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Bill Burnett: How to Live a Meaningful Life
00:28:57
In our conversation with Bill Burnett, we dig into the loneliness epidemic, especially among Gen Z, and why so many people look to work to provide meaning when work isn’t actually set up to do that. Bill introduces a powerful framework: Wonder, Coherence, Flow, and Community which are the four components of meaning-making and influence longevity.
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- [00:02]
A
There's a ton of new research now in the neuroscience of awe and wonder, these states of feeling connected. And you can manifest those states by just practicing the mindset of wonder and the mindset of curiosity. That's why it's so natural for designers to feel those states, because we're good at getting into a curiosity mindset, a wonder mindset.
- [00:27]
B
When we last spoke with Bill Burnett, it was in 2020 and he just published his book Designing your, co authored by Dave Evans. The world was in the midst of a pandemic and work and careers seemed very uncertain. Along with their other best selling book, Designing youg Life, millions of people found guidance and a process for reframing how to approach their career and life plans in general, inspired by a methodology that Bill taught during his many years in the Stanford Design Program.
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C
Over the intervening years, Bill and Dave had countless conversations with people who had, at least to some degree, quote unquote, figured out work, family and friends. But ironically, they still felt stuck. They were stuck on the question of meaning. Bill told us that asking what is the meaning of life? Is not the right question. Instead, we should be asking how can I find meaning in life? In their new book, how to Live a Meaningful Life, Bill and Dave aspire to give you the tools and ideas to help you make a life rich with meaning and purpose. In our conversation, we dig into the loneliness epidemic, especially among Gen Z, and why so many people look to work to provide meaning when work really isn't set up to do that. Bill introduces a powerful and useful framework about wonder, coherence, flow, and community, the four components of meaning making that can also influence life longevity.
- [01:52]
B
If you've ever felt like you're checking all the boxes but still missing something, this conversation offers a practical, design driven way forward. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [02:06]
C
And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two, and all of them are ad free. Plus you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, you'll also get our Toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Read AI and more. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, just shoot us an email@subscriptionsdepartment.com we'll help you out. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Design Better is brought to you by WIX Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop and manage exceptional web projects at scale. Learn more@wix.com studio. And now back to the show.
- [03:38]
B
Bill Burnett, welcome back to Design Better.
- [03:40]
A
Well, nice to be back. Eli and Aaron, you guys have got a great podcast. It's really been booming since the last time I was here.
- [03:46]
B
Thank you. Yeah, it's been a number of years. And you were also on Aaron's other show, reconsidering.
- [03:50]
C
Yep. You've made the rounds, Bill.
- [03:54]
B
You know, of course we taught together for many years and I do miss that. Though we do get to see you come in as one of our kind of experts in residence every year. So that's fun too. But you got a new book out which is going to be the focus of our conversation.
- [04:07]
C
So.
- [04:07]
B
So let's kind of start with the origin story of that. And you've helped probably hundreds of thousands or millions of folks through designing your life and designing your work life and the workshops that you run and coaching and all that. But what over the course of creating those things and getting them out in the world made you realize that even people who might have sort of figured out a path or used design in your life might still feel stuck?
- [04:30]
A
Yeah, well, that's exactly the point of view we took. I mean, you know, we're human centered designers. We go with where there's a need. And the first book came out in 2016, so 10 years ago. Wow, that's crazy. We've sold over a million copies. It's been pretty successful, way more than we thought it would be. It hit a couple of different nerves. One was, hey, the future's uncertain and people have anxiety about that and how do I figure out my future? And that's why we started the class at Stanford, because the students were really struggling to launch. So there's that and then there's the, hey, let's do it. From a designer's point of view, design is a much more open ended creative process. I was at Apple for seven years designing the first laptops and I knew some guys on the ICLone team. When you're doing something new to the world, a new product or service, which is what you and I have been teaching people for years, Eli, at Stanford, how to do new products, new services, new experiences. You don't have any data about the future, so you have to build lots of prototypes and try lots of things. Turned out. That was a pretty good way to think about your life as well. Okay, so zoom to about two years ago, Dave and I, I had been getting lots of emails and it's lovely. People will say, hey, I got your book. It really helped me change my life, or it helped me with a get over a problem, get me unstuck. But there was a persistent sort of sense of, but, you know, life just isn't as meaningful as I want it to be. And particularly the Gen Zs, we know this from the students. They really want meaning. They want to know why they're doing something, what's the purpose, what's the impact going to be? And so we start talking to people about impact and meaning and what are you really looking for? And then combine that with this is the loneliest generation we've ever educated. And the loneliness epidemic in general, it's really severe in the younger ages. And I've been doing work with folks in retirement, you know, in their sort of 50s, 60s, and above. And Dave Evans, my writing partner, has been working at Stanford in what's called the Distinguished Career Institute, the DCI Fellows. And they're all people retiring and coming back to Stanford for a gap year for grownups to figure out where they want to go next. So you got loneliness, you've got lack of community, you've got this meaning and purpose gap somehow an impact gap. The big question, what's the meaning of life? Is a philosophical problem. We're not philosophers. But how to get more meaning in your life or out of your life? How do you get more out of it? Not cram more into it, but get more out of it. And how to find things that are meaningful and that have impact, that can be a design problem. And so we realized we were onto something. And that was really the genesis of the book called how to Live a Meaningful Life Using design thinking to unlock purpose, joy and flow every day. And we think it's easier than it sounds. I mean, you don't have to sit on a rock for 10 years and meditate. You don't have to have a mindfulness practice. When you reframe from the meaning of life to getting more meaning in life, or what we call being fully alive, fully alive by design, then you start to see, oh, wow, hey, this isn't that hard. And it's pretty satisfying when you turn yourself into a moment designer. We call it meaning astrology, moments. You become a moment designer, which is sort of an experience design thing. And it all kind of fell into place.
- [07:34]
C
You know, a lot of folks look for meaning in their work and I think it's because we spend so much time at work. And so we want it to be more than transactional. We want it to be more than I made some money. We want it to also feel like there's something good that we're doing there. But work is just like one place to get meaning. So how does work fit into that notion of meaning and how do you break down what meaning really is? Because there's a lot of different ways we could look at that.
- [08:05]
A
Work is a place that particularly younger generation wants to find meaning or purpose or want to think about impact. A lot of times most of our time during the day is at work. We're spending 40, 50, sometimes more hours at work a week. And as I'm advising students or people who I'm coaching, it's like, look, the world of work isn't set up around finding your purpose or meaning or impact. I'm pretty sure you didn't answer a job listing that said looking for someone who wants more meaning, like looking for someone who can do figma and blah blah blah blah, right? Some technical workflow. But work is a place where moments occur of meaning, moments of connection with other people, moments of realization, right, that you're not alone, that other people have the similar feelings. First chapter of the book, we talk about a big distinction, that there's one world, really. But you can think of the world as sort of two different things. One world, as we call the transaction world. It's just the world where you're getting stuff done. And that's what mostly work is about, getting things done. Moving information from one place to another, designing something, releasing something. It's all transactional. But right underneath that, right underneath that, like an aquifer of meaning and purpose, right underneath the world of transactions is the world of flow. And we know flow is truly a neuroscience based thing. It's a real thing. Czech Centmihalyi discovered it back in the 90s. Just was reading an article 21 Neuroscience Methods for Achieving Flow. So what we know now is that flow is possible. It's not just a peak experience or the runner's high or being in the zone that you can be in flow at any moment, at any time. So it's just a matter of shifting your mindset impact for Instance is all in the transaction world. Get something done, have an impact. Everybody says, hey, high five, great job. And three months later you're like, okay, now what? The impact's over, right? It doesn't last. But moments of meaning and moments where meaning occurs mostly in the flow world are available at work. They're just not about the transactions. So if you reframe it that way, any activity, work, play. My two daughters have young families, you know, young kids running around, and one has an eight month old baby and not getting enough sleep. It's like it doesn't feel like there's a lot of flow available in some of those things. But that moment of quiet when the baby falls asleep on his shoulder, which I just was up there doing a little bit of grandfathering, is a pure moment of joy and a pure moment of flow. And so once you reorient what you're looking for, don't look for meaning in the transactions. They're not set up for that. It's not anybody's fault. The company's not bad. It's set up to do transactions and make money, serve customers. You have to bring the moments. You have to design the moments of connection with your colleagues and design the moments of impact in the transactional world, but just shift them into the world of flow, where the impact becomes a sense of satisfaction rather than a, oh, I check the box accomplishment.
- [11:02]
B
I really like that idea of extending flow beyond maybe something you're working on. I certainly find that when I'm designing something or sketching something or getting deep into a task, I can find myself in a flow state. But I think I could also label it differently in that. So I was just talking to you, Bill, about the office. I just finished here. And sometimes after working hours, Courtney and I will come out here and just do a little happy hour, sit together, put a record on. And that, in a way, is also kind of a moment of flow, because we don't have the distraction of the kids running around. We don't have screens in front of us. We're just sitting there talking to each other, having a drink, and it feels like a similar state.
- [11:38]
C
Yeah.
- [11:39]
A
And if I put your brain in a scanner, at that time, your executive function, prefrontal cortex, would be calmed down. The left and the right brain would be talking to each other. The music would be stimulating, sort of an emotionalist response, probably some dopamine and other happy chemicals. And those moments can be designed. We talk about designing a moment like an experience design, then executing it, finding the flow there. But you can also look backward and reflect on moments and find the flow in that reflection, right? So when I said in the beginning, it's easier than you think. Once you realize where meaning resides in these moments and that you can design them and that you can reflect on moments and harvest the sense of meaning and flow, then they really are available all the time. And there's a thing that Dave brought into the book. He's the theist in the group. I'm the atheist. But there's an idea in theology, interest in philosophy, called the scandal of particularity, that the most transcendent sense of meaning is a moment of connection to the universe. The sort of a. Either a religious or a moment of enlightenment and connection, right? And that moment, it turns out that the brain is a finite thing. It cannot experience the infinite wonder of the universe. You can have little flashes of it in these inspirational moments or psychedelic moments or whatever, but you can't absorb the whole universe. So the scandal is that the infinite is found in the particular. The infinite is found in that beautiful rose. As I was walking to the train the other day, I don't know why this rose is blooming, but it's blooming, and it was just perfect. And once you realize, oh, wait a minute, I can make a moment right now. I can stop, enjoy this wonder at the amazing spiral of the rose and the color of the rose in the smoke. Once you realize that the infinite is found in the finite, the infinite is found in moments, the scandal isn't that weird that, you know, you can only experience the infinite in moments. Once you've got that orientation, you're good to go. And the reason I think designers are really good at this is that designers are really good at getting into that creative state. An awesome brainstorm where everybody's firing on all cylinders and everybody seems to anticipate what everybody else is saying or working deeply, silently, deeply on a design problem and having a little aha. Moment.
- [13:51]
C
A little moment.
- [13:52]
A
You go, oh, yeah, this would work or this would work. And the fact that we always look for lots of ideas, not just one idea, gives us this neuro flexibility. And so designers are inherently curious people. And curiosity was one of the big mindsets in the first book and the second book. I wanted to take curiosity up a notch. So we said curiosity. Our formula is curiosity plus mystery. How did that rose grow from some little tiny nothing? Curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. So one of the big exercises in the books is to put on your wonder glasses and go for a walk. It doesn't take very long. Before you notice that your curiosity leads you to a sense of wonder and awe. Eli, you know, we teach at Stanford, we can't make stuff up. It's a research university. So there's a ton of new research now in the neuroscience of awe and wonderful like these states of feeling connected. And you can manifest those states by just practicing the mindset of wonder and the mindset of curiosity. That's why it's so natural for designers to feel those states. Because we're good at getting into a curiosity mindset, a wonder mindset, a connectivity mindset. And we try to make that understandable to folks who aren't designers. Obviously the book is for everybody, it's not just for designers. But because we've got this design built basis, it turns out to be really easy to explain. How do you get there? You know, how do you find moments of wonder? How can you become a moment designer, a meaning making moment designer? And why is it easier than everybody told you?
- [15:25]
C
It's no mistake that the parent company of Design Better is called the Curiosity department. That is who we are.
- [15:31]
A
It is. And it's so funny because a lot of the kids who come to Stanford to do design didn't come for design. They thought they're going to some kind of engineer or something. And then they take classes like the visual thinking class or the first design class and they realize, wow, this is so much fun. It's so much fun because it re energizes the curiosity in your brain. It re energizes the excitement of having lots of ideas. Powerful is the wrong word. But it feels great to realize, oh, wait a minute, I am a curious, creative person. I was just putting that aside because you didn't get into an elite university because you got eight hundreds on your creativity sat. Once you can get people to get curious and get engaged in the world, really magical stuff happens. And I think that's why the books have been so well received, is that it helps people just rediscover who they really were. Anyway, they were a curious kid. At four or five years old, I got a four year old grandson. He's reteaching me what real curiosity is all about.
- [16:27]
C
In the book, there are four components of meaning making and we've touched on two. You've talked about flow, you've talked about wonder and curiosity. Being part of that community is one that caught my attention and it immediately brought to mind these longevity studies. There's a big longitudinal study that Harvard did. I think it was like the longest study.
- [16:48]
A
Yeah, the Harvard study started in 1936.
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C
Yeah. So we're approaching the 100 year mark, following the same people to see who lived longest, what were the elements of their life. And the spoiler here is that it's community. It's the connection with other human beings. You talked about that in the context of work, and I've always noticed that I felt like I could be shoveling shit, but if I were doing that with people that I enjoyed, it'd be fine. Like I could do that all day, 365 days a year. Talk to us about the role community plays in creating a meaningful life.
- [17:23]
A
This is huge. And it's one of the reasons we took on the task of writing the book. And there's a chapter on the book called what we call a formative community. So there's lots of kinds of communities. There's communities that get together, have fun. You know, maybe you get together with some friends and you have a nice dinner party, or you all go out to a movie, or you're a community of just people who get together to enjoy each other, play games. You're in a gaming community. Then there's communities that are designed to get something done. You volunteer for the PTA and you're on the PTA and you're trying to get books for the school or whatever. So communities that are around accomplishment are task driven. A formative community is a little bit different. A formative community is a group of people who get together to help each other become better people. And so it's designed around. And this came directly out of our experience with the DCI program, the Distinguished Career Institute. So Dave's been teaching me in that for seven or eight years now, maybe longer. And people come from all over the world, and then they land at Stanford just like freshmen. And then it's like, okay, Dave puts them through a couple of designing your life exercises and he puts them into groups and, and he gives them a couple of prompts and they form a community that stays together through the whole year at Stanford and their exploration and their pivot and whatever they're going to do with their lives. And it was interesting because they were reporting that that community was the most important community they'd ever been in. And these are CEOs and CFOs and senior people who've been in big organizations and run big things. And they're like, really? This thing that ad hoc we slapped together and in six weeks you're saying this is the most important community you've ever been in. And as we talked to them we realized it's because no one in the community is talking about how important they were. They were all important in their prior jobs. Now they're just folks coming to Stanford to pivot. And all of them are deeply interested in each other's journey, in helping each other. So we were able to extract from that a couple of really simple. This is how you create a community like that. These are the sort of the container, you know, the rough rules, that this isn't about accomplishment. This isn't about bragging about your job. And then what are the sort of focal questions that you ask each other and then hold each other accountable to? And two things. One, it's fantastic. In fact, a group, just as a quick shout out, a group of people left the DCI program and said, this has been so transformational. We want to keep doing this. And a guy named Bill King, who's a very senior investor guy and VC guy, has put together a company called the Movi Collective, M O V I Collective. And he's doing exactly that. He's creating formative communities of people that join to help each other get better in whatever the dimension better is for them. It's so powerful. People keep wanting to do it. And we extracted the rules for doing it, and we put that in the book because again, last year, the Surgeon General said, loneliness is one of the number one health problems in America. The Harvard study demonstrated that strong relationships both with yourselves and with others that are not in your family or other communities are critical to health and longevity. And loneliness is the number one health crisis in America. And so we really, really wanted to lean into the idea of how do you create communities that support you? Get together and have a game night with your friends. Awesome. Just laughing and having a good time with friends is also highly healthy for you. But to go deeper and to really be in a kind of community, and, you know, my guess is if you go Back to America 1900, when 3/4 of the country lived on farms and rural communities, formative communities were just what everybody had. You were all farmers. You belonged to the Grange, the local grange organization where the farmers got together and talked about farming. You were part of a church or community, a faith community, and those were communities that were about your growth and development spiritually and as a human. We just don't have those in our modern society anymore. So we really wanted to give people a roadmap for how to build them.
- [21:17]
B
Bill I want to talk about meaning at different life stages, and we've talked a little bit about how younger students that we teach. As they enter their first job, they're looking for a lot of meaning in their career. For Aaron and I, who are sort of mid career, I think we both find the most meaning out of our family and our kids and, and hoping that we're raising successful young adults. And then you and I, Bill had a conversation recently and I talked about my dad, who's basically facing the end of his life right now. And I think there's still time for meaning to be found in those later phases in life too, obviously. So, yeah, maybe talk a little bit about those different stages and how you might approach meaning.
- [21:58]
A
There's been a bunch of work on what people are calling second half. David Brooks, the columnist from New York Times, wrote a book called the Second Mountain. It's been sort of a tradition that the first part half of life is working hard and, you know, getting some accomplishment and getting some financial stability, raising children and stuff. And maybe the second half of life is where you have the time and the energy to invest more in what's meaningful for you, what's important. I know my dad, who was a very successful business guy and a pretty, you know, as a 50s dad, not very emotional, not very effusive, just get stuff done. Did a good job raising the kids, but wasn't the kind of warm, cuddly, self aware, philosophical dad that maybe I was hoping for. But in his last, you know, 10 years of his life, he became quite soft and emotional and philosophical. I was just talking with Chip Conley who created the modern Elder Academy. His whole premise is, look, people, you know, in this ages have all this wisdom. And again, in the old days, no one would do anything without the counsel of the wise old men and women particularly. We don't honor our elders that way. We kind of push them away. So I think you can find really deeply significant moments, particularly as you get older, where you realize, oh, all that other stuff doesn't really matter. The accomplishment. Yeah, we shipped 11 laptops. That's great. But, you know, so what? They're all in a landfill by now. We raised this money or we accomplish this stuff. What people in the Harvard study report as being transformational were the relationships. We do an exercise at the end of the design your life class. We're called the 25th reunion. We imagine that you come back 25 years or your 25th reunion. We're having a little mini reunion of the class. Here's what we're going to talk about. And I can guarantee you, and you've probably been to reunions. I'VE been through reunions. No one at the reunion goes, boy, that chemistry class we took was so hard, wasn't it? Really hard. Yeah. Or that physics class we took was really interesting in that one demo he did about momentum. No, you talk about all the social things that you did at school, your friends. You talk about the parties. You talk about the moments where, in retrospect, that's where the really good stuff happened. It's not the other stuff. So I think as you get older, it's easier to access this kind of curiosity about meaning and you have more clarity because you just don't care about the stuff that doesn't matter. It seems so important when you were 21 or 22 or 25. And one of the things I try to get the young students as they're graduating and getting their first job is to realize, first of all, it's your first job. It's going to last two or three years on average. So relax. It's going to be fine. And the critical thing is, as you said, you're going to meet cool colleagues, people that you really admire, folks you can learn from because you're just getting started, and maybe even folks that you can have a relationship with that will outlast the job. That's what that's for. And if you ship some software or you make some stuff, that's cool, too. But it's harder to have that perspective when you're young. Certainly after you have kids, you realize, oh, the most important thing is raising these little munchkins to be, you know, good human beings. What we consider meaningful shifts. This flow zone is there all the time, and you can tap into it through sports, through any kind of activity that you become good at, anything you master. I do a lot of cooking, and I love to just cook and make a meal and be in the flow state of not just making the meal, but thinking about nourishing people and creating an environment where people will come together and we'll talk and it'll be amazing. You don't have to be in your second half of life, but I think in the second half, a lot more of these things become important.
- [25:33]
C
One thing that came up recently in a formative group that I'm part of, common friend of ours Bob Baxley, who's also been a guest on the show, started a group of folks and were reading Montaigne. I got this big tome right here.
- [25:46]
A
Yeah, yeah, good luck with that. Yeah.
- [25:49]
C
For listeners who aren't familiar with him, he's the guy who invented the essay. But he sat in a tower in his big castle in the 1500s and sort of thought about life and a lot of the key things here. And one thing that when people are reflective about the good life is they often ask the question of how do I become happy? I'm not happy. I want happiness. And to me I feel like that's a fool's errand, that happiness is like anger. It's a thing that pops up and it flows away just like any other emotion. I wonder how you and your co author think about happiness, how that fits into this notion of the meaningful life, and if you have a different way of framing that for people as they search for the good life.
- [26:36]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And if you go back to the origin story of positive psychology, it was Martin Seligman and a bunch of his friends, Dan Gilbert and Emotional Intelligence Guy and Michele Shane. Sibling High they went away after a conference and they just had a little meeting. They said, you know, if you'd like
- [26:54]
C
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