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.
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, you know, 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, 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.
We've got a whole building full of people.
We love helping young people like you.
So what do you want to do?
I kind of go, yep, that's the question.
I kind of go, okay, so what's the answer?
I kind of go, 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.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
So that's, that's what we help people do.
So the the 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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like 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.
Bingo.
Yeah.
There's maps and compasses.
We make the big distinction between navigation and wayfinding, technical terms in design.
So navigation, I know where I am.
I know where I'm going.
I have the data about the space in between.
It's what your GPS does really well.
I can optimize the path, preferably as straight as possible, in wicked problems where I don't know what I'm looking for until I find it.
And I'm going to this very important place called the future, about which we have no data because it doesn't exist yet.
I can't do that because I barely know where I am, and I sure don't know where I'm going, and I don't have any data about the space in between.
So what am I going to do?
Well, I'm going to do an empirical thing called try it.
We call it prototyping.
So I'm going to make this move.
I'm going to go, I'm going to go talk to Chris and see how that goes.
You know, then what did I learn that day?
Um, And then, you know, I'll go here and then I'll go over here.
It's a very jagged pathway.
I might go backward.
I might have to start over again.
Seems terribly inefficient, except I'm learning my way forward till finally like, oh, that's it.
And then the destination I'm looking for finally appears and I land there.
But that boing boing boing boing boing boing, boing thing very, not a straight line in a wayfinding task.
That bouncy line is literally the shortest distance between those two points.
Because that's what mortals have to do.
It's interesting, but it's inefficient.
My friend George has this idea of GPS brain.
Okay.
And what he means by GPS brain is forgiveness with yourself when you don't take the right turn, that if you miss it.
At no point does the GPS say you fucking idiot.
Why didn't you take that?
You should have turned right and you've missed it, and now it's going to take another five minutes.
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 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'm making you a turn.
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 going to 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 fine.
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 if 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.
And 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.
And if you become all that one can be, according to Maslow, you will experience fulfillment.
And we think that's dead wrong because we've known for a long time in the life design lab that all of us contain far more aliveness than one lifetime permits us to live out.
There's more than one of you in there.
That's the good news.
So if you've decided you have to be all that you are, and all that you are won't even fit in one lifetime.
And if I haven't fully manifested everything that I could possibly be, then my life is unfulfilling.
I just have decided to have a policy that I have to be despondent for the rest of my life.
That's a bad choice.
So both the people who are stuck on.
Impact is the only way meaning really deserves to work, or I have to be entirely manifested to be fulfilled.
Both of those people are set up on dead ends and we'd like to give them a better idea.
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?
The 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.
He's won the big thing that he's been working towards.
Right.
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.
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.
And to see someone using the opportunity to fillet 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.
Um 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.
Yeah.
Absolutely love it.
But he basically says the same thing.
He says, you know, you 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.
Oh man.
So a couple of years ago, the U S Olympic committee calls and says, can you help us?
Help you what?
We're successful in the Olympics and everyone's got gold medalist syndrome.
So there's a training for after the games.
There's nothing quite as thrilling as ascending the Olympic platform or terrifying as coming.
The distance from the top of the Olympic platform to dumpster diving is terrifyingly short.
And much shorter than the other side.
It's long to get up there and it's very, very short on the backside.
Yeah.
So they called up and we, and I did a training with them.
You know um, there's a group called elite meat which is a volunteer organization of recently former top gun pilots Rangers, green berets, Special forces people who are the absolute best in their business can kill you in 75 ways.
Do not piss these people off.
But most of them are lovely human beings, by the way.
I'm very fond of professional military.
That's a whole other conversation.
But they retire at 42, mostly.
They start at 22, do their 20 years, they're at 42.
They're incredibly good at what they do.
The world doesn't need them anymore.
Now what?
So there's a whole group of their peers kind of going, this is going to be hard on you.
We're here to catch you.
And I've worked with them a little bit.
So, yeah, absolutely.
You know, killing the impact thing, you know, can be a double edged sword.
So thing one about impact is you've got to get eggs in some other baskets.
And the reframe there is.
There is because that's all done in what we call the transactional world, the get stuff done world.
There's another world we call the flow world, which is really the present moment.
This thing called reality that's happening right now, that you could be experiencing in a different way.
And it's rich with meaning making experiences.
We'll come back to that for the fulfillment person.
Who's stuck on that?
Like, okay, the reframe is, no, you can't be fulfilled, but you can be fully alive.
You can be entirely here in this present moment.
And one thing that will help you accept that that may be true.
The last big reframe is because now we can celebrate the scandal of particularity which usually brings up the question what the hell is that?
I'll let you interview yourself.
Just keep going.
Yeah.
Stop me anytime.
It's your show.
The scandal of particularity is originally a theological, then a philosophical concept.
And what it is that turns out the ultimate of anything truth beauty justice, purity is never actually experienced in reality.
Only reality.
Partial reflections temporarily encountered in a very specific and constrained moment in time, a particularity, are what we actually get.
We're longing for perfection, but all we get is the particular.
That's actually just the nature of reality.
So rather than like, oh, you see the amazing sunset.
And if you really, really attended that amazing sunset—
Just as it's over and the sun hits the horizon and you see the green flash and whoa, what do you want?
More.
I want more.
It wasn't quite enough.
That isn't it fell short.
That is the fundamental nature of reality.
Reality is only expressed in these particularities, all of which are partial.
And it's the fundamental nature of the human person.
Which is that thing you long for is how you're made.
So if you can befriend the longing, it no longer is the problem of everything's not enough.
It's that, oh, I have a chance to participate in a sincere reflection of that perfection briefly.
Celebrate the heck out of it because this is as good as it gets.
And I'm going to come back tomorrow and try again.
Befriending the longing.
I want to come back to that.
One thing that's stuck in my mind the challenge of people who have focused on impact for a long time, but also the route to which they achieved their impact was also the vehicle that delivered them their flow.
So if you are, if you are a gymnast, a very flowy sort of tennis player, very flowy sort of thing.
You're a neurosurgeon.
You're, you're now out of that.
You're no longer getting the impact that you had and you've lost the flow at the same time.
I imagine that double whammy must be very difficult.
It can be.
Yeah.
So I, I, I actually stopped teaching undergrads at Stanford back in 2018.
I now mostly teach them the DCI program, the distinguished careers Institute very fancy name for a gap year for grownups.
Anywhere from 45 to 90, mostly 55 to 75 years old, kind of the old folks who used to think about transitioning to what you used to call retirement.
And now what do I do?
So that's the second half of life transition for people.
And the way I characterize the big challenge of that.
And these are all not all necessarily rich hedge fund people from New York, but we've got plenty of those.
It could be a nonprofit leader, you know, but they're all distinguished people who had impact and enjoyed doing that impactful thing well and got into it and were in the flow.
And now they don't necessarily want to be that person anymore.
So it's the shift from role to soul.
So the shift from, I'm a role-based person.
I'm really good at this, you know, gymnast thing.
I'm really good at the surgery thing.
And I still value that, but it's not first and foremost where my identity wants to come from now.
And as I move away from that, you know, it's sticky.
And boy, I'm really good at making that version of me work.
And that's where kind of the shift into a greater maturity is a very elective move.
And it starts anywhere from 30 to never.
Not much before 30, because you don't get a neocortex until you're 27 or 28 a little later.
In men, big surprise.
But look, you don't get a Buddha, you don't get a Moses, you don't get a Jesus until 30, 40 in Moses' case.
It takes a while to make a person.
But once you get past making a person, then you've got to build an ego before you can transcend it.
You've got to have a life container before you can empty it.
So that task of turning yourself into a person in your 30s You know, your 20s, 30s and 40s is a really important task.
But then, once you've got one, once you've got a person you trust enough that you believe you deserve to exist, now it's time to start emptying out and having a more transcendent experience.
And it is a real tough transition for most people.
That manopause that happens to guys toward the end of their 20s.
I first saw it in the way that me and my friends trained fitness.
Yeah.
And then it became everything the way that we thought about our contribution to our friend group and the way that we thought about money or goals or family life or whatever.
Something that has struck me there is the fact that getting beyond 40 ancestrally would have been increasingly rare.
Yes.
Death was more popular.
More frequent.
What that suggests, we can say popular.
What that suggests is that these challenges that we're facing were not only mismatched evolutionarily for the modern environment, even durationally we are mismatched for our current environment.
And you can talk about an aging population and birth rate decline, you can go into that stuff.
But I think what's more interesting is that the uh adaptive systems that we have, even culturally myth archetype.
Like what does it mean if?
If it's such a rarefied strata to get into 50 60, 70 years old, where there's just not being a big enough sample size of people from history to be able to explain what that transition actually looks like?
Does that make sense?
Sure, but i think what it really means is i mean, people made those transitions in their mid late 30s to early 40s before, because they're going to die at 50 um, and now just the window of time during which that transition can occur has stretched yeah, and shifted and shifted, and so what's happening is people are doubling down.
You know so uh.
William bridges wrote the book transitions making life Making Sense of Life's Big Changes.
So he posits years ago as an 80s self-help classic.
It's a good book based on Erickson's work.
That changes are outside-in realities that happen to you.
Transitions are the internal experience of managing them.
And his observation was that transitions are three steps, not two.
It's not an ending followed by a new beginning.
It's an ending followed by the neutral zone.
So, you know, it's over, then you're lost.
And then you get refound, but you don't go from found to found.
Such a good point.
That's so good.
If you're really comfortable.
And oh, I've extended and had a longer career and I started my fourth company.
I mean, I started the Life Design Lab at 54, you know.
And so my fourth startup, you know, into my seventies, you know it's kind of like hey, I like this.
The feedback loop of doing stuff I'm good at and it works is really gratifying.
And then life kind of says, yeah, let's go off and be confused.
Let's go learn how to be emotional and feel like an incompetent nincompoop for a while.
Like that's really attractive.
So I see people all the time get to the end of something and then kind of go.
I'm going to go into the darkness for a while.
I think I'll go back to the clarity.
So we just re-up.
A buddy of mine, my age, just started his 12th company.
I'll call him John.
And I'm going, John, really? this game again i mean what do you not know so well i'm good at it kind of going you knew that four times ago come on dude if you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold this is going to help eight sleep just released their brand new pod five which includes the world's first temperature regulating duvet compare it Their smart mattress cover, which cools or warms each side of the bed by up to 20 degrees, and you've got a climate-controlled cocoon built for deep, uninterrupted rest.
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Another idea that me and George, my friend, talk about is the anorexic hermit crab.
Explain to me the anorexic hermit crab.
That's great.
So basically the crabs need to shed their shell in order to be able to grow.
And what you could imagine.
I'm not going to say that John is doing this, but you could imagine a world in which a hermit crab refused to eat In order for it to not outgrow its shell.
Right.
And that would be.
I'm staying right here.
That would be the anorexic karmic.
Yeah.
Okay.
No, I think.
And, and.
Because it doesn't want to go through the middle section.
Yeah.
It doesn't want to go through the middle transition.
Right.
We want to go from found.
Fuck it.
I'll just stay in found.
Yeah.
I'll stay found.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, we just had the conversation with Chip Conley, you know, Mr. Modern Elder Academy guy.
And he's pushing the midlife chrysalis, not the midlife crisis.
Crisis is doing it badly as opposed to this transformational thing, which is a nice pitch.
He's a lovely guy doing really good work.
But no, life is change.
If I really believe that being a person is being a becoming, then it's going to change.
And some of those changes are real seasonal stage-like transitions that are pretty interesting.
And you have to decide if it's worth it.
That's impact.
What about the reframe on fulfillment?
Okay.
So fulfillment, I can be fully alive.
Which is again back to be fully alive in the present moment, even with its apparent insufficiency of particularity.
And it's just, I mean, this is my, it's actually my first can of new tonic.
Yes.
I think it's the best one I've ever had.
Fantastic.
You know, and is it the best, you know, caffeinated drink on the surface of the earth?
Yes.
Um, so far, so far.
So am I willing, am I willing to say ah, You know not quite where my oldest.
I'm really enjoying this and let it be what it is and not not blame it for what it's not yet
So that that's what we're fully alive comes back in.
And there are practices that allow us to do that.
And so most of what the book is really about is positing.
Look, there's the transactional world, where all this performance is occurring, and there's a flow world which is happening right now.
Do you have access to the kinds of behaviors, the kind of awareness, the kind of attention.
In this present moment, what I call the flow world.
That will allow you to experience life more deeply, because more aliveness feels more meaningful.
It feels more human.
I think what we're ultimately called to be is more human.
Joseph Campbell said in an interview years ago on PBS you know, on the meaning question, like is it really meaning?
Or is what we're really after just the true rapture of being alive?
At the end of the day you have to decide is the human person fundamentally just a production engine?
I equal what I did, or a living being, and what I equaled was the life I lived.
Your decision about what it means to be a person is a pretty big decision.
Can you put meaning into an evolutionary lens for me, please?
How is meaning adaptive?
What is it ancestrally?
Give it that lens if you can.
I'm winging it because that's not first and foremost where I go.
I'm a realist.
I live in reality.
I notice people think the meaning thing is pretty important.
So I'm just going to start there.
Why might meaning have been important?
Well, that's actually going to depend a little bit on your cosmology.
Right.
I happen to be the theist on the team.
My partner, Bill, is the Nietzsche appreciating existential atheist.
So you're going to get a different answer.
But I think even evolutionarily, if in fact, That which is energizing evolution at all.
There's some trajectory here.
And that collaboration and community and persistence sustain that.
Then let's keep it interesting.
Not just keep it virile.
So I can move along.
And so if I can lean, if there's something in me that wants to lean more deeply into my own life and lean more deeply into our collective life, then that's going to keep the community going.
The community is going to keep the genome going.
Yeah.
Good.
It's a alignment of a bunch of different pro-social macronutrients.
Yeah.
That are both internal and sort of kin-based-y, just around you, Dunbar numbers stuff.
Yeah.
Is it your perspective to try and summarize where we've got to so far?
Yeah.
The problem that people are trying to actually solve when they say they want more meaning is they want more aliveness.
They want to feel more alive.
Almost.
I'm suggesting that if we added more aliveness to the definition of meaning and then give tools to acquire that, then their access to meanings are going to go up.
Right.
Yeah.
Right now, people, you know, it's like your food groups.
I mean, I've got one food group called impact, and we're suggesting, how about five?
Impact, wonder, flow, coherence, and community.
So if I've got more food groups, I might get more calories.
What about fulfillment in that?
Fulfillment's being broken out into some of those other component parts?
Right.
Right, okay, understood.
Yeah, it's ways different aspects of my humanity are being both experienced, grown, and expressed.
Okay, contributing elements of meaning in your conception.
Yeah, which is not comprehensive, by the way.
This is kind of a low-hanging fruit book.
Zero to one is the way to go.
Well, you know, you have a lot of people on here who are about maximizing, about high performance, about getting the most out of
We're the set the bar low and clear it guys.
I mean we're trying to provide doable, accessible tools that regular people can use on a regular basis.
Life is long.
It's an incremental evolutionary process.
Let's all get there.
So when Bill and I looked at where people were struggling and what we might have to say through the lens of design thinking, that's the platform we sort of are allowed to speak from.
We said, well, we're not going to completely boil the ocean of the meaning question here.
We're not.
However, what might be helpful?
And so these reframes we think might be helpful that we discussed.
A couple of mindsets are helpful.
Who's got a chapter on that?
And then these four areas wonder flow, coherency and formative community.
That's not the totality of meaning by any means.
Meaning is a big topic.
But we think those four are readily available to almost everybody and they're accessible pretty quickly.
So here's a design tool or a practice or an idea or suggestion where you might go get some of that stuff.
And if that works for a lot of people, that's a good thing.
Good starting point.
Is there anything else to say about reframe before we get into the engines and the component part?
Yeah, just the point of reframe.
You know it has been said and I would agree that you know, life is largely a story.
Our experience of life is largely a story we tell ourselves.
And we know neurophysiologically now that we don't see what we're looking at.
We see what we're looking for.
So our lens and how we anticipate what the world's going to be really matters.
So the point of reframing, like, no, I'm not trying to be fulfilled.
I'm trying to be fully alive.
That's a reframe.
You know, when we reframe things, it really changes everything.
Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
How much of this is top-down versus bottom-up?
Because can we dictate to ourselves, you will do this thing?
The community piece is going to be exciting, obviously gets to feed into it.
The flow piece is kind of halfway between the two. but much of this is thinking problem.
Uh, someone might interpret it as I need to think my way out of this thinking.
Right.
Um, well, we're, you know, I teach at Stanford.
We wrote a book that's pretty explicit, articulate stuff.
So it's kind of in the idea realm.
Yeah, pretty heady.
You know, I've got closed captioning on all the time.
I really like knowing things and describing.
I'd almost rather describe something than do it.
You know, that's a bit of a temptation for me.
But so I think the rethinking this is where our consciousness, you know, directs our agency can be the thing that gives us some power over our lives.
So it may start with thinking differently.
However, we're going to go into hopefully embodied experiences in a pretty quick way.
We want to get people the chance to grow their actual faculties of attending to and noticing and having these other experiences which are embodied.
I mean, flow is not a thought-based experience.
So we want to move toward embodiment And I think over time, as you get better at these kind of things, sometimes the starting place will be those experiences where you actually are noticing something, in the experience of the moment, or coming out of your body, rather than coming out of your brain or coming out of your ideas.
What's the difference between that problem-solving world and the meaning-making world?
Okay.
Well, there's still meaning in the problem-solving world.
It's just a narrow form of it.
Yeah.
We came up with this model of the transactional world and the flow world and that there's a bunch of meaning to be had in the flow world, simply because look, there's only one real world.
There are two worlds.
But your brain can't handle the whole thing at one time.
And we now know neurologically you know Lisa Miller's work at Columbia there's your achieving brain and there's your awakened brain, the much more sophisticated version of the left brain, right brain model.
You know, as Jill Bolt tailors your stroke of insight, what happened when this neurologist actually lost her left brain for a while.
So what's going on is we're trying to integrate these things and give people access to it.
And so if I can move more into a fuller implementation of my entire consciousness, then my chance at living a richer life goes up.
And so the flow world simply means I want to start making sure that the part of my consciousness that can experience other aspects of reality is getting airtime, because when that part of my awareness gets more airtime, there are experiences available to me, right in front of me, for free, that currently are going wasted.
So we're saying it's not about more.
We are trying to invite people to get more out of the life they're in, not cram more into it to change it.
Now, we wrote two books about how to make big changes.
We're in favor of changing things and making them better.
But along the way, don't forget to live the life you're in.
So with that perspective, does optimization or over-optimization drain life of meaning in some ways?
I think it can.
I think if we're always simply trying to get to the better thing.
Most people's degree of happiness is is described by the delta, the gap between the way things are and what they had in mind.
When that gap is small, it's working.
When that gap is broad, it's not.
So that means I've just decided the quality of my life is based on an imaginal idea that I have.
You can either bring your expectations down or increase your performance.
Yeah, I mean, people land, you know, there's two phrases. good enough is, and good enough isn't.
Most people have a bias.
They tend to be one of those kinds of persons.
The truth is they're both true.
Just pick carefully when you apply them.
So I'm all about high performance.
You know, get better, learn how to do things.
Listen to Huberman, listen to Chris Williamson.
But if I fall all the way into that thing, then my experience in my own life is always simply trying to narrow the gap.
And then, as soon as I get it close, it's time to up my game and push that asymptote further out again, so that I have more gap and push myself forward.
I mean, you can never ultimately maximize your productivity.
There's a beautiful line from Alan Watts.
He says, if we are altogether unduly absorbed with improving our lives, we may forget to live them.
You missed the whole thing.
Yeah, there's provisional life.
Yeah.
The arrival fallacy.
Yeah.
There is no done.
There is no right.
And there is no it.
Have I found it?
There's no it.
I think about the most modern example of this that keeps me.
This is my memento mori, but for the TikTok generation.
Yeah.
One day you'll die and your inbox will still accumulate emails.
Like that.
Will never be done.
There will be people emailing you.
Yeah.
Asking why you're not replying or secretly saying to a friend.
Yeah.
That you were really rude because you hadn't replied.
Who don't know that you're dead.
You're.
And the emails will continue to come.
So.
I have a small group of guys that have been in my support group for 51 years.
I formed them in 1974.
You know, I'm the eldest.
I'm about to turn 73.
But we're all living a year or two of each other.
And so we started moving into our 70s.
And at the 50th anniversary, about 18 months ago, you know, we started a conversation.
We've been going on for about two years now.
But how are we going to become elders?
I mean, literally, I tell people, because it's true, my next major milestone is death.
How do I get there well?
Yeah.
Now, part of that is, you know, I've had a lot of people.
My father died of suicide when I was nine.
So dealing with dead people has become important early on.
I lost my beloved wife, Claudia, to cancer five years ago.
Though, oddly enough, another compass meant this woman has decided to sign up for the program.
So I'm about to get married again.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Yes.
But, you know, it's a very steep learning curve.
John O'Donohue, the old Celtic mystic, would say that marrying another person is moving to a foreign country.
Whole new culture, whole new language.
Or my friend Jerry's sister would say, philosophy prof, there are no second marriages.
There are only first marriages the second time around.
So I'm doing the first marriage the third time around.
And the learning curve is steep, which by the way is terrific.
But this death thing, once you get it, but it's going around.
It's becoming extremely popular.
You know, it was popular earlier and now it's popular later, but still very popular.
Almost everybody's into it.
And once you really get your hands around your finitude and burying a couple of people will help you do that
Um, it gets you more intimate, um, with it.
So, um, it's very freeing.
Um, what have I got, you know, 12 years, 15 years.
Um, and it's very clear to me that my productivity. is going to plummet after my death.
I mean, it's just going to fall.
It's just going to drop off like a stone.
And so this trajectory on the way to the grave, I mean, like you know how hard am I, you know, is the area under the curve of the last six months of my life really going to net matter?
Which doesn't mean mailing it in is okay.
What it means is, look, you're a person.
You have a life.
What's it for?
Now, get something done.
You know, I'm an old Boy Scout.
Let's leave the campground better than we found it.
But is that the only thing we're doing?
What's the gift you have to give?
Chris, your job.
Chris-ing, that's your job.
Now it expresses itself in establishing better, you know, self-help growth awareness, particularly in young men in this current era.
That's a nice contribution.
But at the end of the day, your job is to be Chris.
I think each of us has a gift that God or the universe, depending on your cosmology has given to the world.
And your job is to figure out what's inside there and get the thing unwrapped so we can play with it before the game is over.
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You know my favorite example of this, salvador dali.
I don't know, have you do you know much about dali?
I like, i like his work and i've been to his home and you know okay so, his personal life.
So he was the reincarnation of his dead brother, according to his parents.
So dali's 20 months old right, and his parents take him to a graveyard and show him a gravesite and he had a brother that was born 20 months before him and dali is named after him okay, and his parents say this is salvador, this is who you are, This is that was how it started.
That was how darling life started.
It was interesting from the get go, uh, 10, 10 years old.
He's throwing himself down sets of stairs because he realizes that pain is interesting and that people come and he can manipulate them in this sort of very Machiavellian sort of way.
Yes.
Uh, he walked an anteater through the streets of Paris.
And when he was asked why he said it's because anteaters are never in fashion.
He took a pistol to a live talk that he gave in France and he just fired it intermittently to keep people's attention.
He also gave another talk where he was in a deep-sea diving suit and suffocated in it and had to be wrenched out of it mid-talk.
He refused to walk through doorways forwards.
He would only ever go sideways or backward because he said that habit destroys the patterns of creativity.
He once sued a guy for dreaming about him and said the subconscious belongs to me.
He is buried, as you know, underneath his own.
People walk over his body when observing his work.
Yeah uh, he used to.
He was very poor during his life.
He used to sign checks that couldn't be cashed because he had no money in his bank account, but he would doodle on the back of them and the check illustration would be worth more than the actual check itself.
Again, so what's he doing there?
What's he saying is he's noticing that people fall into patterns and act as though those patterns are what life is, as opposed to they're a container that's supposed to hold them.
So he's going to transcend the pattern and force you to realize oh, doors aren't for walking through.
So he ends up with a policy that he can't abide by the pattern.
So his moral commitment is to constantly press that edge, I'm less than I could be.
Which is a really sort of monastic commitment.
Well, the fullness thing on that is as brilliant as he was.
Da Vinci didn't do Dali and Michelangelo didn't do Dali.
So if he had been anything short of the fullness of himself, the world would be fundamentally less.
So I agree.
I think that we have this sort of cosmic, karmic duty to existence, right to do what only we can do, because you can't do dali and neither can i, neither could michelangelo and neither could da vinci right, so it's his job to walk the antita and go through the doorway sideways yeah, uh.
So okay okay okay, the component parts wonder.
What do we need to know about wonder?
Okay, so wonder, and we have a little equation for that.
So when you take curiosity, Curiosity is a very good thing.
It's a mindset we're in favor of.
And you upgrade it by applying – you direct curiosity toward mystery, those things that are beyond our understanding or transcendent at the moment in time.
Curiosity plus mystery.
So I'm now going to lean with a high availability into a mystery allows wonder to occur.
And the reason wonder is important.
So wonder, awe, even positive overwhelm.
So Dr Keltner, a prophet at UC Berkeley, has written the book on awe and eight different forms of human experience that allow awe or wonder to occur.
So he's quadrupled down on this thing and that it works across all cultures and all different spiritual traditions.
It's a fundamentally human experience that people report as making themselves feel more alive and making themselves feel more like themselves and making themselves feel more like a part of this great, wonderful thing.
So very often in an intense experience of wonder whether it's a communal thing at a concert, whether it's a sunset, whether it's noticing the sleeping baby at three in the morning, you know suddenly like oh, and we are all in, it's all one fabric and we're all in this thing together and the universality of it all suddenly breaks through.
So wonder enables that to occur.
It's profoundly human making experience, you know, so, and we think that's available all the time.
You know, you'd give a quote just a minute ago.
I love this particular quote from Henry Miller.
So the American author and playwright Henry Miller once said, quote I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
I have tried this experiment a thousand times and I have never been disappointed.
So, you know, that's the habit of wonder.
So, So wonder is a place where we can move beyond ourselves, which, by the way, goes back to Maslow.
So late in his life, Maslow and most people still think that the apex of the hierarchy of needs, according to Maslow, is self-actualization.
It's not.
The highest level is actually self-transcendency, which he came up with very late in his life.
He never published it.
It's in his personal journal notes.
Others published it behind him.
But interestingly enough still, you know, eight out of 10 people think it stops at self-actualization.
And self-transcendency, if attained, creates meaning-making.
So there's a difference.
And he's still wrong because he made it hierarchical.
And it turns out self-transcendency isn't hierarchical.
You don't have to be self-actualized together.
Self-transcendency can work for anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Just get beyond yourself, whether it's loving other people, whether it's being selfless, whether it's compassion, whether it's noticing beauty and allowing it to overwhelm you.
All those things get you beyond yourself.
And wonder is a place where you go beyond yourself.
Or else, if that wasn't true, looking up at the night sky wouldn't be impressive unless you'd maximize your potential first.
Exactly.
Doing something for somebody else that makes you feel good and the world a better place wouldn't be pro social and Yeah.
You had not yet earned the right to notice.
As of yet, you haven't maximized your 401k.
Right.
And that means that you don't get.
Scott Barry Kaufman did a good job on that.
His book, Transcend.
Yes.
Was real nice.
And he's big into Maslow's stuff.
Okay.
Okay.
That's wonder.
Engineer me some wonder.
What are some practices for how I can bring more of it into my life?
I'm paying attention to things in a manner to look at them with a fresh set of eyes.
Yeah.
So we have a little exercise called put on your wonder glasses.
So put on your wonder glasses.
First of all, you know, if you can't beat it, join it.
So we recognize that we're transactionally minded.
And so we take a situation and, you know, might be a little challenging here.
You know you take a moment and you just take a look around your situation.
Take a look around your room, whether you're outside.
You're inside, you're walking the dog and you take a quick look with your normal glasses on.
And the first thing you'll notice is what the transactional brain is going to be looking for.
Like, oh, okay, this is what they're using, a certain kind of soundproofing.
And it's the blue lights.
That's kind of interesting.
And I see what's going on.
And probably what will happen is you'll immediately come up with a to-do list.
Like, oh, I've got to get one of those blue lights.
That's a better mic holder than I've got.
And I wonder if that plant deserves to be watered.
So your brain just comes up with a to-do list.
So you scan around the room, scan around the scene, and let your brain do what it naturally does.
And then you say, thank you.
Thank you for sharing.
I'll make that list.
I'll get back to you another time.
Then you take another look and say, is there anything here that is interesting, right?
That allows you to be curious.
You know, you know and, and I'll notice well, he's got a plant there.
He was going to, you know, why is that?
Why do we need a plant?
You know um.
And then something else might be interesting, like the fact that we have all these different cameras and why are these angles important?
That might be curious to me.
And then I'll say, okay, now it's time for wonder glasses.
Which of those curious things do I want to really lean into and let the mystery reveal itself?
And I'm going to go with a plant.
Is it real or plastic?
Plastic.
It's plastic.
Okay.
So it's a plastic plant, but it's a good plastic plant.
So I'm noticing that is so Chris is having these conversations with people and there is a little organic something in the room.
And so what that's this is maybe an homage to, maybe it's evoking the fact that you know it's not just digital.
It's not just electronic.
It's not just black.
There's some life in here too.
And that reminder of life is reminiscent.
So how do reminders of life occur?
So I allow myself to follow – in any moment in time.
There's a way I can, in a minute or two, reopen my availability to the fact that there's something, like Henry Miller was saying that's indescribably mysterious and wonderful, right in front of me, if I let it be.
If you were to – It takes practice.
If you were to try and turn up the – turn down the difficulty and turn up the external – uh, supply of wonder.
Yeah.
What are some reliable ways to do that?
You mentioned sunsets earlier on.
I imagine that that's one.
The natural world is going to be your friend, you know.
Identify the things that are naturally working for you.
The other thing is we have one is is just allow yourself to notice the existence of the flow world, you know, cause that's where wonder is going to be available to you, which means dropping into the present moment.
So having to have an exercise called flip the switch.
So you're sitting in a staff meeting and you're listening to the budget be hacked apart again and you're bored.
And then literally you say to yourself, flip.
Boom, flip the switch.
What's happening in the flow world right now?
So I'm in this room.
I'm with these people.
How is Chris actually feeling right now?
Oh, there's a tree out the window, and that tree is turning colors.
Now, this all costs maybe three or four seconds.
So I can get the habit of calling myself back to the present moment and just noticing what's going on around me.
And the fact that I'm a living person in this present situation.
I mean, if I let myself while I'm thinking about answering your question, I can be aware of how the cushion feels on my buttocks.
Because I'm actually sitting, I'm not just talking to you, I'm sitting in this chair.
Am I actually in this room?
So those awarenesses allow the mental faculties, the part of your brain that knows how to be attentive to the present moment, catch those things.
So you just constantly have these little games you can play with yourself, which is keeping yourself in the game.
Okay, coherence.
Coherence.
It turns out, the meaning-making researchers will tell us that if you can align consciously who you are, what you're doing and what you believe in, which we call coherence,
So, you know, I understand who I, at least presently, I've got a story about who I am.
These are things I really care about.
Here's what I'm doing in the world.
Do they align?
And when they align, usually with some degree of compromise, because life is never perfect, but as a calculated compromise that I've accepted, I'm having an experience of coherency.
I'm being an integrated, you know coherent thoughtful, authentic person in the world, which means I'm living purposefully.
Frankly, if the book takes a risk, it's that we don't talk an awful lot about finding purpose and mission.
And what have you?
In part because people are so over-missioned right now that they're stuck in the transactional world.
We're really deferring almost all of that hopefulness to this coherency thing.
If people are aware of their value set and they're aware of what they're doing in the world and they're trying to move those things into alignment, called coherency, you know, then we're pretty sure they're going to end up doing good things.
So I don't need to preach at you about trying to make the world a better place.
The overwhelming majority of people we work with, they've got great values.
And if their values actually get to be the lead horse on the directing of their lives, we're all going to be in a better place.
So I don't need to tell you what to do.
You've already got what you need.
So the experience of coherency, we call it coherency sightings.
Catch yourself in the act of being an integrated, coherent person, that's really gratifying.
Oh, I'm sitting here in your studio and we're talking about how people can live more meaningfully.
That is a really coherent thing for me to do.
Am I aware of the fact that, oh yeah, this is exactly what I want to be doing.
This is really working for me.
Inverted.
What would somebody being out of coherence look like?
Oh, I was just talking to a guy the other day.
So one of the DCI fellows, a very successful Hong Kong financier, calls me and says my 26-year-old son is about to quit his fabulous job.
Please help me stop him.
So I said, no, I'm not going to help stop him.
And I'm not going to call him because you said call him.
But if he wants to call me, we can chat.
And by the way, I'll probably tell him he's doing the right thing.
So watch what you wish for.
So I'm on the phone on a Zoom call, talking to this 26-year-old young man who is a Stanford grad in economics with a master's in computer science, because everybody should know digital stuff.
And he drops right into investment banking and he's killing it.
He's absolutely killing it.
And he's having a great time killing it until suddenly he wakes up one day and he's bored to tears.
And so I think I'm going to quit and, you know, ruin my career and travel for a while and go try to find myself.
Because what he noticed was, I think, what's happening for him is his neocortex is forming at about 27.
He's a little ahead of himself.
Manopause.
And just like wait a minute, the motivation I had to do this, which was growing and winning, which is fine.
You're getting A's.
He was getting A's at the bank like he got at Stanford.
Suddenly it doesn't work for me anymore.
He awakened an incoherent person.
And he tried to talk himself into success as its own reward, and he just couldn't do it.
So for him to become coherent, he's going to have to go recalibrate his values and recalibrate his priorities.
So he's in a transition.
That's the right thing to do.
Now there are other people who keep re-upping that incoherence because they're getting the money or they're fearful of the change or their wife will think they're stupid.
You know, there's lots of reasons people get stuck in an incoherent place.
But it's soul-sucking, so be careful.
How does coherence outperform balance as a life goal?
Oh, well, I've never had balance as a goal.
I've never seen a balanced person.
I mean if balance means, you know, all of my allocation of time and energy precisely reflects my value prioritization set.
You know the, The perfect layering of the layer cake of my life looks just like my values at all times.
I've never had that moment.
So we talk about, you know, not balance as much as just the dashboard of what is your current portfolio.
What's the mix of your life?
So balance is a resource allocation question.
And so, you know, so you have to decide what your priorities are going to be.
One of my examples is one of my older sisters ran a graduate school in education at a small private college.
And she'd been doing a PhD's job for 15 years and finally decided it was time to get the PhD and actually be the person she was supposed to be.
So she's working full-time running a graduate school while going full-time to school getting a PhD.
And she called her friends and said, I'm a little overbooked.
I've calculated I have six unscheduled hours in the next five years.
A very little—true story.
I have very little time to talk to anybody.
You're not making the cut.
I didn't make the cut.
And that was a radically imbalanced lifestyle and it was exactly the right, coherent thing for her to do.
Highly coherent.
Highly coherent.
So balance is lovely, and if a coherent life and circumstances permit it, great.
But what you really want to be is alive and accepting the compromises that come with it.
Mm-hmm.
Flow.
What about flow?
So flow.
So first of all, we are introducing the concept of the flow world along with the flow state.
So we all know the flow state from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the positive psychologist who invented the term flow, the psychology of optimal experience, published back in 90-something.
And that's lovely as an idea in the zone, what have you.
Most people know what flow is and have had moments of experiencing it.
And so one of the first things we come up with is, okay, so that's the flow state.
The experience of being fully engaged in the moment where time stands still and I feel fully present, all that stuff, which is great.
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.
Thing once we posit the flow world. is the place where you might enter the flow state.
And then on the flow state, the way originally defined, there's this thing called the flow channel, which is where the task at hand and my skill set 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, I'm, I'm, I'm right at my skill level.
So the situation is demanding the most of me.
So, and what we notice about, and that's fine.
We call that apex flow, which is where you know 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, 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.
I need to find some task that will so demand of me my attention that I finally become fully present.
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 want to learn how to do we called simple flow is I can choose to be fully attentive.
I got to chop these damn onions to make the soup.
And then I want to really really get onto is is the dinner, when the people come over at seven o'clock.
So it's five 30.
Now I 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.
As opposed to like whoa whoa whoa, let's go all the way in on the onion shopping.
Oh, I thought you meant forget the onions and just watch the Oh, Chris Williams.
That's fine.
That'd be a higher level flow, but you know, I gotta, I gotta get the end.
It's done.
I'm so sorry.
So um so, if I can fall all the way in like look, it's going to be 10 minutes, you know, I'm going to do this in a nice Zen kind of way.
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 skillset 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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Sounds lovely.
Uh, I think the first thing it makes me think of is whether or not multitasking and the yeah, the.
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.
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.
I bought some time back, yeah.
But again, if I only do that, Again, flow requires full participation.
And the reason time stands still and becomes eternal at the time elongates, you know, and disappears all at once because I'm so fully present to it is this full availability and full concentration.
I'm switching constantly.
I'm never going to have that full presence.
So I do think multitask, what we call multitasking and flow are simply different states.
Now you might, 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, it's gratifying that I'm being high performant.
That's okay.
Yeah.
But if it's, it's the only game you're playing, then you've, you've left flow behind.
Yeah.
I think.
What do you think?
I mean, you're a multitasker.
That's true.
Like chronically, um, The meta thinking thing.
I'm very rarely in flow when I'm thinking about the thinking you have to when you're juggling a bunch of different balls at the same time.
Now, uh, uh, I was trying to think of an example where this wouldn't be true.
I used to run nightclubs is to be stood on the front door of a nightclub for a very, very long time.
And in that it's kind of multivariate.
I'm usually getting my phone out, messaging the guy.
Okay.
Where are the flyers out there doing that thing?
Yeah.
Then the cue's starting to build out.
So I actually need to push that back in, so you can't let the cue get too wide, because then it becomes unruly.
And then it's the door.
Oh, the till's out of change, so I need to get the person to do the till thing.
So that is a kind of multitasking, but it's still relatively linear.
It's sort of moving in the same direction.
The phone is about the thing.
The till is about the thing.
The cue's about the thing.
I can hear the music coming from inside.
What's the DJ doing?
And that is quite a nice dance.
It's a very wide, it's sort of very peripheral when it comes to what I'm taking in.
But if I was to think about kind of the opposite, it would be preparing for a podcast while I've got Slack open.
And I'm also thinking about something else as well.
Like that, it's too disparate.
Adam Lane Smith, my friend, the attachment expert's got this wonderful idea.
And he says, your life doesn't need to be easier.
It needs to be simpler.
That humans are built to handle intensity, but not complexity.
And I found that to be completely true.
There is not really an intensity of work that makes me feel overwhelmed.
Intensity, not complication.
Correct.
Maybe complex, but not complication.
That's exactly the terminology he uses when he uses complicated.
Complicated.
Yes, correct.
There is not an intensity of work that has really ever crushed me in terms of its overwhelm.
Right.
But there is a level of complication that has crushed me at a relatively low dose.
Yeah, so you're a front-of-the-room guy.
Mm-hmm is um technically multitasking, but multitasking like all the colors on the palette when I'm painting, as opposed to like um I'm I'm, I'm painting and jogging.
And so I was just having a conversation with my friend, Steve.
So Steve ran the one of the largest and most successful high-end catering programs.
Uh, catering companies in Southern California caters to presidents to.
You know, does Beyonce's birthday party.
You know the 1000 plate guy.
And he's completely reinvented his life and come up to live in the Redwood Forest in Bondi Dune, up near Santa Cruz, where I am.
And we're talking about this stuff.
And at one point he drops, he says, look, you got to understand, I'm a really good waiter.
I'm an incredibly good waiter as a host.
He says I can stand in that room and instantly I'm looking at my seven tables and I know they need water.
Having a conversation that's going south.
I could put some soothe on there.
You know that guy's hungry.
I mean literally.
He just knows everything that has to be done across the room and then he can move effortlessly.
He's hardly even aware of how his body is routing to the right table and do the right thing because he's he's a different person at each one of those seven tables, so that's a multitasking down on, like your front of the room.
Um, but it's all in this cohesive context Where what's really happening is you're actually becoming pretty selfless.
It's a very high level of a multifaceted competency, but it's still one cohesive thing that allows flow to occur.
So when he's doing that, and I think when you're doing that, that is flow.
Yeah, height.
Complexity, high intensity, low complication.
Low complication, therefore high cohesion, one fabric.
Yeah, that's lovely.
It's all the same fabric.
That's a nice conception.
Okay.
What design choices make flow more likely in daily life?
Pay attention.
I mean, just paying attention.
So we talk about mindset a lot.
So the design choice. of choosing into the way I'm going to be in a particular situation.
So if I'm in that staff meeting and I'm only thinking about the next thing, then I've designed my mindset to never be present at the present moment.
So the critical design choice is how do I live in this day?
How do I live in this moment?
My partner, Bill, has a morning practice.
Despite being an atheist, he has spiritual practices.
One of them, he says two things to himself out loud every single day while shaving.
And he says it's very important that they're out loud.
I don't shave every day, so I can't do it.
It's a good justification to shave every day.
There you go.
One is, I live in the best of all possible worlds.
Now, as an existential atheist, he says, look, I can also say I live in the world.
I live in the worst world.
I live in the only world I notice.
But actually, it turns out because bias matters, I want to bias things in my favor.
If I live in the best of all possible worlds, my chance of catching good things goes way up, because I've pre-biased my attention to positive outcomes.
Thing one.
Thing two.
Everything I do today, I choose to do.
So I announce my agency to my assembly.
Why am I going to this darn meeting?
Oh, because I scheduled it.
Why am I going to the DMV?
Because I chose not to file on time, and so now I'm doing this thing.
So I just own my life.
It's me.
It's me.
It's me.
It's me.
Yeah, I own it, I own it, I own it.
So outing the victim.
So that's mindset choice.
So I think the most important aspect of designing a life that includes these flow experiences is choosing the mindset of the way you live, which is a practice you do every day.
Both me and my housemate have one day where we stack all of our calls mine's a wednesday, his is a thursday okay, and uh, we kind of get it done.
Day yeah yeah, exactly yeah, and it you.
You sort of stare at it and you go okay, today is not going to be deep work, but it's going to be necessary work and that's fine and and that is a kind of cohesion.
Oh yeah, all of its own right.
Yeah um, somebody's got to pick up the dog show.
I call mine big wednesday okay, he used to call his bullshit thursday.
Oh, he realized Two weeks ago.
I've labeled it on my calendar.
It says bullshit day.
Every single week, this thing comes around.
And he said, stupid.
Two weeks ago, called it Ubermensch day.
Day was immediately turned inside out.
I'm crushing it.
I've got to get this stuff done.
I don't really want to, and I'm doing it.
It's like just one reframe like that.
And I thought it was so cute.
So if you have a series of tasks you and your partner needs to do, for some reason the trash in your apartment block is forever away from where you're right.
Just what we're going on a mission.
It's the trash mission.
We're doing the trash mission together, as opposed to got to take the bloody trash out again or whatever it might be.
So I will argue that this is a mindset issue.
So you know the three big chunks to our book.
There's the front end about Hey, think about meaning a different way.
Here's a couple of reframes that might change the game for you then.
Oh, by the way.
The way you walk through the world matters.
We call that mindset.
So it's called think like a designer.
The designer's way, five mindsets.
And then these four areas we just discussed.
And then the mindset thing.
There are five mindsets, but the two for killer of the mindsets are radical acceptance and availability.
So radical acceptance is about look.
I mean the only place design works.
In fact, I would argue, the only place anything works is reality.
So, you know, must be present to win.
So, oh, I should have done this instead.
You're back into your head, not reality.
Like, no, you're here.
So if you start with radically accepting that things are the way they are and your opportunity is to make the most of the situation that happens to actually be,
And so that's okay.
I accept it is the way it is.
You know, it, there was an ice storm and maybe I wasn't going to get to be here today.
You know, the power might go out again.
You know, it's just true.
It's not, it's not good or bad.
It's just true.
So then, availability says not only am I willing to accept the way things are, but I'm going to lean into like and what might be here for me.
I wonder what wonderfulness is latently lurking that I might discover.
So to go from bullshit Thursday to Ubermensch Thursday, See Bullshit Thursday.
I think deserved to be labeled that because I really didn't think it deserved to exist.
I am unhappy with the fact that I have to spend time doing this crap.
So this crap is like an evil force in my life, and it doesn't deserve to be there.
And that's just not true.
I mean, the trash has to get taken out.
The dog poop has to get picked up.
The baby's butt's got to get wiped.
The taxes have to be paid.
It's just true.
So if I accept that And then say oh, and I'm responsible for attending to that in as efficient a way as I possibly can,
Now it's actually okay.
So when your roommate accepts Thursdays and then even says and I'm going to be available to noticing that I can do that really well.
And after I've done that, well, pat myself on the back for being an ubermensch.
Yeah.
I changed my experience of my life.
Your mindset really matters.
Give me the other elements of mindset.
Yeah.
We actually doubled down on one.
So having a wondrous mindset, a high availability to wonder at all times.
So wonder, radical acceptance, availability, which I've just described.
The next one is fully engaged, calmly detached.
And the last one is create your world, which really means create your story.
So fully engaged, calmly detached, is all about.
Again, it's a flow orientation that would say, you know, I want to be entirely present to what I'm doing.
I want to both bring the best I can to it.
And I want to have the most alive making experience of what I'm doing by being fully engaged.
However, I'm also going to recognize that while I'm fully engaged, I don't control outcomes.
So as soon as I get fully engaged, I really care and really want it to work.
And now suddenly I'll get expectations and I'm getting all wrapped up and I'm getting anxious.
So what I want to be, which I think is a very aspirational place, I want to be fully engaged.
I want to care really deeply and bring my best self and recognize that I have very little control over whether or not the outcome works.
And so I can be both those things at the same time, which is really freeing, by the way, if I can detach from the outcome while being fully engaged in the participation.
The big distinction in the mindset between the transactionalist and the flowist.
The flow oriented person is the transactionalist is all about outcomes.
They're primarily the agent of an outcome, and the flow person is a participant.
Now that participant may be participating in a way that hopefully creates an outcome, but my energy isn't worrying about that future outcome.
My energy is in participating fully in this moment, which is, by the way, the single best way to improve the probability of the outcome.
So getting really good at this present moment thing has huge side effects.
They work both ways.
You're not giving up transaction success by becoming more flow-oriented.
What you're giving up is wasting energy that's not contributing.
Yeah.
I think one of the areas I really want to get into is the mistakes that high achievers make when it comes to tying meaning to outcomes and the – sort of endless rabbit holes of pursuit and progress.
Okay.
What are the big mistakes that you see hard charging high achievers making in your world?
Well, the first one is that we correlate, um, our decision-making with the outcome.
So, you know, okay, I'll try it this way.
Um, you work hard on real, on something you really care about and it doesn't work out.
Shoot. what's the first question most people ask themselves as soon as something doesn't work out?
What did I do wrong?
Bingo.
Which makes and that and, by the way, questions matter, particularly the questions you empower to judge or direct your life.
Be very careful because all questions have belief systems.
If it turns out the life directing question you're currently suffering has a belief system you don't agree with, you're in trouble.
So if the first The first thing I think after something goes awry is, what did I do wrong?
There are two assumptions built into that question, both of which I think are dead wrong and are very dangerous.
So if the first question after a mistake or a failure is, what did I do wrong?
What does that question already believe is true?
You could have done something differently and you are wrong.
Bingo.
It does believe that if I'd done everything right, it would have worked.
Mm-hmm.
And that the thing that didn't get done right, which would have caused it to work, was mine.
Which are both, frankly, incredibly egotistical things.
I mean, it's not true if you do it all right that it'll work.
And it's not necessarily your mistake.
So a better question than what did I do wrong?
Which goes right to and if I'd done it right, it would have worked, which is wrong.
It's false.
What's a better first question after a mistake, after a failure?
Why did this happen?
Just what happened?
Let's just start with back to reality.
Radical acceptance.
What happened?
Now, if it turns out that analysis says, oh, yeah, in retrospect, I did.
I mailed it in.
I didn't do the prep properly.
I didn't call ahead.
I didn't get the information.
Spent no time whatsoever talking to people about what they think about Chris Williamson.
I show up here.
I'm unprepared.
And I shanked it.
Shame on me.
Okay.
But that's almost never the case.
When I have debriefed the, oh, what did I do wrong with people over and over again?
Or it seemed like a good idea at the time, but apparently it wasn't.
You know, it turns out your prior self did the best they could.
You're just not responsible for the future.
So back to your originating question, what do high performers do?
High performers believe in they can create, they can cause outcomes.
Every single time.
And they get stuck with it.
Is this not a byproduct of radical responsibility, high agency?
Sure.
Right, because these are very difficult to blend together.
Oh, no, it's a slippery slope.
I want to own the world.
I want to believe that I can make anything happen.
I want to believe that I can make things happen, that I don't even believe that I can make things happen.
And when you lean into that with a high degree of authenticity and agency and commitment, stuff happens.
There is no question that the choice to believe you can has an impact.
And this is a pattern thing that people have been rewarded for professional.
That often hurts them personally.
And if you're, if you're trying to work out, okay.
So I Dave says I I I, I should be more kind of rational about what happened, whatever that means, whatever rationally looking at me means, which is essentially impossible for me to do.
In any case, I'll try my best.
But then that kind of feels a little bit disempowering in some ways, because How do I not allow the temptation of the victimhood narrative to just sneak in here?
And this doesn't sound particularly embodied because it's the most top-down of top-downs.
It's a sterile equation look.
Untie this Gordian knot for me.
This is a big question.
It's a very big question.
Okay.
I think what we're talking about is taking full responsibility for our finitude all along the way.
You're finite and you're growing.
I mean you're.
You're getting better at Chris-ing than you used to be, which means, by the way, if I'm going to get better, I was worse.
People ask me all the time, you know, I'm out backpacking with these four guys.
I've been taking backpacking since for 20 years.
And we, They were all 15-year-old kids and too busy.
But I was the old guy that took them out 20 years my junior and we're all sitting around naked, jumping into an alpine lake at 10000 feet.
And Rich says, so Dave, you're the old guy.
Do you have any regrets?
Is there anything you do differently?
I said, well, those are two radically different questions.
I have no regrets, and I would do everything differently.
And he goes, whoa, reconcile that for me.
I said, regret means that I choose to not accept my life, and my policy is I don't not accept my life.
I accept my life.
And of course I would do it differently because I'm supposed to be smarter now.
I mean if there's almost anything that I would look in my past back on and not say, if I had to do over, I would do it differently.
That means I'm just not paying freaking attention.
Yeah.
That's like saying I would not have picked different lottery numbers last week, knowing what I know now.
So back to this, this trade-off um, and because yeah, if I, If I do further optimize this one thing, particularly in career and capability and performance, you know I might get more, but at what expense?
So I really do have to decide how to allocate this finite resource, this growingly more capable over time, but still always finite resource called myself.
Decliningly available.
Decliningly available across what different aspects of being a human person.
And do I believe I'm supposed to make myself unhappy and suffering the whole way along, or some joy en route, okay?
There's an old line.
It's heaven all the way to heaven and hell all the way to hell.
Which path am I on?
That's lovely.
So there's a real wake-up moment that I hit this.
So in my 30s, again, being a dad was terribly important because I didn't have one.
I lost my dad at nine.
Turns out to suicide.
Um, and then I sort of fall into high tech.
That's a long story.
And I fall into startups and that's a long story.
And I didn't ever think I wanted to be doing that.
I'd sort of fell into it and I didn't know I was a workaholic.
It turns out that I am.
Um, and I'm working, you know, 70, 80 hours a week, sleeping three or four hours a night.
Been doing that for a couple of years.
And I'm sitting in the in the family room with a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning and my now 42 year old, then three year old son Robbie, is in the kitchen and ask his mother mom, can we play with dad today?
Or he's just going to fall asleep in the chair again.
And my heart sank and I went, shit, I didn't have a dad cause he was dead.
Robbie doesn't have a dad cause he's asleep.
This is not okay.
This is not okay.
So I'm optimizing for the wrong thing.
I'm killing it at work, but it's killing me, you know, and it took me six years to fix that by the Um, and I finally did learn how to decelerate.
Yeah.
I mean it ended up I had to do more radical change than I realized at the time.
I was trying to make minor changes and keep it all going just fine, at no cost to anyone.
And that just flat failed.
Um, but the point being, you have to decide what you're going to do with the allocation of the resource called you all along the way.
And there are going to be trade-offs.
There are no solutions.
You could always do everything better.
There's no best.
There's no right.
There's no done.
There's no it.
There's no max.
There's just what you're choosing.
It's your call.
There's a line from Van Gogh.
He says, if I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now for wheat is wheat.
Even if people think it is grass in the beginning.
I think that's so lovely.
So lovely.
Yeah.
I mean um, Bill likes to my partner, likes to quote um, you know a Zen truism that if you can't find enlightenment here, where are you going to find it?
Yeah.
If you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy on a yacht.
So, okay.
Yeah.
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Another wing another malignant tumor to this same thread that we're on.
Lots of people become objectively successful and subjectively miserable.
They have objectively done the thing.
They have achieved success.
Subjectively, it's not there.
It doesn't feel like they're there.
They know that they've done it, but it doesn't feel like they've touched it.
What do you lay that at the feet of?
I wonder if they lost their why on the way, you know, Simon Sinek.
Um, because if you got there and you look and it's not just that, it's temporary, and now what?
But you look back and it feels like dust in your mouth, then were you winning for winning sake.
Um, And that's not very gratifying.
So if somewhere along the way why I care about this, the substance of it, the relationship of it, the culture, creation of it, whatever if I lost that, then when I get there I literally won't even know what the heck I'm doing here.
It's a very disorienting experience.
You talk about post-achievement depression being really common among elites, right?
Yeah.
I think sometimes...
We have so committed to that achievement that we put all of ourselves into that performance and we lose the why.
You know, it's understandable, but it's heartbreaking.
Okay.
People love to accomplish and achieve, though.
How do you think about striving while not missing your life, going after it whilst actually being present at the same time?
Because as far as I can see, striving and improving requires a degree of delayed gratification.
It needs future planning, which by design takes you out of the moment.
It's very difficult to be thinking about the big picture goals in flow, paying attention to the onions that I'm chopping right now.
There has to be a good portion of time spent putting off what I want to do now planning for the future, thinking about tasks, being hypervigilant.
And this is the sort of perennial challenge of the personal growth that they want to achieve a lot but not miss their life at the same time.
And sometimes I think those two things do not.
They are oil and water not always, and maybe less than we might think they are, but there are sacrifices that need to be made in order to be able to get that.
And many of them take you out of the present moment.
But they put you back into another one.
So let's say I'm talking about physical work at PRs, you know, and wanting to add five reps at this bench, press weight, whatever it might be.
So the time I'm spending optimizing my personal training plan with my trainer right, that's thinking about the future and optimizing what the plan is going to be that in and of itself, is a skill.
That's an activity.
Oh, I'm doing this thing called imagining the future and conceptualizing.
You know, while I'm actually doing that,
We all have the observer, right?
There's Dave sitting here talking to Chris, and then there's Dave noticing what's going on in the room.
We all have the, what's the observer observing?
Is the observer observing me in this moment or is the observer observing the likelihood of this getting to the outcome?
So while I'm planning, I'm doing something planning as an activity.
Am I enjoying the planning, while I'm making the sacrificial effort to say no?
I'm going to actually get up a half hour earlier, you know, because I'm going to go into the gym for 20 more minutes, because I'm going to work on these reps when I'm on the bench.
And I'm now doing the second of more reps than I've ever done on that particular exercise before.
Am I enjoying the experience of what my body is showing me that I've not known before?
Or am I saying, God, three more, and then I hit it?
So it's, I mean, even in any given moment, are you here or are you somewhere else?
It's a framework.
You can give yourself permission to, I've decided to do this new routine in the gym.
Now go do it, for God's sake, and be fully present to it.
Is there a risk of people, especially the ones who resonate with the insecure overachiever, turning everything into a performance, including meaning?
Oh, yeah.
So there's a little section in the book called Beware the Practice to Performance Trap or the Practice to Production Trap.
So, you know, everybody thinks mindfulness is great, as do I. I go talk to monks all the time.
Yeah.
And your, your achieving brain can transactionalize anything.
Yep.
That's why you have streaks on meditation apps.
I mean, so, you know, so like, you know, this morning, Hey, I really killed it this morning.
You know, I think, in fact, I think, I think I'm getting my 20 minutes.
I'm down to, I can get my 20 minutes sit down at 50.
Um, that part of your brain, which by the way, is pretty stimulated these days. is ready to go.
It loves being in charge.
Like, hey, just give me the wheel.
Give me the wheel.
Give me the wheel.
Pick me.
Pick me.
Yeah, that hand is always up.
I'll re-describe this in a meaningful way.
And that's not entirely wrong, but this is where, if you start developing and, by the way, the invitation at the end of the book is now we've given you a bunch of ideas.
It's not do them all.
That's a new burden.
That's cram more in.
Start figuring out what your practice is for your way, your Chris way, that allows you to access more meaning in these other forms.
So you have a slowly but surely richer life.
And so, once you make those decisions, you start giving yourself permission, you know, to actually permission.
To be happy is what it boils down to at the end of the day.
We didn't talk about communities.
So community, big deal.
You know, in fact, Bob and I, Bill and I just got to spend a morning with Bob Waldinger.
He's great from the Harvard study.
Harvard study, yeah.
He's been on the show.
He's great.
And a Zen man, a lovely guy.
So we had some home running, all sat around agreeing with each other a lot.
It was really a lot of fun.
And that study makes it very clear community is everything.
The reason there's a thing called formative community it's a technical term that we invented is in the book is that through this DCI program, this Distinguished Career Institute program that I teach in at Stanford, I'm on my 10th cohort.
These really thoughtful people you know 35 to 45 of them a year get thrown together in a room and then, in no time at all, say not only is the community the best part of the program, but I'm having relationships with these people like I've never had before in my life.
And I debrief them collectively and I'll go, Justify your answer.
I'm not buying it.
I mean, these people formed corporate cultures and have huge professional networks.
Most of them are married with happy families.
How many of you?
While you're here, you're getting calls constantly from these huge networks of relationships like oh, we miss you.
Please come home because they're gone for a whole year at Stanford.
And they go, oh, yeah, it's a din.
And you're telling me that some admissions officer on this program throws you in a room with 35 yahoos you never met before.
And suddenly they're the best friends you ever had.
Uh-huh.
Justify your answer.
And what that conversation has revealed is what I ended up naming as formative community, which is there are three reasons to gather.
One is a social gathering, a social community, get together to have a good time, which is lovely.
You know, enjoy being people together.
A collaborative community, let's get together and get something done.
And getting something done together with another person, you know, is really wonderful.
I mean, go to a startup, go have military experience.
That's a profound experience of being a human being.
But there's another kind of gathering which is we call formative not just get together to have a good time, get together to get something done, get together to become better together.
So if a person is a becoming, is there a place and a conversation I can enter into, where what we're doing here together is We are assisting one another in our becoming, which isn't getting a transaction done, isn't solving a problem.
It's allowing one another into the conversation that's growing into the next person I want to become.
So that is a gathering of intent, not content.
Most of the time we get together socially around the content of we all like theater.
We all like jazz, you know?
So there's this commonality of the content of what we're doing.
We're getting together to go, you know, work on this food problem or start this company, or whatever it might be.
So there's the content of our collaboration.
In a formative community like well, you're into climate change and I'm into Beanie Babies and she's into modern art.
Oh, you can't help me because you don't know my thing.
No, no, no.
I don't need you to know my thing.
What I need is for you to be the person who's becoming their better selves.
I want you to get more in alignment with who you're on the way to becoming.
And when that occurs...
Your psyche, your soul, your consciousness resonates in a way that the content of what you're doing doesn't matter to me, but the intent does.
And when I'm with other people who are moving toward that resonance with themselves, it's harmonic to my own.
So you're talking about climate change and I'm having an idea about oil redistribution.
You know, it turns out you being you enables me to be me.
So that's what a formative community does.
And there's a certain kind of conversation they can have.
And so we'll say it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself, because we're fundamentally social animals.
So if there is a place where I can be heard, then I might even tap into hearing my own story well enough that I can grow further into it.
So a formative community is a particularly meaning-making experience because it moves me along that becoming pathway more regularly, more reliably and, if we're lucky, more quickly.
I think this is an important pushback against the solopreneur degenerate sigma lone wolf kind of atmosphere that's going on a lot at the moment.
I understand why.
I understand why it's seductive to go monk mode and recant reliance on anybody and everybody around you.
As I've got older, it's just increasingly difficult to tap into that fuel source.
Maybe I've just spent that particular thing.
I basically extended working from home 10 years before COVID and five years after.
Yeah.
Electively.
And when the pandemic came along, it's brilliant.
Right.
It's just more of me.
Right.
You know, put me in coach.
Yeah.
And um, it's not a bad thing because, again back to particularly in the first half of life, those early adult years, what's really going on is you're building an ego.
The first person who really needs to believe that you're okay is you.
So if my decision to rely entirely on myself is a stringent approach to saying I need to get to a place of self-trust,
And it turns out I can't afford to let that leak off where, oh, it was really Anne.
She really saved my butt.
So, you know, but that should be temporary.
I should get over it.
And now I'm actually free to be part of something bigger than myself.
Yeah.
Agreed.
Yeah.
Manopause.
Um, I realized a good example.
I do this live show.
I did the first work in progress here in Austin last night.
I'm about to go back on tour around Australia, New Zealand and Bali for basically a full month.
Uh, that's going to be rough.
Uh, it's horrible.
Somebody's got to do it.
I mean, I did strategically put the Bali show at the very end.
Okay.
Uh, so there's nothing to do after that.
Um, and I could go out there, get a local photographer at each of the different cities, have one tour manager to make sure that everything's set up, and that would be it.
There's maybe six guys flying out with me, two from the UK, one or two from America.
One is already in Australia.
Actually, another one from the UK.
And two are managing.
Because what's the point?
What is the point of going and doing a solo show?
Alone.
Alone, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, you're going to have to do the onstage thing.
I've got to sit and write the script on my own.
And the sort of person I'm speaking to is me 10 years ago.
If there is the opportunity for you to even just try and co-work with somebody else to find someone that's on a similar sort of trajectory to you.
I've found that I go faster and further because there was always that if you want to go fast, go on your own.
If you want to go far, go with somebody else.
But I genuinely go quicker as well with someone, because the fuel source you have of experiencing, of sharing experiences together with someone else, is so enlivening in the moment that it just keeps pushing that motivation.
That fuel tank just keeps on getting tapped top top top top, top.
It keeps on getting pushed up.
So yeah, and i am saying too, part of the us doesn't have to be people that are bleeding off your role in the goal pursuit that you're currently producing toward, so you can find a conversation to be in which is around how's it going?
How are you becoming?
What's the next question you want to be growing or learning your way into?
It's not problem solving my goal pursuit.
So I'm still going to keep all, keep all that to myself.
So if you want to be selfish about the work, fine.
That doesn't mean you have to live selfishly.
Yeah.
Very good.
What are the signals that tell you it's time to redesign your life?
What would be the things people notice out there in the ether, the little whispers in the back of their mind?
Yeah.
You know um.
I talked to people all particular career um.
I'm often come away from the thousands of conversations i've had with people kind of going you know very from it's not so much i've decided it's time for me to leave the work um, it's that you start noticing the work has left you um.
Very often i think the signals, the change is coming, actually kind of feels like an outside in um.
You know you're going to the office and nothing happens.
You know you're in that thing that used to be enlivening and you go oh, apparently it's not.
You know um, And it's almost like noticing yourself having – it's not the inside.
Now I've been thinking about it a lot and I think the time is up.
I think I've maxed out here.
I think I need to move on as opposed to just like, you know, the soundtrack seems to have stopped.
I think the movie might be over.
So there's an awareness of your experience of something is shifting.
Bill, my friend, talks about the time he was in the car.
He knows exactly where he was on Highway 280 when he's driving into Apple, and he suddenly realized oh, I'm done.
And we spent another year setting up how to quit.
Well, but you know, but, but, but the job left him right there.
I wonder how long before that he'd been turning up to work and just stuff didn't feel as bright as it used to.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I have to ask him, but the, um, um, I think sometimes these awarenesses can be sudden.
Sometimes they kind of grow up on you over time.
But that boils down to you know the Socratic thing you know um the unexamined life is not worth living.
So if you have an unexamined life, um then awareness of this might come slow and it'll have to be dramatic.
I think another challenge that people face is if you are a hard charging, high achiever person, you're probably very good at going shut up emotions and just continuing to push through wherever it is, including the emotion of boredom, of disquiet, of discomfort, low color, low engagement, lack of aliveness.
That's just mere resistance.
Allow me to move through it.
And the more you've hypertrophied the allow me to move through it muscle, the longer sometimes it can take, I think, for people to realize oh, this is not a right fit for me.
And you see, I've seen this in every industry i've been in people who've outstayed their aliveness by decades because they either have this super hypertrophied, delayed gratification they're a world champion at the marshmallow test yes, um.
Or they do not have the they.
They haven't done the self-reflection to to actually be able to sort of feel it.
Yeah, i've long said um, Most people's besetting sin is not some shadowed, dark side evil thing leaking its way out yet again.
It's the over-functioning strength.
There is absolutely, absolutely too much of a good thing.
That is so good.
Yeah.
You know, I'm too helpful.
I'm too efficient.
I'm too committed, you know, and I mean, you know, I'm not a stoic, but they had some good ideas.
And when they see a moderation in all things, they don't sound like well.
The too little is crummy and the too much is uh.
So let's go with the middle.
What they're really saying is it's actually a thoughtful position that the recognition of a good thing over-experienced, over-indulged upon not just sugar but productivity is not a good thing.
The human experience is a mixed, hopefully somewhat balanced thing that allows you enough capacity to both be present to and enjoying that which is actually occurring.
Maxing out isn't actually better.
But it is important to do for a while.
I'm an advocate of obsession.
I recently changed my entire opinion on obsession.
It was something I had a little bit of a frosty relationship with.
And I wrote an essay a couple of weeks ago that I think is about right.
Basically, the obsession is very fleeting.
It doesn't last forever.
It's this weird confluence of desire passion, life situation environment meaning motivation, skill set, a whole bunch of different things.
But it's very temporary.
And what I've come to believe is that a lot of what looks like discipline to us now in other people is simply the cooled aftermath of a past obsession.
So I started going to the gym when I was 18 because I was obsessed with it and I couldn't stop reading bodybuilding forums and drinking protein shakes and researching this and I'm going to get strong and then I'm going to get goals or whatever.
And two decades later, I still train, but I'm not using either discipline or motivation.
It's this weird like neutron star that's cooled down. from a past obsession.
And I think people that are serial obsessives in that sort of a way.
So that is a good justification for going a little bit extreme, for allowing this to consume yourself.
This, at least as far as I can see was strongest when I was 18 in my twenties.
And now the obsession has at least a little bit more.
I can sort of poke my nose and my mouth sort of above the waterline and have a little bit of a look around.
Whereas before I was just completely underneath the swell.
And, um, that I'm going to guess we'll continue over time.
And that's a nice, that feels like a nice trajectory to me.
And the other reason that I like it and the reason that I kind of wrote it um this idea that if you ask, ask a rich or successful or happy people uh, what do you do?
Tell me about your day.
You go.
Well you, you're asking somebody who's got survivorship bias and is a black belt and you're a blue belt.
You should be modeling the rise, not the result.
So model the rise, not the result is the lesson.
What did you do when you were at my stage and what would you do knowing that that was your frame?
Even for super smart and balanced people that have reflected about it a lot, they still go well.
The most important thing is family.
It's like, fuck you, dude.
Look at what you did when you were 25.
You took a flamethrower to the candle.
Okay.
What would you do?
I would do the same thing.
I just make sure I slept six hours a night, because I slept four hours a night and that really damaged my health.
And that put me back by a little while.
And now I've got to do fucking atherosclerosis or whatever the fuck it is.
So, okay.
That's cool.
That's interesting.
Okay.
Let me, let me, let me jump in on your obsession piece and, um, reframe it a little bit.
You know I'm going to.
I could suggest that we could categorize that as a particular invitation to celebrate the scandal of particularity.
Yes.
That's nice.
What I mean by that is Oh, this thing called I suddenly noticed I am obsessed with X Y Z, whatever you know, which means I'm I'm, infatuated.
Right.
So I'm actually having an infatuated experience, which is temporary.
Infatuation is a lovely thing.
You just got to go through it again.
Like what a deal.
Um, and, um, let's make the most of it.
Yeah.
So I'm going to go all in this back to my balance thing.
It's like no, the most alive way I could live right now is to be incredibly out of balance by going, you know, bat nuts about workout or whatever it might be.
You know, and in fact I'm going to so clearly identify that I am now almost abdicating to my obsession.
That I'll be able to pull myself back from it.
This is not the new norm.
This is like, you know, hey, make hell of a sunshine.
It's the honeymoon phase.
It's the honeymoon phase.
For your new task.
For your experience, yeah.
Yeah, that's so great.
And that arises now and then, which is a particular because again, one of the most important particularities, the not completely realized ultimates, is you.
You are a particularity.
Your own life is.
Each day is.
And so when suddenly an opportunity to be obsessed comes by, ooh, those don't happen every day.
Now, I'm not saying take every one and don't let it throw you to the ground.
But have a stoic relationship with obsession.
Well, most people don't get an obsession that's worth anything.
You think about how many people get obsessed with politics or porn or their ex.
You know that if you have the opportunity to do the life giving obsession.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is, this is, uh, energy inflow.
Yeah.
It's a generative obsession.
That's a good way to put it.
And I think God, if you, if you have that, people got their entire lives.
Certain some people get their entire lives without ever being obsessed with anything.
That's worth being obsessed by.
Right.
That's not going to make their lives better.
And this is only going to last for a short period of time.
Another interesting point on your people.
Don't let go the anorexic hermit crab yeah yeah, that particular goal working at apple or ea or whatever it might be kind of like.
If you're in a relationship and you know that this has run its course, every minute you spend in that relationship is a minute that you're not in the right relationship.
The same thing is true with your obsessions.
You're not going to have room for a new obsession if you're trying to hold on to the dwindling fire of the last one.
Allow it to cool.
Allow it to become what it was.
Maybe it's no longer even going to be a part of your life.
There were certain things that I did in my 20s that are no longer even a part of my life.
That were obsessions.
There's many things that have cooled into a more balanced version of it.
Yeah.
The griefier after my wife died.
I mean, so I leaned way into that and it was incredibly generative.
And people kept saying, you know, the first year is the hardest.
And I'm kind of going like, really?
On the 366th day, it's going to be easier?
I mean, yeah, that's the second time it's May 8th and she's been dead.
I'm not sure that's all that transformed it.
But as it turned out and I think largely because I really did lean all the way in, I became obsessed with grieving well,
And I was really good at it.
I killed it.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Brilliant.
But at the end, as the year came along, I really did have this, oh, it's not over, but something.
I literally was sitting quietly and had sort of this dream state of experience spiritually, of I was in the Olympic marathon and I was running through the tunnel for that last lap around the track, the last 440 of the 26 miles.
And as I did that, this huge crowd stood and, uh, and roared as I came along.
I was like, and, and like, well done, Dave, you're done.
And, uh, as I neared the finish line, part of me wanted to stop.
And part of the loss of years two, three, four, and five, you know, cause, um, Don't get me wrong.
I'm now down to the grief that I carry.
There's a permanent thing I carry called grief, which is I befriended where it's a new relationship.
Frisch, my new partner, soon to be a wife, wisely said I'm really sorry I didn't get to meet Claudia, but I really look forward to getting to know her.
The three of us are going to have to spend a lot of time together, which is very insightful.
But I missed that intensity.
There was something about that intense grief that was really alive.
I mean, you were alive.
But you got to let it go.
If I had tried to sustain that, if I had tried to stick with it, that would be very synthetic and everybody gets hurt.
I'm not sure what word to use.
The abuse.
Addiction, the compulsion, the seductiveness of even negative emotions that are sufficiently intense that they make us feel alive.
If that's not an argument that humans really like aliveness, that I would rather be in pain and feel it than be in mundanity and feel nothing.
So this goes back to befriending the longing.
Look, the good news is you're never going to get there.
Which means if you're paying attention, it's going to stay interesting all the way.
All the way down.
I mean the very last thing Claudia said before she died.
She sits up a couple hours before she died and she goes.
Oh, it's so interesting.
Falls back.
Now, at that point, clearly she had one foot on the dock and one foot on the boat and the boat was pulling out.
And she was seeing stuff I've never seen.
And as curious as I am, I didn't feel permission to say, I need you to tell me what you see.
Pretty sure that's not my to see yet.
There's a guy in the book called Arnie.
His name is really Ronald.
Says he's in Atlanta.
He's really in San Francisco.
And he just died.
He just died just sort of in 91.
He's an artist.
It's a long story.
And we're with him a couple of days before he died.
He's clearly going.
He knows he's going.
You know, he's in a wheelchair.
He's thin.
His teeth are out.
I mean, he was leaning on his desk with a blanket over his head.
And he says, David, read poetry to me.
Read poetry to me.
Go get the Shropshire Lad.
It's on the second floor.
So I go get this little book of, you know, 18th century romantic English poetry.
And I read him a poem and he goes, oh, it's so beautiful.
I mean, there was almost nothing of him left, but he directed it toward that.
So we get to decide what to do with this life.
We get to decide how to allocate these energies.
And you let them be what they can until they can't.
And then you move on.
So I think reveling in the obsession healthily while it deserves to be is fine.
And then move on.
That's so beautiful.
That's so beautiful.
Dave Evans, ladies and gentlemen.
Dave, you're fantastic.
You're really, really great.
I'm very glad that I stumbled upon you.
I'm really, really glad you did too.
This has been great.
Where should people go to keep up to date with everything that you're doing?
Oh, we've got a website, Designing Your Life.
So it's designingyour.life.
Pretty simple.
And that'll take you to lots of places.
We've got a newsletter out now, a news one called Fully Alive by Design.
You can get it weekly in your mailbox.
So the website will invite you to that.
And, you know, hey, a week from today, you could buy the book.
That'd be a great idea.
Oh, it'll be out by the time that this goes out so people can go and buy it.
And what's that called?
It's called How to Live a Meaningful Life, Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Flow and Joy Every Day.
Okay.
Dave, I appreciate you.
Until next time.
Okay.
I'll call you on that.
If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list.
It is 100 books that you should read before you die.
The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read, with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.
And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books.
That's chriswillx.com slash books.
