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Dave Evans on Designing Your Life

September 11, 2024 • Think ND

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Suzanne: 0:06

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Education for Flourishing, Pursuing Purpose in the Professions. This webinar is part of Virtues and Vocations, a national forum housed at The Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame, designed for scholars and practitioners across disciplines to consider how best to cultivate character in pre professional and professional education. This initiative is funded through a generous grant from the Kern Family Foundation. I am Suzanne Shanahan, and I direct the Center for Social Concern, and I'm also the host for this series. At any point during the program, should you have technical difficulties, please know that there are folks backstage on Zoom who will jump in and address them. Please also know that you can submit questions through the Q& A function, and I'll address them at about the 1240 mark with our speaker today. And with that, I'm delighted to introduce Stanford Design Lab professor and best selling author Dave Evans of the Life Design Movement. From saving the seals, to solving the energy crisis, from imagining the first computer mice, To redefining software, Dave has been on a mission, including helping others to find theirs. Starting at Stanford with dreams himself as an undergrad of following Jacques Cousteau as a marine biologist, Dave realized a smidgen late that he was lousy at it and shifted to mechanical engineering with an eye toward the energy problem. After four years in alternative energy, it was clear the time hadn't yet come, so while enroute to biomedical engineering, Dave accepted an invitation to work for Apple, where he led product marketing for the mouse team. Every time I read that, I'm thinking literally of mice. and laser, introduced laser printing to the masses. when Dave's bosses at Apple left to start electronic arts. Dave joined as the company's first VP of Talent, dedicated to making software worthy of the minds that use it. Having participated in forming the corporate cultures at Apple and EA, Dave decided his best work was in helping organizations build creative environments where people could do great work and love doing it. So he went out on his own working with startup teams, corporate executives, non profit leaders, and countless young adults. They were all asking the very same question. What should I do with my life? I have a daughter who's about to graduate from Georgetown and I hear this a lot. Helping people get traction on that question finally took Dave to Cal and then to Stanford, to begin what has become his life work. He holds a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from Stanford and a graduate diploma in contemplative spirituality. from San Francisco Theological Seminary. So welcome, Dave. Super happy to have you here.

Dave: 3:10

Suzanne, thanks. Good to be here.

Suzanne: 3:12

so I'm hoping we can have a fairly open ended conversation exploring both the life design paradigm but also how you ended up here, what you think the challenges are of this work, and where you want to go next.

Dave: 3:28

Yeah, look, I'm just an unemployed marketing guy, the, fell through an open manhole cover and into Alice's land of mirrors and became an educator, the, the somewhat cleaned up version in that bio is really true. It understates the melodrama of it. there's an old line that, there's an old line, an aphorism that God often comes to us disguised as our lives. or there's, a, an adage that one's calling may well be found in walking out your woundedness. and I think both of those are true of my case. And, I lost my father when I was very young. my dad died when I was nine. We learned later he died at his own hands. So he died of suicide. and that's a gift that keeps on giving. And, so I was starting to rely on myself very early. Family stayed intact. Mom was fine. it wasn't a horror story, but it, it immediately changed my mind. Like I, I'm just going to have to figure this out. so I've been trying to figure it out ever since. And when I got to college, the college story, so I was 19, walked into the career center, said, Hey, can you guys help me? And they go, oh yeah, there's a whole building. I'll rush over.'cause there's a building full of people, I'm sure many of the people on this webinar who kinda, we love helping people like you. And I go, great. So what do I wanna do? And they go, that's it. that's right. That, what do you wanna do? Go right. Okay, let's get going. They kinda go, so we answer the question. I kinda go, no, that's what we're here for. They go, no what do you wanna do? I kinda go, that's the question. We did this for five minutes. And they kinda go, wait. And they go, let me tell you how this works here at the careers center. You come in. And you tell us what you want to do, and then we help you find it. And he goes, that's no help. I know how to find stuff, what do I want to do? That's the hard question. And they go, you're supposed to know. Oh, and it's a little better now, but, and in fact, I just came back from, as I mentioned, before we started. From three days in Chicago, I was at Northwestern, University of Chicago, Booth, Kellogg, Wheaton, the two business groups. They had 11 speaking gigs in 48 hours, let's go. And, I asked, about a hundred kids at University of Chicago, actually in the Rockefeller Chapel. a hundred was only seating for 19, 000. But, and, and I said, how are you finding the, are the adults helpful? I found them criminally negligent myself at the time I was your age. How's it going? Are you finding the adults very helpful? They so I, it's, I think it's a little better, but it's not where it deserves to be. So that's, that really is the aegis of this thing, and I started trying to figure it out, which I found incredibly hard, particularly not only figure out how to go be successful, but how to go be what I would now call coherent, how to live a life of meaning making. and, so it's consistent with my values. And by the way, what are my values? I was then and still now I'm a deeply religious person. So I was trying to be faith, faith, faithful, my partner, Bill is a Nietzsche loving atheist, I'm a Jesus loving Christian and which is great. So now we span a pretty wide worldview and we've got to make it work for everybody. It's an all inclusive program, because we're all on the same human platform. And so how do you do that? And there was precious little help. So I just kept doing that for myself, slowly, reading waffle irons using the braille method, which was really painful. they're just blind leading to blind and Off we go. then when I got into the corporate world, particularly at Apple in the early days, I was there before the company went public, worked with Steve in the early days when we were inventing who we were. So we came up with the very first corporate culture committee at Apple in 1979, like how do we figure out who it is that we are and how do we help people become like we are and how do they become who they are? And we have no idea what we're doing. And so we started working on that and I said, man, people are struggling with this question. So I've been working on this question on the side for 45, 50 years. just turned 70 last week. Anybody got more than 11 grandkids? I win. So I get 11 grandkids. And I noticed this question comes up all over the place. And then somebody asked me to teach a class at Cal in 99. I said, that's nuts. And we did it. And then you called me and that's how we got here. so the, so the education version of this thing, crept in, it was not a great strategy. I used to be a strategy management consultant. I'm a strategy expert, actually. and this has nothing to do with top down strategy. This has to do with bottom up, calling oriented opportunism. That's how we got here.

Suzanne: 7:26

Great. in your work, you talk about six mindsets. curiosity, bias to action, radical collaboration, reframing, awareness, and storytelling. Yep. Would you say those six mindsets emerged inductively from your own experience? And this is a formula you put together as you said. No,

Dave: 7:47

we did not derive that. so again, we, the life design lab at Stanford is inside the design program, which is inside the design division of the mechanical engineering department of the school of engineering at the university of Stanford. So we're six layers down. All of which, and again, academically, we have an obligation, ethical and vocational and academic, to having a rigorous methodology or body of information that's been demonstrated through peer reviewed research to be meaningful that we teach. And so design thinking is an innovation methodology that was developed at Stanford going back to 1963. It's the oldest interdisciplinary program at the university. The integration of arts, psychology, and engineering. Ended up located in the ME department. There's a long reason for that. David Kelly, the well known founder of Idea, the largest design firm in the world, is also the leader of that organization. He's the third generation leader, standing on the shoulders of Bob McKim, who just died recently, and before him, John Arnold, who came to us from MIT because MIT wouldn't let him do it. It's too silly. So this goes way back to this mindset thing. we, there are different renderings of it, by the way. No one owns the pink slip. on design thinking. we'll tell you the truth, but that's uncertified design thinking. there's no certification on that per se. Stanford is actually where it did get started, where the original guys, there's this couple of diagrams we've been showing for a very long time. some of that stuff I saw as an undergrad in the 70s. but, so those six things are not my idea. there are other mindsets we care about as well. Bill and I did cherry pick off those top six. Because when you migrate from what used to be called product design, so now we just call it design thinking. And then we started applying design thinking not only to, education systems and organizations and experiences, but how about yourself? You can design yourself. Whoa, that's interesting. So life design is a tiny subset of, design thinking. still adheres to the overall concepts of what we're talking about. And so we, we have augmented it a little bit because a person's a little different than something like, talking about the mouse, I've got a mouse here, that's a lot, that's a lot simpler than Souser. Souser is a great deal more complicated than this. even that laser printer behind me, which it had a lot to do with, that's a little more complicated, but it's nowhere near as tough as like a junior hire. That's really complicated. So life design is a little more challenging.

Suzanne: 9:58

when you think then, about your relationship to life design, so one of the things I've heard you say is that, you were working at Cal, you, Bill Burnett was a friend, you reached out to him, had this kind of Mind blowing lunch where, You came together in, in thinking and he said, oh, by the way, and add design thinking to the mix. Correct. For you, was that already part of the logic? was that how you were framing it implicitly without knowing it? Or was this really then labor to break it into a design logic?

Dave: 10:35

No, it's about 10 hours. So the, I've been thinking about this about 40 years and I had not previously specifically explicitly framed it as design thinking, but I've been very involved with design thinking for a very long time, because I've been in Silicon Valley for years and years and we've been using that stuff forever. So when Bill said, Oh, that's great, but you got to flip you check your curriculum, you got to flip it through the lens of design thinking number one because I think it's really cool and number two is the only thing we're authorized to teach is not a problem. I'll be right back. there's I used to be used to do work on cars before you needed to own a 400, 000 computer just to diagnose them. And if you bought a British car repair book in the States, this the US version of a British car repair book had a glossary in the back that gave you the English and American term. Spanner means wrench. Bonnet means hood, boot means trunk. And there's the British car word and there's the US car word. And it's almost like going from the stuff I was doing to design thinking it was almost just like flipping the vocabularies. It's almost that easy. So no, in the essence of it is, the cardiopulmonary system of design thinking is This is a necessarily empirical bottom up process. There are tame problems that are well bounded, you understand for which you have enough either logic or information that you can solve them right once, and you're done, repeatably. then there are wicked problems where you don't know what you're looking for until you find it. You can't repeat it anywhere because it's totally context and user sensitive. and there are intrinsically human problems. There are messy problems, and very often solving something called the future, for which we have no data whatsoever. You can't analyze it. You can't. It's not an equation. So we have to get there empirically would be the academic term. So we go bottom up with the prototype iteration, talk to people and try stuff, and then you iterate your way forward. That's what design thinking does. So we build our way forward. So it's a fundamentally empirical process.

Suzanne: 12:16

You've also talked about, the importance of your own faith and how some of this emerged in faith based conversations. Yeah. When I read, write your two books, I don't see a whole lot of faith. explicitly. How, Ray, how does one integrate that into the model?

Dave: 12:36

Okay, so yeah, so I, again, I started trying to figure out how to live a coherent life, for the formation of purpose and character, this program cares about a lot, in a context, in a tradition. I just finished, David Brooks's rather well done opus, I think it really is his opus, Second Mountain, and he's all about the four commitments, and then one of them is about either a philosophy or religion or point of view, where are you coming from, A very good colleague of mine named Steven Garber, who has a PhD in cultural hermeneutics, like how do you actually, exegete your life from the, your lived experience? visions of, okay, Steve's a very good friend. Steve will tell you that if you want to live what I call the coherent life, you need three things, a telos, sufficient for your praxis, a community of like mindedness and mentors and advisors, and we totally agree on that point. So the telos, sufficient for your praxis, is a big idea of what's the question of what are the ultimate concerns, that's what Sharon Parks would call it, what are the ultimate concerns, and down to what does that actually mean in my lived experience. yeah, so for instance, Bill and Dave have pretty radically different, philosophies or theologies. however, we have almost identical anthropologies. And the question about, how Christian is or isn't, or how existentialist is or isn't design thinking or life design, according to Bill and Dave, has to do with human centered design. And my point is, if you get the human part, you can't go on. So we do have a point to do, and we're trying to simply help you become more human. now if I do that, I've got to integrate that with my largest value set and my deepest concerns.'cause when Bill and I got together, we literally, the origin story on this question is when we finally decided to work together. I said, Ben and Bill, we have to have the conversation. He goes, what do you mean? I go, we have to have the theist atheist conversation. He said, oh, I, I know you well. you're fine. go, no. You don't understand. I'm at Stanford based on your cocktails, and if we get called out, you're gonna get shot. And so I said, we're gonna have this conversation whether you like it or not. We really have to make sure that this really works. And our goal wasn't, here comes the atheist to life design. And then here comes the theist to life design. We can both just barely hang on okay, I'm okay. I'm okay. It's not great, but I can do this. And Bill goes, yeah, me too. We go, no, that's not it at all. It's gotta be totally like this. So everything. That matters to Bill has to, if not be animated by and catalyzed by what we're offering as a tool set, but certainly is completely compatible. There's nothing that goes that doesn't work for me. I have to throw that out. That's crap. And Dave has to say the same thing. So that was the rule. Unless we have 100 percent overlap. Both of our points of view, we're totally enabled. We're done. and we're there. we, we have, we, we've, we work with really diverse people. and it works fine because you get the humor, right? And all I have to do is respect. Everybody's coming where you're coming from. So we're a tool set. We are not a worldview. We're not a religion. We're not an answer. We're not a system. Do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, boom. Then there's an epiphany. Then you do six and seven, and then you're good to go. That's a systemic approach where we know the answer and put yourself in it. We do not do that. We have a toolkit, barely a methodology. And we trust you. Shortly after the book came out, still our favorite review on Amazon is 14, 000 buried down at the bottom now, said, Unlike most self help books, clearly the authors respect the autonomy of the reader. When we read it, we went, Oh, thank God. Because we really do trust you. You're the expert. We're just trying to help you get there. So the faith, by the way, there was a 14 page white paper called the Christian commandment to designing your life, which will explicate the theological alignment, which is out there in the world. And Bill never did finish the existentialist companion to designing your life, which still kicks me off it. we're working on that. and our next book is probably going to be much more philosophic, by the way. and, so it's not explicitly religious, but it's, but, the Christian worldview is entirely compatible there with.

Suzanne: 16:24

Great. Okay, a couple of different questions circling back to your work at Apple. You talked about the first corporate culture conversations and it was about who are we and who are they, right? So who are they as individuals and who are we as a culture? How do you think about life design as a way to answer both those questions, if you will, right? What's the relationship between the individual and the broader culture ethos within which they exist?

Dave: 16:55

in our model, there's, we've got a three layered model, we've got the meaning making model, we've got the action design model, and we've got the discovery and support layer, three layers. And in the meaning making model, the top one, like you have to have the big ideas that hold this whole thing. We have a compass exercise, and the compass exercise is you write your life view, or world view, might be the more academic term, and you write what we call your work view. Which is not your shopping list of your preferred job attributes. It's the characterization of what good work, what, and by work, we very broadly mean your participation in the human adventure out there in the world, whether you're making money at it or not. You know what? And so one is what's your answer to the ultimate questions? What's your answer to the particular questions? And now how well do they integrate and how can, how are they being expressed? And we have a little diagram called connecting the dots and the three dots are who am I? What do I believe? And what am I doing? And you can't, they probably won't perfectly align. They've met some negotiated compromises, but if you cannot articulate those dots, because you can't connect something you can't articulate, you have to start by articulating them. Then you interconnect them and then you, we call it name it and claim it. We help people learn practices for how to extract, Oh, wow. I was just acting coherently in the world. I'm actually becoming a real version of myself. So you get that philosophic stuff done. And then you say, I'm a junior in college and I've got nine different ideas. Great. Let's go come up with, a bunch of different prototyping programs to really quickly get you some exposures and iterations to see where, which part of the world is engaging with you at a level that you want to start investing in.

Suzanne: 18:30

couple of questions about this particular paradigm and how well it travels. one is in bright since you started this work. Are students different? and is it resonating differently? but also, how does, how well does it travel outside the rarefied, environment of a place like Stanford? how does it serve under resourced first gen students? students in environments where, agency is much, much more stifled?

Dave: 18:57

Yeah. How does it work? Those are two really different questions. Let me say the second one first. when you leave the elite campus, Stanford has to do, and by the way, we, this is our 17th year of operation. Any different than year one is, 23 any different than 2010. those are two different, they're complimentary question, but they're quite different. So take thing one first. and, if I'm doing a public speaking thing and there's a, the people in the audience, the more direct, and less well heeled version of the totally appropriate question you just asked me is, Dave, you're an old, fast talking white guy from Silicon Valley. You teach at one of the most elite universities in the world. This is just for the rich white people, isn't it? I'm going to design my life. I have infinite ideas. I can waste post it notes all over the wall about anything I might want to become, and then the world will happily receive me. That's just an elitist thing. This whole thing's crap. That's the question I usually get. It's a totally appropriate question. So the good news, first of all, I am totally, the poster boy for that problem. I, there's nothing I can do about that. I am an old white guy. I have a Stanford degree. I've taught at Stanford. I've been in Silicon Valley. I've made some money. less than you would think, cause I keep walking away to do something more interesting, but nonetheless, I'm fine. And, there's nothing I can do about the fact that's all true and it's true of Bill too. And, both at Stanford, and again, Stanford's not, a white enclave. it's a highly diverse place. Eighty percent of our kids are on, our students are on financial aid. but they're still incredibly bright. They're gonna be okay. They're gonna be okay. now, meanwhile, back at the ranch, We've now trained some 1400 educators in 400 plus universities serving 6 million students, possibly, we've probably touched 100, 000 of them, but, including in under resourced communities and what have you. One particular example is Cal State University of Dominguez Hills, down in Southern California. Very different, it's a Cal State school, it's a different orientation, a commuter school. Last we looked, 15 percent of their students were homeless or living in their cars. and our, reform advocate. There is, Dr. Heather who is in the s psych department and is deployed, designing her life rather thoroughly. And she's really fully instrumented. She's done more research on her student outcomes than we have.'cause she's actually got a bonafide PhD and is a primary investigator. we're mere appointed lecturer teachers in a way. I haven't got, I haven't got a single PI on my team. And the short answer is, Heather's getting better results than we are. So here's the issue, you take a super resourced student, let's take, a rich white prep kid at Stanford, like we get the best and the brightest coming out of Singapore. So Singapore sends a bunch of the absolute superstar, students to Stanford and then brings them back home to run the world. how are they doing? They're doing great. And you give them these tools, what happens to them? More. So if you take. A pile of resources and opportunity and a huge network, and a great education. And then you throw some design tools on top of that. Can you do more things than if you have less? Absolutely. If you get the 5, 000 piece Lego box, you can make more interesting looking dinosaurs than if you get the 150 piece Lego box. That's not the issue. The issue is, if we give these design tools to the students with a 150 piece LEGO box that are less resourced, are they advantaged? is that student, before and after these tools, helped or not? And relatively speaking, are they helped meaningfully? And the data we're getting from people who work with students we don't work with, mostly. is that they're absolutely helped. And relatively speaking, they're helped a lot more. So we're thrilled about it. and this is an awful thing to say, but what I was hoping for, so when Bill said at lunch in 2007, Hey, let's do this. Okay. I was already at Cal and my Stanford pretty rarefied, but Stanford is also a pretty open minded place. This is, we were told we'd get fired as soon as the university figured out what we were really doing. As soon as they find out what you're really doing, you're out. a very, A high ranking administrator told us that at the time, and I said, what are you saying, don't even try? He says, no, this is a great idea. You should do it, but go fast because you're going to get shot. You haven't gotten along. Six years max. He came back seven years later and said, I'm so happy there's been a sea change. you've gone from being on the wanted poster to being the poster boys. So good job on having inadvertently good timing. So that, this is a radical stuff. how this stuff works depends on where you are. and in other organizations, they, in other institutions, they've, depending on who you're working with, they've had as much of not a great deal, more success than have we.

Suzanne: 23:23

And when you look at the kind of success they're having, so certainly students, this is an extraordinary resource, perhaps more extraordinary, for less resourced students than at a place like Stanford, where wherever you come from, while at Stanford, you're part of the privilege to lead.

Dave: 23:39

Particularly on hope, grit, persistence, those

Suzanne: 23:42

things. Yeah, so does it work differently, or does it work the exact same?

Dave: 23:49

No, the, the, in the first book especially, the essentials of what's going on, how it works, and why it works is true pretty much throughout. In fact, we sat down with the publisher, when the book came out, and that's quite a story. hey, are we right? Because at the time, and still, people were very much writing to either life, season, or generationality. Because every one of those was a big market segment. And the quarter life crisis for the 20 something, and the midlife crisis, and then the boomer crisis, and everybody wants their own book. and the publisher said, no, I think this is a fundamentally human question. And we said, yeah, we think it is too. you're asking for a lot. aim at the moon, bound to hit it. if we overshoot, we could end up, successfully doing nothing at all. And they said, nope, we're going for it. and we just crossed a million copies in 24 languages. So apparently we're onto something. and I now spend most of my time, by the way, with older people. So I'm actually not teaching undergrads anymore. we've got a team of five people doing that. I'm now spending most of my time either off campus or on campus. I work at the DCI, the Distinguished Career Institute, which is the gap year for grownups. 45 to 85 years old, mostly, 55 to 70, the traditional retirement question, gee, now what do I do with my life? that thing just keeps coming up and they come and hang out for a year at Stanford. And one of the things they get to do is talk to me. so the question never goes away. Is

Suzanne: 25:03

it, I'm just trying to think of some of the students that I've worked with over the years, from low resource environments who, Have a simultaneous question, which is about what is it I want to do, but, how is that also going to support my family, my community in different ways, right? That fundamental different autonomy and different set of constraints on life design. So it's not open ended in the same way. Sure it is, Yeah, Is there anything about the model in particular that enables that kind of conversation or that thinking?

Dave: 25:40

Yes. Oh, you're wondering what it is? Okay. there's two, two, two core of our ideas that go right after that issue. We run into it all the time. I was just in University of Chicago talking to this young, one young man, I think he's a freshman, walks up to me. We'll call him Alan. That's not his name, but, Really sincere young man. And he said, here's my problem. I really know what impact it is I need to have in the world. And I'm not very interested in it. What do I do with that? and I went, oh, that's interesting. I said, how deeply are you feeling, drawn or if not even called to that thing? Oh, very deeply. and you're not interested at all. He goes, no. I said, man, you got to come downstairs. we, that's a comp, you're in a complicated place. a whole bunch of stuff is fed into you. to get to the place where I feel deeply called and I just don't care. that's a really weird dysfunction. It's utterly dysfunctional. and what leads into that, right? so that's an extreme example. So the two things that factor into that is, we, you mentioned the six mindsets. There's also the five classical steps of the design process. Which lay out linearly, they're never done linearly. empathy, understand deeply what's going on. Then you define what you're doing. We problem find before we problem solve. Then you do ideation in order to know what to prototype, what you iterate until finally something looks good enough to actually commit to. And test that just before you go, because you don't want to hurt people. And then off you go. But that's steps one through five. Now step zero. It's terribly important, my personal favorite, and, was always true even when that five step thing was designed around products, like the laser printer back there. but when you do life design, this step zero, which was always true, we always referenced, but never got its own hexagon, we now make very explicit, which is acceptance. You can't solve a problem you're not willing to have. And design thinking is an empirical process, absolutely, by doing real things in real time with real people in the real world. It only works in reality. It does not work in magical thinking. It does not work in the land of should. We often say, we don't should on you, we don't recommend you should on yourself. so you, and that, that acceptance thing includes constraints. What I call the freedom of constraint. Once you've got a bona fide constraint over which you have no power to change, great! Now you know exactly what you're working with. this gets into dangerous territory, by the way, some Viktor Frankl territory. But, so we start with constraint, we deal with reality. Oh, my reality is. So a student comes to office hours and says, I'm a superstar computer science and blah, blah, blah, and these startups want to help me, but I really want to go back to Taiwan where my parents are, because of course, in my tradition, it's really all about taking care of your parents and all my friends are telling me I'm full of crap. It's my life. It's not theirs. Get, off you go. But I really feel like I owe them at least 10 years. What do you think? So first of all, it doesn't matter a bit what I think, but I think you're telling me you're one of your parents. And that's what you both need to do. And you so need to do it that you actually want to do it. That's how you sound. He says, yeah, I think so. Is that okay? And by the way, this brings up, Bill and I will say privately, 80 percent of the time, 90 percent of the time in office hours, what are we doing? We're giving people permission to hear themselves. Very often it's not that they don't know, that they haven't got the courage to hear themselves. so in that situation, the reality is that tradition is meaningful to that young man, and he, and that's fine. and let's say, oh, okay, you're coming up out of the hood and you're entirely on scholarship and you're just barely getting going and you want to send some money back home. Okay. or I want to go, I want to go back to this culture where there isn't a started thing and I'm probably going to work for the government. I'm probably going to make this much money. Okay. So we, we have no problem with reality at all. And so when people run into the constraint problem, we go, that's, finitude is part of the deal. humanness is finite. The world is finite. You're, so some people are conveniently wired. I love AI and I really want to work, in retail. It's good to be you. I love blue newts and I really want to do documentaries. Okay, it's inconvenient to be you. but let's, that's, let's start. Let's get going. the fact that you want something doesn't mean you can have it. thing one is acceptance, and thing two is this iterative process that allows us to get some feedback from the world to figure out how to make this thing work. When we tell people, our central idea is each of us contains more aliveness than one lifetime permits us to live, i. e. there's more than one of you in there. What I've been saying lately is you will not be fulfilled if fulfillment, which is what I most often hear in the, the parlance out there in the world. I want to be fulfilled. I want all of me to have a chance to be expressed in the world in a meaningful way. In fact, I prefer all of me. I want to bring all of myself to the workplace and I want all of it to have an impact. Never going to happen. I've never met a person that is that small yet. Anybody saying that is thinking incredibly small. You're way bigger than your lifetime, which means you're going to have to negotiate what you're letting go. Everybody's missing out. If you're not aware of what you're missing out, you're just not paying attention. Of course you're missing out. So you move from FOMO to JOMO, from the fear of missing out to the joy of missing out. Every time you miss out on something, it's not oh god, was that it? Oh no, my life is over, I ruined it, because there's only one little teeny tiny version of me that really works, and that was it. Oh god, shoot. Very common experience. That's so coming from scarcity. as opposed to whoa, another cool thing. What a great reminder that I'm an incredibly capacious being living in a target rich world, with lots of challenging choices sometimes. And if I can't get to it now, I might get to it later. Who knows? It's not about did I get everything. It's about was I fully present for the thing I was actually in.

Suzanne: 31:18

Can you have too much aliveness? Is there, can you imagine that being in excess?

Dave: 31:23

no and yes. Can you be too alive? No. We'll stop. Do people sometimes feel like they are? Yes. Why? Because they misbelieve they can experience more aliveness, more of their aliveness, and have it be expressed and give feedback loops to them in real time. They think they can have more of that at the moment than is currently available. Which is an issue I'm running into a lot lately. I've got a new talk called, Is Meaning the New Money? What's the answer? I think it is. And what I mean by that is the hedonic treadmill, right? So that thing of which I need, how much is enough? A little bit more. And in the workplace, so the hedonic treadmill is the psychological engine, physiological, psychological engine that drives addiction, right? In this extreme example, I'm doing the right thing taking OxyContin. I just need a little more. It's working fine as long as I have a little bit more, And in the workplace particularly, the two classical engines of hedonic treadmills have been money and power. That thing to which I need a little bit more. And that, and those two engines have driven capitalism to a very productive place. not solely, but they're a big part of the program. Let's be clear. And now everybody wants to be in the missional company doing the really cool thing. And so I will argue that thing at which there's not quite enough, and I'm really more disappointed than I expected to be by now, is meaning. I got called by a group called Round. Tech that curates an invitation only private conversation with the top 300 product development leaders in technology worldwide. Their argument is tech leads the world. Who leads tech? Not the C E O C F O. Now those people give me the CPO, the Chief Product Officer, the Chief R& D Officer, the top 300 people who decide all that stuff you look at too much on your screen, nine hours a day, 19 hours a day, the people that are deciding what you look at, those people, they're actually running the world. So the top 300 of them hang out privately. You don't know anything about this. You're not invited. And they called and said, we got a problem. And the problem they just had is the one I just described. I'm sitting here at this, I'm at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and I am killing it. Billions, not millions. Billions of people are using my products. I am killing this thing. I'm still not fulfilled. What's up with that? That's the problem. I think that's about to be a new pandemic. We got Honui coming in droves.

Suzanne: 33:40

So let's connect this point back to the question of how have students changed since you started this, because this seems to be that, you, when you started this, it was this fringe, don't let too many people know, let's see if it works. Clearly it was hugely successful, but there, it's obvious that it responded to an absence for students. And people in general, and that sort of absence is shifting. there are lots of students, adults, right? the issue is around meaning in my life and that gap. what are the other changes you're seeing? and how is the, your work responding to that? And. how do you navigate this growing crisis of meaning?

Dave: 34:29

Okay.

Suzanne: 34:30

What do you tell folks about that? How do you engage them around that?

Dave: 34:34

and we don't, we sit pretty confused humbly in front of that situation. we don't for a minute claim to have a lock on it by a long shot. And it's, it's going to take a village. we're one little outfit, four or five people hanging on for dear life, barely funded, doing what we can. And that's, I'm not dodging your question, but it's a fair question. I'm actually now giving you hearsay because I'm literally out of date. Bill and I made a decision, I pivoted to be the outside guy and then ended up being, the people, the guy that teaches the old students on campus, starting, five odd years ago. So I haven't been in the undergraduate classroom for the last five years. But in talking closely with my lab team, so run by Kathy Davies, our managing director, doing a fabulous job, so all, Black Lives Matters and DEI and, COVID and some of the post COVID realities, these are really big shifts. so the mental health, I'd say the number one thing we're running into that's changed. is the mental health crisis. students are struggling. they are really hurt. the number of people, on meds, the number of people in anxiety, the number of people in counseling and therapy, the people acting out, it's skyrocketing. Suicide rates are up. it's a huge issue. And, and we are, gratefully humbled by the fact that apparently we're perceived as helping that a little bit because one of the key things, that we give people is agency. no, you can figure this out. And we, our framework, which is based in psychology, is that, your neocortex isn't even formed till you're 27, 28, a little later, and man, oh, big surprise. and, and so we tell our seniors all the time, you're not broken, you're 22. It's okay. You're, but I still haven't got it all figured out. Of course, you haven't got it all figured out. The research makes very plain, we've known for 100 years. That people can answer the question, Is this really the life you were meant to live, you think? And is this something that you really feel solid and you want to continue? People who can answer that question with deep confidence typically can't do so until 28 to 35. So what's your 22 year old supposed to do? Go get going! Go get that first season of work you're looking at. We tell our students, You're going to probably live to 100. You're going to work till you're 85. You're going to have five to seven careers and 30 to 40 jobs. Pace yourself. It's okay. This is round one. let's go try this thing. and you're going to, set up your 28 year old self to have some interesting options. so that, so we, all that positioning speaks very soothingly, frankly, to that, Oh my God, I have to change the world. I have to do it right now. I don't know what's going on and I'm terrified. so that overwhelm our version of acceptance. when we've looked at the way we think the world is organized, where they think human beings are organized, the way we think life is organized, we say that's our starting place. So we're trying to give you tools to start where you actually are, not where you think you should have been by now, and go forward. if they accept our version, our read on that acceptance, that's really reassuring. That alone really helps them out. and so I think we're again, not very directly trying to solve that problem. We're not, we're not therapists. we would fit more in positive psychology tools to assist the healthy to become thrivers rather than in therapeutic psychology, the remediation of dysfunction. we talk about dysfunctional beliefs all the time. And when we run into somebody who's truly in dysfunction, we got to refer out. we're not about thrive. The changes we see in CSO, there is, we have a little stuff on practices at the bottom layer, discovery and support layer, which is, practices, discernment, community, and mentors. What is the ecosystem of the lifelong journey you have of continuing to design your way forward? We're doing wayfinding, not navigation. Those are, that's technical terminology, so becoming a wayfinder. Our mission is to apply the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life at and after the university. And the objective is to empower you in the formation of a conscious competency in life and vocational wayfinding, i. e. you're going to have to keep making this thing up. Life is an improv skit. We're just improv trainers. That's all we are. So where we're seeing that go is part of the discovery layer thing about formation of community or your personal practices that brings your better self. What is discernment? We use the word discernment. It sounds like a religious word. We use it all the time. We define discernment as being decision making, employing more than one form of knowing epistemologically. Are you tapping into the full access of what you define to be your wisest self? We give people some tools on that. So that stuff That soft stuff, has been a rising tide of interest. So there's more response to that, 15 years ago, yeah, whatever, just, tell me how to get a job, and now it's a little more like, how's that work? so there's definitely a rise going on there. And in the, who am I, what do I believe, what am I doing triangle, More energy and who am I?

Suzanne: 39:14

so where's this going for you?

Dave: 39:17

Boy, if I knew, I'd tell you. I'm just coming, I'm supposed to be coming to the end of having hit the sofa. I was, as I was coming up on turning 70, I turned 70, two weeks here. actually on Easter Sunday. And, I thought, okay, this is a big transition. This is, I'm beginning, my next major milestone is death. what, how about, what do you have to do now, Dave? And I lost my wife 200 years ago. So 2020 was a tough year. So our second book came out February 25th of 2020, one week to the day later, my dear wife, Claudia got a terminal cancer diagnosis, lost her 12 months, nine months later in December, one week after that shelter in place started. 2020 was not what we had in mind. in 2020 I helped my wife die, 2021, I'm grieving her very deeply, while still keeping the plate spinning at Stanford and elsewhere. 2022, let's go try and fall in love with somebody who isn't Claudia. So there's a girl in that picture back there. And and I'm dating a student. I had to do a Title IX filing, but it turns out if you're 69 and she's 68, that's not. And, but I did the Title IX filing. I went to my academic director and said, you need to know that something's going on here. They go, Hey, you're fine. and now finally, and now what? so the now what question is coming up for me big time. I'm fine. I have to actually use this green book we wrote, which I'd much rather teach it than do it's really hard to do. I have no idea. so I'm really thinking about that a lot. And, but I think where, where the left design lab at Stanford is going is more of the same is I can never get that. We're helping as many more people as we possibly can. The studio, which is our cross training thing, is, just sold out all the time. We do as much of that on the side as we can. getting a lot of response out of Asia, doing a bunch of work in Singapore and New Zealand, Australia, so it's really worldwide. That's happening a lot. At Stanford specifically, the growing is to edge, which I think is really cool, is affinity groups. So when we spend a lot of time, not so much oh, let's have another course and another program and have the life design lab become 12 people. So a very classical thing in the academy is when in doubt, do more, right? What do we need? More of my stuff, my thing should be bigger. no. We still got three core classes we teach to, first and second years, third and fourth years in grad center. That's our core. And then Dave teaches the old people. and that's it. We're going to try to stick with that. now we're mostly running around consulting on, Hey, you could do that res ed thing a little different. You could do that athletics thing. What if we incorporated this? So we're trying to assist people in integrating life design tools and thinking into stuff that's already going on. so reform, not, And that's been pretty successful. it's all depends on friendlies who are interested in being helped. and the Academy's got people who are though, but nonetheless, we, we do a lot of that, and that's going quite well then specifically our growth has been these affinity groups. That's the term we're using are saying, we're a particular group of students and we think we're being under seen and we're more at ease when we're with our own tribe than with everybody else. So could you, how about just talking to us? So we've now got a couple of quarters under our experience called Designing the Black Experience. Which is black student. Now it's because Stanford's an inclusive place. It's open, a white kid can take it, but they mostly don't. and the black kids absolutely believe they're having a different experience if I'm with my people. And we're piloting this quarter, the very first time, designing the Muslim experience. So the Muslim chaplain and my existentialist atheist partner Bill are co teaching Designing the Muslim Life. I think that's pretty cool, actually. I got a feeling that, and that's going really well. So I have a feeling we could find ourselves, designing the Latinx life and, a whole bunch of that might start knocking out. And by the way, in those courses, in those versions, We do almost exactly the same thing. The overwhelming uniqueness or specialization of the design for that community is just the them ness of it. With the 4C, we have a pedagogical model called the 4C. It's the container, the construct, the conversation, and the community. That 4C, I could talk about that all day, but the, so that, that pedagogy really drives what we do. And it's all about the container. So the container and the construct includes that affinity group's identity. We don't need new curriculum. We just needed a new container and that new construct and the rest almost takes care of itself.

Suzanne: 43:27

So that's

Dave: 43:28

a big growing edge. And then what Dave's going to do next. Oh man, I don't know.

Suzanne: 43:32

just before we transition to the questions that are queuing up, vis a vis Dave, Have you drunk your own Kool Aid? Is this something you're, like if, like with your children, your grandchildren, when you're at a dinner party, are people asking Dave for advice how to do this? is this, something you walk and talk all day long because it is totally who you are? Or do you turn this on and off? And do you, do you include yourself in the process?

Dave: 43:59

yeah. so two questions. On the, with others, it does come up a lot. the, sometimes People will go, oh wow, hey, sign my book, oh, can we talk about chapter four? when the book first started going nuts, it actually got recognized in airports now and then. a very brief, not quite 15 minutes of Demi fame, more than enough to go, oh, being really famous would be cool. Anyway, so that happens every now and then. not much. and then, you're going along and, you, what I am is just showing up. no, it's not the case. okay. People don't go, oh, here comes the, oh God, oh no, we're going to get that life design. No, that doesn't happen. Cause I'm not, selling and pushing all the time. I'm not, I'm just on broadcast, but. I'm pretty energetic, pretty intense. And they might go, Oh, God, here he comes, just because I just don't want to, I don't know what he's talking about, but I don't want to deal with it. so there's plenty of people who find me exhausting the, and might want to run the other way for understandable reasons. as my new sweetheart, for the first time she met me, she goes, wow, there's a herd of horses. so watch what you wish for. Now my, and my kids, I just got really wonderfully treated by my darling, again, six adult kids, all married, tons of grandkids. gathered around me on my birthday and just said nice things about me, so I'm very close to them. But they, and they spoofed me. They did, they actually did skits of spoofing dad very well. and to which I tell them, aren't you glad you were raised by a person who was so consistent? You know exactly how to emulate him. The, and, So yeah, I'm, it's really, I'm just in this, in conversations with people the same way I was the last 45, 50 years. hey, how you doing? What's on your mind? Suzanne, how's that Suzanne ing going for you? I'm really interested in that question. and just living that way fell into this, hey, you should teach a class at Cal, and Bill goes, hey, now I'm working full time at Stanford. I'm like, okay. And then he got forced to write a book. I don't want to write a book. And Bill, I wrote the book because I was trying to make Bill happy. I turned it down for two and a half years. They want to do. so I'm not selling, but I'm pretty available. And if something's on your mind, let's talk. And guess what? People want to talk about this. So I'm talking, I talk about it a lot, but I don't like, Oh, let's go to chapter you need the good word journal. So it's not, so it'll often be, like the very end of the conversation, I go, is, do you know anything I could read? I go, there is a book. I'll do, oh, there's a book. Yeah, I actually wrote it. and they would have no idea, A million people, there's eight billion people almost now. a million copies isn't that many. It's a lot more than any other thing I ever did, but it's, it's not that many people.

Suzanne: 46:18

Great. Let me turn to a couple of questions. Yeah, what do we

Dave: 46:20

got?

Suzanne: 46:21

One is, do you think encouraging the studies, the study of humanities could help students deal with the search for meaning?

Dave: 46:28

Oh yeah, I remember one time we were over the vice provost of undergraduate ed who was a major supporter of our program and we were talking and one of the philosophy profs goes, This is just the discussion of the good left going back to Plato and I've been teaching this all along. And I go, great! Yeah, one sec. Totally, good. now I will say the problem, the most difficult group of students I work with are PhDs in the humanities. Far and away. Because for the most part, you have to so freaking thin slice a topic to get an approved topic for your dissertation in anything these days, particularly humanities. Overwhelmingly, I think it's inadvertently, there's no strategy here, it ends up being deconstructionist. to put a sharp point on it, what's a new way of understanding yet another thing that did what European males did wrong. and, and so that you end up in the humanities very often with a posture, a mindset of critique and dismissiveness. And the smarter I am, the more dismissive I appear. And that ends up in a snarky stance with a low expectation. It's not quite, it's not quite nihilism, but you can see it from here. and that's a tough one, of all the worldviews we deal with and we deal with everybody, the bonafide card carrying sincere nihilist, is pretty tough because nothing matters. And we get, every now and then we'll get one. They're like, what, why are you here? They go, I'm just curious. are you really a closet male or something? or, it's hard to find a real one because it's such a tough road to hoe. but so that, that stuff is going on. And, we just, we just take it as it comes.

Suzanne: 48:01

question from a high school student, who's joining over their lunchtime. Yep. You've mentioned the two letters a few times, AI. How does AI shift design thinking in your mind? What I understand, design thinking is empirical, formulaic, but there is some art improv. How does AI limit your idea of design thinking?

Dave: 48:24

Okay, but by empirical, I simply mean in practice, it's not theoretical, it's in practice, it's a lab science, it's not a chalkboard science. And where's AI come in? It's a big deal. I'm both very respectful of the fact that this is a quantum shift, the whole chat GPT conversation is going crazy right now. And so I do think we need to take it very seriously. By no means am I of the sky is falling group. We've been through big technological changes before. So the people are saying, oh, the railroads, that was a big deal. Oh, electricity, that was a big deal. It's just another one. Okay, no, I think this is a quantum shift. So as changes go, we'll look back a couple hundred years from now and go, that was a big move. Now in AI specifically, by the way, there's two categories of AI. there's algorithmic stuff, which we're dealing with now. And then there's actual thinking, and ChatGP has no intelligence whatsoever. It's just a huge bucket of words. Now it turns out when you've got a really big bucket of words and a decent algorithm, you can actually pass the bar. but it's not actually, it's not intelligent. ChatGP doesn't know a damn thing about what it's saying. so let's take AI very seriously. And it's just a part of the context of acceptance. oh, being aware of how that will affect. The kind of either world or work I want to be in and want to do is a factor you need to factor in. good friend of mine down the street actually, is a writer, teaches writing classes, just came back from the San Francisco Writers Conference. A couple hundred people get together and she's teaching seminars and there's a whole panel on AI and chat GPT and overwhelmingly the writers were freaking out because, oh my god, I'm going to become totally useless and dead. She goes, stop it. Here's how to use chat GPT as, a tool. A material collection thing to write on. Now you have to become a really good writer because you can do, got to do the stuff that GPT can't, but are you going to get in front of this thing and ride the wave or are you going to get run over by it? So you do have to figure that out. And every technological change creates innocent victims. Just don't be one.

Suzanne: 50:24

I want to just bundle the last two questions. So please say more about the tension between the finitude of human lives and the multitudes we feel within. How does one navigate such? And then, how do you see life design in relationship to the growing field of experience design?

Dave: 50:45

Okay, life design and experience design share a greatness and an easy one. assurance design is the application of design thinking to experiences. We do that when we do curricular work in our studio training. We're really doing experience design training. How do you create programs and curriculum that people have an experience of? And how do I experience my own life in the world? Kind of to zoom out, that's what life design really is. Experience design typically is an event with a start and a finish, and what was that experience like? So life design is a little longer than that, but they're very complementary. So that's the end. The other one, boy, the, how do I negotiate the relationship between the finitude I express in the real world and the multitudes within, that's even artfully phrased, by befriending it. you have to decide what the relationship is. So if the many of the multitudes within that have yet to be expressed, If that's a moral wrong and I've decided they all should be out there, or what do I do with them? And if some of them never get to see the light of a day that's a terrible wrong, then you just signed up to be unhappy. We're talking about this, one of the classic, we think, dysfunctional beliefs is, are you being your best self? The word best has a denotative meaning. It means against a series of alternatives, one set of criteria will define what is absolutely superior to the other. And our argument is, no, there are lots of good you's and no one best you. I'm a bachelor in 70, so should I be spending my last 10, highly productive years totally accelerating into educational reform and talking to all of you? Or should I spend that time, for God's sake, you keep saying fathering is the most important thing because you didn't have one. You're the father of a suicide victim, Dave. You're the son of a suicide victim. You have 11 grandkids who you almost never see. For God's sake, if not now, when? Lean into those 11 lines. Or, hey, it's finally my turn. Do I get to go, get my bare bones certification and start running catamarans in the Caribbean? Now, which one of those is better? Or, they're totally different. I can justify any one of them, but the criteria don't share anything at all. How do I think about that? I'm not going to get to be all those people. the relationship between the finite you that's currently on the stage of life, And the multitude is within. that's a tension that everybody really needs to wrestle, and I try to make that tension as severe as possible, because I really want you to think of the world as a very large place, and you as a very large person, and the constraints are very real. And all three of those are okay. You have to decide whether or not you think, whatever you think of the intelligence or lack of intelligence or friendliness or unfriendliness or disinterest of the universe and you, do you really believe it was all set up for you to be frustrated or not? I will say design thinking is fun. That doesn't have a philosophy it claims, but it is cheerful. We, we start with curiosity, Ooh, there's got to be something cool going on here. That's a fundamentally optimistic stance. Curiosity is a fundamentally optimistic stance. There is something worthwhile here. so that's a stance we take. And I accept that why my one, look, I just buried a woman and she left a bunch on the table. And she said, her death, she described it as sad, but not tragic. That's a really good place to be. I'd love to have some second helpings, she said, but I'm going to run out of time. But I got no regrets. If you can get to that place, that's a really good place.

Suzanne: 54:02

one final question just as we wrap up. you talked at the beginning about the importance of For you personally, having a coherent life, coherence being important, can you recommend one book we should read, not something you have written, that might help us with that question of coherence?

Dave: 54:20

Yeah, I would say the one you held up a minute ago, Visions of Vocation by Stephen Garber. Or Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer. I'd be happy for any of you to read either of those. And if you ever really want to start doubling down on how to get inside that, Second Mountain by David Brooks is pretty good.

Suzanne: 54:36

thank you for that. And thanks to everybody for spending time with us. please join us again on May 22nd with Yale's Nii Addy on mental health and human flourishing. Dave, this has been great fun. Thank you.

Dave: 54:48

Thanks for having me. Take care.