Designing a Life That Matters  🔗 **Source:** [Designing a Life That Matters](https://share.snipd.com/episode/650dd476-cb2d-4007-8d01-5541f76aebc7) ## Highlights - **From Thermoscience To Apple** - Dave Evans graduated in thermoscience aiming to solve the energy crisis but couldn't find work in an industry that didn't exist yet. - He pivoted into tech, unexpectedly joining Apple after 14 interviews and lunch with Steve Jobs, which launched a new career path. Transcript: Shankar Vedantam I was trying to do. Dave Evans So you graduated in 1976. Shankar Vedantam What was the world like at that time? And was the world ready for your miraculous discoveries? Dave Evans Well, the world was doing all kinds of things. You know, we're 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 in a beat-up old 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 contests 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 had the technology, we had the right ideas. But what we were missing was the social will. There was a small fact that was left out of the brochure of my master's degree, which is it's very difficult to get a job in 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 I was really upset. Shankar Vedantam I understand that you eventually pivoted and found a job at a small tech company? Dave Evans Yes, there's a little outfit 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. I had a little solar energy startup that, of course, miserably failed because it was way too soon. And the guy said, my name is so-and 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. 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 liked computers was the guy they wanted. And a very long story later, including 14 interviews and sitting down for lunch with Steve Jobs, they surprised themselves by offering me a job. And to my great shock, I took it. And that's how my high tech career started. ([Time 0:05:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9cab44b5-52a0-49a8-a398-859507dda36c)) - **Successful Life That Still Felt Empty** - Allison had the life she planned—accounting business, family, house—but felt something vital was missing and asked, "What's wrong with my life?" - Her story illustrates success on paper can still feel empty and leave people stuck. Transcript: Shankar Vedantam Years later, after you left Apple, you began teaching at Stanford. You were giving a talk to a room full of accountants in Kansas City when a woman whom you call Allison 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? Dave Evans And she described this success that didn't work out as she had hoped. So she was 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. ([Time 0:09:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b8e8d83b-eec3-4b81-880e-89e46ee58b52)) - **Fulfillment Is Not Being All Things** - Maslow's ideal of self-actualization pushes us to try to be "all we can be," but Evans argues that's impossible within one lifetime. - Instead aim to be fully who you choose to be in the present moment, not everything across imagined lifetimes. Transcript: Shankar Vedantam Let's start with fulfillment. What do you mean when you say that we put too much stock in fulfillment? Dave Evans 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 redesign a lot of careers, and they still kept coming back going, I did all 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, you know, getting a chance to do everything you want to do, or particularly everything You can do, is because Abraham Maslow told you 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. And 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. So self-actualize, be everything you can be, and you get fulfillment. We know all of us contain more aliveness than your lifetime permits you 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 chakras. Which one are you going to be this year? So once I know and I accept the good news that, wow, isn't it cool that my human 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? ([Time 0:17:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b2cb6b7f-48de-40ee-a298-3af45376b854)) - **Impact Alone Is A Fragile Meaning** - Impact as the sole source of meaning is unstable because outcomes depend on many uncontrollable factors and any gained recognition fades. - Betting meaning only on lasting impact is risky and often unsatisfying even when achieved. Transcript: Dave Evans So some people start with, it's not fulfilling enough. And that's, 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. I need to make a difference. I need to change the world. I need to have an impact. I need this to be recognized. I 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, those 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 shipped the mouse a 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. ([Time 0:19:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e844fc02-ff65-4a26-bfcf-265c92bdfc06)) - **Radical Career Jumps Often Wear Off** - Sonia, a successful coder, felt she was "just turning the crank" and briefly tried radical shifts like farming or artist communes to feel different. - Radical changes sometimes fail because the same self still faces daily reality; novelty often wears off. Transcript: Dave Evans You know, she was working in high technology and she went to a great big company and she was writing code 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 realized 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 through the lens of, you know, techno Capitalism and said, that's all this thing is forever. Shankar Vedantam 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 unstuck. Dave Evans 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 is the universe inviting me to do? Or where is my passion? These different narratives come around. 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. Shankar Vedantam I understand that Sonia did this. She basically decided that she was going to make a radical change in this career that she was unhappy with. Dave Evans Yeah, 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 in the of going up to the San Juan Islands and jumping into working together and revitalizing an old farm and making it an organic farm. 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 there's a very similar story. Another young man I know who was highly successful in 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 he 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 shifts are radical, but that radicalism doesn't last very long. ([Time 0:22:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/940f6817-2c61-4500-98f7-7e9deaf0538d)) - **Stop Doubling Down When It Costs Your Life** - Avoid the "more is better" trap; doubling down endlessly can lead to destination sickness and missing present life moments. - When Dave overworked, his 3-year-old's question revealed he needed to stop grinding and be present. Transcript: Shankar Vedantam Can you talk about your own life choices here, Dave? When your first kid was born, you were, you know, I don't know how to put this kindly, you were a workaholic. Dave Evans Yeah, you know, it really is, well, if this is good, more is better. You know, the psychologists call 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 by 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 to 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 of sleep a night, which was a bit of a disaster. And then I had a severe comeuppance one Saturday morning, about 9 o'clock. I'm sitting in the family room drinking a cup of coffee. And I heard my then 3-year son, Robbie, say to his mother, Mom, can we play with Dad today or are he just going to fall asleep in the chair again? Wow. And I went, oh, my God. When I was Robbie's age, my dad was gone because he died. When Robbie's Robbie's age, his dad's gone because he's asleep. You know, a corpse, a sleeping guy, about the same thing. And I suddenly had this epiphany. Oh, my God, I've got to fix this. It's not working. ([Time 0:25:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/478fc463-b30a-4cec-8ae5-3c8d381e1e9e)) - **Treat Life Choices Like Design Experiments** - Use design thinking to approach life: frame solvable problems, prototype experiments, and iterate rather than seek one grand answer. - Treat uncertain life decisions as testable prototypes you can learn from and adjust. Transcript: Dave Evans Design thinking is, first of all, the relatively new, about 15 or 20 year old nomenclature, a 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. It makes it a little more accessible, more accurate, really. And all it is is a methodology to innovatively 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 persons involved, it's not replicatable. 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 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. ([Time 0:32:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6e9012f3-bb39-4392-8a79-824585735628)) - **Be Fully Engaged And Calmly Detached** - Be fully engaged in the present task but calmly detached from outcomes you can't control to improve participation and learning. - Let go of staking identity on results so you can listen, adapt, and enjoy the process. Transcript: Dave Evans 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, entirely engaged with what I'm doing that's right in front. I'm having a conversation with this incredibly lovely person named Shankar Vedantam on this fabulous conversation called Hidden Brain with a 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 at 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 outcome, is this going to go well? Is Shankar going to like the episode? I wonder what the listeners 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. ([Time 0:35:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7db6945b-bd2f-42c3-8130-fb35792dd240)) - **A Short Narrative Reframe Changes Trajectories** - Story crafting shapes performance and belonging; offering first-gen students a generative narrative in 15 minutes improved long-term outcomes. - A brief, true alternate narrative from a relatable peer changed students' trajectories for years. Transcript: Shankar Vedantam What is story crafting, Dave? Dave Evans Well, there's the old line that life is a story we tell ourselves, and the psychologist will remind us now that's true. Your internal narrative really matters. And so story crafting is about picking carefully the story that you are telling yourself and living into, because it has 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 truest and most generative to give you the best possible chance of becoming fully alive. Shankar Vedantam 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. Dave Evans Well, you know, Stanford is, of course, an elite university. But what people lose track of is, you know, 80 percent of our students are on financial aid. So they're not prep school kids. And by no means are they all highly resourced. We have lots of first-generation students or under-resourced students who really suffer the imposter syndrome. Like, man, do I really belong here? And there are a 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, as short as a 15-minute intervention with a 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 10 years after. And the narrative simply is not, yeah, you're under-resourced and all those guys who went to the prep school are going to kick your butt. That story is then replaced 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 story, that alternate narrative is offered to that first gen student by another first gen student two or three years older than them for whom it has worked, they believe it. ([Time 0:39:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a5ada528-f4c7-4d1c-81b7-bf89e6a662b7)) - **Make Moments Not Just Outcomes** - Moment making values being present in the process (like standing at a lathe) over fixating on outcomes that vanish instantly. - Crafting the particular, limited experience yields more lasting meaning than chasing perfect end results. Transcript: Shankar Vedantam Well, the thing about making anything is, of course, it's limitation. Dave Evans And this goes back to one of our big reframes around 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 Vedantim. There's only the one I'm actually in. So thing one in making something is recognizing its limitation. All ultimates are only 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, it started with a great big block of brass, and it ended up being a very specific thing. It's very much like sculpture, you know, like Michelangelo releasing the angel from the marble. I'm in the process of releasing the wrench from the block. And if all I want is the end result, then everything I did up to that simply doesn't matter. And every mistake I make is in the way and a problem. As opposed to, 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 the 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? 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 way, the second I finished 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 I missed it. I missed the whole darn thing. ([Time 0:44:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/12c7e029-2550-489b-a6af-5ae14138bb68)) - **Flip Got To Into Get To** - Reframe tasks from "got to" obligations into "get to" opportunities to shift mood and increase gratitude. - An editor changed her mindset about a noisy child during a Zoom call and immediately felt luckier and calmer. Transcript: Dave Evans 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 transactionally, you're in the transactional world, it's all about getting it 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 have permission 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 onto a Zoom Call. And she started saying to herself, I've got to find a way to get this kid to quiet down while I'm working. And then she suddenly remembered, oh, yeah, she had just read the got-to idea in the manuscript and said, no, no, no. I get to work at home now, which means I get to be in the presence of the effervescent 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 be a part of that. Now, how do I, I've got to find a way to shut the kid up. ([Time 0:49:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3e8e5534-28df-4ef6-81d7-cd53751145f5)) - **Destination Sickness Leads To Late Regret** - Destination sickness—always living for the next achievement—causes many to miss their lives and face despair at the end. - ICU staff observed high-achieving patients dying with regret for a life spent chasing future goals. Transcript: Dave Evans You know, 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, oh, it's the next thing, always the next thing. You know, we get there and then get the next goal, then the next goal. 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 the heck is destination sickness? She goes, oh yeah, you know, here in the ICU, particularly at Stanford, we have all these highly accomplished people. And it was always, you know, when I finished the degree, and then when I get the grad 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 going to die. There's nothing more we can do for them. They suddenly realize there is no next thing. And then they look back at all the things they ran through and they realize they missed the whole thing. And frankly, she said, and most of them die in despair and realize it's too late. I mean, I shuddered at the time. I said, oh my God. She goes, oh yeah, it's really rough. By the way, here's a tip. ([Time 0:50:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4082acd3-f7f1-4683-a4df-bf6443ba6f2b))