← Something You Should Know
Something You Should Know
Secret Service Communication Skills & Designing a Meaningful Life
00:49:00
What Secret Service agents know about earning trust — and a surprising way to design a life filled with meaning and momentum.
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- [00:00]
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Mike Carruthers
Today on something you should know Is it a good idea to warm up your car before you drive it? Then a veteran Secret Service agent reveals powerful communication techniques, from how you speak to trusting first impressions.
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Brad Beeler
Bad people can hack that first impression, and we put horns and halos on people too quickly. A lot of the scams I would work in the Secret Service were because people made great first impressions.
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Mike Carruthers
Oh, also, what you can do when a retailer won't do the right thing, and how to design a meaningful, purposeful life that takes you where you want to go.
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Bill Burnett
What I've run into is a lot of people ended up somewhere. I ended up in high tech, but I don't really like it. I ended up a lawyer, but I don't really like it. There's a wonderful professor Ruth Chang at Rutgers who says, you know, people are drifters or they're intentional.
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Mike Carruthers
All this today on something you should know. You know what's weird about hair loss? It doesn't happen all at once. You just sort of notice it one day. Huh? I've got three brothers. Every one of them has lost his hair, and so when I noticed mine was thinning a few years ago, I didn't want to wait around to see how that turned out. That's when I found hims, and what sold me was how simple it was. No appointments, no waiting rooms. Everything happens online. You answer a few questions, a licensed medical provider reviews it, and if treatment makes sense, it just shows up at your door. I use the spray maybe 30 seconds a day, and from everything I've read, starting earlier really matters. For simple online access to personalized and affordable care for hair loss, ED, weight loss and more, visit hims.comSomething that's himss.com Something for your free online himss.com Something. Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality prescription required. See website for full details, restrictions and important safety information. Individual results may vary based on studies of topical and oral minoxidil and finasteride. Something you SHOULD know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and
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Bill Burnett
practical advice you can use in your life today.
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Mike Carruthers
Something you should know with Mike Carruthers. Here's a question for you. When you start your car in the morning, do you let it warm up for a while before you start driving? Should you? Well, that's the question we're going to start with today on this episode of Something youg Should Know. Hi and welcome. I'm Mike Carruthers. So a lot of drivers believe that letting your car idle to warm up in the morning before you drive, it is a good thing. In fact, it is a bad thing. And it can actually do harm to parts of your engine, causing them to wear out. Warming your engine up was smart back before 1980 when cars had carburetors because if the gasoline was too cold, the could stall out. But now with electronic fuel injection, that's just not an issue anymore. So it's fine to drive. Your car shortly after you start is still recommended by some to wait about 20 to 30 seconds for the engine oil to circulate, but after that, it's fine to drive. Just don't gun it for the first five to 15 minutes as you'll put unnecessary stress on the engine until it does warm up. And that is something you should know. I'm sure you know people like this. I certainly do. People who within minutes of talking to them make you feel comfortable. You find yourself opening up, trusting them, telling them things that you didn't really plan to share. There's nothing flashy about it. It's just the way they talk, the way they listen, the way they respond. And as you listen to my next guest, you'll hear it. You can actually hear it in his voice. The calm, the pacing, the way he addresses me. It makes you trust him almost immediately. And it's not an accident. It's a skill he developed over years of working for the United States Secret Service, where earning trust quickly really matters. My guest is Brad Beeler Today. He's a communication expert and author of the book Tell Me Everything A Secret Service Agent's Proven Strategies for Earning Trust, Revealing the truth, and Communicating with anyone. Hi, Brad. Welcome to Something youg Should Know.
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Brad Beeler
Hey, Mike, thank you so much for having me on.
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Mike Carruthers
Sure, sure. So we're gonna be talking about effective communication and what all that means, but since you were with the Secret Service for so long. We have to start with a good Secret Service story, one that you're allowed to tell or, you know, discretion will still allow you to tell that we would find interesting.
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Brad Beeler
Yeah, I appreciate you, Mike, framing it that way because there's so many funny stories that I wish I could tell, but unfortunately I can't. But I will say how I really got into communication was during the election of 2000. I was on the advance for a George W. Bush event down in a site in Illinois. And it was one of those things where it was seemed like it was pretty low hanging fruit. It was going to be a pretty easy event until the night before we got a call to the Republican National Headquarters that basically said, I'm a sniper, I'm a good shot, obviously, and I'm going to take him out, meaning our protectee. So it's one of those things where as a, as a brand new agent, I didn't know what to do. Kind of a snot nosed kid and thankfully I had an amazing agent named Bill that kind of took me under his wing. And we tracked down where the phone call came from. Small little strip mall, really nothing around there. And what he did was magnificent as far as he whips out his pocket knife, cuts the. This is the old pay phone, so I'm really dating myself, but cuts the receiver off the phone, puts it in a Ziploc bag because he thought, ah, we made it for fingerprints, which kind of blew me away. Then he kicked over the can, the trash can there, and started digging through dirty diapers, all this stuff. I had no idea what he was looking for. And then just his experience really showed because he found a styrofoam cup that had a little yellow piece of paper that actually had the phone number to the Republican headquarters. So we knew that forensically, obviously we would be able to prove based upon the styrofoam handwriting potentially. But the visit was the next day. So he took it the next step. And we started going around looking at gas stations and various places to where, where could this styrofoam cup could come from. We went to the nearest store, which was a shopping market, and walked in, talked to the manager, and while we were talking to the manager in the break area, his observation skills were amazing. And what he was able to see across the room was a little yellow notepad that a piece ripped from it, where the piece that he found in the trash perfectly fit on it. He looked in the yellow pages once again dating myself. And he found the RNC headquarters had been underlined he asked the manager, hey, who was working here between the ages of 40 and 80 of a male that had a male. And there were three people. We looked at their employment apps and he. And right away saw that this person on his employment app had put a Layover on his 2 and a strikethrough on his 7. So we knew pretty much this was the guy that made the phone call. We went out to the guy's house about 10 o' clock that night. And I'll never forget, Bill, when we walked in and met this individual's wife, he just so laid back, so in control of his emotions. You know, I was all hyped up. And he said, you know, identified himself. And the lady said, you know, yeah, my husband's here. He said, well, you might want to put a cup of coffee on or, you know, a pot of coffee on. We're going to be here for a little bit. And we went to talk to the husband who was seated in the kitchen. And while we're walking, I see Bill kind of look at some of the pictures on the wall and he sees this individual, his pictures in the military in Vietnam. He sees the pictures with a woman we had just met about 40 years prior. So he'd been married for about 40 years. And he just put that in the back of his mind. And when he introduced himself, he said to this person, he said, you know, John, Bob, whatever his name is, he goes, hey, with the Secret Service, we do two things. We protect the president and people running for president, and we also stop people who make counterfeit money. And he said to the individual, he said, when's the last time you've made any counterfeit money? And the guy said, never. He goes, well, now you know why I'm here. And then he followed that up with, the good thing is I see that you're a veteran, I see that you're somebody that served this country, and I see that you're a faithful man. So what that says to me is a lot. And it says to me, you probably got in a political conversation that got out of hand, you said something that you don't mean and that you're not the boogeyman. And I think that's a good starting point. And let's have a win win situation here and make sure you're not that boogeyman. And seeing Bill do that from start to finish showed how he was an investigator, show how he could communicate, show how he knew what our protective methodology would be. And it was really eye opening for me to see that excellence. And I wanted from that point on, I want to be a great communicator.
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Mike Carruthers
Wow, what a story. And what happened? I mean, did you arrest the guy?
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Brad Beeler
Yeah, he was arrested. I think there was some mitigating circumstances because of his age. He was an older individual. And looking at the totality of the circumstances, I think he probably got probation. But yeah, it was one of those things where as a new agent it was scary because that's the stuff you learn about in school. And the fact that it happened right before the visit was the time sensitive nature. But that made a drastic impact on man. I want to get good at this.
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Mike Carruthers
Yeah, well, that makes a. Because the way that story just ended was not the way I thought it was going to go where you were going to burst in, guns drawn and take the guy down. But it was so not that it was a connection with the guy that there's such a great lesson in that story.
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Brad Beeler
Yeah, connection is everything. And once again, this goes back to my other love for communication, which my best friend being deaf since I was 15, so for the last 45 odd years, I've had to really connect with him. And when I mean connect, I'm talking about looking people in the eyes and using all forms of communication, just not just the words you use, but how you say the words, how you look somebody in the face and how you use that body language with somebody. And I think having been in the Secret Service and with polygraph, having interrogated thousands of people, you realize that it's not what you see in the movies as far as the bright light, the disrespect, the banging, you know, the, you know, on the table. It's truly connecting with somebody and allowing them to have the space to tell you the truth. Because it's not the fact that people are going to lie to you, they're going to lie to you. It's what is the lie, why are they lying? And once you understand why somebody's lying, a lot of times what they'll do is they'll tell you the what.
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Mike Carruthers
So help me understand how you make those connections. And I mean, that's the topic of your whole book about effective communication. What does that term mean to you? Maybe you just explained it, but what is effective communication to you?
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Brad Beeler
Well, I think, Mike, if you look back on the last 10 or so years of you doing this podcast and 10 or so years before that being on the radio video, I think back about how you prepare for a good podcast episode, right? You request a book or whatever about the subject that you meet, you probably look at some of their other podcast experiences. So you're doing your homework. Then what you're doing is you're meeting in the green room beforehand and you're talking a little bit about, you know, what makes them tick, just to kind of have a great first impression. So first impressions are unbelievable. You know, you have to go back to 300,000 years ago when we walked on the plains, you know, our forefathers, we would use our eyes and our ears to understand, are you a threat to me? So there's certain things we can do to hack that first impression. So at least we're not putting horns on ourselves to that person that we're talking to. Then, you know, we move past that, and we use all our senses. Once we get past that first impression, get past that amygdala, to where now we can get deeper with people, to where I can ask you about your family, your education, your employment, your leisure, and then, you know, your employment. A lot of people don't really, you know, what they do as far as to make a living is not their passion, but what people do in their free time, Mike says everything about them. So for me, a connection is spending a lot of time, time on what somebody does 60, 70 hours a week in their free time and asking them, you know, what do you like to do in your free time? And by doing that, you have people educate you about what they like to do. It brings joy to their hearts. It lowers their cortisol levels, it increases the dopamine, which they're going to associate with you. And if we do a good job, Mike, what we don't do is we don't go. Me too. All right. When they talk about that activity, and I'm sure you've seen it, is there are a lot of times, Mike, where over the last 20 years, you probably have as much information with the people that you're interviewing. You have shared experiences with them, and they may be telling a story. But what does a bad podcaster do? And a bad communicator, they say. Me too. So you talk about running a marathon. Oh, so did I. You just shut that conversation up right away. And I'm sure you've seen it, right? Is that what I want to do, is I find out you do a marathon, and I ask you, oh, man, how did you get into that? What kind of shoes do you like to wear? What kind of nutrition do you do? What's your training split? And by asking those educated 80 questions, Mike, what I find is a lot of times people will then say, oh, do you run too? Oh, yeah. Then you get the best of both worlds. We get the reciprocity of them starting to ask about you, but you get the dopamine hit of you asking about them. So the beauty of you doing a podcast is you let the other person talk 80% of the time, which is what we should do. And then if they go too far down a rabbit hole, you bring them back. You know what your audience wants to listen to, you ask some refining questions, and before you know it, you're 45 minutes in. And the conversation both. Both people feel better for having met.
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Mike Carruthers
Yeah, that's a great explanation. I'm talking with Brad Beeler. He's author of the book Tell Me Everything A Secret Service Agent's Proven Strategies for Earning Trust, Revealing the Truth, and Communicating with Anyone.
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Bill Burnett
We heard you.
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Mike Carruthers
Nine years of bring back the snack wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more.
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Bill Burnett
Say hello to the Hot Honey Snack Wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.
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Mike Carruthers
So, Brad, I want to go back to what you were saying about first impressions, because we didn't get too deep into that. Reading first impressions, translating them as to what they mean has got to be a bit of an art and a science. And so help me be better at that.
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Brad Beeler
Yeah. So if you think of a gut instinct, Mike, I mean, we hear that term a lot, and that's very effective for law enforcement, military. When, you know, if you are in a situation and you're walking up to a car and something doesn't feel right, that's when you want to trust your gut. That's a first impression of something. Patterned recognition, something is not good here. Same thing anybody in your listeners, if they're walking late at night down an alley or to their car and something doesn't add up. Yes, trust that. The problem is people use that gut instinct in personal and professional relationships. Not understanding that bad people can hack that first impression. And we put horns and halos on people too quickly, all right? And it's one thing when we move past that first impression, we've got to be very, very careful about taking into account what people are putting out to us. So I like to hack that impression. And what I mean by it is I want to have a great handshake. I want to have a dry handshake. It's going to be warm. If I'm seated at an event, I'm going to be sitting on my hands so that it's warm and it's dry. The worst thing we can do is have a wet, cold handshake. And I'm sure you've had people do that, that limp fish handshake. And it's terrible because it's the first thing we do. It's the last thing we do in most personal and professional relationships. And that's what scientifically, is what people remember, the first and last thing of that interaction. So that's an easy hack. I like to have warm hands. I like to have a dry. Actually spray and a perspirant on my hands before I do a lot of speaking engagements or a lot of my interviews. So I know I'm gonna have that taken care of.
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Mike Carruthers
I would imagine being in the Secret Service, that you have to read body language really well when you are protecting the president. You've gotta look at how people are just moving their bodies. So talk about that.
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Brad Beeler
Babies and dogs, they don't understand. They don't understand language. But what they do understand is body language. And so do people during first impressions. So I want to have that slightly deeper tone. I want my body language to be controlled. I want to maybe take my neck off to or my head off to one side to expose my carotid. I want to give it a quick eyebrow flash. These are friend signs because people look at neutrality if they see a neutral face out of self preservation, we code that as negative. So what I want to do is I want again, once again, do those things that. If I would walk up to a baby from a body language standpoint, if I would walk up to a dog from a body language standpoint, would it be scared if it was just looking at me? And if that's the case, I need to be very, very careful, but also understand that people are going to do that to us. A lot of the scams I would work in the Secret Service were because people made great first impressions.
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Mike Carruthers
But if you're dealing with, say a scammer who's good at that, who can use body language to deceive you, how do you, as a Secret Service agent or just in public, how do you spot that?
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Brad Beeler
So I want multiple contacts, Mike. And that's one of the best ways to eliminate it. Whether they're a narcissist, whether they're a scammer, it is hard for that person to keep doing that over multiple interactions. So consistency is so important in relationships. I can't tell you how many times I've met somebody, they made a horrible first impression and then they become a really good friend of mine, or vice versa. We've all seen that where somebody made a great first impression and then after multiple interactions were like, that guy's kind of a jerk. All right, So I want multiple interactions and also understand the speed of that relationship. Why are they moving so fast? You know, it's the old thing act now. We need to do this now. No, we don't. Most of the time we can sleep on it when it comes to personal and professional relationships. So if somebody's trying to rush you into a decision, and especially early on in a relationship, that's where the red flags need to go up.
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Mike Carruthers
You mentioned using all of your senses. And maybe people do that instinctively, but let's dig into that and talk about what that means and what that looks like and how to maybe do it better.
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Brad Beeler
So when I talk about senses, hearing is very, very important because a higher pitched voice carries further into the fields and for us to summon help. We didn't always have 911 radio, so a high pitched voice, we've coded as being scary. So I want to make sure I don't have that high pitched voice when I'm talking to people. I want to be very controlled in my voice. I want to warm it up. I've got an app on my phone where before I have any speaking engagements, I'll make sure I warm up my phone. I mean, I don't know what you do, Mike. You have the greatest radio voice of all time. And maybe that's just God given, but I use a lozenge as well that has eucalyptus in it that kind of opens up my nasal passages. So some of that can be very, very helpful. As far as hearing, obviously with sight, I'm avoiding bright colors. I want to look the part. I want to be dressed slightly above the person that I'm talking to because when they make that first impression they're gauging me on. Do I feel comfortable talking to this person when it comes to smell? My teenage son, he likes to use Axe body spray not just as a deodorant, but as a perfume, as a everything, right? And it follows him is that we want to be careful with that. I've talked to criminals before where I was in a room, you could call it an interrog room, where people had been smoking, there was stale urine smell. And this guy said to me, he goes, this smells like jail. And then he lawyered up quickly thereafter because he had an association to that. When we smell something from our past, our memory when it comes to smell is so ingrained, we can probably remember the greatest dish that our grandma made. So there's a lot of marketing research on how we smell. So something as simple as that touch, touching someone on the outside of the frame, their shoulder, obviously with the handshake that we already discussed, all those things taste. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to somebody about very sensitive things over food. Food is a barometer on where their nervous level is. They're not going to eat if their heart rate's over a certain level. If I'm providing food to them, there's going to be reciprocity. And we're used to talking around the dinner table when it comes to with our family members. So little hacks like that. As far as when we have that difficult conversation where we have it go a long ways to be just as important as what we're actually saying during the conversation.
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Mike Carruthers
The whole listening thing, you know, we've talked about that many times on the show. The importance of good listening in that generally people aren't that good at it because they want to tell their side of the story. But talk about it from your perspective of how important that is and how to do it, and silence the urge to keep talking.
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Brad Beeler
Yeah, thanks, Mike. That's a great point. As far as a lot of the people that I've talked to, a lot of the criminals, you would think, why would they talk about this? This is probably against their self interest. Many of these people, this is their identity or it's something they feel horrible about. They've never had somebody ask them about it. All right? And one of the things that really taught me this is in graduate school. I worked at the jail in St. Louis, and it was a research project. And I'm a small town kid. I knew nothing about the big city crime. And I would talk to people about robbery, rape, murder, murder, or prostitution. And what we would do is we'd collect urine from them as part of a research project, and we'd give them a Snickers bar and a Mountain Dew. But I wanted to talk to them. It was all anonymous. So I would ask them, hey, how do you make methamphetamines? How do you make crack cocaine? How do you serve as a pimp? And it's amazing that even though these are criminal acts, when you engage in tactical curiosity, Mike, and you ask people, what is it about they want to teach you. And when people feel like they're teaching you, they don't feel like they're being interrogated, they don't feel like they're being judged. And whatever it is, they yearn to get that information out there. Everybody wants to be the hero of their own adventure. And these were some of the most amazing conversations I ever had. And that kind of something I kept with me over the next 25 years is that, you know, in show those signals of interest, you gotta nod that head when people are talking. You gotta have that subtle smile. And what you really gotta avoid is that contempt, that furrowing of the brow when somebody mentions something that grits your teeth. I've had that. Early on in my career, somebody would say they did that bad thing, and I would just show that little. That little subtle down push of the. Of the, you know, of the brow. And that shuts people up like nothing else. So those are little things, you know, summarizing what they said, you know, mirroring back the last three or four words of what they say many, many times they're going to clarify. And then also just following up with, I see, okay, tell me more. Something as simple as that is going to make them go deeper and you'll get the underside of the iceberg in whatever they're talking about.
- [25:22]
Mike Carruthers
Well, I love your insight and I love the fact that it's from the field. It's from working in the field as a Secret Service agent where the stakes can be pretty high and the things that you've learned, I think, are translatable to anybody. Brad Beeler has been my guest. He's a former Secret Service agent and author of the book Tell Me Everything, A Secret Service Agent's Proven Strategies for Earning Trust, Revealing Truth, and Communicating With Anyone. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Brad, great, Great job. Thank you.
- [25:55]
Brad Beeler
Thank you so much, Mike. I appreciate the opportunity.
- [25:59]
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- [26:30]
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- [27:02]
Mike Carruthers
When people talk about living a meaningful life sounds kind of abstract, like something you're supposed to figure out after years of soul searching. But what if the meaning in your life isn't something you discover at all, but something you design? That's the idea behind today's conversation. Instead of chasing purpose or waiting for clarity to strike, there's a practical approach to building a life that feels meaningful. And here to explain how to do it is Bill Burnett. He's the executive director of the Stanford Life Design Lab, an adjunct professor of mechanical engineering and design at Stanford, and the founder of the Designing youg Life Institute in Singapore. He's also the co author of the book how to Live a Meaningful Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow every day. Hey Bill, welcome to Something youg Should Know.
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Bill Burnett
Mike, thanks for inviting me.
- [27:59]
Mike Carruthers
Sure. So designing a meaningful life sounds like such a great idea, but I think we probably have to define some terms Here, what is a meaningful life? How do you know if you're living one?
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Bill Burnett
Yeah, you know everybody. I mean, this is, this is a perennial question, right? 3,000 year old, you know, wisdom, tradition, the meaning of life. I'm a designer, been a designer my whole career. So, you know the old thing when all you got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. We wanted to make something that was practical and doable. And the meaning of life is kind of a big philosophical question. So we flip it to talking about the meaning in your life. What can you do to have meaning in your life every day? And meaning is, you know, the thing that gives you a sense of purpose, a sense of impact. You know, you're on the right path, you have something, we call it coherency. That your life makes sense to you, that the things you're doing at work, the things you believe in, your sort of big picture and the sort of story you tell yourself all makes sense together.
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Mike Carruthers
And given what you just said, given that definition, do you think most of us have a meaningful life or we don't, or it just depends on who you are or what?
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Bill Burnett
Well, I think everybody's looking for it. I don't think everybody's found it. You know, people are looking for meaning and impact, but impact comes and goes. You know, what have you done for me lately? And people are looking for meaning in what we call the transaction world, you know, getting stuff done. But if you look at all the research and you look at the, and the histories of the question, you know, people answering this question, meaning is really not found in the transactions and the day to day stuff. We have a notion that there's really two worlds. I mean there's one world, but there's two ways of thinking of is two worlds. This world of transactions where you're getting stuff done. And right under that, I like to think of it like an aquifer, you know, of something. Right under the transaction world is the world of flow. And that's the world where actually meaning is, is discovered in moments of flow and moments of wonder and joy. There's a lot of new neuroscience on this. Awe and wonder, but wonder and meaning and joy, it's all found in the flow world. And so we can get there. You just got to look in the right place.
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Mike Carruthers
So can you give me an example of that, of transaction and flow, what you just described, make it a real life situation?
- [30:23]
Bill Burnett
Yeah, sure. So let's say you're sitting in the average staff meeting at the job, and mostly the staff meeting is a Transactional meeting. Things are happening. We're making schedules, we're making budgets, we're doing reports, we're doing status. And so you can experience that meeting as it. Transactional meeting. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's probably kind of boring. Frankly, most of the staff meetings I've been in are pretty boring. But if you, if you flip the switch, if you, if you, if you sort of drop into the flow world and you start to notice, oh well, you know, John is really nailing it when he describes his stuff. He seems to really be embodying the work he's doing. Or Jane over there seems really distant and something else is going on with her. I should check in with her and see what's happening, happening. And so when I'm, when I'm kind of more in a flow transaction or more in my right brain, if you want to think of it that way, I'm looking, I'm looking at the world generatively. I'm seeing opportunities, I'm seeing, I'm available to things that are happening. And you know, and you can also provoke flow by doing activities. People talk about being, you know, athletes talk about being in the zone, musicians talk about being in flow as they're playing. You know, people in the creative world are in flow quite often, but you can train yourself to do it. And we're sort of over indexed in the transactional brain. And it takes a little practice to get into the flow, you know, brain or mindset, but it's available and it's, and it's kind of right there all the time. So you can, you can have a transactional meeting or you can notice the ebbs and flows literally of the emotions and the, and the activities that are happening right below those transactions. And it makes things more interesting.
- [32:05]
Mike Carruthers
So I saw in the introduction of your book where you talked about, I guess you talked about your other book, but the words were get curious. Talk to people. Try stuff, tell your story. Yeah, talk about that.
- [32:16]
Bill Burnett
So it's this sort of circular, it's kind of a little flywheel. Once you get it started, it's a way of thinking about how to design into the future. Designers are always making prototypes. They're always building new stuff. When I was at Apple, I was Apple for seven years and we were doing the first laptops. We, you know, we just built lots of prototypes to figure out what, what the heck a laptop was because it hadn't been invented yet. So get curious is the energy that drives you. Curiosity is a intrinsic motivation. Humans are just Naturally curious people. So re.
- [32:48]
Brad Beeler
Re.
- [32:48]
Bill Burnett
Engage your curiosity, get curious, talk to people, which is get out in the world. You know, you're. You're going to find meaning and purpose in the world with other people. It's almost never found in isolation. So get curious, talk to people, try stuff, which is the prototyping thing. You can. Turns out you can prototype as a designer, I prototype lots of things to sort of figure out my designs, but you can prototype anything in your life with a prototype conversation. Talk to somebody who's already doing what you're doing or what you're thinking of doing. And it's kind of like traveling in time, and you can meet someone who's five years down the road from you or have a prototype experience. So try stuff is all about getting out in the world and taking action, a biased action. One of the mindsets of a designer and tell your story is the way you connect the loop because you want to. It's not about bragging. It's just about saying, hey, I'm on this journey and I'm really curious about this stuff. And I've been talking to people and I've been trying things, and here's where I'm at. And when you do that, what happens is a lot of other people go, oh, hey, that's really cool. You know what you should do? You should talk to this guy. You should try this. So get curious, talk to people, try stuff, tell your story. Leads to more curiosity, more people, more trying. And once you get that flywheel working for you, you start to design into your future and you start to generate moments where you'll find meaning.
- [34:12]
Mike Carruthers
I love that. I love that. Yeah, it's really super practical.
- [34:16]
Bill Burnett
I mean, you can do. Anybody can do it. There's no trick to it. It's just to understand, you know, there's some nuance in what's a prototype and what's a conversation. And you know, and these conversations aren't transactional. You're not trying to extract information from people. You're just trying to get their story.
- [34:31]
Mike Carruthers
The other thing in the title of your new book, design, we were just talking about this the other. Did an interview just the other day about this, about how life is hard to design. That in fact, life is, if you look back, is the result of a lot of coincidences and chance meetings and all that, that you can't sit down and design your life. When I see that in the title, I think, well, wait a minute, wait a minute.
- [34:55]
Bill Burnett
I think if you're looking backwards, you'll notice that, yeah, the life is sort of a zigzag of different things. Nobody's career is a straight line, typically. But if you're looking forward, I'll say this. It's pretty hard to plan your life. And particularly nowadays with the disruptions of AI and other things going on in careers in life, it's pretty hard to plan your way forward. Because there's an old military expression. No plan for the battle survives first contact with the enemy. And I don't know about military stuff, so I would say no plan for your life is going to survive first contact with reality. But I do think you can design your way forward because design is essentially a flexible strategy. Right. Designers generate lots of ideas. Not just one idea or two ideas, lots of ideas. And then they prototype into the future because you don't exactly know where you're going, but you want to know you're on the right path.
- [35:46]
Mike Carruthers
Path.
- [35:46]
Bill Burnett
So you do some work to understand your, your, Your coherency. Am I, Am I looking for something? And is the thing I'm looking for coherent with who I am and what I believe? And then you come up with three things, three plans. And then you start exploring those plans. And as you move forward, you know, things will change and things will happen. But because you have this sort of flexible strategy rather than a planning strategy, I think it, I think it's more. It's more generative. And what I often tell my students is, don't you hope that five years from now, ten years from now, you're doing something amazing that hasn't even been invented yet? And that's what I think. That's why I think a design strategy for the future is more viable. It's not perfect, but it does set you up to be available to things as they occur because you're exercising your curiosity and you're trying lots of things. It's more resilient, I guess, than a planning strategy.
- [36:42]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah. So maybe the better term was plan. You can't plan your life. Cause you just never know when things happen. And we were just going through that exercise of looking back and seeing, like, how we all got here, and we all got here in ways that are just so bizarre that, you know, but that's how life works well and hope, you know.
- [37:06]
Bill Burnett
But if you take a designer's mindset, right? Curiosity, wonder, availability, if you, if you, if you're thinking this way, then
- [37:17]
Brad Beeler
you
- [37:18]
Bill Burnett
don't end up sort of drifting. What, What I've run into is a lot of people in their, you know, 30s and 40s and they've ended up somewhere. I ended up in high tech, but I don't really like it. I ended up a lawyer, but I only did that because my mom wanted me to be a lawyer or I ended up somewhere. There's a wonderful professor Ruth Chang at Rutgers, who says you people, people, people are drifters or they're intentional. And what we're arguing is having some intention. Where do I want to go? I don't exactly know what the destination is, but I haven't know. I know what my. How I want to feel, and I know how I want to, you know, think about it. And then if I'm fully engaged in this journey, but, you know, detached from. I can't. I can't control the outcomes. So fully engaged and calmly detached, I can. I can journey into the future and I won't end up someplace by accident. And you, you know, you've met these people, right? And they're. And they're like, I don't really want to be a lawyer, but my dad was a lawyer, so I became a lawyer and I ended up here. And I'm pretty successful, but I really don't like it. It's so interesting. The people I meet who are maybe in the most pain in some ways are the folks who are pretty successful, but they sort of drifted into something without really, you know, thinking about it, about how it was a good fit and it was something. There was some little system of reward and punishment, you know, but you never really made the decision to do it. You know what I mean? You just sort of drifted. So that's what we're. We don't want you to end up there. We want you to end up in a. In a design that fits for you and that. That you have the possibility of being available to something that's even cooler than the thing you were looking for.
- [38:54]
Mike Carruthers
It does seem, listening to you talk and that. That part of the problem is where you are now, where you're joining this journey. Because if you're a lawyer and you hate it, but you're making a lot of money and you're prestigious and all that, it's pretty tough to jump off that treadmill and try something new. Because it's so risky.
- [39:20]
Bill Burnett
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, absolutely. But the alternative is I stay in something. I was talking to one, a woman who was very successful, you know, very successful at school, went to the best law school, got into the biggest law firm in New York. First woman partner, general manager. And. And I said, how's it going? She said, well, it Steals a little piece of my soul every time I go into the office. And I went, well, that's not so good, I think, even if you're in that situation. So one of our. One of our mindsets is, you know, design starts in reality. Radical acceptance. Where am I right now, now, and how do I feel about it? And the good news is, if you are in a situation where you have some assets, you have some. You have some money, you have some assets, but you're not happy, I'm not suggesting, you know, you throw all that away and suddenly become a dive instructor in Bali or something. I mean, that's crazy. But you can start to think about how do I take what I've got, except where I'm at, and move towards something that. That does feel a little bit more meaningful.
- [40:23]
Mike Carruthers
So I get the principle of awe and wonder. Radical acceptance. I get that. But then how do you do it? Give me some examples of how you do it.
- [40:35]
Bill Burnett
Well, let's take a couple of simple exercises, and one that I really like is this idea of putting on your wonder glasses, we call it. It's really simple. So curiosity is one of the mindsets of a designer, but you add curiosity plus mystery, like, oh, there's mystery in the world. I don't know why. I don't know how roses get so red. I don't know. You know, I don't really know why the sunset has a green flash at the end. So wonder plus mystery, curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. And wonder is that sense of awe or, or. And just sort of the joy at looking, you know, at a moment of. Of a sunset or a beautiful flower or whatever. Walk around the world, you know, just not noticing things. Take five minutes, literally five minutes. Put on your wonder glasses. So seeing the world, looking for something wondrous, something awe inspiring, something wonderful, and it'll occur in a simple. Like, I walked from my house to the train about four blocks. I was walking there the other day, and it's the middle of, you know, it's the middle of winter here, and all of a sudden there was this gorgeous purple flower in somebody's, you know, front garden that I hadn't noticed, and I just took a moment to stop. I had plenty of time to get to the train, really. So savor the fact that this is a beautiful thing. Register that as a moment and walk on so you can find. Put your wonder glasses on for five minutes and see what's in the world that you just aren't noticing and curate your curiosity. It's a. It's a. It's a superpower. Humans are naturally curious or, you know, flow states. I think there's a TED talk on 21. Neuroscience, neuroscience, proven methods to get to flow. But flow is.
- [42:23]
Brad Beeler
Is.
- [42:23]
Bill Burnett
Is just that, you know, that moment where you. You stop, you flip the switch, and you attend to you. You pay attention to the things that are happening all around you, both that are, you know, mysterious and wonderful, but that. That pull you into an engagement, which is. Which is, you know, almost total. People talk about your time stands still. And in flow, I mean, flow or, you know, and it can happen when you're jogging. It can happen when you're, you know, pick a game of basketball if you're an athlete. For me, I like to cook. And literally, if I pay attention, just chopping onions, if I'm paying attention, there's a flow state. It doesn't have to be, you know, climbing a mountain or something magical. It can just be very simple. And then the other one is this idea of, I'm telling your story. You know, talk to people and tell your story. One of the reasons we wrote this book is that people are really lonely now, and they're kind of living in echo chambers, and they're not. They're not, you know, young men are not connecting, you know, in the world, and people in general are spending too much time on social media. So find one or two people and have a conversation around this idea of, hey, what's meaningful for you?
- [43:42]
Mike Carruthers
And so that question, what is meaningful to you? When you said, you know, ask someone what's meaningful to them? If somebody asked me what's meaningful to me, I don't know how to answer that. What's meaningful to you?
- [43:56]
Bill Burnett
Let me ask you the question a little bit differently. When's the last time you remember having a transaction, you know, moment with somebody, a conversation, something or an observation? You're watching kids play in a park, Whatever it was, what's the last moment that you can remember? That was something just a little bit different, a little more emotional, a little more colorful, a little more something than your average daily transaction. Did you have. Can you. Can you think of a moment?
- [44:23]
Mike Carruthers
Oh, it was on a vacation. It was just. Just the beauty of. Of where we were. And there was. There was just a moment where it just seemed so magical. It was just profound. And it's hard to put in words.
- [44:40]
Bill Burnett
Exactly. And that's why, you know, I'd say curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. Don't try to demystify mystery. Like, let it be just wonderful, and I'll Say that the, you know, the format of your experience is quite common. One, we were in a new place, so we were sort of seeing things new because someplace new that left us available to the idea that, hey, this is a really beautiful place. And we're. And you also, you were on a timeout from, you know, something else, a little bit of a vacation time. So you were available and you were fully engaged in the moment. And then that moment came and you were like, wow, this is so beautiful. That's all you. That's all you need. You need. You can. You don't have to be on a vacation to have that experience, because it just needs. It needs five minutes of attention. One, put your wonder glasses on and look around. See, is there something here that deserves my attention that I didn't notice? Two, take a breath. Take the time. You were. You were on a. On a vacation, so you had time and. And you were paying attention to things because they were new. They weren't your daily environment. And then you were with someone, I assume, and then being able to share that moment and say, wow, look at whether. Look at that sunset. Look at that thing. It's so beautiful. So it had. You were available, it was special. You noticed the wonder of it, the mystery of it, and you had the ability to share it with somebody. And all four of those things are readily designable. You can design that moment.
- [46:18]
Mike Carruthers
So that's a meaningful moment. But how does that translate into a meaningful life? Because, you know, that moment where you see the sunset is great, it feels wonderful. But then tomorrow I go back to the bills and the thing and the problems and the thing. So how does that work?
- [46:35]
Bill Burnett
Well, here's the. Here's the trick. In a sense, I guess it's called the scandal of particularity. The scandal particularity says, hey, you know, the, The. These infinite things, love, beauty, truth, joy, all these things like that, they are all infinite. And the human brain is sort of finite. And so it turns out our only experience of the infinite things like love, joy, and beauty, whatever occur in a moment, in a finite moment. So stacking those moments and recognizing, oh, wait a minute, I can actually be in flow for all sorts of moments is how you make it work.
- [47:15]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah, I like that. Because as you just described, we talk about things like happiness and joy and all these experiences, but we only experience those things in those moments. It's the moments that count. So if you stack them up, that I guess turns into a meaningful life. I've been talking with Bill Burnett. He is the executive director of the Stanford Life Design Lab, and he's co author of a book called how to Live a Meaningful Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show Notes and Bill, it was a pleasure. Thanks for explaining this.
- [47:55]
Bill Burnett
Well, thank you very much for the opportunity, Mike. It was fun. Great questions.
- [48:02]
Mike Carruthers
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Bill Burnett
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Mike Carruthers
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Bill Burnett
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Brad Beeler
Wow.
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Mike Carruthers
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Brad Beeler
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