How to find fulfillment: Lessons from ‘dark horse’ success | Big Think

[Music] When people think of a Dark Horse, I think most people think of people who were successful that nobody saw coming. Right? And that's technically true. But in our research, we actually found that Dark Horses are people who prioritize personal fulfillment over conventional notions of success, and that priority is what actually puts them on a very individual path. But it's also ultimately what allows them to be both successful and happy.

I think those lessons end up being valuable to anybody who wants to live a more fulfilling life. The origins of this Dark Horse are a little bit personal, right? So I'm a Harvard professor today, but I also was a high school dropout with a 0.9 GPA. I ended up getting married right out of high school, had two kids by the time I was 21, and we ended up working a string of minimum-wage jobs. I was actually on welfare for a little while, so my future was sort of bleak, and I felt a bit lost.

It was actually my dad who gave me this piece of advice that changed everything. He said if I wanted something better, I needed to figure out what truly motivated me and stay really close to that the rest of my life. He felt like that was going to be important for me to be able to achieve what I could. That piece of advice could put me on a completely different path that led me to get a GED, then eventually to college, and then ultimately to Harvard, where I've spent the last decade getting to study what makes people tick.

For me, Dark Horse is kind of like the culmination of a lot of things that I care about because when I think about how we can use these insights from the science that are part of other things, I think helping people live more fulfilling lives is probably right at the top of the list. I think most folks feel like they should know what motivates them, but actually, I think we're constantly surprised, right? We make choices and then we're like, “I don't really like what I'm doing,” and like, “But you thought you would!” So obviously, you don't know what motivates you.

But I think there's a kind of a laddering of how we get to this—like how do you end up pursuing a fulfilling life, right? Knowing what motivates you is core to that, right? It's not everything. But if you don't truly know what matters most to you and what really drives you, there’s really no chance of having a consistently fulfilling life. You might be successful with some stuff, but you'll probably be successfully unhappy.

So the interesting thing about it—there are two things that I think are really fascinating. The Dark Horses taught us that are different than the way most of us think about things. So first is even how we define who we are, right? Because I think self-knowledge is this vital thing, and most of us when we talk about who we are, we tend to think about things like what we're good at or what job we do. Right? Dark Horses, right off the bat, they'll talk about the things that motivate them, the things that matter most to them, and they build their identity off of that.

So, to the question of then, like if knowing what motivates you is so important, like why do we struggle to figure that out? And like how could we get better at that? So I think that the biggest challenge with the motivation aspect is that when we tend to think about what motivates us, we tend to look at what society tells us we all should be motivated by, right?

If you think about—if you just look outward, you realize there are some big things, some universal things like competition, you know, money, collaboration, or any way stuff that we kind of all feel like affects us in some way. But what we found is like, look, the truth is human beings are just more complicated than that. So all of us are motivated by a wide range of things. Some of them are those big universals, but what we found is that there's also a whole bunch of very specific things that tend to be particularly you as an individual.

Right? So for example, in the Dark Horse project, we actually talked to people who were genuinely motivated by specific things, like organizing people's closets—like genuinely motivated. I can't understand that for the life of me; it has zero motivational home-bush. But, or aligning physical objects with your hands—like truly motivating, right? These are so specific they probably don't matter to very many people, but they matter deeply to these individuals.

And what courses taught us is that when it comes to living a fulfilling life, those specific motives are every bit as important as the big general ones, right? So the question of, okay, well how do I figure out those specific ones? There's a pretty straightforward way to get started, and it seems simple, but it's worth trying. If you just think about some of the things you enjoy doing, right, and ask yourself why.

Again, this seems simple, but like if you say, “I enjoy football,” right? But it's easy to confuse the thing you enjoy with what motivates you. I'm not motivated by football; I just enjoy that activity, right? I enjoy watching it. But then I ask, like, is it the competition? Is it that it's a team sport that requires collaboration and coordination? Is there a strategy element to it? You know, is it playing outdoors? Right?

And the more you can sort of dissect that and answer those questions, you start to get a sense for what really motivates you, right? And if you ask yourself that question often enough, it will pretty quickly reveal a breadth of your motives, and that can put you on a path to a fulfilling life. And why this is important is most people would stop at like, “I can tell you the things I like to do,” right? Or “I can tell you that I like my job right now,” but I can't actually tell you why.

And so you get locked into like, “I'm a football guy,” right? Well, now if I can't play football anymore—which I definitely can't—right? What do I do? Right? I suddenly have this crisis of like, “I don't know who I am. I don't know what.” But if you understood that like the reason you enjoyed football were these four or five things, those travel well, right? You can actually look for other things to do that check those boxes that will turn out to be every bit as fulfilling to you.

And Dark Horses are really good at that—that's like knowing deeply this breadth of motives they have and then being able to make decisions off of them. [Music]