#1062 - Dave Evans - It’s time to rethink your entire life plan

9:39Dave Evans:There's nothing quite as thrilling as ascending the Olympic platform or terrifying as coming. The distance from the top of the Olympic platform to dumpster diving is terrifyingly short.

9:48Chris Williamson:And much shorter than the other side. It's long to get up there and it's very quick. Very short on the backside.

9:54Dave Evans:Yeah. So they called up and I did a training with them. There's a group called Elite Meet, which is a volunteer organization of recently former Top Gun pilots, Rangers, Green Berets, Special Forces. People who are the absolute best in their business, can kill you 75 ways, do not piss these people off. But most of them are lovely human beings, by the way. I'm very fond of professional military. That's a whole other conversation. But they retire out at 42, mostly. They start at 22, do their 20 years, they're out at 42. They're incredibly good at what they do. The world doesn't need them anymore.

10:26Dave Evans:Now what? So there's a whole group of their peers kind of going, this is going to be hard on you. We're here to catch you. And I've worked with them a little bit. So yeah, absolutely. You know, killing the impact thing, you know, can be a double-edged sword. So thing one about impact is you got to get eggs in some other baskets. And the reframe there is, because that's all done in what we call the transactional world, the get stuff done world. There's another world we call the flow world, which is really the present moment, this thing called reality that's happening right now that you could be experiencing in a different way and it's rich with meaning-making experiences.

10:57Dave Evans:We'll come back to that. For the fulfillment person who's stuck on that, like, okay, the reframe is, no, you can't be fulfilled, but you can be fully alive. You can be entirely here in this present moment. And one thing that will help you accept that that may be true, the last big reframe is because now we can celebrate the scandal of particularity, which usually brings up the question, what the hell is that?

11:19Chris Williamson:I'll let you interview yourself. Just keep going. That's okay.

11:22Dave Evans:Stop me anytime. It's your show. The scandal of particularity is originally a theological, then a philosophical concept. And what it is that turns out the ultimate of anything, truth, beauty, justice, purity, is never actually experienced in reality. Only partial reflections temporarily encountered in a very specific and constrained moment in time, a particularity, are what we actually get.

11:50Chris Williamson:We're longing for perfection, but all we get is the particular.

11:55Dave Evans:That's actually just the nature of reality. So rather than like, oh, you see the amazing sunset. And if you really, really attend to that amazing sunset, just as it's over and the sun hits the horizon and you see the green flash and whoa, what do you want? More. I want more. It wasn't quite enough. That isn't, it fell short. That is the fundamental nature of reality. reality is only expressed in these particularities, all of which are partial. And it's the fundamental nature of the human person, which is that thing you long for is how you're made. So if you can befriend the longing, it no longer is the problem of everything's not enough.

12:43Dave Evans:It's that, oh, I have a chance to participate in a sincere reflection of that perfection briefly. Celebrate the heck out of it because this is as good as it gets. And I'm going to come back tomorrow and try again. Yeah.

12:54Chris Williamson:Befriending the longing. I want to come back to that. One thing that's stuck in my mind, the challenge of people who have focused on impact for a long time, but also the route to which they achieved their impact was also the vehicle that delivered them their flow. So if you are a gymnast, a very flowy sort of tennis player, very flowy sort of thing.

13:19Dave Evans:You're a neurosurgeon.

13:21Chris Williamson:you're now out of that. You're no longer getting the impact that you had. And you've lost the flow at the same time. I imagine that double whammy must be very difficult.

13:29Dave Evans:It can be. Yeah. So I actually stopped teaching undergrads at Stanford back in 2018. I now mostly teach in the DCI program, the Distinguished Careers Institute, very fancy name for a gap year for grownups. Anywhere from 45 to 90, mostly 55 to 75 years old, kind of the old folks who used to think about transitioning to what you used to call retirement. And now what do I do? So that's the second half of life transition for people. And the way I characterize the big challenge of that, and these are all, not all necessarily rich hedge fund people from New York, but we've got plenty of those. It could be a nonprofit leader, you know, but they're all distinguished people who had impact and enjoyed doing that impactful thing well and got into it and were in the flow.

14:09Dave Evans:And now they don't necessarily want to be that person anymore. So it's the shift from role to soul. So the shift from I'm a role-based person. I'm really good at this, you know, gymnast thing. I'm really good at the surgery thing. And I still value that, but it's not first and foremost where my identity wants to come from now. And as I move away from that, you know, it's sticky. And boy, I'm really good at making that version of me work. and that's where kind of the shift into a greater maturity is a very elective move and it starts anywhere from 30 to never. Not much before 30 because you don't get a neocortex until you're 27 or 28, a little later in men, big surprise.

14:55Dave Evans:But look, you don't get a Buddha, you don't get a Moses, you don't get a Jesus until 30, 40 in Moses' case. It takes a while to make a person. But once you get past making a person, then you've got to build an ego before you can transcend it. You've got to have a life container before you can empty it. So that task of turning yourself into a person in your 20s, 30s, and 40s is a really important task. But then once you've got one, once you've got a person you trust enough that you believe you deserve to exist, now it's time to start emptying out and having a more transcendent experience. And it is a real tough transition for most people.

15:34Chris Williamson:That man-o-pause that happens to guys toward the end of their 20s, I first saw it in the way that me and my friends trained fitness.

15:41Dave Evans:Yeah.

15:41Chris Williamson:And then it became everything, the way that we thought about our contribution to our friend group and the way that we thought about money or goals or family life or whatever. Something that has struck me there is the fact that getting beyond 40 ancestrally would have been increasingly rare. Yes.

16:01Dave Evans:Death was more popular.

16:03Chris Williamson:more frequent. What that suggests, we can say popular. Yeah. What that suggests is that these challenges that we're facing were not only mismatched evolutionarily for the modern environment, even durationally we are mismatched for our current environment. And you can talk about an aging population and birth rate decline and blah, blah, blah. You can go into that stuff. But I think what's more interesting is that the adaptive systems that we have, even culturally, myth, archetype, what does it mean? If it's such a rarefied strata to get into 50, 60, 70 years old, where there's just not been a big enough sample size of people from history to be able to explain what that transition actually looks like.

16:55Chris Williamson:Does that make sense?

16:56Dave Evans:Sure. But I think what it really means is, I mean, people made those transitions in their mid-late 30s to early 40s before because they're going to die at 50. And now just the window of time during which that transition can occur has stretched.

17:09Chris Williamson:And shifted.

17:10Dave Evans:And shifted. And so what's happening is people are doubling down. You know, so William Bridges wrote the book Transitions, Making Sense of Life's Big Changes. So he posits years ago, it's an 80s self-help classic. It's a good book based on Erickson's work. that changes are outside-in realities that happen to you. Transitions are the internal experience of managing them. And his observation was that transitions are three steps, not two. It's not an ending followed by a new beginning. It's an ending followed by the neutral zone. So, you know, it's over, then you're lost, and then you get re-found.

17:45Dave Evans:But you don't go from found to found.

17:47Chris Williamson:Such a good point. That's so good.

17:49Dave Evans:If you're really comfortable and, oh, I've extended and had a longer career and I started my fourth company. I mean, I started the Life Design Lab at 54, you know, and so my fourth startup, you know, into my 70s. You know, it's kind of like, hey, I like this. The feedback loop of doing stuff I'm good at and it works is really gratifying. And then life kind of says, yeah, let's go off and be confused. Let's go learn how to be emotional and feel like an incompetent and incompetent for a while. Like that's really attractive. So I see people all the time get to the end of something and then kind of go, I'm going to go into the darkness for a while.

18:25Dave Evans:I think I'll go back to the clarity. So we just re-up. A buddy of mine, my age, just started his 12th company. I'll call him John. And I'm going, John, really?

18:37Chris Williamson:This game again. I mean, what do you not know?

18:41Dave Evans:He said, well, I'm good at it. I kind of go, you knew that four times ago.

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20:06Chris Williamson:And what you could imagine, I'm not going to say that John is doing this. Yes. But you could imagine a world in which a hermit crab refused to eat in order for it to not outgrow its shell.

20:16Dave Evans:Right.

20:18Chris Williamson:I'm staying right here. That would be the anorexic hermit crab.

20:20Dave Evans:Yeah, okay.

20:21Chris Williamson:No, I think— Because it doesn't want to go through the middle section. It doesn't want to go through the middle transition.

20:27Dave Evans:Right. It wants to go from found—fuck it, I'll just stay in found. Yeah, I'll stay in found. Yeah. Yeah, well, we just had the conversation with Chip Conley, you know, Mr. Modern Elder Academy guy, you know, and he's pushing the midlife chrysalis, not the midlife crisis. Christ is doing it badly as opposed to this transformational thing, which is, I mean, it's a nice pitch. He's a lovely guy doing really good work. But no, life is change. You know, if I really believe that being a person is being a becoming, then it's going to change. And some of those changes are real seasonal stage-like transitions that are pretty interesting.

21:02Dave Evans:And, you know, you have to decide if it's worth it.

21:05Chris Williamson:That's impact. What about the reframe on fulfillment?

21:08Dave Evans:Okay, so fulfillment, I can be fully alive, which is again back to be fully alive in the present moment, even with its apparent insufficiency of particularity. It's just, I mean, this is actually my first can of new tonic.

21:22Chris Williamson:Yes.

21:22Dave Evans:I think it's the best one I've ever had. Fantastic. You know, is it the best, you know, caffeinated drink on the surface of the earth?

21:28Chris Williamson:Yes.

21:29Dave Evans:So far. Good. So far. So am I willing to say, you know, not quite. Or my older say, I'm really enjoying this. And let it be what it is and not blame it for what it's not yet. So that's where fully alive comes back in. And there are practices that allow us to do that. And so most of what the book is really about is positing, look, there's the transactional world where all this performance is occurring. And there's a flow world, which is happening right now. Do you have access to the kinds of behaviors, the kind of awareness, the kind of attention in this present moment, what I call the flow world?

22:03Dave Evans:that will allow you to experience life more deeply because more aliveness feels more meaningful. It feels more human. I think what we're ultimately called to be is more human. Joseph Campbell said in an interview years ago on PBS, you know, on the meaning question, like, is it really meaning or is what we're really after just the true rapture of being alive? At the end of the day, you have to decide, is the human person fundamentally just a production engine? I equal what I did. or a living being and what it equaled was the life I lived. So your decision about what it means to be a person, there's a pretty big decision.

22:43Chris Williamson:Can you put meaning into an evolutionary lens for me, please? How is meaning adaptive? What is it ancestrally? Give it that lens if you can.

22:55Dave Evans:I'm winging it because that's not first and foremost where I go. You know, I'm a realist. I live in reality. I notice people think the meaning thing is pretty important. So I'm just going to start there. Why might meaning have been important? Well, that's actually going to depend a little bit on your cosmology. Right. I happen to be the theist on the team. My partner, Bill, is the Nietzsche-appreciating existential atheist. So you're going to get a different answer. But I think even evolutionarily, if in fact that which is energizing evolution at all, there's some trajectory here. and that collaboration and community and persistence sustain that, then let's keep it interesting, not just keep it virile.

23:48Dave Evans:So I can move along. And so if there's something in me that wants to lean more deeply into my own life and lean more deeply into our collective life, then that's going to keep the community going the community is going to keep the genome going

24:01Chris Williamson:yeah good it's a alignment of a bunch of different pro-social macronutrients yeah that are both internal and sort of kin-basedy yeah just around you dunbar numbers stuff so is it your perspective to try and summarize where we've got to so far yeah the problem that people are trying to actually solve when they say they want more meaning yes is they want more aliveness they want to feel more alive?

24:27Dave Evans:Almost. I'm suggesting that if we added more aliveness to the definition of meaning and then give tools to acquire that, then their access to meanings are going to go up. Right now, people, you know, it's like your food groups. I mean, I've got one food group called impact, and we're suggesting, how about five? Impact, wonder, flow, coherence, and community. So if I've got more food groups, I might get more calories.

24:52Chris Williamson:What about fulfillment in that? Fulfillment's being broken out into some of those other component parts. Right. Right. Okay. Yeah.

24:58Dave Evans:It's ways different aspects of my humanity are being both experienced, grown, and expressed.

25:03Chris Williamson:Okay. Contributing elements of meaning. Yep. In your conception.

25:07Dave Evans:Yeah. Which is not comprehensive, by the way. This is kind of a low-hanging fruit book. You know, we're the - Zero to one is the way to go. Well, you know, you have a lot of people on here who are about maximizing, about high performance, about getting the most out of. We're the set the bar low and clear it guys. I mean, we're trying to provide doable, accessible tools that regular people can use on a regular basis. Life is long. It's an incremental evolutionary process. Let's all get there. So when Bill and I looked at what people were struggling and what we might have to say through the lens of design thinking, that's the platform we sort of are allowed to speak from, We said, well, we're not going to completely boil the ocean of the meaning question here.

25:48Dave Evans:We're not. However, what might be helpful? And so these reframes we think might be helpful that we discussed. A couple of mindsets are helpful. We've got a chapter on that. And then these four areas, wonder, flow, coherency, and formative community, that's not the totality of meaning by any means. Meaning is a big topic. But we think those four are readily available to almost everybody and they're accessible pretty quickly. So here's a design tool or a practice or an idea or suggestion where you might go get some of that stuff. And if that works for a lot of people, that's a good thing.

26:22Chris Williamson:Good starting point. Is there anything else to say about Reframe before we get into the engines and the component part?

26:27Dave Evans:Yeah, just the point of Reframe, you know, it has been said, and I would agree, that, you know, life is largely a story. Our experience of life is largely a story we tell ourselves. and we know neurophysiologically now that we don't see what we're looking at we see what we're looking for so our lens and how we anticipate what the world's going to be really matters so the point of reframing like no i'm not trying to be fulfilled i'm trying to be fully alive that's a reframe you know when we reframe things it really changes everything be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

27:02Chris Williamson:How much of this is top down versus bottom up? Because can we dictate to ourselves, you will do this thing? The community piece is going to be exciting, obviously gets to feed into it. The flow piece is kind of halfway between the two, but much of this is thinking problem. Someone might interpret it as, I need to think my way out of this thinking problem.

27:30Dave Evans:Well, you know, I teach at Stanford. We wrote a book that's pretty explicit, articulate stuff. So it's kind of in the idea realm. Yeah, pretty heady. You know, I've got closed captioning on all the time. I really like knowing things and describing. I'd almost rather describe something than do it. You know, that's a bit of a temptation for me. But so I think the rethinking, this is where our consciousness, you know, directs our agency, can be the thing that gives us some power over our lives. So it may start with thinking differently. However, we're going to go into hopefully embodied experiences in a pretty quick way.

28:09Dave Evans:We want to get people the chance to grow their actual faculties of attending to and noticing and having these other experiences, which are embodied. Flow is not a thought-based experience. So we want to move toward embodiment. And I think over time, as you get better at these kind of things, sometimes the starting place will be those experiences where you actually are noticing something in the experience of the moment or coming out of your body rather than coming out of your brain or coming out of your ideas.

28:41Chris Williamson:What's the difference between that problem-solving world and the meaning-making world?

28:46Dave Evans:Okay, well, there's still meaning in the problem-solving world. It's just a narrow form of it. So we came up with this model of the transactional world and the flow world and that there's a bunch of meaning to be had in the flow world simply because, look, there's only one real world. There are two worlds.

29:04Chris Williamson:But your brain can't handle the whole thing at one time.

29:08Dave Evans:And we now know neurologically. You know, Lisa Miller's work at Columbia. There's your achieving brain and there's your awakened brain, the much more sophisticated version of the left brain, right brain model. You know, as Jill Bolt-Taylor's here, Stroke of Insight, what happened when this neurologist actually lost her left brain for a while. So what's going on is we're trying to integrate these things and give people access to it. And so if I can move more into a fuller implementation of my entire consciousness, then my chance at living a richer life goes up. And so the flow world simply means I want to start making sure that the part of my consciousness that can experience other aspects of reality is getting airtime.

29:53Dave Evans:Because when that part of my awareness gets more airtime, there are experiences available to me right in front of me for free that currently are going wasted. So we're saying it's not about more. is to get, we are trying to invite people to get more out of the life they're in, not cram more into it to change it. Now, we wrote two books about how to make big changes. We're in favor of changing things and making them better. But along the way, don't forget to live the life you're in.

30:20Chris Williamson:So with that perspective, does optimization or over-optimization drain life of meaning in some ways?

30:27Dave Evans:I think it can. I think if we're always simply trying to get to the better thing,

30:36Dave Evans:most people's degree of happiness is described by the delta the gap between the way things are and what they had in mind when that gap is small it's working when that gap is broad it's not so that means i've just decided the quality of my life is based on an imaginal idea that i have

30:58Chris Williamson:you can either bring your expectations down or increase your performance Yeah. I mean, people land, you know, there's two phrases. Good enough is and good enough isn't.

31:11Dave Evans:Most people have a bias. They tend to be one of those kinds of persons. The truth is they're both true. Just pick carefully when you apply them. So I'm all about high performance. You know, get better. Learn how to do things. Listen to Huberman. Listen to Chris Williamson. But if I fall all the way into that thing, then my experience in my own life is always simply trying to narrow the gap. And then as soon as I get it close, it's time to up my game and push that asymptote further out again so that I have more gap and push myself forward. I mean, you can never ultimately maximize your productivity.

31:47Chris Williamson:There's a beautiful line from Alan Watts. He says, if we are altogether unduly absorbed with improving our lives, we may forget to live them.

31:54Dave Evans:You missed the whole thing. Yeah.

31:58Chris Williamson:Yeah. This provisional life. Yeah. The arrival fallacy.

32:05Dave Evans:Yeah. There is no done. There is no right. And there is no it. Have I found it? There's no it.

32:11Chris Williamson:I think about the most modern example of this that keeps me. This is my memento mori, but for the TikTok generation. one day you'll die and your inbox will still accumulate emails. Like that will never be done. There will be people emailing you, asking why you're not replying, or secretly saying to a friend that you were really rude because you hadn't replied, who don't know that you're dead. And the emails will continue to come.

32:39Dave Evans:So I have a small group of guys that have been in my support group for 51 years. I formed them in 1974. You know, I'm the eldest. I'm about to turn 73. But we're all within a year or two of each other. And so we started moving into our 70s. And at the 50th anniversary, about 18 months ago, you know, we started a conversation going on for about two years now. But how are we going to become elders? I mean, literally, I tell people, because it's true, my next major milestone is death. How do I get there well? Now, part of that is, you know, I've had a lot of people. My father died of suicide when I was nine.

33:10Dave Evans:So dealing with dead people has become important early on. I lost my beloved wife, Claudia, to cancer five years ago, though oddly enough, another compass meant this woman has decided to sign up for the program. So I'm about to get married again. Thank you. Yes. But, you know, it's a very steep learning curve. You know, John O'Donoghue, the old Celtic mystic, would say that marrying another person is moving to a foreign country. Whole new culture, whole new language. Or my friend Jerry's sister would say, philosophy prof, there are no second marriages. they're only first marriages the second time around.

33:44Dave Evans:So I'm doing the first marriage the third time around. And the learning curve is steep, which by the way is terrific. But this death thing, once you get it, but it's going around, it's becoming extremely popular. You know, it was popular earlier and now it's popular later, but still very popular. Almost everybody's into it. And once you really get your hands around your finitude and burying a couple of people will help you do that, it gets you more intimate with it. So it's very freeing.

34:15Dave Evans:what have I got, you know, 12 years, 15 years? And it's very clear to me that my productivity is going to plummet after my death. I mean, it's just going to fall, it's just going to drop off like a stone. And so this trajectory on the way to the grave, I mean, like, you know, how hard am I, you know, is the area under the curve of the last six months of my life really going to net matter, which doesn't mean mailing it in is okay. What it means is, look, you're a person, you have a life, what's it for?

34:50Dave Evans:Now get something done. You know, I'm an old boy scout, let's leave the campground better than we found it. But is that the only thing we're doing? What's the gift you have to give? Chris, your job, I'll, Chris-ing, that's your job. Now, it expresses itself in establishing better, you know, self-help growth awareness, particularly in young men in this current era. That's a nice contribution. But at the end of the day, your job is to be Chris. I think each of us is a gift that God or the universe, depending on your cosmology, has given to the world. And your job is to figure out what's inside there and get the thing unwrapped so we can play with it before the game is over.

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36:41Chris Williamson:You know, my favorite example of this Salvador Dali, I don't know. Have you, do you know much about Dali?

36:47Dave Evans:I like his work and I've been to his home and you know, yeah. Okay.

36:50Chris Williamson:So his personal life is he was the reincarnation of his dead brother, according to his parents. So Dali's 20 months old.

36:58Dave Evans:Right.

36:59Chris Williamson:And his parents take him to a graveyard and show him a gravesite. And he had a brother that was born 20 months before him. And Dali is named after him. And his parents say, this is Salvador. This is who you are. That was how it started. That was how Dali's life started.

37:21Dave Evans:It was interesting from the get-go.

37:23Chris Williamson:10 years old. He's throwing himself down sets of stairs because he realizes that pain is interesting and that people come and he can manipulate them in this sort of very Machiavellian sort of way. He walked an anteater through the streets of Paris. And when he was asked why, he said it's because anteaters are never in fashion. He took a pistol to a live talk that he gave in France and he just fired it intermittently to keep people's attention. He also gave another talk where he was in a deep sea diving suit and suffocated in it and had to be wrenched out of it mid-talk. He refused to walk through doorways forwards.

37:56Chris Williamson:He would only ever go sideways or backward because he said that, uh, habit destroys the patterns of creativity. He once sued a guy for dreaming about him and said, the subconscious belongs to me. He is buried, as you know, underneath his own people walk over his body and observing his work.

38:14Dave Evans:Yeah.

38:15Chris Williamson:Uh, he used to, he was very poor during his life. He used to sign checks that couldn't be cashed because he had no money in his bank account, but he would doodle on the back of them and the check illustration would be worth more than the actual check itself. He—

38:30Dave Evans:Again, so what's he doing there? What's he saying is he's noticing— The fullness of him. He's noticing that people fall into patterns and act as though those patterns are what life is as opposed to they're a container that's supposed to hold them. So he's going to transcend the pattern and force you to realize, oh, doors aren't for walking through. So he ends up with a policy that he can't abide by the pattern. You know, so his moral commitment is to constantly press that edge less than it could be, which is a really sort of monastic commitment.

39:00Chris Williamson:Well, the fullness thing on that is, as brilliant as he was, Da Vinci didn't do Dali and Michelangelo didn't do Dali. Right. So if he had been anything short of the fullness of himself, the world would be fundamentally less. So I agree. I think that we have this sort of cosmic, karmic duty to existence. Right. To do what only we can do because you can't do Dali and neither can I and neither can Michelangelo and neither can Da Vinci.

39:25Dave Evans:Right.

39:25Chris Williamson:So it's his job to walk the anteater and to go through the doorway sideways. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. The component parts. Wonder. What do we need to know about wonder?

39:35Dave Evans:Okay. So wonder, and we have a little equation for that. So when you take curiosity, curiosity is a very good thing. It's a mindset we're in favor of, you know, and you upgrade it by applying, you direct curiosity toward mystery. those things that are beyond our understanding or since transcended at the moment of time. Curiosity plus mystery, so I'm now going to lean with a high availability into a mystery, allows wonder to occur. And the reason wonder is important. So wonder, awe, even positive overwhelm. So Dr. Keltner, a prophet at UC Berkeley, has written the book on awe and eight different forms of human experience that allow awe or wonder to occur.

40:13So he's quadrupled

40:15Dave Evans:down on this thing and that it works across all cultures and all different spiritual traditions. It's a fundamentally human experience that people report as making themselves feel more alive and making themselves feel more like themselves and making themselves feel more like a part of this great, wonderful thing. So very often in an intense experience of wonder, whether it's a communal thing at a concert, whether it's a sunset, whether it's noticing the sleeping baby at three in the morning, you know, suddenly like, oh, and we are all, and it's all one fabric and we're all in this thing together and the universality of it all suddenly breaks through.

40:49Dave Evans:So wonder enables that to occur. It's profoundly human-making experience, you know. So, and we think that's available all the time. You know, you'd give a quote just a minute ago. I love this particular quote from Henry Miller. So the American author and playwright Henry Miller once said, quote, I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. I have tried this experiment a thousand times, and I have never been disappointed. So, you know, that's the habit of wonder. So, wonder is the place where we can move beyond ourselves, which, by the way, goes back to Maslow.

41:33Dave Evans:So, late in his life, Maslow, most people still think that the apex of the hierarchy of needs, according to Maslow, is self-actualization. It's not. The highest level is actually self-transcendency, which he came up with very late in his life. He never published it. It's in his personal journal notes. Others published it behind him. But interestingly enough, still, you know, eight out of 10 people think it stops it, self-actualization. And self-transcendency, if attained, creates meaning-making. So there's a difference. And he's still wrong because he made it hierarchical. And it turns out self-transcendency isn't hierarchical.

42:05Dave Evans:You don't have to be self-actualized together. Self-transcendency can work for anyone, anywhere, anytime. Just get beyond yourself, whether it's loving other people, whether it's being selfless, whether it's compassion, whether it's noticing beauty and allowing it to overwhelm you. All those things get you beyond yourself. And wonder is a place where you go beyond yourself.

42:23Chris Williamson:Or else, if that wasn't true, looking up at the night sky wouldn't be impressive unless you'd maximize your potential first. Exactly. doing something for somebody else that makes you feel good and the world a better place wouldn't be pro-social. Wouldn't work.

42:37Dave Evans:Yeah. Well, you know,

42:39Chris Williamson:you had not yet earned the right to notice. As of yet, you haven't maximized your 401k. And that means that you don't get... Yeah, you're not... Scott Barry Kaufman did a good job on that. His book, Transcend, was real nice and he's big into Maslow's stuff. Okay. Okay, that's wonder. Engineer me some wonder. What are some practices for how I can bring more of it into my life? I'm paying attention to things in a manner to look at them with a fresh set of eyes?

43:03Dave Evans:Yeah. So we have a little exercise called Put On Your Wonder Glasses. So put on your wonder glasses. First of all, you know, if you can't beat it, join it. So we recognize that we're transactionally minded. And so we take a situation and, you know, might be a little challenging here, but you know, you take a moment and you just take a look around your situation, take a look around your room, whether you're outside, you're inside, you're walking the dog, and you take a quick look with your normal glasses on. And the first thing you'll notice is what the transactional brain is going to be looking for.

43:33Dave Evans:Like, oh, okay, this is what they're using, a certain kind of sound proofing. And it's the blue lights. That's kind of interesting. And I see what's going on. And probably what will happen is you'll immediately come up with a to-do list. Like, oh, I've got to get one of those blue lights. And that's a better mic holder than I've got. And I wonder if that plant deserves to be watered. So your brain just comes up with a to-do list. So first of all, you scan around the room, scan around the scene, and let your brain do what it naturally does. And then you say, thank you. Thank you for sharing. I'll make that list.

43:59Dave Evans:I'll get back to you another time. Then you take another look and say, is there anything here that is interesting, right, that allows you to be curious? You know, you know, and I'll notice, well, he's got a plant there.

44:14Chris Williamson:He's got a, you know, why do we need a plant, you know?

44:18Dave Evans:And then, and I might know something else might be interesting, like, you know, the fact that we have all these different cameras and why are these angles important? That might be curious to me, you know? And then I'll say, okay, now it's time for wonder glasses. Which of those curious things do I want to really lean into and let the mystery reveal itself? And I'm going to go with a plant.

44:37Chris Williamson:Is it real or plastic, by the way?

44:39Dave Evans:Plastic. It's plastic, okay. So it's a plastic plant, but it's a good plastic plant. So I'm noticing that is, so Chris is having these conversations with people and there is a little organic something in the room. And so what that's, this is maybe an homage to, maybe it's evoking the fact that, you know, it's not just digital. It's not just electronic. It's not just black. There's some life in here too. And that reminder of life is... So how do reminders of life occur? So I allow myself to follow... In any moment in time, there's a way I can, in a minute or two, reopen my availability to the fact that there's something, like Henry Miller was saying, that's indescribably mysterious and wonderful right in front of me if I let it be.

45:24Chris Williamson:If you were to... It takes practice. If you were to try and turn down the difficulty and turn up the external supply of wonder, what are some reliable ways to do that? You mentioned sunsets earlier on. I imagine that that's one.

45:38Dave Evans:The natural world is going to be your friend. Identify the things that are naturally working for you. The other thing is just allow yourself to notice the existence of the flow world because that's where wonder is going to be available to you, which means dropping into the present moment. So we have an exercise called flip the switch. So you're sitting in a staff meeting and you're listening to the budget be hacked apart again and you're bored. And then literally you say to yourself, flip. Boom, flip the switch. What's happening in the flow world right now? So I'm in this room. I'm with these people.

46:12Chris Williamson:How is Chris actually feeling right now?

46:14Dave Evans:You know, I look out. Oh, there's a tree out the window. And that tree is turning colors. Now, this all costs maybe three or four seconds. So I can get the habit of calling myself back to the present moment and just noticing what's going on around me. And the fact that I'm a living person in this present situation. I mean, if I let myself, while I'm thinking about answering your question, I can be aware of how the cushion feels on my buttocks. Because I'm actually sitting, I'm not just talking to you, I'm sitting in this chair. Am I actually in this room? So those awarenesses allow the mental faculties, the part of your brain that knows how to be attentive to the present moment, catch those things.

46:57Dave Evans:So you just constantly have these little games you can play with yourself, which is keeping yourself in the game. Okay, coherence. Coherence. It turns out the meaning-making researchers will tell us that if you can align consciously who you are, what you're doing, and what you believe in, which we call coherence, So, you know, I understand who I, at least presently, I've got a story about who I am. These are things I really care about. Here's what I'm doing in the world. Do they align? And when they align, usually with some degree of compromise, because life is never perfect, but it's a calculated compromise that I've accepted.

47:34Dave Evans:I'm having an experience of coherency. I'm being an integrated, you know, coherent, thoughtful, authentic person in the world, which means I'm living purposefully. Frankly, if the book takes a risk, it's that we don't talk an awful lot about finding purpose and mission and what have you, in part because people are so over-missioned right now that they're stuck in the transactional world. We're really deferring almost all of that hopefulness to this coherency thing. If people are aware of their value set and they're aware of what they're doing in the world and they're trying to move those things into alignment called coherency, you know, then we're pretty sure they're going to end up doing good things.

48:13Dave Evans:So I don't need to preach at you about trying to make the world a better place. The overwhelming majority of people we work with, they've got great values. And if their values actually get to be the lead horse on the directing of their lives, we're all going to be in a better place. So I don't need to tell you what to do. You've already got what you need. So the experience of coherency, we call it coherency sightings. Catch yourself in the act of being an integrated, coherent person. That's really gratifying. like, oh, I'm sitting here in your studio and we're talking about how people can live more meaningfully.

48:44Dave Evans:That is a really coherent thing for me to do. Am I aware of the fact that, oh yeah, this is exactly what I want to be doing. This is really working for me.

48:53Chris Williamson:Inverter, what would somebody being out of coherence look like?

48:59Dave Evans:Oh, I was just talking to a guy the other day. So one of the DCI fellows, a very successful Hong Kong financier, you know, calls me and says, my 26-year-old son is about to quit his fabulous job. Please help me stop him. So I said, no, I'm not going to help stop him. And I'm not going to call him because you said call him. But if he wants to call me, we can chat. And by the way, I'll probably tell him he's doing the right thing. So watch what you wish for. So I'm on the phone on a Zoom call talking to this 26-year-old young man who is a Stanford grad in economics with a master's in computer science because everybody should know digital stuff.

49:35Dave Evans:And he drops right into investment banking and he's killing it. He's absolutely killing it. And he's having a great time killing it until suddenly he wakes up one day and he's bored to tears. And so I think I'm going to quit and, you know, ruin my career and travel for a while and go try to find myself. You know, because what he noticed was, right, and I think what's happening for him is his neocortex is forming about 27. He's a little ahead of himself.

49:58Chris Williamson:Manopause.

49:59Dave Evans:And just like, wait a minute, the motivation I had to do this, which was growing and winning, which is fine. They're getting A's. He was getting A's at the bank like he got at Stanford. Suddenly it doesn't work for me anymore. He awakened an incoherent person. And he tried to talk himself into success as its own reward and he just couldn't do it. So for him to become coherent, he's going to have to go recalibrate his values and recalibrate his priorities. So he's in a transition. That's the right thing to do. Now, there are other people who keep re-upping that incoherence because they're getting the money or they're fearful of the change or their wife will think they're stupid.

50:40Dave Evans:You know, there's lots of reasons people get stuck in an incoherent place. But it's soul-sucking, so be careful.

50:46Chris Williamson:How does coherence outperform balance as a life goal? Oh, well, I've never had balance as a goal.

50:56Dave Evans:I've never seen a balanced person. I mean, if balance means, you know, all of my allocation of time and energy precisely reflects my value prioritization set. You know, the perfect layering of the layer cake of my life looks just like my values at all times. I've never had that moment. So we talk about, you know, not balance as much as just the dashboard of what is your current portfolio? What's the mix of your life? So balance is a resource allocation question. And so, you know, so you have to decide what your priorities are going to be. One of my examples is one of my older sisters ran a graduate school in education at a small private college.

51:44Dave Evans:And she'd been doing a PhD's job for 15 years and finally decided it was time to get the PhD and actually be the person she was supposed to be. So she's working full-time running a graduate school while going full-time to school getting a PhD. And she called her friends and said, I'm a little overbooked. I've calculated I have six unscheduled hours in the next five years. A very little – true story. I have very little time to talk to anybody. You're not making the cut. I didn't make the cut. And that was a radically imbalanced lifestyle. It was exactly the right coherent thing for her to do.

52:15Chris Williamson:Highly coherent. Highly coherent.

52:17Dave Evans:So balance is lovely. And if a coherent life and circumstances permit it, great. But what you really want to be is alive and accepting the compromises that come with it. Flow. What about flow? So flow. So first of all, we are introducing the concept of the flow world along with the flow state. So we all know the flow state from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the positive psychologist who invented the term flow, the psychology of optimal experience, published back in 90-something. And that's lovely as an idea in the zone, what have you. Most people know what flow is and have had moments of experiencing it.

52:57And so one of the first things we come up with is, okay, so that's the flow state, the experience of being fully engaged in the moment where time stands still and I feel fully present, all that stuff, which is great.

53:10Dave Evans:where does that happen so first of all we're saying it happens in this place called the flow world so flow occurs when i'm fully in the present moment and that's really where the flow world is existing so let's go where flow can be found thing once we posit the flow world is the place where you might enter the flow state and then on the flow state the way originally defined there's this thing called the flow channel which is where the task at hand and my skill set are close so my My capacity and what the task demands of me are really close. I'm neither over-skilled and then I get bored or I'm neither under-skilled and then I get anxious.

53:48Chris Williamson:Is this sort of proximate zone of development type stuff?

53:51Dave Evans:Yeah, I'm right at my skill level. So the situation is demanding the most of me. And what we notice about – and that's fine. We call that apex flow, which is where I'm really right on the ragged edge of my capability. And the reason I can drop into flow in that situation is the circumstance, i.e. the task.

54:09Chris Williamson:I need to wrangle all of my capacity. It takes all of me.

54:12Dave Evans:So literally the way I put that is I have now delegated responsibility for my degree of engagement in life to the quality of the task. I need to find some task that will so demand of me my attention that I finally become fully present.

54:28Chris Williamson:Which means it's the task's job for me to be present, not my job. It's the flow equivalent of putting your meaning in impact.

54:35Dave Evans:Bingo. So what I really want to learn how to do, we called simple flow, is I can choose to be fully attentive. I've got to chop these damn onions to make the soup. And then I want to really get onto is the dinner when the people come over at 7 o 'clock. So it's 5.30 now. I've got to get the soup going. You know, multitask, put on a Chris Williamson, you know, YouTube while I'm listening, do four things to make the most of it. I'm supposed to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's go all the way in on the onion chopping.

54:59Chris Williamson:Oh, I thought you meant forget the onions and just watch the Chris Williams. That's fine.

55:04Dave Evans:That'd be a higher level flow, but I've got to get the onions done. I'm so sorry.

55:07Chris Williamson:So if I can follow all the way in, like, look, it's going to be 10 minutes.

55:12Dave Evans:I'm going to do this in a nice Zen kind of way. I'm going to really appreciate the knife. I'm going to actually feel the experience. I can choose to go all in, even if my skill set far exceeds it. I can just choose to be fully present to what I'm doing. and that allows me to have this fully engaged, calmly detached experience, which is more alive. I can even try something that's hard for me. And if I really can accept that I might make a mistake and that's okay, then the anxiety can be dropped. The anxiety is still an elective pain. So I can drop the anxiety or I can drop the boredom by having the mental discipline of choosing my way into the moment.

55:47Dave Evans:Now, suddenly the flow channel quadruples in size.

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57:01That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom.

57:06Chris Williamson:So that's lovely. I think the first thing it makes me think of is whether or not multitasking and the yeah the i am going to listen to a podcast at one and a half time speed while i get my walk in while i check my notes for the upcoming email i've got to do yeah is that a particularly uh kryptonite additive to try and put into achieving flow, is that going to contribute to the degradation of flow across the world? I think so.

57:42Dave Evans:I mean, in short, I'm not saying never do it. And we do know the truth is neither humans nor computers actually multitask.

57:49Chris Williamson:They're parallel. We task switch. Yeah. What people think they mean is parallel process. Right. What they're actually doing is…

57:55Dave Evans:Task switching. Yeah. Right. So getting good at task switching quickly is a performance optimization capability. And in the high productivity world, that's not a bad skill to have. and I get the feedback loop of I got more done or I got more for my time or I got paid higher or my PowerPoints were cooler than yours, whatever it is. Or I got done what I needed to get done more quickly

58:17Chris Williamson:so that I can -

58:18Dave Evans:I bought some time back, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but again, if I only do that -

58:24Chris Williamson:In perpetuity. Again, the flow requires full participation.

58:28Dave Evans:And the reason time stands still and becomes eternal, time elongates, you know, and disappears all at once because I'm so fully present to it is this full availability and full concentration. When I'm switching constantly, I'm never going to have that full presence. So I do think multitask, what we call multitasking and flow are simply different states. Now you might, somebody might argue, I can flow by how well I'm multitasking. Yep, yep. I'm not sure that's actual flow. I think what it is, it's gratifying that I'm being high performant. That's okay. Yeah. But if it's the only game you're playing, then you've left flow behind.

59:04Chris Williamson:Yeah, I think. what do you think i mean you're a multitasker that's true chronically um the meta thinking thing i'm very rarely in flow when i'm thinking about the thinking yes you have to when you're juggling a bunch of different balls at the same time yes now uh i was trying to think of an example where this wouldn't be true i used to run nightclubs used to be stood on the front door of a nightclub for a very very long time and in that it's kind of multivariate i'm usually getting my phone out messaging the guy okay where are the flyers out there doing that thing then the cue's starting to build out so i actually need to push that back in so you can't let the cue get too wide because then it becomes unruly and then it's the doors oh the till's out of change so i need to get the person to do the tilt thing so that is a kind of multitasking but it's still relatively linear it's sort of moving in the same direction sure the phone is about the thing the till is about the thing the cue is about the thing i can hear the music coming from inside what's the dj doing.

1:00:00Chris Williamson:And that is, that is quite a nice dance. It's a very wide, it's sort of very peripheral, peripheral sort of when it comes to what I'm taking in. Um, but if I was to think about kind of the opposite, it would be preparing for a podcast while I've got Slack open. Uh, and I'm also thinking about something else as well. Like that it's too disparate. Adam Lane Smith, my friend, the attachment experts got this wonderful idea and he says, um, your life doesn't need to be easier. It needs to be simpler that humans are built to handle intensity, but not complexity. and I found that to be completely true.

1:00:32Chris Williamson:That there is not really an intensity of work that makes me feel overwhelmed.

1:00:37Dave Evans:Intensity, not complication. Correct. Maybe complex, but not complication. Yes, sorry, yes, no, no,

1:00:40Chris Williamson:that's exactly the terminology he uses as well. He uses complicated. Complicated. Yes, correct. There is not an intensity of work that has really ever crushed me in terms of its overwhelm. Right. But there is a level of complication that has crushed me. Yes. At a relatively low dose.

1:00:54Dave Evans:Yeah, so your front of the room guy is technically multitasking, but multitasking like all the colors on the palette when I'm painting, as opposed to like I'm painting and jogging. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I was just having a conversation with my friend Steve. So Steve ran one of the largest and most successful high-end catering programs, catering companies in Southern California, caters to presidents, does Beyonce's birthday party, the$1 ,000 plate guy. And he's completely reinvented his life and come up to live in the Redwood Forest and Bonnie Dune up near Santa Cruz, where I am, and we're talking about this stuff.

1:01:30And at one point he drops, he says, look, you got to understand, I'm a really good waiter.

1:01:36Dave Evans:I'm an incredibly good waiter as a host. He says, I can stand in that room and instantly I'm looking at my seven tables and I know they need water. They're having a conversation that's going south. I could put some soothe on there. You know, that guy's hungry. I mean, literally, he just knows everything that has to be done across the room. And then he can move effortlessly. He's hardly even aware of how his body is routing to the right table and doing the right thing. Because he's a different person at each one of those seven tables. So that's a multitasking, not unlike your front of the room.

1:02:09Dave Evans:But it's all in this cohesive context where what's really happening is you're actually becoming pretty selfless. it's a very high level of a um of a multi-faceted competency but it's still one cohesive thing that allows flow to occur so when he's doing that and i think when you're doing that that is flow

1:02:31Chris Williamson:yeah high complexity high intensity low complication low complication therefore high

1:02:36Dave Evans:cohesion one fabric yeah that's lovely it's all the same fabric that's a nice conception okay

1:02:40Chris Williamson:what design choices make flow more likely in daily life

1:02:47Dave Evans:Pay attention. I mean, just paying attention. So we talk about mindset a lot. So the design choice of choosing into the way I'm going to be in a particular situation. You know, so if I'm only if I'm in that staff meeting and I'm only thinking about the next thing, then I've designed my mindset to never be present at the present moment. So the critical design choice is how do I live in this day? How do I live in this moment? My partner, Bill, has a morning practice. Despite being an atheist, he has spiritual practices. One of them, he says two things to himself out loud every single day while shaving.

1:03:28Dave Evans:And he says it's very important that they're out loud. I don't shave every day, so I can't do it.

1:03:31Chris Williamson:It's a good justification to shave every day. There you go.

1:03:34Dave Evans:One is I live in the best of all possible worlds. now as an as an existential atheist says look i can also say i live in the world i live in the worst world i live in the only world i notice but actually it turns out because bias matters i want to buy things in my favor if i live in the best of all possible worlds my chance of catching good things goes way up because i've pre-biased my attention to positive outcomes thing one thing two everything i do today i choose to do so i announce my agency to myself why am i going to this darn meeting. Oh, because I scheduled it. You know, why am I going to the DMV?

1:04:06Dave Evans:Because I chose not to file on time. And so now I'm doing this thing. So I just own my life. It's me.

1:04:12Chris Williamson:It's me. It's me. It's me.

1:04:13Dave Evans:Yeah. I'm just, I own it. I own it. I own it. You know, so, you know, outing the victim. So that's mindset choice. So the most important, I think the most important aspect of designing a life that includes these flow experiences is choosing the mindset of the way to live, which is a practice you do every day.

1:04:30Chris Williamson:Both me and my housemate have one day where we stack all of our calls. Mine's a Wednesday. His is a Thursday. Okay. And kind of get it done

1:04:39Dave Evans:day.

1:04:40Chris Williamson:Yeah, exactly. And you sort of stare at it and you go, okay, today is not going to be deep work, but it's going to be necessary work and that's fine. And that is a kind of cohesion all of its own, right? Yeah. Somebody's got to pick up the dog show. I call mine big Wednesday.

1:04:54Dave Evans:Okay.

1:04:54Chris Williamson:He used to call his bullshit Thursday.

1:04:57Dave Evans:Oh. He realized two weeks ago, he's like, why?

1:05:01Chris Williamson:I've labeled it on my calendar. It says bullshit day. Every single week, this thing comes around. And he said, stupid. Yeah. Two weeks ago, called it Ubermensch Day. Day was immediately turned inside out. He's like, I'm crushing it. I've got to get this stuff done. I don't really want to, and I'm doing it. He's like, just one reframe like that. And I thought it was so cute. So if you have a series of tasks, you and your partner need to do, for some reason, the trash in your apartment block is forever away from where you're doing it. Just we're going on a mission. It's the trash mission. We're doing the trash mission together as opposed to got to take the bloody trash out again or whatever it might be.

1:05:41Dave Evans:So I will argue that this is a mindset issue. So the three big chunks to our book, there's the front end about, hey, think about meaning a different way. Here's a couple of reframes that might change the game for you. Then, oh, by the way, the way you walk through the world matters. We call that mindset. So it's called think like a designer. The designers weigh five mindsets. And then these four areas we just discussed. And then the mindset thing, there are five mindsets. But the twofer killer of the mindsets are radical acceptance and availability. So radical acceptance is about, look, the only place design works, in fact, I would argue the only place anything works, is reality.

1:06:19Dave Evans:So, you know, must be present to win. So, oh, I should have done this instead. You're back in your head, not reality. Like, no, you're here. So if you start with radically accepting that things are the way they are and your opportunity is to make the most of the situation that happens to actually be. And so that's, okay, I accept it is the way it is. You know, there was an ice storm and maybe I wasn't going to get to be here today, you know, the power might go out again. You know, it's just true. It's not good or bad. It's just true. So then availability says, not only am I willing to accept the way things are, but I'm going to lean into it like, hmm, and what might be here for me?

1:07:00Dave Evans:I wonder what wonderfulness is latently lurking that I might discover. So to go from Bullshit Thursday to Ubermensch Thursday. See, Bullshit Thursday, I think, deserved to be labeled that because I really didn't think it deserved to exist. I am unhappy with the fact that I have to spend time doing this crap. So this crap is like an evil force in my life. And it doesn't deserve to be there. And that's just not true. I mean, the trash has to get taken out. The dog poop has to get picked up. You know, the baby's butt's got to get wiped. I mean, you know, the taxes have to be paid. It's just true.

1:07:34Dave Evans:So if I accept that and then say, oh, and I'm responsible for attending to that in as efficient a way as I possibly can, now it's actually okay. So when your roommate accepts Thursdays and then even says, and I'm going to be available to noticing that I can do that really well. And after I've done that, well, pat myself on the back for being an Ubermensch. Yeah. I changed my experience of my life. Your mindset really matters. Give me the other elements of mindset. We actually double down on one. So having a wondrous mindset, a high availability to wonder at all times. So wonder, radical acceptance, availability, as I've just described.

1:08:13Dave Evans:The next one is fully engaged, calmly detached. And the last one is create your world, which really means create your story. So fully engaged, calmly detached is all about, again, it's a flow orientation that would say, you know, I want to be entirely present to what I'm doing. I want to both bring the best I can to it, and I want to have the most alive-making experience of what I'm doing by being fully engaged. However, I'm also going to recognize that while I'm fully engaged, I don't control outcomes. So as soon as I get fully engaged, I really care. I really want it to work. And now suddenly I've got expectations, and I'm getting all wrapped up, and I'm getting anxious.

1:08:54Dave Evans:So what I want to be, which I think is a very aspirational place, I want to be fully engaged. I want to care really deeply and bring my best self and recognize that I have very little control over whether or not the outcome works. And so I can be both those things at the same time, which is really freeing, by the way, if I can detach from the outcome while being fully engaged in the participation. The big distinction in the mindset between the transactionalist and the flowist, the flow-oriented person, is the transactionalist is all about outcomes. they're primarily the agent of an outcome and the flow person is a participant.

1:09:32Dave Evans:Now that participant may be participating in a way that hopefully creates an outcome, but my energy isn't worrying about that future outcome. My energy is in participating fully in this moment, which is by the way, the single best way to improve the probability of the outcome. So getting really good at this present moment thing has huge side effects that work both ways. It's you're not giving up transaction success by becoming more flow oriented. What you're giving up is wasting energy. That's not contributing.

1:09:59Chris Williamson:Yeah. I think one of the areas I really want to get into is the mistakes that high achievers make when it comes to tying meaning to outcomes and the sort of endless rabbit holes of pursuit and progress. Okay. What are the big mistakes that you see hard charging high achievers making in your world?

1:10:19Dave Evans:Well, the first one is that we correlate our decision-making with the outcome. So, you know, okay, let me try it this way. You work hard on something you really care about and it doesn't work out. Shoot. What's the first question most people ask themselves as soon as something doesn't work out?

1:10:38Chris Williamson:What did I do wrong?

1:10:40Dave Evans:Bingo. Which makes, and by the way, questions matter. or particularly the questions you empower to judge or direct your life, be very careful because all questions have belief systems. If it turns out the life-directing question you're currently suffering has a belief system you don't agree with, you're in trouble. So if the first thing I think after something goes awry is, what did I do wrong? There are two assumptions built into that question, both of which I think are dead wrong and are very dangerous. So if the first question after a mistake or a failure is what did I do wrong, what does that question already believe is true?

1:11:17Chris Williamson:You could have done something differently and you are wrong.

1:11:21Dave Evans:Bingo. It does believe that if I'd done everything right, it would have worked. And that the thing that didn't get done right, which would have caused it to work, was mine. Which are both, frankly, incredibly egotistical things. I mean, it's not true if you do it all right that it'll work. And it's not necessarily your mistake. So a better question than what did I do wrong, which goes right to, and if I'd done it right, it would have worked, which is wrong. It's false. What's the better first question? After a mistake, after a failure. Why did this happen? Just what happened? Let's just start with back to reality.

1:11:57Dave Evans:Radical acceptance. What happened? Now, if it turns out that analysis says, oh, yeah, in retrospect, I did. I mailed it in. I didn't do the prep properly. You know, I didn't call ahead. I didn't get the information, you know. You know, spending all the time whatsoever talking to people about what they think about Christian Williamson. I show up here, and I'm unprepared. And I shanked it. Shame on me. Okay. But that's almost never the case. When I have debriefed the, oh, what did I do wrong with people over and over again, or it seemed like a good idea at the time, but apparently it wasn't. You know, it turns out your prior self did the best they could.

1:12:30Dave Evans:You're just not responsible for the future. So back to your originating question, what do high performers do? high performers believe in, they can cause outcomes every single time. Does this not...

1:12:45Chris Williamson:And they get stuck with it. Is this not a byproduct of radical responsibility, high agency? Sure. Right? Because these are very difficult to blend together. Oh, no. It's a slippery slope. I want to own the world. I want to believe that I can make anything happen. I want to believe that I can make things happen that I don't even believe that I can make things happen.

1:13:04Dave Evans:And when you lean into that with a high degree of authenticity and agency and commitment, stuff happens.

1:13:09Chris Williamson:There is no question that the choice to believe you can

1:13:15Dave Evans:has an impact.

1:13:16Chris Williamson:And this is a pattern that people have been rewarded for professionally that often hurts them personally. And if you're trying to work out, okay, so Dave says, I should be more kind of rational about what happened whatever that means, whatever rationally looking at me means, which is essentially impossible for me to do in any case, I'll try my best. But then that kind of feels a little bit disempowering in some ways, because how do I not allow the temptation of the victimhood narrative to just sneak in here? And this doesn't sound particularly embodied because it's the most top down of top downs, right?

1:13:57Chris Williamson:This sterile equation look. Untie this Gordian knot for me.

1:14:07this is a big question it's a very big question okay i think what we're talking about is taking full responsibility for our finitude all along the way you're finite

1:14:24Dave Evans:and you're growing i mean you're you're getting better at chrissing than you used to be which means by the way if i'm going to get better i was worse people ask me all the time you know I'm out backpacking with these four guys. I've been taking backpacking for 20 years. They're all 15-year-old kids and too busy. But I was the old guy that took them out 20 years my junior, and we're all sitting around naked jumping into an alpine lake at 10 ,000 feet. And Rich says, so, Dave, you're the old guy. Do you have any regrets? Is there anything you do differently? I said, well, those are two radically different questions.

1:14:56Dave Evans:I have no regrets, and I do everything differently. And he goes, whoa, reconcile that for me. I said regret means that I choose to not accept my life and my policy is I don't not accept my life I accept my life and of course I would do it differently because I'm supposed to be smarter now I mean if there's almost anything that I would look in my past back on and not say if I had to do over I would do it differently that means I'm just not paying freaking attention yeah that's

1:15:20Chris Williamson:like saying I would not have picked different lottery numbers of course last week yeah knowing what I know now.

1:15:26Dave Evans:So back to this trade-off, because if I do further optimize this one thing, particularly in career and capability and performance, I might get more, but at what expense? So I really do have to decide how to allocate this finite resource, this growingly more capable over time, but still always finite resource called myself.

1:15:51Chris Williamson:Decliningly available.

1:15:52Dave Evans:Recliningly available across what different aspects of being a human person, you know, and do I believe I'm supposed to make myself, you know, unhappy and suffering the whole way along or is some joy en route okay? You know, there's an old line. It's heaven all the way to heaven and hell all the way to hell. Which path am I on? Oh, that's lovely. So there's a real wake-up moment that I hit this. So in my 30s, again, being a dad was terribly important because I didn't have one. I lost my dad at nine. Turns out to suicide. And then I sort of fall into high tech. That's a long story. And I fall into startups.

1:16:28Dave Evans:And that's a long story. And I didn't ever think I wanted to be doing that. I sort of fell into it. And I didn't know I was a workaholic. It turns out that I am. And I'm working, you know, 70, 80 hours a week, sleeping three or four hours a night. Been doing that for a couple of years. And I'm sitting in the family room with a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning. and my now 42-year-old, then 3-year-old son, Robbie, is in the kitchen and asks his mother, Mom, can we play with Dad today or he's just going to fall asleep in the chair again? And my heart sank. And I went, shit. I didn't have a dad because he was dead.

1:17:03Dave Evans:Robbie doesn't have a dad because he's asleep. This is not okay. This is not okay. So I'm optimizing for the wrong thing. I'm killing it at work, but it's killing me. You know, and it took me six years to fix that, by the way.

1:17:19Chris Williamson:And I finally did. You learned how to decelerate.

1:17:21Dave Evans:Yeah, and it ended up, I had to do more radical change than I realized at the time. I was trying to make minor changes and keep it all going just fine at no cost to anyone. And that just flat failed. But the point being, you have to decide what you're going to do with the allocation of the resource called you all along the way. And there are going to be trade-offs. There are no solutions. There are no, there's, you could always do everything better. There's no best. There's no right. There's no done. There's no it. There's no max. There's just what you're choosing.

1:18:02Dave Evans:It's your call.

1:18:03Chris Williamson:There's a line from Van Gogh. He says, if I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now for wheat is wheat. Even if people think it is grass in the beginning. I think that's so lovely. So lovely.

1:18:14Dave Evans:Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Bill likes to, my partner likes to quote, you know, a zentruism that if you can't find enlightenment here, where are you going to find it?

1:18:22Chris Williamson:Yeah, if you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy on a yacht. So, okay. In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. This training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years now. It's designed by Dr. Mike Isretel and comes with over 45 pre-made training programs, 250 technique videos, takes all of the guesswork out of crafting the ideal lifting routine by literally spoon feeding you a step-by-step plan for every workout. It guides you on the exact sets, reps, and weight to use. Most importantly, how to perfect your form so every rep is optimized for maximum gains.

1:18:59Chris Williamson:It adjusts your weight each week based on your progress. And there's a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it, train with it for 29 days. And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get up to$50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Another wing, another malignant tumor to this same thread that we're on. Lots of people become objectively successful and subjectively miserable.

1:19:37Chris Williamson:They have objectively done the thing. They have achieved success. Subjectively, it's not there. It doesn't feel like they're there. They know that they've done it, but it doesn't feel like they've touched it. What do you lay that at the feet of?

1:20:01Dave Evans:I wonder if they lost their why on the way. You know, Simon Sinek.

1:20:10Dave Evans:Because if you got there and you look, and it's not just that it's temporary and now what, but you look back and it feels like dust in your mouth.

1:20:23Dave Evans:Then were you winning for winning's sake?

1:20:30Dave Evans:And that's not very gratifying. So somewhere along the way, why I care about this, the substance of it, the relationship of it, the culture creation of it, whatever. You know, if I lost that, then when I get there, I literally won't even know what the heck I'm doing here.

1:20:49Chris Williamson:It's a very disorienting experience. You talk about post-achievement depression being really common among elites, right?

1:20:54Dave Evans:Yeah. I think sometimes we are, we have so committed to that achievement that we put all of ourselves into that performance and we lose the why. You know, it's understandable, but it's heartbreaking. Okay.

1:21:17Chris Williamson:People love to accomplish and achieve though. How do you think about striving while not missing your life? going after it whilst actually being present at the same time. Because as far as I can see, striving and improving requires a degree of delayed gratification. It needs future planning, which by design takes you out of the moment. It's very difficult to be thinking about the big picture goals in flow, paying attention to the onions that I'm chopping right now. There has to be a good portion of time spent putting off what I want to do now, planning for the future, thinking about tasks, being hypervigilant.

1:21:56Chris Williamson:And this is the sort of perennial challenge of the personal growther that they want to achieve a lot, but not miss their life at the same time. And sometimes I think those two things do not, they are oil and water, not always, and maybe less than we might think they are, but there are sacrifices that need to be made in order to be able to get that. And many of them take you out of the present moment.

1:22:20Dave Evans:But they put you back into another one. So let's say I'm talking about physical work at PRs, you know, and wanting to add five reps at this bench press weight or whatever it might be. So the time I'm spending optimizing my personal training plan on my trainer, right, that's thinking about the future and optimizing what the plan is going to be, that in and of itself is a skill. That's an activity. Oh, I'm doing this thing called imagining the future and conceptualizing, you know, while I'm actually doing that. We all have the observer, right? There's Dave sitting here talking to Chris, and then there's Dave noticing what's going on in the room.

1:22:57Dave Evans:What's the observer observing? Is the observer observing me in this moment, or is the observer observing the likelihood of this getting to the outcome? So while I'm planning, I'm doing something. Planning is an activity. Am I enjoying the planning? while I'm making the sacrificial effort to say, no, I'm going to actually get up a half hour earlier, you know, because I'm going to go into the gym for 20 more minutes because I'm going to work on these reps. When I'm on the bench and I'm now doing the second of more reps than I've ever done on that particular exercise before, am I enjoying the experience of what my body is showing me that I've not known before or am I saying, God, three more and then I hit it?

1:23:41So it's, I mean, even in any given moment, are you here or are you somewhere else?

1:23:51Dave Evans:It's a framework. You can give yourself permission to, I've decided to do this new routine in the gym. Now go do it for God's sake and be fully present to it.

1:24:04Chris Williamson:is there a risk of people especially the ones who resonate with the insecure overachiever turning everything into a performance including meaning oh yeah so there's the literally there's

1:24:15Dave Evans:a little section in the book called beware the practice to performance trap or the practice to production trap so you know you know everybody thinks mindfulness is great as do i i'm you know I go talk to monks all the time. And your achieving brain can transactionalize anything.

1:24:37Chris Williamson:Yep. That's why you have streaks on meditation apps.

1:24:39Dave Evans:I mean, so, you know, so like, you know, this morning, hey, I really killed it this morning. You know, I think, in fact, I think I'm getting my 20-minute sit. I'm down to, I can get my 20-minute sit down in 50. that part of your brain, which by the way is pretty stimulated these days, is ready to go. It loves being in charge. Like, hey, just give me the wheel. Give me the wheel. Give me the wheel. Pick me.

1:25:04Chris Williamson:Pick me. Yeah.

1:25:05Dave Evans:That hand is always up. I'll re-describe this in a meaningful way. And that's not entirely wrong, but this is where if you start developing your, and by the way, the invitation at the end of the book is now we've given you a bunch of ideas. It's not do them all. That's a new burden. That's cram more in. Start figuring out what your practice is for your way, your Chris way, that allows you to access more meaning in these other forms so you have a slowly but surely richer light. And so once you make those decisions, you start giving yourself permission, you know, to actually – permission to be happy is what it boils down to at the end of the day.

1:25:43Dave Evans:We didn't talk about communities. So community, big deal. You know, in fact, Bob and I, Bill and I just got to spend a morning with Bob Waldinger, the, you know.

1:25:53Chris Williamson:He's great, from the Harvard study. Harvard study, yeah. He's been on the show. He's great.

1:25:57Dave Evans:And a Zen man. A lovely guy. So we had some home running, all sat around agreeing with each other a lot. It was really a lot of fun. You know, and that study makes it very clear. Community is everything. The reason there's a thing called formative community, it's a technical term that we invented, is in the book, is that through this DCI program, this Distinguished Career Institute program that I teach in at Stanford, I'm on my 10th cohort. These really thoughtful people, you know, 35 to 45 of them a year get thrown together in a room and then in no time at all, say not only is the community the best part of the program, but I'm having relationships with these people like I've never had before in my life.

1:26:36Dave Evans:And I debrief with them collectively and I'll go, justify your answer. I'm not buying it. I mean, these people have formed corporate cultures and have huge professional networks. Most of them are married with happy families. How many of you, while you're here, you're getting calls constantly from these huge networks of relationships like, oh, we miss you. Please come home because they're gone for a whole year at Stanford. And they go, oh, yeah, it's a din. And you're telling me that some admissions officer on this program throws you in a room with 35 yahoos you never met before. And suddenly they're the best friends you ever had.

1:27:09Dave Evans:Justify your answer. And what that conversation has revealed is what I ended up naming as formative community, which is there are three reasons to gather. One is a social gathering, a social community, get together to have a good time, which is lovely. You know, enjoy being people together. A collaborative community, let's get together and get something done. And getting something done together with another person, you know, is really wonderful. I mean, go to a startup, go have military experience. That's a profound experience of being a human being. But there's another kind of gathering, which is we call formative, not just get together to have a good time, get together to get something done, get together to become better together.

1:27:48Dave Evans:So if a person is a becoming, is there a place in a conversation I can enter into where what we're doing here together is we are assisting one another in our becoming, which isn't getting a transaction done, isn't solving a problem. It's allowing one another into the conversation that's growing into the next person I want to become. So that is a gathering of intent, not content. Most of the time, we get together socially around the content of we all like theater, we all like jazz. So there's this commonality of the content of what we're doing. We're getting together to go work on this food problem or start this company or whatever it might be.

1:28:26Dave Evans:So there's the content of our collaboration. In a formative community, like, well, you're into climate change and I'm into Beanie Babies and she's into modern art. oh, you can't help me because you don't know my thing. No, no, no, I don't need you to know my thing. What I need is for you to be the person who's becoming their better selves. I want you to get more in alignment with who you're on the way to becoming. And when that occurs, your psyche, your soul, your consciousness resonates in a way that the content of what you're doing doesn't matter to me, but the intent does. And when I'm with other people who are moving toward that resonance with themselves, it's harmonic to my own.

1:29:06Dave Evans:So you're talking about climate change and I'm having an idea about oil redistribution. You know, it turns out you being you enables me to be me. So that's what a formative community does. Then there's a certain kind of conversation they can have. And so we'll say it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself because we're fundamentally social animals. So if there is a place where I can be heard that I might even tap into hearing my own story well enough that I can grow further into it. So a formative community is a particularly meaning-making experience because it moves me along that becoming pathway more regularly, more reliably, and if we're lucky, more quickly.

1:29:44Chris Williamson:I think this is an important pushback against the solopreneur, degenerate, sigma lone wolf kind of atmosphere that's going on a lot at the moment. I understand why. I understand why it's seductive to go monk mode and recant reliance on anybody and everybody around you. As I've got older, it's just increasingly difficult to tap into that fuel source. Maybe I've just spent that particular thing. I basically extended working from home 10 years before COVID and five years after, electively. And when the pandemic came along, brilliant. It's just more of me. Put me in coach.

1:30:26Dave Evans:It's not a bad thing because again, back to, particularly in the first half of life, at those early adult years, what's really going on is you're building an ego. The first person who really needs to believe that you're okay is you. So if my decision to rely entirely on myself is a stringent approach to saying, I need to get to a place of self-trust and it turns out I can't afford to let that leak off where, oh, it was really Anne, and she really saved my butt. So, you know, but that should be temporary. I should get over it. And now I'm actually free to be part of something bigger than myself.

1:31:09Chris Williamson:Yeah, agreed. Yeah, manopause. I realized, a good example, I do this live show. I did the first work in progress here in Austin last night. And I'm about to go back on tour around Australia, New Zealand, and Bali for basically a full month. Oh, that's going to be rough. It's horrible. Somebody's got to do it. Yeah, I mean, I did strategically put the Bali show at the very end. Okay. So there's nothing to do after that. And I could go out there, get a local photographer at each of the different cities, have one tour manager to make sure that everything's set up, and that would be it.

1:31:41Dave Evans:Yeah.

1:31:42Chris Williamson:But there's maybe six guys flying out with me, two from the UK, one or two from America. One is already in Australia. Actually, another one from the UK, and two or two are managing. and because what's the point what is the point of going and doing a solo show right that's alone alone yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean you're gonna have to do the on stage thing i've got to sit and write this script on my own and i the sort of person i'm speaking to is me 10 years ago if there is the opportunity for you to even just try and co-work with somebody else to find someone that's on a similar sort of trajectory to you i've found that i go faster and further because there was always that if you want to go fast go on your own if you want to go far go with somebody else but i i genuinely go quicker as well with someone because the the fuel source you have of experiencing of sharing experiences together with someone else is so enlivening in the moment right that it just keeps pushing that motivation that fuel tank just keeps on getting tapped tap tap tap tap tap it keeps on getting pushed up so yeah and i am saying too part of the us

1:32:51Dave Evans:doesn't have to be people that are bleeding off your role in the goal pursuit that you're currently producing toward. So you can find a conversation to be in, which is around, how's it going? How are you becoming? What's the next question you want to be growing or learning your way into? It's not problem solving my goal pursuit. So I'm still going to keep all keep all that to myself. So if you want to be selfish about the work, fine. That doesn't mean you have to live selfishly.

1:33:17Chris Williamson:Yeah, very good. What are the signals that tell you it's time to redesign your life? What would be the things people notice out there in the ether, the little whispers in the back of their mind?

1:33:29Dave Evans:Yeah, you know, I talk to people all, particularly in career. I've often come away from the thousands of conversations I've had with people kind of going, you know, it's not so much I've decided it's time for me to leave the work. It's that you start noticing the work has left you. very often I think the signals that change is coming actually kind of feels like an outside in you know you're going to the office and nothing happens you know you're in that thing that used to be enlivening and you go oh apparently it's not you know and it's almost like noticing yourself having it's not the inside now I've been thinking about it a lot and I think the time is up I think I've maxed out here I think I need to move on as opposed to just like you know the soundtrack seems is to have stopped, I think the movie might be over.

1:34:16Dave Evans:So there's an awareness of your experience of something is shifting. Bill, my partner, talks about the time he was in the car. He knows exactly where he was on Highway 280 when he's driving into Apple and he suddenly realized, oh, I'm done. Now he spent another year setting up how to quit well, but the job left him right there.

1:34:36Chris Williamson:I wonder how long before that he'd been turning up to work and just stuff didn't feel as bright as it used to.

1:34:43Dave Evans:Yeah, I don't know. I have to ask him. But I think sometimes these awarenesses can be sudden. Sometimes they kind of grow up on you over time. But that boils down to, you know, the Socratic thing, you know, the unexamined life is not worth living. So if you have an unexamined life, then awareness of this might come slow. It'll have to be dramatic.

1:35:03Chris Williamson:I think another challenge that people face is if you are a hard-charging, high-achiever person, you're probably very good at going, shut up emotions, and just continuing to push through whatever it is, including the emotion of boredom, of disquiet, of discomfort, low color, low engagement, lack of aliveness. that's just that's just mere resistance allow me to move through it and the more you've hypertrophied the allow me to move through it muscle the longer sometimes it can take i think for people to realize oh this is not a right fit for me right and you see i've seen this in every industry i've been in people who've outstayed their aliveness by decades because they either have this super hypertrophied delayed gratification.

1:35:56Chris Williamson:They're a world champion at the marshmallow test. Yes. Or they do not have the, they haven't done the self-reflection to actually be able to sort of feel it.

1:36:11Dave Evans:Yeah. I've long said most people's besetting sin is not some shadow dark side evil thing leaking its way out yet again. It's the over-functioning strength.

1:36:21Chris Williamson:There is absolutely, absolutely too much of a good thing. That is so good. You know, I'm too helpful.

1:36:27Dave Evans:I'm too efficient. I'm too committed, you know, and I mean, you know, I'm not a stoic, but they had some good ideas. And when they see a moderation in all things, they don't sound like, well, the too little's crummy in the too much is, so let's go with the middle. What they're really saying is it's actually a thoughtful position that the recognition of a good thing, over experienced, overindulged upon, not just sugar, but productivity, is not a good thing. It is not an ultimate... The human experience is a mixed, hopefully somewhat balanced thing that allows you enough capacity to both be present to and enjoying that which is actually occurring.

1:37:08Dave Evans:Maxing out isn't actually better. But it is important to do for a while.

1:37:13Chris Williamson:I'm an advocate of obsession. I recently changed my entire opinion on obsession. It was something I had to little bit of a frosty relationship with. And I wrote an essay a couple of weeks ago that I think is about right. Basically, the obsession is very fleeting. It doesn't last forever. It's this weird confluence of desire, life situation, environment, meaning, motivation, skill set, a whole bunch of different things. But it's very temporary. And what I've come to believe is that a lot of what looks like discipline to us now in other people is simply the cooled aftermath of a past obsession. So I started going to the gym when I was 18 because I was obsessed with it and I couldn't stop reading bodybuilding forums and drinking protein shakes and researching this and I'm going to get strong and then I'm going to get goals or whatever.

1:38:07Chris Williamson:And two decades later, I still train, but I'm not using either discipline or motivation. It's this weird, like neutron star that's cooled from a past obsession. And I think people that are serial obsessives in that sort of a way. So that is a good justification for going a little bit extreme, for allowing this thing to consume yourself. This, at least as far as I can see, was strongest when I was 18 and in my twenties. And now the obsession has at least a little bit more, I can sort of poke my nose and my mouth sort of above the waterline and have a little bit of a look around. Whereas before I was just completely underneath the swell.

1:38:44Chris Williamson:And, um, that I'm going to guess we'll continue over time. And that's a nice, that feels like a nice trajectory to me. And the other reason that I like it and the reason that I kind of wrote it, um, this idea that if you ask, ask a rich or successful or happy people, uh, what do you do? Tell me about your day. You go, well, you, you're asking somebody who's got survivorship bias and is a black belt and you're a blue belt. You should be modeling the rise, not the result. So model the rise, is not the result, is the lesson. What did you do when you were at my stage? And what would you do knowing that that was your frame?

1:39:18Chris Williamson:Even for super smart and balanced people that have reflected about it a lot, they still go, well, the most important thing is family. It's like, fuck you, dude. Look at what you did when you were 25. You took a flamethrower to the candle. Okay, what would you do? I would do the same thing. I'd just make sure I slept six hours a night because I slept four hours a night and that really damaged my health and that put me back by a little while. and now I've got to do fucking atherosclerosis or whatever the fuck it is. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, that's cool. That's interesting.

1:39:44Dave Evans:Okay, let me jump in on your obsession piece and reframe it a little bit. You know, I could suggest that we could categorize that as a particular invitation to celebrate the scandal of particularity. Yes, that's nice. And what I mean by that is, oh, this thing called, I suddenly notice I am obsessed with X, Y, Z, whatever, you know, which means I'm infatuated, right? So I'm actually having an infatuated experience, which is temporary. Infatuation is a lovely thing. You just got to go through it again. Like, what a deal. And let's make the most of it. Yeah. So I'm going to go all in. This is back to my balance thing.

1:40:18Dave Evans:It's like, no, the most alive way I can live right now is to be incredibly out of balance by going, you know, bat nuts about workout or whatever it might be. You know, and in fact, I'm going to so clearly identify that I am now almost abdicating to my obsession that I'll be able to pull myself back from it. this is not the new norm. This is like, you know, hey, make hay with the sunshine.

1:40:41Chris Williamson:It's the honeymoon phase. It's the honeymoon phase. For your new task. For your experience, yeah. Yeah, that's so great. Absolutely.

1:40:46Dave Evans:And that arises now and then, which is a particular, because again, one of the most important particularities, the not completely realized ultimates is you. You are a particularity. Your own life is, each day is. And so when suddenly an opportunity to be obsessed comes by, Ooh, those don't happen every day. Now, I'm not saying take every one and don't let it throw you to the ground, but have a stoic relationship with obsession.

1:41:14Chris Williamson:Well, most people don't get an obsession that's worth anything. You think about how many people get obsessed with politics or porn or their ex. You know, that, if you have the opportunity to do -

1:41:26Dave Evans:A life-giving obsession.

1:41:27Chris Williamson:Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. There you go. Yeah, yeah, this is energy inflow and energy outflow. Yeah, it's a generative obsession. That's a good way to put it. and i think god if you if you have that people go their entire lives certain some people go their entire lives without ever being obsessed with anything that's worth being obsessed by right that's not going to make their lives better and this is only going to last for a short period of time another interesting point on your people don't let go the anorexic hermit crab yeah yeah particular goal working at apple or ea or whatever it might be kind of like if you're in a relationship and you know that this has run its course, every minute you spend in that relationship is a minute that you're not in the right relationship.

1:42:09Chris Williamson:The same thing is true with your obsessions. You're not going to have room for a new obsession if you're trying to hold on to the dwindling fire of the last one. Allow it to cool. Allow it to become what it was. Maybe it's no longer even going to be a part of your life. There were certain things that I did in my 20s that are no longer even a part of my life that were obsessions. There's many things that have cooled into a more balanced version of it.

1:42:31Dave Evans:Yeah. The grief year after my wife died. I mean, so I leaned way into that and it was incredibly generative. And people kept saying, you know, the first year is the hardest. And I'm kind of going like, really? On the 366th day, it's going to be easier? I mean, yeah, that's the second time it's May 8th and she's been dead. I'm not sure that's all that transformative. But as it turned out, And I think largely because I really did lean all the way in. I became obsessed with grieving well. And I was really good at it. I killed it. Sorry. Brilliant. But at the end, as the year came along, I really did have this, oh, it's not over, but something.

1:43:14Dave Evans:I literally was sitting quietly and had sort of this dream state of experience spiritually of I was in the Olympic marathon and I was running through the tunnel for that last lap around the track, the last 440 of the 26 miles. And as I did that, this huge crowd stood and roared as I came along. I was like, well done, Dave. You're done. And as I neared the finish line, part of me wanted to stop. And part of the loss of years two, three, four, and five, you know, because don't get me wrong, I'm now down to the grief that I carry. There's a permanent thing I carry called grief, which is I befriended where it's a new relationship.

1:44:12Dave Evans:You know, Frisch, my new partner, soon to be a wife, wisely said, I'm really sorry I didn't get to meet Claudia, but I really look forward to getting to know her. The three of us are going to have to spend a lot of time together, which is very insightful. But I missed that intensity. There was something about that intense grief that was really alive. I mean, you were alive. But you got to let it go. But if I had tried to sustain that, if I had tried to stick with it, that would be very synthetic and everybody gets hurt.

1:44:51Chris Williamson:I'm not sure what word to use. The addiction, the compulsion, the seductiveness of even negative emotions that are sufficiently intense that they make us feel alive. If that's not an argument that humans really like aliveness, that I would rather be in pain and feel it than be in mundanity and feel nothing.

1:45:15Dave Evans:So this goes back to befriending the longing. Look, the good news is you're never going to get there. Which means if you're paying attention, it's going to stay interesting all the way. All the way down. I mean, the very last thing Claudia said before she does, she sits up a couple hours before she does, and she goes, oh, it's so interesting.

1:45:42Chris Williamson:Falls back.

1:45:43Dave Evans:Now, at that point, clearly she had one foot on the dock and one foot on the boat, and the boat was pulling out. She was seeing stuff I've never seen. And as curious as I am, I didn't feel permission to say, honey, could you tell me what you're seeing? Pretty sure that's not mine to see yet. um just help my there's a guy in the book called arnie his name is really ronald says he's in atlanta he's really in san francisco and he just died he just died just sort of 91 he's an artist it's a long story you know and we're with him a couple of days before he died he's he's clearly going he knows he's going you know he's in a wheelchair he's thin his teeth are out i mean he's leaning on his desk with a blanket over his head and he says david read poetry to me.

1:46:25Dave Evans:Read poetry to me. Go get the Shropshire Lad. It's on the second floor. So I go get this little book of, you know, 18th century romantic English poetry. And I read him a poem and he goes, oh, it's so beautiful. I mean, there is almost nothing of him left, but he directed it toward that. So we get to decide what to do with this life. We get to decide how to allocate these energies. And you let them be what they can until they can't, and then you move on. So So I think reveling in the obsession healthily while it deserves to be is fine. And then move on.

1:47:02Chris Williamson:That's so beautiful. That's so beautiful. Dave Evans, ladies and gentlemen. Dave, you're fantastic. You're really, really great. I'm very glad that I stumbled upon you. I'm really, really glad you did too. This has been great. Where should people go to keep up to date with everything that you're doing?

1:47:17Dave Evans:Oh, we've got a website, Designing Your Life. So it's designingyour.life. Pretty simple. And that'll take you to lots of places. We've got a newsletter out now, a newsman called Fully Alive by Design. You can get it weekly in your mailbox. The website will invite you to that. And, you know, hey, a week from today, you could buy the book. That'd be a great idea.

1:47:38Chris Williamson:Oh, it'll be out by the time that this goes out so people can go and buy it. And what's that called?

1:47:41Dave Evans:It's called How to Live a Meaningful Life, Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose Flow and Joy Every Day.

1:47:50Chris Williamson:I can, Dave. I appreciate you. Until next time.

1:47:53Dave Evans:Okay. I'll call you on that.

1:48:19Chris Williamson:want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.com slash books.