Designing Your Life & Finding Your Talent — with Bill Burnett

Bill Burnett, the co-author of the New York Times best-seller, “Designing Your Life,” and the Co-Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University, joins Scott to discuss the attributes of “design thinking,” understanding your talent, and what to do when you feel stuck. Scott opens by bringing on Robert Armstrong, the FT’s US financial commentator to discuss the latest around Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. Follow Robert on Twitter, @rbrtrmstrng. For more of Prof G’s thoughts on SVB’s fallout, check out our special Markets episode. Algebra of Happiness: nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  Episode 241. 241 is a country code belonging to Gabon, a country in West Africa. 1941, the Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor, and M&Ms were created exclusively for US service members deployed overseas. When my kids bring their Halloween candy home, I don't hide it and then eat it when they're asleep. I eat it in front of them, slowly. Total power move. Go, go, go!

• 1:53Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 241st episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Bill Burnett, the co-author of the New York Times bestselling Designing Your Life and the co-director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University. We discuss with Bill the attributes of design thinking, understanding your talent, and what to do when you feel stuck. Okay, what's happening? Well, the big news is obviously the implosion of Silicon Valley Bank.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Text messages were starting to go around. It became chatter. And as the days went on, screenshots.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  In about 40 hours, essentially collapsing and losing more than 40 billion in deposits.

• 2:27Scott Galloway?

  We broke this down in a special episode of our market show, which you can find linked in our show notes. To cover this unfolding story even further, we're bringing in Financial Times US Financial commentator, Robert Armstrong. Robert, where does this podcast find you?

• 2:41Robert Armstrong?

  Brooklyn, New York.

• 2:43Scott Galloway?

  Brooklyn, nice. Let's bust right into it. In your recent analysis, you wrote that Silicon Valley Bank's collapse is a profitability problem rather than a threat to solvency in the style of the 2008 crisis. What did you mean by that?

• 2:57Robert Armstrong?

  I meant that Silicon Valley Bank fell down because its balance sheet was extremely poorly managed. So, as you know, Scott, banks do two things. They get money from people and they give money from people. And the trick to making money as a bank is to earn more on the money that you give than on the money you get. And Silicon Valley got into a situation where during the good times, they bought a lot of bonds at low yields.

• 3:36Robert Armstrong?

  And then the bad times came, they had all these low yielding bonds, and all of a sudden, the money they were getting, their funding, their deposits, was becoming more expensive. So they threatened, they were threatened with becoming an unprofitable bank.

• 3:52Scott Galloway?

  There's a general feeling across people who know, including yourself, that the risk of contagion here is a lot lower than it was 15 years ago. Why is that?

• 4:03Robert Armstrong?

  Well, in this particular case, the key point is that Silicon Valley Bank was extraordinarily badly managed from a risk point of view. And its peer banks, including the peer banks that have seen their stock prices get badly beaten up, just don't have the same problems to the same degree. The same concentration of highly flighty business deposits, the same domination of the asset side of the balance sheet by low yield, long-term government bonds. This bank was an outlier. That's point number one. Point number two is that the post 2008 crisis regulations have

• 4:46Robert Armstrong?

  kind of worked. Banks are, in general, in America, are quite well capitalized and quite liquid. So that's better. The fact that a bank failed here shows you that the regulatory regime is not perfect. Maybe no regulatory regime can be, but we're better off than we were, systemically speaking.

• 5:08Scott Galloway?

  People reference that the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank lobbied Congress for a rollback in certain aspects of the Dodd-Frank regulation for banks that had less than 250 billion in assets, claiming that they were different. Can you tell us exactly what that regulation was that they rolled back? And if they had not rolled it back, would it have prevented this type of run on the bank or this liquidity crisis?

• 5:30Robert Armstrong?

  So there was, in 2018, there was a bill that rolled back certain aspects of the Dodd-Frank post-crisis regulation for kind of medium-sized American banks. And it meant that those banks would face less frequent stress tests, have somewhat less stringent liquidity and capital requirements, and would not have to have what they call a living will, a resolution plan that the very biggest banks have to do. What living wills are supposed to do is make sure that when a bank falls over, it does not create a systemic problem.

• 6:17Robert Armstrong?

  I don't think rolling back those rules for midsize banks was a good idea. I'm not sure it was material in this case. This kind of talk that it all comes down to that bill, I think, is evidence of the first rule of financial crises, which is that it is the fault of someone who belongs to the other political party. And although that rule is never broken and we'll be reading a lot about it, I'm not sure in this case it would have made a difference because in my view, the failure, the key failures at Silicon Valley Bank were first, the management of Silicon Valley Bank,

• 7:00Robert Armstrong?

  sort of failing balance sheet risk control 101, risk management, and two, the supervisors as opposed to the regulators. So there's two aspects to regulating banks. There's making rules for what they can do, and there's somebody getting on the phone and calling the bank and making sure it's doing the right stuff. So I see this as a failure of management and a failure of supervision rather than regulation per se.

• 7:33Scott Galloway?

  There's also, and this might fall under the umbrella that you just outlined, of looking for someone to blame that doesn't share your political values. But there's a class of individuals who are exceptionally loud on Twitter, and I'm going to refer to them not as venture capitalists, but as venture catastrophists. And it's this catastrophe of, oh, China is pulling ahead in AI because we're being overregulated and our system, our venture system, runs so much better and has such greater lubrication and so much more horsepower when it's not hamstrung by the idiots in Washington. And then there's this panic where arsonists screaming fire.

• 8:15Scott Galloway?

  I mean, literally at the top of their lungs, taking to Twitter and saying lines around the banks, kind of all caps hysteria. And then when there begins a run on the bank, it's sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. There, where's the government? And it, there's just a certain amount of resentment. And I feel some of it that you're not being especially good citizens here, that you're finding soft tissue in the system that you claim is terrible. And then you're an arsonist who figures out a way to start a fire. And then you're just screaming, where is the fire department? Am I being hyperbolic here?

• 8:52Robert Armstrong?

  No. Uh, there is no more satisfying irony in the world than watching a part time libertarian scream for help. And it is clear that this is what has happened here. As soon as it became clear that this bank was in trouble. Everybody in Silicon Valley became a believer in the government and its responsibilities to support and basically backstop industry.

• 9:31Scott Galloway?

  Do you think, what do you think happens here? Your sense is that this is, I'm going to use the pandemic as an analogy. That when a lot of different people get some sort of natural immunity, the contagion gets blocked. It infects one person, it goes to the second signature bank, and then it hits a block. It hits, it hits a Charles Schwab or someone else that quite frankly, just has the liquidity, has done all sorts of stress tests because of Dodd-Frank. And just quite frankly, is just much more bulletproof. Is that a fair analogy and assessment of what might hap, or what is not happening here?

• 10:04Robert Armstrong?

  I think that is true up to a certain point. The difficult point in situations like this is in any banking system, no matter how well designed. You are doing what they call maturity transformation. You are taking short term deposits and turning them into long term loans. And that is powerful magic. And in in the best regulated banking system, if you inject enough panic, the infection just runs out of control. So this goes back to your earlier point that there is a test of the sort of responsibility of everyone involved.

• 10:46Robert Armstrong?

  It depends on a lot of people not yelling fire in a crowded theater and being sensible. And I think there are legitimate questions about how these kind of panic dynamics are different now than they might have been in an era when our communications technology was different. So it is important to recognize that there will always be banking scares and that there is no conceivable regulatory regime that closes off every possibility of stress, severe stress in the banking system.

• 11:28Robert Armstrong?

  Uh, we're dealing with powerful forces that can be moderated, but not eliminated here.

• 11:35Scott Galloway?

  And wasn't at the end of the day, the remedy just to lift uh, the cap on FDIC? And if if that's the case, is that a structural change we have coming? That the $250,000 limit is sort of, you know, means something until it doesn't?

• 11:50Robert Armstrong?

  Yes, and but I would note first that that's always been true. That when push comes to shove

• 11:58Robert Armstrong?

  in a banking crisis, the government does one damn thing or another to protect uninsured depositors. Uh, the prospect of all business depositors having their money stuck in a banking system is just too damn scary. So either by, as in 2008, arranging a forced marriage with another bank or changing this rule or changing that rule or buying assets from banks to make them more liquid, something is always done. Uh, and whether that becomes now explicit, that's that's an open question.

• 12:35Robert Armstrong?

  But part of what you're talking about here is moral hazard. Right? A lot of people worry that if we bail out uninsured depositors, depositors will, they'll become careless and they will become risk prone. And they'll put their money in banks that aren't really stable. I'm not sure how much we need to worry about that, actually. I think banks are risk averse primarily because the boss doesn't want to get fired. And in this case, the boss got fired. And the executive, the whole executive team got fired. Their, their stock options are now worthless. All the shareholders got wiped out. The bondholders got wiped out.

• 13:21Robert Armstrong?

  That's a pretty powerful force, even in the absence of depositors being at risk.

• 13:27Scott Galloway?

  Robert Armstrong is the FT's US Financial Commentator and writes the Unhedged Newsletter. He joins us from his home in Brooklyn, New York. Robert, thanks so much. Really enjoyed this conversation.

• 13:38Robert Armstrong?

  Real pleasure, Scott.

• 13:42Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back for our conversation with Bill Burnett.

• 13:47Scott Galloway?

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• 16:25Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Bill Burnett, the co-author of the New York Times bestselling Designing Your Life and the co-director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University. Professor Burnett, where does this podcast find you?

• 16:37Speaker 05

  I'm at my office at Stanford.

• 16:39Scott Galloway?

  Oh, nice.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  This morning, yeah.

• 16:40Scott Galloway?

  So, how do people become better design thinkers?

• 16:44Speaker 05

  That's a really good question. You know, this thing we call design thinking now, we used to call it just human-centered design. And we've been doing this at Stanford for, I don't know, a long time, since 1963, when we started this program. The way you do it is you just change your mindset. You start thinking like a designer. So, there's five mindsets. Curiosity. Rather than being a skeptic, be curious, because if we're talking about the future, there's no data anyway, so let's just get curious and check it out. That's where the energy for our change comes from. And then, you know, we frame the problem. You probably know the famous Peter Drucker quote, "There's nothing quite so useless as doing something very well that never needed to be done in the first place." Right, so change the problem because most people are working on the wrong problem.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  And then radical collaboration, the problems and the interesting solutions are out in the world. Talk to people, bias to action, because again, if there's no data about the future, just let's go do some stuff, let's build some stuff. And then prototyping, you know, that's the building. Let's, we investigate the world by building things and seeing what people do with them. So if you get curious, radically collaborate, reframe your problems, build lots of prototypes, you're doing design thinking.

• 17:54Scott Galloway?

  And you distinguish between work view and life view, say more.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  So in the classic diagram of design thinking, you start with empathy. In the case of designing your life, you start with first empathy for yourself. Who are you, what do you want, what do you want out of work, what do you want out of life? And then empathy for the world, because just because you want to do something doesn't mean the world cares, right? That doesn't mean the world's going to let you do it. So we have people write a work view, 250 words, 500 words on what's your theory of work? Why do we work? What's work for? And then a life view, which is, you know, literally 250 to 500 words on what's the meaning of life? What's your organizing principle? Why are we here? It might be a spiritual thing, might be a secular thing, but whatever it is. And then the really important thing is that the research shows that when you, when you

• 18:40Speaker 05

  have a coherent life view and work view, when the two match, you are able to experience your life as being more meaningful, more coherent, you know, you're just, you're, you're, you're more in the groove. And so what we ask people to do is make these things explicit. And then they, they read them out to each other. We do put people in little groups of three, because when you speak it, you sort of claim it, right? I mean, and then you hear yourself speaking it and you hear other people's reaction to it. And that forms what we call your compass. So now I know why I'm working. I know what works for in my bigger picture of what's life for. And that gives people, you know, some, a, a place to start.

• 19:18Scott Galloway?

  Give me an example of that.

• 19:19Speaker 05

  So, you know, I'm working with, I'm working with a bunch of young students now in, in the designing your life class, they're typically seniors. And, you know, someone will say, well, you know, I think I work to make money, but I also work because I want to have some impact and meaning in my life. And then maybe their life view, you know, is like, I think, you know, I value family, I value community, I value, you know, the people in my life and I want to, and I want to do, you know, and I, and I want to be a good human. So those are pretty coherent, right? I want to be a good human and work is in the service to others and making money and, and finding meaning. Although I gotta tell you, everybody, this whole idea that like work is gonna be meaningful is a pretty new idea. You know, my, my, my, uh, my grandparents were immigrants from Germany. My dad got the family out of Germany in nineteen thirty.

• 20:03Speaker 05

  My grandfather got the family out of Germany in nineteen thirty-three cuz there was this guy named Hitler who just got elected. And, you know, his thing was like, I'll take any job. He had sixth grade education.

• 20:13Scott Galloway?

  It was, it was work to survive.

• 20:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, work to survive, work to put a roof over our head, work to send the kids to school. His kids went to the community college. I went to Stanford. My daughter's getting a PhD in, in stem cell technologies, you know, UCSF. So it's a classic immigrant story. But nowadays, the kids all want impact and they want meaning. And I'm like, you know, you might not want to get your meaning where you get your money.

• 20:34Scott Galloway?

  I just wanna pause there cuz I think it's, I think it's a really important point. And I find that sometimes, sometimes it's a bit of an indulgence. And when they say they want meaning in the work, uh, sometimes I find just, and I know this is crass, they want the work to be more fun.

• 20:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:48Scott Galloway?

  Than what oftentimes work is, especially early in your career. That this notion that they should feel some sort of meaning, which is Latin for I want it to be less stressful and less like bureaucratic, less bullshit. I, I, and I know I sound boomerish here. You know, this notion that, that you can have balance in your life. I've never bought it. Uh, you can have it all at once. You, you can have it all, you just can't have it all at once. Like, it's a certain amount of balance requires a certain amount of lack of balance at some point. Is there some sort of, is a younger generation a bit more entitled or are their expectations unrealistic?

• 21:24Speaker 05

  I don't know if they're entitled, but I think, you know, psychologists have this principle called the hedonic treadmill. It used to be money, I gotta have more money. Get a little more and then it's good for a while, then I gotta have some more, I gotta have some more, right? And now I think money, uh, your meaning is maybe the new money. It's this hedonic treadmill. But, but I mean, there's nothing wrong with saying, hey, look, I wanna go to work and I wanna know what, you know, what I'm working on and what I'm working for. That's fine, that's not entitled, that's reasonable. And managers are doing a shitty job of connecting the dots between, hey, you're the junior analyst, you're making the spreadsheet for the partner. So shut up and do your work, or hey, let me tell you why this is important. Because if we have good data, we can make better decisions. If we organize the data well, the partner can just, you know, move fast.

• 22:07Speaker 05

  So, you know, we had the big quit, forty seven million people quit in twenty twenty one, about the same number quit in twenty twenty two. Um, people are pretty unhappy at their jobs. You know, the Gallup engagement survey has never had more than, you know, thirty, thirty two percent engaged workers in the U.S. So it's not a new problem that people find their jobs meaningless. It's a management problem because you can, you can make, you can make any job, you know, significant and feel like it has impact. And I think we do a terrible job at doing it. And this generation is a little more demanding. They, they value novelty over mastery. You know, they, they're talking to me about, well, I want to have an impact. They go, well, you've only been in the job a year and you don't really know what you're doing yet.

• 22:50Speaker 05

  You know, so like dig in and learn how to do the job well. Once you have mastery over this junior analyst position or this junior designer position, you get more responsibility and you start to move into, into, you know, bigger and bigger, more responsible roles. And those roles, you know, have more, more impact because you're moving the needle on how much money we make or, you know, how many customers we serve. So, you know, dig on on mastery. But I, I think that if I, I don't know about entitlement, but this generation seems to like to change. Like I did something for a little while, I got bored, I, I quit my job, I went to another company, I did the same thing. I had a student who did this five times, you know, five completely successful jobs in, you know, five years. And I'm going, what are you doing? She goes, well, you know, it's just not that interesting. I said, well, it's not that interesting because you don't really, you never get to the, the second part.

• 23:35Speaker 05

  You never get to the second project.

• 23:38Scott Galloway?

  So if mastery is a goal, I think of mastery, two components would be grit and perseverance and time spent trying to master that. And also just natural talent. And I find that most young people fall into the trap of thinking they've been told, follow your passion. And I've always been follow your talent. And your job in your twenties, or one of your jobs, is to figure out what you're just naturally talented at. Do you have a process or a way of distilling that down to a set of behaviors for getting to that answer sooner rather than later?

• 24:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think so. And you know, this whole follow your passion thing, Dave Evans, the guy I wrote the books with, and I are kind of the anti-passion guys. We're research-based. We teach a class. It's got, you know, lots of exercises in it, but it's Stanford, so I can't just make shit up. I've got it based on the research. So right across the campus is the Center for the Study of Adolescence, and a guy named Bill Damon, who's a big researcher in this space. He wrote a book called Path to Purpose. He said, look, only 20% of people have any single identifiable passion. 80% of the people, when you ask them that question, go, I don't know. Or, I got five of them. What do you want to talk about first? So it's a stupid question, because eight out of 10 people are going to answer, I don't know.

• 24:51Speaker 05

  And actually, you know, like you, I think we're all in favor of people working passionately and working with grit. But you don't have to know your passion in advance to figure out what you want to do with your life. And so, yeah, you do a work for you in a life that's your compass. And then you engage your curiosity to figure out, yeah, where are my talents? And talent is interesting, because I think it does exist. But I also think that, you know, talent plus the 10,000 hours is what gets you to mastery and to a state where, you know, you can see around the corners and you're doing work that nobody else can do. So if you can identify something that you're naturally drawn to, and whatever the

• 25:35Speaker 05

  circuits in your brains are that happen to sort of process that kind of information better than others, then you're on the right path. We have a, you know, I think it's like, get curious, talk to people, try stuff, and then tell your story. That's the whole book in a nutshell. Get curious, because that's the thing that, you know, take your curiosity for a walk. There's stuff in the world that's interesting. Go find it. Then talk to people and talk, you know, this is maybe information interviewing. We call it prototype conversations, prototype experiences. Go out and talk to people. You know, William Gibson, a science fiction writer, he said, "The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed." You know, so like, there's somebody doing what you think you're interested in doing. Just go talk to them. It's like time travel.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  They're 10 years down the road in your career. If you talk to them and something in your body lights up, that's a really good sign that maybe this is something of interest to you. Do a ride along, do a shadow of somebody for a day, make up a little project and do it and then, you know, find somebody to talk to with it. And then tell your story, because as you tell your story about this journey, other people come in and say, "Oh, you know who you should talk to? You should talk to this guy Scott Galloway, or you should talk to this guy Dave Evans." Our experience is five, six cycles of that, and all of a sudden you found yourself in a really interesting place in the work world or in your, in your personal life, and you're, and you're hanging out with people that are in your tribe.

• 26:57Scott Galloway?

  Part of the problem is we don't have a common vocabulary. And you need to be able to, so talent, people understand the term, but have you thought about and has there been, has anyone distilled it down to like, these are the, the seven types of talent?

• 27:12Speaker 05

  I'm not fond of assessments because I think it puts people in boxes, but the one we use is the, from, it comes from, well, it was called the Clifton Strength Finder. But now it's, but Gallup bought it, so they call it the Strength Finder. What Strength Finder is, is sort of 35 things that Gallup has isolated that...

• 27:30Scott Galloway?

  Thirty-five?

• 27:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, 35. And then you do the test and they give you your top five.

• 27:34Scott Galloway?

  Right, I got it.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  They give you your top five. And there are things like strategist, you know, imagination, you know, a maximizer, which they, they use kind of crazy words, but maximizer is a person who just likes to optimize systems. A strategist is a person who thinks, you know, thinks in big picture. You know, an ideator is a person who's really good at generating options. And so you get your, we, we do that in class, we get, and the kids get their five signature strengths, they call it, and they break it down, you know, according to certain, certain things. It doesn't say, "Oh, if you're really good at coming up with ideas and you're a strategizer and a maximizer, you should be an investment banker." It doesn't say that. But at least it gives you a sense of, you know, compared to other people.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  The reason I'm the person in the group that tends to get things organized and get things done, or the reason I'm the person in the group who tends to come up with the idea that nobody else thought of is because it's a talent. And they call it strength, a talent plus what you work on. So talents is underlying, but if you don't, if you don't work on it, if you don't practice it, you know, and make it better, it ain't a strength. But it's backed up, you know, Gallup does lots of statistics, it's backed up by a couple of million data points of what works in. And it's all about the, it's not like Myers-Briggs, I'm an INTJ and anything like that. It's, it's very much about what are the things that, that make people successful at work?

• 29:00Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 29:05Scott Galloway?

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• 30:12Speaker 06

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• 30:42Scott Galloway?

  I got introduced to a group called Second Act and it was, I think it's called Second Act. And it was all these incredibly successful professionals who worked at Goldman for 20 years, got laid off or decided to leave. They wake up at 42 and they're like, I don't know what I want to do. I just don't, I just know I don't want to be an investment banker any longer. And I feel blessed because I figured that out after two years, not 20. And I was also blessed with, I was not very good at it. So there was no temptation to stay in it. What advice do you have to people who feel like, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm getting stuck? Like A, how do you know when you're stuck? And B, what's a means of catalyzing or getting through the mud, if you will?

• 31:19Speaker 05

  You're right. You got lucky because if, for whatever reason, you weren't as good as your peers at investment banking, you got a really clear signal, hey, maybe this isn't my path.

• 31:28Scott Galloway?

  100%. Fast failure is a gift.

• 31:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, fast failure is a gift. And you know, the folks I talked to who were, who were 45 and now burned out and pissed off and they don't want to be an investment banker anymore. They just happened to be really smart, so they were good at it. But that, the curse of being really smart is they didn't get a lot of signals from the marketplace about stuff they couldn't do. Because pretty much if they worked really hard, they probably could do almost anything. So that, there is a curse in being too smart, you know, too smart for your own good. I think people get stuck. That's the whole basis of, you know, our students get stuck. People get stuck in mid-career. They get stuck when they, you know, people are retiring in some cases earlier and they have a much longer, you know, health span. They're going to be healthy for another 20, 25 years. That's a whole nother career. You can't just go golfing for 25 years.

• 32:13Speaker 05

  So this is a big problem. But how, so how do you, how do you know you're stuck? Well, you've come, you know, taken an assessment. The last, you know, 12 months you've come to work and you, and you had to drag your ass out of bed every Monday morning. And there's nothing, you're not curious about anything you're doing anymore because you've just been doing it for so long that it isn't interesting. So the stuck feeling is like numb, like your brains, your brain's numb, your head's numb, your heart's numb. So it takes a little bit of work to identify it. But once you've identified it, then the mindsets of curiosity, reframing, you know, come into play. And so you get curious, you start talking to people, and you try different things, and then you tell your story.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  It's an empirical process. It's the difference between navigation and wayfinding. If I'm navigating, if I know, I'm currently sitting in Stanford, if I want to go home to my house in the dog patch, I know exactly how to do that. I enter the address in my GPS, it takes me up 280 and I'm there. I know the beginning and the end point. That's navigation. Wayfinding is, I know where I am, I don't know where I want to go. I have a vague target. One of the interesting studies on this is hunters in northern Norway, in Lapland, and way up north. You know, they leave the village as a group, they go to a certain place, they don't know where the animals, where the caribou are, but they have some ideas, they have some heuristics for how they go to the next step, and they look for some tracks, and they find something. And the path is left, right,

• 33:38Speaker 05

  up, down, forward, back. You know, they finally find the animals because they're good hunters, they kill a caribou, and then they navigate back to, you know, they dress the animal, bring it home. That's straightforward. So the shortest path between the animal and home is a straight line. The shortest path between the hunters and the animal is literally the shortest distance is this circuitous route. But they use their tacit knowledge and tracks and signs in the environment. So that's what you do when you're trying to find a new gig, a new thing to do, a new thing that'll turn you on. So just accepting that you're done is sometimes really hard to do. And it is the shortest distance to your future, is to start the journey to the

• 34:22Speaker 05

  next step, collect some data, run some prototypes, see what you find, go left, go right, based on the data, get to the next point, you know, and some introspection, some discernment, and you'll get there. You will absolutely get there.

• 34:37Scott Galloway?

  So when you're trying to figure out your talent and kind of this design thinking as it relates to your work, and I love this exercise of figuring out, trying to articulate, why do we, or why do we work, or why do you work, what is your life for, and then the answers to those two things kind of form a compass, and then your five-part process, I think, is really actionable. Have you thought about applying this notion of design thinking to creating stronger relationships or more enduring relationships? Should you be going through the same, similar process around the key relationships in your life?

• 35:12Speaker 05

  When we wrote the first book, we realized very early on that the book is called Designing Your Lives. It's always designing our lives together. I mean, nobody's, nobody's, no man is an island, right? So, and it was interesting, we were at a book signing, and this couple came up, and they said, "Thank you so much for saving our marriage." And we said, "What are you talking about?" And they said, "Well, you know, now that, now, we used to fight over my career, her career, blah, blah, blah, but now we do Odyssey plans together, and it's really cool, because we generate all these ideas of things we could do that aren't a trade-off, they're a yes and." And we're like, "Oh, shit, we totally screwed up. We didn't include that in the book." And I think, I know that the same ideas, empathy, redefine the problem, come up with

• 35:53Speaker 05

  lots of ideas, try stuff, all of these techniques are brilliant when applied to building your community, finding mentors, you know, creating sustainable relationships. You know, back to my grandfather, who, you know, came to America with no education and took any job he could take. He literally worked at the sewage factory, shoveling stuff from one tank to another, you know, for 50 cents a day at one point. But he had a meaningful life, because he had his community and he had his church. He was a man of faith, and he and my grandmother, you know, had the people at the church. Life wasn't easy, but he had community, and he had relationships. If you, you know, the Harvard study. Um, the Grant Study and the Harvard Study of Adult Development that's wrapped up.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  Robert Waldinger wrote a book on this. It's like, what's the number one thing that predicts longevity? That predicts health, that predicts actually wealth and it's relationships. So you got, you gotta dive, you gotta dig into that and you gotta double down. And that's what I, I really worry about my students because, you know, this is the loneliest generation we've educated. It's the most anxious and, and, you know, screwed in a lot of ways psychologically, you know, challenged generation, the most medicated number, you know, offset line on something like sixty, seventy percent of the students at Stanford are on some kind of medication for their anxiety.

• 37:10Scott Galloway?

  Sixty to seventy percent.

• 37:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, because this is, you know, I, I heard you talk about this is the generation of boys who got, you know, diagnosed as ADHD because they were what? They couldn't sit in a chair for six hours a day when they were nine. Um, and so there are, you know, they all got their Adderall's and their whatevers. Um, it's, it's funny, you know, when I was in, I was a college student, all the drugs were fun.

• 37:33Scott Galloway?

  Now you listen to Led Zeppelin after doing the drugs we did.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. And then, and nowadays all the drugs are for performance.

• 37:40Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 37:41Speaker 05

  To be better at something. That's no fun.

• 37:44Scott Galloway?

  And how has your work impacted your role as a husband and a father? Are there certain things when your kids were teenagers or acting as their dad and giving them advice? What, can you advise other dads on?

• 37:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, you know, one, boys are.

• 38:03Scott Galloway?

  Is this the cobbler's kids have no shoes?

• 38:04Speaker 05

  No, no, boys are different than girls. My, my son was a lot more challenging than my daughters. But, um, you know, we, you know, my, my, my wife was, is, is actually an entrepreneur now in a business. Went to the dark side, got an MBA, but she was also a designer at, at one point in her life. And so we, we just thought, you know, the most important thing is social, emotional learning. And the most important thing is that the kids know that they, that they preserve their creativity even through the, you know, through school, which kind of just teaches conformity and they say they want creativity, but they just want kids to sit up and shut, sit down and shut up and do their work, right? You know, and I'm a sort of reform toy designer. I did Star Wars toys and other toys in the early part of my career. And then I realized these toys are just turning our kids into into consumers.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  And so our thing was like, you don't get toys, but you get all the hot melt and, you know, and X-acto knives you want. Our kids, you know, we're cutting stuff out with X-actos at four and five. And if you cut yourself, you'll learn not to do that. If you burn yourself with a hot melt gun, you know, you'll learn not to do that. So we just focused on their creativity and their social emotional learning. And they've all turned out great. Now, were there lots of challenges to the teenagers? Sure. Because but, but you know, that's what they're supposed to do. I mean, at one point, I remember talking to my wife, I said, boy, if we do this really, really well, they're going to say, the reward is they say, thanks, mom and dad. I'm out of here. I'm good. So, so we just focused,

• 39:32Speaker 05

  you know, we said, and we won't be in the room where they have to make a hard decision. You know, am I going to put that pill in my mouth? And am I gonna, you know, in my son's case, break into that schoolroom? And so, you know, just try to teach them to make the right decision when we're not there. And so we taught them a lot of design, and they're very creative kids. The rest of it, they did on their own. They were just, they're just wonderful. I love them. That's my biggest accomplishment.

• 39:59Scott Galloway?

  And just circling back to the corporate world, and my guess is you're going to agree with this thesis, but one observation I've had is that when VCs, I work with a lot of VCs, and I'll be in the room during a pitch, and they used to ask, who's the tech guy or gal on the team? And then they'd ask, you know, thoughtful questions to try and make sure there was a there there. I increasingly believe and find that they're going to ask, who's the design person? That the chief designer, whatever you want to call this person, the chief creative officer, is now no longer gets just a cool office where they can put up stickers and bring weird posters. They're actually on the on the executive floor now. It does feel as if, you know, founder of Airbnb, CEO of Snap, that design has been elevated as kind of a core competence of successful companies.

• 40:45Speaker 05

  I think it's absolutely true. In fact, one of our lecturers sometimes is a woman named Irene Aow, and she's the design partner at Coachella Ventures. And her job is to help the startups that they've invested in to understand how to use design as a strategic power. And you mentioned Snapchat. So I don't know, what is 2000? 1415, um, one of my advisees, Evan Spiegel, walked in my office and said, hey, what if, you know, everybody's trying to make pictures permanent on the internet, what if we made them disappear? And I said, Evan, that's a stupid idea. Why would anybody want their pictures to disappear? And that's Evan Spiegel, and that's Snapchat. And we still, we still do some work together. It's kind of fun. But yeah, I think you're right.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  What, what people have looked at is that, you know, the example of Apple, the example of Harley Davidson, the example of why are Apple's hardware margins 50% and everybody else in the business barely ekes out a margin at all? Because you will pay more for an Apple product. Why? Because it's not just the product, it's the design, it's the whole integration. And people misunderstand, they think Apple products are just designed to look nice, but there's actually three layers to it. And, and so, you know, yeah, I think design has, has, Dave Kelly, our, our senior guy here from, uh, that started the D school and, and started IDO, he says, you know, designers used to be at the kids' table, you know, for dinner, but now they're with the grownups.

• 42:10Scott Galloway?

  Bill Burnett is a designer, educator, and an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He is also the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, Designing Your Life, and the co-director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University, and executive director of the design program where he manages the undergraduate and graduate programs. He joins us from his office at Stanford University. I really enjoyed this, Bill. Congratulations on your success and the impact you're having. I keep seeing your name and people referring to your good work more and more.

• 42:41Speaker 05

  Well, thank you very much. And again, it's a, it's a privilege. I love your, I love the work you're doing. I, I think you are a truth teller, and then we need more of that.

• 42:57Scott Galloway?

  Algebra of Happiness, this was a super interesting weekend, and it revealed a lot about different parties, I thought. I was involved, and when I'm saying this weekend, the Silicon Valley Bank implosion. I was directly involved, or am directly involved, either on the board of an investor in, or the founder of a company that does banking with Silicon Valley Bank. Prof G does their banking with Silicon Valley Bank, and we had more than the $250,000 FDIC limit. My ed tech company, Section 4, had dramatically more than the $250,000 limit. Another company I'm involved in. Had tens of millions, another one, I think almost 10 million. And there were a range of behaviors.

• 43:41Scott Galloway?

  And first off, as much shit as venture capitalists get, the venture capitalists I work with, specifically General Catalyst, who's backed everything I've ever done, were just calm and said, "Don't worry, we'll figure this out. Don't worry about things like payroll, tell the CEO that we'll absolutely figure this out." They were kind of there. They were also part of that letter that said, "We back Silicon Valley Bank." And in general, the majority of the VCs I spoke to were very supportive. The CEOs immediately kind of jumped to action and tried to figure out liquidity and what it meant. There was definitely a difference, though. The young CEOs had their hair on fire, they'd never seen this before. And there was more of a, I don't want to call it a panic, but they just hadn't experienced something like this before.

• 44:25Scott Galloway?

  And my view was, and I only took money out, and let me be clear, I was the dumb one. I was only part of one company that got their money out, because I was not panicked, and maybe I should have been. And had the government not stepped in, I'd be hating myself right now. And one of the things that happens when you get older is you develop perspective. What does that mean? That is, you have a wider lens, the aperture is broader. And that is, you've been through a lot of this stuff, and you realize that, "I thought in 2008, that was it, that the economy was coming to an end." And guess what? It didn't. In 2000, when the dot bomb crisis wiped out every one of my companies, I thought, "That's it, my career's over, no one's ever gonna invest in me. I'm gonna be a pariah, people are gonna be angry."

• 45:09Scott Galloway?

  That was not true either. There's been all sorts of times when I thought, "This was it, this is the end." On the flip side, in 1999, when Red Envelope was supposed to go public, and I thought, "By this time next year, I'll have a Gulfstream." That was not true. In 2007, when I thought, "I'm a master of the universe advising hedge funds, and I'm gonna make hundreds of millions of dollars as an activist investor." That was not true either. And that is, and again, it all comes back to the same place. And this has been such a huge source of comfort and perspective for me. And it's the following. Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. And it should impact your life on both sides of the spectrum.

• 45:53Scott Galloway?

  When you're killing it, when you've been promoted, when things are going well for you, you're making money, your stocks are going up. Recognize a lot of it isn't your fault and be humble and be grateful and maybe even diversify a little bit because recognize a lot of it is luck. And I find luck over the long term is perfectly asymmetrical. And you will at some point face bad luck and you should prepare for it. Life isn't about what happens to you. Life is about how you react to what happens to you. And I think part of being masculine, and again, I don't think masculinity is a domain of any, any one gender, but part of being masculine is remaining calm when shit gets real, recognizing that as bad as something might seem in real time, it likely isn't as bad as we think.

• 46:37Scott Galloway?

  And in a few years from now, and definitely when you're near the end, you're going to look back and you're not going to be upset about what happened. You're going to be upset at how upset you were. Be the steady hand. Calm other people. Be good to yourself. Be forgiving to yourself. Also be humble. Nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems.

• 47:01Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Caroline Shager and Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.

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