How To Live Freely In A Goal-Obsessed World - Anne-Laure Le Cunff - #957

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's the problem with people obsessing over finding their purpose, in your opinion?

**Anne-Laure Le Cunff** (0:06)
It makes them miserable. When we try to find our purpose, we feel like if we haven't found it yet, something is wrong with our life. Our life doesn't have meaning. We also spend a lot of time comparing our life to the life of others. We wonder, why is it that this person seems like she knows where she's going? Why is this person so excited about what they're doing? Why do they have a passion? Why is it that I don't have my purpose? I don't have my passion? And because of that, we become so obsessed with figuring out what is my purpose that we end up not giving ourselves the time and the possibility to explore and maybe figuring out in the end what that is.

**Chris Williamson** (0:49)
What is a better way to look at creating a direction in life then?

**Anne-Laure Le Cunff** (0:55)
A better way to figuring out your purpose is just to experiment. It's thinking like a scientist. When a scientist wants to learn something new, they don't start with a specific outcome in mind. What they do is that they start with a research question, a hypothesis. They wonder, hey, what might happen if I tried this? If you do that, if you keep on asking questions, if you keep on trying new things, if you keep on making mistakes, learning from them and iterating, this is how you figure out your purpose.

**Chris Williamson** (1:31)
How good do you think we are predicting what it is that we like? This seems sort of in the discussion around having a purpose, that there is an inherent sort of self-knowing. I know what's best for me. I am the master of this universe and I didn't know, but now that I do have a bit of a grasp on a purpose, everything else can go and fuck itself.

**Anne-Laure Le Cunff** (1:58)
There's a lot of research showing that we are absolutely terrible at predicting what we'll like in the future. We change a lot and we think that we're going to be a lot more similar to who we are today than what we actually end up being like in the future. We also think that whatever we like in the future will follow a nice progression, a logical progression, like a nice narrative based on who we are today and what our life looks like today. But we change quite a lot and a lot of the things we like are based on our experiences, the people we hang out with, the work we do, the failures we experience, and the growth that we have as well. There are lots of things that you might hate today because they're hard, that you will enjoy in the future because you've mastered them, and this is something that's really, really hard to predict. So deciding what you want to pursue based on what you think you will enjoy is not necessarily a great way to go about it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:01)
Yeah, it seems like, I don't know, a lot of people are probably living somebody else's dream. I don't know whether they're following their own, but they're probably following something that they think is their own, but very well might not be theirs and very well might be somebody else's.

**Anne-Laure Le Cunff** (3:22)
Yeah, what you're talking about actually has a name in psychology research. It's called a cognitive script. And this is based on really interesting research coming from the late 70s, where researchers asked people, okay, if I put you in this specific situation, how do you behave? How do you act? And what they found is that most people, if you put them in a similar situation, will behave in a very similar way. And that's okay for a lot of everyday situations. So let's say you go to the restaurant and you know that you're supposed to go there and wait for a member of staff coming and telling you, this is your table. If you go to the doctor, you know you wait in the waiting room and then you go in the doctor's office. That's okay, right? This is how we don't overthink every single decision. But the problem is that we follow these scripts not only in everyday situations, but also to make way more important decisions in our lives. And that includes the dreams that we pursue, the careers that we follow, the way we manage our relationships, the topics we decide to study at university. And those cognitive scripts are kind of the invisible threads that actually determine a lot of the decisions that we're making in life.