The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Why “Follow Your Passion” Is Bad Advice — with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans argue that finding your one true purpose is the wrong goal.  Recorded live at Odoo Experience in San Francisco, they join Scott Galloway to discuss why “follow your passion” is often bad advice, whether your job needs to provide both money and meaning, and how small experiments can help you move forward when you feel stuck. Scott also opens up about sending his son to college—and what happens when the role that gave your life purpose begins to change. Their latest book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, is out now.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Episode 414 was the Air Coat serving Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2012, Tender launched. My wife, I found out, is actually on Tinder, so I swiped left on that cheating. I wish Tinder would adopt the Netflix feature that says skip intro. What's happening? Today's episode was recorded live at the O-Doo Experience in San Francisco. with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, the co-founders of Stanford's Life Design Lab and authors of how to live a meaningful life. And I actually find some value in what they have to say as cynical as I am. And I mostly use it for therapy. I'm a fucking hot mess. Let's bring this back to me. I dropped my son at

college a couple weeks ago. And I kept it together. I kept it together. Why? Because I'm self-aware enough to know that my 18-year-old doesn't need to be worried about his father's emotional trauma. from the cats in the cradle and the fact that I, on this podcast, talk about what an amazing father I am and then review the last 18 years and think, okay, I was good, but maybe not great. And now it's too fucking late. Now the credits are rolling. Anyways, it's been a rough couple weeks.

And in some, your world gets smaller so theirs can get bigger. I have found myself very, very into my youngest, though. I still have him. I still have, he's trapped. He's still at home for another three. years and I've been taking a ton of photos of him. I think he realizes I'm freaking out. Anyways, that is where I have found purpose the last 18 years, was trying to prepare boys for others, and I worry that I've lost that purpose, and this conversation attempts to address that.

And we explore kind of that feeling of emptiness, if you will, and we had some very, I thought, open and honest questions from the audience. So with that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Welcome back, everyone. I hope you are all ready for this next speaker. Now, he wears a lot of hats. He's a professor of marketing at NYU Stern, an entrepreneur with nine companies founded,

he's a best-selling author several times over, co-host of Pivot, host of the Prof G-Pod, and the voice behind a growing family of shows that millions listen to every week. Now, what sets him apart is his range. He talks about big tech and the economy, but also about politics, about education, and about young people trying to find their way and about what a good life really looks like. He says what he thinks, he backs it with data, and he's never boring.

For a lot of his listeners, he has become one of the essential voices in America. He will be recording his podcast right here, joined by his guest Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Please, everyone, give a warm welcome and a round of applause for Professor Scott Galloway. It's great to be here. I should have a mic. How are we doing so far?

All right, quick show of hands. Dad joke or dick joke? Who wants a dad joke? Who wants a dad joke? Who wants a dick joke? This is my kind of crowd. Okay, but you asked for it. But I'm at that point where my kids need, you know, the sex talk.

So I walked into my son's bedroom with a banana and a condom. And he said, what's the banana for? And I said, well, I can't get hard on an empty stomach. You asked for it. I was just in the urinal. Just in the urinal. And the guy next to me looks over and looks down and goes circumcised. And I'm like, no, that's just the wear and tear.

All right, dad joke. The politically correct guy over there is like, Jesus Christ. Dad joke. So I invented a new word. Plagiarism. Think about it. It's actually pretty funny. Maybe not.

I only know 25 words in the alphabet. I don't know why. All right, back to dick jokes. Anyways. Super excited to be here. we have two fantastic professors. How many of you like me were rejected from Stanford? So true story, rejected from Indiana.

I was rejected from UT Kellogg, Penn. Basically rejected eight to nine schools, and then UCLA let me off the waiting list. But it's really exciting to have these two guys. And I really like these guys because they're older than me and much more handsome, which gives me hope. These guys are definitely like juicing or something. You'll see when they come out. A lot of saunas and testosterone and NAD going on here.

All right. Let's bring them out. Today, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford educators and best-selling authors of Design Your Life and most recently, How to Live a Meaningful Life. Gentlemen, come on stage. Okay, so guys, do you want to just do a quick intro? I didn't do it justice. Tell us a little bit about your class and your book. and what you guys do. That was the first intro with testosterone in it since we've been doing this, by the way. Just wanted to say, thank you for that. Go ahead.

Start. Go ahead, guys. You start. So it turns out, how many do you think your life matters to you? Your life's like a big deal for you? The rest of you talk to me later. Okay. So that turns out to be a broad consideration.

Most people think their life matters to them. How many have you got really good help figuring out what to do with it? That's the issue. Okay. So we noticed that. And so we decided to teach a class and it worked in, people liked and we sold two million books and then you called us. We came.

How many books have you guys co-authored together? We authored three. Three, got it. I'm Bill Burnett. And I'm still teaching full-time at Stanford. Dave's a little bit more part-time with me. But it was the same question. You know, I've been in office hours for a long time with a lot of students.

And, you know, Stanford kids are smart, but they don't really know anything. Yeah. They don't know anything about life. They don't know how to launch. They live in this little bubble where we give them dorms and food. all sorts of fun stuff to do. So we got together in 2007 and created this class. And it's been a lot of fun because it replies this idea of design, and we'll get into this idea of design thinking. And I've been in an industry for, Dave and I've both been in an industry for a lot of our career. I was at Apple for

seven years designing. If you had a power book back in the 90s, my team probably designed it. So I've been designed a lot of stuff using these same ideas. And then we thought, well, what about people. We could design people this way, right? They're an unknown thing in the future and you can't get any data so you have to figure out how to design it. Got it. And so, Sarah, we got to pay for this right now. For those listening, we're at the Odu experience here in lovely San Francisco. Odu is an all-in-one platform for running a business from sales to accounting to inventory, marketing, and operations. The idea is simple. You run one business, so you should run one system. Okay, so we're going to jump right into it. I'm going to ask him a bunch of

of questions, and then we're going to save a bunch of time for what I think is the most interesting part of these types of sessions, and that is Q&A, where I hope you literally ask anything totally unfiltered. And we are all going to agree that this is a safe space, and if someone says something indelicate or in artful, we're just going to do what we should do more of, and that is forgive each other and move on. Two, I have a bunch of notes about happiness and purpose, but I'm going to just start with, when I look at this crowd, I think of a bunch of young professionals who are probably in the tech scene and in a capitalist society thinking a lot about economic security,

which I think despite what people tell you is pretty central, at least at a certain level, to establishing some level of happiness and purpose. Anyways, I'll stick by that. But at the same time, when you're, you're in this city and you're in tech and you're trying to establish a life, a partnership, I think sometimes in your, kind of in your 30s, you start beginning thinking, well, okay, maybe I have some professional trajectory, but maybe I don't feel as if I have a real center

of purpose or meaning. Do you have a series of questions to go through around whether or not someone is tracking or not tracking around finding purpose and meaning in their life? And I'll begin with you. Yeah, we do. Actually, it's an exercise we call the compass. So it's got three pieces first. Like, what's the story you grew up with? You know, I grew up with work hard, you know, go to a good school, make some money,

you'll be fine. Actually, I worked. And my dad said, and you're going to have to make all the money, you know, because that's what men do. Right. And I decided I would find a woman who made more money than me, which I did, and my wonderful wife. So that part was wrong.

But, you know, so what's your story? And then what's your work view? What's your theory of work? Why do we work? And then the final one is what's your life view, kind of 250 to 500 words, what's the meaning of life? Put those three things together, make them coherent. And now you've got what we call a compass because you don't necessarily have to know where you're going. You just have to know you're going in the right direction.

And that gives you your center, the thing you were talking about. Like, now I know who I am and what I'm looking for. Right. Any thoughts to? Well, just the research makes very clear if you want your life to be meaningful to you, and most people do, if you can align and interconnect who am I what I believe in what I'm doing. Right. If you can connect those three dots, your chance of meaning making goes way up.

If you can't connect those dots, your chances of meaning making goes way down. You can't connect a dot you're not articulated. So the purpose of our compass exercise is to articulate what those dots are. Now what you'll notice is it doesn't answer the question, what should you believe in and what should you be doing? We don't should on you. We don't recommend you should on yourself. It's not helpful. And so there's some exploration.

You have to answer these questions. They're not easy questions to answer. But once you write down the answers that you currently have, you can start moving toward that. And we believe a human being is a becoming. You're never done. You're always growing. And if you're doing that over time, you keep moving toward the best version of what you think is true of yourself. It's going to get clearer.

And how do you separate happiness and quote unquote larger purpose and meaning? We'll start with you, Dan. Well, we don't talk about happiness much, frankly. In fact, the positive psychology movement started by Martin Seligman and Mihai Chiximbiha about 20 years ago, the first book was called Authentic Happiness, and there was a happiness equation. And the book as large have been debunked as not particularly true. So they moved from happiness to flourishing or thriving, and that's probably a better thing. We talk mostly about joy and aliveness, actually.

So I think if you're living in such a way that's bringing generativity to you, it's causing you to grow, it's causing you to think what you're doing is worthwhile, and it's particularly enabling you to experience more aliveness. You feel more like yourself and more here. That's a joy-producing thing. Those are good indicators to look for. So that's the criteria we like. And talk to me a little bit, Bill, about dysfunctional beliefs. Well, we see these all the time.

It's a belief that just holds you back. It's either not true or it's just preventing you from moving forward. So one of the things we hear our students say all the time is, oh, I've got to pick the right major. Don't pick the right major. I'm not going to have a good life. Yeah. Completely baloney.

Ten years out of school, the data is. No less than 20% of you will have anything, will be doing something that has anything to do with your major. Major is the way you organize. College is not the way you organize your life, right? Or I hear this in, you know, from 30-something. So it's too late. It's too late for me.

I'm an accountant, I hate it, I'm a lawyer, I hate it, it's too late. It's never too late because it's a sunk cost, right? Economist is a sunk cost to start from where you are and design your way forward. So, you know, oh, and the other one, and I think you and I agree on this, is follow your passion, which is probably the worst advice you can give somebody. So we're, you know, we teach at Stanford, so we can't kind of make shit up. We have to have it based on research. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there's a guy at Stanford, Bill Damon, who runs this. I think he's a meritist now, but he ran the center for the study of adolescence. Yeah. And he researched this. He wrote a book called Path to Purpose. Less than 20% of people have a singular identifiable passion. Eight out of ten people go, I don't know what you're talking about, or I got lots of things, you know, where do you want to start? And by the way, in that 20%, most of that stuff is for the arts.

I want to be a singer. I want to be a dancer. I want to be a writer. And what do we tell those kids? Oh, you can't do that. That's not a real job. So anyway, following your passion is a bad starting point because it leaves eight out of ten people going, I don't know what's wrong with me. And go to the back of the line, come when you have a passion, come on up, and we'll talk to you.

So we're not into passion. That's a big dysfunctional belief. So how do you discern between, I would imagine there's a lot of people in the audience that think, well, I don't know, I'm not loving this. I go to work, it's okay, it pays the bills. I'm kind of doing what I think I should be doing, but I don't feel really fulfilled. And when young people come to me and say that, I have trouble discerning between, well, that's called work.

And if you think you're going to just find a lot of emotional and psychological reward in your work, I think that's a nice aspiration. But typically what I found, you have to, I don't want to say not hate your job, but it's a grind. If you expect to achieve a certain level of economic or relevance, there's just a certain level of grind required.

At the same time, you don't want to end up at the end of your life thinking, God, I really screwed up. I just did something I didn't love because I felt societal pressure or economic pressure. Is there a means of discerning the difference between work and when you should pull the rip cord and do something? different? Yes. Well, there are a couple of things we talk about around this stuff. First of all, there's money-making and meaning-making. Right. Right? So we talk about that a lot. And the modern presupposition for most educated people, certainly in the West, I mean, as in West of Athens,

is that I should be able to make money at what makes meaning. In fact, I really should make make a better place, and I want to make the world a better place, and I want to be fulfilled, and I want to a killing and that should all work easily and the universe should be organized around that. The universe is not organized around that premise. The universe, the world is doing what it's doing, period. The overwhelming majority of human history, meaning making and money making were two different things. You know, I mean, you did the poetry thing on the side or you did the art thing on the side

and meaning making and money making don't have to be the same. We call that there's the vocational lifestyle where my life is in my work. and I get to do one thing for all of it. That's really rare. It's a very modern idea. If it happens to work for you, if you happen to be conveniently configured. So one student walks up to Officer,

I sits down and says, so what's going on with you? Well, I'm in computer science. I'm really good at AI. I'm particularly fascinated how AI can affect the retail world and enterprise software. So, you know, I'm kind of thinking,

what might I do with that? I went, oh, that's really convenient to be you right now. Next student, Allison, says, what do you do? I'm into, I'm really, I'm really into documentary film, preferably about nature. Actually, newts.

I'm into doing documentary film about nudes. Oh, terribly inconvenient to be you right now. You don't get to pick the you. You don't get to pick the universe. You don't pick your time. So you just have to navigate the gap between how you're working and how the world is working and make it work as best you can.

Last thing I'll say is there are three ways to think about work, jobs, careers, and callings. You do jobs for money, careers for professional development, in callings for missional fulfillment in values or realization. Most people stack those vertically. A job is down here. A career is better. A calling is even better.

We hold those horizontally. They're just different. They're not better or worse. I know a heart surgeon who has a job. He does it for the money. He went to med school to make his parents happy, happened to finish really well, doesn't really like that much,

happens to be really good at it. He does it for the money. He doesn't tell his patients because it would make them nervous. He is saving lives. But he actually will say, I'm a better surgeon because I don't give a shit. I'm just doing the work. You get your ego wrapped up in this thing. You get all connected to the patient.

You get in trouble. I'm the best surgeon I know because I don't give a shit. It's an interesting thing to hear from somebody. So think about this stuff and decide how you want to play it. Any... Well, you know, it is a very modern idea. You know, we're all children of immigrants. my grandparents came over from Germany on my mom's side.

In 1933, my grandfather got the family out of Germany in 33 because 33 was when Hitler was elected. It was a good idea to get out. Yeah, I didn't think that was going to go well. It was his Trump moment. And he got the family in California somehow. Ooh. And that's pandering to the crowd. I know, I know.

It's a San Francisco. What a risky thing to say in San Francisco. It's a San Francisco crowd. Right, right. So, but, so, and he took any job. I mean, he took any job. Put a roof over the head feed the kids. get him to school.

And that was his job. He had meaning from his church, from his community. He got meaning from other things that you didn't expect to get a lot. He had, you know, his sixth grade education. He had terrible, crappy jobs for most of his life. But he had a meaningful life because the mission was get the kids. So my mom and uncle went off to the community college and got, you know, got educated that he didn't have. My parents were able to send me to Stanford.

my daughter just finished her PhD in cancer immunology at UCSF here from Pernassas. And she's going to change the world and save cancer and cure cancer. So she's wonderful. But I mean, it's a all of these things, all these jobs and money and meaning thing. It gets so confused. And particularly in this generation, people want it all in one place. It doesn't have to be that one place. In fact, you might not want to get your money.

It might get your meaning on the market. its terms. You inspire a couple questions. So I really appreciate your story about your grandparents leaving Germany in 1933. My mom in 1939 was a four-year-old Jew living in London, and I would say the R.A.F. in Roosevelt, by the reason I'm here, so much of what happens to us is just out of your control. Yeah. It's not your fault. I would say the smartest thing I've ever did was being born a white heterosexual male in California in the 60s. That was literally the smartest thing I could done. And unfair disproportionate advantage. America, 30% of the world's GDP growth, 1945 to 2000, and two-thirds of that was crammed into the one-third of the population that looked smelt and felt like me.

And so much, and this goes to what I often tell young people is that so much of your success and your failure is not your fault. And to be humble when you do well, I think the tech community is very good at crediting their grit and character for their success and then blaming the markets for their failure. And what I find is that people don't nearly give enough credit to things that are out of their control. And the overwhelming majority of human experience happens to you. That's right. That's right. So when you're talking to people who feel like they have a lack of meaning and purpose,

and, you know, under the auspices of forgive yourself and be responsible for the things you can control and can control, when someone is struggling, are there certain means of trying to inspire an upward spiral or exercise for saying, right, before we even get to the purpose and meaning and the promise land, if you really feel lost right now, are there a set of like go-toes or hacks to begin to build back? Well, I'll talk about prototyping you want to talk about meaning. Yeah, go ahead. So our whole, you know, in class, in the books, everything else, the philosophy, set the bar low, clear it, do it again, do it again, do it again.

You know, James clears atomic habits. Yeah, yeah. Start small, make small changes. what we talk about designers have two mindsets that are important. Curiosity. Even if you're really at the lowest of low, there's something you're curious about, right? And then prototyping. Prototyping is just run a little experiment.

Talk to somebody who's interesting, who's doing the thing that you're interested in, or have a little experience of doing something that you're curious about. And these small prototypes build a sense of momentum and increases your curiosity, because if you're a curious person, there's a lot of stuff in the world going on. right now that's really interesting. And so if you start small, build little prototype experiments

and just keep moving forward, you'll eventually find some track that fits and feels good. And that's how you get out of, you know, the sort of existential, I don't even know where to start. Question. Yeah. There is no figuring it out. There's only getting on with it. Mm-hmm. So I got married four weeks ago. and right there the darling woman in the third row who for some reason is willing to put it your wife comes to see you speak

yeah I am so sorry well she's still under warranty you know I mean you got married four weeks ago well you had married four weeks ago oh congratulations that's nice yeah and she ran an art gallery here in San Francisco

for 40 years the Frankel Gallery but 20 years ago decided I think there's something else I'm supposed to do too, had no idea what it was. So she's stuck. But you just, you just lean into what you know. Quit worrying about what you don't know and lean into what you do know. Okay, so maybe it's this. Maybe she's reading. She's thinking, oh, maybe it's palliative care. I read an article, palliative care. What's that? I think it might have something to do with that. Looks into that. Maybe it could become an interfaith chaplain. No, it doesn't work. I can't go to

middle school. I'm 60, you know, 45 years old, have a kid, whatever it is. And then, you know, 10 years after that, she's sitting in the sun in Tucson, Arizona, and it hits her, you could help people write letters. She literally gets a calling. And she goes, yes, I could do that. What the hell is that mean? I don't know what that means. So she's now a letter midwife, and she assists people writing the essential letters of their lives. She's done that 800 times.

She's got a book coming out in October all about it called Unfinished Business. And so if you just keep leaning into it, after about 20 years or so, it starts getting clear. It's called being a human being. So if you're stuck, just identify what you are drawn toward and make a move. Even if it's a conversation or a start or reading an article or whatever it might be, you're making progress. Don't measure, have I fixed it yet, have I solved it yet, am I making a move? This is the classic design thinking thing. David Kelly, who runs the D-School and IDO and it's kind of the king of all this stuff,

He would say, we build our way forward. Just go build something. Build a little prototype. Write a couple letters. Say it was somebody, you know, who's about to lose someone they love and, you know, a letter midwife. That's a great description. Build something and see what happens.

Because as soon as you build a prototype, the world that is possible just changed. I've seen this a million times. I was at Apple for seven years. We'd build a prototype, something. We'd put it in a room. You know, we'd stand behind the window and the glass. Somebody would start playing with it and they'd realize, oh, man, if you could do this, I could do this or this and this.

And you're like, as soon as you have a prototype, you change the world as possible. So build something, anything, and you'll get unstuck. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Delta Airlines. Every athlete at the top of her game knows that greatness isn't just a destination. It's a grueling, lifelong journey. It's built on early mornings, silent sacrifices, and an unwavering drive to outclimed the achievements of yesterday. That is the journey of a WNBA athlete, and Delta is there every step of the way.

Delta is proud to host these competitors, providing charter flights for every WNBA team, to elevate their travel experience and champion equity on every leg of their trip. Keep climbing with Delta Airlines, the official airline of the WNBA. So the question I would have is sequential versus concurrent, and that is when I got out of the high school of business in the 90s, I didn't want to save the whales, I didn't want to be a good person, I wanted to get mad rich, and because that's where I grew up with no money, and it was just very, very important to me. And I did nothing but work. I had no purpose. I had no meaning. It cost me my hair cost me my first marriage and it was absolutely worth it.

And now I have the economic security to try and think about, all right, can I find something, can I have some influence that might be positive somewhere down the road? And I would argue one of the things I don't like about the tech community is they pretend to give a shit about the world while depressing teens so they can sell more advertising and make a shit ton of money. And I'm like, just come out of the closet and say you're about making money in economic security right now, and then hopefully you'll go on to do something with your money. And that's what I've done.

And I guess my question is, is it okay to think about purpose or meaning sequentially as opposed to concurrently? Well, sure. And first of all, you weren't without purpose when you were just a rapacious capitalist. You know, you had a goal. Yeah. And you met it. And you sacrificed for it. You may have changed your mind about it later, and it makes for a good one-liner.

But the truth is, you'd probably do it again. Yeah. And look, we make decisions. You optimize one thing versus another. And this is why we had to write a third book, by the way. So after the pandemic and then the great resignation, 52 million people walk off the job looking for something better. Yeah.

We'd all either had or sat next to somebody who went through an executive. existential crisis. And so if the question gets raised, wow, is this good enough? Is this it? And Holbin's people said, no. How many of you quit in the last five years at least once? Okay, 20% of the room, right? Not because it was going great. And so when we started hearing back from people, that didn't work. We heard two things, I'm just not fulfilled. Yeah. Or I'm not having the impact I want to. Yeah. We overwhelmingly heard that mostly impact.

It's about 80 to 20 impact of fulfillment. And we looked into that. And both of those are dead ends if that's the only form of meaning making you're looking for. Yeah. So they're a good thing. We're trying to have an impact right now, right? We wrote a book because we hope it will impact people's lives. But if impact, which is a thing and you're not a thing.

Yeah. And even if it works, the glow is short alive. And most of the time it doesn't work. So that's a dead end. That's a treadmill. And fulfillment, which is what Mazel. told you you wanted to be, become self-actualized, become all that you can be. And we know you can't be all you can be because all of us are bigger than a lifetime's worth of a person.

There's more than one of you in there. So you can't manifest your whole self. That's impossible. And that's the good news. So other forms of meaning making, which are occur in a place we call the flow world, the transactional world where we get stuff done is one thing, the flow world, which is what's actually happening right now. So right now, am I thinking about, gee, I wonder if this is going to move the needle on sales this week? And, you know, is Scott going to get this thing out digitally fast enough? Or I wonder what's on these people's minds? And are we actually being helpful? Am I here or am I somewhere else? And in this place called here, regardless of whether or not your life is working, regardless of whether or not this is the perfect career, right here, right now,

your chance of being more alive is extremely how you can get more out of the life you're already in while you're still trying to design a better life down the road. And there are four places we can do that, which are wonder, flow, coherence, and formative community. But, you know, that's four chapters. And so, but there are things, there are hacks, if you will. We have 21 tools in this book describing ways to get your hands on more meaning right now. You don't have to spend, you know, the next nine years developing a mindfulness practice.

That's cool if you want to do it. You don't have to go, you know, 40 days in the wilderness. You know, I'm starving. It's, meaning is made in moments. Moments are made in this here and now flow place. And we teach people to be moment designers. I want to talk about partnership. Okay.

And that is I have found that at capitalist society, you have to be economically viable, especially as a man. And if that offends people, I'm sorry, 75% of women say economic viability is central to a mate. It's only 25% of men. don't care. It's that joke that Chris Rock makes, that the Banzac could work at KFC and Mary JZ, the opposite is not true. And in San Francisco, hypergamy is still alive and well. Educational hypergamy has been reduced. There are now a lot of women who have greater levels of certification than the men than the partners they're with. But in San Francisco still, if you meet a couple,

the man is twice as likely to make more money than the woman, even despite the fact that in San Francisco, we now have, fortunately, this wonderful thing called Incomparity among men and women until women have kids in the corporate world takes them down again. Anyways, I have found, much to my surprise, that the money was the means, but the ends was meaningful relationships with an absence of economic anxiety. That that's the point, right? And that waking up and hopefully finding that you're in a really good partnership is, as I get older, I find 100% the most rewarding thing in life. And I feel as if I got, quite frankly, just really lucky. And my criteria for picking a partner was would I really like to have sex with this

person? That's it. That's where it started. That's where it ended up in a really good partnership. How can you be more thoughtful than I was? But that wouldn't be hard, actually. But how can we be more thoughtful around picking partners that result in, you know, long-term, meaningful, rewarding lives? Like, if you're advising your kids, is they're thinking about getting married or moving in with someone, are there a set of criteria questions people should be asking themselves that they're. don't do you know well it just occurred to me there's a there's an old saying that you know the best the best marriages are when each person thinks they got the best deal right certainly i got the best deal my wife cynthia is amazing i got the best deal i don't know why she puts up with me but i think

it's amazing and and i've asked her and she says no no no i actually i got the better of the deal because you're you know you're kind and you're nice and blah blah blah blah blah so um i think I think you're looking for a situation where you think you, not that you don't deserve it, but you think that you're going to get the best deal and that this person is irrationally attracted to you. If you got that and it goes both ways, see, there, there, they're holding hands there. That's good. Then I think that's what you're looking for. But you have a little more current.

Yeah. I mean, I've been married 38 years. so I forget why we got married. You pointed out them, so I can't help it. I'm looking at both of you. The dude got the better deal. Trust me on that. Sorry, go ahead.

That's true. They met in the lobby this morning. Anyway, the, well, first of all, there actually is, I mean, the truth is there are some pretty good answers to this. I mean, so the field of counseling and field of relational development has been around for a long time. And a strong opinion, but it happened to be right. The best work on that is by John and Julie Gottman, and the Gutman Institute out of Seattle. And they said, you know, we don't need to argue theoretical ideas

or psychological models about this. We just need to observe what works and what doesn't. So John and Julie put together the Love Lab and then videotaped people for years and evaluated relationships and identified behaviorally what are the masters and disasters of marriage and partnership relationship. And it's all been well documented.

And he's got a book called In Eight Dates. I mean, so what are the questions you need to ask? What are the things? It's a values alignment, you know, image of what your future looks like together. There are a couple of pretty rational things you can understand that will allow you to partner well. And if you miss those topics, you're probably going to partner poorly. So do the work, you know, read the Gottman stuff and apply it. Now, that's sort of the objective side.

Then there's the cosmic side. You know, in my own case, I've been married three times, you know, and well, well, once and fabulously twice. So it was married for 24 years, then divorced, then I married the love of my life in Los Angeles cancer, and have married the second love of my life a couple of weeks ago. And my first wife and I are still friends. I mean, we raised kids really well together, and we just did everything but husband and wife well, and we tried and tried to fix it, and the raw material just wasn't there, and we finally put the dog down kind of kindly. And so I got some thoughts on this, but in each case, the chemistry thing is,

is unmistakable. I was absolutely gobsmacked by Claudia, my second wife, and by Frisch. She came to office hours, and, I mean, it just knocked me out. She was a student of mine. She was only eight months, my junior, so it wasn't a Title IX violation. But I had to do a title nine filing. And I'm like, thank you for filing. You know, it's going to be okay. If you're 69 and she's 68, it's okay. If you're 69 and she's 25, you're fired. And you should be. But the chemistry thing matters. So my late wife and I had the line,

because we had a marriage people wanted, how did you guys get it? And the only line we came up with is be a healthy person who marries their partners with a healthy person. By healthy, like know who you are, know where your baggage is, and have people in your life

who can call you on your crap. You know, Bill calls me on my crap all the time. So be a healthy person who marries a healthy person for love. Love isn't enough, but if you don't have, it is pretty tough. So between the two of you, have 10 kids? I got three. He's got seven. Seven. So there you go. And 11 grand kids, yeah. So I want to talk a little bit. Well, actually,

I'll ask a question about purpose. I'll put forward a thesis. And that is, I never thought much about purpose. And what I have discovered is that purpose bubbles up from you wake up one day. I used to approach work and life in a capitalist transactional format. Am I getting more from this relationship with a girlfriend than maybe I'm giving? Am I paying this person less than their worth? That was my goal. I wanted to be on the right side of every transaction. And then as I got older, I realized that if you're constantly on the negative side of a transaction

and you still engage in it and still get some sort of a reward for it. I'll use an example. I am never going to get a positive ROI on my boys. I just don't think they're ever going to be up at 2 a.m. worried about me. I don't care how nice the home they stick me and ship me off to is. I'm going to spend way more money than them. And yet every day, I enjoy continuing to make this negative investment. That's my purpose.

Right. And that is, I think maybe someday you wake up and say, I keep donating time at this no-kill animal shelter. They could build a statue for me and it wouldn't be worth the time I have invested here. I think that's how you find. You wake up and say, well, maybe this is my purpose, is that you take the exact opposite approach I took and find I continue to make these ridiculous overinvestments in something. And it feels natural. it feels, it makes sense. Thoughts on negative ROI as a means of finding your purpose.

Not everything the counts can be measured. You love your boys? Of course. That's it. Yeah. There's no negative positive. You love your boys. You do anything for him.

100%. You're asking the return question, not the love question. Right. So. No, I mean, because you love your boys. I mean, so your purpose is walking that out. Yeah. You know, so one of the discernment questions, I'm the discernment lead in a social impact venture accelerator.

And a discernment question I ask people all the time is to, you know, walk in your life expectantly. Right. So be curious. Listen for longing. What do you mean by that? Listen for longing. Listen to your. own heart. What do you care about? What do you long for? What is it that makes you come alive?

What do you weep for? What, what, frankly, what brings you pain? Yeah. You know, that's what you lean into, you know. And that's, that's what we would argue. It means to be human being. Look, you know, we're friends with Bob Waldinger, the final project manager of the Harvard adult study of human behavior, Longest running study of humans ever done on the planet, three generations, 75 years. You know, the predecessor to Bob Waldinger, George Valiant, would say, happiness, it's love, full stop. Yeah, the grand study. Yeah, the grand study. Yeah, the, so, and I've done a podcast with these gentlemen before, and I used it as a chance to just get cheap therapy.

my purpose, my purpose has been to raise men for others. And what wasn't expecting applause from that. And I just dropped my oldest off at college. And quite frankly, I'm struggling because I'm like, what's my purpose? So let's go to the other end and you find, okay, my purpose has been trying to raise good humans. And quite frankly, I did my job. I'm obsolete. I've just figured out like, that's it. What do you do when you feel like you've lost a sense of purpose? Just got very quiet. Well, you know, I did. My wife and I came to that sort of existential moment a long time before they

went off to college. And we said, you know, there's going to be a whole bunch of times when we're not in the room and they have to make the right decision. Right. So what we've got to do is teach them how to make a good decision based on how they know themselves. Yeah. So you're not done yet. Your kids at college, you know what college is going to be all about.

Yeah. No one ever goes to their reunion, a 25th reunion, and says, man, I remember that chemistry final that I got a good grade on that was awesome. They don't say that thing. I remember that time when we all got drunk and fell off the roof, you know, and then we and then we blah, da-da-da-da-da. So that's what, hopefully, you know, your son is going to experience, and you've trained, you've taught him to make good decisions.

So you're not done yet, because now he's going to make a decision about college, then he's going to make a decision about grad school, then he's going to make a decision about who he marries, and you get a chance to watch, to walk alongside him with that. So you're not, you know, I always say like I'm no longer really a father, I'm just a consultant. And my kids are younger than Dave's, but they're all at work, and, you know, my 31, 33, and 35. All that work on there, all make good choices. They all picked great partners. And so my wife and I are like, yeah, high five, good job.

Dave, father, seven? Yeah, no, I'm going to with you on, I really, my father died of suicide when I was nine. I didn't have a father. I really wanted to be one. I actually didn't want to be anything other than a dad. I didn't want to be successful. I didn't want to be famous. Didn't want to be important.

I just wanted to be a good dad, you know. I forgot you should be a good husband first. So that's why I kind of got bad at that the first time around. And learn my way forward, but nonetheless. And I remember walking upstairs and passing, going down the hallway, the week after my eldest son went to college. And I passed by his room and the door was open. And four feet past his door, I burst in his tears. I had no idea why.

And I went back and looked in the room and it was neat. I had never seen it that way before. And I went, oh, there's something deep in me that even in my peripheral vision picks up, he's gone. Right. And I really miss that. So it's a big deal. That's a big deal. I mean, that was purposeful.

So Bill and I talk a lot about, you know, we're not in favor of you trying to find your purpose. Like there's an it. There is no it. There's just, you learn how to live purposefully. It should be an adjective or an adverb, not a noun. There's not a purpose. You didn't lose your purpose. You succeeded at it.

So first you have a party, and then you grieve the fact that I love that job, and now it's going away from me. And then you start looking for the next invitation. I think life is full of invitations. Are you paying attention? You have to learn to pay attention. You have to be present in the moment, a little bit reflective. Oh, hi, Scott, what do you do?

I'm a professor. You know, stop asking me what I do. I'm not a human doing. I'm a human being. You know, okay, fine. Well, rather than the B-Doo duality, we teach the B-Doo become tri-circle. So rather than the vicious duality, the virtuous circle, you start with who you are, I was a dad. Then you go do stuff.

You raise a kid. And then you become, oh, you become, you know, the parent of college-age kids who's got somtomitous hands and that you reflect on that. That becomes the new being. You go do something different. that becomes a virtuous cycle. B, do become, be, do become, that's the deal. You're becoming all the way to the very end.

You know, the week she died, my late wife, chose not to take the end-of-life drug when she started really losing it and she didn't want to die without her brain. I said, are you sure, honey? She goes, no, even if it gets weird, I want to stay, and she died three days later, there might be one more lesson,

and I don't want to miss it. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Odo. If your business runs on five different apps, 12 browser tabs, and one spreadsheet that everyone's afraid to touch, it's probably time for Odu. Odo is an all-on-one business management software that connects every part of your business into one powerful, easy-to-use platform. So instead of wasting time switching between disconnected systems, your entire business works together in real time. Your team moves faster, your data stays accurate, and you can actually focus on growing your business. business. Let one unified system run your entire business. From the first opportunity to the final

payment, everything works together in one place. Whether you're a small business or managing a large operation, O-DU gives you one flexible platform built to grow with you. Try today for free at at Odo.com slash prop-G. That's O-D-O-O-O-com slash prop-G. We're back with more from Bill and Dave. I think that's a good place to move to Q&A. I don't think we can top that. So we have someone, my colleague, Jennifer's here with a mic. Please raise your hand and Jennifer will roll over and ask your question. And while we're finding that person, a shout out to, you know, your book on raising young men. Thank you.

I mean, it's a, it is a crisis. And young men need, you know, need more mentorship, more, everything we can give them. So, you know, my son, my youngest son, as a son, went off to Northeastern in Boston, and a week later, we get a call from the Boston police. Your son's done...

I've had to get an attorney three times for my son to get to college. He's now chief of staff for a congressman in Washington, D.C. He's doing great. But it might be... There may be more parenting coming up than you know. So... The key is to get arrested three times.

All right. Please introduce your, stand-up, introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Dan from Cleveland. Hi, Dan from Cleveland. I find it interesting that all three of you have had children and the meaning of that in your lives. I'm in a similar situation, so it has a lot of impact for me. For me, though, it's been about just realizing you only get this time to raise your children and the one time. Yeah.

And then you're done. and maybe you'll have grandchildren and have some impact on them, but it's an in-between. I'm in-between right now. That's the best way to put it, where the kids are gone, they're doing their thing,

and now it's over, right? I mean, that's the best way I can describe the feeling. There's a level of overness for me that I'm struggling with. So I don't know if you have comments on that. Yeah. Well, if my mom had been your mother, you would have had the meeting when you were 18.

She sits down. She draws a circle, starts at zero, goes to 80. She goes, honey, we need to have this conversation before you leave for school. Here's the way it works. You know, you're a kid. Go to college, maybe get a graduate degree. You graduate. You're 20. You work for a while. You probably get married and have some kids. You know, you have your own children. They leave. Then you get older than you die. And she fills in all the pie charts. Then she crosses out the section where she says, this is when you're a parent. And then, you know, it's over when they're 18. Because if you do your job right as a parent when your kids are 18, they leave and they don't come back. I go, I'm the youngest. So that's a hint, mom. She goes, that's a hint, honey. She says, look, all this over here. No kid. Don't design your life around your children.

They don't last. Love them when you have them, but have something else in mind. Any thoughts? Yeah, it's a tough time. I remember sending, you know, my first, my oldest Eliza off to college. And you want to hang out and hang, I don't know, but you know, you hang out for a while. And then pretty soon one of the people who's dealing with this starts to shoe the parents out of the room. You have to leave now.

You have to leave. Oh, my gosh. But I want to say one more thing. I just, I quit. Got to leave, you got to leave. You got to leave. And then you cry all the way home. And we did that three times.

get curious build something it's now time for you it's time for you to build something for your life for yourself and grieve the fact that they're gone but you know be joyful in the fact that they're out there making really good choices

and you did a good job yeah so I I so relate to what you're saying I'm in that. You called it the in between times. I'm in that. To be blunt, I'm struggling. And what helps me is actually, there was a book by, I've got to forget her name. And she has this great line in it that I hold on to, and that is grief and anxiety are the receipts for love. So I feel like, okay, this makes sense. I'm where I should be. I had, you know, such a good experience. Next question. Hi, I'm Marie. I'm from Copertino, California.

Scott, I think I can help you out a little bit. I could use it. I am actually a recipient of your accelerator program. I graduated last May with a certificate in project management, and I'm very proud and just went to thank you in person. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. So my question is this. Okay, I had to make notes.

So for people like me who are kind of like at a transition career-wise, can you help me in figuring out how to convince employers that we are very much someone that we could, you know, that they should put a chance on us that they should hire us. We're still, you know, valuable to tech and to, you know, we bring value. It's like, I think finding a job, mid-career, early career, you know, I've raised so much money for startups. And I've, people say, it's easy to raise money. I've never had an easy time raising money. I've never had an easy time finding a job.

Even in the biggest bull economies, I never thought it was easy. And what I would say is that the secret to success is your willingness to get out a big spoon need shit. And that is to call people who don't want to hear from you, to embarrass yourself and call friends and say, I'm struggling, I need to find another job. Can you make an introduction? To show up to all sorts of social events and be more friendly than you otherwise would be. And just, you know, get after it. I don't, you know, I think the secret to success is rejection, specifically your willingness to endure rejection. And I've never, had an easy time raising money. I've never had an easy time finding romantic partners. I've never

had an easy time starting businesses. And every time the only key to success and the yes of getting hired was a shit ton of nose and my willingness to endure those nose. So I don't have like a silver bullet. What I would suggest is every day get in front of a, you know, a virtual mirror and say, I could add value to a company. I could make someone very happy and then put together a list and think of every know you get as a step closer to a yes. But I just see it as literally endurance and a willingness to mourn and move on and not lose your sense. It's like Churchill said, the key to success is your ability to move through failure without

losing your sense of enthusiasm. But I've never had an easy time finding a job. finding a successful business, raising money. It's just all been really, quite frankly. And I look at the environment I grew up in and the blessings I've had that weren't my fault. And it's been easier for me than 99.9% of everyone else. And it's still been really hard every morning. So anyways, long-witted way of saying every no you get means you're getting closer to a yes.

So quick piggyback on that. So, Bell, you know, we totally agree with Scott. We got a whole chapter in our first book about how not to find a job, which is by applying. And we advocate the relational networking, you know, find it through people that Scott was just advocating. So we totally agree about that. But wait, you're three old white men and it's AI and it's now automatic resume screening and it's totally automated. And that doesn't effing work anymore. Don't you guys get that?

Do you really still think that relationship stuff works, Bill? I think it's the only thing that's going to work. You know, we tell our students, don't go to the job boards, don't go to LinkedIn, don't do all that stuff. If you want to put a LinkedIn profile up with a really hot portfolio, maybe someone will find you. But the way you're going to get a job is through the network of people. And it's not just people that you know. It's also what psychologists who people call loose connections, loose network connections. So somebody who knows somebody, your dad's roommates, college, friends.

who's a lawyer who knows a person is going to be the person who refers you into a job, get your resume out of this AI, you know, screening system to the top of the layer where a human being looks at it. I tell my students like, you know, you've, I have a student, I wrote 100 cover letters, beautifully crafted cover letters before AI did it all by my hand, by hand. I sent in 100 resumes. I got three responses. I said, well, then you're, that's about average. It's three to five percent. If you want to burn yourself out, you know, writing 97 letters that nobody, and the problem is you think you got rejected 97 times. Nobody read your resume. Never happened.

It's just a waste of a total waste of time. You're going to find it through networks of people. That's where you're going to find it. It's going to be harder. It's harder. But it's still going to be much, much more productive. Next question. All right.

We have time for one more. Hi. My name is Ellen Kelly, and I'm right up the road at USF, and I'm here with my team of career counselors. So we are on the front line of taking your design lab. Thank you. Really, most of the things have been talked about today. But what will you tell the student that comes to my office and has done all of these and still isn't making traction? Can you share some nuggets about resilience, please?

Thank you. Yes, have it and keep going. I mean, that's it. It's, you know. I was, we were once on a talk, and Angela Duckworth, who wrote the book on grit, was on the talk. And she was saying, yeah, you know, the school system hired me, and they wanted to make the students more gritty. And so I was supposed to go look at the school and figure out how to make things more gritty.

And I came back with a list of 20 things. The teachers shouldn't have to buy the supplies for the kids. The kids should have a hot lunch and a good breakfast before they start. I mean, she's a whole bunch of things had nothing to do with grid. She said, your school system doesn't work because, not because the kids aren't gritty, because you're not giving them the circumstances they need. I'm sure you guys are giving them all the stuff that they need to get started, but it's just, well, I'd be with Scott.

Like, are you out every night? Are you talking to new people? You're not going to find it in the listings that we have here at the college, because those are going to be oversubscribed. When I was at Apple, we posted a thing for a design, and we get 5,000 resumes in a minute. You know, I mean, I'm a busy manager. By the way, when you're a busy manager,

You don't get extra time for interviewing. You have to squeeze that in. So I'm walking through the hall, looking at resumes going, no, no, no, no, yeah, let's talk to this person. No, no, no, no. And then somebody comes up to me and says, you should talk to Jane. They go, great, Jane's on the list. So they've got to get out in the world and they've got to get their connection. And widen your net.

There's a really insightful thing that a career counselor at Stanford went to me. I said, what makes you nuts? I'm most curious of people who are driven crazy by. She goes, oh, it's the on-campus recruiting. Like, what's the problem? She goes, the students believe the world. is the collection of companies that do on-campus recruiting. That's 0.01% of the companies on the planet. That is not what the world looks like. By the way, we're at the Odu conference, and Odu supports

small businesses. How many small businesses are you looking at? The ones you can't find by just reading the article in ink or looking on LinkedIn. I mean, that's what runs, what percent of the GDP has got? Or small businesses? Well, two-thirds of job creation is. from small and medium-sized business. Yeah. So two-thirds of the potential jobs you're looking for are going to be from a smaller

or medium-sized business. Yeah, so you have to widen your net, you have to necessarily lower your expectations, but just think differently about what's possible and try harder and try harder and keep trying until it works. Yeah, the suffix on that is don't let perfect be the enemy of good. When kids come to me and complain,

I mean, NYU Stern, the average starting salary now to business school is $212,000. And when kids come to me and complain about not getting a job, it's usually they can't get the job they want. So I think the key is just to be in the game and maybe not take what feels like the ideal opportunity, but just to kind of get in the game. Also, and this is going to sound, I think, a bit unusual,

but a huge unlock for me is my atheism. And that is it reduces my fear of embarrassing myself or failure or doing a job that might be below what I perceive as my own ego at that point because I believe everyone in this room is going to be dead really soon, and so am I. And to not take risks and to be worried about what other people think about you

is just such a waste. I find it an incredible unlock to just imagine I'm going to be at the end sooner than I'd like. So why am I worried about just emailing these people or going up and introducing myself or why am I embarrassed to take a job that I think is below my certification right now. It doesn't matter. Everyone you're worried about what they think about you is going to be gone really soon, and so are you. Thank you, Odo. Join me.

Join me in thanking Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford Education and best-selling authors of Design Your Life, and most recently How to Live a Meaningful Life. What a Wonderful Time to Be in a Wonderful Country and a Wonderful City. and to be out meeting and in person. It's so nice to be an IRL here. Thank you so much for showing up today. Have a great rest of the afternoon. Thanks very much.

Thank you.