Friendster and people were changing, downloading stuff from LimeWire. And I, but I recognize that the internet and making money there was going to be the future. And I wanted to find a way in. But I chose self development as a path to build some skills that I realized after 10 years of following my passions that I didn't have. And that interest turned into, I'm guessing this is my obsessive personality into another passion. So, and the whole time that I was working on self development and then getting interested in coaching and then meeting AJ and creating the art of charm, I played music the whole time alongside of it because it was this other passion that had to be quelled along with my thirst for knowledge, learning, skill building and psychology and human behavior. So as, and I know we'll talk about some of the pitfalls in following your passions. But for myself, I think I was lucky in the, in the fact of seeing that 3-0 and recognizing there was holes in my own development that needed to be filled. Yeah, there's a thank you because that's stories are always so much better than the science. But the science actually backs up and validates your experience because the research shows that the more that we just value happiness as the ultimate goal in life, it actually leads to a feeling of emptiness, higher levels of depression, anxiety, and it actually leads to the same place as the performance mindset. And it's not passion itself that is bad. It's, so it's like, it's the belief system behind it. So if the belief is I need to be feeling positive emotions all the time, like the Latin root of passion is an overflowing of emotions, right? So it's only doing things that are making you feel incredible all of the time. Well, it's part of the human condition to experience the good, the bad and the ugly in our emotions. No one feels good all the time. Actually, there is only one subset of people who feel good all the time, clinical sociopaths, right? And I don't think that's what we want here. And so I think the issue with the passion mindset, if the performance mindset says, what should I do? The passion mindset says, what do I want to do? And it sends this message that uncomfortableness, negative emotions are to be avoided at all costs. And it makes us not take big courageous leaps of faith like you did, Johnny, or commit to self-discipline all these things because we know all the stuff you're doing is very, very purposeful. I'm guessing it doesn't feel amazing all the time. There's tons of hard work behind the scenes where you're not feeling incredible all the time, because you're tapping into something different. You're tapping into what we call the purpose mindset, which is this balance between the two. Balance is the key here. And I think that's where so many of us are led astray. I mean, whether it's the performance mindset where there's a total imbalance, like everything in life is geared around performance, even the extracurriculars you take on often are devoid of passion because you're trying to get to the very top to compete. Then you have the flip side where there's tons of passion. There's avoiding all of these tough choices that often lead to you not having a roof over your head, not having what you actually need to pay your bills. And both of those are almost dead ends, because ultimately you end up in the same empty place. And I feel a lot of times the message that we see propagated in the media and in our heroes is one of those two paths. Like very rarely do we hear this third path around the purpose and the challenges that come along with it. We hear about the performance athlete superstar who just grounded through all of that hardship. Or we hear about the person who struck gold with their passion and happened to become a superstar musician and everything was paved in gold. And in reality, like that is just hitting the lottery on both ends of the spectrum. And it's so rare that we don't realize by trying to go down either of those two paths fully, we're going to lead ourselves into that pit of despair and happiness frustration and end up in the 51% who aren't happy with where they would just school aren't happy with their life choices. Just before bell you go into the purpose mindset. Can I just ask AJ, can you just how did you know you said you were on the pre-med track? You're obviously not on it anymore. So like can you speak to how did you get off of it? How did you know what was the pivot there that took you away from the performance mindset? I always say this to young men and young women that we work with. And I firmly believe that you need to be trying lots of things. And I just tried podcasting while I was in the lab, while I was doing cancer research. It was something I did on the weekends and in the evenings as a way to blow off steam, find a little passion. I didn't go into it thinking this is going to be my life's work. I certainly didn't go into it thinking I'm going to make a living off of it. And this was 15 years ago. So no one was doing it. And it just so happened that a spark lit in me, it was something that felt effortless and fun. And I looked forward to whereas dragging myself to the lab to inject more mice with tumors was not as fun and interesting. And I finally listened to my gut and my intuition and I had a very tough conversation with my family. And even to this day, I will be honest, like I share the story. I just got married, I had my whole family together and they still don't fully understand that decision that I made. But they're happy that I'm happy. Right? So at the end of the day, me finding my purpose ultimately led to them feeling fulfilled and happy, even if they don't understand the decision that was made and they don't understand getting out of their performance success track. So I feel in a lot of ways I got lucky, but I generated that luck by trying lots of things and failing at lots of things. I had three other businesses that I tried my hand at entrepreneurship wise with some friends, and they all failed. And this just happened to be something that caught a little fire and started to make a little bit of money. And once it made enough money where I was like, well, I could do this and have a ton of fun or I could stay on this track that really just makes my family happy because they get to say I'm a doctor. I'm going to choose the path that's right for me. And we're here 15 years later and my family scratches their head, but they're happy to see what I've built. And I think that is something that isn't often talked about when we're faced with these choices and decisions. And I know when I shared that story in class with our clients, they're always shocked by my bravery, but it didn't feel like bravery in the moment. It didn't feel like this clear choice or this lightning bolt. It was like it started to gain a little steam because I was willing to try a bunch of different things. And I want to add to that as well. And this goes back to the performance mindset and where a lot of our younger clients' heads are. Specifically, there's one that I'm thinking about who every time I talk to him, he's always down on himself that he's not nearly as far along in his life that he needs to be in his career and this and that. He just turned 22. And for the last year, and he has been working with us before he was even 21. And he's always been this way. And as he gets older, now a couple years in, he gets more frantic. And for us, I was like, well, let's just talk, let's talk about some interests and passions that you are looking at that are outside of you beating yourself up over this career and advertising. And he was talking about, well, he likes comedy. Well, for him, that was the next venture. I'm like, well, why aren't you pursuing it? Why aren't you writing some jokes going to open mic night, taking an improv class? Because again, coming back for Tim, for you and I and what AJ was just saying, it's like when you're trying all of these different things, you are learning, you are building skill sets, you are meeting different people outside of your own bubble, you're being shared with new world views and ideas. And that's what's going to spark more interest, passions, and finding ultimately that purpose. But you're certainly not going to find it having a one track mind. And of course, the older we get, you start to learn that anything that you chase so fervently just runs. When people ask me how I got involved in the art of time, I joke, I say that I fell into it backwards. But the reality was interest in learning and skill building and psychology. But the things that happened due to those interests, well, those were the lightning strikes, but those would have never happened had I not fully committed to these interests. I could not agree more. I see all the time young people feel like they have to figure out, they have to do the risk assessment first. And as long as there's this tiniest bit of risk, they can't just pull the trigger, they can't make the move. They're just so stuck because they're so afraid of making a mistake. And I really do agree with you, the name of the game is exploration. It's being willing to see life as a little bit more of a playing field and a little bit more of play. And it's when you start to move in a particular direction, that things start to gain traction. It's kind of like when you're riding a bike, you have to be in motion before you start going. And that's, I think, one of the hardest things for people is to make a move in a particular direction before they know 100% that it's going to work out for them. I want to go to the four groups of students that you have put together here because I think it's very important. And for those young folks that listen to this show, they might be able to see themselves in one of these groups of students that you have here. I believe it's a drift too soon decided. The searchers and the samplers and the purpose driven, if you could go through those for us, I think that would be quite helpful. Okay, so those four categories come up when you're doing research on a general population of students who you're trying to assess for levels of purpose. And what you find is that there are some students who aren't looking and they haven't committed to anything either. They just don't care. They have no clue about purpose. That's one category. Another category of students are the people who are really working hard to search. And they're trying all these different things, but they haven't committed yet. That's probably the best scenario for a searching, a college years is to be searching and you haven't committed somewhere. And then there are those who commit too soon. They have committed already coming into college without having explored. Maybe they are like, I'm going to be a doctor because my parent was a doctor. They're just like, that's the safe bet. And so they don't explore, they commit too soon. And then there's the eventual process of getting to a place where you've done a lot of exploration. And you're ready to make your first commitment. It's not your forever commitment because purpose is constantly evolving from one stage of our life to another. Just like you guys, like what you just described in your own career journeys, you'll probably have other chapters as much as you love this one. It's probably going to grow and evolve. And that's great. So purpose means like a first commitment, a next commitment, a third commitment. And that continues to evolve down the road. This is not like a generational downfall or this is not like, oh, young people today are doing this. It's that as we talk about in our book, we have designed educational and workplace systems that treat life as a pathway. Everything in school is all about, we use the language of paths all the time. You're on track to graduate, you're in an accelerated program, you got to make sure you're not going to drop out. All of this language infuses this language of that life is this linear path that you need to stay on. And I'm guessing AJ, when you were going pre-med, what's the appeal of it? There is a very clear, straight path on pre-med because you know exactly what you're doing and where it's going to lead. The challenge with treating life like this very linear path to the top of expectation mountain is that what happens when you veer off the path, right? What happens when you hit a detour or a dead end? Or if you don't know the path, you're lost, you're losing and you're behind. And the dangerous part is that the higher up we go on that path, the higher we climb that mountain, the harder it is to go our own way, right? The harder it is to find a different path because we've sunk so much time, energy and money into that path, we feel like we have to keep going. And you two are great because what you're talking about is we talk about in the book that people who find purpose in life, they don't view life as this path, they view it as an open-ended adventure and journey. And so there is no specific map with a destination forward. You all have a compass that you are using to orient yourself and you've done these heart checks to be like, am I using my strengths? Am I gaining new skills? Am I learning? Do I feel like I'm making a positive contribution? And what purposeful people do is that when they do that heart check and it says these check off the box is a purpose, they head in that direction even if they don't know exactly where they're going. And the irony is is when you have the courage to do that, people who have the courage to pursue their purpose for the right reasons end up more successful and happy based on the research. I think it's fascinating. We have a lot of our clients who absolutely love video games, some who work in video games. And just in you describing that, it really makes me think about the video games I had growing up, the Mario, the level, one direct path, it's going in one line. To now you have the Grand Theft Auto's where there are little submissions and you can go find and explore other parts of the world, the Zelda's where we're spending hours and hours and hours gaming and leveling up our character. That's life. And if you had talked to me in my 20s, my mission was, well, solve cancer, make my family happy. Then around my mid to late 20s, I was like, you know what, the solving cancer thing isn't that much fun for me. And guess what? I'm probably not going to make my family happy, but I got to figure out what's actually going to light me up. Into my 30s, it was like, hey, you know what really makes me happy helping young men in their dating life? Well, now I'm 40 and I'm like, you know what really makes me happy? Work you with the military, work you with professionals and helping them with team building communication and building these deeper connections that we're all searching for. So I love when our audience hears that like your purpose can change and evolve too. Because when people hear purpose and they're like, nodding along now, I love it. Purpose Mind said, I get it. They go, I don't know what my purpose is. And they feel like that's a commitment and then committing to it. Well, they could pick the wrong purpose. And then they're back on that wrong track again. And they stop short of even trying and finding and discovering. You know, and last night, I was at dinner with some friends and a few of them went to business schools. As I said, box checking, very like focused on this. Mind said of like keeping their families happy and they're like, man, I wish I could be you. I wish I could start a business. I'm like, you got an MBA. Like you got a graduate degree in business. Like there's nothing magical that I did other than go to LegalZoom and get the LLC. Like you can do it. And unfortunately, we find ourselves trapped as you said at the top of the mountain with this sunk cost fallacy. Well, now I have these student loans. Now I got this nice apartment that I got to cover. I can't possibly be an entrepreneur. I can't possibly start that band and go on tour. I can't possibly go explore Europe and figure out what it would be like to teach English in Asia. I can't do that. I have all these responsibilities and I have these people in my life back home that I have to live up to. And the biggest weight off my shoulders was realizing like your family is going to be happy when you are purpose driven. When you walk in that room, purpose driven, they're going to feel it. They're going to see it in you and that's going to lighten them. It's not going to be the zeros in your bank account. It's not going to be the letters after your name. It's not going to be the bragging about what you do for work when they see your eyes sunken in, they see you beat up from the stress, overworked, exhausted and unable to show up at the family events, unable to participate in your kid's upbringing because of the choices you've made. Just on that one point and then I do want to get into the purpose research because Bell is a world leading expert in purpose. So she has a lot of like, what can we do in, what can we actually do? But to speak to AJ's point, you know, like you being a young man and saying, I'm going to be a doctor and go solve cancer, what I've realized working with young people is we ask them all the time, what do you want to do when you grow up? Right? We ask them all the time, like you need to have some sort of profession picked out. And what happens with young people is that the worst answer is not having an answer. No one feels like they can say, I have no idea. I'm a drift. I have no idea how to pursue life. So what do we do instead? We just randomly choose some prestigious vocation, like being a doctor to solve cancer. I'm not saying this is what you did, AJ, but this is what happens a lot. We pick some profession that we think sounds good to other people because we'd rather have a bad answer to that question than no answer at all. But then over time, we just keep saying it over and over and we never question it anymore. And then all of a sudden we find ourselves on this path with all these responsibilities and we feel trapped. And so thankfully there is a better way. There's a better way to do this that is not that complicated. I wonder, Bell, if you want to jump into purpose. Yeah, let's hear it. Yeah, okay, absolutely. So just in the most simple terms, the way that we define purpose in the research is it's doing things that are personally meaningful that also are intended to contribute to the world beyond oneself. And it's really as simple as that. It's the intention to contribute with things that are personally meaningful. So you can take that same career as a physician and you can either be doing it in a way that is not about personal meaning and contribution. It's just about the accolades and the prestige and the wealth behind it. And that's going to be probably a really long slog for you if that's what it's about. Or you could be a doctor who is like, I am fascinated by the study of medicine and I want to be able to use that privilege and those talent and that education in order to affect change or change lives or heal. And then that same job just like any other job, a custodian or a teacher or a nurse or whatever it is, can have very different meaning to people. And when people have purpose around their particular things that they want to do, it's a completely different experience. And so that's what we see in our research is that it has everything to do with whether people have increased levels of engagement in school and work. They're increased in performance and it also affects their sense of mental health and well-being. When people have purpose, all of those lights kind of turned on. I also think it really influences your relationships. And I feel we sort of touched on this as college should be this opportunity to build social capital. And again, at the prestigious schools, you often walk away with this vast network of movers and shakers who can open doors. And we talk about here on the show, 80% of jobs aren't found online. They're found through the people you know. But what we find again and again is that school doesn't teach these relational skills. They don't teach the collaboration skills that lead to the great mentorship relationship, that lead to the friendships, lead to the network building. So what is the advice for students who are struggling on the relationship side of building the social capital and how to find that if they find themselves on one of these tracks that is very competitive and very performance-based? Because I know in my experience, that was an area that I struggled with in college because it was so competitive. And I realize now just man, looking back, I regret not building and fostering more of those relationships. And I wish I would have been less competitive and more collaborative and more seeking of mentorship. And we hear time and time again, I would love to get a mentor. I would love to have these great relationships, but I'm just a college student. I don't have anything to offer. Like, how do I start to spark these relationships when I don't know anything about anything, or I don't know my purpose, or I don't know really what I want? Just on the mentorship piece there too. And we do a lot of research where you're right. It is the social capital is the number one thing that's most important, not just in college, but it's related to satisfaction in your job. It's related to your health. It's a stronger indicator if you're going to be alive later on in life than if you exercise, drink, or smoke. So it's the biggest thing that you're touching on it, but just to go back to the purpose piece. So it's doing something that's personally meaningful that you also feel like is contributing to the world beyond the cell. So it's doing something that feels fired up to you, but you also genuinely believe that if you achieve this goal, it's going to have a positive impact either on your family, on your community, society, your customers, whatever it is. And so that piece gets lost a lot in this world where it's all about success, success, success, because it's all about you, right? And purpose is all about thinking about what problems in the world do you care about? Why do you care about those problems and what do you want to do about it? And so if you come in with a purpose mindset, it's going to you're going to approach relationships in a very different way. So if you have people here listening today, they're obsessed with getting just being successful because they want wealth, status, prestige, and power. When they go to try to meet a mentor or meet someone to connect, it's going to be a very transactional relationship because they're just trying to figure out what can I get out of this, right? But if you actually can do the work to figure out, I genuinely want to help other people, you're going to look for people who are already doing that that you can learn from or they have some resources that you can use. And so that's going to cause you to build what we call transformational relationships where you can go in and say, hey, listen, I'm really trying to help young men 22 to 24 get the skills they need to be successful because I personally didn't have it. What advice would you give to me so I can help these people? Do you see the difference there in like how you show up to that? And it's like, suddenly those people are like, what does this person want from me? What do they want? You are just looking for resources to give to other people. And that's actually what builds it. Yeah, that dynamic versus the what's in it for me mindset. And what we often find when we give this advice is people don't realize how their behaviors and actions are signaling that. It's sort of their default behavior. And then they get frustrated when they feel like, well, I followed all of your steps and I'm trying to grow this network, but people don't really want to invest time or energy or effort in me. And it's like, well, what you're communicating either subconsciously with your nonverbals or your ask is exactly that. It's a me first, not a we, not a grow society, grow the community, have a larger impact. It's, I need this from you. I need this skill. Tell me how you built your business. Well, why do you care so much about how I built the art of charm? Why are you trying to build something that would be a much more helpful question for me to understand to mentor you than just me giving you my cookie cutter answer of how I built this because it's going to be different for everyone. So I love that you brought that up because these relationship pieces are I think the biggest regret that we have heard from our clients around their college experience that they went through the motion, they joined Greek life, they did the extracurriculars and then they left school and now all those people that were in their life in school, well, they went on to pursue their career. They're having wife, kids, family, and now they don't have as much time and they realized, well, man, I didn't really invest in my professors. I didn't really talk to the TA. I didn't really go to that graduate assistant and really get a sense for how they got on this path or what they're working on and how I could support them. And it's a lot harder later in your career to start building and go back to those relationships that really college is the one time in your life when everyone is in that location ready to relate and connect. Like they are all ready on that campus to make those connections if you're willing to put in a little bit of the work and have the right mindset, that transformative relationship versus the transactional. I think at this point, there'll be a lot of folks asking for the young folks who's on the show. It's like, this is great, guys, but how do I find my purpose? And in the book, there was a lot of science about a task that I don't think a lot of them are going to want to hear, but it's a very good thing. And we all have to learn and it's called struggle. So if we could hear what the science has to say about struggling to find your purpose, will be great. You're talking about the pro-social piece, right? Which is so hard to like, because you can't fake it. You can't say like, oh, okay, I need to focus on other people. Like, if you aren't internally feeling that in your heart and your gut, people are going to read it all over you. And so what you're talking about is how do you develop a pro-social intention? And it's really thinking about what problems do you want to be solving in the world? And instead of not to pick on AJ again, when we think about positive impact and purpose, we think we need to go solve cancer. We think we need to go solve world hunger. We think we need to go do these things to be purposeful. But actually, it is just the intention to help one other person beyond the self actually is the science of it. And so here's what people should be asking themselves. They should actually be thinking about what are the biggest challenges and adversities that they've had to experience in their life, right? And just anything that has made your life harder, reflect on it. What was it? What caused it to happen? How did it make your life harder and really do the reflection to understand how did this adversity impact me? And then you start thinking, what did I need in that moment of need? What did I need that I was not getting at that moment, right? Who did I need to talk to? What was happening? This could be around economic security, psychological health, basic food and housing. It could be about societal injustices and systemic racism, whatever it is, think about these things that are big problems. And then the key powerful question for you is there's going to be someone else who's going to go through that same struggle. What role would you want to play for them that you didn't have? And then how would it feel to help someone else going through the same thing? And what's powerful about that is you are the very best person to solve that problem because you are an expert in whatever that adversity is. And I just on the other end, I would just say, if you're listening to this and you're like, I've grown up with a lot of advantages and a lot of privileges in my life, right? I don't feel like I've gone through a lot of adversity. I don't feel like my adversity compares to all these other huge problems that I'm seeing. Reflect on your advantages. So what are the things in your life that have made your life easier? What would happen if you didn't have those things? It's actually about harboring gratitude for the things that made your life a lot better. And so if we can do these things, we're like, oh, I took this great self-development class in college and that really had a huge impact on me. I'm so grateful for it. How can I spread that advantage to other people? That can be the same pro-social intention. So it's really about reflecting on your advantages and your adversities. Well, this comes back to what we started the show on though, which was the snow plow parents that are taking out all of the obstacles out of your way. Well, how are you going to face adversity when you got green grass all the way? And that makes it incredibly difficult. That's so true. It's like what we're talking about is kind of counter-cultural. Like we think we should be keeping people from any kind of suffering whatsoever. And that's just not even possible. It's the ticket into the human race is that you will suffer. And the research shows is that there are ways in which people grow from even their trauma and various kinds of suffering. And it can very much lead to that very thing that you want to dedicate your life to doing. Your point, Tim, I think is also key for those in our audience, because we have students in our audience and we have young people in our audience who are starting their career or working their way up to management. But we also have a lot of older members of our audience who are feeling some regret and feeling some of these tough choices that they wish they would have made. And when I work with them and executive coaching one-on-one, my first thought exactly to them is, well, what can you do now to give back? So maybe you made the wrong choice. Maybe you went through this the wrong way. But are you answering those calls for mentorship? Are you checking back in with your alumni association to see how you could help someone else who's at that same crossroad that you were at and offer that advice, offer that advocacy, offer that support. And it doesn't have to be hours every single week. But joining a board, helping another company overcome their adversity that you've learned to overcome is a great way later in your life if you felt like your life is purposeless. So there are times, of course, as we talked about where you fought hard, you're at the top of the mountain, you're lacking in purpose, but now you got the wife, the kids, the family, the house, all of the trappings that go with the outward success, and you're feeling that lack of happiness and support in your life. You can actually still evoke that by finding ways to give back, to mentor, to help others than just yourself and your immediate family. And that's what I've been really grateful for in our community that so many of our older clients are willing to do that with the younger clients, like that 22-year-old we were talking about, saying, hey, you know, I was in your same shoes, and I made these mistakes by rushing too fast and not trying some things and check this out. So there are opportunities for everyone listening to tap into that purpose. And I'm loving that we touched on the science of the struggle and the purpose because so many times we hear this nebulous phrase purpose and exactly your point, we tie it to cure cancer and world hunger. And those are great purposes if that is what is the lightning strike for you. But that curing cancer wasn't the purpose for me. And my impact is a lot smaller with this podcast and a lot smaller with our coaching clients, but it's still purposeful because it's beyond myself. I would just say just on that point, anything can be purposeful. So, you know, I had a friend of ours who's an accountant, and he would always be like, we always get crap that accountant is not this purposeful thing. And then I dig beneath the surface, why are you an accountant? Oh, it turns out he felt very financially unstable growing up. He never knew about money. He never knew about how much money he had. And it wasn't until he got these skills around accounting that he was like, Oh man, there's a science to this. I can use numbers that I can make what's felt gray. I can make it black and white. Now he's an accountant for a corporation, and he's providing a company financial stability, right? And so it's not what you do. It's why you do it. And so there's no profession out there that you can really find that can't be purposeful if you do the self reflection needed to apply your purpose to it. And that is ultimately the hardest part about all of this is that tough asking yourself these really big questions. Well, we have one last question for you both. We love asking our guests what their X factor is, what unique skill set or ability makes you extraordinary. I think that what I love to do and what I've decided, what I've determined that I'm good at is translating languages across to other cultures. So the language of academic research is very inaccessible to like real people like on the street who can most benefit from it. And what I do is build a bridge between the ivory tower and main street. And that is very much I think a unique skill that I've developed from living between worlds as a multicultural person, as somebody who is between different kinds of faith, faith backgrounds, just learning how to speak the language that I speak to populations across the lines. I love that. What about you, Tim? Yeah, I think for me too, it is really trying to meet people where they're at and not assume anything about anyone and how can we really try to provide evidence based resources to people in a way that feels actually helpful and it makes sense to them. That's really at the heart of our work right there. So it's how can you do stuff that's also evidence based but feels imminently practical and logical at the same time because so much you read these books and has these amazing theories in it. But I'm like, I have no idea how to apply that to my own life. And so that's this amazing partnership that Bell and I have in trying to write this book for anyone who's struggling to navigate life or has these big questions around inflection points. Well, thank you so much for sharing. Where can our audience find out more about the resources you offer? So we have our book out how to navigate life, the new science of finding your way in school, career and beyond. So that's came out August 2nd. So you can buy that wherever you get books. And then you can also find us at howtodnavigate.com where we have a whole bunch of research articles, validated assessments on helping people get this language to help them develop their own purpose. So thank you for having us and thank you for the work that you're doing because you're doing purpose work as well. So this is a lot of fun. Yeah, this is a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much.