Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. How cool would it be if you could just teleport into one of the most popular and interesting college courses that's ever been taught? You know, be a student again, no matter your age, and learn from two of the top professors on the planet.
You know, one course that I've always dreamed about taking more than any other courses at Stanford, and it's called Designing Your Life. In fact, when I started this podcast here in Boston, which is the world's home for higher education, that was my vision.
to have world-renowned professors and experts come here to Boston and give you and me the exact same lessons, takeaways, and wisdom being taught in the most incredible courses and research being done at the top universities on the planet.
Well, today, I am so excited that the two Stanford professors who created the Design Your Life course 20 years ago are here in our Boston studios to teach you their greatest life lessons. Now they're going to tell you that the real challenge isn't designing a life. It's designing your life so it has more meaning and purpose.
And today you're going to get the same proven frameworks that these professors have used for two decades to help people take charge of their lives. They're going to walk you through a powerful exercise that's going to give you clarity, especially when you feel stuck, uncertain, or overwhelmed.
You will leave this conversation with a crystal clear idea of what will bring you more meaning right now.
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Chapter 2: How can you design a meaningful life?
And trust me when I tell you, what's going to come up for you when we do this exercise is going to be a total wild card. It's not too late. You can find work that makes you happy. You can experience more meaning and fulfillment in your life. And using the process you're about to learn, it will be easier than you think. So grab your seat because class is in session. It's time to design your life.
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm thrilled to be here, and I'm excited that you're here too. It's such an honor to be together to spend this time with you, but I'm super excited about what's about to happen. And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this with you,
I just wanna take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family.
Chapter 3: What are the three powerful questions to find your purpose?
I cannot wait for you to meet two professors from Stanford University who are here in our Boston studios to walk you through how you can design the life you want. The lessons that they've learned from teaching one of the most popular courses in the world for more than two decades are gonna change everything.
Dave Evans and Bill Burnett are the founders of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University. They're also the creators of the Designing Your Life course at Stanford, which has been taught for almost 20 years and is now being taught at over 600 universities. But long before they were teaching life design,
For decades, Bill and Dave, they were designing products and leading teams at startups and Fortune 100 companies across Silicon Valley. Bill Burnett earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in product design at Stanford. He worked at Apple in the early days designing their laptops. He also worked on the team that designed the original Star Wars action figures.
Today, he's a professor in mechanical engineering and design at Stanford. Dave Evans also earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering at Stanford. He also went on to work for Apple. And while Bill was designing laptops, Dave was leading the team that created their very first computer mouse.
Dave was also the co-founder of the video game company Electronic Arts, which is one of the most successful gaming companies in the world. If Madden
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Chapter 4: Is it ever too late to pursue your dreams?
FIFA or Sims ring a bell? Well, you're about to meet the co-founder who made it happen. Together, Bill and Dave have authored multiple bestsellers, including the number one New York Times bestseller, Designing Your Life, and their latest blockbuster, How to Live a Meaningful Life.
So without further ado, please help me welcome Professor Bill Burnett and Professor Dave Evans to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
Thanks for having us. We're thrilled to be here. Yeah, this is fantastic.
You two have been at the top of my list since I started this. I have been waiting for this moment. I hope you don't disappoint me. No, I'm just kidding.
You're going to call sooner. We're going to come sooner.
Oh my gosh. Okay.
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Chapter 5: How can you transform ideas into action without stress?
Here's where I want to start. How will my life be different if I take to heart everything that you're about to share with us today and I apply it to my life?
You're going to get freer. You're going to feel more agency in your life. You're going to realize you actually know how to find your way. And as you go along it, you can make meaning every day.
Everybody's so busy and there's so much going on. You're going to learn that it's not about cramming more stuff in. It's about getting more out of what you've already got and what you can design for. And I think that helps people just relax and understand that they probably have enough.
Bill, what do you think it is about the popularity of both of your books and the course? What does all of this interest say to you about what we're searching for?
Particularly amongst the students, and I've taught at Stanford and I've taught all over the place, and we've got over 600 schools now teaching the class. With the students, it's really clear, and it's gotten kind of worse lately in the last five or six or seven years. social media and other things.
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Chapter 6: Why is failure not an option in life design?
Will I have a good life? Will I find a good job in it? I want meaning and purpose, but people tell me jobs aren't purposeful. The Gallup poll says 70% of Americans are disengaged from their job. Is that the world I'm going into? Is it going to be that bad? And so for the students, it's that kind of anxiety about how do I get started?
And I had been in office hours for students for years and years and years before Dave and I decided to put this together. And it seemed clear to me that designing the new thing in the world, because I've been teaching designers to design iPhones and iPads and websites and things for years, designing the new thing in the world was just like designing the you. What am I going to be in my future?
So everybody had that problem. And then we started working with folks in, you know, some mid-careers, 35, 45. And they're having the same question. Gee, it isn't as much, it wasn't as cool as I thought it would be, or I'm kind of done with this job, or I need to pivot. Now what? Now what?
Chapter 7: What is the Odyssey Plan and how does it work?
And I haven't thought about that in a long time, and I don't have any framework for thinking about it. And I've been doing work with folks who are retiring, you know, in their 50s, 60s, or folks that are, you know, suddenly empty nesters. And they're like, well, geez, I organized my whole life, my wife and I are empty nesters, organized my whole life around my kids.
And now it's just me and my wife, like, do we even know each other? Do we even like each other anymore? What are we going to do? So this question just keeps coming up and it's about, will my life, will my future be meaningful? Can I find something to do that has got some purpose in it?
And a lot of the structures of that, it used to be, well, you had a community, everybody grew up in the same town. And so you knew where you fit in, or maybe you had a faith community or a church or something. And a lot of those communities have gone away. There's this huge loneliness. People really feel isolated and lonely. And things are changing so fast, right?
That they don't know where to turn for even a way to get started.
Chapter 8: How do you find meaning in daily life?
You say in your number one New York Times bestselling book, Design Your Life, that the true way to design a life is to design your lives. What does that mean?
We say all the time, all of us contain more aliveness, more personhood, than one lifetime permits you to live out. There's more than one of you in there. Hmm. which is why, by the way, Maslow's idea about self-actualization through fulfillment is dead wrong, because he literally says on the 1943 paper, you achieve that by becoming all that one can be.
No, you can't possibly be all that you can be because you're way bigger than your own lifetime. Look, I buried plenty of people. None of them were done. That's the good news.
Oh, whoa. I want to make sure that you didn't miss it. We've buried a lot of good people and none of them were done. Yeah.
I mean, I'm at an age where I know plenty of dead people closely, and they all left with a long to-do list. That's the good news. You're far bigger than your lifetime, so the chance of you being bored or running out of things is zero if you're paying attention. Right. That's the good news. So the best way to design your life is to recognize there is no getting you right. There is no right life.
There are lots of good lives. Let's go lean into them. And by the way, you don't know the future. You might have a good idea and implement it poorly. You might have an idea you thought was good and it didn't work out very well. Whoops. Oh, I blew it. No, I learned my way forward and I'm going to keep going. There's no getting it right. They're just getting it going.
Imagine this. We have this linear accelerator at Stanford. It's not as big as it used to be because we had bigger ones now. But this one's pretty good. It still runs. And I can put you in the tube and fire you to the end of the accelerator. It's two miles long. And by the time you get to the end, you're going 99.999% the speed of light, at which point you will experience the multiverse.
And you can have as many lives as you want simultaneously. You could be the astronaut and the ballerina and the stay-at-home mom and whatever you want. And you'll know about all the universes at the same time. And then we ask, I said, on the count of three, one, two, three, tell me how many lives you want.
I go one, two, three, and people go everywhere from one, the really bored, burned out guy, to infinity. But on average, seven. Seven or eight is the average. Seven or eight. People want eight lives. And I go, well, that just proves our theory. There's more than one life in you. If you could have all those lives, wouldn't it be cool?
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