So we've talked about purpose in real life, about college and military, about work and workplaces, about aging and retirement. Now we're going to talk about family and community. I'm going to just forewarn you, there's very little research in this area. There's a little, but not so much. There's some new emerging research that just starting up with families, but we don't know too much about purpose and family. But one really important question that we need to answer is, how can a family create a purpose that ends up lasting for generations? To me that's such a cool question. First of all, the family is a unit. The family can have a purpose. You could talk over your dinner table, what a good friend of mine calls the gathering place. Talk with the family about what our purpose is as a family. What did we represent as a family? But really importantly, can we make that last from the current generation asking that question to the next generation with their children, and with their children. We also have to recognize the fact that there are different family members that may have very different purposes, and they may not necessarily connect with a family purpose. Allowing that person some leeway into saying, "I might not be connected with our family purpose", that may be really important. Also family purposes may change over time especially over generations. So just thinking about that, thinking about the family as an entity, as a unit of analysis, just like a corporation could have a purpose overall that people could align to, and feel proud of. A family can certainly do that as well. I asked Jim Loehr, who works with a lot of families of future budding sports stars or among people who are not going to end up making it in sports, but their family is pushing and pushing them. I asked him how he thinks about purpose among these kids that he is working with so closely. I want you to reflect on this question. Your son or daughter is chasing something. They're chasing golf, tennis, some sport, soccer, hockey, field hockey, do you like who they are becoming as a person, as a consequence of the chase. That's the only thing that matters. You are not to be a coach. You are not to be anything but the mother or the father because that can never be replaced. Your job is to make sure that they're becoming a better, more character-driven human being because of their exposure. Better able to handle the forces of life or get them out. It's a boondoggle. How about purpose-driven communities? Can a community have an overall purpose? Well, that's a really exciting concept. So this is a really cool study looking at census tracks basically communities around the Atlanta area that were at very high-risk for heart disease. Then they also looked at census tracks, communities who are at very low-risk for heart disease, the upper 25th percentile of risk and the very lowest 25th percentile for risk of heart disease. The lowest risk were in these blue areas, the highest risk were in the red areas, and here was the risk. So the red areas in these census tracks had a much higher risk of mortality than the blue areas they had a much higher risk of going to the emergency department. They had a much higher risk of being hospitalized. So these things were very strong risks. Then they took a look at neighborhood factors that contributed to risk, and they looked at individual factors that contributed to risk. Here's what they found. In looking at all of these different neighborhood, and individual factors, they found that aesthetic quality of the neighborhoods were really important. So the prettier that neighborhood was, the lower the risk level was, the more likely they were to be in those blue zones here. The more access they had to healthy foods, the more likely they were to be in blue zones. The more likely they were prone to violence, the more likely they would be in the red zones. But over and above all of those neighborhood factors, was one individual factor and you guessed it, it was having a strong purpose in life. So imagine how important this might be. Even though neighborhood and structural factors are incredibly important, it's also really important to think about having a strong purpose. When they looked at people who had a strong purpose, it was associated with greater mastery of the environment. What does that mean? Well, it means that if there's a dumpster in the middle of your neighborhood, that you might be able to organize your community to figure out how to put a fence around that dumpster or get rid of that dumpster, move it elsewhere. It was also associated with increased optimism. Purpose in life was also associated with increased resilient coping. So all the things that we've been talking about in the past of this course, were relevant here in this study. They also found the purpose in life was negatively associated with the perception of everyday discrimination. People with stronger purpose did not feel that discrimination. They also were less likely to develop depressive symptoms. So you see how purpose interacts with a difficult environment. Maybe making people more resilient in that difficult environment, but also very importantly, allowing people the confidence and mastery to be able to change their environment to improve it, which is even more important. You know how big cities often have ticker tapes that cut across different buildings and those ticker tapes have an indication of what the stock market is doing, for example. Well, what if there was a ticker tape that also had a purpose indicator in it? So my community has a medium amount of purpose, maybe a medium amount of energy or maybe a high amount of kindness or whatever. There are different levels of dignity. What if we started caring more about some of these issues than we did just about what the stock market is doing. That'd be a really interesting indicator for a community to think about the purpose, the energy, the kindness, the dignity of a community. Robert F Kennedy talked about this. He said, "Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task. It is to confront the poverty of satisfaction, purpose and dignity that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short except that which makes life worthwhile." So the aims of week 4 had been to understand how purpose operates in real life. In colleges, in the military, after military as a veteran, at work, in workplaces, in aging and retirement, among family members and in community. I asked Jim Loehr more about the fact that I think we can choose to be more purposeful if we want. If we do choose to be more purposeful, what purpose do we choose as a college student, in the military, as a veteran, at work? What purpose does a workplace choose? In aging and retirement? What purposes do we choose? What purposes can families or communities choose? I think it's really important to understand that we do indeed have choice in our purpose. That was again another confirmation in our living love. That purpose is king, and our energy is what makes everything happen in life. One of the things that I learned that was for me maybe the most significant understanding, and learning that connects to all of this is that I learned that we give life to whatever we give our energy to, for better or worse. So if I give energy to kindness in my own life, kindness will grow. The capacity for my time is if I give. Like a muscle? Exactly like a muscle. The same thing is true if I give energy to impatience or cynicism or sarcasm, those will grow. I can have world-class muscle capacity for sarcasm and cynicism of if I want to die with that, I can have it.
