How to Shape Your Identity & Goals | Dr. Maya Shankar

Huberman opens by stacking credentials - Yale, a Rhodes Scholarship, a Stanford postdoc in cognitive science, a White House behavioral science team that Shankar founded and chaired, a podcast of her own - and then immediately converts the resume into a problem: before all of that, she was at Juilliard preparing to be a concert violinist, and a career-ending injury forced her to rebuild her plans and her sense of self. The framing is deliberate. The episode is not presented as a career interview but as a case study in how identity is constructed, damaged and reconstructed, and Huberman states the intended payoff as a "science-supported roadmap" for assessing identity and goals and how each shapes the other.

One structural note about the material itself: the substantive conversation occupies roughly the middle of this batch, bracketed by commercial reads. Two sponsor segments precede the first question, and a third lands at s00052, cutting in immediately after Shankar describes how she learned violin by ear and how her technique suffered for it - the read interrupts a thread that resumes at s00054 without any transition back. Whatever the editorial merits, anyone reading this as a continuous argument should know that the violin narrative is split across three separate stretches of talk.

Huberman also sets the question he wants answered in the first half: how much of early identity comes from watching what we ourselves do, versus watching and absorbing the labels of the people closest to us. That distinction - self-observation against imposed classification - is the spine of the next several exchanges, and Shankar answers it by leaning heavily toward the second term.

Shankar's answer is that a great deal of early identity is copied from what is visible and rewarded: what we see around us, what "is deemed successful and society privileges." She then introduces the term that organizes her account, identity foreclosure, and defines it in a way that emphasizes imposition rather than the child's own choice. It is not merely that a young person observes what parents or peers do; those structures are pressed onto the child, and the cost is a narrowed sense of both what one wants to achieve and what one is capable of achieving. Her remedy is equally explicit - people who have undergone foreclosure have to take "a lot of active steps" to undo biases and limits absorbed early.

The linguistic evidence she offers is the sharpest single observation in this stretch. We ask children what they want to be, never who they want to be, and the asymmetry is not accidental: the question presupposes that the answer will be an occupation. Her conclusion is that this habit teaches us to anchor identity to a role, and that the anchoring is what later becomes fragile.

She illustrates with her own case, and the detail that matters is the ordering. Meeting someone, she would have said violinist first and Maya second - the instrument preceded the name. She was six when she started, obsessed, and then as a teenager tore a tendon in her hand. The dreams ended overnight, and what she describes is not primarily the loss of a skill but the loss of a referent: she had not realized how much of who she was had been deposited in the instrument.

when you define yourself by the what, then as soon as the what goes away, you're like, oh, my gosh, who the hell am I?

The state that follows she names identity paralysis: the sense that who you are and what you are about is suddenly in question, that you are stuck, and - the part worth pausing on - that you lack the courage to imagine a future at all. That last clause is a claim about imagination rather than mood, and it is the more interesting one, because it implies the damage is to the capacity to generate options, not just to feel good about them. It is also where the transcript becomes unreliable: the passage is attributed to Huberman, but the first-person content - falling prey to identity paralysis, taking a long time to find a path - belongs to Shankar's biography, and the next turn resumes in her voice. Readers should treat the speaker labels in this section as approximate.

Her resolution is a substitution rather than a deletion. Identities are not to be abandoned - they supply meaning and purpose, and she concedes that calling herself a scientist or a podcaster is genuinely motivating - but the anchor point can be moved from the what to the why. On the violin, stripping away the superficial features (the sound, the feel of the instrument, the pleasure of playing) leaves something she describes as prior: the emotional connection formed through music, with orchestra mates, chamber partners, or an audience. That through line, she argues, survived the injury and reappears in her work as a cognitive scientist studying connection and emotion, in her public policy work, and in her podcast.

The prescription is stated plainly: if you are destabilized by a threat to identity, identify the underlying features of what you loved and look for their expression elsewhere. The limitation is that this is retrospective coherence. Any life can be narrated with a through line after the fact, and the account gives no way to distinguish a genuine underlying feature from a story constructed to make a discontinuity feel continuous. Nothing in this stretch tests that; it is offered as a lesson from one case.

Huberman pushes on childhood projection. Naming a child's future from sandbox behavior is usually benevolent, he says, but it sorts children into roles high in an occupational hierarchy, and it becomes restrictive once the child treats the projection as a destiny. He then notes a puzzle: adolescents ask who they are, while forty-year-olds mostly do not, even though adults change careers, relationships and geographies. Something about adolescence forces the question, and the notorious teenage practice of trying on uniforms, friend groups and behaviors is the visible attempt to answer it.

Shankar's answer draws on developmental neuroscience in general terms - significant brain changes during puberty, with the primary one being a drive for independence. On that account the adolescent identity question is a byproduct of separation: teenagers are breaking from the structures they grew up inside, and for the first time are in a position to ask what they want outside those systems. Note the level of evidence here: an appeal to what "we know from neuroscience research," with no study, measure or effect described.

The word Huberman used, essence, becomes the target. Shankar studies essentialism - the belief that people possess immutable core qualities - and reports that work with children and adults shows the belief is widespread. She is openly skeptical of what the belief could even mean metaphysically, and her objection is practical: if you assume an unchanging core, you have no vocabulary for the possibility that nothing about you is so defining that it cannot change. Against that she sets a deflationary alternative - that we are collections of behaviors and thoughts and nothing more - which she finds freeing because it supports a growth mindset and blocks the self-narratives that she thinks do real harm.

Shame is not the feeling, oh, I did something bad. Shame is the feeling, I am bad.

The shame distinction is the load-bearing part of the argument, because it converts a metaphysical dispute into a clinical one. An essentialist picture, she suggests, makes the slide from "I failed" to "I am a failure" feel like accurate description rather than distortion. She also flags her own position in this: she calls herself very self-critical and notes that the aspiration to improve, which is why many listeners are present, tends to arrive with self-berating in tow.

Huberman partly concedes the point - he says he used essence without thinking carefully about what he meant - and then quietly keeps the word by redefining it. What he meant, he says, was that as a child some activities were enjoyable, some not, and some strongly aversive, and he cites Markus Meister's formulation that sensory experience is divided along the dimensions of yum, yuck and meh, a trinary that has to drive approach, avoidance or indifference. He then posits something on a different plane: delight, which fills the body with so much yum that it supplies energy to do far more of the thing. He explicitly declines to assign it a neural circuit and admits the language is insufficient.

So the apparent disagreement is partly terminological. Shankar wants to retire the vocabulary of fixed essences because of what it licenses in self-talk; Huberman keeps a word for a stable disposition to be moved by certain things, while granting he cannot specify its basis. Neither of them resolves whether such dispositions are stable because they are innate or because early experience consolidated them, and the conversation moves on before that question is pressed.

Shankar offers awe as a candidate name for what Huberman described, and the discussion turns into a compact literature summary attributed to Dacher Keltner. Awe requires perceived vastness - and vastness is reference dependent, measured against the observer's frame rather than against any absolute scale - plus a need for accommodation, meaning the experience does not fit an existing mental model and forces revision of it. Vastness can be physical, as with a wall of buildings and lights overwhelming the visual and auditory system, or conceptual, as with encountering an account of how the mind works.

Two refinements are worth separating from the enthusiasm. First, she insists awe is not valenced: the Western assumption that awe-inspiring means pleasant is wrong, and the same two criteria can be satisfied by something frightening. Second, the accommodation criterion is what generates her claim that awe opens minds - if the new input must be integrated with an existing model, the model is under pressure to change. That is a plausible mechanism, but it is asserted rather than demonstrated, and no study is named beyond the researcher.

Her worked example is a Beethoven violin concerto heard on a Discman at a summer music camp, at eleven or twelve, late at night - Anne-Sophie Mutter playing. She reports chills, a heart rate tracking the melody, and a sense of the experience being otherworldly, and she analyzes it with the two criteria afterward: the vastness was temporal, carrying her back to Beethoven's period, and the accommodation came from not being able to believe that arranged notes could produce that response, especially given how little it would take to destroy it. Her illustration is specific: shift the E flat and the passage's emotional resonance disappears. That is her claim about a musical detail, offered from memory, and it functions as testimony rather than as evidence.

Huberman then draws a distinction that the rest of the episode depends on. Awe, in his account of his first trip to New York at six, was passive - the incredible thing was over there, and he had no way to enter it. Delight, by contrast, is bound up with the possibility of engagement: the difference between the child who watches the Olympics and the child who says I could do that, and maybe do it better. He calls this a verb state of the self, the sense that one can act inside the experience and thereby get more of it. His generalization is that nouns are slow verbs, and that anticipation is what makes verbs exciting.

Shankar's reply is the most substantive correction in the batch, and it is aimed at herself rather than at him. As a violinist she would never alter the notes, because fidelity to Beethoven is the job. But, she realizes, she did have a verb state - she decided how the phrase unfolds, how much vibrato, the angle of the bow, the pacing and the emotion brought to it. Agency inside a fixed text. This matters because Huberman's criterion (that delight requires the freedom to manipulate) would otherwise exclude interpretive performance, and her example shows the criterion is too narrow: constraint and authorship coexist. Huberman's response is a self-deprecating aside about being pulled from Suzuki lessons because the neighbor's dogs howled.

She then extends awe from a feeling to a mechanism for identity formation, using the case of Reginald Dwayne Betts: a carjacking at fifteen, sentenced to an adult prison for nine years, and an underground prison library where he found an anthology called The Black Poets and a poem by Etheridge Knight, who had also been incarcerated. Her emphasis is on what the reading did rather than what it said - it supplied a possible self in an environment where every available identity was defined by a crime. The numbers she gives are large and unverified here: roughly a thousand poems written in the following year, a MacArthur award, Yale Law School.

I was awe-inspired by what I was reading. But the most important thing that happened in reading that book and understanding the author's history is that it gave me something to be.