Shankar Vedantam

At Stanford University, Dave Evans studies a concept called design thinking.

He says that the same principles that engineers and innovators use to solve complex problems can also be applied to designing our lives, making them more meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling.

Dave, we talked about your friend Gary, who was in denial about the seriousness of his strokes.

You told him he had two options, to die well or to go out kicking and screaming.

I want to go back to early March of 2020.

The COVID pandemic had just broken and worries about illness were on all of our minds.

Paint a picture for me of what was happening in your life at the time.

I cannot imagine how this news must have struck you, Dave.

How did you and Claudia react?

It's strange that you say that it was a wonderful year of your life, Dave.

Many people would say, you know, I went through the whole year with a sense of dread and a sense of grief and a sense that, oh, my God, why is this happening to me?

How come those things didn't happen to you?

You know, Dave, we've talked about the five stages of grief that have been in the popular culture for a very long time.

And in some ways, it's not a very good accounting of the story of grief because the original work was done with patients who had terminal diagnoses and the research was looking at how they responded to the news of their own impending death.

But it talks about going through these phases of denial and anger and bargaining and depression before getting to acceptance.

What you and Claudia did was cut out those first four steps and just get to the last one.

Yeah.

Can you talk about how this idea of not just acceptance, but radical acceptance is at the heart of design thinking?

Before we can figure out where we want to go, we have to fully accept where we are.

So as people are designing their lives or asking to design their lives, they're often asking, you know, where I want to go.