How Doing a Life Review Can Help Your Understand Your Past, Present, and Future
Episode Stats
Summary
Who and where do you want to be in the future?It s a question we typically answer by looking ahead, but my guests would say you can actually best find the answer, by looking back. Bill Damon, a Stanford psychologist who studies adult development and purpose and the author of the book A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present, explains why you should consider doing something called a Life Review.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast who and where do
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you want to be in the future it's a question we typically answer by looking ahead my guests would
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say you can actually best find the answer by looking back his name is William Damon he's a
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Stanford psychologist who studies adult development and purpose and is the author of the book a round
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of golf with my father the new psychology of exploring your past to make peace with your
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present on the show today bill explains why you should consider doing something called a life
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review it's a process you can initiate at any age in order to get greater clarity on what is now
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probably a blur of memories around how you ended up who and where you are today bill explains the
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steps of doing a life review and how doing one can do two things for you one help you think more
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positively and gratefully about your life story even its regrets and understand why you made certain
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choices and developed as you did and then two help you refine your life's purpose recognize that you
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can change and grow no matter where you are in the life cycle and chart a course for further development
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in the future bill does this through the lens of the fascinating story around how he came to do
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his own life review in order to better get to know himself by getting to know his father who he was
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told growing up was killed in world war ii but bill would discover in fact survived the war and led a
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more complex life than bill could have imagined after the show's over check out our show notes at
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awim.is slash life review bill damon welcome back to the show thank you always delighted to be here
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so we had you on way back in 2017 to talk about your book the path to purpose and this is about your
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research on where you look at how young people adolescents young adults develop their sense of
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purpose you got a new book out called rounded golf with my father and this is both a exploration of
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a psychological concept that we'll talk about life story but it's also a memoir where you use this
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concept of telling or recreating life stories to explore the relationship or non-relationship
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relationship that you had with your father so let's talk about this idea of a life review
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what is a life review who developed it and what are the benefits of of a life review
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a life review is a way to continue your development of purpose throughout the lifespan
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as you mentioned earlier when we talked a few years ago i had focused most of my work on young
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people developing purpose adolescents young adults and i've since then become more and more interested
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in purpose throughout the lifespan and one way to continue purpose learning and it's always
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important to keep your purpose alive or to look for new purposes as you grow through adulthood and later
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in adulthood and one way to do that is to look back on your life whatever you've done and think about
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what the high points were what the choices you made were what the failures and regrets you have
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were how you can learn from them and how you can bring it forward to first of all understand who you are
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in the present and how you got there but also to make choices about your future because you always
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have a future as long as you're alive and the future means figuring out how you're going to change how
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are you going to adapt to new conditions and the point of the book really is that thinking positively
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about the future means that you really have to come to terms with your past including including some of
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the regrets you have and my book is full of uh full of missed opportunities and regrets a lot of them have
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to do with my relationship with my father or my non-relationship and that's the story that i tell in the book
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using myself as a case in point for this idea of purpose development throughout life
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well this idea of life review this has been around for since like world war ii you saw the beginnings of
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it with victor frankel and his logo therapy and then there's a guy named butler who took the idea of
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finding meaning in your life by basically doing a life review what was butler's idea like why did he
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think okay we're gonna you create this story about yourself and what was he hoping it would you be
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able to do with that yeah butler was an amazing person he died in 2007 he was a psychiatrist and a
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legendary psychiatrist he founded the national institute of aging he wrote a pulitzer prize winning
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book he coined the term ageism in fact so he was a great figure a great public figure early in his
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career before he started before he moved to the stage of being a public leader he developed the
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method of the life review and he developed that to deal as a psychiatrist with his patients that were
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battling depression late in life and he figured the reason they were getting so depressed is that
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they were thinking about their pasts in the wrong way and in a very haphazard way remembering the
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things that really stung them in the past and not getting over them and thinking oh gee i made bad
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choices if only my life had turned out this way rather than that way or if only i'd made this choice
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rather than that choice my life would be great all of these kind of defeatist attitudes and so he worked
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on a life review that was a systematic way of thinking back on your life thinking about what was
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meaningful and purposeful and everybody has those things and also thinking about the idea that you
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wouldn't be the person you are now if you hadn't made those choices even if the choices felt like
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mistakes at the time and so it's a very compelling method i am not a clinical psychologist or a
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psychiatrist and my book has nothing to do with depression but it does have to do with attempting to
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cast a positive light on your life and making the best use out of your past memories that can prepare
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you for a hopeful positive and purposeful future and i'll just say one more thing about this whole
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idea of looking back into the past a lot of people say well gee you know i gotta get over the past it's
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kind of dead or it's you know why think backwards why not just look forwards you know the kind of don't
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look back attitude but i quote faulkner and i think faulkner was right on this and the quote is the past
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is not dead it's not even past it's part of who we are and either we come to terms with it or we don't
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but if we don't we're going to be living for a long time with regrets and a kind of a disorganized
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and not even authentic view of who we are how we got to this point and where we should go moving
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forward well i think a point that butler made and you make too is that we're always telling stories
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to ourselves like butler noticed that his patients with depression they were telling a story to
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themselves it was just they weren't even thinking about it and as a consequence it was a story that
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you know tended to go negative because they had that negativity bias what he said okay if you're
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going to tell a story about yourself we have to do that to develop ego integrity to have a sense of
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self let's at least be a little bit more systematic about it yep that's exactly right telling stories
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is a human it's a feature of human life and in fact we tell little stories every time we take a trip to
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a store and come back and say hey i got a great bargain or some anything even trivial little stories
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all the time and that's natural and it's good but in addition to doing it spontaneously if you do it
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thoughtfully and intentionally and really go back over your life to take a look at try to understand
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what was important to you in your past life and why does that matter and what meaning can that bring
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to your present and future life that can really give you a uplifting sense of who you are and a lot
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of confidence moving forward when did you pick up on the idea of life review would be useful to help
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people develop a sense of purpose and meaning because this is your area of work purpose and
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meaning when did you make that connection between the two ideas yeah well intellectually i made it
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through my work because i do read of course in the field of lifespan developmental psychology
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and so i knew about butler's work and about people like dan mcadams who's done
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landmark work on narrative identity so i knew about all this but i never really brought it home
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what brought it home to me was the amazing discovery that my daughter led me to having to do with my
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father and i use this as the case in point i use myself as a case study in the book about how somebody
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in my early 60s which is pretty late in life can transform a view of who you are and how you got to that
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place by doing the life review and i was shocked into doing it by the revelation that my daughter
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came up with that my father who had abandoned me at birth was actually not a no account scoundrel he
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had a life and an interesting life he was dead at the point that my daughter discovered this but
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she came up with information that fascinated me and gave me a sense of who he was and i did at that
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point the life review including research on who he was and got to know him in absentia and that
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meant a lot to me and it really did fill in my life story all right so you're exploring your
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relationship with your father that was a way for you to put theory into practice well let's talk about
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that a little bit about your relationship with your father so as a boy you never knew your father
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growing up what were you told you know what happened to your dad that he died that what was the story
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that you were told as a young man and that you believed until you know your 60s right well my mom
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told me during my whole childhood and adolescence that quote my father was missing in world war ii
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that phrase was like a mantra it was the only thing i ever heard and whenever anybody asked me
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where's your father who is your father when i was in school my friends my teachers i would repeat
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that mantra he's missing in world war ii i assumed that meant he was killed in action
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and that's actually on my school records i found when i was in college my mother showed up in my
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college dorm one day and revealed to me that he was still alive and in fact she said he's been sending
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me a hundred dollars a month child support and she felt maybe she should share that with me because
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i was i had a scholarship to college and she wasn't contributing to my college expenses i was
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kind of shocked i thanked her for her generosity i refused the uh share of the child support
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and the conversation lasted about a minute she lived another 42 years and we never discussed the matter
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again i felt embarrassed i she was basically revealing that she'd hidden his existence from me
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from my whole childhood but my other my attitude really was well okay this guy abandoned me he must
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really be a irresponsible cad i don't want to know about him i don't want to have anything to do with
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him and so i refused in my mind to even think about him for the next 40 years or 50 years or 40 years
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of my life and it was only when my own daughter got interested and started poking around in online
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archives and so on and came up with information that i kind of realized you know i can't just live
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my whole life in denial and he's a guy that he's dead now but i'd like to know more about him at that
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point so i began finding out what he was like at the point where my daughter made a phone call
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to me a very consequential call saying dad i don't know if i should be telling you this
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this might upset you but i found out who my grandfather is and who your father is and that
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got me hooked and you noticed you you highlight too in your research you've noticed this with a lot
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of individuals when they get to about your age like their 60s um they they take an interest in
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genealogy to figure out who they are like what do you think is going what is it about that age and
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adult development that i don't know people feel nudged to to research about their their roots
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yeah exactly it's exactly as we talked about earlier that people have a need to think about
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what's been important in their lives and that need always comes up during any transitions any important
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life transitions of course it comes up when you graduate college and so on earlier but later in
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life when you especially when you get to your 50s 60s and so on a lot of things that you were committed
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to begin not necessarily going away but begin to take less of your time in my case my children
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had left home and gone on to their own lives and i'm not a micromanaging parent i keep in touch
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with them but it's not the same as when they're in your home you begin thinking about retirement
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and so a lot of the purposes that you have in life begin to become withdrawn and you think about
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who am i and what am i going to do moving forward i still have a lot of life to live and i think that
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that's why people the baby boomer generation for example of of which i am sort of part of is so
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fascinated by their ancestry and by their own earlier life because that's a way to construct
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how you got to this point and what is important for you for your parents and who you are and not
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only who you are this is really the main point but who you want to be going forward because we are
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always in a position to learn to build new things in life to reconstruct our lives to develop
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our identity further in a positive way and that's what keeps us alive and we still have a lot of
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life to live even when we hit our our 60s so that's i think that's why people are drawn to this naturally
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yeah it sounds like it's preparing you for that generative phase of life yeah yeah exactly okay so
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the phone call from your daughter saying hey i dad i found out some stuff about your dad he he didn't
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disappear he wasn't a scoundrel he actually had an entirely different life on his own and we'll talk
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about what that life looked at and it would sound like his life was enriched and he contributed to
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a higher cause than himself had his own family so you find this out and you're like wow i gotta i gotta
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explore this some more so let's use this as a starting off point to talk about this life review process
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and the first part is basically just collecting information to construct that story how did you
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start that collection process well number one i got in touch with my father's still living relatives
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he had a younger sister who was fortunately 12 years younger than him so she was actually pretty vital
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in her maybe age 80 or something like that and she welcomed me i went to visit her and she revealed a lot
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of stuff that opened new doors for example she revealed to me that he had gone to the same
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high school that i went to a private independent school that i had no idea how i'd even gotten there
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because i grew up in a not very advantaged situation my mother was a single mother we were not well off
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and i i never understood how how did i ever get to this was phillips academy andover a wonderful boarding
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school how in the world did i ever get there well it turned out that my father went there and that's how
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my mother knew about it and she arranged the necessary financial scholarship and so on
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and that was a great educational experience for me but it didn't just happen
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so that's an example of how information can really change your view of of who you are and how you got
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there and of course once i learned that i could go back to the school i dug up my father's old school
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records i dug up my old school records in the archives i could compare them look for similar character
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traits look for differences in how we approached our schooling he was much less ambitious than i was and
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kind of irresponsible at that age and his irresponsibility of course continued to when he abandoned
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my mother and me and and as much as i wanted to learn about him and um and found a pathway to respecting
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him because he had done some very positive things in his life i still had to deal with how to forgive him
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for that act of irresponsibility of abandoning my mother and me and that was a crushing blow to my mother
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and for me i had to figure out how it how that made a difference in my life and that was not simple
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because there were upsides and downsides to growing up without him there well so you mentioned your
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mother had passed away before you to start start on this you know exploration this life review so how
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did you find out how she felt about or what she knew about your father abandon you guys you know it's just
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in little bits and pieces and kind of a salvage operation but i uncovered one amazing document
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she had of course no pictures of him or any information and never talked about him but when
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she died i went through her belongings and she had one little memorabilia of him it was a little note that
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he sent from the army from germany he was serving on the lines front lines in germany in world war ii
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and there's a little note that he started the note dear pie face a little note of endearment i think
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and how to get in touch with him he was already married to her and that she had saved that that she
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had saved that among all her other things and that and that alone all of those decades it gave me a
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little sense of that she still had some feelings for him and of course she chose to send her one and
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only child me to his same school which again means that she found him admirable in some sense
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so i guess the first step if you're trying to collect this information talk to people
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talk to i mean if your parents are still around talk to them about their own lives and what they were
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like growing up or talk to their siblings i mean that would be like the step number one resource
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correct right and and let me just say that one of my regrets that i had to deal with is that i never
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did confront my mother or talk to her openly about this and it was too late by the time i found out
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about my father to do that and that was a missed opportunity and i do write in the book one of the
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lessons i learned is to have the conversations with your loved ones before it's too late and another
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source of of facts so you construct the story is i mean you actually you go to places to get
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primary source documents about your father and yourself like you went to your old school and i was
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surprised i didn't i mean i didn't i guess this must be unique to andover but they had records
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for your father and for yourself like notes from your teachers yeah and and full uh especially for my
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father full documents about the teacher's opinions about his character and all of that some of that
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teachers don't even do these days and i can't say which schools would have this but it was pretty
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amazing to discover this it was it was a little bit like a dickensian search walking down dusty
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corridors and finding old file cabinets and there was a wonderful archivist at andover that helped me do
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that but what i did find in not just school records i also looked from his military records i went to
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the british war museum i went all over the place and there's a lot of stuff around you you can dig
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up old records some of it online actually others you have to actually visit places and it's a lot of
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fun to be that i was a totally amateurish historian i'm not trained as a historian at all but it's it's
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amazingly moving to open a file and discover a letter written for example by your grandparents to a
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school when they're upset because their son isn't doing a good job it's one of the things i found
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i'd never seen letters from my grandparents before and to actually discover original documents in these
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old dusty files is really thrilling especially when it's part of your family and the useful thing about
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those documents it's a third-party source because oftentimes you can ask your parents or an aunt or an
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uncle you know what was grandpa like what was dad like and they've got their story but it's nice to
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have like a third party saying well no here's how we saw it and so it gives you a fuller picture of of
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that story yeah and in the book i write a lot about memory and memory is misunderstood i think and that's
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why i spend time writing about it as a psychologist because a lot of people think memory is like a camera
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you know it takes a snapshot and it kind of resides there under the surface and all you got to do is
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poke and see the picture but that's not right memory is partly at least a construction you you have
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certain traces of things that happened and you fill them in with your own opinions and and experiences
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since then so a lot of times if you do speak with your grandparents say or your great parents
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they'll do their best to tell you stories and that's great you should do that and get their versions
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of things but you should understand also that they're they're constructing a lot of the details
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themselves out of their feelings about what happened and so it is very helpful to find other third
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sources objective documents and historical records and so on to get the whole story and and to get the
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more accurate story because memory is never going to be 100 accurate we're going to take a quick break
00:22:56.440
for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show besides checking it with third-party sources
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like how do you do this internally so you know we've had a psychologist on to talk about the idea of
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cognitive dissonance so it's the idea you there's like a tension where you did something but that's
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that something you did doesn't match up with how you think of yourself and so you'll do things to
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release that tension where you well it wasn't that bad what i did or so how do you how do you avoid
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doing that as you're constructing this the story that you're like you're not creating a story that
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that's uh i want to soothing your ego um but it's it's actually you're you're getting the full story
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warts and all yeah that's a great question red you know and that's the most challenging thing of all
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that's the psychological challenge and you're absolutely right there are tendencies are to do all kinds
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of rationalization denial bad away recollections that we don't like that shed bad light on ourselves
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and so on and you're absolutely right this is a challenge and you do have to kind of train yourself
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and steel yourself to try to take a really frank and honest look at what you did and how you made the
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decisions and mistakes that you made we all make mistakes every human being makes mistakes and so you
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have to first of all be forgiving to yourself and say hey i know i made mistakes of course i did
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everyone does but i'm going to be honest and and try to really confront them encounter them admit to
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them and then you look for what you can learn from them you you look for the lessons and how you can
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then deal with the regrets that you have because you made the mistakes and i go that that's a long
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story that i go into i have a whole chapter in the book about dealing with regrets i begin by quoting
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frank sinatra one of my favorite singers who sang in his in one of his famous songs regrets i've had a
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few but then again too few to mention and i say you know that's a very plucky attitude and i always kind
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of thought that sounded sensible but there's there is a but there which is that if you actually avoid
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really admitting that you that you have a number of regrets and and you just turn away from them
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you never really you never really learn to deal with them in a in a healthy way they're always going
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to be there and they're always they're always going to bug you in some in some sense and so it's
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really better to bring them out and to say okay i do have regrets and here's what they mean to me
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because we all make mistakes and not only that part of it is understanding that sometimes the mistake
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you made put you on a path that now you've ended up a different person but that's okay that's okay
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the it's fine that you are that you're not the person you would have been if you had not made that
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mistake yeah you did this with your father so you you got this information you got a picture of what
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your dad was like and then you also got a picture of what you were doing this to yourself as well you
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were talking to professors or getting records from your your university going back look reconstructing
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the story of how you got to where you're doing today so you got a better idea of what your
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personality was like and one thing you did is you sat and you're like okay well it's terrible i didn't
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get to have a dad but then you kind of sat down and looked at well knowing my personality knowing
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my mom's personality and knowing my dad's personality i don't maybe things wouldn't have
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turned out the way they did if my dad hadn't left i mean it was terrible that he left but maybe it was
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good that he left yeah i mean realistically i i as you said i i took an honest look at my own
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characteristics his characteristics my mother's characteristics all of which i were revealed by
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this life review and looking through documents and my father was a very easygoing guy that was one of
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his strengths but also one of his character weaknesses because he was they didn't have this
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phrase back then but he was laid back to a fault he was i describe him as an expert in not trying too
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hard and my mother was the opposite she was very focused and that's part of why she was able to get
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through this abandonment in a successful way eventually and have she was had a career which
00:27:28.500
was hard for a woman in those days and i was more like my mother and also very stubborn that's another
00:27:35.440
thing i learned about myself in early years there would have been domestic turmoil beyond belief in in
00:27:42.600
this family if he had come back he would have resented coming back he was over in europe he was having a
00:27:47.700
great time he met a french ballerina who he fell in love with and divorced my mother and remarried
00:27:55.080
none of this excuses his irresponsibility in not coming back but when i really took an honest look
00:28:01.980
at it i said you know my life turned out okay i had a pretty good run and it was not easy i had to learn a lot
00:28:09.600
of stuff that young men have to learn without a father and that was a challenge but nevertheless
00:28:16.760
all things considered i can't say i would have been better off if he had been around and in any case
00:28:22.860
there it is it happened the way it happened and i affirm my life it's okay and i think that's one
00:28:30.880
example of how a life review can help you settle your resentments deal with your regrets in a positive
00:28:39.600
way and end up feeling that the life i was given i'm grateful for that gratitude really is one of the
00:28:47.740
great end products of this and it's very important to feel gratitude for the things you've been given in
00:28:53.440
life it's that it helps you do that live up with that nietzsche talked about amor fati love of fate
00:28:58.260
say yes to life right yes so besides helping you sort of deal with or manage regrets things that
00:29:06.480
mistakes that happen in your life the life review can also help you see how you've developed as a
00:29:11.380
person and you saw this in your father so you had an idea okay first when you were a kid it was like
00:29:17.780
well he he died in the war well no then it was well he abandoned me and he's just a deletante and he
00:29:24.720
doesn't care about anything but as you researched your father's life you saw that this is a man he
00:29:30.140
had his faults but he also had he had some character development what did you see there and what's the
00:29:35.720
benefit of seeing how you or another person can develop as a person this character development
00:29:42.480
really came about when he went into the military he enlisted early in world war ii he was a sophomore
00:29:50.180
in college he dropped out of college and joined the army and that's when he developed his moral
00:29:56.800
maturity he was highly irresponsible in school and in college and as i said laid back to a fault but
00:30:06.860
once he got into the service he developed some commitments and one of the stories i tell that i dug up
00:30:13.200
in my research is that he was a very courageous witness at a war crimes trial that a lot of the
00:30:20.920
witnesses were being threatened and dropped out because they were afraid but my father stuck with
00:30:28.420
it and there's evidence of his testimony he wrote letters home there were newspaper stories about his
00:30:34.720
testimony and he was really courageous on the side of the angels in that trial he was ordered by general
00:30:40.780
eisenhower to be a witness at the trial and eisenhower comes across in the book i did some historical
00:30:46.260
research as really a great great leader who really cared about the troops and so on and my father rose
00:30:52.720
to the occasion and was courageous and committed and then he went on to a career in the foreign service
00:30:59.800
when he stayed in europe he stayed in germany he joined the war department and then the foreign
00:31:05.560
service the state department and then the usia he spent years in germany working to help reconstruct
00:31:14.060
the country in a in a pro-american way and then he was stationed in thailand where he became a very
00:31:21.340
significant diplomat all of this showed commitment and patriotism and love of the country and and that's
00:31:30.840
when he developed his strong character none of it again excuses his irresponsibility and the way he
00:31:38.780
hurt my mother especially and and abandoned me and that was also part of his early character but he
00:31:45.120
developed well beyond that and i i learned about that of course this is my field it's my profession to
00:31:52.180
study these things and i learned about that in a professional way that was fascinating to me
00:31:57.820
but it was also personally important to me because as i said it gave me a path to respecting him and to
00:32:05.320
thinking you know he had a life of consequence he also mentioned this one other thing that was
00:32:10.960
important to me he raised a couple of wonderful daughters who i have now gotten to know and they're
00:32:17.220
my wonderful half sisters and they're part of my family i i was an only child i now have a couple of
00:32:23.160
half sisters who my father raised and they're great people so he contributed to the world and i was very
00:32:31.100
gratified to find out about that when you've looked at your own life and develop i mean did you see any
00:32:36.240
have you seen any development in your own character as you've looked at your own life yeah i mean i've
00:32:41.880
i've learned first of all to become less stubborn and more open-minded and maybe even a little more
00:32:49.660
courageous in thinking about my past because i do think that there's a tendency maybe all people
00:32:57.580
have it to some extent but i was certainly a uh an example of this a tendency to shy away from things
00:33:04.160
that are painful and difficult and that you just don't want to think about and i've learned that
00:33:10.120
that's not such a good approach you really should confront your problems and and open them up and
00:33:16.140
that's how you get over them and so i think even fairly late in my life i've had some character
00:33:21.600
development towards open-mindedness and and the courage to look honestly at uh at my own at my own
00:33:28.640
mistakes also because as i said i should have i should have had that conversation with them with my
00:33:33.480
mother i should not have avoided it and other other and looked into other clues that came up along the
00:33:40.180
way yeah i think you had a college professor like even notes from your high school teachers they're like
00:33:44.600
i think they talked about your stubbornness like you had that was a problem even the even way back
00:33:48.740
then well that's what that's how i it was revealed to me i was kind of surprised but when i thought
00:33:53.420
about it i said hey this is right but that is an example of how a life review can give you insights
00:33:58.720
into who you were because i had forgotten all that and or maybe not even been aware of it but
00:34:03.480
it clicked as soon as i as soon as i read that on my records that bill damon you know bill damon
00:34:08.680
prides himself on being liberal and open-minded but he's really very stubborn and bears right in when he
00:34:14.600
gets an opinion or something like there's a quote something like that and i i laughed and i said oh
00:34:19.540
my god i was like that even at age 18 holy cow but i think this is this doing the life review and
00:34:25.600
seeing the ways you have developed can really help people shift to that growth mindset because i think
00:34:31.240
a lot of people when they get older they think well it was it william james said like we're kind of
00:34:35.140
like plaster and then once it's it sets in your 20s and you can never change after that but your
00:34:41.440
research says no that's not true i mean there's some things that are stable over the lifetime but
00:34:45.280
you can make nudges and and get better and doing a life review can can show you that yeah well you
00:34:52.140
know i i love william james and i thought he was a great psychologist but that's the old psychology
00:34:56.880
and you know that was over a century ago and he was wrong we've learned that people can learn as long
00:35:03.640
as the brain is still alive and character develops all through life and that is part of what my research
00:35:09.840
shows and that is exactly the hope that i had in writing this book is encouraging people to say you
00:35:16.440
know it's it's not over till it's over and people learn and grow all the way through life and the way
00:35:23.860
to do it is to be open-minded and curious and think anew about all the things don't forget your past by any
00:35:34.100
means don't have amnesia but think about your past and think anew about what it what it all means and
00:35:40.640
and who you are and who you want to be because you still have agency over that you have agency you can
00:35:48.300
you can make choices that will give you a positive future going back to how a life review can help you
00:35:56.160
figure out your purpose he defined how you define purpose and then how did doing a life review help you
00:36:02.240
i don't know you didn't discover your purpose but i guess it magnified it really brought to light
00:36:07.460
that yeah i did what i was supposed to do in this life yeah that's exactly right that's exactly right
00:36:12.360
well purpose and i think our lab really has been a leader in this developing purpose and in a scientific
00:36:19.240
sense and we have a definition that we that we care about a lot because in science you really want to
00:36:26.300
define your terms and the definition is that purpose is a long-term intention to accomplish
00:36:35.660
something that's of consequence to the world beyond the self and meaningful to the self and just in a
00:36:43.120
sentence take you through the high points of the definition it means first of all purpose is a
00:36:47.340
commitment it's not a one-shot deal you can do one-time things that are great like jump in the river to
00:36:53.220
save a drowning child but you wouldn't say that's your purpose in life that's just something you did
00:36:57.180
but purpose is a commitment to really accomplish something that you stick with and it has to be
00:37:03.780
meaningful to you if somebody orders you to do it that's really again not a purpose maybe you should
00:37:10.460
do it if somebody if a teacher tells you to do homework you ought to do it but you wouldn't say
00:37:14.460
that's my purpose so it's something that's meaningful to you that you own but it's also beyond the self it's
00:37:21.040
consequence to the world it's something it's not simply meaning it's not just reading a poem or going
00:37:27.060
to a movie or listening to some music all of which is great i'm not i'm not diminishing any of those
00:37:33.520
meaningful experiences but they're not really purpose in the definition of the term because purpose is an
00:37:40.480
attempt to accomplish something whether it doesn't have to be something heroic or noble it can be raising a
00:37:46.380
child it can be contributing to your community in any in any small way but it is attempt to make some
00:37:54.920
kind of a mark or difference in the world humble small whatever but it's something you stick with
00:38:01.280
you're committed to you care about it it's meaningful and you're trying to make a difference
00:38:06.920
in a positive sense and so when you looked at back on your life did you start seeing your
00:38:12.300
burgeoning purpose as a young man yeah well i tell a story in the book that i wasn't i wasn't much of a
00:38:18.800
student by the time i got to andover at my mother's lead but when i got there i started writing for my
00:38:26.520
school newspaper because i wanted to cover sports i did love sports i didn't have any other intellectual
00:38:33.220
interests but they sent me i was not a good writer and so they sent me to the sports events that
00:38:38.460
nobody cared about and one of them was a pickup game between our junior varsity low status soccer
00:38:46.480
team and soccer was a low status sport in those days and a group of hungarian immigrants who had
00:38:52.240
just come over from hungary because of the cold war and the revolution there and these kids these
00:38:57.620
hungarian kids were so good because they played soccer and american kids didn't and they wiped us out
00:39:05.100
our team out and i hung around afterwards to talk to them and they talked about how happy they were to
00:39:11.820
be in america and to enjoy freedom their parents didn't have to worry about being thrown in jail
00:39:19.400
anymore for political opinions and they had aspirations american aspirations they were all going to get rich and
00:39:26.060
you know they just loved this country and i thought about that and i had grown up i think i was 14 years
00:39:33.260
old at the time i'd never appreciated being in this country or any of the freedoms i didn't even think
00:39:39.140
about it but i wrote that article up for the school newspaper and my classmates read it and they all had
00:39:45.540
the same revelation i did wow and they talked to me about it and at that point i got hooked on writing
00:39:51.440
and in a sense doing research because that was what i did i discovered this thing about these kids
00:39:58.400
being happy and even though they had nothing they had no material their moms had packed them
00:40:03.500
bacon fat and green pepper sandwiches that's how little they had but they were so happy and full of
00:40:10.100
joy about being in this country so that was where i kind of discovered the purpose of what i ended up
00:40:17.300
doing for the rest of my life which was doing research writing about it teaching and finding out new
00:40:23.340
stuff that could maybe contribute to people's lives it goes back to that ninth grade experience i had
00:40:30.800
writing for my school newspaper writing for sports okay so to recap here life review first part is the
00:40:37.660
information collection phase so talk to people is the number one thing get primary source documents
00:40:43.220
about yourself or maybe your parents or ancestors so call your mom she probably has a tub with all of your
00:40:48.940
elementary school report cards somewhere in the attic ask for those review that and then basically
00:40:55.600
you just look at it and you try to figure out like find consistencies about your character how things
00:41:00.460
have changed and think about your regrets without you're not trying to manipulate the story so you
00:41:06.920
can soothe your ego but you know try to come to terms with it and it sounds like it's not a one
00:41:11.980
and done thing is this like an ongoing process exactly brett and you said it very well including the last
00:41:17.980
part which is rigorously forcing yourself to confront stuff that maybe you you wanted to forget all
00:41:23.560
those years and figure out what the meaning of that is and the other thing i'd say about it is that
00:41:29.900
everyone needs to do it in their own way i use the term ideographic study in the book because it's very
00:41:38.560
different than a typical psychological study where you look at groups of people and you have standard
00:41:44.280
methods this is the kind of thing that everyone has their own individual unique life everyone is a
00:41:50.440
snowflake everyone and so everyone is going to have their own materials to look at their own
00:41:56.900
ways of talking to their relatives and friends and their own memories that they're going to have to
00:42:04.360
confront and so it's a highly individualistic process i do not in the book give a cookbook method for
00:42:10.340
this i just described the process and and what's important about it but as i said if people are going
00:42:16.760
to do it they need to adapt it just as i did to my own conditions in life and of course i adapted
00:42:24.800
the method i did not invent the method by any means robert butler did and i adapted his writings to my
00:42:31.660
own situation so the book's called a round of golf with my dad did you ever get that round of golf with
00:42:36.580
your dad i did it was an imaginary one one of my new cousins sent me an old golf bag that my father
00:42:44.860
had used when he was a kid it was still hanging in the family garage which amazed me right there
00:42:50.320
and in the pocket of this little canvas bag was a scorecard from the pittsfield country club in
00:42:57.440
pittsfield massachusetts i managed to get a tea time with a very wonderful person that brought me on with
00:43:03.280
him and i played with my dad's scorecard in mind and kind of pretended that he was with me he was
00:43:09.540
a great golfer that was one of the things i discovered and that was one of my resentments
00:43:14.100
because he never taught me how to play golf and i love the sport but i'm very modest ability and i
00:43:21.860
played against his scorecard and that was also a kind of a bonding experience in absentia between my
00:43:29.420
father and me well bill this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more
00:43:34.000
about the book and your work well they can go to the book the book is of course available on amazon
00:43:39.280
and every other place that books are sold so i hope people enjoy reading it it's called a round
00:43:45.680
of golf with my father the new psychology of exploring your past to make peace with your present
00:43:52.480
well bill damon thanks for his time it's been a pleasure thank you brad i really enjoyed the interview
00:43:57.080
my guest today was bill damon he's the author of the book a round of golf with my father it's
00:44:02.100
available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is
00:44:06.100
slash life review where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic
00:44:09.860
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at art of manless.com
00:44:21.560
where you can find our podcast archives well as thousands of articles written over the years about
00:44:24.780
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00:44:52.840
reminding you to listen to aom podcast but put what you've heard into action