The Art of Manliness - Prototype Your Way to a Better Life

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.940 Now, I used to wake up early, around 5.15, and do my workout right after getting out

00:00:14.840 of bed.

00:00:15.380 But I noticed I was tired all day, and I just felt kind of stiff and not very strong during

00:00:19.420 my workouts.

00:00:20.160 So I decided to try waking up a few hours later, 7.15, and doing my workouts in the

00:00:24.940 late afternoon instead.

00:00:25.860 I found that setting up my schedule this way gave me greater energy both overall and during

00:00:29.980 my workouts.

00:00:30.960 Well, my guest today says that this tinkering I did with my routine is an example of life

00:00:34.760 prototyping, a process that can be used for anything and everything in order to improve

00:00:38.220 both your personal and professional life.

00:00:40.060 His name is Dave Evans, and as a lecturer in Stanford's design program, he teaches the popular

00:00:44.200 Designing Your Life course, which, as the name implies, takes the principles of design thinking

00:00:48.800 and applies them to crafting a happy and fulfilling life.

00:00:51.820 He's also the co-author, along with Bill Burnett, of Designing Your Life and Designing Your New

00:00:55.780 Work Life.

00:00:56.560 Today on the show, Dave explains how one of the central steps of design thinking, called

00:00:59.700 Prototyping, can help you make both big and small changes that move you closer to the

00:01:03.400 life you want to lead.

00:01:04.520 He explains what prototyping is, how prototyping a life is different from prototyping a product,

00:01:08.820 the two approaches involved with the former, and embracing the design thinking mindset of

00:01:12.540 being immune to failure.

00:01:14.000 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash prototype life.

00:01:17.620 All right, Dave Evans, welcome to the show.

00:01:30.300 Great to be here, Brett.

00:01:31.400 Thanks for having me.

00:01:32.420 So you are a lecturer at Stanford's design program.

00:01:36.760 For those who aren't familiar with design thinking, because this is what you teach, big

00:01:41.040 picture, what is design thinking, and what is it that your graduates of your program, what

00:01:46.060 do they go on to do?

00:01:47.640 Sure.

00:01:48.100 The Stanford design program is the eldest interdisciplinary program at the university.

00:01:53.300 It started in 1963, actually, been the lunatic fringe for a long time, integrating engineering,

00:01:58.820 psychology, and art in a thing we call human-centered design.

00:02:03.100 That's the formal term of what we teach at the design program, nowadays known as design thinking.

00:02:08.920 That's a new name for an older idea.

00:02:10.860 And you can, in fact, get either a BS in engineering in design, or you can get an MS or MA in design

00:02:17.680 from the Stanford design program, which is technically located inside the mechanical engineering

00:02:22.540 department of the School of Engineering.

00:02:25.060 So design thinking, or human-centered design, is one of the methodologies for innovation and

00:02:29.660 problem-solving that we teach at the Stanford School of Engineering.

00:02:32.720 So that's the elevator description.

00:02:34.220 And what do you do if you get a design degree from Stanford?

00:02:36.540 Well, you do a whole bunch of different things.

00:02:37.720 The key thing to understand here is there are, as I put it, two schools or two domains of

00:02:43.220 design in the world.

00:02:44.400 And they're both totally legitimate, but they're quite different.

00:02:46.920 There's what I call craft design.

00:02:49.020 So I'm a graphic designer.

00:02:50.220 I'm an industrial designer.

00:02:51.440 You know, I'm a car designer.

00:02:52.540 You know, I shape things, I color things, I draw things.

00:02:55.080 And that's the older design world by far.

00:02:59.020 And, you know, those real designers would look at the stuff we do at Stanford and say,

00:03:02.400 yeah, that's not design.

00:03:03.200 You know, you can get a master's in design at Stanford and still not be able to draw that

00:03:07.980 well.

00:03:08.820 You know, and a real designer, you know, an old school designer might say, no, no, no,

00:03:11.800 that's all wrong.

00:03:12.760 Because our design is not a craft, per se.

00:03:15.960 It's a methodology.

00:03:17.480 So we think a different kind of way.

00:03:19.060 That's why the name got moved over to design thinking.

00:03:21.600 It's not design crafting or drawing or shaping.

00:03:23.760 It's design thinking.

00:03:25.060 And we take an approach to problem solving.

00:03:28.000 And it's a methodology that's been developed quite thoroughly over the last 50 plus years.

00:03:32.180 And it really has been sort of the cardiopulmonary system of an awful lot of product development

00:03:37.380 here in Silicon Valley that's changed the world.

00:03:39.900 And that's sort of where design thinking got like super popular in the last 10, 15 years.

00:03:44.460 So what you do with that design degree is you can go be a product designer.

00:03:47.820 You can be a user experience designer.

00:03:50.940 You'd be product management.

00:03:52.380 You know, a lot of people go into the product world.

00:03:54.680 Increasingly, people even go into consulting.

00:03:56.260 Design is now being used in educational design and social systems design and, you know, large

00:04:02.200 social impact design.

00:04:03.360 So design thinking can actually apply almost anywhere there.

00:04:06.480 You know, IBM is one of the largest design thinking certified institutions on the planet.

00:04:10.200 They do all kinds of things.

00:04:11.620 So the idea is you find a problem and you apply this process.

00:04:15.560 It's multidisciplinary to solve that problem.

00:04:18.740 Exactly.

00:04:19.520 Gotcha.

00:04:20.020 And in particular, before you actually, you do two things.

00:04:22.960 You apply this interdisciplinary process first to find the right problem to solve, then to

00:04:30.660 define exactly which part of it you're going to uniquely solve, and then to come up with

00:04:35.420 the ideas for actually pulling that off.

00:04:37.060 So we talk about problem finding preceding problem solving.

00:04:41.000 Half the time stuff doesn't work because you're working on the wrong thing.

00:04:43.800 I mean, the steps of design are very simply five steps, empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping,

00:04:49.880 and test.

00:04:50.260 We start with deeply understanding what's going on.

00:04:53.100 The first question isn't, what do I do?

00:04:54.700 The first question is, what's happening?

00:04:56.780 Very different question.

00:04:57.840 And then we define, well, what that's happening here might I have something to offer to?

00:05:03.760 You know, you don't presuppose you even can have a solution.

00:05:06.240 That's being a little imperial.

00:05:08.240 And so then if there is something, and the elements of a definition include a user, an insight,

00:05:12.880 and a problem.

00:05:13.540 So who am I serving?

00:05:14.660 What's the real problem that deserves to be addressed?

00:05:17.300 And do I have any insight to contribute to that in a unique way?

00:05:20.960 If I don't have all three of those things, I haven't defined anything yet.

00:05:23.460 And then I start having a bunch of ideas, and the core thing is prototyping.

00:05:26.980 The problems we solve are called wicked problems, not tame problems.

00:05:30.620 We've got a tame, well-bounded, highly defined problem you can solve replicatively over and

00:05:36.300 over again.

00:05:36.940 That's probably an engineering problem.

00:05:38.620 I mean, you need some equations and some charts.

00:05:40.680 If you've got a messy human problem where you don't know what you're looking for until you

00:05:43.840 find it, then you probably need to design your way forward.

00:05:46.780 And the only way to do that is empirically with these hands-on prototypes where you try

00:05:51.820 stuff over and over again until you find the thing that really works.

00:05:55.660 Okay, so let's talk about how we can start applying design thinking to our own lives

00:05:59.420 in big picture.

00:06:00.160 Because this is a course that takes several weeks to get through.

00:06:03.520 I mean, you wrote an entire book and another book about it, about your work life.

00:06:07.080 So hopefully we can give people a big picture.

00:06:08.540 And you make the case that when you start off, you need to kind of have an idea of where

00:06:13.580 you are now.

00:06:14.480 I think you have that famous, there's a sign at the design program that says, you are here.

00:06:18.480 Like, know where you're at right now and kind of come up with some metrics so you can know

00:06:23.100 where you're going.

00:06:24.740 And then you recommend people, your students, to come up with a dashboard that there's some

00:06:29.580 criteria you're checking.

00:06:30.760 And then there's like four, I guess we'll call them analytics that you're checking on this

00:06:34.500 dashboard.

00:06:34.800 What are those analytics and how do you figure out where you are right now with that stuff?

00:06:39.420 Actually, the first thing we're saying you need to do is to accept that you are wherever

00:06:44.080 it is that you are.

00:06:45.880 You may not know where it is you are, but you got to accept that that is where you are.

00:06:49.140 So the sign, there's a you are here sign, you know, that looks like one of those locators

00:06:53.800 in an airport.

00:06:55.240 Great big four foot diameter, one that's hanging on the wall outside the lab where our grad students

00:07:00.660 hang out.

00:07:01.300 As a reminder, you have to start there.

00:07:03.240 And on our books, if you take the dust jacket off on the hardcover book, you'll see a you

00:07:09.260 are here symbol stamped into the cover just to make sure that the reader knows, no, no,

00:07:13.520 no, you have, you, um, the way I put it is step zero of the design process, you know, empathy,

00:07:20.100 definition, ideation, prototyping test.

00:07:22.280 Step zero of the sixth step is acceptance.

00:07:25.200 You start by accepting you are wherever it is you are. 0.99

00:07:28.640 Cause most people don't like, I really should be some pearl and shitting on yourself doesn't 0.99

00:07:32.800 help at all. 0.99

00:07:33.340 So you have to get over that and wherever it is, you are, that is where you are.

00:07:37.140 And now let's go figure out where that is and start moving from there.

00:07:39.480 So thing one is to accept that things simply are the way they are.

00:07:42.560 Design only works in reality.

00:07:44.340 It doesn't work in magical thinking and it doesn't work in the land of should, you know, 0.97

00:07:48.380 we won't shit on you. 0.99

00:07:49.660 We don't recommend you shit on yourself either. 1.00

00:07:51.080 So thing one is acceptance. 0.99

00:07:52.680 And then thing two is where am I?

00:07:55.200 And so the dashboard and also a thing called the good time journal.

00:07:58.120 So the dashboard is our reframe of the balance problem.

00:08:01.680 Cause one of the shoulds that people get stuck in really quickly is the work-life balance

00:08:06.820 problem.

00:08:07.360 And this is true of students, true of almost everybody.

00:08:08.920 Oh, my work-life balance, I got to go fix that.

00:08:11.440 Well, when your brain has the opportunity to define a complex problem by oversimplifying

00:08:16.440 it and it's just two opposing forces, your brain will turn it into a teeter-totter, a

00:08:21.080 zero-sum game.

00:08:22.380 So work goes up, life goes down.

00:08:24.340 Life goes up, work goes down.

00:08:25.460 My work-life balance, you know, is a zero-sum game.

00:08:27.920 And that's not true of most things.

00:08:29.540 That's an oversimplification.

00:08:30.760 And that binary thinking is really dangerous. 0.54

00:08:32.920 It's dysfunctional, we would call it.

00:08:34.260 So the first point of our dashboard, the work-love-play-health dashboard, is that you aren't just two things.

00:08:43.020 So when you need to simplify something to make it manageable, right?

00:08:46.760 As Einstein said, all metaphors are wrong.

00:08:49.060 Some metaphors are helpful.

00:08:50.800 So we're trying to get an unhelpful metaphor, work-life trade-off, and make it a more helpful

00:08:54.860 metaphor, which is the work-love-play-health metaphor, which is, again, a hyper-simplification

00:09:00.700 of the complexity of the human adventure.

00:09:02.180 But it's not bad, you know, and it fits on a page.

00:09:04.880 So look at those things.

00:09:06.300 And the first thing is recognize they're all four of them defined according to you.

00:09:09.860 What does work mean to you?

00:09:10.800 It's not just about money.

00:09:11.580 What does love mean to us in all of its various forms, you know, from intimacy to friendship?

00:09:16.180 You know, what does play mean where I'm there for the joy of it, you know, and health, I

00:09:20.580 mean, which is physical and social and spiritual.

00:09:22.460 And so these are rich definitions that you can monkey with.

00:09:25.360 So it's a very user-defined reality.

00:09:27.440 We just give you a container to get better in.

00:09:29.940 And then recognize when you move one of the sliders up or down a little more, a little

00:09:33.640 less of something, you don't have to move all the other ones too.

00:09:36.420 They're not in lockstep.

00:09:37.320 There's not like only 100 points of your aliveness.

00:09:40.120 And as soon as you take one away from work and put it on play, you know, you have to decrement

00:09:44.940 something.

00:09:45.520 It doesn't work like that.

00:09:46.640 So we do that four attribute dashboard just as a way of trying to look at a whole life.

00:09:53.420 I'm not just designing my job.

00:09:55.520 So we've got to get more than work going on.

00:09:57.360 So that's why the dashboard is there.

00:09:59.100 And then the other thing even preceding the dashboard, by the way, is what we call the

00:10:02.800 good time journal.

00:10:03.900 And the good time journal is a way to just log what you're doing, the activities of your

00:10:09.020 day, and then notice at the end of the day, where was I engaged or disengaged at what level,

00:10:14.720 you know, and what level of energy is this giving or taking from me?

00:10:18.760 And I mean, are you physically tired, but are you, you know, is your aliveness increased

00:10:23.080 or is your aliveness depleted at the end of, you know, talking to Brett on a podcast?

00:10:28.080 And by the way, I love doing this stuff.

00:10:29.700 So that's where we help people and say, don't, don't change anything.

00:10:32.600 Just track yourself.

00:10:33.940 Just be empathetic and watch yourself.

00:10:36.360 So you start with accepting it is what it is.

00:10:39.020 Then you take the what it is and you observe it well.

00:10:41.520 And then you redefine your self-assessment, you know, with a little more complex model than

00:10:46.520 an oversimplifying dysfunctional model, you know, with those good time journal and dashboard

00:10:51.660 tools.

00:10:52.100 And now you're in a good place to start.

00:10:54.240 Okay.

00:10:54.700 And then, so you, you got this information, this big picture overview.

00:10:58.420 Yeah.

00:10:58.880 You can start, maybe kind of start seeing not, maybe not granularly, but you start seeing

00:11:04.760 the shape of, well, maybe there's a problem here.

00:11:06.600 You start seeing problems.

00:11:08.200 Now this is where you, where design thinking starts coming in.

00:11:11.280 As you said earlier, part of it is using a thinking process to make sure you're solving

00:11:15.280 the right problem.

00:11:16.620 Right.

00:11:17.060 So let's apply design thinking.

00:11:18.500 How do we define problems using design thinking?

00:11:20.540 So we're looking at our dashboard, got our work, love, health, play all there.

00:11:25.640 We're like, okay, what's the, where do I see the problem?

00:11:28.480 How do I figure out my problems?

00:11:30.080 Right.

00:11:30.360 Okay.

00:11:30.920 And first of all, there are two pretty different kinds of things going on in the work that

00:11:35.020 we do.

00:11:35.360 We, and we will definitely say that our work is not a system.

00:11:40.460 You know, it's not, here's a 17 step system and you start at step one and you finish at

00:11:44.960 step 17 and then you will have an epiphany and your life is great and we're good to go.

00:11:49.060 You know, it's not anywhere near that prescriptive.

00:11:52.260 We don't think people are that homogenous.

00:11:54.300 I mean, they're similar enough that we can use these tools, but by no means do I know what

00:11:58.160 you need to be doing.

00:11:58.880 So first of all, we're not systematic, we're coherent, but we're a toolkit.

00:12:04.000 You know, it's barely a methodology.

00:12:05.640 It certainly isn't a system and you don't have to start at the beginning and end at the

00:12:09.240 end.

00:12:09.400 You can start in the middle.

00:12:10.000 So that being said, first of all, am I trying to make a small incremental change in my life?

00:12:15.880 You know, I mean, you know, designing how to build the well-lived and joyful life.

00:12:19.620 Well, is that a minor adjustment or is that a wholesale renewal?

00:12:23.280 So a bunch of people are at an inflection point in life.

00:12:26.580 You know, I'm coming out of college or I'm really done with this first job or I'm, you

00:12:31.420 know, I teach in the thing, a really cool program now.

00:12:34.460 My primary teaching at Stanford is a program called the DCI, the Distinguished Career Institute.

00:12:39.640 Sounds very snazzy.

00:12:41.120 It's the gap year for grownups.

00:12:43.480 Mostly, I mean, the range is 45 to 85.

00:12:46.420 Most of the people in there are in their late 50s to late 60s, you know, on the way into

00:12:52.000 what we used to call retirement or your encore phase, your third, third, something like

00:12:56.080 that.

00:12:56.320 And they take a year off, for which Stanford charges them a time, but that's Stanford.

00:13:01.280 And they get to, you know, be in this cool community and think deeply about what am I

00:13:04.440 going to do the rest of my life?

00:13:06.120 And so this question, and so they're definitely doing life design, right?

00:13:09.800 Now, that's the big redesign of life for a change.

00:13:13.660 And there's the little adjustment along the way.

00:13:16.180 So if I'm doing, let's start with a smaller adjustment along the way.

00:13:19.840 Well, I just wrote an article we posted yesterday on LinkedIn on reframe and reenlist.

00:13:24.180 So for people in the workplace who are looking for a better job, you know, 64% of Americans

00:13:29.520 and 80% of the worldwide workforce are disengaged at work.

00:13:33.240 It's not working for them.

00:13:34.600 Probably most of the people listening to this are having some struggle.

00:13:37.380 Well, that's kind of heartbreaking.

00:13:38.780 That's too many souls to crush.

00:13:39.800 So we said, look, you know, the best place to get a better job and the easiest place to

00:13:44.480 get a better job is from yourself.

00:13:46.520 And we have four strategies for doing that.

00:13:48.460 These are tactical strategies, you know, which are reframe and reenlist, number one.

00:13:52.280 Number two, remodel.

00:13:53.280 Number three, relocate.

00:13:55.260 And number four, reinvent.

00:13:57.240 And my article is focusing in on strategy number one, reframe and reenlist.

00:14:01.620 Just literally just change the narrative of what you are doing, which can transform your

00:14:08.220 experience of what it is you're doing.

00:14:09.260 Maybe you don't want a new job.

00:14:10.540 You don't, you can't even get a new job description, but you could have a different point of view

00:14:14.580 about what it is that you are doing.

00:14:16.320 And a whole lot of people in a post hybrid work environment and as we're starting to come

00:14:20.780 out of the pandemic, it may be the same job, but my point of view has changed.

00:14:25.660 So it's time to reframe and reenlist.

00:14:27.620 So that reframe is write a different story.

00:14:29.580 That's a, it's a specific bite-sized tool on the dashboard.

00:14:33.440 I do that dashboard tool and I kind of go, well, I am experiencing a life feels a little

00:14:36.720 flat, feels a little boring.

00:14:38.280 Well, okay, maybe I need more play.

00:14:40.300 But at one point, literally I noticed as a very small tool utilization that, you know,

00:14:45.460 I grew up with, you get your work done first and then you can play.

00:14:47.880 And I had that as a habit all my life, you know, and, and of course, when there's no such

00:14:51.300 thing as the end of the day, you know, and you're getting emails from clients all over

00:14:54.260 the world, 24 by seven.

00:14:55.760 I mean, the work kind of never ends.

00:14:57.300 So I kept noticing that I wasn't playing at all until after dark.

00:15:03.060 Cause I just worked straight through the day.

00:15:04.480 I kind of got, I can't do this anymore.

00:15:06.440 And my wife is bugging me because she goes, you know, you, you know, you're not pulling 1.00

00:15:09.860 your end of the weight on taking care of the dogs.

00:15:13.160 We have two dogs.

00:15:13.680 And, you know, so I said, oh, what if I started doing dog walks in the middle of the afternoon

00:15:19.440 when it's sunny?

00:15:20.720 And I don't think of that as a chore.

00:15:22.500 I frame that as, as play, you know, and I find somebody to make that fun with the dogs.

00:15:27.220 I've come up with some games.

00:15:28.160 So it's 20 minutes, 20 freaking minutes, you know, three times a week in the middle of

00:15:32.180 the day. 0.70

00:15:32.420 Not after dark.

00:15:33.260 I take the dogs out for a walk in the park across the street from my house and it's transformative.

00:15:37.720 You know, so that, those are small changes.

00:15:39.240 And you start with those by identifying where the pain point is or where the change point

00:15:44.180 wants to be.

00:15:45.060 And then frankly, you scan through the book and grab the right tool on the large end.

00:15:48.800 And I'll just see this up.

00:15:49.780 I don't want to go too long.

00:15:50.440 It's one question.

00:15:51.380 Then, you know, our, our centerpiece tool is the Odyssey plan.

00:15:54.920 This is where I'm really coming up with a new, a potential overhaul of my life.

00:16:00.940 And that's a different starting point.

00:16:02.760 So I do this Odyssey plan, which comes up with three completely different versions of

00:16:05.860 the next five years of my life on a single piece of paper.

00:16:08.340 And that what I get out of that Odyssey plan worksheet is not a decision to make.

00:16:14.000 I get a shopping list of prototyping.

00:16:17.700 Prototyping isn't a big part of design thinking, but as you were talking, I think you even do this

00:16:21.820 with those small changes as well, right?

00:16:23.760 You see an issue, say at work, you do this dashboard stuff, this analysis, and you try

00:16:28.220 to figure out like, what is it that I, that brings me joy at work?

00:16:30.980 And what is it that de-energizes me?

00:16:33.420 Then you can start, then once you have that idea, that information, you can start generating

00:16:38.420 ideas on how you could, you know, keep your job, but do less of the stuff that you don't

00:16:45.460 like and more of the stuff that really drives you.

00:16:47.520 And then you can come up with a prototype and say, come to your boss, say, boss, I'd like

00:16:51.160 to try this out.

00:16:52.060 Can we give it a shot?

00:16:52.860 And you might say, yes, and it, you, you, you run with it and maybe it works great.

00:16:57.920 If it doesn't, okay, you tried.

00:17:00.680 Yeah.

00:17:01.120 It's a, and so first of all, briefly, I'm prototyping, which is, which is a big deal for

00:17:06.180 us in the design thinking world.

00:17:07.800 And by prototype, we mean a specific thing.

00:17:10.500 We don't mean what a lot of people mean, which by the way, is totally valid too.

00:17:14.060 It's just different, which I consider a late stage engineering prototype.

00:17:17.360 If your prototype's job is to prove that the thing you've developed really works right

00:17:22.440 before you go visit it on the end user, then you're doing an engineering prototype.

00:17:28.520 Very important thing to do, not what I'm doing in design.

00:17:31.320 So the, the, the question, the prototype is addressing is the critical concern.

00:17:36.100 So if the question your prototype is addressing is, Hey, does this work?

00:17:40.000 Then you, what that means is you hope it does, which means you hope you're done.

00:17:44.120 You hope this is it.

00:17:46.360 Well, when we're in design and iterating our way to a solution, we absolutely know for

00:17:51.320 sure when we start that this isn't it because we're working on something we never saw before.

00:17:55.960 So the question of a design prototype is what am I trying to learn?

00:18:00.260 What do I want to know more about?

00:18:02.780 So the reason you have failure immunity when you do prototype design in a design thinking

00:18:08.460 manner is the only purpose of that prototype is to learn something.

00:18:11.300 It doesn't matter if it quote fails, meaning it's not going to become the product.

00:18:14.160 It's not going to become the decision of your next life design.

00:18:16.840 That's not the issue.

00:18:17.680 It's just, did I learn something?

00:18:18.980 So in life design, I mean, you can think about how would I prototype a product?

00:18:22.360 Like when I was the mouse product manager for Apple, you know, a million years ago, I

00:18:26.000 had a box full of 130 mice under my desk, you know?

00:18:29.040 And so I know what a prototype product looks like.

00:18:31.520 Well, what's a prototype life look like?

00:18:33.320 Well, it looks like two things.

00:18:34.700 It's a conversation or an experience.

00:18:36.880 I go talk to people who are already having the kind of life I'm having.

00:18:40.800 The psychological term for that is surrogation.

00:18:43.000 In fact, Dan Gilbert at Harvard has research that shows that surrogation, talking to other

00:18:48.740 people is a superior form of discernment, insight, gathering than is research.

00:18:53.580 You know, read all the Google reports versus go talk to a couple of people.

00:18:57.020 Talking to a couple of people is a lot better.

00:18:58.780 So we believe go, go talk to people.

00:19:01.080 And then the second thing is try stuff, get a ride along, get some experience.

00:19:04.420 So before, by the way, you come up with a prototype idea, you don't go ask your boss.

00:19:08.440 You just go do it.

00:19:09.840 You just go start trying stuff.

00:19:11.300 And you come back maybe later on like, hey, I've done this thing 10 times.

00:19:14.220 It worked pretty well.

00:19:14.860 What do you think?

00:19:15.900 Because most of the small changes people want to make, you don't need permission.

00:19:20.120 Just go for it.

00:19:21.560 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:19:26.320 And now back to the show.

00:19:28.120 Okay, gotcha.

00:19:29.140 But on those big changes, that's when prototyping will come in particularly handy because you're,

00:19:34.160 like you said, you think you might have a solution based on this information you have,

00:19:39.000 but you probably don't.

00:19:40.540 So you prototype to figure out, well, is this a viable option?

00:19:43.820 So let's say you're thinking, I want to start a completely new career.

00:19:47.680 Right.

00:19:48.040 Because then you feel like, well, I, because on paper, it looks good.

00:19:51.540 Like, well, it has all the things that I feel like engages me, but you really, you really

00:19:56.580 don't know until you actually do something.

00:19:59.540 So you said two ways you can do that to figure out is talk to people and then come up with,

00:20:04.440 try it.

00:20:05.100 So I think to talk to people with their career, I think that the people I've heard about,

00:20:09.080 you know, just interviews, they're not like job interviews.

00:20:11.520 They're sort of informational interviews where you just talk, tell me, tell me about

00:20:14.940 your job.

00:20:15.380 Tell me what you do.

00:20:16.340 That's one, that's one type of prototyping.

00:20:19.080 It's a huge one.

00:20:19.920 And by the way, interesting, we were about to go on TV for a live talk show in Canada

00:20:23.760 a couple of years ago.

00:20:24.500 And of course the show got behind and the assistant producer grabs me behind the camera

00:20:28.540 and Bill and I are standing right there and he goes, oh, hey Dave, we're, we're behind.

00:20:32.240 We need you to have the book in a sentence.

00:20:33.860 Okay.

00:20:34.820 And I said, dude, you know, we're Stanford instructors.

00:20:38.400 Neither of us, me especially are known as I've already proven here for short answers to

00:20:42.620 complex questions.

00:20:43.420 I don't think you can get a 280 page book in a sentence.

00:20:46.040 And he goes, well, then you're off the air.

00:20:47.620 And I said, give me a minute.

00:20:49.440 And so it wasn't one sentence, but because it's four, but it's only 10 words.

00:20:53.060 So if your readers haven't got time to read the book, here it is, right?

00:20:56.200 Just get a post-it note out and everything you need to know about 90% of what you need to

00:20:59.820 know is get curious, talk to people, try stuff, tell your story.

00:21:06.460 Four steps, get curious, talk to people, try stuff, tell your story.

00:21:10.080 And the hint in that, by the way, is two out of four of the four steps simplified process

00:21:14.680 are prototyping.

00:21:16.240 Talk to people and try stuff are prototyping.

00:21:18.480 And the talk to people is absolutely crucial because you got to talk to people to get to

00:21:22.720 try stuff.

00:21:23.620 And the talk to people is what used to be called the informational interview, what we call

00:21:27.420 the life design prototype conversation.

00:21:29.700 And you're absolutely right.

00:21:31.300 It's critically important that it is not a job interview.

00:21:35.120 It is not a transactional interview where you're not asking for money, a referral, the

00:21:41.180 job, you know, what you're asking for is the story.

00:21:44.560 It's all about the story.

00:21:46.120 You know, hey, Brett, are you hiring any more interviewers?

00:21:47.900 No.

00:21:48.420 I mean, nine times out of 10, when you're asking a transactional question, the person you're

00:21:52.940 talking to doesn't even have the thing you want, like a job, much less if they did, are

00:21:58.100 they going to give it to you?

00:21:58.960 And if you do ask that question, the brain you're going to get from the person listening

00:22:03.060 to you is a judging brain.

00:22:04.640 Hmm.

00:22:05.140 If I had a job, would I do it to this guy?

00:22:07.960 That's a judging brain.

00:22:09.140 I don't want that brain.

00:22:09.940 I want a collaborative brain.

00:22:11.000 I want an open-minded, you know, innovative brain.

00:22:13.260 Like, hey, Brett, turns out you and I have this incredible shared interest.

00:22:18.500 You think you're really interesting.

00:22:20.320 I think you're really interesting.

00:22:22.260 We agree on that.

00:22:23.580 Why don't we get together and talk about how interesting you are?

00:22:25.660 Would that work for you?

00:22:26.600 I'm not sure I'd actually say it quite that sycophantically, but not far from.

00:22:31.180 And that conversation people are willing to have.

00:22:33.940 So that's the conversation you get.

00:22:35.800 And literally, psychologically, we've learned that, you know, hearing other people's stories

00:22:39.700 is an experience.

00:22:41.600 Your body will actually be, you know, because we're really social animals, you know, we really

00:22:44.800 do connect to each other.

00:22:46.320 And I can learn a lot from you.

00:22:48.720 It's not the information.

00:22:49.880 It's that my person is experiencing your person's experience through this story.

00:22:54.840 That's what's really going on.

00:22:56.000 We call it harmonic resonance.

00:22:57.360 You're looking for where the resonance lies.

00:22:59.400 And then you go off and try to have some experiences.

00:23:01.480 But you start with storytelling.

00:23:02.940 And that's, by the way, prototyping is crucially important in all the way from tiny changes to

00:23:07.620 huge ones.

00:23:08.680 And Bill and I are talking about the set the bar low and clear it method.

00:23:11.800 We're kind of like, well, you know, life's hard.

00:23:14.020 I mean, let's just take a small step and see what goes.

00:23:16.080 You know, so give yourself a chance to succeed.

00:23:19.780 So prototyping is always important.

00:23:22.100 It's just that on the big chain stuff, prototyping is particularly important to avoid the downside

00:23:28.960 of not having prototyped. 0.97

00:23:31.020 You know, I've had it with this corporate crap. 0.97

00:23:32.780 I want to start a restaurant. 0.98

00:23:34.860 I love Tuscany.

00:23:35.980 I'm going to start the most amazing Tuscan restaurant you ever saw.

00:23:38.140 You know, and we know a woman who did this, and off she goes, you know, and she canvases

00:23:42.520 these areas, and she buys a decrepit deli, and she totally remodels this thing, and she 1.00

00:23:47.580 has a deli cafe, and she opens it to great fanfare, and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and

00:23:52.420 she's successful, except she hates it. 0.98

00:23:56.000 Turns out running a restaurant and going to Tuscany are not the same thing at all.

00:24:00.740 You know, she has to get the same recipe over and over again because everybody loves the 1.00

00:24:03.780 food.

00:24:04.240 And most of the staff are, you know, entry-level high school kids, and they quit about every

00:24:09.080 six minutes, so she's constantly interviewing people that don't want to work for her anyway.

00:24:13.640 And like, who ordered this?

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.

00:24:27.220 Your prototypes help you learn things.

00:24:29.220 They help you uncover hidden assumptions.

00:24:31.440 They allow you to sneak up on the future very inexpensively.

00:24:36.380 And by the way, they're fun.

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?

00:24:48.360 Because I've done this in the past.

00:24:49.800 When I was in law school, or thinking about going to law school, I did some informational

00:24:53.100 interviews with attorneys.

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

00:25:03.500 on the profession of being an attorney.

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.

00:25:27.340 Right.

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,

00:25:44.520 that's important for me to know.

00:25:45.740 Well, that's interesting.

00:25:47.400 I think you just got after something.

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.

00:25:59.640 What's interesting is what's on my mind.

00:26:02.420 And so like, will I like this?

00:26:05.080 That's, you know, let's say you're talking to me like, Hey Dave, you made the shift from

00:26:08.260 high tech into education.

00:26:09.820 And, and, and I'm thinking, you know, is, so is, is curriculum planning, you know, and I'm

00:26:13.520 worried about doing curriculum planning.

00:26:14.580 So how hard is curriculum planning?

00:26:16.680 You know, you know, you're solving your problem.

00:26:18.640 I don't want to solve your problem.

00:26:20.020 I'm not interested in 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.

00:26:36.120 That's a pretty different domain.

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?

00:26:55.240 You know, what's the fun part for you now?

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.

00:27:08.040 One of my counsels is never waste FaceTime.

00:27:11.840 I don't mean the Apple app.

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.

00:27:26.780 You can read it on a website.

00:27:28.520 That means you're asking me to read to you.

00:27:30.180 Yeah.

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

00:27:38.420 about what they're doing.

00:27:39.300 You can imagine what they're sweating with.

00:27:41.200 Keep in mind, people talk about you.

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.

00:27:48.520 That's a, that's an inaccurate phrase.

00:27:50.440 There are no snapshots because snapshots are stills.

00:27:54.000 Life isn't a still life is very active.

00:27:56.160 It's a movie.

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.

00:28:04.040 What keeps you up at night?

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.

00:28:30.580 You got to actually be interested.

00:28:32.380 See, step one is get curious, get curious, talk to people, try stuff, tell your story.

00:28:35.500 If you're not actually curious.

00:28:37.780 And if you go, oh, so this is how you get a job.

00:28:40.340 Okay.

00:28:40.500 So I need to go act like I'm interested.

00:28:42.480 And then he'll offer me a job and you're faking it.

00:28:45.420 Trust me, people will figure that out.

00:28:46.960 It's don't waste your time.

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.

00:29:00.520 Okay.

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

00:29:12.960 kind of idea of prototyping as well.

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

00:29:23.480 know if that's a good fit for me.

00:29:24.780 And he would say, okay, here's what you do.

00:29:27.140 We're in an Airbnb for a week or two in the country and see how you like it.

00:29:31.660 And that's the way to prototype.

00:29:34.220 Absolutely.

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,

00:30:02.340 Albuquerque in particular.

00:30:03.740 And I don't know, I can't pull it off.

00:30:06.500 It's too big a move.

00:30:07.400 And I just don't know what to do.

00:30:09.760 And they said, well, why don't you go there?

00:30:11.100 She said, yeah, but that would just be a vacation.

00:30:12.820 And that doesn't count.

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.

00:30:20.560 You should totally do that.

00:30:21.580 And I said, absolutely.

00:30:22.920 And here's the thing.

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

00:30:30.440 time in the art museums.

00:30:33.280 Do some homework in advance.

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.

00:30:54.620 Don't go have a vacation, for God's sake.

00:30:56.460 No, no, no, don't go do that.

00:30:57.700 Go be a short-term, full-time resident.

00:31:01.460 My wife and I developed that skill, by the way.

00:31:03.220 It was fabulous.

00:31:03.920 We didn't take trips anymore.

00:31:06.320 We just moved.

00:31:07.680 We moved about seven times a year.

00:31:10.380 And it's a mindset thing.

00:31:11.680 And it's a huge prototype.

00:31:12.780 So there's absolutely ways you can prototype, but you got to think about it.

00:31:16.500 Gotcha.

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

00:31:28.800 enough for my love, so with my family.

00:31:31.300 Say you want to spend more time with your kids.

00:31:32.600 Right.

00:31:32.800 But I also need to exercise.

00:31:34.740 Well, and it's not an either or.

00:31:36.460 It doesn't have to be, like the reframe would be, well, it doesn't have to be, you either

00:31:39.900 spend time with your kids or you exercise.

00:31:42.020 Right.

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

00:31:51.120 and what doesn't work.

00:31:52.560 Totally.

00:31:53.000 So my, you know, Bill, my partner at Stanford, you know, was not getting much activity and,

00:31:57.600 you know, he got into the 10,000 step thing.

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.

00:32:10.340 They're not going to sell yet.

00:32:11.500 Up in San Francisco.

00:32:12.740 By the way, that was years ago.

00:32:13.900 They since, you know, moved full time, bought the condo they were renting.

00:32:16.960 Off they go.

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.

00:32:27.600 And he goes, oh, he had been.

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.

00:32:35.960 And he goes, I know what I'll do.

00:32:37.260 I'll schedule calls on my cell phone and I'll walk from the train station to the campus,

00:32:43.160 about a mile and a half, two miles each way.

00:32:45.280 And he didn't change his day.

00:32:47.580 He didn't change his calendar necessarily.

00:32:50.180 He reallocated some minutes that were normally sitting at his desk on the phone to walking

00:32:54.420 down the street on the phone.

00:32:55.500 And it was absolutely transformative.

00:32:57.400 And so nothing else had to move.

00:32:58.920 His exercise just went up a little bit.

00:33:00.900 So there are lots of ways you can get stuff darn near for free.

00:33:04.860 Right.

00:33:04.940 But it just requires that reframing.

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

00:33:13.660 on your first answer.

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? 0.72

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

00:33:35.980 simple.

00:33:37.120 I mean, I just said you can summarize our entire, you know, two books into 10 words.

00:33:41.160 Get curious.

00:33:41.640 Talk to people.

00:33:42.000 Try stuff.

00:33:42.360 Tell your story.

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

00:33:53.120 up with actually what is a solution.

00:33:55.060 Because it goes, you know, prototype, ideate, prototype, test.

00:33:59.660 Oh, I thought prototyping was testing.

00:34:02.620 No, no, no.

00:34:03.600 Prototyping is the developmental iteration process of inventing the thing you're actually

00:34:07.560 going to do.

00:34:08.500 And then when you've got what you're pretty sure it really is, then you test it.

00:34:15.160 Does it really work well enough to keep?

00:34:17.940 That's a completely different question.

00:34:19.480 That's, well, how might this work at all?

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

00:34:28.280 you're working on.

00:34:29.240 This is such a different way to think for most people that it is sneaky.

00:34:33.940 So I won't use exact names.

00:34:35.780 If there was, you know, an organization.

00:34:37.800 I mean, a lot of the growth of what the Life Design Lab at Stanford is doing these days is

00:34:41.560 not teaching more and more courses.

00:34:44.020 We have a core set of three courses.

00:34:46.140 We do some key programming, but it's helping other people do what they're already doing

00:34:50.060 a little differently.

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. 0.96

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.

00:35:56.560 We're not done yet.

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

00:36:05.500 get it.

00:36:06.140 So we started changing our language.

00:36:07.740 We now talk about prototypes versus pilots.

00:36:11.720 A pilot is your first implementation of, you know, a particular program or an activity

00:36:16.540 that you really think might actually work.

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.

00:36:24.020 Prototyping is just to learn your way forward.

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

00:36:34.680 by prototype.

00:36:35.760 Yeah, this is a good point because you have this chapter in the book about becoming immune

00:36:41.480 to failure.

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?

00:36:55.540 Exactly.

00:36:56.140 Yeah.

00:36:56.480 But I mean, I think people might say, okay, I understand that intellectually, but like,

00:37:00.800 how do you do that?

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.

00:37:20.260 Okay.

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

00:37:34.440 failure is costly.

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.

00:37:57.440 How does that work?

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.

00:38:14.980 Gotcha.

00:38:15.320 So set the bar low.

00:38:16.600 Set the bar low.

00:38:18.200 And don't be too picky about where you learn something.

00:38:22.380 And again, imagine this process never ends.

00:38:24.360 It's continually going on, right?

00:38:26.100 Yeah.

00:38:26.460 So even when you think you have an answer.

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.

00:38:43.520 So you could do that with like anything, huh?

00:38:49.020 And I go, yeah.

00:38:50.280 And he goes, wow.

00:38:51.260 I go, yeah, good, cool.

00:38:53.220 He raises his hand again and kind of like, you know, he goes, Dave.

00:38:56.420 Hey, you could do this.

00:38:59.060 You could do this all the time, right?

00:39:01.640 And I go, yeah, that's right.

00:39:04.500 We're good.

00:39:05.060 He goes, yeah, great.

00:39:05.640 Thanks.

00:39:06.120 You know, come on.

00:39:06.820 Raises his hand again and go, dude, what?

00:39:08.640 And he kind of goes, Dave, on anything, all the time.

00:39:13.380 This is a really big deal, isn't it?

00:39:15.040 And I go, no, you got it.

00:39:17.140 Yeah, it's a really big deal.

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.

00:39:24.400 It's a way of being in the world.

00:39:25.620 Well, it actually believes anthropologically that you're a growing entity and the world

00:39:31.220 is an interesting place.

00:39:32.380 And let's go try it out.

00:39:33.780 This, you know what this reminds me of?

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

00:39:43.000 for observe, orient, decide, act.

00:39:46.240 Yes.

00:39:46.720 Right.

00:39:46.980 Yeah.

00:39:47.580 And he says, whoever can do the OODA loop the fastest and the battle wins.

00:39:51.980 But he also kind of saw it.

00:39:54.140 This is a meta-learning model, right?

00:39:56.800 This is how we all learn.

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.

00:40:07.080 Yeah.

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.

00:40:14.580 Like, there is a right answer.

00:40:15.840 There is a perfect, there is a best me.

00:40:19.420 There is a best way to do this. 0.98

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. 0.94

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

00:40:39.240 time.

00:40:39.320 And by the way, I've done a lot of work with the military.

00:40:41.400 I've done a lot of work.

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

00:41:04.580 you do now?

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

00:41:16.360 experience with.

00:41:16.980 And it works great.

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.

00:41:24.960 So it's Designing Your Life.

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.

00:41:31.640 We just updated it.

00:41:32.820 It's on pre-sale right now.

00:41:33.920 So skip the old book.

00:41:34.920 So Designing Your Life and Designing Your New Work Life.

00:41:37.740 The website is really simple.

00:41:39.580 It's the first book's title with a dot in it.

00:41:41.340 So Designing Your Dot Life, all small letters.

00:41:45.380 And that'll take you to our website, which has all kinds of resources.

00:41:48.360 And then lastly, gee, can I take the class?

00:41:50.300 We hear, can I take the class all the time?

00:41:52.040 And now the answer is, finally, yeah, you can.

00:41:54.500 You go to CreativeLive, CreativeLive.com.

00:41:57.540 So CreativeLive, no punctuation, dot com.

00:42:00.640 And enter Designing Your Life.

00:42:02.600 And bada bing, bada boom. 1.00

00:42:03.420 There you go.

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.

00:42:13.780 And the last I looked, it was on sale for $29.

00:42:16.400 By the way, it was originally the most expensive class on the side.

00:42:18.980 It was $300 or $400.

00:42:19.780 And now they're going to blow it out with volume.

00:42:23.060 So it's a good deal.

00:42:24.580 So yeah, CreativeLive.com or DesigningYour.Life.

00:42:28.140 And we're good to go.

00:42:29.400 Fantastic.

00:42:29.820 Well, Dave Evans, thanks for your time.

00:42:30.900 It's been a pleasure.

00:42:32.100 Britt, what a blast. 1.00

00:42:33.160 Thanks, man.

00:42:34.200 My guest today was Dave Evans.

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.

00:42:48.840 We can find links to resources.

00:42:50.080 We can delve deeper into this topic.

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 as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you'd think

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00:43:32.700 Until next time, it's Brett McKay.

00:43:34.060 Remind you to only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - December 15, 2021

Prototype Your Way to a Better Life

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