How To Live a Meaningful Life Using Design Thinking | 104

If you could design your life the way a great product gets built? That's the premise behind Designing Your Life, the best selling 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 10,000,000 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 gonna like it. Bill, Dave, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Thanks for having us, Nathan. Yeah. Thank you. Alright. 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, like, goes on to a meaningful life, there's really two ingredients that are essential. Can you say what those are? Yes. The Pew Research at a long study UCLA looking at g I mean, is college really worth it? That's a big question these days. As a college dropout, I'm curious about it. Yeah. Does college correlate to life working? So they've looked at flourishing post college life five, ten, fifteen years out of long term, bunch of different indices they track, financial, social, all kinds of things. And they found six items that mattered. And if you really look at that list hard, it's two. Okay. Those two things are, number one, have a connection with a a mentor, human being, a a faculty member, a staff member, you know, a residential life member …