How To Live a Meaningful Life Using Design Thinking

What if you could design your life the way a great product gets built? That's the premise behind Designing Your Life, the bestselling book by Stanford design professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It's helped millions rethink how they approach work, joy, and meaning. Bill and Dave didn't plan to become authors. Their framework struck a chord and grew far beyond the classroom, impacting how people think about their career and purpose across generations and industries. In the first half of this episode, we dive into that story. You'll hear how it all started, what surprised them along the way, and some of the most thought-provoking insights from decades of helping people design better lives. Then we get tactical. Their next book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, they want to reach 10 million people. And so in the second half, we break down what actually works for distribution, getting press coverage, and the practical mechanics of moving books at scale. Getting to sit down with Bill and Dave was really special for me because my first career was as a designer. And so they were the people who actually got to work on products like the Lisa and the original mouse at Apple and these other companies that really defined generations of design. And so being able to talk to them both about design, but also how they use design thinking to influence every part of their life was just very, very special for me. Before we dive in, just a quick heads up. This episode is audio only. We had some unexpected studio issues that took out the video recording. Now, this is an episode that I absolutely loved. So even though it's just audio, I'd encourage you to stay tuned, enjoy the conversation, because I think you're really going to like it. Bill, Dave, welcome to the show.

Good to be here. Thanks for having us, Nathan Barry.

Yeah, thank you.

All right. So we were talking last night at dinner and you said something that really stuck with me. And as I was driving home, I kept thinking about this. And it was that in order to have a meaningful, fulfilled college experience that goes on to a meaningful life, there's really two ingredients that are essential. Can you say what those are?

Yes, the peer research did a long study, particularly UCLA, looking at, gee, I mean, is college really worth it? That's a big question these days.

As a college dropout, I'm curious about that.

Does college correlate to life working? So they looked at flourishing post-college life, 5, 10, 15 years out, long term. Bunch of different indices they tracked, financial, social, all kinds of things. And they found 6 items that mattered. And if you really look at that list hard, it's 2. Those 2 things are, number 1, have a connection with a mentor, human being, a faculty member, a staff member, you know, a residential life member who cared about my life and walked along with me. So someone who walks along. And number 2, I have experiences that help me interconnect and integrate what am I learning on the campus with what's happening in the real world. So I need a real person and I need the real world.

Yeah. Okay. So that stood out to me because as I was trying to sum up everything that both of you have done over, you know, 40+ years and, and all of this and your, your work at Stanford and everything else, I just saw like, oh, that's it. That's what you were doing. You were investing in as many, you know, college students and, you know, young adults as possible to create exactly that.

Well, and the funny thing about— the sad thing about that survey is less than 5% of college students report having those two things. You know, so you can go through college, you can have all the classes, you can never go to office hours, you can never meet a professor. You might have your friends in the dorm, but if you don't meet an adult who cares about your journey, it's not going to work. And a lot of places, your education is pretty theoretical. You know, like we teach in the engineering school, you can learn a lot of engineering, but never build anything, never go out and, or go out in the world and see how things get made or designed or engineered. So we're really about trying to both connect those two dots. So we do a lot of office hours and a lot of time invested in our students, but also sending them out in the world to prototype stuff, to try stuff, to see if what they're studying, you know, has any resonance when they actually see it happening in the world. You don't necessarily have to have a job or a full-time internship. You can just go talk to people and find out if what you're learning translates to something in the world that's useful and interesting to do.

Yeah, I love that. Okay, so give me the high-level summary of what you spend your time at Stanford doing and what the, what the program that you run is and all that.

Sure. Well, I think this is a little different answer than you're looking for.

Wherever you want to take it.

What we're actually doing, what's under the hood, and then I'll let Bill say what we formally do. We're designers, so we spend a lot of time reframing your problem. Problem finding precedes problem solving. And if you're working on the wrong problem, it doesn't matter. So we spend a lot of time reframing what you're working on, what your problem is. And the goal of reframing is to give you more freedom. So we're in the freedom business, followed by once you have that more freedom, then we give you permission, both through concepts and particularly doable tools, to go enter into that freedom and do something interesting. So what we do is we give people freedom and permission. That's what we do. Now, how we do that is in classes and office hours in a variety of ways.

Yeah. So I run what's called the Life Design Lab at Stanford. Everybody has to have a lab. So that's our lab. We teach classes for undergraduates, for freshmen, for seniors. We teach a class called Designing the Professionals for MBA students and PhD students. And it's all based around this idea of life design, using design techniques, design thinking, and human-centered design to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. And so students, it's very popular classes because the class is really about the students, their transformation. And most of the students don't have any background in design. And I've been teaching design at Stanford since a long time, since dinosaurs roamed Pike Plaza.

I looked at your LinkedIn. I think I saw 40 on there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the classes are amazing and we teach the classes. I'm in the middle. This is week 6 of our 10-week quarter. So I'm in the middle of that quarter. I'll teach tomorrow. And the lab also runs what we call the transfer studio because we wanted to give the class. Dave and I decided, among other things, write a book and try to have more impact to give the class away to any university who wants it. So we've trained about 610 universities, maybe 5,000 educators on teaching this class at their schools. And it's all over the country and some internationally. So, so we, we teach, we sponsor research because it's Stanford's a research university. You want to know that your stuff works and not just because the students like it, but that it actually, you know, has some efficacy and in a variety of different measurements. And then we get it off campus as much as we can. We run a couple of transfer studios a year. To teach other schools how to teach it.

And another big program is coach training. So the coaching world came to— when the book got popular, the coaching world came to us and said, we need help. We want training. And so we failed miserably at that. You would be incredibly impressed with what we did. The wrong thing. We held a Facebook Live event to announce that training was unnecessary. We said, hey, coaches, if you're a good coach and you can actually read, you don't need a license to buy your client a book. So ole ole, oxen free, go forth, do the right thing. You should know what to do. The book is fairly straightforward.

You're good to go.

We got hate mail and like, no, no, no, we really want training. So there was a business waiting for us that we tried real hard not to be in. So we said, okay, well, I guess we'll try training. So now, about 1,000 coaches later worldwide, that apparently is a trend. So we're happy to support, which also turned out to be wonderful.

The coaching community in general, life coaching, executive coaching, whatever. It's just full of fantastic people.

Oh, yeah.

They want to help people. They're a little entrepreneur, but they're out in the world trying to help people. Everybody's got a slightly different version. And we said, hey, if you're already a coach and you want to add in the Designing Your Life tools, and this was even before the new book, we'll help you. We'll give you the dos and don'ts. We'll show you how to coach with it. Our whole idea is you take the class or you read the book and it's full of ideas and tools, but it's not like a sort of, hey, 3 steps to a perfect life. It's not that. Programmatic or that prescribed.

The very first Amazon book reviews said, finally, a self-help book where the writers respect the autonomy of the reader. And we read that, which I went, oh, thank God. Because one of the reasons we really wondered if we should write the book at all is like most self-help books, first of all, they just lie on your nightstand unread and make you feel guilty. But the author got the $27. So we didn't want to be the guilt inducers. Number 2, they don't work. And so like, what the heck, you know? And they tell you what to do. So they're proscribing or prescribing. They're shitting on you. We have a strong conviction. We don't want to shit on you and we don't recommend you shit on yourself. So we were fearful that people would hear shoulds even if we hadn't intended them. And so really respecting the autonomy of the reader, you know, you're the expert. You know, you're much better at being Nathan than we are. We got some tools for how that might help you, but we're not here to tell you who you are.

Because I want to go into design and your background and all that in a moment. But since we're talking about the book, Designing Your Life has been a, like, fantastically popular book.

As it turns out.

Yeah.

Who knew? And we didn't know.

We did not see that coming.

First time we ever wrote anything.

So how many copies has it sold now?

About a million.

Well, it's well over a million that we know of. And then there's such wonderful piracy.

And you're not even mad about it.

In Asia, it could well be between 1.5 and 2. We just don't know.

Yeah.

And so what's like, if you were to distill down the essence of the book or the, the, the not very prescriptive process that you take your students through, the questions that you get them to ask, what would that be?

You want to do the post on that?

Well, I mean, the first, the first part is think like a designer, right? So we have the designer's mindset of curiosity. Radical acceptance or curiosity, radical collaboration, biased action, biased action, things like that. So if you start— a lot of people want to plan their lives, but plans don't work because the future is uncertain. So we say, well, let's, let's come up with a design because design is inherently flexible. It's way more adaptive when things change. So we teach the mindsets, which is a little bit about the process. And then we help people figure out how to come up with more than one idea. Every designer knows you never go with your first idea. You want to come up with lots of ideas. And we know from our research at the Stanford Center for Design Research that having lots of ideas means you're going to choose better. And then there's techniques for choosing. There's techniques for whittling the ideas down to a few prototypes. And we're really big on trying something in the real world. So we talked about this last night when we were on a Good Morning Canada show in Canada, and we were forced to summarize the whole book and the whole process in—

the producer says, look, we're running late. You have to have the book in a sentence. And I go, dude, we're Stanford instructors. We have complicated answers to difficult questions. He goes, well, then you're off the air. I go, give me a minute. I used to be a marketing guy. I can do this. So the Post-it note, which is not one sentence, it's actually four, but it's only 10 words. Is get curious, talk to people, try stuff, and tell your story. So get curious means take the natural energy in your life that moves you out into the world and lean into that. Because this whole thing is kind of hard to do. You might as well start with some juice. Then talk to other people. This is not the transactional conversation. It's the narrative conversation. Oh, wow. Not just like, so what would I need in my resume to get hired here at Kidd? And what are the openings? And, you know, what do you make? And what's the vacation policy? That's all transactional. Like, oh, so you're Nathan, you know, and you, and you, and you're a dropout, but it's working pretty well. Tell me about that. So that's the narrative story. So go and get the story and then start trying living into those worlds experientially. And then as you're learning your way along that, because now you're learning your way into your own future, you tell the story of what you're learning, you know, and that generates more interesting conversations. So iterate that until something happens that you want to stick with.

I mean, there's so much in that that I love as a designer myself, right? I spent my early career in web design and UX design. Like one thing that really stood out to me was what you're talking about of designing lots of options.

Yeah.

You know, like in our class, one of our professors, you know, really stressed thumbnailing, right? Creating.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, she was like, you do not create one composition. Like, we're going to make, you know, 2x2 squares and we're going to make 10 of them on the piece of paper and you're going to make 10 different compositions.

People go to CAD too soon. They go to Figma too soon. They go to all these tools too soon. Have a bunch of ideas first. And, you know, and then vet the ideas, try a lot of different things. But everybody, I mean, everyone in any creative profession, whether it's songwriting, writing, uh, you know, like I say, web design, anything, have lots of ideas. And that also tends to pique curiosity. That tends to pique the ability to try stuff. I've got all these different ideas. Let's first have 3 or 4 of them. The biggest, the big kind of, uh, assignment in the class and the big thing in the book So we call the odysseys, 3 completely different versions for your life.

Okay.

There's a lot of data. A lot of times people just have an A/B decision, money versus meaning, work-life balance. Whenever it's a binary, it's a zero-sum game and you can't solve it. So have at least 3 ideas for your life. And the odysseys is like, what would you do if you keep doing what you're doing? What would you do if AI comes and that blows up and you need a plan B? And what would you do if you didn't care about money and you didn't care about what your friends thought of you, right? And the social status that comes along with whatever it is you're doing. And when people actually get into that and they create 3 completely different lives, they realize, oh, wait a minute, there's more going on here than I thought. What we would say is there's more aliveness in you than one life.

A big framing for us, a foundational framing is, you know, you're talking about you do a bunch of thumbnails. There's not one version of this website, there's not one version of you. And most people actually think there's a right answer to their lives, and that's what they're struggling with. And like, no, there is no right answer. There is no right. There are lots. There's no one right you. There are lots of good yous. So everybody contains more aliveness than one lifetime permits you to live out, i.e., there's more than one of you in there. So you want to hear from at least a couple of them before you choose which one you get to be. And then, and then that's all Designing Your Life. And then that also tees up another really challenging issue, which the new book is all about. Which is that, oh, and we do this exercise called, you know, how many lives are you? Like, if you could live in— Bill loves this, he loves physics models. So let's say we now know that the multiverse is real and we figured out string theory. So we now know how to run wormholes. So you could actually have consciousness access to all of your parallel selves and parallel universes. But it turns out in this Gedankenexperiment, German for a thinking experiment, something you can only do in your imagination, it turns out that the universe abhors waste. So you can be as many of you as you want in as many parallel universes and multiverses as you want, except don't waste any. So the multiverse would like to know, how many Nathans would you like to be? In fact, so like, if I go 1, 2, 3, and then on 4, so Nathan, 1, 2, 3, how many Nathans would you like?

Uh, 7.

7. Bingo. Turns out 7 or 8 is almost the answer every time. Um, so, and, and of course I lied, you don't get 7, you get 1. Um, which means if you're going to be 7 people, then you're only going to get to be about 15% of yourself. So 85% Nathan is never going to actually happen. And that's the good news.

Okay.

That's not— and then you're from FOMO to JOMO, from the fear of missing out. Like, oh my God, is that it? Is that it? So FOMO is all about exclusivity. Like, there is a right answer. There is a best Tuesday available to us. October 28th, Tuesday. There is a best one. Did I miss it?

Oh, shoot.

You know, no, no, no, no. There's lots of good ones. Be fully present to the one you're in. You're a particularity. You know, you're not a universality. And can you live deep? So you have to pick from among your particularities, and then you're going to live into that well.

How do you coach someone through that? Right. It's easy to talk about in theory of like, okay, which one do you want to pick? How do you actually coach someone through making that decision?

Well, it's the prototype thing.

Yeah. First of all, in the class, we do lots and lots of design exercises. The class is really a design studio. It's a 2-hour studio. Or if you look at the book, there's lots and lots of exercises. So first of all, we warm up. We do a bunch of improv comedy stuff. We play Yes, And, we play I'm a Tree. We do a bunch of stuff just to get, you know, these are smart students and they want to get right.

You go from the, like, I sit down in a classroom like, you want me to get out my textbook? Like, they're like that mindset.

And first thing is, you know, we have a saying at the D School, space creates behavior. You walk into a lecture hall, you know exactly what to do. Sit down, shut up, wait for the person at the front of the room to start talking. Our rooms are studios. They're set up in studios. They're sitting in teams of 3 or 6 or something. and we're constantly changing the energy. We're playing music. We're doing lots of stuff to get them to stop acting like the passive student receiving information and start acting like the designer. So we warm them up. We do a bunch of those kinds of things. And, and we, we're constantly stressing, you got to have lots of ideas. Let's, let's, we'll teach you how to brainstorm better. We'll teach you how to mind map better. We'll teach you how to use a bunch of other tools designers use to think more creatively. And a couple of research studies on the class, one from a woman named Lindsay Oishi, she was looking at the class and she's like, if you take the class versus a control group and the whole research protocol, if you take the class, you leave with what they call career self-efficacy. You believe you can design the career you want. And even if things change, you believe you can do it. We lower dysfunctional beliefs, things that you think are true that just aren't true. Oh, your major decides what you'll do for the rest of your life. No, that's not true. Less than 20% of the people are doing anything that has to do with what they studied in college 10 years out. That's the data. But the cool one that I like is if you take the class, you double your ability to have ideas. Literally, it's called novel ideation. You double your ability to have ideas. So now you're choosing from a much broader— and like you said, the joy of missing out is like, I got all these ideas. I'm going to pick one or two. Prototype my way forward. And by the way, if I get someplace I don't like, I can come up with more ideas. So once you've got that set of tools in your toolkit, you feel pretty, you feel pretty good because you know that you can manage change, you can adapt to change, or moreover, you can put your intention out in the world and start building your way towards it. We say in the design group, we say we build our way, we build to think. It's not like, oh, I built a thing to prove it works. I don't know. I'm trying lots of stuff. I'm building lots of stuff to discover the possible future that I'm going to live into. And the other thing we always tell students, don't you hope 5 years from now you're doing something you can't even imagine because it hasn't been invented yet? Wouldn't that be cool? Okay. How do you find that thing that hasn't been invented yet? We have an exercise called unicorn hunting. How do you find the thing that you're not even sure it exists, and maybe it's just a fantasy, but maybe it's the coolest thing in the world. And so we do lots of those kinds of exercises, and when people leave, they really have adopted the mindset and sort of the stance of being a designer. And our goal is that you're the designer of your life. We're not the guys telling you what to do. We don't should. But, you know, you reawaken your basic creativity, you reawaken your basic curiosity, and you feel pretty confident that you can go out in the world and get what you want.

The essence of prototype is prototype iteration. And in design, we prototype to learn something. We don't prototype to prove that we're right. So when you say, well, does this thing really work well enough to ship it? Let's prototype it. Okay, that's an engineering prototype that's doing a test. Like, I think I'm right. Let me test that I'm right. That's a certain kind of prototype. That's not what we're talking about at all. We're talking about a prototype like, gee, I wonder what it would be like to work for the CIA. Do I really want to work for an organization that kills people? Without saying anything about that. That was actually a conversation with one of my students. And like, well, how would we figure that out? You know, so go off and have a conversation. So we have conversations learning what people's stories are like. And because we're story-generating animals, it turns out sitting down, having a cup of coffee with somebody who's living the kind of life you're thinking about living is an incredibly good experience. It's actually— there's research out of Harvard on this about surrogation versus analysis. It turns out surrogation participating in another life through somebody else's lived experience is a more accurate way to make decisions than research. So reading the 6-inch dossier is not nearly as good as talking to 2 people who've done it before. And then try the experience, get a ride-along, sit in, go do a little thing, do a small project, and keep iterating that until you find something worth committing to. And then hold that for a year or 2 or 3 as a prototype. And we're talking a lot about college kids, but this question never goes away. I mean, so, and it's so— I no longer teach undergrads. I teach in the DCI program at Stanford, the Distinguished Careers Institute, a very fancy name because it's expensive for a gap year for grown-ups. So if you're 45 to 90 years old, you can take a year off and come to Stanford and think deeply about what do I do with the rest of my life? Most of them are 55 to 75, what we used to call retirement age, rethinking themselves, probably won't go back and live the life they left. And they're all asking the exact same questions that the 19-year-olds are. They ask it with a different mindset, with a different situation, but it's the same darn question. And then in between, our coaches are mostly working with people in their careers. So 35, 45 people. So we're in every generation from Gen Z to boomers. And guess what? Everybody thinks their life is important to them, and everybody's asking the question, now what? And then not only now what, but even after I design that life and does it really work? Is that a better life? Is that a better career? Is that a better situation? Oh, and is my lived experience of it actually working for me and is it being fulfilling? And what we overwhelmingly started hearing, particularly after the pandemic, was no.

Right.

So then we got stuck writing another book.

So there's so much that I want to get into the book, and we still need to come back to your background in design. But before we do that, now that I'm tallying up, we designed lots of products before.

Okay. Yeah.

But something that I'm thinking about is like the problem of an abundance of opportunity. And so a lot of listeners to the show may have been in a place where early in their career or something else, they're like, do I choose between A or B? You know, I have this range of things. And then somehow they found themselves in this creator world where now they have thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people listening to them on a weekly or monthly basis for their expertise. And then this incredible influx of opportunity because now you have the attention of all these people who are then saying, do you want to speak at this event? Do you want to start this business with me? Do you want to do all of these things? And so you go from this fairly narrow set of opportunities to basically an infinite set of opportunities. And, and knowing you could generate more if you wanted to, because like your whole frame for the world is now broken because like, wait, I can connect with basically anyone that I want to, and I can start any business that I want to. And so I talk to all of these creators who are like, I have no idea what to do because how do I choose? How do I, how do I choose? How do I even begin to frame this problem? And they go talk to their friends, right, that they grew up with, went to college with, whatever, who are, who cannot relate in any way. And you're like, what are you talking about? You have too much money, too much opportunity, too many connections. And so I'm very curious how you would go about, like, helping, you know, coaching someone through a problem like that.

Yeah. Well, see, interestingly, in most career paths, you can still walk into it. Okay, we talk about design thinking. Yep. You know, easiest way to understand design thinking is understand other ways of thinking that it's not. There's engineering thinking where we solve our way forward and there's a right answer that's replicatable every time. There's business thinking where you optimize your way forward. There is no right answer, but you can get better, preferably quantitatively and over time. There's research thinking where you analyze your way forward. There's bureaucratic thinking where you process your way forward. And those are all really powerful tools. They all think they have right answers. But there's a whole class of questions called wicked problems. That's a concept developed by urban planners back at Berkeley in the '70s where, you know, you don't know what you're looking for, so you find it. The solution is so unique to the circumstances that it's not replicatable, you know, and it changes over time. Oh, deeply human problems and wicked problems. None of those tools work because there's no right answer. And they usually rely on the future where we have no data. So you can't analyze data that doesn't exist. So you're screwed. Except design your way forward. So we can actually do this empirical iterative process of designing a way forward. So when you're facing the wicked problem of too many wonderful choices, You have to start. You don't have the convenience that everybody else does, which, oh, there's probably the right answer about how do I make partner in the law firm? There's the right answer. How do I become VP? How do I get the next big VC round? How do I, you know, how do I do the thing everybody says you're supposed to want to do here? You're not that person. You are the dog who caught the car. You're sitting there with a bumper in your mouth. You got a car. What do you do with it? You know? And then the question becomes, oh, what do I actually want? Now, there might be— the tempting right answer is that which will create even more followers. So bigger is better, and I can just fall right into bigger is better, and now can optimize and call Kit, and they can help you solve that problem. So you want them to think that way, but that actually isn't the right answer. That's just one answer. So now when you really have that many choices, it does actually boil down to you have to really think through what you want. We call that coherence and your compass and what your values are. So it actually becomes a value alignment issue.

Yeah. We've got a great little snippet of a lecture we use because we have a decision-making model. How do you make a decision in the face of abundance? And it's a professor of philosophy, I think, at Rutgers, a woman named Ruth Chang. And she says, look, when faced with two options, equally wonderful and equally, you know, potentially fantastic money, whatever, prestige, whatever, but different. You have the opportunity to author who you want to be. Who do you put your agency behind? Because the external world is saying these things are equal. Then the question becomes, if I go down this path, I become this kind of a person. If I go down this path, I become that kind of person. So the question gets back to values, coherence, sense of who do you want to become, right? Because we're all becoming into the next version of ourselves.

Can is not should.

And her thing is like, put your agency behind something and become the person you want to be. And that's actually kind of the peak of human potential is to be able to author the person you are. A lot of people in the traditional economy or in whatever you want to call it are basically just slogging through a job, hanging on, probably not happy. 70% of American workers are disengaged at work according to the Gallup polls. And that number hasn't changed much in 20 years. So 70% of the people get up on Monday morning and go, I got to go to work. You're talking about people who saw the electric fence and realized there was no juice in it. They just hopped the fence and now they're doing their own thing. And that's another challenge right now. I can do anything. And maybe if I get a little bit of success, how do I figure out what's next? But you figure it out by putting your agency, yourself behind the thing you do. In the dinner we had last night with other folks who are creators, everybody is doing it because it's their mission in life. They didn't do it because they wanted, you know, success and fame on Instagram. That was the tool to get to being able to have the permission to keep doing the thing they were doing. But they would probably do it anyway.

There's a line I've heard from Seth Godin where he says, profit is just permission to do it again tomorrow.

Exactly.

And so, yeah, it's an indicator you're doing the right thing.

Yeah. Yeah.

So you're talking about design thinking and this approach to it. I want to know in the early stages of your career and all of that, where you got exposed to design thinking and the types of products that you got to apply this on hands-on.

Sure. You know, I grew up on the East Coast. I grew up right outside of Boston. I wanted to get as far away from my parents as possible. Ended up at Stanford. And Stanford has this really unique design program, had it since the '60s, which combines engineering, art, psychology, and anthropology. And I thought, oh, I'm a guy who can't stick to one subject. This looks pretty good to me. And particularly the art part, because I'm also an artist. But, um, so I got into this program and it's basically human-centered design. It was the original thinkers from MIT, from Stanford, uh, from Berkeley thinking about how do we design stuff that responds to human needs? Otherwise we're creating inhuman, in those days, machines. Now, you know, human-centered design to create better interactions, websites, digital stuff, experiences. So I fell into that pretty early. And then I ended up working in the toy industry, worked on Star Wars toys for about 2 or 3 years, came back to the Valley and then just jumped into high tech. And I've been in the tech business ever since. I did a couple of startups where I was one of the founders, raised the money, sold one successfully, ran the other one straight into the ground. So I had both of those experiences, which is great. I worked at Apple for 7 years designing when, right when we were starting to really pioneer the modern laptop was the original PowerBook 100 was the first laptop from Apple that was successful. And so I was on that team for about 7 years. Then I did consulting and, you know, I designed toilets for the Kohler Corporation, which is a really interesting bunch of people and ticketing systems for stadiums and medical devices and stuff. Consulting was fun because you get this huge variety. And then in 2000s, and I had been teaching all along a little bit, you know, one quarter a year. And in 2006, David Kelley, who runs the D School, was starting the D School, is the founder of IDEO, the big international consulting firm, innovation firm. He called me up and said, hey, would you want to come in and do this full time? So most of my experience has been in industry. I've only been a full-time academic since 2006.

Okay.

But I mean, like building a lot of the products.

Building a lot. Lots and lots of products.

Lots and lots of products. And we're product guys. I mean, you know, and—

I got two products in the Computer History Museum, which is kind of cool.

That's very cool.

Yeah, I was just walking through the Technology Museum in Pearson. Oh, there's Elisa. How cool. No, so my backstory, I was a mechanical engineer. I actually was on the hard side, not the design side when I was at Stanford and at Apple early. Like Bill, but a couple of years before him. So I was going through the ME program at Stanford and doing heavy thermal science and this kind of stuff, making engines, you know, but hung out a lot with the design guys, the crazy guys who would lie around in the Imaginarium and stare at strange psychedelic images. Like, this is pretty interesting. Then ended up in high tech and was on the original Lisa team. The Lisa was the computer that preceded the Macintosh. I often say the Lisa died in childbirth but birthed Macintosh into the world, the first user-friendly computer on the planet. So I was the world's first, you know, computer mouse product manager at Apple in 1979, which was a transformational product. Yeah. And one of the first times I got to come to Boise, because where I'm sitting now was in 1980, to fly out here when Hewlett-Packard had just opened what became the new printer division and started to invent this thing called desktop printing, desktop laser printing. So I was looking at the very first Canon laser optic bench on a Hewlett-Packard lab in 1980. So I started laser printing, desktop publishing, and mousing at Apple. And that's— and I worked with what was then called Hovey Kelly Design, which was the predecessor of what became IDEO. So that was the first product that they did. So we created the, the mother of IDEO. So I've been hanging around designers my entire career and facilitating their work and product managing them. And then I went into consulting and mostly I was also on the Apple Corporate Culture Committee. We were the first year I was at Apple. We grew from 800 to 5,000 people.

Wow.

So that was kind of fast. So suddenly there's way more of them than us.

Yep.

You know, and 6 weeks in, I was one of the old guys. And so I ended up on the culture committee. How do we not lose it? And Apple suddenly becomes National Semiconductor instead of Apple. And that turned into an interesting conversation. So a lot of my consulting work— I was an unemployed marketing guy for 30 years, what we now call gigging— a lot of that was around corporate culture. So designing organizational systems, designing corporate cultures. Designing processes that don't just get the work done, but care about the worker on the way.

There was one other thing he left out. He was one of the founders of Electronic Arts.

Another.

Which was interesting to really understand product design because I ended up being— and I did that because I really love— I wanted to do a startup, wanted to do a VC thing, wanted to be with a good team, wanted to be in a missionally minded company, and I wanted to do good work. And they had all those things. They happened to want to do personal software, which I thought was incredibly boring. I still don't play games. But everything else was there. So 5 out of 6 is hard to get. Go for it. So I jumped on that bus and of course ended up in charge of product development. So even though I wouldn't have bought one of our products, I helped create the process that created them. And that was really understand— do I understand how this process works? Because I'm doing it as a professional facilitator, not necessarily as a user.

What I love about both of you, your stories, is this blend of the real-world application, the, you know, the very heavy research-based, you know, everything you've done at Stanford and all of that. And then just the deep investment in people all the way through, right? As you're talking about building company cultures and all, because so many people end up in this place where they're saying they're designing it in a purely academic way or, or it's theoretical and you're like, this is how it works. You're like, No, it's a combination of people. Like, it doesn't work anything like, you know, you think it does on paper. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't have a question in it, but if there's more on that, then—

Too many academics are just about the idea, and too many business people are just about the money. And frankly, it's like you said, God incarnate. Both of those are just tools to get to the people. It's about the people.

And it still astonishes me that 95% of engineering programs across all the universities that I know of don't teach psychology. Like, if you don't, if you, I know how to build anything because I'm a smart engineer. I'm going to build things that are inhuman because I haven't factored in the fact that, oh, nobody knows what this button does, or nobody can figure out this interface, or nobody can figure out this thing. So it's just a little bit of human psychology goes a long way to enable people to do better designs. And then, you know, I've always cared about the aesthetics of things. I mean, I used to tell my teams, look, it takes 9 months to make a baby because it was just early days of being a dad. And it's going to take about 9 months to make this computer. So let's— babies are beautiful. We've got plenty of time. Let's make this thing beautiful. And then going to Apple just reinforced that because the studio is all about what we used to call creating objects of desire. We never talked about, you know, industrial design is often misused in a lot of ways. And at Apple, we talked about making objects of desire and sort of three levels of why an object works. There's the functional level, there's the aesthetic level, and there's the sort of deeply cultural level. How does this fit with the culture of what humans want to do? And so that's why Apple, it's always been the computer for the rest of us. It's always been the computer that's beautiful. It's gorgeous, a gorgeous object. And it's a gorgeous object because you carry your portable around with you. It's a, it's a, it's a statement of fashion as much as your you know, the brand of your jeans or the brand of your handbag. And so like, why not make, we're responsible for the built world. Why not, why not make it beautiful? It doesn't take extra time to make, it takes extra time to make things simple. To make a computer easy to use is much harder than just to make one that just works, right?

Yeah.

Um, but to make things beautiful, it seems like that should be in everybody's, you know, the mission of every, every designer, engineer, creator. It's like, make a beautiful experience, make a wonderful product. And by the way, if you make a beautiful experience and a wonderful product, you're going to have more customers.

Right. So how would you equate that, that approach to making it beautiful and the mindset that you bring to products back to life? Because I think there's some, some pretty strong parallels to meaning in life. And that's the new book.

Life is an aesthetic experience, essentially, right? I mean, it's the experience of the wonder of the world and the beauty of the world. And it's an experience in what we talk about in the other book. It's an experience in the particular moment of this particularly beautiful world.

What underlies beauty is elegance and recognizability. So we screw with people's lives who are living. I mean, we literally put out there that we have some thoughts about how you might think about redesigning your life. And now we have the most presumptuous title of all time, How to Live a Meaningful Life. I mean, people say, oh, what's the title of your book? And I'm embarrassed. It's actually how to live a meaningful life. Oh my God, you think you have something to say about that? Yeah, so you're gonna put that out there. Then what we have to do, what beauty looks like in that conversation, I think, is it's recognizable. So as people are reading stuff, it's not like, oh my God, I never thought of that. It's like, ah, that really is true. So we're trying to mostly awaken truths that are already there. And then we're gonna give, we wanna leave you hopeful that that is not just, a never-ending elusive thing, and there's a doable step you can take right away. So for us, it's recognizability, the elegance of simplicity, and doability. So if we are simple, recognizable, and doable, you put those all three together and you see people's shoulders drop like, oh, maybe I can actually do this. That moment is what beauty looks like when you're trying to free people up to become more alive.

Simple, recognizable, doable.

Yep.

Okay.

And so recognizable. It really is true. So it's authentically true. It's simple and doable.

Yeah. So you're not feeling like you read this thing and you're like, I don't know, you got to convince me. It's just that, oh, you just peeled back a layer to uncover this thing that I already knew to be true.

Yeah. And I knew it intuitively, but you've named it. You put it in, named it and framed it, and now I can do something about it. But still, at the end of the day, I kind of knew this was true. Now, people are flooded with self-help stuff and all sorts of stuff. And in the attention economy, it's often hard to hear your own voice.

Yeah, there's a lot of noise out there.

A lot of noise out there. So we're basically trying to get people back to, hey, wait a minute. There's a way to do this. It's simpler than everybody— I mean, all the mindfulness gurus and everybody else are trying to make it really complicated, I guess, to sell more mindfulness classes or something. And our thing is like, well, actually, it's pretty simple because it's right here in the particular moment. The scandal of particularity is one of the big themes in the book. It's simple. You have availability to it. You just have to kind of pay attention a different way. Again, mindsets are so powerful. Like, if you have a mindset of curiosity as a designer, you're going to discover things other people didn't see. You're just curious they were there. You just found them. In the new book, it's like curiosity plus mystery, because there's lots of things in the world we don't understand. Curiosity plus mystery equals wonder. So when you take curiosity up a step, it becomes wonder. Like, look, not just, oh, how curious, this is interesting. Look at the world. It's like, Oh, wait a minute. Look at the world. Isn't it amazing? We were just talking about this this morning. As the sun came up through the windows at the hotel restaurant, it's like, wow. If you stop and pay attention, that's pretty cool. It's pretty wondrous. So we're trying to, one, make it simple because we think it is simple, and two, make it available. So it's just right here. You just need to look at things differently. And if you have these new mindsets, if you're looking at the world this way, because the mindset is how you frame things, and whatever you're paying attention to is what you get. So if you pay attention to all the crap in the world or you're distracted by all the attention-grabbing apps, that will be your reality. You have a choice to have a different kind of reality, and it's not that hard.

Is there a time for you either where someone helped you uncover a truth like that that was readily apparent and help you find that meaning, or that you were able to do it for a student or someone you were working with?

There's the old adage that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I don't think that's about, oh, my studential reality will manifest a teacher and suck them out of the cosmos and make them materialize in front of me like a Star Wars transporter or Star Trek transporter. What it means is there are invitations all over the place. And the ones you learn are the ones you're ready for. So the moments when this happens, I think, for us individually and certainly for the people we work with, is when the teachable moment arrives. We tell our coaches, by the way, that we do what we call facilitative coaching or situational coaching. Start with what's going on. Here's what you need to know, but what is actually happening in your life? So when there's a need, when there's a teachable moment in your life, whether it's the beginning of your career, whether it's, you know, you're 10 years into your marriage and it's fine, but it's boring. Like, oh, who are you growing into next? I mean, there's a longing in you. So the longing of the heart and the soul, you know, are reaching out. And then in that longing moment, do you have something to offer it that it can respond to in a meaningful way? You know, so, and we ran into a deep longing with, we, I learned all this stuff in college, but how the heck do I decide what to do with it? So we responded about longing, and lately we've been hearing the longing like, and I did all that stuff and it's still not very fulfilling. What's up with that? So that longing. So there's a moment in individuals' lives, and right now we think there's a moment in the culture's life around this meaning question that's really struggling because people— and our thesis about that is that the primary problem is most people's definition of what's meaningful right now or what's fulfilling to them is making an impact, which is a wonderful thing. A lot of impacts deserve to get made, except you don't have control over the other 9 billion people who may not stay on script for the plan you had for the world. And even if you make an impact, 5 minutes later, what have you done for us lately? So impact is important and it's a worthwhile thing, but it's a temporary thing and it's just a thing thing. And you're a person, not a thing. So if impact is the only form of meaning-making that you validate, technically you're screwed because it's not going to last and it probably won't work. Most things don't at the end of the day. And there are, we think, significant other parts of the human experience, which really boils down to the way you're living and what we call the transactional world versus the flow. The transactional world is the consciousness of your mind thinking about getting stuff done, which is where modern people spend 99.7% of their time, which is why impact is what they care about. Because when I'm getting stuff done, what's meaningful is the outcome of what I did, and that's called an impact. And that's great. But that's all you are. It's not very satisfying. Even when it works, it's not very satisfying. And then the rest of this has to— we think there are a number of categories. We specifically wonder when that experience— wonder Bill was just talking about. Flow. Can I be fully involved in the present moment? How do I learn how to be in flow? Coherence. When am I actually acting like what I care about is true? I'm living values aligned. And then lastly, we call formative community in relationships with other people that are meaningful. So we take these 4 categories and say these are rich with opportunity. And each one of those ones we picked are around a longing. I long for this transcendent experience for wonder. I long to be fully alive in the moment that I'm in. I want to be in flow. I long for feeling like I matter and I am a significant person. That's coherence. And I long to be with other people and part of something bigger than myself. That's what community is about. So those 4 longings create teachable moments. We're just trying to hand a little tool to each of those moments so people can make progress.

And, you know, you talk to lots of Gen Zs and we talk to lots of students and also people in their 30s and 40s. It's a, it's a thing now. Everybody's looking for more meaning, right?

52 million people walked off the job after the pandemic looking for more meaning and most of them didn't find it.

So it's a good thing. Actually, I'm very excited about this generation of students. The last 10 years or so, 10, 12 years, they're coming to class. They really want to work hard. They want to know more. They want to figure out how to get a job that's meaningful. They talk a lot about impact. We try to sort of reframe the impact thing to make sure that they're looking for the right thing. But I'm super encouraged. This is a generation of people who are not going to settle for a 9-to-5 crappy job, mostly. And/or put the job in a category. That's fine. That's just for money making. But I have this other thing I'm doing for meaning making. I saw a statistic, I think in the US, like 75% of Gen Zers have a side hustle.

Yeah.

You know, because the job isn't going to get you everything you want, maybe even in terms of money and impact and things. But, and the side hustle isn't ready to be monetized yet. But I think that that speaks to this longing of, but wait a minute, I can't spend all day doing something that's meaningless. Just making PowerPoints for the boss, right? I've got to have something in my life where I can say, at least in the big picture for me, I think I'm doing something that matters. I'm doing something that matters. If nothing else, it matters to me. So, you know, you talked about what we have some moments where we realize this thing. My very first job working in the toy company in Cincinnati, Ohio, I had The best and probably the only good manager I ever had, because tech companies, by the way, are poorly managed by people who are technically adept but are terrible at managing, but they end up managing. And he taught me the most important rule of management is people will never remember what you said. They'll only remember how you made them feel. And then that's transferable to teaching and everything else I do. I'm not managing. I'm trying to manage that the connection is valid, that it's legitimate, that it's real. So we made a deal when we started this class. We were out at Sawatzky's beer garden out behind the university. I said, you know, if we teach this stuff, we have to do all the exercises. We're talking about designing a life and living into the design that you have. It can't be theoretical. We have to do it. We do odysseys. I do work-life balance stuff. I do all sorts of stuff. And I do it also as examples to the students, because if you're standing up in front of class, it's just like we talked about this in terms of parenting last night. Students figure out pretty quickly if you're inauthentic or you're hypocritical or you're just talking, but you don't really live it. And so it's a very different, I mean, it's a design class. It's a studio. It's not a lecture. It's a lot of activities. We actually plan the energy in the class. When are we going to play music? When are we going to do it? All to create an experience that the student can have to design into that. But if the two guys in front of the class are just phoning it in, it's not going to work. So you want to, you want to, if you tell people authenticity and coherence is important, you have to live it. Have it. Not that we're totally coherent or I'm not totally authentic. But I'm working at it.

Something that I notice in so much of what you, you all are doing, you know, you're very intentional at the same time from talking last night and, you know, from this conversation today, you're also at times very reluctant, right? Of being pulled into so many of these opportunities that you create. And so if you're up for it, I'd love to shift gears a little bit and talk about, I know we don't want to over, over-index on impact. No, but you've made something that's very impactful.

No, no, no, it's true.

Keep going.

And we're hoping, and we're hoping that the book has an impact on people and that it's a positive thing.

So you've sold well over a million copies and then had probably another million copies pirated of the first book. You know, with the new book, what's the reach or the impact that you hope that it has? You know, if we're talking about numbers and all that.

Well, I mean, we've hired some phenomenal resources to help us with launching the book. And Simon Schuster—

Shout out to Delma, who's hanging out with us in the studio just off camera.

The guy that brought us into this room.

And Simon Schuster, so the January to March time frame in the publishing industry is called the New Year, New You season. New Year, New You. You're going to buy your diet book, your self-help book, your meditation book, whatever, because that's, you know, people make their New Year's resolutions. So we're the New Year, New You book for Simon Schuster. They've decided this is their book for the launch for this season. So they're putting a lot of time in.

And what's the launch date?

February 3rd.

Yeah, February 3rd. They're putting a lot of time in.

February 3rd, available at all retail outlets and online, wherever books are sold.

Wherever books are sold.

How to Live a Meaningful Life.

Yeah, How to Live a Meaningful Life. Using design thinking to unlock more joy, purpose, joy, and flow every day. And so we're putting a lot of resources behind this because, you know, my thought, I think we shared, is like, let's give this book the best chance of finding the readers who need it, right? So let's give the book the best chance of finding the readers who need it. And nowadays that means, you know, on social media, on a newsletter, on all the ways in which you're trying to communicate to people using Kit as our platform to get it out so that if you are thinking about the meaning of life, or if you're thinking about how to have more flow, more joy, or if you're thinking about the transcendent questions of what's really going on here, we think we have something you might enjoy reading. And it might be helpful. And it's very doable. It's, you know, we take the research down to something you can understand. And so we really want to get it out there. And frankly, we aren't very good at— we're kind of older than most of your other creators. I know I've had an Instagram account. Okay, I've got a little— I've got about 20,000 people on my Instagram.

But you asked the question, asking ourselves.

Well, we don't know. We don't know how— we don't really know how to do this. So we've surrounded ourselves with experts, including, you know, working with the Kit team. Um, but yeah, yeah, you know what, James Cleary sold 30 million books.

Yeah, right, right about that. Okay, 30 million.

It's a good— that's a good target.

Only the best-selling book of the last, uh, I, I take 10, 10 million. 10, 10 million.

I mean, I've got, I've got a little, uh, summer cottage I'm trying to build. 10 million could really impact the, uh, the architecture. Um, and, uh, and, and forgetting whatever that turns out to be in terms of money, it's like This is probably the last book we write, right?

Please.

I like writing them. He doesn't like writing them. But, um, if this is the last one, I'd really like to get it out there to a lot of people. So whatever advice you've got on how you do that, let's talk through that.

You know, I'm in a fairly privileged position of having a front row seat to a lot of these book launches. Like, James Clear and I have been friends for, uh, I guess 13 years now. And so we were at a cabin a couple hours from here, like brainstorming book titles, you know, and working on that for Atomic Habits. And the first ingredient that I've seen in all of these book launches is just writing a really great book, right? Because these books that sell for a long time, it's, you know, it's how good is the product. And as product guys, you understand that very, very clearly.

Books are all about referral and it's all about My friend said, you got to read this book. Yeah.

So, you know, Atomic Habits is a perfect example because there are some books that launch to a huge level and just stay there. Like, um, the Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins is an example like that. But Atomic Habits launched, hit the New York Times list, and then didn't reappear on the New York Times list, I think for 3 years. And then, but it like had built this groundswell and just the referrals and the attention. And then it, like, you know, year 4 or 5, somewhere in there, uh, it was back on the New York Times list, and then it has never left. And I think at least 2 years it's been the number 1 book on Amazon. You know, we're talking like 6 years after it came out and 7 years after it came out. I think he slipped to number 2 on Amazon. Uh, poor guy. But, um, so the quality of the book initially is very, very important. I think the next thing is—

and the quality of the problem it speaks to.

Yes. Yeah. And the universality of the problem, right? If someone's writing it, you know, a niche business book is not going to have the same reach. But the next thing is the relentless and steady marketing that happens behind it, because some people have this approach like, oh, I made a good product and then people will come to it, right? And it's like, now if you made a good product, people will stay once they find it, right? But to have that You know, that, that machine behind it. Someone that I really admire is Ryan Holiday, who is just, he puts in a relentless amount of work to build this, you know, not only his writing, but also his, his promotion and all that of every book, uh, that he puts out. James is the same way with Atomic Habits, where he has steadily promoted that book for the last 7 years. You know, he actually hasn't come out with another one. You know, it's just like, on this one book. And so one thing I'm curious about for you guys is like what level of time and energy you're able, you know, over the next, let's say 3 years, are you able or willing to put into promoting this book?

Well, it's the big dog, you know, it's the big dog in the room. So I think, you know, whatever we're gonna give, we're gonna give to this.

I think within that framing of like, okay, you know, that's super helpful. So then my next question is, Is there someone that you look to who has done what you're trying to do and you're like, oh, I want to have that level of impact or I want to grow and market it in the way that they did? Any inspirations there?

Boy.

Well, Tom McCabbage is certainly one because it's interesting. Tom McCabbage came out roughly the same time one of our colleagues, a guy named BJ Fogg, wrote a book, which is essentially the same book. And he called his book Tiny Habits. Yes, it's a good book. He's a, you know, he's a well-known researcher in the space of, you know, habits and behavior and motivation. But nowhere near, you know, the same thing. So again, it's, let's even assume they're of equal quality. What Claire was able to do to get the message across, to give his book the best chance of finding readers who needed it, I think is phenomenal. I had read Matthew McConaughey's Greenlights book. Actually, it's one of the few books I listened to on tape. Oh, it's because he's so, he's so fun to listen to him say his own story.

People give away the physical copy and I'm like, you should have that on your shelf, but go on Audible.

Yeah, go on Audible. It's a great listen. And I think certainly McConaughey has fame as a movie star, but that doesn't mean his book's going to be any Doesn't mean his story is going to be any good. And I thought he captured his story really, really well. And now he's using the asset of himself and his voice and everything else for his new book on poetry and things like that. So I really admire the fact that he— and then everything I've heard from insiders is he's actually the guy he says he is. He's not made up a story to play Matthew McConaughey, blah, blah, blah. He's a real guy. And so that's— I think I like his authenticity, and I like the way he's brought his message out to people. So there's two that I look at that are good. The book that we sort of supplanted that's been around for a billion years was What Color Is Your Parachute? By Dick Bolles. And then he published that book in the '70s. And then What Color Is Your Parachute? 2001. What Color Is Your Parachute? 2002. He passed away. His son is now taking it forward. It was a good book on sort of how to figure out what you want to be when you grow up and what was your, what was your, what's your strategy for doing that. But it was pretty idiosyncratic and it wasn't based on any research or anything. But we're now the book ahead of that book in terms of people thinking about stuff. But, you know, what he did in the early days of publishing in the '70s, the self-help category wasn't even really a category yet. Was created a whole category of books about how to live a meaningful life. So I look at that as— and he sold a billion of them over a very long period of time. So those, I'd say, Greenlights, Atomic Habits, and What Color Is Your Parachute are three pieces of content I admire. And the latter two I admire the way they got it out to the people who would be potential readers. What was the one I read about? It was the guy who was the megachurch guy.

Purpose Driven Life?

Purpose Driven Life. Yeah, Rick Warren. Yeah.

That's another one that spread like crazy. Yeah.

Yeah. And that certainly has a very strong point of view, not one I connect to, but a strong point of view. Well-written and really clear, like, who's this for and why would it be useful? Why would it be helpful? People come up to me all the time and Dave all the time and say, hey, I read your book, changed my life. And my one question is, that's fantastic. Thank you so much for letting me know. And what did you find useful? Like, what in the book was—

What did you apply?

Yeah, what did you apply? And there's two kinds of readers. There's like, There's the one that comes up and the book has got a Post-it on every page and a tab on every page and everything's underlined. And that's probably 20% of the readers. And the other ones, the book changed my life. And I go, really? What exercise did you do? I didn't do any exercises. I just liked the book. And what I've figured out from that, because we were thinking about it a lot when we were writing this book, is like, it was one thing, like the idea that you could reframe a problem, the idea that you could prototype something. So typically there's one thing in there that was useful, and that's what I'm looking for. What was useful?

What is that one thing? Yeah. So I guess running with those examples, the, you know, the one that I'm closest to is Atomic Habits. And there's three things that really stand out to me about how James executed on that book.

Right.

The first one is the book is full of portable stories, these one-liners that describe a thing. I think there's— I won't get them all off the top of my head, but, um, uh, like Identity-Based Habits, right? Every action you take is a vote for who you want to become. Um, 1% Better Every Day is another one. And he's got a few of these that when someone wants to recommend the book— oh, what are you reading right now? Oh, I read this book called Atomic Habits, it was great. What was great about it? And they have that one thing that they can— that they can say.

So that, uh, it's memeable and that's a good thing.

Yes, exactly. And he spent an absurd amount of time getting to that point and getting to those. Um, the second thing is the relentless promotion, like his time horizon for the book. So many authors are looking at this like, you know, 90-day window for launch. And, you know, you should be looking at like a 9-year window. You spend, you spend a lifetime of experience to build up to be able to write this book. And now it's like, okay, let's, um, let's have a very long time horizon. Not to say that—

So make it sticky and stick with it.

Yes. Yep, exactly. The third thing is that I don't think many authors get right is the flywheel of reviews and the feedback loop to be able to get readers in a way that you can contact them. So this is something that I've never seen someone do better than what James did in Atomic Habits. So throughout the book, he has various resources, you know, the things he cut from the book or the Atomic Habits for Parenting, or like you'll find these little things that go to the website, you know, jamesclear.com/whatever and put in your email address and download it. Everybody does that, or they should. That is, um, if you don't have that, you know, I would try to get at least 4 or 5 of those throughout the book. Uh, you know, if it had, the book hasn't gone to print yet, like, yes, that's it for that. The cool thing about that. Is that when someone signs up for that, so long as you don't promote that link anywhere else, you know that they're a reader. And that is the hardest thing to get is readers that you can push information to. Okay.

Right.

Because the book was bought at Barnes Noble and Amazon. Like, they're not your customer. Yeah, they bought a product that you made, but they're not your customer. And so there's all these things that you want them to take action on that you can't asked them to do. And you have your email list, but you don't know—

Who read it.

You don't know who bought, and you don't know who read, and those are two different things. And so if halfway through the book, they go to the link and they opt in, you know, that's in chapter 7, right? Usually they at least read through to chapter 7. And so what James does really well is he has an email sequence in Kit. So when someone subscribes to these, he tags them as a reader. Specifically. And then he sends an email or a series of emails with more engaging content. He wants them to finish the book because the likelihood of them recommending the book if they finish it is way higher. And you know, there's every book is going to have a retention curve, right? And so some of the emails are to get you to be like, oh yeah, no, I was meaning to turn that back on on Audible or get back to it. But then the thing is, he sends them an email a few weeks later and says, hey, how'd you like the book? And it's 1 to 5 stars. And this is what I think is really clever. Everyone says like, oh, you finished the book, will you write a review? He doesn't do that. He asks, how'd you like the book? And depending on which of the 5 stars you click, he sends you to a different place. 1 to 4 stars, he says, thank you so much for the feedback. I really appreciate it. Or he doesn't need more feedback. You know what you might do early on is say, uh, oh, like, thank you so much for telling us that. Would you mind filling out this short survey or tell us what you didn't like about the book, how we can make it better? And the 5-star people, only those do you then send to Amazon or wherever else and say, wow, thanks so much. I'm glad you love the book. Will you write your review in this place? And so what happens is someone, you, all the people who, uh, hated the book, right? You're like, great, go over here. Oh, but you love the book?

Come over here.

And so what happens is you end up in this flywheel where the more books you sell, the more readers you tag, the more that you're able to segment as a 5-star reader, ask them to write a review on Amazon, which helps your rankings, which helps you sell more books. And so you just— everyone in my life I'm looking for flywheels or virtuous cycles. And then you also have this group. You not only have readers tagged inside of Kit, you have 5-star readers. And so then when someone writes the nasty review on Goodreads where they're like, I hate these guys in particular, you know, whatever happens, and you're like, ooh, our ranking is going down. You can set, you can email the 7,000 5-star reviews and say, hey, will you do this for us? Right? And you can mobilize them and you know who your biggest fans are. And that is wildly valuable. Any reactions, thoughts?

It's a fantastic idea.

It's creating an infrastructure that allows the people who want to help you to do so.

Right. Yes.

You're enabling. You've got more help available than you think. Give them a chance to let you succeed.

And then the other thing is, because you have location for every email address, right? Then when you show up and you're like, hey, I'm doing this event, right? I'm going to be in LA, in New York, or, you know, I'm doing this locally, right? You can say, oh, who are my 5-star readers within 100 miles of the Bay Area? Right. And that could be very interesting and very useful.

The other direction that I want to go is unfair advantages.

Okay.

What I'm curious about is what unfair advantages do you think you all have in writing and promoting this book that some other author would look at and be like, man, I wish I had this thing that they have?

Hmm. Well, it was pretty clear to me that we wouldn't have gotten even the first book deal if we weren't two guys from Stanford.

Credibility.

He said it gave us credibility. And we had been teaching the class for 7 years. We had phenomenal student feedback on that sort of stuff. And we had done some things in the professional world. We did a couple of gigs at Google and a few other things. So we had a whole bunch of brand names that people would go, wow, you've done this thing at Google, you've done this thing at Stanford.

So I think that's Another key thing is we have a relationship with almost 1,000 coaches and about 6,000 educators.

Yeah, that's a huge one.

And they're real evangelists for what we're doing. They really care.

Pretty dedicated people.

So what have you put together in this launch strategy and then the ongoing strategy for the 9 years to follow?

Right.

What have you put together for those coaches?

And we just launched an affiliate— we just announced an affiliation program for the coaches for them to participate in pushing the word out because they've all got client lists and they've all got referral bases. So we created a motivation for them where they can earn their— there's an annual fee to stay on the certified list and appear on the website, and they can earn their way into that. So there's a way for them to actually do good work and get paid for it. We haven't come up with the educator one yet, but we're thinking about it.

So I think you're teachable there.

If there's, you know, in a typical affiliate launch, if you were going to the online marketing world, there would be a leaderboard of some kind. I don't know if that matches, um, that profile, the profile of what you're doing here, but, but you want to think about like, hey, what's the version of that? Something that I would do in my design career a lot is I would blatantly steal from a different industry.

Okay.

So like if I was designing websites, everyone copied from other websites.

Right.

And I was like, no, no, no, forget that. Let me go to a clothing store and look at what color palettes and textures and fonts and all of that are they using. And I did the same thing, really merging like the direct response marketing world and the software design world. And so I'd write like long-form sales pages, which were very common in the direct response marketing world, but I would design them beautifully. And people were like, what is this new thing? This is incredible. I've never seen— and you're like, well, it's just the merging of two industries. So I would look at, you know, what do the best direct response marketers do? Right. And then what's the version of that that is a fit for us and our industry? So is there a way that you could get friendly competition going right within the coaches, within— you could say, hey, if you're selling, if you help us sell 100 books, right, that achieves this, right? And we're hosting a full-day event at Stanford just for the 25 coaches who help us sell the most books, right? And those kinds of things where people want to help you anyway, but you give them that extra little incentive. Motivation to push that forward. Another unfair advantage I think that you have is probably corporate relationships, right?

Yeah, we've done a couple of hundred corporate speaking gigs.

Yeah, and so I would make sure that there is, you know, someone on your team or, you know, making sure the DOMA is on top of this of like, okay, what does the corporate side of that look like? And being able to line up all that because you have an advantage, right? There's many books that can never be sold into corporations. You know, the entrepreneurship, like how to quit your job and pursue your dream.

Probably not.

You know, like they're not going to be like, let me buy 5,000 copies of that. Now the sales book, you know, of like then it's like, okay, Keller Williams is going to go buy that for every single one of their real estate agents. You know, in your case, you know, this is a book that's like, oh, here's— it demonstrates care. Right. And so I think there's an opportunity for corporate purchases.

Yeah. You know, that demonstrates care. It's interesting because we were— we had been talking on the plane coming out from San Francisco. It's like, well, the last couple of books have a corporate application. And if you've We get calls from a learning and development team from some company, and they're like, hey, we're trying to improve employee engagement, improve retention. We want to activate the more entrepreneurial spirit in our employees. And like, yeah, we can do all that from those books. This book, because it's so much about your own personal journey to meaning and purpose, I was going, I don't know if there's a corporate thing for this, but you just mentioned if I want to show care, You know, and there's nothing in this book that would inherently cause me to quit my job. So a lot of this book might result in a pretty interesting conversation with my boss. Yeah.

But I think a lot of, a lot of leaders would be thrilled to have that conversation.

Yeah.

So that, that's actually, that's a really, that's a really interesting.

And there's a version of like, you know, okay, I buy 20 copies, I buy 250 copies.

Right.

Right. And then like that, that could be really, really meaningful.

I think that the only other unfair advantage is probably around 5,000 students that we've taught. And then if you look at the community we've built of all the other schools, there's, you know, the total available markets, a couple million students who've been potentially exposed to this thing. So I'm wondering, how would you, how would you act? I mean, and we don't, again, we don't we don't know who they are, and no one's going to give me their class lists because that's actually illegal. But how would, how would I get to all the students who have taken a class and maybe had one, you know, they had one epiphany, one moment where they're like, this is really good.

Well, so I like to make lists. So we were talking last night about what made a difference for Kit taking off, right? 2 years, $2,000 a month in revenue, and then third year. We grew by 50x, right? And it came down to direct sales.

Right.

And so I think the direct sales, even in the case of a, you know, a $27 purchase from Amazon, which you're going to make $3 from, is still worthwhile because of the potential like longevity and virality of the book. So, so first I would look to your students because you could actually have presumably the names of all of the students that you have directly taught, right?

Yeah.

Barrett Brooks is a good friend of mine, former coworker, and he's an executive coach. When he was launching his coaching practice, he downloaded his entire LinkedIn.

Yeah.

And he went through and he rated everybody. He had two columns and it was their likelihood or desire to help him on a 1 to 3 scale. You know, how much, how much relationship do you have? How much they like me, all of that. and then their likelihood, uh, for that, that individual to know his ideal client.

Okay.

1 to 3 scale.

Right.

So he just ran through all, you know, 1,700 or 3,000 or whatever and just rated everybody and then sorted that and multiplied the two columns. And so all of the 9s, right, really like me and probably know my ideal client. He's like, I am getting on a call with them.

My referral. Yeah.

You know, I'm, I'm targeting that group specifically. And then as you work your way down through the list, you know, the, the 6s might get a semi-personalized email or that sort of thing. And then everybody else in your network should at least know, hey, I'm doing this thing, right? And so I would do that with your students, right?

Right.

Because you're going to have people who are highly influential, right?

Right.

Who are like, oh, I would love to buy 5,000 copies for my 5,000 employees.

Right.

Because I've built one of the most famous tech companies, you know, or that sort of thing. And then you're going to have people who say like, oh, I'd love to recommend that and go from there. But I think it's very worthwhile to do that list and basically to go through and say, here's everybody, you know, and some of them you might just send a text or an email and say, hey, I was thinking about you. Here's what's going on. I launched this book. I'd love to send you a copy. You're up for it. And so I would do that. And then I would also do it with a list of any educators that you can get.

Right.

So you may not be able to— if someone taught your class at another university, you don't have their list of students. No, no. But presumably you have them.

Yeah.

Right. And so if there's 1,000 people, about 6,000 people, right? So I would do that. Right. How much do they like you? You know, figure out what your criteria is.

Right, exactly.

And I would go through that and say, hey, is there a way that I could get this new book to every one of your students, you know, in your current class, in your previous classes, or that sort of thing? And they might say, yeah, and actually, in fact, we have budget in all of this to pay for it. Or you might say, hey, I'll, I can get you the books at cost, right? Because we're just trying to get the book in as many people's hands as possible. Because we're going to trust that it has impact.

The other one we're going after is there's always a freshman book. Like, what do you—

freshman read?

A freshman read. Everybody gets it in the summer. You read it and there's a little seminar or something. And this is a perfect freshman book. So that's another one we're pushing to try to figure out.

And you have all the credibility within academics.

Yeah. That's a lot of books.

Yeah.

I mean, all the incoming freshmen in America. That's a lot of books.

So then I'm like, okay, from a— you know, we're talking about warm relationships before.

Right.

People who know you.

Right.

And You potentially know them. But now we're getting into potentially cold outreach. I would make it someone's job to find out who at every university is the decision maker on what the freshman book is. And timing-wise, right now, you think the freshman book is decided for next fall?

It's almost a year-long process. In fact, it's a big enough market that there's usually a specialty salesperson at the publisher, somebody at Simon Schuster whose full-time job is figuring that out. First sale is to sell that person a Simon Schuster. Like, okay, the freshman book for next year in the entire catalog of Simon Schuster is How to Live a Meaningful Life, which I think we're gonna get that. And then working with those people, 'cause they actually have all those names.

Right.

Yeah.

And that would be something where often, often in business, there's a specialist who's like, oh, this is their job.

There's their thing.

And I think as leaders, we often say, cool, you've got it. And that's, on one hand, you should do that.

On the other hand, you should be like, great, let's come alongside you And I will, like, let's make this as easy as possible.

Because if they're like, hey, I have this book, it's like, yeah, you had a book last year and the year before that you were trying to get us to do this way. And if you're like, hey, I would love to get, you know, I have this book, I would love to get you a sit-down meeting with the authors of the book. They're willing to do this other thing. They're, you know, it's so much more meaningful.

Yeah. And we've just a shout out to, because the first book was with Penguin Random House and this book's with Simon. And a lot of people told us, ah, the publishing industry's dead, they're not going to support you. Our experience, at least our experience, and it's only with a couple of books, has been great support. Great support. Mass media really matters. You know, and we did a couple things that didn't work in mass media, but NPR and the way our publisher positioned us with other, you know, other events. It really works. Like, get on, you know, the time it was Diane Rehm on the East Coast and then Michael Krasny on the West Coast. Get on their show. And I can watch the book on Amazon go from, you know, 22nd to actually, we got on Dan Rehm's show. We got off that show. We were number one on Amazon for about a day. But we were ahead of Bruce Springsteen's biography and the new Harry Potter. So, I mean, it's like mass media really does work if you can get access. And the first book, we got a lovely cover page in the opinion section or the lifestyle section of the New York Times about us with a picture of us in the D-school and everything. And that was fundamental to getting the book on the New York Times list. So, um, and the version of that, like, that is all absolutely so true.

And the version of that that's even more true now is the creator aspect of it, right? All of these people who have incredibly popular newsletters and podcasts. And so that's where putting together the strategy and I'll help you list out like, hey, these are the people who really move books. Um, and all of that, but we're thrilled to be seeing Mel in January. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. She absolutely moves books. Um, and for her to do that. And so really deliberately lining those up makes a big difference. I'll just say to all creators who are listening to this, like, reach out, have these guys on your show, talk about, you know, the newsletter and really line those things up well in advance because a lot of people are happy to do the shout out in the newsletter or something else. They'll just forget. And so that follow-up campaign and then just the little updates. Right? Other creators are going to want to follow the behind-the-scenes story, right? You all doing this launch, which will serve two purposes. One, it will have them be more invested in you and your success, right? And then two, it will remind them to actually help out, right?

Right.

Because the number of times it's like, yeah, when your book comes out, I'll totally help promote you, right? You know?

Yeah.

And it's like, am I going to remember 3 months from now?

Yeah. You know?

Yeah, exactly. Well, but, you know, the, the The James Clear story is so interesting, right? I mean, books are kind of like records. Like, you launch your album, it's a bestseller for a while, and then you're gone, and then you're off the charts. The fact that he could build that momentum 2, 3, 4 years after the book came out, where the traditional industry, you know, wisdom, logic is, hey, you're going to sell almost all of your books in the first year and a half, and then you're going to, by year 3 or year 4, you're in the back catalog and we don't care about you anymore. And he proved that's wrong. Essentially, that's wrong. That this new digital form of communication distribution doesn't have that curve. It isn't just when the record company releases the record. It's, you know, this singer Betty LaVette?

I don't.

She's amazing. She was a soul singer back in the '60s and '70s, backup singer and that whole thing. She 70-something, and a couple years ago released an all-Dylan cover album. And she's 75 years old and she's touring and she's incredibly hot. So like, okay, well, that's interesting. You had a career 30 years ago. You can have another career. And playing off of that same idea of like, well, it's a completely different way of getting your music out to people and a completely different way of getting a book out to people. So we're still learning. You know, how do you do that?

I'm very excited to like watch both everything that you all have done up until this point, but also as you embark on this next book launch. And, and I'm excited to see how it goes. I'm excited to help you promote this and launch it. I know a lot of people watching are probably like, yeah, this sounds really cool. I not only want to buy the book, uh, so first title of the book and when it comes out again. That's okay.

So How to Live a Meaningful Life Using Design Thinking to Unlock More Purpose, Joy, and Flow every day. I love it. And again, to all your listeners, all those creators out there, you know, what we're trying to do is hand very doable tools to everybody to get more aliveness, more fulfillment, more joy out of the life you're already in today. You don't have to make any big changes. There's literally— the whole tagline is get more out of life, not cram more into it. This isn't another thing I have to do. It's how to take what's right in front of you and enjoy it more. More fulfilling. So if that's something that matters to your listeners and to your participants, we would love for you to help us help you help them.

Yeah.

And if you want to reach out to us, um, shoot us a note at daveandbill@designingyour.life. So that's Dave, D-A-V-E, and A-N-D, Bill, B-I-L-L, all small case, @designingyour.life.

Sounds good. You guys have done some remarkable work. You've got your newsletter now on Kit. Everyone should go and subscribe to that. So designingyour.life.

Yep.

Check out everything you're doing. And thanks so much for making the trip out to Boise. It means a lot to me.

Hey, thanks for helping us.

Yeah, it's been fantastic. Thanks for the conversation.

For sure. If you want to get your book into as many hands as possible, go check out episode 61 with Justin Moore. We dig into what it really takes to build momentum behind a book and turn it into something that people keep sharing. Something that would help me out a lot is if you were to like this video, subscribe to the YouTube channel, and I will see you next week.