Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Charlotte Burgess-Auburn on How to Recruit Yourself to Your Cause EP 266

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Charlotte Burgess-Auburn, the Director of Community at Stanford University's world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school), joins me on Passion Struck to discuss her book "You Need a Manifesto: How to Craft Your Convictions and Put Them to Work." In This Episode, Charlotte Burgess-Auburn And I Discuss Her Book "You Need a Manifesto." In our interview, Charlotte outlines the challenges of information overload that are ubiquitous in today's society. She emphasizes the significance of developing a personal motto or mantra to confront everyday obstacles and tasks, guiding how to infuse your life with greater purpose. Charlotte explains how to collect, curate, and craft your own manifesto that you can use as an everyday tool for making decisions and taking action.  Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/charlotte-burgess-auburn-how-to-recruit-yourself/  Brought to you by Green Chef. Use code passionstruck60 to get $60 off, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/_YhDBsEmDH4  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struct podcast. Part of the reason why it is a multi-tool is because it's not so much the end object that is the most important part of a personal manifesto. It's the process of making it and remaking it. The process of beginning it is a process of poking away your self-awareness, right? Right? And the more that you continue to work on it in a variety of different ways. The more you begin to know about yourself. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.

Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews, the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders,

visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 266 of PassionStruck, recently ranked by FeedSpot as one of the top 40 most inspirational podcasts of 2022. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn. How to live better, be better, and impact the world.

And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode starter packs, which are collections for fans, favorite episodes, that we organize into convenient topics to give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed it, last week I interviewed former fighter pilot and retired Air Force Colonel Jim Campbell, and we discussed her brand new book, which released last week, Flying Into The Face of Fear. I also interviewed my friend Bill Pots and we discussed his book Up for the Fight. Bill is a six-time cancer survivor and throughout the book he gives his tips on how you become your own best advocate during your cancer journey. And lastly, I interviewed Dr.

J. Van Bavill, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University. And we discussed his book, The Power of Us, harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony. I hope you check all those episodes out. And I also wanted to thank you so much for your continued support of the show.

Your ratings and reviews go such a long way in helping us promote the popularity, but more importantly, bringing them into the passion start community where we can give them weekly doses of hope, connection, and meaning. Now let's talk about today's episode. Ever struggled with a decision? Perhaps you lacked a sense of purpose or drive? Ever been challenged by Adelaima? Right now, with the tools in our hands, creative work is now more powerful than ever. It can move mountains,

your plagues, and change the world for good. Amid the complexity of your everyday life, how do you determine not just what you can do, but what you should do, what you must do, and how you do it? You need a manifesto. A modern manifesto is a statement of purpose and a script for action. Our guest today, Charlotte Burgess Auburn, explains how to collect, curate, and craft your own manifesto that you can use as an everyday tool for making decisions and taking action. Charlotte is a designer, artist, and educator with a background in production for Fine Arts and Theatre and experience in the MIT Media Laboratory. She has been the Director of Community at the Stanford D School since 2005,

where she also teaches classes and the role of self-awareness in creativity and design. She's the author of the new book You Need A Manifesto. Add a craft your convictions and put them to work. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am so excited today to welcome Charlotte Burgess Auburn to the Passion Struck podcast. Welcome Charlotte. Thank you. It's very nice to be here. Well, and we're going to get into it in a bit, and I wanted to put the cover up here just so those who are watching and see the visual, but you are the author of the new book, you need a manifesto, which will be the majority of our discussion today. But I always like to start out these interviews by allowing the audience to get to know the

person I'm interviewing. So, the question I like to ask is, we all have moments in our lives that define who we become. What are some of the things that led you to where you are today and your focus on being a creator? Oh, well, I think my family has a lot to do with it. I'm sure that's true for most people, but both my parents are theirs and they are both fairly creative people but in different ways. My mom is much more of the hands-on kind of creator and my dad is more of the writer. I think they, I got a really great model from them about the value and the interest and excitement that creative pursuits bring to your life and a result, I just felt always encouraged to pursue them.

And so through a variety of different routes, they've led me to this place that's a kind of confluence of education and creativity. Yeah, I love it because I, over the years found out, I was artistic as well, but it didn't come to me naturally because not necessarily how I was artistic as well, but it didn't come to me naturally because not necessarily how I was raised. I didn't think of myself in the typical sense of being a painter or a dancer or something like that. So for me, creativity really comes in the form of writing, whether that's writing song lyrics or

an episode for the podcast or my own book, which will be coming out. So what was the experience like going through becoming a first-time author? I was amazed at how emotional and difficult it was. I think I had sort of simultaneously been working with authors at the D-School to help them publish their books, and then I had an opportunity to do my own.

And I thought, oh, I know so much about how this goes. I'll be totally, it's just very, very emotional, right? It makes you really question your capacities and every word I was like, slaving over every word for a while. And then sometimes it would just be like, I'd sit down and pull chapter would arrive in in a morning. So it was barely unpredictable, highly emotional, but also really interesting, really sort of self-exploratory, which is probably why it makes people kind of anxious and tense is because you're really exploring the things that you think and believe. And so it

feels a little dangerous and tender to put them down on the page. Well, I would describe it using the words humility, which is something we're gonna discuss later on in the episode, but I have just found it to be rejection after rejection, along the way of out of nowhere having someone discover your work and you've having this great feeling of,

ah, only to learn that now she's got a present to publishers who then just give you more rejection after rejection. Oh, someone hopefully likes your platform and your idea enough to give it life. So I can totally sympathize with you. While speaking of the D school and people that you helped, I had Professor Jeremy Atley on the show episode 206.

And I thought for someone who's not familiar with the D school, could you tell the audience what it is because they're probably familiar with Stanford University, a household name, but the D school is really different from the other Stanford schools. Yeah, so the D school is not technically a school right we're actually an institute within the School of Engineering at Stanford. What we are is is more of a school crossing. We teach design and design methodologies and design thinking to students from all over the university. So whatever school you are enrolled in at the university, you can have

an opportunity to take classes at the D school. And our classes focus on how to create intentional designed solutions using human center design practices for big gnarly problems that require people from more than one field of expertise to solve or to innovate in. And we've done that since 2005. We've been teaching classes to students from all over the university, graduate students and undergrad. And this past year that we have adopted and merged with the two degree granting design programs that Stanford houses, the undergraduate program, which was a product design and the graduate program, which was the design impact program and is now a graduate program in design.

And that program has been around for quite some time. It's been around since the 50s and it has a long and really interesting history and place in the kind of history of the development of design in the United States. The D-School in some ways is a product of that particular program so it's a real joy to be kind of recombining with that program. Yeah well I understand when you first got started, the institute was kind of on the outskirts of campus and here me was telling me it's now right in the heartbeat. It is, yeah. So we're right behind the central quad right now. When we started we were in a double-wide

trailer but over one of those buildings that are built to be temporary buildings but then end up being sort of mostly permanent buildings. So we're there for a year and moved around the campus several times, an increasingly kind of larger and more interesting spaces. Prototype to our way through those spaces really helped us design our current space by kind of moving and recreating new designs for each space, bringing along the things that we're working, that we're creating the kinds of behaviors in our classrooms that we were really excited about, and then trying new ideas and new models as we moved forward. But we've been in our current location now since about 2010. So it's been a while, although we've done a whole bunch of

redesigns inside the building since then. So, yeah, and for the listener who might not be familiar with this concept, is the D-school unique to Stanford or are there other universities that have a similar type of construct? There are other universities that have developed these kinds of programs. Every university kind of design based program or innovation program is unique. I think we started fairly early

and so we were a model for a lot of different people, not everyone, but for a lot of universities, but each university has its own needs, its own kind of group of students that is trying to serve. And so I would say there are quite a few other places that do teach design to students. Some of them are interdisciplinary, some of them are really specific to a discipline, but yeah, there's quite a few. Okay, well, I'm gonna jump to some questions about the book. You start out, you need to manifest up by saying

that there's no time like the present and creative work is more powerful than ever, but you also indicate that our lives are burdened by information overload today that is at its highest in history. How is information overload impacting us and what is your advice for navigating the sea of change? Yeah, I mean, I think it's not just information overload. I feel like if it was just data, like we would have a better opportunity to filter it. I think the overload is also in a sense, in the methods of kind of like marketing and recruitment. I feel like what's happening is that you're constantly being asked to not just pay attention, but to jump into action for every

single thing that's out there, right? So I cannot pick up my phone without somebody like sending me a call to action. Then figuring out not just what you believe, but how you want to act and what you want to act on I think is one of our kind of critical issues for folks at least in this country today. And so the programs that I began to develop with my students at the D School, which started quite some time ago, had to do with that. These were

students who were coming to Stanford intentionally attempting to make a transformation in their life. Part of the reason why you go back to school is to transform your life to a certain extent. They were struggling to make sense of how to navigate in the kind of new landscape. And they were being recruited by old jobs and old ideas and seeking out new ones, but finding a gazillion of them and not really understanding how they personally wanted to approach that.

So that is the context in which these exercises, this kind of manifesto exercise was born. Yeah, I did a solo episode recently that I titled Put Your Phone Away. And I just went through all the ramifications of this digital addiction, whether you believe in that or not, that is causing most people

to use their phone or some digital device over four hours a day. And the impact on your productivity is enormous when you start analyzing that over time. Yeah. Well, and speaking of that, and the need to have focus, I had Hindu priest Dada Pani on the show for episode 189. And in that episode, we discussed the power of unwavering focus. And he told me that this was the most important thing that he learned during his 10 years as a monk.

And in the book, you say that you desired to create a strong navigational practice by being your own monk. This is significance of this phrase, your own personal journey. It's not my phrase. It was given to me by my friend, Deborah, who is a Buddhist. And during a period of time when I was meeting with her at a conference, she had this really difficult decision

that she had to make at one point when her very beloved dog back at home was dying and she was kind of stuck. She was at this conference, everybody needed her. She had been working to pull this off for quite some time and then her husband called her and told her what was going on and she was conflicted. She just was kind of sitting in that place of conflict where you want to do

one thing, but you also want to do another thing, right? And you're trying to decide what the quote right thing to do is. And I encountered her in that situation. There were several Buddhist monks, but she could, you could readily see with their very bright saffron robes and very, in the very gloomy English weather. And she asked her if she would want me to find one of these gentlemen and ask them to come see her and she said, no, my own monk. I'm going to tell myself all the things I know that I need to hear. And then I'm going to see with the conference later. And I think what that brought home to me was that sense, not just a focus, but a strong understanding of your own navigational and decision making process. She knew what she needed to hear,

and she knew how to tell herself those things. And that was what I felt so excited by. What I so admired, she just has a really strong practice of being able to navigate those moments of difficulty, and that was what I was really, I aspired to. Well, it's interesting. I've had four or five people on the show over the past year

who have met this holiness, the Dalai Lama. And two of the ones I had on are both neuroscientists. The one is David Vago, who is at Vanderbilt, who is one of the world's experts on mindfulness, and then David Yaden, who is at Johns Hopkins. But they're both also studying self-transcendence, and it was interesting in both their audiences, which were years apart, but Dalai Lama told them both that he was charging them with helping to save humanity from itself by teaching people how to be their best selves, which he felt when you reach that level, you serve others.

And I think that's a real struggle for so many people to know how do you even start? Yes. And we're going to be talking a lot today about how do you create a manifesto, which helps you to do just that, get on this path to knowing yourself. But for some of the listeners who might be new to this term, can you explain to them what a manifesto is and how it can help them try out new methods, identities, and behaviors. Yeah, a manifesto is a statement of purpose and also a script for action. Historically, manifestos have been recruitment tools, right? So it's a piece of written

information. It's like a list of things that you believe and beliefs whether it's a personal belief or a common belief, right? So it could be a manifesto that has been written with others or it could be like Martin Luther's 99 statements. It has been in the past sort of method for proclaiming your beliefs and ideas and recruiting others to your cause. And these days I really don't recommend that we head out there

trying to recruit others to our cause yet. And so, it's kind of my version of a manifesto is a statement of beliefs and a script for action that recruits you to your best self. That helps you to remember how it is that you want to be in the world, how you want to behave, how you want to connect with others, the kind of work you want to do, and the way in which you want to approach that work. Well, then maybe I need to take down the Passion Start Value System from website, because that's basically what it is. It's just a list of about 30 different values

that I came up with that kind of people in the community that I've talked to tend to lean in towards. So I ended up putting it on there because I kept hearing these phrases again and again. Yeah, I actually think that's totally great. I think that's a little different than putting your manifesto out there and asking people to sign onto it. It's more of an outward expression. I find that manifesto is, you know, they can do a lot of different things for folks. And one of the things that they can do

is to really help you to connect and project your values towards others, right? So they can help you be transparent about what you care about with other people, which can actually really help you to develop strong and authentic and transparent relationships with folks, right? So sometimes when people make their manifesto, they put it up as their zoom background.

It makes a great way to begin a conversation with somebody on the right footing in addition to kind of like the other things that a manifesto can do for you. Almost like a kind of like values calling card is one of the things I think it can do. Well, I loved your phrase where you said a personal manifesto is the Swiss Army knife of self-awareness. Yes. Can you explain that metaphor just so people really understand it? It's a multi-tool, right?

Sort of how I feel about it. And the part of the reason why it is a multi-tool is because it's not so much the end object that is the most important part of a personal manifesto is the process of making it and remaking it. And so the process of beginning it is a process of sort of hooking away to your self-awareness. And the more that you continue to work on it in a variety of different ways, the more you begin to know about yourself, the more you can understand about yourself,

and then the more you can communicate about yourself, the more you can begin to act in the ways that translate those values that you believe in into the world that help others. So yeah, the Swiss Army knife of it all really relates, I would say, most to the process. But then the actual like thing that you have, whether it's an actual object or it's something on your phone or it's a piece of audio that you are listening to. It is a thing that you can turn to in almost any situation, right? It can help you to work your work, it can help you in moments of real difficulty, where you're trying to make a decision, it can help you to to resist moment where you feel

It can help you to resist moment where you feel underpowered or you feel oppressed in some way. It can help you to stand your ground. There's just a real variety of ways that you can utilize it. And so I guess that's why I call it this was Army Night Freaks. It's just like the thing I can pull it out whenever I'm like, I don't know what to do. I'm gonna go a little bit deeper on that because I think so many of us today go throughout our days on what I call autopilot and much of our behavior is done subconsciously. We get into these routines like where we get gas

or where we go shop, but I think we often don't focus enough on living our lives to those values or living our lives to the inner purpose that we're driving for. And the purpose of this podcast, as I talked to you before, you came on as to teach people how to live intentionally. And part of that understanding of what you believe in your values and what you're really after. So how do you make sure that the answer to these questions show up and how you live each day? I think the main thing that I want people to do when it comes to creating a manifesto is to begin, right? It's to just start. If you bump into

somebody in the supermarket and you're like, what do you believe in? It's not a question that is easily answered for most people. And if it is easily answered, I'm suspicious that it's a little dogmatic. These are pretty deep questions that feel like they need deep answers. That depth can be intimidating to people when they are confronted with this idea of like really trying to expand their self-awareness and understand themselves and be able to articulate what they believe in. And that intimidation can put people off and bounce them right back out into autopilot, right? So if they have a moment where they're like,

I really would like to live a more purposeful life. I would like to be more intentional about what I do. And then they're like, you have to have a manifesto, right? And I don't have one. And then they just bounce right back out into that kind of autopilot place. And so the X, the manifesto project that I developed and then the one that's in the book is really about reducing the intimidation factor book is really about reducing the intimidation factor and starting, getting to the moment where you can begin and breaking down some of the kind of initially necessary moments of like searching for what you value into their smallest parts, right, so that you can really take some baby steps to get there.

So I think the way to get there is to get past the intimidation fact and start. So what's an exercise that members of the audience could use if they want to get started on their own? So one thing I do with students, which is a quick, very low key values finder exercise is to ask folks to think about something that they love to do, whether it's a hobby or something that's part of their work, but something that they really actively enjoy doing, and to write a sort of descriptive story about why they like to do that thing. So in my case, in the book, the big example that I give is gardening. I'm like, love to garden, even though I absolutely cannot stand the feeling of dirt or anything underneath my fingernails. It's so painful, and yet I just love everything else about it.

I love to watch the slow growth pattern, right? The sense of sort of like things, the sense of it's magic and it's happening without me. And yet with me, it happens even better. My God, it's kind of thing. Once people have written down a short paragraph about the highly descriptive, about what they love to do and why they love to do it, I ask them to go back and find kind of verbs in there

that are kind of key words that they can pull out, that they can correspond with a, in my book, it's a super short list of core values because there wasn't an uproom on the page. But if you go to the internet, you can find exhaustively long lists of core values that can help people kind of get a corresponding sense of like the things that they enjoy and that they love to do reveal something about what they value, right, and reveal something about what they believe in. And then you can do that exercise again with a different activity that you feel committed to to try and understand why you feel committed to it and what it is about it that you value and then consequently what it is that you feel you value as a person so that if it turns thing that you can do that is going to be gardening for you. That is going to help to bring you that, but also let you give that type of value to the world.

Well, I love that gardening analogy because I've recently started my own garden with my partner, and I have to tell you what we researched it because I initially went into this thinking, it can't be that hard, but the more I started looking at it, the more complex it really was. And we both thought we were the worst gardeners on earth when we did our first tray and only two of them germinated. And then we realized that the reason it happened is the top of the container that we put on wasn't on securely enough,

so that it was really keeping all the moisture and everything in. So we band in that idea and then we found one where you can use toilet paper rolls and you can do the seedlings in them and just put the cellophane over it. And that worked like a champ out of 26. I think we got 23 going now. So, but I hear exactly what you say

because every day I walk outside and I'm like, well, how they're getting big. Yeah, you're like, it's magic. It's magic. Yeah, it's really an, I do think that idea of being able to examine the things that you enjoy, the things that you love to do is a really nice way of entering the face of adversity immediately, right? To lean back into the kind of cozy cushions of what do I really love to do? Is this another way? I'm just like being like reducing the intimidation factor of starting this process. It doesn't have to be painful and it shouldn't be really.

Hopefully it's a joyous process, right? Of discovering what it is you believe in and what you wanna bring to the world. But I, nor does it have to be kind of confusing and difficult, I think, and be done in small steps. Well, one of the phrases that you used in the book to describe why you should create this manifesto is you say that we need a way to recruit ourselves.

Our own cause. And I might even use that for the title of this episode because to me it was really. Powerful. In that you've got to recruit yourself. Your own cause and I think often times we want to follow someone else's cause we can't even think of what our cause should be. And you allude to this other analogy that you need to take this inner road trip to knowing ourselves. And I think you've just laid out a way that you could get started on this journey. But oftentimes, we find ourselves starting, and then we hit this pesky midpoint where

we can't sustain the momentum. And how have you found or taught your students that they can get through that pesky midpoint where we can't sustain the momentum and how have you found or taught your students that they can get through that pesky midpoint? I would say it's okay to go back to the beginning. This beginning, the middle and the end, actually all look the same. And I think the question is, if you feel like you have to arrive somewhere, you may have the wrong visual for kind of what the road trip looks like. I think the road is endless, often where you arrive is right back where you started. That's a great road trip when you make it home. So I think helping them to understand that it's okay to just returning

to the starting point, right, when you feel kind of confused or stuck or like you're not getting anywhere to just keep kind of returning to those starting points and seeking out these like small ways that you can move. When you feel stuck just a little motion can sort of get you unstuck and so yeah that's generally the advice that I get to my students and that I do myself. When there's a moment where I'm I'm like I just feel so weighed down and I can't get out of students and that I do myself. When there's a moment where I'm like, I just feel so weighed down and I can't get out of things and I'm not using the tool that I've made and the way that I wanna make it.

I'm like, let's go back to it, let's go revisit it, let's go spend a little time with it. I mean, time is kind of all there is, right? So, where you get to where you're at. Yeah, definitely. I spend our days is how we spend our lives as many alerts as so. So.

Yeah, I had a great episode about two months ago with Cassie Holmes, who's at UCLA, Anderson School of Business, and it was all about how you use your time to create a happier life. And you're so right on that point. Time is it, that's all we've got. So, the other thing I wanted to talk about with what you just brought up about this starting,

middle, and end is on the PassionStruck website. I have a system on there. I call the personal agility process, although you can use this either in your personal life or you can use it in your careers as well, which is where I started using it. But it's something I derived years ago when I was in big-for-consulting because with these really heavy methodologies for how you implement ERPs, but they wanted us to use, but a lot of the clients that I was working on needed shorter duration delivery. And so I started working on this process that's really meant to do like a sprint. So you do it in a couple of week intervals.

But one of the most important aspects that people leave off is feedback loop and the measurement and then coming back and renewing what you're on. And this feedback loop was something that you brought up as well. Can you tell the audience why that feedback loop is so important? You don't know anything until you reflect on it, right? When something happens to you, there's a wonderful, I think it's a podcast from someone who's at the New York Times, just called still processing. When you do things and have experiences, you kind of have to reflect on them and process them in order to learn from them.

And there's a lot of really wonderful science that's been done behind that that I am not an expert in, but I really appreciate the idea of, which is really the process of reflection and consolidation of knowledge happens over time. So when you sit in a classroom and learn something, that is actually not when you learn it. It's when you first encounter it and that you actually learn new things by consolidating them, implementing them and processing them. And so

really taking the time to do that is the feedback loop, right? That you, if you have made your first version of a manifesto and you have an opportunity to use it in a moment, you go back to it and I'm bringing my problem or my moment to this. What kind of advice can I get from this for myself? If you act on that and then experience what happens after you act on that and then take it back to your manifesto. Did it work for you? Did it not work for you? Do you have different thoughts about that now?

I'm almost like asking people to externalize a process that most of the time happens internally and that we're not necessarily aware that we're doing. And just by bringing it out of our heads and putting it on a piece of paper and creating an intentional feedback loop, you can really get a sense of progress for yourself, of change and differentiation. Yeah, and whether it's a manifesto or maybe you call it a life plan, depending on what vocabulary a person wants to use, one of the biggest pieces of advice I have is to put it somewhere where you're at most of your time so that you can keep referring to this. I think when you look at it and you see how you're living your time, you start really seeing

is what you're focused on the most important thing that you should be. As Kavi said, the main thing about the main thing is keeping the main thing, the main thing. And if you're not, then you really got to look back on that manifesto and say, are the values that I put on there, the right values that are driving me or is my behavior not following the values that I wish to live by? I think sometimes people feel like what needs to be on a manifesto. It's like, what am I trying to make happen in the world? What is the change I want to see?

And those things absolutely can be on a manifesto, but the how is also something that's incredibly important to put out there. Right? Because some of the time you will be doing things that are not the main thing. And yet, I think if you are doing them in the way that you want to show up in the world, and they are contributing ultimately to the overall goals that you have, then they're valuable. They're the thing you should be doing, right? But it is a really good way to externalize and intentionally visualize where it is you want to be going as well.

I want to ask you a couple of questions about creativity. And in my own upcoming book, whenever the thing gets published, I have a house section and it starts with this chapter on five archetypes or plateaus that someone undertakes on the path to becoming passion struck. And the last plateau that I came up with, and it took me months to come up with this name, I kept passing around a number, but I came up with this term called creative amplifier, and it really dives into importance of creativity.

And so what I wanted to ask you is, why is creative work really the work of idea flow so hugely powerful? Oh, I think creativity gets kind of a bad rap, right? It's gotten pigeonholed as artistic creativity, right? Or at the very most, it might go out to the writing aspect. And when we think of creative writing, we think of it as being like fiction,

not nonfiction. Every human every day is practicing creativity. They are just labeling it in different ways. And I think not pursuing it in a way that can be most helpful both to them and to other people. The D-School is a great believer that part of our mission is that everyone is creative, right?

Everyone is a designer. And a little bit of structured work on developing your capacity to be creative and your capacity for design can just hugely amplify your impact in your life and on the world. I think that's a great answer. Why does creativity require humility? Yeah, because we are wrong all the time. We're wrong all the time. I also think humility is a posture of learning, right? It's not just a posture of feeling like you're going to be wrong. It's an openness to learning. It's an acceptance of being in the posture

of a student or a learner. And I think that's the new information is welcome, is what humility says. And I think that's always the place you need to be in when you are being a designer, when you're searching for new solutions, when you are trying to create change in the world, you need new information, and you need to be open and accepting.

And you need to, the vast majority of the time, the things that you are trying to make happen in the world require the presence of other people, and they happen in a world, right? That is not just you and your particular local environment. They require you to work well with other human beings to be cognizant of your impact on both your local and your larger environment in the world.

And I think humility puts you in the right place to experience that as a positive place to move from. I think that's a great answer. I really appreciate the angle that you used for that. I'm gonna move off of creativity to talk about agency. And in the book you talk about when you possess agency, it's the power to effect change, make decisions and achieve goals.

Why today is agency so unevenly distributed? A lot of that is just it's historic, right? We are living still in an age where oppression is part of our world. Not everyone is given the rights that others are. And so early agency is very unevenly distributed. At the same time, the methodologies that are these technological methodologies that I so vilify all the time are also giving us the ability to connect with one another in ways that we've never had before, at scales that we've never had before. And so they also open the door to our ability to hold

each other up to support one another, to advocate for change for the transfer of power and agency more broadly to folks. And I would say that kind of agency is the active power to make change in the world, to make a decision that then can be implemented. There is another kind of agency, which is the agency,

you give yourself, right? It is the permission to act, the personal permission to act, and has access to that, but it is hard to find sometimes. And I think it's one of the things that a personal manifesto can help you to hold on to, to essentially, to recruit both, recruit yourself and give yourself permission to act. When you...

I love that. And three great resources for the audience and three great books this year that have come out. Catching this one was by Wendy Smith, the Marianne Lewis, called Both Hand Thinking. Another one was recently by Professor Dolly Chug, where she talks about hidden biases and then Max Bayeserman just came out with a book called Complicit and they

all touch on this. So thank you for bringing that up. Well, I'm going to jump all the way in to the book, which is part five, where you discuss, how do you cultivate? And the question I wanted to ask is, how do you experiment with yourself and cultivate the manifesto? Yeah, there's a section in that latter part of the book that's really about when you've created your first manifesto, what do you do with it? Yay! Super, Charlotte, thanks. Now what? And there's a real variety of ways depending on your kind of comfort level with sharing things with other folks and your desire to implement things right away. So it's, are you on this low road or are you a little bit more active in your pursuit? I mentioned before there's everything between throwing up your manifesto as your Zoom background.

So literally everyone you interact with online has to see it right then. You're gonna have a conversation about it with everybody or seeking out somebody who's a more trusted individual to yourself and showing it to them and having conversation with them or doing it together with someone else who wants to experience that kind of journey as well and having a partner to work with.

And there's a pretty wide variety of methodologies in the book for doing that. But then the other piece I think that people have found really, really useful. I shared the, to a project with my colleagues at the D-school and asked them, I basically said, this is an open source piece of material. Please take it and run with it. I'd love to see where you find it to be useful. And they've done all sorts of different things. One of my colleagues, he's really spends a lot of time thinking and working on concept of reflection has a methodology that's really about like how many different kinds of manifestos could you possibly make a couple of weeks just to get the

full gamut out there and she's a neurobiologist by training. So her experimentation skills are very strong. She's the force is strong with her there. And then other colleagues have taken it and started to use it as a kind of collective making device, right? So if you are working in a team to really get a sense of having people do that they do the manifesto of first themselves, then they create a manifesto as a team, and then they come together with their whole class and make it kind of credo for the class and how they're going to be working with their partners, the teams who then work with external partners, they'll show them this kind of document and be like, let's create a compact amongst ourselves about how we want to work together, right?

So it's really being intentional about the methodologies they want to use working together. I guess I would say it's like a really wide gamut about the ways in which you could use this. And I really encourage people to take it and run with it, right? It is that works for you. Like you said, what's the vocabulary that suits your situation? Use that, I'd say, as long as where you're going towards is getting more clear about what your values are and how they show up in your behaviors in the world, that's the goal, right? That's the ultimate in the world, that's the goal, right? That's the ultimate arrival. So.

Well, and, sure, one last question. If the listener wanted to learn more about you, is there a central place that they can go to? Yeah, so a lot of the work that I do and that others do at the D-School is on our website, which is dschool.stanford.edu. And there's a lot of resources on that site, design thinking resources, that are made for folks who all the way from

total beginners to experts. So, well Charlotte, thank you so much for being on the show, and congratulations on your great book. We covered just the tip of the iceberg on it. There's a whole section on framework that I think would be so valuable to many people as well. And the fourth section of the book. So thank you very much and really enjoyed having you. Thank you so much, John. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Take care. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Charlotte Burgess Auburn. And I wanted to thank Charlotte, her and Angler and Penguin Random House, for giving me the opportunity and privilege to have her around the show. Links to all things Charlotte will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show. Videos are on YouTube at both John Armiles and Passion Struck Clips. and passion struck clips. Avertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place

at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show and make it possible. I am on LinkedIn and you can also find me at John Armiles at both Twitter and Instagram, where I provide weekly doses of meaning, hope, and connection that go far beyond what we do on the passion strike podcast. You're about to hear a preview of the passion strike podcast interview I did with Dr. Mike Rucker,

who is an organizational psychologist. His ideas about health and fun have been featured in Psychology Today, Forbes, Vox, Thrive Global, and more. We discuss his new book, The Fun Habit, Out the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder, Can Change Your Life. We still need to have a certain level on Maslow's triangle to be able to thrive, right? So I'm not suggesting quitting your job and living as no matter anything like that. What I am suggesting is that you should look at time in a similar fashion as you do money

because ultimately anyone who's smart can make more money, but you can never make more time. A fee for the show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something interesting or useful. If you know someone who would like to create their own manifesto, then definitely share it today's episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give the show is to share it with those that you love and hear about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what

you listen. And until next time, live life-assioned strap.