#58: What If Your Next Chapter Is Bigger Than You've Imagined?

0:00Rachel Lim: Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of the Who We Are podcast. I hope you have been well this season and I just wanted to come to also share some of the questions that I have personally been reflecting on and sitting with in this season of my life. That is why I decided to bring on board this very special guest today. So some of the questions I've been sitting with lately are, you know, for example, what if I finally took that leap? I find myself also wondering, you know, what if my children need something different from me now? What if success looked different in this season of my life? And what if there isn't just one right path or one right future for me?

0:43Rachel Lim: I've realized that some of life's biggest decisions aren't between right or wrong. They're between different possibilities. And before making them, I don't want to just rush to an answer. I want to give myself that space to really properly explore them. Three years ago, I interviewed Bill Burnett, the co-founder of Stanford University's Live Design Lab and the number one New York Times bestselling author of Designing Your Life. Later that year, I also had the privilege of hosting an Odyssey Planning Workshop with him. He called it a Designing Studio Workshop. It came at exactly the right time.

1:21Rachel Lim: The exercise then gave me the clarity that I really needed for that season of my life. And many of the decisions that followed were shaped by that session. Now, three years later, I'm returning to Bill's work because life has evolved. I have evolved and I'm ready to explore the next chapter and what it could look like. So whether you're navigating a career decision, raising a family, wondering what comes next, or simply curious about what else might be possible from here, I hope that this conversation gives you the permission to pause, to zoom out, and to imagine more than one future. And as you listen, I wonder, what possibilities have you not yet given yourself permission to explore?

2:06Rachel Lim: I will be hosting a very special in-person workshop session with Bill Burnett in Singapore on the 25th of July. You can find out more details below and I hope to see you there. In the meantime, enjoy the episode. Firstly also, Bill, I want to say how excited I am to be doing this with you again. We did it three years ago. It was transformational. And even for me personally, I was so impacted that exercise with you later also shaped a lot of decisions that I got to make. There have also been really important milestones in my life. And I feel also now that this is a workshop that I need again for myself.

2:50Rachel Lim: And that's why I wanted to also bring you back to the community to do this. Firstly, I also want to say congratulations, huge congratulations on all the amazing success you've had, especially with your new book. You never fail to amaze me. You just don't seem to rest or stop. Dave Evans and I are the two guys who read the books together. We thought we were done, but we kept coming across this problem. Something I think we want to talk about here is that even people who are kind of, they're okay, they're happy, their life is fine, but there's missing something. You know, we kept hearing that they were missing something.

3:25And people were talking about not having communities. You know, they didn't feel like they had a community they could hang out with. or they didn't feel like even the job was okay, but they were still searching for more meaning, more impact, more something. And there was sort of a general sense that, you know, a sense of unease. And we thought the more we talked to people and we zoomed in on what was going on around, you know, people feel isolated. They don't feel like they have communities. They're struggling to find meaning in their jobs. Everybody is, you know, worried about, really worried about AI and what's going to happen with that.

4:02And so we just thought, I mean, if we could reframe the problem for, you know, I don't know about the meaning of life. That's a big philosophical question. But I can help you get more meaning in your life and we can live more meaningfully and more purposefully. That's a design problem. And that we felt we could make a contribution. That's why we wrote the book.

4:22Rachel Lim: Wow. I love that. And it's also such a meaningful transition, especially from designing your life. And I thought that was something that really gets us to also think more deeply into what we want out of life. And I think something I really appreciate, bringing us back to what truly matters at the end of the day. Yeah, and I think people make it hard. Like, oh, you've got to have a meditation practice or a mindfulness practice. Or you've got to go away for 40 days in a silent retreat. You know, meaning is all around us. We can, what we talk about in the book is becoming a meaning designer. And you're designing moments because you find meaning in these little moments.

5:04I'm sure, you know, you can think of moments with your children. And those moments are precious. And they're all around us. It's just we're moving too fast, I think. So anyway, that was, the book was to help us slow down and really appreciate what we've already got, right? Because people are busy. Nobody has time to learn new stuff or find a new practice. We're all too busy. And yet, even in a busy life, we can find moments of flow and moments of wonder. And it's interesting. You write the book, and then you actually live the book. After you're done with it, you're like, hey, I really can do this.

5:44Yeah.

5:44Rachel Lim: That's the most authentic type. And I think from whatever that I know of you, Bill, you truly live it out. And that's why it's so inspiring. What are some signs that someone may be entering a new chapter, even if they don't realize it yet? Yeah, and I think you're right. It's not necessarily, when I'm working with people, it's not necessarily they have a big crisis. I mean, you know, sometimes that happens if you lose a job or something happens in a relationship or you lose a friend. And, um, but most of the time people are, like you say, they're, they're, they're cruising along in their, in their jobs and their lives.

6:23Um, and, and the thing that shows up and the thing that we, we found when we were doing our research the most is it's, it's just a sense that, hmm, this is fine, but I thought it was going to be more. I thought I'd find more meaning in my job. I thought I'd find more impact. and even though i've had some impact it it doesn't last it kind of comes and goes um and as particularly as we get older as people move in you know from into sort of middle the middle career and then later you know you're starting to you're starting to think but wait a minute is this all there is i i thought we were gonna i thought it was gonna feel some i thought it was a subtle thing, but it's a nagging thing, right?

7:10It's kind of always there. And you find yourself talking to your friends about it and you find yourself, you know, talking to your partner about it maybe, but it's hard to put it into words. It's like, it's just a vague feeling that something's missing. And what we can do with, you know, particularly with the Odyssey exercise is really explore, well, if we could imagine what happens from here, how might we think of our lives, not just as one simple, you know, the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, but how might we think of our lives in more than one possibility? And we do three odysseys for that reason.

7:49Because what we're trying to do is generate some ideas that we can actually try, we can prototype, and that will give us the information about what's missing. And so the first step is to really step back and go, okay, things are fine, but I'd like to come up with some ideas for what's next. And to do that, I need to do a design process. So you really can't just wait for change. You have to design it.

8:17Rachel Lim: Yeah. And that's just someone who is listening to you now, you know, and they're wondering, am I in this position? Some of us we may not even know because a lot of times, maybe people assume that life transitions happen after a major crisis. In your experience, what do they actually look like? Yeah, it's often not a crisis, right? You know, we talk about different life stages. And we started the whole Designing Your Life thing at Stanford University. And we were teaching it to college students because there's a big transition from college to life, right? And that was a big transition. Typically in your mid-career, there's another transition where you're trying to either accelerate your career or maybe try pivot and try something new.

9:03And then when you get to a little bit older, then the questions become more like, okay, well, what's this going to add up to? What's this going to mean at the end of the day? And so you don't need a crisis. In fact, I think it's, you know, I always wonder, like, why is it that, you know, people know, oh, you're not supposed to eat well and get exercise, but they wait until they have a heart attack, right? And then they go on a diet and they start exercising. Let's not wait for the heart attack. Let's get into our lives and be intentional. And one of the, you know, I've been working in Singapore now for about four, almost five years.

9:43And what I've noticed that makes, I think, Singapore very unique is that, you know, people work very hard and they're very focused on achievement in their jobs. But they didn't necessarily pick the job that they wanted. They picked the job that was the right thing to pick, right? They picked something that was practical. And when I talked to people, we did a big program for people 50 and over, which was called Designing Your Next Chapter. This was a little bit different. It was for older folks. And what we noticed is that people really enjoyed the opportunity to think about, well, what would I pick if I could pick what I wanted?

10:23Not always practical necessarily. And I'm not saying you will do something that's not practical. I'm just saying, let yourself think a little bit about who you are and put some agency into deciding who you want to become. one of our ideas in the book is we're all becoming right where the be do become loop there's this loop of we do something we change and we do something else we change we keep learning and changing and we're all becoming the next version of ourselves so let's put some let's put some ideas together about what that next version looks like and it's very energizing and it's very exciting and and it can be like you say it can be quite transformational um i was listening do you Tim Ferriss, I was just listening to him and he was talking about the difference between information and transformation.

11:12Information, you can go to AI and learn everything about everything I've ever taught by asking an AI because they've stolen all my books and all my talks and all my videos. But that doesn't get you transformation. Transformation comes when you get together with a group of people and you really dig deep into what you want and what your goals are. And we give you a little bit of structure to help you surface ideas. And when you can do that in a community of people, because you know, we always do this where people are sitting at tables of six and they get to talk to each other and they get to share ideas and they become, it's a very vulnerable kind of sharing.

11:49But that's where the transformation happens in the conversation with others. David Evans will always say, you can't hear yourself by yourself. You need to be in a community of people talking. And that's why it's so important to do this the way we're going to do it with this group, is to get together and really work hard together to try to help each other transform what's possible.

12:15Rachel Lim: Bill, is there, I love that firstly, you know, information, there's a difference between information and transformation. And I think it's very different when sometimes we're just sitting alone in our room or in our study, just absorbing and consuming a certain information through weather books or videos. But it's so different when you say you come together, right? Gathered in a community, a group of people where we get to reflect back to each other what we're hearing and also share and articulate. I think a lot of times it is in articulating the ideas that I've had in my head that I realized, oh my goodness, wow, I actually never knew that it sounded like that or I had the answer to that in that sense.

12:58When you say it out loud, you know, you design something and then you tell everybody, you say it out loud. And remember, these are very, you know, we're going to do this for a relatively short period of time. But you can go pretty deep in a few hours. And when you actually speak what you wrote down and you speak it to other people, there's something about saying it out loud where you go, wow, you know, I think I could really do that. Or the other people go, wow, I think you could really do that, Rachel. It's the common experience is that people have this idea that, oh, my ideas are too crazy or they're too, you know, they're too, you know, too wild or whatever.

13:39And yet everybody else will say, oh, I totally see this possibility for you. So, yeah, bringing a community together, talking together. I've had people who've said, I've read the book and I did all the exercises. They show me the book and everything is, we've got a post-it note on every page. But they come to one of these workshops and we set up this environment that's very nurturing and very carefully designed to be a safe place to have these conversations. And they come back and they say, oh, wow, it was completely different doing it with people. Sitting at home and thinking about it or reading it is one thing.

14:15But really doing it and digging in with other people and hearing other people's stories to inspire you. It's amazing. It works every time.

14:24Rachel Lim: It works every time. And that's why I'm excited to do this again for myself. Bill, you have done this for thousands and thousands of people globally. What are some of the most common breakthroughs you have seen through Odyssey planning? Well, a couple of things. Odyssey's are, so in the design process, we talk about you start with empathy, then you come up with a good problem, then you come up with lots of ideas, and then you prototype and test. And one of the things that I think comes up in the Odysseys a lot is to really develop empathy for you. Because in the designing your life, if I'm designing, when I'm teaching my students to design a new iPhone or a new laptop or a new website, the empathy is for the customer.

15:08What's the customer need? But in life design, at first, it's empathy for me. Who am I? What do I really need? And then what does the world need that I can do? Just because I want to do something doesn't mean the world cares, right? So one big transformation is people come away feeling like, oh, this is the first time I really ask myself, what do I want? And I think I've got a pretty good idea of what that is. So the empathy piece is one. And then at the other end, because after you do these odysseys, we go, let's go prototype. Let's go find out if some of these ideas are possible. And prototypes are just little tiny experiments.

15:39Like, you know, it's like having a coffee with somebody who's doing something you're interested in. or it's having a small experience, maybe shadowing somebody who's doing a project that you like. And they're very simple. They're inexpensive. They're quick. But you can learn so much. So I hear people say, wow, I learned how to prototype anything. And now I prototype birthday parties. I prototype, you know, my wife's anniversary. I prototype everything. And that I finally had a chance, just a few hours, with a supportive group of people to really think about what do I want? Right? Because that comes right after the feeling of, I know something's not right.

16:17I'm not getting the meaning I want or the impact I want. And then I go, well, what are you looking for? And people go, I'm not sure. I don't know. I just know I'm unhappy. I don't know why. And so part of this exercise is to really dig into the empathy for yourself. And I think that's what people take away again and again.

16:37Rachel Lim: What would you say to that someone who has lived a life that they're grateful for, but can't shake that feeling that there might be more to this right well i thought i would say two things one one is there is more there's more and and and you know we that's what we wrote a whole other book about how do you find the meaning you're everybody's in the transactional world doing transactions all day long getting stuff done so you deserve to be in both states of mind your transaction mind and your flow mind but most of the time we're only in transactions So if we can learn to be in, to access flow, then we find that, yeah, there is more meaning and it is available right here.

17:17That's one thing. And the other thing is that it's not as hard as people think, but it does, it does take your intention, right? And right now, you know, we live in the attention economy. Everybody's trying to steal our attention. Our apps are stealing our attention. Everybody wants to keep us on the app, keep us on the phone, keep us, keep us scrolling, keep us doing things. But that's such a distraction because it takes away from you being intentional, doing things on purpose. I talked to my students. I said, yeah, I was scrolling on Instagram. I go, what do you remember? They go, I don't remember anything.

17:53I go, so you just had a 45-minute experience and you remember nothing. You know, like that's not useful. So we want to get back to being intentional just a little bit. And we want to be not just doing transactions all the time. And then you find that, yeah, if you're that person who's like, I'm pretty happy, I'm grateful for my life, but I think something's missing. And what's missing is you don't have access to the flow world as much as you need to balance your life and your experience. You're letting the world just make decisions for you. Stuff's happening and you're responding. You need to put your intention in the world.

18:35You need to put a direction in the world where you want to go. And that's what the odysseys help you do.

18:40Rachel Lim: What do you think is the biggest misconception people have when thinking about our future? Oh, this comes up all the time. And it's really, really, I think, a very strong cultural thing as well in Singapore. That I've got one life. I'm going to optimize it. I'm going to make the best possible, you know, single path. I'm going to go here, here, here, get promoted, get promoted, go to the here. It's going to be a single path all the way to retirement. and it's going to be up, up, up, up, up. And it's one straight line. And I don't know anybody, hardly anybody, who has a life like that. Things happen, you pivot, you lose interest in something, you grow out.

19:19I mean, I was at Apple for seven years. I loved working at Apple, but I had done 11 laptop computers. I designed 11, my team said, design 11 laptop computers. I just don't want to do any more computers. I'm tired of them. And that's all Apple does. They didn't have phones at the time when I was there. So it was sort of like, all right, I got to find something new. So everybody's path, if you really are honest about it, is a little bit of a zigzag. And it's okay, in fact, to find yourself, you know, kind of moving forward. You don't, I would say you don't exactly have to know exactly where you're going, but you have to know you're going in the right direction.

19:56So that's the idea of what's my path. And I would say now, particularly now, because AI and everything will re-transform the way jobs are, that you can look at it one of two ways. And the way I tell my students is, don't you hope that five years from now, you've got a job that doesn't even exist yet because it hasn't been invented. Because the world of work has transformed and all these new jobs, these new opportunities are available. You want to be a person who's looking for that. You don't want to have your head down trying to do a straight line because it's probably going to hit a brick wall anyway.

20:37And if you think like, if you start to learn to think like a designer, then the idea of having multiple paths forward, the idea of brainstorming to come up with options, the idea of having empathy first for what you, you know, to know that you're on the right path. Does this feel right? You know, it might be the logical thing to do, but does it feel right? And then, you know, these kinds of questions tend to lead towards people who live very intentional lives and they're quite a bit happier. I'm, you know, life can be hard and things and bad things can happen. No one can, no one can change that.

21:14But it's how you, it's what your mindset is, right? If you have a mindset of scarcity and fear, then you're going to react to things that way. But if you can develop a mindset of abundance, I can always come up with more ideas. If you're going to develop a mindset of design, I can always come up with a new design. And it would be fun to optimize these new designs. And that means there'll be change, and change is okay, rather than being afraid. So I think the number one thing is everybody thinks their career is going to be a straight line and their life's going to be straight line. They're going to get married, they're going to have children.

21:54It just doesn't work that way. In the real world, it's a lot more improvisation.

22:00Rachel Lim: That was great. Thank you so much. And I just wanted to ask, Bill, if there's anything else that you wanted to share with the community, what would you want to say to all of us? Well, one, I really hope that people have, if they have the time and they have the chance to come, come with us, do it, come, please do come. It's not a class like a class where you're going to sit there and people are going to lecture at you. You're going to, you're going to be able to learn these mindsets. You're going to be working together. It's a very dynamic, it's a design studio, really. It's not even a workshop.

22:32I like to think of it as a design studio. And, and there's nothing more fun than designing things together. And you might think to yourself, oh, wait, maybe I'm not creative enough for this or I'm not a designer. I can't think that way. Don't worry about it. We have taught thousands and thousands of people how to do this. And in just a few hours, you can be thinking differently. And you'll discover that you're just as creative as anybody else if I put you in the right situation. So don't be afraid that you're not creative enough. Come on down and play. It's going to be a lot of fun. And people do walk away with some pretty transformational ideas about what's next.

23:15Rachel Lim: Amazing. Thank you so much, Bill. This has been so great. I look forward to having you back in Singapore very, very soon. But in the meantime, take care of yourself. Enjoy your 38th wedding anniversary. Thank you. And I'll see you soon in Singapore. Thank you.

23:36Thank you.