00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Let's be real for a second. The world feels pretty overwhelming right now. Lots of us are feeling exhausted and despondent. We spend our days grinding at work and then trying to zone out when we get out of work, which often means scrolling endlessly just to unwind. And if that sounds familiar, you might be wondering quietly to yourself, is this all there is? How do I feel better when the world feels so blah? What if there was a way to hit the reset button on how you experience life, To see the world with fresh eyes like you did as a child, when everything felt alive, full of possibility and somehow a little magical.
00:01:00
Speaker 2: The mere fact that anything exists at all is astonishing. So just take a longer, deeper look into almost anything and some wondrousness might be available to you.
00:01:13
Speaker 3: Well.
00:01:13
Speaker 1: In today's episode, the last one in our series on how to Get Unstuck in twenty twenty six, we'll learned that this mindset can be within reach. In fact, today's two guests will share their tips for how to design it.
00:01:25
Speaker 2: Greetings, this is Dave Evans, the co founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab, so glad to be here today with doctor Laurie Santos and my dear partner, Bill Burnette. We've been teaching life design for twenty odd years and now Hi.
00:01:36
Speaker 3: I'm Bill Burnette. I'm an adjunct professor at Stanford University teaching the Designing Your Life series of classes, and now the co author with my good friend Dave of a new book called How to Live a Meaningful Life Using design thinking to unlock purpose, joy, and flow.
00:01:52
Speaker 1: Every day You're going to live to hate that long a subtitle every time you have to say I learned about Dave and Bill's work because our professional stories are surprisingly similar. Like me, they created a class aimed at improving college students well being, one that ended up going viral, and like me, they've decided to share the insights from their class widely with people of all ages, far beyond the university setting.
00:02:17
Speaker 2: We teach you the improv skills to live life more fully. Life is an improv. It really is this thing you make up as you go along. But you can get a lot better at them making up as you go along. So we teach a class that starts out with debunking a bunch of dysfunctional beliefs, really wonderful things that people often think are true and guide their lives, but happen not to be either helpful or even true at all, of which there are many. Once we get through the dysfunctional beliefs, we start giving them tools and techniques for how to figure out what they want, how to meet people can animate that thing in them, how to actually go and engage with the world and get going.
00:02:50
Speaker 1: And so core idea of this class is this idea of design thinking, which I think a lot of folks don't really know what that means.
00:02:56
Speaker 3: Bill.
00:02:56
Speaker 1: What's design thinking?
00:02:57
Speaker 3: Human centered design? Now we call it design thinking. It's a way of solving problems. It's deeply human and engaged with the problems humans have. And so it was obvious to me when we started thinking about how our students might approach building a meaningful life that it was a design problem because designers make things new to the world all the time. I was at Apple for seven years before Stanford and I worked on the very first laptops, and when you're building something that's never existed before, you can't just engineer it because you don't have any data about the thing that's never existed like your future, and so it's using human centered design to figure out what's the next cool version of you.
00:03:37
Speaker 1: I love this idea of the next cool version of you because often when we think about designing, we think about designing something like emphasis on the thing. But you've really argued that we can design ourselves and our own lives and interesting ways. What are some of the features of design thinking we should bring in when we're thinking about designing our own lives.
00:03:54
Speaker 2: Well, it starts to you know, again user centered to human centered. So it starts with like, what does it mean to be a person? Well, you know, our sort of definition is a human person is a becoming, a never ending story, and so what you're growing into is the for the revealed version of yourself. All of us contain more aliveness than when lifetime permits us to live out. I either there's more than one of you in there, so there is no getting it right because you are way bigger than it when it is your lifetime. So all of us are only going to express a small portion of the fullness of our humanity. We have multiple choices in front of us, both between which of me do I want to give a chance to get out on the stage and the next season of my life. And by the way, what does the world think might be an interesting thing for me to be collaborating with other people on. So I'm looking for the nexus of those things, which is evolving all the time. And now all of let's go have some ideas and get started to start prototyping what the future of that person might be. So it really does begin with the very first dysfunctional belief is I have to find my passion, purpose answer thing. No, I have to find the next one that will be interesting enough to live into what will become after that.
00:05:03
Speaker 1: So if you're feeling a little off track, stick around because Bill and Dave have some excellent advice on becoming of version of yourself that feels more engaged and more live. We'll learn all their tips after some quick ads. Dave Evans and Bill Burnett are best known for their popular Stanford course Designing Your Life and the best selling book that grew out of that class, but they've recently put out a new book called How to Live a Meaningful Life. One of their biggest insights is what's known as the Designer's Way, a mindset for intentionally engineering the life you want.
00:05:47
Speaker 3: Designs inherently value free, except we always try to make the next design better. Right, we think we can improve the world. So you start with wonder. I'm naturally curious. If I'm a designer, I'm curious about the world and how to make things better. It's not just who has that work, but oh wow, how amazing is that? I wonder how that works? Right? Then we say availability, be available to the experiences of the world. That's where the interesting stuff happens. Radical acceptance like availability plus acceptance is like we always say, design starts in reality. You've got to start right here where you are, not in some place where you think you should be because you saw it on social media or something else. Right, and then being fully engaged but commonly detached from the outcomes. Because we know a lot about decision science. You can make a good decision, but that doesn't assly mean you're going to get the outcome you want. So be fully engaged in your life, be intentional, but give yourself some grace about the outcomes, and then God in the world and tell your story or create your world. So as mindset's put together, we call it a designer's way, but I when you put it together, it's like, approach the world with a sense of wonder, be available to the things that are happening, root yourself in the reality of the world, and then tell that story to people. Because when you tell the story, you're creating the experience of the world that you want to have.
00:07:09
Speaker 1: I loved this idea of the Designer's Way in part because it's not just great for human centered design or even designing your life. I think it's so useful for navigating all the stuff that can come up in a life. It fits with a lot of the happiness evidence we talk about on the show, Dave in particular. I know what this idea of radical acceptance you've talked about, how you use that to navigate a really painful time of grief in your own life.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're probably referring to the death of my beloved wife, Claudia So on March eighth of twenty twenty, she got a terminal diagnosis. She beat breast cancer once before twenty years prior, decided to give it a second try, picked a much nastier cancer, and she was four ways metastasized in terminal. On day one, she thought she had bronchitas. She came home with the destines. She had sixty to twenty four months to live. We got nine, and she died at seventy. She was sixty nine at the time, so she died fifteen years ahead of the contract. We had a deal and she broke the deal. You know, I was pretty pissed. But the first thing was to frame what is this? We said, Okay, well, I'm gonna die. I was going to die before she is. Now I know when, and so oh it's sad, not tragic, because at seventy I've kind of done everything I need to do. There's nothing really missing. She goes, but I'd love second helping is of a couple of things before I go. So the mantra for the next year was second helpings, which we didn't get that many up because between COVID and fires and everything else is pretty tough. But nonetheless, the holy idea was to decide how to think about it. Mindset was everything. So I started interviewing widows, people who I thought had widowed. Well, so I'm going to borrow other people's wisdom. One of the best pieces of wisdom I got was from a guy whose wife went through a nine year death process. He said, look, Dave, don't waste one second thinking about how are you going to handle this after she's gone, because no matter what you do, since you had an intimate marriage, it's going to rip your legs off, it's going to blow your brains up. There's not a chance in hell you're going to be prepared for this. So the don't always time trying to prepare, and every bit of energy you take away thinking about that future, you're stealing from the present. So lean into doing nothing but enjoy the Heck, at the time, you guys have and as soon as she's gone you can figure that out. Then that's exactly what it did, was exactly the right thing to do. So I learned a ton about grief, but there was all in that framework of it just happens to be really painful. I wonder what the lessons might be.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: And also just not going away from reality. You mentioned this idea before that you can't design things well if you're not taking into account the reality of the situation, as crappy and as terrible as it might be.
00:09:35
Speaker 2: Well, you know, design is an empirical process. So if it's empirical, it has to work in this place called real. It's the only place design works. We can't work with you and the landa should. We only do real stuff, and in reality you can make it better.
00:09:49
Speaker 3: I mean, just also mention Claudia was an exceptional woman and her ability to accept radical acceptance isn't about happiness per se. It's about no reality, which means radically accepting grief. But Claudia was brilliant at this. You could imagine a different situation with someone clinging to false hope or something else, but having watched Dave do this, it was both incredibly tragic and incredibly beautiful in a way that they together managed this acceptance a situation that neither one of them, neither one of them wanted. So that was battle testing one of our mindsets for sure.
00:10:31
Speaker 2: And it's situations where right now we're walking through this with a couple of our significantly older friends, where the guy is going down swinging. I mean, he's not going quietly into this night. He is rejecting everything right and he's ruining his life in the life of everybody around him.
00:10:45
Speaker 3: And it's a choice.
00:10:46
Speaker 2: So choosing well on this acceptance thing has an amazing upset. It really is one of the biggest mindsets of all time.
00:10:53
Speaker 1: So you all are living in your daily life teaching students, and you give them these incredible tools for designing their lives in wonderful ways. But you, like me, sometimes have the interesting moment of a student who comes back a little bit later on and you know, maybe later in their twenties, and they often feel like my ill students sometimes feel, which is it like they're kind of feeling a little lost, Like they're kind of feeling like they tried to follow what you were telling them, but life isn't turning out the way they thought. Bill, tell me about some of these conversations you had with your students.
00:11:27
Speaker 3: I love meeting students two years out, five years out, seven years out. I just talked to somebody who was like fifteen years out and came up and said, oh, Professor Burnett, I haven't seen you. So they come back, and often, you know, I get two reactions. One is, hey, I remember the class and it's still very helpful. And in fact, even my friends ask me sometimes and I tell them read the book or whatever. And then sometimes they say, you know, I used all these tools, but I'm still my life still doesn't have the meaning or the purpose or the impact that I wanted to have, particularly impact, because the gen zs all want to have a lot of impact. And so that was one of the reasons we wrote this last book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, is that even after designing a pretty good life for career, they're still looking for well, wait a minute, where's the payoff, where's the impact, Where's the meaning? And we wanted to go back and look at that kind of step back from the life design I yet really look at more at meaning and purpose because our conclusions, they were looking in the wrong place, and we wanted to give them better navigation. I guess in that question.
00:12:27
Speaker 1: And I think students sometimes get it wrong, especially when they're in that position of feeling like something's missing. When I talk to my own students who are in this position, I often get the sense that they think what they need to do to fix things is to like detonate their life, like I'm going to buy a van and I'm going to move across country or I'm going to move to a farm. But do you both have argued that there are other ways around this that doesn't involve detonating your life. Why is it the wrong path to meaning.
00:12:50
Speaker 2: Well, not never there, I mean every now and then I'll say, yeah, I think you probably should quite out of that horrible, toxic job working for that voracious boss. But that's pretty rare. What it boils down to is, you know, I'm going to talk about the college of those college ships. I mean, while you're in college, you know it is about you. It's all about you. And a good day is when you heard something you never heard before, you saw something in a saw, before you did something. So life is cool when I'm on a really steep learning curve. Well, if you're out in the world, whether you're in medicine or the marketplace or the military, whatever you're doing, that world is about mastery and it's not about doing something for the first time six hours a day. That's called incompetency. We don't let you do that to patients or customers or investors. They actually want people who know what they're doing. So I go from this thing where it's all about novelty to all about mastery. It's a huge shift, and that's a longer, more patient pathway. So sometimes people are looking for the but it's not amazingly new every single day. I must be in the wrong place. No, you're just thinking about the paradigm of life wrong. And we keep talking about getting more out of life, not cram more into it. Oh, I need another hobby, I need a bigger thing, I need more. No, you don't need more. You need to get more out of what's already there. And so we start teaching people more how to live into that life, to get more full of liveness from it.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: And this is the idea of really designing for meaning and designing for the right kind of meaning, which means we need to be honest about the kind of meaning that we can design for and the kinds of meaning that we can't really design for. And so talk about the kind of meaning that people usually want to get, the very big meaning, and why that's different from the meaning that you're talking about designing.
00:14:24
Speaker 2: In your book.
00:14:25
Speaker 3: It's a design book, not a philosophy book. So we don't try to answer the meaning of life the big question, you know, what's the meaning of life? Is there a God? Blah blah blah. That's not a designable question, But getting more meaning out of life is a designable question. And this idea of getting more out of not packing more into.
00:14:43
Speaker 2: First of all, am I going to change the world. Probably not, And that's a good thing to aspire to. But if that's the only egg in your meaning basket, boy, are you at risk? And so, first thing you get beyond impact and then becoming fully human, it means I'm not just making a difference, but I'm also living more fully. And so the key thing we do is we try to give people, you know, more food groups, not just the meat of impact, but the vegetables of wonder and the beverages of you know, flow, And so we try to get people a couple more crayons in the box to mix the metaphor.
00:15:17
Speaker 1: So it sounds like we're not going after the meaning of life. We're going after meaning in life. And a thing that we need to radically accept to do that is that we need to understand how tiny sometimes the meaning in life buckets are. And I think this gets us to this idea of the scandal of particularity. Dave, do you want to explain what this is?
00:15:35
Speaker 2: Yes, a scandal particularity is a philosophical idea, actually started as a theological idea by Walter Brugman. But what it really boils down to is It turns out the ultimate is only accessible in the particular. To put it differently, the sublime is actually found in the ridiculous beauty, truth, love, communion, unity, These lovely things we all aspire to, and when we experience them deeply, we're kind of go ooh, that's really it.
00:16:01
Speaker 3: You know.
00:16:01
Speaker 2: You see that amazing sunset and everybody kind of goes, ooh, I want more of that. That's what I was made for. And so that alt is beckoning to all of us all the time. But it turns out it only arrives in small, partial chunks. They're all essentially reflections of that fullness, they're not full embodiments of it. Every one of those experiences of something wonderful, frankly, it leaves you wanting more, Like you know, that was a really great kiss, but it stopped too soon. You know, you can never have all of it. So the scandal particular is it's kind of scandalous that these wonderful things only come in these little cupcake sized bits, you know, that little tasting thing they give you at Costco. You know, like, where's the rest of the pizza? And oh, that was a really good bite. And the fact that I long for more is the promise that life will continue to be interesting. So the huge shift is in the scandal particularity. You go from it's still not what I really want too, that was lovely and mores to come. It's a complete transformation of your relationship with finitude.
00:17:09
Speaker 1: We humans don't like finitude. When something feels good, we want more, more accomplishment, more success, more kisses, more nachos. But chasing more isn't how we get to capital m meaning. To do that, we have to embrace the finite bits, however scandalous that might feel. But the big question is how do we do that? How do we notice and make the most of these tiny, beautiful moments. We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns after the break. Stanford designers Dave Evans and Bill Burnett argue that instead of trying to find the big elusive meaning in life, we should instead focus on the little stuff, tiny moments of beauty and wonder. In fact, they think we should all be putting our efforts into creating these kinds of moments.
00:18:07
Speaker 3: Well, you can design moments right, design any experience, and what you're looking for is to connect that moment to something bigger than yourself, right s transcendence that moment can be. I always make my grandmother's purple cabbage. It's a recipe, you know, Germany from the thirties. It's just purple gabbage with some vinegar and sugar. But it's a thing. And when the purple cabbage comes out, the moment is everybody remembers Grandma. So it's these particular moments where we can discover a connection to the ultimate meaning of life. I guess love community a memory of an important person in our lives. You have opportunities all around you to create these moments. I just you know, I live in an industrial neighborhood in the city, and I'm walking to the train. I'm noticing there's this bush that's got a bunch of purple flowers on it. I don't know why it's blooming in December, but there's this bush doing its thing. I stood there for a moment and I watched probably twenty other people just walk right by it. But to stop and take some pictures, just to have a moment to savor the beauty of nature. Part of this moment making thing is change what you're looking for, pay attention be available to what's right in front of you, this bush with purple flowers, the friendly barista who you know heated up my muffin. All the little things actually are packed with meaning. And you can design those moments, and you can also recognize and savor those moments, And in either case, you're changing the way your brain is wired. Right, You're starting to look for things that are imbued with the scandal of particularly the meaning in life, not the meaning of life.
00:19:52
Speaker 2: What's really going on in you know, we're designed guys. We're going to give you tools to design something, to make something. What are we making? So if I go right to making meaning, nine times out of ten, the people we talk with, well from twenty to ninety they're all having the same problem. They go up this impact thing. So if I want these other forms of meaning, they're found in a different way of seeing the world.
00:20:12
Speaker 1: To really get into this idea of moment making, we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of worlds. First, the world that we often find ourselves in, the world of outcomes and instrumental value and capitalism and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What you call the transactional world. So, Dave, what's the transactional world?
00:20:30
Speaker 2: We've posited this idea of the tale of two worlds. There's the transactional world where I go and get stuff done, and there's the flow world, which is the fullness of the cosmos that's happening in this very moment, right in front of me, right under my feet, right around me.
00:20:43
Speaker 3: All the time.
00:20:44
Speaker 2: We're playing with which world you're participating in in terms of directing your attention. Transactional world, you know, it's the world of lists. Frankly, it's a world where you're living almost entirely in the past or the future. I am criticizing what it did last time and learning from it so it can do it better. And I'm thinking about you know, I'm still a post it note, Gude. I am literally looking at my desk and I've got one, two, three, four, of five, six, seventy, got eighteen things on a post list, and there's circles next to them, and if the circle has an excident, it's done. So right now I have twelve out of eighteen things with exues and six things with circles. And you know what a really good day is A really good day is when there's all exes. What it can't wait is for that to be over All the transaction world wants to be is done and successful, successfully done, and the feedback is money and accolade and social media likes, and you get tons of feedback. So it's an easy world to be completely stuck in. And some people tell you it's the only real world, and that's that's kind of heart pricking.
00:21:43
Speaker 1: And so you make a distinction between this transactional world and a different world that you call the flow world. So Bill, what's the flow world? How's it very different from the thing that Dave was just talking about.
00:21:53
Speaker 3: Well, in terms of what Dave just said and transactions, it's looking backwards to see what I got done and looking forward to see what's next. And I'm never right here in the moment, in the present moment, and the flow world is more about the present moment. Again, it's available all the time. There's nothing inherently wrong with the transactional word, but it's when you make intrinsically float things. Let's say I have a mindfulness practice or I have a yoga practice, which should just be about being in the moment, in that place where you're in a sort of a flow state. You can turn that into transaction. Hey, I went to yoga five times this week. Check and none of those things are the way the flow world actually works. You can be in both worlds at the same time. By the way, I can be in a totlet flow state looking at the purple flowers and still get to the train on time. Right, there's no contradiction here. It was the work of you know, doctor Lisa Miller at Columbia. We're talking about the awakened brain and the achieving brain, or the left brain and the right brain, if you want to use that model, whatever it is. They're both on all the time. It's just you're not paying any attention. You know. The left brain is the one that talks. And if you're like me and Dave, there's somebody talking in my head all the time, and it's taken up all the space. The ability to access your creative of self here into it. It's all there. It's just underdeveloped in our society. And as they mentioned, people trust the transactional brain, the brain the talks. They think it's the real one, and they think this other one is sort of you know, it's it's okay, but it's not quote real cute. It's just is real, in fact, even more real. If you want to be a whole human being, you have to accept the reality of your creativity, your intuition, your awakened brain. All these things are neurologically true. It's just we live in a society that doesn't value them.
00:23:47
Speaker 2: You know, we're talking about reframes all the time, but point of a reframe is to look at something differently, change your point of view. And we're trying to free people up to get them access to a bunch of stuff that they're missing. Now or are you doing this work too? So let me turn the arrow around. Now, you've got this struggle with your students. What are you finding helpful in number one, convincing them that this is available in legitimate actually spending some time and energy on it.
00:24:11
Speaker 1: Well, I think this was one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you and so excited about this concept of the transactional world, because I think, especially my type A Yale undergraduates, spend a lot of time in this transactional world. You had this quip that the transactional world is very imperialistic, which I was like, yes, yes, yes, because I think it sucks you in. You Bill, you mentioned this idea of you're doing your meditation, which in theory should be like full on flow world, you're just being present and nothing else. But I'm taking it off my list. I also have my meditation on a post it note, and I'm trying to do it so that I work better in my you know, investment, make a job or something like that. So I'm curious what you all think of, like how to fight the imperialism. This transactional world is so prone to suck you in. Especially I think if you've been successful and benefited from the transactional world in the way that a lot of our Ivy League students have done.
00:25:00
Speaker 2: Well, one of our tools is savoring. And I know you're a saving fan as well. You're sitting at a red light and your favorite song comes on and you kind of go, oh, that's great, Oh no, no, really love it. Oh my god, I love that Dylan song. It is so drop all the way into it for seventeen seconds and then off you go. And if you start learning how to do that, you start learning how to do a sudden savoring like it's a good cup of coffee. Wait, hold that one on your tongue for three seconds, longer three seconds. Oh my god, I can actually taste because I make half calf, I use dark decaf and medium grind calf. Can I taste both beans?
00:25:39
Speaker 3: Oh god? It can.
00:25:41
Speaker 2: That moves the needle.
00:25:43
Speaker 1: One of the reasons I love this suggestion is that it's just a reminder that we can switch back and forth. One of the suggestions you give in the book is to literally tell yourself, okay, switch And this was something I found myself even using right after reading the book. Is you know, I'll be prepping for a podcast and you know, kind of in full transaction, urgent mind head, and then I just remember, like, oh wait, switch. Ah, I'm paying attention to the light in the world, or like the seat under me, or you know, someone walking by, let me smile at them. It's almost like you give yourself the task of noticing what you can notice in the flow world. And that works pretty well.
00:26:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, it really does. The idea of flipping the switch. Like Dave and I were prepping for this, you know, the podcast, and we're looking at our notes and that was all transactional and then just before we came on. It was the moment when I flipped the switch to like, oh wow, I get to talk to this really interesting person, Laurie Santos. This is an amazing body of work. This is going to be fun. There's the ways you can get on stuck that are really quite simple. I don't think you have to spend ten years developing a meditation practice. Go ahead, that's probably a good thing. But even the zen monks would say that enlightenment is instantaneous. And one of my favorite quotes is if you can't find enlightenment right where you are, where do you expect to find it? Is it over there? Is it over there? That's right here? And it's in just little moments. So it's easier than you think. You don't have to spend a lot of time. Savoring is one thing, the idea of just practicing acceptance. Hey, I'm just going to try to be in the real world today and see what happens and availability can I change what I'm looking for. It's all about connection. It's all about love and people and things beyond yourself. So is there a moment where you can have a little more community? Can you talk to that person on the train. Can you chat with someone at the coffee shop? Find a way to connect? You know, these little tiny design moments that help you get unstuck and figure out that you know, maybe there is some meaning in the life you're already living, and you don't have to go find it somewhere else.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: One of the reasons I love your books so much is you tell us some really good techniques for making that switch, for kind of switching to the flow world. And one of the big ones you talk about is this idea of wonder Dave. You mentioned that you give your students the mantra of pursuing late wonderfulness. What do you mean by that?
00:28:09
Speaker 2: You know, minset matters. And if you walk into a room you're walking any experience. Oh, it's probably going to be boring. I don't think I even know these people. Your chances of fulfilling that expectations are extremely high. If you're walk in kind of going, man, I bet this is going to be great. It can't wait to meet these interesting people. Now you maybe doesnappointed. Then maybe all absolute dults like, oh oh well, but when you round up, your chance of finding it goes way up. Use confirmation bias as a friend, give yourself a chance. You know, we're learning how to play the game to win here. So the pursuit of late and wonderfulness is there's something wonderful going on all the time.
00:28:42
Speaker 3: On the late and wonderfulness. This is also a response to our students, you know, have a very high bar for everything. It's like, I'm not going to go interview at a big company because big companies are bad. Well, how do you know that? Well, that's all all my friends tell me. All right, here's your assignment. You know you're going to go interview at you know, Apple and Google and come back. And now one students that I will never interview at the CIA, say, okay, go interview at the CIA. There's a twenty percent chance that there's something in there that's interesting. Go find give it a shot, Go find it. And inevitably they come back and they go, do you know that the CIA is working like ten years ahead? In the AI thing? They talked about stuff nobody's talking about in the valley. I totally want to work there. So our students said a ridiculously high bar for their experiences, and if they're not going to be amazing, they don't want to do it, and so they shut themselves out of so many things they could try because their bar for late and wonderfulness is if it's not one hundred percent, I'm not going to do it. And then when you actually get down to how do you know it's not going to be cool, they don't know. They just heard it from a friend, or more likely they're just afraid to try it. And so this is a way of getting them unstuck.
00:29:50
Speaker 1: So that's seeking out these moments of wonder and maybe even these tiny moments of wonder, not putting wonder like you know, capital w wonder out. They look for. A second strategy you've talked about a lot, is to attend to coherence. Dave, what's coherence and why is it so important?
00:30:05
Speaker 2: Okay, So we define coherenceatives the intersection of the alignment of who you are, what you believe in, what you're doing. The research on meaning will say that if you can interconnect those three dots, who am I, what do I believing, what am I doing? Then my life is coherent. I am making sense in the world. I'm acting just like myself. And if I don't have those dots connected, the chance of meaning making goes way down now. Of course, the prerequisite to connecting those dots is locating them. So we have an exercise called the compass exercise which has three components my current story, my workview, and my life you so three a little essays you're write that will help you figure out the narrative that describes kind of who you are now. Is that the totality of who you are? No, but it's a real good start. We've been doing this a couple one hundred thousand times now, so we kind of got to hang out and it seems to be working well for people. So coherency is when I'm actually living out who I really am in the world, including the compromises that I have to make. And a coherency sighting, which is a meaning making tool, is catching yourself in the act of when was I coherent today? So example, a really lovely coherency siding for me, which is so easy to miss, you know. One of the growing edges of life design at Stanford is not more and more classes, but classes to different affinity groups. So there is a pilot on designing your Muslim life. So the kids who adhere to Islam feel pretty isolated and they would like to be in this life conversation with people of a similar mindset. So Bill gets them in a room the Muslim chaplain. Bill the existential atheist are co teaching a class and designing your Muslim life. And I'm the guy with a seminary degree. I'm sitting in the back of the room watching my atheist partner teach a spirituality class, and I'm thinking, this is so cool. I helped build a place where people are integrating the spirituality even beyond their personal ideology. That is such a coherent moment for me. This is as good as it gets. And so it's about catching ourselves in the act when it's actually working, and guess what, it's working more often than you think.
00:32:06
Speaker 1: It's time for a quick break. But when we return, we'll explore some of my favorite tips for stepping into the flow world, and we'll hear the surprising way that Bill is able to stay in the flow world almost all the time. The Happiness Lab will be back at a moment. We've been chatting with designers Dave Evans and Bill Burnett and exploring how to get out of the transactional world of doodoo doo all the time, so that we can find ways into the flow world. Now, flow is an idea that we talk about a lot on the Happiness Lab, but Bill and Dave have developed their own unique take on the concept.
00:32:50
Speaker 2: The original definition of flow according to me head check Sime High the founder of this concept and a wonderful researcher, and you know, the definitive work flow the Psychology of Optimal Experience comes out some time ago and defines the flow channel as being a zone where the challenge of the task in which you are currently engaged and your skill level are close to matched. Meaning you're not underskilled and now you're anxious because you're going to fail. You're not overskilled, and you're bored because you could do this in your sleep, but you're kind of really on it. And so what happens is the task demands enough of you that you could be fully engaged, and that zone is a place where you might drop into flow. There's like, you know, APEX, when you're really in the zone that amazing US hockey team to beat the Russians, you know, you're totally in flow. That's great, and most people think that's what flow is. But here's the problem. It's this APEX experience, which makes it way too hard, particularly in the simple task where I might be overskilled. We redefine what we call simple flow. You don't have to let boredom steal your brain. I mean, last night, the heater went on at one in the morning, What the heck? And I went upstairs and the thermostat had kind of exploded. So I went all the way down the nerd rabbit hole of an old school thermace that didn't work very well, and it only took me forty five minutes and I fixed it, and I had the best time because I went all the way into Not this is such a pan of ass on, but it's kind of like Jeae. I wonder what that nineteen eighties engineer was thinking when he designed one of the worst UIs of all time. How interesting this could be? And so I just chose to go all the way in and enjoy the heck out of solving my thermostat problem and saving a little gas for Pacific asnal. You so just go with it. That's a choice flow, full engagement in what you're doing, which allows you to experience as much of your liveness as that particular activity will permit to be expressed in your scandalously particular self in this scandalously particular moment could be a flow mode.
00:34:53
Speaker 1: I love that flow really plays on this idea of the scandal of the particular, because we can only ever get it in the present moment. It's not something we can design for the future. Think about in the past, Bill, you've also talked about how these moments of being in flow really require being a little bit more embodied. Why is embodiment so important?
00:35:11
Speaker 3: Oh, you know this thing, this body, isn't just a thing that takes my brain to meetings. I mean, we know that there's a lot of neurology going on in the gut, in the vagual nerves, and all the other systems. So we are embodied creatures and we learn by moving and working in the world. There's our intelligence, our IQ, I guess you would say, the talking part of our brain. There's our EQ, our emotional part of our brain. There's our kinesthetic understanding of the world. How do we move in the world, the appropriateception in our body. There's a whole bunch of stuff coming up now around how the body actually understands itself in the world. And so, you know, don't talk to me about artificial intelligence and disembodied computers. You have to be inside this embodied intelligence because it's also where where we feel our intuition, our curiosity, and many of the triggers for flow have to do with, you know, either releasing a dopamine circuit or releasing some kind of a neural circuit that engages the rest of the body in that experience, which is why athletes often to talk about being in the zone or things. It's a physical kinesthetic flow. So these are all embodiments of ourselves in a time and space in the world that are all triggers to what we were calling simple flow or the flow state that's available all the time. One of our analogies, it's like an aquifer running right under the surface. All you got to do is drill a hole and there's plenty of water. You just got to dig into that thing that's right beneath you.
00:36:39
Speaker 2: Bill I called the flow Master. Bill has love flow for a long time. He's like Captain Flow. Bill. You know, more than a few times you'll tell me something like, oh God, you know, it's really been great. I've been in flow for four days now. I mean, you claim to attain this persistent flow state. Can you give the listeners any tips on how the heck do you pull that off?
00:37:00
Speaker 3: It's both something I try to do and it's a mystery fundamentally, but I really get back to it depends on what you're looking for. And so when I start my day, I've been for along many many years now, I start the day with an affirmation where I say I live in the best of all possible worlds because as date mentioned, I'm an extential atheist, so truly the radical acceptance that this is it might as well be the best, And everything I do today I choose to do. Choosing into my experience, I think is there's the number one way in which I find flow.
00:37:37
Speaker 2: That's the voice of availability. But that's what availability sounds like.
00:37:40
Speaker 3: I'm pretty good at being simultaneously I get stuff done. I mean, you know, some people might I'm absent minded, but it's just because my mind is something else, not on whatever their priority is in the transaction world. But it's also you know, I've practiced creativity. I'm a painter and I'm an artist. I spend a lot of time in that wonderful you know's a quote from Robert Henry. The goal isn't to make artists to be in that wonderful state of mind that makes art inevitable. So I try to spend a lot of time in the state of mind that makes flow inevitable.
00:38:17
Speaker 1: Another thing you seem to both spend a lot of time in is the last suggestion that you have for everyone for how to get into the flow world more, which is that you both spend a lot of time in community. Why is community so important for design thinking generally?
00:38:31
Speaker 3: Well, community, I mean, in terms of design, design is always done on teams. It's always done with people. You want to radically collaborate with people of different points of view. But the community part in the new book really comes from Dave's experience teaching apartment standard called the Distinguished Career Institute. It's a gap year for grown ups. People come to Stanford for a year after a distinguished career and they spend time trying to figure out the pivot, the thing they're going to do next in their lives. These are pretty smart, successful people, Dave, how does this community thing work with them?
00:39:03
Speaker 2: Well, it's been interesting, first of all, and we do community work at all our classes, and we often say it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself. Dan Siegel, you know, formerly out of the UCLA at the Mindset Institute, will remind us all that, in fact, the autonomous itself is a profoundly toxic c line. We now know scientifically the consciousness extends. This is the nature of human consciousness. We are deeply involved with each other. So if you start understanding that, then you really want to leverage what it means to be in community, because that the fullness of you is really only available as part of us. And so what we found at this distinguished Careers group, I started putting people into design teams, not to design the life after their program, but to get the most from it in the present moment. And the nice thing about these folks, these thirty five to forty five people forty five to ninety years old, mostly fifty five to seventy five thinking about what do I do next? And they're here to become their fuller selves and they spend some time just exploring. So this idea of we're all becoming can you become more intentionally? And so the fellows look at each other kind of go, well, hi, who are you? You know, I'm Dave, I'm Lori Santos. What are you into? I'm going an happiness thing. Oh really, that's so cool. And they take each other at face value and the only thing they want to do for each other is help one another become their more authentic selves. And what's funny is that a couple of weeks into the program they will all say, these are the best friends I've ever made. And mylne is I'm not buying it. You created corporate cultures. Almost all of them have big families, aren't most of you offending off hundreds of people.
00:40:31
Speaker 3: Saying where are you?
00:40:32
Speaker 2: Or mische you've been going for you and you're telling me these thirty five yahoos that some admission officer at Stanford threw you into a room with you've never met before in six weeks become the best friends you've ever had.
00:40:42
Speaker 3: Really, And they go yeah.
00:40:44
Speaker 2: And the reason is because they're in this kind of community where the intention of our interaction is not just having a good time. That's a social gathering. It's not getting something done that's a collaborative gathering. And my argument is ninety nine percent of what people do in the transactional world is social or collaborative wonderful things. But then there's a formative community, which is why are we together. We're together to become our better selves and to enjoy more fully of the self we're presently trying on. So that is a different conversation with different questions and a trans I don't have to be in the same thing. So the climate change fanatic and the person who wants to become a fine artist, they can be in the same group because they're not collaborating on the content of their lives. They're collaborating on the intent of their lives, which is becoming. So when we set people in relationships that allow becoming to occur, which all you need to be as a thoughtful, self aware person, stuff happens.
00:41:41
Speaker 1: And so for folks that maybe can't join this Stanford group but really want to form a similar formative community and focus on becoming any tips, the.
00:41:50
Speaker 2: Savile answer is, frankly, come up with some generative questions. I did this at Thanksgiving, actually three Thanksgivings, and in all the dinners I brought three questions, and those questions were formative, not transactional or entertainment. One was boy, the world's kind of full of a lot of ugly things these days. When were you recently surprised by someone doing something good? They've restored your faith in humanity? And guess what, everybody had an answer. I asked directly, what have you become this year? Or what are you hoping to become next year? And you know, maybe two out of ten people are like, WHOA, that's a little much, you know, But in addis tid oh, well you know what I'm becoming is? And the other is is there a letter in you that needs to get out? And if so, what is it and who's it too? And those are all becoming kinds of questions and people are surprisingly available. So the key thing if you want to start forming a more formative community is have better question.
00:42:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something that I think we get wrong all the time. There's such a lovely work by folks like Nick Eppley that find that we often go for shallow questions, especially for a dinner party something like Thanksgiving or holiday meal or something. But really what people resonate with answering are these so called deep questions, questions that are vulnerable, which I think have a lot of features of these becoming questions. Right, what are these emotions that you want to share? How can we focus things in a different way, How can you take a different perspective, How can you reframe to steal the designers thinking It seems like we've known this in social science for a while, but we can really apply it to becoming more in the full world and finding these moments of meaning making.
00:43:22
Speaker 2: People want to have the experience of interacting with each other in meaningful ways, So think of a way to say something kindly. Have your own story ready to go. Don't make it be about you, But if you want to get it in the deep water, jump in the pool first, and I think you'll be surprised. People are pretty good to each other if.
00:43:37
Speaker 3: You give them a chance, and they're desperate for these conversations and these kinds of communities, right the loneliness epidemic. They're not going to find it on social media. They're not going to find it in these other places. You know, when people are trying to think about how can I improve my life? What can I do to make it better? Getting rid of these dysfunctional beliefs, leaning into these meaning making moments and creating communities instead of echo chambers and arguing and all this other stuff that's going on. You know, Dave is a big Jesus guy and I'm a big you know, not needs just needs you. Again. We've been collaborating for twenty some years on this work and it's the best collaboration I've ever had. So you don't have to agree on things in order to be in the collaboration, particularly if the collaboration is about how to become the best version of yourself. And with that intention, do anything. Start a book club, start a sell on where people get together and everybody gets to ask one question. But the questions can't be in the transaction world. That's the only rule.
00:44:39
Speaker 1: So thank you so much for figuring out ways that we can find a few more of these moments of meaning if we're doing it in a way that I think really resonates with everybody that's feeling stuck right now, which is not by creaming more in but getting more out of the moments that we already have.
00:44:53
Speaker 2: Well, thanks, And here's the little ps by the way, while we duck the question what is the meaning of your life? And let's just live more meaningfully along the way. Let's live more purposefully on the way too. Whatever we're going to find later. It turns out, if you get good at this, that meaning of life thing is going to come into view a lot more soon, a lot more Clearly.
00:45:15
Speaker 1: Figure out the meaning of life is hard, but I hope that this episode has convinced you that there's plenty of ways to find a meaning in life, even when it doesn't feel like it. If you're feeling stuck, why not commit to turning towards some new moments of meaning this week? And if you want even more advice about how to do that, check out Bill and Dave's new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, which is out this week. That's a wrap on our series about getting unstuck in twenty twenty six. What do you think? Why not let us know? You can email us at Happiness Lab at Pushkin dot fm, or leave us a review to tell us what you liked. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness with my free newsletter on my website, Doctor Laurie Santos dot com. That's d R l a U ri E. Santos dot com. We'll be back next week, just in time for Valentine's Day with a new series on the Science of Love. In our first Step episode, we'll explore what we get wrong about love. We'll learn why the love we get from others doesn't always register emotionally, and what we can do to open ourselves up to it.
00:46:18
Speaker 2: We can be loved, you know. We can have all these people in our lives that kind of objectively love us, or we don't actually feel loved by them, or maybe not feel loved by them or as much as we want to be.
00:46:29
Speaker 1: That's next week on the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Let's be real for a second. The world feels pretty overwhelming right now. Lots of us are feeling exhausted and despondent. We spend our days grinding at work and then trying to zone out when we get out of work, which often means scrolling endlessly just to unwind. And if that sounds familiar, you might be wondering quietly to yourself, is this all there is? How do I feel better when the world feels so blah? What if there was a way to hit the reset button on how you experience life, To see the world with fresh eyes like you did as a child, when everything felt alive, full of possibility and somehow a little magical.
00:01:00
Speaker 2: The mere fact that anything exists at all is astonishing. So just take a longer, deeper look into almost anything and some wondrousness might be available to you.
00:01:13
Speaker 3: Well.
00:01:13
Speaker 1: In today's episode, the last one in our series on how to Get Unstuck in twenty twenty six, we'll learned that this mindset can be within reach. In fact, today's two guests will share their tips for how to design it.
00:01:25
Speaker 2: Greetings, this is Dave Evans, the co founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab, so glad to be here today with doctor Laurie Santos and my dear partner, Bill Burnette. We've been teaching life design for twenty odd years and now Hi.
00:01:36
Speaker 3: I'm Bill Burnette. I'm an adjunct professor at Stanford University teaching the Designing Your Life series of classes, and now the co author with my good friend Dave of a new book called How to Live a Meaningful Life Using design thinking to unlock purpose, joy, and flow.
00:01:52
Speaker 1: Every day You're going to live to hate that long a subtitle every time you have to say I learned about Dave and Bill's work because our professional stories are surprisingly similar. Like me, they created a class aimed at improving college students well being, one that ended up going viral, and like me, they've decided to share the insights from their class widely with people of all ages, far beyond the university setting.
00:02:17
Speaker 2: We teach you the improv skills to live life more fully. Life is an improv. It really is this thing you make up as you go along. But you can get a lot better at them making up as you go along. So we teach a class that starts out with debunking a bunch of dysfunctional beliefs, really wonderful things that people often think are true and guide their lives, but happen not to be either helpful or even true at all, of which there are many. Once we get through the dysfunctional beliefs, we start giving them tools and techniques for how to figure out what they want, how to meet people can animate that thing in them, how to actually go and engage with the world and get going.
00:02:50
Speaker 1: And so core idea of this class is this idea of design thinking, which I think a lot of folks don't really know what that means.
00:02:56
Speaker 3: Bill.
00:02:56
Speaker 1: What's design thinking?
00:02:57
Speaker 3: Human centered design? Now we call it design thinking. It's a way of solving problems. It's deeply human and engaged with the problems humans have. And so it was obvious to me when we started thinking about how our students might approach building a meaningful life that it was a design problem because designers make things new to the world all the time. I was at Apple for seven years before Stanford and I worked on the very first laptops, and when you're building something that's never existed before, you can't just engineer it because you don't have any data about the thing that's never existed like your future, and so it's using human centered design to figure out what's the next cool version of you.
00:03:37
Speaker 1: I love this idea of the next cool version of you because often when we think about designing, we think about designing something like emphasis on the thing. But you've really argued that we can design ourselves and our own lives and interesting ways. What are some of the features of design thinking we should bring in when we're thinking about designing our own lives.
00:03:54
Speaker 2: Well, it starts to you know, again user centered to human centered. So it starts with like, what does it mean to be a person? Well, you know, our sort of definition is a human person is a becoming, a never ending story, and so what you're growing into is the for the revealed version of yourself. All of us contain more aliveness than when lifetime permits us to live out. I either there's more than one of you in there, so there is no getting it right because you are way bigger than it when it is your lifetime. So all of us are only going to express a small portion of the fullness of our humanity. We have multiple choices in front of us, both between which of me do I want to give a chance to get out on the stage and the next season of my life. And by the way, what does the world think might be an interesting thing for me to be collaborating with other people on. So I'm looking for the nexus of those things, which is evolving all the time. And now all of let's go have some ideas and get started to start prototyping what the future of that person might be. So it really does begin with the very first dysfunctional belief is I have to find my passion, purpose answer thing. No, I have to find the next one that will be interesting enough to live into what will become after that.
00:05:03
Speaker 1: So if you're feeling a little off track, stick around because Bill and Dave have some excellent advice on becoming of version of yourself that feels more engaged and more live. We'll learn all their tips after some quick ads. Dave Evans and Bill Burnett are best known for their popular Stanford course Designing Your Life and the best selling book that grew out of that class, but they've recently put out a new book called How to Live a Meaningful Life. One of their biggest insights is what's known as the Designer's Way, a mindset for intentionally engineering the life you want.
00:05:47
Speaker 3: Designs inherently value free, except we always try to make the next design better. Right, we think we can improve the world. So you start with wonder. I'm naturally curious. If I'm a designer, I'm curious about the world and how to make things better. It's not just who has that work, but oh wow, how amazing is that? I wonder how that works? Right? Then we say availability, be available to the experiences of the world. That's where the interesting stuff happens. Radical acceptance like availability plus acceptance is like we always say, design starts in reality. You've got to start right here where you are, not in some place where you think you should be because you saw it on social media or something else. Right, and then being fully engaged but commonly detached from the outcomes. Because we know a lot about decision science. You can make a good decision, but that doesn't assly mean you're going to get the outcome you want. So be fully engaged in your life, be intentional, but give yourself some grace about the outcomes, and then God in the world and tell your story or create your world. So as mindset's put together, we call it a designer's way, but I when you put it together, it's like, approach the world with a sense of wonder, be available to the things that are happening, root yourself in the reality of the world, and then tell that story to people. Because when you tell the story, you're creating the experience of the world that you want to have.
00:07:09
Speaker 1: I loved this idea of the Designer's Way in part because it's not just great for human centered design or even designing your life. I think it's so useful for navigating all the stuff that can come up in a life. It fits with a lot of the happiness evidence we talk about on the show, Dave in particular. I know what this idea of radical acceptance you've talked about, how you use that to navigate a really painful time of grief in your own life.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're probably referring to the death of my beloved wife, Claudia So on March eighth of twenty twenty, she got a terminal diagnosis. She beat breast cancer once before twenty years prior, decided to give it a second try, picked a much nastier cancer, and she was four ways metastasized in terminal. On day one, she thought she had bronchitas. She came home with the destines. She had sixty to twenty four months to live. We got nine, and she died at seventy. She was sixty nine at the time, so she died fifteen years ahead of the contract. We had a deal and she broke the deal. You know, I was pretty pissed. But the first thing was to frame what is this? We said, Okay, well, I'm gonna die. I was going to die before she is. Now I know when, and so oh it's sad, not tragic, because at seventy I've kind of done everything I need to do. There's nothing really missing. She goes, but I'd love second helping is of a couple of things before I go. So the mantra for the next year was second helpings, which we didn't get that many up because between COVID and fires and everything else is pretty tough. But nonetheless, the holy idea was to decide how to think about it. Mindset was everything. So I started interviewing widows, people who I thought had widowed. Well, so I'm going to borrow other people's wisdom. One of the best pieces of wisdom I got was from a guy whose wife went through a nine year death process. He said, look, Dave, don't waste one second thinking about how are you going to handle this after she's gone, because no matter what you do, since you had an intimate marriage, it's going to rip your legs off, it's going to blow your brains up. There's not a chance in hell you're going to be prepared for this. So the don't always time trying to prepare, and every bit of energy you take away thinking about that future, you're stealing from the present. So lean into doing nothing but enjoy the Heck, at the time, you guys have and as soon as she's gone you can figure that out. Then that's exactly what it did, was exactly the right thing to do. So I learned a ton about grief, but there was all in that framework of it just happens to be really painful. I wonder what the lessons might be.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: And also just not going away from reality. You mentioned this idea before that you can't design things well if you're not taking into account the reality of the situation, as crappy and as terrible as it might be.
00:09:35
Speaker 2: Well, you know, design is an empirical process. So if it's empirical, it has to work in this place called real. It's the only place design works. We can't work with you and the landa should. We only do real stuff, and in reality you can make it better.
00:09:49
Speaker 3: I mean, just also mention Claudia was an exceptional woman and her ability to accept radical acceptance isn't about happiness per se. It's about no reality, which means radically accepting grief. But Claudia was brilliant at this. You could imagine a different situation with someone clinging to false hope or something else, but having watched Dave do this, it was both incredibly tragic and incredibly beautiful in a way that they together managed this acceptance a situation that neither one of them, neither one of them wanted. So that was battle testing one of our mindsets for sure.
00:10:31
Speaker 2: And it's situations where right now we're walking through this with a couple of our significantly older friends, where the guy is going down swinging. I mean, he's not going quietly into this night. He is rejecting everything right and he's ruining his life in the life of everybody around him.
00:10:45
Speaker 3: And it's a choice.
00:10:46
Speaker 2: So choosing well on this acceptance thing has an amazing upset. It really is one of the biggest mindsets of all time.
00:10:53
Speaker 1: So you all are living in your daily life teaching students, and you give them these incredible tools for designing their lives in wonderful ways. But you, like me, sometimes have the interesting moment of a student who comes back a little bit later on and you know, maybe later in their twenties, and they often feel like my ill students sometimes feel, which is it like they're kind of feeling a little lost, Like they're kind of feeling like they tried to follow what you were telling them, but life isn't turning out the way they thought. Bill, tell me about some of these conversations you had with your students.
00:11:27
Speaker 3: I love meeting students two years out, five years out, seven years out. I just talked to somebody who was like fifteen years out and came up and said, oh, Professor Burnett, I haven't seen you. So they come back, and often, you know, I get two reactions. One is, hey, I remember the class and it's still very helpful. And in fact, even my friends ask me sometimes and I tell them read the book or whatever. And then sometimes they say, you know, I used all these tools, but I'm still my life still doesn't have the meaning or the purpose or the impact that I wanted to have, particularly impact, because the gen zs all want to have a lot of impact. And so that was one of the reasons we wrote this last book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, is that even after designing a pretty good life for career, they're still looking for well, wait a minute, where's the payoff, where's the impact, Where's the meaning? And we wanted to go back and look at that kind of step back from the life design I yet really look at more at meaning and purpose because our conclusions, they were looking in the wrong place, and we wanted to give them better navigation. I guess in that question.
00:12:27
Speaker 1: And I think students sometimes get it wrong, especially when they're in that position of feeling like something's missing. When I talk to my own students who are in this position, I often get the sense that they think what they need to do to fix things is to like detonate their life, like I'm going to buy a van and I'm going to move across country or I'm going to move to a farm. But do you both have argued that there are other ways around this that doesn't involve detonating your life. Why is it the wrong path to meaning.
00:12:50
Speaker 2: Well, not never there, I mean every now and then I'll say, yeah, I think you probably should quite out of that horrible, toxic job working for that voracious boss. But that's pretty rare. What it boils down to is, you know, I'm going to talk about the college of those college ships. I mean, while you're in college, you know it is about you. It's all about you. And a good day is when you heard something you never heard before, you saw something in a saw, before you did something. So life is cool when I'm on a really steep learning curve. Well, if you're out in the world, whether you're in medicine or the marketplace or the military, whatever you're doing, that world is about mastery and it's not about doing something for the first time six hours a day. That's called incompetency. We don't let you do that to patients or customers or investors. They actually want people who know what they're doing. So I go from this thing where it's all about novelty to all about mastery. It's a huge shift, and that's a longer, more patient pathway. So sometimes people are looking for the but it's not amazingly new every single day. I must be in the wrong place. No, you're just thinking about the paradigm of life wrong. And we keep talking about getting more out of life, not cram more into it. Oh, I need another hobby, I need a bigger thing, I need more. No, you don't need more. You need to get more out of what's already there. And so we start teaching people more how to live into that life, to get more full of liveness from it.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: And this is the idea of really designing for meaning and designing for the right kind of meaning, which means we need to be honest about the kind of meaning that we can design for and the kinds of meaning that we can't really design for. And so talk about the kind of meaning that people usually want to get, the very big meaning, and why that's different from the meaning that you're talking about designing.
00:14:24
Speaker 2: In your book.
00:14:25
Speaker 3: It's a design book, not a philosophy book. So we don't try to answer the meaning of life the big question, you know, what's the meaning of life? Is there a God? Blah blah blah. That's not a designable question, But getting more meaning out of life is a designable question. And this idea of getting more out of not packing more into.
00:14:43
Speaker 2: First of all, am I going to change the world. Probably not, And that's a good thing to aspire to. But if that's the only egg in your meaning basket, boy, are you at risk? And so, first thing you get beyond impact and then becoming fully human, it means I'm not just making a difference, but I'm also living more fully. And so the key thing we do is we try to give people, you know, more food groups, not just the meat of impact, but the vegetables of wonder and the beverages of you know, flow, And so we try to get people a couple more crayons in the box to mix the metaphor.
00:15:17
Speaker 1: So it sounds like we're not going after the meaning of life. We're going after meaning in life. And a thing that we need to radically accept to do that is that we need to understand how tiny sometimes the meaning in life buckets are. And I think this gets us to this idea of the scandal of particularity. Dave, do you want to explain what this is?
00:15:35
Speaker 2: Yes, a scandal particularity is a philosophical idea, actually started as a theological idea by Walter Brugman. But what it really boils down to is It turns out the ultimate is only accessible in the particular. To put it differently, the sublime is actually found in the ridiculous beauty, truth, love, communion, unity, These lovely things we all aspire to, and when we experience them deeply, we're kind of go ooh, that's really it.
00:16:01
Speaker 3: You know.
00:16:01
Speaker 2: You see that amazing sunset and everybody kind of goes, ooh, I want more of that. That's what I was made for. And so that alt is beckoning to all of us all the time. But it turns out it only arrives in small, partial chunks. They're all essentially reflections of that fullness, they're not full embodiments of it. Every one of those experiences of something wonderful, frankly, it leaves you wanting more, Like you know, that was a really great kiss, but it stopped too soon. You know, you can never have all of it. So the scandal particular is it's kind of scandalous that these wonderful things only come in these little cupcake sized bits, you know, that little tasting thing they give you at Costco. You know, like, where's the rest of the pizza? And oh, that was a really good bite. And the fact that I long for more is the promise that life will continue to be interesting. So the huge shift is in the scandal particularity. You go from it's still not what I really want too, that was lovely and mores to come. It's a complete transformation of your relationship with finitude.
00:17:09
Speaker 1: We humans don't like finitude. When something feels good, we want more, more accomplishment, more success, more kisses, more nachos. But chasing more isn't how we get to capital m meaning. To do that, we have to embrace the finite bits, however scandalous that might feel. But the big question is how do we do that? How do we notice and make the most of these tiny, beautiful moments. We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns after the break. Stanford designers Dave Evans and Bill Burnett argue that instead of trying to find the big elusive meaning in life, we should instead focus on the little stuff, tiny moments of beauty and wonder. In fact, they think we should all be putting our efforts into creating these kinds of moments.
00:18:07
Speaker 3: Well, you can design moments right, design any experience, and what you're looking for is to connect that moment to something bigger than yourself, right s transcendence that moment can be. I always make my grandmother's purple cabbage. It's a recipe, you know, Germany from the thirties. It's just purple gabbage with some vinegar and sugar. But it's a thing. And when the purple cabbage comes out, the moment is everybody remembers Grandma. So it's these particular moments where we can discover a connection to the ultimate meaning of life. I guess love community a memory of an important person in our lives. You have opportunities all around you to create these moments. I just you know, I live in an industrial neighborhood in the city, and I'm walking to the train. I'm noticing there's this bush that's got a bunch of purple flowers on it. I don't know why it's blooming in December, but there's this bush doing its thing. I stood there for a moment and I watched probably twenty other people just walk right by it. But to stop and take some pictures, just to have a moment to savor the beauty of nature. Part of this moment making thing is change what you're looking for, pay attention be available to what's right in front of you, this bush with purple flowers, the friendly barista who you know heated up my muffin. All the little things actually are packed with meaning. And you can design those moments, and you can also recognize and savor those moments, And in either case, you're changing the way your brain is wired. Right, You're starting to look for things that are imbued with the scandal of particularly the meaning in life, not the meaning of life.
00:19:52
Speaker 2: What's really going on in you know, we're designed guys. We're going to give you tools to design something, to make something. What are we making? So if I go right to making meaning, nine times out of ten, the people we talk with, well from twenty to ninety they're all having the same problem. They go up this impact thing. So if I want these other forms of meaning, they're found in a different way of seeing the world.
00:20:12
Speaker 1: To really get into this idea of moment making, we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of worlds. First, the world that we often find ourselves in, the world of outcomes and instrumental value and capitalism and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What you call the transactional world. So, Dave, what's the transactional world?
00:20:30
Speaker 2: We've posited this idea of the tale of two worlds. There's the transactional world where I go and get stuff done, and there's the flow world, which is the fullness of the cosmos that's happening in this very moment, right in front of me, right under my feet, right around me.
00:20:43
Speaker 3: All the time.
00:20:44
Speaker 2: We're playing with which world you're participating in in terms of directing your attention. Transactional world, you know, it's the world of lists. Frankly, it's a world where you're living almost entirely in the past or the future. I am criticizing what it did last time and learning from it so it can do it better. And I'm thinking about you know, I'm still a post it note, Gude. I am literally looking at my desk and I've got one, two, three, four, of five, six, seventy, got eighteen things on a post list, and there's circles next to them, and if the circle has an excident, it's done. So right now I have twelve out of eighteen things with exues and six things with circles. And you know what a really good day is A really good day is when there's all exes. What it can't wait is for that to be over All the transaction world wants to be is done and successful, successfully done, and the feedback is money and accolade and social media likes, and you get tons of feedback. So it's an easy world to be completely stuck in. And some people tell you it's the only real world, and that's that's kind of heart pricking.
00:21:43
Speaker 1: And so you make a distinction between this transactional world and a different world that you call the flow world. So Bill, what's the flow world? How's it very different from the thing that Dave was just talking about.
00:21:53
Speaker 3: Well, in terms of what Dave just said and transactions, it's looking backwards to see what I got done and looking forward to see what's next. And I'm never right here in the moment, in the present moment, and the flow world is more about the present moment. Again, it's available all the time. There's nothing inherently wrong with the transactional word, but it's when you make intrinsically float things. Let's say I have a mindfulness practice or I have a yoga practice, which should just be about being in the moment, in that place where you're in a sort of a flow state. You can turn that into transaction. Hey, I went to yoga five times this week. Check and none of those things are the way the flow world actually works. You can be in both worlds at the same time. By the way, I can be in a totlet flow state looking at the purple flowers and still get to the train on time. Right, there's no contradiction here. It was the work of you know, doctor Lisa Miller at Columbia. We're talking about the awakened brain and the achieving brain, or the left brain and the right brain, if you want to use that model, whatever it is. They're both on all the time. It's just you're not paying any attention. You know. The left brain is the one that talks. And if you're like me and Dave, there's somebody talking in my head all the time, and it's taken up all the space. The ability to access your creative of self here into it. It's all there. It's just underdeveloped in our society. And as they mentioned, people trust the transactional brain, the brain the talks. They think it's the real one, and they think this other one is sort of you know, it's it's okay, but it's not quote real cute. It's just is real, in fact, even more real. If you want to be a whole human being, you have to accept the reality of your creativity, your intuition, your awakened brain. All these things are neurologically true. It's just we live in a society that doesn't value them.
00:23:47
Speaker 2: You know, we're talking about reframes all the time, but point of a reframe is to look at something differently, change your point of view. And we're trying to free people up to get them access to a bunch of stuff that they're missing. Now or are you doing this work too? So let me turn the arrow around. Now, you've got this struggle with your students. What are you finding helpful in number one, convincing them that this is available in legitimate actually spending some time and energy on it.
00:24:11
Speaker 1: Well, I think this was one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you and so excited about this concept of the transactional world, because I think, especially my type A Yale undergraduates, spend a lot of time in this transactional world. You had this quip that the transactional world is very imperialistic, which I was like, yes, yes, yes, because I think it sucks you in. You Bill, you mentioned this idea of you're doing your meditation, which in theory should be like full on flow world, you're just being present and nothing else. But I'm taking it off my list. I also have my meditation on a post it note, and I'm trying to do it so that I work better in my you know, investment, make a job or something like that. So I'm curious what you all think of, like how to fight the imperialism. This transactional world is so prone to suck you in. Especially I think if you've been successful and benefited from the transactional world in the way that a lot of our Ivy League students have done.
00:25:00
Speaker 2: Well, one of our tools is savoring. And I know you're a saving fan as well. You're sitting at a red light and your favorite song comes on and you kind of go, oh, that's great, Oh no, no, really love it. Oh my god, I love that Dylan song. It is so drop all the way into it for seventeen seconds and then off you go. And if you start learning how to do that, you start learning how to do a sudden savoring like it's a good cup of coffee. Wait, hold that one on your tongue for three seconds, longer three seconds. Oh my god, I can actually taste because I make half calf, I use dark decaf and medium grind calf. Can I taste both beans?
00:25:39
Speaker 3: Oh god? It can.
00:25:41
Speaker 2: That moves the needle.
00:25:43
Speaker 1: One of the reasons I love this suggestion is that it's just a reminder that we can switch back and forth. One of the suggestions you give in the book is to literally tell yourself, okay, switch And this was something I found myself even using right after reading the book. Is you know, I'll be prepping for a podcast and you know, kind of in full transaction, urgent mind head, and then I just remember, like, oh wait, switch. Ah, I'm paying attention to the light in the world, or like the seat under me, or you know, someone walking by, let me smile at them. It's almost like you give yourself the task of noticing what you can notice in the flow world. And that works pretty well.
00:26:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, it really does. The idea of flipping the switch. Like Dave and I were prepping for this, you know, the podcast, and we're looking at our notes and that was all transactional and then just before we came on. It was the moment when I flipped the switch to like, oh wow, I get to talk to this really interesting person, Laurie Santos. This is an amazing body of work. This is going to be fun. There's the ways you can get on stuck that are really quite simple. I don't think you have to spend ten years developing a meditation practice. Go ahead, that's probably a good thing. But even the zen monks would say that enlightenment is instantaneous. And one of my favorite quotes is if you can't find enlightenment right where you are, where do you expect to find it? Is it over there? Is it over there? That's right here? And it's in just little moments. So it's easier than you think. You don't have to spend a lot of time. Savoring is one thing, the idea of just practicing acceptance. Hey, I'm just going to try to be in the real world today and see what happens and availability can I change what I'm looking for. It's all about connection. It's all about love and people and things beyond yourself. So is there a moment where you can have a little more community? Can you talk to that person on the train. Can you chat with someone at the coffee shop? Find a way to connect? You know, these little tiny design moments that help you get unstuck and figure out that you know, maybe there is some meaning in the life you're already living, and you don't have to go find it somewhere else.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: One of the reasons I love your books so much is you tell us some really good techniques for making that switch, for kind of switching to the flow world. And one of the big ones you talk about is this idea of wonder Dave. You mentioned that you give your students the mantra of pursuing late wonderfulness. What do you mean by that?
00:28:09
Speaker 2: You know, minset matters. And if you walk into a room you're walking any experience. Oh, it's probably going to be boring. I don't think I even know these people. Your chances of fulfilling that expectations are extremely high. If you're walk in kind of going, man, I bet this is going to be great. It can't wait to meet these interesting people. Now you maybe doesnappointed. Then maybe all absolute dults like, oh oh well, but when you round up, your chance of finding it goes way up. Use confirmation bias as a friend, give yourself a chance. You know, we're learning how to play the game to win here. So the pursuit of late and wonderfulness is there's something wonderful going on all the time.
00:28:42
Speaker 3: On the late and wonderfulness. This is also a response to our students, you know, have a very high bar for everything. It's like, I'm not going to go interview at a big company because big companies are bad. Well, how do you know that? Well, that's all all my friends tell me. All right, here's your assignment. You know you're going to go interview at you know, Apple and Google and come back. And now one students that I will never interview at the CIA, say, okay, go interview at the CIA. There's a twenty percent chance that there's something in there that's interesting. Go find give it a shot, Go find it. And inevitably they come back and they go, do you know that the CIA is working like ten years ahead? In the AI thing? They talked about stuff nobody's talking about in the valley. I totally want to work there. So our students said a ridiculously high bar for their experiences, and if they're not going to be amazing, they don't want to do it, and so they shut themselves out of so many things they could try because their bar for late and wonderfulness is if it's not one hundred percent, I'm not going to do it. And then when you actually get down to how do you know it's not going to be cool, they don't know. They just heard it from a friend, or more likely they're just afraid to try it. And so this is a way of getting them unstuck.
00:29:50
Speaker 1: So that's seeking out these moments of wonder and maybe even these tiny moments of wonder, not putting wonder like you know, capital w wonder out. They look for. A second strategy you've talked about a lot, is to attend to coherence. Dave, what's coherence and why is it so important?
00:30:05
Speaker 2: Okay, So we define coherenceatives the intersection of the alignment of who you are, what you believe in, what you're doing. The research on meaning will say that if you can interconnect those three dots, who am I, what do I believing, what am I doing? Then my life is coherent. I am making sense in the world. I'm acting just like myself. And if I don't have those dots connected, the chance of meaning making goes way down now. Of course, the prerequisite to connecting those dots is locating them. So we have an exercise called the compass exercise which has three components my current story, my workview, and my life you so three a little essays you're write that will help you figure out the narrative that describes kind of who you are now. Is that the totality of who you are? No, but it's a real good start. We've been doing this a couple one hundred thousand times now, so we kind of got to hang out and it seems to be working well for people. So coherency is when I'm actually living out who I really am in the world, including the compromises that I have to make. And a coherency sighting, which is a meaning making tool, is catching yourself in the act of when was I coherent today? So example, a really lovely coherency siding for me, which is so easy to miss, you know. One of the growing edges of life design at Stanford is not more and more classes, but classes to different affinity groups. So there is a pilot on designing your Muslim life. So the kids who adhere to Islam feel pretty isolated and they would like to be in this life conversation with people of a similar mindset. So Bill gets them in a room the Muslim chaplain. Bill the existential atheist are co teaching a class and designing your Muslim life. And I'm the guy with a seminary degree. I'm sitting in the back of the room watching my atheist partner teach a spirituality class, and I'm thinking, this is so cool. I helped build a place where people are integrating the spirituality even beyond their personal ideology. That is such a coherent moment for me. This is as good as it gets. And so it's about catching ourselves in the act when it's actually working, and guess what, it's working more often than you think.
00:32:06
Speaker 1: It's time for a quick break. But when we return, we'll explore some of my favorite tips for stepping into the flow world, and we'll hear the surprising way that Bill is able to stay in the flow world almost all the time. The Happiness Lab will be back at a moment. We've been chatting with designers Dave Evans and Bill Burnett and exploring how to get out of the transactional world of doodoo doo all the time, so that we can find ways into the flow world. Now, flow is an idea that we talk about a lot on the Happiness Lab, but Bill and Dave have developed their own unique take on the concept.
00:32:50
Speaker 2: The original definition of flow according to me head check Sime High the founder of this concept and a wonderful researcher, and you know, the definitive work flow the Psychology of Optimal Experience comes out some time ago and defines the flow channel as being a zone where the challenge of the task in which you are currently engaged and your skill level are close to matched. Meaning you're not underskilled and now you're anxious because you're going to fail. You're not overskilled, and you're bored because you could do this in your sleep, but you're kind of really on it. And so what happens is the task demands enough of you that you could be fully engaged, and that zone is a place where you might drop into flow. There's like, you know, APEX, when you're really in the zone that amazing US hockey team to beat the Russians, you know, you're totally in flow. That's great, and most people think that's what flow is. But here's the problem. It's this APEX experience, which makes it way too hard, particularly in the simple task where I might be overskilled. We redefine what we call simple flow. You don't have to let boredom steal your brain. I mean, last night, the heater went on at one in the morning, What the heck? And I went upstairs and the thermostat had kind of exploded. So I went all the way down the nerd rabbit hole of an old school thermace that didn't work very well, and it only took me forty five minutes and I fixed it, and I had the best time because I went all the way into Not this is such a pan of ass on, but it's kind of like Jeae. I wonder what that nineteen eighties engineer was thinking when he designed one of the worst UIs of all time. How interesting this could be? And so I just chose to go all the way in and enjoy the heck out of solving my thermostat problem and saving a little gas for Pacific asnal. You so just go with it. That's a choice flow, full engagement in what you're doing, which allows you to experience as much of your liveness as that particular activity will permit to be expressed in your scandalously particular self in this scandalously particular moment could be a flow mode.
00:34:53
Speaker 1: I love that flow really plays on this idea of the scandal of the particular, because we can only ever get it in the present moment. It's not something we can design for the future. Think about in the past, Bill, you've also talked about how these moments of being in flow really require being a little bit more embodied. Why is embodiment so important?
00:35:11
Speaker 3: Oh, you know this thing, this body, isn't just a thing that takes my brain to meetings. I mean, we know that there's a lot of neurology going on in the gut, in the vagual nerves, and all the other systems. So we are embodied creatures and we learn by moving and working in the world. There's our intelligence, our IQ, I guess you would say, the talking part of our brain. There's our EQ, our emotional part of our brain. There's our kinesthetic understanding of the world. How do we move in the world, the appropriateception in our body. There's a whole bunch of stuff coming up now around how the body actually understands itself in the world. And so, you know, don't talk to me about artificial intelligence and disembodied computers. You have to be inside this embodied intelligence because it's also where where we feel our intuition, our curiosity, and many of the triggers for flow have to do with, you know, either releasing a dopamine circuit or releasing some kind of a neural circuit that engages the rest of the body in that experience, which is why athletes often to talk about being in the zone or things. It's a physical kinesthetic flow. So these are all embodiments of ourselves in a time and space in the world that are all triggers to what we were calling simple flow or the flow state that's available all the time. One of our analogies, it's like an aquifer running right under the surface. All you got to do is drill a hole and there's plenty of water. You just got to dig into that thing that's right beneath you.
00:36:39
Speaker 2: Bill I called the flow Master. Bill has love flow for a long time. He's like Captain Flow. Bill. You know, more than a few times you'll tell me something like, oh God, you know, it's really been great. I've been in flow for four days now. I mean, you claim to attain this persistent flow state. Can you give the listeners any tips on how the heck do you pull that off?
00:37:00
Speaker 3: It's both something I try to do and it's a mystery fundamentally, but I really get back to it depends on what you're looking for. And so when I start my day, I've been for along many many years now, I start the day with an affirmation where I say I live in the best of all possible worlds because as date mentioned, I'm an extential atheist, so truly the radical acceptance that this is it might as well be the best, And everything I do today I choose to do. Choosing into my experience, I think is there's the number one way in which I find flow.
00:37:37
Speaker 2: That's the voice of availability. But that's what availability sounds like.
00:37:40
Speaker 3: I'm pretty good at being simultaneously I get stuff done. I mean, you know, some people might I'm absent minded, but it's just because my mind is something else, not on whatever their priority is in the transaction world. But it's also you know, I've practiced creativity. I'm a painter and I'm an artist. I spend a lot of time in that wonderful you know's a quote from Robert Henry. The goal isn't to make artists to be in that wonderful state of mind that makes art inevitable. So I try to spend a lot of time in the state of mind that makes flow inevitable.
00:38:17
Speaker 1: Another thing you seem to both spend a lot of time in is the last suggestion that you have for everyone for how to get into the flow world more, which is that you both spend a lot of time in community. Why is community so important for design thinking generally?
00:38:31
Speaker 3: Well, community, I mean, in terms of design, design is always done on teams. It's always done with people. You want to radically collaborate with people of different points of view. But the community part in the new book really comes from Dave's experience teaching apartment standard called the Distinguished Career Institute. It's a gap year for grown ups. People come to Stanford for a year after a distinguished career and they spend time trying to figure out the pivot, the thing they're going to do next in their lives. These are pretty smart, successful people, Dave, how does this community thing work with them?
00:39:03
Speaker 2: Well, it's been interesting, first of all, and we do community work at all our classes, and we often say it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself. Dan Siegel, you know, formerly out of the UCLA at the Mindset Institute, will remind us all that, in fact, the autonomous itself is a profoundly toxic c line. We now know scientifically the consciousness extends. This is the nature of human consciousness. We are deeply involved with each other. So if you start understanding that, then you really want to leverage what it means to be in community, because that the fullness of you is really only available as part of us. And so what we found at this distinguished Careers group, I started putting people into design teams, not to design the life after their program, but to get the most from it in the present moment. And the nice thing about these folks, these thirty five to forty five people forty five to ninety years old, mostly fifty five to seventy five thinking about what do I do next? And they're here to become their fuller selves and they spend some time just exploring. So this idea of we're all becoming can you become more intentionally? And so the fellows look at each other kind of go, well, hi, who are you? You know, I'm Dave, I'm Lori Santos. What are you into? I'm going an happiness thing. Oh really, that's so cool. And they take each other at face value and the only thing they want to do for each other is help one another become their more authentic selves. And what's funny is that a couple of weeks into the program they will all say, these are the best friends I've ever made. And mylne is I'm not buying it. You created corporate cultures. Almost all of them have big families, aren't most of you offending off hundreds of people.
00:40:31
Speaker 3: Saying where are you?
00:40:32
Speaker 2: Or mische you've been going for you and you're telling me these thirty five yahoos that some admission officer at Stanford threw you into a room with you've never met before in six weeks become the best friends you've ever had.
00:40:42
Speaker 3: Really, And they go yeah.
00:40:44
Speaker 2: And the reason is because they're in this kind of community where the intention of our interaction is not just having a good time. That's a social gathering. It's not getting something done that's a collaborative gathering. And my argument is ninety nine percent of what people do in the transactional world is social or collaborative wonderful things. But then there's a formative community, which is why are we together. We're together to become our better selves and to enjoy more fully of the self we're presently trying on. So that is a different conversation with different questions and a trans I don't have to be in the same thing. So the climate change fanatic and the person who wants to become a fine artist, they can be in the same group because they're not collaborating on the content of their lives. They're collaborating on the intent of their lives, which is becoming. So when we set people in relationships that allow becoming to occur, which all you need to be as a thoughtful, self aware person, stuff happens.
00:41:41
Speaker 1: And so for folks that maybe can't join this Stanford group but really want to form a similar formative community and focus on becoming any tips, the.
00:41:50
Speaker 2: Savile answer is, frankly, come up with some generative questions. I did this at Thanksgiving, actually three Thanksgivings, and in all the dinners I brought three questions, and those questions were formative, not transactional or entertainment. One was boy, the world's kind of full of a lot of ugly things these days. When were you recently surprised by someone doing something good? They've restored your faith in humanity? And guess what, everybody had an answer. I asked directly, what have you become this year? Or what are you hoping to become next year? And you know, maybe two out of ten people are like, WHOA, that's a little much, you know, But in addis tid oh, well you know what I'm becoming is? And the other is is there a letter in you that needs to get out? And if so, what is it and who's it too? And those are all becoming kinds of questions and people are surprisingly available. So the key thing if you want to start forming a more formative community is have better question.
00:42:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something that I think we get wrong all the time. There's such a lovely work by folks like Nick Eppley that find that we often go for shallow questions, especially for a dinner party something like Thanksgiving or holiday meal or something. But really what people resonate with answering are these so called deep questions, questions that are vulnerable, which I think have a lot of features of these becoming questions. Right, what are these emotions that you want to share? How can we focus things in a different way, How can you take a different perspective, How can you reframe to steal the designers thinking It seems like we've known this in social science for a while, but we can really apply it to becoming more in the full world and finding these moments of meaning making.
00:43:22
Speaker 2: People want to have the experience of interacting with each other in meaningful ways, So think of a way to say something kindly. Have your own story ready to go. Don't make it be about you, But if you want to get it in the deep water, jump in the pool first, and I think you'll be surprised. People are pretty good to each other if.
00:43:37
Speaker 3: You give them a chance, and they're desperate for these conversations and these kinds of communities, right the loneliness epidemic. They're not going to find it on social media. They're not going to find it in these other places. You know, when people are trying to think about how can I improve my life? What can I do to make it better? Getting rid of these dysfunctional beliefs, leaning into these meaning making moments and creating communities instead of echo chambers and arguing and all this other stuff that's going on. You know, Dave is a big Jesus guy and I'm a big you know, not needs just needs you. Again. We've been collaborating for twenty some years on this work and it's the best collaboration I've ever had. So you don't have to agree on things in order to be in the collaboration, particularly if the collaboration is about how to become the best version of yourself. And with that intention, do anything. Start a book club, start a sell on where people get together and everybody gets to ask one question. But the questions can't be in the transaction world. That's the only rule.
00:44:39
Speaker 1: So thank you so much for figuring out ways that we can find a few more of these moments of meaning if we're doing it in a way that I think really resonates with everybody that's feeling stuck right now, which is not by creaming more in but getting more out of the moments that we already have.
00:44:53
Speaker 2: Well, thanks, And here's the little ps by the way, while we duck the question what is the meaning of your life? And let's just live more meaningfully along the way. Let's live more purposefully on the way too. Whatever we're going to find later. It turns out, if you get good at this, that meaning of life thing is going to come into view a lot more soon, a lot more Clearly.
00:45:15
Speaker 1: Figure out the meaning of life is hard, but I hope that this episode has convinced you that there's plenty of ways to find a meaning in life, even when it doesn't feel like it. If you're feeling stuck, why not commit to turning towards some new moments of meaning this week? And if you want even more advice about how to do that, check out Bill and Dave's new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, which is out this week. That's a wrap on our series about getting unstuck in twenty twenty six. What do you think? Why not let us know? You can email us at Happiness Lab at Pushkin dot fm, or leave us a review to tell us what you liked. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness with my free newsletter on my website, Doctor Laurie Santos dot com. That's d R l a U ri E. Santos dot com. We'll be back next week, just in time for Valentine's Day with a new series on the Science of Love. In our first Step episode, we'll explore what we get wrong about love. We'll learn why the love we get from others doesn't always register emotionally, and what we can do to open ourselves up to it.
00:46:18
Speaker 2: We can be loved, you know. We can have all these people in our lives that kind of objectively love us, or we don't actually feel loved by them, or maybe not feel loved by them or as much as we want to be.
00:46:29
Speaker 1: That's next week on the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos
