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I realized a number of years ago with my colleagues that and then this really came as a shock to me Talking to my 19 year old students 20 year old students who’d been in the formal education system for say 18 15 years and What I realized look the it was within a course. I was teaching called maps of meaning which is based on the first book that I wrote And it’s a it’s a book about how our existence or even our perceptions our motivations our emotions are grounded in narrative they’re grounded in stories And and I believe the scientific evidence for that is actually overwhelming As well as the as the cloqually of it evidence so to speak by Jesus taught in parables Yeah, so it’s the most effective way of teaching and well look you go you go We’ll pay money to go see movies you to be instructed by stories. It’s it’s a very deep part of our character in any case I realized that my students hadn’t ever really been asked to write their own stories and You know you can write a story about who you’ve been and you can write a story about who you are now but you can also write a story about how you who you could be and You know they’d had they had written essays on all sorts of abstract topics and been asked to think To some degree deeply about those topics, but no one had ever sat them down and said explicitly okay look kid like Here’s the deal You can have what you want and need Assuming you’re taking care of yourself right assuming that you’re you’re starting out with the proper attitude towards yourself which is that you’re worthy of care and Respect and and there’s something to you that that’s valuable that at least could be developed You need to give yourself that amount of credit like like you would with anyone that you might Be willing to attempt to care for and love and then the next Question is alright. You can have what you want, but you have to specify it What would you like from your friends three to five years down the road? What would you like your friendship network to look like? What would you like to do? Well, how would you like your career to to shape itself? How are you going to take care of your family? You’re you’re and then what about children and a and a and a long-term mate wife or husband? What are you going to do with your time outside of work? That’s useful and engaging and meaningful and productive How are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically and how are you going to withstand? Temptation so that it doesn’t take you down in the particular way that temptation might take you down And so you’re asked to write a few sentences Not to be obsessive about it, but to sketch it out like a bad first draft You know and then you’re asked to write for 15 minutes. It’s like okay It’s three to five years down the road and you have what you need and want to make your life What it needs to be So that you can be a good person in the face of the suffering of life, what does it look like and Then we ask people to do the contrary which I think is also useful which is alright. Well consider for a moment your the multitude of your faults and The direction those faults could pull you in and everyone knows that everyone has a sense of how they would fall apart in their own Particular manner with their own particular weaknesses It’s it’s three to five years down the road and you’ve let that part of your character dominate What particular corner of hell is it that you’re now occupying? And so now you have Something to aim at you have a purpose right and and that that’s motivating people need a purpose in life It’s it you need a purpose neuro chemically Because without a purpose you don’t feel any positive motivation or any positive emotion Like our positive emotion is linked to our pursuit of valuable goals that’s how our brains are are are set up and and so you need that that positive goal and also to stop you from being unduly uncertain and anxious because nothing is specified enough and you need something to run away from and So you can run away from the worst in you you can escape from the worst in you and you can Move towards the best in you and and then we have people write out a strategic plan for the accomplishment of their of their goals It’s called the future authoring program by the way It’s available online at a site called self authoring comm and we we’ve tried it with thousands of university students now and It’s had a remarkable effect on their retention The effect is approximately 25 percent we decrease dropout by 25 percent And it seems to be most effective for the most disaffected students, so it works better for men Because women are outperforming men academically and it actually works better for non-west non-western ethnic minority men Having a tremendous impact on their likelihood of staying in university and also on their grades And so we were speaking this morning about the potential utility of well of offering that to your to your online students in the hope that that would But but the thing that was so strange to me when I was developing that program And this is like it was a miracle of negative miracle of sorts it just struck me as so pulpably surreal that we would spend 15 years educating people and never once Sit them down seriously and say okay look You can craft yourself to some degree you have the capacity to write your destiny not not in its entirety, but at least as a sequence of aims and Having done that you you need also to justify it So for example one of the things we ask people to do once they’ve specified a goal is to say well Okay, imagine you achieve this goal. Okay, so why is that good for you? Why is it good for your family? Why is it good for your community? you know because if you want to be locked in on a goal in a manner that’s sufficient to take you through the trials that will occur while you’re Pursuing this goal especially if it’s a high-order goal, and it’s difficult then you need an explicit philosophy a Rationale for why this is worth pursuing it’s like well Here’s what it’ll do for me in the sense of the development of my character and my capacity to deal with the world and here’s how it’ll strengthen my family and Here’s how it will benefit the community and then having formulated those arguments you have that you have that that that body of carefully articulated thought that Enables you to chase away the doubts that will inevitably accrue as you’re attempting to do something difficult you have to Negotiate with yourself and you have to justify what you’re doing carefully and philosophically deeply so that you have the commitment and the strength of character that enables you to Push through times that are difficult and so well, so we discovered that That hadn’t been done except in in in Isolated cases there were some business people who are working on similar projects and a man at the University of Texas at Austin James Pennebaker and the program has been phenomenally successful and thousands of people have now done it online and so And I’ll close this by saying if you have any interest in doing this which I would recommend It’s also okay to do it badly Because a good first draft aim for your life is incomparably better than vague nihilistic hopelessness and And you’re not gonna get it right anyways, because what do you know, you know, you’re gonna pursue your goal avidly for a year or so Especially at your age and you’re gonna learn a bunch and then your trajectory is gonna shift But it doesn’t matter because the trick is to get the process of moving forward toward the aim Started and then to have the humility to make course changes along the way as you inform yourself And so it gets the ball rolling and so it’s been very gratifying to have developed that because it seems to have been of great Use to many people