[00:00] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Welcome to another episode of Success for the Athletic Minded Man. Real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus in business and life. This is your host, Jim Harshaw Jr., and today I’m bringing you Professor Bill Burnett. Bill Burnett is a professor at Stanford University, and I interviewed him three years ago in the The reason I’m bringing this episode back to you today is because I’ve been talking to so many of you who are struggling to figure out what’s next for you, and you’re looking for a framework to help you figure that out.

[00:34] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And Bill Burnett is the co-author of a book called Designing Your Life, and then another one called Designing Your Work Life, and in this episode we talk mostly about Designing Your Work Life. And the reason he wrote this book is because They were having a lot of their students coming back to them a few years after graduation from the Stanford Design School and saying, you know, my career is not all it’s chalked up to be.

[01:00] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s not what I thought it was going to be. And I’m looking to pivot, but I don’t know how to do it. I don’t want to just, you know, jump and hope the parachute will appear, but I don’t have the time to sort of. Try something new or try something different without kind of risking it all. And if you feel like that, then we are going to deliver in this episode an incredible framework for you.

[01:22] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s going to be really, really helpful. And what they do, what they started helping their students with was, Doing this through using design thinking and design principles. So there’s a real framework that, that Bill shares here in this episode. So you’re going to get a real clear framework and expert, right?

[01:37] Jim Harshaw Jr.: A guy who’s done this with a lot of different people and just a great guy. Second time I’ve had him on the podcast. And again, this is an episode from 2021. Bringing this back to you now because I’ve just been talking to so many people lately. And this is the episode that I think you need to hear right now.

[01:53] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So let’s get into it. Republishing my interview, interview number two, that is with Bill Burnett, Stanford design professor. Here we go. Author of Designing Your Work Life. As a design professor, how did you come to write a couple of books, bestselling books on life design and work design?

[02:12] Bill Burnett: Well, you know, it, it always starts with somebody’s, a need, right?

[02:16] Bill Burnett: I mean, designers, you know, designers like me, design thinking or human centered designers, we always say, don’t start with the problem, start with people. And so I, I, you know, I’ve had a couple of thousand students in my career at Samford and they’re all, And they, and you know, right around, you know, spring quarter, we have lots of office hours about, you know, what’s it going to be like to graduate?

[02:37] Bill Burnett: And what’s the world going to be like? And is it going to suck? Everybody tells me jobs suck. And in fact, 68 percent of the people in America say they’re disengaged from their jobs. So that’s not so, that’s not so, uh, it’s probably kind of true. Anyway, I was just talking to students and then, uh, Dave and I got together and we had done some business before and we said, And he said, you know, I’m doing a class over at Berkeley on, um, how to find a career.

[03:00] Bill Burnett: And I said, well, you know, if we did that here, we’d have to do it around design. And he said, yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s try that. And so we, we built that class and then we built on a couple more classes and it just kind of took off. But you know, the, you know, designers have evolved a way of inventing stuff that’s never been seen before, right?

[03:16] Bill Burnett: The iPhone, the iPad, you know, the very first, I was at Apple, we did the very first laptops. So how do you invent something new to the world? Something that you can’t get any data because it exists in a future that doesn’t, hasn’t happened yet. And then all of a sudden, you know, bam, there’s this thing called an iPhone.

[03:34] Bill Burnett: And actually I have my very first one, the iPhone, the iPhone one, they didn’t call it that of course, but the one, and it’s actually probably primitive when you, when you see it, but it was revolutionary, right? It worked. It was a computer plus your, plus your iPod, plus, you know, your email, plus. Your browser plus everything in this one thing.

[03:53] Bill Burnett: And then, and the combination of those things was much more than simply, you know, the addition of one plus one plus one plus one, right? It became this huge magnifier. And in some cases, maybe, you know, an attention, you know, deficit, you know, provoking device. But, um, so, so designers come up with a way to come up with new, new to the world things, and they do it by prototyping, by building and say, we build our way forward because you can’t analyze it because there’s no data.

[04:18] Bill Burnett: And, uh, if you’re looking for something brand new. You need that process. So what could be more brand new than my future or how to find my next job or how to figure out what I really want to do. Um, you know, one of the, one of the bad pieces of advice that people often get is follow your passion. It’s one of our dysfunctional beliefs in the first place.

[04:40] Bill Burnett: We’ve got a bunch more in the second, but you know, I mean, if you, if you always knew you wanted to be a doctor, great, go be a doctor and see if it works out, by the way, most of the people who come to my workshops who want to change something in their life are doctors or lawyers, because they, you know, They went into it without really thinking about what it was really going to be like.

[04:59] Bill Burnett: And, you know, the doctors thought they were going to cure people and they spend all their time filling out insurance forms, and the lawyers thought they were going to argue for truth and justice, and they ended up writing, you know, contracts for large companies like Exxon to, you know, destroy the planet.

[05:12] Bill Burnett: So, you know, be careful what you, what you’re passionate about. Do a little research. But most people don’t have a passion. So this idea that you need to know in advance what you want, it just isn’t true. It’s not the way the world works. So we just saw this huge need of people kind of struggling with bad ideas, bad tools, or no tools to try to figure out their careers.

[05:32] Bill Burnett: And we started talking to people in their, in their mid careers, you know, 30 something, 40 something, and we were seeing a lot of people unhappy. And so the first book was about, you know, kind of life design, applying design thinking to your life. And the second book is really zooms in on, all right, well, this world of work where we spend 40 or 50 years, sometimes more hours a week, you know, a couple of hundred thousand hours in your lifetime spent doing something, wouldn’t it be great if it were enjoyable?

[05:59] Bill Burnett: Wouldn’t it be great if it felt like it was sort of fun? Part of your mission or your goal in life, or, or, or wouldn’t it be great if you just, you knew what work was about and then you had this life with a job in it and it was, and it all fit. It was coherent. You know, it’s a modern idea that your job is going to, you know, make you happy or make you, you know, fulfill some sort of inner, you know, goal or mission.

[06:21] Bill Burnett: I don’t know about you. My, my grandparents came over from Germany. My grandfather got the family out of Germany in 1933. Because they had just elected a new chancellor, elected by a popular vote. A guy named Adolf Hitler, and he didn’t think that was going to go so well. He was able to get the family out of, out of Germany and here.

[06:40] Bill Burnett: But he, you know, he landed with sixth grade education, speaking hardly any English. Took any job. He worked at the sewerage plant, literally shoveling sewerage from one tank to another. You know, for 50 cents a day and his, why his mission was put a roof over our head, get us out of an unsafe place, put us someplace where we could, you know, where he could provide a safe place for the family and that his kids could then go on to things like education, college and stuff.

[07:08] Bill Burnett: And my dad went to San Jose state, great state school here down in California. And his son went to Stanford and my daughter’s getting a PhD in immunology at Berkeley. So just, you know, three, four generations. We went from Germany and poverty to quote the American dream. So his goal was, you know, I mean, it’s always life with a job in it.

[07:30] Bill Burnett: Start with life and think about how does the job support that life? And in his case, it was just safety, security, and a roof over head. You get the kids off to school. Perfectly legitimate way to work,

[07:42] Jim Harshaw Jr.: right? So is this. Dissatisfaction that you talk about the 68 percent of Americans who are dissatisfied with their work, is this a new thing in our culture and society?

[07:54] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Has it always been there?

[07:56] Bill Burnett: As far as I can tell, Gallup does that survey and they do an international survey, the first world, highly technological society that has the lowest. Job engagement is Japan. 93 percent of Japanese hate their job. So another way of looking at it is in companies, they survey engagement.

[08:15] Bill Burnett: They want employee engagement because there’s lots of evidence that engaged employees are more creative, they’re more productive, they make a better work workplace. It’s never been much more than 30%, 30, 35%. And has declined in some years and gone up in some years. But if you think about it, only a third of the people are coming to work and engaged in the activities they do in the workplace.

[08:38] Bill Burnett: So, you know, lots of, lots of companies are working hard in this engagement problem, because if you can unleash the creativity and the, and the engagement of people, they just do a better job. And you have a happier workplace, which is, you know, ultimately. A pretty good goal. So, you know, everybody struggled with it and it’s funny.

[08:58] Bill Burnett: I’ve always loved my jobs. I’ve always had jobs I really liked. I mean, even after I, you know, I, at some point I might have outlived the job or outgrown the opportunities or I left Apple cause there was kind of nothing else that I wanted to do there. And I ended up doing my own, my own consulting firm, but there was always interesting.

[09:16] Bill Burnett: So I’m, I’m really, David, I really want to help the people who feel like it. They don’t like their job and there’s nothing they can do about it. I think that the real thing is this notion that you’re not in charge of. Making yourself happy. And that’s just not true. All of, all of the psychology and, you know, our stuff is based on design thinking and the positive psychologists like Martin Seligman and Haley Chikson Mahai and Payne Coleman, who wrote the book Emotional Intelligence.

[09:44] Bill Burnett: You have a lot more agency than you think. And a lot of the strategies in our book, you don’t even need to ask your boss to do. It’s just the way you approach, the way you reframe and approach your work is going to have, is going to have a lot to do with how you. Report your satisfaction and what you’re looking for is at the end of every week to say, Hey, that week was a little better than the last one.

[10:07] Bill Burnett: And I’m making progress on the goals that I’ve set for myself. Well,

[10:12] Jim Harshaw Jr.: you mentioned dysfunctional beliefs and you mentioned reframing. What do you mean by dysfunctional belief? And maybe you can give us an example or two. And I think you already mentioned one, which is, you know, I’m dissatisfied with my job and there’s nothing I can do about it.

[10:25] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So this concept of dysfunctional beliefs, these are, we don’t even see them as dysfunctional beliefs. They’re just. As far as most people think, they’re just, it’s just a fact in their mind. And then this idea of reframing. Can you talk about those?

[10:39] Bill Burnett: Sure. The reframing thing is sort of the power tool in design, right?

[10:43] Bill Burnett: It’s kind of, you know, we always say in design, there’s, you know, there’s, there’s problem finding and problem solving, and that leads to an innovation. Find a good problem, solve it well, you got an innovation. And the reframing is all about finding a better problem. And it’s coupled with dysfunctional beliefs.

[10:58] Bill Burnett: So follow your passion. Well, if I’m one of the eight out of ten people who don’t have one, but I think everybody else has one, now I’m stuck, right? And dysfunctional beliefs either keep you stuck or you’re believing something that isn’t actually true. My students, they think, Oh God, you know, if I, if I picked the wrong major, I’ll never get a job.

[11:16] Bill Burnett: Completely dysfunctional belief. Eight out of ten years out of school, less than 20 percent of college graduates are doing anything that had anything to do with what they majored in in college. Majors are about organizing your college experience. They have nothing to do primarily with organizing your life and work experiences.

[11:34] Bill Burnett: They may influence the first

[11:35] Jim Harshaw Jr.: job. I was an environmental science major. So I’m another example.

[11:38] Bill Burnett: Exactly. Exactly. And so another dysfunctional belief we talked about in the book here is, um, Money versus meaning, well, I wanna do something meaningful, but you know, the meaningful jobs in nonprofits and stuff, that doesn’t pay very well.

[11:51] Bill Burnett: So I got, if I gotta go for the money somehow or other, I gotta sell out my soul. And it’s like, no, no. I mean, every time you make something a, a dichotomy like that, like money versus meaning or work life balance, I got more work, I got less life. Right? Got more money, got less meaning. It’s not true. It’s not the way the world works.

[12:09] Bill Burnett: And the reframe for that is, it’s not. Two things. It’s three. First of all, never make anything a binary decision because your brain automatically makes that a zero sum game. The psychologist, neurologist, neurologist who studied the brain would say, A B decisions are almost always suboptimal. So just add one more thing.

[12:29] Bill Burnett: Like that’s why we do three odyssey plans. And we do, you know, when we do brainstorming, we have more than three ideas. So the, the, the reframe is okay. What we’re really talking about is, you know, people ask you, well, you know, what do you make? And then what they normally mean is, what do you, how much money do you make?

[12:46] Bill Burnett: But when we say make, we say, okay, everybody’s a maker in this maker movement and maker world, right? And you make three things in the, in the commercial economy. When you’re in the work economy, you make money. That’s how you get, that’s how you score, you know, I make money for this job. In the non profit or the impact economy, you’re making, what you’re going for is, you know, is impact.

[13:09] Bill Burnett: It’s not how much money does my non profit raise, it’s how many kids Are in that afterschool program and learning to read and, you know, impacting their velocity and education. And then when we do the big exercise from the first Odyssey plans and people do three completely different plans for their life, inevitably, 100 percent of the time in thousands of plans, people want a little more creativity.

[13:34] Bill Burnett: They’d like to have more, they might not say, say I’m a creative person, but be like, wouldn’t it be better if there’s more creativity in my life, a little something that was, was more fun. And so we went and talked to the, the labeled creatives, the artists, the writers, the dancers, the painters, the singers, you know, people who do creativity for a living.

[13:51] Bill Burnett: And we said, how do you get paid? And they go, well, I get paid in expression. If I, if I get a chance to, you know, recite my poem at open mic night, if I get a chance to play my song, if I get a chance to paint my painting, I’m not doing it for money. I don’t care about, I mean, it’d be nice if somebody paid me, but I’m doing it for the joy of expression.

[14:10] Bill Burnett: So now you have, you know, um, money, impact and expression are the three levels on your maker mix, and it’s like mixing a song. I can have more money, I can have more expression, I can have more impact. And you’ve got three sliders. And you control how much attention you pay to making money, making impact, and making expression.

[14:31] Bill Burnett: My example is, you know, I was working at a nice consultant firm, about 40 people. We were doing really cool engineering projects. We were working for big companies like Intel and little tiny startups in the valley. And it was a lot of fun. And, uh, you know, when you’re a consultant, you’re working on other people’s ideas.

[14:46] Bill Burnett: So it’s not your expression, it’s their expression. Impact, you know, it depends on the product. You know, we don’t, we didn’t control the impact of how the product actually got in the world. And so mostly I’d say that job was intellectually interesting, but mostly for money. And then in 2006 when David Kelly called me up and said, Hey, I’m starting at e school and I need some help.

[15:05] Bill Burnett: Would you have you ever thought about coming in and working full time? We’ll invent this job called executive director. I said, great. He said, yeah, it pays about, you know, half of what you’re making. I said, it was a little bit less than half, but I took it because my idea was, wow, look at how much impact. I mean, if I work on this job for 10 years and we put a thousand designers in the world trained in human centered design, design thinking, and they’re going out to work on the hard problems, energy, health, climate, a much bigger impact than just doing consulting projects for companies.

[15:37] Bill Burnett: Right. So I traded, I dialed down the money thing. Push the impact thing up. I’ve never, best job I’ve ever had. Super, super good job. But I could articulate why, right? What, where in my mix was I changing, you know, like when you’re mixing, when you’re making a song, you want more, you know, a lot more bass, if it’s a, if it’s, you know, it’s a rap song or something, a lot more treble, if it’s a, if it’s a classical, you know, a violin concerto, so you got to have the right mix for the right time in your life.

[16:07] Bill Burnett: And that blows up the whole dysfunctional belief of, you know, I got to trade one for the other. No, it’s three things, at least three things. And if you’re, if you assess where you’re at and then decide what you want to change, it’s, it’s a lot easier to make really specific, small changes, prototype your way forward to get to a mix that really feels like the right mix.

[16:30] Bill Burnett: And everybody is concerned about money. And certainly in this pandemic, if you have lost your job or you were a small business person, you owned a restaurant, you owned a, you know, travel agency or whatever, and that whole business has evaporated. Money is, of course, a huge issue, and I’m not, I’m not suggesting that money is not important.

[16:46] Bill Burnett: But, all the research shows is that when you have enough, and enough is less than most people think, enough is, you know, I’m paying the bills, I’m putting some money away for the kids college education, and we’re fine. You know, literally, we’re okay. There’s a little bit of surplus, and we’re okay. All of the research, and there’s tons and tons, there’s 20, 30 years of research in this.

[17:11] Bill Burnett: The incremental amount of money above that range makes you happy for a little while, about six months. And then you stabilize again and you’re neither more or less happy than before. Although you have more money. And typically with them, what people do is they upped their need. And so now they’re still right at that little margin and getting a lot more money.

[17:30] Bill Burnett: A hedonic treadmill, right? Most of the people who come to my workshops and really want to change something in their lives are very successful and have making lots of money. And they hate their lives because somewhere along the way, they lost track of. What this is all about. Money is just one of the three kinds.

[17:49] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah, this is the hedonic treadmill, which you talk about.

[17:51] Bill Burnett: Yeah,

[17:51] Jim Harshaw Jr.: they’re on a hedonic

[17:52] Bill Burnett: treadmill, they get a little more. Yeah, you talk

[17:53] Jim Harshaw Jr.: about the hedonic treadmill in the book. Yeah, and this is the term psychologists use to define the endless seeking of more.

[18:01] Bill Burnett: Yeah, exactly. No. Yeah, so the book, the, the, the second book is really about how do you make work, work for you?

[18:07] Bill Burnett: How, what are the, what are ways to redesign your job without even, you know, necessarily engaging your boss to, to try to find more, uh, engagement, more impact, more expression, and just let people know that they have way more agency than they think they do.

[18:23] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You talk about cultivating the good enough for now.

[18:26] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Attitude. Why is that helpful whenever we’re trying to not settle, we’re maybe dissatisfied in our jobs, and how does this concept of good enough for now help us?

[18:40] Bill Burnett: So, if you look at the, the sort of science, the psychology of behavior change, how do people start a new positive behavior? You know, eating better.

[18:50] Bill Burnett: Or how do people end the negative behavior? Smoking, you know, not working out, something like that. The way people fail is they try to, they try to do too much too fast. Our book is, sells really well in January because that’s what the publishers call the new, new year, new you season. Everybody’s gonna get their diet book, their self help book.

[19:10] Bill Burnett: It’s January and you say, I’m going to run a marathon this year. And I go, hey, listen, hand me your phone. I can’t help but notice that you’re not even doing 5, 000 steps a day. Between here and a marathon, you know, that’s a long distance. Let’s set some smaller goals. We can have a marathon in the back of our mind, but how about we set a goal of 10, 000 steps for three weeks.

[19:33] Bill Burnett: Compensate that goal and set up a bigger goal. You know, we’ll go a little bit more, a little bit more. It’s really well documented that the way you make significant big changes in your life is paradoxically making small changes, not big ones. The small ones add up. And the small ones add up because they’re sustainable.

[19:51] Bill Burnett: Pretty soon, 10, 000 steps a day, it’s no big deal. You’re not even thinking about it. Of course you’re going to walk, you know, I’m going to walk from the train to my office. If the train ever starts happening again and I’m allowed to go to my office instead of, instead of taking the shuttle, because you know, that gives me 6, 000 steps right there.

[20:06] Bill Burnett: Boom, done. So the, the good enough for now is how do we make small appropriate changes? How do we prototype our way forward, build our way forward and use those small changes to reinforce our sense of self efficacy. We have the power to change. I went from 5, steps. Awesome. And then, you know, like let’s just maybe rather than setting goals that are exhausting, because I think a lot of the times, you know, particularly when we’re doing New Year’s resolutions and stuff, we’ve set these big goals and to actually get there, it’s, it’s on, it’s a lot of, it’s tiring, right?

[20:42] Bill Burnett: It’s, it takes a lot of energy. And by the way, the stats are pretty clear that 90 percent of, New Year’s Resolutions are abandoned by the end of March. We know that method doesn’t work, right? So let’s do the method that we, that we have some evidence that it works. By the way, just a little shout out to a colleague who wrote a book called Tiny Habits.

[21:00] Bill Burnett: He’s, uh, another, another, uh, professor at Stanford, B. J. Fogg. And he’s documented a whole sort of methodology for taking small steps to make big changes. And so You know, set the bar low is our methodology. Set the bar low and clear it and do that over and over again. That builds your confidence. What David Kelley calls your creative confidence.

[21:19] Bill Burnett: It builds what psychologists call self efficacy, the belief that you can be in charge of your life and you can make changes. And it follows the science, you know, so you don’t, you don’t end up trying something. Here’s the thing. A lot, a lot of books are out there about like, be your best, most extraordinary, fantastic self.

[21:35] Bill Burnett: Okay, fine. But you read the book, you try to do it six months later, you’re back where you started, except now you feel like, Oh, wow. I bet everybody else could do that. And I I’m the only person who read this book and can’t make it work. And so you feel you actually aren’t where you started. You feel worse because you failed to execute whatever the book said.

[21:55] Bill Burnett: We didn’t want to be that book. We wanted the book. We wanted it to be the book that was hopeful, like try a couple of little things. Hey, that worked. Or, you know, on the subject of failure, you know, design. If you want to innovate. You have to fail. You know, people talk about Silicon Valley being this model of innovation, venture capitalists, startups, and all this stuff.

[22:14] Bill Burnett: Venture capitalists know that nine out of 10 of their investments will not return the invested dollars. They know that they’re going to fail eight or nine times out of 10. And yet they’re considered the geniuses of innovation because That one or two successes is Apple, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, giant biotech companies, giant, you know, medical device companies.

[22:39] Bill Burnett: All those companies came from this rapid experimentation, lots and lots of shots on Google and one or two successes. So if that’s the model, That people are willing to commit billions of dollars to. Why do you think you gotta succeed every time? You can’t succeed every time. And the idea of prototyping, running these little experiments in the world, like what would it be like if I tried this?

[23:03] Bill Burnett: What would it be like if I tried that? And making them small steps and accessible steps is when they quote, fail, when I have, I get a hold of somebody and I talk to them and I find out Oh man, that’s really a, that’s way more boring. I’m way more, I’m so not interested in that idea anymore. Is that a failure?

[23:22] Bill Burnett: Cause you asked a question and you got a negative answer back? No, it’s a success because now you learned, I don’t have to investigate that path. That path is not my path. Now you need a little bit of self discernment. You need to kind of know yourself a little. But these little experiments are also experiments in learning how to listen to see if this idea this other person has, you know, might work for me or might not work for me.

[23:48] Bill Burnett: Or maybe I’m neutral and I need more prototypes before I just pick a direction.

[23:53] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So you’re saying this concept of work design and life design requires failure. It requires trying things and expecting, you know what, some of this is going to fail. Sometimes I’m going to fail. Sometimes I’m going to be embarrassed.

[24:07] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Sometimes things aren’t going to work out. And that is information for me.

[24:11] Bill Burnett: Of course. It’s all information. It’s all learning. And that’s why, you know, and so that’s why we say take small steps because first of all, it’s scary to try and change. Right. We acknowledge that. It’s just scary. The reason most people stay in jobs they don’t like, and the reason most people end up in, you know, situations that they don’t like, and they’re kind of stuck in their static is, it’s scarier to try something new than to just deal with the thing you got that’s not very good.

[24:36] Bill Burnett: We always say the first step in design thinking is empathy, but the first step in life design is accept. Dave would say, my buddy Dave, my co author would say, you can’t solve a problem you’re not willing to have. Until you decide, I want to work on this, Nothing’s going to happen. And then you’re going to try some prototypes and things and see what goes.

[24:55] Bill Burnett: But, but you got to make a decision. I want to make something, I want to change something. And a lot of people are stuck in a place where they don’t like what they don’t like their life, but it’s not, I mean, it’s miserable, but it’s not, you know, horrible, toxic, whatever. But it’s safer to have the problem than to try to change the problem.

[25:14] Bill Burnett: And that’s just a normal human thing, right? It’s not like I like my problem, but you know, I’d rather, I’d rather just sit here and complain. Then actually take some action and see if I can make it better. And it’s because it’s scary. So again, you know, set the bar low, try small things, build your competence up.

[25:32] Bill Burnett: It’s all learning, even a prototype that quote, fails. Like that was a complete disaster and I was really embarrassed and I couldn’t think of any good questions to ask. What did you, you know, then think back reflecting that, what did you learn? You know, we’ve got whatever we got, 70, 80, 90, my, my young students graduating, you know, are starting college right now.

[25:52] Bill Burnett: Maybe the first generation to live to a healthy 100 on average. So I tell them, look, you’re going to work for 70 years. So just chill out. Just enjoy college because, you know, like, don’t worry. There’s a lot more, a lot more life ahead of you. But we’re all trying to maximize some happiness, some meaning, some purpose, right?

[26:11] Bill Burnett: And, and the research says. Well, that comes from relationships. That comes from building strong family and community and other relationships. And boy, do we need more of that now, right? Talking about a, you know, a divided nation. There are families that can’t even talk to each other because they’ve decided politics.

[26:29] Bill Burnett: Defines relationships. That’s ridiculous. Uh, you know, I, I spent the summer in, uh, most of the summer in Ohio. We talked about going different places. You went to some really cool places. I went to Cleveland, Ohio, which was fine. It’s where my wife’s family is. And I hung out with lots of people who, you know, probably voted differently than I did in this election.

[26:48] Bill Burnett: They’re all nice people. Kind to their children and to their, their pets. They live in houses that they take good care of. Um, they commute, you know, they participate in their community and their churches, so they’re. They just have a different opinion about, you know, what, what the balance of government versus personal action is.

[27:07] Bill Burnett: I guess we can all live together. We can, we can be a community. I don’t have to enjoy your politics to enjoy, you know, picking up a guitar and singing with you. So that, that’s what we’re after. We got to reorganize around what really matters. And once you have enough, it’s not money. And once, once you realize you have the, you have more agency than you think to make your job better.

[27:33] Bill Burnett: I got a situation. It’s good enough for now. I mean, in this global pandemic, if you’re still working and you’ve got a job, awesome. You’re in the 50 percent of the world that is still functioning, you know? So great. If you don’t have that, then, then you need different strategies for getting back into a different, probably a different career, because a lot of the industries that have been hard hit by this aren’t going to come back, people say now for two, three, four years.

[27:58] Bill Burnett: So you can’t just. You can’t wait. You’re not in the waiting room, you know, waiting for those things to come back. You’re in this neutral zone where lots of things are happening and you got to get prepared for, you know, for the next wave. So, we’re just trying to, we’re just trying to give people, you know, some tools and a little bit of hope that they have the ability to make things better.

[28:19] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You talk about this concept of radical collaboration and I love this concept, this idea. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

[28:27] Bill Burnett: Well, you know, it’s a, it’s the simplest way to say it is like, if I could figure out everything I need to do in my life, just by sitting here and thinking really hard in my head and then going out and doing it, that’d be awesome.

[28:37] Bill Burnett: I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. I’m still stuck. So the answer is in the world and I run prototypes. I run these little experiments to try things in the world and I run them with other people. And radical collaboration on a design team means I need lots of different kinds of skills. I need lots of different voices.

[28:55] Bill Burnett: Nowadays, it’s including that we, you know, if we’re going to be working across all the communities, you want to include everybody. I want, I need, Representation from everyone on my design team. It can’t just be a bunch of white men. It’s I need, I need women. I need people of color. I need, I need folks who have different experiences, but it’s also that when I go out in the world to try something, I have to try it with people.

[29:15] Bill Burnett: And this is where, yeah, go, you know, go talk to your uncle who, who’s in a red state, if you’re in a blue state or a blue state, if you’re in a red state, talk to people that have different ideas and be, you know, have empathy. You know, we’re out in the world with empathy, trying to discover what does the world need?

[29:35] Bill Burnett: What does the world need right now that I might be able to participate in? Or what does the world think about this idea I have for what I want to do next? Maybe I’m, you know, I want to start a blog. I’ve heard all about all these blog things. I’ve talked to my good friends, you know, who are bloggers like you, and I’ve said, Hey, this is kind of interesting.

[29:52] Bill Burnett: It’s a way of, it’s a way of expression, right? It’s a way of expression and impact. Might even create some money, but at the beginning, it’s really just about, I think I have a point of view. I’d like to get something out there around failure, right? Success through failure. And, uh, I wonder if people would be interested in that.

[30:09] Bill Burnett: And you can start that with your laptop, your iPhone and post your first thing in, you know, a week. So radical collaboration means. All the good ideas are not in my head. That we’ll co create ideas by working together. And the more different we are, the more the chance that we’ll mix up something that’s never happened before.

[30:31] Bill Burnett: And that’s where innovation comes from in products and services. And that’s where that new idea in your life comes from. And it’s just being open to the possibility that there’s something out there that you hadn’t even thought of that’s cooler than your idea. How many times have you been standing in a line at a Starbucks or something and gotten into a conversation with somebody and it turned into a lead up for a job or an interesting opportunity to join a different group or something?

[30:58] Bill Burnett: It’s like just being open in the world to the possibility that there are things happening that you are unaware of, that if you could participate in them, you would. Wow. Things would be different. There’s so many, and that’s such a bigger set of possibilities than just sitting all by yourself, trying to figure stuff out.

[31:18] Bill Burnett: You got to do some of that. You have to do some reflection.

[31:20] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And trying to figure some of this out on our own is one part of it. And radical collaboration is another part, but this whole thing, this designing your life, this getting to your next level, whatever that next level is, even if that’s just the next level of.

[31:34] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Understanding of what makes you tick and what you enjoy, or maybe what you love about your job right now that can help you be a little bit more satisfied, or maybe it’s the next career, but it takes action. It doesn’t happen by just listening to a podcast episode, shaking your head a few times and going, uh huh, uh huh.

[31:52] Jim Harshaw Jr.: That sounds great. That sounds like a good idea. And then flipping onto the next podcast episode and moving on with your life, you actually have to stop and do the work. And one of the things that you talk about in your first book, and it comes up again in the second book, is The work view, life view exercises.

[32:08] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I think they’re really foundational. Can you talk about those?

[32:12] Bill Burnett: And, and that’s a, you know, you, you said, you know, sometimes you just, you know, think by yourself and sometimes you’re out in the world, like, well, the thinking by yourself part is actually pretty important, like you say, it’s kind of a foundation because.

[32:24] Bill Burnett: If you get good at prototyping, if you get good at, you know, radical collaboration and going out in the world and finding a bias to actions and other mindset, lots of stuff’s going to happen. And you’re going to have to decide, you’re going to have to make some decisions. Like, well, is this good or bad? Do I want to go left or right?

[32:38] Bill Burnett: Do I want to go forward or pull back a little? In order to make those decisions and feel like you’re doing something that’s, uh, you know, like you’re actually moving in a consistent direction. You do need to know yourself. And the way we’ve organized that is, well, we’re trying to optimize work. So let’s write 250 to 500 words on our theory of work, our work view, not a job description, but like, why do we work?

[33:06] Bill Burnett: I mean, you know, Hey, if we had a, if we had a guaranteed income in the United States and you could live on, you know, 1, 000 a month, you wouldn’t need to work, but most people do. And most people want to work anyway, because it’s the way of doing something valuable in the world. It’s a way of, you know, interacting with colleagues.

[33:22] Bill Burnett: So what’s your theory of work? Write that down. And then what’s your life view? What is your, you know, work and life? Your life view is truly, you know, 250 words or a novel on why are we here? What’s, what’s the answer to the big question? Why are we here? Is there a God or is there some kind of spiritual, you know, something in the, in the world that puts things together?

[33:46] Bill Burnett: Are we alone? Are we together? What is your view on community? And the individual versus the, you know, the, the greater collection of, of, of individuals. And there’s no, there’s no wrong or right answer, but what we’re looking for is what we call coherence. So if in my life view, I say something nice, like I think part of my life should be helping other people who aren’t as fortunate as me.

[34:12] Bill Burnett: That’s a, a wonderful, positive, you know, aspect of a life view. But my work view is make as much money as possible. And, you know, and, uh, if I have to climb over the backs of my colleagues, who cares? Now, nobody ever writes that down, but you know, if you had that much of a disparity between those two, it wouldn’t be coherent.

[34:34] Bill Burnett: You’d have to either say, you’re just saying nice stuff to make yourself feel good, but you don’t really mean it about this helping others. Or you’d have to say you’ve, you know, exaggerated this, this idea of competition. Competition is fine, but really not at the expense of other human beings. But, but mostly what we find is that people write two, two things, and we, and they come to the realization, Oh, I’ve been putting jobs and work kind of over in this box.

[34:58] Bill Burnett: And I’ve been putting my idea about what makes a good life kind of over in this box. The boxes aren’t talking to each other. And the research shows that when you can connect the dots between who you are and what you do and what you believe, you experience your life as being more meaningful. So taking some time to write those and then speaking them out loud to a, to a friend, do this with a partner.

[35:21] Bill Burnett: They do it theirs, you do yours, and then you speak them out loud. And then you talk about now that you’ve heard yourself say them, because that’s important. Somehow we don’t really own it until we speak it out loud, you know, to another person. And then we have to own it. And then we go, huh, I’m noticing there’s some places where these are really connected.

[35:38] Bill Burnett: I’m noticing other parts that aren’t, they’re not maybe in opposition, but there’s no connection. There’s no connection between this element. And so I wonder if I, if I rewrote it or I thought about it again, or I tried some things, I prototyped some things to see if. Because sometimes we don’t, we don’t always know how we feel until we act in the world.

[35:58] Bill Burnett: Anyway, that, that turns out to be a super generative exercise. Brings up a lot of stuff for people. And when it is coherent, they go, okay, now I know how to judge, you know, whether this path or that path would make the most sense. It disentangles the money thing. I’m not just chasing money anymore. I’m chasing something bigger than that.

[36:19] Bill Burnett: It disentangles some of the other, you know, like, Oh, well, you know, getting promoted is, there’s a whole thing about status. I get a lot of, you know, four year old lawyers in my workshops going, I hate my job. I hate my life. And I go, what happened? And they said, well, you know, I wanted to make, I wanted to get into a good law school.

[36:37] Bill Burnett: And I did, and I got into a good law firm. Made junior partner and then I made partner. Now I’m on the managing committee. So I got all, I just kept chasing that, that status, you know, bigger office, bigger title, bigger something. I got it. And guess what? It doesn’t mean anything to me. So if you can get clear on what really matters.

[36:59] Bill Burnett: In your work and in your life, you don’t go down these paths that, you know, end up as dead ends.

[37:04] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And I encourage the listener to, to actually do this work. This is for the long time listeners. You know what I’m about to say? This is a productive pause. And the definition of a productive pause is a short period of focused reflection around specific questions that leads to clarity of action and peace of mind.

[37:21] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And that’s what we all want is that clarity of action and peace of mind. And it comes from doing exercises like. Absolutely. So if the listeners sitting there, shaking, nodding their head, saying, yes, yes, I get it. I want to move forward. I would number one, recommend that they buy the book, Designing Your Work Life.

[37:42] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And I’m going to have the link in the action plan for all the listeners. Make sure to go to JimHarshawJr.com/action. I’ll have the link there. You can go to Amazon. Of course, anywhere you can buy the book. It’s a great book. It’s a valuable read. I got a ton out of it. And this is the kind of work that I do every day.

[37:57] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And I got so much out of this book. But Bill, can you recommend another action item, something that the listener could do in the next 24 to 48 hours to really start living a life of coherence, to really start designing their work life?

[38:12] Bill Burnett: You know, we were, once we were going to be on a TV show in Canada and we thought we’d have a 10 minute segment and we only had a two minute segment at the end and they said, you got to summarize the whole thing.

[38:21] Bill Burnett: So we came up with this summary and this is where you start. So the whole sort of learning cycle is get curious. Talk to people, try stuff, tell your story. Stories tend to lead to more curiosity, which sends some more talking to people, trying stuff, telling stories. So, the step one is, take your curiosity out for a walk.

[38:43] Bill Burnett: We are naturally curious humans. It’s one of the innate sort of motivators of the human being is they have this, this, this, Weird kind of curiosity. We’ll do stuff just because it’s interesting to us. And sometimes it’s hard to activate your curiosity. If you’ve been in sort of a job and it feels a little bit dead ended, or you’re, you’re just kind of exhausted from the pandemic, I get it.

[39:05] Bill Burnett: But, and stop doom scrolling through, you know, uh, Trump tweets and all that stuff. That’s none of that’s productive. There’s got to be something you’re curious about. I don’t care if it’s, you know, you’re curious about stamp collecting or you’re curious about, you know, nuclear arms treaties, there’s something you can find you’re curious about.

[39:24] Bill Burnett: And nowadays there is the possibility of gathering lots of information from your screen, you know, getting on the internet in a productive way. Cause there’s tons of stuff out there. Pick anything. I don’t care if it’s. 17th century French poetry or learning how to macrame, you know, I’ve noticed macrame and decoupage are coming back in the pandemic.

[39:42] Bill Burnett: Too old, like, you know, craft things from this, from the 70s and 80s. There was macrame hangings in every fern bar in the 80s, I think. Find something you’re curious about. Go spend, spend an hour, just spend an hour and learn about it. And then, and then check in with yourself. Like, am I, is my body tingling?

[39:59] Bill Burnett: Am I curious about learning more? Or is this kind of like, eh, whatever. It’s not as interesting as I thought. Learn to identify that feeling. Learn to identify the feeling of curiosity. Where does it come from? And then learn to identify the feeling that, and it’s a gut feeling. It’s in your body. It’s not in your brain.

[40:15] Bill Burnett: It’s in your body. Am I, is there something that’s driving me to ask questions? The question, tell me more, or is this a, you know, interesting, but, but kind of fit in. Just find curiosity and learn to identify that feeling. You can do that in less than an hour on any subject you want. And the nice part is, is that your brain is organized around generating happy, you know, fun chemicals.

[40:42] Bill Burnett: When you start down a path that, that, that does excite your curiosity, it involves all sorts of different brains, parts of your brain, systems in your brain that we don’t have to go into. But curiosity is the antidote to pandemic boredom, exhaustion, and everything else, because curiosity comes with its own energy source.

[41:01] Bill Burnett: So get curious. That’ll lead you to talking to people and trying prototypes and telling your story. First step is get curious.

[41:10] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Great advice, Bill. Thank you so much. So much to digest here for the listeners. I recommend you go buy the book and dive deeper into all this stuff. So valuable. So helpful. Bill, where can people find you, follow you?

[41:25] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Obviously, we said we can find you. You can find the book pretty much anywhere. But how can people find you, follow you, et cetera?

[41:31] Bill Burnett: Well, we, you know, we, we post a lot of stuff on our website for, you know, we just did, uh, six videos on, on, you know, designing your life in the pandemic times. So, um, go to designingyour.

[41:43] Bill Burnett: life, designingyour. life, life is like com, life. Designingyour. life, that’s where we post everything we do, including workshops that we’re going to do and stuff in the future. But also just lots and lots of reflections now on how do we, how do we get through this pretty extraordinary and predictable time for a lot of people.

[42:01] Bill Burnett: We’re just trying to be helpful. There may be some things in there that people, you know, find that they can use that, uh, helps them reframe, you know, their approach to, um, getting through this pandemic.

[42:12] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Excellent. For the listeners, I’ll have all those links again in the action plan, of course, but I definitely recommend you take action on everything that Bill shared here today.

[42:21] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Bill, thanks for making time to come on the show. Once again, it’s great to see you again.

[42:25] Bill Burnett: Jim, it’s great to be with you. It’s, uh, I think you’re, you’re doing, you’re doing a good service in the world and generating a lot of useful information for people. And again, you know, it is hard to get that, you know, get that, just that little piece of energy that gets you to take the first action.

[42:41] Bill Burnett: But take one, take to any of the things we’ve talked about or any of the things that Jim recommends, if you take action, a bias to action, it’s our mindset, you’ll be surprised at how much comes back to you, how much In the form of energy information and just feeling connected with the world again.

[42:58] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Excellent for the listeners. I’ll have all those links again in the action plan, of course, but I definitely recommend you take action on everything that Bill shared here today. Bill, thanks for making time to come on the show once again. It’s great to see you again.

Note: This text was automatically generated.