Start Designing a Life That Matters | Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

24 Nov 2025 · 1 h 1 min

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In short

The Art of Charm Podcast Summary

Episode Title

Start Designing a Life That Matters

Hosts

AJ and Johnny

Guests

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

Description

In this episode, AJ and Johnny engage Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford professors and co-authors of "Designing Your Life," discussing how to cultivate a meaningful and fully alive existence. They reveal the shortcomings of following traditional advice to "follow your passion" and introduce design thinking as a framework to enhance one's sense of purpose.

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Key Discussion Points

  1. The Origin of the Project
  2. Lunch Meeting: The collaboration between Burnett and Evans originated from a lunch meeting in 2006.
  3. Teaching Experience: They initially taught a class at Stanford centered around helping students find their vocation, which evolved into broader discussions about life design.
  1. Reframing Passion
  2. Challenging the "Follow Your Passion" Narrative: They argue this advice can lead to frustration and confusion, suggesting instead to "design your life."
  3. Emphasis on Impact: They discuss how pursuing impact alone is insufficient for a meaningful life.
  1. Redefining Self-Actualization
  2. Myth of Self-Actualization: The notion that one can achieve complete self-actualization is critiqued, proposing that self-transcendence—engaging beyond oneself—can lead to a more meaningful experience.
  1. Four Keys to a Meaningful Life
  2. Wonder: Embracing curiosity and mystery.
  3. Coherence: Aligning one's beliefs, actions, and identity.
  4. Flow: Engaging in activities that induce a state of flow.
  5. Community: The importance of belonging and shared experiences.
  1. Finding Your Focus Question
  2. Compass Exercise: Participants write essays on their current story, work view, and life view, helping illuminate their focus question and guide their life design.
  1. The Power of Formative Communities
  2. Engagement through Storytelling: Sharing personal narratives in supportive communities can lead to insights and deeper connections.
  3. ERS Practice: Engage, Reflect, and Storytell as a method for personal growth.
  1. Building Resilience
  2. Mindset Shifts: Moving from a "got to" mentality to a "get to" mentality to foster a sense of opportunity and growth.
  3. Celebrating Small Moments: Finding joy and wonder in everyday experiences.
  1. Curiosity and Wonder
  2. Curiosity + Mystery = Wonder: Encouraging a mindset that embraces the mysterious aspects of life to enhance overall well-being.
  1. Mindsets for Living Fully Alive
  2. Radical Acceptance: Accepting life as it is, combined with availability to new experiences, fosters resilience.
  3. Awakened Brain vs. Achieving Brain: Recognizing the difference between being caught in constant achievement versus being present and engaged in the moment.

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Key Takeaways

  • Design Your Life: A proactive approach to living meaningfully involves questioning societal norms and crafting a life based on personal values.
  • Holistic Support: Formative communities play a crucial role in personal development, offering emotional support and shared learning experiences.
  • Mindfulness in Action: Embracing wonder and curiosity can transform mundane tasks into meaningful experiences.
  • Resilience through Reflection: Building resilience is about celebrating small victories and reframing challenges as opportunities for growth.

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Resources Mentioned

  • Books: "Designing Your Life" by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
  • Website: [Designing Your Life](https://designingyour.life)

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Conclusion This thought-provoking episode emphasizes the importance of intentional life design, moving beyond traditional advice to create a more meaningful, engaged, and fulfilling life. By applying design thinking and embracing community, individuals can craft a life aligned with their authentic selves, fostering not just productivity but also a deeper sense of connection and purpose.

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Transcript

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0:28You know why you're tired all the time? talking or even using my camera. Stuff is built to intake information quickly in whatever form you think in and turn it into actionable tasks right away. Lists and stuff are built like completable projects. So that book you want to write, that business you want to start, or that trip you want to plan starts to take form inside stuff, step by step. The magic is it gets exponentially more powerful the more you feed into it. Download stuff today. Start brain dumping and organizing your tasks and feel the freedom of an uncluttered brain. Download stuff for free today by going to trystuff.app.

1:04That's T-R-Y-S-T-U-F-F dot A-P-P. Or simply by searching stuff, S-T-U-F-F in the app store and to enjoy everything stuff has to offer. You can get 50 % off your first year of extra stuff by using code charm at checkout. Get stuff done and start closing your open loops. Download stuff from the App Store today. Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. Expertly cleaned and folded. So you can take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave?

1:47Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Mindfulness, meditation, self-improvement is all inward. I'm going to perfect myself. I'm going to sit on a rock and finally, you know, connect to the universe. The Harvard study, any, you know, the idea of self-transcendence is all about outward. It's like, okay, engage in the world. Do stuff. Do stuff with people. And engagement is great, but if you don't reflect on it, you don't really get the benefit of it, right? So engage in the world and reflect on what happened and how did I feel?

2:34Welcome to the show, Bill and Dave. It's great to have you. Yeah. Johnny and I love asking the question anytime we have two guests on, what brought you together on this project? Well, technically lunch. Yeah, it was. I got a, I went full-time at Stanford in 2006 and 2007. Dave called me up for lunch and said, yeah, let's go out for lunch. And we had lunch in a little cafe that doesn't exist anymore. They tore down the building. It's been so long. And he'd been teaching over at Berkeley. Dave, tell me what you were doing. I had done youth work all my life, you know, as well as being a high tech management consultant.

3:10And I'd been away from that, been too busy. And so I wanted to get back to it. And I wasn't quite sure in the 90s what college students had on their minds. So I went and met with people who were doing that kind of work. And a guy at Berkeley I was meeting with having a coffee at Cafe Strada right there on the campus. Said, well, we talked about these things. And he said, well, you should teach a class. And, well, that's a great idea. Except I'm not on the faculty, don't have a PhD, don't know any other faculty. you know, done with a place to teach. You know, it's a horrible drive. Other than that's a great idea.

3:39And he said, well, I can solve everything but the drive. I said, no way. It goes away. And sure enough, he could. So then I ended up teaching a class called Finding Your Vocation Is Your Calling Calling. And I thought I'd teach it once. And at the end of the semester, one of the kids says, hey, my roommate wants to take it. You're teaching in the spring, right? And I said, well, get them to get at least 10 more kids. And the deal is if you show up, I'll show up. So 14 semesters later, we seem to be having a trend. And then Bill starts teaching at Stanford full time. And I knew him and I went, oh, I wonder what he's up to.

4:09And we had lunch and Bill said, what are you doing? And I described that story and he goes, well, that's a really important problem. I've been talking to kids about that forever. We don't deal with this. We really should deal with this here. Let's do it here at Stanford. But we have to do it using dishonest. Well, that's a great idea because it's a lot less horrible drive. And so I flipped over to Stanford. And he said, this is a great idea. I got to go, by the way. We'll prototype it this summer. We'll launch it this fall. I need a proposal by next week. He said, not a problem. So Monday, I took up my curriculum, flipped it through design thinking, which I knew pretty well.

4:39And off we go. I love that. I think some of the best opportunities in life come from those chance meetings where you're just catching up and all of a sudden magic happens. Little did we know that 20 years later, we'd be talking to you guys and selling millions of books and training thousands of educators. But hey, you know, showing up sometimes works. And helping people really wrestle with one, I think, the biggest questions in life. And I know the book starts off with a great reframe. Meaningful life, I think, in today's world with the rise of secularism has a varying definition across cultures and across the way we think about it.

5:14But I'd love to hear from you what meaningful life means and then how do we get there? It starts with deciding which preposition you're going after. And I'll let Bill address that question. Well, yeah, we make a distinction in the beginning that this is a design book. It's not a philosophy book. It's not a big theory book. It's very design active. Let's go make some stuff. And we start off by saying, we don't know the answer to the meaning of life. That is the big philosophical question. It's been going on for years. But if you want to get more meaning in life, if you want to live more fully alive, hey we've got some things we we think we can we can contribute to that conversation so it really is about the first reframe is you know meaning of life question yeah you know take a philosophy class go talk to your your pastor or something but uh if you want to talk to the designers getting more meaning in your life have living more fully alive um dave and i have been known lately as the or since the first book is the anti-passion guys don't follow your passion And that's a bad advice.

6:18But if you want to live more passionately, we're your guys. And we're purposefully, yeah. That was the first step is just deciding it wasn't a philosophical question. We could turn it into a design question. And we didn't write the book because we thought it was interesting. We wrote the book because we pretty much got dragged into it. You know, we've been talking to people about how to have a more joyful and meaningful life for some time now. And helping them design, you know, a career, a lifestyle, a situation that really works for them. and the feedback we're getting, both for the people for whom that worked and the people for whom they didn't, especially following the pandemic and the great resignation, 52 million people walk off the job because it's not working for me.

6:58The question was, I did all this stuff and I'm still not fulfilled. And it's not as meaningful as I thought. Like, what the heck? What'd I do wrong? And we kept hearing that over and over and over again, cross-generationally, cross-culturally, cross-situationally, like, oh, we got a problem. So designing your life is one thing. Getting the aliveness, the purpose, the joy, and the meaning out of it turns out to be another. And design is a pretty helpful place to go for that, too. So the first thing we do is reframe the problem because the big conclusion was when we said to people, so what are you not getting enough of?

7:32And overwhelmingly, it was impact. I'm trying to make a difference. I'm trying to change the world. I'm trying to matter in the world. And most of the time, that doesn't work, by the way, because it's really hard to get anything actually done. And even when it does, an impact, which is wonderful and important and you should pursue it, is just a thing. And the half-life and the meaning of it is very, very short because, you know, oh, yeah, we, you know, oh, and we released a new book. That's great. Three, two, one. What have you done for me lately? So that impact thing is not sustainable. And so the big is that impact is the thing, not the sole source of meaning.

8:08You've got to look more places. as educators the book helps with one thing which is helping people come to a determination on their own because as you guys know you can tell people talk to people yell at people until you're blue in the face and some will follow along but a majority people when they come up with those answers on their own through work that they did they're more committed to it they're more resound to it. They hold it stronger because it's theirs. And so, you know, it certainly helps guide them to those answers or at least those answers for themselves. Yeah. The whole idea is that you're the designer.

8:52We're just going to give you ideas and tools. And you're right. Once you've, you know, you've done a little bit of work or you've put on your wonder glasses or you've investigated the scandal of particularity, which are two of the big ideas in the book and you find something you actually find a moment of wonder or you realize wow it is about designing meaning and designing meaningful moments and i can do it that's when the yeah that's when the change occurs because just lecturing it's like i always tell you can't lecture golf you got to swing the club yeah you can't lecture design you got to go do just do some design yeah you know the unfortunate mistake that the academy made a couple hundred years ago 300 years ago, they weren't making this mistake.

9:34And 100 years ago, they were, is they decided in the post-enlightenment world that, well, you know, it's so terribly important that we don't tell you who we are. That's not our job. We'll give you a bunch of information and you can figure it out. And they stepped away. And in the process, it kind of gave up on formation. And we were saying, because if you tell people how to do this stuff, you're deciding for them who they are. And we go, no, no, no. We can give you a process. We can give you tools. We can give you insights that then you go use to figure out what you think. We do not proscribe or prescribe what you're supposed to believe.

10:08We will not should on you. We don't recommend you should on yourself either. But we can give you tools that help you figure out where you're coming from. And our favorite review on Amazon in the first book, now almost 10 years ago, and it happened really quickly, was somebody wrote, finally, a self-help book where the authors respect the autonomy of the readers. And we went, oh, thank God. because that's really, we don't want to write a book because we're going to sound like we're telling you stuff. We're just trying to give you some tools. It's up to you. For many of us, when we think about this, we've probably encountered Maslow's laws as a hierarchy.

10:39And I think you guys have an interesting twist on it in the book and a new way of thinking about it that might be new to our listeners, especially those who aren't familiar with design thinking and don't even know what think like a designer means. Maslow, who wrote his definitive paper in 1943, gave us the hierarchy of needs, which the National Institutes of Health will tell you is one of the most pernicious ideas in the social sciences. And so, as we all know, the apex of the human experience, the top of the pyramid, is self-actualization, which he defines in the paper as if you attain self-actualization, you will experience fulfillment.

11:16So everybody's saying, I'm not fulfilled. I'm not doing that thing Maslow told me I should be shooting for. And what does Maslow tell you that that thing is? It is becoming all that one can be, which is unattainable if you buy into our life design philosophy, which is one thing we do say is we observe all of us contain more aliveness than one lifetime permits us to live out, i.e. there's more than one of you in there. So if there's more than a lifetime of you and I have defined fulfillment as being everything I can possibly be, i.e. I must have 10 lifetimes in order to be fully expressed, then life was set up for you to have to be unfulfilled.

11:53Bad idea. Fundamentally bad idea. Which Maslow knew by the end of his life in his 70s, he suddenly realized, you know, there's something wrong with this thing. And he's right. There's something wrong. So the sixth layer, which a few people know, because it was never formally published by him, though it's been written about, is self-transcendency. You've got to get beyond yourself. And that results in meaning making. Turns out, and even when he published, when he thought about that, he still got it wrong because he thought that self-transcendency was a hierarchical level above actualization. Actualization is a myth.

12:21It's not attainable. But self-transcendency is accessible all the time, which is why Wunder is the top of our list, because you can get past it. And so we move from, well, from what to what, Bill? Being fully alive. And this idea of self-transcendence, you can be self-transcendent while you're still working on safety and security needs, while you're unemployed. You can be self-transcendent, you know, almost any time, folks who live in not very good situations, let's say in a refugee camp in the Middle East, they still can be self-transcending because that's about your relationship to the things in the world beyond yourself.

13:01And it's a pretty powerful idea. And so we like the idea that there's more than one life in you and that you can try to be all that you can be. That's great. You can attain some level of that. But what you're really looking for is the experience of yourself in a bigger world and transcending the ego needs to something that is actually more sustainable because it's bigger than yourself. And this shows up in a lot of research, the Harvard study of adult development, the longest longitudinal study of humankind and the development into our adult self. One of their findings is longevity is predicted by relationships, and particularly relationships with you in your community and doing things for people other than yourself.

13:56It makes you live longer, it makes you live happier, and it gives you life meaning. Well, the transcendence idea is amazing. And certainly there are many ways of going about it. Some people will do it through synthetic mind-altering. Sure. For me, it's art, creativity, losing yourself in that process, whatever your medium is. For me, it's music, it's playing guitar, it's something else. But knowledge and education and experience allows that art form to reach even farther. They go hand in hand for me, but it's certainly a way of, and I think my favorite transcendence moments have been on stage where I've completely forgot that I was even in front of an audience, but it's now just about the music and the notes and where we're going to take this.

14:49Let's assume that you're a good guitar player, but maybe not as good as Jimi Hendrix. Okay. But still, I'd like, that's just the whole thing. You don't have to be Jimi Hendrix to achieve transcendence. When I'm in the studio here painting, and I'm probably a mediocre painter, But there are moments when, wow, you're in the zone, it just clicks. There are moments playing music where you're in the zone and it just clicks. And at whatever level of professionalism or quality of that experience, the thing you're making is, it doesn't matter. Because you have access to that creative moment at any level of professionalism.

15:30You can learn how to get better at being a person. That's really what we're in the business of doing, is empowering you. So our goal in the first book was to give people a conscious competency and awareness of being how I can get better at life and vocational wayfinding. How do I find my way when I don't know where I'm going? And that's the skill we can actually teach you. In this book, we're going to give you a conscious competency in living fully alive and moment making. You can learn how to do this. You can access these skills. You can get muscle memory on these capacities. You know, we talk about the four key areas where we think there's not the whole meaning making story, but four really hot spots that almost every life can get more juice out of, which are wonder, coherency, flow and formative community.

16:17We can talk about those. But the coherency thing is, again, you can't be fully manifested. All of you, that version of fulfillment is not available because you're way bigger than that. Isn't that the good news moving from fear of missing out FOMO to JOMO, the joy of missing out? It's so cool that I'm bigger than my own lifetime. I wonder what I'm going to do with it. And then but coherency says who I am, what I believe and what I'm doing are in alignment. So you can live. You can manifest fully authentically. It's not all of you, but all of what's happening is totally you centric, you legitimate.

16:52And that's a really meaningful experience. I feel like I am I am actually acting, acting. I'm doing, I'm AJing really well right now. That feels really terrific. So these are skills that you can actually learn. You can get some language, you can get some tools and you can actually have this success. When Beno says, hey, how's it going? You go, it's going pretty well. It's kind of working for me.

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21:23Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash charm. One thing that we've observed with the top performers that we've worked with our clients is that they tend to err on the side of self-actualization on a lone wolf path. So how do I go inward? How do I become the best version of myself and shut everyone else out? You know, I don't want to participate in groups. I don't want to be a team player. I want to self-actualize and look at it almost in a selfish lens to the detriment of the relationships in their life that we know create so much benefit. And I'd love to start first just talking about formative communities Because I think this aha moment for our audience will be really profound.

22:05What we have found, and this comes particularly out of the work I do with the DCI program, the Distinguished Careers Institute program, now 17 years old, 15 years old. And I've been working with them for going on 10 years. It's a year-long gap year program for grownups, 45 to 90 years old, mostly 55 to 75, taking a year, stopping out, paying a big chunk of money to do it. And think about, so now what? You know, and we put them in these small groups for the purpose of figuring that out together. And what we've come up with is the model that there are three reasons people get together. There's a social gathering to have a good time together.

22:39There's a collaborative gathering to get something done together. And there's a formative gathering to become better together. Bill and I defined the human person anthropologically. What are we? We're becoming. Skip the classic Western challenge. Am I a being or a doing? A being or a doing? Which am I? That's the duality. You're going to get stuck in a in a binary dead end. You're start with who you are, your being. Go out and do stuff in the world and then pay attention to it and grow into the next thing you're going to be growing into. You're becoming. So you're you're lifelong. The one mission we all have is to increasingly become coherently more and more authentically ourselves in a meaningful way in the world.

23:15Now, that that never stops. So when we gather around becoming, it's a gathering of intention. you know you know jimmy's into guitar and bill's into beanie babies and i'm into sustainability oh we can't be in the same group because you guys can't help me no no we can't because bill's billing and i'm daving and you're aging and whatever aj wants to do i can help you aj better and so that that gathering around the authenticity of how we are becoming we've got tools for that too um turns out to be and these people who all have huge networks and big families will say within six weeks, these are the most important relationships I've ever had in my entire life.

23:53Because most people don't have a formative community that supports them becoming there's these high performance you're dealing with. How can you help me hit a new personal record? If you're not helping me hit a new personal record, get out of my way. It's all performance. It's all outcome. It's all transaction. What are these tools to help us build this formative community if we're now recognizing this is absent in our life? The ERS practice goes way back. We developed some years ago for another class bill i want you to talk about eras engage reflect and storytell engage in the world go out and do stuff i mean you're you know i think you hit on something there like this whole notion of um mindfulness meditation self-improvement is all inward right it's all like i'm gonna i'm gonna perfect myself i'm gonna sit on a rock and finally you know connect to the universe but the harvard study any you know the idea of self uh of self-transcendence is all about out outward it's like okay engage in the world do stuff do stuff with people and engagement is great but if you don't reflect on it you don't really get the the benefit of it right so engage in the world and reflect on what happened and how did i feel and what happened when Mary and I had that interaction and how did she feel right and really think think about it and then tell your story you know go out and tell people hey I'm on this yeah on this journey and I did this thing and I'm in this I'm starting this formative community and we're doing blah blah blah because the telling your story kind of loops you back to another engagement right somebody will say hey why don't we try this together so engage like story tell is this you know kind of generative loop it it picks up energy as it goes and uh it's quite simple right but again that the rather than going inside you go inside to think how did that experience um how did it feel but you but you go outside to engage you got to engage the world to get the data about where are you going right everybody wants to go somewhere they want to go to go someplace and achieve something where are you going and why did you go there?

26:00And then tell your story. And we find that it starts to generate its own momentum because curiosity leads to more engagements. Engagements lead to more reflections. Reflections lead to more stories that create some more curiosity and around you go. The blocker for many of our listeners and we know for our clients in the story piece is they feel that the story has to talk about the destination, not the messy middle and not the journey. So they find themselves like, well, I'm not good at guitar. I've never been on stage like Johnny. So I can't share that story of me perfecting guitar and screwing it up.

26:36Or, you know, I'm not when I compare myself to others based on social media and what media that we're consuming shows, I'm not where I should be. I'm not enough. And therefore, they don't have that opportunity to present the story that actually creates engagement. So one of the things that we do to get them out of that loop is to recognize that the journey in the story is actually more connecting than the destination. If you tell me your personal best in a marathon and I'm not a marathon runner, well, I can't really connect to that. But if you tell me all the discipline that went into the journey of you getting into running, why was your passion and how you work towards that personal best, well, I can connect to that.

Read the full transcript

27:14You want to go beyond narrating the transaction of my performance. Like, oh, that's a really cool story how you hit your personal best. That's still just, which is interesting. And that's a version of a collaborative community because we're discussing our performance and what I got done. So a bunch of individuals talking about, you know, we're collaborating on how to do that stuff. What we're really saying is if I accept this idea that you're becoming, and one of the ways we kind of unfairly divide the world into two groups of people is there are people wandering around, rehearsing their answer.

27:44Like I got this fingered out, listen to me. And there are people who are living the question. So we're supporting the latter. We're helping you live the question. So a formative community, a community whose goal is to help you form more fully into your more fully authentic and more fully alive self in a variety of expressions. That's what we think is interesting. So I'm on the agenda of becoming. So who can help me become more? Well, that means I got to lean into the present moment in a thoughtful way because I know. So right now, I would love to have a conversation with April 26, Dave, because April 26, Dave, you know, six months from now is much more interesting than I am.

28:23And so then we come up with this. So what it was, we guide the conversation. It's like, what am I talking about? What you're talking about is not the goal you're hitting. You're talking about the particular aspect of the becoming trajectory that you're moving toward. We call it the focus question. So if I'm living the question of life. And the question of life is, so Dave, how much more daving can we expect from you? What new daving is coming to a theater near the world soon? And for that to occur, we have people say, so if you lived well for the next four, six, maximum 12 months, if you lived well into life, if you became well, you paid attention, you grew in ways that you is what the universe is currently inviting you to do.

29:10What would six months from now, Dave, or six months from now, AJ, know that you don't know? Right? So for me right now, my focus question is, so what happens when I really commit to living no longer the role-centric life as opposed to the soul-centric life? I mean, still, I'm a co-author with Bill. I still, I'm going to go present to a bunch of social impact entrepreneurs at 145 this afternoon. I'm still a venture partner and a mentor coach to a whole bunch of startup guys. I have these roles in the world. But that's not really what I'm doing. Those are just excuses to get me in the room, to be present to other people's conversation.

29:47I want to be there for the story. And that's the soul-centric way of living. So what does it mean to be no longer role-centric, but soul-centric? So we help people find their focus question. And that focus question drives the formative conversation. And once people get the hang of it, because they're only used to talking about outcomes, they really don't know how to do this. It takes a little practice. Once they get the hang of it, it's surprisingly generative. Dave's challenge of moving from role to soul. If you saw his calendar, man, it's just full of roles. You know, I'm a speaker at this. I'm a lecturer at that.

30:21I'm going to go do this, you know, mentoring thing here and there. So it's a challenge for him to drop all the names of the things he does and just become the soul in the world. But it's a really good challenge. So how do we find that focus question? Help us develop it for our listeners who've never heard this concept. It starts with actually you do an exercise called the compass, which has three components to it. This is our core coherency thing, because I want to become more coherent. Well, what's coherency defined as? And it's called My Current Story, My Work View, and My Life View. And those three little essays are the platform that once you've written them, often your focus question arises.

31:02I'll let Bill describe what a compass is. 250 words on your identity. Everybody grew up with some identity. My dad said, work hard, go to a good school, get a good job, you'll be happy. That was the story I grew up with. Then you do 250 words on what's work for. Not what kind of job you want, but what's your theory of work? What is work for? What is work fulfilling you? And maybe what the gaps are in what you're currently doing. And then the hard one, 250 words on the meaning of life. What's life? Where's the big picture? And people struggle. It's interesting. People struggle differently with each of those.

31:40But once you've got all three and then you look at them and you read them and you pick them up. You say, pick them up and read them like they were somebody else's. It wasn't yours. It was somebody else. Some other person said, hey, read these three things for me and tell me, do they match? Do they line up? Are they coherent? And there's often little glitches in there. But once you've tuned it up a bit, you have what we call a compass. So now you have something you can go back to and say, hey, I just got this new job offer or hey, I'm thinking of, you know, changing, you know, buying a new car or whatever it is.

32:11Is it consistent with my I'm heading in the right direction? Because, you know, again, we don't always know where we're going in the future, but we could know if we're going in the right direction. And the compass helps you do that. I was laughing as you mentioned those three questions. For myself, I was like, oh, let me add it. And I also know that 10 years ago, I would have had a different gut reaction to those questions. And so I'm sure there's a lot of people in the audience who are, you know, curious, but even probably even scared to have to sit down with a pen and paper and answer those questions.

32:51However, I would challenge them to answer those questions to the best of their ability right now and then C, pull those answers back out five years. There's no getting it right. There's just getting the current version. Right. It's been done hundreds and thousands, if not millions of times. We've been in the room with anywhere from 10 to 600 people at a time doing this a couple thousand times now, literally. And a whole lot of, oh, I can't, I'm sorry. And 10 minutes later, oh. In fact, there's, you know, there's a whole Daniel Kahneman think fast, think slow thing. And we often push people really hard to think fast.

33:27Not because that's the best answer, but there is one. Like, okay, you've got five minutes, write your life for you. What? What are the most, what are the ultimate things that make life important? You know, is it truth, beauty, God, what, you know, or money? It doesn't matter. It's up to you. And their hand starts moving. So the truth is all of you listening have answers to these questions. You just haven't heard them yet. So give them a chance and they'll come out. And then after you write that stuff, by the way, we're big believers in the narrative. Here we use the term storytelling a lot because we now know neurobiologically that we are story based animals.

34:04You have a story based memory system in your mind. You know, any data your mind can't make a coherent story out of, it's going to reject. So one of our mindsets is called the create your world mindset. Life is a story you tell yourself. Yes, that's actually true. So pick your story really carefully. It's got to be true. It's got to make sense. But there are a lot more generative and less generative versions of your story. So by writing the story of my life and the story of my work view and the story of my life view, those are narratives. And then after that's done, we say, and now if you want, you can mine out your core compass values.

34:40My values are, you know, beauty, community, performance, whatever it is. We don't start with, okay, write down your top values. If we do that, they're going to give us a constructed answer. They're going to give us this outcome image-based answer as opposed to, what do I really think? What do I really believe? You reverse engineer yourself. And then those values, by the way, if you look at that list of values, your top four or five values hiding in your narrative story, real good chance one of those values is at the core of your focus question.

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37:29And we do it in class and the students get together. We put them in threes. And we say, read your work for your life, your story to each other. Because, and don't start with, oh, I didn't read it very well. I just did it last night. I'm not sure of saying it. Don't do that. Just read it. And it's almost, and 100 % of the time, a transformation occurs when you read it out loud to other people you kind of own it and and maybe there's stuff in there you'd like to change but that's not the point the point is to just read out loud authentically and let other people hear your voice and it changes you it changes them by the way then they think oh that was really interesting i think i want to put that in my worldview because i i really resonated with that so it is it's a community thing we still do it in groups.

38:19We do it in communities. And, you know, the number one of the other reasons we wrote the book is this is the loneliest generation we have ever educated at Stanford. I mean, all the statistics about loneliness that last year, the surgeon general said loneliness is the number one health issue in America. So when we get people together and they have a chance to read and hear and kind of speak that speak their truth to some extent and witness someone else speaking their truth. It's transformational. It turns out it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself. Absolutely. So when we have people read their own work back and forth to each other, one of the questions he says, so how many of you, while you were reading something, suddenly went, wait, that's true.

39:06I do think that, you know, and we, and we asked the listeners who don't know each They met us two seconds ago. And their assignment is, comment on the moment in that reading when the speaker was being most authentic. Oh, I like that. And we don't explain what we mean by that at all. It's an outrageous term to use, by the way. And so when was A.J. – I mean, I wouldn't know. I bumped into A.J. in some way this afternoon and probably wouldn't recognize him. When was A.J. being the most authentic? Well, it turns out if you're a human being, because we are profoundly social animals. Our colleague Dan Siegel has reminded us now that we are really much more of an aspen forest of a collective consciousness than we are a bunch of autonomous beings.

39:51So when I'm being significantly disclosing, not divulging, this isn't, you know, tell the gory story. This is just tell the honest story with other people and being received that I'm actually got a better shot at getting in alignment with my true self. So these conversations can be very meaningful. the better you know yourself or more comfortable you are with this these narratives of yourself and reading them and telling the other people it changes your social media experience so now you're just not somebody who's influenced by everything coming at you you are now doing the influencing yeah and you're doing the discernment oh that's a bunch of bullshit i don't believe that you know yeah it's like or whatever or hey that was a really authentic um post by that person i think i want to comment um because yeah we're bombarded by messaging most of it pretty full of baloney but um once you've got a compass like i say then you're going to go in the right direction and that's and that and that that builds confidence and yeah if you end up in a cul-de-sac or something didn't work out that's okay because the other thing we teach people to do is how to prototype i was at apple for seven years and i was there when we were building the first laptops and i enough people from the iPhone team.

41:06They built a lot of prototypes before they figured out what something was. Because if you're doing something new to the world, you have no specification, right? There's no spec to design to. Well, you don't know what you're going to be in five years or even three years or probably even six months of the way things are changing. So prototype your way forward is the best way we know to kind of invent something new. And the new you is an invention. So I think for those in our audience who are feeling stuck or maybe feeling completely out of alignment. A lot of this stuff sounds great when you are on your way to actualizing and you feel really good about the values in front of you.

41:44But we know that life doesn't always run smoothly. And I think a big part of this is building the resilience to actually handle it when things don't go your way, when you have answered these questions for yourself and you care deeply about these changes in your life. So how do we start to build that resilience through all of this? Well, part of that, we talk about mindset, right? So this book is probably the most, you know, it's not a philosophy book, but it's the most philosophical book we've written. It starts with, you know, four big reframes to think differently about meaning. And then it gives you five mindsets.

42:19Like this is the point of view. If you want to put kind of this, this mindset on your chances of running into, you know, meaning and purpose wellness go way up. And then four areas where you can, with sets of tools, you can go start practicing. But the reframes are huge. And one of them is called the scandal of particularity. So it starts with, you know, impact is not the only game in time. If you put all your meaning making eggs in the impact basket, you're probably screwed because it's way too small and it's not going to last. So you've got to get beyond that. And so we have these other categories.

42:50And the next idea is it's not fulfilled, but it's becoming fully alive. And the last big idea is it's the scandal of particularity. And I've not forgotten your question, AJ. I'm actually going to connect to it. And the scandal of particularity actually was originally a theological idea that became a philosophical idea, which is, as it turns out, the nature of reality is such that the full expression or experience of any ultimate love, truth, beauty, compassion, community, you name it, doesn't exist. Never happens. There is no perfect sunset. There is no right anything. It turns out the sublime is only encountered in the ridiculous.

43:26And the ultimate is only reflected partially and temporarily in a very constrained manner in the particular. You cannot make the perfect cake, but you can make a pretty enough cupcake that my grandson Memo on his seventh birthday party a couple of weeks ago can go, ooh. And when he sees the cupcake, he goes, ooh. During that, ooh. Wow, there's a moment when real beauty was recognized by a real soul and it actually happened. And that's a particularity. So you decide to accept the finitude of life and the constraints of living in a universe where the arrow of time is going and moments are fleeting.

44:05If you make that decision as a reframe, then it's all about not fighting against, I'm never going to get there. It's about celebrating the wonderfulness of a particularity when, in fact, it reflects something that you care about. So where the resilience comes from is not getting tougher and tougher and tougher. The resilience starts with, cut yourself some slack. When I say this is as good as it gets, that's not the consolation prize. Turn your mind, shift your mindset. that, hey, this is as good as it gets. I don't know you two guys, but we're sitting here having an honest conversation about things that matter to people.

44:44My day job is talking to sincere people about stuff they care about. That's freaking great. You know, and I'm going to hang up in 16 minutes and then it'll be over. But that's, you know, celebrate that. So the first step to resilience is shoot for the right thing, which is a couple of moments, a couple of particularities in your day when something either meaningful or beautiful or wondrous or deeply engaged in flow is happening. And they go, great, do it again tomorrow. If I'm really stuck and, you know, in my sort of morphology of personalities, Dave is a tigger and I'm kind of an Eeyore with a little poo in me.

45:31I'm kind of a depressed guy sometimes. And sometimes it is hard. I'm sure some of your listeners, it's just hard to say, oh, yeah, sure. You know, maybe, yeah, the ultimate is in the in the in the moment and stuff. But gosh, I'm just having trouble getting out of bed today. I think I think even in a therapeutic sense, my therapist and counselors have said, hey, Bill, you can't boil the ocean. Just find one little thing today that makes you happy, which is exactly what David Simon said. Find one little thing today and maybe find two tomorrow and maybe find two or three the next day. Don't make it a competition.

46:14You're not trying to better yourself. But you are looking for little moments of wonder, little moments of joy. I was walking into campus the other day, and it's late fall, but there's a bush on campus that's just awash with blue flowers. And I just stopped for, I'm busy, got to get to class, got to get to class. I stopped for a second. I took a picture of one of the flowers, and I tucked one of the flowers in my notebook. small moment of wonder, beauty, whatever you want to call it, I think you can build your way out of the sort of sense that nothing matters anyway, and I'm never going to get anywhere anyway.

47:00It's about small moments, as Dave described, but I have a real soft spot in my heart for people who are a little more e-earth than everybody else, because it's hard. And resilience comes from finding small moments and then building on those. The holidays are here. And if you're running a business, you know that's when things get real. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the biggest shopping weekend of the year. Your platform needs to handle whatever comes at it. That's why over 10 % of all U.S. e-commerce runs on Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses, from brands you know to people launching their first holiday sale this year.

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48:54Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Get smart about playing the game to win, people. You know, we teach design thinking, and the formal name of it, which is HCD, Human-Centered Design. So, you know, and, you know, I'm the theist, Bill's the atheist, you know, I'm the ticker, he's the ER. But, you know, and people go, how do you guys get along? We get along great. We just celebrated. We're celebrating our 20th year of collaboration because we agree on the human part. We say if you get the human part right, you can't go wrong. So our theologies may be different, but our anthropologies are identical.

49:27And what we now know about the way people actually are, right, Lisa Miller's work out of Columbia is you're you've got we're learning a lot about the brain. And one interesting model that she's put forth is that there's the achieving brain and there's the awakened brain. And they're different parts of you and they operate in different ways. And the achieving brain is that get stuff done guy or the really killing it woman. And that's what we're in almost all the time. So when these people who are stuck, they're actually not only stuck on their problem, they're stuck in their achieving brain. And so we've actually posited this concept called the transactional world and the flow world.

50:05there's really only one universal world, but we're completely incapable of grokking the whole thing at once because your brain operates in different modalities at different times. So there's a different consciousness. So we say, look, there is a transactional world that you perceive and experience and encounter while you're achieving get stuff done performance brain is running. And most people we talk to, they're in that brain 99.7 % of the time. So what I'm talking about, how do I make this better? How do I achieve better? How do I hit my goal? How do I feel better about what am I accomplishing?

50:35And that's, you know, that's fine, but it's a dead end because these other things we're talking about are available to you in the flow world, which is in the present moment where the full experience of the entire reality of the cosmos is flowing by us right now. It's available right now in this present moment. Can you be attentive to that with your awakened brain? So I want to get unstuck. What I really want to do is I want to wake up my awakened brain. These are what these little tools are for, you know, so that you can drop into flow. You can have an experience of community. These little moments of beauty that Bill is talking about.

51:08We were really trying to get people to put on their wonder glasses, because the truth is the fact that anything at all exists at all is actually rather wondrous. And if you just give yourself a chance to be in awe and wonder, it's not just a brief moment of respite, you know, in the rest stop and then back on the highway of life. I'm actually awakening my awakened brain. I'm becoming more fully human and I'm actually turning into more of myself. It's not just a little snack on the side. It's fundamentally growing a bigger version of yourself. When those moments happen for me, well, whatever it is that sticks out, that wakes me up from the achieving mind into the present mind or my subconscious mind into the present mind, It's to acknowledge all of the invisible, selective, organic pressures that culminated to make that moment happen.

52:04And just, and as you were saying, Dave, and be of wonder, like, how lucky am I that this happened to me or that I got to experience this? For so many in our audience, their curiosity is really targeted towards that transactional world and really achieving to get ahead and tuning that curiosity elsewhere. And you actually have a formula for wonder and tapping into that, I think would be really helpful for our audience who recognize like, hey, when it comes to work, like learning about AI or learning how to code, like I can fire up my curiosity to the max. I'm not paying attention to that bush on campus.

52:40I'm not paying attention to these things that are happening outside of that. We talk a lot about curiosity in both books because curiosity is just it's a natural human mindset. I have a four year old grandson and he's really teaching me about what curiosity is really about because he's like everything is interesting. An ant is interesting. A leaf is interesting. A rock is interesting. That's it's amazing. And we were we were all that four year old kid at one point. So we all have curiosity as a as a way of engaging the world. And then there's stuff in the world that, you know, it's just, it's amazing.

53:16It's mysterious. You can't figure it out. The moments you have playing guitar, the moments I have in the studio, and moments of this transcendent sense of things, or just other forms of mystery, the mystery of nature and how beautiful it is. And so we realize that, you know, if you take curiosity plus mystery, you take curiosity up a notch and it becomes wonder. wonder is just sort of like the the deeper level of curiosity where you were acknowledging and you're not even trying to demystify that would be that would be the wrong thing so you're trying to figure out the mystery you're just you're just in the mystery with this deep curiosity of the world and it's like yeah look at that you know and looking at that through what we call your wonder glasses or putting on a frame of mind to try to see what's what you're looking for but to look for the things that contain some of the mystery of the world, the mystery of nature, the mystery of the human condition, right?

54:16So we describe wonder as curiosity plus mystery. We have an exercise called put on your wonder glasses where you go out and you look at the situation and you kind of first you interrogate the situation and write it down as a transaction. And then you go, hey, if I was curious about this, I'm really curious about this bush. Why is it blooming in the middle of the... it's almost winter, it's raining, but why are there still flowers? And then you drop that curiosity to one more level of like, how is it that flowers even get made? Like, yeah. And then I know a little bit about evolution and bees and flowers and color, but heck, this is really wonderful.

55:01So you can design these wonder moments, these meaning-making moments every day. Once you get into the practice of doing it once or twice a day, the positive psychology guys will say, hey, you're actually rewiring your brain. Because instead of looking for problems or looking for things that are bad, you're now looking for things that are not only good, but wondrous and curious and fantastic. And the more you pay attention to those things, the more your experience of your day and your life and your mood, you will elevate. And they've even shown that you actually rewire parts of your brain. So yeah, wonder is a big deal in this book.

55:40That tool really points out one of our top goals, our overarching goals, is to help you get more out of life, not cram more into it. Like, what else do I need to do? What trick do I need to get better at work? Okay, that's all more, more, more, more, more. I mean, I'm not having enough fulfillment. It's not meaningful enough. What else do I need? Well, I got to start taking Ritalin then sleeping two hours a night. That is not a good pathway. What we're saying is, no, no, no. It's right in front of you. These are about tools and mindsets that allow you to extract the beauty, the joy, the meaning, the purposefulness, the aliveness, really, of the life you're already in.

56:19You don't have to change anything other than the way you permit yourself to experience the fullness of what's right in front of you right now. It's free. I'd love to talk about one last reframe. We had a recent guest on the show, a UPenn professor who shared that almost 99 % of his class felt they were in survival mode. So even while they're studying at UPenn and all of their needs are taken care of and they're achieving everything that they set out, they still feel like they're stuck in survival mode. And I think for many of us, when we feel that way, we are stuck in, I got to do this. I got to do that.

56:57And that mode can just wear us down and make it really hard to put on our wonder glasses, really hard to see everything outside of it. We talked at the top of the conversation of pick your preposition, meaning in life versus meaning of life carefully. And here's pick your vowel carefully. The got to get to is you find, I've got to get this done. The best thing an element of your to-do list can do is be checked off and be. My favorite thing about things is when they're over and they're gone. It's called done. Great. I love it when life is over. I want to die now. That's what I want to do. What's wrong with me?

57:28I suppose. So but got to versus get to is a mind shift that identifies the characteristic of what it is I'm about to do that I may have to do. It may be important to get done. But can I live into it in this generative way? And Bill, this really started with Bill recognizing that he was doing a really crappy job of walking into his staff meetings where he felt like he, oh, I got to go to the staff meeting as opposed to a get to go. Now, Bill, how did that work? Once you flip from got to the get to, right, you're making a choice. And I'm choosing to go to the staff meeting with curiosity. I'm choosing to go to the staff meeting with some energy and some desire to communicate what we're doing and to listen to other people.

58:13It's moving from the victim to the person in charge. Right. I've got to do this. I'm the victim of a circumstance versus, hey, I get to do this. He complained to me. I've got to go to these damn staff meetings. You know, I mean, who called these meetings anyway? We get stuck arguing about the Xerox machine and it kind of goes, oh, I've got to go because I called the meeting. It's my meeting. Why do I do it? Oh, because I'm working with some of the smartest people in the world trying to make the planet a better place. And a couple of topics might come up that might even be interesting, might even be world changing and have a big impact at some point.

58:43I get to go to this meeting. So it's a choice. about where you send your brain. I'm a motorcyclist. And one thing we know in motorcycling, it's really important to learn, very different than driving a car. You go where you look. Rookie riders ride right off the road all the time because they see the ravine, they're scared of it. And they look at the ravine and you go where you look. You drive right into the ditch. There are all these YouTube videos about stupid little white guys riding their Harley Davidson right into the ditch. And that's what we do all the time. Oh God, I bet we're going to argue about the Xerox machine again.

59:16And oh, there we go. See, I told you I knew it. Crap. As opposed to, oh, wow, I get to do. So pick what you get to do, even in the midst of that requirement, and allow yourself to be present to it. Look up to go up, look down to go down. That's all there is. You both have such unique personalities. I'm curious if there's one reframe that really shaped you. I think we may have touched on a couple of them, but just from a personal side. I get up every morning and I say two things. I say, I live in the best of all possible worlds because I'm an existential atheist. There is no other world. I'm stuck with this one, so I might as well like it.

59:56And then this is the idea of choice. And everything I do today, I choose to do. And that comes from the work of Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning. It comes from other things. So I try to make my life a choice. It doesn't always work, but most of the time it does. and recognize that I'm privileged. You know, you are privileged in this life, in this incarnation to be a sentient being. So make the most of it. I don't really believe in reincarnation, but I'll try to make the most of it. We have these five mindsets, you know, and we'll do the whole list, but two of them. And we talk about mindset twofers.

1:00:33A couple of them, when you put them together, become a power tool. And my favorite twofer is acceptance, radical acceptance. All the cool stuff happens in reality, so you must be here to win. So I want to accept things exactly as they are. And then availability, not only accept like, oh, OK, I guess I'm going to staff meeting, but availability and then leaning in like, oh, and I wonder what might happen here. This positive anticipation. You know, if we call it the pursuit of latent wonderfulness, if you expect wonderfulness to occur, its chances of actually arising go way up. And Bill often sneaks up behind me.

1:01:06You know, we kind of call each other on our own crap after all this time. And I'm I'm I'm always wanting things to be better. So acceptance isn't my favorite thing. And Bill will sneak up and whisper. He goes, Dave, Dave, I think we're having an acceptance problem again, Dave. You know, because, you know, there's only 30 kids in the room. We were expecting there are 50. But, you know, there are 30 kids here. Can we accept that now? Can we move on? And and so acceptance plus availability like, OK, this is what's happening. You know, these guys, we had to reschedule this call for today. I have to get up at seven o 'clock in the morning again on Thursday.

1:01:40Oh, and could it be available? Because AJ and Jimmy might turn out to be interesting. Guess what? They were. So acceptance plus availability. That's my favorite reframe for almost anything. Well, thank you both for joining us this early morning. We appreciate it. Where can our audience find out more about the book and your work? Go to designing your life, designing your dot life. So designing your life with the dot between your and life. and that'll take you to our homepage. I'll introduce you to our new newsletter called Fully Alive. Once a week, we're going to give you something you can think, learn, and do to start living this way right now.

1:02:15Don't even have to wait for the book, which ships in February. Thank you both. Thanks a lot, guys.

1:02:26Thank you to listening to another episode of the Art of Charm podcast. And now, here's where we showcase one of our X Factor members. Take it away, Zach. Hi, my name is Zach. I'm an educator who's always seeking opportunities to challenge myself and grow, which is why I decided to enroll in the Unstoppable course offered by Art of Charm. This course has had a profound impact on me, offering incredible content and personalized support from the entire AOC team. I've particularly enjoyed the comforts on challenges, which have expanded my limits. I even got the whole family dancing in random public places like no one is watching.

1:03:06Most importantly, that's strengthened our bond and been fun. What sets this quarter apart is its foundation in acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, always focused on action. I'm eager to take the next step in my development by joining the X Factor Accelerator. I'm hungry for more. If you're considering joining, I assure you the benefits are real. The AOC team is committed to their promises and offer genuine support throughout the journey. I'm confident that investing time, money, and energy in this course will be worth it for you, just like it has for me and my family. Best of luck. Thank you, Zach.

1:03:44It was a pleasure working with you two and good luck to all your future endeavors. If you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show. It means the world to us and it helps others find the show. Till next week, go out there and crush it.

1:04:24Your taste of black only yesterday. Yeah, but I remember you. Oh, yeah, I remember you.

1:04:41Lemo, emu. And Doug. Here we have the Lemo, emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.

From the publisher

AJ and Johnny sit down with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford professors and authors of Designing Your Life, to explore how to build a more meaningful, fully alive existence. They share why “follow your passion” is bad advice, how design thinking can help you reframe your sense of purpose, and what it really takes to live with coherence and wonder.

Bill and Dave unpack the myths around self-actualization, the power of community in shaping growth, and how curiosity plus mystery creates everyday wonder. From shifting your mindset from “got to” to “get to,” to discovering your “focus question,” this conversation reveals how to design a life that’s creative, connected, and consciously alive.

Chapters:00:00 – How lunch at Stanford started a global movement
05:00 – From “follow your passion” to “design your life”10:00 – Why chasing impact isn’t enough for meaning15:00 – Rethinking self-actualization and transcendence20:00 – The four keys to a meaningful life: wonder, coherence, flow, and community25:00 – How to find your focus question and design your compass30:00 – The power of formative communities and shared stories35:00 – Building resilience through small moments of wonder40:00 – Awakening the “flow world” and shifting from got to → get to45:00 – The mindsets for living fully alive

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Episode resources:

⁠DesigningYour.life

How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

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