How to Design a More Meaningful Life (with Dave Evans and Bill Burnett)

What does it mean to live a meaningful life? How do you find direction when you feel stuck or you’re unsure about your purpose? Dave Evans and Bill Burnett, co-founders of the Stanford Life Design Lab and authors of How to Live a Meaningful Life https://www.amazon.com/How-Live-Meaningful-Life-Thinking/dp/1668084899 join Dr. Laurie to challenge our assumptions about where meaning really comes from. They share practical strategies from the world of design thinking to create a more purposeful and fulfilling life while making the most of your current circumstances. Resources mentioned in this episode: Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Your-Life-Well-Lived-Joyful/dp/1101875321/ref=sr_1_1?adgrpid=186468607116&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9. QxCsh0-mkd76Quzh0NkJQ6jBNzoUIB5nbGdvE03EzEDo_9rCaFD2Mx1jATpSrhYjWo5XJI-RwoUt94k8ncl1VFi8NysakeegJGnJtAFckPRjsD8Hpjpe_7VJ-hBzt1iAp3Nr0kI4WpCtdGLZ9LV_1Zok2JOpbMbIVR1HdsyxDjumAPn-CPcs06Qdfj1sj-W0gTog13YbgCdmlLjDghMss4JxUoqLUpt5dvAEI5whBvQ.foSBkvPI3KobgF8kryfmfSCMTzuVHLpmGRMbs3v8M5Q&dib_tag=se&hvadid=792743001533&hvdev=c&hvexpln=0&hvlocphy=9004400&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=3232145671337798699--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=3232145671337798699&hvtargid=kwd-361420157037&hydadcr=21860_13695409_2458594&keywords=design+your+life&mcid=1bed389dd8b53eb3aaa3d0bbc22afbe1&qid=1769799471&sr=8-1 How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day https://www.amazon.com/How-Live-Meaningful-Life-Thinking/dp/1668084899 Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202 The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are https://www.amazon.com/Developing-Mind-Third-Relationships-Interact/dp/1462542751/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9. YLDde29j-rthu_dg8bzFRHewpY6H12VdHcwoOQpVDZXsY7HbmOw1_dNyFkaeonX1HOBjr4RCvlGgdByQzbvf3BAMHLqEpHSxZ5avHRgqfuJLQdo6g8kznPYNcF-dT81rmX0-vdyp_Mt_w0aIfDeOFgkmaee-PD1Xwh9XTVFVJcT8Y9MdHrioAAZhCFnXB_-3aIc7IG-Xc8UO4fdU4oqImQ.00yX-_feGRTbROHMvddV-2yADBsfMCdesMl3aPRL3L4&qid=1769799689&sr=1-1 "Overly Shallow?: Miscalibrated Expectations Create a Barrier to Deeper Conversation https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspa0000281.pdf" See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 0:13Laurie Santos?

  Let's be real for a second. The world feels pretty overwhelming right now. Lots of us are feeling exhausted and despondent. We spend our days grinding at work and then trying to zone out when we get out of work, which often means scrolling endlessly just to unwind. And if that sounds familiar, you might be wondering quietly to yourself, is this all there is? How do I feel better when the world feels so blah? What if there was a way to hit the reset button on how you experience life? To see the world with fresh eyes like you did as a child? When everything felt alive, full of possibility, and somehow a little magical?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  The mere fact that anything exists at all is astonishing. So just take a longer, deeper look into almost anything, and some wondrousness might be available to you.

• 1:04Laurie Santos?

  Well, in today's episode, the last one in our series on how to get unstuck in 2026, we'll learn that this mindset can be within reach. In fact, today's two guests will share their tips for how to design it.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Greetings. This is Dave Evans, the co-founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab. So glad to be here today with Dr. Laurie Santos and my dear partner, Bill Burnett. We've been teaching life design for 20-odd years now.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Bill Burnett. I'm an adjunct professor at Stanford University, teaching the Designing Your Life series of classes. And now the co-author with my good friend Dave of a new book called How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day.

• 1:44Laurie Santos?

  You're gonna live to hate that long a subtitle every time you have to say it on the podcast. I learned about Dave and Bill's work because our professional stories are surprisingly similar. Like me, they created a class aimed at improving college students' well-being, one that ended up going viral. And like me, they've decided to share the insights from their class widely with people of all ages far beyond the university setting.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  We teach you the improv skills to live life more fully. Life is an improv. It really is this thing you make up as you go along, which you can get a lot better at than making up as you go along. So we teach a class that starts out with debunking a bunch of dysfunctional beliefs, really wonderful things that people often think are true and guide their lives, but happen not to be either helpful or even true at all, of which there are many. Once we get through the dysfunctional beliefs, we start giving them tools and techniques for how to figure out what they want, how to meet people who can animate that thing in them, how to actually go and engage with the world and get going.

• 2:41Laurie Santos?

  And so a core idea of this class is this idea of design thinking, which I think a lot of folks don't really know what that means. Bill, what's design thinking?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Human-centered design, now we call it design thinking. It's a way of solving problems that's deeply human and engaged with the problems humans have. And so it was obvious to me when we started thinking about how our students might approach building a meaningful life, that it was a design problem. Because designers make things new to the world all the time. I was at Apple for seven years before Stanford, and I worked on the very first laptops. And when you're building something that's never existed before, you can't just engineer it because you don't have any data about the thing that's never existed, like your future. And so it's using human-centered design to figure out what's the next cool version of you.

• 3:28Laurie Santos?

  I love this idea of the next cool version of you because often when we think about designing, we think about designing something, like emphasis on the thing. But you've really argued that we can design ourselves and our own lives in interesting ways. What are some of the features of design thinking we should bring in when we're thinking about designing our own lives?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Well, it starts with, again, user-centered, a human-centered. So it starts with like, what does it mean to be a person? Well, our shortest definition is the human person is a becoming, a never-ending story. And so what you're growing into is the further revealed version of yourself. All of us contain more aliveness than what lifetime permits us to live out, i.e. there's more than one of you in there. So there is no getting it right because you are way bigger than it when it is your lifetime. So all of us are only going to express a small portion of the fullness of our humanity. We have multiple choices in front of us, both between which of me do I want to give a chance to get out on the stage in the next season of my life? And by the way, what does the world think might be an interesting thing for me to be

• 4:29Speaker 01

  collaborating with other people on? So I'm looking for the nexus of those things, which is evolving all the time. And now, oh, let's go have some ideas and get started and start prototyping with the future of that person might be. So it really does begin with the very first dysfunctional belief is I have to find my passion, purpose, answer thing. No, I have to find the next one that will be interesting enough to live into the what will become after that.

• 4:53Laurie Santos?

  So if you're feeling a little off track, stick around because Bill and Dave have some excellent advice on becoming a version of yourself that feels more engaged and more alive. We'll learn all their tips after some quick ads.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 5:17Laurie Santos?

  This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. You can hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, historians, athletes, and more about why we do the things we do and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com/podcast or wherever you listen to your shows.

• 5:49Speaker 04

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• 6:24Laurie Santos?

  Dave Evans and Bill Burnett are best known for their popular Stanford course, Designing Your Life, and the bestselling book that grew out of that class. But they've recently put out a new book called How to Live a Meaningful Life. One of their biggest insights is what's known as the designer's way, a mindset for intentionally engineering the life you want.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Design is inherently value-free, except we always try to make the next design better, right? We think we can improve the world. So you start with wonder. I'm naturally curious. If I'm a designer, I'm curious about the world and how to make things better. It's not just, oh, how's that work? But, oh, wow. How amazing is that? I wonder how that works, right? Then we say availability, be available to the experiences of the world. That's where the interesting stuff happens. Radical acceptance, like availability plus acceptance is like, we always say, design starts in reality. You got to start right here where you are, not in someplace where you think you should be because you saw it on social media or something else, right?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  And then being fully engaged, but calmly detached from the outcomes. Because we know a lot about decision science. You can make a good decision, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get the outcome you want. So be fully engaged in your life, be intentional, but give yourself some grace about the outcomes. And then go out in the world and tell your story or create your world. So those mindsets put together, we call it the designer's way. But when you put it together, it's like approach the world with a sense of wonder, be available to the things that are happening, root yourself in the reality of the world, and then go out and tell that story to people. Because when you tell the story, you're creating the experience of the world that you want to have.

• 8:05Laurie Santos?

  I love this idea of the designer's way, in part because it's not just great for a human-centered design or even designing your life. I think it's so useful for navigating all this stuff that can come up in a life. It fits with a lot of the happiness evidence we talk about on the show.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:18Laurie Santos?

  Dave, in particular, I know with this idea of radical acceptance, you've talked about how you use that to navigate a really painful time of grief in your own life.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're probably referring to the death of my beloved wife Claudia. So on March 8th of 2020, she got a terminal diagnosis. She beat breast cancer once before 20 years prior, decided to give it a second try, picked a much nastier cancer, and she was four ways metastasizing terminal on day one. She thought she had bronchitis. She came home with the death sentence. She had six to 24 months to live. We got nine. And she died at 70. She was 69 at the time. So she died 15 years ahead of the contract. We had a deal and she broke the deal. You know, I was pretty pissed. But the first thing was to frame, what is this? We said, okay, well, I'm gonna die. I was gonna die before, now I know when. And so it's sad, not tragic, because at 70, I've kind of done everything I need to do. There's nothing really missing.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  She goes, but I'd love second helpings of a couple of things before I go. So the mantra for the next year was second helpings, which we didn't get that many of because between COVID and fires and everything else is pretty tough. But nonetheless, the whole idea was to decide how to think about it. Mindset was everything. So I started interviewing widows, people who I thought had widowed well. So I'm going to borrow the people's wisdom. One of the best pieces of wisdom I got was from a guy whose wife went through a nine-year death process. He said, look, Dave, don't waste one second thinking about how are you going to handle this after she's gone? Because no matter what you do, since you had an intimate marriage, it's going to rip your legs off, it's going to blow your brains up. There's not a chance in hell you're going to be prepared for this.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  So don't waste time trying to prepare. And every bit of energy you take away thinking about that future, you're stealing from the present. So lean into doing nothing but enjoy the heck out of the time you guys have. And as soon as she's gone, you can figure that out then. That's exactly what I did. It was exactly the right thing to do. So I learned a ton about grief, but it was all in that framework of, it just happens to be really painful. I wonder what the lessons might be.

• 10:20Laurie Santos?

  And also just not going away from reality. You mentioned this idea before that you can't design things well if you're not taking into account the reality of the situation, as crappy and as terrible as it might be.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Well, you know, design is an empirical process. So if it's empirical, it has to work in this place called reality. It's the only place design works. We can't work with you in the land of shit. We only do real stuff. And in reality, you can make it better.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Let me just also mention.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Claudia was an exceptional woman and her ability to accept, you know, radical acceptance isn't about happiness per se, it's about

• 10:56Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  reality, which means radically accepting grief. But Claudia was brilliant at this. You could imagine a different situation with someone clinging to false hope or something else, but having watched Dave do this, it was both incredibly tragic and incredibly beautiful in a way that they together managed this acceptance, a situation that neither one of them, neither one of them wanted. So that was battle testing, one of our mindsets for sure.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  And it's a choice, right now, we're walking through this with a couple of our significantly older friends where the guy is going down swinging. I mean, he's, he's not going quietly into this night. He is rejecting everything right and he's ruining his life and the life of everybody around him. And it's a choice. So choosing well on this acceptance thing has an amazing upside. It really is one of the biggest mindsets of all time.

• 11:49Laurie Santos?

  So you all are living it in your daily life, teaching students, and you give them these incredible tools for designing their lives in wonderful ways. But you, like me, sometimes have the interesting moment of a student who comes back a little bit later on, you know, maybe later in their twenties. And they often feel like, my Yale students sometimes feel, which is that like, they're kind of feeling a little lost, like they're kind of feeling like they tried to follow what you were telling them, but life isn't turning out the way they thought. Bill, tell me about some of these conversations you had with your students.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  I love meeting students, two years out, five years out, seven years out. I just talked to somebody who was like 15 years out and came up and said, oh, Professor Burnett, I haven't seen you. So they come back and, and often, you know, I get two reactions. One is, hey, I remember the class and it's still very helpful. And in fact, even my friends ask me sometimes and I tell them, read the book or whatever. And then sometimes they say, you know, I used all these tools, but I'm still, my life still doesn't have the meaning or the purpose or the impact that I wanted to have, particularly impact, because the Gen Z's all want to have a lot of impact. And so that was one of the reasons we wrote this last book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, is that even after designing a pretty good life or career, they're still looking for, well, wait a minute, where's the payoff? Where's the impact? Where's the meaning?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  And we wanted to go back and look at that, kind of step back from the life design idea and really look at more at meaning and purpose. Because our conclusion was they were looking in the wrong place. And we wanted to give them better navigation, I guess, in that question.

• 13:23Laurie Santos?

  And I think students sometimes get it wrong, especially when they're in that position of feeling like something's missing. When I talk to my own students who are in this position, I often get the sense that they think what they need to do to fix things is to detonate their life. Like, I'm gonna buy a van and I'm gonna move across country, or I'm gonna move to a farm. But Dave, you both have argued that there are other ways around this that doesn't involve detonating your life. Why is it the wrong path to meaning?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Well, it's not never. I mean, every now and then I'll say, yeah, I think you probably should quit and get the heck out of that horrible, toxic job working for that voracious boss. But that's pretty rare. What it boils down to is, you know, I'll sometimes talk about the college to post-college shifts. I mean, while you're in college, you know, it is about you. It's all about you. And a good day is when you heard something you never heard before, you saw something you never saw before, you did something. So life is cool when I'm on a really steep learning curve. Well, if you're out in the world, whether you're in medicine, the marketplace, or military, whatever you're doing, that world is about mastery. And it's not about doing something for the first time, six hours a day. That's called incompetency. We don't let you do that to patients, or customers, or investors. They actually want people who know what they're doing.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  So I go from this thing where it's all about novelty to all about mastery. It's a huge shift. And that's a longer, more patient pathway. So sometimes people are looking for the, but it's not amazingly new every single day. I must be in the wrong place. No, you're just thinking about the paradigm of life wrong. We keep talking about getting more out of life, not cram more into it. Oh, I need another hobby. I need a bigger thing. I need more. No, you don't need more. You need to get more out of what's already there. And so we start teaching people more how to live into that life to get more full aliveness from it.

• 15:02Laurie Santos?

  And this is the idea of really designing for a meaning and designing for the right kind of meaning, which means we need to be honest about the kind of meaning that we can design for and the kinds of meaning that we can't really design for. And so talk about the kind of meaning that people usually want to get, the very big meaning, and why that's different from the meaning that you're talking about designing in your book.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  It's a design book, not a philosophy book. So we don't try to answer the meaning of life, the big question, you know, what's the meaning of life? Is there a God, blah, blah, blah. That's not a designable question. But getting more meaning out of life is a designable question. And this idea of getting more out of, not packing more into.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  First of all, am I going to change the world? Probably not. And that's a good thing to aspire to. But if that's the only egg in your meaning basket, boy, are you at risk. And so first thing, you have to get beyond impact. And then becoming fully human means, and I'm not just making a difference, but I'm also living more fully. And so the key thing we do is we try to give people, you know, more food groups, not just the meat of impact, but the vegetables of wonder and the beverages of, you know, flow. And so we try to give people a couple more crayons in the box, to mix the metaphor.

• 16:13Laurie Santos?

  So it sounds like we're not going after the meaning of life. We're going after meaning in life. And a thing that we need to radically accept to do that is that we need to understand how tiny sometimes the meaning in life buckets are. And I think this gets us to this idea of the scandal of particularity. Dave, do you want to explain what this is?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yes. A scandal of particularity is a philosophical idea. It actually started as a theological idea by Walter Bruegmann. But what it really boils down to is it turns out the ultimate is only accessible in the particular. To put it differently, the sublime is actually found in the ridiculous. Beauty, truth, love, communion, unity, these lovely things we all aspire to. And when we experience them deeply, we're kind of go, ooh, that's really it. You know, you see that amazing sunset and everybody kind of goes, ooh, I want more of that. That's what I was made for. And so that ultimate is beckoning to all of us all the time. But it turns out it only arrives in small, partial chunks.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  They're all essentially reflections of that fullness. They're not full embodiments of it. Every one of those experiences of something wonderful frankly leaves you wanting more.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Like, you know, that was a really great kiss, but it stopped too soon. You know, you can never have all of it. So the scandal in particular is it's kind of scandalous that these wonderful things only come in these little cupcake sized bits, you know, that little tasting thing they give you at Costco, you know, like, where's the rest of the pizza? No, that was a really good bite. And the fact that I long for more is the promise that life will continue to be interesting. So the huge shift is in the scandal particularity, you go from it's still not what I really want to that was lovely and more is to come. It's a complete transformation of your relationship with finitude.

• 18:05Laurie Santos?

  We humans don't like finitude. When something feels good, we want more, more accomplishment, more success, more kisses, more nachos. But chasing more isn't how we get to capital M meaning. To do that, we have to embrace the finite bits, however scandalous that might feel. But the big question is, how do we do that? How do we notice and make the most of these tiny, beautiful moments? We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns after the break.

• 18:40Laurie Santos?

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• 19:25Laurie Santos?

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• 20:09Laurie Santos?

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• 20:50Laurie Santos?

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• 20:59Laurie Santos?

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• 21:41Laurie Santos?

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• 21:59Laurie Santos?

  Stanford designers Dave Evans and Bill Burnett argue that instead of trying to find the big elusive meaning in life, we should instead focus on the little stuff, tiny moments of beauty and wonder. In fact, they think we should all be putting our efforts into creating these kinds of moments.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Well, you can design moments, right? You can design any experience. And what you're looking for is to connect that moment to something bigger than yourself, right? So transcendence. That moment can be, I always make my grandmother's purple cabbage. It's a recipe, you know, Germany from the 30s. It's just purple cabbage with some vinegar and sugar. But it's a thing. And when the purple cabbage comes out, the moment is, everybody remembers grandma. So it's these particular moments where we can discover a connection to the ultimate meaning of life, I guess. Love, community, a memory of an important person in our lives. You have opportunities all around you to create these moments. I just, you know, I live in an industrial neighborhood in the city, and I'm walking

• 22:59Speaker 02

  to the train. I'm noticing there's this bush that's got a bunch of purple flowers on it. I don't know why it's blooming in December, but there's this bush doing its thing. I stood there for a moment, and I watched probably 20 other people just walk right by. But to stop and take some pictures, just to have a moment to savor the beauty of nature. Part of this moment making thing is change what you're looking for. Pay attention, be available to what's right in front of you. This bush with purple flowers, the friendly barista who, you know, heated up my muffin. All the little things actually are packed

• 23:40Speaker 02

  with meaning. And you can design those moments. And you can also recognize and savor those moments. And in either case, You're changing the way your brain is wired, right? You're starting to look for things that are imbued with the scandal, in particular, the meaning in life, not the meaning of life.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  What's really going on in, you know, we're design guys. We're going to give you tools to design something, to make something. What are we making? So if I go right to making meaning, nine times out of 10, the people we talk with, all from 20 to 90, they're all having the same problem. They go after this impact thing. So if I want these other forms of meaning, they're found in a different way of seeing the world.

• 24:20Laurie Santos?

  To really get into this idea of moment making, we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of worlds. First, the world that we often find ourselves in, the world of outcomes and instrumental value and capitalism and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What you call the transactional world. So Dave, what's the transactional world?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  We posit this idea of the tale of two worlds. There's the transactional world, where I go and get stuff done. And there's the flow world, which is the fullness of the cosmos that's happening in this very moment, right in front of me, right under my feet, right around me all the time. We're playing with which world you're participating in, in terms of directing your attention. Transactional world, you know, it's the world of lists. Frankly, it's a world where you're living almost entirely in the past or the future. I am criticizing what I did last time and learning from it so I can do it better. And I'm thinking about, you know, I'm still a post-it note guy. I am literally looking at my desk and I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 things on a post-it list and there are circles next to them. And if the circle has an X in it, it's done.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  So right now I have 12 out of 18 things with X's and six things with circles. And you know what a really good day is? A really good day is when there's all X's. What I can't wait is for that to be over. All the transactional world wants to be is done and successful, successfully done. And the feedback is money and accolade and social media likes. You get tons of feedback, so it's an easy world to be completely stuck in. And some people tell you it's the only real world. And that's, that's kind of heartbreaking.

• 25:50Laurie Santos?

  And so you make a distinction between this transactional world and a different world that you call the flow world. So Bill, what's the flow world? How's it very different from the thing that Dave was just talking about?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Well, in terms of what Dave just said, in transactions, it's looking backwards to see what I got done and looking forward to see what's next. And I'm never right here in the moment, in the present moment. And the flow world is more about the present moment. Again, it's available all the time. There's nothing inherently wrong with the transactional world. But it's when you make intrinsically flow things, let's say I have a mindfulness practice, or I have a yoga practice, which should just be about being in the moment in that place where you're in a sort of a flow state. You can turn that into transaction. Hey, I went to yoga five times this week. Check. And none of those things are the way the flow world actually works.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  You can be in both worlds at the same time, by the way. I can be in a total flow state, looking at the purple flowers and still get to the train on time. Right? There's no contradiction here. It was the work of, you know, Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia, we're talking about the awakened brain and the achieving brain. Or the left brain and the right brain, if you want to use that model, whatever it is, they're both on all the time. It's just you're not paying any attention. You know, the left brain is the one that talks. And if you're like me and Dave, there's somebody talking in my head all the time. And it's taken up all the space, the ability to access your creative self, your intuitive self. It's all there. It's just underdeveloped in our society. And as Dave mentioned,

• 27:22Speaker 02

  people trust the transactional brain, the brain that talks. They think it's the real one. And they think this other one is sort of, you know, it's a, it's okay, but it's not quote real.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Kind of cute.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  It's just is real. In fact, even more real, if you want to be a whole human being, you have to accept the reality of your creativity, your intuition, your awakened brain. All these things are neurologically true. It's just we live in a society that doesn't value them.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  You know, we're talking about reframes all the time. The point of a reframe is to look at something differently, change your point of view. And we're trying to free people up to get them access to a bunch of stuff that they're missing. Now, Laura, you're doing this work too. So let me turn the arrow around. Now, you've got this struggle with your students. What are you finding helpful in, number one, convincing them that this is available and legitimate and actually spending some time and energy on it?

• 28:18Laurie Santos?

  Well, I think this is one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you and so excited about this concept of the transactional world, because I think especially my type A Yale undergraduates spend a lot of time in this transactional world. You had this quip that the transactional world is very imperialistic, which I was like, yes, yes, yes, because I think it sucks you in. You know, Bill, you mentioned this idea of you're doing your meditation, which in theory should be like full on flow world. You're just being present and nothing else. But I'm ticking it off my list. I also have my meditation on a post-it note and I'm trying to do it so that I work better in my, you know, investment banking job or something like that. So I'm curious what you all think of like how to fight the imperialism. This transactional world is so prone to suck you in, especially I think

• 29:02Laurie Santos?

  if you've been successful and benefited from the transactional world in the way that a lot of our Ivy League students have done.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Well, one of our tools is savoring. And I know you're a savoring fan as well. You're sitting at a red light and your favorite song comes on and you kind of go, oh, that's great. Like, no, no, no. Really love it. Oh, my God, I love that Dylan song. It is so. Drop all the way into it for 17 seconds. And then off you go. And if you start learning how to do that, you start learning how to do sudden savoring. Like, it's a good cup of coffee. Wait, hold that one on your tongue for three seconds longer. Three seconds. Oh, my God. I can actually taste. Because I make half calf, I use dark decaf and medium grind calf. Can I taste both beans? Oh, God, I can. That moves the needle.

• 29:50Laurie Santos?

  One of the reasons I love this suggestion is that it's just a reminder that we can switch back and forth. One of the suggestions you give in the book is to literally tell yourself, okay, switch. And this was something I found myself even using right after reading the book is, you know, I'll be prepping for a podcast and, you know, kind of in full transaction, urgent mind head. And then I just remember like, oh, wait, switch. Ah, I'm paying attention to the light in the world, or like the sea under me, or, you know, someone's walking by, let me smile at them. It's almost like you give yourself the task of noticing what you can notice in the flow world. And that works pretty well.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really, it really does. The idea of flipping the switch. Like, Dave and I were prepping for this, you know, the podcast, and we were looking at our notes and da, da, da. That was all transactional. And then just before we came on, it was the moment when I flipped the switch to like, oh, wow, I get to talk to this really interesting person, Laurie Santos. This is an amazing body of work. This is gonna be fun. There's the ways you can get unstuck that are really quite simple. I don't think you have to spend 10 years developing a meditation practice. Go ahead. That's probably a good thing. But even the Zen monks would say that enlightenment is instantaneous. And one of my favorite quotes is if you can't find enlightenment right where you are, where do you expect to find

• 31:07Speaker 02

  it? Is it over there? Is it over there? No, it's right here. And it's in just little moments. So it's easier than you think. You don't have to spend a lot of time. Savoring is one thing. The idea of just practicing acceptance. Hey, I'm just gonna try to be in the real world today and see what happens. And availability. Can I change what I'm looking for? It's all about connection. It's all about love and people and things beyond yourself. So is there a moment where you can have a little more community? Can you talk to that person on the train? Can you chat with someone at the coffee shop? Find a way to connect. You know, these little tiny design moments that help you get unstuck and figure out that,

• 31:51Speaker 02

  you know, maybe there is some meaning in the life you're already living. And you don't have to go find it somewhere else.

• 31:58Laurie Santos?

  One of the reasons I love your book so much is that you tell us some really good techniques for making that switch, for kind of switching to the flow world. And one of the big ones you talk about is this idea of wonder. Dave, you mentioned that you give your students the mantra of pursuing latent wonderfulness. What do you mean by that?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Well, mindset matters. And if you walk into a room, or you're walking into any experience, "Oh, it's probably going to be boring. I don't think I even know these people." Your chances of fulfilling that expectation are extremely high. If you're walking, kind of going, "Man, I bet this is going to be great. I can't wait to meet these interesting people." Now, you may be disappointed. There may be all absolute dolts, like, "Oh, oh, well." But when you round up, your chance of finding it goes way up. Use confirmation bias as a friend. Give yourself a chance. You know, we're learning how to play the game to win here. So the pursuit of latent wonderfulness is there's something wonderful going on all the time.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  On the latent wonderfulness, this is also a response to our students. You know, have a very high bar for everything. It's like, "I'm not going to go interview at a big company because big companies are bad." Well, how do you know that? Well, that's all my friends tell me. All right, here's your assignment. You're going to go interview at, you know, Apple and Google and come back. And one student said, "I will never interview at the CIA." Say, "Okay, go interview at the CIA." There's a 20% chance that there's something in there that's interesting.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Go find it.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Give it a shot. Go find it. And inevitably, they come back and they go, "Do you know that the CIA is working like 10 years ahead in the AI thing? They talked about stuff nobody's talking about in the valley. I totally want to work there." So our students set a ridiculously high bar for their experiences. And if they're not going to be amazing, they don't want to do it. And so they shut themselves out of so many things they could try because their bar for latent wonderfulness is, "If it's not 100%, I'm not going to do it." And then when you actually get down to, "How do you know it's not going to be cool?" They don't know. They just heard it from a friend, or more likely, they're just afraid to try it. And so this is a way of getting them unstuck.

• 33:57Laurie Santos?

  And so that's seeking out these moments of wonder, maybe even these tiny moments of wonder, not putting wonder, like, you know, capital W wonder out there to look for. A second strategy you've talked about a lot is to attend to coherence. Dave, what's coherence and why is it so important?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so we define coherence as the intersection and the alignment of who you are, what you believe in, what you're doing. The research on meaning will say that if you can interconnect those three dots, who am I, what do I believe in, what am I doing, then my life is coherent. I am making sense in the world. I'm acting just like myself. And if I Don't have those dots connected, the chance of meaning-making goes way down. Now, of course, the prerequisite to connecting those dots is locating them. So we have an exercise called the compass exercise, which has three components: my current story, my work view, and my life view. So three little essays you write that will help you figure out the narrative that describes kind of who you are. Now, is that the totality of who you are? No, but it's a real good start. We've been doing this a couple hundred thousand times now, so we kind of got the hang of it.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  And it seems to be working well for people. So coherency is when I'm actually living out who I really am in the world, including the compromises that I have to make. And a coherency sighting, which is a meaning-making tool, is catching yourself in the act of when was I coherent today? So example, a really lovely coherency sighting for me, which is so easy to miss. You know, one of the growing edges of life design at Stanford is not more and more classes, but classes to different affinity groups. So there is a pilot on designing your Muslim life. So the kids who adhere to Islam feel pretty isolated, and they would like to be in this life conversation with people of a similar mindset. So Bill gets them in a room. The Muslim chaplain, Bill, the existential atheist,

• 35:44Speaker 01

  are co-teaching a class on designing your Muslim life. And I'm the guy with a seminary degree. I'm sitting in the back of the room, watching my atheist partner teach a spirituality class. And I'm thinking, this is so cool. I helped build a place where people are integrating their spirituality even beyond their personal ideology. That is such a coherent moment for me. This is as good as it gets. And so it's about catching yourself in the act of when it's actually working. And guess what? It's working more often than you think.

• 36:13Laurie Santos?

  It's time for a quick break. But when we return, we'll explore some of my favorite tips for stepping into the flow world. And we'll hear the surprising way that Bill is able to stay in the flow world almost all the time. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.

• 36:33Laurie Santos?

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• 37:17Laurie Santos?

  from warm, reasonably sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves, to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. What if I told you your skin and your brain are often in conversation? It's true, and that's why what you feel shows up on your skin. Think goosebumps, blushing, and even signs of stress. Tatcha harnesses the skin-mind connection to create skincare rituals that care for

• 38:01Laurie Santos?

  both skin and mind. At the heart of Tatcha's formulas is Hadasei-3, their proprietary complex that counteracts visible signs of stress on skin. It's made up of three Japanese ingredients that are double-fermented to harness 400-plus micronutrients. These micronutrients synchronize your skin's natural renewal cycles and Boost resilience to daily stressors for visibly firmer, smoother, breathtaking skin. Visit tacha.com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off your first purchase. That's T-A-T-C-H-A dot com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. There are plenty of reasons we put off getting support, and for a lot of people, cost is one of them.

• 38:46Laurie Santos?

  With BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And while we're reconsidering old assumptions, maybe there are a few others worth questioning, too. Women these days inherit a lot of unwritten rules. Be ambitious, but not too ambitious. Be there for everyone, but still make time for yourself. Have it all together, but don't look like you're trying too hard. I've been trying to unwrit the unwritten rule that I'm never allowed to say no, that it makes me a bad person. I've been trying to give myself the grace that I would give other people and to remember that no one has the bandwidth to do everything all the time. If you're trying to work through your own unwritten rules, therapy may be of help.

• 39:30Laurie Santos?

  If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks, and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the US? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/laurie to explore your payment options. That's better, H-E-L-P, dot com slash Laurie.

• 40:01Laurie Santos?

  We've been chatting with designers Dave Evans and Bill Burnett and exploring how to get out of the transactional world of do-do-do all the time so that we can find ways into the flow world. Now, flow is an idea that we talk about a lot on the Happiness Lab, but Bill and Dave have developed their own unique take on the concept.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  The original definition of flow, according to me, had Chixome Hi, the founder of this concept, and a wonderful researcher, and you know, the definitive workflow, the psychology of optimal experience comes out some time ago, and defines the flow channel as being a zone where the challenge of the task in which you are currently engaged and your skill level are close to matched, meaning you're not underskilled and now you're anxious because you're going to fail. You're not over skilled and you're bored because you could do this in your sleep, but you're kind of really on it. And so what happens is the task demands enough of you that you could be fully engaged. And that zone is a place where you might drop into flow. There's like, you know, Apex, when you're really in the zone, that amazing US hockey team that beat the Russians, you know, you're totally in

• 41:04Speaker 01

  flow. That's great. And most people think that's what flow is. But here's the problem. It's this apex experience, which makes it way too hard, particularly in the simple task where I might be over skilled. We redefine what we call simple flow. You don't have to let boredom steal your brain. I mean, last night, the heater went on at 1:00 in the morning. I go, what the heck? And I went upstairs and the thermostat had kind of exploded. So I went all the way down the nerd rabbit hole of an old school thermostat that didn't work very well. And it only took me 45 minutes and I fixed it and I had the best time because I went all the way into, not this is such a pain in the ass, but it's kind of like,

• 41:49Speaker 01

  gee, I wonder what that 1980s engineer was thinking when he designed one of the worst UIs of all time. How interesting this could be. And so I just chose to go all the way in and enjoy the heck out of solving my thermostat problem and saving a little gas for Pacific Gas and Electric. You know, so just go with it. That's a choice. Flow, full engagement in what you're doing, which allows you to experience as much of your aliveness as that particular activity will permit to be expressed in your scandalously particular self and the scandalously particular moment could be a flow mode.

• 42:21Laurie Santos?

  I love that flow really plays on this idea of the scandal of the particular because we can only ever get it in the present moment. It's not something we can design for the future or think about in the past. Bill, you've also talked about how these moments of being in flow really require being a little bit more embodied. Why is embodiment so important?

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, this thing, this body, isn't just a thing that takes my brain to meetings. I mean, we know that there's a lot of neurology going on in the gut and into vagal nerves and all the other systems. So we are embodied creatures and we learn by moving and working in the world. There's our intelligence, our IQ, I guess you could say, the talking part of our brain. There's our EQ, our emotional part of our brain. There's our kinesthetic understanding of the world. How do we move in the world? The proprioception in our body. There's a whole bunch of stuff coming up now around how the body actually understands itself in the world. And so, you know, don't talk to me about artificial intelligence and disembodied computers.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  You have to be inside this embodied intelligence because it's also where we feel our intuition, our curiosity, and many of the triggers for flow have to do with, you know, either releasing a dopamine circuit or releasing some kind of a neural circuit that engages the rest of the body in that experience. Which is why athletes often talk about, you know, being in the zone or things. It's a physical kinesthetic flow. So these are all embodiments of ourselves in a time and space in the world that are all triggers to what we were calling simple flow or the flow state that's available all the time. One of our analogies, it's like an aquifer running right under the surface. All you gotta do is drill a hole and there's plenty of water.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  You just gotta dig into that thing that's right beneath you.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Bill, I call the flow master. Bill has loved flow for a long time. He's like Captain Flow. Bill, you know, more than a few times, you'll tell me something like, "Oh God, you know, it's really been great. I've been in flow for four days now." I mean, you claim to attain this persistent flow state. Can you give the listeners any tips on how the heck do you pull that off?

• 44:29Speaker 02

  It's both a something I try to do and it's a mystery fundamentally. But I really get back to, it depends on what you're looking for. And so when I start my day, I've been for a long, many, many, many years now, I start the day with an affirmation where I say, "I live in the best of all possible worlds." Because as Dave mentioned, I'm an existential atheist, so... Truly radical acceptance that this is it, might as well be the best. And everything I do today, I choose to do. Choosing into my experience, I think is the, there's the number one way in which I find flow.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  That's the voice of availability, bro. That's what availability sounds like.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  I'm pretty good at being simultaneously. I get stuff done. I mean, you know, some people might blame I'm absent minded, but it's just because my mind is on something else, not on whatever their priority is in the transaction world. But it's also, you know, I've practiced creativity. I'm a painter and I'm an artist. I spend a lot of time in that wonderful, you know, that's a quote from Robert Henry. The goal isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state of mind that makes art inevitable. So I try to spend a lot of time in the state of mind that makes flow inevitable.

• 45:46Laurie Santos?

  Another thing you seem to both spend a lot of time in is the last suggestion that you have for everyone for how to get into the flow world more, which is you both spend a lot of time in community. Why is community so important for design thinking generally?

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Well, community, I mean, in terms of design, design is always done on teams. It's always done with people. You want to radically collaborate with people of different points of view. But the community part in the new book really comes from Dave's experience teaching a program at Stanford called the Distinguished Career Institute. It's a gap year for grownups. People come to Stanford for a year after a distinguished career. And they spend time trying to figure out the pivot, the thing they're going to do next in their lives. These are pretty smart, successful people. Dave, how does this community thing work with them?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Well, it's been interesting. First of all, and we do community work at all our classes. And we, we often say it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself. Dan Siegel, you know, formerly out of UCLA, the Mindset Institute will remind us all that in fact, the autonomous self is a profoundly toxic lie. We now know scientifically the consciousness extends. This is the nature of human consciousness. We are deeply involved with each other. So if you start understanding that, then you really want to leverage what it means to be in community. Cause that the fullness of you is really only available as part of us. And so what we found at this distinguished careers group was I started putting people into design teams, not to design the life after their program, but to get the most from it in the present moment. And the nice thing about these, these folks, these 35 to 45 people,

• 47:17Speaker 01

  45 to 90 years old, mostly 55 to 75, thinking about, what do I do next? And they're here to become their fuller selves and they spend some time just exploring. So this idea of we're all becoming, can you become more intentionally? And so the fellows look at each other, kind of go, well, hi, who are you? You know, I'm Dave, but I'm Laurie Santos. Well, what are you into? Yeah, I'm into happiness thing. Oh, really? That's so cool. And they take each other at face value. And the only thing they want to do for each other is help one another become their more authentic selves. And what's funny is that a couple of weeks into the program, they will all say, these are the best friends I've ever met. And my line is, I'm not buying it. You created corporate cultures. You almost all of them have big families. Aren't most of you fending off hundreds of people saying, where are you? I miss you. You've been gone

• 48:02Speaker 01

  for you. And you're telling me these 35 yahoos that some admission officer at Stanford threw you into a room with you've never met before in six weeks become the best friend you ever had. Really? And they go, yeah. And the reason is because they're in this kind of community where the intention of our interaction is not just having a good time. That's a social gathering. It's not getting something done. That's a collaborative gathering. And my argument is 99% of what people do in the transactional world is social or collaborative, wonderful things. But then there's a formative community, which is why are we together? We're together to become our better selves and to enjoy more fully the self we're presently trying on. So

• 48:43Speaker 01

  that is a different conversation with different questions. And it turns out, I don't have to be in the same thing. So the climate change fanatic and the person who wants to become a fine artist, they can be in the same group because they're not collaborating on the content of their lives. They're collaborating on the intent of their lives, which is becoming. So when we set people in relationships that allow becoming to occur, which all you need to be is a thoughtful, self-aware person, stuff happens.

• 49:10Laurie Santos?

  And so for folks that maybe can't join this Stanford group, but really want to form a similar formative community and focus on becoming, any tips?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  The simple answer is frankly, come up with some generative questions. I did this at Thanksgiving. I actually had three Thanksgivings. And in all the dinners, I brought three questions. And those questions were formative, not transactional or entertainment. One was, boy, the world's kind of full of a lot of ugly things these days. When were you recently surprised by someone doing something good that restored your faith in humanity? And guess what? Everybody had an answer. I even asked directly, what have you become this year? Or what are you hoping to become next year? And, you know, maybe two out of 10 people are like, whoa, that's a little much, you know? But eight out of 10 went, oh, well, you know, what I'm becoming is. And the other is, is there a letter in you that needs to get out? And if so, what is it and who's it to?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  And those are all becoming kinds of questions. And people are surprisingly available. So the key thing, if you want to start forming a more formative community, is have better question.

• 50:15Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, this is something that I think we get wrong all the time. There's such lovely work by folks like Nick Epley that find that we often go for shallow questions, especially if we're at a dinner party, something like Thanksgiving or a holiday meal or something. But really, what people resonate with answering are these so-called deep questions, questions that are vulnerable, which I think have a lot of features of these becoming questions. Right? What are these emotions that you want to share? How can we focus things in a different way? How can you take a different perspective? How can you reframe to steal the designer's thinking? Seems like we've known this in social science for a while, but we can really apply it to becoming more in the flow world and finding these moments of meaning-making.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  People want to have the experience of interacting with each other in meaningful ways. So think of, think of a way to say something kindly. Have your own story ready to go. Don't make it be about you. But if you want to get in the deep water, jump in the pool first. And I think you'll be surprised. People are pretty good to each other if you give them a chance.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  And they're desperate for these conversations and these kinds of communities, right? The loneliness epidemic. They're not going to find it on social media. They're not going to find it in these other places. You know, when people are trying to think about, how can I improve my life? What can I do to make it better? Getting rid of these dysfunctional beliefs, leaning into these meaning-making moments and creating communities instead of echo chambers and arguing and all this other stuff that's going on. You know, Dave is a big Jesus guy and I'm a big, you know, not Jesus guy. We've been collaborating for 20 some years on this work. And it's the best collaboration I've ever had. So you don't have to agree on things in order to be.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  In the collaboration, particularly if the collaboration is about how to become the best version of yourself. And with that intention, do anything. Start a book club, start a salon where people get together and everybody gets to ask one question, but the questions can't be in the transaction world. That's the only rule.

• 52:07Laurie Santos?

  So, thank you so much for figuring out ways that we can find a few more of these moments of meaning and for doing it in a way that I think really resonates with everybody that's feeling stuck right now, which is not by cramming more in, but getting more out of the moments that we already have.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Well, thanks. And here's a little PS, by the way. While we duck the question, what is the meaning of your life? And let's just live more meaningfully along the way. Let's live more purposefully on the way to whatever we're going to find later. It turns out, if you get good at this stuff, that meaning of life thing is going to come into view a lot more soon, a lot more clearly.

• 52:44Laurie Santos?

  Figuring out the meaning of life is hard, but I hope that this episode has convinced you that there's plenty of ways to find meaning in life, even when it doesn't feel like it. If you're feeling stuck, why not commit to turning towards some new moments of meaning this week? And if you want even more advice about how to do that, check out Bill and Dave's new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, which is out this week. That's a wrap on our series about getting unstuck in 2026. What'd you think? Why not let us know? You can email us at [email protected] or leave us a review to tell us what you liked. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness with my free newsletter

• 53:24Laurie Santos?

  on my website, drlaureysantos.com. That's D R L A U R I E Santos.com. We'll be back next week, just in time for Valentine's Day, with a new series on the science of love. In our first episode, we'll explore what we get wrong about love. We'll learn why the love we get from others doesn't always register emotionally, and what we can do to open ourselves up to it.

• 53:47Speaker 05

  We can be loved. You know, we can have all these people in our lives that kind of objectively love us, but we don't actually feel loved by them, or maybe not feel loved by them as much as we want to be.

• 53:58Laurie Santos?

  That's next week on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 54:08Speaker 02

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• 54:24Speaker 04

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• 55:09Speaker 04

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• 55:31Speaker 02

  Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lilly.com.

• 55:38Laurie Santos?

  The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. When it comes to taking care of their customers, Amica goes the extra mile. From listening to your insurance needs to following up after a claim, Amica provides coverage with empathy. Because as a mutual insurer, Amica is built for its customers and prioritizes you. It's the way insurance should be. Amica, we're your priority number one. Visit amica.com and get a quote today.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.