Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In the 3rd century BC, China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, made a bold proclamation. His dynasty would last 10,000 generations. He launched an obsessive quest for immortality. He ordered expeditions to the eastern sea, demanded his subjects search for an elixir of life, and even welcomed mystics into his court.
His obsession came at a cost, putting him at odds with Confucian scholars at the time. Historians have pieced together parts of Qin Shi Huang's story from thousands of wooden strips unearthed in Hunan province. The strips documented his correspondence. These writings included responses from the emperor's minions who were too afraid to tell their boss what they really thought.
According to the BBC, the notes featured, quote, assorted awkward replies from regional governments who had failed to find the key to eternal life. Qin Shi Huang did achieve extraordinary things during his lifetime.
Chapter 2: What is radical acceptance and why is it important?
He unified China, standardized currency and measures, built roads and canals, and linked fortresses into what became the Great Wall. but he never found the key to immortality. He died in 210 BC at the age of 49. Even in death, he refused to believe death was the end.
His monumental mausoleum, guarded by thousands of terracotta soldiers, was designed to protect him on his journey into the afterlife. What could cause such desperation, such obsession, such refusal to face the inevitable? And is it possible that all of us share something in common with the great Chinese emperor?
This is the second part of our exploration into how design thinking can help you lead a more meaningful life. If you missed the first story, you can find it in our podcast feed or at hiddenbrain.org. It's the episode titled, Designing a Life That Matters. How we seek to avoid the truth and the costs of not facing reality, this week on Hidden Brain. Life isn't easy.
There are times of joy, times of sorrow, and times of uncertainty. Along the way, we inevitably face setbacks, obstacles, and disappointment. At Stanford University, Dave Evans says that one way we cope with these challenges is by telling ourselves stories, narratives that help us make sense of what's happening to us. Dave Evans, welcome to Hidden Brain. Shankar, good to be with you again.
Dave, you had a friend named Gary.
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Chapter 3: How do hidden beliefs affect our ability to accept reality?
How did the two of you meet and get to know each other?
Well, our kids were of similar age, and we frequented the same church. We lived in the same town, so we were neighbors.
One day, Gary came to you with a problem. Tell me what he told you.
Well, his problem was he was having strokes. And it turned out he came from a long line of people who have strokes. He was a technical writer in Silicon Valley. We were in Silicon Valley. And he was having a good career. And his problem was, how could he get back to working full time? He'd had to take a stop out. The way his stroke had hit him was getting in the way of his ability to work.
And he was wondering if I could help him figure out a way to get his skills back to where he could get back on the job.
So his problem was, he said, I have a job that I like. I'm doing what I want to do, but I have this pesky little thing, which is my body is not allowing me to do what I want to do. And I want you to get my body out of the way so I can go back to doing what I want to do.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do we face when trying to accept difficult truths?
Right. He said, well, you know, this, I mean, the problem is, you know, my father died of a stroke. My brother died of a stroke in his late 50s. He was about 52 at the time, something like that. He said, so I don't want to be that guy. Why is this happening? Everything's got to happen for a reason. So it must be that there's something I'm supposed to learn.
So if I could learn what it is that this malady is trying to teach me, then maybe it can stop and I can get my life back. So what I really need to do is figure out why I need to learn something from this and what is it. Can you help me with that?
I'm wondering how you responded to this request of his to help him understand what his body was trying to tell him, the message it was trying to give him.
I was stuck a little bit because I thought, oh, my God. I don't think that's what's going on. And here's this guy who's a lovely guy. And the truth is he's dying. The truth is he's got a severe medical threat and it's not going well. And he's counting on me to help him get someplace I don't think he can go.
Chapter 5: How does storytelling help us cope with life's challenges?
So what I was really struggling with is how do I deliver the bad news that, Gary, I think you're asking the wrong question.
Hmm. I'm wondering whether Gary was getting feedback from other people that was trying to answer the question that he wanted answered, even if it wasn't the right question.
Well, yes, unfortunately, he was surrounded with well-meaning, cheerful people. who wanted him to feel better, you know? And so there were a group of guys he regularly had lunch with, and they were encouraging, like, you can do this, Gary. And he goes, I'm going to try to get back to where they go. That's great. You keep going, buddy. You know, so they all were trying to cheerlead.
And unfortunately, they were cheerleading him down what I thought was a dead end that was going to end very, very badly. So, you know, there's the old phrase, the road to hell is paved with good intention. There's a lot of good intention surrounding him, but frankly, I think it was going a terrible place.
It must have placed you in a very difficult situation, Dave, because a friend is coming to you with this very serious problem. You feel like your friend is not looking at reality for what it is. Other friends are basically encouraging Gary in his delusion. What did you do?
Well, keep in mind, I met Gary at church, which means, you know, he was a person of faith, and that was a big part of the story. And so it wasn't just what's the lesson that my body's trying to teach me, but what is God trying to tell me? He says, because I'm pretty sure this must be a lesson God is giving me, that if I can persevere through and learn the lesson, then I get to get out of jail.
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Chapter 6: What lessons can we learn from the story of Dave's friend Gary?
You know, and I didn't think that was likely to happen because despite the fact that I too happen to believe in God, God doesn't fix every problem. God doesn't instruct himself and miraculously fix everything. That's a whole different understanding. And it's nice to think that's what's coming your way, but you're not in charge of that. You may not be the miracle child.
And so I asked him point blank, no, Gary, why is it you believe this? And he said, well, what else could it possibly be? There's got to be a reason for this. I said, well, let's look at what the other reasons might be. Could we just do that? I said, well, okay. He said, what do you mean?
I said, well, maybe the reason you're having strokes, Gary, isn't because God is going to use you as the demonstration of a miracle, but maybe you're having strokes because you've got really crappy DNA and brain chemistry that breaks down at about 50 to 55 years old. Because, you know, we live in a broken world, and some of that brokenness falls on everybody. We're all going to die, by the way.
All we're talking about is timing. And I told him the story of the head of the gerontology department at Harvard Medical School, who I got stuck on the ground during an ice storm in Chicago with years ago, who reminded me almost nobody dies of old age. They die of disease or starvation or an accident. I said, so Gary, you're not going to die of old age.
You're going to die of something else, and maybe you're going to die of a stroke. So maybe what's going on is, how do you live well through being a person who comes from a long line of guys with bad stroke DNA? And he just stared at me. He said, do you think that might be it? I said, well, Gary, lots of people die in their 50s. You might be one of them.
He said, well, if that's what's going on, what do I do? I said, well, you do this as well as you can. So we had a long conversation about that.
It must have been very difficult for you to say what you said to him, Dave, but also very difficult for him to listen to it. This is not the kind of thing that a friend is supposed to tell you.
Well, this is where I make the distinction between nice and loving. You know, are you trying to be nice to somebody or trying to love them? And sometimes that love, I don't mean tough love and you have to beat them up. I wasn't trying to be unkind. But if it's true that he's going to die of a stroke, which he did,
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Chapter 7: How can design thinking help us lead a more meaningful life?
about four strokes later, then either he's going to do that and be blindsided by it and terrified at the moment of death and leave his family in some despair about his final days, or he's got a little more time to do this well. So what's the kindest thing I can do? The kindest thing I can do is give him a shot at the invitation to actually find the meaning and the joy that is available.
I'm not in charge of his fixing his brain, but I might be able to give him an invitation to a little more life-giving experience than he's currently having.
I'm wondering how Gary took your advice and what he did with it.
Well, we had that conversation and he received it reasonably well. But I mean, it was it was really hard and it was pretty quiet. And his wife, Kathy, was in the kitchen and over here, you know, and it was kind of give us some space. And I didn't really know what was going on. I bumped into his wife in the supermarket about three weeks later and she walks up to me.
She goes, what was it you said to Gary? And I thought, oh, man, this is going to go badly. And I said, well, this is what I said. And she said, well, it made all the difference in the world. He's a changed man. He's finally at peace. It was amazing. Thank you. And she burst into tears. So, phew, you know, dodged that bullet. But, you know, it's kind of hitting me again.
This life stuff, you know, it's pretty serious, but it's the best thing we've got. And so the invitation is, would you like to participate? And he died well.
When we come back, why the most important thing might not be figuring out where you want to go, but accepting where it is you are. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At Stanford University, Dave Evans studies a concept called design thinking.
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Chapter 8: What role does patience play in our personal and professional lives?
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.
Well, at the end of February, we were reeling from the fact that These things might be coming, just the news coming out of China was happening. And then on March 8th, you know, I took my wife Claudia to the local little walk-in clinic because she'd gotten her Christmas cold in New York in late December. We often go to New York between Christmas and New Year's for fun.
And she always comes home with a Christmas cold. But it held on and held on. And it lasted through January. And she was coughing all the time. She said, honey, this is not okay. So we went in to the clinic. And the clinic said, oh, there's more going on here. You need to go to the ER. We went to the ER.
And then they pumped out a liter and a half of fluid from her lungs and said, we need to test this. And so we're going to send it over to the lab to test. And we're going to send it back to Stanford. And so then a couple of weeks after the tests were all done, we got to go on March 8th to Stanford to hear the news. And the news was that she had terminal cancer.
She was already metastasized four times, and she had six to 24 months to live.
I cannot imagine how this news must have struck you, Dave. How did you and Claudia react?
Well, we knew things weren't good when they pumped all that junk out of her lungs, but we didn't know it was fatal. And so jumping from you've got a really bad bronchitis to you're dying was quite a leap. It hit us very hard, but it just hit us. And we said, oh, what do we do with this? Well, the first thing we said, we got to receive this. So we didn't tell anybody.
We sat on it privately for about eight days with the idea being let it sink in and then decide what's the story. What are we doing here? We have all these people. And at the end of that week, we conclude, in fact, Claudia concluded, she says, here it is. The one-liner is, I'm dying. It's sad, but not tragic. She was 69 at the time, had lived a very full life.
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