Bill Burnett: Designing Your Life at TEDxStanford (Full Transcript)

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 problem, 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 is 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 in the design process where you really want to converge and test some things, prototype some things. So 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. Reality has a tendency to throw little things at us that we weren’t expecting, sometimes good things, sometimes bad. So we say just have a bias to action. Try stuff.

Why? Why do we start this class? Well I’ve been in office hours for a long long time with my students, have been teaching here for a while. Dave as well — he was teaching over at that community college in Berkeley for a while. And what we notice is — I’m sorry, I’m sorry; it’s a Stanford TEDx. What I notice is, 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.

And designers get stuck all the time. I mean 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 and stuck and unstuck all the time.

But we also noticed as we went out, and we 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 then I’ll tell you what you need to do. Now if you actually have one of these things, these passions you knew it too; 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 you know where we sort of research based here at Stanford, so we went over to the Center for the Study of Adolescence which by the way now goes up to 27. I met with Bill Damon who’s one of our colleagues; he’s a fantastic guy. He studied this question and it turns out less than 20% of the people have any one singular identifiable passion in their lives.

So we hate a methodology which says OK come to the front of the line, you have passion; oh you don’t; oh I’m sorry. Go to the back; when you have one come on back. We’ll help you over there. 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. Now what are you late for exactly? I’m not quite sure but people have — you know there’s a meta-narrative in the culture in my — when I was growing up, 25, you’re supposed to have, you know, maybe have a relationship, maybe have gotten married, starting to get the family together.

When I talk to my students, 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 nowadays 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 it’s really kind of — it’s not only — it’s like well you should have figured this out by now. Dave and I don’t shoot on anybody in the book or in the class, we don’t believe in should, we just think all right you are wherever 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? I mean, because you’re not settling; are you for something that’s less than the best because this is Stanford. Obviously we all want to be the best.

Well, this implies that one, there’s a singular best; two, that it’s a linear thing in life is anything but linear. And three, there’s this old — 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 the Design Thinking – five ideas, excuse me — it says five; doesn’t yeah — five ideas from Design Thinking, and the things that people have written back to us who read the book or taken the class 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 here read the book is they say, you know, I want my life to be meaningful. I want it to be purposeful. I wanted 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 that’s what you do in the world.

If you can make a connection between these three things, if you can make that a coherent story, you will experience your life is meaningful. The increase in meaning making comes from connecting the dots. So we do two things. We ask people write a work for you. 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 got to be careful because we can reframe almost anything but there’s a class of problems, so people get stuck on that are really really bad problems. We call them gravity problems. Essentially there’s something you cannot change.

Now you have — not you but I know you have a friend. You’ve been having coffee with this friend for a while and they’re stuck. They don’t like their boss; they don’t like their partner; they don’t like their job. There’s something 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 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, then you come up with lots of ideas and 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 is a gravity problem, I can’t change it. You know, this is a company that – 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 do you want to do? Is that a circumstance that you can reframe and work with 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 slack have kind of demonstrated that this multiverse thing might be real. You’ve heard of this, right, that there are multiple parallel universes one right next to each other.

And I said you know, I can — we’ll do a thought experiment. Let’s say you could live in all the multiverses simultaneously and not only that but you would 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 and I asked them how many lives, are you — how many lives would you want? I get answers from three out of 10,000 but you know we’ve sort of done the average. It’s about seven and a half, most people think they have about seven and a half 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 reframe 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 asked people to do some design in the ideate bubble. It’s about having lots of ideas. So we say let’s have some ideas, we’re going to ideate your future but you can’t ideate just one, you have 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 get a much one – 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 three. 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, it’s going to come out great.

So I mean in design, we’re sort of values neutral except for one thing; we never design anything to make it worse. 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, want to go to the Galapagos before the guy with the ice thing before it’s all underwater and we can’t see it anymore. So that’s plan one. Your life now 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 you going to do?

So what do you do if the thing that you’ve got goes away? And everybody’s got — you know, everybody’s got a side hustle or something that 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 got enough you’re not fabulously wealthy, but you got enough and what would you do if you knew no one would laugh?

My students come into 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 just hear people saying you didn’t go to Stanford to do that; did you? Right, because somehow or other if you went to Stanford you have to do some of the amazing things that the past speakers have been doing.

But what would you do if you didn’t — if you had enough money and you didn’t care what people thought, anything from I’m going to go study butterflies; two, 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 realized oh my gosh, I could actually have imagined three completely parallel lives are all pretty interesting. Two, they rarely go become a bartender in Belize but a lot of times the things that come up on the other plans were things that they left behind somehow, in the busyness of life they forgot about those things.

And so they bring them back and they put them in plan one. 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 like 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 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 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 know if this is exactly what I want.

The two kinds of life design prototypes when we call a 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; she’s been doing it; he has 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 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 asked for their story and everybody will tell you their story if you buy them a cup of coffee. They’ll tell you the story and 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. I was working with — Dave and I were working with a woman, sort of mid-career in her 40s and very successful tech executive but wanted to move from money-making to meaning-making. Wanted 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 am 45. Going back to school, is that going to work? And then I heard about these millennials — they’re kind of mean and they don’t like old people. What am I going to do, Bill?

I said, well, you just have to go try this. Turns out, so we sent her to a seminar class into a large lecture hall class. By the way you just put on a t-shirt that says Stanford, you walk into a class, nobody knows. She wasn’t registered but everybody — she went and she went to the classes and she came back, she said you know what, it was a fantastic. I walked into the lecture hall. I sat down; my body was on fire. It was interesting. I’m so interested in the way the lecture was going.

And then I met these millennials that turn 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 felt experience that this might work for her. So those are two ways you could 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 nowadays we have so many choices, so we have a process. Again comes from the positive psychology guys.

Gather and create options. Once you get good at design you’re really good at coming up with lots of options. You got to narrow those down to the working list that you can work with. Then you make the choice, you make a good choice and then of course you agonize that you did the wrong thing. All my students have what’s called FOMO, fear of missing out; what if I didn’t pick the right thing. I had someone come into my office that I’m going to 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. So once you get good at gathering and creating ideas, you also want to make sure you leave room for the good, the lucky ideas, the serendipitous ideas.

This is a guy named Tony Hsieh. He was the CEO of Zappos. He sold it to Amazon but he had — before you become an employee at Zappos, he had to take a test and the test was are you lucky. One, two, or three, I’m not very lucky. 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 what. He wouldn’t hire anybody that was not lucky. I think it’s probably illegal 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 New York Times, the front section of New York Times, 30 pages, lots of articles and the graduate student said please count the number of either headlines or photographs depending on the test.

And if you get the right — 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 get $100. Of course, you all know that when a graduate student tells you what the experiment is that’s not the experiment.

So inside this thing that looked like a New York Times, 30 pages front page, inside all the stories were little pieces of text that said, if you read this the experiment is 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 hundred dollars. People who rate themselves as lucky, seven, eight, nine or ten 80% of the time noticed the text, got the extra hundred fifty.

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, and 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 thirty people who would go by, pick a jam or stop and test something and about a third of those actually buy a jam.

Okay it’s a baseline. Next week you walk in; 24 jams; jalapeno, 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. 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 the psychologists tell 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 off, just pick the five and then make your decision there. Oh my god, what if I pick the wrong one, 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 hey let’s go out to lunch today. That sounds great. What do you want to do? Pizza or Chinese food, I don’t care. Okay everybody gets together and halfway in the elevator on the way down someone says let’s get Chinese food. Then, you go, no, I want pizza. You won’t make the decision until — you won’t decide how you feel about the decision till decision is made; that’s a piece of research been done again and again and again. So just cross them off, if you cross up 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. There’s something a little bad emotional response to that, it summarizes all of the emotions that you have felt and how your decisions were valence, positive or negative and emotion.

The problem with that part of your brain is 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 — the another psychology experiment the the postdoc has got five Monet prints, five pictures for Monet and you rank them from best to least. I like this one the most; I like this one the least. Number one, number five. Thank you very much. Experiment is over; oh by the way as you’re walking out the grad student says 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 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.

Bring people back in a week later, say re-rank the stimuli, which one do you like now? The people who are 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.

The people who were told you pick it, it’s yours; you can’t return it, loved their print. They typically rank it it’s number one, and don’t think – think the rest of them suck. If you make decisions reversible, your chance of being happy goes down like 60% or 70%. So let go and move on, make the decision irreversible and by the way as a designer that’s no problem because you’re really good at generating options, that’s what you’re great at ideation, you’re really good at prototyping to get data in the world to see if that world is going to be the world you want to live in.

So you have no fear of missing out. It’s just a process, mindful of process; collect, reduce, decide, move on. That’s how you make yourself happy.

So the five ideas — connecting the dots to find meaning; to work in 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 demonstrate 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.

 

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