Good Life Project - Dave Evans & Bill Burnett | Designing Your Work Life

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Dave Evans is a Lecturer in the Product Design Program at Stanford, Management Consultant, and co-founder of iconic gaming company, Electronic Arts. Having participated in forming the corporate cultures at Apple and EA, Dave decided his best work was in helping organizations build creative environments where people could do great work and love doing it. And, maybe, along the way, answer the question, "what should I do with my life?" Helping people get traction on that question finally took Dave to Cal and Stanford and continues to be his life’s work. Bill Burnett is Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford. He got his BS and MS in Product Design at Stanford and has worked on a wide variety of projects ranging from award-winning Apple PowerBooks to the original Hasbro Star Wars action figures. Together, they wrote New York Times bestselling book, Designing Your Life, and the follow-up, Designing Your Work Life (https://amzn.to/3hflUvz), train coaches and run workshops for individuals and organizations.You can find Bill Burnett & Dave Evans at:Website : https://designingyour.life/Twitter : https://twitter.com/DYourLife-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dave Evans is a lecturer in the product design program at Stanford, a management consultant, co-founder of the iconic gaming company, Electronic Arts. Having participated in forming the cultures at Apple and EA, Dave decided that his best work was really in helping organizations build creative environments where people could do great work and really love doing it. And maybe along the way, answer the question, what should I do with my life? And helping people get traction on that question finally took Dave to Cal and Stanford, and it continues to be his life work. Now, Bill Burnett, who became his collaborator, is the executive director

of the design program at Stanford. He got his BS and MS in product design at Stanford. He has worked for a wide variety of projects ranging from award-winning Apple Power Books to the original Hasbro Star Wars action figures. And together, they took all their wisdom about doing great work, being lit up and living a better life

and wrote the New York Times bestselling book, Designing Your Life. And more recently, the follow-up, Designing Your Work Life. And they also continue to train coaches and run workshops and individuals and work with organizations, really exploring this question. So I had the chance to sit down with Dave and Bill earlier this year. In fact, it was late February. I was actually in California and we did a live event at Stanford University where we recorded a conversation

before a crowd, a live podcast gathering. And it was amazing. And the conversation was super powerful. And as happened, within a matter of days, so many things started getting shut down. Everything changed dramatically. And as we had done with a handful of conversations that we recorded early, we held on to this conversation and thought to ourselves, well, maybe it's more appropriate for when things start to change, when things shift. And then we held onto it and held onto it. And then we found ourselves now saying, you know what? We are in a place where we're in a

long-term experience here. And what Dave and Bill have shared in this conversation and how it relates to what so many people are now finding themselves in and exploration of how they want to really live their working lives and their lives, devote their energy and be of service is so relevant to this particular moment. So we wanted to actually finally share this conversation with you. So what you hear was actually taped live in front of an audience at Stanford University. So you'll hear the sound is a little bit different. You may hear some background noise and some audience and the occasional laughter at their jokes and pity laughter at my occasional corny dad jokes. I'm so excited to share their incredible ideas and wisdom with you now. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. Let's give a little bit of context just to who you are and how you came to work together. Because you come from sort of like different walks of life and somehow ended up originally teaching this course together. And trying to figure out, okay, what is this thing called design thinking?

And why is it being used in this one domain? But we're not really applying this process, this way of thinking, to actually creating a better life. So how does the marriage first happen here? I'll do the origin and then throw it to you in spring of 2007. So going all the way back to when I was a Stanford sophomore here 75,000 years ago and there were pterodactyls on the White Plaza and struggling with the question, what do I do with my life? I found most of the grown-ups who were supposed to be helpful, not helpful at all. And I found it really difficult to figure my own life out. Then I get into my

career, and I'm at Apple in the early days, and find myself on the first corporate culture committee with Steve in 1980, because we're worried about what makes Apple won't be Apple anymore someday. And over the subsequent 30 years, notice everybody's got this question, particularly in the workplace, about, notice everybody's got this question, particularly in the workplace, about I want to do meaningful work. I want it to work for you. I want it to work for me. I want this to be generative. Maybe they don't use that language, but that's what they were looking for and struggling with. So everybody's got this question. Fast forward many more years later, I'm having a coffee with a guy named Randy over at Berkeley. And he says, gosh,

Dave, you should teach a class on this. And I said, well, minor problems. I'm not on the faculty. I don't have a PhD. I don't have any contacts there. He says, I can solve everything but the lousy commute. I said, deal. So I taught a course experimentally. One student said, are you teaching in the spring? Because my roommate wants to take it.

And I said, sure. And I made a deal with the universe. If the kids show up, I'll show up. So 14 semesters later, I'm teaching this class at Berkeley called Finding Your Vocation. And then, Hasso Plattner and David Kelly get together and invent this thing called the D School, or decide to invent the D School, which is where we are now. And in order to focus on that, David Kelly asked this guy, Bill Burnett, to run the design program. And so in 2007, I heard Bill was coming here to run the design program, and I said, hey, Bill gets this kind of stuff.

He cares about students, and Stanford's a lot less terrible drive for me. Let's have lunch. And so we had lunch in 2007 in the spring, which I thought was the first of 10 lunches over a year, talking about this ambiguous idea of helping students find their way. And about a minute and a half, Bill goes, that's a great idea. It's a huge problem. We should totally fix it. Design thinking is the way to really solve this thing.

So take all that stuff you're doing and flip it into design. Give me a proposal. We'll teach it. We'll prototype it this summer. We'll teach it this fall. Let's go. I've got to run. So it's a two-minute meeting.

And I'll get you an appointment. We've got to go. So one of the few times that Bill talks faster than I do. And so then we start that spring thinking of ideas. And that fall, teaching design students, which eventually meant teaching all the students. But in particular, the design thing really did work. Now, why was that, Bill?

Why did design work? Well, design is inherently human-centered, the way we teach it. And both of you and I have been working with students for a long time. I finished my master's in 82. I started teaching here part-time in 83. I've been doing this for like 36 years or something. And in office hour after office hour after office hour, really smart, capable students are going,

I don't know what to do, I don't know how to launch. Is work going to suck as much as everybody tells me it sucks? How will I find something that I want or I like or might even be meaningful? People keep asking me stupid questions like, what's my passion? And I don't know. So am I broken? What's wrong with me, professor? And it's like, nothing wrong with you.

And then Dave had this experience over at Berkeley. And basically the class happened because he wanted a shorter commute and I wanted to free up my office hour time. But no, it's a really big problem. I mean, if you look at the data around the world, United States, 68% of the people say, I'm highly disengaged from my job. I hate my job. 85% worldwide, people hate their jobs, right?

So the students, we started with students and then pretty soon after, we had kind of gone all over the university. And by the way, now we give the class to any university that wants it, we're now being taught at 115 some universities, courtesy of that wonderful woman over there, Gabrielle, who runs our studios. Everybody's got the same question, like, will life be meaningful? Will this be interesting? What's work, how does work fit into this big thing called life? And it's essentially a human problem because we're trying to, what designers do is make new things that have never happened in the world.

You know, hey, this is an iPhone, it's never been happened before. How do you do it? Well, you build lots and lots of prototypes and you figure it out because you can't get any data about the future. So when you want to do something in the future that's brand new, you need a process. Design thinking is that process. It works over and over again. If you apply it to your life, well, what are you trying to do?

Something new in the world, your future, right? You've never been there before. You don't know what it's going to be like. You probably are a little anxious or you're at a point of change. We started working with 30 and 40-somethings who are kind of, you know, I have this career thing, but it's not exactly what I, it didn't really work out the way I thought, or it's okay, but I'd like to go faster.

So everybody's got this problem problem how do I invent the future well design thinking and design is a way of inventing your future you know and I tell the students you had one or two choices whether that students 20 and launching or 30 and bored or 50 and thinking about their own career you got only got two choices the future is coming You don't get to choose that. You get the default future. Stuff happens and you react to it. Or you design it. You put your intention in the world

and you try to make the world do the things that you are interested in. And you know that thing like when you buy a red car and then all of a sudden you see, everybody's got a red car. Look at all these red cars. It's amazing. I have a red car.

Yeah. Red cars are already there. It's just you notice them because you started thinking about red cars like the one you own. Well, when you start noticing things about the future, like I wonder if I could do this or I wonder if I could do that. When you get curious and you start talking to people and trying stuff, you'll notice that all those opportunities were there anyway. You just weren't paying attention. So this design thinking thing is the way of inventing this future and paying attention to who you are and what the world needs from you. You mentioned 100-something other colleges and universities

are now also teaching this curriculum. So it's almost like you team up, you teach this. The seeds of day's work and the design thinking, then you bring it here and you continue to develop for close to another decade. That goes out into the world. And then September-ish, 2016, it's time to actually distill this into a book. Designing your life, that goes out into the world. I'm imagining that that actually was the catalyst for all these other schools to start raising

their eyebrows and saying- Yeah, the phone really started to ring. Right. So to me, it's like the Roger Bannister moment of design thinking meets creating your life because you have this, you know, one person shows you can run a four-minute mile and then in the years after, all these people are breaking it.

Right. And that becomes this one thing where it's like, oh, there's this intelligent process that we can design to this existential question that everybody suffers and never has an answer to. And now these guys have come up with a way to sort of map it out, which is linear, simple, straightforward, progressive.

Dave and I had been teaching about six, seven years before we got to this idea of writing a book. And it took a while to convince Dave to write a book because he doesn't like to write. And partially, we were also worried that we weren't sure that books could do what we do in a classroom. In a classroom. You know, you've got the students there. You can see how they're reacting.

It's 10 weeks. We get a real relationship. A small group with a facilitator, very personal. Yeah, yeah. So we were really cautious that the book would, one, be useful. It wouldn't be just some silly self-help book that makes you do a lot of stuff that doesn't work. And then you feel bad. All of our stuff is pretty research-based, either positive psychology or design research.

So we try to craft it in a way that would be useful and accessible, and you could read it in any order so that, you know, however, whatever. There's an old expression, when the student is ready, the teacher will arrive. So when the student is ready, the book will arrive. If the book is the right book for you, it'll speak to you somehow. And it took off, and we were quite surprised. We still have trouble thinking about ourselves as authors because we think of ourselves as product guys.

So we shipped a product, and then everybody calls us authors. That's weird. And now we have a new product. It was really, at that point, yeah, lots of other universities found out about it. This wonderful community of people called life coaches and executive coaches or career coaches

all showed up at our doorstep and said, this is amazing, can we use this stuff? So we now have a certification program for coaches. And it's turned out to be kind of a movement. People really like thinking of themselves as a designer. I think that's one hook. And imagining themselves as creating, being creative in the agency of their own lives.

And that word agency is the thing that pops up also because it is that switch from reactive to a sense of power, control, agency, where it's like, okay, I don't necessarily know what the outcome's going to be yet, but I have a process where I'm not just showing up and reacting what other people think is the appropriate path for me.

I'm actually pushing this forward. And I kind of know where to go with this, even though I don't know where it's going to end. And I think that's a huge shift in psychology for so many people. So that goes out into the world. It starts this sort of like generates a ton of interest. Fast forward, we're sitting here now on a stage in Stanford D School. It's 2020.

And you have another book out. So for two product guys who are like, struggle with the idea, author, now book two, right? Most people write their first book and are like, I'm so glad that was done never again. And you're here, so for you to, and you both have so much going on individually in your lives, you know, as well as collectively. What happens in the intervening years? What happens between the end of 2016 and now that makes you say, we're still not quite done creating some tool that needs to go out and solve some problem?

Well, the, I mean, listen, the phone rings off the hook. I mean, you know, we hit the road. We stand in front of rooms like this, you know, with anywhere from 25 to 2,500 people, anywhere from, you know, the 18-minute TED Talk to the eight-hour intensive workshop, over and over again, hundreds, literally hundreds of times. And from the now 60-odd thousand people in our, you know, digital community who have signed up to be in the conversation with us, as well as the 600,000 book readers, a lot of the questions are about, you know, okay, I may not want to massively redesign my life, but I'd like to be a little better right where I am. How about this? How about that?

That question is coming in like crazy. The universities are lining up like crazy asking for help. So clearly the question has power. It's not like we have the coolest book on the planet. We just have a good book that answers a question that's not getting very good food. You know, so finally, you know, high caloric, non-fattening food for a really important question has arrived. And then the publisher said, look, this is not a book, it's a movement. We think there are a couple of things you guys could do. Let us know what you think the possibilities of where we could go from here are. We had an ideation session about that. And then they came back and said, we really want to talk about the work thing. And that's mostly what we were hearing from the world as well. And then I said, so we sat in that room

right there and said, okay, I guess we have to design the workbook, the book about work. And I went, Bill, we're screwed because we haven't taught this for 10 years. We haven't thought this thing. We imagine that we should do a book on work. We don't know what the heck the book is. We're screwed. And 20 minutes later, we designed it. It fell right out because what we forgot was, oh, between us, we've worked for like 75 years and had lots of consulting clients and done all this executive coaching and all this, you know, corporate culture formation work and organizational development work. And the first question was, where do people get stuck at work? Bang. We used to call that a bug list in the early design days. So we had a bug list in no time. Do we have design solutions to that? Actually, we do.

About 19 out of 20 of those we know how to address. And then we just wrote it down. And then a year later, we finished writing it down. 20 minutes to map the whole thing out, and then a year down. Now, I'm curious, what are the bugs? So Bill, you referenced this earlier. You know, like 68% of the people disengage, and 85% of the people hate their work. Talk to me a bit more about the state of work today.

Because it seems like it's almost more bugs than sort of, like, good. Well, I mean, everybody's freaking out right now about the future of work. You know, AI's coming, the robots are coming, no one will have a job. It's all gig economy. It's all going to be, you're going to be, yeah, you're all going to be Uber drivers, maybe if you're lucky, except they're going to go out of business, so that won't work. And, you know, so I got excited about that, dug into that, and

the answer is none of that's going to happen. It's not true. By the way, this isn't a new question. I pulled a paper from an economist in 1919 who predicted that by the year 2000, machines would be doing all the work. He thought they were steam engines, of course. So, you know, one, I think in the future of work, being a creative, working on social and emotional intelligence, working on creativity, working on collaboration and people, things together will never be automated and that will be the most high-value work and so you should probably learn to design your life anyway just to be resilient in the future because you'll you'll need lots of designs to you know sort of surf the changes but the changes have already you know they're already happening I mean

you know I remember the first spreadsheet. Spreadsheet is a piece of automation before spreadsheets if you is a piece of automation. Before spreadsheets, if you had a picture of an office, it would be full of people entering things into what was called a ledger so that people could calculate your taxes. Now we use spreadsheets. When I got out of school, I had a draftsman draw my drawings. Now I just draw stuff on the screen and print it on a 3D printer

while I go to get coffee. And everybody still has a job. So one, we want to address that. I think, you know, on the future of work, I mean, the future of work is mostly talking about the way future of work, and let's do a sci-fi conversation becoming reality. The thing we think is more important

is the future of the worker, and the future of the worker is now. So the future worker, like you guys, is living in reality today. And what's happening finally, it's been brewing for, frankly, guys, you know, is living in reality today. And what's happening finally, it's been brewing for frankly 15, 20 years, is a fundamental shift in organizational shape where the organization is a donut shop or IBM, which is it went from this to this. So organizations are flat. Bosses have not six direct reports, but 20 or 30 vendors who are gig employees remotely all over the world.

And so a career used to be go up. There is no up anymore. You get to level three and there's no more up. So a whole bunch of people are really frustrated. There's nowhere up to go because that's still the default. An incredibly antiquated idea is where do I go next? I go up. There is no up.

It's a dumb idea. So don't waste your time on it. You've got to go laterally. You've got to go other. You've got gotta go different. And now finally, employers are beginning to realize that and are no longer saying we're gonna help you with professional development, we're gonna help you with empowering you

to do your own agency definition of your own future, even here at this organization, in the bigger companies and even in the smaller ones. So what that says is, if I don't want to completely quit and start over again, which is really painful and not necessary much of the time, you don't resign, redesign. So probably one of the big ideas in the book

is in the face of that, wait a minute, I'm now in charge. And even my boss thinks I'm in charge and says, well, how can I help you do whatever it is you want to do here? Now, I'm not going to tell you what to do. You have to figure it out. So now you are the agent of your own future in a more powerful way than ever before. So you need a toolkit.

And so one of the core things is how do you redesign your work in place? And we actually have four different strategies for that. Right. And I want to actually dive into that because this is one, it seems to be one of the central things and is also completely contrary to what you hear very often as sort of the pop psychology self-help world which is if you don't like your thing just

blow it up if somebody doesn't support you jettison them from your life you're like this is just get it all done with which you know if you're 21 years old maybe fine but if you're 30s 40s 50s 60s you have a family responsibilities you've built things and structure around your life, the idea of disrupting on that level is excruciating. And even when people get to a point where they think, I'm ready to blow it all up, I still think we end up being, and I'm raising my hand here also because I've blown it up a number of times, we end up being semi-delusional because we overestimate the joy that we think we'll feel the day after we make this change. And we profoundly underestimate the pain that this disruption is going to bring us.

Yeah. So tell me more about the four things. So the four strategies are reframe and re-enlist, remodel, relocate, and reinvent. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA. That's uvic.ca slash future MBA.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. The first one, which is reframe and re-engage,

is literally bring a new you to the same job with no structural changes whatsoever, and you can actually transform your situation, which is not sort of some patronizing, make lemonade out of lemons. It's literally reframing what your experience is the second one means I can actually change my job description in my current job nine times out of ten even without my boss's permission and do so successfully because I don't need other permission or even or other resources to invent this new job I can relocate over to another kind of a job in the same organization pretty directly, and then reinvent as I probably have to go get some retraining,

some heavy lifting might be involved. You know, so they get harder as you go along. But there's still four ways to get there from here. And the first one, which really is a mindset change, can be absolutely huge. We've got a couple of examples in the book. The classic one is, I mean, I can't afford to quit this job. There was a story in the book about a guy who suddenly, first day on the job realizes, oh, they lied completely to me.

This is a horrible job. My boss is an idiot. It's a nightmare. That's never happened to anybody. Literally. And it's Jekyll and Hyde. And my resume, I can't afford to quit. I got sick here for at least a year, a year or two.

So I just literally eat toxic waste all day, every day, or invent this new thing. And the reframe was, okay, I can't make what's awful better, but I can find what is working here, and it's all about learning. So I'm going to get really efficient because the work itself is boring, so I'm going to get really good at doing it in as little time as possible. I'm going to grow in my efficiency, and I'm going to learn all, by having been so efficient, I'm going to carve up an hour a day or half a day a week to go learn stuff from this great big organization that does things I don't know a lot about that I might be able to use someday. So I'm going to get a little MBA on the side for free when they're not looking. And that's a complete reframe. Abandoned. I accept

the fact that the job I thought I was going to get doesn't actually even exist. They literally lied to me. So let that go. And that frees me to do this other thing. Is it a consolation prize? Sure. But it beats the heck out of waking up and repaying the pain bill. One thing we see people do all the time is go, you know, do you know what my boss did again today? I bet the same thing he did last week. You know, yes, he did. And you're so surprised for the 467th time. You really want to pay your taxes like the 15th of every month, not just April? I mean, why would you do that?

So we're trying to free people from that. And the first strategy is really deep acceptance and then the reframe. And it's really freeing. And just change your why. Why am I coming to work? I thought it was about this job. Turns out they lied to me. Another example of a guy who's got to have a job. He it's really frank. And just change your why. Why am I coming to work? I thought it was about this job. Turns out they lied to me. Right. Another example of a guy who's got to have

a job. He had a cool job. Then the company got bought. And then they said, nothing's going to change. And of course, everything changes when your company gets bought. And now he doesn't like it anymore. But he's got great health insurance and a sick kid. So you change your why. I'm coming to work for my kid. This isn't about me anymore. It's not about my career anymore. As soon as you accept the reframe, you are free from the constraint of, it's not my fault, they changed the rules. Yeah, and also, it's this repeated idea of taking back the idea, like, okay,

so I'm no longer in a victim stance, in a reactive stance. How do I be the one who's actually, who actually has this sense of agency, of control? I mean, it's interesting you brought up the idea of the why, the reframe around purpose. I read some research about two, three years ago that looked at suffering. Right. And that actually showed that when you can reframe suffering as in the name of something that gives you a bigger sense of purpose,

in this context they were looking at supporting people who are in your family who are in need. So you're doing something to get money that you hate. But somewhere deep down, you tell yourself the story, I'm doing it because I have a mother, a father, an aunt, whatever it is, maybe somewhere they're suffering deeply, they can't take care of themselves, but I have this ability to do that and provide for them.

That it doesn't make it completely okay, but it changes the quality of the day-to-day work that you're doing enough where you're okay being there, at least for a window of time. And Adam Grant did the same thing, right? He took people in a call center, notoriously tough job at a university, like raising money, and he just introduces a couple of students that have gotten scholarships through the efforts of the call center who never would have been able to go to college. And all of a sudden it profoundly changes the experience

of the people in the call center from something that they really don't wanna do to something, well now they're on a mission, they're part of a movement, they're making a real difference. Now there's a couple of things. All the research, Dan Gilbert at Harvard, all the research on happiness,

it's not about getting what you want. It's about fully engaging and wanting what you get. And you can have intention about what you get, but sometimes, you know, sometimes you don't get

everything perfectly. By all accounts, Mother Teresa was a depressed person and deeply unhappy most of the time, but she had a really big why. I'm working with the most,

the lowest of the low people here, and I'm giving them sanctuary. I'm giving them hope and a place to live until they die. So, I mean, it's not the other thing. We fall into these silly ideas, like who said work was about feeding my soul? When did that idea pop up? Mostly in the last 20 years. My grandfather came from Germany in 1933 because this, didn't think this Hitler guy was going to turn out so

well, worked his buns off to get the rest of his family out of Germany and took any job he could get just to keep a roof over their head. His why was, we're here, we're safe, we're good. Now, sent his daughter and sons to college, and they sent their sons to Stanford, and my daughter's now doing a PhD in immunology at UCSF. So it's the immigrant story. But the job was not where he was getting his big wife from. He had a wonderful community.

They had church. People got together. The love of people is where you get you know kind of happiness from not from jobs so it's cool if your job provides some of that but that's not that's that's a real dysfunctional belief that you got examined yeah can i jump on the purpose because i actually just did a talk down cal state san luis obispo to a thousand students on the issue of what's my purpose you know and i said I said, what, wrong question. I mean, we almost, I would say it's the wrong question. The designers love to say that. One of the ideas in the book is good enough for now. The dysfunctional belief

is this isn't good enough. You know, I deserve better, you know, and, but I can't find it. So my life's screwed. So the, you know, and the reframe is, well, maybe, no, it's not good enough at the moment, but if we made it a little bit better, could it be good enough for now? And we really want that idea to be understood properly. We're a little worried people kind of go, oh, it'll be fine, and we sound patronizing. We don't mean to be patronizing. But on this purpose question, I was telling a thousand students, no, don't try to answer the question, what's my purpose? Because, like, what's my passion, or is this it?

It's one of the many questions that culture currently frames inadvertently, exclusively like the good life project you're really sure that's it is this really it or could it is it could it is it maybe something else and we don't think there is an it there's not a perfect you there's not a one best you there's not a perfect career there are lots of good use and there are lots of good ways to go you're going to pick one you'll never know there's We're bigger than life. We're bigger than a lifetime, I should say. So of course there's more than one right answer. There's lots of right answers and we just live our way into it.

So I think most people suspect I haven't really found my one true, the one reason I was put on the earth is, now some of you may feel that way, but that's rare, probably because there's a couple of good ways you could spend your life on earth. So my counsel to people is don't try to get done finding your purpose and then just commit yourself to it, but learn how to live purposefully into the moment that life is presently offering you. Pay attention, as Bill was saying earlier, grow your way forward, something else will develop. And if I'm trying to live purposefully, right, which is a way of being, not a

destination with an outcome, then my ability to say, well, why am I doing this? I wake up at three in the morning, I walk in the bathroom, I flip on the light, and that guy's looking back at me in the mirror going, why are you doing this? You know, my clients, they have the three in the morning bathroom conversation. You know, and you want to have a good answer for that guy in the mirror going, why are you doing this? My clients, they have the three in the morning bathroom conversation. You want to have a good answer for that guy in the mirror that's yelling at you at three in the morning. He's like, why are we doing this? That guy's a little crazy.

Here's why we made this decision, and here's what we're doing now, and it's not perfect, but it really is good enough for the moment, and here's what we're hoping for, and go back to bed. You're going to be fine. You want to help people find that kind of way to live. You mentioned agency. I've been a designer ever since I came to Stanford. Well, I was a physics major for a while, but that didn't work out.

Then I became a designer. Designers learn that you never pick your first idea. You brainstorm lots of ideas. I have, in the 30, 40-some years of design, and been on three startup teams and Apple teams and other teams, I have literally thrown away hundreds of thousands of good ideas and picked a few hundred even better ideas. So throwing away ideas or the notion that there's lots of good means, it's just the way my brain works. And what we're trying to get people

to realize is there is no one singular best you. There's lots of good yous. There's no perfect job. The job you've got could be made better. And you are the agent in this change, not the world. Most of the things that we talk about for changing your job in place, you don't even need your boss's permission. Although if you go frame it correctly and you tell a good story, your boss is going to go, oh, you mean you want to be more efficient and do this job better, faster? For free.

In order to do that, you need to make these three changes. Sounds good to me. Let's go. There's an old saying, people don't quit jobs, they quit bosses. And yet, the number of times I've asked this question to my students, so you quit, right? Yeah, I quit. Why? Well, the boss was a jerk.

Okay. Did you ever talk to him or Why? Well, the boss was a jerk. Okay. Did you ever talk to him or her? Like, why are you a jerk? Did you ever do that? Why would I do that? Because that's the data you need to make a good decision. And nobody does it. Yeah.

I think it's also, it's this idea that we are in this perpetual and iterative process. Yes, right. You know, that the only there there is here now. And we just keep taking the next step. And we may figure out some things along the way that are great and take us to a place where we feel alive for a season.

Sure. But we are, like, we may wake up the next day, a season plus a day and be like, huh. Okay, so let's, you know, like, that's not it. I mean, it's also interesting, the notion of finding a sense of meaning and purpose from work. As you said, Dave's you know, like that's not it. I mean, it's also interesting the notion of Finding a sense of meaning and purpose from work as you said dating like it's great when you can make it happen. Yep Yes, and Also, that is not the only place we tend to focus only on the domain of work as like that is a place I must

Arrive my purpose or set of purposes and some meaning in my life and when you can that's awesome And sometimes you can do the reframes and reimagining and change the way you're doing it so that you can derive much more. And at the same time, there's a whole lot of life outside of that will still contribute to the totality of the experience of meaning and purpose when you wake up every single day and live that life. And we exclude that. But I mean, Bill, one of the things that you said, you know, you sort of gave the example of we're in this generation now where it seems like everybody's looking to work to provide this purpose and not everything outside of that there's another shift that's happened which is like we are beasts that have to belong right right it's it's wired into us we have a

physiological a psychological need to belong and the places that we used to look for that sense of belonging are going away really quick. So I wonder if part of what's happening is, and that sense of belonging, where it also often gives us a sense of purpose, or opportunities to do things that give us a sense of purpose. So I wonder if that phenomenon is focusing us even more

on having to have this thing happen in the domain of work. You know, it's possible. It's an interesting hypothesis. You know, we quote the longest running study of human development, the grand study at Harvard, started in the class of Harvard 38, I think. They've been studying this group of people for 80 some years. And the only thing that correlates to living longer, living healthier, and and reporting your life as meaningful is relationships. George Valiant, the last psychologist on the study, has said you want the whole 20 million dollars, 80 years sum to one thing? It's all about love, full stop. So we do seek relationships. We have an intrinsic need to be related. One of the

things we talked about in the book is Edward Dietschy and the guys doing social determination theory. It's like we need to be related, we need to have competence, we need to get better at stuff, and we have an inherent sort of need to be curious and autonomous in our lives. And if you actually reward us for those things, our performance goes down because you can't make an intrinsic thing extrinsically rewarded. So yeah, I think work is a place to find that.

But I also see, I think we're also trying to rebuild other things in our culture, spiritual traditions, churches, and things like that. People just getting together in meetups and things. You know, the best possible version of social media is about connection. It doesn't play out that way in a positive all the time. So I think work can be that place, but I think you're still, if you want community nowadays,

you kind of have to build it yourself or at least catalyze it yourself because it isn't as available as it used to be. And get clear what it looks like. So you brought up the meaning question, and one of the classic dysfunctional beliefs is, gosh, you know, it's money or meaning, which way to go? I mean, students ask us this all the time, you know, I mean, I'm really drawn to go do the save the world thing, but I'm pretty good at the econ thing, and I think I want to go make some money on Wall Street, and I'm really torn. I can't have them both, you know, and we go, look, that's another false dichotomy. Your brain loves dichotomies and turns them into teeter-totters,

it's binary truths, like, you know, meaning goes up, money goes down, money goes up, meaning goes down, work-life does the same kind of foolishness. And we go, look, you know, best way to blow up a bad idea is get away from that dichotomy and also release that if I'm not being paid for it, it doesn't count. We talk about the vocational lifestyle where I'm paid for my purposeful thing and the avocational lifestyle where I'm paid for one thing, nobly done, doesn't mean it's it's hateful you know and some of that other heart stuff or soul stuff is elsewhere conceptually which has been what most human beings have done for the history of humankind and look think about what you're making I mean what you're actually doing so one of our reframes is look you know we're

all makers and we talk about makers this is a maker space right usually is a maker space, right? Usually there's a big making sign hanging from that beam. It's gone today. But we make more than one kind of thing. Hey, what do you make, Jonathan? Well, you make ideas, and you just make some money, right? There's a famous poet who talks about what you make. And so we say there are three kinds of things all of us make. We make economic outcomes, probably in the market economy,

whether it's for-profit or nonprofit, and so we make some money. And then what we also make an impact in the world. So there's the purpose world, the social impact world, you know, talks about things in terms of making an impact. And then on the creativity side, we all have ways of expressing ourselves or taking our creativity and expressing it in a variety of forms, and that's making a form form of expression so we came up with a thing called the maker mix we all have some mix of you know money or production making impact making and expression making um and how to think about that so bill i mean how do we think about that well you know again you don't you you know let's let's assume you want when we look at hundreds and hundreds and thousands of Odyssey plans

that people do from the first book, everybody has, I wish my job was a little more creative, or I wish I had this thing I used to do that I like to do that I don't do anymore. It's like, okay, well, you're just undervaluing the thing that matters. And so when you say, I've got this mix, oh, I'm not doing enough expression. But you might not want to do your art on the market's terms, right? There might be a really good reason not to do expression for money. To keep the money in the money category, the impact in the impact category. You know, money, I go to

work, it's good, it's fine. Impact, you know, I coach that AYSO soccer team and I teach those girls about teamwork and showing up for each other and practicing. Because that's what I think, you know, kids need to learn. That's my impact. And, you know, and then I go to an open mic night and I do my poetry, whatever. So when you separate it out, the only time you get unhappy

is when you're trying to get paid in the wrong dollars for the wrong thing. Like, I want dollars for expression. I want impact for... Number one version of people who come to our midlife seminar and raise their hand when I say they're unhappy tends to be lawyers. Recovering lawyers is a really big group. Yeah, yeah. As Elaine said, like I said. Yeah, and when you, you know, when you get into it, it's like, well, I went into the

law because I wanted to have impact. I wanted to help truth and I wanted to fight for truth and justice. I wanted to be at the Supreme Court saying this was not right. And instead, I'm writing contracts for Exxon to build oil wells. And it just doesn't, you know, like I'm getting paid a lot of money, but I wanted to get paid an impact. And so whenever you have a, whenever it's crossed like that, you experience an incoherent life, right? Right. I thought I was going to do this, but I got this instead.

And then something breaks. So we talk a lot about the coherent life is when what you do and what you believe and who you are kind of comes together as one single story. And that's what we're trying to help people get. So what's that story? And there's a trick here, by the way, that people who haven't done this yet don't necessarily

understand. It's really good news, which is sort of the magic unit opportunity. People tend to think, you know, I don't spend any time at all. I mean, I'm spending so much more time at work than I do coaching literally or what have you, and they haven't been doing that yet. It has nothing to do with time. It's amazing how small an amount of an alternate thing can incredibly change the experience. It's like spice and food, you know, just add a little bit of cumin and it's all different.

So, for instance, for me right now, and this would either be outside work and give an inside work example, really briefly. Outside work for me, so Bill actually didn't quite major in physics and didn't quite major in actually fine art, because he was too chicken, because his daddy engineer was going to say, what are you doing that for? And so he majored in design, which is commercial art. But now he's back to becoming a really fine artist.

He's really developing his art. And my wife is now developing her art after years of being a high-tech salesperson. And she's getting really, so I'm surrounded by artists, and it's pissing me off. So I kind of go, well, I want to be an artist too. So I'm going to start learning

how to make bad lawn art, you know. But in the garage with a welding torch. And so I've just signed up for, last night I went to my second welding class. So I spend two hours a week in welding class. I spend 30 hours a week trying to sell this book. But it's huge because I've got this little welding thing going on. I've got a burn right here. And it's a big part of my life now. So just a little tiny thing outside of work has changed everything because I'm walking around being a future bad lawn artist. Then one of my clients who is in a call center, actually,

a part of her life that wasn't happening much was the interpersonal thing. It turns out everybody loved her as an interviewer for new employees because she was so good at getting to the heart of the story with people really quickly. And long story short, she ends up having spare cups of coffee with people after they get hot. Like, I liked interviewing with you. Can I talk to you after I join the company? Sure you can. She now has become a self-annoyed volunteer coach to people with their careers.

So she comes in early and has coffee with people and does coaching. Doesn't call it that because it's not part of her job description. Then it got so popular that her boss said, you know, keep doing that and I'll give you two hours off a week to go do that instead.

So what she did is she took this meaning-making thing, which is invest in people's lives, and made it a side gig, a side hustle in the job, you know, on the premises, and felt huge, because I'm going to spend all day taking care of customers on the phone, which is fine, but I really want to invest directly

in somebody I see regularly, so I do this little coaching thing on the side for about a half an hour a week, and it's huge. So a little bit goes a long way. So if it's not a time thing, because this is one of my curiosities. When you look at the make or mix, right? We've got the three ingredients, right? We've got money.

We've got impact. We've got expression. Right. Right. If it's not a time issue, why wouldn't everybody want to optimize for all three? What's stopping that? Well, one of the advantages of making it a maker mix, like a mixer board, like, you know, if you're mixing sound for a song, you know, you could have all the bass, all the treble, and all, you know, you could have a full volume all

the time, but that doesn't, that's actually not a very good song, right? Because you can't hear it, it's too muddy. There are times in your life when you might want to dial up expression or dial up impact. You know, when I was running my consulting firm, I was making lots of money, and, you know, a little bit of impact for the clients, but they weren't my ideas, they were the client's ideas. So expression was zero. When David offered me this job at a healthy 50% less than I was making, I dialed down the money, upped the impact, felt pretty good, right? So I think it's just, it's matching where you are in life and notice, you know, all of our things are, you are here, there's a big sign over the studio

on the other side of campus. You are here, the students are here, you're here now, this is reality. What do you see? What do you observe? And sometimes the tools just help you tease out some things. And where do you want to go?

And sometimes life allows you to go with a twofer or a threefer. Right. You know, you can triple score something. So if, you know, if we, if I design an immensely beautiful PowerPoint slide, right, my slides are terrific, and it's talking about something that's transformative to the people who are going to be watching it,

and I'm getting really well paid to present it, so I'm making money with an impact with immensely creative expression all at the same time, that's a threefer. So you could actually max out your mixer board that way. But that's circumstantial. You don't have to demand of life that you can get threefers every day.

That's not a better situation. That's just a good day. And, you know, it's like... And by the way, everybody says, oh, I really want to be more creative. Walk into a studio every day and there's a blank canvas on the easel and it's just laughing at you. You're like,

you got nothing. You got nothing, dude. You got no ideas. It hasn't been done before. Come on in here and I'll eat you up. So this notion that we all want to have a creative life, trust me, it's harder than you think. Yeah. I mean, but I want to push back a little bit because, so agree that you can have these moments or seasons or things where everything is at 11. Yeah. Right? And not that you should expect that to always happen. Right.

But if it is not a time constraint, right, what is the resource that is limited that does not allow us to be there more regularly. Because if I could make gobs of money, have a global impact, and feel fully expressed every day when I open my eyes and go out into the world, why would I not want to do it? That doesn't, I get the analogy with an equalizer and it being flat and it just sounds like noise. But then my visualization mind is like, but I think that would be pretty awesome, actually. So what's the bandwidth resource?

Why is that not true? And what's the bandwidth resource that doesn't make that possible for more than a short amount of time? First, one thing, we try to design our tools so you can use them in ways that work for you and you can push all the sliders up on your Maker Mix board. So that would be fine for Jonathan.

But I think what we're trying to do is we're really anti-should. We work really hard that we want should on you, and we don't recommend you should on yourself as much as possible. So I notice I'm having a reaction. I'm pushing back. I really don't want people to walk away thinking they should be able to or go for having all three sliders of money, impact, and expression maxed out.

They should have a mix that works for them. Part of this has to do with the way you think about it. And so if you think about I'm getting as much expression as I want, and that's a 100, well, that's fine. You can have 100, 100, 100, however you want to score it. But I think the bandwidth issue has to do with compromise is okay. Doling out a limited resource of my energy or my attention, maybe it's not the same as my time, still says, you know,

I mean, could I possibly be more expressive? Yes, I could. Am I asking that of myself at this point in my life? Not really. Not really. I'm not trying to maximize. So I think I want to give people permission to not trying to maximize. So I think I want to give people permission to not have to maximize.

More isn't better. Theoretically, you could totally optimize. Right, and totally agree with the should side of things. I think we're saying the same thing but just framing it differently. Re-framing. What a wonderful tool. After you buy the book, you can review it any way you want. Yeah, and it's funny because

when I think about it through my brain, it says this is a resource issue. Right, right, right. Well, it is. But it gets back to something we had in the original book. We can't make you more time, but it's what you pay attention to is, in fact, your reality. So it's what you put your energy into.

Literally, like, I pay attention to this. My brain is consuming all of its electrical energy on paying attention to writing a book or being a blogger or, or, or. And that's why something that's a high energy activity that's only two hours a week can completely transform Dave's week. By the way, you should all learn to weld because as soon as you realize that you can melt metal and fuse it together in new shapes, you are like a god. So learn to weld. I notice it changes every student in our program.

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You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. So it's about what do you pay attention to and where do you put your energy. And it's also about learning not to put energy in things that are just a waste of time.

And remember, you know, the maker makes just three things. You can have them all maxed, but what about taking care of your aging mom? What about your relationship? What about the kids? You know, when we're working with our students and we have them do a five-year plan and a ten-year plan, some of them will put a dog on the plan maybe. Maybe I could take care of a dog. I don't know, maybe.

But they never put kids or families because they aren't in that stage yet. But you want to change your reality? Have a child. And then you realize this work thing? Not as important. It's not as important as raising this child, right? So as we change ourselves

and change the seasons we're in in our lives, different things become important. And that's appropriate. And it took us, you know, we have three kids, it took us a bunch of years to realize, oh this is not gonna be like, you know, me and Cynthia just hanging out together. This has something to do with these three kids who are running around. Then we changed our why and then we, you know, and now they're all gone and now we're having to figure out, like, do we even know each other anymore and how are we going to work that out so as you progress through these seasons

it's nice to have some tools to observe where am I at now because things are different. Yeah and getting back to Dave what you said also earlier is that to me one of the big fears that I have about somebody actually trying to push all to 11 at all times

is them making choices about how to get there that say, I'm only going to say yes to this if it will allow me to push all three higher at the same time. So in the context of expression, if you're a painter, you will constantly be asking, what is the thing that I need to paint that will optimize for money simultaneously? And that will kill you as an artist. Right, it will destroy you. That will destroy your art.

It's going to express yourself. So I think it's a much more, it's this really interesting nuance and dynamic interplay between the three. Yeah, there's one particular tool called the maker mix, and the image is literally a soundboard. The primary takeaway is it's your soundboard, it's your finger, your sliders,

you can move them around. It's your song, your sliders. You can move them around. It's your song. You know, when you move one, the others don't jump automatically. I mean, you literally have control over this thing, and you could mix it differently, and what would that look like? It's about the agency thing. I mean, every single tool in the book is about a way of turning your agency into action that has an outcome.

Yeah. The Maker Mix is a really interesting tool and process to work with. Another thing that we've kind of been dancing around without naming the tool is the Impact Map. Yep. Tell me a bit more about where this comes from and just the base of it. Yeah. The Impact Map is primarily an insight tool.

It's not one of those like, oh, God, it changed my life. It's not like, oh, now I see. That's kind of what we're looking for in the impact map. An impact map came out of office hours. We found over and over again in office hours, people were groaning around a question they couldn't quite, I'm not sure this is really, I think I'm in the wrong place. It doesn't feel quite right.

You hear that a lot. You know, it's kind of a groany, sort of, you know, I've got tuberculosis. Job's okay, but I don't think

I'm having something. What am I not having? And when we distilled it down, what it was, is it was impact. Am I making an impact in the world the way I'm meant to?

And it feels like this isn't the place. And so people had a sense of place where the impact that I'm supposed to be making is occurring. And we said, a sense of place where the impact that I'm supposed to be making is occurring. And we said well and what impact are you supposed to be having if you're in the wrong impact place? I don't know. You know

so we really know that we want to have an impact and we really don't know exactly what we mean by that. And so what we did is we unpacked that a little bit and said well you know let's look at two aspects of impact, where and what. So the impact map on the horizontal axis looks at what kind of, and these are very qualitative, impact you're having. You're having a remediation impact. You know, I'm getting rid of bad things or fixing broken things. I'm having a generative impact. I'm doing new things. I'm working on autonomous cars, stuff we never had. I'm bringing the new thing to the party, or I'm having a support impact. I'm running the world.

Friday is trash day in my town, and the trash got picked up. And it's really important that they keep picking up the trash every week. That keeps the world running in a not particularly biologically scary way. And so I can either be a new generation kind of person. I can be a support and operations person. I can be a fix or remediate kind of person. And those are qualitatively really different. And equally wonderful.

And equally wonderful. And they have good examples of all kinds. And then where is my point of impact? Is my point of impact particularly relative to people with one, we're having a three-way conversation. So it's a very small group right now. My point of impact right now, if these people weren't watching

and you weren't recording, it's just the three of us. That's a small group. Or is it one-to-one? Is it 10 people? Is it my department? You know, is it 1,600 undergrads at Stanford? Is it everybody in North America? Is it I'm the malaria project manager at the Gates Foundation, everybody on planet Earth who might be infected by malaria? So my point of impact or my point of engagement, my nature of impact locates me and that has a different feel and experience. So the impact map teaches people to locate where they are impact wise, which is role based. It's not like here's Bill, here's Bill the teacher, here's Bill the artist, here's Bill the author.

Those are different roles in the world. And they tell you some things and you start figuring out where is it I want to be? Is this the right place for me now? Do I want to be someplace else? So the impact map is a way to start thinking about where I want to make my impact. Here's one example. I'm the Gates Malaria Program Manager. I'm up at the global level.

I'm trying to solve problems. I never hand out a net to anybody in Africa. I never meet anyone with malaria. But I believe that impact happens because I create this opportunity and the rest of the world executes. And I'm okay with reading policy papers. But that won't work if I really need to be on the ground in Africa and handing out nets. If I'm the kind of person that needs to see the people I'm helping, my impact will have to be here.

It's not better or worse. It's just different. I'm a brain surgeon. One brain at a time. Remediation. By the way, in the quadrant, that's the lower, that's the left quadrant, which everybody thinks is the bad one. No. If it's your brain, and he fixes it, or she fixes it, you're really happy. And sometimes the brain surgeon then becomes head of surgery, and then he's like, I don't like this job anymore, because I'm not

doing the thing that I want to do. You're doing budgets, not brains. Yeah, I'm doing budgets, not brains. So a lot of times when people map the jobs they've had and jobs they are thinking about having from their Odyssey plan, they go, oh, I see the patterns. When I get up too high and I lose connection with the people I'm helping, it doesn't work for me. Or when I get stuck in the day-to-day stuff and I'm not working at the systems level, it doesn't work for me.

And then they have a, and it is actually sometimes a really big aha. Like, that's why this job's, there's nothing wrong with the job, it's just the wrong location, and the wrong constituency. And then they redesign, and then they're super happy.

And there's no good or bad place, and there's no one place for you, you could be all over the map at different points in your life or different times. It just experiences differently. The first woman who helped me invent this thing had been a Starbucks barista,

an E911 dispatcher at a fire department, and then ended up becoming a wellness policy developer, which is her life goal. And she liked being a barista better because she got to see you face-to-face. So we ended up finding a way to make sure there's, but I don't want to do that for a living.

I think I want to go do this policy thing to make wellness part of the public health world. That's the change in the world I want to make. But I've got to make sure I get some face-to-face time. So if I just do the job the way they asked me to do it, I'm going to dry up and die. And this circles all the way back to, Dave, what you brought up earlier about certainly for generations, work being constructed in this very hierarchical, linear way,

where it's like you start as one level, as the doer, and then the place that you should naturally aspire to is going to be the manager, and then higher and higher and higher, which pulls you further and further away from that essence. But if the thing that fills you more than anything else is being on that fundamental level, you know, you have more power, more control, more money, and you're more miserable with every step that you go up the ladder and trying to figure out why. Right. Which, I mean, it also brings up something from your first book, which I think is a really

important distinction to be able to make, and it's this idea of gravity problems. Oh, okay. You know, which is zooming the lens out, really understanding. Like, what is the fundamental nature of the problem that you're trying to solve? And is it, in fact, solvable? And if it is, what should I do? And if it's not, what should I do and not do? Yeah, so there are two classes of problems that people get stuck on all the time.

And unless they reframe the way they think about the problem, they will stay stuck forever. And a gravity problem is a problem. You can't change gravity. It comes from me, the cyclist. And I didn't get the freshman 15 pounds when I was a freshman, but I did get the turn 60, 20 pounds. I got the turn 60, 20 pounds, which has slowed my bike down. I'm fine, but my bike got a bunch slower after I gained 20 pounds. And so I went to Bill and said, Bill, I've got this real problem with gravity. The hills are so much worse than they used to be. Gravity is not working. Could you fix it for me?

And Bill said, no, I can't fix gravity. It's not a problem. It's a reality. So a lot of people's problem is a movable thing. And once you accept that gravity problem as just not a problem, it's a circumstance. If it's not actionable, it's not a problem. it's a circumstance. If it's not actionable, it's not a problem. It's a circumstance. All you can do is accept it.

And now I could lose weight, buy a powered bike, get more gears, ride on the flats. There are lots of things you can do that aren't fixed gravity. And then anchor problems are a different version, which is where you embed. And we see this particularly in the workplace. You embed the answer in your question. So the classic was, how do I get to a promotion? There's a big company I've worked with where everybody's stuck between level seven and eight.

We are massively oversupplied in sevens. We don't need any more eights. And so the attrition waiting line to get to the next eight promotion opportunity is really long, a lot of grumpy people. It is, how do I become an eight? Why is that an anchor problem? The problem has the solution built in it.

If I can't be an eight, I don't want to solve this problem. I'm unhappy. I'm unhappy. And so once you reframe, you go, well, wait a minute. Is it just the eight that I want, which is kind of weird and silly? Or is it that I want more influence, or I want to do more kind of policy setting around here,

or I want to have some more money, or I want to work on a different team. There's a lot of sideways and redesign and remodel. Or prove my boss is wrong. Yeah, prove my boss is wrong. So, you know, or it's the, you know, I want to go sailing every weekend, but I can't afford a sailboat.

How do I buy a sailboat? Right. Or the one of yours was like, I want to have a wood shop just like my dad did, but my garage is too small. How do I get a bigger garage? Like building. That's not the problem, right? The problem is you've created the solution you want that you can't have inside the problem.

It's perfect because then you can stay stuck forever. I mean, I bet you guys know people, not you because you're here. You're really well balanced. But you know people who've been stuck on the same problem for a long time. You go to coffee and they're just complaining about their boss or their HOA or something. Something is not right and it's just not fair. And usually the thing they can't have is built into the, how do I have the thing I can't have? That's the question.

And there's a person usually attached to the can't-ness of its having. Which is never you also. Never you. Your boss, your HOA association president. One in four American workers would forego their next raise if you would fire their boss for them. I will pay you to get rid of them. That's not a great statistic.

The sad thing is I'm willing to bet, I have an intuition but I'm highly confident, that as I tell my clients I'm highly opinionated but the good news is I'm right. So the, is that I bet, you know, at least 50, if not 80%, of those bosses people would pay you to fire are doing their darndest to be a good boss and trying to find a way to make you happy.

And they're either stuck with you or stuck with themselves. And they answered the same survey about their boss. Right. And he answered the same survey about her boss. Almost nobody thinks it's me. I'm not the one. Yeah, it's always somebody else. So what's our favorite review of the book?

The very first book that came out? Oh, yeah, the very first one. It was, a guy said, clearly the authors respect the autonomy of the reader because they're not telling us what to do. They're telling us how to figure out what to do. We're in the how business, not the what business. You're the pro. We're not. And a lot of it comes down to, I mean, I keep circling back to the word that keeps spinning

in my head is discernment and clarity. It's like getting past delusion, getting past illusion. You know, how can I see whatever the circumstance is most clearly? Because right now, I can't make a decision until I actually understand more clearly what it is that I think I'm deciding about. What is the truest nature of my circumstance right now? How do I get there? How do I strip away this thing? What's stopping me from being there? And then once you're there, and it seems like a lot of the tools and the process that you guys have developed is about that.

When you get to that place where you can actually start to see, maybe for the first time, the truth or little teachers. Just what's going on. Little teachers, but maybe what's going on. I feel like so many of the decisions actually become fairly apparent.

You know, I'm the atheist on this stage here, but it is kind of interesting to notice that 3,000 years of wisdom tradition, God grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change, or all suffering is related to clinging to the reality that is an illusion. I mean, we're just, and we're based by, based back in neuroscience and research, but people have been kind of asking these questions for a very long time.

And very modestly, we're offering a few new ideas about how you would approach it. But it is about seeing what's actually there, not what you're clinging to or hoping is there, and then just dealing with it in a way that makes you the agent in your life. Design thinking is very pro-reality. Right. I mean, it seems like it's a lot of the process is about stripping away, and then you're ready to rebuild.

Even though we're tripping away almost sounds like I'm doing something wrong. I mean, it's a dead neutral position. Like, it's just what's going on. The big you are here sign over by the grad loft is all about, I mean, the cool stuff happens in reality. That's right. Design doesn't work anywhere but the real world. Yeah, it's like you're

perpetually prototyping your way through, is it true? Yeah. And you just keep going. With curiosity. Like, not even like, is this true? But more like, wow, this is so interesting. I wonder what's going on in the world with these interesting people. We don't want to do the detail. There's a whole chapter on being overwhelmed. There's a whole chapter on organizational politics. What the heck is a politics chapter doing in a design book? It's the empathy step. I mean, the point of having a politics

chapter is so you can look at what's going on and go, oh, now I understand. And now that I understand what's actually going on, I've framed a way to be empathetic with the situation. Now I have the agency to actually act within it. Because politics isn't inherently evil. It's just when people get to... It's just true. I've coached a startup with three founders that has more politics in it than Apple ever did, right? So it's just the way people are. And once you understand how the people exchange power, influence, and authority, you go, oh, oh, this is completely understandable.

And now I can design my way into it and I can play the game or not play the game. But I'm not sitting here wondering, why is this stuff happening and I don't get it, right? Must be politics. So I want to be respectful of time here also because I want to give everybody a chance to ask some questions. They've all been writing down questions. She's writing down questions.

Okay. He's writing down questions. Before we do that, though, because we are recording this for the podcast also and I always end every podcast the same way. I'm going to ask you my closing question, and then we will roll it out into our awesome crew of people here. So at the end, the question I always offer up, and Dave, you've already answered this once before. I'm curious over the last four years, the answer may have evolved a little bit, but is if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I had an insight in the last, what is this really all about? I was thinking about the phrase Bill

mentioned earlier, where George Valiant, the last project manager of the Grant Report, you know, summarized this whole thing, like, you know, if you really want to understand what life is about, it's love full stop, you know, and we don't explicitly talk about love a lot in the book, but I think what it's really about for me is I'm trying to give people legs on their love. The short version of designing your life is, in ten words, get curious, talk to people, try stuff, tell your story. It starts with get curious.

Curiosity is huge. You mentioned it many times in this interview already for designers. And what's curious about? Curious is an a priori affection for the world that says that might be interesting. And maybe that which animates me could connect to what's animating it. And these animations can get together synergistically

and we can be more alive. We talk about your spark type. It's about aliveness. And I actually think curiosity is a particularly active form of love expressing itself. So at the end of the day what I'm really trying to do here is give your love legs. Picasso said I spent 40 years learning how to draw like a child again because when we're children we are just full of curiosity and we haven't had teachers

who told us we we can't sing we can't dance we can't write or whatever so we still believe work you know that we're creative people. So I think, again, being the existential atheist on the stage, Camus' question, there's only one question in philosophy, why not suicide? So a good life is getting up every day and having a reason to keep going. A good life is having that curiosity and love of the world

that keeps you going, well, maybe one more day. Let's just, let's try this again and see how it comes out, you know, because there's for me no organizing principle other than my desire to see what's happening. And so for me, it's like curiosity and then the opposite of curiosity for me, by the way, is boring when I have left a job it was because I was bored and because there was nothing left in that organization that would make it interesting at least for me so I think you know a curious life without boredom and getting

up every day and saying I got a really good reason, you know, for whatever's going to happen, like coming here today to do this interview with you. Thank you. So let's open it up to the audience. We have a mic that we're going to send around. Thank you, Bill and Dave. This is fabulous. I had the privilege of attending one of your studios,

Ellen Kelly, University of San Francisco. Hi. And, Dave, can you repeat your 10 words? I got get curious, try stuff. Yeah, yeah, okay. The etymology on that was we were about to go on to a seven-minute interview at four in the morning with three dogs and a cat watching the early morning news show in Toronto, Canada four years ago.

And the assistant producer grabs me behind the camera and he goes, hey, we're running behind. We need the book and the sentence. And he goes, hey, we're running behind. We need the book in a sentence. And I said, dude, we're Stanford instructors. We're not renowned. I, in particular, am not renowned for short answers. And he said, well, then you're off the air. And I said, give me a minute.

As a marketing guy, I can do a tagline. And so then, boom, it came out. Four sentences, but they're 10 words. Get curious. Talk to people. Try stuff. Tell your story. Tell your story is putting yourself in the world with the intention from your curiosity and which leads to another you know curiosity and you meet new people and you know it's a virtuous cycle. We call that the

generative virtuous cycle and repeat until engaged. When you're engaged stop keep doing that for a while that's called career planning. Other questions? Yeah, right here. Here we go. Hey. I'm just wondering, in your research, when you looked at career design, what were some of the generational differences that you found in how people should approach designing their careers for different places in your career, different ages, coming from different backgrounds? I'm not sure if we came across that so much as different generations have different expectations. I'm noticing now that because of the Gen Zs are kind of the students I have now. And they're very different than the millennials in one way.

They both all want to do good things, want to have purpose in the world, want to change the world. But remember, if you're 18 or 19 or 20, you were 10, 11, or 12 in 2008 when we had the Great Depression. So I actually think Gen Zs are depression babies. They really want to change the world, but they really want to make sure that they've got a job and that they don't run into that thing that happened to mom and dad when the economy fell off the rails.

So I notice the Gen Zs are more practical. The millennials were more idealistic, but still, I think, wonderfully action-oriented. The generation before that was not my favorite because they just wanted to all get jobs on Wall Street. It was a very, the me generation was very materialistic, which is fine because now they're all 40 and they're coming to seminars going, please help me, my life is empty. So I think it was more around expectations.

But if you expect your job to be more meaningful, then we have to find a way to design into something that is meaningful. And even in that entry-level job where you're just doing spreadsheets for the boss, we've got to figure out why. Why am I doing this? What am I learning? How is this changing? How is this helping the organization get somewhere? But it's interesting. We were talking to the chief learning officer at Deloitte, and they're a pyramid of partners and junior partners

and senior associates, junior associates, all those levels. And they recruit 3,000 or 4,000 students every year. And what's happening is they get to about level 2 or 3, and then they look at the partner's life, and they say, that seems miserable. And they're 3,000 or 4,000 students every year. And what's happening is they get to about level two or three, and then they look at the partner's life, and they say, that seems miserable. And they're all leaving. So they have partners, and they have people at the bottom, but they have no one in the middle

because they haven't articulated why. Why would I want that job? Give me attention. You brought up the fact, in a very past life, I was a lawyer. And one of the reasons I actually ended up leaving the law. It's not a past life. It's a very past life. I was a lawyer. And one of the reasons I actually ended up leaving the law... It's not a past life, it's a very past life. Very past life. Multiple.

Was that I actually, I was fairly early. I started out kind of wearing the white hat, working for a big federal agency, like investigating and doing cool stuff. And then went to a giant firm. And it used to be, you know, like two generations before me, my grandfather, there was a certain set of expectations. And this is what life looked like when you, quote, made it. Right.

You know, but I was looking at the lives of the people who had, quote, made it in this big firm I was working for. They were noble people who were working hard, many of them really enjoying what they were doing, but it wasn't the life that I wanted to live. Right. And it became very clear, and, you know, and even if I actually wanted to get there, there was a path.

But also, I just didn't want that. So why would I give up so much to be there? Question. Yeah, Bill and Dave, thank you so much. I enjoyed your talk. And I've enjoyed your first book. And I've attended one of your workshops. I really appreciate the mindset around curiosity and being curious about the

world around you. In your new book, do you focus on curiosity about self, like self-awareness? And I'm thinking in particular about stage four when you talk about reinventing yourself for your career. And that I think takes a lot of personal insight, right, for a person to move forward. So just curious about the new book and whether you address self-awareness. Yeah, interestingly, there was a long article on the first book done in Mindfulness Magazine, and the managing editor of Mindfulness Magazine actually came and sat in, actually,

on the Creative Live video training course. He was actually one of the people on the camera. And then he came and interviewed us. And the first thing he says, well, clearly, I mean, it's obvious. The book was centered in mindfulness. That's really where you guys are coming from. It's all about that. And we kind of go, if you want to believe that, sure, that's great.

You know, whatever works for you. And we're supportive of that. You know, Bell's practices and I practices. But in terms of self-discovery, we don't go way far down that road. We don't claim a huge competency there. You know, I spend a couple of two weeks a year at a retreat with a bunch of monks up against a hill and that kind of stuff. You know, we don't have those conversations per se.

So I don't overpromise that we're the next mindfulness 2.0 center of the universe. But on the self-discovery thing, what we do say is this is where the talk to people. You know, your curiosity gets you. There's something going on there. If you go into the talk to people and try stuff thing, what you're going to do is the fires that want to burn more brightly will grab that oxygen and flare up. The ones that aren't that interesting won't. And so the self-discovery part turns into the learning. And the reason tell the story is now formally added to the four steps, is in order to have something to say, you have to reflect

on the experiences. My curiosity took me to have something to say, you have to reflect on the experiences. My curiosity took me to this conversation. This conversation took me to these experiences. What did I notice? What did I learn about the world, about me, about what's going on? So then I'm standing in line to get my sandwich at Subway, and I'm going to tell my story. My story isn't, hey, I stayed up all night binge-watching Game of Thrones again last night. How about you? You know, that's not that interesting as opposed to gosh, you know what I noticed this week So this just yesterday I told but what I noticed was, you know, our be do become generative cycle I'm not really doing that very well. I noticed that and here's what I'm thinking about doing to play with that

That's telling my story in a generative way that requires self-knowledge So we move people that direction, but you don't try to over promise Well, you know know from the workshop that there's the design thinking thing, but that wasn't enough for life design. So we have a discovery and support layer, and in that layer is practices. And discernment.

Yeah, and discernment. I think when most people think about self-discovery, they do think about going away, maybe journaling or being quiet or doing some kind of a process where they discover about themselves something that's true. Get rid of all the ego stuff and everything else. But for us, self-discovery is an embodied practice.

It's this going and talking to people and seeing which fire gets the most oxygen. Because we're not just thinking about ourselves just sitting quietly and thinking about ourselves can help organize some things but the the felt experience of the world and how how my empathy for the world starts with my empathy for myself that may be the practice of you know mindfulness or something now what is the world just because i want to do something doesn't mean the world wants it or needs it. So I need empathy for the world too. And our discovery process is in the world. It's radical collaboration with the world. So that's not to say that, you know, sitting quietly and trying to understand, because we live noisy lives and we live in busy times. We do have a thing called the seventh day

reflection, borrowing in part from the wisdom tradition of Sabbath and teach people how to do a reflection, the two outcomes being savoring and insight. So we go into that in some detail, but I don't know that we're gonna be on the mindfulness shelf. Other questions? A few more questions, yeah. Hi, so in everything you're talking about in Reframe,

I'm thinking practical applications, and I'm just thinking with the relationship you guys have, what are some of the challenges you ran into writing a book together, and how did you work around those? Well, as Dave mentioned, we were over in this room, and we sort of just, the way we write together is we outline the whole thing. We make a proposal, and hopefully the publisher said yes,

and they said yes in this case. And then we don't get a chance to work together as much as we used to, so we're basically like, I'm going to write chapters 1, 3, 7, 5, and he's going to write 2, 4, 6, 8, or whatever it is. And then we sort of swap back and forth and show each other what we're doing. And then our professional writer, Laura, makes it sound like we know what we're doing. Yeah, and we have a lovely writer who kind of glues it all together for us and makes sure the grammar works.

I don't think there's a lot of controversy in that process. I miss, like, when we get together and we can brainstorm, it's kind of a magical kind of like, we can fill a whiteboard in 10 minutes. And it's really fun. But the writing part, I mean, writing is a sort of solitary activity. You go off to a dark room and you write the whole thing. A book is 55,000 words. Maybe a little more. This one's, I think, 65,000. And I wrote 50 and threw away 30. No, we happily haven't had much conflict. And we're really good at resolving it when we do. So if you have that tool, you're kind of good to go.

Things happen along the way. Bill's in a reframe right now. The university has asked him to stay longer. Why don't you just keep working full time a little longer, Bill? So he's in the process of reframing why he doesn't want to change his life. But, you know, and that gets in the way of some things. So our individual lives, you know, I've got eight grandkids and that causes all kinds of trouble. So things come up and we have to adapt to that kind of stuff. But we mostly adapt to outside changes, not so much to inside changes. One more maybe? Thanks so much for the talk. I really appreciate it. I'm curious as to whether you have any advice for procrastination. I notice a desire

to be curious and talk to people and then I'll go ahead and watch the season of Game of Thrones And just be like I'll get to it later. And so yeah, if you have any thoughts on that I Love procrastination. I'm really good at it There's a question that isn't in the book that often comes up for me it's like well, that's great How does that serve you? How does it serve you to not do the things you say you want to do and to spend time doing things that you really, you know, at the end of the day don't think are valuable? So, again, it's about where are you putting your attention right now?

And there's a reason you're not doing the thing you want to do. Most of the time it's some kind of fear or it's scary or it's too hard to do. And so, you know, our method and the method of all behavior change scientists who study this stuff is set the bar really low, get off the couch, stop, you can turn off the Netflix automatically, starts the next thing feature, turn it off, because it's not healthy for you. It's healthy for Netflix, but it's not healthy for you.

Get some accountability. Get some accountability. Tell a friend you're going to do this thing. Set a really clear objective that's simple that you can actually get done in a day or something and build your way forward. Build your confidence that you can do the things you want to do. And, you know, as soon as you get started and something starts happening, like, hey, I had this really interesting conversation or this person called me and said, let's do a podcast together, that energy will pull you out of your procrastination. It's very hard to change by yourself. One of the assignments we give students is to go talk to

people. You have to go talk to a stranger. And people love to find reasons not to do that. And so what we found was we put an accountability system in, an incredibly light one, which is get a buddy. And we want you to have made one call to a stranger by a week from today, and your accountability is, and let's say class is on Thursday, by Tuesday, before next Thursday, you two call each other or have a cup of coffee, and here's your accountability question. How's it going? That really penetrating question, how's it going? Because you know what I mean is, did you make the call yet? And that's it.

Not like, well, did it work? And have you done it right? And show me their skins. Nothing anywhere near that provocative. And what people find is we have about a 50% increase in follow through, simply knowing that I'm going to get asked the question. And I don't want to show up and have nothing to say. So just give yourself a chance at winning. If you're the only person holding you

accountable to your discipline, your chance of success is really low, unless you're an amazingly disciplined person, which you're not because you procrastinate. I'll just throw in also, I think a really fascinating frame that I found super helpful is Gretchen Rubin came up with her four tendencies, which is about how we meet our own expectations. Gretchen's an old friend of mine and she read Gary Tau's book, Why We're Fat. And basically she closed the last page and she hasn't eaten carbs since. And people are like, what? Like you're a freak. And she's like, why would I? Like what, it's what you do. Because she's a particular type she just, like, if it makes sense to her, done. No external accountability, just done.

And I found her. You can just Google it. Check out the four tendencies because it's really helpful in understanding what internal and external structures are appropriate for you to create in order to meet your own expectations. I'm a questioner. So am I. And the reason I'm 100% sure about that is because I took her assessment once. I got questioner.

I called Gretchen and I said, we need to have coffee. I sat down with Gretchen and I told her my dilemma. And I said, I don't know if I am. And she's like, we're here. Thank you so much for coming today, Bill, Dave. Thanks for coming here. Thank you so much for coming today. Bill. Thanks for coming out. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com.

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