We all have to make certain choices in life, such as where to live and how to earn a living. Parents and peers influence our major life choices, but they can also steer us in directions that leave us deeply unsatisfied. This week: a favorite conversation with psychologist Ken Sheldon about the science of figuring out what you want. He says there are things we can do to make sure our choices align with our deepest values.If you're not yet a member of Hidden Brain+, this is a particularly good time to give our podcast subscription a try. We’re extending our standard seven-day trial period for listeners on Apple Podcasts. Sign up in January and you’ll get 30 free days to try it out. If you're listening in Apple Podcasts, just go to the Hidden Brain show page and click "try free." Or you can go to apple.co/hiddenbrain and click "try free.” Thanks for listening and supporting the show — we really appreciate it.
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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant. Religions tell us they have the key to our best lives. Advice columnists tell us how to solve problems in our relationships. And airport bookstores are stuffed with tomes on how to grow rich, manage our time better, and build effective habits. All these sources of counsel can teach us valuable skills such as planning, patience, and perseverance.
These can be vitally important to success. But in a world overflowing with useful advice, why do so many people feel stuck? One answer, many of us are pursuing goals that are misaligned with our own deepest values and preferences. This week, in the latest installment of our Wellness 2.0 series, what psychology can teach us about choosing a meaningful path for our lives.
When you're a kid, grown-ups ask you what you want to do when you're an adult. When you're a teenager, college counselors ask you what you want to study. Once you join the workforce, managers ask you what your goals are for the next few years. At every stage, we are really being asked the same question. What do you want to do with your life?
At the University of Missouri, psychologist Ken Sheldon studies the science of knowing what to want, how to set your sights on targets that will actually make you happy if you achieve them. Ken Sheldon, welcome to Hidden Brain. Hey, I'm happy to be here. I want to take you back to 1981, Ken. You just finished college and moved to Seattle. You wanted to become a musician. You started a band.
How did it go? rock musicians can be kind of flaky and unreliable and we were all in our 20s and everybody had different goals everybody was kind of self-centered and they might not have been committed the way we thought that they were or maybe the guitarist slept with the singer unexpectedly and You know, there's a lot of things that can just get in the way of having a smoothly functioning unit.
We just weren't able to make the agreements and follow through with them that we would have needed to make real progress.
I understand that at one point you were recording songs for a radio song contest and things didn't quite go smoothly.
Yeah, I had recorded my tracks on the song that we were going to submit to this contest. And I left for a weekend hiking trip, expecting that the bandmates would put their tracks down so we could send in the song the next Monday. And I got back and nobody had done anything. And it was very disappointing.
I remember walking in the rain, it was Seattle, wondering what to do next, and coming to the decision that this was probably not going to give me a way to make a living, and that music, or at least this particular band episode, was not going to work out. And that I needed to get serious about maybe something else.
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