It’s time to rethink your entire life plan - Dave Evans

Dave Evans is an entrepreneur, early Apple engineer, former Electronic Arts executive, Stanford lecturer, and author. How does someone genuinely find meaning in their life? We’re often told that when things feel empty, uncertain, or painful, the answer is to “find more meaning”. But what does that actually mean? Is meaning something we discover, like a hidden truth waiting to be uncovered? Or is it something we construct through choice, responsibility, and attention? Expect to learn what people actually mean when we’re talking about meaning, the problem people are actually trying to solve when they say they want meaning, how to engineer more meaning into your life, what the difference between the problem-solving world and the meaning-making world is, what the red herrings are in terms of meaning, why so many people become objectively successful and subjectively miserable and much more… - 0:00 How to Figure Out What You Want in Life 5:30 What Does Meaning Really Mean? 15:34 Making Sense of Life’s Changes 21:05 Reframing Fulfilment to Fully Enjoy Life 22:43 Are We Confusing Meaning With Feeling Alive? 28:41 Has Optimisation Killed the Magic of Meaning? 39:31 The Hidden Power of Wonder 42:52 The Best Ways to Inject Wonder into Life 47:03 Does Coherence Create Purpose? 50:46 Can You Be Balanced and Coherent? 52:32 The Secret to Finding Your Flow State 57:06 Is Multitasking Killing Your Flow? 01:02:40 How to Engineer Flow into Your Life 01:09:59 The Biggest Mistakes High Achievers Are Making 01:19:25 How to Strive Without Missing Your Life 01:25:43 Why Community is Essential 01:33:18 The Signs It's Time to Redesign Your Life 01:47:05 Where to Find Dave - Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom - Get Dave Evans' new Book - 'How to Live A Meaningful Life' here: https://designingyourlife.link/how-to-live-a-meaningful-life/chris - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You're the co-founder of Stanford's Life Design Lab.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  True.

• 0:03Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  It's a little tiny operation inside the design program that applies the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life at and after university. So, oh, Bill and Dave realized we've made all these products and all these different experiences using design thinking, started at Stanford back in 1963. You know, and we used it at Apple in the early days and everybody's kind of the thing that built Silicon Valley. Hey, we could apply it to ourselves. We could design ourselves as well. You know, that's a real problem people have and we gave it a try and it seems to have worked out.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  Do people not already try to design their life? Is that not what you do when you set a to-do list or have a calendar?

• 0:41Speaker 01

  So, the word design in the field of design really means there's two categories. There's what I would call craft design or engineering design, and then there's design thinking. And so the older school, you know, so I'm an ergonomicist, you know, I'm a car designer, I'm a graphic designer, you know, I'm an illustrator. So designing things, precisely figuring out exactly what this particular shape and look of something is going to be has been around for a long, long, long, long time. You can get a master's in design at Stanford and still not be very good at drawing. And there are many design schools who think that's a moral wrong. Then there's this design thinking idea that's been around only for the past 50 years, which is an innovation methodology. It's an approach to coming up with new ideas.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  And so when we talk, when people are just talking, I want to, I want to design my life. What they're really saying is I want to engineer my life. I want to, I want to figure it out. I want to solve it. I want to answer it. I want to craft it. And that's a perfectly good thing to do. We're not saying that's the wrong thing to do. So people have been trying to do that for a long, long time. What they've not been necessarily doing very well and they're getting stuck on is, is finding their way. So like, I walk into the career center when I'm 19 years old, back in the seventies, and I kind of, and they go, can you help me? And they go, well, sure, we got a whole building full of people. We love helping young people like you, you know? So what do you want to do? I kind of go, yep, that's the question. I kind of go, okay, so what's the answer? I kind of go, no, that's the question. And they go, what? I said, What do I want to do? And they go, right, what do you want to do? I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, this conversation is going nowhere.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  And they said, we have to, here's how this works. You tell us what you want, then we'll help you go get it. And I go, that's easy. Getting stuff is easy. The hard part is figuring out what you want. They kind of go, well.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  That's just on that point.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  You're supposed to know.

• 2:20Chris Williamson?

  Getting stuff is easy. Figuring out what you want to get.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:23Chris Williamson?

  Is the difficult part.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's, that's what we help people do. So the, the, the objective of the Life Design Lab, you asked that question, is we assist people in the formation of a conscious competency in life and vocational wayfinding.

• 2:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, like.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  How do you find your way? We give you tools to do it. Life isn't improv skit, we're improv trainers.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  Orienting for your life direction.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Bingo.

• 2:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  There's maps and compasses. When, we make the big distinction between navigation and wayfinding. Technical terms in design. So navigation, I know where I am, I know where I'm going. I have the data about the space in between, which your GPS does really well. I can optimize the path, preferably as straight as possible.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  In wicked problems where I don't know what I'm looking for until I find it, and I'm going to this very important place called the future, about which we have no data because it doesn't exist yet. I can't do that because I barely know where I am, and I sure don't know where I'm going. And I don't have any data about the space in between. So what am I going to do? Well, I'm going to do an empirical thing called try it. We call it prototyping. So I'm going to make this move. I'm going to go, I'm going to go talk to Chris and see how that goes. You know, then what did I learn that day?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  And then, you know, I'll go here and then I'll go over here. A very jagged pathway, might go backward, I might have to start over again. Seems terribly inefficient, except I'm learning my way forward till I find like, oh, that's it. And then the destination I'm looking for finally appears and I land there. But that boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing thing, very not a straight line in a wayfinding task, that bouncy line is literally the shortest distance between those two points.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Because that's what mortals have to do.

• 4:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting, but it's inefficient.

• 4:03Chris Williamson?

  My friend George has this idea of GPS brain.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:06Chris Williamson?

  And what he means by GPS brain is forgiveness with yourself when you don't take the right turn. That if you miss it, at no point does the GPS say, you fucking idiot.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:17Chris Williamson?

  Why didn't you take that? You should have, you should have turned right and you've missed it. And now it's going to take another five minutes.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:22Chris Williamson?

  At no point does the GPS do that. It just continually updates the directions. And I think that's a lovely, uh, it makes me think about releasing. It makes me think about David Hawking's Letting Go type.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  I totally agree. In fact, no, having been in the valley for a long, long time, I know that now and then, you know, coders put tricks and, and jokes in code all the time.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  And so I wonder if in the GPS code, you know, if I do the wrong thing on purpose, like, you know, go straight and turn a left on, on, you know, Alpine Street and I'm making a U-turn. You know, and then it says, okay, so I'll go down the street and make another U-turn. And I do it nine times. On the 10th time, it's kind of go, come on, Dave.

• 4:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  What the heck?

• 4:58Chris Williamson?

  If it.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  You're wasting my time here.

• 5:00Chris Williamson?

  You unlocked this special feature.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to unlock, I tried like 15 mistakes and it's totally.

• 5:05Chris Williamson?

  The angry co-pilot feature.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  And it's not even, by the way, it's not even when you did the wrong thing, you did the wrong thing. For it to have been wrong, you had to have had access to information that would have told you it would have been right up front. You didn't make a mistake. You made a move. You learned something that said, oh, continuing on the same co-linear pathway would be suboptimal. I'm going to actually make an adjustment now. That's not a mistake. It's, it's just a move.

• 5:30Chris Williamson?

  What do people mean when they're talking about meaning, do you think?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  That's a big one. Um, well, the reason we wrote this book, I'm to, you know, get fairly direct, is that what overwhelmingly people mean when they talk to us about the meaning they're not getting enough of, if they're talking about one of two things. Primarily, they're talking about having an impact. And I'm just, I'm just, am I making a difference? Am I changing the world? Do I matter? Is it working? You know, did I make the impact that would make my life worthwhile? And so the, for, I'd say 90% of the people we've been talking to recently that motivated us to write this book, the one and only valid form of meaning-making they've named is impact. And then right behind that would be fulfillment. I'm just not being fulfilled.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  And for most people, fulfillment means, am I getting to manifest the fullness of who I really am? Because that's what Maslow told them fulfillment was. And the original 1943 paper that invented the hierarchy of needs. According to Abraham Maslow, the apex was self-actualization. And you attain self-actualization by literally becoming all that one can be. And if you become all that one can be, according to Maslow, you will experience fulfillment. And we think that's dead wrong because we've known for a long time in the Life Design Lab that all of us contain far more aliveness than one lifetime permits us to live out. There's more than one of you in there. That's the good news. So if you've decided you have to be all that you are, and all that you are won't even fit in one lifetime.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  And if I haven't fully manifested everything that I could possibly be, then my life is unfulfilling. I just have decided to have a policy that I have to be despondent for the rest of my life. That's a bad choice. So both the people who are stuck on impact as the only way meaning really deserves to work, or I have to be entirely manifested to be fulfilled. Both of those people are set up on dead ends. And we'd like to give them a better idea.

• 7:20Chris Williamson?

  What's the better idea?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  But our idea is, you know, to, so the reframe on impact is, you know, if you put all your meaning eggs in the impact basket, impact's a good thing. I've worked hard on making an impact. You're working on an impact. It's not worthless by any means, but it's also largely out of our control. Because some of the other eight billion people might go off script when you're not looking. You know, you do everything right, it may not work. Doing it right is not anywhere near enough to pull it off. So impact is a bet. And frankly, after you make the impact even successfully, three, two, one, well, what have you done for us lately? But Half-Life on Impact is short.

• 7:58Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever seen Scotty Scheffler's interview when he won the PGA Masters Tour? It was from last year.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  No, but what did he have to say?

• 8:08Chris Williamson?

  So he basically sits down and has this room of press and he's just won the thing. He's won the big thing that he's been working towards.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:16Chris Williamson?

  The special jacket or the.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, the green jacket.

• 8:18Chris Williamson?

  Whatever it is. And he basically spends seven minutes talking about how fleeting and hollow this experience is.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:27Chris Williamson?

  And it's just phenomenal. It's one of the best things that I've seen in a very long time. And I'm kind of obsessed with the price that high performers pay to be somebody that everyone else admires.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:38Chris Williamson?

  And to see someone using the opportunity to.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  At the apex.

• 8:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, to fellate himself. He could have done that quite happily for five minutes and no one would have thought otherwise. He could have called out, I mean, I remember that Michael Jordan, he got inducted into the Hall of Fame 1993 and he uses the entire speech just to call out all of the people that have insulted him. There's no gratitude at all. And then Scotty does something similar. There's a degree of gratitude, but it's very sanguine. It's very self-deprecating and you would, I'll send you it once we're finished. You absolutely love it. But he basically says the same thing. He says, you know, very quickly after this, you are going to ask me a question. So what's next? You are going to ask me the question and I need to go home tonight and there's going to be diapers to be changed and trash to take out and what are we having for dinner? And life just comes back around again.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Oh, man. So a couple of years ago, the US Olympic Committee calls and says, can you help us? I go, help you what?

• 9:33Chris Williamson?

  We're successful in the Olympics and everyone's got gold medalist syndrome.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  So there's a training. For after the games, there's nothing quite as thrilling as ascending the Olympic, you know, platform or terrifying as coming. The distance from the top of the Olympic platform to dumpster diving is terrifyingly short.

• 9:48Chris Williamson?

  And much shorter than the other side.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:51Chris Williamson?

  It's long to get up there and it's very

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Very short on the backside, yeah.

• 9:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  So they called up and we, and I did a training with them. You know, um, there's a group called Elite Meat, which is a volunteer organization of recently former Top Gun pilots, Rangers, Green Berets, Special Forces.

• 10:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  People who are the absolute best in their business, can kill you 75 ways. Do not piss these people off. Uh, but most of them are lovely human beings, by the way. I am very fond of professional military. That's a whole nother conversation. Um, but they retire out at 42 mostly. They start at 22, do their 20 years, they're out at 42. They're incredibly good at what they do. The world doesn't need them anymore. Now what? So there's a whole group of their peers kind of going, this is going to be hard on you. We're here to catch you. Um, and I've worked with them a little bit. So yeah, absolutely. You know, killing the impact thing, you know, can be a double edged sword. So thing one about impact is you got to get eggs in some other baskets and, and the reframe there is, um, there's, because that's all done in what we call the transactional world, the get stuff done world. There's another world we call the flow world, which is really the present

• 10:50Speaker 01

  moment. This thing called reality that's happening right now that you could be experiencing in a different way. And it's rich with meaning-making experiences. We'll come back to that. For the fulfillment person who's stuck on that, like, okay, the reframe is, no, you can't be fulfilled, but you can be fully alive. You can be entirely here in this present moment. Um, and one thing that will help you accept that that may be true, the last big reframe is because now we can celebrate the scandal of particularity, which usually brings up the question, what the hell is that?

• 11:19Chris Williamson?

  I'll let you interview yourself. Just keep going.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  That's okay. Stop me anytime.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  No, no.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  It is, it's, it's, it's your show. Um, the scandal of particularity is originally theological, then a philosophical concept. And what it is, that, um, turns out the ultimate of anything, truth, beauty, justice, purity, is never actually experienced in reality. Only partial reflections temporarily encountered in a very specific and constrained moment in time, a particularity are what we actually get. We're longing for perfection, but all we get is the particular. That's actually just the nature of reality. So rather than like, oh, you see the amazing sunset.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  And what actually, if you really, really attended that amazing sunset, just as it's over and the sun hits the horizon and you see the green flash and you, and whoa, what do you want? More. I want more. It wasn't quite enough.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  That isn't, it fell short. That is the fundamental nature of reality. Reality is only expressed in these particularities, all of which are partial. And it's the fundamental nature of the human person, which is that thing you long for is how you're made. So if you can befriend the longing, it no longer is the problem of everything's not enough. It's that, oh, I have a chance to participate in a sincere reflection of that perfection briefly. Celebrate the heck out of it because this is as good as it gets and I'm going to come back tomorrow and try again.

• 12:54Chris Williamson?

  Befriending the longing, I want to come back to that. One thing that's stuck in my mind, the challenge of people who have focused on impact for a long time.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:03Chris Williamson?

  But also the route to which they achieved their impact was also the vehicle that delivered them their flow. So if you are.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Both, right.

• 13:13Chris Williamson?

  If you are a gymnast.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:15Chris Williamson?

  A very flowy sort of tennis player, very flowy sort of thing.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  You're a neurosurgeon.

• 13:20Chris Williamson?

  You're, you're now out of that. You're no longer getting the impact that you had.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:24Chris Williamson?

  And you've lost the flow.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:26Chris Williamson?

  At the same time. I imagine that double whammy must be very difficult.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  It can be. Yeah. So I, I actually stopped teaching undergrads at Stanford back in 2018. I now mostly teach them the DCI program, the Distinguished Careers Institute, very fancy name for a gap year for grownups. Anywhere from 45 to 90, mostly 55 to 75 years old, kind of the old folks who used to think about transitioning to what you used to call retirement. And now what do I do? So that's the second half of life transition for people. And the way I characterize the big challenge of that, and these are all, not all necessarily rich hedge fund people from New York, but we've got plenty of those. It could be a nonprofit leader, you know, but they're all distinguished people who had impact and enjoyed doing that impactful thing well and got into it and were in the flow. And now they don't necessarily want to be that person anymore. So it's the shift from role to soul.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  So the shift from, I'm a role-based person. I'm really good at this, you know, gymnast thing. I'm really good at the surgery thing. And I still value that, but it's not first and foremost where my identity wants to come from now. And as I move away from that, you know, it's, it's sticky. And boy, I'm really good at making that version of me work. And that's where kind of the shift into a, to a greater maturity is a very elective move. And it starts anywhere from 30 to never. Not much before 30, because you don't get a neocortex till you're 27 or 28, a little later in men, big surprise. Now, but look, you don't get, you don't get a Buddha, you

• 14:57Speaker 01

  don't get a Moses, you don't get a Jesus until, until 30, 40 in Moses's case. It takes a while to make a person. But once you get past making a person, you know, then, then you've got to, you've got to build an ego before you can transcend it. You've got to have a life container before you can empty it. So, so that, that task of turning yourself into a person in your 30s, you know, your 20s, 30s and 40s is a really important task. But then, once you've got one, once you've got a person you trust enough that you believe you deserve to exist, now it's time to start emptying out and having a more transcendent experience. And it's, it is a real, it's a real tough transition for most people.

• 15:34Chris Williamson?

  That manopoeia that happens to guys toward the end of their 20s, I first saw it in the way that me and my friends trained fitness.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:41Chris Williamson?

  And then it became everything, the way that we thought about our contribution to our friend group and the way that we thought about money or girls or family life or whatever. Something that has struck me there is the fact that getting beyond 40 ancestrally would have been increasingly rare.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:01Chris Williamson?

  And

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Death was more popular. Well, more frequent.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  What that, what that suggests, we can say popular.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:07Chris Williamson?

  What that suggests is that this, these challenges that we're facing were not only mismatched evolutionarily.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:17Chris Williamson?

  For the modern environment. Even durationally.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:21Chris Williamson?

  We are mismatched.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:22Chris Williamson?

  For our current environment.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:23Chris Williamson?

  And you can talk about an aging population and birth rate decline and remember, you can go into that stuff.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 16:28Chris Williamson?

  But I think what's more interesting is that the adaptive systems that we have, even culturally myth, archetype, like what does it mean? If it's such a rarified strata to get into 50, 60, 70 years old.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:46Chris Williamson?

  Where there's just not been a big enough sample size of people from history to be able to explain what that transition actually looks like. Does that make sense?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Sure, but I think what it really means is, I mean, people amid those transitions in their mid, late 30s to early 40s before, because they're going to die at 50. And now just the window of time during which that transition can occur has stretched.

• 17:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and shifted.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  And shifted. And so what's happening is people are doubling down. You know, so William Bridges wrote the book Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Big Changes. So he posits years ago, it's an 80s self-help classic. It's a good book, based on Erickson's work, that changes are outside in realities that happen to you. Transitions are the internal experience of managing them. And his observation was that transitions are three steps, not two. It's not an ending followed by a new beginning. It's an ending followed by the neutral zone, followed by, so, you know, it's over, then you're lost. And then you get refound, but you don't go from found to found.

• 17:47Chris Williamson?

  Such a good point. That's so good.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  If you're really comfortable and, oh, I've extended and had a longer career and I started my fourth company. I mean, I started the Life Design Lab at 54. You know, and so my fourth startup, you know, into my 70s. You know, it's kind of like, hey, I like this. The feedback loop of doing stuff I'm good at and it works is really gratifying. And then life kind of says, yeah, let's go, let's go off and be confused. Let's go learn how to be emotional and feel like an incompetent and incompetent for a while. Like, that's really attractive. So I see people all the time get to the end of something and then kind of go, I'm going to go into the darkness for a while. Uh, I think I'll go back to the clarity. So we just re-up. Buddy of mine, my age, just started his 12th company. I'll call him John.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  And I'm going, John, really?

• 18:37Chris Williamson?

  This game again.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  I mean, what do you not know? So what I'm good at, I kind of go like, you knew that four times ago.

• 18:45Chris Williamson?

  Come on, dude. If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. Eight Sleep just released their brand new Pod 5, which includes the world's first temperature regulating duvet. Compare it with their smart mattress cover, which cools or warms each side of the bed by up to 20 degrees. And you've got a climate controlled cocoon built for deep uninterrupted rest. The new base even comes with a built in speaker. So you can fall asleep to white noise, nature sounds, or a little ambient Taylor Swift, if that's your thing. And it's got upgraded biometric sensors that quietly run health checks every night, spotting patterns like abnormal heartbeats, disrupted breathing, or sudden changes in HRV, which is why it has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night. Best of all, they've got a 30 day sleep trial.

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

  So you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they will give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get up to $350 off the Pod 5 by going to the link in the description below, heading to eightsleep.com/modernd wisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com slash modern wisdom. A modern wisdom at checkout. Another idea that me and George, my friend, talk about is the anorexic hermit crab. So.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Explain to me the anorexic hermit crab. That's great.

• 20:00Chris Williamson?

  So it basically the crabs need to shed their shell in order to be able to grow. And what you could imagine, I'm not going to say that John is doing this.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:10Chris Williamson?

  But you could imagine a world in which a hermit crab refused to eat in order for it to not outgrow its shell.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:18Chris Williamson?

  And that would.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  I'm staying right here.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  That would be the anorexic hermit crab.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. No, I think and.

• 20:23Chris Williamson?

  Because it doesn't want to go through the middle section. It doesn't want to go through the middle transition.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:28Chris Williamson?

  We want to go from found, fuck it, I'll just stay in found.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll say found.

• 20:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we just had the conversation with Chip Conley, you know, Mr. Modern Elder Academy guy, you know, and he's pushing the midlife chrysalis, not the midlife crisis. Crisis is doing it badly as opposed to this transformational thing, which is, I mean, it's a nice pitch. He's a lovely guy doing really good work. But no, life is change. You know, if I really believe that being a person is being a becoming. Then it's gonna change. And some of those changes are are are real seasonal, stage-like transitions that are that are pretty interesting. And I, you know, you have to decide if it's worth it.

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  That's impact. What about the reframe on fulfillment?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Okay, so fulfillment, I can be fully alive, which is again back to be fully alive in the present moment, even with its apparent insufficiency of particularity. And it's just, I mean, this is my, is actually my first can of new tonic.

• 21:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  I think it's the best one I've ever had.

• 21:24Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  You know, and is it the best, you know, caffeinated drink on the surface of the earth?

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Um, so far.

• 21:29Chris Williamson?

  Good.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  So far. So am I willing, am I willing to say, ah, you know, not quite, or am I willing to say, I'm really enjoying this? And let it be what it is and not not blame it for what it's not yet. So that that's what we're fully alive comes back in. And there are practices that allow us to do that. And so most of what the book is really about is positing, look, there's the transactional world where all this performance is occurring. And there's a flow world, which is happening right now. Do you have access to the kinds of behaviors, the kind of awareness, the kind of attention in this present moment, what I call the flow world, that will allow you to experience life more deeply? Because more aliveness feels more meaningful. It feels more human. I think what we're ultimately called to be is more human.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Joseph Campbell said in an interview years ago on PBS, you know, on the meaning question, like, is it really meaning? Or is what we're really after just the true rapture of being alive? At the end of the day, you have to decide, is the human person fundamentally just a production engine? I equal what I did? Or a living being and what I equaled was the life I lived?

• 22:37Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  So your your decision about what it means to be a person is a pretty big decision.

• 22:43Chris Williamson?

  Can you put meaning into an evolutionary lens for me, please? How is meaning adaptive? What is it ancestrally? Give it that lens if you can.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Um, I'm winging it because that's not, first and foremost, where I go. What I, you know, I'm a realist. I live in reality. I notice people think the meaning thing is pretty important. So I'm just gonna start there. Why might meaning have been important? Well, that's actually going to depend a little bit on your cosmology.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Right. I happen to be the theist on the team. My partner, Bill, is the Nietzsche appreciating existential atheist. So you're going to get a different answer. But I think even evolutionarily, if in fact, that which is energizing evolution at all,

• 23:27Speaker 01

  there's some trajectory here.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  And that collaboration and community and persistence sustain that.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Then let's keep it interesting. Not just keep it virile. So I can move along. And so if I can lean, if there's something in me that wants to lean more deeply into my own life and lean more deeply into our collective life. Then that's going to keep the community going. The community is going to keep the genome going.

• 24:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, good. It's an alignment of a bunch of different pro-social macronutrients.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:08Chris Williamson?

  That are both internal and sort of kin based, the just around you, Dunbar numbers stuff. So is it your perspective to try and summarize where we've got to so far?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:17Chris Williamson?

  The problem that people are trying to actually solve when they say they want more meaning.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:21Chris Williamson?

  Is they want more aliveness. They want to feel more alive.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Almost. I'm suggesting that if we added more aliveness to the definition of meaning and then give tools to acquire that, then their access to meanings are going to go up.

• 24:36Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  That right now, people, you know, it's like your food groups. I mean, if you've got, I've got, I've got one food group called Impact. And we're suggesting, how about five? Impact, wonder, flow, coherence and community. So if I've got more food groups, I might get more calories.

• 24:52Chris Williamson?

  What about fulfillment in that fulfillment being broken out into some of those other component parts?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:57Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. It weighs different aspects of my humanity are being both experienced, grown and expressed.

• 25:03Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Contributing elements of meaning.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:06Chris Williamson?

  In your conception.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is not comprehensive, by the way. This is kind of a low hanging fruit book. You know, we're, we're the.

• 25:12Chris Williamson?

  Zero to one is the way to go.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you know, you have a lot of people on here who are about maximizing about high performance, about getting the most out of. We're the set the bar low and clear it guys. I mean, we're, we're trying to provide doable, accessible tools that regular people can use on a regular basis. Life is long. It's an incremental evolutionary process. Let's all get there. So when Bill and I looked at what people were struggling and what we might have to say through the lens of design thinking, that's the platform we sort of are allowed to speak from. We said, well, we're not going to completely boil the ocean of the meaning question here. We're not. However, what might be helpful? And so these reframes we think might be helpful that we just discussed. Couple of mindsets are helpful. We've got a chapter on that.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  And then these four areas, wonder, flow, coherency, and formative community. We are, that's not the totality of meaning by any means. Meaning is a big topic, but we think those four are readily available to almost everybody and they're accessible pretty quickly. So here's a design tool or a practice or an idea or suggestion where you might go get some of that stuff. And if that works for a lot of people, that's a good thing.

• 26:21Chris Williamson?

  Good starting point. Is there anything else to say about reframe before we get into the engines and the component part?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, just the point of reframe. You know, it has been said, and I would agree, that, you know, life is largely a story, our experience of life is largely a story we tell ourselves. And we know neurophysiologically now that we don't see what we're looking at, we see what we're looking for. So our lens and how we anticipate what the world's going to be really matters. So the point of reframing, like, no, I'm not trying to be fulfilled, I'm trying to be fully alive. That's a reframe. You know, when we reframe things, it really changes everything. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

• 27:01Chris Williamson?

  How much of this is top down versus bottom up? Because can we dictate to ourselves, you will do this thing? The community piece is going to be exciting, obviously gets to feed into it. The flow piece is kind of halfway between the two, but much of this is thinking problem. Someone might interpret it as, I need to think my way out of this thinking.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Well, we're, you know, I teach at Stanford. We wrote a book that's pretty explicit articulate stuff. So it's kind of in the idea realm. Yeah, pretty heady. You know, I've got closed captioning on all the time. I really like knowing things and describing. I'd almost rather describe something than do it. You know, that's a bit of a temptation for me. But so I think the rethinking, this is where our consciousness directs our agency, you know, can be the thing that gives us some power over our lives. So it may start with thinking differently. However, we're going to go into, you know, hopefully embodied experiences in a pretty quick way. We want to get people the chance to grow their actual faculties of attending

• 28:14Speaker 01

  to and noticing and having these other experiences which are embodied. I mean, flow is not a thought-based experience. So we want to move toward embodiment. And I think over time, as you get better at these kinds of things, sometimes the starting place will be those experiences where you actually are noticing something in the experience of the moment or coming out of your body rather than coming out of your brain or coming out of your ideas.

• 28:40Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference between that problem-solving world and the meaning-making world?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Okay, well, there's still meaning in the problem-solving world. It's just a narrow form. But so we came up with this model of the transactional world and the flow world in that there's a bunch of meaning to be had in the flow world, simply because, look, there's only one real world. There are two worlds. But your brain can't handle the whole thing at one time. And we now know neurologically, you know, Lisa Miller's work at Columbia, there's your achieving brain and there's your awakened brain, the much more sophisticated version of the left brain, right brain model. And as Jill Bolt tailors here, stroke of insight, what happened when this neurologist actually lost her left brain for a while. So what's going on is we're trying to integrate these things and give people access to it.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  And so if I can move more into a fuller implementation of my entire consciousness, then my chance at living a richer life goes up. And so the flow world simply means I want to start making sure that the part of my consciousness that can experience other aspects of reality is getting airtime, because when that part of my awareness gets more airtime, there are experiences available to me right in front of me for free that currently are going wasted. So we're saying it's not about more. We are trying to invite people to get more out of the life they're in, not cram more into it to change it. Now, we wrote two books about how to make big changes.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  We're in favor of changing things and making them better. But along the way, don't forget to live the life you're in.

• 30:20Chris Williamson?

  So with that perspective, does optimization or over-optimization drain life of meaning in some ways?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  I think it can. I think if we're always simply trying to get to the better thing.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Most people's degree of happiness is described by the delta, the gap between the way things are and what they had in mind.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  When that gap is small, it's working. When that gap is broad, it's not. So that means I've just decided the quality of my life is based on an imaginal idea that I have.

• 30:58Chris Williamson?

  You can either bring your expectations down or increase your performance.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, people land, you know,

• 31:05Speaker 01

  there's two phrases, good enough is and good enough isn't. Most people have a bias. They tend to be one of those kinds of persons. The truth is, they're both true. Just pick carefully when you apply them. So I'm all about high performance. You know, get better, learn how to do things. Listen to Huberman, listen to Chris Williamson. But if I fall all the way into that thing, then my experience in my own life is always simply trying to narrow the gap. And then as soon as I get it close, it's time to up my game and push that asymptote further out again so that I have more gap and push myself forward. I mean, you can never ultimately maximize your productivity.

• 31:47Chris Williamson?

  There's a beautiful line from Alan Watts. He says, "If we are altogether unduly absorbed with improving our lives, we may forget to live them."

• 31:55Speaker 01

  You missed the whole thing.

• 31:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's provisional life.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:01Chris Williamson?

  The arrival fallacy.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is no done, there is no right, and there is no it. Have I found it? There's no it.

• 32:11Chris Williamson?

  I think about the most modern example of this that keeps me. This is my memento mori, but for the TikTok generation.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:19Chris Williamson?

  One day you'll die and your inbox will still accumulate emails. Like, that will never be done. There will be people emailing you.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  Asking why you're not replying or secretly saying to a friend.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  That you were really rude because you hadn't replied, who don't know that you're dead.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  You're.

• 32:37Chris Williamson?

  And the emails will continue to come.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  So I have a small group of guys that have been in my support group for 51 years. I formed them in 1974. You know, I'm the eldest, I'm about to turn 73. But we're all within a year or two of each other. And so we started moving into our 70s. And at the 50th anniversary, about 18 months ago, you know, we started a conversation, been going on for about two years now. But how are we going to become elders? I mean, literally, I tell people, because it's true. My next major milestone is death. How do I get there? Well.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Now, part of that is, you know, I've had a lot of people. My father died of suicide when I was nine.

• 33:10Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  So dealing with dead people has become important early on. I lost my beloved wife Claudia to cancer five years ago. Though oddly enough, another compos mentis woman has decided to sign up for the program. So I'm about to get married again.

• 33:22Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Thank you, yes. But, you know, it's a very steep learning curve. You know, John O'Donoghue, the old Celtic mystic, would say that marrying another person is moving to a foreign country. Whole new culture, whole new language. Or my friend Jerry Sisser would say, philosophy prof, there are no second marriages, there are only first marriages the second time around. So I'm doing the first marriage the third time around. And the learning curve is steep, which, by the way, is terrific.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  But this death thing, once you get it, but it's going around. It's becoming extremely popular. You know, it was popular earlier and now it's popular later, but still very popular. Almost everybody's into it. And once you really get your hands around your finitude, and burying a couple of people will help you do that. It gets you more intimate with it. So it's very freeing.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  What have I got, you know, 12 years, 15 years? And it's very clear to me that my productivity is going to plummet after my death. I mean, it's just going to fall, it's just going to drop off like a stone. And so this trajectory on the way to the grave, I mean, like, you know, how hard, how hard am I, you know, you know, is, is the, is the area under the curve of the last six months of my life really going to net matter? Which doesn't mean mailing it in is okay. What it means is, look, you're a person, you have a life, what's it for? Now get something done. You know, I'm an old boy scout, let's leave the campground, but then we found it. But is that the only thing we're doing?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  What's the gift you have to give? Chris, your job, I'll, christing, that's your job. Now, it expresses itself in establishing better, you know, self-help growth awareness, particularly in young men in this current era. That's a nice contribution. But at the end of the day, your job is to be Chris. I think each of us is a gift that God or the universe, depending on your cosmology, has given to the world and your job is to figure out what's inside there and get the thing unwrapped so we can play with it before the game is over.

• 35:27Chris Williamson?

  AG1 just released their next gen formula, which is a more advanced clinically backed version of the product I've been drinking every day for years, delivering more than 75 vitamins, including your multivitamin, pre and probiotics, superfood, greens and more. And for the first time, they've added new flavors, tropical, citrus and berry, only available in the US and Canada, sorry for that. But you do still get the same one scoop ritual, now with an even more thoughtful formulation, flavor and four clinical trials behind it, designed with absorption and efficacy in mind. AG1 has been evolving continuously since 2010 alongside the latest research and next gen is clinically shown to help fill common nutrient gaps and support gut health, even in people who already eat well.

• 36:12Chris Williamson?

  In one study, it boosted healthy bacteria in the gut by 10 times. If you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they will just give you your money back. So you've got nothing to lose. Right now, get a year's free supply of vitamin D3K2 and AG1 travel packs, plus that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com/.

• 36:40Chris Williamson?

  Modern wisdom. You know, my favorite example of this Salvador Dali. I don't know, have you, do you know much about Dali?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  I like, I like his work and I've been to his home and you know.

• 36:49Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so his personal life, so he was the reincarnation of his dead brother, according to his parents. So Dali's 20 months old.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:59Chris Williamson?

  And his parents take him to a graveyard and show him a gravesite. And he had a brother that was born 20 months before him. And Dali is named after him.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:12Chris Williamson?

  And his parents say, this is Salvador.

• 37:16Chris Williamson?

  This is who you are. This is, that was how it started. That was how Dali's life started.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  He was interesting from the get go.

• 37:22Chris Williamson?

  Uh, 10, 10 years old, he's throwing himself down sets of stairs because he realizes that pain is interesting. And that people come and he can manipulate them in this sort of very Machiavellian sort of way.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:34Chris Williamson?

  He walked an anteater through the streets of Paris. And when he was asked why, he said, it's because anteaters are never in fashion. He took a pistol.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:42Chris Williamson?

  To a live talk that he gave in France and he just fired it intermittently to keep people's attention. He also gave another talk where he was in a deep sea diving suit and suffocated in it and had to be wrenched out of it mid talk. He refused to walk through doorways forwards. He would only ever go sideways or backward because he said that, uh, habit destroys the patterns of creativity. He once sued a guy for dreaming about him and said, the subconscious belongs to me. He is buried, as you know, underneath his own, people walk over his body when observing his work.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:15Chris Williamson?

  He used to, he was very poor during his life. He used to sign checks that couldn't be cashed because he had no money in his bank account, but he would doodle on the back of them. And the check illustration would be worth more than the actual check itself. He.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Again, so what's, what's he doing there? What's he saying is he's.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  The fullness of him.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  He's noticing that people fall into patterns and, and act as though those patterns are what life is. As opposed to they're a container that's supposed to hold them. So he's going to transcend the pattern and force you to realize, oh, doors aren't for walking through. So he ends up with. A policy that he can't abide by the pattern. You know, so his, his moral commitment is to constantly press that edge lest I'm less than I could be, which is, which is a really sort of monastic commitment.

• 39:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, the fullness thing on that is, as brilliant as he was, Da Vinci didn't do Dali and Michelangelo didn't do Dali.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  So if he had been anything short of the fullness of himself, the world would be fundamentally less. So I agree. I think that we have this sort of cosmic karmic duty.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:16Chris Williamson?

  To existence.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:19Chris Williamson?

  To do what only we can do because you can't do Dali and neither can I, neither could Michelangelo, neither could Da Vinci.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:25Chris Williamson?

  So it's his job to walk the anteater and go through the doorway sideways.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:31Chris Williamson?

  So, okay, okay.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  The component parts, wonder, what do we need to know about wonder?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so wonder, and we have a little equation for that. So when you take curiosity, curiosity is a very good thing. It's a mindset we're in favor of, you know, and you upgrade it by applying, you direct curiosity toward mystery.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Those things that are beyond our understanding or since transcended at the moment in time. Curiosity plus mystery. So I'm now going to lean with a high availability into a mystery allows wonder to occur. And one, the reason wonder is important. So wonder, awe, even positive overwhelm. So Dr. Keltner, a prophet, UC Berkeley, has written the book on awe and then eight different forms of human experience that allow awe or wonder to occur. So he's quadrupled down on this thing and that it works across all cultures and all different spiritual traditions. It's a fundamentally human experience that people report as making themselves feel more alive and making themselves, themselves feel more like themselves and making themselves feel more like a part of this great, wonderful thing.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  So very often in an intense experience of wonder, whether it's a communal thing at a concert, whether it's a sunset, whether it's noticing the sleeping baby at three in the morning, you know, suddenly like, oh, and we are all in, it's all one fabric and we're all in this thing together and the universality of it all suddenly breaks through. So wonder enables that to occur. It's profoundly human making experience, you know, so, and we think that's available all the time. You know, you'd give a quote just a minute ago. I love this particular quote from Henry Miller. So the American author and playwright Henry Miller once said, quote, "I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself."

• 41:19Speaker 01

  I have tried this experiment a thousand times and I have never been disappointed.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  So, you know, that's the, that's the habit of wonder. So, so wonder is the place where we can move beyond ourselves, which by the way, goes back to Maslow. So late in his life, Maslow, and most people still think that the apex of the hierarchy of needs, according to Maslow, is self-actualization. It's not. The highest level is actually self-transcendency, which he came up with very late in his life. He never published it. It's in his personal journal notes. Others published it behind him, but interestingly enough, still, you know, eight out of 10 people think it stops it, self-actualization. And self-transcendency, if attained, creates meaning-making. So there's a difference. And he's still wrong because he made it hierarchical. And it turns out self-transcendency isn't hierarchical. You don't have to be self-actualized to get there.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Self-transcendency can work for anyone, anywhere, anytime. Just get beyond yourself, whether it's loving other people, whether it's being selfless, whether it's compassion, whether it's noticing beauty and allowing it to overwhelm you. All those things get you beyond yourself. And wonder is a place where you go beyond yourself.

• 42:23Chris Williamson?

  Or else, if that wasn't true, looking up at the night sky wouldn't be impressive unless you'd maximize your potential first.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  Doing something for somebody else that makes you feel good and the world a better place, wouldn't be pro-social.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Wouldn't work. Yeah.

• 42:38Chris Williamson?

  Well, but you know.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  You had not yet earned the right to notice.

• 42:40Chris Williamson?

  As of yet, you haven't maximized your 401K.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  And that means that you don't get.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  You're not.

• 42:45Chris Williamson?

  Scott Barry Kaufman did a good, a good job on that. His book, Transcend.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:49Chris Williamson?

  Was, was, was real nice. And he's, he's big into, into Maslow's stuff. Okay.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Okay, that's wonder.

• 42:54Chris Williamson?

  Engineering me some wonder. What, what are some practices for how I can bring more of it into my life? I'm paying attention to things in a manner to look at them with a fresh set of eyes?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we have a little exercise called put on your wonder glasses.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  So put on your wonder glasses. First of all, you know, if you can't beat it, join it. So we recognize that we're transactionally minded. And so we take a situation and, you know, might be a little challenging here with the student, but you know, you, you take a moment and you just take a look around the, take a look around your situation, take a look around your room, whether it would, you're outside, you're inside, you're walking the dog. And you take a quick look with your normal glasses on. And the first thing you'll notice is what the transactional brain is going to be looking for like, oh, okay, this is what they're using a certain kind of soundproofing. The blue lights, that's kind of interesting, you know, and I see what's going on, you know, and probably what will happen is you'll immediately come up with a to do list like, you know, oh, I got to get one of those blue lights, you know, and that's a better, that's a better mic holder than I've got, you know, and I wonder if that plant deserves to be watered, you know, so your brain just comes up the to do list. So first you scan

• 43:53Speaker 01

  around the room, scan around the scene and let your brain do what it naturally does. And then you say, thank you. Thank you for sharing. I'll make that list. I'll look back to you another time. Then you take another look and say, is there anything here that is interesting, right, that allows you to be curious, you know, you know, and, and I'll notice, well, he's got a plant there. He was going to, you know, why is that, why do we need a plant, you know, and then, and I might know something, something else might be interesting, like, you know, the fact that we have all these different cameras and why are these angles important? That might be curious to me, you know, and then I'll say, okay, now it's time for wonder glasses. Which of those curious things do I want to really lean into and let the mystery reveal itself? And I'm going to go with a plant. Is it real or plastic, by the way?

• 44:39Chris Williamson?

  Plastic.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  It's plastic. Okay. So it's a plastic plant. It's a good plastic plant. So I'm noticing that is so Chris is having these conversations with people and there is a little organic something in the room. And so what that's, this is maybe an homage to, maybe it's, maybe it's evoking the fact that, you know, it's not just digital. It's not just electronic. It's not just black. There's some life in here, too. And that, that reminder of life is, so how do reminders of life occur? So I allow myself to fall to, in any moment in time, there's a way I can in a minute or two reopen my availability to the fact that there's something like Henry Miller was saying, that's indescribable, be mysterious and wonderful, right in front of me, if I let it be.

• 45:25Chris Williamson?

  If you were to

• 45:26Speaker 01

  It's practice.

• 45:26Chris Williamson?

  If you were to try and turn up the, turn down the difficulty and turn up the external supply of wonder.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:34Chris Williamson?

  What are some reliable ways to do that? You mentioned sunsets earlier on. I imagine that that's one.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  The natural world is going to be your friend, you know, identify the things that are naturally working for you. The other thing is way of, is just allow yourself to notice the existence of the flow world. You know, because that's where wonder is going to be available to you, which means dropping into the present moment. So having, so we have an exercise called flip the switch. You know, so you're sitting, you know, in a staff meeting, you know, and you're listening to the budget be hacked apart again and you're bored, you know, and then literally you say to yourself, flip, boom, flip the switch. What's happening in the flow world right now? So I'm in this room, I'm with these people. How is Chris actually feeling right now? You know, um, what, I look out, oh, oh, there's a tree out the window and that tree is turning colors.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  You know, and this all costs maybe three or four seconds. So I can get the habit of calling myself back to the present moment and just noticing what's going on around me. And the fact that I'm, I'm a living person in this present situation. I mean, if I let myself, while I'm thinking about answering your question, I can be aware of how the cushion feels on my buttocks. Because I'm actually sitting, I'm, I'm not just talking to you, I'm sitting in this chair. Am I actually in this room? So those awarenesses allow the mental faculties, the part of your brain that knows how to be attentive to the present moment, catch those things. So you just constantly have these little games you can play with yourself, which is keeping yourself in the game. Okay, coherence.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Coherence. It turns out the meaning-making researchers will tell us that if you can align consciously who you are, what you're doing and what you believe in, which we call coherence. So, you know, I understand who I, at least presently, I've got a story about who I am. These are things I really care about. Here's what I'm doing in the world. Do they align? And when they align, usually with some degree of compromise, because life is never perfect, but is a calculated compromise that I've accepted. I'm having an experience of coherency. I'm being an integrated, you know, coherent, thoughtful, authentic person in the world, which means I'm living purposefully. Frankly, if the book takes a risk, it's that we don't talk an awful lot about finding

• 47:49Speaker 01

  purpose and mission and what have you, in part because people are so overmissioned right now that they're stuck in the transactional world. We're really deferring almost all of that hopefulness to this coherency thing. If people are aware of their value set, and they're aware of what they're doing in the world, and they're trying to move those things into alignment called coherency, then we're pretty sure they're going to end up doing good things. So I don't need to preach at you about trying to make the world a better place. The overwhelming majority of people we work with, they've got great values. And if their values actually get to be the lead horse on the directing of their lives, we're all going to be in a better place. So I don't need to tell you what to do. You've already got what you need. So the experience of coherency, we call it coherency sightings.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Catch yourself in the act of being an integrated coherent person. That's really gratifying. Oh, I'm sitting here in your studio, and we're talking about how people can live more meaningfully. That is a really coherent thing for me to do. Am I aware of the fact that, oh, yeah, this is exactly what I want to be doing. This is really working for me.

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

  Invert, what would somebody being out of coherence look like?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Oh, I was just talking to a guy the other day. So one of the DCI fellows, a very successful Hong Kong financier, calls me and says, "My 26-year-old son is about to quit his fabulous job. Please help me stop him." So I said, "No, I'm not going to help stop him, and I'm not going to call him because you said call him. But if he wants to call me, we can chat and by the way, probably tell him he's doing the right thing. So watch what you wish for." So I'm on the phone, on a Zoom call, talking to this 26-year-old young man, who is a Stanford grad in economics with a master's in computer science, because everybody should know digital stuff. And he drops right into investment banking, and he's killing it. He's absolutely killing it.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  And he's having a great time killing it, until suddenly he wakes up one day and he's bored to tears. And so I think I'm gonna quit and, you know, ruin my career and, and travel for a while and go try to find myself. You know, because what he noticed was, right, and I think what's happening for him is his neocortex is forming about 27, he's a little ahead of himself.

• 49:58Chris Williamson?

  Manopause.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  And man, and just like, wait a minute. The motivation I had to do this, which was growing and winning, which is fine, you know, getting A's, he was getting A's at the bank like he got at Stanford. Suddenly doesn't work for me anymore. He, he awakened an incoherent person. And he tried to talk himself into success as its own reward, and he just couldn't do it. So for him to become coherent, he's gonna have to go recalibrate his values and recalibrate his priorities. So he's in a transition. That's the right thing to do.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Now, there are other people who keep re-upping that incoherence because they're getting the money, or they're fearful of the change, or their wife will think they're stupid. You know, there's lots of reasons people get stuck in an incoherent place, but it's soul sucking, so be careful.

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  How does coherence outperform balance as a life goal?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I've never had balance as a goal. I've never seen a balanced person.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  I mean, if balance means, you know, all of my allocation of time and energy precisely reflects my value prioritization set. You know, the, the perfect layering of the layer cake of my life looks just like my values at all times. I've never, I've never had that moment. So we don't, we, we don't, we talk about, you know, not balance as much as just the dashboard of what is your current portfolio? What's, what's the mix of your life? So balance is a resource allocation question.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  And so, you know, so you have to decide what your priorities are going to be. One of my examples is one of my older sisters ran a graduate school of.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  In education at a small private college and she'd been doing a PhD's job for 15 years and finally decided it was time to get the PhD and actually be the person she was supposed to be. So she's working full time running a graduate school while going full time to school getting a PhD. And she called her friends and said, I'm a little overbooked. I've calculated I have six unscheduled hours in the next five years. A very little, true story, I have very little time to talk to anybody. You're not making the cut. I didn't make the cut. And, and that was a radically imbalanced lifestyle and it was exactly the right coherent thing for her to do.

• 52:15Chris Williamson?

  Highly coherent.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Highly coherent. So balance is lovely. And if a coherent life and circumstances permit it, great. But what you really want to be is alive and accepting the compromises that come with it.

• 52:30Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Flow. What about flow?

• 52:34Speaker 01

  So flow. So first of all, we are introducing the concept of the flow world along with the flow state. So we all know the flow state from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the, the positive psychologist who invented the term flow, the psychology of optimal experience, published back in 90 something. And that's lovely as an idea in the zone, what have you. Most people know what flow is and have had moments of experiencing it. And so one of the first things we come up with is, okay, so that's the flow state. The experience of being fully engaged in the moment where time stands still and I feel fully present, all that stuff, which is great. Where does that happen? So first of all, we're saying it happens in this place called the flow world. So flow occurs when I'm fully in the present moment and

• 53:18Speaker 01

  that's really where the flow world is existing. So let's go where flow can be found. Thing one, so we posit the flow world is the place where you might enter the flow state. And then on the flow state that we originally defined, there's this thing called the flow channel, which is where the task at hand and my skill set are close. So my, my capacity and what the, the task demands of me are really close. I'm neither over skilled and then I get bored, or I'm neither under skilled and then I get anxious.

• 53:48Chris Williamson?

  This sort of proximate zone of development type stuff?

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm right at my skill level. So the situation is demanding the most of me. So, and what we notice about, and that's fine. We call that apex flow, which is where, you know, I'm really right on the ragged edge of my capability. And the reason I can drop into flow in that situation is

• 54:07Speaker 01

  The circumstance, i.e. the task.

• 54:09Chris Williamson?

  I need to wrangle all of my capacity.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  It takes all of me. So literally, the way I put that is I have now delegated responsibility from my degree of engagement in life to the quality of the task. I need to find some task that will so demand of me my attention that I finally become fully present.

• 54:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Which means it's the task's job for me to be present, not my job.

• 54:32Chris Williamson?

  It's the flow equivalent of putting your meaning and impact.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Bingo. So what I really want to learn how to do, we call it simple flow, is I can choose to be fully attentive. I gotta chop these damn onions to make the soup. And then what I really, really get on to is, is the dinner when the people come over at seven o'clock. So it's 5:30 now, I gotta get the soup going, you know, multitask, put on a Chris Williamson, you know, YouTube while I'm listening, do four things to make the most of it. I suppose to like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's go all the way in on the onion chopping.

• 54:59Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I thought you meant forget the onions and just watch the Chris Williamson.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Well, that would, that would, that'd be a higher level flow, but you know, I gotta, I gotta get the onion done. I'm so sorry. So, um, so if I can fall all the way in, like, look, it's gonna be 10 minutes. You know, I'm gonna do this in, you know, a nice zen kind of way. I'm gonna really appreciate the knife. I'm gonna actually feel the experience. I can choose to go all in, even if my skill set far exceeds it. I can just choose to be fully present to what I'm doing. And that allows me to have this fully engaged, calmly detached experience, which is more alive. I can even try something that's hard for me. And if I really can accept that I might make a mistake and that's okay, then the anxiety can be dropped. Anxiety is still an elective pain. So I can drop the anxiety or I can drop the boredom by having the mental discipline of choosing my way into the moment. Now suddenly

• 55:48Speaker 01

  the flow channel quadruples in size.

• 55:51Chris Williamson?

  In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I am frankly. Dependent on it, and it's how I've started my day every single morning. This is the best tasting hydration drink on the market. You might think, why do I need to be more hydrated? Because proper hydration is not just about drinking enough water. It's having sufficient electrolytes to allow your body to use those fluids. Each grabbing your stick pack is a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium. It's got no sugar, coloring, artificial ingredients or any other junk. This plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating your appetite and curbing cravings. This orange flavour in a cold glass of water is a sweet, salty, orangey nectar and you

• 56:34Chris Williamson?

  will genuinely feel a difference when you take it versus when you don't, which is why I keep going on about it. Best of all, there's a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. Buy it, use it all, and if you don't like it for any reason, they give you your money back and you don't even have to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavours with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. So that's lovely. I think the first thing it makes me think of is whether or not multitasking and the,

• 57:16Chris Williamson?

  yeah, the, I am going to listen to a podcast at one and a half times speed while I get my walk in, while I check my notes for the upcoming email I've got to do.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:27Chris Williamson?

  Is that a particularly kryptonite additive to try and put into achieving flow? Is that going to contribute to the degradation of flow across the world?

• 57:41Speaker 01

  I think so. I mean, in short, I'm not saying never do it. And we do know the truth is human, neither humans nor computers actually multitask.

• 57:49Chris Williamson?

  They're parallel.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  We task switch.

• 57:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What people think they mean is parallel processing.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:53Chris Williamson?

  What they're actually doing is.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Task switching.

• 57:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  So getting good at task switching quickly. Is a performance optimization capability. And in the, in the high productivity world, that's not a bad skill to have. And I get the feedback loop of I got more done, or I got more for my time, or I got paid higher, or my PowerPoints were cooler than yours, whatever it is.

• 58:14Chris Williamson?

  Or I got done what I needed to get done more quickly so that I

• 58:18Speaker 01

  I bought some time back, yeah. So, but again, if I only do that.

• 58:24Chris Williamson?

  In perpetuity.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Flow requires full participation. And the reason time stands still and becomes eternal, time elongates, you know, and disappears all at once because I'm so fully present to it. Is this full availability and full concentration. If I'm switching constantly, I'm never going to have that full presence. So I do think multitask, what we call multitasking and flow are simply different states. Now, you might, somebody might argue, I can flow by how well I'm multitasking.

• 58:53Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that's actual flow. I think what it is, it's gratifying that I'm being high performant. That's okay. But if it's, it's the only game you're playing, then you've, you've left love behind.

• 59:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  What do you think? I mean, you're a multitasker.

• 59:07Chris Williamson?

  That's true, chronically. The meta-thinking thing, I'm very rarely in flow when I'm thinking about the thinking.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:17Chris Williamson?

  You have to when you're juggling a bunch of different balls at the same time.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:21Chris Williamson?

  Now, I was trying to think of an example where this wouldn't be true. I used to run nightclubs, used to be stood on the

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  Front door of a nightclub for a very, very long time. And in that, it's kind of multi-variety. I'm usually getting my phone out, messaging the guy, okay, where are the flyers at? They're doing that thing.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:37Chris Williamson?

  Then the queue's starting to build out, so I actually need to push that back in. So you can't let the queue get too wide, because then it becomes unruly. And then it's the doors, oh, the tills out of change, so I need to get the person to do the till thing. So that is a kind of multitasking, but it's still relatively linear. It's sort of moving in the same direction. The phone is about the thing, the till is about the thing, the queue's about the thing. I can hear the music coming from inside, what's the DJ doing? And that is, that is quite a nice dance. It's a very wide, it's sort of very peripheral, peripheral, sort of when it comes to what I'm taking in. But if I To think about kind of the opposite, it would be preparing for a podcast while I've got Slack open and I'm also thinking about something else as well like that. It's too disparate. Adam Lane Smith, my friend, the attachment expert's got this wonderful idea and he says,

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  your life doesn't need to be easier, it needs to be simpler, that humans are built to handle intensity, but not complexity. And I found that to be completely true, that there is not really an intensity of work that makes me feel overwhelmed.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Intensity and not complication.

• 1:00:38Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Maybe complex, but not complication.

• 1:00:39Chris Williamson?

  Yes, no, that's exactly the terminology he uses as well, uses complicated.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Complicated.

• 1:00:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes, correct. There is not an intensity of work that really ever crushed me in terms of its overwhelm.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:49Chris Williamson?

  But there is a level of complication that has crushed me.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:52Chris Williamson?

  At a relatively low dose.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're, so you're front of the room guy is technically multitasking, but multitasking like all the colors on the palette when I'm painting as opposed to like I'm, I'm, I'm painting and jogging and.

• 1:01:06Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  I was just having a conversation with my friend Steve. So Steve ran the, one of the largest and most successful high end catering programs, catering companies in Southern California, caters to presidents, to, you know, does Beyonce's birthday party, you know, the thousand dollar plate guy. And he's completely reinvented his life and come up to live in the redwood forest in Bonny Doon up near Santa Cruz where I am. And we're talking about this stuff. And at one point he drops, he says, look, you gotta understand, I'm a really good waiter. I'm an incredibly good waiter as a host. He says, I can stand in that room and instantly I'm looking at my seven tables and I know they need water. They're having a conversation that's going

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  south. I could put some soothe on there, you know, that guy's hungry. I mean, literally, he just knows everything that has to be done across the room. And then he can move effortlessly. He's hardly even aware of how his body is routing to the right table and do the right thing. Cause he's, he's a different person at each one of those seven tables. So that's a multitasking that unlike your front of the room.

• 1:02:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  But it's all in this cohesive context where what's really happening is you're actually becoming pretty selfless. It's a very high level of a.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Of a multifaceted competency, but it's still one cohesive thing

• 1:02:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  that allows flow to occur. So when he's doing that, and I think when you're doing that, that is flow.

• 1:02:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, high complexity, high intensity, low complication.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Low complication, therefore, high cohesion, one fabric.

• 1:02:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's lovely.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  It's all the same fabric.

• 1:02:39Chris Williamson?

  That's a nice conception. Okay, what design choices make flow more likely in daily life?

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Pay attention. I mean, just paying attention. So we talk about mindset a lot. So the design choice of choosing into the way I'm going to be in a particular situation. You know, so if I'm only, if I'm in that staff meeting and I'm only thinking about the next thing,

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  then I've designed my mindset to never be present to the present moment. So, so the, the, the critical design choice is how do I live in this day? How do I live in this moment? My, my partner, Bill, has a morning practice. And despite being an atheist, he has spiritual practices. One of them, he says two things to himself out loud every single day while shaving. And he says, it's very important that they're out loud. I don't shave every day, so I can't do it.

• 1:03:31Chris Williamson?

  It's a good justification to shave every day.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  There you go. One is, I live in the best of all possible worlds.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Now, as an, as an existential atheist, he says, look, I, I can also say, I live in the world, I live in the worst world, I live in the only world I notice, but actually it turns out because bias matters, I want to bias things in my favor. If I live in the best of all possible worlds, my chance of catching good things goes way up because I've pre-biased my attention to positive outcomes. Thing one. Thing two, everything I do today, I choose to do. So I announce my agency to myself, like, why am I going to the staff meeting? Oh, because I scheduled it. And why am I going to the DMV? Because, because I, I chose not to file on time, and so now I'm doing this thing. So I just own my life. So those two.

• 1:04:12Chris Williamson?

  It's me, it's me, it's me, it's me.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm just, I own it, I own it, I own it. You know, so, you know, outing the victim. So that's mindset choice. So the most important, I think the most important aspect of designing a life that includes these flow experiences is choosing the mindset of the way to live, which is a practice you do every day.

• 1:04:31Chris Williamson?

  Both me and my housemate have one day where we stack all of our calls. Mine's a Wednesday, his is a Thursday.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:04:37Chris Williamson?

  And.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  We kind of get it done day, yeah.

• 1:04:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. And you sort of stare at it and you go, okay, today is not going to be deep work, but it's going to be necessary work and that's fine. And that is a kind of cohesion.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:50Chris Williamson?

  All of its own, right?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Somebody's got to pick up the dog shit.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  I call mine big Wednesday.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:04:54Chris Williamson?

  He used to call his bullshit Thursday.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:04:58Chris Williamson?

  He realized two weeks ago, it's like, why? I've labeled it on my calendar, it says bullshit day. Every single week, this thing comes around and he said.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Stupid.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Chris Williamson?

  Two weeks ago, called it Uber mensch day. Day was immediately turned inside out. It's like, this is, I'm crushing it. I've got to get this stuff done. I don't really want to and I'm doing it. It's like, just one reframe like that. And I thought it was so cute. So if, yeah, you have a series of tasks, you and your partner need to do, for some reason, the trash in your apartment block is forever away from where you're.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:33Chris Williamson?

  Just, we're going on a mission. It's the trash mission. We're doing the trash mission together as opposed to got to take the bloody trash out again, or whatever it might be.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  So I'll argue that this is a mindset issue. So, you know, the three big chunks to our book, there's the front end, but hey, think about meaning a different way. Here's a couple of reframes that might change the game for you. Then, oh, by the way, the way you walk through the world matters. We call that mindset. So it's called Think Like a Designer, The Designer's Way, five mindsets. And then these four areas we just discussed. And then the mindset thing, there are five mindsets, but the two for killer of the mindsets are radical acceptance and availability. So radical acceptance is about, look, I mean, the only place design works, in fact, I would argue the only place anything works is reality. So, you know, must be present to win. So, oh, I should have done this instead.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  You're back into your head, not reality. Like, no, you're here. So if you start with radically accepting that things are the way they are and your opportunity is to make the most of the situation that happens to actually be. And so that's okay, I accept it is the way it is. You know, it, there was an ice storm and maybe I wasn't going to get to be here today. You know, the power might go out again. You know, it's just true. It's not, it's not good or bad, it's just true. So then availability says, not only am I willing to accept the way things are, but I'm going to lean into it like, hmm, and what might be here from it? I wonder what wonderfulness is latently lurking that I might discover. So to go from bullshit Thursday to Ubermensch Thursday.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  See bullshit Thursday, I think deserved to be labeled that because I really didn't think it deserved to exist. I am unhappy with the fact that I have to spend time doing this crap. So this crap is like an evil force in my life and it doesn't deserve to be there. And that's just not true. I mean, the trash has to get taken out, the dog poop has to get picked up. You know, the baby's butt's got to get wiped. I mean, you know, the taxes have to be paid. It's just true. So if I accept that and then say, oh, and I'm responsible for attending to that in as, in as efficient a way as I possibly can, now it's actually okay. So when your roommate accepts Thursdays and then even says, and I'm going to be available to noticing that I can do that really well.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  And after I've done that, well, pat myself on the back for being an Ubermensch.

• 1:07:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  I changed my experience of my life. Your mindset really matters.

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  Give me the other elements of mindset.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  We actually double down on one. So having a wondrous mindset, a high availability is to wonder at all times. So wonder, radical acceptance, availability, which I have just described. The next one is fully engaged, calmly detached. And the last one is create your world, which it really means create your story. So fully engaged, calmly detached is all about, again, it's a flow, it's a flow orientation. They would say, you know, I want to be entirely present to what I'm doing. I want to both bring the best I can to it and I want to have the most alive making experience of what I'm doing by being fully engaged. However, I'm also going to recognize that while I'm fully engaged, I don't control outcomes.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  So as soon as I get fully engaged or really care and really want it to work, and now suddenly I'll get expectations and I'm getting all wrapped up and I'm getting anxious. So what I want to be, which I think is a very aspirational place, I want to be fully engaged. I want to care really deeply and bring my best self and recognize that I have very little control over whether or not the outcome works. And so I can be both those things at the same time. So which is really freeing, by the way, if I can detach from the outcome while being fully engaged in the participation. The big distinction in the mindset between the transactionalist and the flowist, the flow oriented person, is the transactionalist is all about outcomes. They're primarily the agent of an outcome and the flow person is a participant.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Now, that participant may be participating in a way that hopefully creates an outcome, but my energy isn't worrying about that future outcome. My energy isn't participating fully in this moment, which is, by the way, the single best way to improve the probability of the outcome. So getting really good at this present moment thing has huge side effects. They work both ways. You're not giving up transaction success by becoming more flow oriented. What you're giving up is wasting energy that's not contributing.

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think one of the areas I really want to get into is the mistakes that high achievers make when it comes to tying meaning to outcomes and the sort of endless rabbit holes of pursuit and progress. What are the big mistakes that you see hard charging, high achievers making in your world?

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Well, the first one is that we correlate our decision making with the outcome. So, you know, okay, I'll try it this way. You work hard on something you really care about and it doesn't work out. Shoot. What's the first question most people ask themselves as soon as something doesn't work out?

• 1:10:39Chris Williamson?

  What did I do wrong?

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Bingo. Which makes, and that, and by the way, questions matter, particularly the questions you empower to judge or direct your life. Be very careful because all questions have belief systems. If it turns out the life directing question you're currently suffering has a belief system you don't agree with, you're in trouble. So if the first thing I think after something goes awry is what did I do wrong? There are two assumptions built into that question, both of which I think are dead wrong and are very dangerous. So if the first question after a mistake or a failure is what did I do wrong? What does that question already believe is true?

• 1:11:17Chris Williamson?

  You could have done something differently and you are wrong.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Bingo. It does believe that if I'd done everything right, it would have worked. And that the thing that didn't get done right, which would have caused it to work, was mine. Which are both frankly incredibly egotistical things. I mean, it's not true if you do it all right that it'll work. And it's not necessarily your mistake. So a better question than what did I do wrong? Which goes right to, and if I'd done it right, it would have worked, which is wrong. It's false. What's a better first question? After a mistake, after a failure.

• 1:11:51Chris Williamson?

  Why did this happen?

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Just what happened? Let's just start with back to reality. Radical acceptance. What happened? Now, if it turns out that analysis says, oh yeah, in retrospect, I did. I mailed it in. I didn't do the prep properly. You know, I didn't call ahead. I didn't get the information, you know? You know, spending all the time whatsoever talking to people about what they think about Christian Williamson. I show up here and I'm unprepared and I shanked it. Shame on me. Okay. But that's almost never the case. When I have debriefed the, oh, what did I do wrong? With people over and over again, or the, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but apparently it wasn't. You know, it turns out your prior self did the best they could. You're just not responsible for the future. So that, back to your originating question, what do high performers do? High performers believe in.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  They can create, they can cause outcomes every single time.

• 1:12:44Chris Williamson?

  Does this not?

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  And they get stuck with it.

• 1:12:45Chris Williamson?

  Does, is this not a byproduct of radical responsibility, high agency?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:12:52Chris Williamson?

  Right? Because these are very difficult to blend together.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it's a slippery slope.

• 1:12:56Chris Williamson?

  I want to own the world. I want to believe that I can make anything happen. I want to believe that I can make things happen that I don't even believe that I can make things happen.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  And when you lean into that with a high degree of authenticity and agency and commitment, stuff happens.

• 1:13:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  There is no question

• 1:13:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  that the, the choice to believe you can has an impact.

• 1:13:16Chris Williamson?

  And this is a pattern that people have been rewarded for professionally.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:22Chris Williamson?

  That often hurts them personally. And if you're, if you're trying to work out, okay. So I, Dave says, I, I, I, I should be more kind of rational.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Chris Williamson?

  About what happened, whatever that means, whatever rationally looking at me means, which is essentially impossible for me to do in any case.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  I'll try my best. But then that kind of feels a little bit disempowering in some ways. Because how do I not allow the temptation of the victimhood narrative to just sneak in here? And this doesn't sound particularly embodied because it's the most top-down of top-downs.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:57Chris Williamson?

  Sterile equation look.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:01Chris Williamson?

  Untie this Gordian knot for me.

• 1:14:08Chris Williamson?

  This is a big question. This is a very big question.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  I, okay.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  I think what we're talking about is taking full responsibility for our finitude all along the way.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  You're finite and you're growing. I mean, you're, you're getting better at crissing than you used to be. Which means, by the way, if I'm gonna get better, I was worse. People ask me all the time, you know, I'm out backpacking with these four guys. I've been taking backpacking since for 20 years. They were all 15 and old kids and too busy. But I was the old guy that took them out, you know, 20 years my junior and we're all sitting around naked, jumping into an Alpine lake at 10,000 feet. And Rich says, so Dave, you're the old guy. You know, do you have any regrets? Is there anything you do differently? I said, well, those are two radically different questions. I have no regrets and I would do everything differently. And he goes, whoa, reconcile that for me. I said, regret means that I choose to not accept my life.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  And my policy is I don't not accept my life, I accept my life. And of course I would do it differently because I'm supposed to be smarter now. I mean, if there's almost anything that I would look in my past back on and not say, if I had to do over, I would do it differently. That means I'm just not paying freaking attention.

• 1:15:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's like saying I would not have picked different lottery numbers.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:15:24Chris Williamson?

  Last week.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Chris Williamson?

  Knowing what I know now.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  So back to this, this trade off. And because yeah, if I, if I do further optimize this one thing, particularly in career and capability and performance, you know, I might get more, but at what expense? So I really do have to decide

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  how to allocate this finite resource, this growingly more capable over time, but still always finite resource called myself.

• 1:15:51Chris Williamson?

  Decliningly available.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Decliningly available. Across what different aspects of being a human person, you know? And do I believe I'm supposed to make myself, you know, unhappy and suffering the whole way along? Or is some joy en route okay? You know, there's an old line, it's heaven all the way to heaven and hell all the way to hell. Which path am I on?

• 1:16:11Chris Williamson?

  That's lovely.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  So there's a, there's a real wake up moment that I hit this. So in my 30s, again, being a dad was terribly important because I didn't have one. I lost my dad at nine, turns out to suicide.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  And then I sort of fall into high tech, that's a long story. And I fall into startups and that's a long story. And I didn't ever think I wanted to be doing that. I sort of fell into it and I didn't know I was a workaholic. It turns out that I am. And I'm working, you know, 70, 80 hours a week, sleeping three or four hours a night. Been doing that for a couple of years. And I'm sitting in the, in the family room with a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning. And my now 42 year old, then three year old son Robbie is in the kitchen and asks his mother, Mom, can we play with dad today or he's just going to fall asleep in the chair again?

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  And my heart sank and I went, shit.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  I didn't have a dad because he was dead. Robbie doesn't have a dad because he's asleep. This is not okay. This is not okay. So I'm optimizing for the wrong thing. I'm killing it at work, but it's killing me. You know, and it took me six years to fix that, by the way. And I finally did.

• 1:17:20Chris Williamson?

  Learn how to decelerate.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and it ended up, I had to do more radical change than I realized at the time. I was trying to make minor changes and keep it all going just fine. It had no cost to anyone and that just flat failed. But the point being, you have to decide what you're going to do with the allocation of the resource called you all along the way. And there are going to be trade offs.

• 1:17:44Chris Williamson?

  There are no solutions.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  There are no, there's, you could always do everything better. There's no best, there's no right, there's no done, there's no it, there's no max. There's just what you're choosing. It's your call.

• 1:18:03Chris Williamson?

  There's a line from Van Gogh. He says, if I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now for wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning. I think that's so lovely. So lovely.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Bill likes to, my partner likes to quote, you know, a Zentruism, that if you can't find enlightenment here, where are you going to find it?

• 1:18:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, if you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy on a yacht. So, okay.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Chris Williamson?

  In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. This training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years now. It's designed by Dr. Mike Isretel and comes with over 45 pre-made training programs, 250 technique videos, takes all of the guesswork out of crafting the ideal lifting routine by literally spoon feeding you a step-by-step plan for every workout. It guides you on the exact sets, reps and weight to use. Most importantly, how to perfect your form so every rep is optimized for maximum gains. It adjusts your weights each week based on your progress and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it, train with it for 29 days. And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back.

• 1:19:09Chris Williamson?

  Right now you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to r p strength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's r p strength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Another.

• 1:19:28Chris Williamson?

  Wing, another malignant tumor to this same same thread that we're on.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:19:34Chris Williamson?

  Lots of people become objectively successful and subjectively miserable. They have objectively done the thing. They have achieved success.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Chris Williamson?

  Subjectively, it's not there. It doesn't feel like they're there. They know that they've done it, but it doesn't feel like they've touched it.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:50Chris Williamson?

  What do you lay that at the feet of?

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  I wonder if they lost their why on the way.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  You know, Simon Sinek.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Because if you got there and you look, and it's not just that it's temporary and now what, but you look back and it feels like dust in your mouth.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Then

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  were you winning for winning sake?

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  And that's not very gratifying. So if somewhere along the way, why I care about this, the substance of it, the, the, the relationship of it, the culture creation of it, whatever, you know, if I lost that, then when I get there, I, I literally won't even know what the heck I'm doing here. It's a very disorienting experience.

• 1:20:51Chris Williamson?

  You talk about post-achievement depression being really common among elites, right?

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think sometimes we are, we have so committed to that achievement

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  that we put all of ourselves into that performance and we lose the why.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  You know,

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  it's understandable, but it's heartbreaking.

• 1:21:17Chris Williamson?

  Okay, people love to accomplish and achieve though. How, how do you think about striving while not missing your life? Going after it whilst actually being present at the same time, because as far as I can see, striving and improving requires a degree of delayed gratification.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:21:34Chris Williamson?

  It, it, it, it needs future planning, which by design takes you out of the moment. It's very difficult to be thinking about the big picture goals in flow, paying attention to the onions that I'm chopping right now. There has to be a good portion of time spent putting off what I want to do now. Planning for the future, thinking about tasks, being hypervigilant. And this is the sort of perennial challenge of the, the, the personal growther.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:22:02Chris Williamson?

  That they want to achieve a lot, but not miss their life at the same time.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:06Chris Williamson?

  And sometimes I think those two things do not, they are oil and water. Not always, and maybe less than we might think they are. But there are sacrifices that need to be made.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:16Chris Williamson?

  In order to be able to get that, and many of them take you out of the present moment.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  But they put you back into another one. So let's say, I'm talking about physical work at PR, you know, and, and, and wanting to add five reps at this bench press weight, or whatever it might be. So at the time I'm spending optimizing my personal training plan with my trainer, right? That's thinking about the future and optimizing what the plan is going to be. That in and of itself is a skill, that's an activity. Oh, I'm doing this thing called imagining the future and conceptualizing, you know, while I'm actually doing that. We all have the observer, right? There's, there's, there's Dave sitting here talking to Chris. And then there's Dave noticing what's going on in the room. We all have the, what's the observer observing? Is the observer observing me in this moment?

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Or is the observer observing the likelihood of this getting to the outcome? So while I'm planning, I'm doing something. Planning is an activity. Am I enjoying the planning? While I'm making the sacrificial effort to say, no, I'm going to actually get up a half hour earlier, you know, because I'm going to go into the gym for 20 more minutes because I'm going to work on these reps. When I'm on the bench and I'm now doing the second of more reps than I've ever done on that particular exercise before, am I enjoying the experience of what my body is showing me that I've not known before? Or am I saying, God, three more, and then I hit it?

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  So it's, it's, I mean, even in any given moment, are you here or are you somewhere else? It's a framework. You can give yourself permission to, I've decided to do this new routine in the gym. Now go do it for God's sake and be fully present to it.

• 1:24:04Chris Williamson?

  Is there a risk of people, especially the ones who resonate with the insecure overachiever, turning everything into a performance, including meaning?

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So there's a little section in the book called Beware the Practice to Performance Trap, or the Practice to Production Trap. So, you know, everybody thinks mindfulness is great, as do I. I go talk to monks all the time. And your achieving brain can transactionalize anything.

• 1:24:36Chris Williamson?

  Yep. That's why you have streaks on meditation apps.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  I mean, so, you know, so like, you know, this morning, hey, I really killed it this morning. You know, I think, in fact, I think I'm getting my 20 minutes. I'm down to, I can get my 20 minute sit down in 50. That part of your brain, which by the way, is pretty stimulated these days, is ready to go. It loves being in charge. Like, hey, just, just give me the wheel, give me the wheel, give me the wheel. You know, so you.

• 1:25:03Chris Williamson?

  Pick me, pick me.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Pick me. Yeah, that hand is always up. I'll, I'll re-describe this in a meaningful way. And, and that's not entirely wrong, but this is where if you start developing, and by the way, the invitation at the end of the book is now we've given you a bunch of ideas. It's not do them all. That's a new burden. That's cram more in. Start figuring out what your practice is for your way, your crisp way, that allows you to access more meaning in these other forms. So you have a slowly but surely richer life. And so, once you make those decisions, you start giving yourself permission, you know, to, to actually, permission to be happy is what it boils down to at the end of the day.

• 1:25:43Chris Williamson?

  We didn't talk about communities.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  So, community, big deal. You know, in fact, Bob and I, Bill and I just got to spend a morning with Bob Waldinger, the, you know.

• 1:25:53Chris Williamson?

  He's great, from the Harvard study.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Harvard study, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:56Chris Williamson?

  Been on the show, he's great.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  And a Zen man, a lovely guy. So we had some, the whole morning, we all sat around agreeing with each other a lot. It was really a lot of fun. You know, and that study makes it very clear, community is everything. The reason, there's a thing called formative community. It's a technical term that we invented. Is in the book is that through this DCI program, this distinguished career institute program that I teach in Stanford, I'm on my 10th cohort. These really thoughtful people, you know, 35 to 45 of them a year get thrown together in a room. And then in no time at all, say, not only is the community the best part of the program, but I'm having relationships with these people like I've never had before in my life. And I debrief them collectively and I'll go, justify your answer. I'm not buying it.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  I mean, these people have formed corporate cultures and have huge professional networks. Most of them are married with happy families. And how many of you, while you're here, you're getting calls constantly from these huge networks of relationships like, oh, we miss you, please come home. Cause they're gone for a whole year at Stanford. And they go, oh, yeah, it's a den. I kind of go, and you're telling me that some admissions officer on this program throws you in a room with 35 yahoos you never met before. And suddenly they're the best friends you ever had. Uh huh. Justify your answer. And what, and what that conversation has revealed is what I ended up naming as formative community, which is there are three reasons to gather. One is a social gathering, a social community, get together to have a good time, which is lovely, you know, enjoy being people together.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  A collaborative community, let's get together, get something done. And getting something done together with another person, you know, is really wonderful. I mean, go to a startup, go have military experience. That's a profound experience of being a human being. But there's another kind of gathering, which is we call formative, not just get together to have a good time, get together to get something done, get together to become better together. So if a person is a becoming, is there a place in a conversation I can enter into where what we're doing here together is we are assisting one another in our becoming, which isn't getting a transaction done, isn't solving a problem. It's allowing one another into the conversation that's growing into the next person I want to become. So that is a gathering of intent, not content.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  Most of the time we get together socially around the content of we all like theater, we all like jazz, you know? So there's this commonality of the content of what we're doing. We're getting together to go, you know, Work on this food problem, or start this company, or whatever it might be. So there's the content of our collaboration. In a formative community, like, well, you're into climate change and I'm into beanie babies and she's into modern art. Oh, you can't help me because you don't know my thing. No, no, no, I don't need you to know my thing. What I need is for you to be the person who's becoming them their better selves. I want you to get more in alignment with who you're on the way to becoming. And when that occurs, your psyche, your soul, your consciousness resonates in a way

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  that the content of what you're doing doesn't matter to me, but the intent does. And when I'm with other people who are moving toward that resonance with themselves, it's harmonic to my own. So you're talking about climate change and I'm having an idea about oil redistribution. You know, it turns out you being you enables me to be me. So that's what a formative community does. And there's a certain kind of conversation they can have. And so we'll say it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself because we're fundamentally social animals. So if there is a place where I can be heard, then I might even tap into hearing my own story well enough that I can grow further into it. So a formative community is a particularly meaning-making experience because it moves

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  me along that becoming pathway more regularly, more reliably, and if we're lucky, more quickly.

• 1:29:45Chris Williamson?

  I think this is a important pushback against the solo prene degenerate, single lone wolf kind of atmosphere that's going on a lot of the moment. I understand why. I understand why it's seductive to go monk mode and recant reliance on anybody and everybody around you.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:04Chris Williamson?

  As I've got older, it's just increasingly difficult to tap into that fuel source. Maybe I've just spent that particular thing. I basically extended working from home 10 years before COVID and five years after.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16Chris Williamson?

  Electively. And when the pandemic came along, it's brilliant.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:21Chris Williamson?

  It's just more of me.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:23Chris Williamson?

  You know, put me in coach.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it's not a bad thing because again, back to particularly in the first half of life, those early adult years, what's really going on is you're building an ego.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  The first person who really needs to believe that you're okay is you. So if my decision to rely entirely on myself is a stringent approach to saying, I need to get to a place of self-trust. And it turns out I can't afford to let that leak off where, oh, it was really, it was really Anne, she really saved my butt. So, you know, but that should be temporary. I should get over it. And now I'm actually free to be part of something bigger than myself.

• 1:31:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, agreed. Yeah, manopole. I realized, a good example, I do this live show. I did the first work in progress here in Austin last night. I'm about to go back on tour around Australia, New Zealand and Bali for basically a full month.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Oh, that's gonna be rough.

• 1:31:24Chris Williamson?

  It's horrible.

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  Somebody's gotta do it.

• 1:31:25Chris Williamson?

  I mean, I did strategically put the Bali show at the very end.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:30Chris Williamson?

  So there's nothing to do after that. And I could go out there, get a local photographer at each of the different cities, have one tour manager to make sure that everything's set up and that would be it.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Chris Williamson?

  There's maybe six guys flying out with me, two from the UK, one or two from America, one is already in Australia, actually another one from the UK and two tour manager. And because what's the point? What is the point of going and doing a solo show?

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:00Chris Williamson?

  That's.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  Alone.

• 1:32:01Chris Williamson?

  Alone, yeah.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're gonna have to do the onstage thing. I've got to sit and write the script on my own. And I, the sort of person I'm speaking to is me 10 years ago. If there is the opportunity for you to even just try and co-work with somebody else, to find someone that's on a similar sort of trajectory to you, I've found that I go faster and further. Cause there was always that if you wanna go fast, go on your own. If you wanna go far, go with somebody else. But I genuinely go quicker as well with someone because.

• 1:32:31Chris Williamson?

  The fuel source you have of experiencing, of sharing experiences together with someone else is so enlivening in the moment.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:40Chris Williamson?

  That it just keeps pushing that motivation. That fuel tank just keeps on getting tapped, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. It keeps on getting pushed up. So, yeah.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  And I am saying too, part of the us doesn't have to be people that are bleeding off your role in the goal pursuit that you are currently producing toward. So you can find a conversation to be in, which is around, how's it going? How are you becoming? What's the next question you want to be growing or learning your way into? It's not problem solving my goal pursuit. So I'm still gonna keep all, keep all that to myself.

• 1:33:13Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  So if you want to be selfish about the work, fine. That doesn't mean you have to live selfishly.

• 1:33:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very good. What are the signals that tell you it's time to redesign your life? What would be the things people notice out there in the ether? The little whispers in the back of their mind?

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, um, I talk to people all, particularly on career. I've often come away from the thousands of conversations I've had with people kind of going, you know, very often, it's not so much, I've decided it's time for me to leave the work. It's that you start noticing the work has left you. Very often, I think the signals, the changes coming actually kind of feels like an outside in. You know, you go into the office and nothing happens. You know, you're in that thing that used to be enlivening and you go, oh, apparently it's not. You know, and it's almost like noticing yourself having, it's not the inside. Now I've been thinking about it a lot and I think the time is up. I think I've maxed out here. I think I need to move on as opposed to just like, you know, the soundtrack seems to have stopped.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  I think the movie might be over. So there's an awareness of your experience of something is shifting. Bill, my friend, talks about the time he was in the car. He knows exactly where he was on highway 280 when he's driving into Apple. And he suddenly realized, oh, I'm done. Now, he spent another year setting up how to quit well, but you know, but, but, but the job left him right there.

• 1:34:36Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how long before that he'd been turning up to work and just, stuff didn't feel as bright as it used to.

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know, I'll have to ask him, but the, um, um, I think sometimes these awarenesses can be sudden, sometimes they kind of grow up on you over time, but that boils down to, you know, the Socratic thing, you know, um, the unexamined life is not worth living. So if you have an unexamined life, um, then awareness of this might come slow and it'll have to be dramatic.

• 1:35:03Chris Williamson?

  I think another challenge that people face is if you are a hard-charging, high-achiever person, you're probably very good at going, shut up emotions and just continuing to push through, whatever it is, including the emotion of boredom, of disquiet, of discomfort.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:22Chris Williamson?

  Low color, low engagement, lack of aliveness. That's just, that's just mere resistance. Allow me to move through it. And the more you've hypertrophied the allow me to move through it muscle, the longer sometimes it can take, I think, for people to realize, oh, this is not a right fit for me.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:41Chris Williamson?

  And you see, I've seen this in every industry I've been in, people who've outstayed their aliveness by decades because they either have this super hypertrophied, delayed gratification, they're a world champion at the marshmallow test.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:35:59Chris Williamson?

  Or, um, or they do not have the, they, they haven't done the self-reflection to, to actually be able to sort of feel it.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, as Long said, um, most people's besetting sin is not some shadowed, darkside evil thing leaking its way out yet again. It's the over-functioning strength. There is absolutely, absolutely too much of a good thing.

• 1:36:25Chris Williamson?

  That is so good.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  You know, I'm too helpful, I'm too efficient, I'm too committed, you know, and, you know, I'm not a stoic, but they had some good ideas. And when they see a moderation in all things, they're just like, well, the too little is crummy and the too much is, so let's go with the middle. What they're really saying is, it's actually a thoughtful position, that the recognition of a good thing over experienced, over indulged upon, not just, you know, sugar, but, you know, productivity, you know, is not a good thing. It is not an ultimate, the human, the human experience, you know, is, is a mixed, hopefully somewhat balanced thing that allows you enough capacity to both be present to and, and enjoying that which is actually occurring. Maxing out isn't actually better.

• 1:37:12Chris Williamson?

  But it is important to do for a while. I'm, I'm an advocate of obsession. I recently changed my entire opinion on obsession. It was something I had a little bit of frosty relationship with, and I, I wrote an essay a couple of weeks ago that I think is about right. Basically, the obsession is very fleeting. It doesn't last forever. It's this weird confluence of desire, life situation, environment, meaning, motivation, skill set, a whole bunch of different things.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:44Chris Williamson?

  But it's very temporary. And what I've come to believe is that a lot of what looks like discipline to us now in other people is simply the cooled aftermath of a past obsession. So I started going to the gym when I was 18.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:58Chris Williamson?

  Because I was obsessed with it and I couldn't stop reading bodybuilding forums and drinking protein shakes and researching this and I'm going to get strong and then I'm going to get goals or whatever. And two decades later, I still train, but I'm not using either discipline or motivation. It's this weird, like neutron star that's cooled from a past obsession.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:38:18Chris Williamson?

  And I think people that are serial obsessives in that sort of a way. So that is a good justification for going a little bit extreme, for allowing this thing to consume yourself. This, at least as far as I can see, was strongest when I was eighteen and in my twenties. And now the obsession has at least a little bit more, I can sort of poke my nose and my, my mouth sort of above the waterline and have a little bit of a look around, whereas before I was just completely underneath the swell. And that, I'm gonna guess, will continue over time. And that's a night, that feels like a nice trajectory to me. And the other reason that I like it, and the reason that I kind of wrote it, this idea that if you ask, ask a rich or successful or happy people, what do you do? Tell me about your day. You go, well, you're asking somebody

• 1:39:01Chris Williamson?

  who's got survivorship bias and is a black belt and you're a blue belt. You should be modeling the rise, not the result. So model the rise, not the result is the lesson. What did you do when you were at my stage? And what would you do?

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:17Chris Williamson?

  Knowing that that was your frame, even for super smart and balanced people that have reflected about it a lot, they still go, well, the most important thing is family. It's like, fuck you, dude. Look at what you did when you were twenty-five. You took a flamethrower to the candle. Okay, what would you do? I would do the same thing. I'd just make sure I slept six hours a night, because I slept four hours a night. And that really damaged my health and that put me back by a little while. And now I've got to do fucking athelosclerosis or whatever the fuck it is.

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  That is, yeah.

• 1:39:42Chris Williamson?

  So, okay, that's cool. That's interesting.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  Okay, let me, let me, let me jump in on your obsession piece and reframe it a little bit. You know, I'm gonna, I could suggest that we could categorize that as a particular invitation to celebrate the scandal of particularity.

• 1:39:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes, that's nice.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  What I mean by that is, oh, this thing called, I suddenly notice I am obsessed with X, Y, Z, whatever, you know, which means I'm, I'm infatuated, right? So I'm actually having an infatuated experience, which is temporary. Infatuation is a lovely thing. You just got to go through it again. Like, what a deal. And let's make the most of it.

• 1:40:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna go all in. This is back to my balance thing. It's like, no, the most alive way I could live right now is to be incredibly out of balance by going, you know, Bat nuts about workout or whatever it might be.

• 1:40:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  You know, and in fact, I'm going to so clearly identify that I am now um, almost abdicating to my obsession. That I'll be able to pull myself back from it. This is not the new norm. This is like, you know, hey, make hay with the sunshine.

• 1:40:41Chris Williamson?

  It's the honeymoon phase.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  It's the honeymoon phase.

• 1:40:44Chris Williamson?

  For your new.

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Your experience. Yeah.

• 1:40:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's so great.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that arises now and then, which is a particular, because again, one of the most important particularities, the not completely realized ultimates is you. You are a particularity. Your own life is, each day is. And so when suddenly an upset, an opportunity to be obsessed.

• 1:41:04Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  Comes by, ooh, those don't happen every day. Now, I'm not saying take every one and don't let it throw you to the ground.

• 1:41:11Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  But have, have, have a Stoic relationship with obsession.

• 1:41:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, most people don't get an obsession that's worth anything. You think about how many people get obsessed with politics or porn or their ex, you know, that if you have.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:25Chris Williamson?

  The opportunity to do.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  A little life giving obsession.

• 1:41:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. This is, this is uh, energy inflow and energy outflow. Yeah, it's a generative obsession. That's a good way to put it. And I think, God, if you, if you have that, people go their entire lives. Certain, some people go their entire lives without ever being obsessed with anything that's worth being obsessed by.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:44Chris Williamson?

  That's not going to make their lives better. And this is only going to last for a short period of time. Another interesting point on your people don't let go the anorexic hermit crap.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:55Chris Williamson?

  For that particular goal, working at Apple or EA or whatever it might be.

• 1:42:00Chris Williamson?

  Kind of like, if you're in a relationship and you know that this has run its course.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:42:06Chris Williamson?

  Every minute you spend in that relationship is a minute that you're not in the right relationship. The same thing is true with your obsessions. You're not going to have room for a new obsession.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:15Chris Williamson?

  If you're trying to hold on to the dwindling fire of the last one. Allow it to cool. Allow it to become what it was. Maybe it's no longer even going to be a part of your life.

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:23Chris Williamson?

  There were certain things that I did in my twenties that are no longer even a part of my life that were obsessions. There's many things that have cooled into a, a, a more balanced version of it.

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, the grief here after my wife died. I mean, so I leaned way into that. And it was incredibly generative. And people keep saying, you know, the first year is the hardest. And I'm kind of going like, really? On the 366th day, it's going to be easier? I mean, what, I mean, yeah, that's the second time it's May 8th and she's been dead. Um, I'm not sure that's all that transformed it. But as it turned out, and I think largely because I really did lean all the way in. I became obsessed with grieving well. Um, and I was really good at it.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  I killed it.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  Sorry. Brilliant. But at the end, as the year came along, I really did have this, oh, it's not over. But something, I literally was sitting quietly and had sort of this dream state of experience. Um, spiritually of I was in the Olympic marathon and I was running through the tunnel for that last lap around the track.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  The last 440 of the 26 miles. And as I did that, this huge crowd stood and, uh, and roared as I came along. I was like, and, and like, well done, Dave. You're done.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  And, uh, as I neared the finish line, part of me wanted to stop.

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  And part of the loss of years two, three, four, and five, you know, cause, um, don't, don't get me wrong, I'm carrying, I'm now, I'm now down to the grief that I carry. There's a, a permanent thing I carry called grief, which is a befriended, where it's a new relationship, you know? Um, Frish, my, my new partner, soon to be a wife, um, wisely said, um, I'm really sorry I didn't get to meet Claudia, but I really look forward to getting to know her. The three of us are going to have to spend a lot of time together, which is very insightful. But I miss that intensity.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  There was something about that intense grief that was really alive. I mean, you were alive.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  But you gotta let it go. But if I had tried to sustain that, if I had tried to to stick with it, that would be, that would be very sympathetic and everybody gets hurt.

• 1:44:49Chris Williamson?

  The, not sure what word to use, the addiction, the, the compulsion, the seductiveness of even negative emotions that are sufficiently intense that they make us feel alive. If that's not an argument that humans really like aliveness, that I would rather be in pain and feel it than be in mundanity and feel nothing.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  So this goes back to befriending the longing. Look, the good news is you're never going to get there. Which means if you're paying attention, it's going to stay interesting all the way. All the way down. I mean, the, the very last thing Claudia said before she died, she sits up a couple of hours before she died and she goes, "Oh, it's so interesting." Falls back. Now, at that point, clearly she had one foot on the dock and one foot on the boat and the boat was pulling out and she was seeing stuff I've never seen. And as curious as I am, I didn't feel permission to say, "I need to tell me which is..." Pretty sure that's not my to see yet.

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  Just tell my, there's a guy in the book called Arnie, his name is really Ronald, says he's in Atlanta, he's really in San Francisco, and he just died. He just died just sort of in 91. He's an artist, it's a long story, you know, and we're with him a couple of days before he died. He's, he's clearly going, he knows he's going, you know, he's in a wheelchair, he's thin, his teeth are out. I mean, he was leaning on his desk with a blanket over his head and he says, "David, read poetry to me. Read poetry to me. Go get the Shropshire letters on the second floor." So I go get this little book of, you know, 18th century romantic English poetry. And I read him a poem and he goes, "Oh, it's so beautiful." I mean, there is almost nothing of him left, but he directed it toward that.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  So we get to decide what to do with this life. We get to decide how to allocate these energies. And you let them be what they can until they can't, and then you move on. So I, I think reveling in the obsession healthily while it deserves to be is fine. And then move on.

• 1:47:02Chris Williamson?

  That's so beautiful. That's so beautiful. Dave Evans, ladies and gentlemen. Dave, you're fantastic. You're really, really great. I'm very glad that I stumbled upon you.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  I'm really, really glad you did too. This has been great.

• 1:47:13Chris Williamson?

  Where should people go to keep up to date with everything that you're doing?

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  Oh, we've got a website. It's Designing Your Life. So it's designingyour.life. Pretty simple, and that'll take you to lots of places. We've got a newsletter out now, a newsletter called Fully Alive by Design. You can get it weekly in your mailbox. So the website will invite you to that. And, you know, hey, a week from today, you could buy the book. That'd be a great idea.

• 1:47:38Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it'll be out by the time that this goes out. So people can go and buy it. And what's that called?

• 1:47:41Speaker 01

  It's called How to Live a Meaningful Life. Using Design Thinking to Unlock Joy Flow, Purpose Flow and Joy Every Day.

• 1:47:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay, Dave, I appreciate you. Until next time.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll call you on that.