The Liz Moody Podcast - Stanford Professors: One Tool That Makes Every Life Decision Easier

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

This episode is a radical reframe of what a good life actually is, and how we can all get there. If you feel stuck, it’s gonna unstick you. If you’re struggling with problems that feel insurmountable, this episode will offer solutions you haven’t heard anywhere else.  I’m talking with Stanford professors Dave Evans and Bill Burnett. Their books have sold millions of copies around the world. They’ve helped us design our lives, design our work, and now they’re back to teach us how to infuse our lives with meaning, purpose and flow.  We get into all of their expertise, from the workplace to relationships to how to get the most of your one human life in this episode. It’s practical and deeply philosophical. It made me cry both recording it and then again looking back on the edit.  🎧 What you’ll learn: • How to use the life design thinking framework to make any decision • How to stop working on problems you can't solve and find the ones you actually can • The "reframing ladder" technique to unstick yourself from any life problem • The five mindsets that turn ordinary moments into a deeply alive life • How to escape the exhaustion trap without changing your schedule • Why Maslow got it wrong—and what actually sits at the top of the pyramid Check out our FREE “21 Days To Change Your Life Plan for Nutrition, Movement & Mental Health” we made for our listeners at https://pages.lizmoody.com/january. If you liked this episode, check out: You’re Not Behind In Life: Real Science + Mindset Shifts You Need To Hear For more from Bill Burnett & Dave Evans: • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fullyalive_bydesign/  • Website: https://designingyour.life/how-to-live-a-meaningful-life/  • Book, How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day: https://www.amazon.com/How-Live-Meaningful-Life-Thinking/dp/1668084899  Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: • Timeline: visit Timeline.com/Liz to claim my special offer. • Avocado: check out AvocadoGreenMattress.com for up to 20% off organic mattresses and more. • LMNT: head to DrinkLMNT.com/Liz to get a free 8-count sample pack with any order. • Lumebox: go to TheLumeBox.com/Liz for 40% off anytime. • Marley Spoon: check out MarleySpoon.com/offer/LizMoody to get up to 25 FREE meals. • Masterclass: head to MasterClass.com/LizMoody for an additional 15% off. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 400. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I used to think that someday I was going to create my dream life, that the pieces would snap into place and I would just wake up with a big smile on my face every day. I thought that if I got the right job, the right routine, the perfect habit stack, I would finally have my ideal life, like the perfect version of what my life could be. But no matter what I did, that moment never came. Instead, I often felt myself feeling stuck and burned out and overwhelmed and wondering why nothing. felt as good as it was supposed to. Today's episode is about exactly what I was getting wrong and exactly how we all can fix it. This episode is a radical reframe of what a good life actually is and how we all can get there, no matter where we are right now. If you feel stuck, this episode is going to unstick you. If you are struggling with problems that feel insurmountable, like wanting a partner

and not being able to find one or having a career that you hate but not knowing how to get to a job that you love, or feeling like you cannot make enough money for the life that you want, feeling like the life that you want is unattainable to you for some reason, somehow. This episode is going to offer you solutions that you have not heard anywhere else. Today I'm talking with Stanford professors Dave Evans and Bill Burnett. Their books have sold millions of copies around the world. I'm sure that you've seen them on shelves. They've helped us design our lives, design our work.

And now in their latest book, they are back to teach us how to invent. fuse our lives with meaning, purpose, and flow. We get into all of their expertise from the workplace to relationships to how to get the most out of your one human life, your one go-around on this planet in this episode. It is practical and it is deeply philosophical. It made me cry, both recording it, interviewing them, and then also looking back on the edit. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast where we share real solutions that fit into your actual life to the trickiest problem so you can feel as good as possible every single day. I'm your host, Liz, and I've been a journalist for over two decades. I have spent my career learning how to ask the right

question so that you can get the answers that will actually change your life. If you have ever thought, why does all of this feel so hard when I am doing all of the right things? Stay with me, because this episode is going to answer that and it's going to change everything. Okay, so you guys are Stanford professors who study living a good life. What do you think is the number one thing that people get wrong about designing a life that feels good? They think there is an answer. And if they find it, then they can accomplish it as opposed to there's a process that you live through continually. That's interesting. Is that about the like moment to moment living that you sort of talk about in the book? It's moment to moment and that's certainly what the current book is about. But even there's

seasons of life, you know, I'm coming out of college. What's that first 10 years going to be all about? I'm in the middle of my career. You know, I'm raising the kids now. So what's going on at this time? There is no done. There's just continuing through. So there are big chunks of life that you want to sort of get your hands on. But that all boils down to moment by moment. So it's not just moment by moment. It's moment by moment and season by season. But we define a human person as a becoming. Now, you get into the argument, am I a being or a doing? No, you're a becoming. And so if you're a becoming, are you becoming well? What would it mean in the moment if you were trying to be or do versus become? Well, you know, being and doing is very transactional, right?

You're just, I'm trying to get something done in the how to live a meaningful life. We talk about the tale of two worlds, the transactional world and the flow world. And most of us live all the time in the transactional world. That's where we try to have an impact, try to get stuff done. It's become sort of an endless treadmill of, you know, tasks and accomplishments and impact. And people don't find what they're looking for. they're looking for meaning and they can't find it there because meaning isn't really found in the transactional world. The other way of looking at it is we say there's more than one life in you.

This idea that you're going to optimize, you're going to hack your way to the perfect life or you're going to somehow achieve the perfect career. It can't happen. There's more than one life in you. You have more aliveness than one life is going to allow you to ever realize, which is actually the good news, which means that there's so much to choose from. You're coming from a place of abundance, it's not scarcity. But a lot of people feel overwhelmed by all of that choice. They're like, if I can do this, I could go move to Europe. I could live anywhere.

I could do all these different jobs. What do I do on a Tuesday morning when I wake up? How do we tackle that? Well, one of the lines I'm using for a long time is time to go from FOMO to Jomo. It's like, oh, should I move to Europe? And I don't want to blow it. Maybe that's the right thing. And I don't want to miss it.

Okay, that's FOMO, the fear of missing out. And once you really get your hands around the fact that not only, I mean, you are way more capacious than your lifetime permits you to live out. Wait, can you define capacious for anybody? Yeah, you have more capacity. Okay. That's just a fancy Stanford word for, you have a lot of capacity. You're a capacious person.

You're really big. You're way bigger than your lifetime. Way bigger than your lifetime. We do an exercise called How Many Lives Are You? And we ask people, hey, if the multiverse was true and you had access to wormholes and you could have as much access to your parallel conscious selves and all the universes of the multiverse that you could possibly want, how many would you like? And the average answer is eight.

So let's say most people are, in fact, eight people. But you only get one, so you're going to be about 13% of yourself. 87% of you is never going to happen. That's the really good news. Wait, that's good news? That feels terrible to me. No, no, that's because you're stuck in FOMO. The FOMO thinks I can have it all.

I can get it right. I can pull it off. No, you can't possibly because you're so big. So now it's not get it all. It's enjoy what it is. So the joy of missing out, something really cool goes by, you haven't got time to even attend to you. You go, oh, that's so wonderful to remind me that the world is an interesting place. I am never going to run out of a something else might be coming along.

And now I'm back to having a really good time talking to, I'm on the Liz Moody show. I mean, am I thinking about what I'm doing this afternoon? Am I being somewhere else because maybe I'm missing out? I want to be fully here. Are there any questions that we could ask ourselves or simple exercises that we could do if we're trying to figure out, like, should I go to great? grad school. Should I take this job? Should I move to this city? Yeah. There's lots. You got to build what we call a compass. I'm not sure where you're going, right? You don't know if grad school is the right thing or something else is the

right thing. But you can know if you're going in the right direction. And so we say, you know, the compass is made of three things. What's your life story? It's the story you grew up with, you know, the story you tell yourself about who you are. And then what do you want to do? What's your work view or the view of the things you're going to do in the future that are productive and what's the meaning of life? But these three things, small little reflection essays, you put them all together, and then you look for what we call coherency. It's who I am and what I do and what I believe. Does it make sense together? Is it coherent together? And when it is, then you can test any decision you have against this compass. Is this going in the right direction? Would grad school get me to where I want to go in my

becoming the person I want to become? Should I stay in this job? Or maybe I should quit and do a startup, whatever it is. You can know you're going in the right direction without knowing exactly where the endpoint is. I want to just dive in on that a little bit deeper because I do think it's such an effective tool. Could you guys maybe share an example from somebody in your life or even yourselves of how those buckets would look and then how a decision might make when it stacked up against those buckets? The last thing I did before I jumped on the car to come over here is I'm having an hour-long

conversation with, we'll call him Tom. He was a 43-year-old entrepreneur on his second company, which is doing well. and he began about a year ago to start disengaging, wasn't feeling right about it. You know, the business was harder than we thought it's succeeding, but the context is different, and AI has changed everything, and he's got a bunch of employees now. So, boy, is it, is it them or is it me? I mean, so he got sufficiently ambiguous about whether or not he was having a problem with his life or he just needed to solve the problem of his business and get back to work.

That he took a sabbatical, took a sabbatical break, came back from that sabbatical. and noticed that even after that refreshment, he was refreshed, he was rested because he'd been working his tail off for a long time, that he still wasn't as passionately engaged on the mission of the company. Mission of the company was fine, but it didn't mean what it used to mean to him. So that's a good example. So he started with, you know, what am I doing day to day? Overworking. He starts delegating. So it's managing what's going on in his tactical activity. And then back to my workflow. Why am I doing this? What's the mission of the company? What are we here for? So that's this work view. And he was coherent.

with that. And then his life, you, am I leaving the planet better than I found it? You know, what's the, what's the grand contribution of that in my family? Because I'm certainly of kids now. He's 43 years old. What happened was he did that coherency analysis, took a break to make sure he had the energy on. It came back and noticed that that didn't correct. So now he's in a situation where he's thinking, I think this may be the end of a season for me. You know, he's probably going to sell his company and get out. Just he's grown to a place where his relationship with what he's doing and why he's doing it has changed. So he didn't just jump out the window on day one when he got upset. And he didn't just tell us, oh, just get back

to work. You're fine. So he didn't talk himself into or out of his problem, but he iterated a couple of steps of paying attention and then is probably going to make a strategic decision. The iterating the steps is a key part of kind of what you guys are saying people is missing from this conversation of building the life we want right. This is design thinking. Can you kind of define design thinking and what makes it different? We've been teaching what we call human-centered design at Stanford since the 60s. This isn't a new topic, but we called it design thinking. What's the human that I'm designing for? What's the need behind the thing that we're trying to make here? I worked at Apple for seven years. I've done lots of products, lots of designs. And the goal is always

to make something that a human can really use and it helps them, or just taking something that's hard to do and making it easier. So design is all about, sort of an optimistic point of view that says we can always make the next design better. We start with empathy, redefining the problem to make sure we're really work on the right thing. Come up with lots of ideas because we know if we have lots of ideas, we'll choose better. Designers never picked their first idea. And then to test that hypothesis about the user, we prototype something and then we test to see if it worked. And in that prototype test, we discovered, did we ask the right question or do we have the right point of view? So when we came to talking about life design, it was like, well, certainly you can prototype any change

you want to try in the world, right, and get some information. And you should probably come up with lots of ideas. And then when we think about, are we really working on the right problem? We get into the whole question of how do you reframe and look at a problem differently to open up the solution space. So all those things that come directly out of design, you know, I was on the team that did the first laptops at Apple. When you're building something that's never been done before, you don't have a specification. So you just have to build lots of things to explore how to pull it all together and make it work. And so that's design thinking. That's human-centered design. and it's the human-centered way to designing the version of you in the future that doesn't exist yet.

Identifying the right problem, I think, is such an interesting part of the conversation. I think a lot of the reason that people feel stuck in their lives is they think they're working on the right problem, but they've actually identified the wrong problem. I'm curious if you guys would agree with that, and if so, how you would suggest that maybe we find the right problems in our lives. Yeah, we definitely say problem finding precedes problem solving. And half the time stuff doesn't work, you're working on the wrong problem. You want to work on the real problem and a real solvable problem. So if there's a problem you can't solve, that's not actually a problem.

It's just a circumstance and your only chance is to accept it and move on. Wait, speak more to that because I think it's so interesting that so many of us spend so much of our lives on problems that are essentially insolvable. Yes. And then we're exhausted, we're burnt out and we don't feel like our life is moving in the right direction. Yeah, we call those gravity problems and anchor problems. So a gravity problem, we named it that because, you know, I'm 72 and I'm a cyclist and so I'm 20 pounds heavier than I used to be. which means my bike doesn't work as well anymore. As I go to Bill, I've got this real problem.

This gravity thing, it's screwing up my cycling. Can you help me with this gravity problem? And he goes, no, Dave, I can. Gravity's not a problem. It's just reality. So an example of that might be, hey, Dave, I want to be a poet and you can't make any money being a poet. Can you help me of that problem?

Well, no, the fair market value of poetry is a buck. So I'm sorry, that's just true. So when you run into what you called a problem, which is in fact a circumstance, because a problem you think you can solve, and it's not solvable, it's not a problem. It's a circumstance. So your choice now is to accept it, which gives you the freedom to move on and redefine a different, like, oh, how can I find a way to make a living in a way that doesn't take so much time that I can still do my poetry in a meaningful way? Now, how do I tell the entire capitalistic world that poetry deserves to be paid more for? Like, good luck with that. The whole idea of problem findings, first of all, starts with a solvable problem and then understanding really what's going on. How do we identify the right problem so we break through that feeling of feeling stuck? Go out in the world and talk to people and figure out some stuff that you couldn't figure out on your own and maybe a prototype experience.

Go try something, a little tiny something that gives you the experience of what it is your wrestling with. Over and over, we find people who are, you know, they're working on problems that you can't solve because it's a gravity problem. You know, I really want to get promoted. I have to get promoted this year, but the company's laying people off and not making any more directors. How do I become a director bill? Well, the reality is for the next year or so, there aren't going to be any more directors, Liz, so you're going to have to figure out a reframe. And then the big thing, in addition to prototyping, which is the power tool, is the reframe. How do I figure out a different way to think

about this problem that opens up the solution space? Instead of banging my head against the thing I can't solve. Is there another way to look at it moving from trying to solve the problem I can't solve to going out and prototyping things that might actually change the problem in a way that becomes more attractible, more open to solutions? And reframing is the other superpower tool, which I'm using a lot of AI for now. By the way, AI is really good at reframing. Wait, how so? So I have three kids, and they're now all over the country. And we have a few grandkids, and I really want to stay in touch with my three kids. So I said, I asked Chad, I said, hey, using the framework in the book designing your life, blah, blah, blah.

because it knows the whole thing. They ripped us off years ago. I know. I get money in the anthropic settlement. Yeah. We're working on that. So I said, give me a way to stay connected to my three kids and three different time zones. And it said, Bill, that's a great question.

But let me reframe it for you. What if it's about, rather than you trying to stay connected, what if we co-create a way of the kids staying connected with their folks? And so they become agents in the design. Now, that's a classic reframe. I went from, I have to do this to, wait a minute. Why don't I think about this as about co-creation process? And it spat that out because you asked it to think about that problem in the context of your book.

I said, give me five reframes. And two of them were kind of lame. But three of them were like this big shift. Like, oh, wait a minute. It's not just me doing this. It's me and the kids doing this together. That was one. Wait, so what did you guys end up doing?

We're still working on it. Okay. Come back to us when you started it. But reframing is really critical because it gets you to a problem you can actually start prototyping some ideas, some solutions to. And once people learn, even it's just how to reframe a problem and then how to prototype their way forward, they get unstuck. Okay, can I ask you to apply this to a few problems that I commonly see with listeners? Sure. What about I want to meet my life partner, but I cannot find them out there. I'm dating. The people that I'm finding

dating aren't the type of people that I want to end up with, but I know I want a life partner. I maybe want kids. I want a family. I'm engaged. Congratulations. Thank you. Because five years ago, last Friday, I lost my wife to cancer. A year after that, I came out of the grief process, which was incredible, and then sort of looking around and then actually bumped into one of my students. She happened to be 68 at the time.

So it's not a violation of Title IX. But I began to research, how do you part, because I hadn't, you know, dated and God knows how long. And the research I found is if you want, if you're looking for a partner that you want to be in alignment with, right, not just be entertained by. Overwhelmingly, you know, it turns out personal referral. I mean, online can be effective. But the reason personal referral works is the people who know who you actually are, not just what your profile looks like.

So I enlisted eight referers. You all know who I am and what's going on. I give me a good example of how a referer can help where a matching system may not. So I went to Maggie and Allen's 40th anniversary party alone because I was a widow. And 50 of their closest friends from 40 years are there, lovely people. And then two weeks later, Maggie said, says, well, you know, after the party, I got calls. I go, what do I mean?

She goes, well, three women called and said, who was the tall, fast-talking guy with the gray hair? I said, oh, anybody asked you me? She goes, no. Oh. Anyway, wait, Maggie, these are your best friends. These are the curated friends of your last 40 years. I mean, they're probably great. She goes, yeah, they're great.

And I'm looking for you. I'm kind of looking. Are you sure there's no conversation? She goes, trust me. No. And I just went, oh, that's why this. works. So she just saved me a year of my life. So thing one is if you want to have a significant relationship, significant relationships probably come from significant relationships. So you have to go

to your friend base and your colleague base and start talking about what you're doing, where you want to be, who you want to know. Frankly, in our new book, we talk about how to create a formative community, a conversation group that's really people not just getting something done or having a good time together, but becoming their better selves together. There are three reasons people gather for social time to enjoy each other, for collaborative time to get something done, or formative time to become better together. Very few people are in real formative communities. And if you can form one of those, that's the kind of place where you can bump into the people who are trying to become something, not just get something. Love that. Okay. What if we don't know people who know people, though?

We have a thing in the book called the reframing ladder. The problem is, hey, I'm trying to find a life partner. I'm at that stage in life. I'm not interested in dating anymore. I really don't find somebody that I can start a family with, that I can connect with, that I can love deeply. Okay, so then I say, great. And oftentimes the way we try to tackle this is, okay, that's an interesting problem, but it's really big. Let's level up one thing. If you were to find this life partner, Liz, what would you get out of it?

Okay, so I know a lot of friends who say a feeling of family and a partner to have a child with. I'm looking for the feeling of family, and I want to be around kids. I want to be connected to kids. All right. So we can just stop one level up in the ladder. And so I'm turning that into, how might I have a better feeling of family and be around kids some more? And then I can prototype, hey, you know, I could volunteer at the childcare center down the street to be around kids.

I could organize more family events around my family and invite more people in. And so I can't come at the problem directly because if I'm just walking around going, are you, are you my life partner? Are you my life partner? You know, I'm going to sound a little desperate. It's going to be a little weird. but if I could focus on the experience of family and the experience of children, that would put me in the range of people who might be potential life partners. So again, it's not just go join a club at the Y and see if you bump into somebody.

It's intentionally thinking about how could I design the experience of family and children into my life? Because if this works, maybe that'll happen. If it doesn't work, I'll still have family and children in my life. And I can even go up a level and say, if I had family and children in my life, I'd have a meaning and purpose for the day. I'd have a meaning and purpose for things that I want to do. And now I can start designing prototypes around that.

And somewhere in that process, by the way, just like with jobs, you're going to get the most powerful recommendations for jobs from the loosely connected network. It's not your friends who know, I know somebody, I know somebody can get you a job, Liz. It's I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. And then that person, because of the loose network connection, has a reason to respond to your request, hey, I'm looking for a job.

In the same way, they've just did a thing where very close friends and very close people that he knows could have referred him to three women. He might have had a fun time dating, but he wasn't interested in dating. He's interested in a real relationship. So they knew that. But I'll bet from that group to the next group to the next group out, there's someone in that group that you're going to find interesting. And the other pieces, psychologists know that we don't see what we're looking at.

we just see what we're looking for. We can walk down the street and we don't even notice stuff because we weren't looking for it. We're on our way to the store and we're just looking to get to the store. So if what I'm looking for is that perfect spouse, again, that perfect solution to my problem, I'm not going to find it because that's sort of the wrong framework. But if I open up my experience, it's not just about looking for the straightforward things. You open up your peripheral vision. Look at the, there's an interesting thing over there.

There's some pretty flowers over there. Some interesting people here. interesting people there. If you open up what you're looking for, the chance of finding something in all the stuff that's coming at you is much greater. Part of that is, how do I find the prospective partner who's looking for my prospective partnerness? But their question then is, okay, who am I looking for? And if that person were acting coherently with that way of being in the world, where would they be and what would they be doing? So let's say, I really care about social justice. And so I really want to be involved in social justice. And if I want to meet other people

who cared about that? Could I volunteer and assist them? So I'm going to go do the kind of thing that the kind of people I want to be with are doing. Rather than go solve your problem, go where the solution to your problem might be for other reasons. I very rarely get genuinely excited about skincare, but this is one of the most innovative products that I have come across in years, and I'm so obsessed with it. I've been telling all of my friends to get it, so now I need to tell you guys. Here's some science first. Your skin isn't just getting older. It's being actively broken down by something called senescent cells. These are cells that have stopped functioning but refused to die.

They sit there, releasing inflammatory signals, breaking down your collagen, degrading your skin barrier, and accelerating every visible sign of aging. Scientists call them zombie cells, and as they accumulate, they are one of the primary drivers of how old your skin looks and feels. The team at one skin, a group of female longevity researchers and PhDs, spent five years testing over 900 peptides to figure out how to help reduce the accumulation of senescent cells. And they finally landed on it. OSO1, the first peptide scientifically studied to reduce skin's biological age at the molecular level. OSO1 goes in and it clears out the senescent cells

so it helps skin function like healthier, younger looking skin. It is not masking the signs of aging. It's not targeting one thing. It is actually rolling the clock back at a cellular level. I've been using the face moisturizer for almost six months now, and I love it so much. It feels amazing. It goes on really smoothly. It's not tacky at all. And I actually see a difference, which I just feel like is never the case with skincare. You want to always like see a real difference.

And you're kind of like, do I? Do I? And this I genuinely do. Because it's clearing the senescent cells, it doesn't just target one thing. So my skin looks firmer. It looks glowier. The texture feels dramatically smoother. And I feel like you can see that too.

I also love the body moisturizer. It dries down really quickly, which is always a pet peeve of mine with moisturizers. I hate that like sticky feeling when you go to put your clothes on. This does not do that. But it does moisturize really, really well. And then again, I'm reducing my skin's biological age. I am not making it just look younger. I am making it actually younger. One skin has four peer-reviewed clinical studies and over 10,000 five-star reviews. The data backs everything up for a limited time get 15% off with code Liz at one skin.co slash Liz. Again, that's 15% off at one skin.com with code Liz. Okay, so Bill, you said that we should be asking like our friends of friends,

this extended network. Do you have any advice? I have to ask this because a lot of the people that I know who are struggling with these problems are very shy. And the idea of reaching out to a basic, like almost stranger, like that would horrify them. Yeah. How do we do that practically?

I'm very shy as well. Okay. That would horrify me. In the new book, we talk about mindsets. There's five mindsets. But the couple that are interesting, I think, for this one, is the mindset of availability. Can you just put yourself in the mindset of, hey, I'm available if something comes along, which is different than I'm desperately seeking. It's just I'm open to exploring new things.

And maybe it'll be, oh, I'm interested in social justice and I met some people in this group that do that. But it might also be, you know, I got dragged to this crazy art. event at one of these studios in the city and everybody was really not like me, but boy, that was really interesting and I was available. I find, particularly if I'm at an event and I'm supposed to be making small talk with people, I mostly just stand in the corner and try not to be seen. But when I can imagine myself in the availability mindset, if there's a 20% chance that something amazing might happen in there, you know, like just leave yourself open for it, right? I sit there and say, well, you know, there's probably somebody in this room that'd be

interesting to talk to. And if I just like drop my shoulders, and don't stand here like a soldier and maybe wander over to the, you know, to the canapes and grab something and say, hi, that something will happen. And so when I'm in that mindset, the shy person is just observing, oh, look at all this interesting things that are going on. I think that's one way to get past the shyness piece. In addition, I like Dave's idea, put yourself places where the other people who like the things you like are doing. Design also says when you're doing the empathy work, work with the extremes of the bell curve. Find people who have nothing like you that have, you know, like they're artists, they're Burning Man folks, whatever the, whatever the group is that

you're like, I don't know anything about those people. They seem a little weird. Go see if you can find a way to spend some time there too, because what happens, just, it's like when you're traveling and you're in a culture and you don't know what anything means and you're not sure even what the right thing to do or say is, or how do you fix, how do you work the machine to get your ramen and you don't know, you are naturally in an availability mindset. Okay, I've got to figure this out and I'm someplace where I don't know what's going on. I'm available to information that's coming in. It's like an availability hack. Yeah, it's an availability hack. So try that and try, finding groups of people that you don't know anything about because you'll be instantly curious.

But in the moment, it's really that mindset shift of like when you're at the party and you want to just retreat and you want to just talk to the people that you know. Try that. Try that. Try the hack of a try to just loosen up and say, I'm available to whatever's going to happen. And if there's a 20% chance of something wonderful happening, I'm in. You asked the question about how do I overcome this internal inertia to do the confronting experience of talking to a stranger or engaging somebody I don't know well. And that was a long way of saying, you got to do it. In the new book, we call the designer's way, these five mindsets.

And the power two for, there's a power two for among the five. And the two are radical acceptance and availability. And radical acceptance means, completely accept what's going. Look, reality doesn't have an attitude about you. It's just true. It's just lying there. It's not, it's not like reality's going like, I'm going to, I'm going to crush Liz's soul today. You know, reality didn't wake up thinking that. It's just going, I'm doing reality. Come and play if you want. So you radically accept reality, which might in this case mean, oh, it's really hard to find a partner. That's just true. And then availability is, and what can I

do to that? I need to be available to these people I don't know very well. So I have that availability, what I'm doing is I'm using these reframes, these ideas, to lower my internal activation energy problem and say, I can find a way to make this manageable. We're not going to give you a new reality where everybody knocks on your door and says, I understand you're shy, but would like to have a child. Well, I'm fertile and lovely. Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be nice? We don't happen to live in that world. So what you're looking for is the best possible way to get where you want to be in the world we happen to be in. And I do want to say briefly, because of the work we do, we know a lot of young people. We spend most of our time

with the people much younger than us because most of our peers are pretty boring, frankly. But so about four or five, you know, 32 to 38 year old young women who happen to know would sit with me and kind of go, oh, Dave, this is, I'm so happy for you. And I got to be honest with you, I'm a little pissed, you know, because you're about to get married happily for the third time. I was married 24 years. you know, productively but not happily. And we very amicably got divorced. And then I was very passionately married for 20 years.

And then she died 15 years ahead of schedule, which was, we're going to have a conversation about that later. And then I'm about to get married massively wonderfully again. Like, whoa, I'm getting married for the third time. And she goes, you're on your third one. I'm still waiting for number one. This is not fair. And I just want to be honest.

There is a massive men problem, particularly. Men are not doing well right now. the number of amazing young women I know, you know, of anywhere in the sexual curve, sexuality-wise, you know, straight, gay, or by, who are really struggling. And I know two young women who've reframed the problem too, I'm going to be a single mother. I know a number of women who are doing that or like I'll raise a kid with my best friend, which I think goes to your ladder. It's like, what am I willing to do?

What is the actual thing that I'm looking for? For a lot of my friends, they've realized, It's companionship while raising a child. Like, they don't want to be a single mom. They don't want to necessarily do it alone. But if they can find that companionship elsewhere, and many of them are realizing that the partners that they'd considered having children with would be more work than raising a kid with their mom or their best friend or whatever.

The other joy of missing out is, isn't it wonderful that we live in a culture where that even would be possible? Yeah. You know, it's 100 years ago, and a woman said, I think it's just going to go have kids and I'll be friends with John and he can be my companion. and people would have been aghast. Right. Yeah.

No, I'm watching the Gilded Age right now. And one of this, this guy character just came in and asked his wife for divorce. And she was like, because he was having an affair. And he was like, I can't file for divorce. I need you to do it. And she's like, that would literally ruin my entire life. And it is like, what a blessing that we don't even think about that we have that option, you know. There are more ways to solve the problem, typically, than you think.

And if you're working on the right problems, you can frame it up at one level of the ladder or two levels of the ladder. And remind me, again, remind listeners, that question to go up the ladder. Yeah, so you take your existing problem, and we always like to use the design framework of how might I find a life partner and raise a family? And then you say, okay, if I got what I wanted out of a life partner and a family, what would I get? Well, I'd get connection to someone, a partner that could be a life, you know, a friend for life. And I might, and I ever get a connection to kids again. If I got what I wanted, what would I get? And then you turned that into your new question. How do I get a friend to help me raise children or a friend to help me connect

back to kids. And then you say, well, if I got that, I would have this. And then you can, you can just keep going up the ladder. This comes from a colleague of mine who's one of my mentors, Bernie Roth, who, a shout out. He wrote a book called the achievement habit. And Bernie's a fantastic, he just retired at age 90, was still teaching the hardest math class at Stanford at 90 years old. He taught me the reframing ladder. And his one caveat is, don't go up more than three or four things. Otherwise, you'll get to, well, well, I think I'm going to become a monk and shake my head. Because what I really want is fulfillment. Yeah, and happy.

It's just a way of reminding yourself that you can reframe any problem. Love it. I do want to get to the five mindsets in a little bit. I also want to get to grief in a little bit because I think it's really interesting the idea of applying design thinking to grief. And I know you both have had grief experiences. But I want to round out some other problems that people run into in their lives. A big one I hear is just like I am too exhausted by the day to day of my life to even zoom out and think about what I want. And I'm afraid that's going to be my life.

Then I'm going to die. Yeah, I'm overwhelmed. And I mean, actually overwhelmed by overwhelm. Yeah, I think if you really are in that place where there is absolutely no space whatsoever, you have no energy at all to do anything other than what you're currently doing, then you're in a bad place. Now, I think for a lot of people, it actually isn't the time problem. Most people I know working 60 hours a week could work 50, but that's just what they're used to doing.

And I go home and it's not that I have no time, but I have no energy. And it's not because I have no energy because I'm physically exhausted. I have no energy because I'm soulfully exhausted. There's nothing feeding me other than what we call living in the transactional world. So again, there is only one reality in the world. But your brain can't begin to comprehend the whole thing. So in fact, you've got two chunks of your brain, which Lisa Miller at Columbia calls the awakened brain and the achieving brain. And we posit that that represents really your consciousness currently active can only recognize one world or another.

There's the transactional world where we get a bunch of stuff done, which most modern people spend 99.7% of their time in. Then what we call the flow world, which is the fully present moment in which I am presently living. So there's the reality that's coursing right under my feet all the time that's happening in this eternal moment called now. While I'm thinking about what's going to happen after this interview is over. And so I'm living in the future and realities are in front of me and I'm missing it. So if I'm not having any experiences that actually have that enlivening human-making, person-making generativity of enjoying the fullness of the moment that I'm in, then I can be exhausted all the time. So I'm stuck in that transactional world, and it takes everything from me, and then I fall down and do some social media, then do it again tomorrow.

So the first thing you needed to do to begin to restore yourself to start having these practices of getting more out of the present moment and being in the flow world. and, you know, enjoying the cup of coffee, you're actually participating in drinking, you know, and actually during the staff meeting, looking out the window and noticing the color of the trees. And rather than, you know, go on social media, then call your friend and complain about what the other person just posted about you, you called your old college roommate who really loves you. I got a text yesterday morning from Marty Asher, who was my college roommate 50 years ago and said, Dave, I miss you. Call somebody who misses you and have that conversation. So start putting those flow experience.

that regenerate the aliveness in you in place, and you're gonna start finding that the awakened brain is not gonna start having more capability to inform you about things you might be wanting to work on differently. So it's almost about adding more in, but more of the right things. Yeah, we talk about it's not about cram more in,

that's about get more out of. There's actually a great deal more aliveness in everyone's life lying for free right in front of them if they would just access it, the meaningfulness and the purpose fullness that's just waiting for you. There's so much competing for our attention, though, these days. Like, it can sound nice to be like, well, don't scroll on social media. Like, think about how delicious the cup of tea or drinking is. But in practice, my brain has been hijacked to be addicted to social

media. So when I get home, I'm exhausted. I'm pulling up TikTok. I'm scrolling. And I can like try to set my phone aside and be like, hmm, like this moment. But it's hard to do that. So how do we overcome kind of the forces of the modern world? Well, it is hard to do. And I apologize for training my students exactly how to steal your attention through design. But you are still the agent in your life, right? So you're still the actor here that can figure out what do I want to do. Can I just turn off the phone for an hour and not do the doom scrolling thing? We talk about designing moments. Can I design a moment when I get home? Just a little ritual something where I, you know, I put the keys away and I hang up my jacket. And before I start whatever the next task is to start,

I stop and I do a little reflection on the day. It's just like one line, one thing I was grateful for, and was it energetic, and was I in flow? You know, like, what was my engagement? What was my energy? You have as little small interventions that you kind of make a practice of every day can start to turn that tide. But also, if you're just feeling way, way overwhelmed, is there any way to redesign the thing that's overwhelming you? You know, we talk about different kinds of overwhelm. Is there anything you could delegate to other people so that you do have just a little more,

you know, physical energy at the end of the day? We have a tool called the energy map. We actually map all the things you're doing every week, figure out what are the positive ones and the negative ones, and then just move stuff around on your schedule to see if you can end with a little more energy. There's a classic finding in psychology that in any experience, one hour experience, one week experience, whatever it is, you'll remember the peak and the last thing, right? You know, so you remember the peak and the final thing.

So design your week so that during the week, one good thing happens that's exciting and never leave the long staff meeting summary notes or whatever to the end of the day, end the day on a Friday with some kind of a positive emotional experience, whether that's with colleagues or something else. So little tiny tweaks like the best last experience, you know, applying that to your week, doing an energy map of the week, or finding other ways to start taking some control over where the overwhelms coming from. These are small things.

You can do them in a week. You can, you know, energy map for two weeks, and you can totally change the way you experience that week. So if I asked you, hey, well, how was your week? This week, Liz, you'd say it was a little better, you know, I ended on a high. So there's lots of things we know from positive psychology that you can do to make small changes.

And then, yeah, you know, we live in the attention economy and everybody's after our brain and our attention. We've got to kind of re-reaching. claim that somehow. Well, can we use design thinking to reclaim our attention and break our phone addiction? Unfortunately, due to a large number of family members who decided to participate in that genre of lifestyle, I know a lot more about addiction than I want to. And at some point, you simply have to choose. At some point, you've got to make a choice. If you want to, if you want to declare your powerless victimhood, you get to keep it. A lot of people are looking

for the trick that will give them the will and the conscience that they don't want to apply. We all know you can't make another person do something. And you can't find a trick that will make you do something. At the end of the day, you get to decide. So if you want to stop doom scrolling, it's somewhat you have to stop that. Now, it's much easier to replace. So it's not, I'm now going to stop doom scrolling as opposed to I'm now going to do the Wonderglasses exercise.

We've designed a whole bunch of practices and exercises you can do to have these experiences. So rather than like stop doom scrolling, start wonderglassing, start flipping the flow switch. We can get back to what those things actually are. But what you need to do is give yourself some tools you can actually positively engage in and then go have those experiences. Yeah. But no one's going to make you into a different person other than you. So the first decision is, do I actually want this to be different? The classic design thinking framework is you start with empathy, redefine the problem, come up with lots of ideas, prototyping tests. In life design, we had to add one more step. And the step comes before everything else is called except.

Dave will say, you can't solve a problem you're not willing to have. So if you want to solve the problem of doom scrumbing, you have to decide, I accept this is my problem. I accept it's not working for me. And I'm going to start looking for some ideas like I could replace a bad habit with a better habit. I could remove the triggers that create this, all those little things. But I have to start with, I accept. I accept that it is my responsibility to work on this. You know, it's funny. our kids are raised and gone, but I run to parents all the time or I'm in the airport. I see people handing a thousand dollar iPhone to a child to keep them quiet, go play games to keep quiet or on the airplane.

And they go, you know, my kids have too much screen time. What can I do? And I go, well, you're giving them the screen. But I think those parents feel so overwhelmed that they don't know what else to do in those moments. I know. And in the past it was stick a VHS tape in and have them watch Rafi, you know, while we make dinner because we don't have two parents. and we're busy.

Well, the reason being that parent hasn't... Which is a replacement, though. Like that... It's a replacement. But that parent hasn't accepted that while I'm sitting in the airport lounge, I'm not going to be able to get three memos and 15 emails done while my child doesn't look at a screen. And doesn't annoy the Livingdale outside the other 70 people sitting in close quarter. So you're like, we're making these tradeoffs, but we haven't actually accepted that we're making these trade. Yeah.

We all wanted both ways. We all wanted both ways. Yeah. I want it both ways. I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want all of my eight lives. I want my child to be totally happy and still get a bunch of work done. And I have them think I'm a fabulous father at the same time.

So if you're decided to travel with your child, then you're traveling with a child. And you're probably doing email from one to two in the morning tonight. That's an acceptance. It's like, oh, I accept that I'm now in a public space with a small child. And I don't want that child to become media addicted. So I guess I'm going to have to create an alternative experience for that person. Or I really decided to delegate responsibility for my child to the people. he's annoying up and down the hole.

Or I've decided to delegate, you know, the attention of my child to this screen. For this period of time. And I decide that that's okay for a little bit, but it's not going to be forever. Yeah. So just whatever reality you're choosing to live in. Accepting. Not a doubt. Radical acceptance.

That's okay. I do think I want to come to another idea and the question you were asking earlier, what can we do? How can design help? I do think when people start trying to make these incremental moves, it's very easy to get set back and feel like, it's just not, it's still not working. It's not enough. Because like, oh, well, okay.

yeah, I mean, I did the gratefulness exercise, and that was great, but I mean, is that really enough? And the answer is, yeah, it is. It turns out there's a philosophical concept called the scandal of particularity, which means that it turns out any ultimate thing, truth, beauty, justice, compassion is never actually experienceable. We'll never actually encounter ultimate beauty, complete truth. All presentations of things that are toward those. those ultimate directions come in partial, temporary, constrained forms. They come in particulars. There is no ultimate.

It turns out all ultimates only present in particulars. The sublime is only found in the ridiculous. Can I suddenly make you joyous 24-7? Probably not. But, I mean, you could sit down, and instead of doom scrolling after work, you could do the gratefulness exercise and actually go back and reflect on that moment during the staff meeting when you said something. and Bill and she said, oh, that's really helpful.

And you return to that moment when you heard that was really helpful, and you fully savor the fullness of, I actually made a difference in somebody's day. I had an idea that opened something up for somebody else. I level only get to make a contribution. And now I have that experience, and that's a little bit of an experience of fellowship or community. Bill and I actually collaborated in a way that made a difference for like a minute.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is as good as it gets. So if I move from fighting the scandal of particularity, like, well, when is it finally going to be real? Never. So along the way, for God's sake, take the fullness of what is available, which is always in these small little packets, and celebrate them. And you say, and stack them up. And the part of you that's longing for more, but I want more of that. Of course you do. That's the human spirit.

That longing doesn't mean you fell short. That longing means you're not dead yet. and you're coming back tomorrow. Embrace the longing? Absolutely. The longing, people have studied this, the mystical states of mind. So you sit there and you watch the amazing sunset. The amazing sunset's riveting.

And then finally the sun goes down and it goes to Azure and it goes to twilight and then it's over. And it was completely mind-blowing. And what do you want? More. That best sunset you ever saw wasn't quite enough. Why? because something in you longs for ultimate beauty. And that was really beautiful, but it wasn't the ultimate.

Why? Because that's an aspirational thing you'll never get to. The good news is the part of you that deeply longs for beauty is never going to die. That's not I'm unsated. Beauty should be done at some point. No, no, no. This is why fulfillment, getting it is a dead end. There's not just things of fulfillment.

But I can be fully alive. fully appreciate that sunset. And then when I want more of it, I go, and thank God, I want more. So I might even be available to the next beautiful thing when it comes by. I love the idea of fully appreciating the longing. I feel like I live a lot in the longing. Befriend the longing. It just means you're still here.

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please make sure to mention the show. That is branch basics.com and use code Liz Moody. Forget the B-Doo fight. B-Doo become is a virtuous cycle. So I start with who I am. I'm going the world. So I'm Liz, and I care about people's lives, and I want them to live. I'm going to go do a podcast.

I'm going to meet all these people, and I interview all these people and all these cool books on the bookshelf behind me. And I'm going to do that. And now, I mean, 0, and then Liz 2.1, and then Liz 2.1, and then Liz 2.3 and and Liz 3.0. And we keep that process going. And we really believe that the human person can grow forever. One of the reasons you contain more aliveness than a lifetime permits to live out is so that

you're becoming will never end. the last thing my dear wife Plaudi did when she died five years ago last week. She really liked her brain. She had five metastasies. One of them was her brain. And so we got the end of life prescription to kill her, which is legal in California. She says, my brain goes, I'm out of here. Okay, and I got it.

So the Tuesday before it turned out to be the Friday, but she died, she was getting pretty close to her. I said, so honey, are we doing that thing? What do you think? She goes, no. I'm going to play it out. go, okay? Because there might be one more lesson, and I don't want to miss it. I said, okay, we're in. The very last thing she said to me before she went unconscious, and she sat up and

popped her eyes up, and she goes, oh, it's so interesting. Closed her eyes and went back to sleep. So she became all the way to the finish line. We can all do that. Can you share? I know that You lost your wife and you lost your parents, correct? Yeah, my folks both died within a year of each other. In the process of writing this book, I'm curious what you learned about living a meaningful life, how you applied design thinking to grief, just kind of how you explored those life situations with your unique framework. In both cases with my mom and my dad, I'm past first, it was really in the sense of becoming, like, becoming as much of that relationship as we could have.

And both my mom and dad died of just, you know, bodies wearing out. So they were both fully cognizant. They were just as smart as they ever were. You have no choice when someone's dying. The only choice you have is to be there. I always tell my students, like, all you can do is show up, you know, and be whatever it is that they needed. And what my mom needed was just everybody to be around her

and to know that she was loved. And so that was the lesson there is to show up. I was scared. I was unhappy. I was frightened, you know, I didn't know what would be like after I lost my mom. I was very close to my mom. What would that be like? And all that was just my stuff and the stuff that was necessary at the time was to show up

and make sure she knew she was loved and she was surrounded by the people that loved her. And it was similar with my dad. And then there's the thing where my daughter had our first grandkids, Connor. It's like, oh, I got to tell mom. Oh, I can't. Oh, I got to tell dad. Oh, I can't. There's that thing where they're still alive in your brain and you, and you, you, you,

you walk in the house and you think, oh, there's the thing I got to tell my dad. But this is, you know, this is, you know, seven, eight, nine years ago now. So I think it was just the, if I had to connect it back to design things, empathy for the situation they were in, empathy for the situation my brother, my brothers and my sister and I have two brothers and a sister. And trying to hold a space so all of us could be there and be there the way we wanted to be. And then whatever we needed to work out amongst ourselves about how we felt about my mom

and dad and who loved who and, you know, I was your favorite or should not, to have all that stuff just disappear and just be present for the event, right? And be there in that way. The reframe after, after the grief is, hey, they did the best they could. They were great parents. There's really no reason to, you know, to go back and try to rewire that whole thing. I spent time with my mom, time with my dad. I was very clear about what the relationship was about. And so it felt really complete. And I still miss him, right? I'm going to miss him the rest of my life. One of the things that I just want to tease out that you said, though,

is that you were in that process of becoming in your relationship with your parents till the end. And I think there's something really beautiful about applying the becoming framework, not only to ourselves in our lives, but also to all the relationships that we're in. Because I do think with romantic relationships, certainly we have this idea of like, okay, I did it. I found my partner. And now the work is done. I've certainly experienced it in my own marriage.

The relationship is a living organism. and you want to become in that relationship into the last moment of it. And the person that you're with is becoming, too, and you don't get a, you don't get a chice about what kind of where that direction is going. I've been married 37 years, one life. It's a long road of becoming. I think also trying to become the person that person could be in love with in a way, right? So it's a very interesting dynamic.

The dear friend of my gun, I'm a jury sits there as a retired professor, wrote a book on Grateful Long time ago and it was very experienced to agree if he lost his wife early on as we speak he's been widowed 36 years I think and remarried 13 raised his kids alone got married late in life so when I lost Claudia I called him and said Jerry can you walk

through this with me a little bit and he's been great as I started moving into a new relationship with Frisch my soon to be third wife he said now you know there are no second marriages there are only first marriages the second time around you have to do all the work again now you can bring all that skill and all

that practice and, you know, you get to have learned a lot of things, including particularly what's wrong with you, yourself, you know, and gets your baggage labeled. But you've got to do the work. So they're becoming as always available there. And in my own grief story, we actually had the advantage of a terminal diagnosis. I mean, so literally on March 8th of 2020, Claudia, got a terminal diagnosis. March 8th of 2020? Yeah. Our second book came out February 25th. That timing of that, though. One week later, 10 days later, my wife gets a terminal diagnosis. 10 days later, Shelton Place started. So 2020 was kind of a dramatic year. Yeah. A few months after that, there was a fire one mile from my house.

A bunch of my friends burned down. So it was a fairly intense year. The first thing we did was frame it. When we got the news, we sat on and said, okay, what do we do of this? We didn't tell anybody for eight days, and we just sat on it and held it. But what's this mean? How do we hold this? The story really matters.

And so Claudia knows, okay, here's the line. It's sad, not tragic. She died at 70. She was diagnosed at 69, which was 15 years before she was supposed to die. We had a deal, and she broke the deal. So there will be a conversation later. But once we did radical acceptance, like, okay, our choices are to die and go kicking and screaming into a horrible year or to die well, accept this thing and lean into it.

So pick one. So we picked door number two, which was a really good choice. So it really did start with practicing this acceptance and availability thing and leaning into it all the way. And then the grief year after she died, I've often said, and it sounds kind of horrible, but it's entirely true. You could easily argue the best year of my marriage. was the year after she died.

Because grief is just love in another form. All that pain is just an expression of love. And it was incredibly intense. We had an amazing marriage. And I kept saying to myself, this is an amazing privilege. Very few people get to hurt this much. So don't miss it.

And we learned how to do that because one of the lessons on acceptance we got came from one of her oncology nurses. She was going in for yet another procedure. And the nurse says, now when we inject this radio opaque dye before we start taking pictures of your body, you may feel a little warmth. And at this point, Claudia had become extremely tired of what you called medical euphemisms.

She means a little warmth like where you take a can of kerosene, injected into me and then light it, my body burst into flame. Is that what to mean by a little warmth? You know, and the nurse goes, oh, you've had the procedure before. She goes, yes, I've had the fucking procedure before, and I'm tired of this crap. You know, then the nurse goes hard on her. She goes, oh, well, then you get it. So here's the deal.

Look, it's just pain, okay? Let it rinse through you and it'll be over. Resist it and it's worse and last longer. I don't care. I could pay it to see me other way. Up to you. That's a tough nurse. That sounds astonishingly harsh.

It turned out to be the most generative thing we'd almost ever heard. And the prescient sentence is, it's just pain. Let it rinse through you. And the critical words are just in rinse. It's just pain. And itself is not going to kill you.

oh, I'm in a lot of pain right now. So most people do pain plus. Like I'm in pain. Oh, no. And it's painful. And how long will it last? And I don't like this. And this isn't the way it's supposed to be.

All that crap is elective. The pain is not elective. So it's just pain. So when the pain hits you, the pain's plenty. Why add? Why add all that resistance that's making it worse? So just take the pain and then it'll rinse through you. it'll be over and then it'll stop.

And I actually used that all during the grief year. So I thought, well, the grief's going to be hard enough and it was. It was incredibly hard. But I accepted that, and so when a wave of grief would hit me, rather than, oh, no, and you strike and tough this out. Just like, okay, hit me. That's interesting.

I don't do tough it out, but I do do, is my life worse forever now? Like, are my good years behind me type of thing, which would be not letting it rinse through me, right? Yeah, no. And my conviction was, look, death is so normal. It's going around, but I mean, everybody's doing it. It is, it is catching on.

This death thing is really catching on. There's got to be a gift in it. So I just kind of wouldn't let it go until the gifts came. And there were huge gifts. Can you articulate any of them? Oh, sure. I finally realized I don't feel like a widow. I'm a married guy.

I'm a husband. And I went, oh, I'm not a widow. I'm an amputated husband. You know, I'm missing my wife. It's like you lopped it. And actually studied amputation and, you know, phantom pain and all, and how that actually works. It's exactly what I was going through.

And I thought, I hate this because I'm not Dave. I'm part of an us. I'm an us-based person. And I showed that with my children, who I'm very close to, I've got a bunch of adult kids. And I said, you know, because I've lost my us. And they go, dad, that sucks. That's not fair.

where you're us? And I went, oh, yeah, but it's not the same as this woman right here. I said, yeah, but you know, you're thinking about this all wrong. So they called me on it. My kids called me on it. So I had to reframe it. Am I willing to imagine? Because I can, I'm out by myself.

And there's this big hole next to me where Claudia used to be. And can I allow my consciousness to literally zoom out another 20 yards? My immediate family is 23 people. So there are 23 people. one circle out, all of whom love me dearly. Am I willing to see that and allow myself to call that my us? So there's a document called the New Us that I wrote back to my kids. And so I had to have the mental and spiritual discipline of every time I was awakened to the us that had been gone, but that's an invitation to a new us that's broader. And so now as Frisch comes in and takes the Wifely Place, not Claudius' place,

but the wifely place. You know, I have to hang on at that bigger eyes. So am I willing to have my relational consciousness changed permanently? And that was the gift of grief allowed that if I was going to receive it as opposed to just like put my head down, tough it out and have another drink. I love that. Okay, one more scenario I want to get into a problem that I'd love to apply design thinking to, which is I feel like I cannot afford the life that I want.

Like I see everybody else living this fabulous life. I don't feel like either safe at my job, layoffs, et cetera, et cetera. Or I don't feel like I have the skill set to literally like get the job. I know a lot of people want to be influencers or content creators. I read this article that it was like, it's really hard to watch somebody else getting paid a ton of money to do their laundry and go shopping. And then you sit down and log into your computer and you're like working away all day. How would you suggest people apply design thinking to that problem? First of all, all those people who are, you know, getting paid to go shopping, most of them are getting very much money.

at all. If you look at the whole influencer, you know, curve, it's the half of one percent of the people that are making money. But again, the problem is there's a quality of lifestyle. There's a cost of living lifestyle that I really want that I don't believe I have access to get because I can't get enough money. That's my problem. That's the fundamental problem. I do think to your point, bill, I do think people don't know how much people are like going into debt to have this life. They're comparing themselves to others. They're coming up short. And it's so easy now because I can go on social media and find all sorts of people who look like they're having a way better life than mine. And I really want to have that life, but I can't afford it and or I'm not willing

to do what it would take to get it. Try it, right? Or I feel like I'm sitting here willing and able to do what it would take, but I don't feel like it's available to me for whatever reason. Like I can't get in those medians. I can't get in those rooms. Sure. Okay. All right. Might be true. Yeah. So it might be true. We don't know. Let's let's assume you've got some idea of the thing that you want to do and is different than the thing you're doing, then what we would first do is, like, we'd say, all right, well, let's, let's make sure we're framing the right problem here. Is it about making more money? Is it about having more influence?

Is it about being more famous? Is it about restructuring my life? So I have more time, more control. What is it? And a lot of people, a lot of people go, oh, I know, I'll work for myself. Then I won't have a boss. Now your bosses are all your customers. And your customers think they can have your time anytime they want.

It's actually, I've run my own companies. It's worse than just working for somebody to get a business. paycheck. Just some analysis. Okay, it's about, I really want to have more control of my time and still have the lifestyle that I'm accustomed to. Okay, now we can start prototyping into that. I read an interesting statistic that 70% of Gen Zs have a side hustle, not necessarily

to make money, but they have something else that they're doing that they really are passionate about, interested in, whatever. So if it's, okay, would I have more time, if I had, if my side hustle made me some money, or would I have more time, or could I control my? time and just do the things I want if I had this new, this new gig or this new thing. And then we start prototyping. All right, what would it take? Maybe I think I want to have a podcast and be as influential as Liz Moody and it'll be great and I'll have advertisers and everybody will love me. What's it take to do that? Well, you know, before you quit your job

and launch a podcast and have, you know, three friends subscribe or you do a substack and have no friends subscribe. Let's do a prototype. Let's try that. Call somebody up you know, shadow them for a day. thing about generating content. Try writing a 1500 word essay every day. No chat. You can't use chat. Try writing a 1500 word essay every day for 10 days and see what it's like because it's hard. It's not a lot of fun to be a content creator because you're constantly creating. Unless you love it. Unless you love it. Unless you love it. So try a prototype. Give yourself a couple little design challenges. See how there goes. And then interrogate yourself. How does it feel? How did it feel? Do I feel more in control or out of control?

Do I feel more like I'm being the authentic me? Again, I got my compass. I know I'm going in the right direction. You know, writing every day, it's not my thing. Or writing every day I found it was beautiful. It was joyful. So break it into smaller problems. Prototype your way forward and learn what it is that you are good at.

So empathy for yourself. What am I good at? What do I do that I just do naturally because I'm a curious person. I like to write. I'm a curious person. I love interviewing people. I'm a curious person and I love, you know, this connection I can create with folks in this kind of format.

and then empathy for the world. Does the world need another podcast? Does the world need another substack on, you know, relationships? What would be the indication that the world is listening to me? So how can I put stuff out there and test it very quickly? If you do that process, even if it turns out, I'm not going to become an influencer, I'm not going to quit my job. You've learned a bunch of things about what makes you happy. Curiosity is my favorite mindset of designers. What drives you forward to ask the next question and the next question and the next question. If you do that process in three to six months, you're going to have a really clear idea of what the shape of the next thing looks like. And you can want things you can't have. And when you've decided you want something

you can't have, where it's extremely unlikely you're going to get, you've got an opportunity to make a really big decision, which is now the universe against you and you deserve to have the right to be unhappy for the rest of your life, or what I'm now doing is staring the scandal of particularity in the eyes and noticing the constraint in which I live in. So within this income level that's readily accessible to me, I have the opportunity to create as satisfactory a lifestyle as I can get my hands on while being aware of the fact that if I had a whole bunch more money, I could do something different. And that's a very, very important decision. And you have the right to decide to be unhappy for the rest of your life.

Now, by the way, there are forces encouraging you to do that. Capitalism. Well, capitalism and even psychology. So one of our other big reframe is you can't be fulfilled, but you can't be fully alive. Now, where's that clever one-liner come from? It comes from Maslow was wrong. So this is Maslow's Pyraman. Yeah.

The reason we wrote this last book is, you know, we help people redesign their lives and redesign their careers and that worked for, I mean, like literally millions of people, which is kind of cool. but they started coming back and saying, well, you know, that's great, Dave and Bill, and we did this, and it kind of worked, and we did that. It worked great, and this worked fair, but nonetheless, it's still not as fulfilling and meaningful as I thought it would be. What did I do wrong? And that, that complaint skyrocketed in the last three years, particularly after the pandemic, way after the big resignation when 52 million people walk off the job looking for something more

meaningful. Why? Because they just had the existential threat of nearly dying from the pandemic and looked at their lousy job and kind of going, I'm not putting up with this. short. I got to get a better thing. I don't think most of those 52 million people found a better thing, but they tried. So there's something going on there, and I want to be fulfilled. Now, when people said, what do you mean, be fulfilled? Most people's definition of fulfillment comes directly from Maslow, who in 1943 wrote the paper that started the whole hierarchy of needs, which the National Institutes of Health says is the single most sticky idea in the social sciences. And the apex of that was self-actualization. So the idea is once all the other needs are met,

We should the pinnacle. The apex of human experience is self-actualization. How do you accomplish that? According to the paper, one accomplishes self-actualization by becoming all that one can be. But we can't do that. And if you accomplish being all that you can be, you will experience fulfillment. Tadda! Here's the problem.

According to Bill and David, everybody we've ever met, there's more aliveness in you than one lifetime permits you to live out. So you could not possibly become all that you can be because you were about 10 lives worth of a person, which is the good news. So if you have decided, you have to be fully manifested. Every little square molecule of lizness deserves its moment of full manifestation and preferably an echo back that recognizes it in the world. And if I fall short of that, I'm not getting what I deserve. You just decided to be unhappy for the rest of your life. Yeah. So watch what you choose your way into. I would like

living the Kardashian lifestyle, and the Kardashians are not currently hiring for more Kardashians. The fact that you could imagine liking that in and of itself doesn't actually mean a darn thing. So am I willing to live in the reality in which I find all human person in counter-constraint? Always have always will. And does it? I mean, design thrive in constraint? Absolutely. Totally.

And just to finish this thing, Maslow wasn't wrong, per se. That was this pyramid, and that was a thing. But later in his life, he published in his diaries and never published fully in his diary. So I think there was one more step and I left it out. And it's really important. Past the self-actualization thing is self-transcendence. That's actually the top of the pyramid is doing things for the world beyond yourself. It's transcending the ego. So the self-actualization is the ego needs. Self-transcendence is the bigger picture. And the cool part about self-transcendence is you can have it at any layer of the pyramid. It's not hierarchical. It's not hierarchical. You can self-transcend while

still, you know, working two jobs to, you know, to pay the mortgage. Yeah, where do poor people get off having a joyous day? By loving their children well, by doing something for the community, by enjoying that sunset. All of those things take you out of yourself into something bigger than you. You're being fully alive. And your fully aliveness is available at any level on the hierarchy. Folks with less money are more charitable by percentage of income. Folks with less money and less social prestige have stronger family networks, typically. So having the more money, more success, more things has been demonstrated over and over and over again. It doesn't increase happiness. Daniel Conman published a paper and then republished it.

He's the guy who wrote Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, republished it with some other researchers. Somewhere around $200,000 a year past that. Happiness does not increase. In fact, anxiety and other things increase. Once you get to $200,000, you pretty much have got all the other levels of the pyramid needs met. Now it's all about transcendence. Which is available at any point in the pyramid. Which is available at any income level at any point in your life. It tends to show up later in life. In the second half of life, people start thinking more about, oh, you know, what is what is my life had up to? And it's not just about me. Maybe it's about family and other things. I certainly saw my dad worked in the same company for 40 years, had a very successful career.

But the last part of his life, particularly after he retired, was all selflessness. and that's where he found great joy. And it's quite common that people in their later half of life move toward the transcendent level. But you can have it at any point in life. 15-year-olds and 16-year-olds are still dealing with puberty. So maybe transcendence is a little bit too much. Is the doorway to this self-transcendence?

Is that being fully alive? Or is it something to do with interacting with other people? It almost always has other people involved in it. Okay. It could be a transcendent experience of art or beauty or truth. You could be paper on philosophy or theology and be a social. and be astonished and wowed by that, which can sort of take you out of yourself. But the positive psychology movement has long known.

Having a bad day, go do something for somebody else. So if I'm at home and I want some self-transcendence, like right now, should I just go do something for somebody else? Sure. Or call them up. Okay. I'm up and have a conversation with a friend you know who's struggling. I love that.

Okay. So anybody listening. I love the little homework assignment. Like call somebody up who's struggling after you turn off this podcast, have a little dose of self-transcendence. See how it feels. Yeah. Feel into it.

Lather rinse, repeat. Do it again. Do it again. Go make somebody's day. I mean, look, Marty Asher, say me a text this morning at 6.57 a.m. that says, Dave, I miss you. Boom. Made my day.

So call somebody, tell me miss them, make their day. How important is it to find meaning in our work? Or should we be like the poet where we're making money at work and then we're keeping our meaning reserved as his own precious thing on the side? Hugely. I mean, look, if meaning factors into your life and we're meaning making engines, the largest single expression of human energies is in the workplace. Studies have shown over and over and over again.

I mean, relationships and parenting and sex and food and surfing, nothing beats work as the big dog for the expression of human energy during most of the adult years. So if the largest single chunk of humanity is work, and humanity wants to be meaningful, work better be meaningful. So let's go figure out how to do that. The people who research meaning making will say that the number one place people experience meaning making is in the workplace. The problem people keep saying, I want to be fulfilled. And the second thing they say is, what would be meaningful for you is I need to make an impact.

So the number one, if not in most cases, sole form of meaning making that we hear workers telling us that they are pursuing is impact. And I need to change the world. I need to make a difference. And it needs to matter. It phrases different ways, but it's all about the production of the impact. And the problem with putting all your meaning eggs in the impact basket is it doesn't really work. because first of all, impact is a thing, you're not a thing, you're a person. And even if you make an impact,

capped a five and then say, what are you done for me lately? I mean, we sold over a million bucks. And that's great, but that's been true for a while now. So like, you know, that that fact doesn't keep creating my experience of meaning making. Most of the time, impact doesn't work. Because it turns out in decision science, we know if you do everything right, it still may not work. Most things fail.

So you're trying to make impact most of the time you won't. And when you do, it won't last. And even if it does last, it won't matter that it lasts. So that can't be the only game you're playing. You've got to look at other parts of that. But let me just take a little pressure off of the job has to be meaningful. One of my favorite slides in the D.YL class is, I've put up a slide that says there's moneymaking and there's meaning making

and that might equal one job. it might equal two jobs. You might not want to get your meaning on the market's terms. Okay, so you might decide this job is for money and I coach the AYSO soccer league 12 year old girls because I want to teach them teamwork in the game and I want to teach them how to persevere when they lose. So it's okay. Most jobs are not set up around meaning. You're going to have to design meaning into the job. And it's a pretty modern idea. I mean, my grandparents, my mom said came from Germany. In 1933, my grandfather said, this isn't going so well. And he got the family out of Germany, brought him to California.

33 is when Hitler was elected. Sixth grade education took any job he could take. His meaning came from, I got to put a roof over their head. I got to get the kids to a good school. And he worked his buns off and crappy jobs. So often when I hear stories about people like your grandfather, people are like, yeah, but they had meaning in their time away from their job. But you're saying, no, he actually had meaning in what the job meant to his life.

He reframed the crappy job to. I'm putting a roof over the head. The kids are going to school. That generation went to San Jose State. I was able to go to Stanford. Awesome. That's a big jump from there. And then my daughter just finished her PhD in Cancer Immunology, UCSF.

So in three generations, the American Dream, immigrant family, works really hard, next generation, next generation, and on. So he was seeing that in a way that, you know, he's an educated man, but he realized he came here to change the game. and then he worked really, really hard to make sure that the family, you know, had what it needed. And, you know, he was a religious man. They had the church. That was a community. There was actually quite a few German expats in the Bay Area.

So he was part of all of that. He was a crusty old guy, but he played the zither, this beautiful German sort of auto harp without the auto part. Yeah. He was more than just that guy. He didn't define himself by the crappy jobs. But, yeah, you can take any job and frame it. And we're not saying stay in a crappy job if you can.

can get out if you, we're certainly not staying in an organization that's abusive or toxic or anything else. But most people's jobs are just not to their liking. And you're saying, so you're both kind of agreeing. You need to find meaning at work. We always agree. You need to find some meaning at work. And that can be from I'm doing this thing that I love that I'm so, so passionate about, or it can be how does this thing contribute to my greater sense of self, my greater life goals. Right. Yeah. You may find yourself in a situation where you can't make a lot of changes, one thing you can do is find a different story. So his grandfather is telling himself a different story. He's not saying, boy, do I love, you know, shoveling horse shit or whatever it is he has to do. Actually, he was working in

the sewage factory shoveling shit. There you go. So literally, you know, it's not that I love that, but somebody's got to take care of it. It's better than it piles up. But he, I'm about creating, you know, a legacy for future generations who will be living in a free society. And that's a story that ennobles what he's doing. So Victor Frank. in his mansurts for meaning, identified three sources of meaning making. Love, achievement, and suffering. You know, great love can a noble life. Accomplishing things can ennoble life.

It's back to the impact thing, but it's only one thing. And then he added suffering. So Freud had said, Lieben and Arbiden, love and work. So those two things can make a life worthwhile. And Frankel added suffering. Because what he observed in the concentration camps, the Nazi concentration camps, where he was a prisoner. And just for people's background, he was a psychologist,

and then he was taken prisoner during the Holocaust, and he lived in these conversations. Yeah, he was a mentee of Jung, and he was on his way to, in the burgeoning new field called psychology that was being invented by Freud, and he gets captured, and he's in the camps, and he's watching people very carefully.

You know, he's really interested in how people live, and he notices that the prisoners who recognize they still had some freedom and exercised it. Some choice. Did well, and the people, people who didn't did poorly. And the only freedom left to a Nazi concentration camp prisoner was their freedom to choose how to react to their captors. And I can either become animalistic

and hate them the way they hate me, or I can rise above that and keep recognizing that I'm a human person. And so the point being, no one has no choice. Everyone at least has the choice about how to handle their reaction to their circumstance. And for most of most of you've got a lot more than that. But you will run into the edge of your constraint. And that constraint, which you cannot go past, you could describe as what you are suffering. And so how you choose to live within that constraint or simply complain about that constraint. So am I going to complain about that constraint, which empowers it and makes me a victim? Or am I going to say, there's such a thing as finitude, and it's happening to me too. It happens to all of us.

And then within that, what choices do I have? How do we know if we should be trying to view our current job in a more meaningful way or if we should be jumping ship to a job that inherently has more meaning? Prototype and iterate. Was it Apple for seven years? And in the last year, I actually came to a point where I decided, you know, I don't want to design computers anymore. I done 11. I talked to people in Apple.

I said, can we design something other than a computer? This is before phones. Can we design, you know, refrigerators or toilets? They're like, no, we just do computers. I said, okay. And so I took the year of quitting well. So I thought, all right, well, I think I'm done with this. I was actually driving. I had a moment as I was rounding on the curve. And I realized, oh, I think I'm done. I think I'm done here. And then I was like, okay, well, if I'm done here, what's next? And it took a year to do two things, to prototype a bunch of different opportunities. I looked around Apple and couldn't find anything interesting. And I started talking to lots of people. And then I realized, well, if I'm going to leave, then all the folks are working for me who are really great. They all need to get promoted before I go. because the social capital I have to make sure they get promoted is 100% now. And as soon as I leave, they're just on their own. So I got three of my leads all promoted to senior positions.

And they were like, what are you going to do? I said, don't worry, I got a plan. I literally went and spent some time in three different companies and talked to them about what the role might be. And then when I left, I had two different offers lined up. And so it was like, okay, I prototyped my way into the next thing. Prototype, prototype, prototype, try little bites of the, it's, we call it sneaking up on your future. I was finding ways to experience what would it be like if I did this consulting

thing? What would be like if I did this e-book thing? What would be like if I went to Microsoft and worked there? And the prototype isn't take those five jobs six months at a time. The prototype is go have those conversations with people living the other lifestyle you're thinking about and see whether or not that resonates. What's the culture like at Microsoft? Yeah, it's exactly what I thought it was. Like, this is not my place. What's the culture like in the startup? This is going to be really cool. And then talk to some BCs and stuff, do you think this is a category that's going anywhere. So it's a way of getting information about the future, sneaking up on it, before you have to go all in. And it works every time. I want to quickly touch on the five mindsets.

So I'd love just maybe one sentence of why something's important. One of these mindsets is important, then one way to cultivate that mindset. So we already kind of did wonder, but just to reiterate, it's you said in the book, curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. Five mindsets are wonder, availability, radical acceptance, fully engaged and calmly detached, and lastly, create your world. So there's the five different mindsets. And so wonder, wonder is this experience of something bigger than myself. So the reality includes more than meets the eye. And I want to give myself the chance to experience being in wonder because it's a very alive-making experience. And the equation we came up with there is curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. So you bump into something

mysterious, which could be, I mean, could be quarks, but could also be like, wow, poppies are really orange. They're amazingly orange, you know, and then rather than try to fix that by making it a problem, like, how do they do that? So like, just allow yourself to be curious. Like, that's so amazing and let your curiosity lean into the mystery, and that evokes wonder and just enjoy it. And all five of these are going to help us make more meaning, add more meaning to our lives. Yeah. And when we start thinking this way, we call it the designer's way, we just see the world differently. We talked about availability a lot. So availability is just the notion of being, you know, open to the possibility. Radical acceptance we talked about. And nobody does radical

acceptance better than Dave. And then particularly the year he and Claudia spent essentially dying together. The fully engaged would calmly detached, fully engaged is that same thing of like, when I'm doing something, I want to be fully engaged in that outcome. But I don't want the anxiety of having to control whether or not it comes out right. Which you can't control. Yeah, you know, You can do everything right. I can do all the things I wanted to do for have impact, but it turns out in the world it didn't work. Can I ask a follow-up question to this one?

Sure. You write in the book that quality of decision does not equal quality of outcome. Yes. This feels crazy. And Ron Howard, who invented decision-making at Stanford, I took his class, and he said the quality of the decision does not equal the quality of the outcome. So classic is like, hey, Dave, when we're done with this thing, I heard it's going to be really sunny.

Let's go to Ocean Beach, and we'll have a lunch there, and we get to Ocean Beach, and it's raining. Well, did we make a bad decision? We looked at our app and said things, and we looked at the, even the beach cam, and it was nice and clear. When we get there, something changed was out of our control. So don't hold yourself responsible for information you could only get in the future, right? You're responsible for making good decision, be fully engaged, do everything you can to create the

experience that you want, but don't have the anxiety of looming over you of what if it doesn't turn out right is the thing. And is there a certain point where we should like cabash our job? trying to make the perfect decision with this information? It's just re-understanding the nature of reality and how it works. I mean, design is a reality-based program. When you think about it, the quality of your decision, what causal effect correlation doesn't have to the outcome.

So I carefully look at ACUweather, and that's going to make the marine layer stay a half mile offshore. There's no correlation whatsoever between the marine layers' behavior and the thoughtfulness of my weather checking. Now, in 10 parallel universes, if I'm careless, I'm going to have more foggy days. If I check the weather mark often, I am more likely to have a successful outcome. So no, don't stop trying, but stop fooling yourself that you're trying will create reality. Right. Okay. Create your world is the last one. Goods your world is the idea of, you know, control your story. What is the story you tell yourself? And in that story, what's the connection between family, friends, relationships, and all

the things that make a life worth living. If you look at that, you've got the Good Life book here from Robert Waldinger. It's a summary of the Harvard study of adult development. And they conclude that what predicts longevity, what predicts happiness, what predicts you saying, I had a good life, are relationships, particularly relationships over 50. And so folks, on creating the world that is full of these relationships and formative communities, that will generate long-term meaningful behaviors and experiences. Don't accept the default world that's just coming at you. Design the world you want to live in.

Life is a story we tell ourselves, which is actually true, neurophysiologically. So pick your story carefully. It has to be a reality-based story, but it can be the most generative reality-based story available. Yeah. Can you leave us with just one homework assignment, something anybody can do the second they turn off this podcast to instantly start to live a more meaningful life? Change your vowel. Change your vowel. Go ahead.

You go from got to to get to. You want to flip from the transactional world to the flow world. You take your to do list. Oh, you know, I've got to do my quarterly estimated payment on my taxes. I got to pick up more peanut butter because I'm making all the cookies for the Lodley team. Got to get that done. and you go from got to to get to. I get to talk to my tax account because I have enough money that I owe taxes.

And my taxes will actually create streets and police so I get to live in a safe society. So I get to pay my taxes. I get to be the person who will make 12 children happy today. And I'll have to do is pick up a couple of jars of peanut butter and put it in the oven. So you take your O and you make it an E and you completely transform your life in a couple of Yeah. The other one would be put on your wonderglasses. You out in the world and you, you know, you can walk in your backyard, you can walk around the neighborhood and you can walk around and just notice everything. It's kind of transactional, notice everything. Oh, that house is painted white. That is green. Or you can walk through the neighborhood with curiosity. Gee, I wonder why the neighbors, you know, decided to rip up the front yard and put in this eco-friendly, you know, sustainable front yard. Or you can just walk through around the world with your wonder glasses on and notice the things. You know, you know, things that are all around you that really are unexplainably, mysteriously beautiful, interesting, wonderful, even maybe ugly or horrible.

But when you have your wonderglasses on, you're seeing in the flow world all the time. How do you prime yourself to be like, okay, my wonderglasses are on? If you tend towards more cynical where you're like, the world isn't what I want it to be. Well, in class, I actually hand out these little rave glasses. You know, they have these glasses that you wear raves that make everything look sparkly. just because it disrupts the students' attention. I don't think you have to have a pair of rave glasses in your pocket. But I do think you're right.

Some kind of a ritual of getting into that mindset would be a great idea. And whether you do that with glasses or you do with a little flip-up lens or something in the wonderglass's exercise. Because it's 10 or 15 minutes. It's just walking around the world. And you can do it in. You can do it walking around. You can do it in the garden. You can do it in the front room.

if you're sufficiently good at managing that mindset. Dave and Bill, this was absolutely wonderful. I love how actionable you make your books, by the way. Like you have the tools. You're like, we are sharing practical ways you can change your life, which is what we're all about on this podcast. But can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your wonderful book? So How to Live a Meaningful Life came out of lots of people telling us their life

wasn't as meaningful as they thought. And they seemed stuck on just impacts, got to make it better. And we realized that they're in the transactional world. The flow world is all around them, and then they're missing it. So rather than having one form of meaning, we are offering five. So impact and wonder, which you just talked about, coherence, where I'm living authentically into myself, flow being more deeply engaged.

We think the flow channel is much wider than Mihail, checks in how I told you what was, so that we make flow a lot more accessible. And formative community, being in a relationship, not just to have a good time, but to actually become a richer person together. So we have these ideas we want to put out there because everybody, deserves more meaning in their life right now. Don't wait to figure out the meaning of your life. Start designing more meaning in your life. And, you know, reframe impact. Impact is great, but it's in the transactional world. Go to the flow world for meaning. Having the completely

fulfilled life, the self-actualized life, probably not possible, but you can live in a more fulfilling way, more fully alive. Celebrate the scandal of particularity. You're going to find the ultimate in these moments of beauty, truth, love, whatever. whatever, but it's in the moment that you find it. And then the fact that there are these two worlds that you can be in the, you know, like the transactional world's here all the time, but right under it, this aquifer of flow is running and bubbling right below the surface. All you've got to do is drill down and find it. What's one tiny way we drill down to find the flow world? We have to go and flip the switch. So it's about your consciousness. You've got the awakened

brain. You've got the achieving brain. You've got the achieving brain. Your achieving brain is running the store 99% of the time. Give your awakened brain. that's paying attention to the present moments is all about the present moment, which is why the chief task of a meaning designer is moment making. You're sitting at the red light, you know, you've got another 27 seconds to go and say to yourself, flip. So stop transacting, managing the traffic and quickly look around that something might be like, oh, I forgot. I love that song that's currently playing on the playlist. Rather than kind of like, oh, nice song. It's going to actually enjoy it for maybe the next refrain, let that song course all the way through you.

Then the light changes, flip, go back to not hitting the guy next to you. So you literally give yourself the chance to catch yourself in the act of being present. I love it. You guys are wonderful. You're really like living what you're preaching. And it's just been such a joy to talk to you both. So thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having us, Louie.

Yeah, thanks for inviting us. Unfortunately, that is all for this episode of the Liz Moody podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, I would so appreciate if you would share it with somebody that you think would love it too. It is my goal to get as much life-changing information out to as many people as possible. And you sharing episodes with people is 100% the thing that makes that happen. I would also love to hear from you in the comments, any thoughts or questions or opinions that you have on this episode. And remember, you can get our free 21-day plan for nutrition, movement, and mental health at lizmoody.com

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