It’s time to rethink your entire life plan - Dave Evans

You're the co-founder of Stanford's Life Design Lab.

True.

What's that?

It's a little, tiny operation inside the design program that applies the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life at and after university. So, oh, Bill and Dave realized we've made all these products and all these different experiences using design thinking, started at Stanford back in 1963, you know, and we used it at Apple in the early days, and everybody's- it's kind of the thing that built Silicon Valley. Hey, we could apply it to ourselves. We could design ourselves as well, you know, and that's a real problem people have, and we gave it a try, and it seems to have worked out.

Do people not already try to design their life? Is that not what you do when you set a to-do list or have a calendar?

So, [clears throat] the word design in the field of design really means there's two categories. There's what I would call craft design or engineering design, and then there's design thinking, and so the, the older school, you know, so I'm an ergonomist, you know, I'm a, I'm a car designer, I'm a graphic designer, you know, I'm an illustrator. So designing things, precisely figuring out exactly what this particular shape and look of something is going to be, has been around for a long, long, long, long time. You can get a master's in design at Stanford and still not be very good at drawing, and there are many design schools who think that's a moral wrong. Then there's this design thinking idea that's been around only for the past fifty years, um, which is an innovation methodology. It's an approach to coming up with new ideas. And so when we talk-- when people start, "I wanna, I wanna design my life," what they're really saying is, "I want to engineer my life. I want to, I want to figure it out, I wanna solve it, I wanna answer it, I wanna craft it," and that's a perfectly good thing to do. Uh, we're not saying that's the wrong thing to do. Um, so people have been trying to do that for a long, long time. What they've not been necessarily doing very well and, and they're getting stuck on is, is finding their way. So, like, uh, I walk into the career center when I'm nineteen years old, back in the '70s, and I kinda-- and I go, "Can, can you help me?" And they go, "Well, sure, we got a whole building full of people. We love helping young people like you, you know? So what do you want to do?" I kinda go, "Yep, that's the question." They kinda go, "Okay, so what's the answer?" I kinda, "No, that's the question." And they go, "What?" I said, "What do I wanna do?" And they go, "Right, what do you wanna do?" I said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, this conversation is going nowhere." And they said, "We have to-- Here's how this works. You tell us what you want, then we'll help you go get it." And I go, "That's easy. Getting stuff is easy."