How to Experience More Meaning in Your Life with Dave Evans

25:49What's his name? The guy that wrote The Purpose Driven Life. Successful TV pastors keep falling down because they get a zipper problem. And I was talking to, what was his name? This mega pastor who wrote a massive successful book. I can't remember his name. And he said he had learned from Billy Graham to absolutely believe that you two are made of the same dirt as everybody else. And you better watch out. So this guy had a file drawer in his desk full of articles about fallen leaders, sexual fallen leaders. And his responsibility was to read one article every week to remind him there, but by the act of stupidity, go you fool.

26:29And so he erected a practice to keep his brain in this thing called humanity, not egotism. And I think fiscally, it's a similar thing. It's very, very, very difficult. When I even hear the term prosperity gospel, to me, that's an oxymoron. That is an oxymoron. No, yeah, it's complete crap. Sorry, sorry. I happen to have a seminary degree. I will win that argument. We could go down that pathway. By the way, you know, Jesus' conversation with the rich young ruler, and he says, obey the law. What must I do? Jesus says, obey the law and the prophecies. I've done that since I was a kid. Oh, so you got that problem.

27:08You did everything right, and you're still not feeling like you're— probably what's happening is your material wealth is in the way. Why don't you sell all that crap and give it away and get that burden off your back? And then the young man walks away sad because he doesn't like the counsel he's getting. And people, I think, misread what happens next. Jesus says, it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And people go, I.E., he just means it's impossible. No, that's not what that means. The needle was the nickname of the smallest gate through the wall of the city of Jerusalem.

27:42And a camel had to get on its knees to go through that gate because of a low lintel. And camels don't like getting on their knees. They bellyache and they scream and they whine like crazy. It's very, very difficult. So it's not impossible for a camel, an actual camel, to go through the actual gate called the needle. But boy, do they not like it. They will resist it with every bone in their body. That's what he's talking about. So if you are a rich person and you want to enter this kingdom of humanity, this presence of the wonderfulness of being a member of this collective consciousness called people and this enjoyer of this thing called creation in this life nobody gave you, you did not make, but somebody gave you, you got to humble yourself.

28:27And rich people have a really powerful capability to avoid that humility and in so doing dehumanize themselves. And I guess the complexity is that maybe that ability enabled them to be rich, right? Oh, yeah. I think if you throw all of your capability at winning that external game, you will have a greater chance of winning it. Let's be clear. The people who are willing to give everything they've got and everything everybody else has got at winning at any cost are more likely to win. But the results have a huge, huge boomerang of negative effect. Yeah. Okay. Let's get off that topic. Okay. So now, oh, no, no, one more thing.

29:15I want to, because. Sure, sure. Will you explain the story of how you came up with the term evangelist for Apple? Okay. Because everybody, not everybody, but many people believe that Guy either invented or personify the concept of secular evangelism. And I keep telling them, first of all, there was Jesus, and then there was a 2 ,000-year gap. And then there was Mike Boych, and then there was Guy. But then I interviewed you, and I found out, man, you preceded Boych and I. So just tell this story about Guy. Okay, the story is true. The speculative conclusion is this is where the term evangelism started to sneak into at least the Apple lexicon and then eventually the business lexicon.

30:07I don't know that for a fact, but I happened to have been in the room before you were in the room and I used the word evangelism and got in some near trouble for it. So once upon a time, shortly after the IPO, in the first year that I was at Apple back in 79, 80, the company grew from 800 to 5 ,000 people in one year, kind of fast, which meant the newbies outnumbered the tried and true six to one. And Steve and Ann Bowers, the head of HR, wife of Bob Noyce, the CEO of Intel, now there's a power couple, were very worried that with all these national semiconductor and Hewlett Packard and God knows what other people running around the campus, that they would outnumber the real Apple people and they wouldn't get it.

30:50And suddenly would he wake up and be some other company. And so we formed the Apple Corporate Culture Committee. To my knowledge, the first corporate culture committee, maybe the first time we discussed corporate culture as a term, 79, 80. And there was a conversation, about 12 people in the room, and we should have trainings, we should have a video, we should have posters and this kind of stuff. And at one point, I've only been there a couple of weeks. My boss, Tripp, dragged me in. And I kind of go, hey, none of that's going to work. Because you guys are talking about programming and curriculum.

31:18And this isn't programming curriculum. It's evangelism. And Steve leans over and goes, what the fuck did he just say? And my boss, Tripp, goes, hey, Steve, wait a minute. He talks like this all the time. It's usually pretty interesting. Give him a minute. And if it's interesting, great. If not, we'll just fire his ass. Steve goes, OK, you got a minute. Go. True story. And I go, so evangelism is about giving away what's true of you. It's caught, not taught. It's the disease model. You guys are talking about training and education, and that's just content that can be transferred by anybody. We're talking about culture, which is actually something you embody.

31:57So the only way you can actually have Apple keep being Apple is that the people who get Apple who've got the Apple disease come into relational proximity with the people who don't, so they can actually transmit the disease through contact. It's a cultural experience. It's not a content information delivery system. It's a personal exposure system. You've got to get people to get the disease from the people who are infected with it. That's what evangelism means. And then a couple of years later, I come back as a software developer, and there's a guy name guy kawasaki who's got the word apple evangelist on his business i think you were the first person to have evangelist on the business card no mike boych was the first oh was he okay okay yeah well you're the coolest one though you got the brand value well i would say mike boych was the first one but i got all the credit how's that i was self-actualizing there you go that's right yeah i was being all the evangelists i could be yeah so now that we straighten that out and It's clear that you're the father of evangelism.

33:04Yes. As far as I know, I didn't get fired. It didn't get fired that day. Yeah. All righty. So now let us talk about, you have a section of the book where you talk about the five mindsets that are necessary for achieving meaning. So what are those five mindsets? And please explain that to us. Okay. So the book has kind of three sections. There are a couple of reframes up front, like, hey, maybe the fulfillment thing, you could think about that differently. So some reframes so we work on a better problem. Then the middle, we've got the mindsets, which is the posture and the stance it would take if you want to live a meaningful life.

33:39This approach to life is going to help. And then four areas you can go give it a try. So I'm glad you picked the mindsets because frankly, if you get those right, the rest kind of comes for free. And the mindsets are first wonder, having a mindset of wonder, seeing the world with a wonder bias. Second is radical acceptance. Then availability. Then next is fully engaged and calmly detached. And last is create your world, which really means write your internal narrative, create the world in which you're living in. So the five mindsets are wonder, radical acceptance, availability, full engagement with calm detachment, and create your world with your story.

34:17So do you want to go down one at a time? I think wonder is self-evident. I think the most difficult one for people to just hear and understand is what the hell is radical acceptance? Okay. Radical acceptance. First of all, we've been teaching design at Stanford since 1963. And there's the five-step design process, little hexagons that have been on slides for 50-odd years. And step one is empathy. Understand deeply what's going on and then define the right problem to work on, then have ideas about it, well-known for ideation, then prototype a bunch of things before you finally design. Those are the steps.

34:52But step zero that precedes empathy is acceptance. You can't solve a problem you're not willing to have. You can't be in a place other than reality. Design, which is a bottom-up empirical approach to trying things through behavioral prototyping, not an analytic approach, only works in reality. And so Bill and I have been saying acceptance is step zero for a long time. And in this book, we realized if I'm going to experience meaning in the present moment, I have to be in the present moment. I can't be going, well, it's okay talking to God, but I really wish I was talking to Rainn Wilson, which I did last week.

35:28But so that doesn't work. I wish I was talking to Peter Thiel. Yeah, I wish I was talking to Peter Thiel. That doesn't work. And then so we see you got to accept. And we added radical in the sense of make a deep philosophical, personal, ideological commitment to acceptance. Like reality is the place I am going to live and something suddenly changes on you, some news arrives and you kind of go, oh God, here we go. Like I want to get my transition time from a reality update to accepting that reality update down to as close to zero as I possibly can. I want to radically accept, meaning constantly, readily, frictionlessly update to reality.

36:11You're sitting in the airport like, oh, I'm so sorry. The wing just fell off the plane. We're going to be delayed four hours. Okay. Oh, okay. Maybe I get two seconds. That's radical acceptance. And radical acceptance is particularly handy when you add it to the next one, availability. In fact, we call that the power twofer. The power twofer is radical acceptance plus availability. So let's say I'm an accepting person. Like, okay, okay, fine. The plane's delayed. I accept that. That's a neutral acceptance. It's full acceptance, but it's neutral. No, I want more than that. I want availability, which is leaning in and what's here for me in this reality.

36:49What's the invitation? There's got to be like, hey, I now have time to go over and actually, you know, there's a little museum in SFO. There is, there's a museum in SFO. I've got time to go to the museum. Let's go have a great time. Well, I guess I can get some more email done. My battery's, oh man, oh, that guy's got the chair next to the power plug. Shit. That's not available. I'm not doing availability there. So I'm doing, oh, I'm going to go to the museum. I'm going to have a great time. So that's what radical acceptance is about. And it's surprisingly unpopular. Most people's experience of happiness is the gap between the way things are and the way they had in mind.

37:28There's this gap. It's what the Buddhists talk about as suffering. Mostly I'm coming from what I had in mind, not what actually is. Radical acceptance means what's in my mind and what's in reality are the same thing, which means my chance of being happy with it goes way up. Who among us has not been at the airport or on a flight where somebody's copying this attitude? Do you know who I am? Of course I should be upgraded. How dare you? Blah, blah, blah. Turn this plane around. Oh, we forgot my wife's blanket on the other plane. I'm going to fire the pilot. Quick sidebar story. One of my favorite versions of that actually happening years ago, back when I flew enough that I kept getting upgraded.

38:10I'm sitting in business class. Not bad. Big, wide body. Everybody's filing in full plane. And these two young professionals, very nicely dressed, having a nasty argument. And she's in front and she's carping back at him. And then she goes back. She's in economy. He's in business class. So he's clearly the boss. He's the last guy in. And of course, sure enough, he's right next to me because there's two seats left in business class and he's in the one next to me. And then he stuffs his thing in the overhead. And he finally sits down and he goes, so are you having a bad day? He goes, yeah, I am. I said, yeah, you got to get a life.

38:51And he goes, what? I said, you got to get a life. He goes, I do, don't I? I said, oh, yeah. He said, what do you think the problem is? I said, the problem is you're an asshole. And he goes, I am, aren't I? I said, oh, everybody in this class knows you're an asshole.

39:11And you got some work to do. He goes, can we talk about that? I said, sure. True story. I'm either going to get punched out or we're going to have a really interesting conversation. I have no idea if he followed up on it because he was pretty committed to being the coolest guy he had ever met. It could have been a long flight, Dave. It could have been a long flight. I was younger. I was stupid. I took the risk. I probably just put my headphones on there. I can use that story to tell you a funny spinoff on my interpretation of that story. I don't know if you know this, but I am deaf. I do know that.

39:45I learned that at the Digital Nest Gala. We were trying to have a conversation and I wasn't looking at you properly. Oh my gosh, guy is deaf. So I have radical acceptance of my deafness. I don't hide it. I don't give a shit and all that. So that's radical acceptance. And so now - I want to affirm that, by the way, because when you explained it to me at the nest in that cacophonous cocktail scene where it's really tough to be a deaf person, even with a cochlear implant, I went, man, he is carrying this beautifully. So I just want to affirm you for that. Oh, thank you. Thank you. So now I have radically accepted my deafness, but I've gone beyond acceptance.

40:24I've gone to radical flaunting, which is if I sat next to an asshole like this, I would just tell them, I'm deaf. You can say whatever you want. It's like a superpower of mine. I can literally not hear assholes. Yeah, there you go. I find not only acceptance out loud, radical acceptance out loud. Some people find a little confrontational. You're just telling the truth quickly. But I think it's incredibly freeing. I'm thinking of a young man I know who has survived being bipolar. And as a young man thought a good way to handle that was to become a meth addict, that would be a really brilliant way to handle it.

41:04So five rehabs later, he finally gets his act together and he's now married and has kids. He's doing great. Now he's still bipolar. He's dragging a heavy bag. Somebody kind of goes, well, how's it going? And he goes, well, I'm having kind of a hard day. Oh, what's up? He said, well, you know, I'm bipolar and I'm currently on a long depressive trough and my meds aren't working very well, but I'm doing the best I can. They kind of go, oh, okay. And some people think he's oversharing, but what he's finding is, look, I'm just living in this place called reality. Would you like to join me here? So like, hey, I'm deaf.

41:36Please move your mouth. That's great. Go for it, man. I would predict, Dave, that that asshole in business class, he went to his company or his spouse and he said, I fly 52 times a year. I sit next to people 52 times a year. The first time somebody ever told me I'm an asshole was this guy and he was right. And why didn't the other 51 people tell me I'm an asshole? It would have helped me come to this realization. Part of what we're trying to give people an invitation to do in this book is pay enough attention to their lives to wake up to, is this actually working for you? A guy named John O 'Neill was the youngest ever VP at AT &T long ago.

42:22He's in the corporate limo being driven to the private jet again. And on the way to the plane, he asks his driver, Rodrigo, he says, Rodrigo, talk to me. He goes, what? He says, I'm in the car with you all the time. You never talk to me. He goes, no, That's not my job. He goes, why don't you talk to me? He said, do you really want to know? He goes, yeah. Why don't you talk? He says, I don't want to talk to you. You're incredibly boring. All you do is sit there and read these numbers and get on planes. And I hear you on the phone. There's nothing you're saying I find interesting. I have no desire to talk to you.

43:00He says, why do you do this job you do? You seem like you hate it. Why are you doing this? And they arrive at the airplane. And John goes, that's a really good question. Why do I do this? I'll have an answer for you when I get back. So he gets on the airplane, goes off to his meeting, comes back three days later. Rodrigo picks him up for the airplane. John, true story, John gets in the back of the limo and goes, drive me to headquarters. I have to quit. He goes, what? I've spent three days trying to answer your question. Why do I do this? And I have no idea. I got to figure out what the heck my life is for.

43:33I'm going to go back and quit so I can get enough time to figure out what am I doing here? Oh, my God. And he starts the School of Alternative Parapsychology. I'm going to figure out how the brain works. But nonetheless, like, why am I doing this? That's a good question. Okay. You're taking me down another rabbit hole. Do you know who Carol Dweck is? Yeah. Okay. So Carol Dweck and I, there is a link to the Rodrigo story. So Carol Dweck and I, we shared the same limo servers. It's this guy named Chris Webster. Okay. She used to use Chris Webster. I used to use Chris Webster. So Chris Webster dies.

44:10And I know that Chris Webster was always taking Stanford professors and venture capitalists and CXOs to the airport. Yeah. So Chris Webster dies. And my son and I, because he knew him too, we go to his funeral, right? And I'm thinking, I'm going to go to his funeral. Oh, my God. There's going to be like all these venture capitalists, all these professors, all these CXOs. and I go there and it's all family except for Carol Dweck. So it was me and Carol Dweck went to his funeral and all those other assholes who probably were just reading numbers and not engaging Chris Webster in any conversation, they were nowhere to be found.

44:55And so that is the day I fell even more in love with Carol Dweck and the growth mindset. I mean, do you want to actually be a member of this thing called the human race and participate in the human experience? So my aunt Helen dies at 99, outlived everybody. Very well to do. She had married into money. Go to the service, go to the wake at the house. And there are two different rooms. There's the family room in the kitchen full of all the rich people bragging about their new boat and drinking a lot of bourbon. And there's the Filipino family, the people she had hired for the past 20 years to live in her home and take care of her.

45:32So she had this caretaking Filipino family, which had gone through two generations taking care of her. There are eight Filipinos, none of whom have any blood relationship to her whatsoever, in the living room, going through the photo albums, crying. And I literally walk back and forth, walk in the Filipino room, walk in the kitchen. The relative's drinking and bragging, and the Filipinos crying, kind of going like, I'm with these guys. It's a choice. I would be with the Filipinos and we would be eating lumpia. I guarantee you that. And telling stories. I guarantee you that. Up next on Remarkable People.

46:12She is entirely in the movement. You can't see her thinking about it. You can't see her executing it. She just isn't. The movement and the person and the intention are all simply one thing. become a little more remarkable with each episode of remarkable people it's found on apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows welcome back to remarkable people with guy kawasaki we gotta talk about one more big topic which is flow let us talk about flow and you can start off by answering the question what's the difference between the transactional world and the flow world. So we came up with this alternative model where you did a reframe called the flow world versus the transactional world.

47:03We conceived that because when we heard people's complaint about not getting the meaning they were looking for, and they were looking for either fulfillment or impact, both of which are these accomplishment-oriented things, all of that occurs in the get-stuff-done world. And it's missing the present moment. and they're not in flow. And we ask ourselves the question, wait, what else is going on here? So Lisa Miller out of Columbia, neurologist, who's the whole left brain, right brain model thing has gotten much more sophisticated. We understand that much better than we used to. She calls it the achieving brain versus the awakened brain.

47:40Liz Bolt Taylor's famous TEDx talk about my stroke of insight when a neurologist had a huge tumor and literally her left brain died. She nearly did. It took eight years to recover, but she lived entirely out of her right awakened brain and went, oh, wow, this is a completely different version of humanity. It's really cool. We should get back to that. So we came up with this because people are living in the transactional achievement place all the time, and they're missing a big part of reality, not because it's a different world, really, but because consciously you can't attend to those two things at the same time, typically.

48:16And people are living only in the get stuff done world. We call it the transactional world, which is the part of your brain you're in too much of the time. And in the present moment, in an experience of humanity, an experience of beauty, you're in this other world, which we call the flow world. Like where does the flow state? You know, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's psychology of optimal experience when I'm fully engaged and totally involved in what I'm doing, I am entirely in the present moment. That's the flow state. Where does the flow state happen? It happens in what we're calling the flow world.

48:52So the easiest way to start having more meaning is tapping into these other forms of meaning. There's other forms of aliveness and humanity that are present in the flow world, i.e. the moment that we're in right now. So the chief task of meaning design, a meaning designer is a moment maker. by making more flow in the moment. I truly believe that when I am in the middle of a podcast interview and when I am making a speech, I lose all track of time. This is my flow environment. No, clearly, you're really good at it. You're really enjoying it. And the thing we're advocating for people is, look, the way Csikszentmihalyi studied this thing identifies flow, the experience of flow being pretty elusive.

49:41It's where the challenge of the task and my skill set meet almost perfectly, meaning it takes everything I've got to be present of this task. And the way we look at that is we say, oh, what you've done is you've delegated to the task. I got to go find a task that's hard enough. I can just barely do it. Then I might be able to fall into flow. That's where the system as originally defined works. We're going, whoa, whoa, whoa. Take your agency back. You get to be in charge. You can decide that chopping onions is something you deserve to flow in. Like, oh, it doesn't take much of my brain. I should be bouncing on my feet, getting in 10 ,000 steps while listening to two podcasts, one in one ear, one in the other while chopping onions because I'm so bored.

50:21Okay. No. How about just like enjoy the heck out of it? Be fully present. Have the mental discipline to say, I'm doing this now. I'm doing this now. So we think the ability to more deeply engage what you're doing at the time is readily available to way more people, way more of the time. We call that simple flow. It may not be the same as when you're totally maxing out, getting the gold medal in figure skating at the apex of your experience. Those are lovely when they occur, but don't wait for them. You can be in flow just doing a podcast. Yeah. Dave, we discussed this before we started recording, but I want you to trust me and I want you to go and find the video of Alyssa Lu in her gold medal performance.

51:12Okay. I have seen a lot of things in my life. I cannot think of a person who more exemplified being in the flow state than Alyssa Lu when she did that performance at the Olympics. Oh, my God. I go surfing almost every day. And I always think to myself, I have to surf like she was skating. I'm not even close. But anyway, just trust me, Dave. invest five minutes of your life and watch it is the most freaking amazing example of flow ever. I'm going to predict what I'm going to see because I've had that experience before. And you know, from surfing, jazz music is another good example of this, by the way, where you have to attain an incredible level of mastery in order to become self-forgetting.

52:06In order to drop, my guess is that what I'm going to see on that video is she is entirely in the movement. You can't see her thinking about it. You can't see her executing it. She just is it. The movement and the person and the intention are all simply one thing. That's what complete engagement looks like. And that's profoundly alive because it's all there to be seen. It's all right there. And that's exactly how I do not surf. But wait, okay, this brings us up to the scandal of particularity, which is a terribly important. I'll bet there are moments when you do. That's true. You actually, maybe by accident, were in exactly the right place for the takeoff.

52:47You were in exactly the right place on the curl. You dropped in beautifully and just coming down the face, maybe a second and a half, coming down the face, it was like totally thin the zone. You were so astonished you fell off the board and crashed. You purled right at the bottom, right? So you have seen me surf. Well, I used to be a really bad surfer and I had maybe two seconds. surfing has brought many things into my life including madison nismar that's how we met oh great yeah yeah she can tell you what a lousy surfer i am okay my very last question for you is i think one of the best ways to learn about a new topic such as flow or meaning yeah or self transcendence is examples.

53:32So I want to know who is in the Dave Evans Hall of Fame of living a meaningful life and achieving transcendence. I'll answer that two ways. First of all, being authentically around anyone who's getting closer to it animates my own move. We call this formative community. People get together three different ways to have a social gathering, Have a good time. Collaborative gathering, go get something done together. Those are both very wonderful human experiences. One of the reasons that being in a startup or being in the military is so life-giving to people is that deep collaboration. But there's another kind called formative community, we called it, which is where I'm getting together not to do something together, but just to become, I want to become more like Dave.

54:17You want to become more like Guy. Guy becoming Guy actually animates Dave becoming Dave. I don't want to run a podcast. It may be necessarily that we both write books. You're into surfing. I'm into motorcycling, kind of different. He can't help me be a better motorcyclist because that's not the same as surfing. I don't want to talk to him. No, no. You tell me how guy turns more into guy and I actually am around you guying more deeply in your surf story. That will animate the same thing in my psyche. So anybody who's moving in the right direction can keep you moving in the right direction. It doesn't have to be the world-class Olympia.

54:54No, but your question was, who's the poster boy for me? Well, a couple of people. I'm going to mention one. In the book, there's a person, we call him Arnie, and we claim that he lives in Atlanta. His name is Ronald, and he lived in San Francisco until a couple of weeks ago when he died. Arnie was, at the end of his life, wheelchair-bound, poor as a church mouse, long-standing artist. And Ronald, bless his heart, literally, we saw him just 36 hours before he died, was living into what was available to him. He was incredibly present all the time. He's sitting there in his little Garrett apartment, in his little wheelchair, very little going on.

55:32And you walk in the door and he goes, David, have you read Balzac? It's amazing. Now there's a whole bunch of stuff he couldn't do, but what he could, he leaned all the way into. And I sat with him one time privately, just the two of us. I've met him through my fiance, who's known him for 20 years. I said, Ronald, what is it with you anyway? How'd you get like this? He said, I think I know what you're talking about. He said, you know, long, long ago, when I decided to be an artist, I was really struggling. And then I suddenly realized, oh, if I want to be an artist, I just have to accept the fact that I'm going to be abjectly poor for the rest of my life.

56:09I can do that. So I did. And he was happy. And he did this radical acceptance thing and availability thing like no one I have ever met. I've got a slide in one of my decks that says, you know, WWRD, what would Ronald do? So Ronald's kind of my poster boy right now. He had this tiny little life you would think from a distance. If you look at the Viewmaster pictures of his life. But man, the aliveness he had in that life shames those assholes on the airplane.

56:42Especially the assholes on the private planes.

56:48I've been on a couple of those, actually, and sat there thinking to myself, thank God I'm not you people.

56:57Dave, I think we've been in flow long enough and we've trashed enough people. Unkindly. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, no, no. It's been wonderful. So just let me thank the team behind me who, you know, deal with my flow. So I would like to thank Madison Nisemer, co-producer. She's the brains behind the outfit. Jeff C., co-producer. He's the technology behind the outfit. Shannon Hernandez is a sound design engineer. Tessa Nisemer is a researcher. This is the Remarkable People team, and we all are searching for people like Dave so that we can inform and inspire you. So thank you very much for joining us on the Remarkable People podcast, Dave and everybody listening.

57:48Until next time, mahalo and aloha.

57:57This is Remarkable People.