Chapter 1: What is the Life Design Lab and its purpose?
You're the co-founder of Stanford's Life Design Lab. True.
What's that? It's a little tiny operation inside the design program that applies the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life at and after university.
So, oh, Bill and Dave realized we've made all these products and all these different experiences using design thinking, started at Stanford back in 1963, and we used it at Apple in the early days, and everybody's kind of the thing that built Silicon Valley. Hey, we could apply it to ourselves. We could design ourselves as well. You know, and that's a real problem people have.
And we gave it a try, and it seems to have worked out.
Do people not already try to design their life? Is that not what you do when you set a to-do list or have a calendar?
So the word design in the field of design really means there's two categories. There's what I would call craft design or engineering design, and then there's design thinking. And so the older school, you know, so I'm an ergonomist, you know, I'm a car designer, I'm a graphic designer, you know, I'm an illustrator. So designing things...
Precisely figuring out exactly what this particular shape and look of something is going to be has been around for a long, long, long, long time. You can get a master's in design at Stanford and still not be very good at drawing. And there are many design schools who think that's a moral wrong.
Then there's this design thinking idea that's been around only for the past 50 years, which is an innovation methodology. It's an approach to coming up with new ideas. And so when people say, I want to design my life. What they're really saying is I want to engineer my life. I want to figure it out. I want to solve it. I want to answer it. I want to craft it.
And that's a perfectly good thing to do. We're not saying that's the wrong thing to do. So people have been trying to do that for a long, long time. What they've not been necessarily doing very well and they're getting stuck on is finding their way. So I walk into the career center when I'm 19 years old, back in the 70s, and they go, can you help me? And they go, well, sure.
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Chapter 2: How can we design our lives effectively?
I kind of go, okay, so what's the answer? I kind of, no, that's the question. And they go, what? I said, what do I want to do? And they go, right, what do you want to do? I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, this conversation is going nowhere. And they said, we have to, here's how this works. You tell us what you want, then we'll help you go get it. And I go, that's easy. Getting stuff is easy.
The hard part is figuring out what you want. They kind of go, well.
That's just on that point.
You're supposed to know.
Getting stuff is easy. Figuring out what you want to get is the difficult part.
Yes. 100%. Yeah. So that's what we help people do. So the objective of the Life Design Lab, you asked that question, is we assist people in the formation of a conscious competency in life and vocational wayfinding.
Okay. Yeah.
How do you find your way? Uh-huh. We have you tools to do it. Life is an improv skit. We're improv trainers.
Orienteering for your life direction.
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Chapter 3: What is the difference between problem-solving and meaning-making?
You should have turned right and you've missed it, and now it's going to take another five minutes. Right. At no point does the GPS do that. It just continually updates the directions. I think that's a lovely, it makes me think about releasing. It makes me think about David Hawking's letting go type.
I totally agree. In fact, having been in the Valley for a long, long time, I know that now and then, you know, coders put tricks and jokes in code all the time.
And so I wonder if in the GPS code, you know, if I do the wrong thing on purpose, like it'll go straight and turn left on, you know, Alpine Street and I make a U-turn, you know, and then it says, okay, so go down the street and make another U-turn. And I do it nine times. On the 10th time, it's kind of go, come on, Dave. What the heck?
You're wasting my time here. You unlocked this special feature.
Yeah, I tried like 15 mistakes and it's totally- The angry co-pilot feature. And it's not even, by the way, it's not even when you did the wrong thing, you did the wrong thing. For it to have been wrong, you had to have had access to information that would have told you it would have been right up front. You didn't make a mistake. You made a move.
You learned something that said, oh, continuing on the same collinear pathway would be suboptimal. I'm going to actually make an adjustment now. That's not a mistake. It's just a move. What do people mean when they're talking about meaning, do you think? That's a big one.
Well, the reason we wrote this book, I'm going to get fairly direct, is that what overwhelmingly people mean when they talk to us about the meaning they're not getting enough of is they're talking about one of two things. Primarily, they're talking about having an impact. I'm making a difference. Am I changing the world? Do I matter? Is it working?
Did I make the impact that would make my life worthwhile? I'd say 90% of the people we've been talking to recently that motivated us to write this book, the one and only valid form of meaning-making they've named is impact. And then right behind that would be fulfillment. I'm just not being fulfilled.
And for most people, fulfillment means, am I getting to manifest the fullness of who I really am? Because that's what Maslow told them fulfillment was in the original 1943 paper that invented the hierarchy of needs, according to Abraham Maslow. The apex was self-actualization. And you attain self-actualization by literally becoming all that one can be.
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Chapter 4: How does one find coherence in their life?
What's the better idea? But our idea is, you know, so the reframe on impact is, you know, if you put all your meaning eggs in the impact basket, impact's a good thing. I've worked hard at making an impact. You're working on an impact. It's not worthless by any means, but it's also largely out of our control because some of the other 8 billion people might go off script when you're not looking.
You know, you do everything right, it may not work. Doing it right is not anywhere near enough to pull it off. So impact is a bet. And frankly, after you make the impact even successfully, three, two, one, well, what have you done for us lately? But Half-Life on Impact is short.
Have you ever seen Scotty Scheffler's interview when he won the PGA Masters Tour? It was from last year.
No, but what do you have to say?
So he basically sits down and has this room of press and he's just won the thing. The big thing that he's been working towards. The special jacket or the... Yeah, the green jacket. Whatever it is. And he basically spends seven minutes talking about how fleeting and hollow this experience is. Yeah. And it's just phenomenal. It's one of the best things that I've seen in a very long time.
And I'm kind of obsessed with the price that high performers pay to be somebody that everyone else admires. Oh, yeah. And to see someone... using the opportunity to fillate himself. He could have done that quite happily for five minutes and no one would have thought otherwise.
He could have called out, I mean, I remember that Michael Jordan, he got inducted into the Hall of Fame 1993 and he uses the entire speech just to call out all of the people that have insulted him. There's no gratitude at all. And then Scotty does something similar. There's a degree of gratitude, but it's very sanguine. It's very self-deprecating.
And you would, I'll send you it once we're finished. I absolutely love it. But he basically says the same thing. He says, you know, very quickly after this, you are going to ask me a question. So what's next? You are going to ask me the question. And I need to go home tonight and there's going to be diapers to be changed and trash to take out. And what are we having for dinner?
And life just comes back around again.
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Chapter 5: Where can flow be found in life?
Where does that happen? So first of all, we're saying it happens in this place called the flow world. So flow occurs when I'm fully in the present moment and that's really where the flow world is existing. So let's go where flow can be found. Saying once we posit the flow world is the place where you might enter the flow state.
And then on the flow state that we originally defined, there's this thing called the flow channel. which is where the task at hand and my skillset are close. So my capacity and what the task demands of me are really close. So I'm neither over-skilled and then I get bored or I'm neither under-skilled and then I get anxious.
Is this sort of proximate zone of development type stuff?
Yeah, I'm right at my skill level. So the situation is demanding the most of me. And what we notice about – and that's fine. We call that apex flow, which is where I'm really right on the ragged edge of my capability. And the reason I can drop into flow in that situation is – The circumstance, i.e. the task.
I need to wrangle all of my capacity.
It takes all of me. So literally the way I put that is I have now delegated responsibility for my degree of engagement in life to the quality of the task.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of fully engaging in tasks?
I need to find some task that will so demand of me my attention that I finally become fully present.
Yep.
Yep, yep.
Which means it's the task's job for me to be present, not my job.
It's the flow equivalent of putting your meaning and impact.
Bingo. So what I really wanted to learn how to do, we called simple flow, is I can choose to be fully attentive. I've got to chop these damn onions to make the soup. And then what I really get onto is the dinner when the people come over at 7 o'clock. So it's 5.30 now. I've got to get the soup going.
You know, multitask, put on a Chris Williamson, you know, YouTube while I'm listening, do four things to make the most of it. I'm supposed to look, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's go all the way in on the onion chopping.
Oh, I thought you meant forget the onions and just watch the Chris Williams. That's fine.
That would be a higher level flow, but I've got to get the onions done. I'm so sorry. So if I can fall all the way in, like, look, it's going to be 10 minutes. I'm going to do this in a nice Zen kind of way.
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Chapter 7: How can mindset choices impact daily life?
I'm going to really appreciate the knife. I'm going to actually feel the experience. I can choose... To go all in, even if my skill set far exceeds it, I can just choose to be fully present to what I'm doing. And that allows me to have this fully engaged, calmly detached experience, which is more alive. I can even try something that's hard for me.
And if I really can accept that I might make a mistake and that's okay, then the anxiety can be dropped. The anxiety is still an elective pain. So I can drop the anxiety or I can drop the boredom by having the mental discipline of choosing my way into the moment. Now suddenly the flow channel quadruples in size.
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Chapter 8: What signals indicate it's time to redesign your life?
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Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. Sounds lovely. I think the first thing it makes me think of is whether or not multitasking and the
Yeah, I am going to listen to a podcast at one and a half times speed while I get my walk in, while I check my notes for the upcoming email I've got to do. Yeah. Is that a particularly kryptonite additive to try and put into achieving flow? Is that going to contribute to the degradation of flow across the world?
I think so. In short, I'm not saying never do it. And we do know the truth is neither humans nor computers actually multitask.
We task switch. What people think they mean is parallel processing. What they're actually doing is... Task switching.
Yeah. So getting good at task switching quickly is a performance optimization capability. And in the high productivity world, that's not a bad skill to have. And I get the feedback loop of I got more done or I got more for my time or I got paid higher or my PowerPoints were cooler than yours, whatever it is.
Or I got done what I needed to get done more quickly so that I can... I bought some time back. Yeah. So, but again, if I only do that... In perpetuity. Again, the flow requires... Full participation, and the reason time stands still and becomes eternal, time elongates and disappears all at once because I'm so fully present to it, is this full availability and full concentration.
If I'm switching constantly, I'm never going to have that full presence. So I do think what we call multitasking and flow are simply different states. Now, somebody might argue I can flow by how well I'm multitasking. Yep, yep. I'm not sure that's actual flow. I think what it is, it's gratifying that I'm being high-performant. That's okay. Yeah.
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