When we were doing the very first laptop at Apple back in the ’90s, nobody knew that you could put the keyboard in the back and the trackpad or the trackball in the front. Nobody had ever invented anything that was that small and that amazing. Then, Jon Krakauer just built a lot of prototypes and came up with that idea. We build to think. David Kelley, our senior professor, the guy who founded IDEO, and the Stanford d.school. He’ll say we build things to think about things and to ask questions. So, it seemed clear that all the ideas that we use to innovate products and services and experiences, to where I normally teach my students to design, could be used to design a joyful life. You didn’t need to be a design student to do that. Students from every major take the class, and they find it useful.

Sean Murray  03:21

What are some of the concepts you teach during the course?

Bill Burnett  03:25

We teach them how to brainstorm, how to mind map, and how to have lots of ideas. You mentioned positive psychology. There is a class in positive psychology over the psychology department. It’s called the happiness class or something. They also have one at Yale that’s very famous. They’re coming at it from the psychology of happiness, or what Martin Seligman now calls flourish. We use a lot of Martin Seligman’s work, Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow, and Dan Gilbert’s work on decision-making, and Dan Goleman, the guy who wrote the book, Emotional Intelligence. We use that research to inform the stuff that we do in the class and to come up with our exercises, but it is all still a design-based class where you come up with lots of options, build your way forward, and try stuff. It’s out in the world where we discover what the world needs, what we’re good at delivering, and how we want to do something the world needs. That’s how you launch. That’s how you figure out what you want to do in the world.

Sean Murray  04:22

What I love about the book is it’s not just theoretical. It’s giving the reader very, very practical advice that you can apply to your world. It reads almost like a how-to book, how to design a life based on design thinking. I’m a novice to design thinking. I read about Kelley and incredible products that have been designed through these principles. Maybe we could talk a little bit about some of those principles and how they apply to designing our life as you talked about curiosity, this idea of bias to action.

Bill Burnett  04:56

We call those the mindsets of a designer. So, I can teach you the process, which is to start with empathy, talk to people to find out what they need. Then, find the problem. Typically, the client always has the wrong problem. They always come in with something that’s poorly framed or too small or something that’s never going to work. So, talk to people, come up with a good reframe of the problem, come up with lots of ideas, and then build and test, build and test. That’s the process. But, more in the class, we lean on thinking like a designer.

Sean Murray  05:25

So, how do we think like a designer?

Bill Burnett  05:28

When a designer starts a problem, they start with curiosity because they don’t know the answer. They don’t need to know the answer because they’re going to move into this ambiguous space of the future. We all have curiosity. We were as curious as children. David Kelley wrote a book called Creative Confidence, which is this idea of reclaiming our curiosity and our creativity that maybe got beaten out of us in high school or something. Half of what I do is just re-awakening the curiosity of my students.

So, you start with curiosity, and then this mindset of bias to action. What’s the point of planning if you don’t have any data? Let’s just try some stuff. That’s radical collaboration. We collaborate with the world. You’re not going to solve the problem sitting in your socially-isolated COVID world. You have to talk to people. Get out in the world and collaborate. Curiosity; bias to action; radical collaboration; and then the two magic mindsets are reframing and prototyping. Prototyping is to build your way forward. Our conversation is a little prototype conversation. You’re learning about design. You may resonate with something I say, and decide to try it. Or, let’s say this was reversed and I was wondering what podcasting is like. I call you up and we have a conversation. I’m time traveling into a possible future of me, talking to you about what you like to do. So, a conversation can be a prototype, trying something for a day –there are all sorts of ways you can prototype stuff before you try to find out if it’s going to be a good fit.

Sean Murray  06:59

I’m intrigued by prototyping. To design principle, I think it lends itself very well too. I want to come back to designing our lives, but let’s keep going. You mentioned the other mindset of reframing. What’s that?

Bill Burnett  07:11

Reframing is if you can’t solve the problem, pick a better problem. Designers love constraints. Right now, we’ve got this weird constraint of not being able to be physically in the classroom with our students. That’s tough. I’ve had to redesign all my classes for the spring quarter. But it’s also true that in this period where lots of people are home staring in front of the screen, I can get almost any guest I want to come to class. I had the head of IBM design, Phil Gilbert, come to class and spend a wonderful hour with the students being gracious with his time and giving them advice about career and design. Also, even though I worked at Apple and had some connections, I’ve been trying for years to get Jony Ive, the head of the studio, come to class, but it never happened until last week. Jony came to class, spent an hour with my seniors. He was incredibly gracious, incredibly kind. There my students were, speaking to the former head of the premier design company on the planet, the guy who works side by side with Steve Jobs to invent everything in their lives –the iPhone, the iPod, the iPad. He spent an hour with them because he could Zoom in from his home in London.

Sean Murray  08:17

Wow, so the constraint of requiring your course to be delivered online led to the opportunity of Jony Ive visiting your course. So, with every constraint, there’s probably an upside.

Bill Burnett  08:31

Even when you have a lot of resources, every problem has some kind of constraint. I would argue, if you don’t give a designer some constraints, they’ll never finish anything as you can always make things better.

Sean Murray  08:41

The one thing I noticed about the book is it’s not an advice book. It doesn’t tell you what to do. It doesn’t give you advice. Maybe you could talk about that. Why is that?

Bill Burnett  08:53

Dave and I have an absolute rule. We don’t “should” on our students, no “shoulding” in the classroom. We don’t tell you what you should do. We don’t give you advice, like, “Hey, Sean. You know what I would do if I were you?” What they’re saying there is what they would do, not what you should. So, that’s not what we do. We ask interesting questions, like those a mentor would ask. A student might come to me and maybe have a hard problem to try to work on, and have two options. We’d talk about the options, and I’d just reflect them what I hear, and help them make their best decision.

Sean Murray  09:25

I’d like to get a little more granular, especially with those first two steps of being curious and a bias to action, which leads to prototyping. I love the idea of prototyping. When I design something physical, that’s what I love to do. It goes back to building with Legos when we were kids. It’s like, let’s just dive in. Let’s put the box together. We have that natural curiosity as children, but when you think about your own life, the stakes are pretty high. We tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves. We have to be happy. We have to have the right life. We only have one shot at it. It makes it a little more challenging. So, how do we channel that curiosity? And how do we prototype on our own life?

Bill Burnett  10:04

When we were kids, that wasn’t so much of a problem. We had more curiosity than we knew what to do with. We could turn anything. We could turn a stick into a rocket ship or a box into a playground. Somewhere along the way through middle school in high school, we were told to get serious, pay attention, sit down, and shut up. If you were an antsy young boy, you were told you’re a problem because you couldn’t work in that kind of environment.

So, we believe –and I seriously think it’s true– that our natural curiosity gets suppressed. Partially, we do it ourselves because we want to fit in. We don’t want to be different. We want to fit in with our friends for them to like us. And partially because grownups told us to stop acting that way. We wanted to please our grownups or we were afraid. So, what we noticed, and what the psychologists will tell you is true. Although you used to have access to curiosity. You just inherently wanted to try things and figure them out, that meant building things and interacting with the world. I made the Lego model that they had in the box and made my design, which was even cooler. The reason we don’t do it is fear. We’ve been taught fear, and it suppresses our creativity.

So, you have to think about when you want to get started when your procrastinating, or when you want to get started when you say, “I don’t have any ideas.” What’s happening is that the fight-flight or freeze response is triggered. You won’t have that much access to your creativity because you’re worried that you might do something wrong or you might do something stupid or you’ll make a mistake or it won’t work, but designers make hundreds and hundreds of mistakes. There were maybe 300 prototypes of the iPhone, 99 of which were garbage. Thomas Edison says, “I know 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb,” because he prototyped just material science trying to figure out how to make a light bulb. So first, we’ve got to learn how to move into the space of creativity by lowering our fear. I would argue that courage is action in the face of fear. If you’ve read about courageous people who did something in a battle or saved a child from a rolling car or something, they were terrified when they acted, but they acted anyway because they felt they had to.

Sean Murray  12:15

So, curiosity is about courage. It’s about having the courage to try something new with the understanding that it might fail, but that’s okay. For me, it helps that you call it prototyping because a prototype is not a final product. It’s going to have flaws. It’s not going to be perfect. Once we test the prototype, we’ll see the flaws, and if we can channel that curiosity, we’ll have the courage to build the next prototype and get a little closer to our goal.

Bill Burnett  12:46

So, you have to get courageous. You have to get over your fear of being stupid or dumb or wrong. You’ve got to build what we call “failure immunity.” It’s okay to fail. You’re supposed to fail lots in the beginning in any kind of design, including your life design. Also, failing in a sense of trying something, but it didn’t work is not a failure because the reason I’m trying stuff is I’m asking interesting questions. I’m asking questions about my future that might lead me to something new. Most of those will be dead ends, or they will result in me finding out that that’s not something I’m interested in. It’s not a failure. You didn’t design a failed prototype. You just learned something.

So, if we can reframe early failures into learnings and if we can reframe bias to action, not just stabbing at any direction, but listening to your internal self, your emotional intelligence, and your cognitive intelligence, and finding your way forward by moving from here to the next experience and the next experience, and each time extracting lessons. Wherever you want to start, whatever project you want to do, just start. Maybe you have to take a deep breath and hold back a little bit of that fear. But, trust me, creativity is such a fun state of mind when you can find it again. Also, everybody’s curious about something.

Sean Murray  14:10

Could you provide an example of a situation where someone channels their curiosity and finds the courage to build a prototype in their life design? What does that look like?

Bill Burnett  14:20

A bunch of my friends is retiring, and they’re trying to figure out where they want to live. I told them, “Well, don’t just pick someplace and go there. Prototype it.”

Sean Murray  14:30

How do you do that?

Bill Burnett  14:31

Go get an Airbnb in Santa Fe, and hang out for a month, and see how it is. Don’t be a tourist. That’s not prototyping. Every place is fun when you’re a tourist. Get an Airbnb in Santa Fe, and then live there for a month as if you lived there, you’ve sold the house and all the other things not in Santa Fe. What’s it like to go to the grocery store? Whom do you talk to? Where are you going to find your new friends? You’re free to move past the fear because everything is just an experiment. Hopefully, an informed experiment that leads you to a little bit better future.

The other thing is that our technique is really simple. Set the bar low. Read any of the literature on the psychology of behavior changes. Our colleague, BJ Fogg, at Stanford just wrote a book called Tiny Habits. It’s the whole methodology of making changes in small increments. It takes about 10 weeks to establish a new habit or to get rid of an old habit. You have to have an incentive and a trigger, and you got to get rid of the things that make you fall back into your old habits. He’s got a nice model for that, but basically, start slow.

Sean Murray  15:38

When I think about my career, I have built prototypes. I didn’t know they were prototypes at the time, but I’ll give you one example: writing. I used to enjoy writing. In college, I took creative writing courses. I took philosophy. I got stories published in the school literary journal, but all the grown-ups around me said, “Don’t be a writer. You can’t make money at writing.” So, of course, I went off in another direction. I studied math and computer science, and all along, I couldn’t get away from the writing. There was something in me that wanted to write, that needed to write. Along came the internet and this tool called blogging, and I took it up. I started a blog. Looking back on it, it’s exactly what you call prototyping, Bill. If I go back and read those early blogs, they’re not very good, but, at the time, the bar was low. I just wanted to get something out there. That led to several doors opening in my career that led to my podcasting. Podcasting is another prototype in my career. As I reflect on the lesson that I took away from all this, I don’t think I prototype enough. You encourage people in the book: Try new things. Learn. Experiment. Prototype. Your book left me wondering, “What am I missing because I don’t do this?”

Bill Burnett  16:51

Well, I would argue that you did a couple of things well. You were intuitively competently moving towards something that would work. Most of the successful entrepreneurs I know, for instance, don’t have an idea, and then quit their job and do it. Most successful entrepreneurs I know can’t not do their idea. It’s like, “Look. First of all, I can’t work for this corporation. I hate it, so I’m quitting. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. And then I’ve got this other idea. Every day I wake up, and I think about this idea, and I can’t not do it.” It’s not like it’s a compulsion. It’s also a recognition that they suck at being an employee. Those are the best entrepreneurs. Not people who have some starry-eyed dream because they’re all-in because they have to.

Now, you went to school and people told you something logical, but dysfunctional. “You can’t be a writer and you can’t be a philosopher. Math is a good subject, study that.” Maybe you were even good at math, so you said, “Okay, I’m good at this. I can do it.” But somewhere in your “can’t not” category was “I can’t not write. I have to write,” and then an opportunity came to do that. There were low stakes and a low threat, so you were able to try it, and then you got better and then you got better and then you got better. Then writing turned into podcasting. Look, that’s why we don’t believe in “Follow your passion.” Because the research says less than 20% of people have any singly identifiable passion. Most people say, “I don’t know,” or “I’ve got lots of things, I’m sure.” It’s not a good way to organize your life. But we do believe in living passionate; living into the things you’re curious about, living into the things that give you energy. That’s why we do the energy map.

Sean Murray  18:26

I like the concept of living into things that give us energy. I can relate to that. You make a very interesting observation. In the book, you say that if we pursue the activities that interest us and give us energy, doors will open. We’ll eventually find a way to add value to society. Can you talk about that?

Bill Burnett  18:49

Once you get invested in something and you explore it passionately or with a bias to action, which means motion, let’s get something done here, you start to discover things that you’re not only good at but the things that the world needs. That’s the sweet spot. Just because you want to do it doesn’t mean the world needs it, but if there’s some way you can connect that thing you like to do to something that the world needs, i.e. might pay you for or at least acknowledge and listen to you, then that’s great. Also, there are some things that you don’t want to get paid for. I’m an artist, I’m a painter. I have a studio four blocks from the house. I don’t want to paint what people want me to paint. I want to paint whatever the hell I want. Now, maybe somebody will buy it. I don’t know. That’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it because it has to get done. This painting has to get done. They’re weird. They’re strange. I’m not sure anyone’s going to like them. I will certainly try to sell them, but I’m not going to paint dogs playing poker on black velvet just because that sells. No way.

Sean Murray  19:47

I didn’t know that was popular.

Bill Burnett  19:49

Evidently. But I looked on the internet, and that seems to be. Pictures of dogs, pictures of cats, pictures of horses. I don’t know. Whatever.

Sean Murray  19:58

Yeah, there are always going to be things we do, no matter what we do, because we’re intrinsically motivated. We’re not motivated by any extrinsic reward like money or claim. It sounds like painting is that thing for you. I assume that, at some point, you probably got energy from painting, so you leaned into it. You mentioned that you don’t believe in following your passion, but you do believe in following your energy.

Bill Burnett  20:29

Therefore, I live passionately. I live a life of excited, energetic engagement. In a Western society, we live all a part of our head that talks all the time. We think we can solve every problem by just talking it into our prefrontal cortex, and somehow solve it. Well, that’s only a small way of knowing. It’s a way of logically knowing something. We have neurological evidence that the wisdom of emotions gives us information about good and bad decisions. Look at the work of Dan Goleman and some other people who’ve looked at this topic. There’s a thing called the amygdala, which is a part of the brain that doesn’t talk to the rest of the brain, but it talks to your gut. That’s where your emotional gut reaction comes from. There’s the work of Dan Gilbert on decision making, how we make good decisions, and how we draw on our unconscious thinking; not like the Freudian unconscious, but just thinking of we aren’t aware of because it doesn’t talk to our talking brain. So, you have to get good at listening to the other signals that give you information about what gives you energy, which might be coherent with your skills and talents. But you have to shut off the talky part because it’s so loud.

And so, we work in the class and develop what we call discernment. Discernment, we say, is making good decisions. Discerning is making a good decision with more than just one way of knowing. Just your prefrontal cortex and logical pro-con lists will get you so far, but it won’t listen to the other available information. You have kinesthetic intelligence; athletes talk about that all the time, being in the zone, in the flow, knowing exactly where their body needed to be at a moment in time and space. There’s also emotional intelligence. People who also have a spiritual or meditation tradition know that there are other forms of communication that they can access. So, you have to get quiet and develop a practice of these things.

Sean Murray  22:24

Could you provide an example? Maybe of a student who is applying these design principles to build their life and they use this technique of discernment and leaning into their energy.

Bill Burnett  22:36

One of the reasons we start with energy is because energy’s easy to observe. A student came to my office, and says, “I got two job offers. I don’t know what to do.” I said, “Okay, tell me about the first one.” “Teach for America. I’m going to go to rural Tennessee, and I’m going to work with kids. I’m going to help them learn to love literature the way I love literature and reading,” he says. “Fantastic! What’s the other job offer?” I respond. He slumps in his chair. “Well, it’s McKinsey. I did that thing where they help me learn how to do a case study interview, and I got the job. It’s great. I’m going to be in the Chicago office, and I’ll make a ton of money.”

And I go, “Well, can I tell you what I noticed?” He says, “Sure.” “So, what I noticed when you talked about McKinsey, you also slumped over in your chair, you have no energy, and your face looks a little sad. But you’re pretty sure that’s the right one, right? Because that’s what everybody tells you. And then, when you talked about Teach for America, you were sitting up straight and your eyes were bright and shiny, and you’re all excited talking about those kids and loving literature. I just have to tell you I don’t think your body wants to work in McKinsey. I’m not going to decide for you, but I have to say it.”

“You’re right. Is it okay if I say no?” I say, “Well, don’t worry about McKinsey. They’ve got kids lined up out the door who want that job. So, if you can’t bring your best self to that job, you know, do them a favor. Don’t take it.” “My friends tell me I’m crazy! My parents said I didn’t go to Stanford to become a teacher.” And so, I asked, “Well, what do you want to do? What’s the voice in your head telling you?” Every part of his body was telling him exactly what he wanted to do. The social and emotional intelligence was saying, “Yes, be a good teacher.” But the other part was doubting, “But what will people think?” I said, “Well, I don’t ever tell you what to do, but I’ll tell you what I notice. You have more energy here than there. I’ll tell you one other thing that I’ve noticed, just in general, about the pattern of my graduates. You will never be more idealistic than now when you’re 22. So, take those two pieces of information, add them to your decision matrix, and go pick something you want to do.”

Sean Murray  24:34

There are times in your life when those opportunities make a lot more sense to me. It gets harder to go do Teach for America after you’ve bought the house and have kids.

Bill Burnett  24:47

In my generation, it was the Peace Corps. I’ve got three friends who went to the Peace Corps. One of them went off to college, and the other went grad school or whatever jobs and things. They have the best stories. They have amazing relationships all over the world. They’ve been back in the Peace Corps for 30 years, or so, but that’s an experience that tends to shape your life forever. It changed who they were because what we do changes who we are. Every time I hear their stories, I wish I joined. It wasn’t even on my radar. I didn’t know that it was a possibility. That would have been cool.

Sean Murray  25:22

What you do shapes who you are. That’s an important theme that runs throughout your boo. You point out that we refer to ourselves as human beings, but it would be more appropriate or maybe more accurate to refer to ourselves as human doings. Can you explain that?

Bill Burnett  25:40

Well, it’s sort of almost like the East-West duality. In the West, we don’t ask each other, “How’s your emotional state?” We say, “What do you do for a living? What do you do?” In the East, they’re more into the inner life. What’s your inner life? How are you being? But we’ve reframed that as a cycle. You are being. You do stuff in the world and the being and doing, you become. Now, you’ve transformed yourself into a different thing that does the being, doing, becoming. Being, doing, becoming. So, we’re always in this circle. We’re always becoming the next version of ourselves. Often, there’s a small edit, but it’s the same thing, and we just do it again. But we’re developing mastery of the subjects that we work in, and we’re developing a broader understanding.

At my age, I’d say my memory is much less than it used to be. I used to have a photographic memory. But then I’ve learned that it’s not what you know. It’s how you put it all together that matters. If you take the time to reflect, if you take the time to think about what you’ve learned, then this being-doing-becoming, being-doing-becoming, being-doing-becoming cycle over the course of this interview or day or decade or life, you have the chance to become the person you want to be.

Sean Murray  27:00

In closing, I’d like to come back to happiness. You say, somewhere in the book, I’m looking at the quote here, “Happiness comes from designing a life that works for you.” Can you just reflect a little bit on that, in closing how we can connect this idea of designing and happiness?

Bill Burnett  27:16

When Martin Seligman and a bunch of his buddies all got together, they were studying abnormal people. He said we’re not being useful. We’re not helping people understand. Look at these happy people. What makes them happy? So, they started the psychology of happiness, and now he’s decided happiness isn’t the whole thing. It’s really about flourishing, and flourishing contains other things than just happiness –its achievement, relationships, and other things. If you understand his model, he calls it Perma, then you can say, “Okay, how do I build elements of each of these things? Because they’ve been shown by psychologists to create a sense of flourishing or a sense of happiness.” Once you kind of break down the formula you go, “Okay, well, I have control over my relationships to some extent. I have control over how I express myself in the world. I have achievements that I go for that I value.

By the way, money does not correlate with happiness. Certainly, if you don’t have enough, there’s a correlation to misery. But if you have enough money, past that, there is no correlation that money makes you happy. Everybody needs to know that, and everybody needs to stop the hedonic treadmill of chasing more and more and more and more and more because there’s just addiction. There’s no happiness there.

Dan Gilbert at Harvard would say, happiness is not about getting what you want, striving for something, and getting it. Happiness is wanting what you have. So, certainly, there’s an element of going for, striving, and trying to make accomplishments and things happen. But happiness is synthesized. It’s created by us accepting and wanting what we get. Now, I’m not saying you have to settle for bad things or anything like that. In our second book, Designing Your Work Life, if you have a toxic boss or toxic environment or experience sexual harassment or anything bad, just leave. You don’t have time for that. Leave when you can. But you can design a better job without quitting. There are four ways you can do that. You can design a better career path by really getting into what is it that gives you energy? What is it that gives you a connection to others?

Sean Murray  29:18

This has been a wonderful conversation, Bill. I appreciate you coming on The Good Life. How can people learn more about your work and get started in designing their life?

Bill Burnett  29:28

We have a website, it’s designingyour.life. We’ve got tons of videos up there. We just did a series of eight videos, Designing Your COVID Life. You can apply these principles to designing in a situation where the constraints are really different and pretty difficult for a lot of people. You can also find me on Twitter, at Dwell, and 400 to 500 book clubs on Facebook. Designing Your Life The Book is the Facebook page. Go to those places, and you can find out more.

Sean Murray  29:56

Right. Thanks for being on The Good Life, Bill.

Bill Burnett  29:59

Thanks for the time. I appreciate talking with you.

Outro  30:02

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