This week's blog is another case study of how people's two minds interact in real life, and focuses on University of Michigan psychologist Vic Strecher. I first became aware of Dr. Strecher's work in the late 1990s, when I read his studies about tailored messaging to improve people's adherence to medical recommendations (a topic that's right up my alley). I first heard him speak in 2000 when we were both presenters at a conference on adherence for pharmaceutical executives. My talk was so-so, but his was dazzling. He had some joke about sharks' teeth that people were talking about for days after. He was fast-paced, funny, surprising, entertaining, erudite. His sense of humor had a sharp edge to it. Based on my past experiences with very bright people who have those characteristics, I also had the thought (and I apologize Dr. Strecher if you're reading this) that he was kind of a jerk.
I was not too surprised a few years later when I learned that Vic Strecher had launched a company, HealthMedia, that delivered tailored health promotion messages. He seemed very much the entrepreneurial type, a business showman like Steve Jobs. My university offered the HealthMedia service to its employees, so I signed up. I was again impressed with the quality of Dr. Strecher's work, an avatar-based software coach that was very personalized and interactive. Strecher wrote that the avatar was actually so lifelike that his software people had to build in a delay of several seconds between the human user's input and the computer response, because it was disconcerting to get a personalized message at computer-algorithm speeds; it felt more natural to have a human-like pause in the conversation. As someone who studies tailored messaging for health promotion, I thought it was one of the best examples I had ever seen, and it also had a solid basis in research. The company was acquired in 2008 by Johnson & Johnson, and I hope Dr. Strecher made a lot of money.
To this point I had thought of Vic Strecher as an interesting scientist and businessman, but not necessarily as an interesting human being. But there were other things happening below the surface in his life at that time. In his book Life On Purpose, Strecher writes that his life reached a crossroads early on June 20 2010, two miles offshore in a kayak on Lake Michigan. He was considering paddling across 88 miles of open water to Wisconsin — a very bad idea. Suddenly he heard his 19-year-old daughter Julia’s voice in his head: “Get over it, Dad!” The thing that he needed to get over was Julia's sudden death, which had happened because of a heart condition a few months before. He had been wallowing in grief, not thinking clearly, and setting off on self-destructive paths. He felt adrift. “The signs were clear,” Strecher writes. “One arrow said, ‘Change Everything!’ The other said, ‘Death.’ ... Julia wasn't derisively telling me to 'Get over it!' She was telling me that if I was to survive, I would need to get over myself and live for what matters most. When I came back to shore, I realized it was Father's Day. This was her gift to me -- the gift that would save my life."
In a recent talk, Strecher said that as a scientist, he couldn’t understand how his dead daughter could have been talking to him. And yet, he said, as a scientist he couldn’t deny his experience either. He turned back to shore. There he wrote a list of everything he cared about. Parts of his list were about his family – a wife and another daughter, aging parents – and parts were about his work. His list was more strongly tied to relationships than to achievements, although he is an accomplished man. Cutting short a leave of absence that he had taken from his university, he went back to teaching, vowing to treat each student like his own child. He started reading philosophy. He started to meditate, improved his diet, exercised more. And he changed the direction of his research to discover what makes life meaningful to others, which is the topic of his book.
What Dr. Strecher learned was that a having sense of purpose not only makes people happier, it also improves their health. People with a strong purpose find the going easier when times get hard; in impoverished parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Strecher said, “purpose gives poor people hope.” People with purpose have better sleep, more friends, more money, and are happier. They have stronger immune systems, less fear, less inflammation, and better cellular repair of DNA. If purpose were a drug that did all of these things, Strecher writes, the pharmaceutical company that made it would be worth billions. Perhaps most strikingly, purpose makes death itself less frightening. Strecher talked about how he felt that he had been wasting his own limited time on Earth before his experience in the kayak: “Give us 150 years of life and we would just spend it watching more TV.” But with a strong sense of purpose, he said, one can do a great deal in just a little time and feel good while doing it. As the title says in one of Dr. Strecher's published papers, “purpose moves mountains.” Strecher said that when people focus on their purpose, they might initially feel bad because they realize they aren’t yet the people they want to be. But then, like Strecher, they often realize they have a choice to change.
In his book Strecher initially talks about purpose in a way that links it to the Narrative mind. He equates purpose with eudaimonia, a sense of well-being in classical philosophy that is less a happy emotion and more a deep satisfaction with behaving in line with one's goals. Strecher says "eudaimonia requires self-discovery: Of the things you care most deeply about and that transcend your immediate desires. Of the people you most want to emulate. Of the legacy you want to leave. Of your purpose in life. Of the habitual actions leading to the fulfillment of this purpose. This process may be likened to leaving your old town and embarking on a journey. You jump into your boat and sail into a new, uncharted sea, toward a better harbor." A purpose is like a mission statement for your life, or the "elevator speech" that you would give someone to say what you're trying to do with your life. Perhaps you have had the chance to develop one of these at your job. My own purpose statement for work purposes is helping people change their behavior to improve their health -- a tag line to summarize my research, bringing together the ideas of behavior, health, and helping or coaching. Strecher encourages us to think about a meta-narrative that's broader than just work, that encompasses one's whole life: "Do I want [insert current obsession here] to be on my headstone? Do you want to be the richest person in the graveyard? The most attractive person in the graveyard?" Strecher connects having a sense of purpose to Aristotle's idea of virtues, which I have written about previously. He says that our Narratives are what make us who we are, and what make our lives worth living.
But even though Strecher's book starts with a Narrative-level sense of purpose, most of what he wrote is actually about the Intuitive mind. Once you know where you are sailing, he says, you need "wind and a rudder," in the form of energy and willpower to move you toward your purpose. To power yourself, he suggests the acronym SPACE -- sleep, presence, activity, creativity, and eating. Several of these factors, as you can see from the links, are aspects of the Intuitive mind that I have considered previously on this blog. Strecher contends that when you sleep well, when you meditate, when you stay active and eat healthy and think creatively, then you are better able to accomplish your Narrative-level purpose in life. Yet it is the Intuitive-level factors, often operating outside of people's conscious awareness, that provide the energy and focus needed to keep making purposeful progress. Yet we aren't only dependent on Intuitive-level SPACE factors: You can be the healthiest person in the world and still fall apart under stress. The final section of Life on Purpose talks about how people cope with traumatic events like an earthquake, or the death of a child. Part of that is about having Narratives that sustain them. But another part is about a sense of transcendence, a connection to something beyond oneself, or a deep centering within oneself, that lets them ride out life's roughest conditions. That feeling of purpose is less Narrative and more Intuitive, like the connection Dr. Strecher experienced with his daughter that day on Lake Michigan. And even finding one's purpose is in some ways an Intuitive process, as he writes "you've got your friends, your family, your intelligence, your culture, your values, and above all your conscience to guide you." Purpose isn't something you can think your way into, it's something that emerges organically from your whole life. This is similar to what I have written before about effective narratives, that you can't simply decide on them but have to instead experience them as being true.
A decade after first meeting Dr. Strecher, I had occasion to visit his home in Ann Arbor as part of a research team. We didn't know each other well (still don't). We hadn't even talked before the meeting, which I had been invited to by a pharmaceutical company we both knew. It wasn't clear what everyone's role was at the start of the meeting, a situation that would often lead to various levels of academic posturing and intellectual one-upmanship. I came to the meeting expecting someone with a big ego, and of course I was out of my element while traveling while Dr. Strecher was in his own home. Despite all of that, I have rarely met someone who was such a gracious host. I found Dr. Strecher kind and welcoming, genuinely interested in me and my background, generous in introducing me to the others present and including me in conversation. This was about two years after his life-changing morning in the kayak, although I didn't know that at the time.
I most recently heard Dr. Strecher speak last year, when he seemed like the same bright guy but now practically glowed from inside. There was a joy about him, an openness, a generosity of spirit that seemed different from before. He was still a funny and engaging presenter, but with less of an edge. He went out of his way to engage the audience (something you don't often get in research-conference keynotes); he made the talk about drawing out our views and experiences, rather than about him as the "sage on the stage." Perhaps most remarkably, just before Strecher’s talk a speaker had asked people to support a scholarship for Native American nurses, which was $1,500 short. The first thing Strecher did when he reached the podium, before talking about himself, was offer to donate that entire remaining amount. This was at a nursing conference, not even in Dr. Strecher's field, and with a group of people he might never see again. His daughter, it turned out, had been studying to become a nurse at the time she died. Strecher had been paying close attention to the preliminary speakers, connected what they said to his own experience, and responded with instant generosity, at a time when most of us would have been frantically reviewing the notes for our own talk. As Dr. Strecher writes in his book, it's remarkable what a sense of purpose can do.
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