00:00:00- You're the co-founder of Stanford's Life Design Lab.
00:00:03- True.
00:00:04- What's that?
00:00:05- It's a little tiny operation inside the design program
00:00:07that applies the innovation principles of design thinking
00:00:11to the wicked problem of designing your life
00:00:12at and after university.
00:00:14So, oh, Bill and Dave realized,
00:00:16we've made all these products
00:00:18and all these different experiences using design thinking,
00:00:20started at Stanford back in 1963,
00:00:23you know, and we used it at Apple in the early days,
00:00:24and everybody's, kind of the thing that built Silicon Valley.
00:00:27Hey, we could apply it to ourselves.
00:00:29We could design ourselves as well,
00:00:31you know, and that's a real problem people have,
00:00:33and we gave it a try and it seems to have worked out.
00:00:36- Do people not already try to design their life?
00:00:38Is that not what you do when you set a to-do list
00:00:40or have a calendar?
00:00:41- So the word design in the field of design
00:00:44really means there's two categories.
00:00:46There's what I would call craft design or engineering design,
00:00:49and then there's design thinking.
00:00:50And so the older school, you know, so I'm an ergonomist,
00:00:54you know, I'm a car designer, I'm a graphic designer,
00:00:56you know, I'm an illustrator.
00:00:58So designing things, precisely figuring out exactly
00:01:01what this particular shape and look of something's
00:01:03going to be has been around for a long, long, long, long time.
00:01:05You can get a master's in design at Stanford
00:01:08and still not be very good at drawing.
00:01:10And there are many design schools
00:01:12who think that's a moral wrong.
00:01:13Then there's this design thinking idea
00:01:15that's been around only for the past 50 years,
00:01:17which is an innovation methodology.
00:01:20It's an approach to coming up with new ideas.
00:01:23And so when we talk, when people are just like,
00:01:25I want to design my life.
00:01:27What they're really saying is I want to engineer my life.
00:01:29I want to figure it out, I want to solve it,
00:01:31I want to answer it, I want to craft it.
00:01:32And that's a perfectly good thing to do.
00:01:34We're not saying that's the wrong thing to do.
00:01:37So people have been trying to do that for a long, long time.
00:01:39What they've not been necessarily doing very well
00:01:41and they're getting stuck on is finding their way.
00:01:44So like, I walk into the career center
00:01:46when I'm 19 years old, back in the '70s,
00:01:48and they go, can you help me?
00:01:50And they go, well, sure.
00:01:51We got a whole building full of people.
00:01:52We love helping young people like you, you know?
00:01:54So what do you want to do?
00:01:55I kind of go, yep, that's the question.
00:01:57I kind of go, okay, so what's the answer?
00:01:58I kind of know that's the question.
00:02:00And they go, what?
00:02:01I said, what do I want to do?
00:02:03And they go, right, what do you want to do?
00:02:05I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, this conversation's going nowhere.
00:02:07And they said, we have to, here's how this works.
00:02:09You tell us what you want, then we'll help you go get it.
00:02:12And they go, that's easy, getting stuff is easy.
00:02:15The hard part is figuring out what you want.
00:02:16They kind of go, well--
00:02:17- That's just on that point.
00:02:19- You're supposed to know.
00:02:20- Getting stuff is easy, figuring out what you want to get
00:02:23is the difficult part, 100%.
00:02:25- Yeah, so that's what we help people do.
00:02:27So the objective of the Life Design Lab,
00:02:30you asked that question, is we assist people
00:02:33in the formation of a conscious competency
00:02:35in life and vocational wayfinding.
00:02:38- Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, like--
00:02:39- How do you find your way?
00:02:41- Uh-huh.
00:02:41- We give you tools to do it.
00:02:42Life is an improv skill, we're improv trainers.
00:02:45- Orienteering for your life direction.
00:02:48- Bingo. - Yeah.
00:02:49- There's maps and compasses, we make the big distinction
00:02:53between navigation and wayfinding.
00:02:55Technical terms in design.
00:02:56So in navigation, I know where I am, I know where I'm going,
00:02:59I have the data about the space in between,
00:03:00so what your GPS does really well,
00:03:02I can optimize the path, preferably as straight as possible.
00:03:05In wicked problems where I don't know
00:03:09what I'm looking for until I find it
00:03:10and I'm going to this very important place called the future
00:03:12about which we have no data 'cause it doesn't exist yet,
00:03:15I can't do that 'cause I barely know where I am
00:03:18and I sure don't know where I'm going
00:03:20and I don't have any data about the space in between.
00:03:22So what am I gonna do?
00:03:23Well, I'm gonna do an empirical thing called try it.
00:03:26We call it prototyping.
00:03:28So I'm gonna make this move.
00:03:28I'm gonna go talk to Chris and see how that goes.
00:03:31You know, then what did I learn that day?
00:03:33And then, you know, I'll go here
00:03:35and then I'll go over here.
00:03:36It's a very jagged pathway.
00:03:38Might go backward.
00:03:38I might have to start over again.
00:03:40Seems terribly inefficient,
00:03:41except I'm learning my way forward
00:03:43till I find like, oh, that's it.
00:03:44And then the destination I'm looking for
00:03:46finally appears when I land there.
00:03:47But that boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing thing,
00:03:50very not a straight line in a wayfinding task,
00:03:53that bouncy line is literally the shortest distance
00:03:57between those two points.
00:03:59Because that's what mortals have to do.
00:04:01You know, it's interesting, but it's inefficient.
00:04:03- My friend George has this idea of GPS brain.
00:04:06- Okay.
00:04:06- And what he means by GPS brain is forgiveness with yourself
00:04:10when you don't take the right turn.
00:04:12That if you miss it, at no point does the GPS say,
00:04:15you fucking idiot.
00:04:17- Right.
00:04:17- Why didn't you take that?
00:04:18You should have turned right and you've missed it
00:04:20and now it's gonna take another five minutes.
00:04:22- Right.
00:04:22- At no point does the GPS do that.
00:04:23It just continually updates the directions.
00:04:26And I think that's a lovely,
00:04:27it makes me think about releasing.
00:04:29It makes me think about David Hawking's letting go type.
00:04:31- I totally agree.
00:04:32In fact, having been in the valley for a long, long time,
00:04:34I know that now and then, you know,
00:04:36coders put tricks and jokes in code all the time.
00:04:40And so I wonder if in the GPS code, you know,
00:04:43if I do the wrong thing on purpose,
00:04:46like if I go straight and turn left on,
00:04:48you know, Alpine street and I make a U-turn, you know,
00:04:51and then it says, okay,
00:04:52so go down the street and make another U-turn.
00:04:53And I do it nine times.
00:04:55On the 10th time, it's gonna go, come on, Dave.
00:04:57What the heck?
00:04:58You're wasting my time here.
00:05:00- You unlocked this special feature.
00:05:02- Yeah, I tried like 15 mistakes and it's totally--
00:05:05- The angry co-pilot feature.
00:05:06- And it's not even, by the way,
00:05:07it's not even when you did the wrong thing,
00:05:09you did the wrong thing.
00:05:10For it to have been wrong,
00:05:12you had to have had access to information
00:05:15that would have told you it would have been right up front.
00:05:17You didn't make a mistake.
00:05:18You made a move.
00:05:19You learned something that said,
00:05:21oh, continuing on the same co-linear pathway
00:05:23would be suboptimal.
00:05:24I'm gonna actually make an adjustment now.
00:05:25That's not a mistake.
00:05:27It's just a move.
00:05:28- What do people mean
00:05:31when they're talking about meaning, do you think?
00:05:33- That's a big one.
00:05:35Well, the reason we wrote this book,
00:05:37I'm gonna get fairly direct,
00:05:40is that what overwhelmingly people mean
00:05:43when they talk to us about the meaning
00:05:45they're not getting enough of,
00:05:47is they're talking about one of two things.
00:05:50Primarily, they're talking about having an impact.
00:05:52I'm just, am I making a difference?
00:05:55Am I changing the world?
00:05:56Do I matter?
00:05:56Is it working?
00:05:58Did I make the impact that would make my life worthwhile?
00:06:01And so, I'd say 90% of the people
00:06:03we've been talking to recently
00:06:05that motivated us to write this book,
00:06:07the one and only valid form of meaning-making
00:06:09they've named is impact.
00:06:12And then right behind that would be fulfillment.
00:06:14I'm just not being fulfilled.
00:06:16And for most people, fulfillment means,
00:06:17am I getting to manifest the fullness of who I really am?
00:06:20Because that's what Maslow told them fulfillment was
00:06:23in the original 1943 paper
00:06:25that invented the hierarchy of needs.
00:06:27According to Abraham Maslow,
00:06:29the apex was self-actualization,
00:06:32and you attain self-actualization
00:06:34by literally becoming all that one can be.
00:06:37And if you become all that one can be,
00:06:39according to Maslow, you will experience fulfillment.
00:06:43And we think that's dead wrong
00:06:44because we've known for a long time in the life design lab
00:06:47that all of us contain far more aliveness
00:06:49than one lifetime permits us to live out.
00:06:51There's more than one of you in there.
00:06:52That's the good news.
00:06:53So if you've decided you have to be all that you are
00:06:57and all that you are won't even fit in one lifetime,
00:07:00and if I haven't fully manifested
00:07:01everything that I could possibly be,
00:07:03then my life is unfulfilling.
00:07:05I just have decided to have a policy
00:07:07that I have to be despondent for the rest of my life.
00:07:08That's a bad choice.
00:07:10So both the people who were stuck on impact
00:07:12is the only way meaning really deserves to work,
00:07:14or I have to be entirely manifested to be fulfilled.
00:07:16Both of those people are set up on dead ends,
00:07:18and we'd like to give them a better idea.
00:07:20- What's the better idea?
00:07:22- But our idea is, so the reframe on impact is,
00:07:25if you put all your meaning eggs in the impact basket,
00:07:28impact's a good thing.
00:07:29I've worked hard at making an impact.
00:07:30You're working on an impact.
00:07:32It's not worthless by any means,
00:07:35but it's also largely out of our control
00:07:37because some of the other eight billion people
00:07:39might go off script when you're not looking.
00:07:42You do everything right, it may not work.
00:07:45Doing it right's not anywhere near enough to pull it off.
00:07:47So impact is a bet.
00:07:49And frankly, after you make the impact even successfully,
00:07:53three, two, one, well, what have you done for us lately?
00:07:57But Half Life on Impact is short.
00:07:58- Have you ever seen Scotty Scheffler's interview
00:08:03when he won the PGA Masters Tour?
00:08:06It was from last year.
00:08:07- No, but what do you have to say?
00:08:08- So he basically sits down and has this room of press
00:08:12and he's just won the thing,
00:08:14the big thing that he's been working towards,
00:08:16the special jacket or the--
00:08:17- Yeah, the green jacket, yeah.
00:08:18- Whatever it is.
00:08:19And he basically spends seven minutes talking about
00:08:24how fleeting and hollow this experience is.
00:08:27And it's just phenomenal.
00:08:29It's one of the best things that I've seen
00:08:32in a very long time.
00:08:32And I'm kind of obsessed with the price
00:08:34that high performers pay to be somebody
00:08:36that everyone else admires.
00:08:38- Oh yeah.
00:08:38- And to see someone using the opportunity to--
00:08:42- At the APEX.
00:08:43- Yeah, to fillet himself.
00:08:44He could have done that quite happily for five minutes
00:08:46and no one would have thought otherwise.
00:08:47He could have called out.
00:08:48I mean, I remember that Michael Jordan,
00:08:50he got inducted into the Hall of Fame 1993
00:08:52and he uses the entire speech just to call out
00:08:55all of the people that have insulted him.
00:08:58There's no gratitude at all.
00:08:59And then Scotty does something similar.
00:09:01There's a degree of gratitude, but it's very sanguine.
00:09:04It's very self-deprecating.
00:09:05And you would, I'll send you it once we're finished.
00:09:08I absolutely love it.
00:09:09But he basically says the same thing.
00:09:11He says, you know, very quickly after this,
00:09:13you are going to ask me a question.
00:09:16So what's next?
00:09:17You are going to ask me the question
00:09:19and I need to go home tonight
00:09:20and there's going to be diapers to be changed
00:09:21and trash to take out.
00:09:22And what are we having for dinner?
00:09:24And life just comes back around again.
00:09:26- Oh man.
00:09:27So a couple of years ago, the US Olympic Committee calls
00:09:30and says, can you help us?
00:09:32I go, help you what?
00:09:33- We're successful in the Olympics
00:09:34and everyone's got gold medalist syndrome.
00:09:36- So there's a training for after the games.
00:09:39There's nothing quite as thrilling
00:09:40as ascending the Olympic platform or terrifying is coming.
00:09:44The distance from the top of the Olympic platform
00:09:46to dumpster diving is terrifyingly short.
00:09:48- And much shorter than the other side.
00:09:51It's long to get up there and it's very--
00:09:53- Very short on the backside, yeah.
00:09:54So they called up and I did a training with them.
00:09:57You know, there's a group called Elite Meat,
00:09:59which is a volunteer organization
00:10:01of recently former Top Gun pilots, Rangers,
00:10:04Green Berets, Special Forces.
00:10:06People who are the absolute best in their business
00:10:09can kill you 75 ways, do not piss these people off.
00:10:11But most of them are lovely human beings, by the way.
00:10:13I am very fond of professional military.
00:10:15That's a whole nother conversation.
00:10:17But they retire out at 42, mostly.
00:10:20They start at 22, do the 20 years, they're out at 42.
00:10:23They're incredibly good at what they do.
00:10:25The world doesn't need them anymore, now what?
00:10:27So there's a whole group of their peers kind of going,
00:10:30this is gonna be hard on you, we're here to catch you.
00:10:32And I've worked with them a little bit.
00:10:34So yeah, absolutely, you know, killing the impact thing,
00:10:37you know, can be a double-edged sword.
00:10:38So thing one about impact is you gotta get eggs
00:10:41in some other baskets.
00:10:42And the reframe there is, because that's all done
00:10:45in what we call the transactional world,
00:10:46the get stuff done world.
00:10:48There's another world we call the flow world,
00:10:49which is really the present moment.
00:10:51This thing called reality that's happening right now,
00:10:53that you could be experiencing in a different way.
00:10:55And it's rich with meaning-making experiences.
00:10:57We'll come back to that.
00:10:58For the fulfillment person who's stuck on that,
00:11:01like, okay, the reframe is, no, you can't be fulfilled,
00:11:03but you can be fully alive.
00:11:05You can be entirely here in this present moment.
00:11:07And when things will help you accept that that may be true,
00:11:10the last big reframe is because now we can celebrate
00:11:13the scandal of particularity,
00:11:15which usually brings up the question, what the hell is that?
00:11:19- I'll let you interview yourself, just keep going.
00:11:21- That's okay, stop me anytime.
00:11:23- No, no, no. - It's your show.
00:11:25The scandal of particularity is originally a theological,
00:11:28then a philosophical concept.
00:11:30And what it is that turns out the ultimate of anything,
00:11:35truth, beauty, justice, purity,
00:11:37is never actually experienced in reality.
00:11:40Only partial reflections temporarily encountered
00:11:45in a very specific and constrained moment in time,
00:11:47a particularity, are what we actually get.
00:11:50We're longing for perfection,
00:11:52but all we get is the particular.
00:11:54That's actually just the nature of reality.
00:11:57So rather than like, oh, you see the amazing sunset.
00:12:01And what actually, if you really, really attended
00:12:02that amazing sunset, just as it's over
00:12:05and the sun hits the horizon and you see the green flash
00:12:08and you, and whoa, what do you want?
00:12:12More, I want more, it wasn't quite enough.
00:12:16That isn't, it fell short.
00:12:21That is the fundamental nature of reality.
00:12:24Reality is only expressed in these particularities.
00:12:27All of which are partial.
00:12:29And it's the fundamental nature of the human person,
00:12:31which is that thing you long for is how you're made.
00:12:36So if you can befriend the longing,
00:12:39it no longer is the problem of everything's not enough.
00:12:43It's that, oh, I have a chance to participate
00:12:45in a sincere reflection of that perfection briefly.
00:12:49Celebrate the heck out of it,
00:12:50'cause this is as good as it gets.
00:12:52And I'm gonna come back tomorrow and try again.
00:12:54- Befriending the longing, I wanna come back to that.
00:12:56One thing that's stuck in my mind,
00:12:58the challenge of people who have focused on impact
00:13:01for a long time, but also the route
00:13:06to which they achieved their impact
00:13:08was also the vehicle that delivered them their flow.
00:13:11So if you are a gymnast, a very flowy sort of tennis player,
00:13:16very flowy sort of thing.
00:13:19- You're a neurosurgeon.
00:13:20- You're now out of that.
00:13:22You're no longer getting the impact that you had
00:13:25and you've lost the flow at the same time.
00:13:27I imagine that double whammy must be very difficult.
00:13:29- It can be.
00:13:30Yeah, so I actually stopped teaching undergrads
00:13:33at Stanford back in 2018.
00:13:35I now mostly teach in the DCI program,
00:13:37the Distinguished Careers Institute,
00:13:39very fancy name for a gap year for grownups.
00:13:41And you work from 45 to 90, mostly 55 to 75 years old,
00:13:45kind of the old folks who used to think about transitioning
00:13:47to what you used to call retirement.
00:13:49And now what do I do?
00:13:50So that's the second half of life transition for people.
00:13:53And the way I characterize the big challenge of that,
00:13:55and these are all not all necessarily rich hedge fund people
00:13:58from New York, but we've got plenty of those.
00:14:00It could be a nonprofit leader,
00:14:02but they're all distinguished people who had impact
00:14:05and enjoyed doing that impactful thing well
00:14:07and got into it and were in the flow.
00:14:09And now they don't necessarily wanna be that person anymore.
00:14:12So it's the shift from role to soul.
00:14:14So the shift from I'm a role-based person,
00:14:17I'm really good at this gymnast thing,
00:14:20I'm really good at the surgery thing.
00:14:22And I still value that, but it's not first and foremost
00:14:26where my identity wants to come from now.
00:14:28And as I move away from that, it's sticky.
00:14:32And boy, I'm really good at making that version of me work.
00:14:37And that's where kind of the shift into a greater maturity
00:14:42is a very elective move.
00:14:43And it starts anywhere from 30 to never.
00:14:47Not much before 30,
00:14:51because you don't get a neocortex till you're 27 or 28,
00:14:53a little later in men, big spread.
00:14:55But look, you don't get a Buddha, you don't get a Moses,
00:14:57you don't get a Jesus until 30, 40 in Moses' case.
00:15:02It takes a while to make a person.
00:15:04But once you get past making a person,
00:15:06then you've gotta build an ego before you can transcend it.
00:15:11You've gotta have a life container before you can empty it.
00:15:15So that task of turning yourself into a person
00:15:18in your 30s, your 20s, 30s, and 40s
00:15:21is a really important task.
00:15:22But then once you've got one,
00:15:23once you've got a person you trust enough
00:15:24that you believe you deserve to exist,
00:15:27now it's time to start emptying out
00:15:29and having a more transcendent experience.
00:15:31And it's a real tough transition for most people.
00:15:34- That mano pause that happens to guys
00:15:37toward the end of their 20s,
00:15:38I first saw it in the way
00:15:39that me and my friends trained fitness.
00:15:42And then it became everything,
00:15:44the way that we thought about our contribution
00:15:46to our friend group and the way that we thought about money
00:15:48or goals or family life or whatever.
00:15:51Something that has struck me there is the fact that
00:15:54getting beyond 40, ancestrally,
00:15:58would have been increasingly rare.
00:16:00- Yes, that was more popular, more frequent.
00:16:04- What that suggests, we can say popular.
00:16:06What that suggests is that these challenges that we're facing
00:16:13were not only mismatched evolutionarily
00:16:17for the modern environment, even durationally,
00:16:21we are mismatched for our current environment.
00:16:23And you can talk about an aging population
00:16:26and birth rate decline, you can go into that stuff.
00:16:28But I think what's more interesting is that
00:16:31the adaptive systems that we have,
00:16:34even culturally, myth, archetype, what does it mean?
00:16:39If it's such a rarefied strata
00:16:42to get into 50, 60, 70 years old,
00:16:46where there's just not been a big enough sample size
00:16:50of people from history to be able to explain
00:16:53what that transition actually looks like.
00:16:55Does that make sense?
00:16:56- Sure, but I think what it really means is,
00:16:58I mean, people made those transitions
00:17:00in their mid-late 30s to early 40s before
00:17:02because they're gonna die at 50.
00:17:04And now just the window of time
00:17:06during which that transition can occur has stretched.
00:17:09- And shifted.
00:17:10- And shifted.
00:17:11And so what's happening is people are doubling down.
00:17:14So William Bridges wrote the book Transitions,
00:17:16Making Sense of Life's Big Changes.
00:17:18So he posits years ago, it's an 80s self-help classic.
00:17:21It's a good book based on Erickson's work.
00:17:24That changes are outside end realities that happen to you.
00:17:29Transitions are the internal experience of managing them.
00:17:32And his observation was that transitions are three steps,
00:17:34not two.
00:17:35It's not an ending followed by a new beginning.
00:17:37It's an ending followed by the neutral zone.
00:17:39Followed by two, it's over, then you're lost.
00:17:44And then you get refound.
00:17:45But you don't go from found to found.
00:17:47- Such a good point.
00:17:48That's so good.
00:17:49- If you're really comfortable,
00:17:51and oh, I've extended and had a longer career.
00:17:54And I started my fourth company.
00:17:55I mean, I started the life design lab at 54.
00:17:57And so my fourth startup into my 70s.
00:18:02It's kind of like, hey, I like this.
00:18:04The feedback loop of doing stuff I'm good at and it works
00:18:06is really gratifying.
00:18:08And then life kind of says, yeah,
00:18:10let's go off and be confused.
00:18:12Let's go learn how to be emotional
00:18:14and feel like an incompetent nincompoop for a while.
00:18:17Like that's really attractive.
00:18:18So I see people all the time get to the end of something
00:18:20and then kind of go,
00:18:22I'm going to go into the darkness for a while.
00:18:25I think I'll go back to the clarity.
00:18:26So we just re-up.
00:18:28Buddy of mine, my age just started his 12th company.
00:18:32I'll call him John.
00:18:34And I'm going, John, really?
00:18:36- This game again?
00:18:38- I mean, what do you not know?
00:18:41He said, well, I'm good at it.
00:18:42Kind of going, you knew that four times ago.
00:18:45- Come on, dude.
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00:19:50- Another idea that me and George, my friend, talk about
00:19:54is the anorexic hermit crab.
00:19:56So-- (laughing)
00:19:58- Explain to me the anorexic hermit crab, that's great.
00:20:00- So basically the crabs need to shed their shell
00:20:04in order to be able to grow.
00:20:06And what you could imagine,
00:20:08I'm not gonna say that John is doing this,
00:20:10but you could imagine a world in which a hermit crab
00:20:13refused to eat in order for it to not outgrow its shell.
00:20:16- Right.
00:20:18I'm staying right here.
00:20:19- That would be the anorexic hermit crab.
00:20:20- Yeah, okay.
00:20:21No, I think, and--
00:20:23- Because it doesn't want to go through the middle section.
00:20:25It doesn't want to go through the middle transition.
00:20:27- Right.
00:20:28- It wants to go from found,
00:20:30fuck it, I'll just stay in found.
00:20:31- Yeah, I'll stay in found.
00:20:32Yeah, well, we just had the conversation with Chip Conley,
00:20:34you know, Mr. Modern Elder Academy guy, you know,
00:20:37and he's pushing the midlife chrysalis,
00:20:39not the midlife crisis.
00:20:40Crisis is doing it badly
00:20:41as opposed to this transformational thing,
00:20:43which is, I mean, it's a nice pitch.
00:20:45He's a lovely guy doing really good work.
00:20:47But no, life is change.
00:20:49You know, if I really believe that being a person
00:20:52is being a becoming, then it's gonna change.
00:20:56And some of those changes are real seasonal stage-like
00:20:59transitions that are pretty interesting.
00:21:03And you know, you have to decide if it's worth it.
00:21:06- That's impact.
00:21:07What about the reframe on fulfillment?
00:21:08- Okay, so fulfillment, I can be fully alive,
00:21:11which is, again, back to be fully alive
00:21:13in the present moment,
00:21:14even with its apparent insufficiency of particularity.
00:21:18And it's just, I mean,
00:21:19this is actually my first can of new tonic.
00:21:22- Yes.
00:21:23- I think it's the best one I've ever had.
00:21:24- Fantastic.
00:21:25- You know, and is it the best caffeinated drink
00:21:27on the surface of the earth?
00:21:28- Yes.
00:21:29- So far.
00:21:30- Good.
00:21:31- So far.
00:21:32So am I willing, am I willing to say, you know, not quite,
00:21:34but am I willing to say, I'm really enjoying this?
00:21:36And let it be what it is
00:21:38and not blame it for what it's not yet.
00:21:41So that's where fully alive comes back in.
00:21:43And there are practices that allow us to do that.
00:21:45And so most of what the book is really about is positing,
00:21:48look, there's the transactional world
00:21:50where all this performance is occurring.
00:21:52And there's a flow world which is happening right now.
00:21:55Do you have access to the kinds of behaviors,
00:21:58the kind of awareness, the kind of attention
00:22:00in this present moment, what I call the flow world,
00:22:03that will allow you to experience life more deeply
00:22:06because more aliveness feels more meaningful.
00:22:10It feels more human.
00:22:11I think what we're ultimately called to be is more human.
00:22:14Joseph Campbell said in an interview years ago on PBS,
00:22:17you know, on the meaning question, like,
00:22:18is it really meaning or is what we're really after
00:22:21just the true rapture of being alive?
00:22:25At the end of the day, you have to decide,
00:22:27is the human person fundamentally just a production engine,
00:22:31I equal what I did, or a living being
00:22:34and what I equaled was the life I lived.
00:22:36So your decision about what it means to be a person,
00:22:41there's a pretty big decision.
00:22:43- Can you put meaning into an evolutionary lens for me,
00:22:47please, like how is meaning adaptive?
00:22:50What is it, ancestrally?
00:22:53Give me that lens if you can.
00:22:54- I'm winging it 'cause that's not first and foremost
00:22:57where I go, you know, I'm a realist, I live in reality.
00:23:00Notice people think the meaning thing is pretty important.
00:23:02So I'm just gonna start there.
00:23:03Why might meaning have been important?
00:23:06Well, that's actually gonna depend
00:23:08a little bit on your cosmology.
00:23:09Right, I happen to be the theist on the team.
00:23:13My partner Bill is the Nietzsche appreciating
00:23:16existential atheist, so you're gonna get a different answer.
00:23:18But I think even evolutionarily,
00:23:20if in fact that which is energizing evolution at all,
00:23:26there's some trajectory here.
00:23:31And that collaboration and community
00:23:36and persistence sustain that,
00:23:41then let's keep it interesting, not just keep it virile.
00:23:47So I can move along and so if I can lean,
00:23:51if there's something in me that wants to lean more deeply
00:23:53into my own life and lean more deeply
00:23:55into our collective life,
00:23:57then that's gonna keep the community going.
00:23:59The community is gonna keep the genome going.
00:24:01Yeah, good.
00:24:03It's a alignment of a bunch of different
00:24:05pro-social macronutrients that are both internal
00:24:09and sort of kin-basedy just around you, Dunbar numbers stuff.
00:24:13So is it your perspective to try and summarize
00:24:16where we've got to so far?
00:24:17The problem that people are trying to actually solve
00:24:19when they say they want more meaning
00:24:21is they want more aliveness.
00:24:22They want to feel more alive?
00:24:27Almost, I'm suggesting that if we added more aliveness
00:24:31to the definition of meaning
00:24:32and then give tools to acquire that,
00:24:34then their access to meaning is gonna go up.
00:24:36Right.
00:24:37Right now people, it's like your food groups.
00:24:40I mean, I've got one food group called Impact
00:24:43and we're suggesting, how about five?
00:24:45Impact, Wonder, Flow, Coherence and Community.
00:24:49So if I've got more food groups, I might get more calories.
00:24:52What about fulfillment in that?
00:24:54Fulfillments being broken out
00:24:55into some of those other component parts?
00:24:57Right. Right, okay, understood.
00:24:58Yeah, it's ways different aspects of my humanity
00:25:00are being both experienced, grown and expressed.
00:25:03Okay, contributing elements of meaning in your conception.
00:25:07Yeah, which is not comprehensive, by the way.
00:25:08This is kind of a low-hanging fruit book.
00:25:11You know, we're the--
00:25:12Zero to one's the way to go.
00:25:13Well, you know, you have a lot of people on here
00:25:16who are about maximizing, about high performance,
00:25:18about getting the most out of.
00:25:20We're the set the bar low and clear it, guys.
00:25:22I mean, we're trying to provide doable, accessible tools
00:25:27that regular people can use on a regular basis.
00:25:29Life is long.
00:25:31It's an incremental evolutionary process.
00:25:34Let's all get there.
00:25:35So when Bill and I looked at what people were struggling
00:25:39and what we might have to say
00:25:40through the lens of design thinking,
00:25:41that's the platform we sort of are allowed to speak from,
00:25:44we said, well, we're not gonna completely boil the ocean
00:25:47of a meaning question here.
00:25:48We're not.
00:25:49However, what might be helpful?
00:25:51And so these reframes we think might be helpful
00:25:53that we just discussed.
00:25:54A couple of mindsets are helpful.
00:25:56Who's got a chapter on that?
00:25:57And then these four areas, wonder, flow,
00:26:02coherency, and formative community.
00:26:04We are, that's not the totality of meaning by any means.
00:26:07Meaning's a big topic.
00:26:08But we think those four are readily available
00:26:11to almost everybody, and they're accessible pretty quickly.
00:26:15So here's a design tool or a practice or an idea,
00:26:17suggestion, where you might go get some of that stuff.
00:26:20And if that works for a lot of people,
00:26:21that's a good thing.
00:26:22- Good starting point.
00:26:22Is there anything else to say about reframe
00:26:24before we get into the engines and the component part?
00:26:27- Yeah, just the point of reframe.
00:26:29It has been said, and I would agree,
00:26:32that life is largely a story,
00:26:34our experience of life is largely a story we tell ourselves.
00:26:37And we know neurophysiologically now
00:26:39that we don't see what we're looking at.
00:26:41We see what we're looking for.
00:26:43So our lens and how we anticipate
00:26:47what the world's gonna be really matters.
00:26:49So the point of reframing, like, no,
00:26:51I'm not trying to be fulfilled,
00:26:51I'm trying to be fully alive.
00:26:52That's a reframe.
00:26:53When we reframe things, it really changes everything.
00:26:57Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
00:27:01- How much of this is top-down versus bottom-up?
00:27:05Because can we dictate to ourselves you will do this thing?
00:27:10The community piece is gonna be exciting,
00:27:12obviously it gets to feed into it.
00:27:14The flow piece is kind of halfway between the two.
00:27:17But much of this is thinking problem.
00:27:22Someone might interpret it as,
00:27:25I need to think my way out of this thinking problem.
00:27:27- Right.
00:27:28Well, you know, I teach at Stanford,
00:27:32we wrote a book that's pretty explicit, articulate stuff,
00:27:35so it's kind of in the idea realm.
00:27:37Yeah, pretty heady.
00:27:38You know, I've got closed captioning on all the time.
00:27:40I really like knowing things and describing.
00:27:43I'd almost rather describe something than do it.
00:27:45You know, that's a bit of a temptation for me.
00:27:48But, so I think the rethinking,
00:27:53this is where our consciousness directs our agency.
00:27:58You know, can be the thing
00:28:00that gives us some power over our lives.
00:28:02So it may start with thinking differently.
00:28:04However, we're gonna go into, you know,
00:28:07hopefully embodied experiences in a pretty quick way.
00:28:09We want to get people the chance
00:28:11to grow their actual faculties
00:28:14of attending to and noticing
00:28:15and having these other experiences, which are embodied.
00:28:17I mean, flow is not a thought-based experience.
00:28:21So we want to move toward embodiment.
00:28:26And I think over time,
00:28:27as you get better at these kind of things,
00:28:29sometimes the starting place will be those experiences
00:28:33where you actually are noticing something
00:28:35in the experience of the moment or coming out of your body
00:28:38rather than coming out of your brain
00:28:39or coming out of your ideas.
00:28:40- What's the difference between that problem-solving world
00:28:44and the meaning-making world?
00:28:46- Okay, well, there's still meaning
00:28:47in the problem-solving world.
00:28:48It's just a narrow form.
00:28:51So we came up with this model
00:28:53of the transactional world and the flow world
00:28:55and that there's a bunch of meaning
00:28:56to be had in the flow world.
00:28:58Simply because, look, there's only one real world.
00:29:02There are two worlds.
00:29:04But your brain can't handle the whole thing at one time.
00:29:07And we now know neurologically, you know,
00:29:10Lisa Miller's work at Columbia.
00:29:11There's your achieving brain and there's your awakened brain.
00:29:14The much more sophisticated version
00:29:16of the left brain, right brain model.
00:29:17You know, Jill Bolt tailors here, Stroke of Insight,
00:29:19what happened when this neurologist
00:29:21actually lost her left brain for a while.
00:29:24So what's going on is we're trying to integrate these things
00:29:27and give people access to it.
00:29:28And so if I can move more into a fuller implementation
00:29:34of my entire consciousness,
00:29:37then my chance at living a richer life goes up.
00:29:40And so the flow world simply means
00:29:44I want to start making sure
00:29:47that the part of my consciousness
00:29:49that can experience other aspects of reality
00:29:52is getting air time.
00:29:53Because when that part of my awareness gets more air time,
00:29:57there are experiences available to me
00:29:59right in front of me for free,
00:30:00that currently are going wasted.
00:30:03So we're saying, it's not about more.
00:30:04We are trying to invite people to get more
00:30:07out of the life they're in,
00:30:09not cram more into it to change it.
00:30:12Now we wrote two books about how to make big changes.
00:30:14We're in favor of changing things and making them better.
00:30:16But along the way, don't forget to live the life you're in.
00:30:19- So with that perspective,
00:30:21does optimization or over optimization
00:30:25drain life of meaning in some ways?
00:30:27- I think it can.
00:30:28I think if we're always simply trying
00:30:32to get to the better thing,
00:30:33most people's degree of happiness
00:30:38is described by the delta, the gap between
00:30:42the way things are and what they had in mind.
00:30:45When that gap is small, it's working.
00:30:48When that gap is broad, it's not.
00:30:50So that means I've just decided the quality of my life
00:30:55is based on an imaginal idea that I have.
00:30:58- You can either bring your expectations down
00:31:00or increase your performance.
00:31:01- Yeah, I mean, people land, you know,
00:31:03there's two phrases.
00:31:06Good enough is and good enough isn't.
00:31:10Most people have a bias.
00:31:12They tend to be one of those kinds of persons.
00:31:15The truth is they're both true.
00:31:17Just pick carefully when you apply them.
00:31:20So I'm all about high performance.
00:31:22You know, get better, learn how to do things.
00:31:25Listen to Huberman, listen to Chris Williamson.
00:31:28But if I fall all the way into that thing,
00:31:31then my experience in my own life
00:31:33is always simply trying to narrow the gap.
00:31:36And then as soon as I get it close,
00:31:37it's time to up my game and push that,
00:31:39ask them to further out again,
00:31:41so that I have more gap and push myself forward.
00:31:43I mean, you can never ultimately maximize your productivity.
00:31:47- There's a beautiful line from Alan Watts.
00:31:49He says, "If we are all together unduly absorbed
00:31:51"with improving our lives, we may forget to live them."
00:31:55- You missed the whole thing.
00:31:56- Yeah, this provisional life.
00:32:00- Yeah.
00:32:01- Arrival fallacy.
00:32:05- Yeah, there is no done, there is no right,
00:32:09and there is no it, have I found it?
00:32:10There's no it.
00:32:11- I think about the most modern example of this
00:32:14that keeps me, this is my memento mori,
00:32:16but for the TikTok generation.
00:32:19One day you'll die and your inbox
00:32:20will still accumulate emails.
00:32:23Like that will never be done.
00:32:25There will be people emailing you,
00:32:27asking why you're not replying
00:32:29or secretly saying to a friend that you were really rude
00:32:33because you hadn't replied,
00:32:35who don't know that you're dead,
00:32:37and the emails will continue to come.
00:32:39- So I have a small group of guys
00:32:41that have been in my support group for 51 years.
00:32:43I formed them in 1974.
00:32:45I'm the eldest, I'm about to turn 73,
00:32:47but we're all within a year or two of each other.
00:32:48And so we started moving into our 70s
00:32:50and at the 50th anniversary about 18 months ago,
00:32:53we started a conversation,
00:32:55been going on for about two years now,
00:32:56about how are we going to become elders?
00:32:59I mean, literally I tell people, because it's true,
00:33:00my next major milestone is death.
00:33:02How do I get there?
00:33:03(laughing)
00:33:05Now part of that is, I've had a lot of people,
00:33:08my father died of suicide when I was nine.
00:33:10So dealing with dead people has become important early on.
00:33:14I lost my beloved wife, Claudia, to cancer five years ago.
00:33:17Though, oddly enough, another compass meant this woman
00:33:20has decided to sign up for the program,
00:33:21so I'm about to get married again.
00:33:23- Congratulations. - Thank you, yes.
00:33:24But it's a very steep learning curve.
00:33:28John O'Donohue, the old Celtic mystic,
00:33:32would say that marrying another person
00:33:33is moving to a foreign country.
00:33:35Whole new culture, whole new language.
00:33:37Or my friend, Jerry's sister, would say, philosophy prof,
00:33:41there are no second marriages,
00:33:42there are only first marriages the second time around.
00:33:44So I'm doing the first marriage the third time around.
00:33:46And the learning curve is steep,
00:33:47which by the way is terrific.
00:33:49But this death thing, once you get it, but it's going around.
00:33:54It's becoming extremely popular.
00:33:57It was popular earlier and now it's popular later,
00:33:59but still very popular, almost everybody's into it.
00:34:01And once you really get your hands around your finitude,
00:34:04and burying a couple of people will help you do that,
00:34:07get you more intimate with it.
00:34:09So it's very freeing.
00:34:12What have I got?
00:34:1612 years, 15 years.
00:34:18And it's very clear to me that my productivity
00:34:22is gonna plummet after my death.
00:34:23I mean, it's just gonna drop off like a stone.
00:34:27And so this trajectory on the way to the grave,
00:34:30I mean, is the area under the curve
00:34:35of the last six months of my life really gonna net matter?
00:34:39Which doesn't mean mailing it in is okay.
00:34:41What it means is, look, you're a person,
00:34:44you have a life, what's it for?
00:34:47Now get something done.
00:34:52You know, I'm an old boy scout,
00:34:53let's leave the campground better than we found it.
00:34:55But is that the only thing we're doing?
00:34:59What's the gift you have to give?
00:35:01Chris, your job, I'll, Chris-ing, that's your job.
00:35:05Now it expresses itself in establishing better,
00:35:08you know, self-help growth awareness,
00:35:10particularly in young men in this current era.
00:35:12That's a nice contribution.
00:35:13But at the end of the day, your job is to be Chris.
00:35:16I think each of us is a gift that the God of the universe,
00:35:20depending on your cosmology, has given to the world.
00:35:22And your job is to figure out what's inside there
00:35:24and get the thing unwrapped so we can play with it
00:35:26before the game is over.
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00:36:42You know my favorite example of this, Salvador Dali.
00:36:44Don't know, have you, do you know much about Dali?
00:36:47- I like his work and I've been to his home and you know.
00:36:49- Okay, so his personal life,
00:36:52he was the reincarnation of his dead brother
00:36:55according to his parents.
00:36:56So Dali's 20 months old and his parents take him
00:37:00to a graveyard and show him a grave site
00:37:04and he had a brother that was born 20 months before him
00:37:08and Dali is named after him and his parents say,
00:37:13this is Salvador, this is who you are.
00:37:17This is, that was how it started.
00:37:19That was how Dali's life started.
00:37:21It was interesting from the get-go.
00:37:23- 10 years old, he's throwing himself down sets of stairs
00:37:26because he realizes that pain is interesting
00:37:29and that people come and he can manipulate them
00:37:31in this sort of very Machiavellian sort of way.
00:37:34He walked an anteater through the streets of Paris
00:37:36and when he was asked why, he said,
00:37:38it's because anteaters are never in fashion.
00:37:40He took a pistol to a live talk that he gave in France
00:37:44and he just fired it intermittently
00:37:46to keep people's attention.
00:37:47He also gave another talk where he's in a deep sea diving suit
00:37:50and suffocated in it
00:37:51and had to be wrenched out of it mid-talk.
00:37:54He refused to walk through doorways forwards.
00:37:56He would only ever go sideways or backward
00:37:57because he said that habit destroys
00:38:00the patterns of creativity.
00:38:02He once sued a guy for dreaming about him
00:38:04and said, the subconscious belongs to me.
00:38:08He is buried, as you know, underneath his own,
00:38:11people walk over his body when observing his work.
00:38:14He used to, he was very poor during his life,
00:38:18he used to sign checks that couldn't be cashed
00:38:22because he had no money in his bank account
00:38:23but he would doodle on the back of them
00:38:25and the check illustration would be worth more
00:38:27than the actual check itself.
00:38:29He--
00:38:30- Again, so what's he doing there?
00:38:31What's he saying is--
00:38:32- The fullness of him.
00:38:33- He's noticing that people fall into patterns
00:38:36and act as though those patterns are what life is
00:38:39as opposed to they're a container
00:38:41that's supposed to hold them.
00:38:42So he's gonna transcend the pattern
00:38:44and force you to realize, oh,
00:38:45doors aren't for walking through,
00:38:47so he ends up with a policy
00:38:50that he can't abide by the pattern.
00:38:52So his moral commitment is to constantly press that edge
00:38:55less than it could be.
00:38:58Which is a really sort of monastic commitment.
00:39:00- Well, the fullness thing on that is,
00:39:03as brilliant as he was, da Vinci didn't do Dali
00:39:05and Michelangelo didn't do Dali.
00:39:06So if he had been anything short of the fullness of himself,
00:39:10the world would be fundamentally less.
00:39:12So I agree.
00:39:13I think that we have this sort of cosmic karmic duty
00:39:16to existence, to do what only we can do,
00:39:20because you can't do Dali, and neither can I,
00:39:23and neither can Michelangelo, and neither could da Vinci.
00:39:25So it's his job to walk the anteater
00:39:28and to go through the doorway sideways.
00:39:30So okay, okay, the component parts.
00:39:33Wonder, what do we need to know about wonder?
00:39:35- Okay, so wonder, and we have a little equation for that.
00:39:38So when you take curiosity, curiosity is a very good thing,
00:39:42it's a mindset we're in favor of,
00:39:43and you upgrade it by applying, you direct curiosity
00:39:47toward mystery, those things that are beyond
00:39:51our understanding, or transcendent at the moment of time.
00:39:54Curiosity plus mystery, so I'm now gonna lean
00:39:57with a high availability into a mystery,
00:39:59allows wonder to occur.
00:40:00And one, the reason wonder is important.
00:40:03So wonder, awe, even positive overwhelm.
00:40:07So Dr. Keltner, a prophet at UC Berkeley,
00:40:09has written the book on awe, and eight different forms
00:40:11of human experience that allow awe or wonder to occur,
00:40:14so he's quadrupled down on this thing,
00:40:16and that it works across all cultures
00:40:18and all different spiritual traditions.
00:40:20It's a fundamentally human experience that people report
00:40:24as making themselves feel more alive
00:40:26and making themselves feel more like themselves,
00:40:29and making themselves feel more like a part
00:40:31of this great, wonderful thing.
00:40:32So very often, in an intense experience of wonder,
00:40:35whether it's a communal thing at a concert,
00:40:37whether it's a sunset, whether it's noticing
00:40:39the sleeping baby at three in the morning,
00:40:41we're suddenly like, oh, and we are all,
00:40:44and it's all one fabric, and we're all in this thing together
00:40:46in the universality, but it all suddenly breaks through.
00:40:49So wonder enables that to occur.
00:40:51It's a profoundly human-making experience.
00:40:54And we think that's available all the time.
00:40:56You know, you give a quote just a minute ago.
00:40:58I love this particular quote from Henry Miller.
00:41:02So the American author and playwright,
00:41:03Henry Miller, once said, quote,
00:41:05"I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention
00:41:09"to anything, even a blade of grass,
00:41:12"it becomes a mysterious, awesome,
00:41:14"indescribably magnificent world in itself.
00:41:19"I have tried this experiment a thousand times,
00:41:21"and I have never been disappointed."
00:41:23So, you know, that's the habit of wonder.
00:41:27So wonder is a place where we can move beyond ourselves,
00:41:31which, by the way, goes back to Maslow.
00:41:33So late in his life, Maslow, and most people still think
00:41:36that the apex of the hierarchy of needs,
00:41:37according to Maslow, is self-actualization.
00:41:40It's not.
00:41:41The highest level is actually self-transcendency,
00:41:44which he came up with very late in his life.
00:41:46He never published it.
00:41:47It's in his personal journal notes.
00:41:49Others published it behind him.
00:41:50But interestingly enough, still, you know,
00:41:51eight out of 10 people think it stops at self-actualization.
00:41:54And self-transcendency, if attained, creates meaning-making.
00:41:59So there's a difference.
00:42:00And he's still wrong because he made it hierarchical.
00:42:02And it turns out self-transcendency isn't hierarchical.
00:42:05You don't have to be self-actualized together.
00:42:07Self-transcendency can work for anyone, anywhere, anytime.
00:42:11Just get beyond yourself, whether it's loving other people,
00:42:14whether it's being selfless, whether it's compassion,
00:42:16whether it's noticing beauty and allowing it to overwhelm you.
00:42:18All those things get you beyond yourself.
00:42:21And wonder is a place where you go beyond yourself.
00:42:23- Or else, if that wasn't true,
00:42:26looking up at the night sky wouldn't be impressive
00:42:28unless you'd maximize your potential first.
00:42:31- Exactly.
00:42:32- Doing something for somebody else that makes you feel good
00:42:34and the world a better place
00:42:36wouldn't be pro-social. - Wouldn't work.
00:42:37Yeah.
00:42:38You'd not yet earned the right to notice.
00:42:40- As of yet, you haven't maximized your 401(k)
00:42:42and that means that you don't get it.
00:42:44- You know, you don't--
00:42:45- Scott Barry Kaufman did a good job on that.
00:42:48His book "Transcend" was real nice
00:42:50and he's big into Maslow's stuff.
00:42:53Okay.
00:42:53- Okay, that's wonder.
00:42:54- Engineer me some wonder.
00:42:55What are some practices for how I can
00:42:57bring more of it into my life?
00:42:58I'm paying attention to things in a manner
00:43:01to look at them with a fresh set of eyes.
00:43:03- Yeah.
00:43:04So we have a little exercise called
00:43:05put on your wonder glasses.
00:43:07So put on your wonder glasses.
00:43:09First of all, you know, if you can't beat it, join it.
00:43:11So we recognize that we're transactionally minded
00:43:13and so we take a situation and, you know,
00:43:16might be a little challenging here.
00:43:17This would have been, you know,
00:43:18you take a moment and you just take a look around the room,
00:43:21take a look around your situation,
00:43:23take a look around your room,
00:43:24whether you're outside, you're inside,
00:43:25you're walking the dog,
00:43:26and you take a quick look with your normal glasses on.
00:43:30And the first thing you'll notice is
00:43:31what the transactional brain is gonna be looking for.
00:43:33Like, oh, okay, this is what they're using,
00:43:34a certain kind of soundproofing and it's the blue lights,
00:43:36that's kind of interesting, you know?
00:43:38And I see what's going on, you know?
00:43:39And probably what'll happen is
00:43:41you'll immediately come up with a to-do list.
00:43:43Like, you know, oh, I gotta get one of those blue lights,
00:43:44you know, and that's a better mic holder than I've got,
00:43:47you know, and I wonder if that plant deserves to be watered.
00:43:50You know, so your brain just comes up the to-do list.
00:43:52So you scan around the room, scan around the scene,
00:43:55and let your brain do what it naturally does.
00:43:57And then you say, thank you, thank you for sharing.
00:43:59I'll make that list, I'll get back to you another time.
00:44:00Then you take another look and say,
00:44:02is there anything here that is interesting, right,
00:44:05that allows you to be curious?
00:44:07You know, and on those, well, he's got a plant there.
00:44:13He was gonna, you know, why do we need a plant, you know?
00:44:17And then, and the mind knows something else
00:44:21might be interesting, like, you know,
00:44:23the fact that we have all these different cameras
00:44:24and why are these angles important?
00:44:26That might be curious to me, you know?
00:44:28And then I'll say, okay, now it's time for a wonder glasses.
00:44:29Which of those curious things
00:44:30do I want to really lean into
00:44:32and let the mystery reveal itself?
00:44:34And I'm gonna go with a plant.
00:44:35Is it real or plastic, by the way?
00:44:39- Plastic. - It's plastic, okay.
00:44:40So it's a plastic plant, but it's a good plastic plant.
00:44:42So what I'm noticing that is,
00:44:43so Chris is having these conversations with people
00:44:45and there is a little organic something in the room.
00:44:48And so what that, this is maybe an homage to,
00:44:53maybe it's evoking the fact that, you know,
00:44:57it's not just digital, it's not just electronic,
00:45:00it's not just black, there's some life in here too.
00:45:03And that reminder of life is,
00:45:05so how do reminders of life occur?
00:45:08So I allow myself to fall, in any moment in time,
00:45:11there's a way I can, in a minute or two,
00:45:14reopen my availability to the fact that there's something,
00:45:18like Henry Miller was saying,
00:45:19that's indescribably mysterious and wonderful
00:45:22right in front of me, if I let it be.
00:45:25- If you were to-- - It's practice.
00:45:26- If you were to try and turn up the,
00:45:29turn down the difficulty and turn up
00:45:30the external supply of wonder,
00:45:34what are some reliable ways to do that?
00:45:35You mentioned sunsets earlier on, I imagine that that's one.
00:45:38- The natural world is gonna be your friend.
00:45:39You know, identify the things
00:45:41that are naturally working for you.
00:45:42The other thing is, is just allow yourself
00:45:46to notice the existence of the flow world.
00:45:49You know, 'cause that's where wonder's
00:45:51gonna be available to you,
00:45:51which means dropping into the present moment.
00:45:53So having, so we have an exercise called flip the switch.
00:45:56You know, so you're sitting, you know, in a staff meeting,
00:45:58you know, and you're listening to the budget
00:45:59be hacked apart again, and you're bored, you know,
00:46:02and then literally you say to yourself,
00:46:04flip, boom, flip the switch.
00:46:07What's happening in the flow world right now?
00:46:09So I'm in this room, I'm with these people.
00:46:12How is Chris actually feeling right now?
00:46:14You know, what, I look out,
00:46:16oh, there's a tree out the window,
00:46:18and that tree is turning colors.
00:46:20You know, now this all costs maybe three or four seconds.
00:46:23So I can get the habit of calling myself
00:46:27back to the present moment
00:46:28and just noticing what's going on around me,
00:46:32and the fact that I'm a living person
00:46:33in this present situation.
00:46:35I mean, if I let myself,
00:46:39while I'm thinking about answering your question,
00:46:40I can be aware of how the cushion feels on my buttocks,
00:46:44because I'm actually sitting, I'm not just talking to you,
00:46:46I'm sitting in this chair.
00:46:47Am I actually in this room?
00:46:49So those awarenesses allow the mental faculties,
00:46:53the part of your eye, Brandon,
00:46:53knows how to be attentive to the present moment,
00:46:56catch those things, so you just constantly have
00:46:59these little games you can play with yourself,
00:47:01which is keeping yourself in the game.
00:47:03Okay, coherence.
00:47:04Coherence.
00:47:06It turns out the meaning-making researchers will tell us
00:47:09that if you can align consciously who you are,
00:47:14what you're doing, and what you believe in,
00:47:16which we call coherence.
00:47:19So, you know, I understand who I,
00:47:21at least presently I've got a story about who I am,
00:47:23these are the things I really care about,
00:47:24here's what I'm doing in the world,
00:47:25do they align?
00:47:26And when they align, usually with some degree of compromise,
00:47:29'cause life is never perfect,
00:47:30but it's a calculated compromise that I've accepted,
00:47:33I'm having an experience of coherency,
00:47:36I'm being an integrated, coherent, thoughtful,
00:47:40authentic person in the world,
00:47:42which means I'm living purposefully.
00:47:45Frankly, if the book takes a risk,
00:47:46it's that we don't talk an awful lot about finding purpose
00:47:49and mission and what have you,
00:47:51in part because people are so over-missioned right now
00:47:53that they're stuck in the transactional world.
00:47:55We're really deferring almost all of that hopefulness
00:47:59to this coherency thing.
00:48:00If people are aware of their value set,
00:48:03and they're aware of what they're doing in the world,
00:48:05and they're trying to move those things into alignment,
00:48:08called coherency, you know,
00:48:09then we're pretty sure they're gonna end up doing good things.
00:48:13So I don't need to preach at you
00:48:15about trying to make the world a better place.
00:48:17The overwhelming majority of people we work with,
00:48:19they've got great values.
00:48:21And if their values actually get to be the lead horse
00:48:24on the directing of their lives,
00:48:26we're all gonna be in a better place.
00:48:27So I don't need to tell you what to do.
00:48:29You've already got what you need.
00:48:30So the experience of coherency,
00:48:33we call it coherency sightings.
00:48:34Catch yourself in the act of being
00:48:36an integrated, coherent person.
00:48:38That's really gratifying.
00:48:39Oh, I'm sitting here in your studio,
00:48:42and we're talking about how people can live more meaningfully.
00:48:44That is a really coherent thing for me to do.
00:48:47Am I aware of the fact that, oh yeah,
00:48:49this is exactly what I want to be doing.
00:48:51This is really working for me.
00:48:53- Inverter, what would somebody being
00:48:55out of coherence look like?
00:48:57- Oh, I was just talking to a guy the other day.
00:49:01So one of the DCI fellows, you know,
00:49:05a very successful Hong Kong financier, you know,
00:49:08calls me and says, "My 26-year-old son
00:49:11"is about to quit his fabulous job.
00:49:12"Please help me stop him."
00:49:13So I said, "No, I'm not gonna help stop him,
00:49:17"and I'm not gonna call him 'cause you said call him,
00:49:19"but if he wants to call me, we can chat,
00:49:21"and by the way, I'll probably tell him
00:49:22"he's doing the right thing, so watch what you wish for."
00:49:24So I'm on the phone on a Zoom call talking
00:49:27to this 26-year-old young man who is a Stanford grad
00:49:30in economics with a master's in computer science
00:49:32'cause everybody should know digital stuff,
00:49:35and he drops right into investment banking,
00:49:36and he's killing it.
00:49:38He's absolutely killing it,
00:49:39and he's having a great time killing it
00:49:41until suddenly he wakes up one day and he's bored of tears.
00:49:44And so I think I'm gonna quit and ruin my career
00:49:48and travel for a while and go try to find myself.
00:49:50You know, because what he noticed was, right,
00:49:53and I think what's happening for him
00:49:55is his neocortex is forming about 27.
00:49:57He's a little ahead of himself.
00:49:58- Manopause.
00:49:59- And just like, "Wait a minute,
00:50:01"the motivation I had to do this,"
00:50:04which was growing and winning, which is fine,
00:50:07you know, getting A's.
00:50:08He was getting A's at the bank like he got at Stanford,
00:50:11suddenly doesn't work for me anymore.
00:50:12He awakened an incoherent person,
00:50:15and he tried to talk himself into successes of its own reward
00:50:20and he just couldn't do it.
00:50:22So for him to become coherent,
00:50:24he's gonna have to go recalibrate his values
00:50:26and recalibrate his priorities.
00:50:28So he's in a transition, that's the right thing to do.
00:50:31Now, there are other people who keep re-upping
00:50:33that incoherence because they're getting the money
00:50:36or they're fearful of the change
00:50:38or their wife will think they're stupid.
00:50:40You know, there's lots of reasons people get stuck
00:50:42in an incoherent place, but it's soul-sucking.
00:50:44So be careful.
00:50:45- How does coherence outperform balance as a life goal?
00:50:52- Oh, well, I've never had balance as a goal.
00:50:55I've never seen a balanced person.
00:50:58I mean, if balance means, you know,
00:51:01all of my allocation of time and energy
00:51:03precisely reflects my value prioritization set.
00:51:07You know, the perfect layering of the layer cake of my life
00:51:11looks just like my values at all times.
00:51:13I've never had that moment.
00:51:14So we talk about, you know, not balance
00:51:20as much as just the dashboard
00:51:22of what is your current portfolio?
00:51:23What's the mix of your life?
00:51:25So balance is a resource allocation question.
00:51:28And so, you know, so you have to decide
00:51:33what your priorities are gonna be.
00:51:35One of my examples is one of my older sisters
00:51:38ran a graduate school in education
00:51:42at a small private college.
00:51:44And she'd been doing a PhDs job for 15 years
00:51:46and finally decided it was time to get the PhD
00:51:49and actually be the person she was supposed to be.
00:51:51So she's working full-time running a graduate school
00:51:53while going full-time to school getting a PhD.
00:51:56And she called her friends and said,
00:51:57"I'm a little overbooked.
00:51:58"I've calculated I have six unscheduled hours
00:52:00"in the next five years."
00:52:03A very little, true story.
00:52:04"I have very little time to talk to anybody.
00:52:06"You're not making the cut."
00:52:07I didn't make the cut.
00:52:09And that was a radically imbalanced lifestyle
00:52:13and it was exactly the right coherent thing for her to do.
00:52:15- Highly coherent.
00:52:16- Highly coherent.
00:52:17So balance is lovely.
00:52:20And if a coherent life and circumstances permit it, great.
00:52:25But what you really wanna be is alive
00:52:27and accepting the compromises that come with it.
00:52:30- Flow, what about flow?
00:52:34- So flow.
00:52:36So first of all, we are introducing the concept
00:52:38of the flow world along with the flow state.
00:52:40So we all know the flow state from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
00:52:43the positive psychologist who invented the term flow,
00:52:46the psychology of optimal experience,
00:52:48published back in 90 something.
00:52:49And that's lovely as an idea in the zone, what have you.
00:52:54Most people know what flow is
00:52:55and have had moments of experiencing it.
00:52:57And so one of the first things we come up with is,
00:53:00okay, so that's the flow state,
00:53:02the experience of being fully engaged in the moment
00:53:05where time stands still and I feel fully present
00:53:07and all that stuff, which is great.
00:53:09Where does that happen?
00:53:11So first of all, we're saying it happens
00:53:13in this place called the flow world.
00:53:14So flow occurs when I'm fully in the present moment.
00:53:18And that's really where the flow world is existing.
00:53:19So let's go where flow can be found.
00:53:22Then once we pause at the flow world,
00:53:24is the place where you might enter the flow state.
00:53:27And then on the flow state that we originally defined,
00:53:30there's this thing called the flow channel,
00:53:33which is where the task at hand and my skillset are close.
00:53:37So my capacity and what the task demands of me
00:53:42are really close.
00:53:43So I'm neither over-skilled and then I get bored,
00:53:46or I'm neither under-skilled and then I get anxious.
00:53:48- Is this sort of proximate zone of development type stuff?
00:53:51- Yeah, I'm right at my skill level.
00:53:53So the situation is demanding the most of me.
00:53:55So, and what we notice about, then that's fine.
00:53:58We call that apex flow, which is where, you know,
00:54:00I'm really right on the ragged edge of my capability.
00:54:02And the reason I can drop into flow
00:54:04in that situation is the circumstance, the task.
00:54:09- I need to wrangle all of my capacity.
00:54:11- It takes all of me.
00:54:12So literally the way I put that is,
00:54:14I have now delegated responsibility
00:54:17for my degree of engagement in life
00:54:19to the quality of the task.
00:54:21I need to find some tasks that will so demand of me
00:54:24my attention that I finally become fully present.
00:54:28- Yep, yep.
00:54:28- Which means it's the tasks job for me to be present,
00:54:31not my job.
00:54:32- It's the flow equivalent
00:54:33of putting your meaning and impact.
00:54:35- Bingo.
00:54:35So what I really want to learn how to do,
00:54:37we call it simple flow,
00:54:38is I can choose to be fully attentive.
00:54:41I got to chop these damn onions to make the soup.
00:54:43And then what I really get onto is the dinner
00:54:45when the people come over at seven o'clock.
00:54:47So it's 5.30 now, I got to get the soup going, you know,
00:54:49multitask, put on a Chris Williamson, you know,
00:54:52YouTube while I'm listening,
00:54:54do four things to make the most of it.
00:54:55I'm supposed to like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:54:58Let's go all the way in on the onion chopping.
00:54:59- Oh, I thought you meant forget the onions
00:55:01when you just watched the Chris Williams.
00:55:03- Well, that would be a higher level flow,
00:55:05but you know, I got to get the onions done, I'm so sorry.
00:55:07So if I can fall all the way in,
00:55:10like, look, it's going to be 10 minutes.
00:55:12You know, I'm going to do this in a nice Zen kind of way.
00:55:14I'm going to really appreciate the knife.
00:55:15I'm going to actually feel the experience.
00:55:17I can choose to go all in,
00:55:22even if my skillset far exceeds it,
00:55:23I can just choose to be fully present to what I'm doing.
00:55:26And that allows me to have this fully engaged,
00:55:28calmly detached experience, which is more alive.
00:55:32I can even try something that's hard for me.
00:55:33And if I really can accept that I might make a mistake
00:55:35and that's okay, then the anxiety can be dropped.
00:55:38Anxiety is still an elective pain.
00:55:41So I can drop the anxiety or I can drop the boredom
00:55:44by having the mental discipline
00:55:46of choosing my way into the moment.
00:55:47Now suddenly the flow channel quadruples in size.
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00:57:05So that's lovely.
00:57:07I think the first thing it makes me think of
00:57:11is whether or not multitasking and the,
00:57:15yeah, the I am going to listen to a podcast
00:57:19at one and a half time speed while I get my walk in,
00:57:22while I check my notes for the upcoming email I've got to do.
00:57:26Is that a particularly kryptonite additive
00:57:33to try and put into achieving flow?
00:57:37Is that going to contribute to the degradation of flow
00:57:40across the world?
00:57:41I think so.
00:57:43In short, I'm not saying never do it.
00:57:45And we do know the truth is neither humans nor computers
00:57:48actually multitask.
00:57:50We task switch.
00:57:51- Yeah, what people think they mean is parallel processing.
00:57:53What they're actually doing is--
00:57:54- Yeah, switching.
00:57:56So getting good at task switching quickly
00:57:58is a performance optimization capability.
00:58:02And in the high productivity world,
00:58:05that's not a bad skill to have.
00:58:07And I get the feedback loop of I got more done
00:58:09or I got more for my time or I got paid higher
00:58:11or my PowerPoints were cooler than yours, whatever it is.
00:58:14- Or I got done what I needed to get done more quickly
00:58:18so that I can--
00:58:18- I bought some time back, yeah.
00:58:20But again, if I only do that.
00:58:24- In perpetuity.
00:58:25- The flow requires full participation.
00:58:28The reason time stands still and becomes eternal,
00:58:31time elongates and disappears all at once
00:58:34because I'm so fully present to it
00:58:36is this full availability and full concentration.
00:58:39When I'm switching constantly,
00:58:40I'm never going to have that full presence.
00:58:42So I do think multitasking, what we call multitasking
00:58:45and flow are simply different states.
00:58:48Now you might, somebody might argue,
00:58:50I can flow by how well I'm multitasking.
00:58:53- Yep, yep.
00:58:54- I'm not sure that's actual flow.
00:58:56I think what it is, it's gratifying
00:58:57that I'm being high performance.
00:58:59That's okay.
00:59:00But if it's the only game you're playing,
00:59:02then you've left flow behind.
00:59:04- Yeah, I think--
00:59:06- What do you think?
00:59:06I mean, you're a multitasker.
00:59:07- That's true, chronically.
00:59:10The meta thinking thing, I'm very rarely in flow
00:59:15when I'm thinking about the thinking.
00:59:17You have to when you're juggling a bunch of different balls
00:59:20at the same time.
00:59:21Now, I was trying to think of an example
00:59:24why this wouldn't be true.
00:59:26I used to run nightclubs, used to be stood
00:59:28on the front door of a nightclub for a very, very long time.
00:59:30And in that, it's kind of multivariate.
00:59:32I'm usually getting my phone out, messaging the guy,
00:59:34okay, where are the flyers out there doing that thing?
00:59:37Then the queue's starting to build out,
00:59:39so we actually need to push that back in
00:59:40so you can't let the queue get too wide
00:59:41'cause then it becomes unruly.
00:59:42And then it's the doors, oh, the till's out of change,
00:59:44so I need to get the person to do the till thing.
00:59:46So that is a kind of multitasking,
00:59:48but it's still relatively linear.
00:59:51It's sort of moving in the same direction.
00:59:54The phone is about the thing.
00:59:55The till is about the thing.
00:59:56The queue's about the thing.
00:59:57I can hear the music coming from inside.
00:59:59What's the DJ doing?
01:00:00And that is quite a nice dance.
01:00:03It's a very wide, it's sort of very peripheral
01:00:06sort of when it comes to what I'm taking in.
01:00:08But if I was to think about kind of the opposite,
01:00:10it would be preparing for a podcast
01:00:12while I've got Slack open,
01:00:14and I'm also thinking about something else as well.
01:00:16Like that, it's too disparate.
01:00:18Adam Lane Smith, my friend, the attachment expert,
01:00:20has got this wonderful idea, and he says,
01:00:22"Your life doesn't need to be easier.
01:00:25"It needs to be simpler.
01:00:26"That humans are built to handle intensity,
01:00:28"but not complexity."
01:00:30And I found that to be completely true.
01:00:32There is not really an intensity of work
01:00:36that makes me feel overwhelmed.
01:00:36- Intensity and not complication.
01:00:38- Correct, yes. - Maybe complex,
01:00:39but not complication. - Yes, sorry, yes.
01:00:39No, no, that's exactly the terminology he uses as well.
01:00:41He uses complicated.
01:00:43- Complicated. - Yes, correct.
01:00:45There is not an intensity of work
01:00:47that has really ever crushed me in terms of it's overwhelm,
01:00:49but there is a level of complication that has crushed me
01:00:52at a relatively low dose.
01:00:54- Yeah, so your front of the room guy
01:00:57is technically multitasking,
01:01:00but multitasking like all the colors on the palette
01:01:02when I'm painting, as opposed to like I'm painting
01:01:05and jogging and-- - Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
01:01:07- I was just having a conversation with my friend, Steve.
01:01:10So Steve ran one of the largest
01:01:12and most successful high-end catering programs,
01:01:15catering companies in Southern California,
01:01:18caters to presidents, does Beyonce's birthday party,
01:01:21you know, the $1,000 plate guy.
01:01:23And he's completely reinvented his life
01:01:24and come up to live in the Redwood Forest in Bondi Doon
01:01:26up near Santa Cruz, where I am.
01:01:28And we're talking about this stuff.
01:01:30And at one point he drops, he says,
01:01:32"Look, you gotta understand, I'm a really good waiter.
01:01:36I'm an incredibly good waiter as a host."
01:01:39He says, "I can stand in that room,
01:01:41and instantly, I'm looking at my seven tables,
01:01:44and I know they need water.
01:01:47They're having a conversation that's going south.
01:01:49I could put some soothe on there."
01:01:51You know, that guy's hungry.
01:01:53I mean, literally, he just knows everything
01:01:55that has to be done across the room,
01:01:56and then he can move effortlessly.
01:01:58He's hardly even aware of how his body
01:02:00is routing to the right table and do the right thing,
01:02:02'cause he's a different person
01:02:04at each one of those seven tables.
01:02:06So that's a multitasking down on your front of the room.
01:02:09But it's all in this cohesive context
01:02:14where what's really happening
01:02:15is you're actually becoming pretty selfless.
01:02:17It's a very high level of a multifaceted competency,
01:02:22but it's still one cohesive thing that allows flow to occur.
01:02:28So when he's doing that,
01:02:29and I think when you're doing that, it is flow.
01:02:31- Yeah, high complexity, high intensity, low complication.
01:02:34- Low complication, therefore high cohesion, one fabric.
01:02:37- Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's lovely.
01:02:39- It's all in the same fabric.
01:02:39- That's a nice conception.
01:02:40Okay, what design choices make flow more likely
01:02:44in daily life?
01:02:45- Pay attention.
01:02:48I mean, just paying attention.
01:02:52So we talk about mindset a lot.
01:02:54So the design choice of choosing
01:02:58into the way I'm going to be in a particular situation.
01:03:02So if I'm in that staff meeting
01:03:04and I'm only thinking about the next thing,
01:03:07then I've designed my mindset
01:03:08to never be present at the present moment.
01:03:10So the critical design choice is how do I live in this day?
01:03:15How do I live in this moment?
01:03:17My partner Bill has a morning practice.
01:03:20Despite being an atheist, he has spiritual practices.
01:03:23One of them, he says two things to himself out loud
01:03:26every single day while shaving.
01:03:28And he says, it's very important that they're out loud.
01:03:30I don't shave every day, so I can't do it.
01:03:31- It's a good justification to shave every day.
01:03:33- There you go.
01:03:34One is I live in the best of all possible worlds.
01:03:37Now, as an existential atheist, he says,
01:03:40look, I can also say I live in the world.
01:03:42I live in the worst world.
01:03:44I live in the only world I notice.
01:03:45But actually it turns out because bias matters,
01:03:48I want to bias things in my favor.
01:03:49If I live in the best of all possible worlds,
01:03:51my chance of catching good things goes way up
01:03:53because I've pre-biased my attention to positive outcomes.
01:03:56Thing one.
01:03:57Thing two, everything I do today, I choose to do.
01:04:00So I announced my agency to myself.
01:04:02Why am I going to the staff meeting?
01:04:03Oh, 'cause I scheduled it.
01:04:04You know, why am I going to the DMV?
01:04:06Because I chose not to file on time
01:04:08and so now I'm doing this thing.
01:04:09So I just own my life.
01:04:11So those two-- - It's me, it's me,
01:04:12it's me, it's me.
01:04:13- Yeah, I own it, I own it, I own it.
01:04:15You know, so outing the victim.
01:04:18So that's mindset choice.
01:04:19So the most important, I think the most important aspect
01:04:22of designing a life that includes these flow experiences
01:04:25is choosing the mindset of the way you live,
01:04:28which is a practice you do every day.
01:04:31- Both me and my housemate have one day
01:04:34where we stack all of our calls.
01:04:35Mine's a Wednesday, his is a Thursday.
01:04:37And-- - We kind of get it done day.
01:04:40- Yeah, exactly.
01:04:40And you sort of stare at it and you go,
01:04:43okay, today is not going to be deep work,
01:04:45but it's going to be necessary work.
01:04:47And that's fine.
01:04:47And that is a kind of cohesion all of its own, right?
01:04:51- Somebody's got to pick up the lecture.
01:04:53- I call mine Big Wednesday.
01:04:54He used to call his Bullshit Thursday.
01:04:58He realized two weeks ago, I've labeled it on my calendar,
01:05:03it says Bullshit Day.
01:05:05Every single week, this thing comes around.
01:05:07And he said, stupid.
01:05:10Two weeks ago, called it Ubermensch Day.
01:05:12Day was immediately turned inside out.
01:05:14He's like, this is, I'm crushing it.
01:05:15I've got to get this stuff done.
01:05:16I don't really want to, and I'm doing it.
01:05:18He's like, just one reframe like that.
01:05:21And I thought it was so cute.
01:05:22So if you have a series of tasks,
01:05:25you and your partner need to do, for some reason,
01:05:29the trash in your apartment block is forever away
01:05:32from where you're doing it.
01:05:34Just, we're going on a mission.
01:05:35It's the trash mission.
01:05:36We're doing the trash mission together,
01:05:38as opposed to got to take the bloody trash out again,
01:05:41or whatever it might be.
01:05:41- So I will argue that this is a mindset issue.
01:05:44So, you know, there are three big chunks to our book.
01:05:46There's the front end about,
01:05:47hey, think about meaning a different way.
01:05:49Here's a couple of reframes
01:05:50that might change the game for you.
01:05:51Then, oh, by the way,
01:05:52the way you walk through the world matters.
01:05:55We call that mindset.
01:05:56So it's called think like a designer,
01:05:57the designer's way, five mindsets.
01:05:59And then these four areas we just discussed.
01:06:01And then the mindset thing, there are five mindsets,
01:06:05but the two for killer of the mindsets
01:06:08are radical acceptance and availability.
01:06:12So radical acceptance is about, look,
01:06:15and the only place design works,
01:06:17in fact, I would argue the only place anything works
01:06:19is reality.
01:06:20So, you know, must be present to win.
01:06:22So, oh, I should have done this instead.
01:06:26You're back in your head, not reality.
01:06:28Like, no, you're here.
01:06:30So if you start with radically accepting
01:06:33that things are the way they are,
01:06:34and your opportunity is to make the most of the situation
01:06:37that happens to actually be.
01:06:39And so that's, okay, I accept it is the way it is.
01:06:43You know, there was an ice storm
01:06:45and maybe I wasn't gonna get to be here today.
01:06:47You know, the power might go out again.
01:06:48You know, it's just true.
01:06:49It's not good or bad, it's just true.
01:06:52So then availability says,
01:06:54not only am I willing to accept the way things are,
01:06:57but I'm gonna lean into it, like,
01:06:58and what might be here for me?
01:07:00I wonder what wonderfulness is latently lurking
01:07:02that I might discover.
01:07:04So to go from Bullshit Thursday to Ubermensch Thursday.
01:07:09See, Bullshit Thursday, I think,
01:07:11deserved to be labeled that
01:07:12because I really didn't think it deserved to exist.
01:07:16I am unhappy with the fact
01:07:17that I have to spend time doing this crap.
01:07:19So this crap is like an evil force in my life
01:07:22and it doesn't deserve to be there.
01:07:23And that's just not true.
01:07:25I mean, the trash has to get taken out.
01:07:27The dog poop has to get picked up.
01:07:29You know, the baby's butt's gotta get wiped.
01:07:31I mean, you know, the taxes have to be paid.
01:07:32It's just true.
01:07:35So if I accept that and then say,
01:07:37oh, and I'm responsible for attending to that
01:07:39in as efficient a way as I possibly can,
01:07:41now it's actually okay.
01:07:44So when your roommate accepts Thursdays
01:07:48and then even says,
01:07:49and I'm gonna be available to noticing
01:07:51that I can do that really well.
01:07:52And after I've done that,
01:07:53while pat myself on the back for being an Ubermensch,
01:07:55I changed my experience of my life.
01:07:57Your mindset really matters.
01:07:59- Give me the other elements of mindset.
01:08:01- We actually double down on one.
01:08:05So having a wondrous mindset,
01:08:06a high availability to wonder at all times.
01:08:08So wonder, radical acceptance, availability,
01:08:12as I've just described.
01:08:13The next one is fully engaged, calmly detached.
01:08:18And the last one is create your world,
01:08:19which really means create your story.
01:08:20So fully engaged, calmly detached is all about,
01:08:25again, it's a flow orientation.
01:08:28They would say, you know,
01:08:30I wanna be entirely present to what I'm doing.
01:08:33I wanna both bring the best I can to it.
01:08:35And I wanna have the most alive making experience
01:08:39of what I'm doing by being fully engaged.
01:08:41However, I'm also gonna recognize
01:08:44that while I'm fully engaged, I don't control outcomes.
01:08:47So as soon as I get fully engaged or really care,
01:08:50I really want it to work.
01:08:51And now suddenly I get expectations
01:08:52and I'm getting all wrapped up and I'm getting anxious.
01:08:55So what I wanna be,
01:08:55which I think is a very aspirational place,
01:08:58I wanna be fully engaged.
01:08:59I wanna care really deeply and bring my best self
01:09:02and recognize that I have very little control
01:09:04over whether or not the outcome works.
01:09:06And so I can be both those things at the same time.
01:09:09So which is really freeing, by the way,
01:09:11if I can detach from the outcome
01:09:13while being fully engaged in the participation.
01:09:16The big distinction in the mindset
01:09:18between the transactionalist and the flowist,
01:09:20the flow oriented person,
01:09:22is the transactionalist is all about outcomes.
01:09:25They're primarily the agent of an outcome.
01:09:29And the flow person is a participant.
01:09:31Now that participant may be participating
01:09:34in a way that hopefully it creates an outcome,
01:09:36but my energy isn't worrying about that future outcome.
01:09:39My energy is in participating fully in this moment,
01:09:42which is by the way, the single best way
01:09:44to improve the probability of the outcome.
01:09:46So getting really good at this present moment thing
01:09:49has huge side effects that work both ways.
01:09:52You're not giving up transaction success
01:09:55by becoming more flow oriented.
01:09:56What you're giving up is wasting energy
01:09:58that's not contributing.
01:09:59- Yeah, I think one of the areas I really wanna get into
01:10:02is the mistakes that high achievers make
01:10:05when it comes to tying meaning to outcomes
01:10:08and the sort of endless rabbit holes of pursuit and progress.
01:10:14What are the big mistakes that you see
01:10:16hard charging high achievers making in your world?
01:10:19- Well, the first one is that we correlate
01:10:22our decision-making with the outcome.
01:10:25So, you know, okay, try it this way.
01:10:27You work hard on something you really care about
01:10:31and it doesn't work out.
01:10:32Shoot, what's the first question most people ask themselves
01:10:36as soon as something doesn't work out?
01:10:39- What did I do wrong?
01:10:40- Bingo.
01:10:40And by the way, questions matter.
01:10:44In particular, the questions you empower
01:10:45to judge or direct your life,
01:10:47be very careful because all questions have belief systems.
01:10:52If it turns out the life directing question
01:10:54you're currently suffering
01:10:56has a belief system you don't agree with, you're in trouble.
01:11:00So if the first thing I think after something goes awry
01:11:04is what did I do wrong?
01:11:06There are two assumptions built into that question,
01:11:07both of which I think are dead wrong and are very dangerous.
01:11:10So if the first question after a mistake or a failure
01:11:13is what did I do wrong,
01:11:15what does that question already believe is true?
01:11:17- You could have done something differently
01:11:19and you are wrong.
01:11:21- Bingo.
01:11:22It does believe that if I'd done everything right,
01:11:23it would have worked.
01:11:25And that the thing that didn't get done right,
01:11:28which would have caused it to work was mine.
01:11:30Which are both frankly, incredibly egotistical things.
01:11:34I mean, it's not true if you do it all right,
01:11:36that it'll work and it's not necessarily your mistake.
01:11:39So a better question than what did I do wrong,
01:11:43which goes right to and if I'd done it right,
01:11:44it would have worked, which is wrong, it's false.
01:11:47What's a better first question?
01:11:49After a mistake, after a failure.
01:11:51- Why did this happen?
01:11:53- Just what happened?
01:11:54Let's just start with back to reality.
01:11:57Radical acceptance, what happened?
01:12:00Now, if it turns out that analysis says,
01:12:01"Oh yeah, in retrospect, I did, I mailed it in.
01:12:04"I didn't do the prep properly.
01:12:05"I didn't call ahead.
01:12:06"I didn't get the information."
01:12:09Spend a little time whatsoever talking to people
01:12:10about what they think about Christopher Williamson.
01:12:12I show up here, I'm unprepared and I shanked it.
01:12:15Shame on me, okay.
01:12:17But that's almost never the case.
01:12:19When I've debriefed the, "Oh, what did I do wrong?"
01:12:22With people over and over again,
01:12:24or it seemed like a good idea at the time,
01:12:26but apparently it wasn't.
01:12:27It turns out your prior self did the best they could.
01:12:30You're just not responsible for the future.
01:12:32So back to your originating question,
01:12:34what do high performers do?
01:12:37High performers believe in,
01:12:40they can cause outcomes every single time.
01:12:44- Does this not-- - And they get stuck with it.
01:12:46- Is this not a byproduct of radical responsibility,
01:12:50high agency? - Sure.
01:12:52- Right, because these are very difficult to blend together.
01:12:54- Oh no, it's a slippery slope.
01:12:56- I want to own the world.
01:12:58I want to believe that I can make anything happen.
01:13:00I want to believe that I can make things happen
01:13:02that I don't even believe that I can make things happen.
01:13:04- And when you lean into that with a high degree
01:13:06of authenticity and agency and commitment, stuff happens.
01:13:09There is no question that
01:13:11the choice to believe you can has an impact.
01:13:16- And this is a pattern that people have been rewarded
01:13:21for professionally that often hurts them personally.
01:13:24And if you're trying to work out, okay,
01:13:27so Dave says I should be more kind of rational
01:13:32about what happened, whatever that means,
01:13:36whatever rationally looking at me means,
01:13:38which is essentially impossible for me to do in any case.
01:13:40I'll try my best.
01:13:41But then that kind of feels a little bit disempowering
01:13:45in some ways because how do I not allow the temptation
01:13:49of the victimhood narrative to just sneak in here?
01:13:53And this doesn't sound particularly embodied
01:13:54because it's the most top-down of top-downs,
01:13:57the sterile equation look.
01:14:00- Right.
01:14:01- Untie this Gordian knot for me.
01:14:08- It's a big question, it's a very big question.
01:14:10- Okay.
01:14:11I think what we're talking about
01:14:14is taking full responsibility for our finitude
01:14:17all along the way.
01:14:20You're finite and you're growing.
01:14:25I mean, you're getting better at christening
01:14:27than you used to be, which means by the way,
01:14:29if I'm gonna get better, I was worse.
01:14:32People ask me all the time, I'm out backpacking
01:14:35with these four guys I've been taking backpacking
01:14:37since for 20 years.
01:14:39They were all 50 now with kids and too busy.
01:14:42But I was the old guy that took them out 20 years
01:14:44my junior and we're all sitting around naked
01:14:45jumping into an alpine lake at 10,000 feet.
01:14:47And Rich says, "So Dave, you're the old guy.
01:14:49Do you have any regrets?
01:14:52Is there anything you do differently?"
01:14:54I said, "Well, those are two radically different questions.
01:14:57I have no regrets and I would do everything differently."
01:14:59And he goes, "Whoa, reconcile that for me."
01:15:02I said, "Regret means that I choose to not accept my life."
01:15:05And my policy is, I don't not accept my life,
01:15:07I accept my life.
01:15:09And of course I would do it differently
01:15:10because I'm supposed to be smarter now.
01:15:12I mean, if there's almost anything that I would look
01:15:14in my past back on and not say, if I had to do over,
01:15:17I would do it differently.
01:15:18That means I'm just not paying freaking attention.
01:15:20- Yeah, that's like saying I would not have picked
01:15:22different lottery numbers last week,
01:15:25knowing what I know now.
01:15:26- So back to this trade off.
01:15:27Because yeah, if I do further optimize this one thing,
01:15:33particularly in career and capability and performance,
01:15:35you know, I might get more, but at what expense?
01:15:38So I really do have to decide
01:15:41how to allocate this finite resource,
01:15:46this growingly more capable over time,
01:15:48but still always finite resource called myself.
01:15:51- Decliningly available, right?
01:15:52- Decliningly available across what different aspects
01:15:55of being a human person, you know?
01:15:56And do I believe I'm supposed to make myself, you know,
01:16:00unhappy and suffering the whole way along?
01:16:02Or is some joy en route okay?
01:16:06You know, there's an old line,
01:16:08it's heaven all the way to heaven
01:16:09and hell all the way to hell.
01:16:10Which path am I on?
01:16:11- Oh, that's lovely.
01:16:12- So there's a real wake up moment that I hit this.
01:16:16So in my thirties, again, being a dad
01:16:19was terribly important because I didn't have one.
01:16:21I lost my dad at nine, turns out to suicide.
01:16:23And then I sort of fall into high tech.
01:16:27That's a long story.
01:16:28And I fall into startups and that's a long story.
01:16:29And I didn't ever think I wanted to be doing that.
01:16:31I sort of fell into it and I didn't know I was a workaholic.
01:16:35It turns out that I am.
01:16:36And I'm working, you know, 70, 80 hours a week,
01:16:39sleeping three or four hours a night.
01:16:40Been doing that for a couple of years.
01:16:41And I'm sitting in the family room with a cup of coffee
01:16:44on a Saturday morning.
01:16:45And my now 42 year old, then three year old son, Robbie,
01:16:49is in the kitchen and asks his mother,
01:16:52"Mom, can we play with dad today?
01:16:53"Or he's just gonna fall asleep in the chair again?"
01:16:56And my heart sank and I went, "Shit."
01:17:01I didn't have a dad 'cause he was dead.
01:17:03Robbie doesn't have a dad 'cause he's asleep.
01:17:06This is not okay.
01:17:09This is not okay.
01:17:11So I'm optimizing for the wrong thing.
01:17:13I'm killing it at work, but it's killing me.
01:17:15You know, and it took me six years to fix that by the way.
01:17:19And I finally did.
01:17:19- Did you learn how to decelerate?
01:17:21- Yeah, I mean, and it ended up,
01:17:23I had to do more radical change than I realized at the time.
01:17:26I was trying to make minor changes
01:17:27and keep it all going just fine at no cost to anyone.
01:17:30And that just flat failed.
01:17:32But the point being, you have to decide
01:17:37what you're gonna do with the allocation
01:17:38of the resource called you all along the way.
01:17:42And there are going to be trade-offs.
01:17:44- There are no solutions.
01:17:45- You could always do everything better.
01:17:50There's no best, there's no right, there's no done,
01:17:54there's no it, there's no max.
01:17:56There's just what you're choosing.
01:18:00It's your call.
01:18:04- There's a line from Van Gogh.
01:18:05He says, "If I'm worth anything later,
01:18:07"I'm worth something now for wheat is wheat,
01:18:09"even if people think it is grass in the beginning."
01:18:12I think that's so lovely.
01:18:14So lovely.
01:18:15- Yeah, I mean, Bill likes it.
01:18:17My partner likes to quote a Zen truism
01:18:19that if you can't find enlightenment here,
01:18:21where are you gonna find it?
01:18:22- Yeah, if you can't be happy with a coffee,
01:18:24you won't be happy on a yacht.
01:18:25So, okay. - Yeah.
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01:19:26- Another wing, another malignant tumor
01:19:30to this same thread that we're on.
01:19:34Lots of people become objectively successful
01:19:36and subjectively miserable.
01:19:37They have objectively done the thing.
01:19:39They have achieved success.
01:19:41Subjectively, it's not there.
01:19:43It doesn't feel like they're there.
01:19:45They know that they've done it,
01:19:47but it doesn't feel like they've touched it.
01:19:49What do you lay that at the feet of?
01:19:56(silence)
01:19:58I wonder if they lost their why on their way.
01:20:03Simon Sinek.
01:20:06Because if you got there and you look,
01:20:14and it's not just that it's temporary and now what,
01:20:16but you look back and it feels like dust in your mouth.
01:20:18Then were you winning for winning's sake?
01:20:26And that's not very gratifying.
01:20:31So somewhere along the way, why I care about this,
01:20:36the substance of it, the relationship of it,
01:20:39the culture creation of it, whatever.
01:20:41If I lost that, then when I get there,
01:20:44I literally won't even know what the heck I'm doing here.
01:20:49It's a very disorienting experience.
01:20:51- You talk about post-achievement depression
01:20:53being really common among elites, right?
01:20:55- Yeah.
01:20:56I think sometimes we have so committed to that achievement
01:21:01that we put all of ourselves into that performance
01:21:06and we lose the why.
01:21:08It's understandable, but it's heartbreaking.
01:21:16- Okay, people love to accomplish and achieve though.
01:21:20How do you think about striving while not missing your life?
01:21:25Going after it whilst actually being present
01:21:27at the same time?
01:21:28Because as far as I can see,
01:21:29striving and improving requires a degree
01:21:32of delayed gratification.
01:21:34It needs future planning,
01:21:36which by design takes you out of the moment.
01:21:39It's very difficult to be thinking
01:21:41about the big picture goals in flow,
01:21:43paying attention to the onions that I'm chopping right now.
01:21:47There has to be a good portion of time spent
01:21:50putting off what I want to do now,
01:21:52planning for the future, thinking about tasks,
01:21:54being hyper-vigilant.
01:21:56And this is the sort of perennial challenge
01:21:59of the personal growth that they want to achieve a lot,
01:22:03but not miss their life at the same time.
01:22:06And sometimes I think those two things do not,
01:22:10they are oil and water, not always,
01:22:12and maybe less than we might think they are,
01:22:14but there are sacrifices that need to be made
01:22:16in order to be able to get that.
01:22:17And many of them take you out of the present moment.
01:22:21- But they put you back into another one.
01:22:23- So let's say I'm talking about physical work at PRs,
01:22:26you know, and wanting to add five reps
01:22:28at this bench press weight, whatever it might be.
01:22:32So the time I'm spending optimizing
01:22:34my personal training plan with my trainer, right,
01:22:37that's thinking about the future
01:22:38and optimizing what the plan is going to be,
01:22:40that in and of itself is a skill, that's an activity.
01:22:43Oh, I'm doing this thing called,
01:22:45imagining the future and conceptualizing,
01:22:47you know, while I'm actually doing that.
01:22:49We all have the observer, right?
01:22:51There's Dave sitting here talking to Chris,
01:22:54and then there's Dave noticing what's going on in the room.
01:22:56We all have the, what's the observer observing?
01:22:59Is the observer observing me in this moment,
01:23:03or is the observer observing the likelihood
01:23:04of this getting to the outcome?
01:23:06So while I'm planning, I'm doing something.
01:23:11Planning is an activity.
01:23:12Am I enjoying the planning?
01:23:13While I'm making the sacrificial effort to say,
01:23:17no, I'm going to actually get up a half hour earlier,
01:23:19you know, because I'm going to go into the gym
01:23:20for 20 more minutes because I'm going to work on these reps.
01:23:24When I'm on the bench, and I'm now doing
01:23:28the second of more reps than I've ever done
01:23:30on that particular exercise before,
01:23:32am I enjoying the experience of what my body
01:23:36is showing me that I've not known before,
01:23:38or am I saying, God, three more, and then I hit it?
01:23:41So it's, I mean, even in any given moment,
01:23:46are you here or are you somewhere else?
01:23:51It's a framework.
01:23:52You can give yourself permission to,
01:23:54I've decided to do this new routine in the gym.
01:23:57Now go do it, for God's sake, and be fully present to it.
01:24:01- Is there a risk of people, especially the ones
01:24:07who resonate with the insecure overachiever,
01:24:10turning everything into a performance, including meaning?
01:24:14- Oh yeah, so there's a little section of the book
01:24:16called beware the practice to performance trap,
01:24:20or the practice to production trap.
01:24:22So everybody thinks mindfulness is great, as do I.
01:24:26I go talk to monks all the time.
01:24:28And your achieving brain can transactionalize anything.
01:24:34- That's why you have streaks on meditation apps.
01:24:39- I mean, so this morning, hey,
01:24:42I really killed it this morning.
01:24:44In fact, I think I'm getting my 20 minutes,
01:24:46I'm down to, I can get my 20 minute sit, down to 15.
01:24:49That part of your brain, which by the way
01:24:53is pretty stimulated these days, is ready to go.
01:24:57It loves being in charge.
01:24:59Like hey, just give me the wheel, give me the wheel,
01:25:01give me the wheel, you know, so you--
01:25:03- Pick me, pick me.
01:25:04- Pick me, yeah, that hand is always up.
01:25:06I'll re-describe this in a meaningful way.
01:25:08And that's not entirely wrong,
01:25:12but this is where if you start developing your,
01:25:15and by the way, the invitation at the end of the book is,
01:25:16now we've given you a bunch of ideas.
01:25:19It's not do them all, that's a new burden,
01:25:21that's cram more in.
01:25:22Start figuring out what your practice is for your way,
01:25:26your Chris way, that allows you to access more meaning
01:25:29in these other forms, so you have a slowly
01:25:31but surely richer life.
01:25:33And so once you make those decisions,
01:25:35you start giving yourself permission, you know,
01:25:39to actually, permission to be happy
01:25:41is what it boils down to at the end of the day.
01:25:43- We didn't talk about communities.
01:25:45- So community, big deal, you know.
01:25:47In fact, Bob and I, Bill and I just got to spend a morning
01:25:52with Bob Waldinger, the, you know.
01:25:54- He's great from the Harvard study.
01:25:55- Harvard study, yeah.
01:25:56- He's been on the show, he's great.
01:25:57- And a Zen man, a lovely guy.
01:25:58So we have some of the home running y'all set around agreeing
01:26:00with each other a lot, it was really a lot of fun.
01:26:03You know, and that study makes it very clear,
01:26:04community is everything.
01:26:06The reason there's a thing called formative community,
01:26:08it's a technical term that we invented, is in the book,
01:26:12is that through this DCI program,
01:26:16this Distinguished Career Institute program
01:26:17that I teach in at Stanford, I'm on my 10th cohort.
01:26:20These really thoughtful people, you know,
01:26:2435 to 45 of them a year, get thrown together in a room.
01:26:28And then in no time at all, say not only is the community
01:26:30the best part of the program,
01:26:31but I'm having relationships with these people
01:26:33like I've never had before in my life.
01:26:36And I debrief with them collectively and I'll go,
01:26:39"Justify your answer."
01:26:40I don't, I'm not buying it.
01:26:42I mean, these people formed corporate cultures
01:26:44and have huge professional networks.
01:26:46Most of them are married with happy families.
01:26:48And how many of you while you're here,
01:26:49you're getting calls constantly
01:26:50from these huge networks of relationships.
01:26:52Like, "Oh, we miss you, please come home."
01:26:53'Cause they're gone for a whole year at Stanford.
01:26:56And they go, "Oh yeah, it's a din."
01:26:58I kind of go, "And you're telling me
01:27:00"that some admissions officer on this program
01:27:02"throws you in a room with 35 yahoos you never met before
01:27:06"and suddenly they're the best friends you've ever had.
01:27:08"Uh-huh, justify your answer."
01:27:10And what that conversation has revealed
01:27:13is what I ended up naming as formative community.
01:27:16Which is, there are three reasons to gather.
01:27:18One is a social gathering, a social community,
01:27:21get together to have a good time.
01:27:23Which is lovely, you know, enjoy being people together.
01:27:26A collaborative community,
01:27:27let's get together and get something done.
01:27:29And getting something done together with another person,
01:27:31you know, is really wonderful.
01:27:34I mean, go to a startup, go have military experience.
01:27:36That's a profound experience of being a human being.
01:27:38But there's another kind of gathering
01:27:40which is, we call formative,
01:27:42not just get together to have a good time,
01:27:44get together to get something done,
01:27:46get together to become better together.
01:27:48So if a person is a becoming,
01:27:50is there a place in a conversation I can enter into
01:27:54where what we're doing here together is
01:27:56we are assisting one another in our becoming,
01:27:58which isn't getting a transaction done,
01:28:00it isn't solving a problem,
01:28:01it's allowing one another into the conversation
01:28:05that's growing into the next person I want to become.
01:28:08So that is a gathering of intent, not content.
01:28:11Most of the time we get together socially
01:28:14around the content of we all like theater,
01:28:16we all like jazz, you know.
01:28:17So there's this commonality of the content
01:28:20of what we're doing.
01:28:21We're getting together to go, you know,
01:28:23work on this food problem or start this company
01:28:25or whatever it might be.
01:28:26So there's the content of our collaboration.
01:28:29In a formative community,
01:28:30like well you're into climate change
01:28:32and I'm into Beanie Babies and she's into modern art.
01:28:36Oh, you can't help me 'cause you don't know my thing.
01:28:38No, no, no, I don't need you to know my thing.
01:28:41What I need is for you to be the person
01:28:43who's becoming their better selves.
01:28:45I want you to get more in alignment
01:28:47with who you're on the way to becoming.
01:28:49And when that occurs, your psyche, your soul,
01:28:52your consciousness resonates in a way
01:28:55that the content of what you're doing doesn't matter to me,
01:28:58but the intent does.
01:28:59And when I'm with other people who are moving toward
01:29:02that resonance with themselves, it's harmonic to my own.
01:29:06So you're talking about climate change
01:29:08and I'm having an idea about oil redistribution.
01:29:10You know, it turns out you being you enables me to be me.
01:29:15So that's what a formative community does
01:29:17and there's a certain kind of conversation they can have.
01:29:20And so we'll say it's almost impossible
01:29:23to hear yourself by yourself
01:29:24'cause we're fundamentally social animals.
01:29:26So if there is a place where I can be heard,
01:29:30then I might even tap into hearing my own story well enough
01:29:33that I can grow further into it.
01:29:35So a formative community
01:29:36is a particularly meaning-making experience
01:29:38because it moves me along that becoming pathway
01:29:41more regularly, more reliably,
01:29:43and if we're lucky, more quickly.
01:29:45- I think this is a important pushback
01:29:48against the solo, preneur, degenerate,
01:29:52sigma, lone wolf kind of atmosphere
01:29:55that's going on a lot at the moment.
01:29:56I understand why.
01:29:57I understand why it's seductive to go monk mode
01:29:59and recant reliance on anybody and everybody around you.
01:30:04As I've got older,
01:30:05it's just increasingly difficult
01:30:08to tap into that fuel source.
01:30:10Maybe I've just spent that particular thing.
01:30:12I basically extended working from home 10 years before COVID
01:30:15and five years after, electively.
01:30:17And when the pandemic came along, it was brilliant.
01:30:21It was just more of me, you know, put me in, coach.
01:30:24- But it's not a bad thing
01:30:27because again, back to, particularly in the first half
01:30:30of life, those early adult years,
01:30:31what's really going on is you're building an ego.
01:30:34The first person who really needs to believe
01:30:39that you're okay is you.
01:30:41So if my decision to rely entirely on myself
01:30:45is a stringent approach to saying,
01:30:50I need to get to a place of self-trust
01:30:53and it turns out I can't afford to let that leak off
01:30:57where it was really Anne, she really saved my butt.
01:31:00So, you know, but that should be temporary.
01:31:03I should get over it.
01:31:06And now I'm actually free to be part
01:31:08of something bigger than myself.
01:31:09- Yeah, agreed.
01:31:10Yeah, man-o-paws.
01:31:11I realized a good example.
01:31:14I did this live show.
01:31:15I did the first work in progress here in Austin last night.
01:31:18I'm about to go back on tour around Australia,
01:31:20New Zealand, and Bali for basically a full month.
01:31:22- Oh, that's gonna be rough.
01:31:24- Oh, it's horrible.
01:31:25- Somebody's gotta do it.
01:31:25- Yeah, I mean, I did strategically put the Bali show
01:31:29at the very end, so there's nothing to do after that.
01:31:32And I could go out there, get a local photographer
01:31:37at each of the different cities, have one tour manager
01:31:39to make sure that everything's set up and that would be it.
01:31:42But there's maybe six guys flying out with me,
01:31:46two from the UK, one or two from America.
01:31:50One is already in Australia.
01:31:52Actually, another one from the UK and two tour managers.
01:31:55Because what's the point?
01:31:57What is the point of going and doing a solo show?
01:31:59- Right, alone.
01:32:01- Alone, yeah.
01:32:02Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:32:03I mean, you're gonna have to do the onstage thing.
01:32:05I've got to sit and write the script on my own.
01:32:07And the sort of person I'm speaking to is me 10 years ago.
01:32:11If there is the opportunity for you
01:32:13to even just try and co-work with somebody else,
01:32:15to find someone that's on a similar sort of trajectory to you,
01:32:19I've found that I go faster and further.
01:32:22'Cause it was always that if you wanna go fast,
01:32:24go on your own.
01:32:25Or I'll go with somebody else.
01:32:26But I genuinely go quicker as well with someone
01:32:29because the fuel source you have of experiencing,
01:32:34of sharing experiences together with someone else
01:32:37is so enlivening in the moment
01:32:40that it just keeps pushing that motivation.
01:32:43That fuel tank just keeps on getting tapped.
01:32:45Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
01:32:46It keeps on getting pushed up.
01:32:48So, yeah.
01:32:49- And I am saying too, part of the us
01:32:51doesn't have to be people that are bleeding off your role
01:32:54in the goal pursuit that you're currently producing toward.
01:32:57So you can find a conversation to be in,
01:33:01which is around how's it going?
01:33:04How are you becoming?
01:33:05What's the next question you wanna be growing
01:33:07or learning your way into?
01:33:09It's not problem solving my goal pursuit.
01:33:11So I'm still gonna keep all that to myself.
01:33:13So if you wanna be selfish about the work, fine.
01:33:15That doesn't mean you have to live selfishly.
01:33:17- Yeah, very good.
01:33:18What are the signals that tell you
01:33:22it's time to redesign your life?
01:33:24What would be the things people notice out there
01:33:26in the ether, the little whispers in the back of their mind?
01:33:29- Yeah, you know,
01:33:30I talk to people all, particularly in career.
01:33:35I've often come away from the thousands of conversations
01:33:39I've had with people kind of going, you know,
01:33:40vary from, it's not so much,
01:33:41I've decided it's time for me to leave the work.
01:33:44It's that you start noticing the work has left you.
01:33:46Very often, I think the signals, the changes coming,
01:33:51actually kind of feels like an outside in.
01:33:54You know, you're going to the office and nothing happens.
01:33:57You know, you're in that thing that used to be enlivening
01:34:00and you go, oh, apparently it's not.
01:34:02You know, and it's almost like noticing yourself having,
01:34:05it's not the inside, now I've been thinking about it a lot
01:34:07and I think the time is up, I think I've maxed out here,
01:34:09I think I need to move on, as opposed to just like,
01:34:11you know, the soundtrack seems to have stopped
01:34:14and I think the movie might be over.
01:34:17So there's an awareness of your experience
01:34:18of something you're shifting.
01:34:20Bill, my partner talks about the time he was in the car,
01:34:23he knows exactly where he was on highway 280
01:34:25when he's driving into Apple and he suddenly realized,
01:34:28oh, I'm done.
01:34:29Now he spent another year setting up how to quit well,
01:34:33but you know, but the job left him right there.
01:34:36- I wonder how long before that he'd been turning up to work
01:34:39and just stuff didn't feel as bright as it used to.
01:34:43- Yeah, I don't know, I have to ask him.
01:34:44But the, I think sometimes these awarenesses can be sudden,
01:34:48sometimes they kind of grow up on you over time,
01:34:50but that boils down to, you know, the Socratic thing,
01:34:54you know, the unexamined life is not worth living.
01:34:57So if you have an unexamined life,
01:34:59then awareness of this might come slow.
01:35:02It'll have to be dramatic.
01:35:03- I think another challenge that people face is
01:35:05if you are a hard charging, high achiever person,
01:35:09you're probably very good at going shut up emotions
01:35:13and just continuing to push through, right where it is,
01:35:15including the emotion of boredom, of disquiet,
01:35:20of discomfort, low color, low engagement, lack of aliveness.
01:35:25That's just mere resistance.
01:35:29Allow me to move through it.
01:35:30And the more you've hypertrophy,
01:35:32the allow me to move through it muscle,
01:35:34the longer sometimes it can take, I think,
01:35:36for people to realize, oh, this is not a right fit for me.
01:35:41And you see, I've seen this in every industry I've been in.
01:35:45People who've outstayed their aliveness by decades
01:35:50because they either have this super hypertrophy,
01:35:54delayed gratification,
01:35:56but they're a world champion at the marshmallow test.
01:35:59- Yes.
01:35:59- Or they do not have the,
01:36:07they haven't done the self-reflection
01:36:09to actually be able to sort of feel it.
01:36:11- Yeah, I've long said most people's besetting sin
01:36:15is not some shadow, dark side, evil thing
01:36:18leaking its way out yet again.
01:36:19It's the over-functioning strength.
01:36:22There is absolutely, absolutely too much of a good thing.
01:36:25- That is so good.
01:36:26- I'm too helpful, I'm too efficient, I'm too committed.
01:36:29I'm not a stoic, but they had some good ideas.
01:36:34And when they see a moderation in all things,
01:36:36they don't sound like,
01:36:37well, the too little is crummy and the too much is,
01:36:40so let's go with the middle.
01:36:41What they're really saying is it's actually a thoughtful
01:36:45position that the recognition of a good thing
01:36:48over-experienced, over-indulged upon,
01:36:50not just, you know, sugar, but you know, productivity,
01:36:52you know, is not a good thing.
01:36:54It is not an ultimate, the human experience, you know,
01:36:58is a mixed, hopefully somewhat balanced thing
01:37:01that allows you enough capacity to both be present to
01:37:05and enjoying that which is actually occurring.
01:37:09Maxing out isn't actually better.
01:37:12But it is important to do for a while.
01:37:13I'm an advocate of obsession.
01:37:16I recently changed my entire opinion on obsession.
01:37:18It was something I had a little bit
01:37:21of a frosty relationship with.
01:37:23And I wrote an essay a couple of weeks ago
01:37:27that I think is about right.
01:37:28Basically that obsession is very fleeting.
01:37:30It doesn't last forever.
01:37:31It's this weird confluence of desire,
01:37:36life situation, environment, meaning, motivation,
01:37:41skill set, a whole bunch of different things.
01:37:44But it's very temporary.
01:37:45And what I've come to believe is that a lot of
01:37:47what looks like discipline to us now in other people
01:37:50is simply the cooled aftermath of a past obsession.
01:37:55So I started going to the gym when I was 18
01:37:58because I was obsessed with it and I couldn't stop
01:38:00reading bodybuilding forums and drinking protein shakes
01:38:03and researching this and I'm gonna get strong
01:38:05and then I'm gonna get girls or whatever.
01:38:07And two decades later, I still train,
01:38:09but I'm not using either discipline or motivation.
01:38:11It's this weird like neutron star
01:38:15that's cooled from a past obsession.
01:38:18And I think people that are serial obsessives
01:38:19in that sort of a way.
01:38:20So that is a good justification
01:38:24for going a little bit extreme,
01:38:25for allowing this thing to consume yourself.
01:38:28This, at least as far as I can see,
01:38:30was strongest when I was 18 in my 20s.
01:38:34And now the obsession has at least a little bit more,
01:38:37I can sort of poke my nose and my mouth
01:38:40sort of above the waterline
01:38:41and have a little bit of a look around,
01:38:42whereas before I was just completely underneath the swell.
01:38:44And that, I'm gonna guess, will continue over time.
01:38:47And that feels like a nice trajectory to me.
01:38:49And the other reason that I like it
01:38:50and the reason that I kind of wrote it,
01:38:53this idea that if you ask rich or successful or happy people,
01:38:58what do you do?
01:38:58Tell me about your day.
01:39:00You're asking somebody who's got survivorship bias
01:39:02and is a black belt and you're a blue belt.
01:39:05You should be modeling the rise, not the result.
01:39:09So model the rise, not the result is the lesson.
01:39:12What did you do when you were at my stage
01:39:15and what would you do knowing that that was your frame?
01:39:18Even for super smart and balanced people
01:39:20that have reflected about it a lot,
01:39:22they still go, "Well, the most important thing's family."
01:39:24It's like, fuck you, dude.
01:39:25Look at what you did when you were 25.
01:39:27You took a flame thrower to the candle.
01:39:29Okay, what would you do?
01:39:31I would do the same thing.
01:39:33I'd just make sure I slept six hours a night
01:39:35'cause I slept four hours a night
01:39:36and that really damaged my health
01:39:37and that put me back by a little while
01:39:38and now I've got to do fucking atherosclerosis
01:39:40or whatever the fuck it is.
01:39:42So, okay, that's cool, that's interesting.
01:39:44- Let me jump in on your obsession piece
01:39:46and reframe it a little bit.
01:39:49I could suggest that we could categorize that
01:39:51as a particular invitation to celebrate
01:39:53the scandal of particularity.
01:39:55- Yes, that's nice.
01:39:56- What I mean by that is, oh, this thing called,
01:39:59I suddenly notice I am obsessed with X, Y, Z, whatever,
01:40:03which means I'm infatuated.
01:40:05So I'm actually having an infatuated experience,
01:40:07which is temporary.
01:40:08Infatuation's a lovely thing.
01:40:09I just got to go through it again, like what a deal.
01:40:12And let's make the most of it.
01:40:15So I'm gonna go all in.
01:40:17This is back to my balance thing.
01:40:19The most alive way I could live right now
01:40:20is to be incredibly out of balance
01:40:22by going bat nuts about workout or whatever it might be.
01:40:27And in fact, I'm gonna so clearly identify
01:40:31that I am now almost abdicating to my obsession
01:40:35that I'll be able to pull myself back from it.
01:40:37This is not the new norm.
01:40:38This is like, you know, hey, make hay with the sunshine.
01:40:41- It's the honeymoon phase for your new task.
01:40:44- For your experience, yeah.
01:40:45- Yeah, that's so great. - Absolutely.
01:40:46And that arises now and then, which is a particular,
01:40:49'cause again, one of the most important particularities,
01:40:52the not completely realized ultimates, is you.
01:40:56You are a particularity.
01:40:58Your own life is, each day is.
01:41:00And so, when suddenly an opportunity to be obsessed
01:41:04comes by, ooh, those don't happen every day.
01:41:07Now, I'm not saying take every one
01:41:09and don't let it throw you to the ground,
01:41:11but have a stoic relationship with obsession.
01:41:14- Well, most people don't get an obsession
01:41:16that's worth anything.
01:41:18You think about how many people get obsessed with politics
01:41:20or porn or their ex.
01:41:22You know, that, if you have the opportunity to do--
01:41:26- With a life-giving obsession.
01:41:27- Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
01:41:28Yeah, yeah, this is energy inflow and energy outflow.
01:41:31Yeah, it's a generative obsession.
01:41:33That's a good way to put it.
01:41:34And I think, God, if you have that,
01:41:37people got their entire lives.
01:41:39Some people got their entire lives
01:41:40without ever being obsessed with anything
01:41:42that's worth being obsessed by.
01:41:44That's not going to make their lives better.
01:41:46And this is only going to last for a short period of time.
01:41:48Another interesting point on your people don't let go,
01:41:53the anorexic hermit crab thing, for that particular goal,
01:41:56working at Apple or EA or whatever it might be.
01:41:58Kind of like if you're in a relationship
01:42:03and you know that this has run its course,
01:42:06every minute you spend in that relationship
01:42:07is a minute that you're not in the right relationship.
01:42:10The same thing is true with your obsessions.
01:42:12You're not going to have room for a new obsession
01:42:15if you're trying to hold on to the dwindling fire
01:42:18of the last one.
01:42:19Allow it to cool, allow it to become what it was.
01:42:21Maybe it's no longer even going to be a part of your life.
01:42:23There were certain things that I did in my 20s
01:42:25that are no longer even a part of my life
01:42:26that were obsessions.
01:42:27There's many things that have cooled
01:42:28into a more balanced version of it.
01:42:31- Yeah, the grief here after my wife died.
01:42:33I mean, so I leaned way into that.
01:42:36And it was incredibly generative.
01:42:38And people kept saying, you know,
01:42:40the first year's the hardest.
01:42:41And I'm kind of going like, really?
01:42:42On the 366th day it's going to be easier?
01:42:45I mean, yeah, that's the second time it's May 8th
01:42:48and she's been dead.
01:42:50I'm not sure that's all that transformed it.
01:42:52But as it turned out, and I think largely
01:42:54because I really did lean all the way in.
01:42:56I became obsessed with grieving well.
01:42:58And I was really good at it.
01:43:00I killed it.
01:43:03(laughing)
01:43:05Sorry.
01:43:06But at the end, as the year came along,
01:43:09I really did have this, oh, it's not over, but something.
01:43:14I literally was sitting quietly
01:43:16and had sort of this dream state of experience
01:43:20spiritually of I was in the Olympic marathon
01:43:25and I was running through the tunnel
01:43:27for that last lap around the track.
01:43:30The last 440 of the 26 miles.
01:43:34And as I did that, this huge crowd stood
01:43:37and roared as I came along.
01:43:41I was like, and like, well done, Dave.
01:43:44You're done.
01:43:45And as I neared the finish line,
01:43:51part of me wanted to stop.
01:43:53And part of the loss of years two, three, four, and five,
01:43:59'cause don't get me wrong, I'm now down to the grief
01:44:04that I carry.
01:44:05There's a permanent thing I carry called grief,
01:44:09which is I befriended where it's a new relationship.
01:44:12Frisch, my new partner, soon to be a wife,
01:44:16wisely said, "I'm really sorry I didn't get to meet Claudia,
01:44:20"but I really look forward to getting to know her.
01:44:22"The three of us are gonna have to spend
01:44:23"a lot of time together," which is very insightful.
01:44:26But I missed that intensity.
01:44:29There was something about that intense grief
01:44:33that was really alive.
01:44:35- I mean, you were alive.
01:44:36- But you gotta look, if I had tried to sustain that,
01:44:41if I had tried to stick with it,
01:44:44that would be very synthetic and everybody gets hurt.
01:44:51- I'm not sure what word to use.
01:44:53The addiction, the compulsion, the seductiveness
01:44:58of even negative emotions that are sufficiently intense
01:45:02that they make us feel alive.
01:45:03If that's not an argument that humans really like aliveness,
01:45:08that I would rather be in pain and feel it
01:45:13than be in mundanity and feel nothing.
01:45:15- So this goes back to befriending the longing.
01:45:18Look, the good news is you're never gonna get there.
01:45:22Which means if you're paying attention,
01:45:25it's gonna stay interesting all the way.
01:45:28All the way down.
01:45:30I mean, the very last thing Claudia said before she died,
01:45:33she sits up a couple hours before she died and she goes,
01:45:35"Oh, it's so interesting."
01:45:39Falls back.
01:45:43Now, at that point, clearly she had one foot on the dock
01:45:45and one foot on the boat and the boat was pulling out.
01:45:47And she was seeing stuff I've never seen.
01:45:50And as curious as I am, I didn't feel permission to say,
01:45:52"I need you to tell me what you're seeing."
01:45:55Pretty sure that's not my to see yet.
01:45:56There's a guy in the book called Arnie.
01:46:01His name is really Ronald.
01:46:02Says he's in Atlanta.
01:46:03He's really in San Francisco.
01:46:04And he just died.
01:46:05He just died just sorta in '91.
01:46:06He's an artist.
01:46:08It's a long story.
01:46:09And we're with him a couple of days before he died.
01:46:12He's clearly going.
01:46:13He knows he's going.
01:46:14You know, he's in a wheelchair.
01:46:15He's thin.
01:46:16His teeth are out.
01:46:17He was leaning on his desk with a blanket over his head.
01:46:21And he says, "David, read poetry to me.
01:46:23"Read poetry to me.
01:46:26"Go get the Shropshire Ladder.
01:46:27"It's on the second floor."
01:46:29So I go get this little old book of 18th century
01:46:32romantic English poetry and I read him a poem
01:46:34and he goes, "Oh, it's so beautiful."
01:46:37I mean, there was almost nothing of him left,
01:46:40but he directed it toward that.
01:46:42So we get to decide what to do with this life.
01:46:45We get to decide how to allocate these energies.
01:46:48And you let them be what they can until they can't
01:46:50and then you move on.
01:46:51So I think reveling in the obsession healthfully
01:46:56while it deserves to be is fine.
01:46:59And then move on.
01:47:00- That's so beautiful.
01:47:04That's so beautiful.
01:47:05Dave Evans, ladies and gentlemen.
01:47:07Dave, you're fantastic.
01:47:08You're really, really great.
01:47:09I'm very glad that I stumbled upon you.
01:47:11- I'm really, really glad you did too.
01:47:12This has been great.
01:47:13Where should people go to keep up to date
01:47:15with everything that you're doing?
01:47:16- Oh, we've got a website, Designing Your Life.
01:47:20So it's designingyour.life, pretty simple.
01:47:23And that'll take you to lots of places.
01:47:25We've got a newsletter out now,
01:47:27a news one called Fully Alive by Design.
01:47:30You can get it weekly in your mailbox.
01:47:32So the website will invite you to that.
01:47:34And you know, hey, a week from today you could buy the book.
01:47:37That'd be a great idea.
01:47:38- Oh, it'll be out by the time that this goes out
01:47:40so people can go and buy it.
01:47:40And what's that called?
01:47:41- It's called How to Live a Meaningful Life
01:47:44Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose Flow and Joy
01:47:49Every Day.
01:47:50- Thank you.
01:47:51Dave, I appreciate you.
01:47:52Until next time.
01:47:53- Okay.
01:47:54I'll call you on that.
01:47:55- Thank you very much for tuning in.
01:47:57Congratulations for making it to the end
01:48:00of an entire episode.
01:48:01Another one that I think you'll enjoy is right here.