Stanford Professors Bill Burnett & Dave Evans On How To Design A Meaningful Life

21:38Bill Burnett:There is no best you, but there are lots of good yous. Let's go try some. Yeah. And this bias to action, which gets into kind of your prototyping idea of getting out of our indecision and our kind of navel gazing or paralysis around like, well, I don't know if this is the right decision because there is this fully actualized version of me out there. And if I make this decision, is that moving me away from that or towards it? Oh, no. Yeah. Well, one is we do believe that there's more aliveness in you than one life can contain. And that's actually the good news. And then two, a couple of the mindsets in the book are, let's practice radical acceptance.

22:18Radical acceptance is, well, where am I right? Design starts in reality. I was at Apple. We were designing the modern notebook. I know the guys on the iPhone team. When you're doing something that's never been done before, you got to start with, what do we got right now? What are the parts we can put together? So radical acceptance and then availability. The other mind says, okay, if I'm here in the present moment, what's actually available? I mean, this hypothetical best self way out there, it's like, oh, I'm going to run a marathon, except you looked at my phone. I only did 6 ,000 steps today, right?

22:48So this is not going to happen. So you got to get in the moment. Where are you right now? And what's available to you to go forward? And if you could just put aside the I'm optimizing my best self or I'm hacking, you know, my whatever to get to some place. what could I actually do in the next moment, in the next few days, in the next few weeks that would be coherent with who I think I am, where I think I'm going? Because you've still got to have a direction, right? We talk about building a compass and having coherence in your life so that you may not know exactly what the next step is, but you know you're going in the right direction.

23:24So the chance of suddenly going this way when you wanted to go that way is lower if you know yourself a little bit. Radical acceptance, availability puts you, it's kind of the two-for mindsets, the power set. It's like, I know where I'm at. I'm being honest with myself about what's possible. And then I'm trying to figure out what's available. What can I make available? And when you start with that, you realize, well, there's so many more opportunities than I thought. Designers never do their first idea. You have lots of research, lots of ideas. It leads to better choices. So you want to be able to have lots of ideas.

24:01And then why don't people actually make the change? Well, because it's scary. I just read a neuroscience paper where they've actually proven that your brain is much more comfortable to work on a problem that you've got that maybe is quite painful than to actually make a change to solve the problem. That the stimulation of the amygdala is much higher to do something new than it is to just deal with the pain you've got. So our thing is like, all right, well, then you're going to take really small steps called prototypes. Try something. Have a conversation with somebody. See what it's like. Do a little experiment.

24:36Have an experience so you have a felt sense of what it might be to move in this direction. But if you practice radical acceptance and availability, all these opportunities start showing up. And so, you know, you do make some motions in the right direction. And then you get the felt sense of this is a good direction or maybe that wasn't quite right. But no matter what you prototype, you're always learning something. So it really is the designer's mindset rather than the planner's mindset or the engineer. The engineer would need to know what's the formula that predicts the outcome. I don't have a formula.

25:10A planner would need to know, well, what are the cause and effects for the next five steps? I don't know what the cause and effects are. But I know how to way find into this uncertain future and know that I'm in the right direction. And radical acceptance, availability, and prototyping is the sort of simple, I mean, the message in this book, it's simpler than you think. You don't need to spend 10 years developing a meditation practice. You don't need to go out and do 40-day fast in the wilderness. Yeah. Maybe I'll just fly a kite today or watch the sunset or something. You can do the ayahuasca thing in Mexico, whatever you want to do.

25:47But you could just start today by looking at what's available and seeing how you can see it a different way. and then slowly build up the confidence that you have a compass, you are going in the right direction.

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29:16Product design is such a tactile way to deconstruct this problem because I'm just, as you're sharing, I'm thinking about a group of people sitting around, you know, Steve Jobs comes in and he's like, I want to make a portable MP3 player. And then he leaves the room, you know, and then you guys got to like figure it out. You have all this gear in front of you. Well, if we do this, it's going to be this big. Is it really portable? Like you've got this giant problem. You have to solve, there is an infinite number of choices and trade-offs that you have to make, but that's the job. It is by definition grappling with uncertainty, but the human animal has a severe distaste for uncertainty, particularly when it comes to life choices, right?

29:58So finding a way to engage at a very kind of like low bar where the risk is so minimal as a way of like that prototyping idea as a way of dipping your toe into it, I guess is what I'm - To go back to your Steve Jobs story, and I wasn't in the room with Steve when they were doing the iPhone, but I know some people were. But in the Isaacson's biography, they said they brought prototypes to Steve three times. He said, no, that's not it. Do it again. Do it again. So he did come in the room and say, I want a smartphone. I don't even know what it is. Figure it out. And I know they built over 300 prototypes, both industrial design prototypes and works-like prototypes.

30:35because nobody, like if you put messaging within a browser and you add a phone to it, like what's that? I don't know, let's try it. So even they, creating the revolution as the smartphone was, had no idea what it was when they started, but they knew the process of finding it as they went. And so the future of you, the thing you're trying to design in the future, the happier, more meaningful version of you, prototype your way to it. It's the way we invent the future. Which is also all about essentialism, right? It's like, what is really serving this? And most of it is stripping away. I know in the context of the iPod, there were a lot of people who thought it should have all kinds of whiz-bang stuff.

31:19And it's like, no, we're just doing this one thing. What is the essence of this thing that we're trying to create? And then thinking about that in the context of our lives, I think we think of this as an additive problem and not enough as a reduction, like a removing – what's not serving me that I can strip away? It's not about going out and getting this other thing and bringing it in as much as it is like dispensing with the things that are leading us astray.

31:44Bill Burnett:It surfaces two really critical things. So what do we do? We're the design guys. Well, we help people get unstuck. We mostly deal with stuck people. People are stuck on meaning right now. And we'll probably give you some reframes to think about your problem differently. And the goal of the reframe is to be closer to radical acceptance and freer so you've got more choices. And then we'll give you ideas and tools for how to actually act once you've gotten more free. And so the reframe thing is a big deal because you've got to be working on the right problem. Problem finding precedes problem solving.

32:11Bill Burnett:You're working on the wrong version of the problem really, really, really well. You're still going to get nowhere. So the two things that surface in the conversation you and Bill are just having for me are back to that personhood thing. So people kind of go, is this it? Am I getting it right? Is this really my best self? And you mentioned how sticky that is. If it's actually true, there is no one best you. There are lots of wonderful yous and it could be pretty radically different. What if you went back and stuck with a lawyer thing and did that really well? That's really different than what you're doing now.

32:43Bill Burnett:But that could be a wonderful version of you. So once you accept there isn't a right, then that thing – because people have the experience, It's, well, this is pretty good, but I'm not sure it's really it. It's not enough. I don't know what feeling like I found it feels like, but this isn't it yet. So there's this elusive never-ending thing I should be doing, but I'm not. And you're going to go, no, you're fine. You are a becoming. You're going to become more. If I'm better tomorrow, I was worse yesterday. And I'm never going to be done. So it's all partial credit essay questions. There's no right, wrong, multiple choice thing.

33:20Bill Burnett:So thing one, you're becoming – so relax. Tomorrow's another day. And then the whole issue of, well, is the iPad this or that? And am I going to be the lawyer, the athlete, or the podcaster? Which I can't do them all really well at the same time. Brings us to – you talked about essentialism. We talk about the importance of understanding the scandal of particularity, which is a philosophical concept that we think is terribly important. We knew we had the right editor when she underlined that introductory paragraph on that topic and said, if we get this right, we've done our job. Great, she gets it.

33:54Bill Burnett:It's terribly important. The scandal of particularity simply is no ultimate is ever experienced in this life. Truth, beauty, justice, compassion, richness. Is this really the ultimate authentic rich? Have I got Bill right yet? No. You're a becoming that will never be realized. So even your own life is a particularity, a particular expression in a particular space and time with constraints and compromises. And you get to choose one of two reactions to that particularity, that constraint. Either, shoot, still not enough. Not quite. I'm a little disappointed. Or, awesome. That's an honest reflection of something I care deeply about and my longing says it's kind of like that.

34:41Bill Burnett:I see the amazing sunset and my soul goes, yeah, that's what beauty's like. Go there. And then when it goes down, you don't go, well, that's over. Thank God. You go, more. Do it again. You're never satisfied. That never satisfiedness about life, that never satisfiedness about meaning, that never satisfiedness about yourself isn't the bad news. It's the reminder that you're a human being and deeply implanted in you is the thing called longing. So befriend that. Don't have your longing go, oh, haven't got it yet. Oh, I'm still a human being. I still have the drive to move into my ongoing becoming project.

35:23Bill Burnett:It's going to stay interesting all the way to the end. So rather than flogging ourselves for having that longing or that sense of missing something, understand it to be this generative force in our perpetual becoming. Yeah. So the radical acceptance of particularity then joins availability, and now we celebrate it. So you celebrate, oh, I actually get a chance to taste some coffee. How's this coffee today? I'm going to celebrate the fact that I have access to something that reflects taste. How cool is that? So it's really a positioning that matters. Yeah. And that sunset in and of itself was enough.

36:09I mean, then there'll be another beautiful sunset. And maybe I could even put myself someplace like Big Sur where the sunsets will be amazing. but that sunset is enough. I've got a couple of young grandkids and watching them play reminds me what curiosity looks like and how intrinsically wonderful human curiosity is because everything to them is new and everything is something to play and oh grandpa look at this, look at this, what is it? It's an ant. Okay? But it's an ant grandpa. And so I'm reminded that we have the capacity for wonder. We have the capacity for awe and joy and all these things But they show up in moments, right?

36:48Moments of joy, moments of curiosity. And most often people find it in nature because that's a huge trigger for what we call flow or a bigger definition of flow. And it often shows up in interactions with people because that's where we find connection and community and joy. So go for those things. They're available. Talk more about curiosity, because it feels to me like curiosity is really something that we can control, that we have agency over, and it's this portal to all these other things like awe and wonder and connection, et cetera.

37:26Bill Burnett:Oh, it's absolutely the gateway drug to wonder. It totally is. It's an intrinsic human capacity. Oh, how interesting. I wonder what's here. And if you lean into it, it's going to draw you into all kinds of things. So we have a little equation, the wonder equation, that curiosity plus mystery, which is anything that's more than what you understand, even if it's understandable. I don't at the moment understand it. Equals wonder. I can be in wonder. And that's available all the time. So curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. And I'm actually going to go to a quote. I kept my phone because there's a thing I can't ever remember how to say.

38:04Bill Burnett:Henry Miller, the playwright, 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 and of itself. I have tried this experiment a thousand times and I have never been disappointed. Now, that's a guy with a wonder mindset. So now there's more to curiosity than wonder. I mean, this is all rooted in being present in your life. Like there's a kind of an Eastern aspect to this in the sense that the answers that you're looking for are in the right here and now. And if you're bored or like, you're just not paying attention enough because if you actually focused on anything, a blade of grass, pick your whatever, these things are, you know, infinitely fascinating, you know, but we're just, we're living our lives in this daydream where we're constantly captured by the past and the future.

39:04And even a discussion around designing a life of meaning is very forward casting, right? If impact is the primary form. Yeah. You know what I mean? So, and you're teaching Stanford students and these people are all like, you know, like here's what, you know, they're all forecasting, right? And they're trying to put all the pieces together. And we're all missing our lives in the moment. But the only way that we can experience awe and wonder or true connection with another person or even find a locus for our curiosity is when we're anchored in the moment that we're in, which is actually the only thing that's real anyway.

39:42Bill Burnett:I'm going to let Bill comment on that, but I could just say, by the way, you caught us with that comment because after we figured out what we thought the book might be if we were going to write this book, we looked at each other and said, it's just about the present moment. Ram Dass was right. You know, be here now. Yeah. Like everybody knows that. Why waste their time? Why waste the paper? And so we came to the conclusion, we talked for quite a long time, almost two years. Do we deserve to write this book? Doesn't everybody know? In a sense, it's not the only thing we're talking about, but it's most of what we're talking about.

40:14And the conclusion was, well, either we're wasting the paper because it's obvious or

40:18Bill Burnett:it's a fresh take with a really implementable, accessible, doable set of tools and approaches to get people back into this thing that we've lost track of. So you figured it's really about the present moment, is it, guys? Yep. Pretty much what the whole book is about. Pretty much. And it's not that hard. You don't need to fast for 40 days. But back to curiosity, the psychologists talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Extrinsic motivations is if I work hard, I get paid more money. The money's the extrinsic thing. And we were talking - Or save the world or I cure cancer. Right, right. Or all the fun to do.

40:52Or my parents will tell me they love me. Yeah, my parents will tell me they love me, yeah. And maybe mean it this time. Yeah, intrinsic motivations, curiosity, autonomy, mastery, wanting to get good at things just because humans like to get good at things. So there's a bunch of intrinsic motivations. And we were talking to Bob Weldinger. I know you had Bob on for a while. And Bob told us that there's some neuroscience around if you only stimulate external motivation and you don't live into or stimulate any internal motivations, you actually lose those circuits. and you lose your ability to be creative, you lose your desire for mastery to get better.

41:33And so one of the big messages in the book is, hey, we got to work with both sides of our brain here and we got to work with our intrinsic motivations a lot to keep those alive. Curiosity being the gateway and curiosity plus wonder, the things that you can't understand, but they're amazing. Curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. so we have an exercise just sort of silly put on your wonder glasses and actually have a pair of goofy glasses but like go out in the world and instead of just seeing what's there or even just being curious about oh I wonder how that grass grows take the Henry Miller approach of like if I really get into it a world of of wonder, mystery excitement will unfold and my curiosity will be stimulated and And that will lead to more wonder, more curiosity.

42:24It's kind of a flywheel. But we talk about your brain works in two worlds, the transaction world and the flow world. Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia calls it the awakened brain and the achieving brain. But transactions, we do it every day. We get stuff done. And flow, which used to be just thought of as peak experience, is actually available all the time. I think of it like an aquifer under the surface. And you can drill down and get into flow in almost any circumstance. And that's where meaning is. Meaning is not in transactions. Getting transactions done is nice. It feels good for a while. Even impact feels good for a little while.

43:03But then, what have you done for me lately? What's your impact lately? Hey, great numbers on the last five podcasts. What have you done for me lately? So impact is transactional. And meaning is not transactional. It's down in the world of flow, in the world of intrinsic motivations. It's in the world of emotions, really. And we're undereducated there. Sure. I mean, we live in a highly transactional world. All of the incentives of modern life are driving us towards a more and more transaction-based experience. And when those transactional relationships or career paths, et cetera, don't deliver on fulfillment and satisfaction and all of that, then we're in this sort of arrival fallacy crisis.

43:50And then we descend into what Arthur Brooks calls like the striver's dilemma, convinced that it's always at the top of the next peak or around the bend. And we live our lives kind of on this hamster wheel of dissatisfaction. And meaning is available to us all along, if we would just avert our gaze and kind of look over here. But to your point about flow, it is this thing that we think about, like, oh, this is something that you can harness for these peak performances, whether you're an athlete or you're some kind of creative person, but you distinguish that from what you call simple flow, which is what you were getting at, right?

44:31So talk a little bit about that and how people can access that and what the connection between that is and the meaning that we're lacking.

44:41Bill Burnett:Well, the point you're making about the transactional world, so we posited in the book, we observed in people's complaint, I'm trying to make a difference. And so in the transactional world, the primary form of meaning making that's offered is, and did you make an impact? Did you change the world? Did you hit the mark? Did you hit the quarterly number? Did you you know, did you do the thing? And most of the time you can't control outcomes, even if you do it right. So oftentimes having an impact fails, even when it does succeed, it's a thing and it has a short half-life. So people can be saying, how do I have my more meaningful life?

45:15Bill Burnett:And they're just looking through the one window, one of the transactional space. That's why they're stuck. So that's why we said, well, you know, while there's really only one actual cosmos and world, your consciousness can only handle so much at a time. And we're leaning into this consciousness, this achieving brand that does transactions. So we talk about these other forms of meaning. Impact is fine, but it's just one form. Don't put all your eggs in that basket, which go into these relationship things, these flow things, these wonder things. And so in flow, we said, well, flow is, the original book is flow, the psychology of optimal experience.

45:52Great.

45:52Bill Burnett:So when I'm in an apex of experience, I'm deeply engaged in a task, what's it like? I'm so in the thing. I'm totally in the zone. What we refer to as apex flow. But all it really means is I'm so engaged that I'm fully experiencing the moment that I'm in. Fully alive. So the traditional definition of flow is I need a task, the requirements of which right on the edge of my capability. So what I've really done is I've outsourced to the complexity of my task, the ability for me to fully experience something because I'm going to go do something that's so demanding, it will take all of my attention.

46:27Bill Burnett:And now suddenly I'm fully engaged. And so I'm so in the moment, I'm not worried about other things. I'm Alex Handel making the climb. I'm doing this thing. And we're saying, wait, you can choose your way into flow. So simple flow is, oh, I'm just going to chop onions. That's so boring. I better be doing my steps to get in my 10 ,000 while chopping, kind of chop while doing steps and having a podcast on at the same time, great. As opposed to, no, just choose to totally be chopping onions, enjoy the feel of it, enjoy the texture of the knife going through the food, notice the smells, your body can smell things, be fully present at the moment.

47:06Bill Burnett:That's a choice. And we said the flow world is the place where flow experiences come from. So we just came up with an idea. Hey, there's two worlds, not just one. There's the transactional world and the flow world. You're mostly missing the flow world. That's where flow is had. It's in the present moment. Let's go over there some more. So the biggest idea we have about flow is it's there all the time. You could have it in lots of forms. In Lisa Miller's world of the awakened mind. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I'm concerned about these ideas coming across as very highbrow. And I want to drill down into some real world examples, because I'm imagining the person who's listening to this or watching it and going, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great.

47:48You know, the awakened brain and like chopping, he's like, you don't understand my life. Like, I'm just trying to make it through the day. I'm deeply unhappy, but I'm stuck. There's no possible way that I can leave this job. I've got, you know, two kids at home and a mortgage and, you know, car payment, et cetera. I think this is the situation with like just so many people, if not most people, they are living a life that lacks meaning and fulfillment and a sense of satisfaction. but there doesn't really seem to be an off-ramp or an accessible means to reframe how they're living to engender these experiences that you guys are talking about.

48:28And they are legit. They're maxed out. They're maxed out all their time. You're like, get out of here with all this. Like, I just, you know, like - They need something else to do with a hole in the head. And then when I get home, I just want 30 minutes of Netflix to turn my brain off before I go to bed. And like, that's the only way that I can't handle anything more than that. But these are the people that need the most help. Right.

48:51Bill Burnett:Look, there are 21 or depending how you count, 23 exercises and possible worksheets in the book. So we give you stuff to do. The whole idea is this should be implementable right away. One of the exercises is flip the switch. Flip the switch from the transactional world to the flow world. All that means is drop into the present moment even for two or three seconds. We give an example of sitting in a staff meeting. I'm sitting here at the podcast table with Rich Roll. So what am I thinking? Am I thinking about how's this going? Am I talking as much as Bill? And will they like this? So all transactions as opposed to like, okay, stop.

49:29Bill Burnett:What's going on? Here's this lovely guy, Rich Roll, and he's wanting to talk to us. And these are new studios. You've only been in here a year. like I'm thinking, and what conversations are coming here? What is going to get said across this table? How is that going to impact some people's lives? Okay. I can think about that in about a, it takes about 20 seconds to say that. It takes half a second to think that. I can do that. I can just flip the switch. What's going on right now? Two, three, notice, flip back. What did you say? Flip back to the conversation. If you start doing that, you give the rest of your psyche, the rest of your soul, if you will, a chance.

50:09Bill Burnett:So maybe you don't want to do Netflix instead, but if you're watching Netflix, are you zoning out or are you actually really enjoying it? Like her voice is beautiful. That costume is terrific. Can you be present to the reality that you're in? There is more aliveness in every life waiting to be had. And that's why we really, it's not about cramming. It's not about learning five more ways to hack your meaning. It's about getting more out of what you've got right in front of you and maybe spending a little time on where's your attention right now. You know, and I have fallen into this. I'll sit there, you know, just before I go to sleep and scroll through 100 reels or 100 short videos on YouTube.

50:53And then my wife— This is part of your becoming. Yeah, it's part of my becoming. Am I hopeful to say, what are you watching? And I go, I don't know. like what was the last video i don't know right so catch yourself sometimes being sometimes letting someone else steal your attention just catch yourself and see if you can come back to the moment and yeah and have a flip the switch or you know at the end you know the simplest the simplest exercise from positive psychology is the gratefulness exercise at the end of the day write down three things you're grateful for Why don't one thing you're grateful for?

51:27Because what you're trying to do is develop some processes which rewire the brain towards paying attention to right brain stuff instead of just left brain stuff. Transactional, you know, flow stuff instead of just transactional stuff. You know, the old right brain, left brain model. Lisa updated it with achieving and awakened. It's the same thing. You want to be in all of your brain most of the time. and we're so over-indexed in the transaction stuff. You know, I teach design at Stanford. Young engineers, I teach them how to design. They're used to having an answer in the back of the book. There's no answer in the back of the book in design.

52:05And I joke with them. You got in because you got 800s on your math and English. You didn't get 800s on your creativity exam, right? So you're under-practiced in creativity, in curiosity. But you can learn it. We know the brain's plastic. You can learn this stuff quickly. And what you find when you flip the switch or you do what we call the sudden savoring exercise or you do any of the exercises are like five minutes that you have an experience in your brain where you say, oh, that was pleasant. That wasn't hard to do.

52:42Bill Burnett:And there's a time psyche thing you've got to watch out for. So if I change five minutes of your week, it could have a 25 % impact on your psychic ROI. He mentioned savoring. So he said, so I'm going to double down on this. You do the gratefulness exercise. Maybe you do it once a week. That's fine. And then we'll say, okay, we have a thing called the seventh day savoring. Again, five minutes, once a week, just before dinner on Sunday or whatever it might be, your Sabbath practice. You take one of those things you were grateful for this week and you return to it. And you just go, oh, that was really great.

53:18Bill Burnett:You know, when Rich came into the office, you know, we were talking to the crew and Rich came in and he was really welcoming. And we were standing in the hallway having this really lovely chat. You know, that was great. I was grateful for the way Rich received us. Then I kind of go, okay, that's just recognizing. Then re-enter it and savor it. Like, you know, play the GoPro camera screen of that moment again. And then freeze frame it. And then here's Rich Roll, this really successful podcaster, this guy that's really developed a life seriously. And he wants to spend time with us. And can I savor that and receive the fullness of it?

53:54Bill Burnett:Because life in real time, you can't begin to get the fullness of life out of life in real time. So go back and do it again. Frankly, if you do the seventh day savoring once a week for a while, five minutes a week, three minutes a week, you start liking that. You could learn how to do sudden savoring. Can I save her in real time? That's a pretty cool skill. These are all highly accessible ways to live differently.

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55:46So a little over nine months ago, I underwent spinal fusion surgery. And since then, my focus has shifted away from chasing these really big, audacious performance goals like I did in the past to now accepting my limitations in this current reality and learning how to build a daily rhythm that actually feels sustainable for where I'm at right now, today. and whoop this wearable health and fitness coach that you see right here on my wrist every time you see me is this amazing tool that gives me insights into all the things that influence how I feel and how I perform my sleep my recovery my strain and my overall health so that I can better understand how my habits are influencing how I feel and what's interesting is how these insights translate beyond training.

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57:16I can't help but think about how everything you're sharing overlaps with 12-step recovery programs. Have you guys thought about that? Like in addition to this being all about the present, so much of what you're talking about really overlaps in the Venn diagram of like the 12 steps. It's like you do your inventory, which is kind of a form of coherence, right? Like are your actions lining up with your values? Are you doing what you said you're gonna do? That kind of thing. A formal gratitude practice. An essential aspect of being part of this community is being service oriented, like making it about something more than yourself.

58:02How are you transcending your ego through your daily actions? Sure. And really being rigorous in your kind of self-honesty and inventory of your behavior and your decisions. Yeah. So, I mean, oh, aren't you guys 12-step?

58:17Bill Burnett:Bob Baldinger is pretty sure, aren't you guys Zen Buddhists? You guys are Zen Buddhists, right? Yeah. So all of these traditions are intersecting. It's like this is ancient wisdom. No, the wisdom traditions share a lot of common. We spend too much time about what we disagree about. If you look at, by the way, a buddy of mine, Scotty McLennan, the former chaplain of Stanford, says, He says, if you look at all the spiritual, you've got the Christian spiritual man and the Judaic and the Sikhs, you know, and the Buddhists and the freelance spiritualists, you know. And he said, the people at the bottom love to argue about everything.

58:44Bill Burnett:He says, all the guys at the top, the mystics who are sitting up there kind of who really get it, they all get along fine. All the mystics understand each other, you know. And so does our stuff sound familiar to these other wisdom traditions? Uh-huh. Because the truth stuff's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't know that much about the 12-step process, but it's, again, what we're trying to come up with are really simple things you can design. How do you become a moment designer, right? If we say, hey, most of the experience of - The atomic habits of design. Yeah, most of the experience of meaning will be in a moment.

59:23How do I design moments that are meaningful? How do I recognize the ones that just showed up for me? And how do I actually design some so that they work out fine? So, you know, this example I think in the book was you can't experience total beauty, but you can make a cake for your grandson's birthday and you can see his face light up when he blows out the candle. And then he puts his hand right in it and grabs a piece of, you know, of icing and it's like, well, that was cool. I can set that up and just let it happen. The one difference though is that if you're making, baking a cake or you're building an iPod or you're designing some product or widget, there's a limited number of variables.

1:00:04And the key variable that's lacking in that is the variable of human emotion, like fear and insecurity and like a bespoke set of life circumstances that have created neural pathways and reactive patterns. I mean, essentially, so much of this boils down to the human animal getting in its own way and, you know, just unable to act in its own best interest despite, you know, reading the books and knowing all the information, just not being able to, like, translate that into new behavioral patterns. But it's also optimistic that those behavioral patterns, curiosity, mastery and things, are built in to that same human who's got, like I say, a bespoke set of neural pathways, maybe took them down to something that doesn't make any sense anymore.

1:00:55But I'm totally optimistic that if you just start trying a few things, you can start to unlock some of that stuff, reframe. It's not about impact. Impact is in the transaction world. I need to find meaning somewhere else. The impact's fine. I still want to do a good job at work, but if I'm looking there, I'm looking in the wrong place. So some reframes to give you a slightly different, you know, like every stage you want out of the box thinking, well, move the box. You know, I'm looking over here. This isn't working. Move the box over here. There's more possibilities here. And so I'm optimistic that even in a pretty grooved set of dysfunctional beliefs, dysfunctional patterns, there's still a curious person in there, still an optimistic person in there.

1:01:42Fear kills curiosity, right? I'm not going to be curious about new stuff because I'm terrified of changing anything. But, you know, small steps, what Albert Bandura called guided mastery, what David Kelly called creative confidence in his book. It's like small steps of learning to be, take a few risks, be a little more creative, have your curiosity, ask some of your questions, try a few things. Those small steps will overcome a phobia, will overcome the fear. And it's not a lifelong practice. It's six weeks.

1:02:17Bill Burnett:You mentioned we kind of sound like some other things. Well, you know, in the 75 ring circus called The Human Experience, the meeting tent is a pretty big tent. And there's a whole bunch of – there's a dog act. There's some clowns in there. There's some dancing animals. There's a whole lot of stuff going on in the meeting room. And we just walked in there. But, again, we're design guys. I mean, Bill's a Nietzsche-loving atheist. You know, I'm a Jesus-loving theist. I mean, we've got pretty different worldviews here. I'll say again, if you get the human part right, you can't go wrong. That's our baseline.

1:02:51Bill Burnett:and all we're trying to do is offer tools that work for human beings. So we're not trying to be a new religion. We're not trying to be a new psychology. We're guys with freeing reframed ideas to make your situation more manageable and tools to get you unstuck and moving. So this is entirely compatible with any world. There is no worldview that this is incompatible with. We say at the end of the book, we call the set of mindsets the designer's way. which is a little presumptuous. And then we say, your homework now is to figure out your way. And of course, you're never going to – there's no getting it done, and there's no getting it right.

1:03:29You know, I made a mistake again today.

1:03:32Bill Burnett:I'm so hopeless. Of course you are. But if you're becoming, you're going to get bigger, and you look back and you were worse. So if you really can accept your humanity, then it starts getting – and you start living generatively into it, not to get it done because there's no getting it done. Thank God there's no getting it done. Literally on her deathbed. So my dear wife, Claudia, died of cancer five years ago. And I like being in love so much, I'm going to get married again. But nonetheless, she really liked her brain. And she watched her mother lose her brain before she does. She said, I'm not going there.

1:04:09Bill Burnett:So because California is an end of life state, we had the drugs for her to end her life before she lost her brain, if her brain started to really go. and on the Tuesday before the Friday she died I said, are we going there? She said, no, I've decided. I want to stick it out. There might be one more lesson and I don't want to miss it. And the last thing she said, she sat up in bed and she opened her eyes and she stared at me. She goes, oh, it's so interesting. Closed her eyes and fell back, last thing she said. So if you play the game well, it's interesting all the way to the end. Don't try to solve it.

1:04:45Bill Burnett:just live it. Embracing the mystery as opposed to trying to solve it. Celebrating it. This is as good as it gets. Making a little progress on a huge question is fabulous. I am, in fact, an existential atheist and every morning I get up and I say, I live in the best of all possible worlds because this is it. This is the best of all possible worlds. I get an afterlife, but he's stuck. This is all I guess. And everything I do today I choose to do, which is about choices makes you human. But we were in a restaurant a long time ago and Dave and I were talking about atheism and Jesus. And he said, okay, I got it.

1:05:27We both believe in mystery. We believe in the thing that cannot be demystified. There is a mystery in the world. You round down to cognitive science and physics and I round up to God. But it's true. I mean, the reason we're entirely compatible is, I mean, I'm also an artist and when I'm standing in front of a canvas or I'm painting or I've got an idea and I'm designing, there's a moment where I'm not in this world. You know, Rick Rubin, the record producer, wrote the book, The Creative Act. He talks about, you know, we just channel this stuff from, you He would call flow creativity. And we're just channeling this stuff.

1:06:07But I have these experiences of absolutely, like the painting is happening in front of me and I'm just moving my hand. Yeah. And so there is mystery. You can call it flow, but that is self-transcendence. It is self-transcendence. You have become an antenna or a vehicle for something higher. Just something to go on yourself, yeah. And it seems to be something that humans evolved to have the capability to do. You know, from prophets to seers to shamans to whatever, there's always been people in a culture who saw something that everybody else didn't see. And those experiences are available to all of us at any time if we can be present and get out of our own way.

1:06:51Bill Burnett:Those experiences, I want to make sure the listener doesn't think by those, that pronoun is referring to these apex, either psychedelic or mystical mountaintop experiences, or when Bill totally drops into flow in front of a canvas. And I call Bill the flow master because he's really worked on being good at dropping into flow for years now. While those experiences are great, what I hope we mean by, and those experiences are available to all of us, that experience of having a deeper engagement and participation in the present moment and feeling my aliveness and my humanity more than when I'm just worried about the outcome, that is available to everybody all the time.

1:07:30Bill Burnett:It's a process. There's tension in every moment between that type of experience and pivoting back to our default of thinking about how everything's going and our neuroses and insecurities. Somebody's got to take the trash out. I had to take the trash out. Just in the example of the podcast that you were talking about earlier, it's like, I know that the best version of this conversation depends upon the extent to which I can be present for it. Because if I'm totally dialed into you guys, I don't need this stuff here. Like I'll always, you know, I'll let my curiosity find the next line of inquiry and it will be great.

1:08:09But I'm too insecure for that. So I have to surround myself with all of this stuff, you know, and I'm thinking, what's the next question? Or I'm going to have a brain fart, you know. Yeah. And convincing myself that that is what this experience demands when it actually isn't. I wanted to go back to this idea of reframes. You mentioned Joseph Campbell earlier. One of the things that serves us and also trips us up and gets in our way is our story. I spend a lot of time thinking about story. Like we all walk around with this story, you know, who we are, what we're capable of, what's going to work, you know, and, and, you know, like everything, it works for us and it doesn't work for us, but we're very locked in on this.

1:08:54And the idea of challenging that story, let alone deconstructing it, like these stories are all fantasies. Like even the best story, I mean, it's all nonsense. None of these stories are true, yet we're so indelibly attached to them. And it seems to me, and I'm curious what you guys think, that so much of what you're talking about is available when we can kind of release our clutch a little bit and start thinking about not even necessarily forming a new story, but just holding our story more loosely and being more curious about it and developing the willingness to challenge it. Yeah, I mean, you know, we are the story we tell ourselves.

1:09:39One of the first exercises in the Design Life class is I say, hey, tell me the story you grew up with. You know, tell me what your parents, you know, what did you learn from your parents? And, you know, you get the common story of, you know, work hard, get good grades, go to good school, get a good job. And I go, how's that working for you? And it'll be, well, not really. so we are the story we tell ourselves um but we can like you say hold that more lightly and and and maybe lean into the opportunity to change that story because if we are the story we tell ourselves let's change the story to be the one i want to i want to live maybe i don't want to accept my parents notion of success anymore that's not that's not going to work for me or maybe i'm in the mid-career and it didn't turn out to be what i thought and i can beat myself up for that or i can say and now i'm perfectly positioned to figure out what i want to do next um so we're narrative animals storytelling is part of the dna of humans i think all i would say is like keep you know keep asking yourself what part of this story is working for me and what part of the story do i do i want to revise or get rid of or edit out because it just doesn't work anymore and and the the the striving mindset the sort of i got to be the best at everything um i remember one of the very first workshops we did a long time ago it was a big workshop with a bunch of Stanford alums.

1:10:54It was a woman who raised her hand. She was having problems. She said, what's the deal? She said, well, I'm a really senior lawyer in a big law firm in New York, but I hate it. I go, well, what happened? She goes, well, you know, I went to Stanford because it was the hardest school. And then my parents were both lawyers. So they said, be a lawyer. So I said, okay. I got into Yale because that was the school my parents went to. And then I went to New York. I got in the biggest law firm I could. I was the youngest woman partner, first senior partner. I run the management thing and I hate my life.

1:11:20Yeah. I got a house in Manhattan. I got a place out on the island. I got two Tesla's kids in private school. Because it's a terrible life. It really is. Because she didn't choose any of it. She had little reward, systems of reward and punishment. At no point did she feel like she had permission to actually ask herself, what do I want and what's meaningful to me? We're on these escalators. It's hard. Deeply embedded. And I said, look, this is just a quick workshop. I'm not meaning to, you know, you don't need to have an existential crisis here in the 90-minute rubber chicken talk. But look at it this way.

1:12:00It's a sunk cost, right? And you've got lots of resources. You know, you're making$6 million, you know, base$20 million bonuses. Great. Bank that for two years and, you know, and then start moving towards the thing that's more authentic for you. But give yourself permission to, one, not beat yourself up for choices you made that felt okay at the time. And two, look at what you've got available to you to go forward. And you're going to say, all we really do in office hours is give permission.

1:12:32Bill Burnett:Yeah. Together, we've probably had a couple thousand office hour conversations, and mostly it's giving permission. You know, not to go off and join the circus, but we're reminding people they do have the right to exercise the agency over their own lives that they want. And, you know, I'm a big fan of story. I mean, the fifth mindset is create your world, which is acknowledging that life is a story we tell ourselves. Yeah, it is. So pick that story really carefully. What's the one you're in now? And that's not in, you know, dried in ink. It's evolving over time. Hold it lightly. If I'm becoming, of course I'm holding it lightly.

1:13:08Bill Burnett:You know, we say, I don't know your one true purpose, but we could give you some tips on how to live purposefully on the way toward the thing that's ever changing. And so, like in my own story, you know, my father died when I was nine. We learned later of suicide. That's a gift that keeps on giving. I've worked that through with lots of counselors. You know, I've retroactively figured out my coping systems and what my reactions are and what the good things and the bad things that came out of that were, you know, and how that affects my marriage life, you know. So, and I really know my story well.

1:13:39Bill Burnett:I mean, I've worked this thing really, really, really hard. I'm turning 73 in a couple of weeks. That happened 64 years ago. I've got this thing covered. So now my wife dies and now I'm in a relationship. My wife Claudia dies. And now I'm in a relationship with Frisch, who is a different animal entirely, but who I love dearly and is evoking completely different things out of me. and I am learning so much about that coping system that I thought I fully understood that goes back to my origin story by virtue of simply being in the presence of a different soul with a different kind of reflectivity.

1:14:13Bill Burnett:I'm over and over again, I say, oh, that's what Claudia was talking about. The woman who died, like she kept telling me this stuff like, no, no, no, that's not it. And like, oh, that's what she meant. So I'm rewriting my story. You never know your story. You're just working on it. But it does help. Having a story gives you some guidance, gives you a, where do I go from here? You're not done like, oh, I got it. I got it. But like, I'm getting it. So there's your story. There's the story of the senior partner at the White Shoe Law Firm in Manhattan. There's the story of the struggling to make it through the day person.

1:14:52Sure. Sure. What about the senior in high school who's looking at the prospect of applying to college and thinking, well, what's the point in that? There is a veneer of nihilism, I think, in Gen Z. Oh, yeah. They look out onto the world and they're like, what's the point of any of this? As a parent of an 18-year-old, I see this and I'm around young people a lot. What do you make of that? And how do you communicate your message to that person or that generation that's struggling in that particular way?

1:15:30Bill Burnett:Well, I would say, first of all, their skepticism, which translates into disengagement, is well-founded. Because what they're really seeing is, oh, all those games you guys told me the world was built around are falling apart. In fact, they're not even accessible to me in the same way. So, heck with you guys. Right. Like they're thinking, oh, like one of those jobs that you older people are complaining about, that looks pretty good. Like I'd like to have a house, but I don't see any path to that. And the world's going to fall apart by the time that's - And I don't want one of these crappy jobs that you keep complaining about.

1:16:0870 % of Americans are disengaged at work. So, that's what I'm looking forward to. I'm going gonna work hard, go to college, get a job, and then be disengaged for the rest of my life? You guys are all idiots. Thanks, thanks, thanks. Just for two reasons.

1:16:20Bill Burnett:When you guys won the games you told me to play, you didn't look all that happy. And by the way, we can't play them anymore. So other than that, it's a great idea. Good job. You're doing empathy. Step one of design really well. But now let's redefine the problem. Don't just say, oh, I'm screwed. I don't want to play. I can't play. You're accepting that the way we all describe the world to you is accurate. So if we do radical acceptance, okay, AI is coming. Yep. We're going to have to adapt to that. You have to live in a post-AI world for sure. There may be a different economic reality. Even my kids at age, and my kids are all late 30s, 40s, are not buying houses because it doesn't make sense.

1:17:00Bill Burnett:And so we're going to live a different kind of a way. So then inside the particularity called the moment in history in which I found myself, if I radically accept those things, but I believe I'm a human becoming and I can live more fully into my aliveness within this framework, where can I do that? How do I do that? What would be interesting to me? Let's find ways to thrive in this context and get over the fact that the way they all said it was isn't the way it is anymore. It's just not true. So what is true? And let's go be human beings in the world in which you're going to live. Yeah. In some sort of upside down way, it's almost an accelerated way of giving that person even greater permission.

1:17:46Well, if it's all like this, you might as well go directly into the thing that you're, you know, where your curiosity is.

1:17:54Bill Burnett:Bill's been saying we've seen this down to this shift in the student profile in the last 10 years, but you've been saying just in the last one or two, it's turning around. Yeah, very much so. I will radically predict that in five years, the number one major at Stanford is poetry because why take an econ class? Why take an econ class or a CS class if you can't get a job? The number one major? Poetry and creative writing. For the few people still getting a liberal education. But, but I would, you know, the sort of disaffected 18, you know, particularly the male 18, this affected 18 year old, it'd be like, okay, yeah, radically accepted.

1:18:32Things are changing. I think this is why the creator economy is booming. And it's so interesting to them. It's like, well, well, if the goal was to like, you know, make a bunch of money or, or at least get enough money. So I'm secure, but these other paths don't look so good. Maybe I'll just do my own thing. Right. And that's going to be an explosion of, of creativity and engagement and other things. Not everybody will be successful, But that impetus to say, hey, wait a minute, you're right. I got to redefine the world maybe on my own terms or maybe with a community of people who I really want to hang out with.

1:19:05One of my students, one of my top students, you know, left school, went to work for some big design firms for a while and then went, no, I don't think so. Bought some land and, you know, up in San Juan Islands and is running an organic farm. And he's having all the product designers want internships there because who wouldn't want to work the summer on a farm? and he's using design techniques to create a completely different sort of farm economy. But now there's so many. One of the classes I want to do is designing your creative life at Stanford because there's so many more options for how do you find your way in this new world where things are changing.

1:19:39There's going to be chaos, there's going to be dislocation, and there's going to be opportunity. And I think I'm seeing sort of the students who are still engaged or trying, ready to engage. I'm seeing a renaissance in sort of creativity, entrepreneurship, engagement, and particularly in the arts. You know, by the way, in the research that we always quote from Bill Damon on passion, only 80%, only 20 % of people have an identifiable passion, 80 % don't. In that 20%, it's all highly skewed towards creatives. I've always wanted to be a writer, a poet, a singer, a dancer, or something. And what do we tell those kids?

1:20:22Oh, you can't get a job doing that. So what I'm going to tell those kids is that's probably the only job you can get. Because the McKenzie thing will disappear. The banker thing will disappear. All these other things will disappear. And so there's another element to this. The kid who won't get out of the room just plays video games all day. I do a bunch of work in China and they have what they call the lying flat movement. The kids graduate from college and instead of the picture where they're all throwing up their hats. They're literally lying on the ground, lying on the stairs, and in the most nihilistic way, just saying there's nothing in this society for us.

1:21:03Now, China is probably true. There's a lot of stuff in society for these kids. And whether they go to college or not, it's kind of an open question. Whether colleges will even survive, most of them, the AI wave, I don't know. But no, I would say now more than ever. I mean, the friction between my idea and the market is almost zero. You know, a long time ago when I graduated, you had to learn drafting and there's a lot of hard to make something. I can talk to my phone and 3D print something in 20 minutes. If you've got an idea, it's never been easier to put that idea inside your story and become the person who does that thing.

1:21:47And whether that thing is college or college and something else. I just found out, I was talking to one of the physical professors who's running a class for creatives. We have the number one Vietnamese influencer at Stanford. I haven't met him. He's like a sophomore. And I don't know what a Vietnamese influencer is, but he's really big in Vietnam. He's from Vietnam. And he's pulling in a million dollars a month, whatever he's doing. That's wild. And he's a college student, right? And he's still choosing to go to college. And he's still choosing to go to college. I mean, I think the other thing is we have an exercise where we talk about what's college for.

1:22:21And college is, in addition to career readiness, college is really for the life of the mind, like learning how learning works and reading widely the great books from all traditions and understanding that we're not just here as a civilization that was born yesterday. I mean, this goes back, you know, read Socrates, read Plato, and read Chongzi and, you know, Amatso. But I think the life of the mind, the kind of perfecting myself, those years between 18, 20-something, or 19 and 20-something, those are important years of becoming the person you will be, you know, dealing with for the rest of your life.

1:23:04And as we hurdle, you know, off this AI cliff, the only thing that we have is our consciousness and our unique expression of humanity. And I think that becomes a premium. I mean, even in the best case situation where AI comes in and optimizes everything and takes away all these jobs, but don't worry about it because there's going to be universal basic income and there's just going to be massive of prosperity. I mean, this will auger in the greatest crisis of meaning in the history of the species. Like, okay, well, what are we supposed to do now? What are we supposed to do now?

1:23:46Bill Burnett:We've been thoroughly distracted and we won't be anymore. You know, this rose-colored view on like how great it's gonna be. Like, I just don't see any set of circumstances in which that is going to be how this is gonna unfold. But at the center of all of this is meaning. Like how are we going to find meaning amidst the birth of this new life form that we are apparently the sex organs of? Yeah, no, I think in terms of where does the post-AI future land and how does it land? This would be like saying a gymnast going off the high bar, making a move for the very first time and sticking the landing in an Olympic perfection on day one.

1:24:27Bill Burnett:This is my third or fourth massive technological revolution in the past 50 years. It is orders of magnitude bigger. I've finally been convinced that AI isn't just one more cool thing. It's a massive different thing. That being said, every transition is a mess. You know, and while transitions and disruptions create new opportunities for new people, frankly, usually the people hurt by the disruption are not the ones who get the benefits of the upside on the other side. So there will be losses. There will be sacrifices. There will be suffering. How long it will take, whether or not we'll get stuck in a bad corner and we'll end up with a massively AI-enabled oligarchy, I don't know.

1:25:06Bill Burnett:But regardless of how well or how poorly we get through this, you're going to need to know who you are. you're going to need access to tools that will remind you you are worth it. And you're going to need some people around you that you can do that with. And don't count on Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to provide you with your basic income because they're going to take all the money and build a bigger yacht. It's looking pretty clear. Yeah, it's pretty clear. They're not going to be the guys. That's the route that we're on. But you guys are still optimistic guys right there at Stanford in the heart of Silicon Valley around all of these, the next generation of the people who are going to kind of innovate on this.

1:25:48You remain like optimistic about the human species surviving this? Sure. Okay. I've been teaching since the 80s, since you were in school. And there have been waves of times when the students were just interested in, like, how do I get a job? And there have been waves of times when they were a little more socially interested. You know, we had the protests a couple, last year we had the protests around the Palestinian Gaza thing. And so I see a lot more student activism lately that just kind of had disappeared in the 90s and early 2000s. And I see a lot more, you know, students will say, I want to start a startup, but I want to do something meaningful that has impact.

1:26:23I don't want to just start another food delivery company or a version of a social media thing. So they're pretty aware, and they have all these new tools where they can build almost anything instantly. And they're pretty aware of the negative impact that technologies like smartphones and other things have had on their generation. So I think they're smart, they're aware, they've got great tools, and they really want to do something that has value to it, which ultimately will rest on their values, their meaning-making ideas. And so, yeah, it'll be a bumpy ride, but I don't know where it's going to go.

1:27:05I doubt that we're going to all be living in some blissful future where we don't have to work and we just, you know, hang around the park all day. Yeah, I don't see that. I don't think that happening. I don't see that working out. But the other thing is it'll put more – But maybe that will force us to be more intentional about our formative communities, right? It'll put more stress on building communities we care about. You know, I've been looking at different kinds of communities, and one of the communities I don't understand but I see it all around my student is the gaming community. People get together, put their headsets on, and they've got their thing, and they've got their team, and they've got their game.

1:27:37That's a community where people love to play together. And not even just to win, but just to play together. Sports isn't a – I'm terrible at predicting anything, but if you wanted to predict what to invest in, invest in women's basketball teams, professional teams. Invest in the second league for the baseball teams, whatever, the farm teams. invest in things where people have to go to the stadium to be part of the community that watches the activity. Yeah, anything where people are gathering, restaurants, or in this increasingly secularized world that we live in where we've lost all these third spaces and after-school programs, et cetera, and we're in this kind of desert of disconnection, there has to be a counter response to that at some point.

1:28:25We're hardwired to be together. And it doesn't matter how amazing this technology is, that is always going to be the case. And so these are things that the AI can't engineer out people getting together to sit down and have a conversation over a meal. Well, again, you have to decide what you think it means to be a person.

1:28:48Bill Burnett:You know, Viktor Frankl, after coming out of the Holocaust, you know, develops a new school of meaning-making in psychology and concludes there are three ways you can experience a meaningful life, through love, through achievement, or through suffering. Now, before him, Freud said, Leben und Arbeiten, love and work, those are the two key things that make a human life worthwhile. And he added suffering because sometimes you're in a situation completely beyond your control where the only freedom you have is how do you bear suffering well? So if I accept that I'm a becoming, I accept that there are forces over which I have no control, and I recognize, oh, if I'm just thinking transactionally, oh, I can't change politics, oh, I can't change AI, I guess it doesn't matter, I'm impotent, I'm powerless, I'm going to lay flat.

1:29:35Bill Burnett:I'm thinking transactionally. Now, I'm not saying radically accepting some of these difficulties is easy, but it may be necessary. So one of the organizations I work with, I live in Santa Cruz, you know, on the Monterey Bay, that's the north end of the Salinas Valley, which is agricultural. So I work with a group called Digital Nest and Digital Nest does a really fabulous job of helping brown kids crack into high tech because there's a big color barrier in high tech. They do a really good job. Now that means overwhelmingly they work with brown people who ICE are very interested in right now and they're getting rated right and left.

1:30:11Bill Burnett:So there's this whole community and this whole subterfuge, I can't even tell you the details because it's all secret, about how these organizations and how the families that they serve are helping one another avoid getting picked off the street. It's a very generative, loving, human-making experience in the face of a really horrible, constraining, lifestyle-ruining reality. So if you accept this is what's going on, how can I participate? So if I'm a person who recognizes I don't control everything, then I'm not first and foremost a producer. I am first and foremost a participant. So regardless of what world you find yourself in, you're participating.

1:30:52What's the most generative, life-giving, human-making way you can participate in the situation in which you find yourself?

1:31:00Bill Burnett:That's the particularity you're in or, frankly, you're stuck with. So when the plotters of the escape that Frankl was going to participate in finally pull it off and they're ready to go, a colleague runs into the barrack that he's in where he's tending to a patient because he's an MD as well as a psychiatrist and says, we're going. You have to go now. And he's sitting by the bed of this inmate and he looks at the other guy and he says, no, I'll stay. And he just chooses, I'm sure all my patients and I will die here, but suffering well with them, that's life making for me. We have choices to make.

1:31:43Yeah, one really quick thing. The notion of radical acceptance has nothing to do with endorsement. Accepting that the situation is out of control and people are raiding. It's not okay. It's just true. Pulling folks from Salinas off the street for no good reason. you can accept that's the reality what can we do about it how can we make this community safer but there's nothing about that that's an endorsement right so yeah yeah people people often think oh well if you accept something then you have to agree with it no okay no i don't it's nothing about that i have to agree with it nothing about it that i think is okay there's a lot of things going on in the world i really don't think is okay okay and then the question is if that's the reality i'm in what do i do what's available what can i do what can i do that's useful can i do that At Stanford, I can sign a petition.

1:32:28You can work with this group to help these kids get a good job. I can write a letter so one of my students who's going to be deported can get a visa. Whatever you can do. Do the thing you can do. Many people, the Buddha would say, the distance between the way things are and how you want them to be, that's suffering. Yeah, of course. And you can't solve a problem that you're not accepting in its fullness, right?

1:32:55Bill Burnett:You can't solve a problem you're not willing to have. You're not endorsing it. You're putting yourself in a position to deal with it equanimously and not reactively. Again, this can sound like, oh, everybody's got to be some kind of an evangelist or a savior. Or a guru. Look, people are busy. They have hard lives. The person you talked about was me in my 40s with three kids and at the job and my wife working and blah, blah, blah. and where the heck will I have time to, you know, get on the, you know, write a sign and go down to the Tesla dealership and protest, right? You'll notice all those people protesting look like they're retired.

1:33:29Yeah, they got time. Yeah. So we're not saying, you know, pick your battles carefully, pick the things that are meaningful for you, right? And pick the things where you think you can move the needle. I think there's an important piece packed into that, which is that the Western mind is going to default to this idea that the means to the meaning that I lack is through a deeper investment in my own self-obsession. Whereas the solution is actually disabusing yourself of that self-obsession and getting into a contributory like service-oriented kind of approach to life, right? Like, oh, I'm lacking meaning, so I'm going to optimize my life and I'm going to construct this thing and it's all about me and I've got my blinders and here's my thing and I'm doing this.

1:34:21Whereas if you just like let the blinders go and you walk into a room thinking, well, how can I make this room better for being in it rather than looking for like, what am I going to get out of this situation? That seems to me to be the real means to, you know, kind of accessing this.

1:34:40Bill Burnett:I mean, psychology is known for a while now. If you're experiencing anxiety or depression, best thing you can do is go help somebody else. If you want to feel better, go help somebody else. So what's going on there? Well, you know, and again, wisdom and traditions have carried deeply about service for a long time. You know, in the Cain and Abel story, you know, after, you know, the brother kills his brother, he says, you know, who am I, my brother's keeper? And one of the comments of that is that, you know, the answer was so obviously yes that God didn't even answer the question. You know, like everybody knows.

1:35:16Bill Burnett:Yes, you're your brother's keeper. We're in this together. We now know psychologically that consciousness is in fact collective. We say all the time in these small groups that we help people talk to each other meaningfully in, it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself. So, you know, we're big fans of Dan Siegel's work in the Mindsight Institute, where he's talking a lot about collective consciousness, and that we're much more a we than an I. So no matter where you are in the midst of all this thing, if you start living your life in such a way that is participating with others, your chance of experiencing self-transcendency and it gets more meaningful goes way up.

1:35:51Bill Burnett:So absolutely, it's not just about you. Now, we don't preach that real hard. We just talk about, hey, formative community really works and living coherently works where who I am and what I'm doing are in alignment and what I believe are in alignment. But by the time we talk to anybody, they pick up a book, they walk into our class, they even sign up for office hours. I've already found myself in front of a teachable person. So anybody who's listening to this is open-minded enough to probably have some pretty good values. Your values are probably going to take you to a good place, and that good place is probably going to involve somebody other than you, too.

1:36:25You can't transmit something you haven't got. Obviously, you have to walk this talk in your own lives, right? You can't have office hours and go on podcasts and write books about this unless you're actually doing this. So how does it work in your own lives? and what are the challenges that you guys face? You're like, well, I wrote about this. I really have to do this. I really don't want to. I don't know how to do this. I'm resisting this. Well, a long time before, even when we started the class and Dave had come over and said, hey, let's do this thing. I said, okay, great. So we went over to Zotz.

1:36:56You remember Zotz? Sure. Back when it was still kind of a dusty old place. They really like dialed it up, didn't they? Yeah. But they didn't ruin it. Some alums bought it and they made it much fancier. But anyway, so we were sitting there with a pitcher of beer on a warm, dusty picnic table. And I said, okay, one thing about this is, well, one thing I said is you got to leave the Jesus stuff out of the classroom. He agreed to that. The second thing was, you know, we're asking people to do these exercises, so we have to do them. And we have to actually do them ourselves just to understand what it feels like to wrestle with three odysseys or it feels like trying to figure out your balance dashboard better.

1:37:33And particularly with this book, it was the possibility of the imposter syndrome loomed large. I spent with Sam Harris wake up app. I spent a whole like nine months trying to develop a mindfulness practice, complete failure. So I'm terrible at mindfulness. If people out there are good at it, I'm sure it's of great value. I couldn't figure it out. And I listened to all the Sam Harris stuff. I listened to, you know, calm. I tried them all headspace. Can't do it. I have other ways of finding myself in my own thoughts, you know, in something that isn't just, you know, repeating transactions. Um, most of the other stuff, you know, we do, I, I just finished, I just finished rewriting all of my, uh, my compass, my work view, worldview and life view.

1:38:20Um, and I found it had changed since, you know, since a year or two ago when I last did it. Um, at the lab, I have a rotating set of fellows who come in and teach with us and then they leave. And every time they come in, we do a new set of, hey, let's all write our values down so we know what the culture is all about. So I actually have a chance to do most of these exercises every couple of years. And I think that keeps me honest, right? And the rest of the stuff I learn, I learn from my students confronting me with something that either didn't make sense or seemed hypocritical to them. And I've been married for 37 years to a lovely woman named Cynthia, and she keeps me very honest.

1:39:01She's just read the book and she goes, I got some questions. you don't do this yeah when we talk you don't seem present right you know it's like okay i can work on that i can work on that yeah there's a there's a great line in a john

1:39:15Bill Burnett:fogarty song that i'm rather fond of in the refrain that says i ain't no hypocrite except mostly every day um and boy you do this kind of work you hand out stuff recommending how people live their lives i mean you are asking for it yeah um so i'm up against my own stuff all the time. And I would say one thing in particular right now. So where am I learning my way into my own book? And one of the simple little exercises is change your vowel. Go from got to to get to. You want to flip the switch? Look at your to-do list. I've got to get this thing done. So what's the best thing an item on your to-do list can be?

1:39:51Bill Burnett:Over. With a line through it. Oh, that's great. It's gone now. Oh, that part of my life is over. It's gone forever. Like, wait, you know, oh, oh, I got to talk to Rich Roll today. Oh, I get to talk to Rich Roll today. So I kind of flip from got to to get to, which is from over to participant. It's a complete shift in mindset. And truth be told, even though I'm pushing 73 and I've been teaching this kind of stuff for years and over 20 years ago, I got an advanced seminary degree in contemplative spirituality. I suck at this stuff. I am goal-oriented, deadline-driven, a transactionalist, production-minded guy.

1:40:30Bill Burnett:So really trying to move what I call from role, getting impact made, to soul, just being present to the moment, is a bigger shift than I want. My number one goal this year is to live into get to, not got to. Am I experiencing things as a get to, not a got to? And I catch myself missing it constantly. So the growth angle is still pretty steep. Yeah, it's a tricky thing. I mean, you talk about like the Odyssey years, right? Yeah, 15 to 35. If we're that first cohort, the younger people, their identity building. Yep. And the kind of counsel is, you know, like, hey, be wary of, you know, descending too far down the transactional lifestyle kind of approach.

1:41:15And then there's - At least mindlessly transacting. Yeah. And just everything becomes about that. We get indoctrinated in that, like, you know, just by being alive in this world, in this developed world. And then in these older years, it becomes about meaning-making. We've kind of ridden that wave, and it's that tension with our kind of striver disposition. Like, who I am, my identity is this construct that's contingent upon these things that I'm doing in the world, like my position at my job or my salary or whatever it is. And I see the suffering that is created when the person can't let go of that and they start to miss the gifts of that phase of life because they remain so fixated on continuing to tell that story.

1:42:11Bill Burnett:It's a real challenge. I call it the role to soul impact challenge. And this really comes up particularly in these DCI fellows, the Distinguished Career Institute people, the 35 to 45 fellows a year that come spend a year with us. I happen to know one particular cohort really well because it's the one in which the woman I'm now going to marry is a member of. So I get to be – Now it's all making sense. Yeah. After 20 years of teaching at Stanford, I finally got something out of it other than barely enough money to pay for the parking. And so I'm hanging out with this cohort. And a year and a half after they, quote, graduated from spending this year thinking deeply about their futures, we all get together for pizza and beer at one of the alumni members' houses.

1:42:52Bill Burnett:This is the people still in the Northern California area. And there's a conversation that goes around the circle of 20-some people. And the question is simply, so how's it going? It was a year and a half after they'd finished thinking deeply about their lives. And 18 of the 20 people told some kind of a long – it was two and a half hours to get around that circle, eight minutes per person. 18 of the 20 stories were essentially, I'm having a real hard time letting it go. I don't want to live the way I used to live. I'm done with that. I'm not going to go back and run the law firm anymore. I'm not going to, whatever it is.

1:43:26Bill Burnett:But boy, I got a lot of muscle memory on living that way. I got a lot of muscle memory on I am the person who did that sort of thing. And I thought, boy, this is a struggle. Now, the good news is another year and a half later. So three years after they graduated, they got together again at somebody's beach house, went around the same circle, asked the same question, and almost everybody said, I think I'm getting the hang of this now. So it may take a little time. But you're a person, you can grow. Have you guys connected with Chip Conley? Yes. Just talked to him. In his modern program? Did his podcast.

1:44:04Bill Burnett:He's a great guy. Yeah. I mean, he's amazing. And obviously his work is just all about that. Yeah, modern elder. The chrysalis, not the crisis. Yeah, like the chrysalis is not a crisis, but how do you use your, what's it called? Synthesized wisdom, like the brain changes. Arthur talks about this too. Like you have really good at like - The strength of strength, yeah. Data processing to like more of a synthesized - The second curve, yeah. Where you can make all these connections and you have this wisdom - It's the fluid knowledge. Based on your experience. Fluid, yeah, fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence.

1:44:35And leaning into that. Which is really wisdom, yeah. And being this modern elder, this mentor for the next generation, which requires a confrontation with your ego in order to get there. But this is really the path to meaning when you reach that stage of life. Yeah. The other shift I've seen in students, by the way, is that it used to be very much what my parents expected me to do was one of the stories I would hear. And do I have permission to do something else? Yes, you do. But now what I hear is the parents aren't so – the parents are like, hey, do whatever you want. It's fine. The students, the pressure is coming from their peers.

1:45:10The pressure is coming from their peers. I don't know if this is social media or something. It's like I got to look a certain way, I got to act a certain way, and I got to get the right job. And it's not coming so much from the grownups because I think they don't think the grownups have the right answer. And so it's really in that circle. And then I wonder, because I'll do some work with some folks who are retiring. I was the senior vice president of everything. i retired and on monday morning i'm just some guy in the line at starbucks chatting up people because i have nothing to do and nobody cares that i'm was once the senior vice president so that loss of identity around jobs uh it doesn't doesn't just happen at that point right all along you've been been pegging your value to the title to the role to like you said to the role that I had and now I need to move to this other place of working from the soul or working from the heart.

1:46:05It's hard, but boy, isn't that an interesting challenge? Isn't that an interesting journey to be on? And if you're lucky enough to have the resources to do that, why would you miss it? Why would you, you know, like the CEOs who go back after two years and be a CEO again, because they're screwing up my company, I got to go back and fix it. It's like, what are you doing, man?

1:46:25Bill Burnett:It's not just the egoistic person like, oh, I'm a big EVP and I aren't terribly important. And it's not that archetype only. Frankly, you've been doing this way of living for 40 years, 50 years. That's a lot of muscle memory. And it was all transactions. It's a bunch of momentum. It was overwhelmingly transactions. So Bill and I are both in formative communities, guys groups. Mine's 51 years old. Bill's is 35 years old. 35 years old. And so I'm the eldest, but only a couple of months in my group. And so we're all entering our 70s. And two years ago, the year I was turning 70, I said, we need to talk about this.

1:46:56Bill Burnett:We need to talk about becoming elders. So we had a two-year-long conversation. It was carefully curated with some core questions. And the questions included, how much is enough? And enough wasn't so much money as it was, how much is enough contribution? I mean, can you slow down saving the world and start trying to travel a little bit before your wife dies again? You know, is that OK? And then probably the other most important, so how much is enough was a very important question. And the second most important question is, and what are you letting go? So, yeah, I think for those later in life, there's absolutely some letting go.

1:47:34Bill Burnett:And it's very freeing or you hang out too long and then life rips it out of your hands and that's worse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really like this idea of the formative communities and then having this formal question, you know, and holding yourself accountable to answering it to other people, you know, that you're checking in with. I think that's like a huge piece in all of this. Myself, you know, I'm turning 60 this year. I don't want to, it's almost as if like, oh, well, you know, I'll figure that out when I, you know, when I walk out the door on my final day. You know, it's like, no, I want to think about this now.

1:48:10What am I doing now? How am I making this like a multi-year transition? So, it isn't like an overnight, like, wait, what happened? Like, I thought I was going to, You know, like, it's not like, oh, you buy the RV or you play golf or, you know, it's like I'm intent upon remaining engaged in things that interest me and that I'm curious about, some of which, you know, may or may not be professional. But it's not going to look like it looks like right now. And how can I acclimate to that idea now so it's not some kind of ego, you know, devastating blow later? Cliff transitions are hard. We were doing just the only live book talk we did at a local Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park.

1:48:54And at the end, somebody said, what's your next book going to be? And Dave was like, we're not doing another book. So he hates writing. And he's really working hard on moving from a task-driven human. You don't know anybody who's as good as Dave at getting things done. He's really good at it. From that to a soul-driven human who's just kind of in the moment. and uh i'm so i'm pretty sure this is the last book because i it took me two years to talk him into each of the books and you want and that's going to happen this time because he's going to be on a different journey but um you know as you said you it doesn't happen overnight you prepare yourself for this right if you're thinking if you're looking ahead you're like and and a really interesting question is what am i willing to leave behind in terms of my identity my position you know everybody knows me or whatever it is um what am i willing to leave behind in order to to make space for what's coming.

1:49:45And being in radical acceptance of what's coming. Like I think we, you know, our culture is such that we just, well, you know, on some level, we all are convincing ourselves that we're not gonna actually die. That's right, that's right. And that we're not gonna live forever. And this is not serving us. The number of billionaires who are trying to live forever is an example of the sort of narcissism - Don't get me started. In our culture, but I have fully accepted there is a lot less runway in front of me than there was behind. We do an exercising class at the last of the class. We call it the 25th reunion.

1:50:20We say, hey, imagine you're 23-year-olds. Imagine you're now 47, and you're back for your Stanford reunion, 25th year, and we're going to get up and talk about stuff, and we got them through three different conversations. And the last time we did this, I realized, wait a minute, 25 years, I'll be 95, 94. oh shit I'll probably be dead and then I actually I told my co-instructor I need to leave the room for a second I walked out and I tried to deal with it now my reframe is no no I bought this new exoskeleton I'm great I'm running around it's fantastic built by one of your students but when you actually start accepting that yeah probably there's going to be an end but can I live all the way up to that last moment and go, oh, how interesting.

1:51:11I didn't know. Yeah, I think the radical acceptance, it liberates you and gives you permission to engage with those years more intentionally. I mean, I've heard you tell the story of like the woman who came to you, who I don't know, she was like 52 or something like that. I was like, I'm thinking about going to medical school. Yeah, I mean, that's a perfect example of maybe just tell the story, like how you forecast out, like, all right, Well, how long do you think you're going to live? And let's reverse engineer it.

1:51:40Bill Burnett:Yeah, this is just what's crazy, what's not, and how do you think about things. So I give a talk. And this 54-year-old woman comes up and says, can I ask you a question? I said, sure. Well, I'm thinking about going to medical school. I've always wanted to do that. And I think I have the time. But all my friends are saying, I'm too old and I'm crazy and it's stupid. And I said, well, look, let's just run. I mean, so very quickly, you know, how old do people in your gene pool live? Well, you know, if you look around my family, I'll probably make it to 90, you know, maybe 95. I said, okay, now if you're an active person, how long do you want to be working?

1:52:18Bill Burnett:Well, probably 80 at least. And I said, okay. So, okay, so we got 26 years. Okay. Now, so let's say it takes a year for you to get ready to apply to medical school because you're out of practice. Fine. It takes a year to get in. That's two. It takes four years to go through medical school to get your MD to become an intern. Okay, that's six. By the way, after internships, you go into residency, you're doing medicine. Most medicine is done by residents. You're now a full-fledged doctor. I've got a nephew who's a resident doing medicine all day long. So, you know, in six years, you're doing medicine.

1:52:46Bill Burnett:You finish your specialty in another three, four, five, depending which one you want to get. So, you know, now I'm 11 years in. You're now 65. You've got 15 more years between then when you're going to retire from being a doctor to do the work you're doing. By the way, if we take a quick look back at the last 15 years of your life, would you say you were largely wasting your time? No, I think those years kind of matter to me. That's what we're talking about here. So are you crazy? I don't think so. No. Just decide how you want to choose to think about this. Yeah, that's an incredible reframe. The idea that you would entertain going to med school in your mid-50s.

1:53:23My sister got her PhD. It seems insane, and then when you articulate it that way, you're like, well, yeah, why not? It says who?

1:53:30Bill Burnett:I mean, my sister got her PhD in her early 60s. She'd been doing a PhD's job as running a graduate school for many, many years with a master's degree and finally decided to get the degree she should have had. The woman in front of her getting stalled with her PhD was 83. Wow. There are no rules. There are just perceptions. It's up to you. So this answers the question, like, is it ever too late? No. Well, like, okay, I just signed up to do a motorcycle tour with my brother-in-law in Morocco. I ride a BMW GS 1250, which weighs a little over 600 pounds. I can still barely pick it up if I drop it.

1:54:11Bill Burnett:I kind of have a rule. If you can't pick it up, you shouldn't ride it. I'm not sure I'm riding that bike when I'm 85. Maybe a smaller bike. So there might be some things that go away. But, you know, the rules are a lot more fungible than they let you to believe. I'm kind of hoping he's not riding a motorcycle when he's 85 because I love him dearly and I don't have to. I might be bad at it. You guys are very fun, interesting pairings. Like the devout man and the atheist, the painter and the extrovert, Santa Cruz. It's interesting. It all works. But I think just as we kind of bring this to a conclusion, it's not too late.

1:54:52and it's also not indulgent to consider a life of meaning. I think for a lot of people, it's like, well, that's just, how nice for you? Like, what an extravagance. Like, I'm just gonna keep doing my thing. Or I got enough meaning, I'm chasing the whatever and that's just fine. But this notion of not only giving everybody permission, Like, no, you deserve to have a life of meaning. It's available to you. In the life you're already in. It's not too late. And you can find it within, you know, it's like, this is not about like, quit your job and like - Become a nurse. Yeah. This is something that you can, you know, build into your life on a moment-to-moment basis free of charge.

1:55:38Right. And you will feel better. your curiosity will kind of peak and kind of start activating again. And you'll find yourself in the world in a very different sort of mindset. You know, I went to school back when dinosaurs roamed the campus long before you. But I found this thing called design, which was really cool. And it was built around this idea that we'll study engineering, art, and psychology. and we'll put it all together and we'll make things that people want. And that's been a lot of fun. And it's an inherently curious thing to do. Like, hey, can you come up with a better one of these?

1:56:21Hey, can you come up with a better one of these? It's like, yeah, maybe. Let's try it. So once you get in that mindset, the designer's mindset, and you realize, oh, there are no rules. Nobody made up any rules. There's no rules for what microphones need to look like. There's no rules for what my life needs to look like. There's some things that probably. There's some constraints. There's some constraints and there's some things that, you know, probably shouldn't do that if, you know, it might not work, might be too risky. But I bet I could try stuff, right? And I bet there's more out there than I thought.

1:56:51And if I just start with these designers' mindsets of wonder, curiosity, availability, let's see what happens. Let's give it a try.

1:56:59Bill Burnett:Yeah. I mean, look, you exist. You deserve to be here. You're a human being. you deserve the entire human experience Good chance if you're like a lot of modern people, you're cutting some of that short lately, which probably mostly isn't your fault. It's a systemic habit that society and largely capitalism have invited you into. So we're just saying, here's an invitation. You can encounter more of the fully human experience in the life you already have. You deserve it. Go get it. And if you do, you actually start becoming more yourself. You become more whole. And then it gets even better. more of yourselves.

1:57:42Yes. More of yourselves. Well put. And for the person who is being newly introduced to these ideas, who's stuck, who's trying to find their way forward, whose curiosity is piqued by, you know, just a discussion of the possibility of meaning, like what is a practice or a first thing that that person can do to begin this journey? Well, I'll do window glasses. Okay. Yeah, there's an exercise called put on your wonder glasses. Very simple. You walk outside. Nature's a great place to do this. Walk outside and you see a plant or a tree and you go, okay, my transactional glasses are on. That's a tree.

1:58:20I have an app. I pull it out. I can tell you what kind of, that's a Monterey pine. Fine. I need to trim it. Yeah, and then a bunch of stuff with the tree. And then you go, all right, now put on your curiosity glasses. Oh, Monterey pine. I wonder what a Monterey pine is doing in Southern California. This is a Monterey. That's interesting. And who put that there and why did it grow there? So that's the kind of curiosity lens. It's very interesting. And now put on your wonder glasses. The final thing is the wonder glasses. Like, look at that tree. That tree started from, you know, something that was nothing.

1:58:49I'll bet the biomass of that tree weighs 2 ,000 pounds. How the hell did that happen? And why is the Monterey Pine, you know, needle so different from the tree next to it that's a different tree? and isn't it wonderful that I live in a place where like this where nature is all around me we haven't torn it all down yet uh I think I'll go to the beach so put on your wonder glasses go from transaction to curious to wonder and see what happens take five minutes um I'm gonna

1:59:23Bill Burnett:because you mentioned this is maybe a person who doesn't know anything maybe they're feeling a little bit stuck you know they're in situations they can't do a lot about so I'm gonna talk about coherency sightings. So you got to do a little bit of homework, do the compass exercise, which means just simply writing down, what's my story? What do I believe about the work world? What do I believe about the universe? You know, where am I really coming from? And then with that in mind, you now have an idea of who it is that you are. And whatever you're doing, particularly in the workplace, as constraining as that may be, there are opportunities when you get to act yourself out authentically.

1:59:58So we call it coherency sighting, catching yourself in the act of acting

2:00:02Bill Burnett:just like you. Maybe that particular action didn't create a result yet, but hey. The mask came off for a moment. I was acting just like Rich Roll for five whole minutes at that particular moment in the staff meeting or what have you. I'll give you an example. So we gave this talk at this bookstore a couple ago. And one of the people who was there was Denise, Denise Benatar. So a woman who volunteered and worked with us for a couple of years, a couple of years ago. And she walked up and just said, I really love the book. And I just have to thank you guys again. Those years I got to work with you were some of the best years of mine.

2:00:41Bill Burnett:And I really care about giving people an opportunity to do what gives them aliveness. And we gave Denise a chance to experience some aliveness that she's carried on since that. That encounter was about 30 seconds. That's a moment of coherency for me. So I caught myself in the act of acting just like the Dave Evans I'm trying to be. And then patched myself on the back a little bit. Well, actually, I mean, you know. And it's meaning-making to find yourself in the experience of being yourself. I teared up a bit, actually. Yeah. So give yourself a chance to catch yourself in the act of doing it right and being you.

2:01:17Bill Burnett:It's called a coherency setting. And no matter how sucky that job may be, There are some moments when you're executing it in an authentic way and you deserve to affirm yourself for doing that. I helped Gladys clear the thing on the copier. She was freaking out. She had the thing she had to do for her boss. I helped her clear the copier. I got it working. Took five minutes of my time. Right. She's super happy. She's going to take the copies to where they need to go. I'm the kind of person who notices when somebody else needs some help. That's all. Simple. We're so reluctant to be earnest, but that kind of earnestness is the connective tissue.

2:01:55And that simple gesture of her expressing the meaning that she experienced with you guys then became a meaningful moment for both of you. That's how it works in that way. That's a beautiful story.

2:02:10Bill Burnett:if you're available to it. We make the offer and everybody says, that's outrageous. We make the offer for all of your students. You get office hours for life. Come back anytime. I don't care. 10 years, 20 years later, come back. And they think it's a great offer. And most of them do it. I'm having dinner tonight with a kid. I taught 20 years ago. Yeah. But we do it because they come back and they tell us a story. And that's the payoff. Like, what have you been doing for the last 10 years? Well, I did this and this and this and this. But I remember this one thing from class where you could reframe a problem.

2:02:40And I've been doing that and it really works. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. Somebody was listening.

2:02:48The book is great. You guys are providing a much needed public service right now. Like I said, at the outset, you really are meeting the moment. I think there is a craving and a need and a desire to understand how to engender our lives with meaning. And you're providing this roadmap and this way forward, this solution. So thank you for coming and sharing with me today. Appreciate it. Well, thank you. And you didn't need any of these notes. You were totally in it, man. One day I'll like leave them in the, you know, like it's just the safety net. You know what I mean? I get it. You guys made it easy and you forced me to be more present.

2:03:27Like I had to like, you know, talking about like walking the talk. I was like, okay, can I just be here? Cool. Cheers. Thanks a lot. Peace. Thank you guys.

2:03:38Thank you.