How To Design A Meaningful Life w/ Stanford Prof Bill Burnett

Mar 16, 2026

Bill Burnett, director of Stanford’s Life Design Lab and former Apple designer, shares how to treat life as a design problem. He discusses design thinking for life decisions. He explains meaning as felt responses, how to access flow and wonder, identities that change over time, and why relationships and intentional choices shape a meaningful life.

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INSIGHT

Design Thinking For Life Planning

Design thinking is a practical lens for shaping your future self rather than a philosophical search for life's meaning.
Bill Burnett contrasts prototyping small life experiments with big-risk plans, using empathy, reframing, ideation, and prototypes from product design.

INSIGHT

Meaning Lives In The Flow World

Meaning arises from the felt response to encounters that matter, which Burnett locates in a 'flow world' under the everyday transaction world.
He links momentary experiences of truth, beauty, or love to neural correlates of flow and the practice of noticing.

ADVICE

Practice Radical Acceptance To Notice Flow

Do practice radical acceptance and cultivate availability so you can notice flow moments amid transactions.
Burnett recommends training attention (wonder, awe exercises) to access restorative neural states that produce meaning.

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“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is…to actually feel the rapture of being alive.” This is a quote by Joseph Campbell that kicks off the book by my guest in this episode. A key aspect of my personal and professional devotion is how we make meaning of life. You will be hearing much more from me about this in the coming weeks and months. In this episode I have with me Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford, Bill Burnett. Bill is a guru of design. He worked at Apple designing laptops and spent years in the toy industry designing Star Wars action toys. But he’s been at Stanford, he says, “since dinosaurs roamed the campus.” Dave Evans is also a master designer and lecturer at Stanford and together they lead students in designing their lives. They recently co-wrote a book, How To Live A Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day. Bill joined me to discuss how we view meaning in life. Bill says, “Meaning is how we experience our felt response to an encounter that matters to us.” Bill and Dave literally go through steps to designing a meaningful life in their book, drawing from the same guidance they give students at Stanford, but I spend most of my time with Bill talking conceptually about how we perceive and pursue meaning. One thing Bill said that stuck with me and I’ve been discussing a lot, is that in his 40+ years at Stanford they are experiencing the loneliest student population ever, which correlates to what we are seeing in the general populace. So I interest myself with the correlation between both our feelings of increased loneliness and lack of felt meaning in life. Find Bill and Dave’s work at designingyour.life

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