In this episode, Victor Strecher discusses purposeful living and strategies to align your values and actions. Vic shares his imperfect journey back to meaning and to living for what matters most after losing his daughter. He explores what it means to be purposeful versus just having a purpose, how energy and vitality play a role in living out our values, and why purpose isn’t just for the privileged.
For the first time in over three years, I’ve got a couple open spots in my coaching practice. If you’re a thoughtful business owner, creator, or leader feeling stuck in scattered progress or simmering self-doubt, this might be the right moment. Through my Aligned Progress Method, I help people move toward real momentum with clarity, focus, and trust in themselves. If that speaks to where you are, you can learn more at oneyoufeed.net/align.
Key Takeaways:
- The significance of purpose in life and its impact on well-being.
- Personal experiences of loss and grief, particularly the impact of losing a loved one on understanding purpose.
- The distinction between values, purpose, and meaning, and how they interconnect.
- The role of energy and vitality in living a purposeful life, including factors like sleep, mindfulness, and nutrition.
- The concept of mortality salience and its influence on identifying core values and priorities.
- Practical methods for discovering and articulating one’s purpose, such as the headstone test.
- The accessibility of purpose for everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status.
- The relationship between purpose and happiness
- Encouragement for self-reflection and intentionality in daily life to align actions with personal values.
Victor J. Strecher is a professor and director for innovation and social entrepreneurship at the
University of Michigan School of Public Health. He has published over 100 articles in scientific
journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of
Preventive Medicine, and Nature Neuroscience and coedited the book Oncology: An Evidence-
Based Approach. He is the author of Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything
Connect with Victor Strecher: Website | LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this conversation with Victor Strecher, check out these other episodes:
How to Create a Life Strategy for Meaningful Change with Seth Godin
How to Shift Your Emotions: Moving from Chaos to Clarity with Ethan Kross
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Episode Transcript:
Vic Strecher 00:00:00 Sleep, presence, activity, creativity, and eating or space. It’s just a simple moniker that I use. Did I give myself space today? Did I sleep? Was I present? Was I active creative? Did I eat well? And after a while you can become your own researcher.
Chris Forbes 00:00:25 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:09 Today’s guest doctor Vic Strecker, author of Life on Purpose, lost his daughter Julia and in his darkest hour found himself paddling into the freezing waters of Lake Michigan.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:22 Not sure if he would ever return, but what happened next wasn’t a miracle cure. It was the beginning of a long, real, and often imperfect journey back to meaning and to living for what matters most. In this episode, Vic and I unpack what it means to be purposeful versus just having a purpose. How energy and vitality play a role in living out our values and why? Purpose isn’t just for the privileged. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Vic. Welcome to the show.
Vic Strecher 00:02:00 Thank you. Eric. Really looking forward to this.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:03 You have a book called Life on Purpose. How living for What Matters Most Changes everything. And an app called purposeful about Building Purpose. And so we’re going to talk about how important purpose is, how to build it, how to find it, how to not get overwhelmed. That’s a big question. But before we get into all that, we’ll start, like we always do with the parable and the parable. There’s a grandchild who’s talking to their grandparent, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:32 One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Vic Strecher 00:02:58 Oh, man, it’s such an amazing parable, Eric. And I’ve heard other people’s interpretations of it on your show, and I really enjoy listening to that part for me. I guess I don’t want to judge the bad wolf too much, because I think that we do live with this good wolf and this bad wolf inside us. But I often look back to evolution to help guide me in thinking about why people do things that we don’t understand or may think are bad, versus doing things that we think are good. And we have different parts of our brain that have evolved that may make some of the things and behaviors we engage in seem bad.
Vic Strecher 00:03:41 And, you know, we might even call that hedonic. You know, maybe really focus on a part of the brain that relates to our reward center. Like, we may eat too much ice cream all the time or Engage in, you know, addictive behaviors, heroin addiction or alcoholism or many other things. And this is our reward center. And we might say that our reward center is related to immediate gratification, immediate rewards. Well, that was evolutionarily developed. I mean, you know, when we’re cave people, we probably smelled that roasting Mastodon and went, awesome. Roast Mastodon I love this.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:19 It’s not by chance that we have these things in us.
Vic Strecher 00:04:22 Yeah. No. And, you know, even Aristotle talked about it in his famous book, Nicomachean Ethics. You know, his big question always was, what makes us happy and what is happiness? And he said, well, there are probably two forms of happiness. One is hedonist happiness, where, yeah, we’ve got this immediate pleasure, whether it’s great food or great wine or great sex or great vacations or whatever those things are.
Vic Strecher 00:04:47 And he said, that’s okay. He said, we all have that. It’s all part of us. We love those things make sense. And yet, if that’s all we are. It’s like an I’ll quote him. It’s like we’re grazing animals. And while we all like to graze, he said there’s something much bigger. And that’s being in touch with our inner Damon. This true self or true God or angel that lives in us, whatever you want to call it. The Greeks called it the Damon. And he said, eudaimonia, the root word being Damon. Being in touch with that makes you truly happy. So I view those as the good wolf and bad wolf. We live with both of them. We can live with both of them, in fact. And one might be much more hedonic and focused on immediate rewards. But if that’s all we are, we are like grazing animals, and we want to be something bigger. And that’s what Aristotle talked about.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:41 I love that interpretation. And as I think about purpose in relation to the parable, I think there’s two things that go into feeding the good wolf, which to me is just shorthand for living a good life or not shorthand, but, you know, story form of leading a good life.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:58 I think there’s two parts, and one is knowing even which wolf you are feeding in any given moment. And then the second is the ability to do it. And without some degree of purpose, or at the very least, values that cohere in some way. It’s really hard to know. It’s really difficult to judge a situation where you’re like, well, what should I do? Should I do this or should I do that? And I found that some degree of purpose and values helps us make that decision. What I’d like to do before we go too far into this is is hit a couple of words and have you sort of talk about what you mean when we use them? The first would be the word I just used values. The second would be purpose and the third would be meaning. And these things are often interchanged with each other and they’re related in some way. But talk to me about how you think of these three words.
Vic Strecher 00:06:51 Thank you. Well, they are related, but they’re different.
Vic Strecher 00:06:54 And I want to touch on something. You just said that we’re often conflicted. We have different values, which we all do. As we were just talking about, and I view almost our behaviors and our emotions as being the branches of a tree. And if we go up one branch, it’s really like, let’s say, for example, we’re really exhausted. We’ve had a hard day, and the first thing we want to do when we get home is have a cocktail. And, you know, we might go, that’s great. And yet we have two kids who really want to play with us. They got home from school and they want to play with with their, their dad. And they’re going, dad, please play with me. And I want a cocktail too. If I have a strong purpose, I’m going to know which branch to go up, because as soon as I go up one of those branches, it’s going to be more difficult to jump across the entire tree to that other branch.
Vic Strecher 00:07:43 And as soon as I move down that branch, there will be other branches that open up that kind of unfold. If I go down the cocktail branch, the next branch might be another cocktail, of course. And the next branch might be sleeping on the sofa or kind of vegging out in some way and ignoring the kids. And the other way might be playing with the kids, maybe walking around the block or playing little football or whatever with the kids that you’re going to do, and that moves into other branches. And even without any judgment, you might say, well, you know, I might have a purpose which focuses on one branch or the other. One of the things we find in in neuroscience and my colleague Yuna Kang, who is at the University of Pennsylvania, when we did this research, looked at purposeful people, put them into MRI and compared them against people who were not purposeful and basically gave them messages that would induce conflict. And she found that there’s a part of our brain, a region of our brain that really gets more blood flow when it’s very conflicted.
Vic Strecher 00:08:46 The purposeful people didn’t get that blood flow. They knew what to do. They were not conflicted. So what you bring up right up front is we’re conflicted all the time. Purposeful people, though, know what to do. And you might say there is a bad wolf of drinking and drinking and drinking more. Well, one might say that. Or maybe there’s a good wolf that says, I’m going to play with the kids. I’m actually not going to judge that. I’m just going to say whatever your purpose is, is something that developed with you over time. Now, you may grow really tired of the purpose that’s drinking and drinking, and it may not be good for you in the long run. In fact, we have found that we have found that certain types of purposes are really not good for you in terms of depression down the road, more anxiety down the road, even illness, physical illnesses.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:37 So let’s get back to defining those words, because I think very few people would think of the drinking that they do after work as a purpose.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:46 They would think of it as a hedonic desire. Yeah. You know, and I think your point about conflict is, is real. I mean, there’s a reason that, you know, the show is what it is. It’s because that conflict I understand very well, and I think that we face it all the time. We face conflicts between what we want and what we value. We face conflicts between even things that we value. It’s it’s it’s there to me. It’s part. It’s part of life. But having something to steer by helps. So okay. Definitions.
Vic Strecher 00:10:15 When I think about purpose, I think about really a self-organizing framework of my goals. And it’s built around my core values. So my core values, those are the things that matter most in my life. In fact, if if I’m wondering what is a value that I have, you might even open your smartphone. Look at the wallpaper, the first thing you see, and that might be a core value of yours. Maybe it’s your dog, maybe it’s your spouse.
Vic Strecher 00:10:41 Maybe it’s your kids, your grandkids. Maybe it’s a work of art. Maybe it’s actually a saying or quote. There are a lot of things that you might end up valuing very deeply, but it might also be, you know, a glass of wine there. You know, this bottle of wine that you had and thought was awesome or this beautiful, you know, person that you think, oh, that would be, you know, a great trophy spouse for me, whatever. You know, there are hedonism and there are eudaimonia values that we all have. And the question is, do I create purposes around those hedonic values, or do I create purposes around these eudaimonia, or what I might even call self transcending values? Am I just completely focused on self enhancing values, my attractiveness, making a lot of money, having fame, all of those things? Or am I more attracted to things like love and compassion, kindness, things like that that are transcending Ending myself. Yeah. So I believe that you can have purposes that could go in either direction.
Vic Strecher 00:11:48 Okay. Other researchers disagree with that. Not all other. I mean, some agree with what I’m doing, what I’m saying, but some say no. A real purpose is a transcending purpose. I’d say, well, not everybody has a transcending purpose, but they certainly have a purpose to become rich, for example, or to be, like, inebriated a lot. I mean, that’s it sounds like a weird purpose, but I could see people’s purposes moving in this direction. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:15 I think it’s in how you define it. I mean, certainly when I was an addict, it wasn’t exactly a chosen purpose. But if you looked at my life, all of my energy went there. And I think about this a lot because there’s there’s two schools of thought here. One is that how you spend your time? Shows what you value very much.
Vic Strecher 00:12:36 Feeding it, as you say.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:37 And I think this is where we just are probably differing on terms a little bit. Right? Because I think that you can value something and not have the skills or capacities to live into it.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:50 So I may really value my son. And yet every day, every night after work to use your example I’m having the cocktails. And it’s because in my framework in my view of the world, it’s because I don’t have the skills and tools to live according to my value. So it’s not that I value alcohol. Exactly. It’s that I’m in the grips of this hedonic desire. So for me, I would sort of call that desire or hijacked desire.
Vic Strecher 00:13:18 And that’s okay. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not opposed to that either. I think that what you’re talking about is the difference between having a set of core values and a purpose and being purposeful. Okay. So being purposeful means that you are aligning yourself with your core values and your purpose. This, and it’s simple enough to say, oh, I have written out a statement of my purpose. Great. Now I can go to Disney World. Well, no, it’s a matter of having a purpose. And actually we have found that writing a statement really helps.
Vic Strecher 00:13:53 It really builds strength around that, that purpose. And people almost always the purpose is that we read and I’ve read literally tens of thousands of purposes. They’re almost always self transcending. There’s something big. And then the question is do you live into them? And that’s something that I try to help people do because it takes energy to live into this purpose. You can say, I want to do these nice things. I want to one of my purposes, for example, Eric, is to teach my students as if they’re my own child. And this came from, you know, the passing of my own daughter. And when that happened, I it changed my life. But to do that, since I have hundreds of students, you know, it’s hard to treat every one of them as if they might be a child of yours. And so what I try to do is take better care of myself. And I’m a professor in school of Public Health and School of Medicine. And my job is to help people stay healthy and and engage in these behaviors. And I find that probably the most motivating way to do that is to help people find a stronger purpose and direction that motivates change.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:25 I love that distinction between having a purpose and being purposeful. That’s a handy little way to think of it, right? Because yeah, you can have a set of values or purposes that you simply can’t live into. And we’ll get to this later in the conversation where you give some some ideas about not only how to define the purpose, but how to live into it. But I’d like to pause here for a second, because the book opens with a scene of you on Lake Michigan, and you just referenced your daughter’s passing. So I’m wondering if you could sort of tell us that story and how you got to purpose being kind of your life’s work?
Vic Strecher 00:16:05 Sure. And to be honest, I never really thought about purpose in my own life or other people’s lives. I never thought it was something that you would want for better health, necessarily. I was helping people manage their stress or quit smoking or change an addiction or, you know, manage their diet better or whatever.
Vic Strecher 00:16:26 And that that was my focus. I’m a behavioral scientist, and I help people think more about the future and their own possible selves in the future and try to take better care of themselves in doing so. My daughter was born healthy, and then she caught a chickenpox virus when she was six months old out of the blue. And you know, most people get that. It causes a fever and a rash or something for a day or two. This virus attacked her heart and it actually destroyed her heart. And her only hope was to get a heart transplant. And she became one of the first children in, in this country, in the world to get a heart transplant. And she wasn’t the first. But, you know, in that early wave and we didn’t know what would happen to her, but we decided that we would not knowing. And her chance was probably about 50/50 that she would make it to even six years old. And when she got this heart transplant, we sat around our dinner table, what I like to call the gathering Place as a family.
Vic Strecher 00:17:25 And we said, well, what’s a good life? You know what would be a good life for Julia? And we decided if she could have connections. If she felt like she belonged not just to this family, but to other people and connected with other meaningful activities endeavors. In other words, living a big life. And so we helped her live a big life. She needed another transplant when she was nine, it turns out, and she almost passed away at that time. I write about that in my book, and then she ultimately did pass away when she was 19. She wanted to be a nurse in getting her second heart transplant. She really fell in love with nursing. She thought of all the people really cared about her so deeply. It was nurses and she wanted to be one. She wanted to give back. And so her first semester we were on spring break. We decided to take her and her older sister to the Caribbean for a break. She was always cold because her heart didn’t work all that great, and she turned to us one evening as she was going back to her room and she said, I’m so happy, dad, that I could die now.
Vic Strecher 00:18:34 And we thought it was just a very positive thing. And I don’t think she knew she was going to die. But those were her last words, and she passed away of a sudden heart attack that night. And when that happened, you know, of course we grieve. And I’m sure you’ve done podcasts around grieving and in that process. But I remember we went to a therapist and it was a marital counseling therapist as well as a grief therapist, and I came in being the smart professor and I, you know, said, well, Miss Therapist, I you know, I’ve read the stats on this, 80% of families who lose a child break up and I don’t want to break up. And she kind of laughed gently and smiled and she said, well, you know, Vic, 50% of couples break up without this happening. Well, you’re right, but she said, but if you start judging the other person’s grief, you will you will break up. So if you say you’re grieving too fast or too slow or not big enough or not small.
Vic Strecher 00:19:31 You have to allow a person to go on their journey, and you have to do that independently, but also connect with one another. And so my wife, who’s a sculptor and a and a gardener, did more sculpting and gardening and stayed in Ann Arbor, where we live. I went to northern Michigan, to a cottage on Lake Michigan, and started eating and drinking myself to death. Basically, I started just drinking all the time I was eating. I just lost control because I didn’t care. I just simply didn’t care. I was nihilistic, it didn’t matter. I had no purpose and people were almost like, not. I was like in a castle and they were knocking on the castle wall, please, you know, and they were sending me books and everything. And, you know, one morning very early, I had a very, very vivid dream. And I woke up at five in the morning from this dream. It was I had read some poetry from the Persian poet Rumi. The night before.
Vic Strecher 00:20:31 And it said. Your dreams at night. Have secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. It is a beautiful poem. And I read through this poem and I thought, wow, that’s amazing. And that morning, then at five in the morning, I wanted to go back to sleep because I had a vivid dream with my daughter Julia in it, and she was saying goodbye to me, and I wanted to go with her, actually, because I didn’t care. And I remembered the poem and I woke up and I hopped out into my kayak, and I still had my boxers and t shirt on from sleeping. And I know that’s too much information, but I just jumped into this kayak and started paddling out into ice water like a Slurpee. I mean, it was incredibly cold outside, like probably 40 degrees. And if I’d fallen in, I would have died for sure. I didn’t wear any sort of life preservation, and I just kept paddling out at least a mile and towards two miles when the sun came up and when the sun came up.
Vic Strecher 00:21:28 I don’t know how to explain this as a scientist. I felt my daughter in me. I don’t know how else to explain this, but I felt my daughter in me. And I felt Julia saying, you’ve got to get over this, dad. And I wasn’t like, you have to get over this. It was like, you have to get over yourself. Your grief. Because if you don’t, you’re going to die. And I was thoroughly contemplating continuing on to Wisconsin, which is 84 more miles. And of course, I wouldn’t have made it. And I didn’t care because as beautiful morning, it was still dark. But when the sun came up, I realized I had a choice to make. And it was this really amazing thing that suddenly here, you know, I met this crossroads in my life thinking about either you know, my life will end or my life is going to have to change significantly. And here my daughter visits me. Turns out to be Father’s Day. I didn’t even realize that until I’d come back.
Vic Strecher 00:22:26 And I did come back, and I just looked down on myself and started saying, Vic, you have to fix yourself or you’re going to die and you have a choice. You can do that if you want. You can die if you want, but if you don’t, you’re going to have to change. And that’s what your profession is, how to help people change. So I just simply kind of instinctively pull the sheet of paper out and start writing down the things that mattered most to me my family, of course, our older daughter Rachel, our friends. But right away, in line three, I wrote down my students and I called the university almost right away. When I wrote down my students, I said, of course that matters so much. My research does, but my students matter. And so I called the university and said it was so nice that you gave me this semester off, and maybe even next semester of teaching, because losing your daughter is a hard thing, and I am understanding that now.
Vic Strecher 00:23:22 But it’s not the advice that I need. The advice that I need is to go back and teach, and I’m going to do that, and I’m going to teach every one of my students as if they’re my daughter. And it completely changed my life. I don’t even know how to express it. It suddenly it was from darkness into sun. And I started teaching with a vigor and a passion and a love for my students that I’ve never experienced before. And I got it back a thousandfold from my students. That was the most amazing thing. and I started doing research about this idea of purpose, and I luckily I know some wonderful neuroscientists. I know some people who would do what’s called epigenetics research and all these amazing researchers and start connecting with these people. Ethan Kross, for example, this wonderful psychologist, I know you’ve had him on your show. One of the most important ways of coping with stress is to look down on yourself and try to fix yourself. Talking to yourself in this third person, he said, what you were doing is exactly what I recommend.
Vic Strecher 00:24:29 So this changed my life.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:31 Obviously there is heartbreak at the center of the story, and then there’s a couple of really beautiful things in it. I think it’s really beautiful that your daughter got to go happy like that. I mean, what a gift. I’m not saying that your daughter going as a gift. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying within that.
Vic Strecher 00:24:51 I know exactly what you’re saying, Eric. And it was a gift. It was.
Speaker 4 00:24:54 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:55 And then secondly, this idea that you were able to see your purpose and and sort of rededicate yourself. One of the things that I think a lot about, though, is the nature of stories like that and then the, the messier reality of what it looks like moving forward. And so I in my book, I talk about a moment where I made it. They told me to go to long term treatment, I said no. Then I made a decision where I said yes and my life changed in that moment.
Vic Strecher 00:25:29 Was that an epiphany? Did you have some sort of sudden realization?
Eric Zimmer 00:25:33 Did you? I had a sudden realization that I was going to die or go to jail for a long, long time.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:38 I mean, yeah, it was.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:41 And that moment, however, would be worthless if it weren’t followed by a thousand moments of making the right choices. And I’m curious for you, like, you’re still deep in your daughter’s grief, so I’m assuming that, yes, you now had a purpose. It energized you, and this was a difficult period of time to go through. I just always want listeners to kind of have an accurate view of of what things are like, even when you have sort of an epiphany like that.
Vic Strecher 00:26:12 So true. Eric. And it does now I’m going to shift to being purposeful, because as soon as you start saying, I’m going to teach my, you know, students as if they’re my own daughter Julia, or I’m going to do X, Y, or Z as a husband or a family member or friend or a communitarian or any of those things that become, you know, self transcending purposes in your life. You go, wow, I could relapse really fast.
Vic Strecher 00:26:41 And unless I start thinking about what it’s going to take to do that, and there’s this amorphous concept called energy or vitality that probably is one of the most important elements of our lives. We don’t talk about it enough, don’t think about it enough. We don’t use it as outcomes in our research. We don’t say, what gives you more energy. But of those studies that have looked at that, we know that sleeping better gives you more energy. Being present or mindful meditation gives you more energy, physical activity, oddly enough, you think it drains you of energy. It gives you more energy. At the end of the day. Try walking around the block, you know, and you’ll have more energy afterwards. Creativity. Try making a haiku after this podcast. Just whip off a haiku for a loved one. You will have more energy. And then finally eating well. Eating carefully. Not eating monster meals at one point in time and getting sloppy. But maintaining a certain amount of glucose through the day gives you more energy.
Vic Strecher 00:27:42 So sleep, presence, activity, creativity, and eating or space. It’s just a simple moniker that I use. Did I give myself space today? Did I sleep? Was I present? Was I active creative? Did I eat well? And after a while you can become your own researcher. So we’ve actually taken this and extended it into this application called purposeful and purposeful actually looks at this in a much deeper way and helps you become more purposeful over time by taking on new areas. We call them growth areas, but these are areas that you might want to grow in that give you more energy and vitality. That in turn help you become more purposeful because it’s not just about having purpose, although that is important.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:30 The energy thing is, I think, so important. It is really one of the things that I see most often in myself and in people I’ve coached and people have been through our programs, is that when there is no energy, it is very hard to be purposeful, whatever that purpose is, and it can also be very difficult.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:54 The challenge and I love space. I agree with all of those things, and I think that’s a great acronym and kind of defines the way I try and think about my days is that even some of that requires energy to even do some of that. That’s sort of the cruel paradox, you know, it’s like the old, you know, for me, exercise is the best thing I know to do for depression, and yet it’s the hardest thing to do. When I am, I am depressed. Yeah, but this energy is so important because lack of energy leads very often to failures of what we will colloquially call willpower. I want to circle back to that, perhaps later, because that’s sort of a deep thing I think a lot about. But we can just use it in a general sense, meaning the ability to make the right choice at the right moment. Energy is is critical in the ability to do that.
Vic Strecher 00:29:45 In my book Life on Purpose, I devoted the second half of the book to space. Each of those I put a chapter in for each one, because I thought it was so important that it’s not just about finding your purpose, although that is not simple for everybody, and it’s something I hope we can talk about. How to find purpose, yes, but being purposeful, bringing your best self every day, being aligned with your purpose, those are such important elements of living, frankly, a happier life. You know, we talk a lot about happiness. I’m sure you talk about it a lot on your podcast. But, you know, happiness is not necessarily sipping martinis on the beach every day or playing golf every day, or having a trophy spouse or all of those things being wealthy. Those things, after a while, start petering out. That 400th round of golf is far less important, or that amazing meal you just ate becomes kind of rote after a while and you start complaining more. This is what Aristotle was talking about. But being purposeful, having a purpose, and living to that purpose actually has been shown so clearly to make you deeply happy.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:15 Let’s get into finding purpose. And again, that is a big word. You know, people like life’s purpose. And when I hear life’s purpose, I very often, particularly before I knew more about breaking things down into little pieces, I would hear that and I would think about it for a second. I would get completely overwhelmed, and I would just disengage and and go, do whatever. So talk to me about how we can take this question that is really big. It’s an important question. And how can we deconstruct it into something that the average person has time and energy to do?
Vic Strecher 00:31:55 Okay. So when we ask people and we’ve asked literally tens of thousands of people, do you have a purpose? Do you have a sense of purpose? And if you have a purpose, can you write it down? Actually. And people, 60% of people can write down their purpose. Usually it sounds like a hallmark card. You know, I want to change the world, I want to.
Vic Strecher 00:32:15 You know, a simple phrase. You know, I’m going to fly like an eagle or whatever. That, to me, is not a purpose. A purpose to me is. It’s really helping you organize your goals in your life. And when you think about organizing your goals in your life, you think about different domains of your life. So maybe we start with domains. Which domains are important to you? So maybe your family domain is important. It is to most people. Maybe your work where you spend most of your waking hours is important to you. And if it’s not, maybe you can figure out how to create more purposeful work in what you do. And by the way, you know, if you if you watch, you know, this this show called Dirty Jobs, it’s all about that. It’s all about finding purpose. No matter how dirty the job is, how horrible it is. So you don’t necessarily have to be a doctor or something to have purpose that you can have purposes.
Vic Strecher 00:33:09 I believe in almost any job in your life. So I believe in work purpose. That’s very important. You could have a community purpose. And also maybe you have a personal growth purpose yourself. So think about different domains. Once you’ve thought about those domains, you might start thinking about the things that are most important within those domains. You might think about people who rely on you within those domains. You might even think about your legacy within those domains. In other words, what would you want said at your memorial service or carved on your headstone if you were to die around different domains? Do you want to be the richest person in the cemetery? Most people don’t. But if you want to be remembered, Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, said we should all be good ancestors. I love that phrase because maybe thinking back 200 years, people are walking by your headstone and going. That was an awesome person. Oh my goodness, look at that person. That leads to greater purpose. So what we call mortality salience in psychology.
Vic Strecher 00:34:19 Do you want to you know, and most of my students, when I have them, think about what would be in their memorial service. They go, oh, no, I don’t want to do this. It turns out to be a fabulous way to start thinking more carefully about your purpose in life. But who relies on you? What causes do you care about? What do you wake up for in the morning? Those things energize. They create more energy as well. So it goes both ways.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:43 Yeah. That memorial exercise is a really powerful one. And interestingly, I interviewed somebody I don’t know a couple months ago. Sawhill Bloom, I believe, who added a spin to it that I had never heard, which was also imagine who the people are in the front two rows, because that points to who’s most important to you, right? I really like that. The thing about that exercise that’s so powerful is if you do it, you do get a much clearer sense of what’s important. It’s difficult.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:14 Mainly, my experience has been because most people come up against the fact that the person, what they want said about them at their memorial and what people would say about them today. There’s a gap, and that gap is painful. The gap is painful, but that knowledge is where, you know, we talk about energy, right? That’s where the energy comes from. The energy comes from in many ways going, oh, I want to be over there. I’m over here. This is important.
Vic Strecher 00:35:40 You said something really interesting from this other person you were interviewing, who’s in the first two rows at your memorial service. I want to also add who is sitting in the very farthest back, like who’s standing against the wall? Who just came in? Who who knows? They don’t know anyone there, but knows that this person who died touched them in such a deep way, and they’re not connected to anybody else there, but they really this person touched them in some way. It’s one of the most remarkable things that I find in my work right now through my book, Life on Purpose or through the app purposeful.
Vic Strecher 00:36:21 When I get emails from people thanking me for changing their lives. And I’m sure you get that as well. And it may be from India, it may be from some other place around the world, and that’s the person in the very back. Or if it’s out in a cemetery, a person standing by a tree but not part of the crowd just going, I’m here because that person touched me so deeply.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:43 Thank you for taking the time to do that, because that is an interesting element of the the mix, right? For you, you’re wanting to treat each student as if they were your daughter. The vast majority of those people are going to pass through and disappear out of your life? That doesn’t mean, however, though, that you didn’t have some positive impact on them. And so I really like that framing sort of both. And I think that actually brings up a value tension that a lot of us can get into. Right. And that value tension is there’s the people closest to me who deserve want and, and sometimes clamor for our attention and time. And then there might be some purpose that’s out there reaching all the students. And I think those are two values that often come into a tension that many of us feel a lot.
Vic Strecher 00:37:43 I’m so glad you brought this up, Eric, because think about these values in concentric circles. My inner circle might be my family, and when I ask people about purpose a lot and what their purpose is, very often they’ll just go, my family, of course, you know, I want my family and their kids and their kids and their kids to be well off. And so that’s where I’m giving my money and that’s why I’m working. That’s fine. I know opposition to that. But what about those people who start extending it out to people who may not even know them to the disadvantaged, continuing to go further and further out? I mean, if you even read the Bible and read about the Good Samaritan, you know, the Good Samaritan stops next to a person who’s been beaten up and robbed and naked and, you know, puts this person on their donkey walks, you know, walks the donkey over to an inn, pays the innkeeper for a night there, clothes him, feeds him, and never knew who he was.
Vic Strecher 00:38:43 I mean, you could go further and further in this concentric circle to that person on the side of the road. What would you do even if you met an alien who was beaten up like a true alien from a different planet? Would you pick them up? You know, that’s what E.T., in a way, the movie. ET is all about. And it took a child to accept ET, but they had to hide, ET from the parents and all the adults because they would be afraid and probably kill ate. So I.
Speaker 4 00:39:12 Love this.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:12 Quarantine period though. Might make sense, but what I think a quarantine period might be warranted a kind quarantine. I’m not saying you kill E.T., right, but I might be like, hey, I’m gonna. I care about you, I’m interested in you, but I’m going to let you stay over there for a little while while I gather some information.
Vic Strecher 00:39:32 Make sure you don’t destroy the world.
Vic Strecher 00:39:35 But you know, this. Idea of gradually moving out in concentric circles of the things and that matter most.
Vic Strecher 00:39:41 And after a while, you realize that the things that matter most are actually not things. They’re people or they’re living things that you can help support. Maybe it’s pets or other things. How far do you move out in that? To me, those are some of the most interesting people that I meet.
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Eric Zimmer 00:40:50 So what’s your purpose? You’ve given us one part of it to teach every student as if they were your daughter. Is that the the whole thing or do you have do you have more to it than that? And if so, would you be willing to share it?
Vic Strecher 00:41:02 Yeah, of course I have a personal purpose, which is to continue to grow, but also to have fun in my life. I don’t want, you know, I don’t want purpose to seem like it’s it’s kind of not fun because part of this is having a lot of fun in my life, and I enjoy my life. I have a hedonic side to my life, and I don’t shy away from that. I don’t apologize for it. I love those nice things as well. Good food or, you know, wine or whatever. Those things are. At the same time, as Aristotle said, I don’t want to be a grazing animal. I want to do things bigger than that. So I want to be a communitarian, and I pick certain causes that I really am very, very deeply involved in and work on.
Vic Strecher 00:41:49 Many are with seniors, so I’m very active with senior populations very active with student populations. And I love those groups. I want just generally in terms of life, to help people get out on the dance floor of life. And that may sound weird, but I think back to when I’m in this eighth grade sock hop, I’ll never forget this. And I was a very shy person, so I was always a wallflower. And the idea of a wallflower is you’re just standing on the side of the wall, and you’re waiting for somebody else to ask you to dance. But they’re waiting maybe for you to ask them to dance. So you’re never going out on the dance floor. And finally, I’ll never forget in eighth grade, there was this song that came out. It was, Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein, and it had this great guitar riff and. I just loved it. And it was like one of the first electronica pieces. And as soon as it came out, I thought, I love this song, I really want to dance.
Vic Strecher 00:42:46 And so I got the courage to ask this girl to dance, and we started dancing in the middle of this giant electronic riff. And I’m like, dancing like this. My eyes are rolling to the back of my head. And I’m spinning around. Kind of. And I opened my eyes and the entire dance floor. Everybody is circling me. And the girl I’m dancing with says. Are you okay? And it real. And it was very embarrassing, obviously, at the time. But now I realize that’s part of my purpose to get out on the dance floor and dance your dance and not care what other people say or think. And if they think that you’re having this seizure, well, maybe, you know, that’s your own joy that you’re expressing. And as soon as I learned that about myself, that I should stop caring so much about what other people think and care about what I think, care about my core values, and live authentically to that, my purpose deepened. And it does involve many concentric circles that go way, way out helping people.
Vic Strecher 00:43:49 And it involves working very hard to develop and maintain energy. I’ll turn 70 this year and I just feel, you know, we’ve we’ve done research asking people, what’s your age? And then what is your perceived age? What do you how do you feel? People with strong purpose, on average, feel they are six years younger than their actual age. And we recently did research looking at what are called epigenetic clocks. And our epigenetic clocks are looking at how our DNA actually expresses proteins that are positive for you or negative for you. Does it cause these proteins cause inflammation or are they antiviral proteins and things like that? And we found that people’s biologic or epigenetic clocks are much longer if they have a strong purpose. And the fascinating thing about that is these epigenetic clocks, many elements of them may well be transmitted to two year offspring, two year children, which is really strange. I never learned that in high school, but our epigenome may well many parts of it may be passed on to our offspring.
Vic Strecher 00:45:00 That is incredible. So what I’m doing in my own life, and trying to build from the tragedy of our daughter may hopefully benefit my offspring.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:10 So I want to come back to finding your own purpose. You’ve got an app purposeful and so people can check that out, which I assume guides you through finding a purpose as well as living into it.
Vic Strecher 00:45:22 Yeah, they can go to purposeful IO and they can get a free trial of this. It’s for a month. I mean, just try it, see if you like it. But yeah, people, we have found significant reductions in depression and anxiety, improvements in your ability to manage emotions, just, you know, working with Ethan Kross, this great psychologist, we’ve really found some improvements from that.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:46 Assuming someone doesn’t do that. We’ve talked about finding, you know, values from a list. These would be things like kindness or compassion or justice. we’ve talked about the headstone test as a way of sort of thinking about what you want people to say to you.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:02 another is to identify people you want to emulate. pick a guide is what they call it an acceptance of commitment therapy, which is also can be a very helpful one. And then it says to assemble all this into, you know, identify goals that matter across the different domains, assemble all these valued goals into an overall life purpose. And that’s where I’d like to spend a couple minutes, because there’s a lot swirling around there. Right? I can be like, all right. These five people are important to me as well. Or the listeners of the show and the students that come through my program. I value all of that. I value compassion, I value this, I have a goal to do that, I right, there’s all this stuff. And part of what I think gets overwhelming for people is that before we know it, we’ve got so many things that we value that we can’t end up valuing any of them. Right. We used to say in project management, if everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority.
Vic Strecher 00:47:01 Great point. It’s a great point.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:02 And so how does someone narrow this down to a statement that can, as we talked about in the beginning, can orient them when the they’re facing the two wolves or their various decisions? I’m not a believer that you’re going to write a statement and you’re suddenly going to know what to do at every juncture in your life, like life, it just isn’t that simple. But we can have something that’s orients us a little bit more. How do we go from all these various methods into something that looks like a purpose that we can write down and try and live by?
Vic Strecher 00:47:31 I love your question, by the way. Thank you for asking it. Often we can have what I call purpose conflict, where, you know, you have lots of purposes and they can clash with one another. This is where self-reflection comes in. Frankly, there’s a part of the brain that we look at when people are considering their core values. And that’s the part right behind your eyebrows.
Vic Strecher 00:47:54 It’s called a ventromedial prefrontal cortex. We have more of this than any other animal. It’s part of the prefrontal cortex. And we have more of that than any other animal. By threefold I mean it’s large amounts of this. It’s a very modern, very human part of the brain. It relates to decision making and reflection. But the interesting part is part of that ventromedial prefrontal cortex is also it’s also associated with the self. Who am I. And so the self reflection is true self reflection. It’s asking this question who am I? You might even go deeper than that if you think about this metaphorically as the roots of the tree and our behaviors, our emotions are the branches of the tree. The roots of the tree may be our core values, which develops into a purpose, which moves into and defines what the branches are going to look like. But you may go even deeper than the roots of the tree and say, what’s feeding that? Is it toxic? What’s feeding your values? Is it influencers who are telling you by this or by that? Or who’s wearing what? Or making sure you’re keeping up with the Joneses, whatever those things are? Is it toxic? Is it nourishing? Is it very helpful? What is that? It could be a religion for some people.
Vic Strecher 00:49:14 It could be a philosophy. It could be, for example, a stoic philosophy or an existential philosophy. So what are the things? It could be your family that’s feeding this or friends, people who you rely on, people who are are wonderful mentors to you as you are implying here. so I’d like to go back to that element. What is the reservoir that’s feeding into these values? Because once you have those values and it’s very strong. And then the tree starts straying over somewhere. There’s a tendency not for the root system to shift underneath the tree, but the tree to rebound back over the roots. That’s called, by the way, in psychology, cognitive dissonance. We tend to rebound back to where our core values are. So making sure those core values are rooted in something that’s nourishing is very important. I hope that’s not too vague, and I’m happy to get into greater specificity about that if you like.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:14 I don’t think it’s too vague, but okay, I have a way. Let’s try and let’s try and firm this up just a little bit in one particular thing.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:23 So let’s say that I take the headstone test right. And I imagine what I want people to say would I then. One way of establishing a purpose would be to take those basic statements and put them into one coherent statement that I then try and live by.
Vic Strecher 00:50:42 Yeah, I think so. So in this headstone test, it could be what’s on your headstone. It could be what what people say at your memorial service. And this is something my book talks about a lot. So if people say this was such a generous person or this was such, this person was such a kind person, or this person got me thinking in a new way, or this person who died made me a more curious person. I always brought up questions then, you know, in thinking about that, it’s almost like when you’re writing a book. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got in writing my book, Life on Purpose, was write your book review. Now write you know what you’d want book reviewers to write about your book now, because it shapes how you want people to think about what you want people to think, and what you want people to feel about your book.
Vic Strecher 00:51:32 Well, you can do that with your life as well. So you pick through these different pieces and say, is that something I want? Do I want to help make people more curious about life? And if you say yes, then you go, okay. I now have a purpose. That is something that I’m going to do. And I’m going to start figuring out how to become purposeful, to help people become more curious. So you work through that. And that’s leading a life of great purpose.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:00 Yeah. You know, for me, I have two sort of orientations that go. One is I just have a general it’s sort of just like a life sort of rule that I try and take, which is to leave every person, place or thing better for me. Having been there than before, I.
Vic Strecher 00:52:16 Got a great purpose.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:17 It’s just very simple. And again, it’s not like I do that all the time, you know. But it’s a it’s an orientation. And then the second is I just have sort of three words.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:26 You know, kindness is one, curiosity is the other. And health is the is the third. And there’s a lot of things tucked under them. Right. So when I look at kindness, I’m like, okay, well, that includes my son being kind to my son. You know how I treat other people. There’s a lot of stuff under there. Under curiosity is like my love of adventure and my love of learning and my. But when I, when I sometimes am at a place where I’m like, okay, I can’t decide what to do, I sort of say, well, what would these tell me to do? And then health, mental and emotional and spiritual health. So oftentimes that’s what I’m sitting on the couch. I don’t really feel like doing anything. I don’t feel good. And I’m what should I do? I look at those values and I’m like, oh, okay. Well, health tells me get up. And so for me, it’s those, those sort of three words.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:15 And then that one statement that that act as general steering devices.
Vic Strecher 00:53:22 I love that, you know, when we talk about people who tend to lean forward, you know, they’re going to still be blown over backwards. You know, when I say I’m going to teach my students as if they’re my own child with hundreds of students, just as you say, many, many, many of those students will go by. And maybe not like me or not feel
that I help them in that way, or go through and never tell me that that, you know, I changed their life in some way. One has to accept that and it’s totally fine. It’s an orientation, like you said, and being more intentional as you wake up. That’s something that I try to do in my intervention work. It’s something I hope my book helps people with. Something I hope our app helps people with. when you wake up in the morning, you very often look at the weather, say, what’s the weather going to be like? And you say, oh, okay, it’s going to rain, so I better wear a raincoat.
Vic Strecher 00:54:17 But do we wake up and go? I need to be inspiring today, or I really need to be thoughtful today, or I need to be very calm today. I need to be certain things. And you map that back to your purpose and you say, okay, this is a really important thing for me to focus on and that focal area, then I may need a little help. I may need a tip or two, or maybe I don’t. Maybe I just know I better really focus on my meditation this morning. But maybe I need to learn a new meditation. And that’s why we have built the things that we’ve built to help people make those kind of changes, to be purposeful every day, to bring their best self every day. Not that they will succeed, but that’s the intention. And as you say, the orientation one has. I’m going to I’m going to throw this out to I’m looking at that awesome hairdo that you have this mohawk, and I’m just going to throw this thing out, that I have a feeling that you also are a person who wants to express themselves in a creative way, in an independent way, and say, I’m my own person. I’m not going to let other people judge me. This is who I am, and I’m working on building. I’m a sculptor. I’m not a sculpture,. I’m not a sculptor. I’m a sculptor. And I’m sculpting myself in a way that I want to do that because this is my life and it’s no one else’s. And I have this brief period on this planet. And here’s what I am working on. And it’s a never ending process. Am I off base in that?
Eric Zimmer 00:55:50 No, I don’t think you’re off base. I don’t think a lot about expressing myself at this stage in my life. It just. I’m just doing.
Vic Strecher 00:56:00 You just have an awesome mohawk.Though, dude.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:01 Well, okay. Well, here’s the story on the Mohawk. Some listeners will have heard this. If I was to let my values list go a little bit longer, one of the ones that would be on there very close is, is freedom in one way.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:12 I mean, freedom, like, you know, we all mean it, but I mean it more specifically, which is freedom from. Nah, we used to say bondage of the self, which is thinking about myself all the time, but that also translates into freedom in a lot of different ways. I value it. And the Mohawk came about. It was one year after I left my my. My previous career in software and had been doing the one you feed for a year full time and I thought, well, what can I do today? You know, like, how do I celebrate this? And I thought, I’m just going to get a stupid haircut that I wouldn’t have gotten any time in the last X number of years, because it just might have been a career limiting move. Maybe, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have done it. And so I went and got a mohawk, thinking, I’ll get it, and tomorrow I’ll cut it off. And now, something like five years later, I still have it.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:59 So to me, it’s sort of like the Freedom Hawk, right? It’s the it’s the symbol for me of this freedom that I’ve worked really hard to kind of carve out.
Vic Strecher 00:57:10 That’s great. I love that expression of freedom. What you’ve just said, and it tells me a lot about you. It tells me more about your purpose, about what you value, what you try to live to every day. So. Yeah. In other words, I guess what I’m getting at to is sometimes finding a purpose might involve asking friends more about what or acquaintances, what they think about you, and getting that 360 feedback.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:38 One of the complaints that is often lodged in today’s world towards things like purpose or meditation or personal growth, is that it is only for people who are essentially wealthy enough to have time to do it. And you sort of take that head on in the book. I’m not saying that, of course, wealth doesn’t contribute to the choices we have. I mean, all those things have an element of truth in them.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:11 And something like purpose transcends well beyond that. So share with me your thoughts on that.
Vic Strecher 00:58:19 Yeah. You know, Viktor Frankl is one of my true heroes. He went through three concentration camps in World War two. He lost his family. He was a camp physician to prisoners. So one of the reasons he was still alive was that he could treat other people. But he also was a great observer of human beings. And he found that people who lost their purpose would tend to get sick, and then they would die, and it wasn’t as much the other way around. They wouldn’t just get sick and then lose their purpose and die. They would lose their purpose and direction, and then they would just, you know, without any direction, they would start going away. And he started talking with Abraham Maslow a lot. And Maslow has this famous hierarchy of needs where, you know, very basic safety and shelter or things like that, moving up through support from other people, moving to this concept of self-actualization.
Vic Strecher 00:59:15 And, you know, Maslow talked about peak experiences and things. And Viktor Frankl said, you know, actually having a sense of purpose is at the very basis of our needs. It’s essential for our needs. And I tested that out with a good friend of mine from Uganda who created teach for Uganda. He actually grew up. They called him and they called many people like this an Aids orphan where his parents died of HIV. And as a kid, his grandmother raised him. His grandmother actually walked and bussed him 300 miles to Kampala, to the palace of, you know, the person who runs the whole country and knocked on the gate basically and asked for an education. And eventually, I think it took about a month for him to finally see the wife of the president of Uganda. And basically he’s by himself, he’s five years old and he’s going, I would like an education. And he got an education. And from that he created teach for Uganda. I asked James Earnhardt Way, that’s his name.
Vic Strecher 01:00:19 Wonderful, by the way. Wonderful cause, wonderful charity. Teach for Uganda. But I said is purpose is just for people who have everything else. And he laughed. He said, I know you people in the West may think that, but purpose gives poor people hope. It’s essential for people who have nothing else. It’s the thing that people need. you might even argue in a bigger way that purpose is essential for life itself. Life exists until it doesn’t and you die, and then entropy occurs. Entropy is, you know, suddenly, you know, the dissolving of all the, you know, of all the elements of your body. And what purpose does is keep all those working. It keeps them all together, whether you’re a paramecium or an amoeba or you’re a human being. purpose and purpose is at different levels, obviously, but purpose is what keeps us alive. it’s absolutely fundamental, I think. Absolutely. It’s not just for rich people. And I’ve talked to many, many wealthy people about their purposes, and that’s great.
Vic Strecher 01:01:24 One thing that’s surprising is how many wealthy people don’t have purpose, or have a purpose that’s been so hidden and so focused on making money or those hedonic things that they’re terribly unhappy people, and you go, oh, you poor, unhappy, rich person, how can you care about that person? You understand that? But at the same time, you have to realize they’re very unhappy because they don’t have this transcending purpose. And you meet a lot of people in all walks of life who have tremendous, transcending purposes. And regardless of their circumstances, they can be happy people. And I think they improve their lives through this, too.
Eric Zimmer 01:02:00 Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to spend a couple more minutes in the post-show conversation, and we are going to talk about miracles, God, and the afterlife. which is a fascinating part of your book. And watching you as a scientist wrestle with some things that seemed unexplainable. So we’re going to head towards that.
Eric Zimmer 01:02:23 Listeners, if you’d like access to this conversation as well as ad-free episodes, a special episode I create each week just for you, where I present a teaching a song that I love, a poem that I love. And if you’d like to support the show because we can really use it, go to one you feed, join. Vic, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you.
Vic Strecher 01:02:47 I so appreciate talking to you as well. Your questions, as I’ve heard in other podcasts of yours, are very deeply educated, informed, thoughtful, and fun to answer. So thank you. I felt like I wanted to interview you as well.
Eric Zimmer 01:03:06 Well, maybe another time. Thanks, Vic.
Eric Zimmer 01:03:11 Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action. My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change.
Eric Zimmer 01:03:33 Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again one you feed. Net newsletter. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
