Name: How to Live a Meaningful Life | Brian S. Lowery | TED
Uploaded: 2025-06-12T10:37:29.000Z
Duration: 14 min 3 s
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The experiences we have, the possibilities of personal achievement.

You could create a huge successful business.

And when you're successful, it feels incredible.

Success, the flush of excitement, the celebration, and you should celebrate, the congratulations, the posting on Instagram, wherever you put your stuff up, it all feels great.

But when that fades, when that starts to fade, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once, a question comes up.

And so I'm going to tell you a little story about myself to give you an idea.

When I got my job, I was elated, elated, and a little bit terrified.

And I was terrified because when you get a job like that, you know you're going to be reviewed in about seven years.

And either you're going to be given tenure, more or less a job for life, or you're going to get fired.

It's a little bit like that movie, Glenn Gary, Glenn Goss, the scene where Alec Baldwin's character goes in to give the motivational speech.

And he says, it's going to be a competition.

It's a little bit like that, except there's no second prize.

And it turns out, as you might imagine, that has a way of focusing your mind.

So I was really, really focused on doing good research, getting my papers published, doing well in the classroom, and all the other little things you need to do to get tenure.

And it was a huge relief, and I was so excited.

And I reflected back, and I thought about the time I spent in undergrad, five years in grad school, the tears, and there were a lot of tears, the seven years of trying to get tenure.

And I had expected, I had hoped that when I made it past that, when I succeeded, when I went through that threshold, life would feel different.

But it turns out that wasn't what happened.

Now, when psychologists talk about meaningfulness in life, what they're talking about is a sense that our lives matter, that the world makes sense, that we are more than the sum of our minutes, days, and years on this planet.

Now, the research on meaningfulness in life suggests there are three big ideas associated with meaningfulness in life.

After winter comes spring, after spring comes summer, you get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, you have breakfast, you get the kids off to school, you go to work.

Those little routines make the world feel knowable, predictable, coherent.

Now, when you think about personal achievement, it does create sometimes this experience of coherence because we achieve within a framework.

I understood what they expected of me for tenure.

I understood that if I got my papers published, that I did well in the classroom, that I talked to the right people, I did all the networking, there was a good chance I'd get tenure.

If you're trying to lose weight, you understand.

If you change your diet, you exercise, the weight will come off, or at least we hope so.

Now, those things, that framework gives the world a sense of coherence.

Second big idea associated with meaningfulness in life, second big idea, purpose.

Now, sometimes people use the term purpose as a synonym for meaning in life, and that's not how I mean it here.

Purpose is a way of thinking about what your life can be and should be in the future.

When you get up in the morning, you know what you need to do.

Here's where the drive for personal achievement is strongest.

When I was worried about tenure, I knew exactly what I needed to do when I got up in the morning.

When you have a goal, when you're trying to achieve something, you have a clarity about what you should do, how to direct your behavior.

So that's the second big idea is purpose.

Now, the third big idea, by many considered to be the most important, is significance.

Now, the way I like to think about significance is the sense that you can transcend yourself, that you are more than what you are right now, that you will continue to matter into the future beyond this moment.

This is where I think personal achievement falls short.

By definition, personal achievement focuses on you.

If that's all there is, it's difficult to have significance.

So when I want to think about meaningfulness in life and significance in particular, it brings to mind a quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

So Leonardo da Vinci was purported to have said on his deathbed, I have offended God and mankind because my work did not achieve the quality it should have.

Now, I wasn't there, so I don't know if he said that exactly in that way, but here's the thing.

You understand what it means to have even the most glorious achievements and still ask, is this enough?

When I look back and think about my time early on in my career, I think about when did it feel meaningful?

So one of the things that faculty do is train the next generation of faculty.

And so you have PhD students and you have them for a significant amount of time, often could be five to six years.

And the relationships are pretty intense.

So let me tell you about my first student, Miguel Lanzueta.

So Miguel was born in El Paso, Texas, in a relatively low income area, really smart kid, does well in school, ends up at the University of Texas at Austin, which is a great university, does well there, eventually ends up in the PhD program at Stanford.

So Miguel gets there the year before I do.

And by his own account, he's having a tough time.

And it's rough in part because he doesn't have the cultural capital that many people that go places like Stanford have.

He doesn't understand how the place works.

Now, when I arrive, I'm really impressed because he's so smart, he's ambitious, and he's asking questions and interested in things that I'm interested in.

We see each other almost every day, almost every day for those four years.

And some days we're working together 10 to 12 hours a day.

And what I remember about that time was that I was really worried about doing enough to make sure he would be successful.

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How to Live a Meaningful Life | Brian S. Lowery | TED

intense

eventually

incredible

opportunity