Okay, so purpose is the third stage of the development of the world class individual. According to not just my own qualitative work but Benjamin Bloom studied 120 world class performance, in swimming and tennis, neuroscience and mathematics, sculpture and painting, I think, no sculpture and music. So those are the six domains. And he identified these three phases. The first phase of romance, I'm really interested. The second phase of systematic, disciplined, not always fun practice. And the third stage is the longest stage, because it lasts for the rest of your life. And this is when you feel that it's purposeful. When you can answer these questions in the affirmative. That you can particularly look for the other centered purpose in your work. So when people say like this is important, they very often mean that it's not just important for them but it's important for other people, and here's a graph of purpose force and great scores, do I know what's driving one, I don't know, maybe purpose makes you gritty, maybe grit makes you have purpose. Maybe there's a third variable, I don't know. My guess is that lot's of these things are going on. That all three of these stories are at least, in part correct. But the one that is most obvious to me is that, if you don't feel like your work is important to other people and makes other people's lives better it is really hard to sustain motivation when things go really badly. So people will disengage from a hobby that's interesting to them because it's just a hobby, but they don't disengage from their calling. Here's pleasure. We measured your approach style to happiness through pleasure. Like, how much do you care about being comfortable? Enjoying yourself, eat dessert first, life is short. I want to go on more vacations, I want to have fun, go to better restaurants. There's no relationship at all between this orientation to happiness and grit. I mean, this is comforting because of the flat line it doesn't mean that you have to, if it were downward sloping line it'd be like, well you must be a monk to be gritty. But you can enjoy your red wine and nice sheets like high thread count sheets. >> [LAUGH] >> Go ahead, it's not going to make you gritty. And if you hire someone and all their questions are about, You know vacation days and you know, perks. Well, for me like the moment a graduate student applicant is like, so do we work this summer? I'm like, what's your name again? It's just not that orientation. Here's a graphic from my colleague David Yeager and his collaborator. David trained under Carol Dweck. And he has this following schematic for understanding purpose. So this would be essentially a mediation. Like if purpose changes something, why? All these boxes in the middle essentially are the deviator. So I said, well, look, you started off and you say, does someone have purpose. And then, in the thought level, this is what goes through your head if you have purpose. You think, [SOUND], this math assignment is boring. But it's relevant the people I know they can help me make a difference in the world. Then, you engage in deeper learning, so behaviorally you start to do something different. You stick with the task in spite of distractions, like I could go on Instagram, but you know what, if I do this Math problem like I'm going to grow up to be kind of of person who actually can help the people in my neighborhood. And that leads to objective performance. So this is a mediation diagram in a different way starts with purpose and ends with academic performance and it asks the question like why do these kids, which we see in our data kids who have purpose are better at school, why? And this is David's guess about that, he led a study where he randomly assigned kids to develop purpose. How the hell do you do that? He gave kids a simple writing prompt. Said, what are things that you really care about? He's such a great adolescent psychologist. He writes like a teenager talks. >> [LAUGH] >> So it's like, what are things that really piss you off? And I'm like, what are things that really get you mad about like the world? Like what do you change if you could change anything? And so, these kids write stuff like it's unfair, it's racist. My neighborhood looks like shit. It's like there's garbage everywhere. And then, you're like get them all excited. Then, you in a very subtle way get them to think about what they're doing in algebra class might connect to that personal, emotional valu that is the whole intervention. If you want to read it, it's published in JPS Feeds and on my website. And you find it, whoa before it gets taken down, and whoa you did not find it in Diamond. >> [LAUGH] >> When you find it, that when you experimentally manipulate purpose, you can increase effort and objective academic performance. He finds evidence for this. So that's an experiment not a correlational study and that suggests to me that at least I know of these three possible stories, like is purpose driving grit or is grit driving purpose Then at least one of those errors has some evidence behind it which is a purpose can increase your persistence for what you do.
