Designing Your Best Life with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

so Dave, yes, Bill, we're supposed to answer the question: what are you going to do with the rest of

your

wild and wonderful

life

? Yeah, great question, do you have an answer to that question? Yes, I do, this is what we should do. you should live the dream you should pursue

your

passion with relentless abandon you should totally go for it you should be your

best

self and under no circumstances should you settle because settling sucks you shouldn't strive for the

best

wow yeah wow that's the answer, that sounds amazing Dave, that would be amazing, yeah, can you do that

dave

?

I have no idea how to do it. I have no idea at all. I couldn't do anything like that. You know I can't either. Actually, it's really horrible. I keep trying, you know, I try things and I go out and then things happen that I didn't plan for and people I never met show up and you know it's not what I had in mind and it never works out and I'm stuck, you know? I think you are stuck because of what we call in our book dysfunctional beliefs. One of the big dysfunctional beliefs is that you have to be the amazing person 110% all the time, from the moment you get up in the morning until you go to bed, it's exhausting. but you should do it it's a dysfunctional belief it won't work the other one we really don't like is Follow your passion now if you have a passion that's great if you knew at age 8 that you wanted to be a doctor and now you're a doctor that's great but a good buddy, a friend of ours at Stanford, Bill Damon, has studied this and it turns out that eight out of 10 people, when you ask them what their passion is, they say, well, I have a lot of different ones or I don't have one that's really right, so which this passion leaves eight out of 10 people stuck, so you can't be amazing all the time, you can't follow your passion, but there's another really big dysfunctional belief, yeah, that one.

A minute ago I said how great if you were the best version of yourself, which of course is impossible because there is more than one of you, yes, each of us contains more vitality than your one

life

will allow you to live. more than one of you there are a lot of you there are a lot of greats and they are not the same and you can't even compare them because the criteria are completely different. I mean, I just got here. I came back from doing this book tour in the UK and I'm going through customs and they said why are you here and he said, well, I've been doing a book tour and they said, "Oh, occupation, author, and I said: no, I'm a tea, yes". yes, that's right, I'm an author, um, that's my new, my author self is better than my teacher self, is my teacher self better than my entrepreneur self, they are completely different, you can't compare them, there's an old saying in the business world.

That says you know that the good is the enemy of the best and the best is the enemy of the best. You're being your best but here's the problem? If in reality there is no particular best, there are many goods that you cannot. You even compare fairly fairly, but you're still trying to get to the place of best. You just decided to be unhappy for the rest of your life, which we think is a bad idea because you see that fake best is the enemy of available is best and that's where we want to go, but the challenge is still that we're still trying to discover this thing called the future and that is difficult, how do we do it?

Well you know, designers have been inventing the future for years when I was at Apple we invented laptops, they didn't exist before, we didn't know what they would look like before we made them, but we did it so that designers would have a way to invent the future. future, but the important thing that designers always do before they start is they look around they look around and try to find the right problem because finding problems turns out to be much more important than solving them because if you are working on the wrong problem you will get the answer wrong every time and the wrong problem is trying to find the perfect strategy to become your absolutely perfect best version and the reason why that is the wrong problem is that it wrongly perceives that your life is a tame problem that can be solved when in reality It's a wicked problem that needs to be designed.

What do I mean? A simple problem is a technical term developed by urban planners back in the 1970s, and a simple problem is a well-defined, well-behaved problem. It may be a difficult problem, but it behaves well if I want to build the Brooklyn. Bridge, once I find the solution it will work, everything will be fine if I want to put an astronaut on the moon or find the shortest route to O'Hare Airport. I can actually solve that problem and once I solve it, the solution will still work. you know, on Thursday morning, the Brooklyn Bridge doesn't wake up and you go, you know this burden doesn't work for me, I just don't feel it today, but in the evil problems, which are intrinsically human problems that occur, look.

Wicked problems are those where the solution criteria keep changing over time. You won't even know what the answer is until you find it, and once you find it you won't be able to reuse it again. Once you've designed New York City, you can't place it anywhere else. I certainly couldn't put Chicago in any CL but CU is incomparable, there you can say something that you know they will like, that's fine and and you know, he can't be Dave and I can't be Bill, so life is a bit perverse. problem and what we need is an adaptive and flexible approach to solving those things, yes, and that's where design thinking comes into play.

We've been working in design since the '60s at Stanford and we've developed this thing we call human-centered. design that is based on having empathy for people who have a lot of ideas that is actually reasonably technical and some people pay over a quarter of a million dollars to come to Stanford and learn it. I'm going to show you in one sentence. The whole design thinking thing is okay, be curious, talk to people, try things, okay, be curious, talk to people, try things. I'm going to unpack a little bit of that, the being curious part, if we had more time, we would ask everyone to create three completely different ones. versions of your life we ​​call these Odyssey plans because your life is an odyssey, it is an experience, it is a journey, it is not something you solve, so you would create three completely different versions of your life and we all have that in us and then I ask you What are you really curious about in any of those versions and that curiosity would take you to the next step and the next step raises the possibility of going crazy because what three versions of my life I don't know how to do. wait, I'm sure some of these people are three altogether.

I'm having a hard time finding one, you can do it, and you can actually do this. We've done it with thousands and thousands of people, in fact, they do it. on a single sheet of paper in 12 minutes we can't do that with you, no, but here's the deal, if you're not sure you can make three versions of your life, let me tell you how you can think of one and the next. If what you're currently doing is really working well, imagine the best version of what your current life is and just pull out the bow. 5 years, thing number two, what would you do if what you're currently doing isn't working?

It won't happen anymore, the whole industry, the whole field died, you are a teacher, guess what, now we can transmit all the information to every brain in the world, we don't need any more teachers, it's just over, just imagine what you are doing. It's over, you're a surgeon. Hey, we have robots for that now. Thanks for sharing. Bye bye. Just imagine that what you are doing is over. You're not going to sit in a lawn chair waiting for the end of your life to come. You're bored, you're going to do something else. Two industries have died since REM, but I'm older than most of you, you know, so things like this really happen and the third wild card thing would be what would you do?

If neither money nor respect were a problem, if you knew the money was going to be fine and I promised you they wouldn't laugh, what would you do? That's the wild card and we've done it with a lot of people and everyone has at least done it. those three ideas, so trust us, you have three ideas, but once you have them, Bill says the next step is to talk to people and try things, so what is it about? Well, it's about prototyping because in life design you don't plan your prototype and we I think there's probably two main types of prototyping in this area, one we call a prototyping conversation where you go talk to someone and you ask them their story, everyone has a story and everyone loves to tell their story and if you ask them, say, can I?

Could Dave? Could I buy you a cup of coffee and have 30 minutes of your time? Would you mind telling me how wonderful Dave is? He'll probably say yes, that's my favorite topic. Me, that's his favorite topic, so we have a curiosity in common. I'm really curious about how cool Dave is and Dave's really curious about how cool Dave is right, it's a prototypical conversation where we might get along, but then you can go deeper and have a prototypical experience that you actually get to . go out into the world and have the embodied experience of something that is in the future of your life, these prototypes are a way to sneak up on the future because, like we said, you can't know the future, but you can be a little curious and then try a few things to see, wow, it's that person who is doing what interests me and who is like me in the future.

I wonder if I resonate with your story or if that experience I just had would be like what I would be doing if I was doing this for prototyping, easy, cheap, fast, really fun ways to figure out which of your Odyssey plans might be the one. you like it, but a warning, yeah, so we often say don't plan a prototype because you can't really plan for the future that you have. go experience it so give an example a woman we know will call her Elise but based on a completely true story a business woman who had a parallel passion, actually she had a passion which is fang food and the Italian lifestyle and She is a human resources executive. in big companies, but he had always had this passion and this love and finally he decided to do it, so he had a passion and he bet on two fabulous cultural concepts, so he did it, he found an old delicatessen, he bought it completely renovated, he installed it . a cafe and also small tables, you know, they got this up and running and, surprisingly, his first time off filming as a restaurant tour, a very, very difficult business, he was very successful, it was fantastic, except he hated it , it was horrible because it turns out. running a restaurant and thinking about one are not the same thing at all she orders things all the time hires high school kids who quit every other day cooks the same food every day over and over again like no one told me about this I should have executed a prototype, I should have run some prototypes, I might have had conversations with other people who own easily found restaurants or delis or people who tried it and failed, I might have had experiences, you know, let's not sell the farm, how about maybe they will answer? your friend's daughter's wedding on the weekend you don't have to buy anything for that you know you could even get a job as a waitress or bus girl in an Italian restaurant and hear if people talk about interesting things like they did when you lived in Tuscany for 6 months or they're just talking about the election, you know whatever they have in mind and you could really have these experiences and we talked to her after this was all over, she was like, boy, I sure wish that.

I had done that, um, she finally successfully divested herself of the successful business you know, went into restaurant design for a while and then went on to another business, but if Elise had prototyped her life with a couple of conversations and a couple of experiences, I would have had a completely different experience of sneaking up on the future, so that's it, you know, our message is that you can't design your life, it's not a tame problem and you can't plan for it because no plan action will survive the first contact with reality, but you can design it because design is an adaptive process that allows you to continue changing the result when you get more data and the data in the future you get through prototyping, so feel again curiosity, talk to people, try things, it's actually almost that simple. really that's a great question and it seems too simple, I mean just be curious, talk to people, try things, does this really work well, does it really work now, we both teach at Stanford, it's a big research university that actually We can't, do I like something? other people just make things up, um, the work done, our, our peers, it's called data, people are fine, our peers demand evidence, so we've had two doctoral studies, one in the school of education and one in the school of psychology, which show that people who actually applythese principles, they know that they have greater self-efficacy, more and better ideas and they feel that they have the ability to plan, design the life they really want, but the most important thing is that this is a 10-year class, the book is Based on our experience with 2,000 or 3,000 students and not just our Millennials, but mid-career people, people in their major careers and they all report that by using these methods they have a more positive outcome and things happen and what we hear from these people and Again, Now we're working with them, you know, 30s, 40s, PE, middle-aged people, middle-aged people, core people, we just got back from a long strategy session with AARP, you know, we did a seminar in Manhattan, with a group of 373 people front and center. she was a young woman from the class of 1950 87 years old and she couldn't wait to design the rest of her life um she got stuck in exercise and I thought well she's 87 you know what you're going to do U but I went down to help her and I said: how's it going?

I have so many ideas I don't know where to start. That is an aspirational way of living. What we hear from these people are two things number one, you know, guys. I think so. I could do this, this seems doable to me and it's because we set the bar low, sure, do it again and the second thing we heard, you know, I feel more hopeful because the world is changing rapidly, nobody is going to do anything for more than 3 Five years from now, if I have to do something, I have to reinvent my life over and over again for the foreseeable future, and frankly, I feel a lot more hopeful if I think I know how to do it right.

Anyway, thank you very much for your Now we wish you all the opportunity to design a life that works for you. May you all have a happy and well-lived life. Thank you.