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Hello, everyone.

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I'm here to help you design your life.

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We're going to use
the technique of design thinking.

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Design thinking is something
we've been working on at the d.School

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and in the School of Engineering
for over 50 years,

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and it's an innovation methodology,
works on products, works on services.

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But I think the most interesting
design problem is your life!

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So that's what we're going to talk about.

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I want to just make sure everybody knows:
this is my buddy Dave Evans, his face.

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Dave and I are the co-authors of the book,

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and he is the guy who helped me co-found
the Life Design Lab at Stanford.

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So what do we do in the Life Design Lab?

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Well, we teach the class
that helps to figure out

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what you want to be when you grow up.

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Now, I'm going to give you
the first reframe.

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Designers love reframes.

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How many of you hope you never grow up
and lose that child-like curiosity

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that drives everything you do?

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Raise your hand. Right!
Who wants to grow up?

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I mean, we've been talking about curiosity
in almost every one of these talks.

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And so I'd like to reframe this as:

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we say we teach the class
that helps you figure out

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what you want to grow into next,

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as this life of yours,
this amazing design of yours, unfolds.

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So, design thinking is what we teach

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and it's a set of mindsets,
it's how designers think.

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You know, we've been taught
probably in the university

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to be so skeptical realists, rationalists,

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but that's not very useful as a mindset
when you're trying to do something new,

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something no one's ever done before.

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So we say you start with curiosity and you
lean into what you're curious about.

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We say you reframe problems
because most of the time

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we find people are working
on the wrong problems

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and they have a wonderful solution
to something that doesn't work anyway.

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So, what's the point
of working on the wrong thing?

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We say radical collaboration

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because the answer's out
in the world with other people.

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That's where your experience
of your life will be.

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We want to be mindful of our process.

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There are times in the design process
when you want lots of ideas,

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and there are times when you really want
to converge test some things,

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prototype some things,
you want to be good at that.

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And the other is biased action.

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Now, you know, I'll say that we think

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no plan for your life will survive
first contact with reality.

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(Laughter)

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Reality has the tendency to throw little
things at us that we weren't expecting,

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sometimes good things, sometimes bad.

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So we say: just have
a biased action, try stuff.

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Why? Why did we start this class?

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I've been in office hours for a long,
long time with my students.

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I've been teaching here
for a while. Dave as well.

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He was teaching over that community
college, in Berkeley, for a while.

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(Laughter)

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And -

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I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
it's a Stanford TEDx.

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But we notice that people get stuck.

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People really get stuck
and then they don't know what to do

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and they don't seem to have any tools
for getting unstuck.

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Designers get stuck all the time.

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I signed up to be a designer,

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which means I'm going to work
on something I've never done, every day,

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and I get stuck and unstuck,
stuck and unstuck, all the time.

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We also noticed as we went out and talked
to folks who are not just our students,

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but people in mid-career
and encore careers,

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that people have a bunch of beliefs

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which psychologists label
"dysfunctional beliefs,"

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things they believe that are true
that actually aren't true,

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and it holds them back.

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I'll give you three.

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First one is: "What's your passion?

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Tell me your passion and I'll tell you
what you need to do."

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Now, if you actually have
one of these things, these passions -

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you knew at two you wanted to be a doctor,

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you knew at seven you wanted
to be a clown at Cirque du Soleil,

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and now you are one, that's awesome.

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But we're a sort of research space
here at Stanford,

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so we went over to the
Center for the Study of Adolescence,

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which by the way now goes up to 27 -

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(Laughter)

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and met with Bill Damon,
one of our colleagues, a fantastic guy.

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He studied this question and it turns out
less than 20% of the people

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have any one single
identifiable passion in their lives.

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We hate a methodology which says,
"OK, come to the front of the line.

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You have a passion?
Oh, you don't? Oh, I'm sorry.

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When you have one, come on back
and we'll help you with that."

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It's terrible, eight out of 10 people say,
"I have lots of things I'm interested in."

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So this is not an organizing principle
for your search or your design.

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The second one is, "Well,
you should know by now, right?

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Don't you know where you're going?

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If you don't know, you're late."

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(Laughter)

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Now, what are you late for, exactly?

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I'm not quite sure.

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But you know, there's a meta-narrative
in the culture and when I was growing up:

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by 25, you're supposed
to maybe have a relationship,

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maybe have gotten married
and started to get the family together.

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When I talk to my millennial
students, they'll say,

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"Oh, that's got to be
like 30 or something,"

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because they can't imagine,
anything past, like, 22,

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but 30 is a long way out.

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But we know that now these people
are forming their lives much more fluidly,

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they are staying in a lot more dynamic
motion between about 22 and 35,

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and so this notion that you're late
is really kind of like,

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"Well, you should have
figured this out by now."

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Dave and I don't "should" on anybody.

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In the book or in the class,
we don't believe in "should."

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We just think, "Alright,
you are whatever you are.

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Let's start from where you are.
You're not late for anything."

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But the one we really don't like is:

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"Are you being the best
possible version of you?"

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(Laughter)

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"I mean, because you're not settling

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for something that's less than the best,
because this is Stanford.

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Obviously we all
are going to be the best."

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Well, this implies that, one,
there's a singular best;

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two, that it's a linear thing,
and life is anything but linear;

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and three, it kind of comes
from this business notion,

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there's an old business saying,

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"Good is the enemy of better,
better is the enemy of best,"

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and you always want to do
your best in business.

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But if there isn't one singular best,
then our reframe is,

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"The unattainable best is the enemy
of all the available betters,

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because there are many, many versions
of you that you could play out,

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all of which would result
in a well-designed life."

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So I'm going to give you three ideas
from design thinking -

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five ideas, excuse me -
That says five, doesn't it? Yeah.

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Five ideas from design thinking.

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And people who've read the book
or taken the class

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have written back to us and said,

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"Hey, these were the most useful,
these were the most doable,

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they were the most helpful."

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And we're human-centered designers,
so we want to be helpful.

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The first one is this notion
of connecting the dots.

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The number one reason people take
our class and we hear read the book

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is they say, "You know,
I want my life to be meaningful,

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I want it to be purposeful,
I want it to add up to something."

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So, we looked in the positive psychology
literature and in the design literature,

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and it turns out

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that there's who you are,
there's what you believe

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and there's what you do in the world,

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and if you can make a connection
between these three things,

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if you can make that a coherent story,

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you will experience
your life as meaningful.

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The increase in meaning-making
comes from connecting the dots.

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So we do two things.

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We ask people: "Write a work view.
What's your theory of work?

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Not the job you want,
but why do you work? What's it for?

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What's work in service of?"

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Once you have that, 250 words, then -
this one's a little harder to get short,

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"What's the meaning of life?
What's the big picture? Why are you here?

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What is your faith
or your view of the world?"

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When you can connect your life view
and your work view together,

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in a coherent way,

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you start to experience
your life as meaningful.

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That's the idea number one.

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Idea number two: people get stuck

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and you've got to be careful
because we can reframe almost anything,

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but there's a class of problems
that people get stuck on

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that are really, really bad problems.

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We call them gravity problems.

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Essentially, they're something
you cannot change.

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Now, I know you have a friend

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and you've been having coffee
with this friend for a while,

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and they're stuck.

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They don't like their boss,
their partner, their job,

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there's something that they don't like.

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But nothing's happening, right?
Nothing's happening with them.

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If Dave were here he'd say, "Look,

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you can't solve a problem
you're not willing to have."

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You can't solve a problem
you're not willing to have,

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so if you've got a gravity problem

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and you're simply
not willing to work on it,

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then it's just
a circumstance in your life.

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And the only thing we know to do
with gravity problems is to accept.

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In the design thinking chart,
you start with empathy,

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then you redefine the problem,
you come up with lots of ideas,

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then you prototype and test things,

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but that only works if it's a problem
you're willing to work on.

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The first thing to do is accept and once
you've accepted this as gravity problem -

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"I can't change it.

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You know, this is a company,

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the company is a family-run company
and the name of the founder is on the door

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and if you're not in the family,
you can't be the president."

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You're right, you can't!

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So, now you have to decide
what you want to do.

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Is that a circumstance
that you can reframe and work in,

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or do you need to do something else?

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So be really careful
about gravity problems

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because they're pernicious
and they really get in the way.

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But back to this idea of multiples,

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I do a little thought experiment
with my students,

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and I say, you know,

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"The physicists up in SLAC
have kind of demonstrated

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this multiverse thing might be real."

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You've heard of this, that there are
multiple parallel universes,

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one right next to each other.

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And say, "We'll do a thought experiment.

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Let's say you could live
in all the multiverses simultaneously,

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and not only that, but you'd know about
your life in each one of these instances.

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So, you could go back
and be the ballerina,

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and the scientist, and the CPA,
and whatever else you wanted to be.

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You could have all
these lives in parallel."

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When I ask them, "How many lives are you?
How many lives would you want?",

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I get answers from three to 10,000.

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But, you know, we've sort of done
the average: it's about 7,5.

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Most people think they have about 7,5
really good lives that they could live.

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And here's the deal: you only get one.

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But it turns out it's not
what you don't choose,

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it's what you choose in life
that makes you happy.

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Nevertheless, we reframed this and we say,

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"Great, there's more lives
than one in you.

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So let's go on an odyssey,
and let's really figure out those lives!"

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And we ask people to do some design.

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And the "ideate" bubble,
it's about having lot's of ideas.

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So we say, "Let's have some ideas.

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We'll ideate your future,
but you can't ideate just one.

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You have to ideate three."

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Now, there's some research
from the School of Education

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that says if you start with three ideas
and you brainstorm from there,

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you've got a much wider range of ideas,

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the ideas are more generative

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and they lead to better
solutions to the problem

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rather than just starting with one
and then brainstorming forward.

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So we always do threes;
there's something magical about threes.

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We have people do three lives,
and it's transformational.

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We give them this little rubric.

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One: "The thing you're doing,

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the thing you're doing right now,
whatever your career is, just do it.

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And you're going to do it for five years
and it's going to come out great."

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00:11:20,243 --> 00:11:22,512
I mean, in design,
we're sort of values-neutral,

232
00:11:22,512 --> 00:11:26,302
except for one thing: we never
design anything to make it worse, right?

233
00:11:26,302 --> 00:11:29,178
I have been on some teams
that made some pretty bad products,

234
00:11:29,178 --> 00:11:32,243
but we weren't trying to,
we were trying to make it better.

235
00:11:32,243 --> 00:11:35,151
So, thing one: your life, make it better.

236
00:11:35,884 --> 00:11:38,354
And also put in the bucket list stuff:

237
00:11:38,354 --> 00:11:40,413
you want to go to Paris,
to the Galapagos -

238
00:11:41,103 --> 00:11:42,522
the guy with the ice thing -

239
00:11:42,522 --> 00:11:46,880
before it's all under water
and we can't see it anymore.

240
00:11:46,880 --> 00:11:49,742
So, that's plan one: your life goes great.

241
00:11:49,742 --> 00:11:51,169
Plan two:

242
00:11:51,763 --> 00:11:54,812
I'm really sorry to tell you,
but the robots and the AI stuff -

243
00:11:54,812 --> 00:11:57,421
that job doesn't exist anymore,
the robots are doing it.

244
00:11:57,421 --> 00:11:59,321
We don't need you to do that anymore.

245
00:11:59,501 --> 00:12:01,104
Now, what are going to do?

246
00:12:01,304 --> 00:12:05,313
So what do you do if the thing
that you've got goes away?

247
00:12:05,313 --> 00:12:08,941
And you know, everybody's got
a side hustle or something they can do

248
00:12:08,941 --> 00:12:10,974
to make that work.

249
00:12:10,974 --> 00:12:13,863
And three is: what's your wild-card plan?

250
00:12:13,863 --> 00:12:17,641
What would you do if you didn't have
to worry about money? You've got enough.

251
00:12:17,641 --> 00:12:20,152
You're not fabulously wealthy,
but you've got enough.

252
00:12:20,152 --> 00:12:23,656
And what would you do
if you knew no one would laugh?

253
00:12:24,252 --> 00:12:26,870
My students come in
for my office hours a lot of times,

254
00:12:26,870 --> 00:12:28,371
and they'll say something like,

255
00:12:28,371 --> 00:12:32,173
"Well, what I really want to do is this,
but I can't just hear people saying,

256
00:12:32,173 --> 00:12:34,851
'You didn't go to Stanford
to do that, did you?'"

257
00:12:34,851 --> 00:12:36,061
(Laughter)

258
00:12:36,061 --> 00:12:38,072
Because somehow, if you went to Stanford,

259
00:12:38,072 --> 00:12:41,682
you have to do some of the amazing things
the past speakers have been doing.

260
00:12:41,682 --> 00:12:44,383
"But what would you do
if you had enough money

261
00:12:44,383 --> 00:12:47,127
and you didn't care what people thought?

262
00:12:48,232 --> 00:12:52,776
Anything from,
'I'm going to go study butterflies'

263
00:12:52,776 --> 00:12:57,281
to, 'I want to be a bartender,
you know, in Belize.' What would you do?"

264
00:12:57,281 --> 00:12:58,926
And people have those three plans.

265
00:12:58,926 --> 00:13:01,615
Now what happens when
they do this is, one, they realize,

266
00:13:01,615 --> 00:13:03,656
"Oh my gosh, I could
actually have imagined

267
00:13:03,656 --> 00:13:06,659
my three completely parallel lives
are all pretty interesting."

268
00:13:06,659 --> 00:13:10,479
Two, they rarely go become a bartender,
you know, in Belize.

269
00:13:10,479 --> 00:13:13,457
But a lot of times, the things
that come up in the other plans

270
00:13:13,457 --> 00:13:16,917
were things that they left behind somehow.

271
00:13:16,917 --> 00:13:20,291
In the business of life,
they forgot about those things.

272
00:13:20,587 --> 00:13:23,255
And so they bring them back
and put them in plan one,

273
00:13:23,255 --> 00:13:25,136
then they make their lives even better.

274
00:13:25,136 --> 00:13:27,057
Sometimes they do pivot,

275
00:13:27,057 --> 00:13:29,898
but mostly they just use this
as a method of ideating

276
00:13:29,898 --> 00:13:33,334
all the possible wonderful ways
they could have a life.

277
00:13:33,859 --> 00:13:37,027
Now, you could start executing that,

278
00:13:37,027 --> 00:13:41,300
but in our model, the thing you do after
you have ideas is you build a prototype.

279
00:13:41,775 --> 00:13:45,277
We have met people who've quit their job
and suddenly done something else,

280
00:13:45,277 --> 00:13:47,705
It hardly ever works.

281
00:13:47,705 --> 00:13:50,887
You kind of have to sneak up on it,
because in our model,

282
00:13:50,887 --> 00:13:55,132
we want to set the bar really low,
try stuff, have some success, do it again.

283
00:13:55,476 --> 00:13:58,346
So when we say "prototype,"
in our language,

284
00:13:58,346 --> 00:14:01,806
what we mean is a way to ask
an interesting question,

285
00:14:01,806 --> 00:14:04,117
"What would it be like if I tried this?",

286
00:14:04,117 --> 00:14:06,339
a way to expose the assumptions,

287
00:14:06,339 --> 00:14:07,827
"Is this even the thing I want

288
00:14:07,827 --> 00:14:11,416
or is that just something
I remember I wanted when I was 20?"

289
00:14:11,985 --> 00:14:14,078
I've got to go out
in the world and do this,

290
00:14:14,078 --> 00:14:17,766
so I'm going to get others involved
in prototyping my life,

291
00:14:17,766 --> 00:14:21,527
and I'm going to sneak up on the future,

292
00:14:21,527 --> 00:14:24,119
because I don't if this is
exactly what I want.

293
00:14:25,255 --> 00:14:28,247
There's two kinds
of life-design prototypes

294
00:14:28,247 --> 00:14:30,707
and what we call prototype conversation.

295
00:14:30,707 --> 00:14:33,164
You know, William Gibson,
the science-fiction writer

296
00:14:33,164 --> 00:14:34,179
has a famous quote:

297
00:14:34,179 --> 00:14:37,563
"The future is already here.
It's just unevenly distributed."

298
00:14:37,905 --> 00:14:40,549
So, there is someone
who's a bartender in Ibiza.

299
00:14:40,549 --> 00:14:44,618
He's been doing it for years, I could go
meet him and have a conversation,

300
00:14:44,618 --> 00:14:45,706
he or she.

301
00:14:45,706 --> 00:14:49,117
Somebody else is doing
something else I'm interested in.

302
00:14:49,117 --> 00:14:53,127
All of these people are out there,
they're living in my future, today.

303
00:14:53,127 --> 00:14:55,006
They're doing what I want to do, today.

304
00:14:55,006 --> 00:14:56,900
And if I have a conversation with them,

305
00:14:56,900 --> 00:15:00,066
I just ask for their story
and everybody will tell you their story.

306
00:15:00,066 --> 00:15:02,775
If you buy them a cup of coffee,
they tell you the story.

307
00:15:02,775 --> 00:15:05,158
If I hear something
in the story that rings in me -

308
00:15:05,158 --> 00:15:07,434
We have this thing
we call narrative resonance:

309
00:15:07,434 --> 00:15:11,136
when I hear a story that's kind of like
my story, something happens,

310
00:15:11,136 --> 00:15:15,283
and I can identify that
as a potential way of moving forward.

311
00:15:15,283 --> 00:15:17,867
The other one is a prototype experience.

312
00:15:17,867 --> 00:15:19,726
Dave and I were working with a woman,

313
00:15:19,726 --> 00:15:23,165
sort of mid-career in her 40s
and a very successful tech executive,

314
00:15:23,165 --> 00:15:25,756
but wanted to move from
money-making to meaning-making,

315
00:15:25,756 --> 00:15:27,305
to do something more meaningful,

316
00:15:27,305 --> 00:15:30,186
thinking of going back to school,
getting an MA in education,

317
00:15:30,186 --> 00:15:31,886
working with kids.

318
00:15:31,886 --> 00:15:35,407
But she's like, "You know, I don't know,
I'm 45, going back to school.

319
00:15:35,407 --> 00:15:36,843
It's not going to work.

320
00:15:36,843 --> 00:15:38,818
And then I heard about these millennials.

321
00:15:38,818 --> 00:15:41,381
They're kind of mean
and they don't like old people."

322
00:15:41,381 --> 00:15:42,397
(Laughter)

323
00:15:42,397 --> 00:15:43,985
What am I going to do, Bill?"

324
00:15:43,985 --> 00:15:46,646
I said, "Well, you just have
to go try this, you know.

325
00:15:46,646 --> 00:15:49,007
It turns out we sent her
to a seminar class

326
00:15:49,007 --> 00:15:50,907
and to a large lecture-hall class,

327
00:15:50,907 --> 00:15:53,807
and by the way, you just
put on a T-shirt that says "Stanford"

328
00:15:53,807 --> 00:15:55,837
and you walk into a class, nobody knows.

329
00:15:55,837 --> 00:15:59,336
She wasn't registered, but you know,
she went and she went to the classes

330
00:15:59,336 --> 00:16:02,266
and she came back and said,
"You know what? It was fantastic!

331
00:16:02,266 --> 00:16:05,267
I walked into the lecture hall,
I sat down, my body was on fire!

332
00:16:05,267 --> 00:16:08,708
It was interesting, I was so interested
in the way the lecture was going.

333
00:16:08,708 --> 00:16:10,296
And then I met these millennials.

334
00:16:10,296 --> 00:16:12,563
It turned out they're
pretty interesting people!

335
00:16:12,563 --> 00:16:14,516
I've set up three
prototype conversations.

336
00:16:14,516 --> 00:16:18,657
And they think I'm interesting because
I'm coming back to school and I'm 45."

337
00:16:18,657 --> 00:16:22,045
So she had a felt experience,
because we are more than just our brains.

338
00:16:22,045 --> 00:16:24,626
She had a felt experience
that this might work for her.

339
00:16:24,626 --> 00:16:27,885
So these are two ways
you can prototype your way forward.

340
00:16:28,695 --> 00:16:30,045
The last idea:

341
00:16:30,045 --> 00:16:32,347
you want to make a good decision well.

342
00:16:32,687 --> 00:16:36,245
So many people make choices
and they're not happy with their choices

343
00:16:36,245 --> 00:16:41,376
because they don't really know
how do they know what they know, right?

344
00:16:41,376 --> 00:16:44,828
It's a hard thing, particularly in our
days when we have so many choices.

345
00:16:44,828 --> 00:16:46,057
So we have a process.

346
00:16:46,057 --> 00:16:48,801
Again it comes from
the positive psychology guys.

347
00:16:48,984 --> 00:16:50,268
Gather and create options.

348
00:16:50,268 --> 00:16:53,719
Once you get good at design you're
really good at coming up with options.

349
00:16:53,719 --> 00:16:57,006
You've got narrow those down
to a working list that you can work with.

350
00:16:57,006 --> 00:16:59,358
Then, you make the choice
to make a good choice,

351
00:16:59,358 --> 00:17:02,189
and then of course you agonize
that you did the wrong thing.

352
00:17:02,189 --> 00:17:03,118
(Laughter)

353
00:17:03,118 --> 00:17:05,901
All my students have what is called
FOMO, fear missing out,

354
00:17:05,901 --> 00:17:07,818
"What if I didn't pick the right thing."

355
00:17:07,818 --> 00:17:11,607
Someone came into my office and said,
"I'll declare three majors and two minors"

356
00:17:11,607 --> 00:17:15,059
and I said, "Do you plan
on being here for a few years?

357
00:17:15,059 --> 00:17:16,755
It's not going to happen, right?"

358
00:17:16,755 --> 00:17:20,091
So we don't say that; we say
you want to let go and move on,

359
00:17:20,091 --> 00:17:23,295
and all these have
some psychological basis in them.

360
00:17:23,295 --> 00:17:24,568
Let me tell you about it.

361
00:17:24,568 --> 00:17:27,010
Once you get good at gathering
and creating ideas,

362
00:17:27,010 --> 00:17:30,078
you also want to make sure
you leave room for the lucky ideas,

363
00:17:30,078 --> 00:17:31,864
the serendipitous ideas.

364
00:17:31,864 --> 00:17:33,359
This is a guy named Tony Hsieh.

365
00:17:33,359 --> 00:17:36,737
He was the CEO at Zappos,
he sold it to Amazon.

366
00:17:36,737 --> 00:17:40,458
But before you became an employee
at Zappos you had to take a test,

367
00:17:40,458 --> 00:17:42,508
and the test was, "Are you lucky?"

368
00:17:42,508 --> 00:17:45,428
One, two or three: "I'm not very lucky,
and I'm not sure why."

369
00:17:45,428 --> 00:17:49,230
Seven, eight, nine, ten, "I'm very lucky,
great things happen to me all the time,

370
00:17:49,230 --> 00:17:50,539
I'm not sure why."

371
00:17:51,130 --> 00:17:53,360
He wouldn't hire anybody
who was not lucky.

372
00:17:53,360 --> 00:17:54,356
(Laughter)

373
00:17:54,356 --> 00:17:57,057
I think it's probably illegal,
but it was based on -

374
00:17:57,057 --> 00:17:58,007
(Laughter)

375
00:17:58,007 --> 00:18:01,728
but it was based on a piece of research
where psychologists did the same thing,

376
00:18:01,728 --> 00:18:03,548
"Rate yourself from lucky to unlucky."

377
00:18:03,548 --> 00:18:07,039
And then they had people read
the front section of the New York Times,

378
00:18:07,039 --> 00:18:09,399
30 pages, lots of articles.

379
00:18:09,399 --> 00:18:11,698
And the graduate students said,

380
00:18:11,698 --> 00:18:13,316
"Please count the number of -"

381
00:18:13,316 --> 00:18:16,377
either headlines or photographs,
depending on the test.

382
00:18:16,377 --> 00:18:20,518
"And when you get the whole thing read
and you count the number of photographs,

383
00:18:20,518 --> 00:18:22,137
just tell the person at the end."

384
00:18:22,137 --> 00:18:24,971
And if you got the
right number, you'd get $100.

385
00:18:26,300 --> 00:18:27,639
Of course you all know

386
00:18:27,639 --> 00:18:31,588
when a graduate student tells you what the
experiment is that's not the experiment.

387
00:18:31,588 --> 00:18:34,337
So, inside this thing
that looked like the New York Times,

388
00:18:34,337 --> 00:18:35,806
30 pages, front page,

389
00:18:35,806 --> 00:18:38,648
inside all the stories were
little pieces of text that said,

390
00:18:38,648 --> 00:18:42,935
"If you read this, the experiment's over.
Collect an extra $ 150."

391
00:18:43,678 --> 00:18:48,736
People who rated themselves as unlucky
by and large got the right answer,

392
00:18:48,736 --> 00:18:50,626
36 headlines, whatever it was,

393
00:18:50,626 --> 00:18:52,278
got the $ 100.

394
00:18:52,278 --> 00:18:56,748
People who rated themselves as lucky -
seven, eight, nine or ten -

395
00:18:56,748 --> 00:19:01,477
80% of the time noticed the text
and got the extra $150.

396
00:19:01,477 --> 00:19:02,897
It's not about being lucky.

397
00:19:02,897 --> 00:19:05,136
It's about paying attention
to what you're doing

398
00:19:05,136 --> 00:19:08,829
and keeping your peripheral vision open
because it's in your peripheral vision

399
00:19:08,829 --> 00:19:11,373
that those interesting
opportunities show up, right,

400
00:19:11,373 --> 00:19:13,245
that you were not expecting.

401
00:19:13,245 --> 00:19:15,153
So you want to get good at being lucky.

402
00:19:15,153 --> 00:19:17,241
Narrowing down. This is quite simple.

403
00:19:17,881 --> 00:19:21,731
If you have too many choices, you go into
what psychologists call choice overload,

404
00:19:21,731 --> 00:19:24,353
and then you have essentially no choices.

405
00:19:24,353 --> 00:19:27,342
Here's the experiment.
This was done at Stanford.

406
00:19:27,782 --> 00:19:30,322
You walk into a grocery store
and there's a nice lady.

407
00:19:30,322 --> 00:19:33,793
She's got a table and on the table,
she has six jams,

408
00:19:33,793 --> 00:19:37,172
and you come over try the jams
to have a sample, buy some jam.

409
00:19:37,172 --> 00:19:40,991
Six jams; about 30 people
who would go by pick a jam,

410
00:19:40,991 --> 00:19:42,504
or stop and test something,

411
00:19:42,504 --> 00:19:45,621
and about a third
of those actually buy a jam.

412
00:19:46,262 --> 00:19:47,432
That's the baseline.

413
00:19:47,432 --> 00:19:49,970
Next week, you walk in, 24 jams:

414
00:19:51,200 --> 00:19:55,282
jalapeño, strawberry, banana,
whatever; all sorts of jams.

415
00:19:55,282 --> 00:19:56,532
Well, guess what happens?

416
00:19:56,532 --> 00:19:58,882
Twice as many people stop,
look at all these jams,

417
00:19:58,882 --> 00:20:00,470
it's so interesting.

418
00:20:00,732 --> 00:20:02,532
Three percent of the people buy them.

419
00:20:02,532 --> 00:20:03,563
(Laughter)

420
00:20:03,563 --> 00:20:06,434
When you have too many choices,
you have no choice.

421
00:20:06,953 --> 00:20:09,233
What do you do when you have
too many choices?

422
00:20:09,233 --> 00:20:10,993
Just cross off a bunch of choices.

423
00:20:10,993 --> 00:20:13,955
Psychologists tells us we can't handle
more than five to seven.

424
00:20:13,955 --> 00:20:15,483
I'd say it's five.

425
00:20:15,483 --> 00:20:18,374
If you've got a bunch of choices,
cross them all off,

426
00:20:18,374 --> 00:20:20,884
just pick the five and then
make your decision there.

427
00:20:20,884 --> 00:20:25,254
"Oh my God! What if I pick the wrong ones?
What if I cross off the wrong ones?"

428
00:20:25,254 --> 00:20:26,262
Right?

429
00:20:26,262 --> 00:20:29,432
Well, you won't, because it's
the pizza or Chinese food thing.

430
00:20:29,432 --> 00:20:32,802
You're at the office and everybody says,
"Let's go out to lunch today."

431
00:20:32,802 --> 00:20:36,482
"Sounds great. What do you want to do?
Pizza or Chinese food?" "I don't care."

432
00:20:36,482 --> 00:20:41,272
In the elevator on their way down,
someone says, "Let's get Chinese food."

433
00:20:41,682 --> 00:20:43,340
Then you go, "No, I want pizza."

434
00:20:43,340 --> 00:20:44,428
(Laughter)

435
00:20:45,922 --> 00:20:51,024
You won't decide how you feel about
the decision till the decision's made.

436
00:20:51,024 --> 00:20:54,322
That's a piece of research that's
been done again and again and again.

437
00:20:54,322 --> 00:20:55,463
So just cross them off.

438
00:20:55,463 --> 00:20:56,941
If you cross off the wrong one,

439
00:20:56,941 --> 00:21:00,651
you'll have a feeling somewhere in your
stomach that you did the wrong thing.

440
00:21:00,651 --> 00:21:03,131
Choosing - this is about
that feeling in your stomach.

441
00:21:03,131 --> 00:21:07,992
You cannot choose well if you choose
only from your rational mind.

442
00:21:09,282 --> 00:21:12,394
This is Dan Goleman, who wrote
the book on emotional intelligence.

443
00:21:12,394 --> 00:21:15,133
He does a lot of research on this,
a lot of brain science.

444
00:21:15,133 --> 00:21:16,533
There's a part of your brain,

445
00:21:16,533 --> 00:21:19,005
way down in the base brain,
the basal ganglia,

446
00:21:19,005 --> 00:21:21,360
that summarizes emotional
decisions for you.

447
00:21:21,360 --> 00:21:24,571
I did something, got good emotional
response from that: good, check.

448
00:21:24,571 --> 00:21:27,575
I did something and had a little bad
emotional response to that.

449
00:21:27,575 --> 00:21:30,107
It summarizes all of the emotions
that you have felt

450
00:21:30,107 --> 00:21:33,794
and how your decisions were valenced
positive or negative an emotion.

451
00:21:33,794 --> 00:21:37,342
The problem with that part of your brain
is that it's so early in the brain

452
00:21:37,342 --> 00:21:39,833
it doesn't talk to the part
of your brain that talks.

453
00:21:39,833 --> 00:21:42,871
There's no connection
to the prefrontal cortex or anything else.

454
00:21:42,871 --> 00:21:45,803
It's only connected to your GI tract
and your limbic system.

455
00:21:45,803 --> 00:21:49,490
So, it gives you information
through felt sensations,

456
00:21:49,490 --> 00:21:50,942
a "gut feeling."

457
00:21:50,942 --> 00:21:53,921
Without that, you can't make
good decisions.

458
00:21:54,350 --> 00:21:56,193
And then the letting go and moving on.

459
00:21:56,193 --> 00:22:00,523
This was the hardest part for me,
but this is also the work of Dan Gilbert,

460
00:22:00,523 --> 00:22:02,966
who is a distinguished
scientist at Harvard,

461
00:22:02,966 --> 00:22:06,823
despite the fact that he's doing
insurance commercials now.

462
00:22:06,823 --> 00:22:11,857
And he's been studying decision-making
and how do you make yourself happy.

463
00:22:11,857 --> 00:22:15,434
So, you walk in another
psychology experiment.

464
00:22:17,004 --> 00:22:21,286
The postdoc has got five Monet prints,
five pictures from Monet,

465
00:22:21,286 --> 00:22:23,069
and you rank them from best to least,

466
00:22:23,069 --> 00:22:25,660
"I like this one the most,
I like this one the least,"

467
00:22:25,660 --> 00:22:26,969
number one and number five.

468
00:22:26,969 --> 00:22:29,012
"Thank you very much,
the experiment's over.

469
00:22:29,012 --> 00:22:31,256
Oh, by the way, as you're
walking out, you know,

470
00:22:31,256 --> 00:22:34,408
I kind of screwed up and I bought
too many of number two and three.

471
00:22:34,408 --> 00:22:36,887
So if you want to take one home
you can just have it.

472
00:22:36,887 --> 00:22:39,437
Two conditions: in one case,
take it home and have it,

473
00:22:39,437 --> 00:22:42,336
but don't bring it back
because I'm kind of embarrassed and -

474
00:22:42,336 --> 00:22:44,496
Just keep it, you can't exchange it.

475
00:22:44,496 --> 00:22:46,449
Second condition: I've got lots of these.

476
00:22:46,449 --> 00:22:48,267
If you don't like the one you picked,

477
00:22:48,267 --> 00:22:51,057
you can swap it back
and pick another one."

478
00:22:51,057 --> 00:22:55,024
And of course everybody picks number two.
It's a little better than number three.

479
00:22:55,328 --> 00:22:57,495
We bring people back in
a week later and say,

480
00:22:57,495 --> 00:23:00,477
"Re-rank the stimuli.
Which one do you like now?"

481
00:23:00,477 --> 00:23:04,027
The people who were allowed to change
their mind don't like their painting,

482
00:23:04,027 --> 00:23:05,287
they don't like the print,

483
00:23:05,287 --> 00:23:08,895
they don't like the other one anymore,
they don't like any of them anymore.

484
00:23:08,895 --> 00:23:10,923
In fact, they don't like the whole process

485
00:23:10,923 --> 00:23:13,647
and they have destroyed
their opportunity to be happy.

486
00:23:13,647 --> 00:23:14,727
(Laughter)

487
00:23:15,257 --> 00:23:19,555
The people who were told, "You pick it,
it's yours, you can't return it"

488
00:23:19,555 --> 00:23:22,977
love their print, they typically
rank it as number one

489
00:23:22,977 --> 00:23:25,448
and think the rest of them suck.

490
00:23:25,448 --> 00:23:26,547
(Laughter)

491
00:23:26,697 --> 00:23:29,979
If you make decisions reversible,

492
00:23:30,406 --> 00:23:34,476
your chance of being happy
goes down like 60 or 70 percent.

493
00:23:34,476 --> 00:23:38,464
So, let go and move on,
make the decision reversible.

494
00:23:38,464 --> 00:23:41,943
And by the way, as a designer,
that's no problem,

495
00:23:41,943 --> 00:23:44,816
because you're really good
at generating options,

496
00:23:45,194 --> 00:23:47,174
you're great at ideation,

497
00:23:47,174 --> 00:23:49,962
you're really good at prototyping
to get data in the world

498
00:23:49,962 --> 00:23:52,743
to see of that world will be
the world you want to live in,

499
00:23:52,743 --> 00:23:54,837
so you have no fear of missing out.

500
00:23:54,837 --> 00:24:00,666
It's just a process, a mindful process:
collect, reduce, decide, move on.

501
00:24:00,666 --> 00:24:02,811
That's how you make yourself happy.

502
00:24:03,514 --> 00:24:04,580
So,

503
00:24:04,994 --> 00:24:06,824
the five ideas:

504
00:24:06,824 --> 00:24:10,305
Connecting the dots to find meaning
through work and life views.

505
00:24:10,305 --> 00:24:13,985
Stay away from gravity problems because
I can't fix those and neither can you;

506
00:24:13,985 --> 00:24:16,423
reframe those to something
that is workable.

507
00:24:16,423 --> 00:24:19,308
Do three plans, never one,
always do three of everything,

508
00:24:19,308 --> 00:24:22,064
three ideations for any
of the problems you're working on

509
00:24:22,064 --> 00:24:26,374
to make sure that you've covered not just
the ideas that you had when you started,

510
00:24:26,374 --> 00:24:28,933
but all the other ideas that are possible.

511
00:24:28,933 --> 00:24:33,072
Prototype everything in your life
before you jump in and try it.

512
00:24:33,072 --> 00:24:37,531
And choose well; there's no point
in making a good choice poorly.

513
00:24:37,531 --> 00:24:43,040
Choose well and you will find
that things in your life are much easier.

514
00:24:43,040 --> 00:24:45,221
And you can do this, we know you can,

515
00:24:45,221 --> 00:24:47,231
because thousands
of students have done it.

516
00:24:47,231 --> 00:24:49,260
Two PhD studies
have been done in the class

517
00:24:49,260 --> 00:24:52,501
that demonstrated higher self-efficacy,
lower dysfunctional beliefs.

518
00:24:52,501 --> 00:24:56,489
It's a fascinating process to watch people
who don't think of themselves as creative

519
00:24:56,489 --> 00:24:58,490
go through this class and walk out saying,

520
00:24:58,490 --> 00:25:00,631
"You know what?
I'm a pretty creative person!"

521
00:25:00,631 --> 00:25:02,781
what David Kelly calls
"creative confidence."

522
00:25:02,781 --> 00:25:05,930
So, we know you can do it,
thank you very much.

523
00:25:05,930 --> 00:25:07,321
It's simple:

524
00:25:07,321 --> 00:25:09,181
get curious,

525
00:25:09,181 --> 00:25:10,529
talk to people

526
00:25:10,529 --> 00:25:11,880
and try stuff,

527
00:25:11,880 --> 00:25:14,452
and you will design
a well-lived and joyful life.

528
00:25:14,452 --> 00:25:15,751
Thank you.

529
00:25:15,751 --> 00:25:17,669
(Applause) (Cheers)