It’s time to rethink your entire life plan - Dave Evans - #1062

You're the co-founder of Stamford's Life Design Lab. True. What's that? It's a little tiny operation inside the design program that applies the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life at and after university. So, oh, Bill and Dave realized, we've made all these products and all these different experiences using design thinking, started at Stanford back in 1963 And we used it at Apple in the early days, and everybody's kind of the thing that built Silicon Valley. Hey, we could apply it to ourselves. We could design ourselves as well. And that's a real problem people have, and we gave it a try, and it seems to have worked out. Do people not already try to design their life? Is that not what you do when you set a to-do list or have a calendar? So, the word design in the field of design really means there's two categories. There's what I would call craft design or engineering design, and then there's design thinking. And so, the older school, so I'm an ergonomist, I'm a car designer, I'm a graphic designer, I'm an illustrator. So, designing things, precisely figuring out exactly what this particular shape and look of something is going to be, has been around for a long, long, long, long time. You can get a master's in design at Stanford and still not be very good at drawing. And there are many design schools who think that's a moral wrong. Then there's this design thinking idea, it's been around only for the past 50 years, which is an innovation methodology. It's an approach to coming up with new ideas. And so, when we talk, when people are just like, I want to design my life. What they're really saying is, I want to engineer my life. I want to figure it out, I want to solve it, I want to answer it, I want to craft it. And that's a perfectly good thing to do. We're not saying that's the wrong thing to do. So people have been trying to do that for a long, long time. What they've not been necessarily doing very well and they're getting stuck on is finding their way. So like, I walk into the Career Center when I'm 19 years old, back in the 70s, and they go, can you help me? And they go, well, sure, we got a whole building full of people. We love helping out people like you, you know? So what do you want to do? I kind of go, yep, that's the question. I kind of go, okay, so what's the answer? I kind of know that's the question. And they go, what? I said, what do I want to do? And they go, right, what do you want to do? I said, well, well, well, this conversation is going nowhere. And they said, here's how this works. You tell us what you want, then we'll help you go get it. And I go, that's easy. Getting stuff is easy. The hard part is figuring out what you want. They kind of go, well, that's just on that point. You're supposed to know. Getting stuff is easy. Figuring out what you want to get is the difficult part. 100%. Yeah. So that's what we help people do. So the objective of the Life Design Lab, you asked that question, is we assist people in the formation of a conscious competency in life and vocational wayfinding. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you find your way? We have you tools to do it. Life is an improv skit. We're improv trainers. Orienteering for your life direction. Bingo. Yeah. There's maps and compasses. We make the big distinction between navigation and wayfinding. Technical terms and design. So, navigation. I know where I am. I know where I'm going. I have the data about the space in between, so what your GPS does really well. I can optimize the path, preferably as straight as possible. In wicked problems where I don't know what I'm looking for until I find it and I'm going to this very important place called the future, about which we have no data because it doesn't exist yet, I can't do that. Because I barely know where I am and I sure don't know where I'm going, and I don't have any data about the space in between. So what am I going to do? Well, I'm going to do an empirical thing called try it. We call it prototyping. So I'm going to make this move. I'm going to go talk to Chris and see how that goes. Then what did I learn that day? Then I'll go here and then I'll go over here. It's a very jagged pathway. I might go backward. I might have to start over again. Seems terribly inefficient, except I'm learning my way forward until I find like, oh, that's it. Then the destination I'm looking for finally appears and I land there. But that boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing thing, very not a straight line in a way finding task, that bouncy line is literally the shortest distance between those two points, because that's what mortals have to do. It's interesting, but it's inefficient. My friend George has this idea of GPS brain. What he means by GPS brain is forgiveness with yourself when you don't take the right turn. That if you miss it, at no point does the GPS say, you fucking idiot, why didn't you take that? You should have turned right and you've missed it, and now it's going to take another five minutes. At no point does the GPS do that. It just continually updates the directions. I think that's a lovely, it makes me think about releasing, it makes me think about David Hawking's letting go type. I totally agree. In fact, having been in the Valley for a long, long time, I know that now and then coders put tricks and jokes in code all the time. So I wonder if in the GPS code, if I do the wrong thing on purpose, like if I go straight and turn left on Alpine Street, and I make a U-turn, and then it says, okay, so go down the street and make another U-turn. I do it nine times, on the 10th time, it's going to go, come on Dave, what the heck, you're wasting my time here. You unlocked this special feature. Yeah, I tried like 15 mistakes and it is totally- The angry co-pilot feature. It's not even, by the way, it's not even when you did the wrong thing, you did the wrong thing. For it to have been wrong, you had to have had access to information that would have told you it would have been right up front. You didn't make a mistake, you made a move. You learned something that said, oh, continuing on the same collinear pathway would be suboptimal. I'm going to actually make an adjustment now. That's not a mistake, it's just a move. What do people mean when they're talking about meaning, do you think? That's a big one. Well, the reason we wrote this book, come to get fairly direct, is that what overwhelmingly people mean, when they talk to us about the meaning, they're not getting enough of, if they're talking about one of two things. Primarily, they're talking about having an impact, and I'm making a difference, am I changing the world? Do I matter? Is it working? Did I make the impact that would make my life worthwhile? I'd say 90% of the people we've been talking to recently that motivated us to write this book, the one and only valid form of meaning making they've named is impact. Then right behind that would be fulfillment. I'm just not being fulfilled, and for most people, fulfillment means, am I getting to manifest the fullness of who I really am? Because that's what Maslow told them fulfillment was, and the original 1943 paper that invented the hierarchy of needs according to Abraham Maslow. The apex was self-actualization, and you attain self-actualization by literally becoming all that one can be, and if you become all that one can be, according to Maslow, you will experience fulfillment. We think that's dead wrong because we've known for a long time in the life design lab that all of us contain far more aliveness than one lifetime permits us to live out. There's more than one of you in there, that's the good news. So if you've decided you have to be all that you are, and all that you are won't even fit in one lifetime. If I haven't fully manifested everything that I could possibly be, then my life is unfulfilling. I just have decided to have a policy that I have to be despondent for the rest of my life. That's a bad choice. So both the people who are stuck on impact is the only way meaning really deserves to work, or I have to be entirely manifested to be fulfilled. Both of those people are set up on dead ends, and we'd like to give them a better idea. What's the better idea? But our idea is, so the reframe on impact is, if you put all your meaning eggs in the impact basket, impact is a good thing. I've worked hard on making an impact, you're working on an impact, it's not worth the list by any means, but it's also largely out of our control, because some of the other 8 billion people might go off script when you're not looking. You do everything right, it may not work. Doing it right is not near enough to pull it off. So impact is a bet, and frankly, after you make the impact, even successfully, three, two, one. Well, what have you done for us lately? But Half Life on Impact is short. Have you ever seen Scotty Sheffler's interview when he won the PGA Masters Tour from last year? No, but what do you have to say? So he basically sits down and has this room of press, and he's just won the thing. He's won the big thing that he's been working toward. He's got the special jacket or the- Yeah, the green jacket, yeah. Whatever it is. And he basically spends seven minutes talking about how fleeting and hollow this experience is. And it's just phenomenal. It's one of the best things that I've seen in a very long time. And I'm kind of obsessed with the price that high performers pay to be somebody that everyone else admires. Oh, yeah. And to see someone using the opportunity to fillet- At the apex. Yeah, to fillet himself. He could have done that quite happily for five minutes, and no one would have thought otherwise. He could have called out- I mean, I remember that Michael Jordan, he got inducted into the Hall of Fame 1993, and he uses the entire speech just to call out all of the people that have insulted him. There's no gratitude at all. And then Scotty does something similar. There's a degree of gratitude, but it's very sanguine. It's very self-deprecating. And you would- I'll send you it once we're finished. I absolutely love it. But he basically says the same thing. He says, you know, you- Very quickly after this, you are going to ask me a question. So what's next? You are going to ask me the question. I need to go home tonight and there's going to be diapers to be changed and trash to take out and what are we having for dinner? And life just comes back around again. Oh man. So a couple of years ago, the US Olympic Committee calls and says, can you help us? I go, help you what? We're successful in the Olympics and everyone's got gold medalist syndrome. So there's a training for after the games. There's nothing quite as thrilling as ascending the Olympic platform or terrifying is coming. The distance from the top of the Olympic platform to dumpster diving is terrifyingly short. And much shorter than the other side. It's long to get up there and it's very short on the backside. Yeah. So they called up and I did a training with them. There's a group called Elite Meat, which is a volunteer organization of recently former top gun pilots, rangers, green berets, special forces. People who are the absolute best in their business can kill you 75 ways. Do not piss these people off. But most of them are lovely human beings, by the way. I am very fond of professional military. That's a whole nother conversation. But they retire out at 42 mostly. They start at 22, do the 20 years, are at 42 They're incredibly good at what they do. The world doesn't need them anymore. Now what? So there's a whole group of their peers kind of going, this is going to be hard on you. We're here to catch you. And I've worked with them a little bit. So yeah, absolutely, killing the impact thing can be a double-edged sword. So thing one about impact is you got to get eggs in some other baskets. And the reframe there is, because that's all done in what we call the transactional world, the get stuff done world. There's another world we call the flow world, which is really the present moment. This thing called reality that's happening right now, that you could be experiencing in a different way. And it's rich with meaning making experiences. We'll come back to that. For the fulfillment person, who's stuck on that, like, okay, the reframe is, no, you can't be fulfilled. But you can be fully alive. You can be entirely here in this present moment. And one thing that will help you accept that that may be true, the last big reframe is, because now we can celebrate the scandal of particularity. Which usually brings up the question, what the hell is that? I'll let you interview yourself. Just keep going. That's okay. Stop me anytime. It's your show. The scandal of particularity is originally theological than a philosophical concept. What it is that turns out the ultimate of anything, truth, beauty, justice, purity is never actually experienced in reality. Only partial reflections temporarily encountered in a very specific and constrained moment in time, a particularity are what we actually get. We're longing for perfection, but all we get is the particular. That's actually just the nature of reality. So rather than like, oh, you see the amazing sunset. And if you really, really attend to that amazing sunset, just as it's over and the sun hits the horizon and you see the green flash and, and whoa, what do you want? More. I want more. It wasn't quite enough.