Designing a Life that Matters

We tell ourselves that meaning comes from impact, passion, or finding the “one right path.” But these beliefs can leave us feeling stuck —even when our lives look perfectly fine on paper. Behavioral scientist Dave Evans describes a new approach, borrowed from design thinking, to help us build lives that feel more alive, flexible, and real.

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

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 2012, Michael Phelps was at the peak of his career. At the London Games, he became the most decorated Olympian of all time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  He's coming hard, Phelps. He's still a chance. He's a real big chance. Can he do it again? He hits it, and he does. Remarkable, stunning.

• 0:21Shankar Vedantam?

  He had 22 Olympic medals to his name, including 18 gold medals.

• 0:29Shankar Vedantam?

  The swimmer's entire life had centered around his sport, at being the best. Early mornings, endless training, he pursued victory tirelessly, and it paid off.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Michael Phelps and his team have maintained this extraordinary record.

• 0:52Shankar Vedantam?

  But then, it was over.

• 0:59Shankar Vedantam?

  No more early morning practices, no more races, no more gold medals to chase.

• 1:07Shankar Vedantam?

  He described the feeling as a post-Olympic depression. "I saw myself as strictly a swimmer, not as a human being," he said.

• 1:16Shankar Vedantam?

  At times, he felt like he did not want to be alive.

• 1:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Eventually, the great athlete turned to advocacy, using his experience to raise awareness about mental health. He realized that retirement was scary because he had to find, quote, "whatever it was I was looking for."

• 1:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Michael Phelps's experience illustrates a challenge many of us face. When the rules we've relied on to live a good life stop working, where do we find new rules? How do we discover what we are looking for?

• 1:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Over the next couple of weeks on Hidden Brain, and in a companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus, we look at the misguided beliefs that get in the way of living a rich and meaningful life, and an unlikely source that may have the answers we need.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE, SIPC.

• 2:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Defender. Even the boldest journeys start small, with a single decision to go somewhere new. The Defender 110 is a vehicle built for those moments, for drivers capable of great things, whether they're headed toward uncharted territory or just a weekend away. The Defender 110 combines on-road presence with off-road capability. It looks tough, because it is, with an exterior engineered for durability. Inside, capability meets comfort, with seating for five and the option for seven, plus refined finishes and thoughtful design. It's also packed with intuitive tech, like 3D surround cameras with clear-side ground view to help you navigate rough terrain, and the next-generation Pivi Pro infotainment

• 3:36Shankar Vedantam?

  system, designed to keep you informed, connected, and in control, no matter the path. The Defender 110 is naturally capable, expedition-ready, and built for those ready to move forward. Explore the Defender 110 at landroverusa.com.

• 3:56Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 4:30Shankar Vedantam?

  What is the meaning of life? Many of us have asked a question like this at some point. It's a big question, perhaps too big. But as creatures who are wired to make meaning of the world around us, we cannot help ourselves. At Stanford University, Dave Evans studies how questions like this often lead us astray. Dave Evans, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Shankar, good to be with you.

• 4:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Dave, you graduated from college in the 1970s with a degree in thermoscience. What is thermoscience and what were your hopes and dreams at the time?

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Well, it's in the mechanical engineering department. I got my bachelor's of science in mechanical engineering, and there are two divisions of that department, the thermoscience division. Some mechanical engineers burn things, they're kind of the power and engine guys, and some mechanical engineers make mechanisms that kind of, you know, bend and forge things mostly out of metal. So I ended up on the thermo side of the house, the guys that make engines, because I cared about the energy problem. And my master's degree was in thermosciences, so I graduated actually with a degree paid for by Chevron Research, the oil company, paid for my master's degree, and I became a certified advanced energy technologist in 1976.

• 5:43Shankar Vedantam?

  What did you want to do with this? How did you want to make a difference to the world?

• 5:47Speaker 03

  It was very simple. I wanted to solve the energy crisis. I had an absolute epiphany. I was waiting in line at a store one day, and there was a television playing up in the corner of the store, and the news was on, and gasoline had suddenly hit a dollar a gallon, a dollar a gallon, 1973. And I said, that's got to stop. We've got to get off this oil thing. That's what I need to do. I have to solve the energy crisis. So that's all I was trying to do.

• 6:15Shankar Vedantam?

  So you graduated in 1976. What was the world like at that time? And was the world ready for your miraculous discoveries?

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Well, the world was doing all kinds of things, you know. We were still reeling from trying to end the Vietnam War. Civil rights was going full blast. I'm a full-on boomer, so we were trying to change the world. I gave myself a trip all the way around the country in a beat-up old van as my graduation present, and it was a great summer because that was the bicentennial. So I went to about 15 different apple pie contests across the country. So there was a lot of Americana, there was a lot of stress. It was a really confusing time, but it was certainly, we have to fix the world. And I was quite convinced I was ready to do that because we had the technology, we had the right ideas, but what we were missing was the social will. There was a small fact that was left out of the brochure of my master's degree, which

• 7:07Speaker 03

  is, it's very difficult to get a job in an industry that doesn't exist yet. So I was all dressed up for a party that hadn't started. I spent four years profoundly unsuccessfully looking for a job that didn't exist, and I was really upset.

• 7:24Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that you eventually pivoted and found a job at a small tech company?

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Yes, there's a little outfit called Apple, actually. It's a very long story as to how that occurred. It began, actually, with a phone call. I had a welding torch in my hand, I had a little solar energy startup that, of course, miserably failed because it was way too soon. And the guy said, "My name is so-and-so, and I'm from Apple Computer. We'd like to talk to you." And I said, "No, you want to talk to the Dave Evans at Hewlett Packard? That's the one who likes computers. I don't." And I hung up. And there are lots of Dave Evanses. You can get them in 24 packs at Costco. And I was sure that the other Dave Evans who I knew worked at Hewlett Packard and liked computers was the guy they wanted. And a very long story later, including 14 interviews and sitting down for lunch with Steve Jobs, they surprised themselves by offering me a job, and to my great shock, I took it.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  And that's how my high-tech career started, but it was the last thing I wanted to do.

• 8:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, you've been on Hidden Brain previously, Dave, and you told us the last time that while at Apple, you helped to design the world's first mouse?

• 8:39Speaker 03

  That's correct. I was in charge of peripheral product marketing. The two fun things I did was I did the mouse and made the first mouse for Apple. I organized. I didn't design it myself, but I organized the team of people who did. And I got to work on laser printing and do this thing called desktop publishing before anybody knew what that was.

• 9:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, many people would say that you hit the jackpot. You started working for Apple before it became the Apple that we know today. And the work you were doing was having an impact. Did you wake up every morning feeling like you were doing something meaningful?

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Well, yes and no. I mean, the work we were doing, which was at the beginning of a shift of how technology serves people, was a big deal. But let's be clear. What I was doing was making stuff. We were making, you know, plastic things with wires in them. And so then I just thought, you know, and if I don't do it, somebody else will. And I mean, some of the incredibly important things I worked on are long gone. Not only are they replaced by later generation things, they're completely gone. Nobody even does that stuff anymore. It's like, what is that? It doesn't even matter. And by the way, it's not going to last. So is that all there is?

• 10:00Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to talk about a couple of other examples of people who felt like their lives had become dead ends, even though from the outside it might feel like they had not. Years later, after you left Apple, you began teaching at Stanford. You were giving a talk to a roomful of accountants in Kansas City when a woman whom you call Allison came up to you with a question. What was the question she asked you?

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Well, she really started with, "What's wrong with my life and what did I do wrong?" And she described this success that didn't work out as she had hoped. So she was an accountant, which is what everybody in the room was. She ran a small business, successfully doing accounting and taxes for about 50 other small businesses. She was happily married, she had two children, she had a three-bedroom house, she had a car mostly paid for. So she had exactly everything that she had ever tried to get in her life. She was living exactly the life she had in mind. And it wasn't that she was even bored, it's just something was terribly missing. And what have I done wrong?

• 11:06Speaker 03

  I mean, she really thought she did it all right, but her experience of it was, "Not what I had in mind, and I have no idea why." She was really stuck.

• 11:31Shankar Vedantam?

  In some ways, this is not that different than your thermoscience story. You know, you came up with a model for what you wanted to do. You were doing a lot of stuff, but in some ways, you suddenly encountered some aspect of the world that was not what you had prepared yourself for, and you found yourself stuck.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  I think very often, what a lot of us, myself certainly included, have done, is we have this goal in mind, "If I just get to there, all will be well." I call it the "all will be well" system. "Once I am happily married with two kids and have my own business, all will be well." "Once I have an important job at an advanced energy technology company getting us off the oil problem, all will be well." You know, "Once everybody knows how to use a mouse, all will be well." And it turns out, all isn't well.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  I mean, there's not a different you waiting on the other side of that finish line. There's not a different universe you're suddenly living in. There's not a different psyche suddenly saying, "Oh, now I feel like I'm really being my true self." None of those things are caused by hitting those objectives.

• 12:39Shankar Vedantam?

  There are some questions that can keep us up at night. What is the meaning of life? What should I do with mine? These are big juicy questions and we can spend lifetimes thinking about them. But are they useful questions? When we come back, what we can learn about designing our lives from people who design products for a living. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 13:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Mazda. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle. Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during

• 14:01Shankar Vedantam?

  every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It helps make you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit mazdausa.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. We all want to live meaningful lives, but sometimes, the way we go about doing it can be counterproductive. In our pursuit of meaning, we can push ourselves into cycles of rumination and self-doubt, or chronic stress and exhaustion.

• 14:40Shankar Vedantam?

  At Stanford University, Dave Evans says there are a handful of dysfunctional beliefs that get in the way of living the lives we want to live. Dave, I want to talk about some of these dysfunctional beliefs. You talked earlier about wanting to solve the energy crisis in the late 70s, getting a master's degree in thermoscience and then not being able to find work. You once met a man whom you call Alan, who had a similar story. I understand he started out in sociology, but then made a transition into the tech world?

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Yes, well, he was trying to make a living. He'd studied sociology and minored in art history, and he was a lovely guy with a nice liberal arts education, and, you know, it's hard to get paid for that. But he turned out to be a pretty good quantifier as well. He kind of liked spreadsheets and even statistics a little bit, and he found his way to doing project management, managing schedules and resources, that sort of thing, in software companies, particularly related to the way they ran their marketing programs. So he ended up becoming a pretty well-respected marketing project manager.

• 15:41Shankar Vedantam?

  So he's working on these large engineering teams, he's working on multimillion-dollar projects, he's making good money. Was he feeling on top of the world?

• 15:52Speaker 03

  No, he was feeling, he was feeling underutilized, and he was feeling under-recognized. Because what he wanted was the chance to demonstrate some creativity. And so, again, he's in a service role, his clients, if you will, are internal people who work for the same company, and they would come to him with, "Can you help us with this? And we have this project, can you help us?" And that was his job, which he did well. And then he would have ideas about how he could do it better, do it more creatively. And more often than not, not only were people not interested, they didn't even want to hear about it. Like, whatever, I mean, where's that thing? I mean, I ordered, you know, a hamburger with no cheese on it, you know, I don't know what this sausage thing is, but where's my hamburger?

• 16:33Shankar Vedantam?

  Right.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  And, and he was pretty heartbroken, and his conclusion was that they don't value me. I'm not valued, these people don't understand what I can do, and so I can't be here.

• 16:52Shankar Vedantam?

  So I think many of us have felt this way at some point. We get the thing that we think will fulfill us, the dream job, the house, perhaps even the perfect family, but we still feel like something is missing. You argue that this frustration stems from the fact that we put too much stock in two concepts, fulfillment and impact. Let's start with fulfillment. What do you mean when you say that we put too much stock in fulfillment?

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Well, this is really kind of why we wrote this most recent book. I mean, we'd helped people design a lot of lives, redesign a lot of careers, and they still kept coming back going, "I did all that, and technically it worked, but it's still not as fulfilling as I was hoping it was going to be." And we said, "Well, tell us what you mean by that." And overwhelmingly, what fulfillment meant to people was, "Am I getting to be all that I can be?" And then we did some research and found out the reason almost everybody thinks that fulfillment is, you know, getting a chance to do everything you want to do, or particularly everything you can do, is because Abraham Maslow told you that's what you should want. So we have a hierarchy of needs, going back to his originating paper in 1943, which the NIH calls "one of the stickiest ideas in the social sciences," where the apex of the

• 17:59Speaker 03

  human experience is self-actualization. And self-actualization occurs when one becomes all that one can be. And if I can pull that off, what will I get, according to Maslow, is I will get fulfillment. So self-actualize, be everything you can be, and you get fulfillment. We know, all of us, contain more aliveness than your lifetime permits you to live out. There's more than one life worth of living in you in there. There's more than one of you. There's lots of shockers. Which one are you going to be this year? So once I know, and I accept, the good news, wow, isn't it cool that my human capacity even exceeds my lifetime, which means I've got some alternative choices to make, I've got some variety in front of me.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Oh, I no longer have the goal of trying to be all I can be, because you can't even get there from here. You can't be all you can be. Don't worry about that. Now, can I be fully who I'm trying to be right now? That's the invitation.

• 18:58Shankar Vedantam?

  So in some ways, what Maslow was telling us is that if you are everything that you want to be, if you can become everything that you possibly can be, you're going to be happy. But the point that you're making is there are more lifetimes in each of us than we can fit into any one lifetime. And so by definition, none of us are actually going to reach that point of fulfillment.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so unfortunately, Maslow gave everybody this moral incentive to believe, I deserve to be all that I can be. And our argument is that's impossible.

• 19:38Shankar Vedantam?

  The other idea you think can lead us to dysfunctional outcomes is this idea of impact. As people reach for fulfillment, they often ask themselves, how will I fulfill my destiny? Can you talk about how this relates to the idea of impact, Dave?

• 19:52Speaker 03

  So some people start with, it's not fulfilling enough. And that's, am I getting to express all of me? And the other most common is, you know, it's just not meaningful enough. Well, what would make it more meaningful? Making a difference. I need to make a difference. I need to change the world. I need to have an impact. I need this to be recognized. I need this to last. And they're talking in a variety of ways, all about the production of their lives, the product, the outcome of their work, making some kind of a difference. Now, don't get us wrong, we are terribly in favor of people having positive impacts. I'm still trying to have a positive impact. But what we're noticing is for a lot of people, impact making is the only version of meaning making that they validate.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  And the problem with it is, when you lean into that, even if it works, and by the way, if you do everything right, your chance of still successfully having an impact is maybe 50/50. Because you know, those other 8 billion people on the planet, they might go off-script at some point, and they're awfully hard to control. But you know, even if you do pull off that impact, well, what have you done for me lately?

• 20:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, you know, I shipped the mouse a long time ago. What have you done for us lately? So impact, the feeling that comes from an impact, doesn't last. And frankly, most of the time, pulling off having an impact doesn't work. So it's a very risky business to decide that's the only way my life is meaningful.

• 21:19Shankar Vedantam?

  So in some ways, we've hitched our wagons to these two horses, fulfillment and impact. And in some ways, they're both mirages.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. And even for some people who are pulling it off, I've got friends my age, starting their seventh company. You know, look at this.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Anna, why are you doing this again? Well, I'm really good at it. Well, I know, but we knew that five companies ago. I mean, don't you have another idea yet? And frankly, what they are is they're so stuck on pulling off that impact thing, they've become addicted to it and they can't let go. And then when they finally get to the place where they can't do it anymore, it's an existential crisis.

• 22:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's look at another dysfunctional belief that gets in the way of living a meaningful life, Dave. Many of us feel stuck in one way or another. We're not sure why or what to do. Some people call it a midlife crisis, or I've even heard the term quarter life crisis now. Your colleague Bill Burnett once had a student that you call Sonia. Sonia had a problem. What was this problem?

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Well, she too had, you know, she was working in high technology and she went to a great big company and she was writing code. And she was one of these successful people. The stuff she's writing, millions, even billions of people are using. And she's making a good living. She's working with really intelligent people. She's growing and learning new things. Wow, this is, this is working on every front. Except then, you know, she suddenly realized, I'm just turning the crank. You know, I'm part of this mechanism of high technology, you know, having people click things through and look at another website. Does that really matter to me? And am I stuck on this thing forever? And, I mean, she was in her early twenties and already felt like she was not hitting the ceiling.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  She was hitting the wall because she kind of looked forward through the lens of, you know, techno-capitalism and said, that's all this thing is forever.

• 23:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Talk about the idea, Dave, that when we are feeling stuck and desperate like this, many of us look for a single big solution that can get us unstuck.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  You know, there's this magical idea that there is this one place I really deserve to be, that my special calling, my special place in the world, what is the universe inviting me to do? Or where is my passion? All these different narratives come around. There's this lovely idea that I will find it, which either has no compromise or just tiny little compromises and really lights up the dashboard of my soul and makes me feel like I am in the right place, doing the right thing. This is what I was made for. And then and then only do I deserve to be happy and feel like I'm being my authentic self. And that almost never really happens.

• 24:11Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that Sonia did this. She basically decided that she was going to make a radical change in this career that she was unhappy with.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, she really wanted to make a jump and she was particularly attracted to something radically different because she really wanted to feel different. And a number of her friends were in the process of going up to the San Juan Islands and jumping into working together and revitalizing an old farm and making it an organic farm. So maybe I can just go back to the land and have a personal experience and join this commune of organic farmers. And that's what's really going to work for me. We don't really know how that all worked out for her, but there's a very similar story. Another young man I know who was highly successful in high technology stopped out and went to try to start an artist commune. Actually bought a property in a rural area, brought artists in, like, we're going to have this creative environment, it's going to be great. And did that for about two years.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  And then, that was lovely. And then realized, all it is is radically different. I don't even really like this. This isn't that interesting. At the end of the day, these people are kind of boring because all they want to talk about is this one little narrow view about art. And what I fell for was the radical shift. And radical shifts are radical, but that radicalism doesn't last very long. And you're still stuck with waking up being you, living in the world. Is this the life I want to be in?

• 25:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's look at another dysfunctional belief that gets in the way of our happiness. This one is about the idea that if we don't feel good about doing what we're doing, the solution is to double down, work harder and grind. Now, of course, there is a vast amount of research that finds that hard work is strongly correlated with success. But I want to talk about the misguided idea we have that more is always better. Can you talk about your own life choices here, Dave? When your first kid was born, you were, I don't know how to put this kindly, you were a workaholic.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it really is. Well, if this is good, more is better. The psychologists call this hedonic treadmill. This is how addiction works. How much is enough? A little bit more. And so what I was trying to do was trying to be a successful businessperson. So I was growing rapidly and getting more responsibility. And having one kid is a good idea. Let's have more. So by this time, I've got three kids. And so I've got twice as big a family and about five times as big a job. And of course, my obligation is to do everything well, and I'm not. It takes me about 75 hours a week to do that job. I learned how to operate on three to four hours of sleep a night, which was a bit of a disaster. And then I had a severe comeuppance.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  One Saturday morning, about 9 o'clock, I'm sitting in the family room drinking a cup of coffee, and I heard my then-three-year-old son Robbie say to his mother, "Mom, could we play with Dad today? Or are he just going to fall asleep in the chair again?"

• 27:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  And I went, "Oh, my God." When I was Robbie's age, my dad was gone because he died. When Robbie's Robbie's age, his dad's gone because he's asleep. You know, a corpse, a sleeping guy, about the same thing. And I suddenly had this epiphany. "Oh, my God, I've got to fix this. It's not working. More is not working."

• 27:37Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, we had Lydie Klotz on Hidden Brain some years ago, and that episode has stuck with me ever since. And his thesis is that whenever we're trying to do something in our lives, our instinctive approach is always to add, to do something more, to increase what we're doing, to add the extra note in a score of music, to add the extra ingredient in a dish that we're cooking, to always think of addition rather than subtraction, whereas very often, it is subtraction that gets us to the person and the place we want to be.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  It is indeed. You know, Georgia O'Keeffe, an artist that you're talking about, that it's in elimination that things become available. The biggest decision you make as an artist is to decide what not to include. It's about getting more out of. In fact, probably the life you're already in is full of more meaning-making, full of more aliveness, if you have the tricks, the wherewithal, and particularly the mindsets necessary to see it, to attend to it, and to get it from it. So we really want to free people up. We want people to be free to get what's already there.

• 28:49Shankar Vedantam?

  The poet Mary Oliver famously asked, "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" It's a wonderful question. It can prompt us to dream big, to ask if our ambitions are equal to our potential.

• 29:03Shankar Vedantam?

  But it's also the kind of question that can make us feel that whatever we do is not enough. If one lifetime cannot contain all that we can do, surely our hopes and dreams will always be far greater than our accomplishments. Doesn't that set us up for a lifetime of feeling like we are not measuring up, not doing enough, for a lifetime of unhappiness?

• 29:25Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to root our dreams and ambitions in the soil of what is possible. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 29:46Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 30:19Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever felt stuck in life, even when you are doing work that was important and useful? If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Send the audio file to us using the email address [email protected]. Use the subject line "Stuck." Again, that's [email protected].

• 30:53Shankar Vedantam?

  We all make plans, set goals, and chase after what we believe will bring us happiness. But then, almost inevitably, things don't go the way we expect. Life doesn't work out the way we imagined. What if the problem isn't us, or even the vagaries of life, but the way we are approaching our goals?

• 31:15Shankar Vedantam?

  Dave Evans is co-author, with Bill Burnett, of How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day. He argues that thinking like a designer can help us establish the foundations of a good life.

• 31:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Dave, you've taught design thinking for many years. You've come on the show before to talk about this idea. For listeners who are not familiar with this approach, what is design thinking?

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Well, design thinking is, first of all, the relatively new, about 15 or 20-year-old nomenclature, the name we have for a process that was originally conceived at Stanford going back to 1963 called Human-Centered Design, HCD. We renamed it Design Thinking about 20 years ago. It makes it a little more accessible, more accurate, really. And all it is, is a methodology to innovatively come up with ideas and solutions to problems that are not easily solved. Problems where you don't know what you're looking for until you find it. And when you find it, it's so unique to the context and the persons involved, it's not replicatable, and it changes over time. And so, design thinking is an approach to, number one,

• 32:27Speaker 03

  understanding the problem you're working on and what you might try to do about it. And then, having ideas that turn into prototypes, experiments to learn your way forward and see what might actually work. And then, you can implement something that actually is feasible. So what Bill and I did, starting 20 years ago, is we took those ideas about designing a future thing you've never done before into designing ourselves, not just designing products. And that's turned out to be a pretty interesting conversation.

• 32:57Shankar Vedantam?

  So one of the imperatives of design thinking is to grapple with problems at the right scale. So when we ask ourselves, what is the meaning of life? You say that could be an interesting question, but that might be a very bad design question. Can you explain why?

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, we say problem finding precedes problem solving. And one of the reasons many efforts fail is you're working on the wrong thing. Very often, you're working on a too-big-a-thing or the wrong thing. And so, trying to answer that one ultimate existential question, what is the meaning of my life? What will I be able to say on my deathbed and be satisfied with? Phew, that is a really tall bar. And frankly, we don't know how to design for that because it takes the whole life to answer it. So we like working on answerable, doable problems. And the better question is not what's the meaning of life, but how might I live a more meaningful life now? And that's what we're trying to help people do.

• 34:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's talk about some of the ways that design thinking can make the question of life's meaningfulness more achievable, more doable. You point to a number of different design principles that can help break down this question. The first is something that you call "fully engaged and calmly detached." What do you mean by this, Dave?

• 34:21Speaker 03

  What does it mean to have the mind of a designer? Designers who think this way look at the world a little bit differently. So, fully engaged and calmly detached is this aspirational mindset that says, "I want to be entirely available, entirely engaged with what I'm doing that's right in front." I'm having a conversation with this incredibly lovely person named Shankar Vedantam on this fabulous conversation called Hidden Brain with a bunch of thoughtful people. Am I paying attention? Or am I thinking about what I'm going to have with dinner with my friend who's staying over at the house tonight? So, I want to be fully engaged, but I also want to be calmly detached. Because there's this thing called "the outcome of what I'm doing" that, in truth, I have no control over. At the end of the day, doing the right thing is all I can do,

• 35:06Speaker 03

  the best I can possibly do. So, I can control my participation, but I cannot control the outcome. And it turns out, those two things then become competitors. If I get too wound up in worrying about the outcome, "Is this going to go well? Is Shankar going to like the episode? What do the listeners all think?" And if I'm too distracted by my involvement in the outcome, I'm too attached to that outcome. It's going to get in the way of my participation. So, the best way to be fully engaged is to let go of the outcome, and then we'll take things as they come.

• 35:40Shankar Vedantam?

  And of course, this happens at an interpersonal level all the time. Someone gives us feedback. The feedback is critical. And instead of listening to it or exploring it with curiosity, we get defensive. Because we now are saying, "Someone is criticizing what I'm doing. Someone doesn't like the outcomes of what I'm doing. I'm working so hard. I'm a good person." And now, suddenly, your ego gets caught up with the problem. And now, you can't listen to the advice for what it actually is.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, being all committed to the outcome that you have in mind, frankly, completely takes you out of what you're already doing.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  It's not that I don't care. It's that I'm not so committed to it and involved to it that I now am staking my reputation on it, I'm staking my identity, and now I've got a psychological attachment to it and it's all about me. So what it really boils down to is recognizing that it's not about you all the time.

• 36:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Many years ago, the researcher Ron Howard talked about the quality of the decision versus the quality of the outcome. And in some ways, that has bearing on what we've been just talking about, Dave. Can you explain this idea?

• 36:54Speaker 03

  It turns out, thinking well, making a good decision, is a good idea. And if we could run, you know, the same decision in a thousand parallel universes and watch all the vagaries, you know, the better decisions would probably work out more often than the bad decisions. But let's be clear, I'm not in charge of the future. You can influence as best you possibly can. But let's, let's have an honest and humble perspective on ourselves. I'm doing the best I can, but that doesn't mean it's going to work.

• 37:23Shankar Vedantam?

  So in some ways, what I'm hearing you say is that when it comes to the outcome of our decisions, you know, acknowledging them with some humility means that, you know, I can plan for a beautiful wedding, but I might want to tell myself, you know, it could rain that day. The caterers might get a flat tire on their way to the venue. The venue itself might burn to the ground. There are many things that are outside my control. And acknowledging them at the outset might, in some ways, limit my expectations and frustrations when things don't go the way I want.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Absolutely. What we're trying to do is, I'm trying to give reality its best possible chance of turning out the way I hope. And then, once I'm doing that, then I release the fact that then I get to fully participate in the reality that is actually going to occur. So if indeed I've planned this thing and it rains that day, well, I can spend all afternoon going shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, you know, and being mad at the weatherman who owed me a sunny afternoon, or just go, okay, and what can we do with this? You know, there's this phrase, making the best of a bad situation. That's really unfair. The situation doesn't think of itself as bad. The rain's not going, "I'm here to ruin your party." You know, the rain's just falling. So it's really making the best of the situation.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  All we're ever trying to do is make the best of the situation.

• 38:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Another design principle you talk about is story crafting. What is story crafting, Dave?

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Well, there's the old line that life is a story we tell ourselves. And the psychologists will remind us now, that's true. Your internal narrative really matters. And so story crafting is about picking carefully the story that you are telling yourself and living into, because it has a profound effect, both on the life you live and the quality of your experience of it. Now, of course, that story has to be true. It can't be a fantasy story. We're not fans of magical thinking. But we are big fans of picking the story that's truest and most generative to give you the best possible chance of becoming fully alive.

• 39:37Shankar Vedantam?

  You and others have looked at the role that story crafting plays among first-generation college students. Tell me about this work and what you find.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  Well, you know, Stanford is, of course, an elite university. But what people lose track of is, you know, 80% of our students are on financial aid. So they're not prep school kids, and by no means are they all highly resourced. We have lots of first-generation students or under-resourced students who really suffer the imposter syndrome, like, man, do I really belong here? And there are a group of people in the education school and psychology department who work on intervening in ways that might be helpful to these students. And one of the results was, it turned out, as short as a 15-minute intervention with a first-generation student on the narrative they're telling themselves can have a transformative effect that lasts not only all four years of college, but five or 10 years after.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  And the narrative simply is not, "Yeah, you're under-resourced, and all those guys who went to the prep school are going to kick your butt." That story is then replaced by, "The reason you're here is you're highly capable. You can do this work, and there are lots of resources to help you that you can avail yourself of." And if that store, that alternate narrative is offered to that first gen student by another first gen student, two or three years older than them for whom it has worked, they believe it and literally that 15 minutes, their performance changes permanently.

• 41:14Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to talk about another design principle, but first I want to talk about some of your own experience as a designer. When you were an undergraduate engineering student, Dave, you were also a firefighter. And one of the first products you designed was a fire hydrant wrench. What is a fire hydrant wrench?

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Well, if you ever take a look at your neighborhood fire hydrant, there's a little, you know, cover over the nozzle where the water comes out on one side. And on the other side of that thing, there's a little post sticking out. That's actually the valve that opens and closes the hydrant. And if you look at it, it's in the shape of a pentagon. It's in the shape of a five sided pentagon. And the reason is because we don't want people opening fire hydrants who don't know what they're doing. And so when I went into mechanical engineering and went into the P R L, the Product Realization Lab, which you might call the machine shop, I walked in there with a great big chunk of brass. And the idea was to mill that thing into a fire hydrant wrench that had one of those pentagon things on it on the one hand and a kind of special curvy thing on the other to take the cover

• 42:17Speaker 03

  off. Because you need one of those if you're fighting a fire.

• 42:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Tell me what happened as you were trying to mold this brass thingy into a wrench. Did it all go smoothly?

• 42:28Speaker 03

  It went very unsmoothly because I didn't know what I was doing. I'd never done anything like that before. I never used the machine, didn't know how to use a mill or a lathe or a high speed, you know, metal bandsaw. I'd never worked with anything that heavy before. I was completely inexperienced, you know, broke, broke tools. I had to get more materials. And I had this idea in my head about this perfect wrench that I'd seen that was, you know, bought from a very expensive supplier. And then I finally realized what I was doing was, which is a metaphor for the rest of real life, is I'm trying to make a real thing. I'm trying to bring it into being. I'm trying to take something and allow something real, something finite, something limited, something constrained, something even with flaws in it to come into being.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  And all that struggle with, you know, breaking parts or what have you, proved to me that this thing was going to be a compromise.

• 43:31Shankar Vedantam?

  You say that the way we craft physical objects can teach us something about how to craft and make meaningful moments out of the daily events of our lives. And you call this moment making. What do you mean by this, Joe?

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Well, the thing about making anything is, of course, is limitation. And this goes back to one of our big reframes around the meaning question is what we call the scandal of particularity, which is that there is no perfect fire hydrant wrench. There is no perfect birthday cake. There is no perfect conversation with Chakravarti. There's only the one I'm actually in. So thing one in making something is recognizing its limitation. All ultimates are only really found in the particular. And they reflect that. They're not the fullness of it, but they reflect it honestly. And that isn't a problem. It's not, oh, I fell short again. It's not the perfect fire hydrant wrench. It's the real one. All the hours I spent making this thing started with a great big block of brass, and it ended up being a very specific thing.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  It's very much like sculpture, you know, like Michelangelo releasing the angel from the marble. I'm in the process of releasing the wrench from the block. And if all I want is the end result, then everything I did up to that simply doesn't matter. And every mistake I make is in the way and a problem. As opposed to, I, yes, I need to pay enough attention that this thing will actually work when it's all said and done. That matters. However, was I present at the time? Was I actually noticing and learning how to use the machine tools? Was I noticing how a sharpened tool works differently than a dull tool? Did I understand the difference between brass and steel? Did I get the feel that I actually feel?

• 45:11Speaker 03

  And you can, if you do this right, you can feel the metal cutting in your hands. And do you understand that experience? And now I'm actually being a maker, not just I completed making.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  And so if everything's just the outcome, when it's all done, by the way, the second I finish making that wrench, how long does the moment of being done last? A microsecond?

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Now it's passed. So what's next? You know, and I missed it. I missed the whole darn thing. You know, people very often miss the whole darn thing because all they wanted was the outcome and then it's over.

• 45:58Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, philosophers and spiritual traditions have told us for centuries that we have to live in the moment. And in some ways, that's what I hear you saying.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  It's exactly what we're saying. I mean, Ram Dass said it a long time ago. You know, be here now. Because at the end of the day, that's the essence of it. We call it the flow world, not the transaction world. The transaction was finish the wrench, make it available on the fire truck. That's a transaction. But the moment was standing at the lathe and actually experiencing how a cutting tool and a piece of metal interact. That's entering into the fullness of the moment. So moment making turns out to be the critical task of people who want to design more meaning in their life. And particularly the kinds of meaning that can transcend not just impact making, which is wonderful but hard and short-lived.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  These moments full of potential meaningful experience abound in front of us. So the number one skill of a meaning-making designer is moment making.

• 47:10Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm also reflecting, Dave, that the process that you're describing to build a fire hydrant wrench also applies in some ways to interpersonal contexts and emotional situations. When we are working on something with someone, we're working as part of a team. When we are managing someone, when we're dealing with a boss, when we are, you know, thinking about a child or a partner or a spouse. All of these involve relationships that are under construction. And in fact, they're under construction all the time. And when you have that mindset, you're not trying to think about, okay, there is a perfect place I'm going to get to with this other person. And once we get to that place, we're going to be happy forever. We're going to live happily forever, as the fairy tales say.

• 47:53Shankar Vedantam?

  In some ways, it takes the pressure off the outcome and gives us more enjoyment in the process.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And one of the little tools we've invented for that is the got to get to shift. When you're thinking transactionally, you're in the transactional world. It's all about getting it done. So I've got to get this thing done. You've got to get through this meeting. I've got to get these people to agree. I've got to sign this contract. I've got to get these tasks assigned, whatever that might be. You know, as opposed to I get to participate in this process. There's a lovely illustration that I think I have permission to use. Our editor, who's working with us on this book, is, you know, she's working at home remote one day, and her child is in the other room making a bunch of noise while she's about to go on to a Zoom call. You know, and she started saying to herself, God, I find it when you get this kid to quiet down while I'm working. And then she suddenly remembered, oh, yeah.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  She had just read the got to get to idea in the manuscript and said, no, no, no, I get to work at home now, which means I get to be in the presence of the effervescent sound coming out of this very alive child. I still get to work in the presence of that. I can put on my headphones and solve that problem easily. I'm so lucky that I get to be here and be a part of that. Now, how do I, I've got to find a way to shut the kid up. And she said, and that took about two seconds to have that change of mind and everything changed. So that's what we're looking for. We're looking for see it a different way and have a surprising change of your psychic experience of your own life.

• 49:24Shankar Vedantam?

  And of course, many of us discover this too late, Dave. You know, when we lose someone in our lives, we now say, you know, I would give anything to have that person back with us, even though when they were with us, we were often frustrated by them or irritated by them or wishing that they would say or do something different. And of course, we recognize that we are actually happy with all those things when we don't have that person anymore.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I had this experience in my twenties in my career where I suddenly realized that I was living entirely in the future that I would never get to. And then there was a time I was talking with an intensive care unit nurse about this problem of always the next thing, always the next thing, you know, we get there and then get the next goal, then the next goal. And frankly, you're never really enjoying the meal, you're just trying to get it over with. And she said, oh, yeah, yeah, we have a term for that. We call it destination sickness. I go, what the heck is destination sickness? She goes, oh, yeah, you know, here in the ICU, particularly at Stanford, we have all these highly accomplished people. And it was always, you know, when I finish the degree and then want to get the grad degree and then I want to get the good job and then I make partner and then I make my first million and it's always that next thing will make me happy.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  And she said, and some of the people here, like the ones in their mid 50s who've burned their heart out and now they're actually going to die. There's nothing more we can do for them. They suddenly realize there is no next thing. And then they look back at all the things they ran through and they realize they missed the whole thing. And frankly, she said, and most of them die in despair and realize it's too late. And I shuddered at that. I said, oh, my God. She goes, oh, yeah, it's really rough. By the way, here's a tip, don't do that.

• 51:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Are the challenges we face in designing our lives the same as we go through different stages of our lives? Turns out, they are not. Designing your life when you are a high school or college student is a very different challenge than designing your life when you're in the thick of a career or when you're contemplating retirement.

• 51:44Shankar Vedantam?

  In our companion episode, available exclusively for our subscribers on Hidden Brain Plus, we look at how different design strategies apply to different stages of our lives. If you're already a subscriber, that episode is available right now in this podcast feed. It's titled "Seasons of Meaning." If you're not yet a subscriber, please consider signing up. Go to support.hidenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. You can get a free trial in both places, and you'll instantly have access to all our subscriber-only content. Again,

• 52:21Shankar Vedantam?

  that's support.hidenbrain.org or apple.co/hiddenbrain. Dave Evans and Bill Burnett are co-authors of How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day. Dave, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Thanks, Tucker. It's great to be here.

• 52:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you have questions or comments about how to live a more meaningful life? Have you felt stuck in life but then found a way forward? If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with a Hidden Brain audience, or if you have a question or comment about design thinking, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the audio file to us using the email address [email protected]. Use the subject line "stuck." Again, that email address is [email protected]. Our conversation with Dave Evans continues next week. Many of us think of meaning as

• 53:33Shankar Vedantam?

  something we find, but meaning is really something we design. By staying curious, experimenting, and reframing our challenges, we can create lives that feel purposeful and grounded, instead of rushed and depleted. In our conversation next week, we focus on what may be the most difficult challenge in designing our lives. It isn't about where we want to go. It's about accepting where we are right now. Please tune in for it. It's titled Radical Acceptance.

• 54:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you liked this episode, please share it with a couple of friends. Word of mouth recommendations are the way most people find their way to our show. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 54:46Speaker 04

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