Designing a Life that Matters

In 2012, Michael Phelps was at the peak of his career.

At the London Games, he became the most decorated Olympian of all time. He had 22 Olympic medals to his name, including 18 gold medals. The swimmer's entire life had centered around his sport, at being the best. Early mornings, endless training, he pursued victory tirelessly and it paid off. But then it was over.

No more early morning practices, no more races, no more gold medals to chase. He described the feeling as a postal Olympic depression.

I saw myself as strictly a swimmer, not as a human being he said.

At times, he felt like he did not want to be alive. Eventually, the great athlete turned to advocacy, using his experience to raise awareness about mental health. He realized that retirement was scary because he had to find, quote, "Whatever it was, I was looking for." Michael Phelps' experience illustrates a challenge many of us face.

“When the rules we relied on to live a good life stop working, where do we find new rules?”

How do we discover what we are looking for?

Over the next couple of weeks on Hidden Brain, and in a companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus,

we look at the misguided beliefs that get in the way of living a rich and meaningful life, and an unlikely source that may have the answers we need. What is the meaning of life? Many of us have asked a question like this at some point. It's a big question, perhaps too big, but as creatures who are wired to make meaning of the world around us, we cannot help ourselves. At Stanford University, Dave Evans studies how questions like this

often lead us astray. Dave Evans, welcome to Hidden Brain. Sugar, good to be with you. Dave, you graduated from college in the 1970s with a degree in thermal science,

“what is thermoscience and what were your hopes in dreams of the time?”

Well, it's in the mechanical engineering department. I got my bachelor's of science in mechanical engineering, and there are two divisions of that department, the thermoscience division, some mechanical engineers burn things, the power and engine guys, and some mechanical engineers make mechanisms that kind of, you know, bend and forge things, mostly out of metal. So I ended up in the thermoside of the house, the guys that make engines, because I cared about the energy problem, and my master's degree

was in thermoscience. So I graduated actually with a degree paid for by Chevron research, the oil company paid for my master's degree, and I became a certified advanced energy technologist in 1976. What did you want to do with this? How did you want to make a difference to the world? It was very simple. I wanted to solve the energy crisis. I had an absolute epiphany. I was waiting a line into the store one day, and there was a television playing up in the corner of

the store, and the news was on, and gasoline had suddenly hit a dollar, a gallon, a dollar, a gallon,

“1973, and I said, "That's got to stop. We've got to get off this oil thing. That's what I need to do.”

I have to solve the energy crisis." So that's all I was trying to do. So you graduated in 1976. What was the world like at that time? And was the world ready for your miraculous discoveries? Well, the world was doing all kinds of things. We were still reeling from trying to end the Vietnam War. Civil Rights was going full blast. I'm a full on boomer, so we were trying to change the world. I gave myself a trip all the way around the country,

and a beautiful van as my graduation present, and it was a great summer because that was the bicentennial. So I went to about 15 different apple pie contest across the country. So there was a lot of Americana. There was a lot of stress. It was a really confusing time, but it was certainly we have to fix the world. And I was quite convinced I was ready to do that because we have the technology, we have the right ideas, but what we were missing was the social will. There was a small

and an industry that doesn't exist yet. So I was all dressed up for a party that hadn't started.

I spent four years profoundly unsuccessfully looking for a job that didn't exist, and what I was really upset. I understand that you eventually pivoted and found a job at a small tech company. Yes, there's a little effect called apple, actually. It's a very long story as to how that occurred. It began actually with a phone call. I had a welding torch in my hand, a little solar energy startup that of course miserably failed because it was way too soon. And the guy said,

"My name is Sonsau, and I'm from Apple Computer, we'd like to talk to you." And I said, "No, you want to talk to the Dave Evans at Hewlett Packard. That's the one who likes computers. I don't." And I hung up. And there are lots of Dave Evanses. You can get them in 24 packs at Costco. And I was sure that the other Dave Evans who I knew worked at Hewlett Packard and let computers as the guy they wanted. And a very long story later, including 14 interviews

and sitting down for a lunch with Steve Jobs, they surprised themselves by offering me a job into

“my great shock. I took it. And that's how my high tech career started, but it was the last thing I wanted to do.”

Now you've been on Hidden Brain previously, Dave, and you told us the last time that while at

Apple, you helped to design the world's first mouse? That's correct. I was in charge of

peripheral product marketing. The two fun things I did was I did the mouse and made the first mouse for Apple. I organized. I didn't design it myself, but I organized the team of people who did. And I got to work on laser printing and do this thing called desktop publishing before anybody knew what that was. Now, many people would say that you hit the jackpot. You started working for Apple before it became

the Apple that we know today. And the work you were doing was having an impact. Did you wake up every morning feeling like you were doing something meaningful? Well, yes and no. I mean, the work we

were doing, which is at the beginning of a shift of how technology serves people, was a big deal.

But let's be clear what I was doing was making stuff. We were making, you know, plastic things with wires in them. And so then I just, you know, and if I had to do it, somebody else will.

“And I mean, so the incredibly important things I worked on are long gone. Not only are they”

replaced by later generation and things, they're completely gone. Nobody even does that stuff anymore. It's like, what is that? It doesn't even matter. And by the way, it's not going to last. So, is that all there is? I want to talk about a couple of other examples of people who felt like their lives had become dead ends. Even though from the outside, it might feel like they had not. Years later, after you left Apple,

you began teaching at Stanford. You were giving a talk to a room full of accountants and Kansas City. When a woman whom you call Alice and came up to you with a question, what was the question she asked you? Well, she really started with what's wrong with my life and what did I do wrong? And she described this success that didn't work out as she had hoped. So she was a an accountant, which is what everybody in the room was. She ran a small business, successfully

doing accounting and taxes for about 50 other small businesses. She was happily married. She had two children. She had a three bedroom house. She had a car mostly paid for. So she had exactly everything that she had ever tried to get in her life. She was living exactly the life she had in mind. And it wasn't that she was even bored. It's just something was terribly missing. And what have I done wrong? I mean, she really thought she did it all right. But her experience of it was

not what I had in mind. And I have no idea why. She was really stuck. In some ways, this is not that different than your thermoscience story. You know, you came up with a model for what you wanted to do. You were doing a lot of stuff. But in some ways, you suddenly encountered some aspect of the world that was not what you had prepared yourself for and you found yourself

“stuck. I think very often what a lot of us myself certainly included have done is we have this”

goal in mind. If I just get to there, all will be well. It's called the all will be well system. Once I am happily married to two kids and have my own business, all will be well. Once I have an important job in an advanced energy technology company getting us off the oil problem,

all isn't well. I mean, there's not a different you waiting on the other side of them.

Finish line. There's not a different universe you're suddenly living in. There's not a different psyche. Suddenly saying, oh, now I feel like I'm really being my true self. None of those things are caused by hitting those objectives. There are some questions that can keep us up at night. What is the meaning of life? What should I do with mine? These are big juicy questions and we can spend lifetime thinking about them.

But are they useful questions? When we come back, what we can learn about designing our lives from people who design products for a living. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

We all want to live meaningful lives. But sometimes the way we go about doing it can be counterproductive.

In our pursuit of meaning, we can push ourselves into cycles of rumination and self-doubt or chronic stress and exhaustion. At Stanford University, Dave Evans says there are a handful of dysfunctional beliefs that get in the way of living the lives we want to live. Dave, I want to talk about some of these dysfunctional beliefs. You talked earlier about wanting

to solve the energy crisis in the late 70s, getting a master's degree in thermoscience and then not being able to find work. You once met a man whom you call Alan, who had a similar story. I understand he started out in sociology, but then made a transition into the tech world. Yes, he was trying to make a living. He studied sociology and mitered in art history and he was a lovely guy with a nice liberal arts education and it was hard to get paid for that. But he

turned out to be a pretty good quantifier as well. He kind of liked spreadsheets and even statistics a little bit and he found his way to doing project management, managing schedules and resources, that sort of thing. In software companies, particularly related to the way they ran their marketing program. So we ended up becoming a pretty well-respected marketing project manager.

So he's working on these large engineering teams. He's working on multi-million-dollar projects.

“He's making good money. Was he feeling on top of the world?”

No, he was feeling, he was feeling underutilized and he was feeling under-recognized. Because what he wanted was the chance to demonstrate some creativity. And so, again, he's in a service role. He's clients, if you will, or internal people, who work for the same company. And they would come to him with, "Can you help us with this?" And we have this project, "Can you help us?" And that was his job, which he did well.

And then he would have ideas about how he could do it better. Do it more creatively. And more often than not, not only were people not interested, but they didn't even want to hear about it. Like, whatever. I mean, where's that thing? I mean, I ordered a hamburger with no cheese on it. You know, I don't know what this sausage thing is, but where's my hamburger? Right. And he was pretty heartbroken. And his conclusion was that they don't value me.

I'm not valued. These people don't understand what I can do. And so, I can't be here.

“So, I think many of us have felt this way at some point. We get the thing that we think”

will fulfill us. The dream job, the house, perhaps even the perfect family. But we still feel like something is missing. You argue that this frustration stems from the fact that we put too much stock in two concepts, fulfillment and impact. Let's start with fulfillment. What do you mean when you say that we put too much stock in fulfillment? Well, this is really kind of why we wrote this most recent book.

I mean, we'd help people design a lot of lives and read this on a lot of careers. And they still kept coming back on, I did know that. And technically, it worked, but it's still not as fulfilling as I was hoping it was going to be. And we said, "Well, tell us what you mean by that." And overwhelmingly, what fulfillment meant to people was, "Am I getting to be all that I can be?" And then we did some research and found out the reason almost everybody thinks that fulfillment

is getting a chance to do everything you want to do or particularly everything you can do.

“This is because Abraham Maslow told you that that's what you should want.”

So, we have the hierarchy of needs going back to his originating paper in 1943, which the NIH calls one of the stickiest ideas on the social sciences, where the apex of the human experience is self-actualization. In self-actualization occurs when one becomes all that one can be. And if I can pull that off, what will I get according to Maslow is I will get fulfillment.

We know all of us contain more lifeness than your lifetime premature to live out.

There's more than one life worth of living in you, in there. There's more than one of you.

“There's lots of shockers, which one are you going to be this year?”

So, what's I know? And I accept the good news. Wow, isn't it cool that my human capacity even exceeds my lifetime? Which means I've got some alternative choices to make. I've got some variety in front of me.

Oh, I no longer have the goal of trying to be all I can be, because you can't even get there from here. You can't be all you can be, don't worry about that. Now, can I be fully who I'm trying to be right now? That's the invitation.

So, in some ways, what Maslow was telling us is that if you are everything that you want to be, if you can become everything that you possibly can be, you're going to be happy. But the point that you're making is there are more lifetimes in each of us than we can fit into any one lifetime. And so, by definition, none of us are actually going to reach that point of fulfillment. Yes, unfortunately, Maslow gave everybody this moral incentive to believe I deserve to be all that I can be.

And our argument is that's impossible. The other idea you think and lead us to dysfunction outcomes is this idea of impact. As people reach for fulfillment, they often ask themselves, "How will I fulfill my destiny?"

“Can you talk about how this relates to the idea of impact, Dave?”

So, some people start with it's not fulfilling enough. And this, am I getting to express all of me? And the other most common is, you know, it's just not meaningful enough. Well, what would make it more meaningful, making a difference and need to make a difference. I need to change the world. I need to have an impact.

I need this to be recognized and need this to last. And they're talking in a variety of ways all about the production of their lives. The product, the outcome of their work, making some kind of a difference. Now, don't get us wrong. We are terribly in favor of people having positive impacts. I'm still trying to have a positive impact.

But what we're noticing is for a lot of people impact making is the only version of meaning making that they validate. And the problem with it is when you lean into that, even if it works. And by the way, if you do everything right, your chance of still successfully having an impact

is maybe 50/50, because you know, there's other 8 billion people on the planet.

They might go off script at some point and they're awfully hard to control. But, you know, even if you do pull off that impact, what have you done for me lately? Yeah. You know, I mean, you know, I shift them out so long time ago. What have you done for us lately? So, impact, the feeling that comes from an impact doesn't last. And frankly, most of the time, pulling off having an impact doesn't work.

“So, it's a very risky business to decide that's the only way my life is meaningful.”

[Music] So, in some ways, we've hitched our wagons to these two horses fulfilment and impact. And in some ways, they're both mirages. Yeah. And even for some people who are pulling it off, I've got friends, my age starting their seventh company. You know, look at this, um, Anna, why are you doing this again?

Well, I'm really good at it. Well, I know, but we knew that five companies are going, I mean, don't you have another idea? Yeah. And frankly, what they are, is they're so stuck on pulling off that impact thing, they become addicted to it.

They can't let go. And then, when they finally get to the place where they can't do it anymore,

it's an existential crisis. [Music] Hmm. Let's look at another dysfunctional belief that gets in the way of living a meaningful life Dave. Many of us feel stuck in one way or another. We're not sure why or what to do. Some people call it a midlife crisis, or I've even heard the term "quadder life crisis" now.

Your colleague, Bill Burnett, once had a student that you called Sonia. Sonia had a problem. What was this problem? Well, she too. Have, you know, she was working in her technology. And she went to a great big company and she was writing her. And she was one of these successful people. The stuff she's writing, millions, even billions of people are using. And she's making a good living. She's working with really intelligent people. She's growing and learning new things.

Wow, this is, this is working on every front. Except then, you know, she suddenly real is, I'm just turning the crank. You know, I'm part of this mechanism of high technology, you know, having people click things through and look at another website does that really matter to me. And am I stuck on this thing forever? And I mean, she was in her early 20s and already felt like she was not hitting the ceiling, she was hitting the wall. Because you kind of look forward

Talk about the idea, Dave, that when we are feeling stuck and desperate like this, many of us

“look for a single big solution that can get us on stuck. You know, there's this magical idea that”

there is this one place I really deserve to be, that my special calling, my special place in the world, what does the universe inviting me to do or where is my passion? All these different narratives come around, there's this, there's this lovely idea that I will find it, which either has no compromise or just tiny little compromises and really lights up the dashboard of my soul and makes me feel like I am in the right place doing the right thing. This is what I was made for and then and then

only do I deserve to be happy and feel like I'm being my authentic self and that almost never really

happens. I understand that Sonya did this, she basically decided that she was going to make a radical change in this career that she was unhappy with. Yes, she really wanted to make a jump and she was particularly attracted to something radically different because it really wanted to feel different and a number of her friends were on the in the process of going up to the sandworn islands and jumping into working together and revitalizing an old farm and making it in organic farms.

So maybe I can just go back to the land and have a personal experience and join this

“commune of organic farmers and that's what's really going to work for me. We don't really know”

how that all worked out for her, but it is a very similar story. Another young man in a who was highly successful in a hate technology stopped out and went to try to start an artist commune actually bought a property in a rural area brought artists in like we're going to have this creative environment. It's going to be great and did that for about two years and then that was lovely and then realized all it is is radically different. I don't even really like this. This isn't that

interesting at the end of the day these people are kind of boring because all they want to talk about is this one little narrow view about art and what I fell for was the radical shift and radical shift to radical but that radicalism doesn't last for a long and you're still stuck with waking up being you living in the world is this the life I want to be in.

“Let's look at another dysfunctional belief that gets in the way of our happiness. This one is about”

the idea that if we don't feel good about doing what we are doing, the solution is to double down work harder and grind. Now of course there is a vast amount of research that finds that hard work is strongly correlated with success but I want to talk about the misguided idea we have that more

is always better. Can you talk about your own life choices here Dave when when your first

kid was born you are you know I don't know how to put this kind of leap you you will work a heart. Yeah you know it really is well this is good more is better you know the psychologist called this hedonic treadmill this is how addiction works you know how much is enough a little bit more and so what I was trying to do was trying to be a successful business person so I was growing rapidly and getting more responsibility and you know having one kid is a good idea let's have more

so but this time I've got three kids you know and I've got so I've got twice as big a family and about five times as big a job and of course my obligation just do everything well and I'm not. It takes me about 75 hours a week to do that job. I learned how to operate on three to four hours a sleep a night which was a bit of a disaster and then I had a severe come-upance one Saturday morning about nine o'clock I'm sitting in the family room drinking a cup of coffee and I heard my then

three-year-old son Robby say to his mother mom can we play with dad today or he's just going to fall asleep in the chair again. Wow and I went oh my god when I was Robby's age my dad was gone because he died when Robby's Robby's age his dad's gone because he's asleep you know a corpse a sleeping guy about the same thing and I suddenly I had this epiphany oh my god I've got to fix this it's not working more is not working. You know we had a lightly cloths on hidden brain some years ago

and that episode has talked with me ever since and his his thesis is that whenever we're trying

to do something in our lives our instinctive approach is always to add to do something more to

increase what we're doing to add the extra note in a score of music to add the extra ingredient in a dish that we're cooking to always think of addition rather than subtraction whereas very often it is subtraction that gets us to the person and the place we want to be. It is indeed you know Georgia O.Keefe an artist that is in elimination that things become available

getting more out of. In fact probably the life you're already in is full of more meaning making

“full of more aliveness if you have the tricks that were with all in particular the mindsets necessary”

to see it to attend to it and to get it from it so we really want to free people up we want people to be free to get what's already there. The poet Mary Oliver famously asked what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life it's a wonderful question it can prompt us to dream big to ask if our ambitions are equal to our potential. But it's also the kind of question that can make us feel that whatever we do is not enough

if one lifetime cannot contain all that we can do surely our hopes and dreams will always be

far greater than our accomplishments. Doesn't that set us up for a lifetime of feeling like we are not measuring up not doing enough for a lifetime of unhappiness when we come back how to root our dreams and ambitions in the soil of what is possible. You're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta this is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta have you ever felt stuck in life

“even when you are doing work that was important and useful if you have a personal story you'd be”

willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone two or three minutes is plenty send the audio file to us using the email address feedback at hiddenbrain.org use a subject line stuck again that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org we all make plans set goals and chase after what we believe will bring us happiness but then almost inevitably things don't go the way we expect life doesn't work out

the way we imagined. What if the problem isn't us or even the vagaries of life but the way we are approaching our goals. Dave Evans is co-author with Bilbernet of how to live a meaningful life using design thinking to unlock purpose, joy and flow every day. He argues that thinking like a designer can help us establish the foundations of a good life. Dave you've taught design thinking for many years you've come on the show before to talk about this idea for listeners who are

not familiar with this approach. What is design thinking? What design thinking is first of all the

relatively new about 15 or 20 year old um nomically true name we have for a process that was originally conceived at Stanford going back to 1963 called human-centered design HCD we renamed it design thinking about 20 years ago and makes a little more accessible and more accurate really and all it is is a methodology to inevitably come up with ideas and solutions to problems that are not easily solved. Problems where you don't know what you're looking for until you find it and when you find it

it's so unique to the context and the person's involved it's not replicable and it changes over time and so design thinking is an approach to number one understanding the problem you're working on and what you might what try to do about it and then having ideas that turn into prototypes experiments to learn your way forward and see what might actually work and then you can implement something that actually is feasible. So what Bill and I did starting 20 years ago is we took

those ideas about designing a future thing you've never done before into designing ourselves

not just designing products and that's turned out to be a pretty interesting conversation. So one of the imperatives of design thinking is to grapple with problems at the right scale. So when we ask ourselves what is the meaning of life you say that could be an

“interesting question but that might be a very bad design question. Can you explain why?”

Yeah we see problem finding precedes problem solving and one of the reasons many efforts fails you're working on the wrong thing. Very often you're working on a two-bickie thing or the wrong thing. And so trying to answer that one ultimate existential question what is the meaning of my life what will I be able to say on my death bed and be satisfied with? Who? That is a really tall bar and frankly we don't know how to design for that because it takes the whole life to answer

it. So we like working on answerable doable problems and the better question is not what's the meaning of life but how might I live a more meaningful life now and that's what's on

Let's talk about some of the ways that design thinking can make the question of life's

“meaningfulness more achievable more doable. You point to a number of different design”

principles that can help break down this question. The first is something that you call

fully engaged and calmly detached. What do you mean by this thing? What does it mean to have the mind of a designer? Designers who think this way look at the world a little bit differently. So fully engaged and calmly detached is this aspirational mindset that says I want to be entirely available and entirely engage with what I'm doing that's right in front. I'm having a conversation with this incredibly lovely person, Nameshanka Medottam on this fabulous conversation called

hidden brand or the bunch of thoughtful people am I paying attention or am I thinking about what I'm going to have with dinner with my friend who's staying over the house tonight. So

I want to be fully engaged but I also want to be calmly detached because there's this thing

called the outcome of what I'm doing that in truth I have no control over. At the end of the day doing the right thing is all I can do the best I can possibly do so I can control my participation but I cannot control the outcome and it turns out those two things then become competitors. If I get

“too wound up in worrying about the, is this going to go well as shocker going to like the episode?”

I wonder what the listness will think. If I'm too distracted by my involvement in the outcome I'm too attached to that outcome. It's going to get in the way of my participation. So the best way to be fully engaged is to let go of the outcome and then we'll take things as they come. And of course this happens at an interpersonal level all the time someone gives us feedback,

the feedback is critical and instead of listening to it or exploring it with curiosity

we get defensive because we now are saying someone is criticizing what I'm doing, someone doesn't like the outcomes of what I'm doing, I'm working so hard, I'm a good person and now suddenly your ego gets caught up with the problem and now you can't listen to the advice for what it actually is. It'd be all committed to the outcome that you have in my frankly completely

“takes you out of what you're already doing. It's not that I don't care. It's that I'm not”

so committed to it and involved to it that I know I'm sticking my reputation on it, I'm sticking my identity and now I've got to suck a logical attachment to it and it's all about me. So what really boils down to is recognizing that it's not about you all the time. Many years ago the research of Ron Howard talked about the quality of the decision versus the quality of the outcome and in some ways that has bearing on what we've been just talking about Dave, can you explain

this idea? It turns out thinking well making a good decision is a good idea and if we could run the same decision in a thousand parallel universes and watch all the vagaries, the better decisions would probably work out more often than the bad decisions but let's be clear. I'm not in charge of the future. You can influence as best you possibly can but let's have an honest and humble perspective on ourselves. I'm doing the best I can but that doesn't mean it's going to work.

So in some ways what I'm hearing you say is that when it comes to the outcome of our decisions you know acknowledging them with some humility means that you know I can plan for a beautiful wedding but I might want to tell myself you know it could rain that day. The caterers might get a flat tire on their way to the venue. The venue itself might burn to the ground. There are many things that are outside my control and acknowledging them at the outset. In some ways limit my

expectations and frustrations when things don't go the way I want. Absolutely what we're trying to do is I'm trying to give reality it's best possible chance of turning out the way I hope and then once I'm doing that then I release the fact that then I get to fully participate in the reality that is actually going to occur. So if indeed I've planned this thing and it rains that day. Well I can spend all afternoon going shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot

you know and being out of the weatherman who owed me a sunny afternoon or just okay and what can we do with this? You know there's this phrase making the best of a bad situation. That's really unfair. The situation doesn't think of itself as bad. The rain's not going I'm here to ruin your party. You know the rain's just falling. So it's really making the best of thus situation. All we're ever trying to do is make the best of thus situation.

Another design principle you talk about is story crafting. What story crafting did?

now that's true. The your internal narrative really matters and so story crafting is about

“picking carefully the story that you're telling yourself and living into because it is a profound”

effect both on the life you live and the quality of your experience of it. Of course that story has to be true. It can't be a fantasy story. We're not fans of magical thinking but we are big fans of picking the story that's true. And most generative to give you the best possible chance of becoming fully alive. You and others have looked at the role that story crafting plays

among first generation college students. Tell me about this work and what you find.

Well you know Stanford is of course an elite university but what people lose track of is you know 18% of our students are on financial aid so they're not prep school kids and by no means are they all highly resource. We have lots of first generation students or under resource students who really suffer the imposter syndrome like man do I really belong here and they're

“group of people in the education school and psychology department who work on intervening”

in ways that might be helpful to these students. And one of the results was it turned out is short as a 15 minute intervention with the first generation student on the narrative they're telling themselves can have a transformative effect that lasts not only all four years of college but five or ten years after. And the narrative simply is not yeah you're under resource and all those guys who went to the prep school are going to kick your butt. That story is in replace

by the reason you're here is you're highly capable. You can do this work and there are lots of resources to help you that you can avail yourself of. And if that's stored that alternate

narrative is offered to that first-hand student by another first-hand student two or three years

older than them for whom it has worked. They believe it and literally that 15 minutes their performance changes permanently. I want to talk about another design principle but first I want to talk about some of your own experience as a designer. When you are an undergraduate engineering student Dave you were also a firefighter and one of the first products you designed was a fire hydrant wrench. What is a fire

hydrant wrench? Well if you ever take a look at your neighborhood fire hydrant there's a little you know cover over the nozzle where the water comes out on one side and on the other side of that thing there's a little post sticking out that's actually the valve that opens and closes the hydrant. And if you look at it it's in the shape of a pentagon. It's in the shape of a five-sided pentagon and the reason is because we don't want people opening fire hydrants who don't know what

to do it. And so when I went into mechanical engineering and went into the PRL the product realization lab which you have might call the machine shop. I've walked in there with a great big chunk of brass and the idea was to mill that thing into a fire hydrant wrench that had one of those pentagon things on it on the one hand and a kind of special curvy thing on the other to take the cover off because you need one of those if you're fighting a fire. Tell me what happened as you were trying to mold

this brass thingy into a wrench. Did it all go smoothly? It went very uns smoothly because I didn't

know what I was doing. I'd never done anything like that before and never used the

machine. Didn't know what to use a mill or a lathe or a high speed you know metal bandsaw. I'd never worked with anything that heavy before I was completely inexperienced you know broke a broke tools I had to get more materials and I had this idea in my head about this perfect wrench that I'd seen that was you know box from a very expensive supplier. And then I finally

“realized what I was doing was which is a metaphor for the rest of real life is I'm trying to make”

a real thing. I'm trying to bring it into being trying to take something and allow something real something, find out something, limit it something, constrain something, even with flaws in it to come into being and all that struggle with you know breaking parts of what have you proved to me that this thing was going to be a compromise. You see that the way we craft physical objects can teach us something about how to craft and make

meaningful moments out of the daily events of our lives and you call this moment making. What do you mean by this show? Well the thing about making anything is of course is limitation and this goes back to one of our big reframes are on the meaning question is what we call the scandal of particularity which is there is no perfect fire hydrant wrench there is no perfect birthday cake there is no perfect conversation with chakra vedata there's only the one I'm

really found in the particular and they reflect that they're not the fullness of it but they

“reflect it honestly and that isn't a problem it's not oh I fell short again it's not the”

perfect fire hydrant wrench it's the real one all the hours I spent making this thing you start to the great big block of brass and it ended up being a very specific thing is very much like sculpture you know you know Michelangelo releasing the angel from the marble I'm the process of releasing the wrench from the block and if all I want is the end result then everything ended up to that simply doesn't matter and every mistake I make is in the way

and a problem as opposed to I yes I need to pay enough attention that this thing will actually work when it's all said and done that matters however was I present at that time was I actually noticing and learning how to use the machine tools was I noticing how a sharpened tool works differently than a dull tool did I understand the difference between brass and steel and did I get the feel that I actually feel and you can if you do this right you can feel the metal cutting in your hands

and do you understand that experience and now I'm actually being a maker not just I completed making

and so if everything's just the outcome when it's all done by the second I finish making that wrench

how long does the moment of being done last a microsecond now it's passed so what's next you know and and I missed to I missed the whole darn thing you know people very often missed the whole darn thing because all they want is the outcome and then it's over I mean philosophers and spiritual traditions have told us for centuries that we have to live in the moment and in some

“ways that's what I hear you're saying it's exactly what we're saying I mean rom does sit at a long”

time ago you know be here now because at the end of the day that's the essence of it we call it the flow world not the transaction world the transaction was finished the wrench make it available on the fire truck that's a transaction but the moment was standing at the lathe and actually experiencing how a cutting tool and a piece of metal interact that's entering

into the fullness of the moment so moment making turns out to be the critical task of people who

want to design more meaning in their life and particularly the kinds of meaning that can transcend not just impact making which is wonderful but hard and short-lived these moments full of potential meaningful experience a bound in front of us so the number one skill of a meaning-making designer is moment-making I'm also reflecting Dave that the process that you are describing to build a fire hydrant range also applies in some ways to interpersonal contexts and emotional

situations when we are working on something with someone we're working as part of a team when we are managing someone when we're dealing with a boss when we are you know thinking about a child or a partner or a spouse all of these involve relationships that are under construction and in fact they're under construction all the time and when you have that mindset you're not trying to think about okay there is a perfect place I'm going to get to with this other person

and once we get to that place we're going to be happy forever we're going to live happily forever as the fairy tale say in some ways it takes the pressure off the outcome and gives us more enjoyment in the process absolutely and one of the little tools we've invented for that is the got to get to shift when you're thinking transactional you're in the transactional world it's all by getting a done so I've got to get this thing done you've got to get through this meeting

I've got to get these people to agree I've got to sign this contract I've got to get these tasks assigned whatever that might be you know as opposed to I get to participate in this process there's a

“lovely illustration that I think I've permissioned to use our editor who's working with us on this”

book is you know she's working at home remote one day and her child is in the other room making a bunch of noise while she's about to go into a zoom call you know and she started saying to herself gotta find her when you get this kid to quiet down while I'm working and then she's suddenly remembered oh yeah she had just read the got to get to idea in the manuscript and said no no I know I get to work at home now which means I get to be in the presence of the effort

vessant sound coming out of this very alive child I still get to work in the presence of that I can put on my headphones and solve that problem easily I'm so lucky that I get to be here

and that took about two seconds to have that change of mind and everything changed so that's

“what we're looking for we're looking for see it a different way and have a surprising change”

of your psychic experience of your life and of course many of us discover this too late Dave you know when we lose someone in our lives we now say you know I would give anything to have that person back with us even though when they were with us we were often frustrated by them or irritated by them or we should that they would say or do something different and of course be recognized that we are actually happy with all those things when we don't have that person anymore

yeah you know I I had this experience in my 20s in my career where I suddenly realized that I was living entirely in the future that I would never get to and then there was a time I was talking with an intensive care unit nurse about this problem of always the next thing I was the next thing

“you know we get there and then get the next school then the next school and frankly you're never”

really enjoying the meal you're just trying to get it over with and she said oh yeah yeah we have a term for that we call it destination sickness I go what thick is destination sickness she goes oh yeah you know here in the ICU particularly stand for we have all these highly accomplished people and it was always you know when I finished the degree and then when I get the grade degree and

then when I get the good job and then I make partner and then I make my first million and it's always

that next thing will make me happy and she said and some of the people here like the ones in their mid 50s who've burned their heart out and now they're actually gonna die there's nothing more we can do for them they suddenly realize there is no next thing and then they'll look back

“at all the things they ran through and they realized they missed the whole thing and frankly”

this she said and most of them dying to spare and realize this too late I mean I shuddered at that I said oh my god she goes oh yeah it's really rough by the way here's the tip don't do that are the challenges we face in designing our lives the same as we go through a

different stages of our lives turns out they are not designing your life when you are a high school

or college student it's a very different challenge than designing your life when you're in the thick of a career or when you're contemplating retirement in our companion episode available exclusively for our subscribers on hidden brain plus we look at how different design strategies apply to different stages of our lives if you're already a subscriber that episode is available right now in this podcast feed it's titled seasons of meaning if you're not yet a

subscriber please consider signing up go to support dot hidden brain dot org if you're using an apple device go to apple dot co slash hidden brain you can get a free trial in both places and you instantly have access to all our subscriber only content again that support dot hidden brain dot org or apple dot co slash hidden brain day events and bilber net are co-authors of how to live a meaningful life using design thinking to unlock purpose joy and flow every day

Dave thank you so much for joining me today on hidden brain thanks shockers great to be here do you have questions or comments about how to live a more meaningful life have you felt stuck in life but then found a way forward if you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with a hidden brain audience or if you have a question or comment about design thinking please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone two or three minutes is plenty email the audio file to us

using the email address feedback at hidden brain dot org use a subject line stuck again that email address is feedback at hidden brain dot org our conversation with Dave Evans continues next week many of us think of meaning as something we find but meaning is really something we design by staying curious experimenting and reframing our challenges we can create lives that feel purposeful and grounded instead of rushed and depleted in our conversation next week we focus on

what may be the most difficult challenge in designing our lives it isn't about where we want to go it's about accepting where we are right now please tune in for it it's titled radical acceptance hidden brain is produced by hidden brain media our audio production team includes an emergency

Tara Boyle is our executive producer I'm hidden brain executive editor if you like this episode

“please share it with a couple of friends what if math recommendations are the way most people find”

their way to our show I'm Shankar Vedantam see you soon

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