Dave Evans: Stanford Professor and Author of Designing Your Life

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Remarkable People Podcast Here I want to give a shout out to the My First Million podcast. It's hosted by Sam Parr and Sean Pury. It's now available on the HubSpot podcast network. Just like Remarkable People, My First Million features guests discussing how they made their first million. Duh. And brainstorming about the hottest trends and opportunities. They recently made an episode called How Venture Capitalists Make Money. They interviewed solo capitalist Brion Kimmel in that episode. Listen to My First Million wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, it's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast. This episode's guest is Dave Evans. He is a lecturer for the Product Design program at Stanford, a management consultant, and the co founder of Electronic Arts. He's not the singer with AC dc. Dave was an early Apple employee. He worked in the Lisa division on the laser printer and mouse. He left Apple to co found Electronic Arts with Trip Hawkins. Come to find out, Dave may very well be the person who introduced the concept of evangelism to Apple and the rest is history. Dave obtained his BS and Ms. In Mechanical Engineering from Stanford along with a graduate Diploma in Contemplative Spirituality from the San Francisco Theological Seminary. Throughout his experiences and accomplishments he came to discover that the same design thinking responsible for amazing technology and products can be used as a blueprint when designing one's ideal career and life. These findings inspired him to co found the Stanford Design Lab with Bill Burnett in 2007. This resulted in the formation of one of the most popular courses ever at Stanford, at least according to Fast Company and the book Designing youg Life. We are going to cover why interests trump passions, how to get hired, what to do before you quit, and should it come to this, how to quit. If your podcast player provides the ability to slow down speed, now would be a good time to do it because Dave is a fire hose of ideas and opinions. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People and now here is Dave Evans. Did we overlap At Apple.

Just barely. I actually think you owe me a huge debt of gratitude. Why? Because it. When I left to co found Electronic Arts was Trip. Steve walked me around the parking lot for three and a half hours and tried to talk me into being the division director Marketing for Mac.

So you would have been Mike Murray?

Yeah, or you. I mean the. And the other thing is I left, made some more opportunity and it was actually, it was a really hard call. I was having a really good time at the time. You know, I've been there a couple years and did this stuff really well. And the other thing, I actually have a question. So we, we technically did overlap. I believe you had joined the company before I left. But then the first time I actually saw you, and I don't know if we interacted much, was when you introduced the very first ever Apple Developer Conference. And one of your first slides was your business card which said that you were an Apple evangelist. And it included a definition in a dictionary formatted phonetic layout of what the word evangelism means, what Apple evangelism is. And at that point we'd been Electronic Arts for about seven minutes and Tripp and I came. So I came back to Apple as a vendor, as a prospective evangelist and saw that. I went, oh, now that's interesting because I have to know the backstory. I don't know this for sure, but there's a real good shot that I was the first guy that brought the word evangelism to Apple because I was on the corporate culture committee with Ann Byers and Steve and 12 guys. And I'd been at the company about two months when that got started. Now they were terrified during that year that we grew from 800 to 5,000 people, that all these people from National Semiconductor and HP were going to turn this into some other place. And they're all talking about, you know, we need a museum, we need a training program. And I'd only been there a little while and most people, Steve included, knew that I was the seriously religious guy. And they're all talking and I said, none of this is going to work because what you're talking about is not a program and it's not a training thing. Evangelism, which was not a business word at the time in 1980. And the room stops dead and Steve leans over and he goes, what the fuck did you just say? And Steve, I mean Trapp, who's sitting next to me, interrupts because as he's dragged this guy along, he's like, I didn't deserve to be there. Nowhere near mature enough, but he's interested. And Tripling's running, kind of goes, hey, Steve. He talks like this all the time. Give him a minute. It's either going to be really interesting or we'll just fire his ass. And Steve goes, go ahead and strip. Goes, go. You got a minute. Go. You know, they said, let me tell you what evangelism is. And I won't do the whole shtick, but in about a minute I explained, it's caught, not taught. It's a disease model. You can only get it from somebody who's got it. It's all about the people, these people who are arriving. The only way to become Apple people is to the people who are Apple people. Turn them into Apple people. Programs don't turn them into Apple. To people. People turn into people. And that pivoted the whole program, and I didn't get fired. But it wasn't like evangelism. Posters went up the next week. But nonetheless, you know, that was the first time I'd seen the word evangelism in print in a business meeting. Was at that meeting that you led. Wow. So we never collab, we never worked together, we never collaborated, but we just bounced off each other very briefly. Wow.

I owe my title to you, maybe.

But I'm pretty sure you thought it up.

So the sequence was, first it was Jesus, then there was Dave, and then there was Guy. Did I get that right?

The etymology of technological theological understanding. There you go. That's great. Absolutely. I'm. I'm of a Polish Cephas Daver. Guy. There you go. Yeah.

People at Fuller are throwing up right now, but that's a different discussion.

Actually, they're not, because Todd Bolsinger, the EVP that helped do the complete reformat of the formation model, then at Fuller, I worked with them really closely for many years. I did senior high ministry with Steve Fuller, grandson of the founder, in pasadena in the 70s. You go way back, and we're hanging out at the Coho at Stanford, Todd and I, and he goes, hey, Dave, guess what? I figured out why we get along so well. Because design thinking and practical theology are the same thing, just with different words. I said, great. What does that mean? You know? He says, practical theology is a very specific approach. He sends me a white paper, kind of go, oh, yeah, it's totally. It's orthopraxy, not orthodoxy. It' about doing that kind of stuff. And he said, that's why we get along. I go, fine. I was happy getting along without even understanding why. But I'M glad to know why. Anyway, we digress. We digress easily. In.

In your brief stint at Apple, what were you working on?

Oh, I joined Apple six weeks before the ipo, and that's a bit of a story. It starts with me hanging up on them on the phone three times because you're probably looking for the Dave Evans at Hewlett Packard. He's the computer guy, I'm the mechanical engineering guy. Had a welding torch in my hand at the time when Apple called me. Then as now, Apple's pretty arrogant. If anybody's going to hang up, it's us, not you. And I finally relent and say, look, okay, I'll come over, let you buy me lunch. I don't think you guys are interesting. I don't really like computers, but I'll come to lunch once because Steve was just on the COVID of Time magazine. That might be interesting. And then we'll all figure out, this is stupid, but fine, you're paying for the lunch. So we have lunch. And they do figure out I know nothing about what they do. And at the end they kind of go, huh, well, yeah, now what? But you're kind of interesting. And I go, well, yeah, actually, you're more interesting than I thought you'd be too. What do you want to do? I kind of go. You call the meeting, you decide. And they kind of go, well, will you come back? Come back and talk somebody else kind of go, sure, I'll come back to talk somewhere else. Fourteen visits later, Steve says, you don't understand fuck all about what you do, but we think you're an Apple kind of guy. Let's just try this thing for 90 days, see what happens. Off we go. So then I ended up, I was the third guy in the Lisa marketing team. I worked for Tripp.

Oh, you poor thing.

Because I had a mechanical engineering degree, okay, you product manage anything with a moving part in it. You understand parts. So I had keyboards, mice and printers and disk drives. And the two really interesting things were the mouse and printers. So I got to bring desktop laser printing to the world, which is pretty cool.

The way I remembered, we didn't start laser printing until about 1985 or something with Bob Belville. And so you're telling me there was a laser printer project way back when?

Yeah. So what happened? So we realized we wanted to have graphic printing and we wanted fonts. Fonts didn't exist. The only was fixed character set on 12 matrix printers. And so the first thing I wanted to work on was trying to get somebody to build us a laser printer, a dot matrix scanning laser, the ImageWriter. To get a low end entry level printer where we could control all the materials so we could just turn it into a slow laser. They all came with character generators and stuff. And we said, no, no, no, strip all that shit out. We just want the print head, the platen and the carriage. Just give me the raw controls, we'll take it from there. That was incredibly hard to get somebody to give us that. There's a long story. Got it. And Epson blew it. But they did and we made them a ton of money. And then on the laser side, no, we started working on the lasers immediately. So I was up with Dan Putman before Adobe existed, roaming around the basement at Xerox park looking for stuff we could turn into products. Went to HP Boise, saw the very first Canon optic on a test bed on a bench in 81. So we were working on the laser stuff from the start. We begged Xerox to go into the business. They wouldn't, they didn't get it. And so that's where Hewlett Packard and the laser writer really came into fruition. It wasn't available on the release of the Lisa, but it was all underway. And that's when it got to be such a big deal. People go, oh, wait a minute, this is going to be huge. In fact, the laser printer is more complex and more expensive than the computer. And we go, yeah, now you're finally getting it. Because Steve Capps and Owen Densmore, who we stole from Xerox, finally got them to understand what's going on. So Bill Atkins, Steve Capps and Owen Densmore go, no, this is the hard part. And I ran off and created those relationships. And then they started the Peripherals division. So they took the keyboard company, Mike, what's his name, the crazy German guy, and made him a division manager. Vanard made him a division manager to create the Peripherals division and started all that stuff. If you worked very closely with Vanard at the time, you know he was very aggressive, very successful and extremely territorial. So he hired a bunch of guys and pretended that he started it from scratch. And when they launched the division, the project manager and the marketing guy that started it got up. And the first thing he says, I just want to say, by the way, this entire division owes his existence to Dave Evans. Because everything we're doing, he started and figured it all out. We're just going to deliver on what Dave started. And Vanard just about burst into flames because under no circumstances Is anybody who isn't working for me getting credit for this? And I just said whatever, you know, that's fine, just ship the product, ship the product. But it was really flew to Caricares essay in Switzerland with the guys that did the original, the very, very first designs of Daisy Will printer element fonts. The guy that developed Palatino because his wife liked it. It was a really interesting time. No kidding. So I was there two and a half years and just got to do a whole lot of work really fast and then ran off and did the EA thing. But it was fun. It was fun as you were there. You started around that time. It was, it was a pretty shake and bake time.

In your wildest dreams, did you ever think Apple would be as successful as it has become? Because I'll answer first. I didn't. Obviously I left twice.

No, I was there the day we took out the full page ad in the Wall Street Journal welcoming IBM to the business.

Oh God, yes, yes, I remember that.

And I thought to myself, because I'd been in other industries before, Apple was not my first place out of school. And I went like, I get arrogance as a branding technique but guys, this is a very large, very serious company. And I knew the story about how they shanked it in the mini business and never again. And I just thought, oh, this is, this is not the sleeping giant you want to kick, you know. And between them and Microsoft, I just thought we'll see the 3% market share we'll see. But I think the reinvention of the company coming out of the ipod was just stunningly brilliant. And I got to work with super closely and it was a delightful time. We had a lovely time. Two fun stories Erica tell if you want to go back into the old story thing, but. Oh yeah, absolutely. It was really an interesting time. And before the ipod existed, I wasn't sure they could make it because the people they were fighting were just so strong, whether they deserve to or not. And then the fact that Steve, you know, did it, so to speak, depending how you count, three or four times. There's so few visionary leaders that can do it ever. And to have a repeat performance, but to have a repeat performance three or four times is really stunning. I mean Steve, you worked very closely with him, was, was not necessarily a fabulous human being every day, but he was an incredible piece of work. I had a great time working with him. My favorite day was the day, the day I totally called him out. I just screamed at him one day.

And you live to talk about it.

Well, he just. He's one of those days where he was. Is what he called a Birkenstock day. I'm just one of the engine, you know, he just. He would just appear. He would come in in the T shirt and the jeans and the Birkenstocks. He's been on the COVID of Time, for God's sake, at this point. And he thought what I was working on was interesting because he understood that the mass and printing is really cool. And so he just slides into my team meeting. Everybody goes like this, you know, and. And he goes, I'm just one of the. I'm just an engineer today. I'm just one more. You just have one more engineer on the team today. I can go, that's great, Steve. Thanks. And so, of course, the meeting gets completely perturbed and he jumps in and does his thing and that kind of stuff, you know. And then we're leaving, we're walking out. And he goes, well, hey, thanks. So how'd that go? And I go, don't you ever effing do that again. And he goes, what? Look, I'm sorry to tell you, but you don't get to just be an engineer. You are fucking Steve Jobs. And you are all the time. You gave that away. I'm pretty perfectly happy to have you come join my team. I love your ideas. We work together really great. But I'm sorry, you don't ever get to not be Steve Jobs again for the rest of your life. That's a loss I feel for your brother. I feel your pain, but, no, it's over. And don't you ever pull that in my room again. Call me ahead and we'll bring you in and we'll have a great time. But cut that crap out. And it kind of goes, okay, I'm sorry. And we know we got along fine. We got a lot of mine. Okay? I had nothing to lose. I didn't belong there anyway.

So.

So tell me. Just get in charge of this interview guy. Yeah. Really?

Who's in charge here? Just how popular is your Stanford course?

We are so grateful to Fast Company for the complete disinformation that we teach. The most popular course at Stanford, which was published, was five years ago. And try as we might to tell the truth, that that falsehood, which has done us a great deal of good, continues to persist. We, to our knowledge, are probably one of, if not the most popular pure electives at Stanford. And we run, depending on the year, anywhere from 12 to 20% of the student body takes our course one of five or six students at Stanford get through the course. Now, to our knowledge, somewhere between 15 and 30% more students actually learn the material than take the course. Because there are so many, what are called ballistic students at Stanford who are, you know, shot from a gun through and through, ready to go, triple majoring in, you know, chem engineering and all the rest. Haven't got time for two wasted units on learning how to design your life. So a whole bunch of our students teach the course on the side. There's a gray market of people co teaching the class in real time, running a little study group of people who are unregistered. And we also believe that there's a cultural effect which we really saw early on. I'll stop right there. So the short answer is, yeah, a couple thousand kids a year, somewhere in the order of 15, 20% of the students learn how to design their lives before they go.

And does a dean or the provost or president call you in and give you a bonus at the end of the year for having such a popular course?

No, no, no, we elect most people in the academy very much suffer the profit in his own hometown problem? No, we, we hang on by our fingernails. It's a small team. The left Design lab is a team of five people. We are begging, borrowing and stealing money to just barely survive. We are an incredibly cost efficient operation and big bang for the buck. We cost barely a half a megabuck a year to run and you'd be surprised at the amount of genuflecting involved to get that money. So we're appreciated and a lot of people love us, but because we serve lots of things at the same time, we are supported by the Vice Provos of Undergraduate Ed, graduated Student affairs, the Dean of Engineering, the center for Teaching and Learning. When everybody likes you, nobody loves you. So we have a little bit of the, the problem of being too broad. And at Stanford, we teach. We're overwhelmingly teachers, and Stanford's an R1 university. And at an R1 university you pay for research and teaching is free. You teach on the side and we teach on the front. So getting money for teaching itself is surprisingly difficult. But so far so good. Fifteen years in, we're not gone yet.

So for the uninitiated, and I may count myself in that group, what exactly is design thinking?

Well, that comes up for us a lot because now that we're talking about applying design thinking to designing your life, you know, once upon a time it was the product design program, the oldest interdisciplinary program at the University of the Integration of psychology, art and engineering, actually in the design division of the mechanical engineering department of the School of Engineering at the university called Stanford. So we're five levels down and the Life Design Lab is just a little goofball project inside that thing. So we're like a thing inside of a thing instead of a thing. And design thinking was started in 1963. David Kelly, who you know well, is the third generation guru of design at Stanford, following on the heels of Bob McKim, who really built it, who now lives in Santa Cruz. And Bob was the mentor for both Dave Kelly and my partner Bill Burnett. The executive director before that was John Arnold, who came to Stanford out of MIT because MIT wouldn't let him do it because they thought it was silly. And of course he started the design program in the basement over in the quad by doing the appropriate Silicon Valley thing. He didn't ask permission, he just printed letterhead. So that's how you get the design program. So it was the product design program, how to innovate the concept of what a good product would be for a long, long time. And it was the lunatic fringe for much of that going on 40 year history or 55 year history now. And it became cool in the last 12, 15 years. Not inaccurately coincident with how design thinking fueled Silicon Valley, becoming visible and popular. And with the creation of the D school, the House of Platner Institute for Design at Stanford, which is where when David Kelly started working on that too, he asked Bill Burnett to help him out by becoming the executive director of the design program. So design thinking has been the renaming of human centered design for about 10, 15 years and now is being pushed into economic development and educational systems and now life design. So as we push that model further and further, more and more people get confused by it. And so, not having forgotten your question, what is it? First thing to understand is what it's not. So we talk about engineering thinking, where you solve your way forward. Solving a tame problem that's well bounded and you have adequate information to get the right answer. That's engineering. That's great. I have two engineering degrees. Engineering rocks the house. But it doesn't solve all the problems. You have business thinking where you're never right, you're never done, customer never loves you enough, your profitability is never high enough, your supply chain is never ecological enough, but you can get better. And if you go to the right business school, you can get better quantitatively. So you optimize your way forward. That's business thinking. You've got research Thinking, which we do a ton of at Stanford, going all the way back to the process developed by Aristotle and Plato, downstream of Socrates, dependent independent hypotheses and variables, a way of coming up with knowledge. If you're good enough at coming up with knowledge rigorously, we'll give you a cool floppy hat and a three striped shirt called a doctorate gown, and off you go. And there's bureaucratic thinking, which is, you know, boxes and arrows and a paragraph explaining each one, which is all about. You don't have to depend on the people. The process is so reliable, you can actually depend on the and will be process oriented. So you got process oriented stuff, you got analytic oriented stuff, you got optimization oriented stuff, you got solution oriented stuff. They're all great ways of thinking. And they don't solve wicked problems. Those things where you don't know what you're looking for until you find it, when you find it, it's not replicatable elsewhere because it's totally context sensitive. That concept was developed by urban planners at berkeley in the 70s, actually. Wicked versus tame problems. And most wicked problems are intensely human problems like what do you do the rest of your own wild and wonderful life. So in design thinking, we build our way forward. We are building this thing we have no data on. It's called the future. Never been there before. You sneak up on the future through prototype iteration. You can empirically try small things, set the bar low and clear it. So design thinking, first and foremost is a way of understanding a problem deeply, then concluding what it is you actually might want to do about that problem. So that's empathy followed by definition. And then you have a whole bunch of ideas, the sole purpose of which is to come up with things worthy of prototyping, which are not things to prove you're right. The things to learn what you already know you're wrong about. And you learn iteratively enough to get to a thing that's worthy of shipping. And then you call that a product or a life or a commitment or a strategy, and off you go. That's the semester in six minutes.

So wait, so what is prototyping in this context? How do you prototype a life?

Okay, well, that's a really good question. And because you know design thinking, you knew that was the right question to ask. I'll argue. Prototyping is the absolute cardiopulmonary system of design thinking. It is really what it's about. The whole thing is just a setup to go do prototypes. And I think it's important to distinguish what I Call a design prototype from an engineering prototype. When you walk into your prototype, hey, maybe this new engine will really work. Let's run it at two times normal speed and throw a goose through it before we put it on an airplane full of people. And that prototype fails. You go, oh crap, it failed. That's the outcome of your prototype test. That was an engineering prototype because they asked the question, does it work? Is it ready? You start that prototype because you think you're done. You think it's going to work. You really want this to be the one. Let's go test this prototype and make sure it's okay. That's proving I'm right. Prototyping, totally important thing to do. Design says, I know, I don't know what I'm doing. I mean, so you know, I have 130 mice under my desk. You know, we're talking about the old apple days a minute ago. And you're going to hold this thing in your hand and your hand's going to roll around on the desk and some thing on a, on a goofy, bad looking cartoon is going to bounce around in front of you on the screen. And that's going to help you think about what you want to write. I mean, is that going to work? We have no idea if that's going to work. Is it going to, are people going to get seasick? Maybe they get seasick, you know, and, and is your hand going to cramp? Well, that turned out to be a problem. But if we do it a bunch of times to learn what works and what doesn't work. And this is why. Failure, immunity, right? Fail often to succeed sooner you, you fail your way into learning your way forward on the stuff. You know, you don't know what you're doing, but you have to do the empirical experiential process. So when you prototype a product, it was pretty, I had a box of 130 mice. You can imagine what that looked like. And then to prototype a life again. It's an experiential thing. It's very simple. It's two things. It's a conversation or an experience. So you prototype your way forward by talking to people and a particular kind of talking to people. It's the narrative conversation. It's not the transactional conversation that's crucially important. And then you have experiences, a little trial and error. Take a small project, take a lunch and learn. Go out and do a shadowing. And there's good research on this, by the way. Miss Our buddy Dan Gilbert at Harvard, not a bad School, we'll talk about the distinction between surrogation and research. Surrogation or analysis as a basis for input to decision making. Surrogation meaning learning through the stories of others. And it turns out surrogation is a more effective process. So that when we had to come up with the super short version of the entire 270 page book one time going on live TV in Canada, I came up with the not one sentence which they asked for, but four really short sentences, only 10 words. So if you want the design your life thing and hey listeners, if you're bored, just write this down in a post it note and you just come back to the. The rest later. It is get curious, talk to people, try stuff, tell your story. And the two middle ones, talk to people and try stuff are life prototypes. That's it, that's it, end of discussion, we're done.

I'm surprised it took four things.

I'm sorry, it's almost a whole post it note.

So now, in this context, what's the purpose of education?

Oh, I didn't see that coming. What we're doing, because this goes back to when we started. Scotty McLennan, the then chaplain of Stanford, comes to me and kind of goes, I know what you're doing. I kind of go, okay, yeah, I mean, we've been public. He goes, no, no, no. I mean, I know what you're actually doing. I went, sh. What he meant by that was we're doing adult formation. We're doing values integration. We don't do that here. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to get found out. Then you're not just going to get fired. You're going to get run out of here on a rail. You're going to get tarred and feathered. I've seen people. I'll give you names and numbers of people to whom we've done this before. I said, are you saying don't do it? He goes, no, no, no, do it. Just go fast because you haven't got long. Six years later he comes back and he goes, good news. There's been a sea change. You're no longer on the wanted poster. You're another poster boys for doing it right. Keep going. And so what we think education's job is and always was. 200 years ago everybody understood this. Hundred years ago, we lost it. That it really is young adult formation, which includes knowledge, learning how to learn and learning a lot of things. Now the liberal education and learning how to think and learning what the great ideas have been. That's in great debate right now, of course, in a more inclusive understanding of the world. And that's a totally appropriate conversation we should be having. But along the way, how do you become your authentic and legitimate self? John Hennessy, the president for most of the time I was at Stanford, would say, you know, the university's job is to solve the big problem. That's what we're here for. And then he further said the answers to the big problems in today's world lie between the disciplines, where we've got to overcome this problem of interdisciplinary research, which is another problem which he started to try to work on, which is what the Knight Hennessy Fellows are all about. But nonetheless, education's job should include not merely giving you a bunch of information to go use, but empowering you to be the kind of person who can discern what life to use that in. And so I used to have a slide which, when I was doing this with educators, bubble number one is information or education, which is all this data we're going to download into your brain over this four year period. And then there was going to be, you know, career launch or career transaction. We're going to have a career center and get you a job. So we're going to get you a bunch of information, we're going to land, help you land a job. And there's this thing in the middle that was missing, which I call formation, like and, and who? And how do I translate that information into the right place to be in the world that matters? That is a complete left to the readers and exercise in the modern university. So we're doing, if you want to put a short point on it, is we're trying to do educational reform and reinstall legitimate adult formation as part of what the academy can perform by doing it using a human centered methodology that is completely inclusive and regarding of any and all worldviews and values and belief systems. So, you know, come one, come all and we experience that deeply. But what I keep saying is if you get the human part right, you can't go wrong. So we're just trying to do the human thing. I'm a strongly believing Christian, my partner Bill Burnett is a deeply Nietzsche loving atheist. And we get along great because we do the human thing the same way. So come on down. The mission of the Life Design Lab is to apply the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life at and after university to pursue the objective of the formation of empowerment in a conscious competency in life and vocational Wayfinding. So you get done with us and we'll make you a competent life and vocation wayfinder.

That's all in one course. And all of that and you get.

Two credits and you get two credits and on average we'll double your ideation speed for free.

Such a deal. That makes tuition worth it right there.

It is a deal. Yeah.

A little bit orthogonal to what we've been talking about, but as the expert in designing one's life, that's a terrifying.

Statement, but yeah, go ahead.

Do you think that people should pursue passions or interests?

Yeah, that comes up. In fact Bill and I are getting the rep as the anti passion guys because one of our lead dysfunctional beliefs we're talking about dysfunctional beliefs is the question what's your passion? And we don't like that question. We'd like passion fine. We just don't like that question because you have to watch out for questions. Belief systems. All questions have belief systems. And if you're going to empower a question to either organize or judge your life. And the what's your passion? Question for most people does both. Hey guy, what's your passion? Well, I haven't really found mine yet. Oh, that's so sad. What's wrong with you? You know, or if you're, if you're probably Guy. Oh, Guy, what's your passion? Oh, I have lots. Which one did you hear about first? Oh, you don't really know what you're doing, do you? The problem with the passion question is its belief system includes everybody has a passion, you'll know it early in life. One of them should be the central organizing principle of your life. The world will let you do it. In fact, the world will probably let you do it and at least make a living, preferably make a killing. If you're in Silicon Valley and all five of those ideas are dead wrong, none of them is true. And most people who discover vocational passion, it's the outcome of the well lived life, not the starting place. 80% of people under the age of 40 answer the what's your passion? Question with I don't know yet or I've got a bunch. Which one did you want to hear about? Neither of those. 8 out of 10 totally normal people don't find what's your passion? As a good guidance principle. So we just don't like the idea of the presuppositional a priori passion precedes everything position. But we're pro passion. If you've got an organizing passion and the world cares about it I love blue newts. Great. You know, knock yourself out. I'm a killer programmer and I love AI based retail oriented systems or oh well, come and have a seat. You know, so I talk to some students now and then who are really into what the world's currently doing. And I said, by the way, you do deserve to be incredibly grateful for how convenient it is to be you right now. There are other people you might be that are less convenient, but that's just the way it is. So now we're pro passion, but we're not the presupposition of worrying about it. So whatever your interests are, you start with your interests. We're the intersection of, you know, what's going on in the world that's actually happening and you're interested in and have some skills in and start and prototyping. Let's go prototype those things now. You know, I think I like people. I know. I'll go get a master's in organizational development and start working in HR and see if I like that. And four years later and a quarter million dollars down the drain, you're going to go, ah, that wasn't so great. That's pretty expensive way to try that. So, no, I think passion is a really good thing, but it's not the starting place for most people.

Wait, so what should that person have done instead of getting a quarter million dollars education and starting a career?

Let's say you're, you know, you're, you're, you're an engineer, you're working professional and you start thinking, man, the people thing is really working for me. And I'm tired of this code stuff, you know, maybe I should jump first of all, then go have a whole bunch of what we call the life design interviews, or we used to call informational interviews. Go ask people. Go find people doing the kind of work you think is interesting and say, hey, you know, Guy Kawasaki, I've done the research and it turns out you're the most interesting person in the world. Actually, in your case, that's true because that's the brand you've actually developed, you know, and I've been working really hard on that because I think it's so cool to be you. Hi, I'm Guy Kawasaki. What do you do? Oh, I play Guy Kawasaki.

That's my passion.

Yeah, I'm actually, my passion is being, being me is my passion being that guy. I mean there's, you know, there's the guy you actually are and then there's the Guy Kawasaki thing, you know, brand, you know, I don't mean to be rude, but I thought that was incredibly cool. You know, the. I'm sure you. Well, it's paid well, it's worked out. You can take it just fine. But anyway, so not everybody can play that game. But the. So I want to do human thing. So go talk to people who do that work, get their story. And it turns out really does, you know, literally hearing another human being creates the separate self is a complete lie. As Dan Siegel at UCLA will remind us all, when you're picking up somebody else's story, you're actually having an experience. It's not just information. This isn't the research call. Like, what do you get paid? What do we need to study? No, no, no. Tell me about being you. How did you get there? What was it like? When did you know? What's a good day for you? And that's the, you know, walking a mile in their shoes thing is really important. You do that, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 times, which is perfect. And then along the way, you're telling the story of what you're learning and those people invite you. Well, hey, would you like to sit in on a meeting with me? Well, hey, we're doing the seminar. Why don't you come and maintain the coffee bar and you can learn what the people learning in the back of the room and hang out during the break and see what people are doing. You. So you start getting the hands on experiences and you do small bits and then you go to your boss and kind of go, by the way, I noticed that all the engineers on our team are bored and they suck at leading team meetings. And because they are lousy at the human being thing. What if I did some research on how to lead a meeting and talk to human beings a little better and I did a couple of lunch and learns, would that be okay? And by the way, most bosses do not mind more value for free. You know, more for free, which is a pretty easy sell. And then you go to other people in the company who are doing the kind of work you want. And by the way, no manager on the planet has ever gotten all the money that he or she asked for in the annual budgeting cycle. So you ask any manager for profit, nonprofit, governmental, whatever, and go, hey, Susan, what'd you put in for your budget? I'll put in my budget for 3.2 million. And what'd you get? I got 2.7. So you got a half million dollars short. Right, Right. So if I, if I gave you $50,000 of that 500 you didn't get. You know what you do with it? Yes, I know what to do with it. So there's not a manager in the world that doesn't know what they would do with $100,000 check that just tripped over on the sidewalk. And you can offer that to them called, guess what, I'm 30 grand of free consulting looking right at you. What do you want to do? Let's go. And you give yourself a night job doing real work. And oftentimes they feel so guilty after you do a good job, they hire you anyway that actually, it's a bit of a trick, but it actually has worked for quite a few of our clients.

Up next on Remarkable People.

He's. He is pissed at me. You're wasting my time. A week goes by, he comes back in and he walks into the classroom. 45 kids or 50 kids. And he's glaring at me from across. As soon as he crosses the threshold of the door, he's glaring, oh, this is not going to go well. This is not going to go well. He's going to get a pontificate about how horrible it was, that kind of stuff. So we sit down and kind of go, okay, let's get this over with. Bill, did you go see the, the CIA? He goes, yes, I did. I go, okay, tell us the story. He goes, I'm really. Maddie.

We come across a lot of questions on remarkable people that focus on the complexity of the human condition. For example, what connects us to the world around us? What makes us feel happy? What is important to us? What pisses us off? These questions are also part of our economy. The exchange of problems and solutions, questions and answers between businesses and consumers. And when businesses provide answers to the questions that drive customers, we see growth and opportunity. The HubSpot CRM platform helps you understand what makes your customers tick. With powerful new marketing, operations, service and sales tools. HubSpot is on a mission to help your business grow better by making your customer experience better than ever. Remarkable, actually. From conversation intelligence tools to automated marketing campaigns to Data quality tools, HubSpot tracks every minute detail so you can fully optimize your customer's experience. Learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with a HubSpot CRM platform. @HubSpot.com you're listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. So a lot of this, we're skirting around this issue that many young people are probably thinking, which is, well, then how do I look for my first job? Sure, take the passion thing out of it, because I'M not going to be passionate about my first job.

If you think about it may not be. Yeah.

So what am I looking for?

Well, in fact in the first book there's a whole chapter on how not to find a job which debriefs the way people do it most of the time is pretty ineffective. The most effective way on average, particularly in the for profit sector, about 80% of jobs are not listed. So when you have applied to everything, you just hit one in five. Great. How do I get my hands on those opportunities that aren't even public, aren't even listed somewhere. And now a lot of the listings are bogus anyway. They're just resume collectors for AI engines to pile of resource bases. Now I'm not saying people don't get hired through monster.com and indeed I'm not saying that the published jobs aren't available. Those do happen. Only problem is that there's a less than 3% hit rate, particularly the popular jobs at what I call there's the popular company problem, you know, and Google and you know Fang, right. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google can get anybody they want. So their hiring criteria are understandably draconian. They don't care about anything but not getting a false positive. And so they can throw lots of good people out the window. So what do you do? What you have to do is you have to crack the network. Most hiring is done person to person. And the way to crack into the network is to be in the community. The way to be in the community is to be in the conversation. The way to be in the conversation is to get somebody to talk to you. The way to get somebody to talk to you is to ask them a question to which the answer is very likely going to be yes. And when you say hi guy, are you hiring? The answer is no. Or do you have any openings? No. I mean, or. Well, there might be some here, but I'm not in charge. No or yes. It's now one of those 10% situations where actually there is an opening and I am in charge of it and I am looking. Oh great. Can we talk? Well, sure. Now who am I talking to? I'm talking to you guys. That's immediately judging me because constantly guys going red light green, light red light green. And I'm looking for deal killers as fast as I can because the kindest thing I can do is get rid of you when I find out you don't really apply.

Sounds like Tinder.

Yeah, you said that. I didn't. So it turns out the best Way to get a job is not ask for the job, but ask for the story. And so when you go out and just ask for the story again, I've done the research through a really interesting person. I'm really fascinated by the field. I've done the work. When I look between the lines, the question that arises for me that might be keeping you awake at night is the following. Is that of interest? If so, is there 20 minutes either over zoom or in person, depending on where you live and how nervous you are, when I could buy you a cup of coffee at the place and time of your choice and just hear your story. And Our estimate is 7 out of 10 times. You actually get a yes to that, first and foremost because you are asking a question to which the person you are speaking has the capacity to say yes, which is, yes, I have a story, and yes, I'm in charge of whether or not I tell it to you. And most people's favorite thing is themselves and what they do. So that's not that hard a thing to get. As it turns out, even with cold calls on LinkedIn, which, you know, is a social contract that says, I'm available to the world, so do your homework. And the critical thing to bring to that conversation is a legitimate and sincere curiosity. I'm really interested in you. I'm not pretending to be, so that somewhere during the call you go, hey, how about you come work for us? If that's what you're doing, don't go, because they'll suss you out as a fake in no time. So if you're genuinely curious, just go get the story, keep asking the conversation, and at the end of every conversation, say, by the way, this was great. Can you introduce me to two or three more people I should hear that story from as well? And keep it going. And keep it going. And typically, more than half the time, our feeling is if you. It's a volume game. You got to do this with dozens of people. And if you're. Let's say you're coming to school and I've got three interests, like, maybe this would work. Maybe that'd be interesting. Then you're gonna run those conversational projects down all three of those pathways. So if you're going to have 35 conversations each, that's 100 conversations. I've often encouraged students during the summer, like, hey, I need to go get the killer internship. Okay, you get the killer internship, you've got a 50, 50 chance of having a good boss. If you got the bad boss, you're Brain deadly numbing. You're just cheap labor and you can't see anything. They keep you in a soundproof opaque box doing boring stuff that's great for 10 weeks. You know, you've got exactly three summers between a four year typical undergraduate residency and even it goes great, you have exactly one great big fat data point from your entire 10 week experience. Sometimes I kind of go, hey, what? Go work the swing shift at Starbucks for beans and weenies money and for tuition and then spend the other 60 hours a week talking to people on four different tracks. Come back from the summer of the 150 conversations. You know, 12 insights and 14 relationships and six networks under your belt. Now you got something to work with. I don't say that that's not a universal truth, but people who've done that have come away pretty happy with the outcome.

Okay, I get that part about this technique, foot in the door. But underlying that question is, what am I looking for?

Oh, round one. You have no idea what you're looking for because you don't know anything. One example I would give is I go look. So when you're doing these conversations, the essence of curiosity is the pursuit of latent wonderfulness. You start with the a priori presupposition that everything in the world is fascinating. If I just understood it from the point of view of the people who think it's cool. And there are plenty of people who think that thing is cool. What do they know that I don't know, right? You know, I'm selling this idea to a bunch of grads. I'm teaching a grad summer intensive program. The homework was to go to a career fair and meet a whole bunch of people, including, I want you to talk to three companies that you're sure you have no interest in and then go visit at least of them afterward to prove to yourself you don't know what you know. You know. And one of the young men who's a PhD in geoscience or something like that, math, he's in math, raises his hand and goes, look, you're wasting my time. I kind of go, no, I'm not wasting your time. You got to spend a little money to make a little money. Some of these might be boring, but trust me, there's a lot more interesting out there than you realize. And he goes, wait, no, I don't need to talk to all these people. There's some things I know that I know. For instance, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt there's no way in the world I'M interested in the CIA, for God's sake. And I said, oh, it just so happens that the CIA is visiting the campus next week. They're not at this career fair. But guess what? You specifically, young man, Bill, you are assigned to go talk to the CIA next week and then come back and give us a report. And he kind of goes, no, I kind of go, I'm flunking you because you can't do that. I go, watch me. It says, pass, fail, no credit course. Who cares? He's a PhD, doesn't, doesn't need the units. So sure enough, I mean, he's, he is pissed at me. You're wasting my time. A week goes by, he comes back in and he walks into the classroom. 45 kids or 50 kids, and he's glaring at me from across. As soon as he crosses the threshold of the door, he's glaring, oh, this is not going to go well. This is not going to go well. He's going to get a pontificate about how horrible it was and that kind of stuff. So we sit down and kind of go, okay, let's get this over with. Bill, did you go see the CIA? Goes, yes, I did. I go, okay, tell us the story. He goes, I'm really mad at you. I said, I picked that up. He says, because I've really got a problem now. I kind of go, what's your problem? He goes, it was really interesting. I really liked it. And I'm really upset because they kill people and that upsets me. I don't know what to do with this. Can you help me? I mean, it's a classic example. He had a very clear, completely inaccurate picture of the CIA, wasn't it? And you know, you're 22, you're 25, you've done one or two. You don't know. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with you. We tell our sins. You're not broken. You're 22. There's nothing wrong with you. You're 22. You have a, you know, you're good at the school thing. Guess what? Very few people live at school for the rest of their lives. I said, how many you think it would be really fun to go work for, like a big insurance company? They all kind of go, crickets, right? Dead stuff. I go, how many? You would like to work on an innovation team exploring how technology could actually support the wellness movement, particularly with at home caregivers who are solving one of the greatest problems in healthcare to reduce the amount of time people spend in hospitalization before they die. You know, sort of. Sort of techno wellness. Who thinks that's cool? Half the rumors go great. I got a project leader who's doing that project for AIG Insurance who wants to talk to him. Oh, do they do that kind of stuff? Yeah, you don't know anything. Nothing personal, but give yourself a chance. So I'm interested in this problem. I'm interested in climate change. Well, guy, go read broadly, Find seven different things that are going on. Try to get your hands on somebody doing that one work and go find out what they're doing. Gee, oh, that the Department of Energy is involved. I don't want to do that by the. Other than the acronym. Do you know anything about the Department of Energy? You go talk to six people who work there and find out what happened. The first thing for the new person entering the workforce for the first time is go give yourself the equivalent of back to school night. Go find out what's going on out there. So round one is of my interests, what's actually happening in the world around that interest. And when I find out the entities, the institutional forms that are working on it, what are they doing and what are they like? And then we start thinking, oh, maybe this is the category of the domain of the human endeavor currently happening that I might want to go penetrating, get an opportunity in. So for those people, this whole thing is like a three round project. And by the way, if once you get your head wrapped around doing it, it's not this huge task, oh my God, there's so much you have to do. It's like, this is so interesting. This is actually like being alive on purpose.

Maybe one day the NRA will be interviewing at Stanford and you can assign students to go.

Yeah, see if I can sell that one. I'm not sure that could be. I'm not sure that's a bar I want to clear.

Now. How about we apply some of these theories to people who are in a job?

Sure.

How do you know when to leave? Is it more likely you stay too long or leave too early?

Well, that's a huge question right now. The big quit, right? A year ago, year and A half ago, February 25, 2020, we released a book called Designing your work life, specifically answering the question, hey, you may not want to completely reinvent yourself, but you want life to be a little bit better. And if I had to pick someplace to make it better, maybe work where I spend most of my energy and time is a place I can make it a little bit better. And so we write this book 10 days later at Shelter in place. The book made all the top 10 best business books of the year. We got critical acclaim. We got crushed in sales because everybody's a little fearful of this thing called dying. And I'm just hanging on for dear life. So the book got crushed. And then the CEO of Penguin Random House came to us last fall and said, you know, we really think it's a good book and the work thing is really changing. Why don't you guys update the book, come up with a bunch of brilliant ideas about a post pandemic reality, and we'll start all over again. So three weeks ago we released Designing youg New Work Life, which has four new chapters on disruption design, including work Design in a post disruption world, of which the pandemic is just a really, really big example. There's also climate change and MeToo and Black Lives Matter. You can have a regional disruption or a personal disruption. And we define a disruption as any change that's so big, after which you say, man, things will never be the same again. And you and I are both Northern Californians. And last time when we were working on that, I'm less than a mile from a fire evacuation line, we all darn near burned down. So that's a regional disruption. And during that, that year, sadly, my wife died. Bill's mother and mother in law both died. All the women died on us in the same year. And that's a pretty severe personal disruption. So stuff happens and you gotta handle that. And now the big quit is going on. And I've just drafted an op ed on reframing the big quit. Why? HBR and Gallup got it wrong. And so if I'm in a job and I'm One of the 65% of American workers who are disengaged, 85% of the global workers who are disengaged. This which has been going on for 25 years, what do I do? Well, we will say, first, don't resign. Redesign. You can redesign in place. The best person to give you a new job is yourself. I sound like I'm selling, because I am. We just published this thing, so there's four redesign strategies. Reframe and reenlist, remodel relocate and reinvent with escalating levels of challenge and difficulty, all which could work right where you are. And we're pretty sure that even if you want to quit, you should probably try to do an internal redesign first. Because the worst thing that happens is it totally organizes your act and gets you ready to start looking outside and the first two things that people can do. And we would argue that during times of stress, like a pandemic, one thing you want to do to hang on to your humanity is design for yourself. Experiences where you are reminded of the legitimacy of your agency as a human being being. You don't have no power. This goes back to Viktor Frankl and men's search for meaning. But we'll come back to that if you want. So we would say that the re enlist and the remodel strategies of job design are immediately available all the time. And I'm actually currently advocating relentless remodeling. And so a reframe and a redesign is just to change the narrative. The company's pivoted a little bit and I need to zero base my own job. I need to quit my job, redefine my, my relationship with it, rewrite my own personal manifesto and come to work to do the same thing for a totally different set of reasons. And that's not just making lemonade out of lemons. That's it really is an incredibly powerful thing. So the internal narrative is huge and most people deserve an update. So that's thing one. You can do and do that instantly and it matters. Thing two, remodeling small changes with big reward. You can get huge psychic dividends from very, very small changes. The thing we talked about earlier, like the, the programmer. What if I did some lunch and learns on running effective meetings and I felt like I was making a contribution to the people, not just to the code. And I do that for 45 minutes a week. I could do one lunch and learn a week, but I feel all these other cells in my body activating. There's a whole other part of me that I'm learning. I'm getting incredibly different feedback from people. And the difference between some and none of a certain kind of experience is huge. And that may be enough to bridge you across until, you know, we get acquired by Google and it all changes or whatever. Now we're not saying stay forever. If you're a 20 something listening to this, you're probably going to live to 100. You're going to work to 75 or 80. You're going to have between 30 and 40 jobs and three to five careers. So you're going to quit at some point. Which is why there's a whole chapter on generative quitting. How to quit. Well, most people quit really badly. So if you're going to quit, quit. Well, I'll just leave it there.

If you're Going to say that at least give us the 62nd.

The key thing is, number one, clean up your messes so you don't leave a pile of crap for somebody to come behind. Document your job, literally write the manual on how to do your job well. Set up your replacement to win and leave them wanting more. So you walk out the door with a clean story and you don't throw the Molotov cocktail at the back of the. You know, and you're a bunch of I'm so glad to see you. You know, which is pretty tempting. And it boils down to it's not that hard to quit well. But very few people do it. Most people do the generic quit, which is a four line. This is my notice that I will be leaving Acme bootwear in effective in two weeks. Thank you for the chance to have been a member of the team. Love, Bob. You know, like fuck you. I got to go, you know, sorry. And you know, and somebody will do the flame mail, which is incredibly destructive as opposed to really launch this thing well, and so leave this thing behind. These people are still in your network. So a generative quit is one that recognizes you are in charge. You're not just escaping. If you're going to stay in the same industry, quitting is like divorce. Yeah, you may not be there anymore, but if you had kids, these people are part of your life forever. If you're in the same industry, they're part of your life forever. So there's no reason to make it worse than it has to be. So few people do this. By the way, you do a good gen. I mean, you literally say, oh, by the way, here's a manual on how to do my job. Here are all the key projects in their current state of affairs. Here are the key risks and key next deliverables that are required. Here are the key people to help you on critical issues, on all the ones that are hard to find. And here's my number. If something comes up for the next six weeks, they are gobsmacked when you do that and it takes you about four hours.

I would make the case that if I were the hiring person for the next job, if a candidate presented me and said this is what I did when I left my other job. Yeah, that would be a really powerful thing to encourage me to hire you.

I didn't thought of that. How that looks on the other side, you know.

Yeah.

And no, I think it's really true. The reason we wrote that chapter was actually after I left EA early on because I Wanted to do the startup and we got started and I thought, well, maybe I need a way to have more time for my kids because they were small. Just submit to being a large corporate guy for a while. So I actually went to what became a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM and I couldn't stand it for a year and a half, but nonetheless. But so I met. I met the big corporation and I quit this way. I did this kind of quitting because I'd been quitting a lot and I was getting pretty good at quitting. And my boss goes, wow, that was the best quit I have ever seen. You should totally write a book about quitting. And I've never thinking about that. Like I don't think I've ever seen a book about. And everybody does it, you know, and I never didn't. We. So it's not a book, it's just one chapter. So. Danny Hendrickson, if you're listening, thank you, buddy. For the council. Write a book about quitting. I finally got around to it.

That's great. So you brought it up just now. Maybe you didn't intend to, but how do you counsel students at Stanford to figure having kids in this designed life?

Oh, boy. When the book did well, the first book has done very well. And so the publisher comes to us and says, it's not a book, it's a movement. And we need to keep the movement going. You spell sequel. Okay? Yeah. And we go, sure. And they say, send us a list of next books you could write. So we come up with a list of books. And I was quite sure that they would pick the book designing our lives because the fundamental problem with the first book, designing your life, is the why. The problem is the why almost nobody is in this thing alone. I actually have a slide where I have a cover of the book and a big red X on the Y. So designing our life. And frankly, there's nothing in the book about us, about how we're doing this together. Almost nothing. So it's a great flaw. And they turned that book down for the workbook and they had a whole rationale for that. So we didn't get to write it. I've got five adult children. They're all partnered. Four have kids. I got nine grandchildren, children. I got 19 young people I'm watching very carefully. And they're all going through exactly this thing. I got grandkids from 1 year to 9 years old, all within 45 minutes because I'm way old. And the reality is it's incredibly tough. So I think you have to design our life together. And you have to recognize if you're going to build a family, we're going to be a unit here. And what do we mean by this and how are we going to live and who's going to pay the bill? You know, I'm David the fourth, David the fifth has had David the sixth and Kim, my daughter in law. One of my many daughter in laws is a very seriously busy practicing breast oncologist at Stanford Medical Center. And David's a senior product designer. He was in one of my first graduate classes which kind of annoyed him, but that's another story. And he's been a designer, was at Apple years ago and has designed for lots of the firms in the valley. And he's still working full time for a startup, mostly the swing shift. He's Mr. Mom. But they've worked really hard at figuring out a lifestyle that actually works and raises kids. Well by themselves, not by rental people in the center. And then other people do the rent thing. Other people stop out. You know, one of my middle son and his wife who have three kids decided to homeschool during the COVID year because they just were convinced watching TV all day was not going to work for their kids. Freaking huge decision. So Chrissy has to quit her job, come home and they certify the Evans Academy home school system and work their butts off for a year to make this thing happen. And now they're back in school and they're really happy to not be running the school anymore. But nonetheless it was the right call. So I do think shall we have kids or not? If so how many, when and how is a very, very serious conversation to have. I think some of our ideas can design. You can do Odyssey planning our core exercise. Invent three completely different versions of the next five years of your life and then start prototyping elements of that you find interesting to allow yourself to have enough information to discern a good decision and you could absolutely Odyssey plan ideate alternative lifestyles that relates to what would it be like to be a with child family? What would it like to be a childless couple? If you're a couple, what would it be like to have a whole bunch of kids? And then you lay those out. We're going to simplify and we're going to have a one income family and one of us is going to stay home and we'll trade off every other year. Now go find people living like that and see how that works. Live into it, do prototype it. These are serious decisions and People just sometimes jump into it, having thought about it on the couch for an hour or two. Look, there's three, four, five people's life in that boat you're rowing. I do some soundings. Before you start picking a path, two more questions. Okay?

Okay.

Okay.

Second to the last question is generally the role of money. Especially the theory that after you make 80 grand a year, money doesn't matter that much. I don't know who came up with.

That, but there's a, there's a fair bit of research on it. Yeah.

So how does money play into this plan?

Dan Pink in his book on motivation called Drive talks about this stuff. You know, it turns out once you make enough money that you take the issue of money off the table, then what do people want? They want. The way he describes mastery, autonomy and purpose, he's actually referring to research that calls it autonomy, relatedness and connectedness and competency. But nonetheless people are looking for that meaning making stuff. So the thing about money, and we need to be honest about this here, first of all, we're sitting here, you and I are both Silicon Valley executives who, who've done well and spent a lot of time talking to those people. And you know, if one of my son in law's is a team lead at Netflix on internal tool development and they're all just working their fannies off having a great old time because the COVID drove huge utilization up. Another one of my daughter in laws was in front office management and the hotel industry and that whole candidate, that whole sector just face planted, she's got to completely reinvent herself from scratch. So where you are in this world matters tremendously. Some people are really suffering and some people are thriving and there's a bunch in between. But money wise, yeah, getting over the first couple of bumps on Maslow's hierarchy and feeling safe and not scared is so if you're safe and not scared, then frankly the purpose of money is just to allow you to live in a way that you figured out is what we call coherent. I think we encourage people to pursue is the coherent life where who I am, what I'm doing and what I believe in are in alignment. That frees you to experience meaning making. If that's important to you and if you can't align those things, then your chance of meaning making goes pretty far down. We tend to think that the money thing just enables coherency. Now beyond that, if you want to be fabulously rich or drive a lot of Ferraris or what have you, that's another story but we don't spend much time on that because that's up to you.

And my last question.

Yeah.

Retirement. When, what to do? What's the last chapter?

That's the third book they really want is the Boomer book. I'm down to a 10% appointment at Stanford. I don't teach undergrads anymore. My only full time teaching gig at Stanford is the dci. The Distinguished Career Institute. Yeah, very distinguished.

The thing you pay 60 grand for.

The summer, it's now 72 grand, but it's for a year. So if you are one of the incredibly fortunate people to be among the one in 10 who applied at the Distinguished Career Institute to be identified as sufficiently distinguished in your career to come to the institute and become a fellow, then you can write a check to Stanford for 72 grand, not including travel and housing and books and all that for which you are allowed to take classes, wander around the campus, think about your life and talk to Dave. So the life design is one of the backbone structures of the Distinguished Career Institute year long program. And it's 45 to 85 year old people. It's the gap year for grownup. It's a gap year for grownups. And it's a really cool program. People love it. I'm working with them right now. Typically the cohorts are 35 to 40 odd people with a spike around the late 50s to late 60s. You know, the kind of classic retirement thing. So I'm in this conversation a lot and first of all, my personal position. I'm a spiritual person and I don't think God invited us to quit the team. I don't think there's any quitting team Human. I think you're supposed to be involved in the team and participating in the human adventure for your life until you can't. Okay, I do think you can go off quota. So a couple years ago I went off quota. There's no number I have to hit, but I have to keep playing, right? So thing one is that, and for a lot of people that's about what's the encore career, what's the next thing I do. And there's some of that language I like and some of that language is a little too narrow, but nonetheless, I think for retirement people, if I reframe the question and hey, we're designers, we always reframe the question. You know, it's really just what are you going to do next? And first of all, there's the money question. Do I need more money or not? And if I don't then I can can go off quota. But they're not retiring now. It's just a reframe. And so I think the classical three choices are just keep doing what I'm doing, right, do it again. And I see guys like, you know, I'm 68 and I see guys 65 year old, hey, I'm floating a plan. I'm running up and down Sand Hill Boulevard again for the 37th time and I'm thinking either you don't have a better idea or you just want to really like doing this. I don't want to do that again. And if you really like doing it, want to do it again, that's fine. I mean the first time I took my daughter Lisa to Disneyland at the age of five, she thought a great way to spend nine hours was to ride Dumbo 47 times in a row. And if you want to ride Dumbo again at the age of 67, go ahead. That's thing one, thing two is for most people the framing comes up a lot for me is okay if I'm going to do a different kind of a thing next am I going to relocate largely the same person in a different venue domain and context. And my dear departed wife Claudia, who was, you could argue at one point one of the 10 most powerful female executives in enterprise technology. The first girl that IBM ever let sell a mainframe computer shifted from enterprise sales and her last quota was $350 million. And she hit it every, she had hit a million bucks a day every day. And then she shifts it over to homelessness. She was the queen of homelessness in Santa Cruz for 12 years, the chair of the board of the homeless service center. And she took that same person that she was and massively relocated her, which was a really different thing. I mean homelessness in the public sector is a lot different than enterprise technology, but it was largely the same kind of an exec. So you said Claudia relocated, right? Or you go pick up another one of your personae because all of us contain more aliveness than one lifetime permits us to live. There's a bunch of you in there. Do you want to let another one out? So my partner Bill is finally letting the fine artist out. He's built a studio. He Finally, 15 years into his 10 year commitment to Stanford got to half time. He's half time starting this school year and he's going to do it teaching full time, 2/4 in zero time, 2/4 in the zero time, 2/4. He's a fine artist in the studio. That's A different guy than the design consulting firm guy, design program leader guy. So do you want to go pick up another one of your personae or do you want to relocate yourself or do you want to just keep going? Now, there's other choices too, but those are the three big dog choices and.

Those are admirable choices. But some people just park their brain, right?

I can't help you with that. That's not living the well lived, joyful life. If you want to just go straight to leisure, good chance you're going to die young. Dick Bowles, who wrote what Color is your parachute for 40 years. Yeah, fabulous book. We lost Dick about two, three years ago. Frankly, one of our aspirations was to be, you know, the what Colors yous Parry should of the future, which we seem to be kind of becoming. So I'm really honored by that. Dick did really good work. But for him, like everybody, you know, second books seldom do well. And one of his second books was the Three Boxes of Life. And the three boxes of life are labor, Leisure and learning. And his argument, and he was an ordained Episcopalian priest, which so many people know was that the human person is meant to, you know, work, play and learn. And that a healthy person has got some action in all three of those boxes. Lifelong. And unfortunately modern life screwed it up. So learn for 25 years, labor for 40 years, play till you die. You know, that was the classic format. He said, it's incredibly inhuman. It's going to kill you, so cut it out. So you got to work really hard to get all three going. And modern life still is. There's the school thing and there's the career thing. So just leaning toward one of the boxes in different seasons of life. But the smart play is to have as much of all three, all the time as you possibly can. So I would strongly encourage people who are about to leave their primary traditional career, put it that way, AKA retire, not to just go play. But if you're going to play, play in a really thoughtful way. I know a guy who is a founder of a very successful insurance company, did a really cool thing, quite humanely, saved a bunch of lives, lovely guy. And did a traditional workshop, working his butt off on Friday. Don't go in on Monday. The cliff retirement. He didn't wind down. He jumped out the window, which is increasingly rare, and started walking around town, 10, 15 miles a day listening to books on tape. First three years of his retirement, listening to books on tape. I go, hey, how's it going? He goes, great, it's going great. I'm learning a lot. And now he's applying and he's thinking he's not just entertaining himself to death, but there are very different ways people handle that thing. But the happiest ones are the ones who are still engaged. You still have to have an engagement, and you can make a project out of figuring out what it is you want to be engaged in. That woman, Claudia, that I tend to advocate a lot, took her two, three years of experimentation to figure out what a subsequent passion could be that I could invest my life in. And she made the searching process productive. No. Oh, God, I gotta figure this out. I'm late. No, no, no. Oh, I notice. I'm the faintest idea. I mean, I had a career and I raised my kids. I was a two trick pony. We're done. And then she's done making money selling enterprise technology. Now what? I have no idea. I have no idea what to do with myself. So we came up with a way for her to explore that. Well, I think. I think women matter. I'm a woman. I was a feminist. Well, where might that be interesting? Oh, I'll go sign up with the California Women's foundation, which is a foundation of foundations. They give money to people who give money to people who help women. That's a place I can sort of look broadly across who's helping women's lives get better. Hangs out with them, of course, becomes the president of that in no time, but nonetheless hangs out there for like three years or something. And it was while scanning from that high perch that she said, oh, this homeless. And frankly, she got seriously recruited by a guy she cared about and fell into what then became literally a second career and really enlivened the last 15 years of her life big time.

That's an extremely remarkable interview.

So insight.

There's so many valuable points in this interview.

Well, it's a bucket list, Adam. I've been waiting to get Kawasaki the reason to say the word remarkable for a long time.

You fulfilled my wildest dreams.

Oh, you need to dream bigger, son.

So there you have it. The gospel according to Dave Evans, the fire hose. My favorite three topics. How to get hired by asking for the story. What to do before you quit, Reinvent. That is trying to redo, reinvent, rethink the position you're currently in. And finally, if you are going to quit, how to quit with class, leaving a good impression even as you leave the company. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable, people. My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff C. And Shannon Hernandez, plus Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana. And last but never least, the drop in Queen of Santa Cruz, Madison Nismer. Until next time. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable, people.