Welcome to life on purpose, how living for what matters most changes everything. I'm Vic Strecher, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. So let's start this course. There are four weeks to the course, and they're organized in four sections. So the first week, we cover what is a purpose in life and related issues. The second week, we talk about how purpose organizes our life, get into that from a philosophical perspective as well as from a scientific perspective. Then we get into some pretty hard science in week 3, where we get into the science of how purpose actually changes our life, because there's a lot of data out there showing not only the fact that it does change our life, but now we're better understanding some of the mechanisms for how purpose changes our life. Then finally, in week 4, we're going to get into the real world and talk about how purpose works in very different situations ranging from being in college to being at work, being in the military, growing older, many other situations. So we'll talk about those in week 4. So let's start out with the general principles of this class. First, we're going to be using a lot of science in the class, but we're also going to be talking about philosophy. The first two weeks, we're going to cover a fair amount of philosophy. Why do we cover all this philosophy, including some ancient philosophy? Simple, because philosophy actually frames our science in this case. So it's really important to have some depth of the philosophy and some amazing thinking about that, and what led to how we think about the science now. Then finally, we're going to be talking a lot about the practice domain. That's really focused in week 4, where we ask the question, how do we put purpose into practice? All three of them are really integrated in this class. So looking forward to doing that. We're also going to be talking about some stories. Some of these stories we hope at least are fun for you. We'll also be covering some exercises, not yoga exercises, but we'll be covering different ways of thinking about purpose. We'll be actually covering one meditation as well called loving-kindness meditation. So stories and exercises are going to be interspersed throughout this class. Looking forward to that. Then as I said before, if you want to use an application that I created called Purposeful, you're welcome to do that. The Purposeful application is really designed to go along with the course and you're welcome to use that. You can find it on the homepage of the Coursera course materials for this course, or you don't have to. It's really entirely up to you. I have a secret lesson of this course too. I'll share with you now. The secret lesson of the course is to create a better world. I really think that if you start building a better purpose in your lives, and if you help other people build a better purpose in their lives, we will have a better world. I think frankly, our world is losing its purpose, and I'm really concerned about that. I'm as concerned about losing purpose as I am about climate change or about many other things in the world, and I really think that we need to start building greater direction, greater purpose, and hopefully greater meaning in the world. So welcome to the class.