How to Design a More Meaningful Life (ft. Dave Evans and Bill Burnett) | The Happiness Lab podcast

Key Takeaway

Instead of chasing big, transformative changes, find meaning in the small moments. Practice 'sudden savoring'—when your favorite song plays or you taste good coffee, pause for 17 seconds to fully experience it. These micro-moments of wonder and presence combat the 'transactional world' that dominates our lives. Switch between task-mode and flow-mode intentionally by simply telling yourself 'switch.' The meaning you seek isn't somewhere else—it's hidden in plain sight, waiting to be noticed in your current life.

Episode Overview

Dave Evans and Bill Bernett from Stanford's Life Design Lab discuss how to design a more meaningful life without detonating your current one. They introduce the 'designer's way' mindset and distinguish between the 'transactional world' (focused on outcomes and completion) and the 'flow world' (focused on present-moment experience). The conversation explores the 'scandal of particularity'—the idea that ultimate meaning only arrives in small, finite moments—and offers practical techniques like savoring, switching attention, and pursuing 'latent wonderfulness' to find meaning in everyday life.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How to Design a More Meaningful Life (ft. Dave Evans and Bill Burnett) | The Happiness Lab podcast from The Happiness Lab. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Let's be real for a second. The world feels pretty overwhelming right now. Lots of us are feeling exhausted and despondent. We spend our days grinding at work and then trying to zone out when we get out of work, which often means scrolling endlessly just to unwind. And if that sounds familiar, you might be wondering quietly to yourself, "Is this all there is? How do I feel better when the world feels so blleh?" blleh?" blleh?" What if there was a way to hit the reset button on how you experience life?

To see the world with fresh eyes like you did as a child, when everything felt alive, full of possibility, and somehow a little magical. The mere fact that anything exists at all is astonishing. So just take a longer deeper look into almost anything and some wondrousness might be available to you. to you. to you. Well, in today's episode, the last one in our series on how to get unstuck in 2026, we'll learn that this mindset can be within reach. In fact, today's two guests will share their tips for how to design it.

Greetings. This is Dave Evans, the co-founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab. So glad to be here today with Dr. Lorie Santos and my dear partner, Bill Bernett. We've been teaching life design for 20 odd years now. Hi, I'm Bill Bernett. I'm a adjunct professor at Stanford University teaching the designing your life series of classes and now the co-author with my good friend Dave of a new book called How to Live a Meaningful Life using design thinking to unlock purpose, joy, and flow every day. You're going to live to hate that long a subtitle every time you have to say it on.

on. on. I learned about Dave and Bill's work because our professional stories are surprisingly similar. Like me, they created a class aimed at improving college students well-being, one that ended up going viral. And like me, they've decided to share the insights from their class widely with people of all ages far beyond the university setting. university setting. university setting. We teach you the improv skills to live life more fully. Life is an improv. It really is this thing you make up as you go along, but you can get a lot better at the making up as you go along.

So we teach a class that starts out with debunking a bunch of dysfunctional beliefs. You really wonderful things that people often think are true and guide their lives but happen not to be either helpful or even true at all of which there are many. Once we get through the dysfunctional beliefs, we start giving them tools and techniques for how to figure out what they want, how to meet people can animate that thing in them, how to actually go and engage with the world and get going.

And so a core idea of this class is this idea of design thinking, which I think a lot of folks don't really know what that means. Bill, what's design thinking? Human centered design, now we call it design thinking. It's a way of solving problems that's deeply human and engaged with the problems humans have. And so it was obvious to me when we started thinking about how our students might approach building a meaningful life that it was a design problem because designers make things new to the world all the time.

I was at Apple for seven years before Stanford and I worked on the very first laptops. And when you're building something that's never existed before, you can't just engineer it because you don't have any data about the thing that's never existed, like your future. And so it's using human- centered design to figure out what's the next cool version of you. I love this idea of the next cool version of you because often when we think about designing, we think about designing something like emphasis on the thing, but you've really argued that we can design ourselves in our own lives in interesting ways.

What are some of the features of design thinking we should bring in when we're thinking about designing our own lives? Well, it starts with, you know, again, user centered or human- centered. So, it starts with like what does it mean to be a person? Well, you know, our shortest definition is a human person is a becoming a never-ending story. And so, what you're growing into is the further revealed version of yourself. All of us contain more aliveness than when lifetime permits us to live out. I.e.

there's more than one of you in there. So there is no getting it right because you are way bigger than it when it is your lifetime. So all of us are only going to express a small portion of the fullness of our humanity. We have multiple choices in front of us both between which of me do I want to give a chance to get out on the stage and the next season of my life and by the way what does the world think might be an interesting thing for me to be collaborating with other people on.

So I'm looking for the nexus of those things which is evolving all the time and now oh let's go have some ideas and get started and start prototyping what the future of that person might be. So it really does begin with the very first dysfunctional belief is I have to find my passion purpose answer thing. No, I have to find the next one that will be interesting enough to live into the what will become after that. So, if you're feeling a little off track, stick around because Bill and Dave have some excellent advice on becoming a version of yourself that feels more engaged and more alive.

We'll learn all their tips after some quick ads. Dave Evans and Bill Bernett are best known for their popular Stanford course, Designing Your Life, and the bestselling book that grew out of that class. But they've recently put out a new book called How to Live a Meaningful Life. One of their biggest insights is what's known as the designer's way, a mindset for intentionally engineering the life you want. Design is inherently valuef free except we always try to make the next design better, right? We think we can improve the world.

So you start with wonder. I'm naturally curious. If I'm a designer, I'm curious about the world and how to make things better. It's not just how's that work, but oh wow, how amazing is that? I wonder how that works. Right? When we say availability, be available to the experiences of the world. That's where the interesting stuff happens. Radical acceptance like availability plus acceptance is like we always say design starts in reality. You got to start right here where you are not in some place where you think you should be because you saw it on social media or something else, right?

And then being fully engaged but calmly detached from the outcomes because we know a lot about decision science. You can make a good decision but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get the outcome you want. So be fully engaged in your life. be intentional but give yourself some grace about the outcomes and then go out in the world and tell your story or create your world. So those mindsets put together we call it the designer's way but when you put it together it's like approach the world with a sense of wonder be available to the things that are happening root yourself in the reality of the world and then go out tell that story to people because when you tell the story you're creating the experience of the world that you want to have.

I love this idea of the designer's way in part because it's not just great for human- centered design or even designing your life. I think it's so useful for navigating all the stuff that can come up in a life. It fits with a lot of the happiness evidence we talk about on the show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dave, in particular, I know with this idea of radical acceptance, you've talked about how you use that to navigate a really painful time of grief in your own life. Yeah.

You're probably referring to the death of my beloved wife, Claudia. So, on March 8th of 2020, she got a terminal diagnosis. She beat breast cancer once before 20 years prior. Decided to give it a second try. Picked a much nastier cancer and she was four ways metastasized and terminal on day one. She thought she had bronchitis. She came home with a death sentence. She had six to 24 months to live. We got nine and she died at 70. She was 69 at the time. So she died 15 years ahead of the contract.

We had a deal and she broke the deal. You know, I was pretty pissed. But the first thing was to frame what is this? We said, "Okay, well I'm going to die." I was going to die before. She says, "Now I know when." And so it's sad, not tragic, cuz at 70, I've kind of done everything I need to do. There's nothing really missing. She goes, "But I'd love second helpings of a couple of things before I go." So the mantra for the next year was second helpings, which we didn't get that many of because between COVID and fires and everything else was pretty tough.

But nonetheless, the whole idea was to decide how to think about it. Mindset was everything. So I started interviewing widows, people who I thought had widowed well. So, I'm going to borrow other people's wisdom. One of the best pieces of wisdom I got was from a guy whose wife went through a 9-year death process. He said, "Look, Dave, don't waste one second thinking about how are you going to handle this after she's gone?" Because no matter what you do, since you had an intimate marriage, it's going to rip your legs off.

It's going to blow your brains up. There's not a chance in hell you're going to be prepared for this. So, don't waste time trying to prepare. And every bit of energy you take away thinking about that future, you're stealing from the present. So lean into doing nothing but enjoy the heck out of the time you guys have. And as soon as she's gone, you can figure that out then. That's exactly what I did. It was exactly the right thing to do. So I learned a ton about grief, but it was all in that framework of framework of framework of it just happens to be really painful.

I wonder what the lessons might be. And also just not going away from reality. You mentioned this idea before that you can't design things well if you're not taking into account the reality of the situation as crappy and as terrible as it might be. Well, you know, design is an empirical process. So, if it's empirical, it has to work in this place called real. It's the only place design works. We can't work with you in the land of should. We only do real stuff. And in reality, you can make it better.

Let me just also mention Claudia was an exceptional woman and her ability to accept you. Radical acceptance isn't about happiness per se. It's about It's about It's about reality, which means radically accepting grief, but Claudia was brilliant at this. You could imagine a different situation with someone clinging to false hope or something else. But uh having watched Dave do this, it was both incredibly tragic and incredibly beautiful in a way that they together managed this acceptance a situation that neither one of them wanted. So um that was battle testing one of our mindsets for sure.

And it's situation right now we're walking through this with a couple of our significantly older friends where the guy is going down swinging. I mean he's he's not going quietly into this night. he is rejecting everything right and he's ruining his life and the life of everybody around him and it's a choice. So choosing well on this acceptance thing has an amazing upside. It really is one of the biggest mindsets of all time. So you all are living it in your daily life teaching students and you give them these incredible tools for designing their lives in wonderful ways but you like me sometimes have the interesting moment of a student who comes back a little bit later on.

you know, maybe later in their 20s, and they often feel like my Yale students sometimes feel, which is that like they're kind of feeling a little lost, like they're kind of feeling like they tried to follow what you were telling them, but life isn't turning out the way they thought. Bill, tell me about some of these conversations you had with your students. students. students. I love meeting students two years out, 5 years out, seven years out. I just talked to somebody who was like 15 years out and came up and said, "Oh, Professor Bernett, I haven't seen you." So they come back and and often you know I get two reactions.

one is um hey I remember the class and it's still very helpful and in fact even my friends ask me sometimes and I tell them read the book or whatever and then sometimes they say you know I I used all these tools but I'm still my life still doesn't have the meaning or the purpose or the impact that I wanted to have particularly impact because the genz's all want to have a lot of impact and so that was one of the reasons we wrote this last book how to live a meaningful life is that even after designing a pretty good life or career they're still looking for well wait a where's the payoff?

Where's the impact? Where's the meaning? And we wanted to go back and look at that kind of step back from the life design idea and really look at more at meaning and purpose because our conclusion was they were looking in the wrong place. And we wanted to give them better navigation, I guess, in that question. And I think students sometimes get it wrong, especially when they're in that position of feeling like something's missing. When I talk to my own students who are in this position, I often get the sense that they think what they need to do to fix things is to like detonate their life.

like I'm going to buy a van and I'm going to move across country or I'm going to move to a farm. But Dave, you both have argued that there are other ways around this that doesn't involve detonating your life. Why is it the wrong path to meaning? Well, it's not never there. I mean, every now and then I'll say, "Yeah, I think you probably should quit and get the heck out of that horrible toxic job working for that boss." But that's pretty rare. What it boils down to is, you know, I'll sometimes talk about the college to post college shift.

I mean, while you're in college, you know, it is about you. It's all about you. And a good day is when you heard something you never heard before. you saw something you never saw before. You did something. So life is cool when I'm on a really steep learning curve. Well, if you're out in the world, whether you're in medicine, at the marketplace, or the military, whatever you're doing, that world is about mastery. And it's not about doing something for the first time six hours a day, that's called incompetency.

We don't let you do that to patients or customers or investors. They actually want people who know what they're doing. So I go from this thing where it's all about novelty to all about mastery. It's a huge shift. And that's a longer, more patient pathway. So sometimes people are looking for the but it's not amazingly new every single day. I must be in the wrong place. No, you're just thinking about the paradigm of life. Wrong. We keep talking about getting more out of life, not cramm Oh, I need another hobby.

I need a bigger thing. I need more. No, you don't need more. You need to get more out of what's already there. And so we start teaching people more how to live into that life to get more full aliveness from it. And this is the idea of really designing for a meaning and designing for the right kind of meaning which means we need to be honest about the kind of meaning that we can design for and the kinds of meaning that we can't really design for.

And so talk about the kind of meaning that people usually want to get the very big meaning and why that's different from the meaning that you're talking about designing in your book. It's a design book not a philosophy book. So we don't try to answer the meaning of life. The big question you know what's the meaning of life? Is there a god? Blah blah blah. That's not a designable question. But getting more meaning out of life is a designable question. And this idea of you know getting more out of not packing more into first of all am I going to change the world?

Probably not. And that's a good thing to aspire to. But if that's the only egg in your meaning basket, boy are you at risk. And so first thing you got to get beyond impact and then becoming fully human means I'm not just making a difference but I'm also living more fully. And so the key thing we do is we try to give people, you know, more food groups, not just the meat of impact, but the vegetables of wonder and the beverages of, you know, flow. And so we try to give people a couple more crayons in the box to mix the metaphor.

So it sounds like we're not going after the meaning of life. We're going after meaning in life. And a thing that we need to radically accept to do that is that we need to understand how tiny sometimes the meaning in life buckets are. And I think this gets us to this idea of the scandal of particularity. Dave, do you want to explain what this is? is? is? Yeah. So scandal particularity is a philosophical idea. Actually started as a theological idea by Walter Bugamid. But what it really boils down to is it turns out turns out turns out the ultimate is only accessible in the particular.

To put it differently, the sublime is actually found in the ridiculous. Beauty, truth, love, communion, unity, these lovely things we all aspire to. And when we experience them deeply, we kind of go, "Oo, that's really it." You know, you see that amazing sunset and everybody kind of goes, "I want more of that. That's what I was made for." And so that ultimate is beckoning to all of us all the time. But it turns out it only arrives in small partial chunks. They're all essentially reflections of that fullness.

They're not full embodiment of it. Every one of those experiences those experiences those experiences of something wonderful, frankly, it leaves you wanting more. Like, you know, that was a really great kiss, but it stopped too soon. You know, you can never have all of it. So, the scandal of particular is it's kind of scandalous that these wonderful things only come in these little cupcakesized bits. You know, that little tasting thing they give you at Costco. You know, it's like, where's the rest of the pizza? No, that was a really good bite.

And the fact that I long for more is the promise that life will continue to be interesting. So the huge shift is in the scandal particularity. You go from it's still not what I really want to that was lovely and more is to come. It's a complete transformation of your relationship with finitude. We humans don't like finitude. When something feels good, we want more. More accomplishment, more success, more kisses, more nachos. But chasing more isn't how we get to capital M meaning. To do that, we have to embrace the finite bits, however scandalous that might feel.

But the big question is, how do we do that? How do we notice and make the most of these tiny, beautiful moments? We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns after the break. Stanford designers Dave Evans and Bill Bernett argue that instead of trying to find the big elusive meaning in life, we should instead focus on the little stuff, tiny moments of beauty and wonder. In fact, they think we should all be putting our efforts into creating these kinds of moments. Well, you can design moments, right?

You can design any experience. And what you're looking for is to connect that moment to something bigger than yourself, right? Self-trcendence. That moment can be I always make my grandmother's purple cabbage. It's a recipe, you know, Germany from the 30s. It's just purple cabbage with some vinegar and sugar, but it's a thing. And when the purple cabbage comes out, the moment is everybody remembers grandma. So, it's these particular moments where we can discover a connection to the ultimate meaning of life, I guess, love, community, a memory of an important person in our lives.

You have opportunities all around you to create these moments. I just, you know, I live in an industrial neighborhood in the city and I'm walking toward the train. I'm noticing there's this bush that's got a bunch of purple flowers on it. I don't know why it's blooming in December, but there's this bush doing its thing. And I stood there for a moment and I watched probably 20 other people just walk right by it. But to stop and take some pictures just to have a moment to savor the beauty of nature.

Part of this moment making thing is change what you're looking for. Pay attention. Be available to what's right in front of you. This bush with purple flowers, the friendly barista who, you know, heated up my muffin. All the little things actually are packed with meaning. And you can design those moments. And you can also recognize and savor those moments. And in either case, you're changing the way your brain is wired, right? You're starting to look for things that are imbued with the scandal of particularity, the meaning in life, not the meaning of life.

What's really going on in, you know, we're design guys. We're going to give you tools to design something, to make something. What are we making? So, if I go right to making meaning, nine times out of 10, the people we talk with, from 20 to 90, they're [snorts] all having the same problem. They go after this impact thing. So if I want these other forms of meaning, they're found in a different way of seeing the world. To really get into this idea of moment making, we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of worlds.

First, the world that we often find ourselves in, the world of outcomes and instrumental value and capitalism and etc etc etc. What you call the transactional world. So Dave, what's the transactional world? transactional world? transactional world? We posit this idea of the tale of two worlds. There's the transactional world where I go and get stuff done and there's the flow world which is the fullness of the cosmos that's happening in this very moment right in front of me right under my feet right around me all the time we're playing with which world you're participating in in terms of directing your attention transactional world you know it's the world of lists frankly it's a world where you're living almost entirely in the past or the future I am criticizing what I did last time and learning from it so I can do it better and I'm thinking about you know I'm I'm still a post-it note I am literally looking at my desk and I've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.

Got 18 things on a post-it list and I have circles next to them. And if the circle has an X in it, it's done. So right now I have 12 out of 18 things with X's and six things with circles. And you know what a really good day is? A really good day is when there's all X's. What I can't wait is for that to be over. All the transaction world wants to be is done and successful. Successfully done. And the feedback is money and accolade and social media likes.

So you get tons of feedback. So it's an easy world to be completely stuck in. And some people tell you it's the only real world. And that's that's kind of heartbreaking. And so you make a distinction between this transactional world and a different world that you call the flow world. So Bill, what's the flow world? How is it very different from the thing that Dave was just talking about? Well, in terms of what Dave just said, transactions, it's looking backwards to see what I got done.

I'm looking forward to see what's next and I'm never right here in the moment in the present moment. And the flow world is more about the present moment. Again, it's available all the time. There's nothing inherently wrong with the transactional world, but it's when you make um intrinsically flow things. Let's say I have a mindfulness practice or I have a yoga practice, which should just be about being in the moment in in that place where you're in a sort of a flow state. You can turn that into transaction.

Hey, I went to yoga five times this week. Check. And none of those things are the way the flow world actually works. You can be in both worlds at the same time, by the way. I can be in a total of flow state looking at the purple flowers and still get to the train on time, right? There's no contradiction here. It was the work of, you know, Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia. We're talking about the awakened brain and the achieving brain or the left brain and the right brain if you want to use that model.

Whatever it is, they're both on all the time. It's just you're not paying any attention. You know, the left brain is the one that talks. And if you're like me and Dave, there's somebody talking in my head all the time. And it's taken up all the space, the ability to access your creative sort of self, your intuitive self. It's all there. It's just underdeveloped in our society. And as Dave mentioned, people trust the transactional brain, the brain that talks. They think it's the real one. And they think this other one is sort of, you know, it's a it's okay, but it's not quote real.

Got a cute. It's just as real. In fact, even more real. If you want to be a whole human being, you have to accept the reality of your creativity, your intuition, your awakened brain. All these things are neurologically true. It's just we live in a society that doesn't value them. You know, we talk about reframes all the time. The point of a reframe is to look at something differently, change your point of view, and we're trying to free people up to get them access to a bunch of stuff that they're missing.

Now, Laura, you're doing this work, too. So, let me turn the arrow around. Now, you've got this struggle with your students. What are you finding helpful in number one, convincing them that this is available and legitimate and actually spending some time and energy on it? Well, I think this is one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you and so excited about this concept of the transactional world because I think especially my type A Yale undergraduates spend a lot of time in this transactional world.

You had this quip that the transactional world is very imperialistic which I was like yes yes because I think it sucks you in. You know, Bill, you mentioned this idea of you're doing your meditation which in theory should be like fullon flow world. You're just being present and nothing else but I'm taking it off my list. I also have my meditation on a post-it note and I'm trying to do it so that I work better in my, you know, investment banking [clears throat] job or something like that.

like that. like that. So, I'm curious what you all think of like how to fight the imperialism. This transactional world is so prone to suck you in, especially I think if you've been successful and benefited from the transactional world in the way that a lot of our Ivy League students have done. done. done. Well, one of our tools is savoring. And I know you're a savoring fan as well. You're sitting at a red light and your favorite song comes on and you kind of go, "Oh, that's great." Like, "No, no, no.

no. no. really love it. Oh my god, I love that Dylan song. It is so drop all the way into it for 17 seconds and then off you go. And if you start learning how to do that, you start learning how to do sudden savoring like it's a good cup of coffee. Wait, hold that one on your tongue for 3 seconds longer. 3 seconds. Oh my god, I can actually taste because I make half calf. I use dark decaf and medium grind calf. Can I taste both beans?

Oh god, I can. That moves the needle. One of the reasons I love this suggestion is that it's just a reminder that we can switch back and forth. One of the suggestions you give in the book is to literally tell yourself, okay, switch. And this was something I found myself even using right after reading the book is you know I'll be prepping for a podcast and you know kind of in full transaction urgent mind head and then I just remember like oh wait switch ah uh paying attention to the light in the world or like the seat under me or you know someone's walking by let me smile at them.

It's almost like you give yourself the task of noticing what you can notice in the flow world and that works pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. It really it really does. the idea of flipping the switch. Like Dave and I were prepping for this, you know, the podcast and we were looking at our notes and that was all transactional. And then just before we came on, it was the moment when I flipped the switch to like, oh wow, I get to talk to this really interesting person, Lorie Santos.

This is an amazing body of work. This is going to be fun. There's the ways you can get unstuck that are really quite simple. I don't think you have to spend 10 years developing a meditation practice. Go ahead. That's probably a good thing. But even the Zen monks would say that enlightenment is instantaneous. And one of my favorite quotes is if you can't find enlightenment right where you are, where do you expect to find it? Is it over there? No, it over there? Is it over there?

No, it's right here. And it's in just little moments. So, it's easier than you think. You don't have to spend a lot of time. Savoring is one thing. The idea of just practicing acceptance. Hey, I'm just going to try to be in the real world today and see what happens. And availability. Can I change what I'm looking for? It's all about connection. It's all about love and people and things beyond yourself. So, is there a moment where you can have a little more community? Can you talk to that person on the train?

Can you chat with someone at the coffee shop? Find a way to connect. you know, these little tiny design moments that help you get unstuck and figure out that, you know, maybe there is some meaning in the life you're already living and you don't have to go find it somewhere else. One of the reasons I love your book so much is that you tell us some really good techniques for making that switch for kind of switching to the flow world. And one of the big ones you talk about is this idea of wonder.

Dave, you mentioned that you give your students the mantra of pursuing latent wonderfulness. What do you mean by that? Well, first, you know, mindset matters. And if you walk into a room or you walk into any experience, it's probably going to be boring. I don't think I even know these people. Your chances of fulfilling that expectation are extremely high. If you walk in kind of going, man, I bet this is going to be great. I can't wait to meet these interesting people. Now, you may be disappointed.

They may be all absolute douls like, oh, oh well. But when you round up, your chance of finding it goes way up. Use confirmation bias as a friend. You know, give yourself a chance. You know, we're learning how to play the game to win here. So, the pursuit of latent wonderfulness is there's something wonderful going on all the time. On the lat and wonderfulness, this is also in response to our students. You know, have a very high bar for everything. It's like I'm not going to go interview at a big company because big companies are bad.

Well, how do you know that? Well, that's all my friends tell me. All right, here's your assignment. You know, you're going to go interview at uh, you know, Apple and Google and come back. One student said, "I will never interview at the CIA." Say, "Okay, go interview at the CIA." If there's a 20% chance that there's something in there that's interesting, that's interesting, that's interesting, go find it. Give it a shot. Go find it. And inevitably, they come back and they go, "Do you know that the CIA is working like 10 years ahead in the AI thing?

They talked about stuff nobody's talking about in the valley. I totally want to work there." So our students set a ridiculously high bar for their experiences and if they're not going to be amazing, be amazing, be amazing, they don't want to do it. And so they shut themselves out of so many things they could try because their bar for latent wonderfulness is if it's not 100% I'm not going to do it. And then when you actually get down to how do you know it's not going to be cool, they don't know.

They just heard it from a friend or more likely they're just afraid to try it. And so this is a way of getting them unstuck. And so that's seeking out these moments of wonder and maybe even these tiny moments of wonder, not putting wonder like you know capital W wonder wonder out there to look for. A second strategy you've talked about a lot is to attend to coherence. Dave, what's coherence and why is it so important? important? important? Okay, so we define coherence as the intersection and the alignment of who you are, what you believe and what you're doing.

The research on meaning will say that if you can interconnect those three dots, who am I? What do I believe and what am I doing? then my life is coherent. I am making sense in the world. I'm acting just like myself. And if I don't have those dots connected, the chance of meaning goes way down. Now, of course, the prerequisite to connecting those dots is locating them. So, we have an exercise called the compass exercise, which has three components. My current story, my work view, and my life view.

So, three little essays you write that will help you figure out the narrative that describes kind of who you are. Now, is that the totality of who you are? No. But it's a real good start. We've been doing this a couple hundred thousand times now. So, we kind of get the hang of it. And it seems to be working well for people. So, coherency is when I'm actually living out who I really am in the world, including the compromises that I have to make. [snorts] And a coherency sighting, which is a meaning-making tool, is catching yourself in the act of when was I coherent today?

So, example, a really lovely coherency sighting for me, which is so easy to miss. You know, one of the growing edges of life design at Stanford is not more and more classes, but classes to different affinity groups. So, there was a pilot on designing your Muslim life. So, the kids who adhere to Islam feel pretty isolated and they would like to be in this life conversation with people of a similar mindset. So, Bill gets them in a room. The Muslim chaplain, Bill, the existential atheist, are co-eing a class on designing your Muslim mind.

And I'm the guy with a seminary degree. I'm sitting in the back of the room watching my atheist partner teach a spirituality class and I'm thinking this is so cool. I helped build a place where people are integrating their spirituality even beyond their personal ideology. That is such a coherent moment for me. This is as good as it gets. And so it's about catching yourself in the action when it's actually working. And guess what? It's working more often than you think. It's time for a quick break, but when we return, we'll explore some of my favorite tips for stepping into the flow world, and we'll hear the surprising way that Bill is able to stay in the flow world almost all the time.

The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. We've been chatting with designers Dave Evans and Bill Bernett and exploring how to get out of the transactional world of dod do all the time so that we can find ways into the flow world. Now flow is an idea that we talk about a lot on the happiness lab but Bill and Dave have developed their own unique take on the concept. The original definition of flow according to Mih Chicksumih high the founder of this concept and a wonderful researcher and you know the definitive work flow the psychology of optimal experience comes out some time ago and defines the flow channel as being a zone where the challenge of the task in which you are currently engaged and your skill level are close to matched meaning you're not underkilled and now you're anxious because you're going to fail.

You're not overskilled and you're bored because you could do this in your sleep but you're kind of really on it. And so what happens is the task demands enough of you that you could be fully engaged. And that zone is a place where you might drop into flow. There's like, you know, apex when is when you're really in the zone. That amazing US hockey team that beat the Russians, you know, you're totally in flow. That's great. And most people think that's what flow is. But here's the problem.

It's this apex experience which makes it way too hard. Particularly in the simple task where I might be overskilled, we redefine what we call simple flow. You don't have to let boredom steal your brain. I mean, last night the heater went on at 1:00 in the morning. I go, "What the heck?" And I went upstairs and the thermostat had kind of exploded. So, I went all the way down the nerd rabbit hole of an old school thermostat that didn't work very well. And it only took me 45 minutes and I fixed it and I had the ass time cuz I went all the way into not this is such a pain in the ass, but it's kind of like gee I wonder what that 1980s engineer was thinking when he designed one of the worst UIs of all time.

How interesting this could be. And so I just chose to go all the way in and enjoy the heck out of solving my thermostat problem and saving a little gas for Pacific Gas and Electric, you know. So just go with it. That's a choice flow. full engagement in what you're doing which allows you to experience as much of your aliveness as that particular activity will permit to be expressed in your scandalously particular self in the scandalously particular moment could be a flow mode. I love that flow really plays on this idea of the scandal of the particular because we can only ever get it in the present moment.

It's not something we can design for the future or think about in the past. Bill, you've also talked about how these moments of being in flow really require being a little bit more embodied. Why is embodiment so important? important? important? Oh, you know, this thing, this body isn't just the thing that takes my brain to meetings. I mean, we know that there's a lot of neurology going on in the gut and in the veagal nerves and all the other systems. So, we are embodied creatures and we learn by moving and working in the world.

There's our intelligence, our IQ, I guess you could say, the talking part of our brain. There's our EQ, our emotional part of our brain. There's our kinesthetic understanding of the world. How do we move in the world? The propriception in our body. There's a whole bunch of stuff coming up now around how the body actually understands itself in the world. And so, you know, don't talk to me about artificial intelligence and disembodied computers. You you have to be inside this embodied intelligence because it's also where where we feel our intuition, our curiosity.

And many of the triggers for flow have to do with, you know, either releasing a dopamine circuit or releasing some kind of a a neural circuit that engages the rest of the body in that experience, which is why athletes often talk about, you know, being in the zone or things. It's a physical kinesthetic flow. So, these are all embodiment of ourselves in a time and space in the world that are all triggers to the what we we're calling simple flow or the flow state that's available all the time.

One of our analogies, it's like an aquifer running right under the surface. All you got to do is drill a hole and there's plenty of water. You just just got to dig into that thing that's right beneath you. Bill I call the flow master. Bill has loved flow for a long time. He's like kept in flow. Bill, you know, more than a few times you'll tell me something like, "Oh god, you know, it's really been great. I've been in flow for four days now. I mean, you claim to attain this persistent flow state.

Can you give the listeners any tips on how the heck do you pull that off? Uh, it's both something I I try to do and it's a mystery fundamentally, but um I really get back to it's depends on what you're looking for. And so when I start my day, I've been for a long many many many years now, I start the day with a an affirmation where I say um I live in the best of all possible worlds because as Dave mentioned, I'm an existential atheist.

So truly the rad radical acceptance that this is it might as well be the best. And uh everything I do today I choose to do and choosing into my experience I think is the is the number one way in which I find flow. That's the voice of availability by the way. That's what availability sounds like. like. like. I'm pretty good at being simultaneously I get stuff done. I mean, you know, some people might claim I'm absent-minded, but it's just because my mind is on something else, not on whatever their priority is in the transaction world.

But it's also, you know, I've practiced creativity. I'm a painter and I'm an artist. I spend a lot of time in that wonderful, you know, a quote from Robert Henry, the goal isn't to make art. It's to be in that wonderful state of mind that makes art inevitable. So I try to spend a lot of time in the state of mind that makes flow inevitable. inevitable. inevitable. Another thing you seem to both spend a lot of time in is the last suggestion that you have for everyone for how to get into the flow world more, which is that you both spend a lot of time in community.

Why is community so important for design thinking generally? Well, community I mean in terms of design, design is always done on teams. It's always done with people. You want to radically collaborate with people of different points of view. But the community part in the new book really comes from Dave's experience teaching a program at Stanford called the Distinguished Career Institute. It's a gap year for grown-ups. People come to Stanford for a year after a distinguished career and they spend time trying to figure out the pivot, the thing they're going to do next in their lives.

These are pretty smart, successful people. Dave, how does this community thing work with them? Well, it's been interesting. First of all, and we do community work at all our classes, I mean, we often say it's almost impossible to hear yourself by yourself. Dan Seagull, you know, formerly out of UCLA, the Mindsight Institute, will remind us all that in fact the autonomous self is a profoundly toxic lie. We now know scientifically that consciousness extends. This is the nature of human consciousness. We are deeply involved with each other.

So, if you start understanding that, then you really want to leverage what it means to be in community because that the fullness of you is really only available as part of us. And so what we found at this distinguished careers group is I started putting people into design teams not to design the life after their program but to get the most from it in the present moment. And the nice thing about these these folks these 35 to 45 people 45 to 90 years old mostly 55 to 75 thinking about what do I do next?

And they're here to become their fuller selves and they spend some time just exploring. So, it's this idea of we're all becoming, can you become more intentionally? And so, the fellows look at each other, kind of go, "Well, hi. Who are you? You know, I'm Dave. I'm Lorie Santos." Well, what are you into? Yeah, I'm into the happiness thing. Oh, really? That's so cool. And they take each other at face value and the only thing they want to do for each other is help one another become their more authentic selves.

And what's funny is that a couple of weeks into the program, they will all say, "These are the best friends I've ever made." And my line is, "I'm not buying it." You created corporate cultures. Almost all of them had big families. I said, "Aren't most of you fending off hundreds of people saying, "Where are you? I miss you. You've been gone for a year." And you're telling me these 35 Yahoos that some admission officer at Stanford threw you into a room with. You've never met before.

In six weeks, become the best friend you ever had. Really? And they go, "Yeah." And the reason is because they're in this kind of community where the intention of our interaction is not just having a good time. That's a social gathering. It's not getting something done. That's a collaborative gathering. And my argument is 99% of what people do in the transactional world is social or collaborative wonderful things. But then there's a formative community which is why are we together? We're together to become our better selves and to enjoy more fully the self we're presently trying on.

So that is a different conversation with different questions. And it turns out I don't have to be in the same thing. So the climate change fanatic and the person who wants to become a fine artist, they can be in the same group because they're not collaborating on the content of their lives. They're collaborating on the intent of their lives, which is becoming. So when we set people in relationships that allow becoming to occur, which all you need to be as a thoughtful, self-aware person, stuff happens.

And so for folks that maybe can't join this Stanford group but really want to form a similar formative community and focus on becoming any tips. tips. tips. The simple answer is frankly come up with some generative questions. I did this at Thanksgiving. I actually had three Thanksgivings and in all the dinners I brought three questions and those questions were formative not transactional or entertainment. One was boy the world's kind of full of a lot of ugly things these days. When were you recently surprised by someone doing something good that restored your faith in humanity?

And guess what? Everybody had an answer. I even asked directly, what have you become this year? Or what are you hoping to become next year? And you know, maybe two out of 10 people were like, whoa, that's a little much, you know, but eight out of 10, oh well, you know, what I'm becoming is. And the other is, is there a letter in you that needs to get out? And if so, what is it? And who's it to? And those are all becoming kinds of questions and people are surprisingly available.

So the key thing if you want to start forming a more formative community is have better question. question. question. Yeah, this is something that I think we get wrong all the time. There's such lovely work by folks like Nick Epley that find that we often go for shallow questions especially if we're at a dinner party, something like Thanksgiving or a holiday meal or something. But really what people resonate with answering are these so-called deep questions, questions that are vulnerable, which I think have a a lot of features of these becoming questions, right?

What are these emotions that you want to share? How can we focus things in a different way? How can you take a different perspective? How can you reframe to steal the designer's thinking? designer's thinking? designer's thinking? Seems like we've known this in social science for a while, but we can really apply it to becoming more in the flow world and finding these moments of meaning making. meaning making. meaning making. People want to have the experience of interacting with each other in meaningful ways. So think of think of a way to say something kindly.

Have your own story ready to go. Don't make it be about you, but if you want to get in the deep water, jump in the pool first. And I think you'll be surprised. People are pretty good to each other if you give them a chance. And they're desperate for these conversations and these kinds of communities, right? The loneliness epidemic. They're not going to find it on social media. They're not going to find it in these other places. You know, when people are trying to think about how can I improve my life?

What can I do to make it better? getting rid of these dysfunctional beliefs, leaning into these meaning making moments and creating communities instead of echo chambers and arguing and all this other stuff that's going on. You know, Dave is a big Jesus guy and I'm a big, you know, not Jesus guy. We've been collaborating for 20ome years on this work and it's the best collaboration I've ever had. So you don't have to agree on things in order to be in a collaboration. Particularly if the collaboration is about how to become the best version of yourself and uh with that intention do anything.

Start a book club, start a salon where people get together and everybody gets to ask one question. But the questions can't be in the transaction world. That's the only rule. So, thank you so much for figuring out ways that we can find a few more of these moments of meaning and for doing it in a way that I think really resonates with everybody that's feeling stuck right now, which is not by cramming more in, but getting more out of the moments that we already have. Well, thanks.

And here's a little PS, by the way, while we duck the question, what is the meaning of your life? And let's just live more meaningfully along the way. Let's live more purposefully on the way to whatever we're going to find later. It turns out if you get good at this stuff, that meaning of life thing is going to come into view a lot more soon and a lot more clearly. Figuring out the meaning of life is hard. But I hope that this episode has convinced you that there's plenty of ways to find meaning in life, even when it doesn't feel like it.

If you're feeling stuck, why not commit to turning towards some new moments of meaning this week? And if you want even more advice about how to do that, check out Bill and Dave's new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, which is out this week. That's a wrap on our series about getting unstuck in 2026. What' you think? Why not let us know? You can email us at happiness lab at pushkin.fm pushkin.fm pushkin.fm or leave us a review to tell us what you liked. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness with my free newsletter on my website drlissantos.com.

website drlissantos.com. website drlissantos.com. That's d r l a r i e santos.com. We'll be back next week just in time for Valentine's Day with a new series on the science of love. In our first episode, we'll explore what we get wrong about love. We'll learn why the love we get from others doesn't always register emotionally and what we can do to open ourselves up to it. We can be loved. You know, we could have all these people in our lives that kind of objectively love us, but we don't actually feel loved by them or maybe not feel loved by them as much as we want to be.

be. be. That's next week on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Lauri Santos.