Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 260. From Role To Soul: The Four Ingredients For Mastering Meaning

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Why your best life isn’t about having the right answers, but about asking the right questions.Finding meaning and purpose in life isn’t about having all the answers. For Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, it’s about having the courage and curiosity to constantly engage with the questions.As designers, Burnett and Evans have careers spanning everything from academia to companies like Apple, Electronic Arts, and Hasbro. But beyond fashioning better products and user experiences, they’ve also put their expertise toward the transcendent, writing several books about designing and living lives filled with meaning and purpose.“Compasses say North, not Seattle,” says Evans, highlighting how many mistakenly think of purpose as a single destination. “We're all a dynamic, flowing, constantly changing thing. So how could a changing thing have one static right answer?” Instead, he and Burnett maintain that meaning is more about “going the right direction, not [finding] the right destination.”In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Burnett and Evans join host Matt Abrahams to explore their strategies for leading a purposeful life. Rather than “rehearsing [an] answer,” their method involves “living [a] question” — embracing curiosity and designing a life through dialogue with ourselves and with others.To listen to the extended Deep Thinks version of this episode, please visit FasterSmarter.io/premium.Episode Reference Links:Bill BurnettDave EvansBill and Dave’s Book: How to Live a Meaningful LifeEp.181 Why Happiness is a Direction, Not a Destination: Communication, Happiness & WellbeingEp.138 Speak Your Truth: Why Authenticity Leads to Better Communication  Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedInChapters:(00:00) - Introduction (02:48) - Meaning & Purpose as a Direction (03:28) - Coherence & Living in Alignment (04:09) - Design Thinking for Life Decisions (05:42) - Prototyping Conversations (07:15) - Odyssey Plans: Three Possible Futures (09:19) - The Four Elements of Meaning (11:08) - Wonder Glasses: Shifting Perspective (12:34) - Transactional vs. Flow World (14:22) - How to Build a Formative Community (15:45) - The Practice-to-Production Trap (16:53) - The Final Three Questions (21:35) - Conclusion ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

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to get matched up with your coach today. That's strawberry.comme slash smart and get 50% off your first coaching session. It's the most affordable time ever to see if coaching is right for you. Answers lead to destinations. Questions lead to journeys. My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I look forward to speaking with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Bill is the executive director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford and an adjunct professor in mechanical engineering. Dave is a lecturer in the product design program and co-founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab. Both have worked in various cool and influential jobs from Apple to electronic arts to Hasbro.

Together they wrote the New York Times bestselling book Designing Your Life. And their latest book is How to Live a Meaningful Life using design thinking to unlock purpose, joy, and flow in everyday life. Welcome, Bill and Dave. I am thrilled to have you here as somebody who is trying to figure out what I want to be when I go. grow up. I'm very excited for our conversation. Thanks. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you for inviting us. Shall we get started? Let's go. Excellent. So, Dave, your new book provides useful tools for living a meaningful life. How do you embil define meaning and purpose? And why do you write that we don't need to know our true purpose after all? Well, you know, we're user-centered designers. We live to reframe things. So the first thing the book does is reframe meaning and purpose. And so we're not after finding the

meaning of your life or your one true purpose because we define the human being as a becoming. We're all a dynamic, flowing, constantly changing things. So how could a changing thing have one static right answer? We encourage people to live meaningfully and direct their lives purposefully. We've got some tools for how to do that, but we want you to be going the right direction, not find the right destination. I love that idea. And making those words adverbs can really help. Give me an example of living life purposefully. Well, we talk about coherency a lot. And the whole idea is who I am, and what I believe and what I'm doing in alignment. One of our tools is called a coherency side.

We have a compass tool that helps you figure that out and write it down in less than three pages. And then you can catch yourself in the act of acting just like yourself. So this morning, I'm having a very coherent moment talking to Matt because he's interested in the same things we are and communicating to people, which is what we do. So, man, I'm right on target right now. So it's about reflecting and knowing your purpose. And from that, you can then assess if you're in line or not. encompasses say north, not Seattle. So am I going north? I'm doing the right thing. Excellent. Very good. Bill, your work in both your books focuses on design thinking.

We've talked about design thinking on the show before. But for those who aren't familiar with it, can you define what you mean by design thinking? What are some of the core concepts that you employ? Yeah. It was the idea of taking engineering and adding in psychology, anthropology, and art, because we should make beautiful things. But it was always rooted in the notion that you talk to humans about what they need, and you try to understand them using anthropological tools like ethnography and other things. So we boiled it down to a five-step process. Don't start with the problem. Start with people.

Empathy. It's the first step in design thinking. Then to find the right problem because oftentimes the problem you got is the wrong thing. It doesn't respond to the human need. Then have lots of ideas because we know as designers said if you have lots of ideas, you have better choices. And then prototype and test relentlessly test your hypothesis about the user with a prototype. A prototype is not to prove you're right or wrong.

It's just to explore the idea and then test and then refine it and test and refine it. So it's a very empirical human-centered process. I took a full-time position here at Stanford in 2006, but I'd been teaching design students for a long time. When Dave came over in 2007 and proposed, hey, let's do a class for the students. Are they struggling to launch? Are they concerned about meaning and purpose? I said, absolutely. And it seemed to me like it was a design problem.

We could prototype your future. We could interrogate what do I need, empathy for me, empathy for me, empathy for for the world, what does the world need? So the whole idea of using design thinking for life design just fell into place very quickly and the students really responded. I think it's a wonderful toolkit to look at purpose and meaning, and I have benefited from it from the work you've done in my own life and my own searching. In your book Designing for Life, Dave, you leverage one of the tenets of design thinking

when you advocate for prototyping conversations to gather data. What are prototyping conversations and what are some of the best practices? for having them. So again, as Bill just described in design thinking, and prototype's job is to ask an interesting question and learn your way forward. And I'm trying to design this thing called the future. I don't have any data, so you can't analyze it. So we have a very hands-on empirical bottom-up process that talks about gathering data through experiences. And if I'm trying to design my life, I'm thinking about ways people live, oh, I can go visit the future by sitting down with a person who's doing the kind of thing or

living the kind of lifestyle or believing the kind of thoughts that I'm contemplating, considering so I could visit the future by entering into their story. So a life prototype is a conversation or an experience. And importantly, it's not a transactional one. Like, well, how much money do you make and do I need an MBA or not? Those are interesting questions about the transaction of do I want to become Professor Matt. But what I realize, so, wow, you communicate about communicating. How's that for you?

That's the narrative story of the experience you're having. And we know neuroscientifically now that if I actually get into your story, I'm actually having an experience walking along with you, surrogation as opposed to simulation, according to Dan Gilbert at Harvard. If I live into your life a little bit, I really can understand things differently than just reading data. Thank you for sharing what you mean by prototyping conversations. Bill, I want to talk about another concept that I really find interesting, which is the idea of an Odyssey plan. What is an Odyssey plan? How should we develop them? And how do we best then communicate them? I mentioned that one of the steps in the design process is ideation, having lots of ideas.

And we know from lots of research from the business world that if you have a binary decision, an A, B decision, you make a bad decision more than 50% of the time. So have more than two. We do three odyses. And there are three explorations of the next five years of your life. What might that be like? And typically, Odyssey one is whatever you're doing now and it just goes great for the first five years. Odyssey two, we suggest, hey, what's your plan B?

A, I just took that job and that life is gone. You have the plan B. And then the wildcard plan, the third plan, is what would you do if you had all the money and the resources that you needed? And no one would say, well, that's a stupid thing. Why are you leaving a position of Stanford to go be a clown at Cirque to Salaire? Matt, that's crazy. So all your friends would say whatever you're doing is great. Because a lot of times the social pressure of staying in their lane is so powerful that they can't even ideate about something different.

So the idea is it's three completely different lives played out in five years and not just work stuff, but life stuff and family stuff and your bucket list and everything else. And we find when people do three, not one or two, it really opens up the possibilities of what could happen in the next five years. Now, we're not suggesting that you pick one. They're not truly plans. They're really just a chance to imagine yourself in three different futures. And then one of the things we do is we say, okay, pick two of those futures and write me a story. It's four or five years from now. I say, hey, Matt, how you doing?

I ran into you at Starbucks. How are you doing? You say, I'm great. I go, hey, what happened with that odyssey? And then you tell me. So you actually write a letter from the future back to yourself about what that odyssey was like. Sometimes it's challenging for people to think of three things.

But once they've actually got it and they get into it, developing these lives really changes their perspective on what's possible. And that's all we're trying to do is open up the solution space. Bill, I want to go back to this idea of meaning. You both articulate four key components. of meaning-making. I'd love to hear more detail about those. We start with this idea of coherence, and we have a little tool, as Dave said, we build a compass, you know, who you are, what's your story, what's your theory of work, and what's your theory

of everything, the sort of transcendent. So coherence is the first part. Wonder is the second step. Wonder we describe as curiosity plus mystery. And so walking around the world with a sense of wonder, and then the idea of flow. We propose in the book, we live in two worlds, the transactional world of getting stuff done, which is great. And then right underneath that, kind of like an aquifer below the surface, is the flow world, where we, where actually the flow world is where you will experience meaning and transcendence. And then the final element is community. We have a mindset called creating your world. You create the world and you create the story of the world you live in, and you surround yourself with relationships that are meaningful. It's all about community and relationships.

So coherency, flow, wonder, and community are for meaning-making methods. Let me double down on the community thing for a minute because there's social community where we gather to have a good time, collaborative community where we gather to get something done, which most of your colleagues help us do over the GSB. And there's a formative community where we are becoming together. And that's a fundamental shift. What we're finding is the overwhelming majority of modern people have lots of social and tons of collaborative community, which is wonderful. getting something done together is very life-giving, but it's not the same as becoming together. So it's not, did you get it done, Matt, or how are we going to do this together?

It wasn't it great when we won. It's like, so are you moving toward the better bill, Bill? And that conversation we call the formative community. We have some tips for how to do that, and it's very life-giving. I want to come back to those tips. I'm in the process of building one of those formative communities, and I really appreciate how you delineate the different types of community. The more I do, the work I do in communication, the more important I see both context and community being.

I want to come back and share with us the wonder activity, if you could. We have a number of tools for each of these things, but the first one is put on your wonder glasses. And put on your wonder glasses means you could sit anywhere. And first of all, you look around the room with your regular glasses on. You just see the way the world is. Like, I'm in the studio, and there's Gordon. He's working behind the desk. And what do I notice?

And then I see what's going on. And then I go, oh, the broom is next to the door. I wonder if I was forgotten. And so my eye naturally goes to things that want to turn into tasks. So suddenly my natural glasses sees the transactional world and what I need to go do next. And I go, thank you very much. Now take another look and just notice. And then what else comes to mind?

And then I see this other really nice chair to clicks over from the broom. And I'm thinking, huh, that's an empty chair. And then my wonder glasses look on, like, I wonder who might sit in that chair next. I wonder what conversations happen in this room. very thoughtful people. Isn't it great? There's an institution dedicated to thoughtful conversation. And then I can just appreciate that. And so in about a minute, I go from, oh, I got to call Patrick back, to I get to be in deep conversations as part of a long tradition. That's a real joy. And I'm so grateful for it. That's the wonderglasses. And you can do it anytime. I love the idea of wonderglasses.

And it really, to me, it sounds like it's all about curiosity and allowing yourself to more deeply think about things. You did something there in your example that I really want to highlight. When you transitioned from the transactional view of the world to the wondering curiosity view, you simply said, thank you. I see that, but I want to look differently. Many of us beat ourselves up or say, oh, I shouldn't be doing that. That's the wrong way to approach things. And you simply acknowledge and move on. And that, to me, I think, is a key element in this flow state. Well, again, we have this framing that so many people came to us where we redesigned our lives, but it's still not as fulfilling or meaningful as I thought. What did I do wrong? We go, oh, we got that problem. So that's

where this recent book came from. And as we listened to them, they overwhelmingly described lives lived entirely in the transactional world. Now, there is only one world, but our brains can't handle the whole thing all at once. We have modalities. So we're inviting people to spend more time in the flow world, which is the present moment through which the entire coursing cosmos is under our feet and in front of our eyes all the time, that present moment, which is different than the transaction in the future. And so the reason we have a friendly relationship between the transactional world and the flow world and transactional thinking or achieving brain and flow thinking or the awakened brain is because they're friends. We need them both. Somebody's got to take out the trash.

So there's nothing wrong with the transactional world. And we accept the fact that most of us are overwhelmingly biased that way because the systems of the world all run on that all the time. So cut yourself some slack. All we're trying to do is get better. And I don't need more reasons to critique myself. Frankly, that's just the transactional world catching me in the act of doing something wrong. I'm just trying to become a person. That's a fundamental mindset shift, but when you do it, it allows access to this flow state. Yeah, and it's always there. Yeah, it's just giving yourself permission to see it. Let's go back to formative communities. How do you build these? How do you find the people to support you? What's involved in building that?

It's all about the question. So if I start with the definition, you know, Bill and I've been talking about people for a long time. We do human-centered design. So our definition of the human is a becoming. So then if I'm becoming, what am I becoming into? So then it begets what's the question I'm living into. And one of the unfair ways to divide the world into is there are the people who run around rehearsing their answer and the people who run around living their question. So if you want to live a becoming growth-oriented life, now you're living into the question. So the question is, what am I living into? So I'm 72. I've got 11 grandkids. And the question I'm asking is, am I ready to shift out of a role-based life into a more soul-based life? And how can I

have my primary verb shift from got to to get to. Now, that's not the same as I got to call Patrick back that I mentioned earlier. That's my transactional task list. I've still got a task list. But the question I'm living into is I want to spend more time doing get to, not got to. How do I do that? So you start coming up with those questions and ask that of yourself and then find others who want to ask that question.

And you start by having a dinner and let's ask more interesting questions. And if people like it, do it again and then, you know, read a book together and then say, I think we've got a group here. I love this idea of the question I am living into instead of just being the answers. Yeah, we call that the focus question. Bill, the book also talks about the practice to production trap. What is this?

And how do we avoid the trap? So we always do this. We turn what could be a beautiful moment. And it's like it's one thing to say, what a beautiful sunset. I long for beauty. It's another thing to say, well, that sunset was okay,

but I've seen better ones. You know, where could I go to find a better one? And so every time we take a potentially meaningful moment and turn it into another item on our to-do list, we try to make it more efficient. Practice to production is making everything a production, a transaction in the transactional world. It's a big trap. And you just want to be aware of it because the beauty of the sunset is beauty in and of itself. It's a completely whole moment. Don't turn everything into a transaction.

That's the trap. People do this all the time to themselves. They rob themselves of the chance of having. having a little moment of meaning by judging and making it performative or whatever. You got to channel the Beatles. So you're doing your practice and the voice pops up like, you could do this better, and then let it be. Just let it be.

But first, you have to be aware that that's what's happening. Yeah, and you have to like the Beatles. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. If you've ever felt like you're trying to do everything yourself, especially when the stakes are high, you're not alone. One of the biggest shifts I see in effective leaders growing their organizations comes from focusing on the right things. But that's hard to do when you're stretched thin.

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That's upw-w-r-k-com. Upwork.com. And now, back to our conversation. Thank you. This has been a fantastic conversation. Before we end, I like to ask three questions of all my guests. One, I create just for you all, and then two, I've been asking forever. You guys up for that?

Yep, sure. Dave, I'm going to start with you. You both have been communicating about finding meaning, purpose, life for a long time. What are some best practices you have found for helping communicate your messages clearly? We've seen it play out here. You give lots of examples. You bring lots of energy. Talk to me about how you strategically think about how you communicate your messages. We're narrative animals. We're human-centered designers. It's about the listener, the user, the reader. It's about the reader. It's about the reader. It's about the reader. It's about the reader. It's not about the user. Keep it a story. And don't worry about the stuff you're not saying. Many other listeners have heard me say this before. A piece of advice my mother, unfortunately, has to constantly remind me of is tell the time, don't build the clock. I'd love to hear from both of you, and we'll start with you, Bill. Who's a communicator that you admire and why? Sir Ken Robinson, who I think still has one of the most popular TED Talks ever.

And he was an educator and was communicating about education and the importance of creativity and education. So I loved his message. And he was funny and self-deprecating. And he's just fantastic communicator. And Richard Feynman, it's probably the only guy who could ever explain physics to me in a way I could understand. And he did all the math and all the equations, but he made it a story. It was great. Dave, how about you? Who's a communicator you admire and why?

Recently, I decided my current favorites are Anderson Cooper and Ken Burns. Anderson is a lovely journalist and gets to the story. And Ken Burns manages, he actually returns us into the history, doesn't talk about it. And he's brilliant at. He's been doing it for 50 years. And I still find him riveting. Excellent. Four amazing communicators. Thank you. Bill, we heard Dave's answer, which essentially was three key ingredients to successful communication.

I'm curious to get your first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe. When I first heard that question, I was thinking more about one-on-one communication, particularly communicating with my wife or communicating with a friend. And so it was empathy, because that's where designers start, right? And then assuming the best of the other person, because we're always in these conversations and people are not giving people the benefit of the doubt. And then, you know, prototype and tests, because one of my favorite, Scott Galloway says, you can't read the label from inside the bottle. And even though you think you're being very clear,

unless you try it with somebody and then you say, okay, what did I just say? And then they say, I have no idea. Prototyping tests, because you don't know if it's going to communicate what you want to communicate until somebody else hears it. Amazing ingredients there. I want to just put an exclamation point around the fact that you practice and you prototype your talks. So many people, either based on being so busy or so nervous, don't take the time to do it. And somebody like you who has been doing this for a long time still does that just really shows how important that is. Thank you both. The idea that when we communicate, we give people an entire experience, you have given us a very meaningful experience. This idea of role to soul I really like, we all have that opportunity to go deeper

to be in that moment. And the tools you provide to help us figure out how to live purposefully and meaningfully really hit home for me and hopefully for all of our listeners. Best of luck with your new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life. Thanks for being here. Matt, thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about life and purpose, please listen to episode 181 with Arthur Brooks and episode 138 with Graham Weaver. This episode was produced by Catherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with thanks to the Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. And check out FasterSmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider joining our Think Fast, TalkSmart learning community at FasterSmartr.io slash learning. You'll find video lessons, learning quests, discussion boards, our AI coaches, and Book Club. Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show.

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