Your Brain On... Purpose (Sherzai Family Special)

Dean Sherzai (0:00)

Welcome to Your Brain On podcast, powered by our NeuroWorld community, an online community built to support people like you in creating brain healthy habits that last. At NeuroWorld, we combine expert guidance, practical tools and a welcoming space for growth, all grounded in cutting edge neuroscience and behavioral science. It's designed to fit into real life and costs less than dollar a day. Today, I'm really excited to have the entire Sherzai family around the table. We're going to keep this unplugged, have a conversation about meaning and purpose and change and moving on with life. Alex and Sophie, welcome to the show again.

Alex Sherzai (0:36)

Hello.

Dean Sherzai (0:37)

Hello.

Ayesha Sherzai (0:37)

Hello.

Alex Sherzai (0:38)

It's so nice to see you guys again.

Dean Sherzai (0:39)

It's good to see you too.

Ayesha Sherzai (0:41)

Neurologically, Purpose is this survival evolutionary tool that gives everything else direction. If you think about a million years ago, Purpose was, how am I going to survive to the end of the day? How am I going to find a mate? How am I going to create a life? Language actually gave it more structure. After that came all these cultural factors that gave it even more structure. But it is very much the central element of evolution that makes change happen. So with that in mind, I love the fact that you're here and all of us, because we all have spoken about this quite a bit. And our own fields deal with that in different ways. You're an AI in the brain and you're with biomedical engineering and the brain machine interface. And you're about lifestyle and human behavior.

Dean Sherzai (1:24)

Sophia, how would you define purpose and meaning and its relevance in your life?

Sophia Sherzai (1:29)

I feel like I've been, first of all, everything I know in life or most of the things that I know in life, I've been taught by you guys, by my parents. I've been guided through life. And it's not just through like verbal examples, but it's also through examples that I've seen, right? And what I've seen is a drive that at its very core is to help reduce suffering amongst family members. And then there's members of your community. Personally, that's something that I define as my meaning, something that I want to strive to achieve. Right now, I'm at a phase in my life where I can't exactly make that big of a difference at a grander scale, but I try and create change in the lives of the people that I'm around, the circle that I can reach, right? I think that's a good purpose. And also reducing suffering in myself. We discussed mental health in the last episode we were together, trying to improve our mental health and just overall trying to form myself into someone who can be in a position to help others.

Dean Sherzai (2:33)

Beautiful. Alex, what do you think?

Alex Sherzai (2:35)

I think the first thing that I want to talk about is what does it mean to not live with purpose? And I feel like a lot of people in our generation, including myself, have periods of time, but I feel like it's really easy to fall into traps nowadays where you're going through the motions. And to me, that's how I define purpose. I define purpose as the opposite of that, where you're not going through the motions. You have intention with every action in your life. Doomscrolling, people following paths that are not their own, right? Maybe influenced by the people around them. Another example could be a person has things that they want to achieve, but they don't have the resources for it. They don't have the facilities to achieve that. Purpose isn't uniform and opportunity as well. A lot of people don't have the opportunity to follow that purpose. I think it's still possible for everyone to live a purposeful life.

And Sophia laid the groundwork for how we as a family view that, which is if you set your purpose outside of yourself and set your meaning external to yourself, place value in the well-being of others, there will never be a time that you're not feeling purposeful because everything that you do, even the smallest of actions, if you do it with compassion, if you do it with intention, you're living a purposeful life.

Sophia Sherzai (3:43)

Beautifully stated. I really love the way you phrased that because a lot of people think of purpose or meaning as... They attribute it to the bigger question, what's the meaning of life? I don't think there is one meaning to life. And I think attributing one meaning to life or very grandiose meanings of life can also take you out of everyday actions. And it can actually change what your intention was. It can make you live with less intention because you're so focused on trying to create these grandiose actions that you can't live with authenticity every single day.