Stanford Professor: Don’t Build Your Life Around Your Kids

I know a heart surgeon who has a job. He does it for the money. He went to med school to make his parents happy. Happened to finish really well. Doesn't really like that much. Happens to be really good at it. He doesn't tell his patients because it would make them nervous.

Yeah. He is saving lives. But he actually will say, "I'm a better surgeon because I don't give a [__]. I'm just doing the work." You get your ego wrapped up in this thing. You get all connected to the patient. You get in trouble. "I'm the best surgeon I know because I don't give a [__]." It's an interesting thing to hear from somebody.

That was the first intro with testosterone in it since we've been doing this, by the way. Just wanted to say thank you for that. Go ahead. Start.

Go ahead, guys. You start. Oh, so it turns out, how many of you think your life matters to you? Your life's like a big deal for you. The rest of you talk to me later. Okay. So that turns out has to be a broad consideration. Most people think their life matters to them. How many of you got really good help figuring out what to do with it? That's the issue. Okay. So, uh, we noticed that and so we decided to teach a class and it worked and people liked it and we sold two million books and then you called us and we came.

We authored three. Three. Got it. I'm Bill Burnett. Um, and uh, I'm still teaching full-time at Stanford. Dave's a little bit more part-time with me, but it was the same question. We, you know, I've been in office hours for a long time with a lot of students and uh, you know, Stanford kids are smart, but they don't really know anything.

Yeah. They don't know anything about life. They don't know how to launch. They live in this little bubble where we give them dorms and food and all sorts of fun stuff to do. So, we uh we got together in 2007 and created this class. Um, and it's been it's been a lot of fun because it it applies this idea of design and we'll get into this idea of design thinking. Um, and I I've been in industry for Bill and I have both been in industry for a lot of our career. I was at Apple for seven years designing. If you had um if you had a PowerBook back in the '90s, my team probably designed it. So, I've designed a lot of stuff using these same ideas. And then we thought, well, what about people? We could design people this way, right? They're they're an unknown thing in the future and you can't get any data. So, you have to figure out how to design it.

Yeah, we do. Actually, it's an exercise we call the compass. So it's got three pieces. First, like what's the story you grew up with? You know, I grew up with work hard, you know, go to a good school, make some money, you'll be fine. Actually work and my dad said and you're gonna have to make all the money, you know, because that's what men do, right? And I decided I would find a woman who made more money than me, which I did, and my wonderful wife. Um, so that part was wrong, but you know, so what's your story? And then what's your work view? What's your theory of work? Why do we work? And then the final one is what's your life view? Kind of 250 to 500 words. What's the meaning of life? Put those three things together. Make them coherent. And now you've got what we call a compass because you don't necessarily have to know where you're going. You just have to know you're going in the right direction. And that gives you your center. The thing you were talking about like now I know who I am and what I'm looking for, right? Any thoughts to...

Well, just the research makes very clear if you want your life to be meaningful to you and most people do. Um, if you can align and interconnect who am I, what I believe, and what I'm doing, right? If you can connect those three dots, your chance of meaning making goes way up. If you can't connect those dots, your chances of meaning making goes way down. You can't connect a dot you've not articulated. So, the purpose of our compass exercise is to articulate what those dots are. Now, what you'll notice is it doesn't answer the question, what should you believe in and what should you be doing? We don't [__] on you. We don't recommend you [__] on yourself. It's not helpful. Um, and so you got there's some exploration you have to do to answer these questions. They're not easy questions to answer, but once you write down the answers that you currently have, you can start moving toward that.

And we believe a human being is a becoming. You're never done. You're always growing. And if you're doing that over time, you keep moving toward the best version of what you think is true of yourself, it's going to get clearer.

Well, we don't talk about happiness much, frankly. Um, in fact, the positive psychology movement started by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about 20 years ago, the first book was called Authentic Happiness. And there's a happiness equation and the book has largely been debunked as not particularly true. Um, so they moved from happiness to flourishing or thriving and that's probably a better thing. We talk mostly about joy and aliveness actually. Um, so I think if you're living in such a way that's bringing generativity to you, it's causing you to grow. It's causing you to think what you're doing is worthwhile and it's particularly enabling you to experience more aliveness. You feel more like yourself and more here. That's a joy producing thing. Those are good indicators to look for. So that's the criteria we like.

Well, we see these all the time and it's just a belief that just holds you back. It's either not true or it's just preventing you from moving forward. So, one of the things we hear our students say all the time is, "Oh, I got to pick the right major. If I don't pick the right major, I'm not going to have a good life." Yeah. Completely baloney. Um, 10 years out of school, the data is no less than 20% of you will be doing something that has anything to do with your major. Major is the way you organize college is not the way you organize your life. Right? Or I hear this from 30-somethings. So it's too late. It's too late for me. I'm an accountant. I hate it. I'm a lawyer. I hate it. It's too late. It's never too late because it's a sunk cost, right? Economics is a sunk cost. Start from where you are and design your way forward. So, you know, uh oh, and the other one, and I think you and I agree on this, is follow your passion, which was probably the worst advice you can give somebody. So, we're, you know, we teach at Stanford, so we can't kind of make [__] up. We have to have it based on research. Yeah.

So, there's a guy at Stanford, Bill Damon, who runs this, uh, I think he's a member emeritus now, but he ran the center for the adolescence, for the study of adolescence. Yeah. And he researched this. He wrote a book called Path to Purpose. Less than 20% of people have a singular identifiable passion. Yeah. Eight out of 10 people go, I don't know what you're talking about, or I got lots of things, you know, where do you want to start? And by the way, in that 20%, most of that stuff is for the arts. I want to be a singer. I want to be a dancer. I want to be a writer. And what do we tell those kids? Oh, you can't do that. That's not a real job. So anyway, following your passion is a bad starting point because it leaves eight out of 10 people going, I don't know what's wrong with me. And go to the back of the line. Come when you have a passion. Come on up. We'll talk to you. So, we're not into passion. That's a big dysfunctional belief.

Yes. Well, there are a couple of things we talk about around this stuff. First of all, there's money-making and meaning-making, right? Right. So, we talk about that a lot. And uh the modern presupposition for most educated people, certainly in the West, I mean, as in west of Athens, um is that I should be able to make money at what makes me... In fact, I really want to make the world a better place and I want to be fulfilled and I want to make a killing and that should all work easily and the universe should be organized around that. The universe is not organized around that premise. Um, the universe, the world is doing what it's doing. Period. Um, the overwhelming majority of human history, meaning-making and money-making were two different things. You know, I mean, you did the poetry thing on the side or you did the art thing on the side. And meaning-making and money-making don't have to be the same. We call that there's the vocational lifestyle where my life is in my work. I get to do one thing for all of it. That's really rare. It's a very modern idea. If it happens to work for you, if you happen to be conveniently configured. So one student walks up to office hours, sits down, says, "So what's going on with you?" "Well, I'm in computer science. I'm really good at AI. I'm particularly fascinated how AI can affect the retail world and enterprise software. So, you know, I'm kind of thinking, what might I do with that?" I went, "Oh, it's really convenient to be you right now." Next student, Allison sits down, what do you... "I'm really into documentary film, preferably about nature. I don't actually... I'm into doing documentary film about nature." Oh, terribly inconvenient to be you right now. You don't get to pick the you. You don't get to pick the universe you're in, you know. Don't pick your time. So, you just have to navigate the gap between how you're working and how the world is working and make it work as best you can. Last thing I'll say is there are three ways to think about work. Jobs, careers, and callings. You do jobs for money, careers for professional development, and callings for missional fulfillment and values realization. Most people stack those vertically. A job is down here, a career is better, a calling is even better. We hold those horizontally. They're just different. They're not better or worse. I know a heart surgeon who has a job. He does it for the money. He went to med school to make his parents happy. Happened to finish really well. Doesn't really like that much. Happens to be really good at it. He does it for the money. He doesn't tell his patients because it would make them nervous.

Yeah, he is saving lives. But he actually will say, "I'm a better surgeon because I don't give a [__]. I'm just doing the work." You get your ego wrapped up in this thing. You get all connected to the patient. You get in trouble. "I'm the best surgeon I know because I don't give a [__]." It's an interesting thing to hear from somebody. So, think about this stuff and decide how you want to play it.

Any, any uh... well, you know, it is a very modern idea. You know, we're all children of immigrants. My grandparents came over from Germany. Uh, my mom's side 1933, my grandfather got the family out of Germany in '33 because '33 was when Hitler was elected.

Yeah. I didn't think that was going to go well. It was his Trump moment. And uh he got the family, he got the family to California somehow.

So, but so and he took any job. I mean, he took any job. Put a roof over the head, feed the kids, get them to school, and uh that was his job. He had meaning from his church, from his community. He got meaning from other things that you didn't expect to get a lot. He, you know, his sixth grade education, he had terrible, crappy jobs for most of his life. But he had a meaningful life because the mission was get the kids. So my mom and uncle went off to the community college and got, you know, got educated that he didn't have. My parents were able to send me to Stanford. My daughter just finished her PhD in cancer immunology at UCSF here up in Parnassus and she's going to change the world and cure cancer. So she's wonderful, but I mean it's a... all of these things, all these jobs and money and meaning thing. It gets so confused and particularly in this generation, people want it all in one place. It doesn't have to be that one place. In fact, you might not want to get your money, you might want to get your meaning on the market's terms.

That's right. That's right.

Well, I'll talk about prototyping. You want to talk about meaning? Sorry. Yeah, go ahead. So, our whole, you know, in class, in the books, everything else, the philosophy is set the bar low, clear it, do it again, do it again, do it again. If you read James Clear's Atomic Habits, just start small, make small changes. What we talk about, designers have two mindsets that are important. Curiosity, even if you're really at the lowest of low, there's something you're curious about, right? And then prototyping. Prototyping is just run a little experiment. Talk to somebody who's interesting who's doing the thing that you're interested in or have a little experience of doing something that you're curious about. And these small prototypes build a sense of momentum and increases your curiosity because if you're a curious person, there's a lot of stuff in the world going on right now that's really interesting. And so if you start small, build little prototype experiments and just keep moving forward, you'll eventually find some track that fits and feels good. And that's how you get out of, you know, the sort of existential I don't even know where to start question.

Yeah. Um, office... there is no figuring it out. There's only getting on with it. Mhm. Um, so I got married four weeks ago. Um, and right there, the darling woman in the third row uh who for some reason is willing to put up with...

Well, she's still under warranty, you know. I mean...

Yeah. Um, and she ran an art gallery here in San Francisco for 40 years, the Frankel Gallery, but 20 years ago decided, I think there's something else I'm supposed to do, too. Had no idea what it was. So, she's stuck, but you just lean into what you know. Quit worrying about what you don't know and lean into what you do know. Okay. So, maybe it's this. Maybe she's reading. She's thinking, "Oh, maybe it's palliative care. I read an article on palliative care. What's that? I think it might have something to do with that." Looks into that. Maybe I could become an interfaith chaplain. No, it doesn't work. I can't go to med school. I'm 60, you know, 45 years old, have a kid, whatever it is. Uh, and then, you know, 10 years after that, she's sitting in the sun in Tucson, Arizona, and it hits her, you could help people write letters. She literally gets a calling and she goes, "Yes, I could do that. What the hell does that mean? I don't know what that means." So, she's now a letter midwife. Um, and she assists people writing the essential letters of their lives. She's done that 800 times. She's got a book coming out in October all about it called Unfinished Business. And so if you just keep leaning into it, after about 20 years or so, it starts getting clear.

It's called being a human being. Um, so if you're stuck, just identify what you are drawn toward and make a move. Even if it's a conversation or a start or reading an article or whatever it might be, you're making progress. Don't measure, have I fixed it yet? Have I solved it yet? Am I making a move? This is the classic design thinking thing. David Kelley, who runs the d.school and IDEO and it's kind of the king of all this stuff, he would say, "We build our way forward. Just go build something."

Build a little prototype. Write a couple letters. Sit with somebody you know who's about to lose someone they love and, you know, let her midwife that. That's a great description. Build something and see what happens because as soon as you build a prototype, the world that is possible just changed. I've seen this a million times. I was at Apple for seven years. We'd build a prototype of something, we'd put it in a room, you know, we'd stand behind the window and the glass and somebody would start playing with it and they'd realize, oh man, if you could do this, I could do this or this and this. And you're like, as soon as you have a prototype, you change the world that is possible. So build something, anything, and you'll get unstuck.

Well, sure. And first of all, you weren't without purpose when you were just a rapacious capitalist. You, um, you know, you had a goal. Yeah. And you met it and you sacrificed for it. You may have changed your mind about it later and it makes for a good one-liner, but the truth is you'd probably do it again.

Yeah. Um, and look, we make decisions. You know, you optimize for one thing versus another. Um, and this is why we had to write a third book, by the way. So, um, after the pandemic and then the Great Resignation, 52 million people walked off the job looking for something better. Yeah, we had all either had or had sat next to somebody who went through an existential crisis. And so, the question gets raised, wow, is this good enough? Is this it? And a whole bunch of people said no. How many of you quit in the last five years at least once? Okay, 20% of the room, right? Not because it was going great. And so when we started hearing back from people that didn't work, we heard two things. I'm just not fulfilled. Yeah. Or I'm not having the impact I want to. Yeah. We overwhelmingly heard that mostly impact. It's about 80/20 impact over fulfillment. And we looked into that and both of those are dead ends if that's the only form of meaning-making you're looking for. Yeah. So they're a good thing. We're trying to have an impact right now, right? We wrote a book because we hope it will impact people's lives. But if impact is a thing and you're not a thing. Yeah. And even if it works, the glow is short-lived and most of the time it doesn't work. So that's a dead end. That's a treadmill. And fulfillment, which is what Maslow told you you wanted to be. Become self-actualized. Become all that you can be. And we know you can't be all you can be because all of us are bigger than a lifetime's worth of a person. There's more than one of you in there. So you can't manifest your whole self. That's impossible. And that's the good news. So other forms of meaning-making, which occur in a place we call the flow world. The transactional world where we get stuff done is one thing. The flow world, which is what's actually happening right now. So, right now, am I thinking about, gee, I wonder if this is going to move the needle on sales this week, and, you know, is Scott gonna get this thing out digitally fast enough, or I wonder what's on these people's minds, and are we actually being helpful? Am I here or am I somewhere else? And in this place called here, regardless of whether or not your life is working, regardless of whether or not this is the perfect career, right here, right now, your chance of being more alive is extremely high. You can get more out of the life you're already in while you're still trying to design a better life down the road. And there are four places we can do that which are wonder, flow, coherence, and formative community. But, you know, that's four chapters. Um, and so, but there are things, there are hacks, if you will. We have 21 tools in this book describing ways to get your hands on more meaning right now.

You don't have to spend, you know, the next nine years developing a mindfulness practice. That's cool if you want to do it. You don't have to go, you know, 40 days in the wilderness, you know, starving. It's, uh, meaning is made in moments. Moments are made in this here and now flow place. And we teach people to be moment designers.

Well, that wouldn't be hard, actually.

Well, it just occurred to me, there's an old saying that, you know, the best marriages are when each person thinks they got the best deal, right? Certainly, I got the best deal. My wife Cynthia is amazing. I got the best deal. I don't know why she puts up with me, but I think it's amazing. And I've asked her and she says, 'No, no, no. I actually got the better of the deal because you're, you know, you're kind and you're nice and blah blah blah blah.' So, I think you're looking for a situation where you think, not that you don't deserve it, but you think that you're going to get the best deal and that this person is irrationally attracted to you. If you got that and it goes both ways—see, they're holding hands there, that's good—then I think that's what you're looking for.

But you have a little more current... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've been married 38 years, so I forget why we got married.

Sorry. Go ahead.