Designing Your Life | Dave Evans | Talks at Google

the folks welcome to talks at Google um today we have Dave Evans here who is going to be talking about designing your life how to build a well lived and joyful life this is a book that he co-wrote with Bill Burnett's and it is based on a course that he is teaching now that is that uses Design Thinking to help you address the challenges and goals in your life so please welcome Dave Evans okay so welcome to design your life so we're gonna spend about an hour together you know and let me tell you where we're gonna go so bill Burnett is the guy that's on a plane going to Korea right now he has to run off and talk to Samsung so he would love to be here but this is my friend bill you know and I'm and I'm Dave you know old Silicon Valley guy I've been around older than any of you by like a way longshot you know so I was at Apple in the early I was the world's first Mouse product manager in 1979 as old enough I should have a job then and then co-founded Electronic Arts then did management consulting for about 25 years in high tech mostly enterprise software you know and then started doing this teaching thing which apparently is now my fourth career all that after completely failing miserably trying to become an advanced energy technologies 35 years before there was such a thing which was not in the brochure so that's kind of my background and we run the life design lab at Stanford the life design lab at Stanford which we started in 2007 and has now kind of grown all out of proportion to what we thought it might be so since we're design guys you know we don't do all lecture that's we're problem-based learning people or pedagogy is always interactive we don't give tests we give projects so we will be doing a little bit of work to it and so if everybody either has or sitting close to a pen you will be needing to use a panel that piece of paper that you're holding your lap but it's really a mini workshop a very mini workshop in just an hour I'll try to even leave some time for Q&A and so it's kind of like a little taste testing at Costco you know it's it's we're not going to rush you through it we're just going to give you a little of it I should get a sense of what is back so what's the mission of the life design lab what are we in business for well the elevator pitch we carefully crafted it says that the life design labs job is to apply the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life hat and after the university and if you double-click the colored where'd you get a white paper and that's an accurate statement to which most people go I don't really get that what does that mean so even though it's accurate aswer familial to say something like well we're the guys that teach the class to help you figure out what do I want to be when I grow up and we actually don't even like that phrase it's just the common phrase we don't think there is such a thing as growing up what do I want to be next as I continue growing up it's kind of made the way we would put that so that's who we are then most people say oh wow now I get it can I take the class I mean literally we've been doing this for some time now and virtually everybody says can I take the class I mean you all showed up you know and Maria thought maybe this would be a pretty decent turnout today and we've got 15 SRO you know so how many of you think your life's lucky interesting to you that was not a trick question ya mean I said um so most people you know at Stanford I'm really get to cheat by having one of the most popular electives on campus because you know I give people two units in you you get two units and figuring you out that's a very a very popular topic as you most people think you is really interesting so that's what we actually do but what's the problem what's the problem in addressing this question why why is it become a big deal why do people need to take the class what's the point of it doesn't everybody has a life we should know how to do this thing well one of the big problems is what we call dysfunctional beliefs of which there are many floating around and the cultural Medan narrative in which we find ourselves the story about how the world works and and what's the way it is and we'll give you some examples so Maryland narrative number one since someone college campuses a lot you may remember this kind of stuff you're talking to one another and he says oh hey do you like so what are you majoring in oh you know creative writing the next question is you all know what do you do that you may you know other than be unemployed the up and that turns out to be a bogus point of view I mean there are career related majors and many of you have had them probably except 75% of all college graduates are working outside their field of major endeavor within four years of graduation now my guess there are certain demographics that would say that number is different here how many of you are doing something for a living at Google you studied in college probably a whole bunch of you how but how many or not ah see more than you think and and not all those people went to hack reactor after wouldn't got to see us just later so the point is that's not a good starting place that's that's a dysfunctional belief that your major determines your future you want to guess how many undergraduate majors we offer at Stanford or Cal or Columbia the number is about the same most big places like a hundred sixty 68 a mere 68 there are 7 billion people in the world we do more than 68 different things and there are many more than 68 job titles at Google right so the question what are you going to do with that as opposed to thinking there's some correlation one-to-one correlation between your major and your outcome is really completely bugger another one our favorite one what's your passion okay who's either said this to somebody or heard it in the last week keep your hand up if you enjoyed it yeah I think so so this is like the popular question this is the most common definitive starting question on navigating your life in the modern culture by our observations and it turns out according to the research from Bill Damon and the Center for adolescence which studies people up to the age of right 27 that true story and not because they're broken that about 20 23 percent of people in their 20s actually have a clear enough sense of a purposeful direction that they can actually use to guide their lives you know so that's maybe one in eight one in seven and in our anecdotal evidence which is now thousands of strong still anecdotal but as thousands and thousands of people overwhelmingly our students in our clients and we've actually done some work at Google and other places have multiple passions and can't pick or don't know what so if you start with what's your passion is the right place to begin this whole life navigation discussion and you know eight or nine out of ten people don't even have an answer to that that's a really bogus way know about it it's a lousy question we mostly think passion is an outcome of a well lived life not the starting place if you've got one and it's definitive and it's clear and you can do it and you're trained and the world wants to let you and they will pay you for it that's a bunch of ifs then go for it but if not you're not screwed so this question makes you feel screwed when you do not deserve to be screwed number three number three you should know by now you know how many of you would say you know when you're in your 20s you somehow got it into your head whether you know where from in my case it was aunt Helen at Thanksgiving when I was 12 told me this maybe you heard it from aunt Helen or maybe you just got it somewhere in the fluoridated water that there is a point in time when if you don't yet know where the City of Oz is that you're pursuing and you are not yet well along the yellow brick road to get there you're late you should know by now right how many you felt there was an aged past which if you didn't have your act together you're behind what age was it 16 Oak it's a tough neighborhood okay yeah so 30 so you really hope in the workshop works you've got fight I got 20 minutes you know in 2010 when we piloted the very first course at Stanford the first version of that we talked to juniors and seniors it happened to be the Spring Quarter we did our need finding in the fall we did our prototyping in the winter we did our first actual run of the course to a limited number of students in the spring and it went to one of the administrators and said this is so stupid no one is going to take this in the spring they are to get it all figured out and it goes no no no no you're gonna plenty of students in this rain and trust me every spring the seniors are really attentive they're like huh okay can you tell me by for you no I mean kiss I don't you know this life thing you know is really pretty compelling so that's that's nuts in fact we've known for almost a century developmental psychology is known for almost a century the age which people really start becoming their natural selves who can say yeah I think this is the me that I want to be investing in at this point is between 30 and 35 33 we known that for a long time um now life is not a problem to be solved you know you're not a Big Data equation you're not an algorithm despite arguments to the contrary and the reframe of that is life is a creative adventure to be engaged therefore let us build our way forward by designing our life and to design our life in fact the secret sauce and this is design thinking okay so what is design thinking and why does it apply to our lives okay I'm so glad you asked that question so Design Thinking is a way of thinking there's lots of ways to thank and what you want it's they're just toolkits David Kelly the founder of IDEO and the reigning chairman of the design group would say you know it's just that one of the things in your tool belt you want lots of ways of thinking in on your belt so you can use it for the right problem so you know if you're doing engineering you do engineering thinking you solve your way for when you have enough information and you know what you're going for and you can in fact solve it that's technically called a tame problem by the way the tame and wicked problems and tame problems are well bounded understandable they may be hard like cold fusion is a tame problem it's a really really hard tame problem we haven't figured out yet but once you figure it out it will work on Tuesday just as well as it did on Monday and if we rebuild the book on Bricklin bridge somewhere else it will stand up right you know when you guys build reusable code it actually runs the second time it is ago I just don't feel like it today though on occasion that does do that the UM there's apparently something we didn't think about so that's engineering thinking which is fat any engineers in the room honey engineers are getting the room behavior great um and now we have business thinking and business people optimize their way for they're pretty quantitative to most of the better business schools nowadays are quantitative you know the electro an ROI is and regression analyses and all kinds of things and they will tell you that they are solving a problem but in business you never finished truly getting it right your brand is never strong enough your market share is never big enough your customer loyalty and the light is never deep enough you know your clarity is never you precise enough you're never done with that stuff but you can optimize you know and certainly have a place like Google you can quantify anything you know so we will find ways to do that but you're never done it's a way of thinking and research thinking we do lots of research at Stanford is a very different top-down analytical approach to things thin slicing like crazy the real prize is the question at the end nobody can answer and that's an analytical way for it the real researchers look at what we do in design to go wait a minute you guys start with the analysis and then you make the hypothesis of course that will always work you're cheating we go dude you figured it out yeah exactly if you guys start with a hypothesis doesn't improve yourself wrong that's a drag that's really not that interesting oh so in design we build our way forward we build our way forward because we're helping solve wicked problems it's actually a technical term developed in the 70s 70s by some University of California at Berkeley urban planners inventing a city is kind of a wicked problem wicked problems are the ones where the success criteria are ambiguous and change in time you won't actually know if you solve the problem until you do once it's solved you can't reuse the solution ever again because the world change that from under you you know in a bunch of other attributes kind of like life so wicked problems are usually inherently human problems and in human problems you can't know the answer so what you're trying to come up with is a way to intersect the future that hasn't occurred yet interacting with these other people we're working with on whatever it is we're doing whether it's a piece of software or what I'm going to do with my life and I have to somehow find a way to get there and the only way to get there is to build your way forward you can't analyze your way for because you don't have enough information another terminology that might help here particularly would be navigation versus wayfinding and navigation which is what your GPS does I know exactly where I am I know exactly where I'm going I know all the data in between and I can give you the solution I am now navigating and you know we would like to navigate everything because it's more efficient right it's faster but when you don't know exactly where you are and you only generally have the direction where you're going and you sure as heck don't know everything in between protecting when that thing you're going to is called the future you know you haven't got full control over those other 7 billion people it mess with it then you're way fine and wayfinding is a step at a time in this iterative process and more shall be revealed but I can be better at wayfinding I can get good at that so we want to help you develop a conscious competency in life and vocational wayfinding or getting better at becoming the next version of you as you continue growing up so that's what we're doing and what is design thinking well it's a process and a mindset shall I talk faster oh by the way I kind of good you guys can keep upright we okay cuz that I like going to Google because I don't have to slow down as a rule that insurance companies they go could just slow down but nothing personal insurance people you're great I mean we just speak a different language so the five steps are empathy define id8 prototype it doesn't we empathize we deeply understand the situation this is the deep dive the user ethnography the need finding what's really going on here it's all about understanding the user this is radically not market research more creases showed you like this okay that's I already know what I have in mind I want to get your reaction to it I'm jumping to the end you know how about you know you got a presentation coming up anytime soon let me I can I just sitting back and watch I'm observing I have no bias whatsoever it's beginner's mind it's childhood curiosity you know the nobody no users as you know user don't know what they want you know apocryphally said about Henry Ford there's no evidence he said this but it sounds just like something he should have you know if I'd asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses you know not a cart nobody thought up a car you know so that's what empathy is about and then we go to define we problem find before we problem solve coming out of what what the heck is really going on having discovered that open-mindedly not biased Lee with the answer already in mind we're not proof texting my answer we're actually just learning what's going on so it's very humble process a lot of work now I know what I'm working on I can actually define the question I'm actually answering or the problem I'm solving then let's have a whole bunch of ideas I will in fact make a better choice and have a better idea if I have many you know brainstorming all that stuff which is not by the way just waste post-it notes take a picture and then throw it away that is not brainstorming it often looks like it but how to have ideas and then narrow those ideas down to the ones that were are worth some investment and let's go prototype them let's try it let's actually do it in the real world not to prove that it's right but to learn things about that I'll go into that in more detail and then test and iterate so this iteration process here is where designers spend a lot of time so a big front end and then after that iteration oh there's that thing we totally didn't realize we made shouldn't come back here and start over again so it flares and collapses and flares and focuses a number of times in life design we make very explicit something designers have always believed don't always necessarily mention which is before you do any of this you have to do acceptance you cannot solve a problem you are not willing to have you know we're just any less of a killer you know you know what if I wanted to jump into medicine I mean you know because I mean that's like a really long training time okay well you know I don't like it that medical training is long thanks for sharing that's a lovely thought it is okay get over so in acceptance I can't solve the problem of am I willing to spend a decade of my life training in my 40s a woman at a seminar we did in Greenwich a couple of days ago 53 years old really weighing whether or not to go to back to med school and do that whole new thing all over again you know well you have to start with that's the way they do it we don't have the weekend medical degree in this country so once you get over that problem now I can actually solve the problem you really have which is what would it be like to spend ten years doing that at the age of fifty screen so that's acceptance you know that will allow you to be free in where you're really are cos trust me if it all comes out cool it goes through a place that looks just like this the thing we really lean into because again that's a process that ends with an outcome called a very often a product or user interface or an experience of some kind but when you're designing a life it's really about approaching it the way a designer would and we truly think like a designer and the mindsets we focus on that are these five starts with curiosity you know what would a designer do again design meaning this innovation methodology there's an approach that you can facilitate yourself to a more broad set of ideas with a more likely outcome of an innovation result that's what we mean by Design Thinking or human centered design at Stanford many of you might think design is craft you know it's graphic design it's you know it's industrial design and those fields are still very vibrant very important I want my car to look cool but that's different than what we just we're the process guys how many people actually like done 2d thinking bootcamp there's much to do thinking all over Google who's been trained in or heard about design thinking human centered design just here okay great so this is news so curiosity is the starting place you know it's like whoa what's going on to this like Wow what's going out of that we leaned into everything's interesting if you just knew more about it then we want to radically collaborate we're going to go talk to everybody involved we know that we don't know and particularly talk to the people you wouldn't normally have talked to because you're going to get a point of view that's not your own then you might be reframing and re describing that thing in a different kind of way you know you're you know if you're 28 you're if you're if you just turned 30 you're not late you're just finally smart enough to have a better answer yeah that's a reframe mindfulness a process it is a process it takes steps it is discovery oriented and you can either get ahead of nor behind yourself so you want to keep in mind exactly what isn't I'm doing it not be more or less demanding of the current moment than I deserve to be and the most important one is biased toward action you know don't plant don't think do don't plan prototype I know don't mean be willy-nilly or mindless but we really are saying you can't analyze your way to a solution in a wicked problem you can only build your way so you got to find ways to engage and do stuff particularly with other people as soon as you possibly can so messed up that's way more lecture that's 20 minute I did 20 minutes of lecture that's like twice as long as we normally think people can stand so it's time to do something we're going to do something in this hour just one little mini exercise and use that piece of paper in front of you demonstrate kind of what I'm talking about we're gonna start with you're here be aware of a certain degree of mindfulness a process and give you a chance to take some action so oh yeah we have a slider we can get you Jen there's even a way yeah we're good so that's what it looks they'll come up on the screen let's try that it looks like and find you a way to get how did they actually download that it's very easy to draw yourself so you got a think it looks like this okay and all we're going to do is map your level of energy on your various engagements so this is actually doing the empathy step right now first thing to do is just write down a list of the primary things you find yourself doing in any average week if you've got some things that are monthly only throw those in to actually give the example I'm going to give you is actually bill bill were here he'd be saying this part so bill writes down you know a bunch of stuff he does he's the director of the design program he Co leads this life design lab with me still does a little consulting I was like that's all the stuff he does and you just make a list and then you go to the graph and you actually try to put a graph on you put a bar on there for each item and just roughly say and when I'm done doing this do I gain energy do I come out of the scene feeling kind of you know energized or deplete it this is a plus or a minus and isn't higher is it low so a bill takes that list and he makes bars out of them it looks like that so you know good art class budgeting office hours faculty meetings a bunch of different stuff some are high summer lows some go both ways actually faculty meeting depends on who's talking you know um a little bit you know are they talking about the copier is overheating again or talking about you know the brave new world of autonomous cars we you know which we do a lot so depends on who's talking so that's what it might look like so now just take a minute and do those two things yourself give you a couple of minutes I'll give you a certified ideation music and write down the stuff you do and then get it onto that graph you try have at least seven or eight if not ten things on there was just four that won't tell you much okay so where we go from here is when there are 373 people in the room we have to do that because it gets really crazy so we've got this laid out now what well what do you notice about your energy fence and now that you've done this just go now well you know we've done the epithet Assange what's going on here we're actually moving into the define step you know what's our point of view about what might be happening here so I'm bill the first thing you notice is you know Bill actually was an undergrad he would have majored in art if he could have yeah if he had the gumption but he majored in product design the closest thing you could but he's also still longed to be a true artist he did some art working now finally said I'm going to get back to that so about two years ago we started taking a figure drawing class they takes figure drawing classes I think it's Monday nights far away his favorite thing to do all week long so it's totally positive energy in fact it even attains a flow state who's heard a flow before the yeah okay so you're you're in the zone this is where you look up and suddenly whoa you know they're there the model has put our clothes back on and left the room and he's all by himself where everybody go we just started you know because three hours went by so he loves that that's really a cool thing then he looked at this and he noticed the thing about you know faculty meeting going either way and he has you know some authority over how the faculty meetings are run so gee maybe we could organize the agendas in such a way so that we make sure there are some interesting topic so we don't have those Wix rows all the gritty crummy boring stuff you know just give ourselves a break get the small business out of the way upfront and then do the interesting conversations we maybe could shift the shape of that a little bit I can influence my world so that might be interesting and well what's going on there the rest of the stuff kind of makes sense you know I like working out I like teaching you know and then what you master is coaching now that's it that's problematic because you know if I'm built my favorite thing is talking to my students you know and I have 150 undergrads and we get a 30 or 40 grad students you know that I'm advising and that's like my favorite thing to do is coach these guys and I notice I hate it that's so weird what's going on you know which then brings up what can you do about it so now that I've made these observations what possible changes could I make well I could adjust the agenda here you know and I can just be sure I keep going about dude not of ever set up another meeting that conflicted Monday night because I get this whole downstream wonderfulness effect if I miss one Monday night I just hate it so that's sacrosanct for now on and the master's coaching what's going on well I don't not enjoy the conversation I know what's going on in the wrong place he was actually doing the Masters coaching over where the students will have their their shops and it's too noisy and touka is kind of a fun high-energy place but it's not a conversational place so he just relocated he just moved it over to the patio and another part of the campus you know it was a completely different field completely different ethos the same amount of times same students same conversation but the setting made it really work and the whole thing just flipped boying just like that now the reason we're doing this exercise is you know when we talk about designing your life it feels like well do I really want to become you know a parachutist now I mean I want to jump out of a plane instead of you know write code that seems like a really big deal the books not about melodrama you may not be wanting to redesign your life but can you live the designed life and so you can make small moves as well as big and the same theories apply so this is one thing we can all do and say okay what do I notice here are there any changes I could make within my current world without you know getting a new degree or getting a whole new job you know to just adjust that the energy flows will actually work more for me than against me and it comes in a whole variety of ways now I at some risk I will mention I was talking with a Google employee where we did some we did some pilots and she had done this exercise and had a bunch of negative stuff it was really regular in a week all week long and she didn't know what to do and she shared it with a colleague gosh what do you think I should do and the colleague says just stop doing them you know these functions that you do and she said I don't think I can do that she goes are you sure you could prototype just don't do it see what happens so there are a bunch of functions that she did on a weekly basis have mostly had to do with going to other people's meetings and writing some reports and she didn't write any of the reports and didn't go to any of the meetings and nobody complained so the report that she doesn't want to write nobody reads and the meetings that she goes to they don't really care if she comes anyway and she can read the minutes so she just stopped and there was zero effect and after three weeks of zero effect she mentioned to her boss that's actually what I've been doing is it okay now you know I want forgiveness not permission and guy got okay and I think that's a fairly dramatic example you know because O'Day said we could just stop doing the stuff we don't like get it this great that is not the case you know but you know there's low-hanging fruit here this is the low-hanging fruit exercise so take a couple of minutes now and what do you notice about you and what might you be able to do about it without getting out heavy equipment and make your life a little bit better okay so we're going to do now is you know sure have a conversation it turns out to be really hard to figure out exactly what you're doing or where your best ideas are if you don't have some degree of conversation so we're going to want you guys to pair up and I'll tell what you're just all you're going to do in just a minute not this second is you know just show your map to your partner you know here's what I mapped here's kind of what I noticed and here's my idea or my question what do you think and it's just a brief conversation about your story then flip you know and then a brief conversation about the other person's story right so it could be you know a couple of four minutes for person number one you know four or five minutes for person over to about ten minutes to have a conversation now I noticed some people will either it into a page or we're actually we're doing it online on a sketchpad or just an email so if you opt it out if you actually didn't do the exercise at all you're just listening today you know if you're an adult that's fine that's your call but then just make yourself a third person and you're going to do listening twice so you're going to listen and get feedback twice because you have got a story to tell don't wing it you know if you did the homework grade if not one of things about our class by the way is it's not the classroom pretend you do the homework you know but you got on you didn't do the homework is then you know the conversations lows down or if you're just pretending you did the reading so if you didn't do it that's fine but just make yourself a third member of a conversation and give some people some feedback so pair up right now and you may be their mod numbered rows and you don't know that for better if you don't know I'm actually so good a partner decide who goes first share your mat give some feedback then change roles I imagine you're not dealt we're not trying to get down were trying to get started well enough you'll finish later we don't have time to fully debrief that but I mean so in terms of the takeaways I mean so anybody get an idea you could actually maybe give a try and if it worked there be kind of cool okay so good three percent and so you know asking the question doesn't always generate that there's absolutely going to be an answer but if we bring some attention and some intention to what we're doing with some reasonably accessible tools to keep the bar low we can actually change things so the takeaway on this energy thing is you know mapping your energy gives you a better sense of your engagement just being conscious you know how many say actually I mean everything you wrote down you knew but you didn't actually know that you knew until you wrote it down and the realization so just knowing you know itself can actually change it oh yeah here yeah this parts boring sure enough it's boring again you know so you know I don't have to hate it oh god is boring yeah just let suzi dude I mean which part do you not understand it's you know that always happens be prepared for it sequence is important you know pacing we're all you know we're circadian animals you know when stuff happens matters you have some control over that and there is this correlation between energy engagement and mini making so you know the question of what is the meaning of life that's free to us to figure out on our own but psychology is now studying a lot about the meaning in life and being able to correlate you know you know Kim mind this is your body you're an embodied reality this is not really a transport mechanism for your brain and so we actually experience this energy thing and you know whether I'm an introvert or an extrovert my personality is the nature of the work that works for me these things are fairly complex and by being smart about that and having an articulate recognition of how you engage with these things you're a chance to get full acquisition and value out of those things and turn them into something meaningful it goes way up you know when billig walks into his figure drawing class and goes oh man I so love this and here's why and I remember why I did them he can articulate to himself why he's grateful for and fully engaged in the experience it significantly amplifies it so so that brings us to now are particularly been number one big dysfunctional belief want to give you just a quick exercise which is let's be sure that we are becoming our are you being the best you are you sure this is it because you'll know whether or not this ideal which is very popular right now is hitting you if you're asking questions like are you sure this is it's just the one thing you should be doing and you're really oh you are you're not settling are you no one's settling here I'll be awful if you were settling you know and the problem with this is it presuppose this question presupposes that there is one best optimal frankly singularly exclusive version of you and everything else is some degree of a compromise which we think is actually profoundly false there's no business adage that says good is the enemy of better and better is the enemy of best are you doing your bad are you settling for better but if there isn't a singular best we're gonna cover that in just a minute in some detail but there's more than one of you in there right there's not just one of you in each of us so if there's more than one of you more good ones of you you know and you can't and you can't always compare them on the same criteria in fact seldom can compare them on the same criteria right I mean you know was my mouth product manager a better me than my college educator me they're entirely different things is beer better than ice cream do not ask me that question um somebody once said you could combine them you know I tried a bad idea that beer milkshake does not work okay so much to know right now but if there isn't a best the rest of that adage becomes the false best is the enemy of the available better the false best is the enemy of the available better and if you find yourself or probably not you but people you know who didn't come who are beset by I guess I'm not sure this is in I think I might be settling you know and they really think there is this best but there isn't one once you've made that decision you've decided to be unhappy the rest of your life you don't deserve to everything you're there because you're not there you know there there isn't a there there's a bunch of theirs which brings us to a pretty important questions we have to reframe there's lots of great use it is never too late to get started you know a woman from the class of 50 came to the Manhattan meeting she's 87 years old and she sat in the front row and she got stuck on the exercise I think she's 87 what do you want so I knelt down do you need some help I just have so many interests I don't know where to begin now that's an aspirational way to be you want to be constants when you grow up so we're all on this Odyssey of life that's adventure it never stops right we're just continuing to grow into our next version of our more like ourselves whichever version of that we have in mind which means you know we really want to answer the question how many lives are you would it help if I explained the question so what I mean is it's really clear there's more aliveness in each of us than one lifetime will permit us to render into reality right it's not all going to ship some of you is going to be unreleased so if that's the case right then the question is well how much well what if we imagine Elise ed it turns out it really is a multiverse there are infinite parallel universes like an angstrom apart if we just knew which x is to measure that on it could perceive it you know and that's true now we actually know that's true and kagura we also figured the wormhole thing out so in terms we have in modern day we will have access to concurrent consciousness so you can literally be as many of you as you want to be and you can have access to all of them in parallel reality and this is no parallel real time it's not Wolverine where you just live forever and all your friends die over and over again I mean that's the that's really a drag you don't do the Wolverine thing but you don't do a parallel reality now the other rule about the multiverse it's a strange rule but it turns out we're not charge is you have to reserve your slots you can have as many slots to live a life and as many parallel multiverse universes as you would like but you have to reserve them in advance kind of like open table so I'm going to ask you the question how many lives are you how many slots in the multiverse would you like including let's say two one year and now yeah I really like it I'd do that over if I could sure fine to get two you get three or like my daughter Lisa first time at Disneyland wrote Dumbo forty two times in a row so if she would have forty two lives with just a Dumbo ride that's cool if that's what you want so right now I want you to have a number in your mind how many lives you are I'm going to go one two three and when I would have said four you say your number and let's see what we get y'all get a number you get a number one two three seven thirty hundred I didn't usually there's an idiot logical loud 101 I have one look going to commit to it you know if that's you that's fine that's an ideological position I get that but I heard like seven ten eleven so first of all this FOMO thing for a missing out of course you gonna miss out most of you isn't going to happen I lied it's not true who you know if you're 11 10 you know 88% of you ain't happening isn't it cool you're incredibly capacious people living in a target-rich environment with choices and possibilities of you know if anybody could see the world going by you guys can you're sitting in the crow's nest of the cosmos you know at Google and stuff is happening I mean if you're paying any attention at all ten cool things you can't do go by daily and you go oh no God was headed you know order you go up there is no one isn't it fabulous to live in this plentiful world where somebody's cool as I am can see this stuff that's a refrain by the way okay so well you got lots of lives then you know we're going to id8 our futures you can tidy at your future you can ideot your futures ISM and we normally in the extra if we have time we actually do this exercise and we limits you to three so we recommend doing the odyssey plans you're sound really plans it's ideation but three different ways you could live the next five years of your life three completely different ways you could be any one of the three of the many of you in the coming five years which looks like we actually have a one-page worksheet you know and in ten or fifteen minutes if we had them which we don't we'd fill this thing out and you put a timeline down that actually shows you know professional personal things I'll give you an example in just a second and then when you look at the life that that description characterizes you watch the narrative of that what's the story because they're not just three plans there are three lives in each life is a narrative it's a story so what is that story mean to me and how how do I feel about it we have a dashboard what's the dashboard of the dials on your dashboard tell you about this version of life that you could lead the four dashboard dials are resources 0 to 100 percent do I have what it takes do I have the training to have the time to have the money the you know the relationships to pull this thing off do I like it am i hot or cold on this thing how do I actually feel about this am i confident it will happen if it was my confidence I can pull this off I mean even if my resources are low or high my confidence might be different those are not always linked and then coherence probably the hardest one to explain we simply mean by that authenticity or fit is this plays this version of me if I look at this life I just drew and wrote down is that one of the real Me's is it coherent to Who I am does it reflect my values does it reflect my personality can I actually see myself doing that or is this one yeah it's coherent to mom let's go here to mom but it is not so coherent or maybe my advisor my advisors are still saying why didn't you go tenure track you know you know so somebody's got this plan maybe it's not mine then it's not a coherent plan let me give you an example really quickly what would the sound like if we did it this is Debbie is a real person 48 Debbie's 48 you know been in high tech actually and in operating roles a very effective executive and she's thinking about do I want to go back and pick up that idea I had long ago about working with at-risk kids and she's thinking maybe she's going to do that so this is using what I know to help kids so I'm really good at running things let me go run something else you know kind of a classic idea for some you know middle-aged people and so I'm gonna start a 501c3 I'm an operating leave mind person minded person I can do the operational thing first I'm gonna raise some money and I'm going to pick the reading model we're going to invest in we have to have a theory of change there's a lot of people out there who know a lot about how to help at-risk kids do reading that's the thing she focused on early reading programs have a huge leverage downstream for kids it turns out so let's focus on that got that thing figured out and then I got a scale this thing so this isn't the cute little thing I'm doing on the side you know this is I'm really refocusing my career I want to go big here you know so I'm going to start on the west coast and then go to the East Coast because that's where a lot of the analytics are if you don't impress people in the Academy which is where you get credibility something East Coast you know and then eventually I need to have a bunch of kids going through this thing and scale it up so in five years I should be I should be at the visible scale level of activity and boy once you hit that I mean it's going to get way the heck busy and now that I think about it before I get too completely distracted I need to remember my family got a family to care about you know I'm 48 my siblings are in their 50s and mom and dad are still living but they're really beginning to age I mean they're not young at all we had a family meeting mom and I said no we when we need help we don't want it from you with all due respect and we love you guys but we don't to live with you so we've got to find a place for mom and dad to go and you know we've been saying in the family for years now that we got to get the family story and we don't and there's a bit of history of dementia we're not we have no idea how far we are from mom and dad can't tell the story anymore so before too much time goes by we got to find a place for him we got to get that story written down now that I think about it you know I'm not sure I know what I'm doing I mean I cared about this 20 years ago I'm really good at business but you know I don't really know what I'm doing and these at-risk kids are troubled maybe I should pick up that MA in counseling if so I got to do that right away I go to the early annika there's a night program near me I could do it in two years time I get that done you know and that's really interesting and then boy that scale thing kicks off so anything that's going to happens got to happen before so that's why I've got to make sure once we pick where mama dead goats Tommy back to Paris we promised ourselves we get to Paris one more time before we got too busy so we got to get that in and let's swing through the Galapagos on the way home I was on my bucket list I want to get that done so you know if I do all that well that's pretty cool I should I should write a book actually you know that's I'm writing a book about what that life changes about that's really interesting so that's an interesting life and how do I feel about that well you know I got about half the resources I don't have the money yet I don't have the team yet and there's a lot to do but I know how to do stuff I really like it and my confidence is actually pretty high because even though the things that are missing I can see how to do them now coherency wise I'm actually a little worried there I mean it sounds all that noble stuff but I think I'm mostly speaking out of my 25 year old self and I'm 48 so it may all still be true but I got to go test that I got to go test that a little bit so that's my story that is you know in a couple of minutes what one Odyssey planned five-year would look like and then you do two more to two very different looking ones in order to have more than one idea now something you're going to implement all these plans but the whole idea is and the research has shown particularly school a bit if you brainstorm off of multiple plans you will on all of them have wider ranging ideas and better it is you have one core plan to try to brainstorm out from it your domain of ideation will be narrower and your outcomes will be smaller you will fall prey to your own internal judgment now once you get your plans figured out you know because it's just the one hour gig here got that time to actually do that but you can do that on your own if you wanted to it's all in the book it's time to do prototyping I'm just having an ideas 5 now we're going to go do something bias to action time and so we want to do prototyping why design prototypes ask interesting questions exposed assumptions which you can't plan you just go do them and go oh I didn't realize I was thinking that and you involve other people with your ideas they're inherently collaborative prototypes to become the substrate upon which you can collaborate into your future so a way to work with other people and it's really sneaking up on the future a good prototype is cheap fast easy to implement and actually teaches you something the key distinction between an engineering prototype that like a beta test that proves the thing works according to your expectation according to spec that's a test prototype usually done in engineering these are design prototypes which are quick mock-ups quick experiences because I know that I don't really understand this yet I need to go out into the world and try it it's experiential learning which is why you can't fail you have failure immunity when you're doing design prototype there are two kinds in life - how do you prototype a life wait a minute like a mouse I had a box full of you know foam rubber mice once upon a time 100 of them you know that this is not the same it's not as easy it's really simple two things conversations and experiences I bought conversations we simply mean go visit your future the thing you're thinking about the thing you're curious about somebody's already doing that understands that knows that there are people in the world that are probably already intersecting the thing that you're thinking about so let's find them and have a conversation hey what's it like over there person currently living in my future you're not asking for the job you're not asking to be admitted you're not asking for money you're asking them to tell to give you something that most people really like to give away their story right what's your name Lauren so it turns out so Lauren and what do you do here I'm a suffering just so interested in software I don't know anything about so I'd know a little bit can't code for you do you reco can you go okay and so I would really like out you know I'm interested in softer and so are you and I'm interested in what you do and so are you so we have a common interest we both think you were so interesting so we still like form a little Club I'll buy the coffee we'll hang out there she's getting scared now the outside why did I sit in the front row yeah but that's really what's going on I mean everybody finds themselves in what they're doing pretty interesting and that's all you're asking people for is get the story don't ask for the job as for the story that's the conversation and then the prototype experience go try doing something how does it actually work so you look at your plan to kind of go what am I worried about a curious about so what on the one on that thing is giving me some anxiety I really want to manage a little bit or gee that's interesting I'd like to know more so I'm staring at that I'm Debby I'm kinda glad it's interesting you know what comes to my attention is this book thing writing I've never written a book I just actually went through writing a book and boy did I not know what I was getting into um by the way it's really hard oh so how could I do that well there are lots of people I could talk to I could go find people I'm not that hard to find somebody who's been an author and knows an author has been in the publishing industry was an agent it's something to do the book business you know I just get a cup of coffee and get your story and if I do that three four five six times I will know so much more and I can borrow your experience not just a research conversation you know what's the royalty rate and how long how many how many words a day do you write and that's just factual isms which are fine but what's the experience like how did you get there what did you have in mind what was a surprise tell me the story and then I can vicariously start picking that stuff up and it's pretty cheap conversations come pretty fast and cheap and now that I think about it you know that going back to school I'm 48 they're gonna look at me funny you're not one of us you know I'm not sure we really want to do that so I said look you could only you can't you can't just think about that you got to go try it so W got to go sit in class or he'd get you to audit classes and go out there and she did it she goes guess what it turns out I really loved it I mean my whole body was just sort of like tingling I just I forgot how much I loved to learn in that context and and yeah the students were all twenty years my junior and they thought it was cool I came to class I turnt that Millennials are kind of nice I heard they were mean it's not true yeah um and so I'm really having a good time that's an experience you know and it wasn't that hard to get so you're learning how to generate experiences and conversations that are readily accessible and maybe don't solve the problem entirely but really advance your awareness your understanding and your experience you'll encounter she had to feel what it was like being back in the classroom not just read about it so to do that of course you know all these things come through people which means you got to make the connections so of course that's networking this probably Oh finally you got to the networking part right who loves networking networking fans we could exactly both of them okay um so most of us maybe I kind of agree with her like Adam it's not so cool you know who thinks that's networking is alone the sleazy side a little not my style okay reframe no it's just asking directions you know I don't know my way around coding Vil Lorne does you know you maybe don't know your way around nanotechnology town or you know nonprofit the nonprofit sector you know you're lost in town anybody ever give directions to a lost person and after it was over how'd you feel felt awesome good stranger walks up rips off your competency and just leaves and you feel good don't you got used and you felt good studies now show people like helping people there's a human beings like being human beings so um people are willing to help you particularly when the bar now you're asking them to manipulate somebody or give you a job you don't deserve like it would you mind if I let somebody feel terrific about themselves by talking about their life or a life pay for the coffee is that okay with you that's really not a high ask so by the way you know this is a great time if there's something you would like to know more about in the world I prom I literally promise you somebody in this room know somebody that would be really interesting for you to talk to but the only way you get that is to ask them so don't be shy about saying hey do you know anybody who could tell me more about like so what is going on to the Google Foundation anyway what's up with that autonomous car thing whatever might be so so similar to a wrapping up we're done you know the three things that are now true about this process that weren't sure before is you know you guys are not the guinea pigs on the book you know we're a couple of thousand people into this process over almost a 15 year period two PhD dissertations were done evaluating the rigor of the efficacy of the intervention of our model as which sounds like proctology or something you mean you know sounds like an invasive surgery but it's a couple of educational psychologists evaluating whether or not this thing works and the good news is it does according to the scientists and it's the first time at Stanford where we invented Design Thinking or human centered design who actually applied it to this problem so those three things come together for the first time in this process in a way that we hope will help you that's the whole point you know and why it works is because you're people and the human centered design process we developed which is built around both how people have ideas and then how people would use the solutions built from those ideas hopefully fit real people like you in the real world that's the whole point so thanks for your time good luck designing your life enjoy the ride you can do this you

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 108,792

Rating: 4.7882037 out of 5

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, Designing Your Life, Dave Evans, designer of the Apple mouse, What do you want to do with the rest of your life, what do you want to grow into, co-founder of Electronic Arts

Id: syJONL-pkyQ

Length: 48min 25sec (2905 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2016