Prototype Your Way to a Better Life
Episode Stats
Summary
Dave Evans, a lecturer in Stanford s Design Program, teaches the popular Designing Your Life course, which, as the name implies, takes the principles of design thinking and applies them to crafting a happy and fulfilling life. In this episode, Dave explains how one of the central steps of Design Thinking, called prototyping, can help you make both big and small changes that move you closer to the life you want to lead.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Now, I used to wake up early, around 5.15, and do my workout right after getting out
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But I noticed I was tired all day, and I just felt kind of stiff and not very strong during
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So I decided to try waking up a few hours later, 7.15, and doing my workouts in the
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I found that setting up my schedule this way gave me greater energy both overall and during
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Well, my guest today says that this tinkering I did with my routine is an example of life
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prototyping, a process that can be used for anything and everything in order to improve
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His name is Dave Evans, and as a lecturer in Stanford's design program, he teaches the popular
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Designing Your Life course, which, as the name implies, takes the principles of design thinking
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and applies them to crafting a happy and fulfilling life.
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He's also the co-author, along with Bill Burnett, of Designing Your Life and Designing Your New
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Today on the show, Dave explains how one of the central steps of design thinking, called
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Prototyping, can help you make both big and small changes that move you closer to the
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He explains what prototyping is, how prototyping a life is different from prototyping a product,
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the two approaches involved with the former, and embracing the design thinking mindset of
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash prototype life.
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So you are a lecturer at Stanford's design program.
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For those who aren't familiar with design thinking, because this is what you teach, big
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picture, what is design thinking, and what is it that your graduates of your program, what
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The Stanford design program is the eldest interdisciplinary program at the university.
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It started in 1963, actually, been the lunatic fringe for a long time, integrating engineering,
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psychology, and art in a thing we call human-centered design.
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That's the formal term of what we teach at the design program, nowadays known as design thinking.
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And you can, in fact, get either a BS in engineering in design, or you can get an MS or MA in design
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from the Stanford design program, which is technically located inside the mechanical engineering
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So design thinking, or human-centered design, is one of the methodologies for innovation and
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problem-solving that we teach at the Stanford School of Engineering.
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And what do you do if you get a design degree from Stanford?
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Well, you do a whole bunch of different things.
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The key thing to understand here is there are, as I put it, two schools or two domains of
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And they're both totally legitimate, but they're quite different.
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You know, I shape things, I color things, I draw things.
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And, you know, those real designers would look at the stuff we do at Stanford and say,
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You know, you can get a master's in design at Stanford and still not be able to draw that
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You know, and a real designer, you know, an old school designer might say, no, no, no,
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That's why the name got moved over to design thinking.
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It's not design crafting or drawing or shaping.
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And it's a methodology that's been developed quite thoroughly over the last 50 plus years.
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And it really has been sort of the cardiopulmonary system of an awful lot of product development
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here in Silicon Valley that's changed the world.
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And that's sort of where design thinking got like super popular in the last 10, 15 years.
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So what you do with that design degree is you can go be a product designer.
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You know, a lot of people go into the product world.
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Design is now being used in educational design and social systems design and, you know, large
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So design thinking can actually apply almost anywhere there.
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You know, IBM is one of the largest design thinking certified institutions on the planet.
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So the idea is you find a problem and you apply this process.
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And in particular, before you actually, you do two things.
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You apply this interdisciplinary process first to find the right problem to solve, then to
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define exactly which part of it you're going to uniquely solve, and then to come up with
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So we talk about problem finding preceding problem solving.
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Half the time stuff doesn't work because you're working on the wrong thing.
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I mean, the steps of design are very simply five steps, empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping,
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We start with deeply understanding what's going on.
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And then we define, well, what that's happening here might I have something to offer to?
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You know, you don't presuppose you even can have a solution.
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And so then if there is something, and the elements of a definition include a user, an insight,
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What's the real problem that deserves to be addressed?
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And do I have any insight to contribute to that in a unique way?
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If I don't have all three of those things, I haven't defined anything yet.
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And then I start having a bunch of ideas, and the core thing is prototyping.
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The problems we solve are called wicked problems, not tame problems.
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We've got a tame, well-bounded, highly defined problem you can solve replicatively over and
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I mean, you need some equations and some charts.
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If you've got a messy human problem where you don't know what you're looking for until you
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find it, then you probably need to design your way forward.
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And the only way to do that is empirically with these hands-on prototypes where you try
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stuff over and over again until you find the thing that really works.
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Okay, so let's talk about how we can start applying design thinking to our own lives
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Because this is a course that takes several weeks to get through.
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I mean, you wrote an entire book and another book about it, about your work life.
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And you make the case that when you start off, you need to kind of have an idea of where
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I think you have that famous, there's a sign at the design program that says, you are here.
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Like, know where you're at right now and kind of come up with some metrics so you can know
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And then you recommend people, your students, to come up with a dashboard that there's some
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And then there's like four, I guess we'll call them analytics that you're checking on this
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What are those analytics and how do you figure out where you are right now with that stuff?
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Actually, the first thing we're saying you need to do is to accept that you are wherever
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You may not know where it is you are, but you got to accept that that is where you are.
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So the sign, there's a you are here sign, you know, that looks like one of those locators
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Great big four foot diameter, one that's hanging on the wall outside the lab where our grad students
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And on our books, if you take the dust jacket off on the hardcover book, you'll see a you
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are here symbol stamped into the cover just to make sure that the reader knows, no, no,
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no, you have, you, um, the way I put it is step zero of the design process, you know, empathy,
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You start by accepting you are wherever it is you are.
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Cause most people don't like, I really should be some pearl and shitting on yourself doesn't
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So you have to get over that and wherever it is, you are, that is where you are.
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And now let's go figure out where that is and start moving from there.
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So thing one is to accept that things simply are the way they are.
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It doesn't work in magical thinking and it doesn't work in the land of should, you know,
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We don't recommend you shit on yourself either.
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And so the dashboard and also a thing called the good time journal.
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So the dashboard is our reframe of the balance problem.
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Cause one of the shoulds that people get stuck in really quickly is the work-life balance
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And this is true of students, true of almost everybody.
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Oh, my work-life balance, I got to go fix that.
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Well, when your brain has the opportunity to define a complex problem by oversimplifying
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it and it's just two opposing forces, your brain will turn it into a teeter-totter, a
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My work-life balance, you know, is a zero-sum game.
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So the first point of our dashboard, the work-love-play-health dashboard, is that you aren't just two things.
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So when you need to simplify something to make it manageable, right?
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So we're trying to get an unhelpful metaphor, work-life trade-off, and make it a more helpful
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metaphor, which is the work-love-play-health metaphor, which is, again, a hyper-simplification
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But it's not bad, you know, and it fits on a page.
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And the first thing is recognize they're all four of them defined according to you.
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What does love mean to us in all of its various forms, you know, from intimacy to friendship?
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You know, what does play mean where I'm there for the joy of it, you know, and health, I
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mean, which is physical and social and spiritual.
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And so these are rich definitions that you can monkey with.
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And then recognize when you move one of the sliders up or down a little more, a little
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less of something, you don't have to move all the other ones too.
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There's not like only 100 points of your aliveness.
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And as soon as you take one away from work and put it on play, you know, you have to decrement
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So we do that four attribute dashboard just as a way of trying to look at a whole life.
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And then the other thing even preceding the dashboard, by the way, is what we call the
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And the good time journal is a way to just log what you're doing, the activities of your
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day, and then notice at the end of the day, where was I engaged or disengaged at what level,
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you know, and what level of energy is this giving or taking from me?
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And I mean, are you physically tired, but are you, you know, is your aliveness increased
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or is your aliveness depleted at the end of, you know, talking to Brett on a podcast?
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So that's where we help people and say, don't, don't change anything.
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Then you take the what it is and you observe it well.
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And then you redefine your self-assessment, you know, with a little more complex model than
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an oversimplifying dysfunctional model, you know, with those good time journal and dashboard
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And then, so you, you got this information, this big picture overview.
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You can start, maybe kind of start seeing not, maybe not granularly, but you start seeing
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the shape of, well, maybe there's a problem here.
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Now this is where you, where design thinking starts coming in.
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As you said earlier, part of it is using a thinking process to make sure you're solving
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How do we define problems using design thinking?
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So we're looking at our dashboard, got our work, love, health, play all there.
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We're like, okay, what's the, where do I see the problem?
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And first of all, there are two pretty different kinds of things going on in the work that
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We, and we will definitely say that our work is not a system.
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You know, it's not, here's a 17 step system and you start at step one and you finish at
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step 17 and then you will have an epiphany and your life is great and we're good to go.
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You know, it's not anywhere near that prescriptive.
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I mean, they're similar enough that we can use these tools, but by no means do I know what
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So first of all, we're not systematic, we're coherent, but we're a toolkit.
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It certainly isn't a system and you don't have to start at the beginning and end at the
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So that being said, first of all, am I trying to make a small incremental change in my life?
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You know, I mean, you know, designing how to build the well-lived and joyful life.
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Well, is that a minor adjustment or is that a wholesale renewal?
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So a bunch of people are at an inflection point in life.
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You know, I'm coming out of college or I'm really done with this first job or I'm, you
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know, I teach in the thing, a really cool program now.
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My primary teaching at Stanford is a program called the DCI, the Distinguished Career Institute.
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Most of the people in there are in their late 50s to late 60s, you know, on the way into
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what we used to call retirement or your encore phase, your third, third, something like
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And they take a year off, for which Stanford charges them a time, but that's Stanford.
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And they get to, you know, be in this cool community and think deeply about what am I
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And so this question, and so they're definitely doing life design, right?
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Now, that's the big redesign of life for a change.
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And there's the little adjustment along the way.
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So if I'm doing, let's start with a smaller adjustment along the way.
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Well, I just wrote an article we posted yesterday on LinkedIn on reframe and reenlist.
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So for people in the workplace who are looking for a better job, you know, 64% of Americans
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and 80% of the worldwide workforce are disengaged at work.
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Probably most of the people listening to this are having some struggle.
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So we said, look, you know, the best place to get a better job and the easiest place to
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These are tactical strategies, you know, which are reframe and reenlist, number one.
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And my article is focusing in on strategy number one, reframe and reenlist.
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Just literally just change the narrative of what you are doing, which can transform your
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You don't, you can't even get a new job description, but you could have a different point of view
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And a whole lot of people in a post hybrid work environment and as we're starting to come
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out of the pandemic, it may be the same job, but my point of view has changed.
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That's a, it's a specific bite-sized tool on the dashboard.
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I do that dashboard tool and I kind of go, well, I am experiencing a life feels a little
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But at one point, literally I noticed as a very small tool utilization that, you know,
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I grew up with, you get your work done first and then you can play.
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And I had that as a habit all my life, you know, and, and of course, when there's no such
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thing as the end of the day, you know, and you're getting emails from clients all over
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So I kept noticing that I wasn't playing at all until after dark.
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And my wife is bugging me because she goes, you know, you, you know, you're not pulling
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your end of the weight on taking care of the dogs.
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And, you know, so I said, oh, what if I started doing dog walks in the middle of the afternoon
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I frame that as, as play, you know, and I find somebody to make that fun with the dogs.
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So it's 20 minutes, 20 freaking minutes, you know, three times a week in the middle of
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I take the dogs out for a walk in the park across the street from my house and it's transformative.
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And you start with those by identifying where the pain point is or where the change point
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And then frankly, you scan through the book and grab the right tool on the large end.
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Then, you know, our, our centerpiece tool is the Odyssey plan.
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This is where I'm really coming up with a new, a potential overhaul of my life.
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So I do this Odyssey plan, which comes up with three completely different versions of
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the next five years of my life on a single piece of paper.
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And that what I get out of that Odyssey plan worksheet is not a decision to make.
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Prototyping isn't a big part of design thinking, but as you were talking, I think you even do this
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You see an issue, say at work, you do this dashboard stuff, this analysis, and you try
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to figure out like, what is it that I, that brings me joy at work?
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Then you can start, then once you have that idea, that information, you can start generating
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ideas on how you could, you know, keep your job, but do less of the stuff that you don't
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like and more of the stuff that really drives you.
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And then you can come up with a prototype and say, come to your boss, say, boss, I'd like
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And you might say, yes, and it, you, you, you run with it and maybe it works great.
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It's a, and so first of all, briefly, I'm prototyping, which is, which is a big deal for
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We don't mean what a lot of people mean, which by the way, is totally valid too.
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It's just different, which I consider a late stage engineering prototype.
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If your prototype's job is to prove that the thing you've developed really works right
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before you go visit it on the end user, then you're doing an engineering prototype.
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Very important thing to do, not what I'm doing in design.
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So the, the, the question, the prototype is addressing is the critical concern.
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So if the question your prototype is addressing is, Hey, does this work?
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Then you, what that means is you hope it does, which means you hope you're done.
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Well, when we're in design and iterating our way to a solution, we absolutely know for
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sure when we start that this isn't it because we're working on something we never saw before.
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So the question of a design prototype is what am I trying to learn?
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So the reason you have failure immunity when you do prototype design in a design thinking
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manner is the only purpose of that prototype is to learn something.
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It doesn't matter if it quote fails, meaning it's not going to become the product.
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It's not going to become the decision of your next life design.
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So in life design, I mean, you can think about how would I prototype a product?
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Like when I was the mouse product manager for Apple, you know, a million years ago, I
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had a box full of 130 mice under my desk, you know?
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And so I know what a prototype product looks like.
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I go talk to people who are already having the kind of life I'm having.
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The psychological term for that is surrogation.
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In fact, Dan Gilbert at Harvard has research that shows that surrogation, talking to other
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people is a superior form of discernment, insight, gathering than is research.
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You know, read all the Google reports versus go talk to a couple of people.
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And then the second thing is try stuff, get a ride along, get some experience.
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So before, by the way, you come up with a prototype idea, you don't go ask your boss.
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And you come back maybe later on like, hey, I've done this thing 10 times.
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Because most of the small changes people want to make, you don't need permission.
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We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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But on those big changes, that's when prototyping will come in particularly handy because you're,
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like you said, you think you might have a solution based on this information you have,
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So you prototype to figure out, well, is this a viable option?
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So let's say you're thinking, I want to start a completely new career.
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Because then you feel like, well, I, because on paper, it looks good.
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Like, well, it has all the things that I feel like engages me, but you really, you really
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So you said two ways you can do that to figure out is talk to people and then come up with,
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So I think to talk to people with their career, I think that the people I've heard about,
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you know, just interviews, they're not like job interviews.
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They're sort of informational interviews where you just talk, tell me, tell me about
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And by the way, interesting, we were about to go on TV for a live talk show in Canada
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And of course the show got behind and the assistant producer grabs me behind the camera
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and Bill and I are standing right there and he goes, oh, hey Dave, we're, we're behind.
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And I said, dude, you know, we're Stanford instructors.
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Neither of us, me especially are known as I've already proven here for short answers to
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I don't think you can get a 280 page book in a sentence.
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And so it wasn't one sentence, but because it's four, but it's only 10 words.
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So if your readers haven't got time to read the book, here it is, right?
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Just get a post-it note out and everything you need to know about 90% of what you need to
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know is get curious, talk to people, try stuff, tell your story.
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Four steps, get curious, talk to people, try stuff, tell your story.
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And the hint in that, by the way, is two out of four of the four steps simplified process
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And the talk to people is absolutely crucial because you got to talk to people to get to
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And the talk to people is what used to be called the informational interview, what we call
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It's critically important that it is not a job interview.
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It is not a transactional interview where you're not asking for money, a referral, the
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job, you know, what you're asking for is the story.
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You know, hey, Brett, are you hiring any more interviewers?
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I mean, nine times out of 10, when you're asking a transactional question, the person you're
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talking to doesn't even have the thing you want, like a job, much less if they did, are
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And if you do ask that question, the brain you're going to get from the person listening
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I want an open-minded, you know, innovative brain.
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Like, hey, Brett, turns out you and I have this incredible shared interest.
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Why don't we get together and talk about how interesting you are?
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I'm not sure I'd actually say it quite that sycophantically, but not far from.
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And that conversation people are willing to have.
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And literally, psychologically, we've learned that, you know, hearing other people's stories
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Your body will actually be, you know, because we're really social animals, you know, we really
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It's that my person is experiencing your person's experience through this story.
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And then you go off and try to have some experiences.
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And that's, by the way, prototyping is crucially important in all the way from tiny changes to
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And Bill and I are talking about the set the bar low and clear it method.
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We're kind of like, well, you know, life's hard.
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I mean, let's just take a small step and see what goes.
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You know, so give yourself a chance to succeed.
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It's just that on the big chain stuff, prototyping is particularly important to avoid the downside
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You know, I've had it with this corporate crap.
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I'm going to start the most amazing Tuscan restaurant you ever saw.
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You know, and we know a woman who did this, and off she goes, you know, and she canvases
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these areas, and she buys a decrepit deli, and she totally remodels this thing, and she
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has a deli cafe, and she opens it to great fanfare, and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and
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Turns out running a restaurant and going to Tuscany are not the same thing at all.
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You know, she has to get the same recipe over and over again because everybody loves the
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And most of the staff are, you know, entry-level high school kids, and they quit about every
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six minutes, so she's constantly interviewing people that don't want to work for her anyway.
00:24:15.600
Well, you could prototype that experience much less expensively.
00:24:19.340
So when you're making big changes, prototypes are crucially important to avoid the problem
00:24:24.580
that happens when you didn't know you'd made an assumption.
00:24:31.440
They allow you to sneak up on the future very inexpensively.
00:24:38.440
Well, here's a question that popped into my head while you're talking about these interviews,
00:24:41.920
these, we'll call them informational interviews, is what I call them.
00:24:45.420
How do you ask the questions so you get the full picture?
00:24:49.800
When I was in law school, or thinking about going to law school, I did some informational
00:24:54.980
And I had no clue what I was supposed to be asking.
00:24:58.360
And I feel like I ended up asking questions that were, it basically gave a positive spin
00:25:05.860
I didn't actually get what I think it was really like.
00:25:09.640
I didn't figure that out until I interned as an attorney.
00:25:12.260
It was actually in the office and hearing the water cooler chatter and interacting with.
00:25:16.460
And so how do you, how do you, how do you go into an information interview where you
00:25:22.180
get like the good and like you get the, the, the whole thing warts and all.
00:25:27.540
And again, I don't think it's necessarily, you're looking for the dirt.
00:25:30.900
I'm not looking for the, yeah, but you're looking.
00:25:32.720
If people pick up, you've sort of got that investigative reporter thing going on, you're
00:25:36.260
going to out them, then it's not going to work either.
00:25:37.860
No, but you're looking for like, you, okay, well, does this actually something I would
00:25:41.080
enjoy is, or is he missing something that I, he's not talking about something that I,
00:25:49.040
I don't know what you did that first time before the internship, but if what you were
00:25:53.500
asking about was what was on your mind, that's not that interesting.
00:26:05.080
That's, you know, let's say you're talking to me like, Hey Dave, you made the shift from
00:26:09.820
And, and, and I'm thinking, you know, is, so is, is curriculum planning, you know, and I'm
00:26:16.680
You know, you know, you're solving your problem.
00:26:21.600
What makes an informational interview work is you get me going on telling my story.
00:26:25.920
So the questions you would ask Dave, you know, I'm trying to understand the shift you made
00:26:32.440
from, you know, high tech product development and then management consulting into education.
00:26:37.480
And it really is kind of goes, well, gee, how, how did that happen?
00:26:40.900
And what, you know, and was that what you had in mind?
00:26:44.080
You know, if you had to do over, what would you do differently?
00:26:47.580
And what's the biggest surprise you've had while you're there?
00:26:49.960
What, what was least like what you thought it was going to be?
00:26:52.800
What have you learned since you've been doing this?
00:26:57.440
If you could change anything in front of you right now, now by the questions I'm asking
00:27:00.560
now, you can ask anybody these questions, but they're all about them.
00:27:03.600
And now if you do a really good job, you do all your homework up front.
00:27:12.900
I mean the, the in-person, particularly in a post-pandemic world.
00:27:15.880
Oh my God, you've got somebody live in person in front of you, physically in front of you.
00:27:21.060
Do not waste FaceTime having the person you're talking to give you information.
00:27:31.000
So you don't care enough to even do your homework.
00:27:33.600
So do your homework, which I was, by the way, anytime you read about people, you read
00:27:42.820
I want to get a good snapshot of what's going on in this guy's life, or I want to get a
00:27:46.100
good snapshot of what's happening at this company.
00:27:50.440
There are no snapshots because snapshots are stills.
00:27:56.960
You want a video clip of what's really going on.
00:27:59.780
Trust me, everybody in that organization is going to bed worrying about something.
00:28:06.340
If you had another $50,000 in your budget, what would you do with it?
00:28:09.660
So there's lots of ways you can get into what is happening for them.
00:28:14.120
And, you know, and they're interested in themselves.
00:28:17.000
Everybody's favorite thing is themselves and what they're doing.
00:28:18.840
So if you just go down that path, you're going to get them going.
00:28:22.780
You know, and then by the way, what makes it really work?
00:28:25.120
Here's the crucial thing to do before you even ask for one of these conversations.
00:28:32.380
See, step one is get curious, get curious, talk to people, try stuff, tell your story.
00:28:37.780
And if you go, oh, so this is how you get a job.
00:28:42.480
And then he'll offer me a job and you're faking it.
00:28:48.240
If you're not actually interested in talking to that person, there's nothing about them.
00:28:52.020
You really would love to hear about if you had the chance, then don't bother them.
00:28:57.140
Now, then you got to go curate some curiosity, but that's a different problem.
00:29:00.580
So that's prototyping by having a conversation.
00:29:03.180
But then there's also prototyping by having an experience.
00:29:06.860
And one example of this is we had a futurist on the show earlier this year, and he had this
00:29:15.100
And he was talking about people who were thinking about making a big move.
00:29:18.840
Like they were saying, I want to leave the city and move to the country, but I don't
00:29:27.140
We're in an Airbnb for a week or two in the country and see how you like it.
00:29:35.000
We did an experimental program with a big high tech company.
00:29:39.000
We did a bunch of workshops and I offered going back in and doing follow-ups.
00:29:43.860
So we did a small group follow-ups with these people.
00:29:45.540
And I'm talking to some people about six months after a one-day seminar, and they're all doing
00:29:52.140
prototypes and they're actually making progress in their corporation.
00:29:55.640
And one woman says, gosh, well, I've really been thinking about relocating to the Southwest,
00:30:11.100
She said, yeah, but that would just be a vacation.
00:30:14.680
And thankfully, the other people on the call, it was a Zoom call, about a dozen people.
00:30:18.260
They'll be able to go, no, no, no, that totally counts, Sarah.
00:30:24.680
I mean, go take a three-day weekend in Albuquerque, but don't go to the resort and spend all your
00:30:35.100
Figure out where in Albuquerque people live neighborhood-wise would be the kind of place
00:30:38.660
you might even want to live, get an Airbnb in that neighborhood, you know, think about
00:30:43.360
what lifestyle you might want to have as an Albuquerquean, and go move and become a full-time
00:30:49.900
resident of Albuquerque for three days, and take a bunch of notes, and then come home.
00:31:01.460
My wife and I developed that skill, by the way.
00:31:12.780
So there's absolutely ways you can prototype, but you got to think about it.
00:31:17.040
And even taking it back to, we've talked a lot about work, but again, you can do this
00:31:21.240
process of reframing and prototyping, even with small changes.
00:31:25.120
If you say you're looking at your dashboard and you're thinking, well, I'm not getting
00:31:31.300
Say you want to spend more time with your kids.
00:31:36.460
It doesn't have to be, like the reframe would be, well, it doesn't have to be, you either
00:31:42.500
You can reframe like, well, what can I do so I can do both at the same time?
00:31:47.040
And then you start coming up with some different ideas and then you prototype and see what works
00:31:53.000
So my, you know, Bill, my partner at Stanford, you know, was not getting much activity and,
00:32:00.060
And then in another project, he and his wife, who had lived in Menlo Park near Stanford and
00:32:03.880
raised their kids there for a long, long time, decided they wanted the urban experience.
00:32:06.560
So they start living in a rented condo while renting out their house.
00:32:13.900
They since, you know, moved full time, bought the condo they were renting.
00:32:17.620
But nonetheless, while he's experimenting with that, he's noticing he's under exercising.
00:32:22.580
So then he's now trying to commute on the train, not in his car.
00:32:29.720
And there's a little shuttle bus from Stanford that goes to the train station near the campus.
00:32:33.400
And he'd been jumping on the shuttle bus and going in.
00:32:37.260
I'll schedule calls on my cell phone and I'll walk from the train station to the campus,
00:32:50.180
He reallocated some minutes that were normally sitting at his desk on the phone to walking
00:33:00.900
So there are lots of ways you can get stuff darn near for free.
00:33:06.720
That's a skill that you just have to keep practicing and practicing.
00:33:09.660
And I think that one of the big points, takeaways that I got from the book is don't get stuck
00:33:14.560
Because you'll just keep on wanting to make that one thing work.
00:33:17.540
And then you suddenly, you get like the invisible gorilla problem, right?
00:33:21.320
Where you're just so focused on counting the basketballs, you miss the invisible gorilla.
00:33:27.540
You know, and it's a really good point you're making, Brett.
00:33:29.820
And I want to emphasize it because one of the problems with design thinking is it's too
00:33:37.120
I mean, I just said you can summarize our entire, you know, two books into 10 words.
00:33:42.740
And that's true, but it's easily underperceived.
00:33:47.420
So on this prototyping thing as a way to learn your way forward and to iterate until you come
00:33:55.060
Because it goes, you know, prototype, ideate, prototype, test.
00:34:03.600
Prototyping is the developmental iteration process of inventing the thing you're actually
00:34:08.500
And then when you've got what you're pretty sure it really is, then you test it.
00:34:22.260
You know, maybe we do it this way, do it that way.
00:34:23.840
And so when you're prototyping, you know, you have to iterate on multiple aspects of what
00:34:29.240
This is such a different way to think for most people that it is sneaky.
00:34:37.800
I mean, a lot of the growth of what the Life Design Lab at Stanford is doing these days is
00:34:46.140
We do some key programming, but it's helping other people do what they're already doing
00:34:51.060
So we participate in new student orientation a little bit differently.
00:34:54.220
We participate in this program over here and we help train people how to do what they're
00:34:57.880
doing a different way because it has more life design implication than they used to imagine.
00:35:03.580
And there was an organization on the campus, a big one, that does a very important thing
00:35:07.480
for a lot of students that is a natural partner of ours.
00:35:10.160
And so we put together a program and partnered with them for over a year.
00:35:13.700
And we're almost a year into helping them develop some new stuff.
00:35:18.140
And we had a team of people we were collaborating with.
00:35:20.520
And our people were sitting down together with their people once again on this mixed team.
00:35:24.820
And one of our people said, okay, so, you know, well, you know, so how about this prototype
00:35:28.880
for this, you know, this aspect of that program?
00:35:30.760
Well, let's go try this and see what we learned about the following question.
00:35:34.160
And one of the, you know, home organization team members who'd been working with these people
00:35:39.360
for a darn near a year said, well, okay, we could try that, but what if it doesn't work?
00:35:45.520
And then, you know, the designer said, well, of course, it's not going to work.
00:35:50.020
And the guy goes, well, then why the hell will we do it?
00:35:53.440
And she goes, because we're trying to learn about it.
00:35:58.160
And literally walk out of the meeting, we're slapping ourselves in the front going, oh,
00:36:01.120
my God, we've been saying prototyping with this guy for 10 months, and he still doesn't
00:36:11.720
A pilot is your first implementation of, you know, a particular program or an activity
00:36:18.880
You know, it's like your alpha test and your beta test.
00:36:21.340
But before you're piloting, you're truly prototyping.
00:36:27.200
Piloting is starting to actually practice what the thing might be.
00:36:29.980
So we had to actually differentiate a word just to get them to understand what we meant
00:36:35.760
Yeah, this is a good point because you have this chapter in the book about becoming immune
00:36:42.680
And I think what it all comes down to is that mindset shift where, okay, when you're prototyping
00:36:48.700
the prototype isn't you're hoping this thing works.
00:36:51.700
The prototype, the goal of prototyping is, well, what can I learn from this?
00:36:56.480
But I mean, I think people might say, okay, I understand that intellectually, but like,
00:37:01.780
Like whenever you, how would you say, you try a new job in your company, right?
00:37:08.200
You know, like this is a prototype and it doesn't work out.
00:37:10.660
You learn that it's like, well, it's not a, it still feels like failure.
00:37:13.720
Like it's hard not to, I mean, is that something just with time?
00:37:16.980
The part is, again, this is why we say set the bar low and clear it.
00:37:20.420
And a good prototype is cheap, fast, and teaches you something.
00:37:24.020
And so if people are learning their way forward and when the thing doesn't work, because it
00:37:29.140
was a learning experience, not a launched, you know, activity for performance, and that
00:37:37.040
Now, the reason you're failure immune as a designer, it's not because you didn't fail.
00:37:40.640
It's that you're immune to failure because failure's job was to be educational and the
00:37:47.320
failure didn't cost you hardly anything at all.
00:37:50.960
So what you're looking for is cheap stuff to learn.
00:37:54.560
And of course, gosh, what I'd like to learn more about, oh, that's interesting.
00:37:59.100
Now, how can you learn more about that empirically out there in the field, so to speak, in ways
00:38:04.820
that don't cost you much in time, exposure, you know, political capital, money, you know?
00:38:11.680
So if your prototypes are costly, they're not good prototypes.
00:38:18.200
And don't be too picky about where you learn something.
00:38:27.840
At the town hall in Seattle, Seattle is a town hall, 300 odd people.
00:38:32.720
And we're talking and I finished the talk, you know, and some guy up in the bleachers raises
00:38:37.780
his hands and kind of goes, hey, Dave, so there's prototyping things.
00:38:53.220
He raises his hand again and kind of like, you know, he goes, Dave.
00:39:08.640
And he kind of goes, Dave, on anything, all the time.
00:39:18.480
This is why we talk about the designer mindset.
00:39:21.520
I mean, it's not a religion, but we're talking about a way.
00:39:25.620
Well, it actually believes anthropologically that you're a growing entity and the world
00:39:34.820
This reminds me, have you heard of the OODA loop from John Boyd?
00:39:38.360
He was a military strategist and he came with this idea called the OODA loop, which stands
00:39:47.580
And he says, whoever can do the OODA loop the fastest and the battle wins.
00:39:58.420
And this process of prototyping is like, that's observing and orienting.
00:40:02.940
And then you make a decision, then you act, and then it's always going on.
00:40:07.260
Because, I mean, a lot of people are trying to get it right.
00:40:10.820
And they're inadvertently walking around with a presuppositionally engineering mindset.
00:40:21.260
And the answer is, no, that's crap most of the time.
00:40:23.760
I mean, there are some things that have right answers, but it's a really short list, frankly.
00:40:27.480
And so the OODA loop is an orientation to reality.
00:40:30.920
And if, you know, no strategy for battle survives the first contact with the enemy.
00:40:35.960
You know, it's a classic line in military school and a line that Bill represents all the
00:40:39.320
And by the way, I've done a lot of work with the military.
00:40:42.640
I've done trainings for both the U.S. Olympic Committee and with a group called Elite Meat,
00:40:48.120
who serves about to retire Navy SEALs, Green Berets, you know, Army Rangers.
00:40:54.600
So if you were one of the finest athletes in the world, and now you're not, and you are
00:40:59.360
one of the most proficient soldiers in the world, and now you're not, holy cow, what do
00:41:05.000
And so reframing, you know, the skills that they got to be the world's best at one particular
00:41:12.560
narrow thing, and then reframing that into another space is something we have a lot of
00:41:18.480
Well, Dave, this has been a great conversation.
00:41:20.040
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:41:22.220
Well, of course, the books are on Amazon, and there's now three of them really, too.
00:41:26.820
And as of right now, Designing Your New Work Life.
00:41:29.380
We put out Designing Your Work Life about a year and a half ago.
00:41:34.920
So Designing Your Life and Designing Your New Work Life.
00:41:45.380
And that'll take you to our website, which has all kinds of resources.
00:42:03.760
21 online modules taught in real time in an interactive setting with Dave and Bill.
00:42:09.040
You're getting the same real stuff as if you came to our all-day intensive nine-hour, one-day workshop.
00:42:16.400
By the way, it was originally the most expensive class on the side.
00:42:19.780
And now they're going to blow it out with volume.
00:42:24.580
So yeah, CreativeLive.com or DesigningYour.Life.
00:42:35.400
He's the co-author of the book, Designing Your Life, also Designing Your New Work Life,
00:42:39.380
both available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:42:41.820
You can find more information about his work at his website, DesigningYour.Life.
00:42:45.460
Also, check out our show notes at AOM.IS slash PrototypeLife.
00:42:51.320
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
00:43:01.320
Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well
00:43:04.820
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00:43:07.900
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