So now we're going to talk about being a camel and we want to be a camel, in other words remember the Nietzschean metaphor that the camel says, "Load everything on my back, make me fully ladened with the joys and sorrows and the pain and suffering and beauty of the world. Once I am that way, once I understand these things, then I can become a lion." So this is really the book of being a good camel so that you can become a lion. So what does the camel need to do? By the way, my college students generally are camels. I would say that almost all of us are camels. Some of us are lions but most of us are probably camels, especially people who want to then expand their mind and learn how to build a more individuated purpose in their lives. So the camel would say, "Wow, I need to get curious. I really need to start exploring new things." I recommend by the way that my students take gap years. Gap year meaning I leave the university for a year, maybe even longer, maybe a year or two or three and I start learning new things about the world. I don't just travel to London or Paris or some other nice place as a tourist, I actually start exploring parts of the world that are maybe very poor, may be very developing, parts of the world that other people typically don't go to. So interesting parts like parts of Sub-Saharan Africa or parts of Asia or parts of South America, parts of the world where you will really learn how real people live, how the majority of the world actually lives and I think you'll really start becoming a more fully laden camel from that. I recommend that people actually for example, hang out with people who are dying. That's a really odd thing to say but a place that you can learn a lot about people is in a hospice. In hospices where people are dying or if you have a relative who is dying, you might ask them this question. In this stage of your life, what are you learning? This is a real quote from a person who is dying. "I'm learning about love and I'm learning about the importance of giving because this is not a way that I used to be." A lot of people who are dying say, "I have a new perspective on the world, I have new values that I never had before. Before I cared about making money and then I realized, I don't really want to be the richest person in the cemetery. Suddenly other things became more important to me like my family or like my community and I started valuing things in a new way. I valued love, I valued connections with other people, I valued learning about new things, I valued giving because those are the things that are really important in the world". What we've called before, eudemonic values or self-transcending values. People as they are starting to die ask the question, "Why didn't I act this way before because actually I'm quite happy with this eudemonic approach to living these eudemonic, self-transcending values. This has made me very happy and yet before when I had a whole bunch of things and I was acquiring new things all the time, I wasn't that happy". The camel is starting to learn now. The camel might, if they're interested in being a doctor and so many of my students come in, in fact, where I work at the University of Michigan, a large portion of incoming freshmen want to be doctors. So I recommend to them shadow a doctor, follow a doctor and not just for a few hours but follow them hopefully for a week or two if you can and ask them the question, what's it like to be a doctor? You may decide you don't want to be a doctor after that or you may decide this is exactly what I want to be. So that's going to give you a much stronger motivation to work harder as a pre-med student to be successful in getting into medical school but you also may really decide, that's not really what I want to be. Maybe I want to be a business-person. So you might ask a business-person, "Hey business-person, what's it like to work in a corporation?" You might find out that you love working in this corporation. You'll love that by shadowing this person. You may find, wow, that's the last thing I want to be and I thought I really wanted to work in a corporate setting. You may ask a person who makes canoes, "What's it like to make canoes?" You might ask a person who makes the most amazing ramen in Tokyo, "What's it like to make the most amazing ramen?" So in other words, go out to people, shadow them, ask these questions, be curious. You may ask a bar-tender, what's it like to be a bar-tender? Because maybe that's what you end up being and you'll end up being the most purposeful bar-tender on the planet and love your life. Maybe you could ask a person who is poor, "What's it like to be poor?" You could go to other countries and find out how other people live in the real world and learn a lot. I ask and I'm very annoying about this. I'd like to ask almost every taxi driver when I'm riding in a taxi. So do you have a purpose in your life? Just about every taxi driver I talk with has a great answer to this. They do indeed have a purpose in life and very often it's, I came from this other country here so that my daughter could be the first person to graduate from college. Wow, what an awesome transcending purpose. That's great and so that's why they are driving this taxi. It's really important to understand from people, from around the world, other countries, other situations, what purpose do they have in their lives and a really important question to ask is something that I asked James Arinaitwe. James Arinaitwe his Ugandan name is Kassaga. So James Arinaitwe or Kassaga Arinaitwe is a person who has an amazing purpose. He found Teach For Uganda. A Teach For Uganda is very special because it educates both little boys and little girls, teaching them English, teaching them Math skills and Science skills and other things, basically giving them a future. In Uganda, just like in many parts of the world, it's not that cool from society to educate girls. He rejected that, he's a lion. He said, "No, I have my own values and it's very important to educate girls as well as it is boys." So that's what Teach for Uganda does and they've taught tens of thousands of children giving them all a future. I asked James this question. I asked, "Is purpose just for rich people? Is purpose for people who have everything else?" James answered this way. He said, "Families that breakdown are the ones that have no purpose or vision for the family. Purpose goes hand in hand with hope. Hope for their children. Hope for a better life. In the West people like you, people may not relate to this but this is how we think. Purpose sustains poor people." This is so important, it's so essential.
