COLD OPEN PROMO
Eric Becker
Welcome to “The Long Game.” My guests today are founders of the Stanford Life Design Lab and two of the most influential voices in rethinking how we approach our life and work. The course they teach at Stanford has been one of the most popular classes for over 19 years.
Dave Evans
The 10-word version of designing your life is get curious, talk to people, try stuff, and tell your story.
Bill Burnett
You really are not a static thing, you’re a becoming. All humans are becoming. You don’t necessarily need to know exactly where you’re going, but you can know you’re going in the right direction.
Eric Becker
I’m excited about this conversation because it comes at a moment when so much feels uncertain about work, purpose, and our lives.
Bill Burnett
Getting more meaning in your life, living more meaningfully. Living with more passion. Those are things we can design for.
Dave Evans
It’s a great time to be prototyping and be really open-minded, because we’re going to have to find our way. Life is an improv skit. We’re just improv trainers.
SHOW OPEN
Eric Becker
Welcome to “The Long Game Podcast.” I’m Eric Becker.
I’m an author, an entrepreneur, and I’m founder and chairman of Cresset, a family office that we built to serve founders, multi-gen business owners, and families.For all the entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs, for leaders and CEOs, “The Long Game” is for you. It’s the practices. It’s the leadership skills. It’s the culture that can stand the test of time.I’m Eric Becker and this is “The Long Game.”
INTRO
Eric Becker
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans are the authors of Designing Your Life, a New York Times bestselling book and global phenomenon that introduced millions to the idea that you don’t have to find your path, you can apply the strategies of design thinking to build the life that matters most to you. And now they’re expanding that conversation with their new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, which explores how to unlock purpose, joy, and flow into our everyday lives.
Welcome, Bill and Dave.
Dave Evans
Eric, good to be here.
Bill Burnett
Yeah, thanks for having us on.
Eric Becker
Absolutely. It’s wonderful to have you. I’ve been so looking forward to this, and it’s a special opportunity for our audience. So let’s start at the beginning. Bill, tell us about the Design Lab, and what happens there? What is it?
Bill Burnett
Yeah, so the Life Design Lab is right now is a group of four of us. I’ve got 3 amazing designing your life fellows, Mariel, Deepak, and Jay, and we teach the classes at Stanford. We’ve got a whole range of things. We’ve got a class for undergraduates called Designing Your Life. Class for grad students, which you’re right, we’re teaching right now, this is week 4 of the quarter, so we’re right in the middle of it. Um, that’s called Designing the Professional for Grad Students. And we’re doing a workshop this weekend called Designing Your Spiritual Life, so we got a lot of different things, trying to attract as many students as possible who are curious about, you know, their future and how they might design it.
Eric Becker
Amazing. And so, Dave, if I were to use the design thinking methodologies from the lab on my life, what might that look like?
Dave Evans
Well, when we talk about what is design thinking? There are lots of ways to think. One of the easiest ways to understand how to design something using design thinking or human-centered design. That’s the formal name of the methodology started at Stanford in 1963 is to distinguish it versus other ways of thinking. In engineering we solve our way forward and get the right answer using equations. In business, we optimize our way forward, getting better and better. In bureaucracies, we process our way forward. In the academy, we analyze our way, or research our way forward, but for problems where you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it. And you can’t reapply that answer to anybody else, because it’s totally context sensitive, i.e. Human problems in this place called the future, which is what your life is. That’s called a wicked problem. None of those approaches to thinking works, because you don’t have the data, and you don’t know what you’re doing. So, you have to build your way forward by having ideas and trying stuff. The 10-word version of designing your life is get curious, talk to people, try stuff, and tell your story. So, if you’re going to design your way forward, we’d help you have some ideas, and then go start prototyping your life by having experiences that fills in the blanks of what you’re really interested in. And repeat that until something sticks, and that’s called a life.
Eric Becker
And, Bill, what does a well-designed life look like? So, based on what Dave was just saying, what kinds of changes happen when I start living that way?
Bill Burnett
Yeah. Well, one of the things we talk about in the new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, is that you really are not a static thing, you’re a becoming. All humans are becoming, so you be, you are what you are right now. Then you do what Dave just talked about. You talk to people, you try stuff. And you change yourself, you become a new person. If you’re paying attention, all of these experiences start to add up to new people, and you know, you don’t necessarily need to know exactly where you’re going, because the future’s uncertain. But you can know you’re going in the right direction. So humans are becoming. We have a way of building a compass using some design tools to make sure I’m going in the right direction. And what it looks like is a person who’s deeply engaged in the world, and having, you know, all of the experiences, certainly wonderful, happy, you know, connected experiences with other people, and also experiencing probably the, you know, sorrows and setbacks of a regular life, but doing it in a fully engaged and alive way. We call it fully alive by design.
Dave Evans
Let me piggyback on that quickly, if I may, Eric. One thing we heard back from people. We’ve been doing this 20 years is, you know, what do you get if you if you follow these ideas? You get 2 things. Life is doable, and it leaves you hopeful where the doable, hopeful guys. You know, it’s not that hard. It turns out these steps are accessible. We’re all about giving people things they can actually do that will actually move them forward, and after they start doing that, they go, wait, wait, I can do this. Oh, and it is starting to work, so I might actually deserve to be hopeful that this is going to come out okay. So people…if we do our job right, we leave people with doability and hopefulness.
Eric Becker
And so, when we think about the world that we’re living in right now, there’s tremendous uncertainty. And so whether it’s someone who’s making a career change, it could be a founder that has exited their business and now is looking at maybe some reinvention, or whether it’s a student that is considering the direction of their life. There just seems to be uncertainty all over the place. Um, and so when people come to the design lab and say, okay, I want to turn around and figure this out. You know, what do you… what do you tell them, particularly in times of uncertainty?
Dave Evans
The world is getting crazy. It’s getting it’s getting really upset. This AI thing. Everyone, you know, I mean, the computer science major has dropped to what, 16 going on 25% in a year and a half. So, it’s plummeting. Everything’s changing. How do I figure this out? Well, design thinking only works in this very special place called reality. It’s a bottom-up, empirical, behaviorist approach to things. We don’t sit on the couch and just, you know, agonize. We get out in the world and do stuff. Well, in the real world, you can’t figure it out right now. Actually, in our second book, we re-released our second book to talk about the post-pandemic world. And we coined the term disruption design. When there is a disruption where you don’t know what’s happening and everything’s changed, you know, you can’t figure it out. Well, we’re in an AI disruption. We just went through the pandemic disruption. You could argue polarization is a disruption, but it’s not going anywhere soon. And AI is clearly a disruption.
So, when you know that you don’t know what you’re doing: there’s a stage between the old world that I understood and the new world that has not yet arrived, and we call that place in between the acceptance zone which is where all you can do is accept the reality that we don’t know what we’re doing, and what’s the best skill to have there? Curiosity. You know, if it all comes out better, it’s going to go through a place that looks like this. So rather than, what’s the answer? It’s like, what’s going on? So you lean in with curiosity. It’s a great time to be prototyping and be really open-minded, because we’re going to have to find our way. We’re in this. We’re giving people wayfinding skills. The goal of the lab is to give you a conscious competency. In life and vocational wayfinding. Life is an improv skit. We’re just improv trainers.
Eric Becker
I love that, and I guess you…I know in the book you use the word about dysfunctional beliefs and blowing up dysfunctional beliefs, so the first thing is when you’re at someone’s graduation and a young person says, I need to find my passion, that’s where the problem begins. And then they need to move into this methodology in order to actually solve what they’re trying to solve for.
Bill Burnett
Yeah. Well, there’s a you know it’s typically that at graduation somebody comes up to that poor kid and says, Hey, what’s your passion? Because if you and and the question has the built-in assumption that if you knew your passion, everything would just get organized and life would go, you know, on rails. Uh, so Bill Damon, who’s a senior professor at Stanford, runs the thing called the Center for the Study of Adolescents. I did a book on this called “Path to Purpose. And in his research, less than 20% of the people had a single identifiable passion. And of those 20%, most of those passions occurred in the arts. You know, I want to dance, I want to sing, I want to paint, I want to write. And of course, we tell people, well, that’s not…that’s not a serious profession.
So, we hate a question that leaves 8 out of 10 people going, “I guess there’s something wrong with me, because I don’t have one.” It’s just the right. It’s not the it’s not the starting point. It’s the place you end up after you’ve worked on something for a while, and you go, Hey, this I’m really into this. This is my thing. So, passion is the wrong starting point. It’s just like the question, what do you want to be when you grow up? I mean, if growing up means you lose your curiosity, you lose your kind of… zest for life and an interest in what’s happening next, then I’m not… I’m not a fan of growing up.
Eric Becker
I understand. So, you talk about the multiverse, Dave, and this idea that a lot of times we are told as a young person that there’s, like, one right path that we’re supposed to find. But talk about the multiverse and the sort of multiple possibilities.
Dave Evans
Yeah, kind of our favorite dysfunctional belief, or one of them certainly is, you know, you need to become the best you. In fact, you know, depending on your worldview, the right you. There is a right answer. There’s it. I’m trying to find it. Well, there is no it. We’ve been saying for a long time, all of us contain more aliveness, more personhood, more humanity, than one lifetime permits you to live out. I just turned 73 last week, and, you know, I’m getting to the age where I’m going to funerals, and I know the person in the box. And sadly enough, and… and tell me, not a single one of those people that I have said goodbye to was anywhere near this thing called done, or, like, I can’t think of a single thing left to do. So, the multiverse idea, Bill just ran this experiment in a group of Nashville last week. We asked everybody, hey, if it really was a multiverse, and you had access to concurrent consciousness, and you could have all the lives you want to, but just don’t waste any. How many would you like? And the average number is 7 or 8. It goes, you know, 1 to a million, you know, but most people kind of go, uh, 7 or 8.
Eric Becker
7 to 8 lives in a life. 7 to 8.
Dave Evans
Yeah, I’d like to be about 7 of me. If I could be 7 or 8 of me, then I think everything I have in mind would get a chance to get done. And then we go, okay, so if that’s true, let’s say the average number is 8, you know, then that means 12% of you is actually going to happen. You’re overwhelmingly not going to happen. Which is fine! That’s the good news. If we’ve got a call moving from FOMO to JOMO, the fear of missing out to the joy missing out. When you miss something, it’s not like, ooh, was that it? As though, if I’m barely lucky enough to get one good thing, you know, then maybe life will work, I hope that’s coming from scarcity. It’s like, oh, another cool thing, and another cool thing, and another cool thing, because guess what? The world is a target-rich environment, and you are a hugely capacious being called a human, so let’s just find something we can do with the life that we have, which will…and this brings up something else called the scandal of particularity. It turns out no ultimate ever fully happens, only little shadows of them, including you. You are your lived life is just one particular expression of this fullness of this thing called you. Don’t worry about becoming entirely expressed, just enjoy the life that you have.
Eric Becker
Amazing. And then, if somebody says, okay, well, I don’t need to quit the current life that I’m in completely, I want to try something new. How do we prototype it? What does that look like, Bill?
Bill Burnett
Well, prototypes are key thing in design. You know, I was at Apple for seven years, and I was there when were doing the first laptops. And we didn’t know what a laptop, nobody knew what a laptop looked like. It was just a small computer running on batteries, but we built lots and lots of prototypes before we figured out, oh, probably the keyboard should be in the back, and the trackball, little trackballs, remember those? Should be in the front. So prototyping is how designers invent the future. And it’s a great way to invent your future, because you can sneak up on it. You don’t have to, like, don’t quit your job and then become a podcaster. That’s crazy, because it’s way too risky. You can prototype anything call this guy Eric and say, hey, what’s the deal with this podcast thing? How’s it work? And how do you create a show?
So, you can have a conversation, you can have a little felt experience just to ride along with somebody doing something you’re curious about. And it’s a great way of taking very, very… we’re the set-the-bar-low and clear it, guys. We’re not for heroic, you know, jumps in your life. If, you know, if you’re in a really bad job or a toxic job, or somebody’s, you know, messing with you, and you have to quit, great. And we have some strategies for how to do that well as well, but. Mostly we’re like, take little tiny steps. Get curious, right? That’s the first step. Then go talk to a bunch of people about what’s it like to do this thing. I call it time travel. If you actually talk to somebody who’s doing what you want to do, but they’re 5 years ahead of you, and so they can tell you what it took to get there. That’s amazing information. So prototypes. You can probably have anything, take small steps, and sneak up on your future.
Eric Becker
So, I’d love to pivot to a life dashboard, and our team can put up a graphic of what the Life Dashboard looks like. This is an exercise that…it’s so simple, but it’s also incredibly powerful. And Bill, maybe you could take us through it for the benefit of the audience. We could quickly do this exercise.
Bill Burnett
You can just make 3 or 4 lines on a piece of paper from 0 to quote 0 to full. So this comes from the classic idea of reframing a dysfunctional belief. One of the dysfunctional beliefs is work-life balance. Oh, I gotta have work-life balance. Everything has to be perfectly balanced all the time. And I just can’t do it because I have more life, I have less work, less work, more life. Oh, gosh, I don’t know how to solve the work-life balance problem. Can you help me? And we’re like, well, first of all, anytime it’s an A/B decision, it’s a false binary, your brain goes into a zero-sum game, and you can’t solve it. So, it’s a bad question. And secondly, it’s just life-life, guys. It’s just life. It’s all life.
So, we reframe work-life balance because it’s a binary, into something bigger. And it really is…there’s work, but there’s also love, which is relationships, number one thing that causes, you know, that creates longevity in your life is relationships. Play, because we’re wired for play. It’s how we learn and health because health underlies everything. So you have now, instead of a work-life thing, we’ve got work-life health play, and you just do an assessment. How am I feeling about my relationships? Where am I in the dashboard? For me, right now, I’m almost full. I got grandkids, kids, everything is going well. Love my wife, blah, blah, blah. Play. I’m pretty low on play because I’m working too much. So, that’s an interesting thing to think about work. I love my work, get to write books. I get to teach students. It’s full. And my health, you know, eh. Got a couple of things that, um, we need the docs to work on, and I probably am not getting enough exercise. So, it’s just a quick assessment. Where am I on work, love, health, and play? And then you say, all right, what’s one small change? Again, set the bar low. What’s one small change you could make. Maybe even get a two for one. And improve, you know, your dashboard. For me, when I did this and my play was low, I came up with a great hack. I found a… Dance class. My wife and I live up in San Francisco now. There’s a dance class about six blocks from here. We could go to dance class. We took the intro to tango lessons twice. And I got more play, more goofing around, because I’m a terrible dancer. We weren’t trying to do this to get good. We were just doing this for fun, and I got an extra boost on my relationship thing, because I was having a fun time goofing around with my wife. So that’s that’s how we use these little assessments, like this dashboard. They’re just ways of blowing up a dysfunctional belief and making it practical and assessing where you’re at, and then doing small changes to improve your life. Because we know from all the behavior change stuff, James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Other things, that you may change in small increments, and small increments, you know, kind of piled up week by week by week, lead to large changes. So try this, try this dashboard.
Dave Evans
Now, Bill, but one thing, Bill, I have a question. Now, if I understand this right, I put a little marker where the indicator would be on my current these gas tank indicators of how much love, play, work, and health I’ve got. And then the question is, which one would I move a little bit, one way or the other? Now, and apparently, you guys say it’s terribly important, only move one. Through your prototype. Why is that so important?
Bill Burnett
Well, because people try to do too much too fast and then because they can’t get to the goal they’ve set, they just abandon trying to change. So setting the bar low is really important, and the one you pick is the one, when you’re looking at this thing, saying. You know, that just doesn’t feel it feels a little out of whack. I’m not doing enough. For my health. I noticed patterns when we’ve done this thousands of times now. A lot of people are, you know, they’re not taking care of their health, both mental and physical health, and so that’s impacting all the rest of the dashboard. I just don’t have the energy for play. I don’t have any energy for my relationships. So you find the one thing that your gut tells you, you know, I gotta work on that. But then, you make very small changes, you know? It’s not, oh, my health is bad, I think I’ll sign up for a half marathon. No, that’s crazy. I’m looking at your phone, you’re not even doing 3,000 steps. Can we get to 5,000 steps for 2 weeks? That’s an easy transition. It’s 5,000 steps for 2 weeks. Okay, we promised it. Can we get to 7,000 steps? And when we get to 10, we’re already at a couple of miles, we’re doing pretty good here. Now we could talk about maybe walking it. a half marathon. But it’s always in small increments, and it’s always pick the one line on the dashboard that looks like it needs a little bit of improvement.
Eric Becker
There are two things that that makes me think of that I love. One is, we have a mantra, which is confront your reality every day. And by doing this exercise and seeing exactly what the percentages are of the fuel in the tank, I think it’s something quantitative. And the second is, we have a lot of leaders and CEO founders in our community, and there’s even a saying that you hear from time to time, you know, I’m going to make this successful, or I will die trying. And I think that health does often get sacrificed when people are trying to build things. And so, again, I love the confront your reality every day of looking at something like this, and then even taking some small steps to improve it. It’s a powerful idea. A simple, yet powerful idea. So, Dave, um, earlier had mentioned finding your compass, and there are a couple things about that that that I’d love to dig into a little bit more in terms of figuring out the compass, um, you know, in life, many times when we’re lost, I think we look for bedrock, things that we know that we can count on, and whether that is, you know, family or trusted friends. Certainly, our values would be an example of bedrock. How does the compass work, and how do we how do we find our compass?
Dave Evans
It’s all about living what we call the coherent life. And you know, while we just wrote a book that came out 2 months ago about meaning-making how to live the meaningful life, we’ve been talking about the meaning-making part of this for 20 years, and the field of research on how do people experience meaning in life has been around for a while now. We now know quite clearly that if you can connect the dots, your chance of meaning experienced in your life goes up, and those dots are, who am I? What do I believe, and what am I doing? If I can interconnect those three dots, and they’re in alignment, and who I am and what I believe in what I’m doing are expressed in the way I’m living, my chance of meeting making goes way up. And if they’re not interconnectable, my chances go down. Now, it’s very hard to connect a dot that you haven’t described or drawn yet.
So, the COMPASS exercise is simply writing 3 things down, which is my current story, what’s the current narrative that describes what your life is like, my work view, which is your manifesto about what work really means to you, it’s still the biggest expression of human energy on the planet. And then, my life view, what are my decisions about, what are the ultimate questions that matter? You know, is there a God? Is the universe beautiful? I mean, you know, those questions. What are the questions that matter, and what are my short answers to them? So there’s 3 little essays, each one two-thirds of a page. Define your compass, and then once you’ve written those in the narrative form, because you’re a storytelling animal, we start with the story, then you can reverse engineer them and say, what are the values, what we call the compass values, that pop out of those stories, and now you’ve got yourself a compass, and you know which way north is.
So, a key exercise we have in living the meaningful life is called a coherency sighting. Simply means catching yourself in the act of being coherent. Oh, I’m spending the morning talking to Bill and Eric, and Eric’s spending, you know, his life helping families live out acting coherently as they steward their resources and the lives of their generations of people. Hey, this is a totally coherent thing for me to do because I care deeply about this. Good job, Dave, for having a coherent morning catching yourself in the act of being coherent increases your chance of living coherently, because you’re training your attention to notice what matters.
Eric Becker
I love that. And when Avy and I actually started Cresset, we took the first eight team members, and we spent 3 days really defining what we would stand for, what were what were our values and principles? What were the behaviors of how we would treat each other and treat clients, and it became such a powerful thing that as went through the zigging and zagging that you do in building something, to be able to always turn to that, it was on a 3-by-5 card, so it was very, very simple, but to always be able to turn to that to see that were on track, or to come back to you know, that bedrock is a powerful, it’s a powerful tool for sure.
Dave Evans
That’s great.
Eric Becker
So, what do you do when you’re stuck? So, if somebody, whether it’s, you know, you’re in a career, I remember meeting a young person who told me he wanted to be an architect, and then once he became an architect, he said, you know what, I’m not loving this, and I think I want to be a doctor. What do we do when we’re stuck?
Dave Evans
I think a lot of people get stuck. And particularly some of the families, and I’ve worked with some of the kind of families that you work with, and it’s very easy to get stuck if you’re a member of one of those families, because there’s so many resources and so many expectations. You end up in a cul-de-sac accidentally all the time. And just because you’re stuck doesn’t mean you’re doing the wrong thing. All stuck means is you’re currently in pain. That’s actually all you really know, and you have to really go into this empathy step and this defining step of design to figure out what’s going on. Example one, a very successful lawyer hates her work. She lives in Palo Alto, she’s driving down El Camino, and she notices, every time she drives by Stanford, she bursts into tears. Because the last time she was happy, it was years and years ago when she was an undergrad at Stanford. And all that reminds her is, I’m in a horrible place, and so what she actually does is like, well, maybe I want to do education and rather than, you know, quit everything and jump out the window, you know, you know, talk to some people, sits in on some classes, you know, years later becomes the very first dean of freshman at Stanford, reinvents herself. So, eventually redesigned her life in a really significant way. Now she’s an author.
Case number two, young man, who’s actually in our first book, and I won’t…we’ll call him Mike, is a civil engineer, hates it, you know, and comes to me and says, I think I should become a stockbroker. Well, why is that? Well, my father-in-law is a stockbroker and he says, I’m really smart and I can make more money. I said, well, that’s great for your dad, but what about you? You think you really hate being a civil engineer? Tell me why. Well, I’m just unhappy. That doesn’t tell us a darn thing. So, we give them a task to what we call the Good Time Journal, go on and analyze what you’re doing. Take stock on what’s occurring all day long, and when are you happy, when are you unhappy, what’s going on? What does he discover? He discovers he loves engineering. When they leave him alone long enough that he and a piece of…and a quadrille pad of paper and a pencil and a, you know, ruler can get into a deep problem, he’s the happiest guy on the planet. He just hates going to staff meetings, it’s a small firm, so everybody has to deal with clients. He hates talking to the clients. Just give me a problem, give me a closed room with no windows and a computer screen. I’m so happy. And we said, oh, you just need to be in a totally engineering-oriented job. So, he changes firms, goes to a problem-solving organization full of PhDs in windowless rooms working on hard problems, totally happy guy. So, his stuck was because he loved what he was doing so deeply, he needed to do more of it. The first person was really in the wrong place, she just chased that success thing until she got there and then hated it. So, just because you’re stuck doesn’t mean you know anything. It means it’s time to understand and start prototyping, and then decide what to do.
Eric Becker
Which seems so critical, because you could see, like in the example of the engineer, if that person was driving by a restaurant and said, I love food, you know, if he went from engineering and then suddenly found himself in a restaurant startup, he might still be miserable. And so that discovery that I’m just super deep in engineering, and I don’t like all the things in this small firm that I have to deal with that are outside of that passion. Um, that discovery, you know, made for a much better life in that example. And so that leads to this concept of an odyssey plan. What is an odyssey plan?
Bill Burnett
Well, so odysseys are really just inventions. They’re ideations, they’re brainstorms. But what we find is most people have one thing for their “I’m going to do that, I’m going to be the architect.” And it’s not working, but I don’t know what else to do, so I’ll just be the architect. So, we’re telling people, look, it’s never one plan, it’s always three. So, it’s three completely different versions of yourself. Version one is whatever you’re doing now goes great. And it’s not just your work plan, it’s your life plan. What are you going to do? What’s on your bucket list? What are you going to do with the family and friends? Are you going to get married? And get the dog. So, that’s plan one is what you’re doing now, and it comes out great. Option two is, okay, well, AI took that job, so what’s your plan B? What? Now what do you want to do? If you couldn’t do what you had set out to do, what would be your plan B? And then the third plan is the wild card, which is, okay, if you don’t have to worry about money, there’ll be enough. Don’t worry. You know, somebody, somebody’s backing you, you’re great. And, you know, you’re going to tell your friends, well, I’ve always wanted to be a clown, so I’m going to join Cirque du Soleil and your friends are going to go, instead of going, what the hell? You went to Stanford? You’re going to be a clown. Then they’re going to say. Fantastic. I always knew you had a clown in you. Your career, you’re going to be great. So, your friends will like it, you’ll have enough money. So that’s the wild card. So you do all 3, and you really invest in all three. Imagine what it would be like to be the person in Plan 1, Plan 2, and Plan 3.
And it’s not that you’re going to quit your job and do the wild card, it’s that you’re going to let stuff come up. In a brainstorm, you just, there’s no bad ideas, you’re just letting stuff come up. Sometimes in the wild card is something you wanted to do when you were 20, but you didn’t get a chance to do it. Sometimes it’s something you really want to do now that had didn’t even exist when you were 20. I mean, I always tell my students, don’t you hope 5 years from now, you’re doing something that’s so cool, that job doesn’t even exist yet, which, by the way, is pretty likely in the next five years because of AI and stuff.
So, the three plans just release you from this notion of I got to optimize one thing. They make you more resilient, because as stuff changes, you’ve always got another plan just in case. I do odysseys every couple of years when people leave the lab. We all do odysseys together. And I find that even in a couple of years, my ideas of what could, what is possible changes every time. So, it’s 3 ideas for 3 completely different lives. And then we look at those lives, and we say, Well, what are you curious about? You start prototyping your way forward, but what really happens is you discover stuff that’s even cooler than the thing you had on your plan, because you had a bias to action, and you’re not constrained by this notion of optimizing just one life.
Dave Evans
And the most common outcome of this exercise, by the way is staying in the life you’re already in and liking it more. It turns out, we know psychologically, one of the most vicious competitors to your peace of mind is that thought, like, is this really it? Probably missed it. I should be doing something else. But what is it? I don’t know. That little thought, your internal critic, is beating you to death with a stick. Give yourself the chance to actually own the life that you’re in. And if you come up with a better idea, it could get cooler. I mean, you can’t lose!
Eric Becker
Yeah. I love that. That makes a lot of sense. And so, you know, the first book was incredible. You’ve provided this toolkit both through Stanford and through your writing and seminars to millions. So people are enabled to create these new opportunities for themselves, but now you come out with the new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, which to me is elevating this to another level. Who did you write this book for? Who was this book for?
Bill Burnett
Well, you know, we kind of thought were done, I guess, and then were then we but we started hearing things from our students, from people who, you know, write us or email us, because if they read the book. And they said, you know, descending life is great, but I’m still stuck on, you know, where’s the meaning in all this stuff? What’s my purpose in life? I don’t know how to find the thing, I thought it would be more fulfilling by now? The one thing I’m supposed to be doing. And then…I thought I would be more fulfilled by now, I thought it would have more impact by now. My job doesn’t seem to have any impact. And so, we had those problems that showed up. And then also, you know, this is the loneliest generation of students we’ve ever had at Stanford. They’re lonely, they’re disengaged, they don’t know how to make communities and friends. We’re in a world now with their communities are, you know, it’s hard to be in a good community, hard to find one. Everybody’s in an echo chamber, everybody’s just talking to themselves on social media. The kids are on social media so much they don’t have real relationships as much as they did real friendships as much as they did. So we’re looking at all that, and we’re saying, look, this is a, there’s a crisis of meaning.
And you know, there’s a big question, the meaning of life, and we’re not philosophers. So, go to the philosophy department if you want to answer that question. But getting more meaning in your life, living more meaningfully. Living with more passion, not looking for passion, but a living passionately. Those are things we can design for. So we had a couple of meetings and then a long whiteboard session, and we filled up a whiteboard and we said, I think there’s some design solutions to this issue of finding more meaning in life, and the Joseph Campbell has a quote about Bill Moyers and Campbell did a thing called The Power of Myth on PBS a while back, and you can see it on YouTube. And Moyers asked him, um, I think everybody’s looking for the meaning of life, and Joseph Campbell said, you know, I’m not sure that’s it. I think they’re looking to be, they’re looking to feel the rapture of being alive. And we added in “fully”. The rapture of being fully alive. And we said, well, that’s something we can design for. So we have the newsletter Fully Alive by Design. We wrote the book. And, you know, it’s not easy to write a book. And Dave particularly doesn’t like writing, because I have to, it takes me about a year to talk him into every one of these books.
But we really thought that there was something out there that could that we could we could help with. Again, we’re trying to be the helpful guys and give people hope and give them stuff they could actually do. This whole idea of meaning, finding meaning in your life. It doesn’t require, you know, five years of a mindfulness practice, or, you know, fasting for 40 days under a tree, or any of this stuff. It’s actually pretty easy when you understand the psychology of flow and flow states, when you understand the psychology of what impact really is and what kind of a, you know, how to frame the world in a way that makes it make more sense. And so, yeah, we came up with a bunch of design solutions and we said, maybe we should write another book.
Eric Becker
Love that. And Dave, let’s talk about flow state. Is flow state the measurement of fully alive? That if I’m fully alive, I’m likely to experience flow state? Is that how to think about it?
Dave Evans
That’s part of it. So when, you know, again, we start with empathy and then define the problem. What problem are you solving? Bill mentioned we’re solving the meaning in life, not the meaning of life. That’s the first part focusing our definition of the problem. And then we started talking to people who were in all this pain, particularly after the pandemic and the great quit 52 million people walk off the job looking for something better. Like, what do they want? And overwhelmingly, we heard, I want to have an impact in the world, and that’s not working for me either. It failed, or it worked for a little while, but then the glow, you know, disappeared in no time, or I’m looking for fulfillment, and since we know you all contain more aliveness than your lifetime permits you to express, you can’t be fulfilled. So what else can you do? Oh, and what we realized is, this is where you need to be experiencing things in the present moment. So all that is what we call the transactional world. All that impact stuff, all that accomplishment stuff, all that goal seeking stuff is transactions. And in the modern capitalist, technologically driven world, 90% of people spend 95% of their time in the transactional world, and all it has to offer you is impact and fulfillment. And neither of those work long-term.
But there’s this other world we call the flow world, which is really the present moment. It’s the fullness of reality happening right here. Transactions are about tomorrow and the flow world is about here. So, you ask the question about the flow state. Well, where does the flow state? Flow state is my psychological experience of being fully engaged in the moment, so engaged in the moment that I lose all track of time, I even kind of forget myself and I drop fully into the experience. And it’s wonderful. I love it. I’m in the zone. Okay, so where is it that that flow state occurs? Where’s the place? Well, the place we call the flow world, which is happening all the time. Now, this is all, of course, just in your head. There’s really one world, and it’s all happening all the time. But your brain only has so much comprehension capacity, and part of you tends to work on transactions, and part of you can be more available to the present moment. It’s basically a left brain, right brain thing. That model’s gotten a lot more sophisticated, and a bunch of neurologists who’ve studied this stuff who agree with us. But it turns out we’re really left shifted.
So, what we’re saying is, hey, these other kinds of experiences flow being the first and foremost, when you’re fully engaged in the present moment, to be in that level of engagement, you have to join the present moment, redirect your attention and your consciousness to what’s happening right here, where your aliveness is actually occurring. And that’s when you experience being yourself, that fully alive thing Joseph Campbell was talking about, and that feels meaningful. Then we looked around for where are not the comprehensive definition of everything that allows people to experience meaning in the moment, but where are the places most people can get their hands on it most of the time? We came up with four. Wonder, when you experience awe and wonder. Flow, when you can allow yourself to be fully in the moment, which you think is a much bigger space than Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi originally defined. Coherency, that thing we said earlier, catching yourself in the act of being coherent, and formative community. When I’m with other people and we’re all trying to become our better selves together in a meaningful way. Those four places, wonder, flow, coherency, and community are rich with meaning right now, right in front of you. So finally, we wrote a book that’s an easy lift. This can work in 10 minutes. Doesn’t take 10 months.
Eric Becker
Incredible. Well, Bill and Dave, it’s been such a pleasure having you on “The Long Game.” Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your stories and inspiring us to cultivate more meaning and flow in our lives. For our listeners, thank you so much for joining us. Please be sure to check out How to Live a Meaningful Life. It’s packed with practical tools, these exercises, many of which we touched on today, to help you design a life that is really unique and your own. No matter what age, no matter what stage you’re in, it’s always an opportunity to improve the quality of your life. So, until next time, thank you, everyone.
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“The Long Game,” a podcast by Cresset, is intended for information only and is not investment advice. Any company discussed is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. Investment involves risk, including loss of principal. Please consult your advisors before making investment decisions.
