This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Religions tell us they have the key to our best lives.

Advice columnists tell us how to solve problems in our relationships.

And airport bookstores are stuffed with tomes on how to grow rich,

manage our time better, and build effective habits.

All these sources of counsel can teach us valuable skills such as planning, patience, and perseverance.

These can be vitally important to success.

But in a world overflowing with useful advice, why do so many people feel stuck?

One answer, many of us are pursuing goals that are misaligned with our own deepest values and preferences.

This week, in the latest installment of our Wellness 2.0 series, what psychology can teach us about choosing a meaningful path for our lives. When you're a kid, grown-ups ask you what you want to do when you're an adult.

When you're a teenager, college counselors ask you what you want to study.

Once you join the workforce, managers ask you what your goals are

for the next few years. At every stage, we are really being asked the same question. What do you

want to do with your life? At the University of Missouri, psychologist Ken Sheldon studies the science

of knowing what to want, how to set your

sights on targets that will actually make you happy if you achieve them. Ken Sheldon, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Hey, I'm happy to be here. I want to take you back to 1981, Ken. You just finished college and moved to Seattle. You wanted to become a musician. You started a band. How did it go? Rock musicians can be kind of flaky and unreliable, and we were all in our 20s, and everybody had different goals. Everybody was kind of self-centered,

and they might not have been committed the way we thought that they were,

or maybe the guitarist slept with the singer unexpectedly,

and there's a lot of things that can just get in the way of having a smoothly functioning unit.

We just weren't able to make the agreements and follow through with them that we would

have needed to make real progress.

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