How To Find a Purposeful Life, Chat With Paul Harvey

Yasi: So, welcome to the Fast Track podcast, Paul.

Paul Harvey: Yasi, thank you so much for inviting me to the program. It’s great to be here.

Yasi: I want to start with the first question because I know that you have been running your podcast since January 2018 and interviewed hundreds of people who experienced a mid-life crisis. Can you explain to us usually what kind of crisis they’d been through and why?

Paul Harvey: I guess I need to rewind a little bit because, in 2017, I was running a marketing practice, I had marketing clients. And my father died in February, and he wasn’t an old man. He was 89 years old, and he did not want to be 90. And, you know, he was resistant to the IDD. He would, you know, as people do. So, he was funny with it, but at the same time, he was quite cynical about life, and he was set up, and he wanted to go. When he left, that was fine. He was like, okay, that’s gone. But when I started to reflect on his life and the journey and towards the end of it, I realized that he wasn’t cynical, and he would have been fed up for years. It wasn’t just a recent thing he’d been fed up with. He had been avoiding life. He had not been living it fully.

And when I reflected on that, I realized I had a lot of the similar kind of, I’m a chip off the old block. I had a lot of similar stuff that my father had, and I thought there was something wrong with me; what’s going on. And I suddenly reflected that I actually didn’t really care whether I lived or died.

That was what I realized. I realized I was in a position myself where I didn’t care. I was going through the motions of living. And it’s only in hindsight where we realize that’s a mid-life reality. It’s a midlife crisis. And my father’s death brought into focus for me. But because I didn’t know what I wanted or didn’t know what to do, I sought out ideas. I looked online as you do. Yeah. You go and check out Google and see what’s possible for you. And I found loads of kinds of comments, loads of things, but this is not good enough. I need to talk to people, ask what people’s experiences. So the podcast started out of my therapy.

I was literally going to people who I thought knew what they were doing and saying, oh you know, there’s this bloody thing called life work. What is it about, well, how do you make it work? And so that’s how it started. And I started with just a few conversations, and I realized it was a podcast. And then, by 2018, it turned into a podcast.

And as you say, since then, I’ve done over 200 interviews. I think the reality is you will not avoid your midlife crisis. It will always happen. We will always go through some shift because that’s the journey; we are on a journey of life. The question is, are you ready for it? Are you prepared for it?

That’s where the issue is. If you accept that life changes and that you have a series of stages, and you embrace those stages, then life works fine. If you are someone that has settled for something and you think this is how it’s going to stay, it won’t because life changes. The partner you loved for years suddenly decides you’re not for them anymore.

The children leave, they leave home. The children have children of their own. Suddenly you’re no longer a dad. You’re a granddad. Whoa, that’s a different feeling, and all those things change our perspective of who we are or where we’re heading. And it’s just about addressing that in ourselves now.

Give you the answer to this because the answer does not come outside of you. The answer is inside of us, and we each have to decide what’s that for ourselves. And what I do is facilitate people and help them discover that answer.

Yasi: You mentioned that, back then, you did not care about live or die. What do you mean by that?

Paul Harvey: I could see no purpose in my existence, outside of the fact that I knew my family loved me and needed me to bring money in and run the house. If I left, they would miss me, but there was no relevance to me being there. I could see no purpose in it. It’s whoa, okay. This is just what I do.

Yasi: Were you working full time back then, like you have been working for 10, 15, 20 years back then?

Paul Harvey: I had a practice; I did marketing clients. It was just my marketing clients, new projects. We were selling more stuff. And that was the thing as well. I lost faith in marketing in 2010 because I could see that this constant drive for more and more is destroying the planet.

We cannot go on the way we are. And so, in order to feel okay about that in myself and around 2010, 2012, I started working for clients, not necessarily for people that were doing fast consumer stuff. I started working for people making a difference. For a while there, I worked for retreat centers, and in that personal development, planet development type marketing projects, things that were making a difference rather than making a problem. And that’s how I felt better about it. But yeah, I wasn’t considering suicide, but it was at that point where I didn’t care. That’s the point.

It’s I wasn’t living life. I wasn’t enjoying life. I didn’t see it as the gift that it can be. I saw it in terms of my father’s context. But bit, you got to get over before you leave. It’s really hard to define this into words for you, I’m afraid, cause it’s a feeling.

Yasi: What would you do later on to change that?

Because I can really relate to it, I think a lot of people, even before they hit, the midlife, even young professionals, twenties, thirties, working 10, 15 years, every single day in/ day out to the office to the job, and then if you take the job away from them, all families away from them, what’s the purpose in life?

How would they define their life?

Paul Harvey: That is the point, isn’t it? We each have to define the purpose for ourselves, and it comes in different ways. And I know a lot of young people now are struggling with this one because they’re looking at their unhappy parents and they do not understand life. If you’re unhappy, how, what chance have I got?

So it is about embracing something in ourselves and finding that zest in something. There’s no answer to this. If you do and that, there are some things that you can do. Of course, there are things that you could do that will help you lead in that direction.

Absolutely. If you just sit in a chair and mope over it, then you won’t get anywhere. So the shift came from me from listening to people’s stories because I’ve been interviewing people, talking to people, and commonalities in that. The people that I found that had got through this process. And the process can hit in many ways.

So for me, it went in the way of I’m miserable, I don’t know what this life’s about. Other people can do extremely extreme behaviors. They can get into drugs; they get into drinking, they get into dangerous things. They get into inappropriate relationships or, they will live life on the edge in the other direction on some level and hope that will kill them. That’s kind of what they’re doing. And they’re testing it and the keys in a way, what they discovered, those people that did that is they actually did discover a way of living. They discovered a healthy way of living. When they did it healthily that they did, they found out well.

What it means is that the people found a solution. They had the daily process, they looked after themselves. So they did exercise. They meditated, they ate well. And the other thing is they had good human interactions. They found enough people to talk to in life and have conversations.

They found joy. The most important thing is to find joy, find space in your life for joy. And I think joy is very difficult as you get older. It’s like I saw it on LinkedIn this week. The guy was saying he was on holiday and he’s having a week-long staycation. And he had this idea to build himself a blanket fort.

Now, this is something we’ve all done as children. You push all the furniture together, and you throw a blanket over the top, and you get underneath, and you’ve pretended something. And this is a man my age who built a blanket fort and sat under it with his cup of tea. He was like, what do you think?

And it was a fun thing to do on LinkedIn. What is the difference? It was like, I know. And I’ve had this conversation with people about this. Like when I was younger, I could enjoy certain things. And as we age, they don’t seem to have the same level of fun. And it’s that exploration of where fun is.

So I know saying to the guy on LinkedIn, yeah, I used to make blanket forts 15 years ago with my son. And we would have an amazing time, and it would be really enjoyable making that fort with him. And interesting about it is I was like in my 40’s doing this, and I really enjoy doing it. And I could really access my child and my own joy of playing this because I could do it with my son. And his joy and excitement of doing it and doing it with me were really exciting. And s,o between the two of us, we both got joy out of this process of making a blanket fort. So now I can’t do that on my own. If I tried to do it on my own, I still wouldn’t get the joy out of it because it was the connection with my son that did.

So what was clear to me now, it’s the connections we have with people that give us access to joy and access to doing things that are unique with people.

Yasi: It’s so interesting. You mentioned earlier is to have a daily routine, take care of oneself, and have a connection with people that brings you joy.

I think it’s really worth it for us to reflect. For the audience, like today, did you have a routine? Did you take care of yourself? Did you have positive connections with people that bring you joy? And if not, try to think about a way to change your life. Recently I started daily workouts from 9:00 to 9:20 with Julian mental six-pack.

He was on my podcast before, so he started this community, and then I started meditation last year. And I really feel different. And now, as you mentioned, I like a connection with people. I started to think why I’m doing this podcast, right? There’s no one forcing me to do it.

No one is disciplined me to do it, but I feel very happy. I enjoy the conversation with people. That’s joy. It’s very interesting when you mentioned all this, and I need to have a mental check on why I do what I do.

Paul Harvey: This is a joy for me, having these conversations and talking about this stuff.

It’s just priceless having this opportunity. You know, the technology that we have that lets us do this, I’m just so blessed. I live when I do. When I started work, bear in mind, I was 58. So when I started what, there was a telephone and a phone directory, that was it.

That’s all you had. And telex machines and fax was just an idea in the future. You know, there was no internet. So to be able to communicate like this with someone is such a joy, the podcast itself was structured around three questions at the time when you first started. No, four questions.

And the first question is, what are you passionate about? And then, there was how did you define success? And then, what’s your contribution. And then, the final question was always, what’s the meaning of life for you. So those are the four questions that I ask, and what I’ve come to realize over the last year or so is the questions themselves are actually a window into who we are and what we’re about.

So you can use the first three questions as a daily routine. And I’ve got people to do this before. I said, okay, so when you get up in the morning, the first thing you do is you get your meal. I do journaling; I write every morning. That’s one of my processes. I come in here in this office, and I write for at least twenty-five minutes or so.

And I ask questions, I write a question on the pad, and I see what answer comes back to me. And sometimes, the answers can be really profound. And it’s, did that come from me? Where did that come from? It’s like, when did I write, where did I get that information from? So it’s fascinating to the journaling process, but getting back to the three questions.

So if in the morning you have a piece of paper and you ask yourself three questions: what could I be passionate about today, what am I doing today that I could get really excited about, the first question. Second question: success. Of all the things I’m doing today, what would be a success?

If I got any one of these things, what would be a success? You see too many people that I met when I was one of them as well. I will sit down with a to-do list of 30 items. I would tick five items off the list. And at the end of the day, I’d beat myself up for not doing the other 25 — cause like what a terrible day, I’ve done nothing.

And the reality is I did five, five things. So I never set high bars for my day anymore; my day will be my day. We’re moving towards the target over there somewhere. As long as you’re moving in a general direction of the target, we’re good. I’ll set some priorities today. I’m going to do a podcast interview, I’m going to do several interviews.

I’ll do a bit of editing. I’ll listen, social media stuff. And if I’ve done those things at the day, I’m happy. So I set myself up so that I can’t fail. That’s the point. I don’t want to be a failing in the day. I want to set myself up for success. So I define what success is in the morning before I start.

Now I appreciate it if you’re in a very busy environment if you’ve got a lot’s going on, if you’ve got big projects going on. Yeah, I appreciate that. It’s tough, but set yourself a small win for the day because you need that. When you need to say, I’m going to finish, I’m going to finish one thing today. If I’ve got so many things I can’t finish, then define what it is.

So what I’m saying is going into the day with knowing what success looks like and then contribution. So I have two forms of contribution: I have, who am I helping others? How am I contributing to other people? But also have is how am I contributing to myself? So every day I must do something for myself. There must be something that I’m doing that contributes to my life, myself.

Now I have a process. As long as I do my process, and I’m always contributing to myself as long as I exercise every day. So I do journaling. I do daily yoga, or so, those are my pivotal things. And I do some meditation on the bit. I’m not goopy meditation. I like it when I sit and do it.

And I feel good about it, but getting my ass on the chair is sometimes a bit more difficult.

Yasi: I feel the same.

I cannot meditate without the meditation app. I’m like you. I want to ask you the first question. Like you ask yourself every day, where is your passion? Are you living it?

I know many people about them. It’s a big question. What is my passion in life? If people cannot find the answer, how would you advise them to find the passion?

Paul Harvey: Okay. So let’s have a routine to finding your passion, and I can tell you this from the experience of the conversations I’ve had.

So some people are born with it. Some people literally are what they do, who they are like. They come into this world, and they literally are that thing. And it repeats itself throughout their life. They literally cannot help but explore their passion. And for others, it’s not so easy. They have to discover it and who you are, what you are that said.

So the first route you can do to look for your passion is to look for what you really enjoyed as a child, look for what it was that you did without asking a question you just did. One of the things that I did as a child was I spoke a lot. I was always talking, I was always known for my stories. I was always known for making stories up and talking a lot.

And it’s always been my best strength. I can write, but the mysteries of grammar seemed to elude me even at 58 years old. And without things like Grammarly and the wife to look over the things I’ve written, people struggle with my writing, but I can speak, I’m good at doing this.

And sometimes I speak drivel. Of course, we all do from time to time, but most of the time, I can string a sentence together and be coherent with it. And I’ve always done that. So that’s one of the passions that drove me. But if you’ve not got anything like that, if there’s nothing in your life that kind of stands out for you, then it will be that you haven’t found it.

And that means you’ve got to explore. You’ve got to move towards things. So the people that didn’t have passion, people that went out to find it the way they did it, is by exploring stuff. They did things, they tried new things. And I appreciate it. It can be difficult for people who are introverted or people who have quite a high fear, fresh off a low fear threshold. Trying new things can be difficult. I appreciate that. But if it is trying something new, it’s experiencing new stuff. And then you got to listen for that quiet voice, and it will be the quiet voice that the quiet inside voice that says, this is interesting.

This is good.

Yasi: Yeah. And the inner voices are often mentioning it in multiple conversations. I really like this book called Mastery. So in the book, he talks about each of us we have our inner voice, but when we grow up in a society, in our family and religion, and culture, that our inner voice is suppressed because of external factors.

And then for those who read this cover the true inner voice, they find their callings, and then they do the things that they’re really, truly passionate about.

Paul Harvey: I agree. I think that’s very true. And that’s why toward the people that I spoke to, a lot of them discovered something quietly in the corner sort of thing.

There’s one of my guests, she had a big career. And she met the man of her dreams, and the pair of them had the big, powerful careers. They had a big house, they bought a massive house, and they had cars and everything.

And suddenly, I think he was 38 or something. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he was gone within two years, and everything that she knew clapped around her, everything went. She now had a big house. She had no income. She had nothing. And where later was because she was in such terrible pain with her grief because she didn’t have children and she had no plan to have children because that was the plan they were going to live together in this big house. And so, in exploring her grief, she discovered grief counseling and the grief process, and her whole life now is about helping people with grief. And that’s it, and it’s like that switch, and she is passionate about helping people deal with their grief. And part of that thing came out of her realization that she struggled so much, she lost so much in those years when she struggled with grief, that it’s become her life calling now to help other people survive it. And I guess for me, in a way, the midlife conversation is the same. I want to help people realize that life is an adventure. This is an adventure from the, I call it, the life quest, we’re born, we die. And how we fill the gap is that is the choice is the journey that we’re on.

And that’s my passion. Now it’s helping people discover that. But if you did ask me that five years ago, I’d say my passion was supporting businesses to build bigger stronger businesses. It would have been in democracy world.

Yasi: I often find this more fulfilling when the personal contribution has a positive impact on another individual. I always find it’s more fulfilling than a positive impact on a business.

Paul Harvey: Yes. And that’s the point. That’s what we have to get to realize and learn the fact that we came into this planet for us, the being that we are, we didn’t come to this planet for the company that we represent and for the money that we have.

Those things are good. They are good. They are part of the journey, but the journey is also rediscovering what we’re about. A few years ago, I took up archery because I wanted to explore what it would be like to fire it, to shoot a bow. And I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I haven’t shot before the beginning of COVID. You know, I need to get back out there at some stage and start shooting a bow again.

Running! When I turned 52, my father and I didn’t have the best of relationships. I didn’t speak to him very much, but it’s surprising how much influence he had on my life, considering I never really spoke to him that much.

When I turned 52, I took a look at the state of my father’s knees. And I thought if I don’t do something about my body, I’m going to lose it. I need to get to the gym. Cause I could see that was in a mess, from the age, you’re not doing anything. So I went to the gym at 52, and I couldn’t run. I discovered that on the treadmill, my knees hurt, my ankles hurt, and I had to learn to walk again. I ended up in physio. And what we realized is that when you place your foot down, said he on the radio. For the benefit of listeners, when you place your foot down, most of the places that I thought flat, but they either pronate left or right.

They are the tip it in or tip it out slightly. And I was tipping my feet in too far. So what it’s doing is putting pressure on my knees. That’s why I couldn’t run. I had to learn to place my foot properly. And so I learned that, and I started running on the treadmill. And I started running outside, and in 2018, I did my first 10 K, and now I’m training to run a marathon.

If it is said to me, when I was 52, I will be running a marathon in some years. I am the fittest I’ve been in my life.

Yasi: Yeah, it’s all about taking care of yourself. And also have this healthy daily routine.

Paul Harvey: There is that, but there’s also, it’s about finding the opposite of pushing against something.

It’s finding something to push against. I think when everything becomes easy, we fall into comfort. And when we fall into that level of comfort and easiness, then things start to get boring.

Yasi: There’s a saying frog dies in boiling water. So which means people survive in uncomfortable situation and roll and they encounter situation. You started to deteriorate over time.

Paul Harvey: There’s a lovely old joke of two old guys sitting on a porch in the US somewhere.

And they’re sitting there, having a beer, and the sun is setting, and there’s a dog sitting in the seat between them, and the dog is whining. The dog is whining, and the whine’s getting louder and louder. And the guy says, why is the dog whining? And he said, oh, he’s laying on a nail.

You said, why doesn’t he move? He said it’s not all that painful yet. There’s the thing that we stay in places of discomfort, but we become accustomed to that discomfort, working hard and stress is one of those things. People get used to living with stress, and they work too.

Then they stick with it. And my podcast is littered with people who have done this, and then their body has gone, No! Because that’s what happens eventually; the body goes, No! And something, disaster happens; either you end up with a breakdown, or you end up with something, or you end up with an illness, you cannot push your body in places where it doesn’t want to go too long.

You have to look after it. We only get one.

Yasi: In the startup world, there’s also a new book published. I forgot the author. Literally, the book is about to not overwork. Like people take pride in overworking. It’s oh, I worked so much. I worked 100 hours per week. It’s a cultural thing.

Paul Harvey: It’s Gary Vaynerchuk’s model. It’s the grind, isn’t it? Is Gary Vaynerchuk we talk about grinding out, getting it done. I know all admiration for Gary Vaynerchuk and what he did change, but I don’t think he’s helping the entrepreneurial world with the grind.

Maybe when you’re young, maybe you do, but you’ve got to set a limit. You got to say, okay, I’m going to grind this out for 18 months, and you must set a hard limit on that. You cannot go on and on, on, on, on. There were so many people that have done this, and as they say, they’re writing checks that their bodies can’t cash.

Yasi: Yeah. Okay. That’s a very good sentence. I have one last question for you. What is the question you wish people would ask?

Paul Harvey: That’s one of my questions.

In the podcast, that’s one of the questions I put in there. But the question people ask themselves is this the life I want? What am I going to do about it? Because if the answer is no, then what am I going to do about it? And, if you may not be able to do any huge thing about it, but you can do one thing, you can write in a journal, you can do one thing.

Even if you take one thing out of this conversation today, start a journal, ask questions of yourself because you will be amazed at what wisdom you have inside of you. And that’s the key to that. We’ve got to tap into our own wisdom, and that can happen through exercise. For me, when I’m running, it’s just me and my running and the kilometers I’m running.

And when I do that, if I run for an hour, my head is so clear at the end of that hour.

Yasi: It’s also like meditation.

Paul Harvey: It is a meditation. Yeah. You have to make space for yourself. Life’s tight, and there is no space, find 10 minutes, even if it’s just, okay, I’m going into a meeting, I’ve gone from one meeting to the next simple one for that one; take two breaths.

Take a breath. There are so many things you can do. Take a breath, take two breaths.

Yasi: I think I can represent this generation or the people who are very driven to achieve more in Korea. I think the pitfall people you usually fall into is that they are so busy focusing on developing their career and working hard and get that promotion.

But at the end of the day, why you are living your day, why you are living, what was the meaning of your life? It’s not about the next promotion, it’s your every single day, how you live your life. And those kinda questions I started to think about more frequently nowadays since I stopped working for companies, like why I’m leaving my life every day, for what?

How would I enjoy my life?

Paul Harvey: I don’t think it’s two things. I think it’s one thing. The meaning of life for me now is to express joy for myself, express joy, and find joy. So the things that I enjoy are running. I express your cooking. I love cooking. I love cooking for people. Not so easy during COVID, but Hey, I cook for my family.

And one great pride for me is that I’ve managed to transfer that joy of cooking to my son. So my son is 19. He’s left home, and we swapped photographs of food with each other. We try and top each other out with different meals with cooking. We think it’s fun.

Yasi: Nice.

Paul Harvey: So it’s about those things, about expressing your joy, but it’s also about expressing joy with others being with others, helping others, supporting others, make the world a better place.

If we can all make the world a better place every day, if we all go to bed, having the I’ve done a good job today, that to me is part of the meaning of life. When you get the bends are screwed people over today, and I’ve damaged the planet, that can’t be helpful.

Yasi: What would be the last message you want to leave to our audience?

Paul Harvey: Live the life you were meant to lead and live that life. Find out what it is. And it’s your choice. You can live a life. You don’t actually have to do anything. You can choose to do nothing with this life, or you can choose to make it great. And it’s your choice.

Yasi: Thank you so much for being here, Paul.

Paul Harvey: Yes, it’s been fantastic. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.