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From the Ted Talk by Bill Burnett: 5 steps to designing the life you want

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Hello, everyone. I'm here to help you design your life. We're going to use the technique of design thinking. Design thinking is something we've been working on at the d.School and in the School of Engineering for over 50 years, and it's an innovation methodology, works on products, works on services. But I think the most interesting design prloebm is your life! So that's what we're going to talk about. I want to just make sure everybody knows: this is my buddy Dave evnas, his face. Dave and I are the co-authors of the book, and he is the guy who helped me co-found the Life Design Lab at Stanford. So what do we do in the Life Design Lab? Well, we teach the class that hlpes to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. Now, I'm going to give you the first reframe. Designers love reframes. How many of you hope you never grow up and lose that child-like curiosity that drives everything you do? Raise your hand. Right! Who wants to grow up? I mean, we've been tialnkg about curiosity in almost every one of these takls. And so I'd like to reframe this as: we say we tcaeh the casls that helps you figure out what you want to grow into next, as this life of yours, this azniamg dsigen of yours, unfolds. So, design thinking is what we teach and it's a set of mindsets, it's how designers think. You know, we've been taught probably in the uvesiitrny to be so skeptical realists, rationalists, but that's not very useful as a mesndit when you're trying to do something new, something no one's ever done before. So we say you start with curiosity and you lean into what you're curious about. We say you reframe problems because most of the time we find people are working on the wrong problems and they have a wonderful solution to something that doesn't work anyway. So, what's the point of working on the wrong thing? We say rdiaacl collaboration because the answer's out in the world with other people. That's where your experience of your life will be. We want to be mindful of our process. There are times in the design pcroses when you want lots of ideas, and there are times when you really want to converge test some things, prototype some things, you want to be good at that. And the other is biased aitcon. Now, you know, I'll say that we think no plan for your life will survive first contact with reality. (Laughter) Reality has the tndeceny to throw little things at us that we weren't expecting, sometimes good things, sometimes bad. So we say: just have a biaesd action, try stuff. Why? Why did we start this class? I've been in office horus for a long, long time with my students. I've been teaching here for a while. Dave as well. He was teaching over that community college, in Berkeley, for a while. (Laughter) And - I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's a Stanford TEDx. But we notice that people get stuck. People really get stuck and then they don't know what to do and they don't seem to have any tools for getting unstuck. Designers get sctuk all the time. I signed up to be a designer, which means I'm going to work on something I've never done, every day, and I get stuck and unstuck, stuck and unstuck, all the time. We also noticed as we went out and talked to folks who are not just our students, but people in mid-career and encore careers, that ppolee have a bunch of blieefs which psychologists label "dysfunctional beliefs," things they believe that are true that actually aren't true, and it hldos them back. I'll give you three. First one is: "What's your passion? Tell me your passion and I'll tell you what you need to do." Now, if you actually have one of these things, these passions - you knew at two you wanted to be a doctor, you knew at seven you wanted to be a cowln at Cirque du Soleil, and now you are one, that's awesome. But we're a sort of research space here at Stanford, so we went over to the cteenr for the Study of aosdcnecele, which by the way now goes up to 27 - (Laughter) and met with Bill Damon, one of our colleagues, a fantastic guy. He studied this question and it turns out less than 20% of the people have any one single identifiable pisaosn in their lives. We hate a methodology which says, "OK, come to the front of the line. You have a passion? Oh, you don't? Oh, I'm sorry. When you have one, come on back and we'll help you with that." It's tlrbiree, eight out of 10 people say, "I have lots of things I'm interested in." So this is not an oiaznirgng principle for your search or your design. The second one is, "Well, you should know by now, right? Don't you know where you're going? If you don't know, you're late." (Laughter) Now, what are you late for, exactly? I'm not quite sure. But you know, there's a meta-narrative in the culture and when I was growing up: by 25, you're supposed to maybe have a relationship, maybe have gotten mareird and steatrd to get the family together. When I talk to my millennial students, they'll say, "Oh, that's got to be like 30 or something," because they can't imagine, anything past, like, 22, but 30 is a long way out. But we know that now these people are forming their lives much more fluidly, they are staying in a lot more dynamic miootn between about 22 and 35, and so this notion that you're late is really kind of like, "Well, you should have figured this out by now." Dave and I don't "should" on anybody. In the book or in the class, we don't believe in "should." We just think, "Alright, you are whatever you are. Let's start from where you are. You're not late for anything." But the one we really don't like is: "Are you being the best possible version of you?" (Laughter) "I mean, because you're not seltntig for something that's less than the best, because this is Stanford. Obviously we all are going to be the best." Well, this implies that, one, there's a singular best; two, that it's a leianr thing, and life is anything but linear; and three, it kind of comes from this business ntioon, there's an old business saying, "Good is the emeny of better, better is the enemy of best," and you always want to do your best in business. But if there isn't one singular best, then our rraemfe is, "The unattainable best is the enemy of all the available betters, because there are many, many versions of you that you could play out, all of which would result in a well-designed life." So I'm going to give you three ideas from design thinking - five ideas, excuse me - That says five, doesn't it? Yeah. Five ideas from design tkinhnig. And people who've read the book or taken the class have written back to us and said, "Hey, these were the most useful, these were the most doable, they were the most helpful." And we're human-centered designers, so we want to be helpful. The first one is this notion of connecting the dots. The nbmuer one reason people take our class and we hear read the book is they say, "You know, I want my life to be meaningful, I want it to be pfreopsuul, I want it to add up to something." So, we looked in the positive psychology lautirtree and in the design literature, and it turns out that there's who you are, there's what you believe and there's what you do in the wlord, and if you can make a connection between these three things, if you can make that a coherent srtoy, you will ecrnipxeee your life as meaningful. The increase in meaning-making comes from connecting the dots. So we do two things. We ask people: "Write a work view. What's your theory of work? Not the job you want, but why do you work? What's it for? What's work in service of?" Once you have that, 250 words, then - this one's a little harder to get shrot, "What's the meaning of life? What's the big picture? Why are you here? What is your ftiah or your view of the world?" When you can connect your life view and your work view together, in a coreneht way, you start to experience your life as meaningful. That's the idea number one. Idea number two: people get stuck and you've got to be curfael because we can reframe almost anything, but there's a class of problems that people get stuck on that are really, really bad problems. We call them gravity plmreobs. Essentially, they're something you cannot change. Now, I know you have a friend and you've been having cffoee with this friend for a while, and they're stuck. They don't like their boss, their partner, their job, there's something that they don't like. But nothing's happening, right? Nothing's henaipnpg with them. If Dave were here he'd say, "Look, you can't solve a problem you're not willing to have." You can't solve a problem you're not willing to have, so if you've got a gatrivy problem and you're simply not willing to work on it, then it's just a circumstance in your life. And the only thing we know to do with gravity problems is to accept. In the design thinking chart, you start with empathy, then you redefine the problem, you come up with lots of ideas, then you prototype and test things, but that only works if it's a problem you're willing to work on. The first thing to do is apccet and once you've accepted this as gravity problem - "I can't change it. You know, this is a company, the cpaomny is a family-run company and the name of the founder is on the door and if you're not in the fmilay, you can't be the president." You're right, you can't! So, now you have to decide what you want to do. Is that a ciramcusctne that you can reframe and work in, or do you need to do something else? So be really careful about gravity problems because they're pcuonrieis and they really get in the way. But back to this idea of multiples, I do a little thought epxremeint with my students, and I say, you know, "The physicists up in SLAC have kind of demonstrated this multiverse thing might be real." You've heard of this, that there are multiple parallel universes, one right next to each other. And say, "We'll do a thought experiment. Let's say you could live in all the multiverses simultaneously, and not only that, but you'd know about your life in each one of these instances. So, you could go back and be the ballerina, and the scientist, and the CPA, and whatever else you wanted to be. You could have all these lives in praleall." When I ask them, "How many lives are you? How many lives would you want?", I get awserns from three to 10,000. But, you know, we've sort of done the average: it's about 7,5. Most people think they have about 7,5 really good lives that they could live. And here's the deal: you only get one. But it turns out it's not what you don't choose, it's what you choose in life that makes you happy. Nevertheless, we reframed this and we say, "Great, there's more lives than one in you. So let's go on an ossdeyy, and let's really figure out those lives!" And we ask people to do some design. And the "ideate" bbblue, it's about having lot's of ideas. So we say, "Let's have some ideas. We'll ideate your future, but you can't ideate just one. You have to idetae three." Now, there's some research from the School of Education that says if you start with three ideas and you brainstorm from there, you've got a much wider range of ideas, the ideas are more generative and they lead to better sotoinuls to the problem rather than just sirnttag with one and then brainstorming forward. So we always do threes; there's something magical about threes. We have people do three lvies, and it's transformational. We give them this little rubric. One: "The thing you're doing, the thing you're doing right now, whatever your career is, just do it. And you're going to do it for five years and it's going to come out geart." I mean, in design, we're sort of values-neutral, except for one thing: we never design anything to make it worse, right? I have been on some teams that made some pretty bad products, but we weren't trying to, we were trying to make it better. So, thing one: your life, make it better. And also put in the bucket list stuff: you want to go to Paris, to the Galapagos - the guy with the ice thing - before it's all under water and we can't see it anymore. So, that's plan one: your life goes great. Plan two: I'm really sorry to tell you, but the robots and the AI stfuf - that job doesn't exist anymore, the robots are doing it. We don't need you to do that anymore. Now, what are going to do? So what do you do if the thing that you've got goes away? And you know, everybody's got a side hsulte or something they can do to make that work. And three is: what's your wild-card plan? What would you do if you didn't have to wrory about money? You've got enough. You're not fabulously wealthy, but you've got enough. And what would you do if you knew no one would laugh? My students come in for my office hours a lot of times, and they'll say something like, "Well, what I really want to do is this, but I can't just hear people saying, 'You didn't go to Stanford to do that, did you?'" (Laughter) Because somehow, if you went to Stanford, you have to do some of the amazing things the past speakers have been doing. "But what would you do if you had enough money and you didn't care what people thought? Anything from, 'I'm going to go study butterflies' to, 'I want to be a bdntraeer, you know, in Belize.' What would you do?" And people have those three plans. Now what happens when they do this is, one, they rzeiale, "Oh my gosh, I could actually have imagined my three completely parallel lives are all pertty interesting." Two, they rarely go become a bartender, you know, in biezle. But a lot of times, the things that come up in the other plans were things that they left behind somehow. In the business of life, they forgot about those things. And so they birng them back and put them in plan one, then they make their lives even better. Sometimes they do pviot, but mostly they just use this as a mhoetd of itiedang all the possible wonderful ways they could have a life. Now, you could sartt executing that, but in our medol, the thing you do after you have ieads is you build a ptrypotoe. We have met people who've quit their job and suddenly done something else, It hardly ever works. You kind of have to sneak up on it, because in our model, we want to set the bar really low, try stuff, have some success, do it again. So when we say "prototype," in our language, what we mean is a way to ask an interesting qoeuitsn, "What would it be like if I tried this?", a way to expose the assumptions, "Is this even the thing I want or is that just something I remember I wanted when I was 20?" I've got to go out in the world and do this, so I'm going to get others involved in ptnyiortopg my life, and I'm going to sneak up on the future, because I don't if this is exactly what I want. There's two kdnis of life-design prototypes and what we call prototype conversation. You know, William Gibson, the science-fiction writer has a famous quote: "The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed." So, there is someone who's a bartender in Ibiza. He's been doing it for years, I could go meet him and have a conversation, he or she. Somebody else is doing something else I'm interested in. All of these people are out there, they're living in my future, today. They're doing what I want to do, today. And if I have a conversation with them, I just ask for their story and everybody will tell you their story. If you buy them a cup of coffee, they tell you the story. If I hear something in the story that rings in me - We have this thing we call narrative resonance: when I hear a story that's kind of like my story, something happens, and I can identify that as a potential way of moivng forward. The other one is a prototype experience. Dave and I were working with a woman, sort of mid-career in her 40s and a very scufsuescl tech executive, but wnaetd to move from money-making to meaning-making, to do something more meaningful, thinking of going back to school, getting an MA in edctiauon, working with kids. But she's like, "You know, I don't know, I'm 45, going back to school. It's not going to work. And then I herad about these miienlanlls. They're kind of mean and they don't like old people." (Laughter) What am I going to do, Bill?" I said, "Well, you just have to go try this, you know. It turns out we sent her to a seminar class and to a large lecture-hall class, and by the way, you just put on a T-shirt that says "Stanford" and you walk into a class, nobody knows. She wasn't registered, but you know, she went and she went to the classes and she came back and said, "You know what? It was fantastic! I walked into the lecture hall, I sat down, my body was on fire! It was ineesrtntig, I was so interested in the way the lecture was going. And then I met these millennials. It turned out they're pretty interesting people! I've set up three prototype conversations. And they think I'm interesting because I'm coming back to shocol and I'm 45." So she had a felt experience, because we are more than just our bnaris. She had a felt experience that this might work for her. So these are two ways you can prototype your way forward. The last idea: you want to make a good decision well. So many people make choices and they're not hpapy with their choices because they don't really know how do they know what they know, right? It's a hard thing, particularly in our days when we have so many choices. So we have a process. Again it comes from the positive psychology guys. Gather and create options. Once you get good at design you're really good at coming up with options. You've got narrow those down to a working list that you can work with. Then, you make the choice to make a good choice, and then of course you aonigze that you did the wrong thing. (Laughter) All my students have what is called FOMO, fear missing out, "What if I didn't pick the right thing." Someone came into my oiffce and said, "I'll declare three mjroas and two minors" and I said, "Do you plan on being here for a few years? It's not going to heppan, right?" So we don't say that; we say you want to let go and move on, and all these have some psychological bsais in them. Let me tell you about it. Once you get good at giranhetg and creating ideas, you also want to make sure you leave room for the lucky ideas, the serendipitous ideas. This is a guy named Tony Hsieh. He was the CEO at zoapps, he sold it to Amazon. But before you became an employee at Zappos you had to take a test, and the test was, "Are you lucky?" One, two or three: "I'm not very lucky, and I'm not sure why." Seven, eight, nine, ten, "I'm very lucky, great things happen to me all the time, I'm not sure why." He wouldn't hire anybody who was not lucky. (Laughter) I think it's probably illegal, but it was based on - (Laughter) but it was based on a piece of research where psychologists did the same thing, "Rate yourself from lucky to unlucky." And then they had people read the front section of the New York teims, 30 pages, lots of articles. And the gaaudrte sednutts said, "Please count the number of -" either headlines or photographs, depending on the test. "And when you get the whole thing read and you count the number of photographs, just tell the perosn at the end." And if you got the right number, you'd get $100. Of course you all know when a graduate student tells you what the experiment is that's not the experiment. So, inside this thing that looked like the New York Times, 30 pages, front page, inside all the stories were little pceies of text that said, "If you read this, the experiment's over. cloelct an extra $ 150." People who rated themselves as ukcluny by and lrage got the right answer, 36 headlines, whatever it was, got the $ 100. People who rated themselves as lucky - seven, eight, nine or ten - 80% of the time noticed the text and got the extra $150. It's not about being lkucy. It's about paying attention to what you're doing and keeping your peripheral vision open because it's in your phiraerepl viiosn that those interesting otitiouprnpes show up, right, that you were not expecting. So you want to get good at being lucky. Narrowing down. This is quite simple. If you have too many choices, you go into what psychologists call choice overload, and then you have essentially no choices. Here's the experiment. This was done at sofratnd. You walk into a grocery sotre and there's a nice lady. She's got a table and on the table, she has six jams, and you come over try the jams to have a sample, buy some jam. Six jams; about 30 people who would go by pick a jam, or stop and test something, and about a third of those actually buy a jam. That's the baseline. Next week, you walk in, 24 jams: jalapeño, strawberry, banana, whatever; all sorts of jams. Well, guess what happens? Twice as many people stop, look at all these jams, it's so interesting. Three percent of the people buy them. (latuhegr) When you have too many choices, you have no choice. What do you do when you have too many cicoehs? Just csors off a bunch of choices. Psychologists tells us we can't handle more than five to seven. I'd say it's five. If you've got a bunch of choices, cross them all off, just pick the five and then make your deiioscn there. "Oh my God! What if I pick the wrong ones? What if I cross off the wrong ones?" Right? Well, you won't, because it's the pizza or Chinese food thing. You're at the office and everybody says, "Let's go out to lunch today." "Sounds great. What do you want to do? pziza or Chinese food?" "I don't care." In the elevator on their way down, someone says, "Let's get Chinese food." Then you go, "No, I want pizza." (Laughter) You won't decide how you feel about the decision till the decision's made. That's a piece of rescreah that's been done again and again and again. So just cross them off. If you cross off the wrong one, you'll have a feeling somewhere in your stomach that you did the wrong thing. Choosing - this is about that feeling in your stomach. You cannot choose well if you choose only from your rational mind. This is Dan glameon, who wrote the book on emotional iglnniltecee. He does a lot of research on this, a lot of barin science. There's a part of your brain, way down in the base brain, the basal ganglia, that summarizes emotional decisions for you. I did something, got good emotional rposnsee from that: good, check. I did something and had a little bad emiootanl response to that. It summarizes all of the emotions that you have felt and how your decisions were valenced positive or negative an eimtoon. The problem with that part of your brain is that it's so early in the brain it doesn't talk to the part of your brain that talks. There's no cnieotcnon to the prefrontal cortex or anything else. It's only connected to your GI tract and your limbic system. So, it gives you information through felt sensations, a "gut feleing." Without that, you can't make good decisions. And then the letting go and moving on. This was the hardest part for me, but this is also the work of Dan Gilbert, who is a distinguished sticsient at Harvard, despite the fact that he's doing insurance commercials now. And he's been studying decision-making and how do you make yourself happy. So, you walk in another psychology experiment. The postdoc has got five Monet prints, five pictures from Monet, and you rank them from best to least, "I like this one the most, I like this one the least," number one and number five. "Thank you very much, the experiment's over. Oh, by the way, as you're walking out, you know, I kind of screwed up and I bought too many of number two and three. So if you want to take one home you can just have it. Two conditions: in one case, take it home and have it, but don't bring it back because I'm kind of ersebsamrad and - Just keep it, you can't exchange it. Second condition: I've got lots of these. If you don't like the one you picked, you can swap it back and pick another one." And of course everybody picks number two. It's a little better than number three. We bring people back in a week later and say, "Re-rank the stimuli. Which one do you like now?" The people who were allowed to change their mind don't like their painting, they don't like the pirnt, they don't like the other one anymore, they don't like any of them aomyrne. In fact, they don't like the whole process and they have destroyed their opportunity to be happy. (Laughter) The people who were told, "You pick it, it's yours, you can't return it" love their print, they typically rank it as number one and think the rest of them suck. (Laughter) If you make decisions reversible, your ccahne of being happy goes down like 60 or 70 percent. So, let go and move on, make the decision reversible. And by the way, as a designer, that's no problem, because you're really good at gnatnieerg options, you're great at ideation, you're really good at prototyping to get data in the world to see of that world will be the world you want to live in, so you have no fear of missing out. It's just a process, a mindful process: collect, reduce, decide, move on. That's how you make yourself happy. So, the five ideas: Connecting the dots to find mneinag through work and life views. Stay away from gravity problems because I can't fix those and neither can you; reframe those to something that is workable. Do three plans, never one, always do three of everything, three ideations for any of the problems you're wknriog on to make sure that you've covered not just the ideas that you had when you started, but all the other ideas that are possible. Prototype everything in your life before you jump in and try it. And choose well; there's no point in making a good choice poorly. Choose well and you will find that things in your life are much easier. And you can do this, we know you can, because touashnds of students have done it. Two PhD studies have been done in the class that demonstrated higher self-efficacy, lower dysfunctional beliefs. It's a fascinating process to watch people who don't think of themselves as crvetiae go through this class and walk out saying, "You know what? I'm a pretty creative person!" what David Kelly calls "creative confidence." So, we know you can do it, thank you very much. It's simple: get cuiuros, talk to people and try stuff, and you will design a well-lived and jufyol life. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers)

Open Cloze

Hello, everyone. I'm here to help you design your life. We're going to use the technique of design thinking. Design thinking is something we've been working on at the d.School and in the School of Engineering for over 50 years, and it's an innovation methodology, works on products, works on services. But I think the most interesting design _______ is your life! So that's what we're going to talk about. I want to just make sure everybody knows: this is my buddy Dave _____, his face. Dave and I are the co-authors of the book, and he is the guy who helped me co-found the Life Design Lab at Stanford. So what do we do in the Life Design Lab? Well, we teach the class that _____ to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. Now, I'm going to give you the first reframe. Designers love reframes. How many of you hope you never grow up and lose that child-like curiosity that drives everything you do? Raise your hand. Right! Who wants to grow up? I mean, we've been _______ about curiosity in almost every one of these _____. And so I'd like to reframe this as: we say we _____ the _____ that helps you figure out what you want to grow into next, as this life of yours, this _______ ______ of yours, unfolds. So, design thinking is what we teach and it's a set of mindsets, it's how designers think. You know, we've been taught probably in the __________ to be so skeptical realists, rationalists, but that's not very useful as a _______ when you're trying to do something new, something no one's ever done before. So we say you start with curiosity and you lean into what you're curious about. We say you reframe problems because most of the time we find people are working on the wrong problems and they have a wonderful solution to something that doesn't work anyway. So, what's the point of working on the wrong thing? We say _______ collaboration because the answer's out in the world with other people. That's where your experience of your life will be. We want to be mindful of our process. There are times in the design _______ when you want lots of ideas, and there are times when you really want to converge test some things, prototype some things, you want to be good at that. And the other is biased ______. Now, you know, I'll say that we think no plan for your life will survive first contact with reality. (Laughter) Reality has the ________ to throw little things at us that we weren't expecting, sometimes good things, sometimes bad. So we say: just have a ______ action, try stuff. Why? Why did we start this class? I've been in office _____ for a long, long time with my students. I've been teaching here for a while. Dave as well. He was teaching over that community college, in Berkeley, for a while. (Laughter) And - I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's a Stanford TEDx. But we notice that people get stuck. People really get stuck and then they don't know what to do and they don't seem to have any tools for getting unstuck. Designers get _____ all the time. I signed up to be a designer, which means I'm going to work on something I've never done, every day, and I get stuck and unstuck, stuck and unstuck, all the time. We also noticed as we went out and talked to folks who are not just our students, but people in mid-career and encore careers, that ______ have a bunch of _______ which psychologists label "dysfunctional beliefs," things they believe that are true that actually aren't true, and it _____ them back. I'll give you three. First one is: "What's your passion? Tell me your passion and I'll tell you what you need to do." Now, if you actually have one of these things, these passions - you knew at two you wanted to be a doctor, you knew at seven you wanted to be a _____ at Cirque du Soleil, and now you are one, that's awesome. But we're a sort of research space here at Stanford, so we went over to the ______ for the Study of ___________, which by the way now goes up to 27 - (Laughter) and met with Bill Damon, one of our colleagues, a fantastic guy. He studied this question and it turns out less than 20% of the people have any one single identifiable _______ in their lives. We hate a methodology which says, "OK, come to the front of the line. You have a passion? Oh, you don't? Oh, I'm sorry. When you have one, come on back and we'll help you with that." It's ________, eight out of 10 people say, "I have lots of things I'm interested in." So this is not an __________ principle for your search or your design. The second one is, "Well, you should know by now, right? Don't you know where you're going? If you don't know, you're late." (Laughter) Now, what are you late for, exactly? I'm not quite sure. But you know, there's a meta-narrative in the culture and when I was growing up: by 25, you're supposed to maybe have a relationship, maybe have gotten _______ and _______ to get the family together. When I talk to my millennial students, they'll say, "Oh, that's got to be like 30 or something," because they can't imagine, anything past, like, 22, but 30 is a long way out. But we know that now these people are forming their lives much more fluidly, they are staying in a lot more dynamic ______ between about 22 and 35, and so this notion that you're late is really kind of like, "Well, you should have figured this out by now." Dave and I don't "should" on anybody. In the book or in the class, we don't believe in "should." We just think, "Alright, you are whatever you are. Let's start from where you are. You're not late for anything." But the one we really don't like is: "Are you being the best possible version of you?" (Laughter) "I mean, because you're not ________ for something that's less than the best, because this is Stanford. Obviously we all are going to be the best." Well, this implies that, one, there's a singular best; two, that it's a ______ thing, and life is anything but linear; and three, it kind of comes from this business ______, there's an old business saying, "Good is the _____ of better, better is the enemy of best," and you always want to do your best in business. But if there isn't one singular best, then our _______ is, "The unattainable best is the enemy of all the available betters, because there are many, many versions of you that you could play out, all of which would result in a well-designed life." So I'm going to give you three ideas from design thinking - five ideas, excuse me - That says five, doesn't it? Yeah. Five ideas from design ________. And people who've read the book or taken the class have written back to us and said, "Hey, these were the most useful, these were the most doable, they were the most helpful." And we're human-centered designers, so we want to be helpful. The first one is this notion of connecting the dots. The ______ one reason people take our class and we hear read the book is they say, "You know, I want my life to be meaningful, I want it to be __________, I want it to add up to something." So, we looked in the positive psychology __________ and in the design literature, and it turns out that there's who you are, there's what you believe and there's what you do in the _____, and if you can make a connection between these three things, if you can make that a coherent _____, you will __________ your life as meaningful. The increase in meaning-making comes from connecting the dots. So we do two things. We ask people: "Write a work view. What's your theory of work? Not the job you want, but why do you work? What's it for? What's work in service of?" Once you have that, 250 words, then - this one's a little harder to get _____, "What's the meaning of life? What's the big picture? Why are you here? What is your _____ or your view of the world?" When you can connect your life view and your work view together, in a ________ way, you start to experience your life as meaningful. That's the idea number one. Idea number two: people get stuck and you've got to be _______ because we can reframe almost anything, but there's a class of problems that people get stuck on that are really, really bad problems. We call them gravity ________. Essentially, they're something you cannot change. Now, I know you have a friend and you've been having ______ with this friend for a while, and they're stuck. They don't like their boss, their partner, their job, there's something that they don't like. But nothing's happening, right? Nothing's _________ with them. If Dave were here he'd say, "Look, you can't solve a problem you're not willing to have." You can't solve a problem you're not willing to have, so if you've got a _______ problem and you're simply not willing to work on it, then it's just a circumstance in your life. And the only thing we know to do with gravity problems is to accept. In the design thinking chart, you start with empathy, then you redefine the problem, you come up with lots of ideas, then you prototype and test things, but that only works if it's a problem you're willing to work on. The first thing to do is ______ and once you've accepted this as gravity problem - "I can't change it. You know, this is a company, the _______ is a family-run company and the name of the founder is on the door and if you're not in the ______, you can't be the president." You're right, you can't! So, now you have to decide what you want to do. Is that a ____________ that you can reframe and work in, or do you need to do something else? So be really careful about gravity problems because they're __________ and they really get in the way. But back to this idea of multiples, I do a little thought __________ with my students, and I say, you know, "The physicists up in SLAC have kind of demonstrated this multiverse thing might be real." You've heard of this, that there are multiple parallel universes, one right next to each other. And say, "We'll do a thought experiment. Let's say you could live in all the multiverses simultaneously, and not only that, but you'd know about your life in each one of these instances. So, you could go back and be the ballerina, and the scientist, and the CPA, and whatever else you wanted to be. You could have all these lives in ________." When I ask them, "How many lives are you? How many lives would you want?", I get _______ from three to 10,000. But, you know, we've sort of done the average: it's about 7,5. Most people think they have about 7,5 really good lives that they could live. And here's the deal: you only get one. But it turns out it's not what you don't choose, it's what you choose in life that makes you happy. Nevertheless, we reframed this and we say, "Great, there's more lives than one in you. So let's go on an _______, and let's really figure out those lives!" And we ask people to do some design. And the "ideate" ______, it's about having lot's of ideas. So we say, "Let's have some ideas. We'll ideate your future, but you can't ideate just one. You have to ______ three." Now, there's some research from the School of Education that says if you start with three ideas and you brainstorm from there, you've got a much wider range of ideas, the ideas are more generative and they lead to better _________ to the problem rather than just ________ with one and then brainstorming forward. So we always do threes; there's something magical about threes. We have people do three _____, and it's transformational. We give them this little rubric. One: "The thing you're doing, the thing you're doing right now, whatever your career is, just do it. And you're going to do it for five years and it's going to come out _____." I mean, in design, we're sort of values-neutral, except for one thing: we never design anything to make it worse, right? I have been on some teams that made some pretty bad products, but we weren't trying to, we were trying to make it better. So, thing one: your life, make it better. And also put in the bucket list stuff: you want to go to Paris, to the Galapagos - the guy with the ice thing - before it's all under water and we can't see it anymore. So, that's plan one: your life goes great. Plan two: I'm really sorry to tell you, but the robots and the AI _____ - that job doesn't exist anymore, the robots are doing it. We don't need you to do that anymore. Now, what are going to do? So what do you do if the thing that you've got goes away? And you know, everybody's got a side ______ or something they can do to make that work. And three is: what's your wild-card plan? What would you do if you didn't have to _____ about money? You've got enough. You're not fabulously wealthy, but you've got enough. And what would you do if you knew no one would laugh? My students come in for my office hours a lot of times, and they'll say something like, "Well, what I really want to do is this, but I can't just hear people saying, 'You didn't go to Stanford to do that, did you?'" (Laughter) Because somehow, if you went to Stanford, you have to do some of the amazing things the past speakers have been doing. "But what would you do if you had enough money and you didn't care what people thought? Anything from, 'I'm going to go study butterflies' to, 'I want to be a _________, you know, in Belize.' What would you do?" And people have those three plans. Now what happens when they do this is, one, they _______, "Oh my gosh, I could actually have imagined my three completely parallel lives are all ______ interesting." Two, they rarely go become a bartender, you know, in ______. But a lot of times, the things that come up in the other plans were things that they left behind somehow. In the business of life, they forgot about those things. And so they _____ them back and put them in plan one, then they make their lives even better. Sometimes they do _____, but mostly they just use this as a ______ of ________ all the possible wonderful ways they could have a life. Now, you could _____ executing that, but in our _____, the thing you do after you have _____ is you build a _________. We have met people who've quit their job and suddenly done something else, It hardly ever works. You kind of have to sneak up on it, because in our model, we want to set the bar really low, try stuff, have some success, do it again. So when we say "prototype," in our language, what we mean is a way to ask an interesting ________, "What would it be like if I tried this?", a way to expose the assumptions, "Is this even the thing I want or is that just something I remember I wanted when I was 20?" I've got to go out in the world and do this, so I'm going to get others involved in ___________ my life, and I'm going to sneak up on the future, because I don't if this is exactly what I want. There's two _____ of life-design prototypes and what we call prototype conversation. You know, William Gibson, the science-fiction writer has a famous quote: "The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed." So, there is someone who's a bartender in Ibiza. He's been doing it for years, I could go meet him and have a conversation, he or she. Somebody else is doing something else I'm interested in. All of these people are out there, they're living in my future, today. They're doing what I want to do, today. And if I have a conversation with them, I just ask for their story and everybody will tell you their story. If you buy them a cup of coffee, they tell you the story. If I hear something in the story that rings in me - We have this thing we call narrative resonance: when I hear a story that's kind of like my story, something happens, and I can identify that as a potential way of ______ forward. The other one is a prototype experience. Dave and I were working with a woman, sort of mid-career in her 40s and a very __________ tech executive, but ______ to move from money-making to meaning-making, to do something more meaningful, thinking of going back to school, getting an MA in _________, working with kids. But she's like, "You know, I don't know, I'm 45, going back to school. It's not going to work. And then I _____ about these ___________. They're kind of mean and they don't like old people." (Laughter) What am I going to do, Bill?" I said, "Well, you just have to go try this, you know. It turns out we sent her to a seminar class and to a large lecture-hall class, and by the way, you just put on a T-shirt that says "Stanford" and you walk into a class, nobody knows. She wasn't registered, but you know, she went and she went to the classes and she came back and said, "You know what? It was fantastic! I walked into the lecture hall, I sat down, my body was on fire! It was ___________, I was so interested in the way the lecture was going. And then I met these millennials. It turned out they're pretty interesting people! I've set up three prototype conversations. And they think I'm interesting because I'm coming back to ______ and I'm 45." So she had a felt experience, because we are more than just our ______. She had a felt experience that this might work for her. So these are two ways you can prototype your way forward. The last idea: you want to make a good decision well. So many people make choices and they're not _____ with their choices because they don't really know how do they know what they know, right? It's a hard thing, particularly in our days when we have so many choices. So we have a process. Again it comes from the positive psychology guys. Gather and create options. Once you get good at design you're really good at coming up with options. You've got narrow those down to a working list that you can work with. Then, you make the choice to make a good choice, and then of course you _______ that you did the wrong thing. (Laughter) All my students have what is called FOMO, fear missing out, "What if I didn't pick the right thing." Someone came into my ______ and said, "I'll declare three ______ and two minors" and I said, "Do you plan on being here for a few years? It's not going to ______, right?" So we don't say that; we say you want to let go and move on, and all these have some psychological _____ in them. Let me tell you about it. Once you get good at _________ and creating ideas, you also want to make sure you leave room for the lucky ideas, the serendipitous ideas. This is a guy named Tony Hsieh. He was the CEO at ______, he sold it to Amazon. But before you became an employee at Zappos you had to take a test, and the test was, "Are you lucky?" One, two or three: "I'm not very lucky, and I'm not sure why." Seven, eight, nine, ten, "I'm very lucky, great things happen to me all the time, I'm not sure why." He wouldn't hire anybody who was not lucky. (Laughter) I think it's probably illegal, but it was based on - (Laughter) but it was based on a piece of research where psychologists did the same thing, "Rate yourself from lucky to unlucky." And then they had people read the front section of the New York _____, 30 pages, lots of articles. And the ________ ________ said, "Please count the number of -" either headlines or photographs, depending on the test. "And when you get the whole thing read and you count the number of photographs, just tell the ______ at the end." And if you got the right number, you'd get $100. Of course you all know when a graduate student tells you what the experiment is that's not the experiment. So, inside this thing that looked like the New York Times, 30 pages, front page, inside all the stories were little ______ of text that said, "If you read this, the experiment's over. _______ an extra $ 150." People who rated themselves as _______ by and _____ got the right answer, 36 headlines, whatever it was, got the $ 100. People who rated themselves as lucky - seven, eight, nine or ten - 80% of the time noticed the text and got the extra $150. It's not about being _____. It's about paying attention to what you're doing and keeping your peripheral vision open because it's in your __________ ______ that those interesting _____________ show up, right, that you were not expecting. So you want to get good at being lucky. Narrowing down. This is quite simple. If you have too many choices, you go into what psychologists call choice overload, and then you have essentially no choices. Here's the experiment. This was done at ________. You walk into a grocery _____ and there's a nice lady. She's got a table and on the table, she has six jams, and you come over try the jams to have a sample, buy some jam. Six jams; about 30 people who would go by pick a jam, or stop and test something, and about a third of those actually buy a jam. That's the baseline. Next week, you walk in, 24 jams: jalapeño, strawberry, banana, whatever; all sorts of jams. Well, guess what happens? Twice as many people stop, look at all these jams, it's so interesting. Three percent of the people buy them. (________) When you have too many choices, you have no choice. What do you do when you have too many _______? Just _____ off a bunch of choices. Psychologists tells us we can't handle more than five to seven. I'd say it's five. If you've got a bunch of choices, cross them all off, just pick the five and then make your ________ there. "Oh my God! What if I pick the wrong ones? What if I cross off the wrong ones?" Right? Well, you won't, because it's the pizza or Chinese food thing. You're at the office and everybody says, "Let's go out to lunch today." "Sounds great. What do you want to do? _____ or Chinese food?" "I don't care." In the elevator on their way down, someone says, "Let's get Chinese food." Then you go, "No, I want pizza." (Laughter) You won't decide how you feel about the decision till the decision's made. That's a piece of ________ that's been done again and again and again. So just cross them off. If you cross off the wrong one, you'll have a feeling somewhere in your stomach that you did the wrong thing. Choosing - this is about that feeling in your stomach. You cannot choose well if you choose only from your rational mind. This is Dan _______, who wrote the book on emotional ____________. He does a lot of research on this, a lot of _____ science. There's a part of your brain, way down in the base brain, the basal ganglia, that summarizes emotional decisions for you. I did something, got good emotional ________ from that: good, check. I did something and had a little bad _________ response to that. It summarizes all of the emotions that you have felt and how your decisions were valenced positive or negative an _______. The problem with that part of your brain is that it's so early in the brain it doesn't talk to the part of your brain that talks. There's no __________ to the prefrontal cortex or anything else. It's only connected to your GI tract and your limbic system. So, it gives you information through felt sensations, a "gut _______." Without that, you can't make good decisions. And then the letting go and moving on. This was the hardest part for me, but this is also the work of Dan Gilbert, who is a distinguished _________ at Harvard, despite the fact that he's doing insurance commercials now. And he's been studying decision-making and how do you make yourself happy. So, you walk in another psychology experiment. The postdoc has got five Monet prints, five pictures from Monet, and you rank them from best to least, "I like this one the most, I like this one the least," number one and number five. "Thank you very much, the experiment's over. Oh, by the way, as you're walking out, you know, I kind of screwed up and I bought too many of number two and three. So if you want to take one home you can just have it. Two conditions: in one case, take it home and have it, but don't bring it back because I'm kind of ___________ and - Just keep it, you can't exchange it. Second condition: I've got lots of these. If you don't like the one you picked, you can swap it back and pick another one." And of course everybody picks number two. It's a little better than number three. We bring people back in a week later and say, "Re-rank the stimuli. Which one do you like now?" The people who were allowed to change their mind don't like their painting, they don't like the _____, they don't like the other one anymore, they don't like any of them _______. In fact, they don't like the whole process and they have destroyed their opportunity to be happy. (Laughter) The people who were told, "You pick it, it's yours, you can't return it" love their print, they typically rank it as number one and think the rest of them suck. (Laughter) If you make decisions reversible, your ______ of being happy goes down like 60 or 70 percent. So, let go and move on, make the decision reversible. And by the way, as a designer, that's no problem, because you're really good at __________ options, you're great at ideation, you're really good at prototyping to get data in the world to see of that world will be the world you want to live in, so you have no fear of missing out. It's just a process, a mindful process: collect, reduce, decide, move on. That's how you make yourself happy. So, the five ideas: Connecting the dots to find _______ through work and life views. Stay away from gravity problems because I can't fix those and neither can you; reframe those to something that is workable. Do three plans, never one, always do three of everything, three ideations for any of the problems you're _______ on to make sure that you've covered not just the ideas that you had when you started, but all the other ideas that are possible. Prototype everything in your life before you jump in and try it. And choose well; there's no point in making a good choice poorly. Choose well and you will find that things in your life are much easier. And you can do this, we know you can, because _________ of students have done it. Two PhD studies have been done in the class that demonstrated higher self-efficacy, lower dysfunctional beliefs. It's a fascinating process to watch people who don't think of themselves as ________ go through this class and walk out saying, "You know what? I'm a pretty creative person!" what David Kelly calls "creative confidence." So, we know you can do it, thank you very much. It's simple: get _______, talk to people and try stuff, and you will design a well-lived and ______ life. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers)

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Original Text

Hello, everyone. I'm here to help you design your life. We're going to use the technique of design thinking. Design thinking is something we've been working on at the d.School and in the School of Engineering for over 50 years, and it's an innovation methodology, works on products, works on services. But I think the most interesting design problem is your life! So that's what we're going to talk about. I want to just make sure everybody knows: this is my buddy Dave Evans, his face. Dave and I are the co-authors of the book, and he is the guy who helped me co-found the Life Design Lab at Stanford. So what do we do in the Life Design Lab? Well, we teach the class that helps to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. Now, I'm going to give you the first reframe. Designers love reframes. How many of you hope you never grow up and lose that child-like curiosity that drives everything you do? Raise your hand. Right! Who wants to grow up? I mean, we've been talking about curiosity in almost every one of these talks. And so I'd like to reframe this as: we say we teach the class that helps you figure out what you want to grow into next, as this life of yours, this amazing design of yours, unfolds. So, design thinking is what we teach and it's a set of mindsets, it's how designers think. You know, we've been taught probably in the university to be so skeptical realists, rationalists, but that's not very useful as a mindset when you're trying to do something new, something no one's ever done before. So we say you start with curiosity and you lean into what you're curious about. We say you reframe problems because most of the time we find people are working on the wrong problems and they have a wonderful solution to something that doesn't work anyway. So, what's the point of working on the wrong thing? We say radical collaboration because the answer's out in the world with other people. That's where your experience of your life will be. We want to be mindful of our process. There are times in the design process when you want lots of ideas, and there are times when you really want to converge test some things, prototype some things, you want to be good at that. And the other is biased action. Now, you know, I'll say that we think no plan for your life will survive first contact with reality. (Laughter) Reality has the tendency to throw little things at us that we weren't expecting, sometimes good things, sometimes bad. So we say: just have a biased action, try stuff. Why? Why did we start this class? I've been in office hours for a long, long time with my students. I've been teaching here for a while. Dave as well. He was teaching over that community college, in Berkeley, for a while. (Laughter) And - I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's a Stanford TEDx. But we notice that people get stuck. People really get stuck and then they don't know what to do and they don't seem to have any tools for getting unstuck. Designers get stuck all the time. I signed up to be a designer, which means I'm going to work on something I've never done, every day, and I get stuck and unstuck, stuck and unstuck, all the time. We also noticed as we went out and talked to folks who are not just our students, but people in mid-career and encore careers, that people have a bunch of beliefs which psychologists label "dysfunctional beliefs," things they believe that are true that actually aren't true, and it holds them back. I'll give you three. First one is: "What's your passion? Tell me your passion and I'll tell you what you need to do." Now, if you actually have one of these things, these passions - you knew at two you wanted to be a doctor, you knew at seven you wanted to be a clown at Cirque du Soleil, and now you are one, that's awesome. But we're a sort of research space here at Stanford, so we went over to the Center for the Study of Adolescence, which by the way now goes up to 27 - (Laughter) and met with Bill Damon, one of our colleagues, a fantastic guy. He studied this question and it turns out less than 20% of the people have any one single identifiable passion in their lives. We hate a methodology which says, "OK, come to the front of the line. You have a passion? Oh, you don't? Oh, I'm sorry. When you have one, come on back and we'll help you with that." It's terrible, eight out of 10 people say, "I have lots of things I'm interested in." So this is not an organizing principle for your search or your design. The second one is, "Well, you should know by now, right? Don't you know where you're going? If you don't know, you're late." (Laughter) Now, what are you late for, exactly? I'm not quite sure. But you know, there's a meta-narrative in the culture and when I was growing up: by 25, you're supposed to maybe have a relationship, maybe have gotten married and started to get the family together. When I talk to my millennial students, they'll say, "Oh, that's got to be like 30 or something," because they can't imagine, anything past, like, 22, but 30 is a long way out. But we know that now these people are forming their lives much more fluidly, they are staying in a lot more dynamic motion between about 22 and 35, and so this notion that you're late is really kind of like, "Well, you should have figured this out by now." Dave and I don't "should" on anybody. In the book or in the class, we don't believe in "should." We just think, "Alright, you are whatever you are. Let's start from where you are. You're not late for anything." But the one we really don't like is: "Are you being the best possible version of you?" (Laughter) "I mean, because you're not settling for something that's less than the best, because this is Stanford. Obviously we all are going to be the best." Well, this implies that, one, there's a singular best; two, that it's a linear thing, and life is anything but linear; and three, it kind of comes from this business notion, there's an old business saying, "Good is the enemy of better, better is the enemy of best," and you always want to do your best in business. But if there isn't one singular best, then our reframe is, "The unattainable best is the enemy of all the available betters, because there are many, many versions of you that you could play out, all of which would result in a well-designed life." So I'm going to give you three ideas from design thinking - five ideas, excuse me - That says five, doesn't it? Yeah. Five ideas from design thinking. And people who've read the book or taken the class have written back to us and said, "Hey, these were the most useful, these were the most doable, they were the most helpful." And we're human-centered designers, so we want to be helpful. The first one is this notion of connecting the dots. The number one reason people take our class and we hear read the book is they say, "You know, I want my life to be meaningful, I want it to be purposeful, I want it to add up to something." So, we looked in the positive psychology literature and in the design literature, and it turns out that there's who you are, there's what you believe and there's what you do in the world, and if you can make a connection between these three things, if you can make that a coherent story, you will experience your life as meaningful. The increase in meaning-making comes from connecting the dots. So we do two things. We ask people: "Write a work view. What's your theory of work? Not the job you want, but why do you work? What's it for? What's work in service of?" Once you have that, 250 words, then - this one's a little harder to get short, "What's the meaning of life? What's the big picture? Why are you here? What is your faith or your view of the world?" When you can connect your life view and your work view together, in a coherent way, you start to experience your life as meaningful. That's the idea number one. Idea number two: people get stuck and you've got to be careful because we can reframe almost anything, but there's a class of problems that people get stuck on that are really, really bad problems. We call them gravity problems. Essentially, they're something you cannot change. Now, I know you have a friend and you've been having coffee with this friend for a while, and they're stuck. They don't like their boss, their partner, their job, there's something that they don't like. But nothing's happening, right? Nothing's happening with them. If Dave were here he'd say, "Look, you can't solve a problem you're not willing to have." You can't solve a problem you're not willing to have, so if you've got a gravity problem and you're simply not willing to work on it, then it's just a circumstance in your life. And the only thing we know to do with gravity problems is to accept. In the design thinking chart, you start with empathy, then you redefine the problem, you come up with lots of ideas, then you prototype and test things, but that only works if it's a problem you're willing to work on. The first thing to do is accept and once you've accepted this as gravity problem - "I can't change it. You know, this is a company, the company is a family-run company and the name of the founder is on the door and if you're not in the family, you can't be the president." You're right, you can't! So, now you have to decide what you want to do. Is that a circumstance that you can reframe and work in, or do you need to do something else? So be really careful about gravity problems because they're pernicious and they really get in the way. But back to this idea of multiples, I do a little thought experiment with my students, and I say, you know, "The physicists up in SLAC have kind of demonstrated this multiverse thing might be real." You've heard of this, that there are multiple parallel universes, one right next to each other. And say, "We'll do a thought experiment. Let's say you could live in all the multiverses simultaneously, and not only that, but you'd know about your life in each one of these instances. So, you could go back and be the ballerina, and the scientist, and the CPA, and whatever else you wanted to be. You could have all these lives in parallel." When I ask them, "How many lives are you? How many lives would you want?", I get answers from three to 10,000. But, you know, we've sort of done the average: it's about 7,5. Most people think they have about 7,5 really good lives that they could live. And here's the deal: you only get one. But it turns out it's not what you don't choose, it's what you choose in life that makes you happy. Nevertheless, we reframed this and we say, "Great, there's more lives than one in you. So let's go on an odyssey, and let's really figure out those lives!" And we ask people to do some design. And the "ideate" bubble, it's about having lot's of ideas. So we say, "Let's have some ideas. We'll ideate your future, but you can't ideate just one. You have to ideate three." Now, there's some research from the School of Education that says if you start with three ideas and you brainstorm from there, you've got a much wider range of ideas, the ideas are more generative and they lead to better solutions to the problem rather than just starting with one and then brainstorming forward. So we always do threes; there's something magical about threes. We have people do three lives, and it's transformational. We give them this little rubric. One: "The thing you're doing, the thing you're doing right now, whatever your career is, just do it. And you're going to do it for five years and it's going to come out great." I mean, in design, we're sort of values-neutral, except for one thing: we never design anything to make it worse, right? I have been on some teams that made some pretty bad products, but we weren't trying to, we were trying to make it better. So, thing one: your life, make it better. And also put in the bucket list stuff: you want to go to Paris, to the Galapagos - the guy with the ice thing - before it's all under water and we can't see it anymore. So, that's plan one: your life goes great. Plan two: I'm really sorry to tell you, but the robots and the AI stuff - that job doesn't exist anymore, the robots are doing it. We don't need you to do that anymore. Now, what are going to do? So what do you do if the thing that you've got goes away? And you know, everybody's got a side hustle or something they can do to make that work. And three is: what's your wild-card plan? What would you do if you didn't have to worry about money? You've got enough. You're not fabulously wealthy, but you've got enough. And what would you do if you knew no one would laugh? My students come in for my office hours a lot of times, and they'll say something like, "Well, what I really want to do is this, but I can't just hear people saying, 'You didn't go to Stanford to do that, did you?'" (Laughter) Because somehow, if you went to Stanford, you have to do some of the amazing things the past speakers have been doing. "But what would you do if you had enough money and you didn't care what people thought? Anything from, 'I'm going to go study butterflies' to, 'I want to be a bartender, you know, in Belize.' What would you do?" And people have those three plans. Now what happens when they do this is, one, they realize, "Oh my gosh, I could actually have imagined my three completely parallel lives are all pretty interesting." Two, they rarely go become a bartender, you know, in Belize. But a lot of times, the things that come up in the other plans were things that they left behind somehow. In the business of life, they forgot about those things. And so they bring them back and put them in plan one, then they make their lives even better. Sometimes they do pivot, but mostly they just use this as a method of ideating all the possible wonderful ways they could have a life. Now, you could start executing that, but in our model, the thing you do after you have ideas is you build a prototype. We have met people who've quit their job and suddenly done something else, It hardly ever works. You kind of have to sneak up on it, because in our model, we want to set the bar really low, try stuff, have some success, do it again. So when we say "prototype," in our language, what we mean is a way to ask an interesting question, "What would it be like if I tried this?", a way to expose the assumptions, "Is this even the thing I want or is that just something I remember I wanted when I was 20?" I've got to go out in the world and do this, so I'm going to get others involved in prototyping my life, and I'm going to sneak up on the future, because I don't if this is exactly what I want. There's two kinds of life-design prototypes and what we call prototype conversation. You know, William Gibson, the science-fiction writer has a famous quote: "The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed." So, there is someone who's a bartender in Ibiza. He's been doing it for years, I could go meet him and have a conversation, he or she. Somebody else is doing something else I'm interested in. All of these people are out there, they're living in my future, today. They're doing what I want to do, today. And if I have a conversation with them, I just ask for their story and everybody will tell you their story. If you buy them a cup of coffee, they tell you the story. If I hear something in the story that rings in me - We have this thing we call narrative resonance: when I hear a story that's kind of like my story, something happens, and I can identify that as a potential way of moving forward. The other one is a prototype experience. Dave and I were working with a woman, sort of mid-career in her 40s and a very successful tech executive, but wanted to move from money-making to meaning-making, to do something more meaningful, thinking of going back to school, getting an MA in education, working with kids. But she's like, "You know, I don't know, I'm 45, going back to school. It's not going to work. And then I heard about these millennials. They're kind of mean and they don't like old people." (Laughter) What am I going to do, Bill?" I said, "Well, you just have to go try this, you know. It turns out we sent her to a seminar class and to a large lecture-hall class, and by the way, you just put on a T-shirt that says "Stanford" and you walk into a class, nobody knows. She wasn't registered, but you know, she went and she went to the classes and she came back and said, "You know what? It was fantastic! I walked into the lecture hall, I sat down, my body was on fire! It was interesting, I was so interested in the way the lecture was going. And then I met these millennials. It turned out they're pretty interesting people! I've set up three prototype conversations. And they think I'm interesting because I'm coming back to school and I'm 45." So she had a felt experience, because we are more than just our brains. She had a felt experience that this might work for her. So these are two ways you can prototype your way forward. The last idea: you want to make a good decision well. So many people make choices and they're not happy with their choices because they don't really know how do they know what they know, right? It's a hard thing, particularly in our days when we have so many choices. So we have a process. Again it comes from the positive psychology guys. Gather and create options. Once you get good at design you're really good at coming up with options. You've got narrow those down to a working list that you can work with. Then, you make the choice to make a good choice, and then of course you agonize that you did the wrong thing. (Laughter) All my students have what is called FOMO, fear missing out, "What if I didn't pick the right thing." Someone came into my office and said, "I'll declare three majors and two minors" and I said, "Do you plan on being here for a few years? It's not going to happen, right?" So we don't say that; we say you want to let go and move on, and all these have some psychological basis in them. Let me tell you about it. Once you get good at gathering and creating ideas, you also want to make sure you leave room for the lucky ideas, the serendipitous ideas. This is a guy named Tony Hsieh. He was the CEO at Zappos, he sold it to Amazon. But before you became an employee at Zappos you had to take a test, and the test was, "Are you lucky?" One, two or three: "I'm not very lucky, and I'm not sure why." Seven, eight, nine, ten, "I'm very lucky, great things happen to me all the time, I'm not sure why." He wouldn't hire anybody who was not lucky. (Laughter) I think it's probably illegal, but it was based on - (Laughter) but it was based on a piece of research where psychologists did the same thing, "Rate yourself from lucky to unlucky." And then they had people read the front section of the New York Times, 30 pages, lots of articles. And the graduate students said, "Please count the number of -" either headlines or photographs, depending on the test. "And when you get the whole thing read and you count the number of photographs, just tell the person at the end." And if you got the right number, you'd get $100. Of course you all know when a graduate student tells you what the experiment is that's not the experiment. So, inside this thing that looked like the New York Times, 30 pages, front page, inside all the stories were little pieces of text that said, "If you read this, the experiment's over. Collect an extra $ 150." People who rated themselves as unlucky by and large got the right answer, 36 headlines, whatever it was, got the $ 100. People who rated themselves as lucky - seven, eight, nine or ten - 80% of the time noticed the text and got the extra $150. It's not about being lucky. It's about paying attention to what you're doing and keeping your peripheral vision open because it's in your peripheral vision that those interesting opportunities show up, right, that you were not expecting. So you want to get good at being lucky. Narrowing down. This is quite simple. If you have too many choices, you go into what psychologists call choice overload, and then you have essentially no choices. Here's the experiment. This was done at Stanford. You walk into a grocery store and there's a nice lady. She's got a table and on the table, she has six jams, and you come over try the jams to have a sample, buy some jam. Six jams; about 30 people who would go by pick a jam, or stop and test something, and about a third of those actually buy a jam. That's the baseline. Next week, you walk in, 24 jams: jalapeño, strawberry, banana, whatever; all sorts of jams. Well, guess what happens? Twice as many people stop, look at all these jams, it's so interesting. Three percent of the people buy them. (Laughter) When you have too many choices, you have no choice. What do you do when you have too many choices? Just cross off a bunch of choices. Psychologists tells us we can't handle more than five to seven. I'd say it's five. If you've got a bunch of choices, cross them all off, just pick the five and then make your decision there. "Oh my God! What if I pick the wrong ones? What if I cross off the wrong ones?" Right? Well, you won't, because it's the pizza or Chinese food thing. You're at the office and everybody says, "Let's go out to lunch today." "Sounds great. What do you want to do? Pizza or Chinese food?" "I don't care." In the elevator on their way down, someone says, "Let's get Chinese food." Then you go, "No, I want pizza." (Laughter) You won't decide how you feel about the decision till the decision's made. That's a piece of research that's been done again and again and again. So just cross them off. If you cross off the wrong one, you'll have a feeling somewhere in your stomach that you did the wrong thing. Choosing - this is about that feeling in your stomach. You cannot choose well if you choose only from your rational mind. This is Dan Goleman, who wrote the book on emotional intelligence. He does a lot of research on this, a lot of brain science. There's a part of your brain, way down in the base brain, the basal ganglia, that summarizes emotional decisions for you. I did something, got good emotional response from that: good, check. I did something and had a little bad emotional response to that. It summarizes all of the emotions that you have felt and how your decisions were valenced positive or negative an emotion. The problem with that part of your brain is that it's so early in the brain it doesn't talk to the part of your brain that talks. There's no connection to the prefrontal cortex or anything else. It's only connected to your GI tract and your limbic system. So, it gives you information through felt sensations, a "gut feeling." Without that, you can't make good decisions. And then the letting go and moving on. This was the hardest part for me, but this is also the work of Dan Gilbert, who is a distinguished scientist at Harvard, despite the fact that he's doing insurance commercials now. And he's been studying decision-making and how do you make yourself happy. So, you walk in another psychology experiment. The postdoc has got five Monet prints, five pictures from Monet, and you rank them from best to least, "I like this one the most, I like this one the least," number one and number five. "Thank you very much, the experiment's over. Oh, by the way, as you're walking out, you know, I kind of screwed up and I bought too many of number two and three. So if you want to take one home you can just have it. Two conditions: in one case, take it home and have it, but don't bring it back because I'm kind of embarrassed and - Just keep it, you can't exchange it. Second condition: I've got lots of these. If you don't like the one you picked, you can swap it back and pick another one." And of course everybody picks number two. It's a little better than number three. We bring people back in a week later and say, "Re-rank the stimuli. Which one do you like now?" The people who were allowed to change their mind don't like their painting, they don't like the print, they don't like the other one anymore, they don't like any of them anymore. In fact, they don't like the whole process and they have destroyed their opportunity to be happy. (Laughter) The people who were told, "You pick it, it's yours, you can't return it" love their print, they typically rank it as number one and think the rest of them suck. (Laughter) If you make decisions reversible, your chance of being happy goes down like 60 or 70 percent. So, let go and move on, make the decision reversible. And by the way, as a designer, that's no problem, because you're really good at generating options, you're great at ideation, you're really good at prototyping to get data in the world to see of that world will be the world you want to live in, so you have no fear of missing out. It's just a process, a mindful process: collect, reduce, decide, move on. That's how you make yourself happy. So, the five ideas: Connecting the dots to find meaning through work and life views. Stay away from gravity problems because I can't fix those and neither can you; reframe those to something that is workable. Do three plans, never one, always do three of everything, three ideations for any of the problems you're working on to make sure that you've covered not just the ideas that you had when you started, but all the other ideas that are possible. Prototype everything in your life before you jump in and try it. And choose well; there's no point in making a good choice poorly. Choose well and you will find that things in your life are much easier. And you can do this, we know you can, because thousands of students have done it. Two PhD studies have been done in the class that demonstrated higher self-efficacy, lower dysfunctional beliefs. It's a fascinating process to watch people who don't think of themselves as creative go through this class and walk out saying, "You know what? I'm a pretty creative person!" what David Kelly calls "creative confidence." So, we know you can do it, thank you very much. It's simple: get curious, talk to people and try stuff, and you will design a well-lived and joyful life. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation	frequency
design thinking	6
gravity problems	4
life design	2
office hours	2
positive psychology	2
work view	2
idea number	2
gravity problem	2
thought experiment	2
peripheral vision	2
emotional response	2

Important Words

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