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I want to begin by thanking you Adam grant for having me here and thanking Wharton for hosting me and thank all of
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you guys for being here my name is Emily Esfahani Smith and I'm the author of the
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power of meaning I've been working as a journalist and a writer for for several
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years now and it's really special for me to be here with you because but the idea
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for my book was born in this very building several years ago when I was a grad student sitting downstairs
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listening to a lecture about the difference between a happy life and a meaningful life and so I was so excited
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by what I heard that I eventually wrote a book about it so it's really it's
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amazing for me to be here with you in this place I want to begin by telling you the story of a woman named Ashley
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Richmond who I had the chance to spend some time with several years ago so Ashley doesn't lead a very glamorous
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life she doesn't work for a fortune 500 company she didn't go to a fancy school
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like Penn she doesn't shop at places like Whole Foods what she does do is spend the majority of her time shoveling
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animal poop from one place to another her hours are terrible and so is her pay and she rarely gets vacations off and
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yet Ashley told me that this is her dream job Ashley is a zookeeper who cares for giraffes Wallabies and
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kangaroos at the Detroit Zoo Ashley doesn't always feel happy or good when she's working in fact 80% of her time
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she said is spent cleaning animal waste which can be physically grueling when you're dealing with large animals like
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giraffes and yet she told me that her job is really meaningful in fact she thinks of it as a calling when I asked
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her several years ago what makes your life meaningful this is what she told me my purpose she said isn't cleaning up
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animal waste my purpose is caring for the animals and doing everything I can to make their lives as good and as rich
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as possible none of the animals here she said chose to be here and yet I have a responsibility to ensure that their
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lives are as healthy and assume is I can make them so my book was inspired by the stories of people like
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Ashley people whose stories I thought weren't being celebrated in our culture
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and in our conversations about what a good life is in our culture we're constantly getting the message that a
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good life is a happy life that we should pursue happiness and a life of comfort and ease and that if we do we'll end up
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being healthier and more successful better liked more attractive even the whole point and purpose of life were led
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to believe is to feel happy but as I was reflecting on that message several years
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ago in this building I realized that so many of the people who I admire most and
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who I look up to weren't focused on the single-minded pursuit of their own happiness they were devoted instead to
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leading meaningful lives in other words they were focused on how they could contribute to and improve the world
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around them so these were you know the quiet heroes of everyday life the nurses the teachers the parents the plumbers
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the bureaucrats who through their contributions helped made the world go round but they were also the great men
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and women of history Socrates and the Buddha Martin Luther King jr. and mother Teresa people who led hard lives but
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good lives so I think at this point I should say I don't have any problems with happiness I like to feel happy and
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I want the people I love to be happy as well but I do think that the happiness zeitgeist has led us astray so happiness
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is a positive emotion it comes and goes it's ephemeral and scientists have found
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that when we chase happiness and when we set it as our goal and pursue it single-mindedly that we ultimately end
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up feeling unhappy and even lonely but it's different with meaning so meaning
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the defining feature of a meaningful life is connecting and contributing to something that's bigger than you are and
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when we devote ourselves to this when we devote ourselves to leading meaningful lives we ultimately experience a deeper
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and more enduring form of well-being we feel more satisfied more at peace more content and I think this makes sense
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because human beings are meaning seeking creatures we yearn for meaning when we look up at the stars for example we
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don't see random balls of fire we see constellations we see warriors and bears we craft myths and stories
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about what we see we wonder about our place in the universe how the world came to be how we can make our individual
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lives count in the grand scheme of things we all want to know that our lives amount to more than the sum of our
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experiences that they matter we all need a why or reason to help us get through the good and the bad of life
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and no to people I found researching my book will necessarily have the same why so for the last several years I've
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traveled all across the country and I've spoken to dozens of people about what
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makes their lives meaningful people like Ashley but also a former drug dealer and
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astronaut a woman dying of cancer I spoke to psychologists and sociologists and philosophers and I
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wanted to know what exactly the building blocks of a meaningful life are and how
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we can build them up in our own lives along the way no two people told me the exact same things we all find meaning in
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our own individual ways at the same time there were four themes I found that came
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up again and again in the stories that I heard and in the research that I read when people talk about what makes their
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lives meaningful they talk about having a sense of belonging so being in relationships where we feel valued and
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like we matter and where we treat other people like they're valued and like they
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matter they talked about having purpose so something worthwhile to do with their
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time they talked about storytelling or crafting narratives that help them understand themselves and their place in
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the world and they talked about transcendence these moments in nature or through prayer and ritual where they
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felt a sense of self loss and connected to something much bigger than themselves
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so those are the four pillars or building blocks of a meaningful life purpose belonging storytelling and
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transcendence so I talked about all of them in my book but I want to dive a little bit more closely into
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storytelling right now because I think it might be the most interesting and perhaps unexpected of the pillars so
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storytelling is really about your own life story what's the story that you tell yourself about
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life it's the act of taking our experiences and weaving them into a narrative that explains who we are and
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where we came from it's it's how we make sense of our experiences and the person
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that we've been and it's the act itself and not necessarily even sharing our
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story with others that really builds meaning because it provides a framework it helps us see the patterns within our
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lives and it gives our lives a sense of coherence and integration but not all stories it turns out are created equal
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when it comes to leading a meaningful life the psychologist Dan McAdams at Northwestern University has studied
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people leading meaningful lives and he's found that they all tell particular
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kinds of stories about their lives in particular they tell stories of redemption which are stories that move
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from bad to good so let me give you an example I spoke to a man several years ago named Carlos Eyre so Carlos he's in
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his 50s now and he grew up in Havana Havana Cuba and he was just a child when the Cuban Revolution happened and he
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talks about the Revolution as the place in his where his narrative broke into so
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before the Revolution he was leading a really happy pampered life in Havana doing what mischievous boys do and after
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the Revolution he was forced to flee to America his parents did not come so he was an orphan he lived in dire poverty
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experienced discrimination daily for being Cuban so it was it was a very difficult life and yet as he was telling
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me his story he said even though that was hard and even though the Revolution completely changed the path of my life I
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grew as a result of it I became a more compassionate person because I suffered and so I began to understand the
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suffering of others more deeply my spiritual life deepened he said I was able to discover what my purpose
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ultimately is which is he's a historian so he that that's what his purpose is it
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was difficult for him and it took him years to make sense of that traumatic experience in his life and it was a
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painful process but it was one that ultimately brought him a sense of peace and resolution about a difficult chapter
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in his life story now you can imagine Carlos taking the same exact events and experiences and
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crafting a very different type of story about them so he could have said I was leading a really wonderful life in Cuba
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in my childhood and then the Revolution happened and it ruined everything he never saw his father again for example
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but he didn't tell that story he chose to tell a different story and psychologists find that when people
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tell the negative kinds of stories the stories that move from bad if Empress excuse me from good to bad I was in
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Havana Cuba and then the revolution happened and then everything was ruined but they actually experienced more
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depression and they're more likely to experience their lives as less meaningful but Carlos chose to tell a
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different story and we all have the power to do that we're all the authors of our own stories we can interpret our
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stories we can revise them and we can edit them to lead more meaningful lives and to experience more meaning in life
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and one of my favorite studies about this was actually by Adam grant and a researcher at the University of Michigan
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named dick Jane Dutton and they had participants come into their lab and they divided them into two and they told
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half of them to tell a story about themselves being a generous person and they told the other half to tell a story
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about themselves as being the recipient of someone else's generosity and what
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they found was that the people who told the story about themselves being generous ultimately went out after the
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study and were more generous the story they told changed their behavior and led them to lead life in more meaningful
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ways there's a myth in our culture that this search for meaning that leading a
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meaningful life is some grand pursuit that you have to cure cancer or write the great American novel in order to
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lead a meaningful life but that's not true if you want to lead a meaningful life be a storyteller take ten minutes
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of your day and reflect on what the defining moments of your life are ask yourself how do these experiences make
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me grow it might be a painful process because some of us are shaped most profoundly through suffering and law
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but try to find a positive meaning in those experiences we all have the power to tell and to retell our life story in
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more positive ways so tell a story that moves you forward thank you [Applause]