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

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So, when people think of a dark horse I think most people think of people who were successful that nobody saw coming. 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. And I think those lessons end up being valuable to anybody who wants to live a more fulfilling life.
So the origins of Dark Horse are a little bit personal, right. I’m a Harvard professor today, but I also was a high school dropout with a 0.9 GPA; ended up getting married right out of high school, had two kids by the time I was 21, and ended up working a string of minimum wage jobs and was actually on welfare for a little while. So my future was sort of bleak and I felt a bit lost.
And it was actually my dad who gave me this piece of advice that changed everything. So he said if I wanted something better, I need 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 being able to achieve what I could.
And that piece of advice 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. And so 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 I’m a part of and other things, I think helping people live more fulfilling lives is probably right at the top of the list.
But I think there’s kind of, for me, there’s almost like this laddering of like how we get to this, like how do you end up pursuing a fulfilling life? And I think knowing what motivates you is like core to that. 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 at some stuff, but you’re probably not going to be successful and happy.
And so the interesting thing about – there’s two things that I think are really fascinating that 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. 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.
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 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. If you just look outward you realize there’s some big things, some universal things like competition, money, collaboration, 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 there’s also a whole bunch of very specific things that tend to be particular to you as an individual. 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 influence. Or aligning physical objects with your hands—like truly motivating.
These are so specific they probably don’t matter to very many people, but they matter deeply to these individuals. And what dark horses 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.