Bill Burnett: How to Live a Meaningful Life

0:01Bill Burnett:There's a ton of new research now on the neuroscience of awe and wonder, these states of feeling connected. And you can manifest those states by just practicing the mindset of wonder and the mindset of curiosity. That's why it's so natural for designers to feel those states, because we're good at getting into a curiosity mindset, a wonder mindset.

0:26Aarron Walter:When we last spoke with Bill Burnett, it was in 2020, and he just published his book, Designing Your Work Life, co-authored by Dave Evans. The world was in the midst of a pandemic and work and careers seemed very uncertain. Along with their other bestselling book, Designing Your Life, millions of people found guidance and a process for reframing how to approach their career and life plans in general, inspired by a methodology that Bill taught during as many years in the Stanford design program.

0:50Evan Kimbrell:Over the intervening years, Bill and Dave had countless conversations with people who had, at least to some degree, quote unquote, figured out work, family, and friends. But ironically, they still felt stuck. They were stuck on the question of meaning. Bill told us that asking, what is the meaning of life, is not the right question. Instead, we should be asking, how can I find meaning in life? In their new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, Bill and Dave aspire to give you the tools and ideas to help you make a life rich with meaning and purpose. In our conversation, we dig into the loneliness epidemic, especially among Gen Z, and why so many people look to work to provide meaning when work really isn't set up to do that.

1:38Evan Kimbrell:Bill introduces a powerful and useful framework about wonder, coherence, flow, and community, the four components of meaning-making that can also influence life longevity.

1:52Aarron Walter:If you've ever felt like you're checking all the boxes but still missing something, this conversation offers a practical, design-driven way forward. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology.

2:04Evan Kimbrell:I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad-free. Plus, you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, you'll also get our toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Read AI, and more. You'll hear a preview of this episode, But if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe.

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3:07Evan Kimbrell:we'll return to the conversation after this quick break

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3:30And now, back to the show.

3:37Aarron Walter:Bill Burnett, welcome back to Design Better.

3:40Bill Burnett:Well, nice to be back, Eli and Aaron. You guys have got a great podcast. It's really been booming since the last time I was here.

3:45Aarron Walter:Thank you. Yeah, it's been a number of years, and you were also on Aaron's other show, Reconsidering. Yeah, you've made the rounds, Bill. You've made the rounds. You know, of course, we've taught together for many years, and I do miss that, though. we do get to see you come in as one of our kind of experts in residence every year. So that's fun too. But you got a new book out, which is going to be the focus of our conversation. So let's kind of start with the origin story of that. And you've helped probably hundreds of thousands or millions of folks through designing your life and designing your work life and the workshops that you run and coaching and all that.

4:19Aarron Walter:But what over the course of creating those things and getting them out in the world made you realize that even people who might have sort of figured out a path or used design in your life might still feel stuck.

4:30Bill Burnett:Yeah, well, that's exactly the point of view we took. I mean, you know, we're human-centered designers. We go with where there's a need. And the first book came out in 2016, so 10 years ago. Wow, that's crazy. We sold over a million copies. It's been pretty successful, way more than we thought it would be. It hit a couple of different nerves. One was, hey, the future's uncertain and people have anxiety about that. And how do I I figure out my future. And that's why we started the class at Stanford, because the students were really struggling to launch. So there's that. And then there's the, hey, let's do it from a designer's point of view.

5:01Bill Burnett:Design is a much more open-ended, creative process. I was at Apple for seven years designing the first laptops. And I knew some guys on the Eichlin team. When you're doing something new to the world, a new product or service, which is what you and I have been teaching people for years, Eli, at Stanford, how to do new products, new services, new experiences. You don't have any data about the future. So you have to build lots of prototypes and try lots of things. Turned out that was a pretty good way to think about your life as well. Okay, so Zoom 2, about two years ago, Dave and I had been getting lots of emails.

5:32Bill Burnett:And it's lovely. People will say, hey, I got your book. It really helped me change my life. Or it helped me get over a problem, get me unstuck. But there was a persistent sort of sense of, but you know, life just isn't as meaningful as I want it to be. And particularly the Gen Zs, we know this from the students. They really want meaning. They want to know why they're doing something. What's the purpose? What's the impact going to be? And so we start talking to people about impact and meaning and what are you really looking for? And then combine that with this is the loneliest generation we've ever educated and the loneliness epidemic in general.

6:04Bill Burnett:It's really severe in the younger ages. And I've been doing work with folks in retirement, you know, in the sort of 50s, 60s and above. And Dave Evans, my writing partner, has been working at Stanford in what's called the Distinguished Career Institute, the DCI Fellows. And they're all people retiring and coming back to Stanford for a gap year for grownups to figure out where they want to go next. So you've got loneliness. You've got lack of community. You've got this meaning and purpose gap somehow, an impact gap. The big question, what's the meaning of life, is a philosophical problem. We're not philosophers.

6:37Bill Burnett:But how to get more meaning in your life or out of your life, how to get more out of it, not cram more into it, but get more out of it. and how to find things that are meaningful and that have impact, that can be a design problem. And so we realized we were onto something, and that was really the genesis of the book called How to Live a Meaningful Life, using design thinking to unlock purpose, joy, and flow every day. And we think it's easier than it sounds. I mean, you don't have to sit on a rock for 10 years and meditate. You don't have to have a mindfulness practice. When you reframe from the meaning of life to getting more meaning in life, or what we call being fully alive, fully alive by design, then you start to see, oh, wow, hey, this isn't that hard.

7:20Bill Burnett:And it's pretty satisfying when you turn yourself into a moment designer. We call it meaning, strong, and moments. You become a moment designer, which is sort of an experience design thing. And it all kind of fell into place.

7:33Evan Kimbrell:You know, a lot of folks look for meaning in their work. And I think it's because we spend so much time at work. And so we want it to be more than transactional. We want it to be more than I made some money. We want it to also feel like there's something good that we're doing there. But work is just like one place to get meaning. So how does work fit into that notion of meaning? And how do you break down what meaning really is? Because there's a lot of different ways we could look at that.

8:04Bill Burnett:Work is a place that particularly the younger generation wants to find meaning or purpose or want to think about impact a lot of times. most of our time during the day is at work. We're spending, you know, 40, 50, sometimes more hours at work a week. And as I'm advising students or people who I'm coaching, it's like, look, the world of work isn't set up around finding your purpose or meaning or impact. I'm pretty sure you didn't answer a job listing that said looking for someone who wants more meaning. Like looking for someone who can do Figma

8:36Aarron Walter:and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

8:37Bill Burnett:Some technical workflow. But work is a place where moments occur of meaning, moments of connection with other people, moments of realization, right, that you're not alone, that other people have the similar feelings. First chapter of the book, we talk about a big distinction that there's one world really, but you can think of the world as sort of two different things. One world is we call the transaction world. It's just a world where you're getting stuff done. And that's what mostly work is about, getting things done. moving information from one place to another, designing something, releasing something.

9:08Bill Burnett:It's all transactional. But right underneath that, right underneath that, like an aquifer of meaning and purpose, right underneath the world of transactions is the world of flow. And we know flow is truly a neuroscience-based thing. It's a real thing. Chuck Sant Mahai discovered it back in the 90s. Just was reading an article, 21 Neuroscience Methods for Achieving Flow. So what we know now is that flow is possible. It's not just a peak experience or the runner's high or being in the zone. You can be in flow at any moment at any time. So it's just a matter of shifting your mindset. Impact, for instance, is all in the transaction world.

9:45Bill Burnett:Get something done, have an impact. Everyone says, hey, high five, great job. And three months later, you're like, okay, now what? The impact's over, right? It doesn't last. But moments of meaning and moments where meaning occurs mostly in the flow world are available at work. They're just not about the transactions. So if you reframe it that way, any activity, work, play. My two daughters have young families, you know, young kids running around and one has an eight-month-old baby and not getting enough sleep. It's like, it doesn't feel like there's a lot of flow available in some of those things.

10:20Bill Burnett:But that moment of quiet when the baby falls asleep on his shoulder, which I just was up there doing a little bit of grandfathering, is a pure moment of joy. and a pure moment of flow. And so once you reorient what you're looking for, don't look for meaning in the transactions. They're not set up for that. It's not anybody's fault. The company's not bad. It's set up to do transactions and make money, serve customers. You have to bring the moments. You have to design the moments of connection with your colleagues and design the moments of impact in the transactional world, but just shift them into the world of flow where the impact becomes a sense of satisfaction rather than a, oh, a check the box accomplishment.

11:01Aarron Walter:I really like that idea of extending flow beyond maybe something you're working on. I certainly find that when I'm designing something or sketching something or getting deep into a task, I can find myself in a flow state. But I think I could also label it differently in that, so I was just talking to you, Bill, about the office I just finished here. And sometimes after working hours, Courtney and I will come out here and just do a little happy hour, sit together, put a record on. And that, in a way, is also kind of a moment of flow because, you know, we don't have the distraction of the kids running around.

11:32Aarron Walter:We don't have screens in front of us. We're just sitting there, talking to each other, having a drink. And it feels like a similar state. Yeah.

11:38Bill Burnett:And if I put your brain in a scanner at that time, your executive function, prefrontal cortex, would be calmed down. The left and the right brain would be talking to each other. The music would be stimulating a sort of an emotional response, probably some dopamine and other happy chemicals. and those moments can be designed. We talk about designing a moment like an experience design and then executing it, finding the flow there. But then you can also look backward and reflect on moments and find the flow in that reflection, right? So when I said in the beginning, it's easier than you think. Once you realize where meaning resides in these moments and that you can design them and that you can reflect on moments and harvest the sense of meaning and flow, then they really are available all the time.

12:23Bill Burnett:And there's a thing that they brought into the book. He's the theist in the group. I'm the atheist. But there's an idea in theology and just in philosophy called the scandal of particularity, that the most transcendent sense of meaning is a moment of connection to the universe, the sort of either a religious or a moment of enlightenment and connection, right? And that moment, it turns out that the brain is a finite thing. It cannot experience the infinite wonder of the universe. You can have little flashes of it in these inspirational moments or psychedelic moments or whatever, but you can't absorb the whole universe.

12:56Bill Burnett:So the scandal is that the infant is found in the particular. The infant is found in that beautiful rose. As I was walking to the train the other day, I don't know why this rose is blooming, but it's blooming and it was just perfect. And once you realize, oh, wait a minute, I can make a moment right now. I can stop, enjoy this, wonder at the amazing spiral of the rose and the color of the rose in the smell. once you realize that the infinite is found in the finite, the infinite is found in moments, the scandal isn't that weird that, you know, you can only experience the infinite in moments. Once you've got that orientation, you're good to go.

13:33Bill Burnett:And the reason I think designers are really good at this is that designers are really good at getting into that creative state, an awesome brainstorm where everybody's firing on all cylinders and everybody seems to anticipate what everybody else is saying, or working deeply, silently, deeply on a design problem and having a little aha moment, a little moment where you go, oh yeah, this would work or this would work. And the fact that we always look for lots of ideas, not just one idea, gives us this neuroflexibility. And so designers are inherently curious people. And curiosity was one of the big mindsets in the first book.

14:06Bill Burnett:And in the second book, I wanted to take curiosity up a notch. So we said curiosity, our formula is curiosity plus mystery. How did that rose grow from some little tiny nothing curiosity plus mystery equals wonder so one of the big exercises in the books is to put on your wonder glasses and go for a walk it doesn't take very long before you notice that your curiosity leads you to a sense of wonder and awe you know we teach at stanford we can't make stuff up it's a research university so there's a ton of new research now on the neuroscience of awe and wonder, like these states of feeling connected.

14:41Bill Burnett:And you can manifest those states by just practicing the mindset of wonder and the mindset of curiosity. That's why it's so natural for designers to feel those states, because we're good at getting into a curiosity mindset, a wonder mindset, a connectivity mindset. And we try to make that understandable to folks who aren't designers. Obviously, the book is for everybody. It's not just for designers. But because we've got this design basis, it turns out to be really easy to explain how do you get there? You know, how do you find moments of wonder? How can you become a moment designer, meaning-making moment designer?

15:21Bill Burnett:And why is it easier than everybody told you?

15:24Evan Kimbrell:It's no mistake that the parent company of Design Better is called the Curiosity Department. That is who we are.

15:31Bill Burnett:It is. And it's so funny because a lot of the kids who come to Stanford to do design didn't come for design. They thought they were going to be some kind of engineer or something. And then they take classes like the visual thinking class or the first design class. And they realize, wow, this is so much fun. It's so much fun because it re-energizes the curiosity in your brain. It re-energizes the excitement of having lots of ideas. Powerful is the wrong word, but it feels great to realize, oh, wait a minute. I am a curious, creative person. I was just putting that aside because you didn't get into an elite university because you got 800s on your creativity SAT.

16:04Bill Burnett:once you can get people to get curious and get engaged in the world really magical stuff happens and i think that's why the books have been so well received is that it helps people just rediscover who they really were anyway they were a curious kid at four or five years old i got a four-year-old grandson he's reteaching me what real curiosity is all about in the book there are

16:27Evan Kimbrell:four components of meaning making, and we've touched on two. You've talked about flow, you've talked about wonder and curiosity being part of that. Community is one that caught my attention, and it immediately brought to mind these longevity studies. There's a big longitudinal study that Harvard did. I think it was like the longest study.