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Chapter 1: What challenges do we face when pursuing a meaningful life?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In 2012, Michael Phelps was at the peak of his career. At the London Games, he became the most decorated Olympian of all time.
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.
He had 22 Olympic medals to his name, including 18 gold medals. 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.
Olympic record. Michael Phelps and his team have maintained this extraordinary record.
But then, it was over. No more early morning practices. No more races. No more gold medals to chase. He described the feeling as a post-Olympic depression. I saw myself as strictly a swimmer, not as a human being, he said. At times, he felt like he did not want to be alive. 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. Michael Phelps' 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?
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.
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. Shankar, good to be with you.
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Chapter 2: How does Michael Phelps' experience illustrate post-achievement struggles?
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? 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?
So
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 room full 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?
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? 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.
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Chapter 3: What misguided beliefs hinder our pursuit of fulfillment?
Once everybody knows how to use a mouse, all will be well. And it turns out all isn't well. 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.
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.
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. 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.
Steve, 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.
Yes, well, he was trying to make a living. He studied sociology and minored in art history. And he was a lovely guy with a nice liberal arts education.
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Chapter 4: How can design thinking help us redefine our life goals?
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.
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?
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, yeah, 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? Right. 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.
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?
Well, this is really kind of why we wrote this most recent book. I mean, we'd help people design a lot of lives and 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.
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