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

Quick Overview

Dave Evans, co-founder of Stanford's Life Design Lab, advocates for applying design thinking principles to life planning, distinguishing it from traditional 'craft design' or 'engineering' approaches, and reframes meaning-making away from solely achieving external 'impact' or internal 'fulfillment' towards embracing 'aliveness' through practices like wonder, flow, coherency, and community.

Key Points: The Life Design Lab applies innovation principles of design thinking to designing life at and after university, contrasting with traditional 'craft design' or 'engineering design' which focuses on precise crafting. People often get stuck asking "What do I want to do?" and expecting a known answer, whereas the Life Design Lab assists in the "formation of a conscious competency in life and vocational wayfinding." Life planning requires 'wayfinding' rather than 'navigation'; wayfinding involves prototyping and empirical 'try it' moves because the future is a wicked problem about which 'we have no data because it doesn't exist yet.' The primary meanings people seek are impact and fulfillment, but Evans suggests both are dead ends; impact is fleeting (like a Masters win), and fulfillment is impossible if one believes they must 'manifest the fullness of who I really am' in one lifetime. The reframe for impact is to put meaning eggs in other baskets besides transactional performance, focusing instead on the 'flow world,' which is the present moment rich with meaning-making experiences. The reframe for fulfillment is to aim for being 'fully alive' in the present moment, celebrating the 'scandal of particularity'—the temporary, constrained reflections of perfection we encounter, like a perfect sunset. The ultimate goal is to move beyond the idea that a person is fundamentally a 'production engine' (I = what I did) to being a 'living being' (I = the life I lived), which involves embracing self-transcendency.

Context: Dave Evans discusses his work as the co-founder of Stanford's Life Design Lab, an initiative applying design thinking—an innovation methodology developed since the 1960s—to the complex challenge of designing one's life trajectory. The discussion centers on overcoming common pitfalls in life planning, particularly the difficulty in figuring out what one wants versus simply executing a plan, and re-evaluating traditional sources of meaning like impact and fulfillment.