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As the CEO of Kit, Nathan Barry has a front row seat to what’s working in the most successful creator businesses.
On The Nathan Barry Show, he interviews top creators and dives into the inner workings of their businesses in his live coaching sessions.
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Tune in weekly for new episodes with ideas and tips for growing your business. You’ll hear discussions around building an audience, earning a living as a creator, and Nathan’s insights on scaling a software company to $100M.
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[00:00:00] Nathan: 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.
[00:00:18] 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.
[00:00:38] Then we get tactical, their next book, how to Live a Meaningful Life. They wanna 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.
[00:01:07] 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.
[00:01:20] 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, 'cause
[00:01:35] I think you're really gonna like it.
[00:01:37] Bill, Dave, welcome to the show.
[00:01:39] Dave: Good to be here. Thanks for having us, Nathan. Yeah, thank you.
[00:01:41] Nathan: 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 like goes on to a meaningful life, there's really two ingredients that are essential.
[00:01:59] Can you say what those are?
[00:02:00] Dave: Yes. The peer research that a long study, particularly UCLA looking at GI mean, is college really worth it? That's a big question these days. As a
[00:02:07] Nathan: college dropout, I'm curious about this.
[00:02:09] Dave: Yeah. Does college correlate to life working? So they looked at flourishing post-college life 5, 10, 15 years now long term, bunch of different indices.
[00:02:16] They tracked 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.
[00:02:23] Nathan: Okay.
[00:02:23] Dave: Those two things are, number one, I have a connection with a, a mentor human being, a a faculty member, a staff member. You know, a residential life member who cared about my life and walked along with me.
[00:02:34] So someone who walks along. And number two, 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.
[00:02:45] Nathan: 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 plus years and, and all of this and your, your work at Stanford and everything else.
[00:02:59] I just saw like, oh, that's it. That's what you were doing. You were investing in as many
[00:03:05] Bill: Yeah.
[00:03:05] Nathan: You know, college students and, you know, young adults as possible to create Exactly that.
[00:03:10] Bill: Well, and, and the, the funny thing about, the sad thing about that survey is less than 5% of college students report having those two things.
[00:03:19] You know, so you go through, 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 a, an adult who cares about your journey. Mm-hmm. It's not gonna work. And a lot of places your education's pretty theoretical.
[00:03:36] 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 engineer. 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 'em out in the world to prototype stuff, to try stuff to see if what they're studying, you know, as any residents, when they actually see it happening in the world.
[00:04:02] 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.
[00:04:13] Nathan: 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.
[00:04:23] Dave: Sure. Well, I think it's a little different answer than you're looking for. You wanna take what we're actually doing, what's under the hood and all that Bill say what we formally do. Um, you know, we're designers, so we spend a lot of time reframing your problem, problem finding, precedes problem solving. If and if you're working on the wrong problem, it doesn't matter.
[00:04:39] Um, 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, we're in the freedom business, um, followed by, once you have that more freedom, then we give you permission both through concepts and particularly to doable tools to go enter into that freedom and do something interesting.
[00:04:58] Mm-hmm. 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.
[00:05:07] Bill: Yeah. So, uh, I run what's called the Life Design Lab at Stanford. Everybody has to have a lab, so that's our lab. Uh, we teach classes for, uh, undergraduates, for freshmen, for seniors.
[00:05:17] We teach a class called Design the Professionals for MBA students and PhD students. And it's all based around this idea of life design, using, using design techniques, design thinking, and human-centered design to figure out what you wanna be when you grow up. And so students, uh, it's very popular classes because the class is really about the students, their transformation.
[00:05:35] And most of the students don't have any background in design. And I've been teaching design at Stanford since, uh, a long time, since long time since Dinosaurs Rome to PI Plaza.
[00:05:46] Nathan: I, I looked at your LinkedIn and I, I, I think I saw 40 on there,
[00:05:50] Bill: something for your tenure.
[00:05:52] It's so, the classes are amazing and we teach the classes.
[00:05:55] I, I'm, I'm in the middle. This is, uh, week six of. Of our 10 week quarter. So I'm in the middle of that quarter. I'll teach it tomorrow. Um, and then, and the lab also, uh, runs what we call the, the transfer studio. 'cause we wanted to give the class, Dave and I decided, uh, among other things, write a book and, and try to have more impact to give the class away to any university who wants it.
[00:06:15] 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, um, so we, we teach, uh, we sponsor research because it's a San Francisco Research University. You wanna know that your stuff works and not just 'cause the students like it, but that it's actually, you know, has some efficacy in, in a variety of different measurements.
[00:06:40] And then we get it off campus as much as we can. We run a couple transfer studios a year to teach other schools how to, how to teach it.
[00:06:47] Dave: Mm-hmm. And we, uh, another big program is a coach training. So the coaching world came to, when the book got popular, the coaching world came to us and said, we need help you, we want training.
[00:06:57] In fact. 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,
[00:07:03] Nathan: okay.
[00:07:04] Dave: 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.
[00:07:13] So all AI 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. Um, and like, no, no, no. We really want training. So there was, 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.
[00:07:28] So now, you know, about a thousand coaches later, uh, worldwide. Uh, that apparently is a trend. So we're happy to support
[00:07:33] Bill: this, which, which also turned out to be wonderful. The coaching community in general, um, life coaching, executive coaching, whatever, um, is just full of fantastic people.
[00:07:42] Nathan: Oh yeah.
[00:07:43] Bill: They wanna help people.
[00:07:44] They, you know, have their, they're, 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 to designing your life tools, and this was even before the new book, um. We'll help you, we'll, we'll give you the do's and don'ts.
[00:07:59] We'll show you how to coach with it. You know, our, our, our whole idea is. You take the class or you read a book and it's full of ideas and tools, but it's not like a sort of, hey, three steps to a perfect life. It's not that programmatic or that, um, that just, you know,
[00:08:15] Dave: prescribed.
[00:08:15] Bill: Prescribed, yeah.
[00:08:16] Dave: By the very first Amazon book reviews said finally a self-help book where the writers respect the autonomy of the reader.
[00:08:24] And we, we read that. We just went, oh, thank God. Yeah. You know, because one of the reasons we really wondered if we should write the book at all is like, you know, most self-help books, first of all, they just lie on the united stand unread and make you feel guilty. So, but the, the author got the 27 bucks. Um, so we didn't wanna be the guilt inducers.
[00:08:40] Number two, they don't work. Mm-hmm. Um, and so like, what the heck? You know, and, and, and they tell you what to do. So they're proscribing or prescribing, they're shooting on you. We have a strong conviction. We don't wanna shit on you and we don't recommend you should on yourself. Um, so we were fearful that people would hear shoulds even if we hadn't intended them.
[00:08:57] Mm-hmm. Uh, and so really respecting the autonomy of the reader, you know, you're the expert. 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.
[00:09:08] Nathan: Okay. So I want to go into design and your background and all that in a moment, but since we're talking about the book, um, designing Your Life has been a.
[00:09:17] Fantastically popular book
[00:09:18] Dave: it as it turns out. Yeah.
[00:09:20] Bill: Who knew? And we didn't know it. We did not see that company. First time we ever wrote anything.
[00:09:25] Nathan: So how many copies has it sold now?
[00:09:26] Bill: It's about a million.
[00:09:27] Dave: Well, it's a well over a million that we know of. Um, and then there's such wonderful piracy. Um,
[00:09:34] Nathan: and you're not even mad
[00:09:35] Dave: about it in, in Asia.
[00:09:36] It is. It could well be between one and a half and two. We just don't know. Yeah.
[00:09:39] Bill: Yeah.
[00:09:40] Nathan: 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. Right. What would that be?
[00:09:51] Dave: You wanna do the post-it note?
[00:09:52] Bill: Well, I mean, the first, the first part is think like a designer. Mm-hmm. Right. So we have the designer's mindsets of curiosity, radical acceptance or, uh, curiosity. Um, radical collaboration. Mm-hmm. Uh, bias to action. Bias to action, things like that. So. If you start, a lot of people wanna plan their lives, but plans don't work because the future's uncertain.
[00:10:13] So we say, well, let's, let's come up with a design. 'cause design's inherently flexible, it's way more, um, adaptive when things change. So we teach the mindsets, we teach a little bit about the process, and then we help people figure out, um, how to come up with more than one idea. You know, every, every, every designer knows you never go with your first idea, right?
[00:10:33] You wanna come up with lots of ideas. And we know from our research at, uh, at the Stanford Center for Design, um, research that that, that having lots of ideas means you're gonna choose better. And then there's techniques for choosing. There's techniques for, um, you know, bring whittling the ideas down to a few prototypes.
[00:10:51] And we're really big on trying something in the real world. So, um, 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
[00:11:05] Dave: the producer says, look, we're running late. You have to have the book in a sentence.
[00:11:08] 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, gimme a minute. I just be a marketing guy. I can do this. So the post-it note, which not one sentence, that's actually four, but it's only 10 words, um, is get curious. Talk to people.
[00:11:22] Try stuff and tell your story. So get curious means take the natural energy in your in, in your life that moves you outta another world and, and lean into that. 'cause if this whole thing is kinda hard to do, you might as well start with some Jews, um, then talk to other people. This is not. The transactional conversation is the narrative conversation.
[00:11:38] Oh, wow. Not just like, so what would I need in my resume to get hired here at Kid? 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, I mean, you and you, you're a dropout, but it's working pretty well.
[00:11:52] 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. Yeah. 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.
[00:12:08] So iterate that until something happens that you wanna stick with.
[00:12:11] Nathan: I mean, there's so much in that, that I love as a designer myself, right? I, I spent my early career in web design and UX design. Like one thing that really stood out to me was. Where you're talking about of designing lots of options.
[00:12:22] Dave: Yeah.
[00:12:22] Nathan: You know, like an, um, in our class, uh, one of our professors, you know, really stressed Thumbnailing. Right. Creating
[00:12:29] Bill: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:30] Nathan: You know, she was like, you do not create one composition. Like we're going to make, you know, two by two squares and we're gonna make 10 of them on the piece of paper, and you're going to make 10 different compositions.
[00:12:40] Bill: 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.
[00:12:45] Nathan: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:45] Bill: And, you know, and then, 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 say web design, anything, have lots of ideas.
[00:12:59] And that, that also tends to peak curiosity. That tends to peak the ability to try stuff, have all these different ideas. Let's prototype three or four of them. The biggest, the big kind of, uh. Assignment in the class. And the big thing in the book is what we call the Odyssey. Three, three completely different versions for your life.
[00:13:16] Nathan: Okay?
[00:13:16] Bill: There's a lot, there's a lot of data. A lot of times people just have an ab decision, you know, money versus meaning, you know, work life balance. Whenever it's a binary, it's a zero sum game and you can't solve it. So have at least three ideas for your life. And the Odyssey says like, what would you do if you keep doing what you're doing?
[00:13:33] What would you do if like, 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, you know, what your friends thought of you, right? And, and the, the social status that comes along with whatever it is you're doing. And when people actually get into that and they create three completely different lives, they realize, oh, wait a minute.
[00:13:51] There's, there's more going on here than I thought of. What we would say is, there's more aliveness in you than one life. So
[00:13:58] Dave: that's a big, 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.
[00:14:08] 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 use. So everybody contains more aliveness than when lifetime permits you to live out.
[00:14:21] Uh, 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 we'll, and then moving, that's all. Designing your life. And then that also tees up another really challenging issue, which the new book is all about. Um, which is that, oh, and we do this exercise called, you know, how many lives?
[00:14:38] How many lives are you?
[00:14:40] Nathan: Okay?
[00:14:40] Dave: Like if you could live in Bill lives this he lives physics model. 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 wormhole. So you can actually have consciousness access to all of your parallel selves and parallel universes.
[00:14:56] But it turns out in this GDA experiment, German for a thinking experiment simply can only do in your imagination. It turns out that the universe of whores waste. You can be as many of you as you want in as many parallel universes in the multiverses as you want, except don't waste any. So we, the multiverse would like to know how many Nathans would you like to be, in fact.
[00:15:15] So select if I go 1, 2, 3, and then on four. So Nathan, 1, 2, 3. How many Nathans would you like?
[00:15:20] Nathan: Uh, seven.
[00:15:21] Dave: Seven. Bingo. Turns out seven or eight is almost the answer every time. Um, so, and, and of course I lied. You don't get seven, you get one. Um, which means if you're gonna be seven people, then you're only gonna get to be about 15% of yourself.
[00:15:35] So 85% of Nathan is never gonna actually happen. And that's the good news.
[00:15:41] Nathan: Okay.
[00:15:42] Dave: That's not, and then you from FOMO to jumbo 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. Yeah. There is a best Tuesday available to us.
[00:15:54] 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're not a universality and can you live deep? So you have to pick from among your particularities and then you're gonna live into that.
[00:16:10] Well,
[00:16:11] Nathan: how do you coach someone through that? Right. It, it's easy to talk about in theory of like, okay, which one do you want to pick? Mm-hmm. How do you actually coach someone through making that decision?
[00:16:21] Bill: Well, it's the prototype thing. Yeah. First of all, in, in the class we do lots and lots of design exercises.
[00:16:26] The class is really a design studios two 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, we play, yes. And we play on a tree. We do a bunch of stuff just to get. You know, these are smart students and they, and they want to get their ideas right, to
[00:16:42] Nathan: go from the
[00:16:43] Bill: Yeah.
[00:16:43] Nathan: Like I sit down in a classroom like, you want me to get out my textbook? Like, they
[00:16:46] Bill: like
[00:16:46] Nathan: that mindset into,
[00:16:47] Bill: well, 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 and shut up. Wait for the person at the front of the room, start talking.
[00:16:57] Our rooms are studios, they're set up in studios. They're sitting in teams of three or six or something. Um, 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 designers.
[00:17:13] So we warm them up. We do a bunch of those kinds of things and, and we we're constantly stressing, you gotta have lots of ideas. Let's, let's, we'll, 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.
[00:17:30] And one of the, the, a couple of research studies on the class one from a woman named Lindsay Oishi, she, she was looking at the class and just like. If you take the class and versus a control group and you know, and the whole research protocol, if you take the class you leave with what they call career self-efficacy.
[00:17:48] You believe you can design the career you want. And even if things change, you believe you can do it, it lower we, we lower dysfunctional beliefs. Things that you think are true that just aren't true. Like, oh, your major decides what you'll do for the rest of your life. No, that's not true. Um, less than 20% of the people are doing anything that has to do with what they studied in college 10 years out.
[00:18:06] 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, and, and like you said, the joy of missing out is like, I got all these ideas.
[00:18:21] I'm gonna pick one or two credit, have my way forward, uh, and by the way, if I get someplace I don't like, I can come up with more ideas.
[00:18:28] Nathan: Right?
[00:18:28] Bill: 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 and adapt to change. Where moreover, you can put your intention out in the world and start building your way towards it.
[00:18:46] Mm-hmm. We say in the, in the design group, we say we build our way, we built a thing. It's not like, oh, I built a thing to prove it works. I dunno. I'm trying lots of stuff. I'm building lots of stuff to discover the possible future that I'm gonna live into. Mm-hmm. And the other thing we always tell the students, don't you hope five years from now you're doing something you can't even imagine?
[00:19:06] 'cause 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.
[00:19:21] And so we do lots of those kinds of exercises and when people leave. They really have adopted the mindset and sort of the, the stance of being a designer. And our goal is that you're the designer of your life. We we're not the guys telling you what to do. We don't should.
[00:19:34] Nathan: Yeah.
[00:19:34] Bill: But you know, you, you reawaken your basic creativity.
[00:19:38] You reawaken your basic curiosity and you feel pretty confident that you can go out in the world and get what you want.
[00:19:44] Nathan: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:45] Dave: 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?
[00:19:57] Let's prototype it. Okay. That's an engineering prototype that's doing a test. Mm-hmm. Like, I think I'm right. Let me test that. I'm right. That's a, a certain kind of prototype. That's not what we're talking about at all. We're talking about a p like, gee, I wonder what it would be like to work for the CIA. Do.
[00:20:11] I really wanna work for an organization that kills people? Without saying anything about that, that was actually a conversation with one of my students. Um, and like, whoa, how would we figure that out? You know? So go off and have a conversation. So there 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 kinda life you're thinking about living is an incredibly good experience.
[00:20:35] Um, it's actually, there's a research outta 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 six inch dossier is not nearly as good as talking to two people who've done it before.
[00:20:52] Um, 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 two or three as a prototype. And we're talking a lot about college kids. Um, but this question never goes away.
[00:21:08] I mean, so, and it, so I no longer teach undergrads. I teach in the DCI program at Stanford, the Distinguished Careers Institute, a very fancy name 'cause it's, it's expensive, um, for a gap year for grownups. 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.
[00:21:25] Most of 'em are 55 to 75, what we used to call retirement age. Rethinking themselves probably won't go back and live the life they left. Um, 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.
[00:21:39] And then in between, our coaches are mostly working with people in their careers. So 35, 45 people. So, you know, so we're, we're in every generation, you know, we're from Gen Z to boomers. Um, and guess what? Everybody thinks their life is important to them. And everybody's asking the question now what? Mm-hmm.
[00:21:55] And then not only now what, but even after I design that life and does it really work? Is, 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? What we overwhelmingly started hearing, particularly after the pandemic was No.
[00:22:11] Nathan: Right.
[00:22:12] Dave: So then we got stuck writing another book.
[00:22:15] Nathan: So I, there's so much that I want to get into, um, the book and we still need to come back to your background in design.
[00:22:22] Dave: Yeah.
[00:22:23] Nathan: Okay. But before we do that, now that I'm tallying up the thing, we
[00:22:25] Dave: designed lots of products before. Okay.
[00:22:27] Nathan: Yeah. Um, but something that I'm thinking about is like the problem of an abundance of opportunity.
[00:22:36] 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?
[00:22:44] Bill: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:44] Nathan: You know, I have this range of things. And then somehow they found themselves in this creator world.
[00:22:49] Bill: Yeah.
[00:22:49] Nathan: Where now they have thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people listening to them Yeah.
[00:22:55] 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 wanna speak at this event? Do you wanna start this business with me? Do you wanna do all of these things?
[00:23:10] Bill: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:11] Nathan: And so you go from this fairly narrow set of opportunities to basically an infinite set of opportunities.
[00:23:17] Bill: Right.
[00:23:17] Nathan: And,
[00:23:18] Bill: and, and knowing you could generate more if you wanted to and,
[00:23:20] Nathan: and who generate more 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.
[00:23:29] Bill: Right?
[00:23:29] Nathan: And so I talked to all of these creators who were like, I, I have no idea what to do because
[00:23:36] Bill: yeah.
[00:23:36] How do I choose,
[00:23:37] Nathan: I, how do I, how do I choose, how do I even begin to frame this problem? And then they go talk to their friends,
[00:23:42] Bill: right?
[00:23:43] Nathan: That they grew up with, went to college with whatever, who are clueless can, who cannot relate in any way,
[00:23:48] Bill: right?
[00:23:49] Nathan: Be and you're just like, what are talking about you have too much money, too much opportunity, too many connections.
[00:23:54] And so I'm very curious how you would go about like helping, you know, coaching someone through a problem like that.
[00:24:00] Dave: Yeah. Well see, interestingly, in most career paths. You can still walk into it. Okay. When we talk about design thinking.
[00:24:08] Nathan: Yep.
[00:24:09] Dave: You know, easy 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.
[00:24:19] Nathan: Yeah.
[00:24:19] Dave: There's business thinking where you optimize your way forward. There is no right answer, but you can't get better, preferably quantitatively. You know, 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.
[00:24:33] They all think they have right answers, uh, but there's a whole class of questions called wicked problems. That's a concept developed by urban planners back at Berkeley in the seventies, where, you know, you dunno what you're looking for until you find it. The solution is so unique to the circumstances that it's not replicatable, you know, and it changes over time.
[00:24:50] Oh, deeply. Human problems and wicked problems. None of those tools work. 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, um, except design your workforce. So we can actually do this empirical, iterative process of designing your way forward.
[00:25:08] So when you're facing the wicked problem of too many wonderful choices, you have to start out. You, you, you don't have as 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?
[00:25:25] 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, you're sitting there with a bumper in your mouth. You got a car, what do you do with it? You know? Um, and, and then the question becomes, oh, what do I actually.
[00:25:42] One. Now there might be the attempting 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, and call kit and they can help you solve that problem. Yeah. Um, so you want them to think that way, but that actually isn't the right answer.
[00:25:56] That's just one answer. So now when you really have that many choices, that 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.
[00:26:09] Bill: Yeah. Uh, we've got a great, um, little snippet of a lecture we use because we have a decision making model.
[00:26:14] You make a decision. Yeah. In the face of abundance. And it's a professor of, of philosophy, I think at Red Curves, a woman named Ruth Chang, and she says, look, when faced with two options equally wonderful and equally, you know, potentially fantastic money, whatever, you know, prestige, whatever, but different but different.
[00:26:34] You have the opportunity to author who you want to be, who do you put your agency behind? 'cause the external world is saying these things are equal. Mm-hmm. 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 you.
[00:26:50] Values, coherence and stuff. Who do you want to become? Right? 'cause we're all becoming into the next version of ourselves Can is not should. And, 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 a, be able to author the person you are.
[00:27:10] A lot of people in in, in the traditional economy or in, you know, whatever you want to call it, are basically just slogging through a job, hanging on. Probably not happening. 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 gotta go to work.
[00:27:34] You're talking about people who go, who, who saw the electric fence and realized there was no juice in it.
[00:27:39] Dave: Yeah.
[00:27:40] Bill: 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?
[00:27:50] But you, you figure it out. But putting your agency yourself behind the thing you do in the dinner we had last night with other, other, uh, folks who are creators, everybody is doing it because it's their mission in life.
[00:28:03] Nathan: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:04] Bill: They didn't do it because they wanted, you know, success and fame on Instagram.
[00:28:08] That was the tool to get to, being able to have the permission to keep doing the thing they were doing. Right. They would probably do it anyway.
[00:28:16] Nathan: There's a line that I've heard from Seth Godin where he says, profit is just permission to do it again tomorrow.
[00:28:20] Bill: Exactly.
[00:28:21] Nathan: And so yeah. As an
[00:28:22] Bill: indicator, you're doing the right thing.
[00:28:23] Nathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've, you're talking about design thinking. Yeah. And this approach to it. I wanna know in the early stages of your career and all that, where you got exposed to design thinking and the types of products that you got to apply this on hands on.
[00:28:36] Bill: Sure. Um, you know, I, I grew up in, on the east coast.
[00:28:40] I grew up right outside of Boston, wanted to get as far away from my parents as possible. And with Stanford. And Stanford has this really unique design program, had it since the sixties, which combines engineering, art, psychology, and anthropology. And I thought, oh. I'm a guy who can't stick to one subject.
[00:28:55] This looks pretty good to me, and particularly the art part. 'cause I'm, I'm also an artist, but, um, so I got into this program and it's basically human centered design. It was the, the original thinkers from MIT, from Stanford, uh, from, uh, Berkeley. Thinking about how do we design stuff that responds to human needs, otherwise we're creating in human, in those days, machines now, you know, human-centered design to create better, uh, interactions, websites, digital stuff, experiences.
[00:29:22] So I fell into that pretty early. And then I, and then I ended up working in the toy industry, worked on Star Wars toys for about two or three years, um, came back to the Valley, uh, and, and then just jumped into high tech. And I've been in the tech business ever since. 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.
[00:29:41] So I had both of those experiences, which is great. I worked at Apple for seven years designing when, right when we were starting to really pioneer the modern laptop was the original Power book. 100 was the first laptop from Apple that was successful. And so I was in that team for about seven years. Then I did consulting and you know, I, I designed toilets for the Kohler Corporation, which is a really interesting bunch of people.
[00:30:05] And, uh, ticketing systems for stadiums and medical devices and stuff. Consulting was fun 'cause you get this huge variety. And then in 2000, and I had been teaching all along a little bit, you know, one, one quarter a year. And in 2006, David Kelly, who's runs the, uh, the D school was starting. The D school is the founder of IDO, the big international consulting firm.
[00:30:27] Ideation, uh, 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 the industry. I've only been a full-time academic since 2006.
[00:30:38] Nathan: Okay. But I mean, like building a lot of the products,
[00:30:41] Bill: building a lot, lots and lots of products.
[00:30:42] Nathan: We don't love
[00:30:43] Bill: lots and lots of products.
[00:30:44] Dave: Yeah. We're product, I mean, you know. Um, and
[00:30:47] Bill: I got two products in the computer history museum. Oh yeah. Which is kind of cool.
[00:30:50] Dave: It's very cool. Um, yeah, I was just walking through the technology museum in Pearson, went, oh, there's Elisa. How cool. Um, no. Um, so my back, I was a mechanical engineer, actually was on the hard side and not the design side.
[00:31:00] When I was, I was at Stanford and at Apple early then like Bill, but a couple years before him. Um, so I was going through the Emmy, uh, program at Sanford and doing heavy thermo 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, and stare at strange psychedelic images.
[00:31:19] Like, this is pretty interesting. Ended up in high tech and, um, it was on the original Lisa team. The Lisa was the computer that preceded the Macintosh. I often say that Lisa died in childbirth, but birth Macintosh into the world, the first user friendly computer on the planet. So I was the world's first, you know, uh, computer mouse product manager at Apple in 1979,
[00:31:37] Nathan: which was a transformational product.
[00:31:38] Dave: Yeah. And one of the first times I got to come to Boise, 'cause where I'm sitting now, was, uh, in 1980 to fly out here, uh, when Hewlett Packard had just opened what became the new printer division.
[00:31:48] Nathan: Yeah.
[00:31:48] Dave: And started to invent this thing called desktop printing. Uh, desktop laser printing. So I was looking at the very first Canon laser optic bench on a Hewlett Packard lab in 1980.
[00:31:57] Nathan: Okay.
[00:31:58] Dave: So I started laser printing, desktop publishing, and mouthing at Apple. Um, and that's, and I worked with, uh, what was then called Hubby Kelly Design, which was the predecessor what became ideo. So that was the first product that they did. So we, we created the, the mother of ideo. So I've been hanging around designers my entire career and facilitating their work in product, managing them.
[00:32:17] And then I went into consulting and mostly, um, I was also on the Apple, uh, corporate culture committee. Um, we were, the first year I was at Apple, we grew from 800 to 5,000 people.
[00:32:26] Nathan: Wow.
[00:32:27] Dave: So that was kind of fast. Um, so suddenly there's way more of them than us.
[00:32:31] Nathan: Yep.
[00:32:31] Dave: You know, and six weeks in, I was one of the old guys, and so I ended up on the culture committee.
[00:32:35] How do we not. Lose it and Apple suddenly becomes national semiconductor, you know, instead of Apple. Um, and that turned into an interesting conversation. So a lot of my consulting work, I was an unemployed marketing guy for 30 years, um, get what we now call gigging. Um, 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.
[00:32:58] Bill: There was one other thing he left out, he was one of the founders of electronic arts.
[00:33:02] Nathan: Another,
[00:33:03] Dave: yeah. Which was interesting to really understand product design, because I ended up being a, 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 an, a missionally minded company.
[00:33:14] Um, and I wanted to do good work. And they had all those things. They happened to wanna do personal software, which I thought was incredibly boring. I still don't play games. Um, but everything else was there. So five outta six is hard to get go for it. So I jumped on that bus and of course ended up in charge of product development.
[00:33:29] Um, so, uh, even though I wouldn't have bought one of our products, I just, I helped create the process that created them. And that was really understand, do I understand how this process works? 'cause I'm doing it as a professional facilitator, not necessarily as a user.
[00:33:44] Nathan: What I love about both of you, your stories is this blend of the real world application.
[00:33:52] Mm-hmm. The, you know, the very heavy research based, you know, everything that you've done at Stanford and, and all of that. And then just the, the deep investment in people all the way through. Right. As you're talking about building company cultures and all. 'cause so many people end up in this place where they're saying they're designing it in a purely academic way.
[00:34:09] Dave: Yeah.
[00:34:10] Nathan: 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 Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you think it does on paper and so. I mean, I don't have a question in it, but if there's more on that than
[00:34:23] Dave: too many academics are just about the idea.
[00:34:25] And too many business people are just about the money. Mm-hmm. And frankly, it's like yourself, God, both of those are just tools to get to the people.
[00:34:33] Bill: Mm-hmm. 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.
[00:34:45] Like if you don't, if you, I, I know how to build anything. 'cause I'm a smart engineer, I'm gonna build things that are inhuman because I, I haven't factored in the fact that, oh, nobody knows what this button does, or nobody can figure out this interface and nobody can figure out the thing. So just a little bit of human psychology goes a long way to enable people to do better designs.
[00:35:06] Dave: Mm-hmm.
[00:35:07] Bill: And then, you know, I've always cared about the aesthetics of things. I mean, you know, I used to. Tell my team, look, it takes nine months to make a baby. 'cause it was just early days of being a dad and it's gonna take about nine months to make this computer. So let's, babies are beautiful, we've got plenty of time.
[00:35:21] 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 'em, 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.
[00:35:36] And so 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.
[00:35:52] 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 you're, you know, the, the brand of your jeans or the brand of your, you know, handbag, right? So like, why not make, we're responsible for the built world?
[00:36:11] 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's just works, right?
[00:36:22] Nathan: Yeah.
[00:36:23] Bill: Um, but to make things beautiful seems like that should be in everybody's, you know, and the mission of every, every designer, engineer, creator is like, make a beautiful experience, make a wonderful product.
[00:36:36] And by the way, if you make a beautiful experience and a wonderful product, you're gonna have more customers.
[00:36:40] Nathan: Right? So how would you equate that? Uh, that approach to making it beautiful and, and the mindset that you bring to products back to life, because I think there's some, some pretty strong parallels
[00:36:51] to
[00:36:51] Bill: Oh, absolutely.
[00:36:52] Nathan: Meaning in life, and that's the new
[00:36:54] Bill: 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 exp in, in, in what we, what we talk about in the other book. It's a, it's an experience in the particular moment of this particularly beautiful world,
[00:37:09] Dave: what underlies beauty is elegance and, um, recognizability.
[00:37:12] Okay. So, you know, we, I mean, we screw people's lives for a living. I mean, we, we literally, you know, put out there that we have some thoughts about how you might think about redesigning your life now. And now we have the most presumptuous title of all time. How to Live a meaningful Life. I mean, I mean, people say, oh, what's the title of your book?
[00:37:28] And I'm embarrassed, like, well, it's, it's actually how to live a meaningful Life. Oh my God. Do you think you have something to say about that? Yeah. So you're gonna put that out there. Um, then what we have to do, what, what beauty looks like in, in that conversation, um, I think is, it's recognizable. So is as people are reading stuff, it's not like, oh my God, I never thought of that.
[00:37:47] It's like, oh, that really is true.
[00:37:48] Bill: Mm-hmm.
[00:37:49] Dave: So we're trying to mostly awaken truths that are already there. Um, and then we're gonna give you, we wanna leave you hopeful that that is not just a never ending elusive thing. Um, and there's a doable step you can take right away. So for us it's recognizability, um, the elegance of simplicity and doability.
[00:38:06] So if we are simple, recognizable, and doable, you put those all three together and you cc 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.
[00:38:22] Nathan: Simple, recognizable, doable.
[00:38:25] Dave: Yep. Mm-hmm.
[00:38:26] Nathan: Okay. And so,
[00:38:27] Dave: I, I, I recognizable it really is true.
[00:38:31] So it's, it's authentically true. It's simple and doable.
[00:38:34] Nathan: Yeah. So you, you're not feeling like you read this thing and you're like, I, I don't know. You gotta convince me.
[00:38:40] Dave: Yeah.
[00:38:40] Nathan: It's just that, oh, you've just peeled back a layer to uncover this thing that I already
[00:38:44] Bill: Yeah. Think
[00:38:44] Nathan: to be true.
[00:38:45] Bill: Yeah. And I knew it intuitively, but you've named it that you've put it in a, you've named it and framed it, and now I can do something about it.
[00:38:53] But 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, and, and, and, and the attention economy. It's often hard to hear your own voice.
[00:39:09] Nathan: Yeah. There's a lot of noise out there.
[00:39:10] Bill: There's a lot of noise out there. So we're, we're basically trying to get people back to, Hey, wait a minute.
[00:39:15] 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.
[00:39:31] 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 gonna, you're gonna discover things other people didn't see.
[00:39:50] They, you just, you're curious. They were there, you just found them in, in the new book. It's like curiosity plus mystery. 'cause there's lots of things in the world you 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.
[00:40:06] 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. Like as the sun came up, you know, through the windows at the, at the hotel restaurant, it's like, wow, if you stop and pay attention. That's pretty cool. He's pretty, pretty wondrous.
[00:40:24] So we're trying to, one, make it, make it simpler 'cause we think it is simple. And two, make it available. So if it's just right here, you just need to look at things differently. And if you have these new mindsets, if you, if you're looking at the world this way, 'cause the mindsets how you frame things and whatever you're paying attention to is what you get.
[00:40:42] 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.
[00:40:53] Nathan: Is there a time where, for you, either where someone helped you uncover a truth like that, that was, you know, readily apparent and help you find that meaning or that you were able to do it for a, you know, for a student or someone you were working with?
[00:41:07] Dave: You know, there's the old adage that, um, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Mm-hmm. I don't think that's about, you know, oh, my student, initial reality will manifest a teacher and suck them out of the cosmos and make them materialized in front of me like a Star Wars transporter or Star Trek transporter.
[00:41:22] What it means is, um, there are invitations all over the place, um, and, and the ones you learn are the ones you're ready for. Hmm. 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. Mm-hmm. Um, we tell our coaches by the way that we do what we call, you know, um, facilitative coaching or in situational coaching, start with what's going on now, here's what you need to know, but like, what is actually happening in your life.
[00:41:49] So when there's a need, when there's a teachable moment in your life, uh, 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 we growing into next? I mean, there's a longing in you. So the longing of the heart and the soul, you know, our reaching out.
[00:42:06] And then in that longings moment, do you have something to offer it that it can respond to in a meaningful way? So, and, and we ran into a deep longing with, we, I, I, I learned all this stuff in college, but how the heck do I decide what to do with it? So we, we've, you know, we responded to about longing and, and lately we've been hearing the longing, like, and I did all that stuff, and it's still not very fulfilling.
[00:42:27] What's up with that?
[00:42:28] Bill: Yeah.
[00:42:28] Dave: So that longing. So there's a moment in individual's lives, and Frank, now we think there's a moment in the culture's life a around this meaning question that's really struggling because people, um, and, and our, our thesis about that is that the primary problem is most people's definition of what's meaningful right now, or always fulfilling to them, is making an impact, which is a wonderful thing.
[00:42:48] 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. Um, and even if you make an impact five 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.
[00:43:06] So if impact is the only form of meaning making that you validate. Technically you're screwed, you know, because it's not gonna last and it probably won't work. Most things don't at the end of the day. Uh, and there are the, we think significant other parts of the human experience, um, which really boils down to the way you're living and what we call the transactional world versus the flow of the transactional world is a, 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.
[00:43:38] 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. So I'm very satisfying. Then the rest of this has to, we think there are a number of categories. We specifically wonder when that experience for Wonder Bill is just talking about flow.
[00:43:56] Can I be fully involved in the present moment? How do I learn how to be in flow coherence? What 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 four categories and say these are rich with opportunity.
[00:44:15] And each one of those wounds 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 wanna 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.
[00:44:31] That's what community is about. So those four longings create teachable moments. We're just trying to handle little tool to each of those moments so people can make progress.
[00:44:39] Bill: And you know, you talked lots of Gen Zs and we talked lots of students and also people in their thirties and forties. It's a, it's a thing now.
[00:44:48] Everybody's looking for more meaning.
[00:44:49] Dave: Right? 52 million people walked off the job after the pandemic looking for more meaning, and most of 'em didn't find it right.
[00:44:56] Bill: So it's a good thing actually. I, I'm very excited about this generation of students. The last 10 years or so, 10, 12 years, they're coming to class.
[00:45:05] They really wanna know, they wanna work hard, they wanna know more. They want to figure out how to get a job that's meaningful. How, you know, they, 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 people who are not gonna settle for, you know, a nine to five crappy job mostly, uh, and or put the job in a category.
[00:45:29] That's fine. That's just for money making. But I have, I have this other thing I'm doing for meaning making. I saw a statistic, I think in the us like 75% of Gen Zs have a side hustle.
[00:45:39] Nathan: Yeah.
[00:45:40] Bill: You know, because the job isn't gonna get you everything you want. Maybe even in terms of money and impact of things, but, um, but, and the side hustle isn't ready to be monetized yet.
[00:45:52] 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.
[00:45:59] Dave: Mm-hmm.
[00:45:59] Bill: Just making PowerPoints for the boss. Right. I've gotta have something in my life where I can say, um, at least in the, the big picture for me, I think I'm doing something that matters.
[00:46:11] I'm doing something that matters to if, if, if nothing else, it matters to me. So, you know, you talked about what, what or did we, did, I, we have some moments where we realized 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.
[00:46:29] 'cause tech companies, by the way, are poorly managed by people who are technically aept, but are terrible at managing, but they end up managing. Um, and he taught me the most important role 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 how I'm, I'm not managing that content.
[00:46:52] I'm trying to manage that. The connection is, is valid, it's legitimate, that it's real. So we made a deal when we started this class, we were out at saw to severe guard out behind the, uh, behind the university. I said, you know, if we teach this stuff, we have to do all the exercises. We, we, this we're, we're talking about designing a life and, and living into the design that you have.
[00:47:15] It can't be theoretical. We have to do it. We do odyssey. I do work life balance stuff. I do all sorts of stuff. And I do it also as examples to the students. 'cause if you're standing up in front of class,
[00:47:28] Nathan: right?
[00:47:29] Bill: It's just like with, uh, we talked about this in terms of parenting last night. Students figure out pretty quickly if you're inauthentic
[00:47:36] Nathan: mm-hmm.
[00:47:36] Bill: 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 gonna play music? When are we gonna all to create an experience that the student can have to design into that.
[00:47:57] But if the two guys in front of the class are just phoning it in, it's not gonna work.
[00:48:02] Nathan: Yep. No.
[00:48:02] Bill: So you want to, you want to, if, if you tell people authenticity and coherence is important. You, you have to
[00:48:09] Nathan: live it.
[00:48:10] Bill: Have it. Yeah. Not that we're totally coherent or I'm not totally authentic, but I'm working at it.
[00:48:16] Nathan: Something that I notice in so much of what you, you all are doing, you know, you're very intentional.
[00:48:22] Bill: Yeah.
[00:48:22] Nathan: 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 Yeah. You create.
[00:48:33] And so if you're up for it, I'd love to shift gears a little bit Yeah, sure. And talk about. I, I know we don't wanna over, over index on impact.
[00:48:41] Bill: Well, no,
[00:48:41] Nathan: but you've made something that's very impactful.
[00:48:43] Bill: No, no, no. It's true. Keep going. And we're hoping we're, and we're hoping that the book has an impact on people and that it's a positive thing.
[00:48:50] Nathan: So you've sold well over a million copies. Yeah. And then had probably another million copies, uh, pirated of, of the first book, you know, with, with the new book, what's the, the reach or the impact, um, that you hope that it has, you know, if we're talking about, uh, numbers right? And, and all that.
[00:49:08] Bill: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:49:09] Well, I mean, you know, we, we, we, we've, um, we've hired some, some phenomenal resources to help us with, uh, launching the book. And Simon and Schuster
[00:49:17] Nathan: Thema, who's hanging
[00:49:17] Bill: out That's right. Studio, just off camera,
[00:49:19] Dave: brought us into
[00:49:20] Bill: this room. Right. Uh, and Simon Schuster, you know, the, so, uh, the January to March.
[00:49:25] Timeframe in the publishing industry is called the New Year. New You season.
[00:49:30] Dave: Okay.
[00:49:30] Bill: New Year, new you. You're gonna buy your diet book, your self-help book, your meditation book, whatever. 'cause that's, you know, people make their New Year's resolution. So we're the New Year new you book for Simon Schuster.
[00:49:43] They've decided this is their book for the launch, for this season. Yeah. So they're putting a lot of time in industry. And
[00:49:48] Nathan: what's the launch date?
[00:49:49] Bill: February, February 3rd.
[00:49:50] Dave: Yeah. February 3rd. Alright.
[00:49:51] Bill: They're putting a lot of time in industry. February
[00:49:52] Dave: 3rd available. And all retail edits and online, wherever books are sold,
[00:49:56] Bill: wherever books are sold, how to live a meaningful life, how to live a meaningful life using design thinking to unlock more joy, purpose, joy, and flow every day.
[00:50:06] And, uh, and so we're putting a lot of resources behind this because, you know, our, my, my thought I think we shared is like, let's give this book the best chance of finding the readers who need it.
[00:50:17] Nathan: Right?
[00:50:18] Bill: So let's give the book the best chance of finding the readers who need it. And, and nowadays that means.
[00:50:21] You know, on social media, on a newsletter, on all the, the ways in which you're trying to communicate to people using Kit as our platform, um, 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, or if you're, you know, if you're thinking about the transcendent questions of what's really going on here, um, we think we have something you might enjoy reading.
[00:50:48] Nathan: Right?
[00:50:49] Bill: And it might be helpful. Uh, and it's very, it's very doable. It's, it's, you know, we take the research down to something you can understand. And so we really wanna get out there. And frankly, we are very good at, we're kind of older than most of your other creators. Uh, I know I've had an Instagram account.
[00:51:09] I, I've, okay, I've got a little, I've got about, but you,
[00:51:11] Dave: you asked
[00:51:12] Bill: the question, 20,000 people on asking
[00:51:13] Dave: ourselves. I
[00:51:13] Bill: mean, but 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, including, you know, working with the the kit team. Um, but yeah.
[00:51:22] Yeah. You know what? James Cleary sold 30 million books.
[00:51:25] Nathan: Yeah. 70. Good. Right, right about that. Okay. 30 millions bar's
[00:51:28] Bill: a good, that's, that's a good target.
[00:51:29] Nathan: The only, the best selling book of the last. Uh,
[00:51:32] Bill: I, I take 10, 10 million.
[00:51:34] Nathan: 10, 10 million.
[00:51:34] Bill: I mean, I've got, I've got a little, uh, summer cottage I'm trying to build at 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.
[00:51:47] It's like, this is probably the last book we we write. Right. Please. I like writing him. He doesn't like writing, but, um, if this is the last one, I'd really like to get it out. There's a lot of people, so whatever advice you've got on how you do that.
[00:52:01] Nathan: Yeah. Well, I'd love, love to talk through that. You know, uh, I'm in a fairly privileged position of Yeah.
[00:52:06] Having a front row seat to a lot of these book launches. Yep. Like James, Claire and I have been friends for, uh, I guess 13 years now. And so we were at a cabin, um, a couple hours from here, like brainstorming book titles, you know? Yeah. And working on that for Atomic Habits. And, and the first ingredient that I've seen in all of these book launches mm-hmm.
[00:52:25] Is just writing a really great book. Right. Because these books itself for a long time. Yeah. It's, you know, it's how good is the product? And, and as, as product guys, you understand that. Yeah,
[00:52:35] Dave: yeah.
[00:52:35] Nathan: Very, very clearly. There's
[00:52:37] Bill: nothing,
[00:52:38] Dave: books are all about referral and it's all about Yes. My friend said, you gotta read this book.
[00:52:42] Nathan: Yeah. And so, you know, harm Habits is the perfect example because there are some books that launch to a, a huge level and just stay there. Like, um, the, let Let Them Theory by more s mm-hmm. An example like that.
[00:52:53] Dave: Right.
[00:52:54] Nathan: But Atomic Habits launched, hit the New York Times list, and then didn't reappear on the New York Times list, I think for three years.
[00:53:01] Dave: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:02] Nathan: And then, but it, it like, had built this groundswell and just the referrals and the attention, and then it like, you know, year four or five, somewhere in there. It was back on the New York Times list and then it has never left.
[00:53:14] Bill: Right.
[00:53:15] Nathan: And I think at least two years has been the number one book on Amazon.
[00:53:18] You know, we're talking like six years after I came out and seven years after I came out. I think he, he slipped to number two on Amazon. Yeah. Uh, uh, poor guy. But, um, so the, the quality of the, the book initially is very, very important. I think the next thing is,
[00:53:33] Dave: and the quality of the problem it speaks to
[00:53:35] Nathan: Yes.
[00:53:35] Yeah. And the universality of the problem. Right. Right. Right. If someone's writing a, you know, a, a niche business book is not gonna, that's fine. Have, have the same reach. But, um, but the next thing is the relentless and steady marketing that happens behind it. 'cause some people have this approach like, oh, I made a good product.
[00:53:52] And then people will come to it.
[00:53:53] Bill: Right.
[00:53:54] Nathan: And it's like, now if you made a good product, people will stay once they find it.
[00:53:57] Bill: Right.
[00:53:58] Nathan: 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 seven years.
[00:54:23] Bill: Right.
[00:54:23] Nathan: You know, he actually hasn't come out with another one. You know, it's just like, um, on this one book. And so one thing I'm curious about, um, for you guys is like, what level of time and energy you're able, you know, over the next, let's say three years,
[00:54:37] Dave: right?
[00:54:38] Nathan: Are you able or willing to put into promoting this book?
[00:54:42] Dave: Well, it's the big dog, you know, is the big Don in the room. So I think, you know, whatever we're gonna give, we're gonna give to this.
[00:54:48] Nathan: Mm-hmm. I, I think within that framing of like, okay. You know. Okay. 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, I want to have that level of impact, or I want to.
[00:55:04] Grow and market it in the way that they did. Um, any inspirations there?
[00:55:09] Bill: Boy? Well, Tom MCC habits is certainly one because it's interesting. Tom MCC habits came out roughly the same time. One of our colleagues, guy named VJ Fogg, wrote a book. It is essentially the same book. And he called his book Tiny Habits.
[00:55:23] Nathan: Yes,
[00:55:23] Bill: it's a good book. He's a, you know, he's a well-known researcher in the space of
[00:55:28] Nathan: mm-hmm.
[00:55:28] Bill: You know, habits and, and, and behavior and, and, uh, motivation. Um, but nowhere near, you know, this the same thing. So again, it's, uh, it's it, let's even assume there of equal quality. Yep. What, uh, 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.
[00:55:50] Nathan: Mm-hmm.
[00:55:50] Bill: Um, I had read. Matthew McConaughey's Green Lights book. Actually, it's one of the few books I listened to on tape.
[00:55:56] Nathan: Oh, it's
[00:55:56] Bill: because he's so, you have to, he's so fun to listen to him say his own story.
[00:56:01] Nathan: People give away the physical copy, and I'm like, you should have that on your shelf, but go on Audible.
[00:56:05] Bill: Yeah, go on Audible. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a great, it's a great listen. Um, and, you know, I think, uh, certainly McConaughey has, has, um, fame as a movie star, but that doesn't mean his book's gonna be any good. Right. It doesn't mean his story's gonna be any good. And I thought he captured his story really, really well.
[00:56:22] Dave: Mm-hmm.
[00:56:22] Bill: And, um, and now he, and he's using the asset of himself and his voice and everything else for his new book on poetry and other things like that. So I just, I, I really admire the fact that he, and, 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 of to, to play Matthew McConaughey, you know, blah, blah, blah.
[00:56:43] He's a real guy. Um, and so that's, I think. I like his authenticity and I like the way he's brought his message out to people. So those are two that, that are looking at it. Good. The book that we sort of supplanted that's been around for a billion years, uh, was What Color Is Your Parachute?
[00:57:00] Dave: Okay.
[00:57:00] Bill: By Dick Bolts.
[00:57:01] And then he published that book 70 71 seventies. And then, you know, what color is Your Parachute? 2001. What color is your Parachute? 2002 when he passed away, his, his son is not taking it forward. It was a good book on sort of how to figure out what you wanna be when you grow up and what was your, what was your, um, you know, what's your strategy for doing that?
[00:57:20] But it was pretty idiosyncratic and it wasn't based on any research or anything, but, uh, we're now the book ahead of that book, right. In terms of people thinking about this stuff. But you know, what he did in the early days of publishing and, you know, in the seventies, the self-help category wasn't even really a category yet, um, was created a whole category of books about how to, how to live a meaningful life.
[00:57:43] So I look at that as, um, and he sold. Billion of them. I mean, I don't
[00:57:47] Nathan: Yeah.
[00:57:48] Bill: Over, over a very long period of time.
[00:57:51] Nathan: Yeah.
[00:57:51] Bill: Um, so those, I would say green lights, uh, atomic habits. Atomic habits, and, uh, what color your parachute or three, three pieces of content I admire and, and the last, the latter two, I admire the way they got it out to the people who would be po potential readers.
[00:58:08] Let's,
[00:58:08] Dave: let's start,
[00:58:09] Bill: what was the, what was the one I read about was the guy who was the megachurch guy? How to
[00:58:15] Dave: purpose driven life.
[00:58:16] Bill: About Purpose driven life.
[00:58:16] Nathan: Yeah. Recording.
[00:58:17] Bill: Yeah. That's, it's another
[00:58:19] Nathan: one that's spread
[00:58:20] Dave: like crazy. Yeah.
[00:58:21] Bill: Yeah. You know, and, and, and that, that certainly has a very strong point of view.
[00:58:25] Not one I, that I, I connect to, but a strong point of view. Well written. Mm-hmm. And, uh, 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 the day all the time and say, Hey, read your book. It changed my life. And my one question is, that's fantastic.
[00:58:44] Thank you so much for, for letting me know. And what did you find useful? Like what in the book?
[00:58:48] Nathan: Mm-hmm.
[00:58:49] Bill: You know, was what did you
[00:58:50] Nathan: apply?
[00:58:51] Bill: Yeah, what did you apply? Um, and there's two kinds of readers and you, you know, there's like, there's the one that comes up and the book has got a, a a, a posted on every page and a tab on every page and everything's underlined.
[00:59:02] And that's probably 20% of the readers and the other one's, I, the book changed my life and I go, really? What did, what exercise did you go? I didn't do any exercises. I just liked the book and what I, what I've figured out from that, 'cause we were thinking about it a lot when we were in this book, is like.
[00:59:16] It was one thing, or, or like the, that you could reframe a problem, the idea that you could prototype something. So typically they, there's one thing in there that was useful, and that's what I'm looking for. What, what was useful?
[00:59:27] Nathan: What is that one thing?
[00:59:27] Bill: Yeah.
[00:59:28] Nathan: 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,
[00:59:40] Bill: right?
[00:59:40] Mm-hmm.
[00:59:40] Nathan: Um, the first one is, the book is full of portable stories. These one-liners that describe, um, 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, right? Um, 1% better every day is another one.
[00:59:59] 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 Islamic 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,
[01:00:14] Dave: it's memeable and that's a good thing.
[01:00:16] Nathan: Yes, exactly.
[01:00:17] Dave: Yeah.
[01:00:17] Nathan: And he spent an absurd amount of time getting to point that point.
[01:00:20] Dave: Yeah.
[01:00:21] Nathan: And, and getting to those. Um, the second thing is the relentless promotion. Like as time horizon for the book. So many authors are looking at this like, you know, 90 day window for launch. Right. And, you know, you should be looking at like a nine year window.
[01:00:34] Right. You know, 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. Right. Not to say that.
[01:00:43] Dave: So make it sticky and stick with it.
[01:00:45] Nathan: 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.
[01:01:00] So this is something that I've never seen someone do better than what James did in Atomic Habit. So throughout the book, he has various resources, you know, the things he cut from the book or the, uh, atomic habits for parenting or like, you'll find these little things that go to the website, you know, james co.com/whatever and put in your email address and download it.
[01:01:19] Everybody does that or they should. That is, um, if you don't have that, you know, I would try to get at least four or five of those throughout the book. Uh, you know, if it had, the book hasn't gone to print yet, like, yeah, that's up 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.
[01:01:39] You know that they're a reader.
[01:01:41] Dave: Ah, okay.
[01:01:42] Nathan: And that is the hardest thing to get is readers that you can push information to.
[01:01:46] Dave: Okay.
[01:01:47] Nathan: Right. Because the book was bought at Barnes Noble on Amazon. Like they're not your customer.
[01:01:50] Dave: Yeah.
[01:01:51] Nathan: They bought a product that you made, but
[01:01:52] Dave: yeah,
[01:01:53] Nathan: they're not your customer. And so there's all these things that you want them to take action on that you can't ask them to do.
[01:02:00] And you have your email list. Yeah. But you don't know
[01:02:02] Dave: who read,
[01:02:03] Nathan: who you don't know who bought, and you don't know who read. And those are two different things.
[01:02:06] Dave: Yeah.
[01:02:07] Nathan: And so if halfway through the book, they go to the link and they opt in, you know that's in chapter seven. Yeah. Right. You, they at least read through to chapter seven.
[01:02:17] 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 it an email or a series of emails, both more engaging content. He wants them to finish the book. 'cause the likelihood of them recommending the book if they finish it, is way higher.
[01:02:38] And you, you know, there's, every book is gonna have, uh, a retention curve,
[01:02:41] Bill: right? Mm-hmm.
[01:02:42] Nathan: And so some of the emails are get to get you be like, oh yeah, no, I was meaning to turn that back on and Audible or Yeah. Or, uh, get back to it. But then the thing is he sends 'em an email a few weeks later and says, Hey, how'd you like the book?
[01:02:53] And it's one to five stars.
[01:02:55] Dave: Mm-hmm.
[01:02:56] Nathan: And this is what I think is really clever. Everyone ask says like, oh, you finished the book, will you write a review?
[01:03:00] Dave: Yeah.
[01:03:01] Nathan: He doesn't do that. He asks, how'd you like the book? And depending on which of the five stars you click, he sends you to a different place, one to four stars.
[01:03:08] He says, thank you so much for the feedback. Yeah. I really appreciate it. Or he doesn't need more feedback. Yeah. You know what, what you might do early on is say, uh oh. Like, thank you so much for telling us that. Um, would you mind filling out this short survey or tell, tell us what you didn't like about the book?
[01:03:24] Dave: Yeah.
[01:03:24] Nathan: How we can make it better. And the five 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,
[01:03:40] Dave: right?
[01:03:41] Nathan: You're like, great, go over here.
[01:03:43] Oh, but you love the book. Come over here people. 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 five star reader,
[01:03:54] Dave: right?
[01:03:55] Nathan: Ask them to write a review on Amazon, which helps your rankings, right? Which helps you sell more books.
[01:03:58] And so you just, everyone in my life I'm looking for, yeah, flywheels are virtuous cycles. And then you also have this group. You not only have readers tagged, instead of Kit, you have five star readers, star reader. And so then when someone writes the nasty review on Good Reads, where they're like, I hate these guys in particular, you know what?
[01:04:16] Whatever happens and you're like, Ooh, our ranking is going down. You can say, you can email the 7,005 star readers and say, Hey, will you do this for us? Right. And you can mobilize 'em and you know who your biggest fans are, and that is Wow. Wildly valuable.
[01:04:31] Bill: Yeah.
[01:04:32] Nathan: Any, any reactions, thoughts?
[01:04:34] Dave: It's a
[01:04:35] Bill: fantastic idea.
[01:04:36] Dave: It's creating an infrastructure that allows the people who want to help you to do so,
[01:04:41] Nathan: right? Yes.
[01:04:42] Dave: You're enabling, you've got more help available than you think.
[01:04:45] Nathan: Mm-hmm.
[01:04:46] Dave: Give 'em a chance to let you succeed.
[01:04:48] Nathan: 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
[01:04:55] Dave: right?
[01:04:55] Nathan: I'm going to be in LA and New York. Or you know, I'm doing this locally, right? You can say, oh, who am I five star readers within a hundred miles of the Bay Area? Right. And that could be very interesting and very useful. The other direction that I want to go is, uh, unfair Advantages.
[01:05:13] Bill: Okay.
[01:05:14] Nathan: What I'm curious about is what unfair advantages do you think you all have in writing and promoting this book?
[01:05:22] That some other author would look at it and be like, man. I wish I had this thing that they have.
[01:05:28] Bill: Hmm. Well, it was pretty clear to me that we would've gotten even the first book deal if there weren't two guys from Stanford.
[01:05:33] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Credibility
[01:05:35] Bill: that gave us credibility. And we had been teaching the class for seven years.
[01:05:38] We had phenomenal student feedback on that sort of stuff. And we had done some things in, in the professional world. We did a couple of gigs at, uh, Google.
[01:05:46] Dave: Yeah.
[01:05:47] Bill: And a few other things. So we, we, we had, you know, a whole bunch of brand names that people would go, wow, you, you know, you've done this thing at Google, you've done this thing at, you know, Stanford, da da, da.
[01:05:58] So I think that's, that's
[01:06:00] Dave: another key thing is we have a relationship with almost a thousand coaches and about 6,000 educators.
[01:06:04] Nathan: Yeah.
[01:06:05] Bill: Yeah.
[01:06:05] Nathan: That's, that's a huge one. Yeah. So, I mean, let's,
[01:06:08] Bill: and they're, and they're real evangelists for, they really, those are all, they really care.
[01:06:12] Dave: Pretty dedicated people.
[01:06:14] Nathan: So what have you put together?
[01:06:17] Like in this launch strategy and then the ongoing strategy for the nine years to follow.
[01:06:22] Dave: Right.
[01:06:23] Nathan: Um, what, what, what have you put together for those coaches and,
[01:06:28] Dave: well, we just launched an affiliate. We just announced an affiliation program for the coaches, for them to participate in person the word, because they, they've all got client lists and they've all got referral basis.
[01:06:38] 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. Um, so there's a way for them to actually do good work and get paid for it. Um, we haven't come up with the educator one yet, but we're thinking about it.
[01:06:53] So
[01:06:54] Nathan: I'm thinking
[01:06:54] Dave: about we're teachable there.
[01:06:55] Nathan: 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,
[01:07:06] Bill: that profile. Yeah.
[01:07:07] Nathan: The, the profile of what you're doing here. But, but you wanna think about like, okay, what's the version of that?
[01:07:11] Bill: Right.
[01:07:11] Nathan: Something that I would do in my design career a lot, right? Is I would blatantly steal from a different industry.
[01:07:17] Bill: Okay?
[01:07:18] Nathan: 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.
[01:07:29] And I did the same thing really merging, like the direct response marketing world, right? And the software design world.
[01:07:35] Bill: Okay.
[01:07:36] Nathan: And so I would write like long form sales pages, which were very common in the direct response marketing world,
[01:07:40] Bill: right?
[01:07:41] Nathan: But I would design them beautifully. And people were like, what is this new thing?
[01:07:44] 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 are the best direct response marketers do?
[01:07:54] Bill: Right?
[01:07:54] Nathan: 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
[01:08:03] Dave: right
[01:08:04] Nathan: within the coaches within, you could say, Hey, if you're selling, if you help us sell a hundred books
[01:08:10] Dave: right?
[01:08:11] Nathan: That achieves this,
[01:08:13] Dave: right?
[01:08:14] Nathan: And we're hosting a, a full day event at Stanford just for the, um, 25 coaches who help sell the most books, right? And those kinds of things where people wanna help you anyway, but you give them that extra little incentive, right?
[01:08:27] Bill: Motivation mm-hmm.
[01:08:28] Nathan: Um, to push that forward. Um, another unfair advantage I think that you have is probably corporate relationships, right?
[01:08:36] Dave: Yeah, we've, we've done a couple of hundred corporate speaking gigs.
[01:08:39] Nathan: Yeah. And so I would make sure that there is, you know, someone on your team or, you know, making sure that DOMA is on top of this. Of like, okay, what does the, the corporate side of that look like? And being able to line up all that because you have an, an advantage
[01:08:53] Dave: right
[01:08:54] Nathan: there.
[01:08:54] There's many books that can never be sold into corporations. Right. You know, the, the entrepreneurship, like how to quit your job and pursue your dream.
[01:09:01] Dave: Probably not,
[01:09:02] Nathan: you know, like they're not gonna be like, lemme buy 5,000 copies of that. Yeah. Now the sales book, you know, of like, then it's like, okay, Keller Williams is gonna go buy that for every single one of their real estate agents.
[01:09:12] Right. You know, um, in your case, you know, this is a book that's like, oh, here's it, it demonstrates care. Right.
[01:09:19] Bill: Right.
[01:09:20] Nathan: And so I think there's a, an opportunity for, um, corporate purchases.
[01:09:24] Bill: Yeah. You know, that I, what you just said demonstrates care. It's interesting 'cause we were, we had been talking, uh, on the plane coming out, um.
[01:09:31] From San Francisco is like, well, the last couple books have a, you know, corporate application. If, if, if we get calls from a learning and development team from some company and they're like, Hey, we're trying to employ, improve employee engagement, improve pretention, we wanna, uh, you know, activate the sort of more entrepreneurial spirit and 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, and purpose.
[01:09:57] Um, I was going, I don't know if there's a corporate thing for this, but you just mentioned if I wanna show care
[01:10:03] Dave: mm-hmm.
[01:10:04] Bill: You know, and, and there's nothing in this book that would inherently cause me to quit my job. Right. So a lot of this book that might result in a pretty interesting conversation with my boss.
[01:10:14] Nathan: Yeah. But I think a lot of,
[01:10:16] Bill: yeah,
[01:10:16] Nathan: a lot of leaders would be thrilled to have that conversation.
[01:10:19] Bill: Yeah. So that, that's actually, that's a really, that's a really interesting, uh,
[01:10:22] Nathan: and if there's a version of like, you know, okay, I buy 20 copies, I buy 250 copies, right? Yeah. Right. And then. Like that, that could be really, really meaningful.
[01:10:33] Bill: I think that the, the only other unfair advantage is probably around 5,000 students that we've taught. Mm-hmm. 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.
[01:10:51] Mm-hmm. So I'm wondering, uh, how would you, how would you act? I mean, and we don't, and again, we don't, we don't know who they are and no one's gonna gimme their class list because that's actually illegal. Um, but how would, how would I get to all the students who've taken a class and maybe had one. You know, they had one epiphany, one moment where they're like, this is really good.
[01:11:11] Nathan: Well, so I like to make lists.
[01:11:14] Bill: Mm-hmm.
[01:11:14] Nathan: So we were talking last night about what made a difference for, uh, kit taking off. Right. You know, two years, 2000 a month in revenue, and then third year, you know, we grew by 50 x
[01:11:24] Dave: Right.
[01:11:24] Nathan: And it came down to direct sales.
[01:11:27] Dave: Right.
[01:11:28] Nathan: And so I think the direct sales, even in the case of a, you know, a $27
[01:11:33] Dave: Right.
[01:11:33] Nathan: Purchase from Amazon.
[01:11:34] Dave: Sure,
[01:11:34] Nathan: yeah. Which you're gonna make $3 from.
[01:11:36] Dave: Right.
[01:11:36] Nathan: Uh, is still worthwhile because of the potential like longevity and virality, the look, 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?
[01:11:51] Bill: Yeah.
[01:11:52] Nathan: Um, Barrett Brooks, who's a good friend of mine, um, former coworker, and, and he's a executive coach. Um, when he was launching his coaching practice, he downloaded his entire LinkedIn.
[01:12:02] Bill: Yep.
[01:12:03] Nathan: And he went through and he rated everybody, he had two columns.
[01:12:07] Bill: Mm-hmm.
[01:12:07] Nathan: And it was their likelihood or desire to help him Yeah.
[01:12:11] On a one to three scale, you know, like how much do, how much relationship do we have, how much they like me, all of that. Uh, and then their likelihood, uh, for that, that individual to know his ideal client.
[01:12:22] Dave: Okay.
[01:12:23] Nathan: One to three scale.
[01:12:23] Dave: Right.
[01:12:24] Nathan: So he just ran through all of, you know, 1700 or 3000 or whatever, and just rated everybody and then sorted that and multiply the two columns.
[01:12:31] And so all of the nines
[01:12:32] Dave: Right.
[01:12:33] Nathan: Really like me and probably know my ideal client. He's like, I am getting on a call with him. That's my referral.
[01:12:39] Dave: Yeah.
[01:12:39] Nathan: You know, I'm, I'm targeting that group specifically. Um, and then as you work your way down through the list, you know. The sixes might get, um, a letter, a semi personalized email or, or that sort of thing.
[01:12:51] And then everybody else should, in your network, should at least know, Hey, I'm doing this thing.
[01:12:54] Dave: Right.
[01:12:55] Nathan: And so I would do that with your students.
[01:12:57] Dave: Right.
[01:12:57] Nathan: 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,
[01:13:08] Dave: right?
[01:13:08] Nathan: 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 will say like, oh, I, I'd love to recommend that and go from there. But I think it's very worthwhile to do that list,
[01:13:20] right?
[01:13:20] Nathan: And basically to go through and say, here's everybody.
[01:13:22] Bill: Mm-hmm.
[01:13:23] Nathan: Um, you know, and some of them you might just send a text or an email and say, um, Hey, I was thinking about you. Uh, here's what's going on. I, I launched this book. I'd love to send you a copy.
[01:13:34] Dave: Right.
[01:13:34] Nathan: 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.
[01:13:42] Dave: Right.
[01:13:43] Nathan: So you may not be able to if someone taught your class at another university. Right. You don't have their list of students.
[01:13:48] Dave: No, no. But
[01:13:49] Nathan: presumably you have them.
[01:13:50] Dave: Yeah.
[01:13:50] Nathan: Right. And so if there's a thousand people, about six, about 6,000 people. Right. So I would do that.
[01:13:57] Dave: Right.
[01:13:57] Nathan: Um, how much do they like you, you know, figure out what your criteria is.
[01:14:00] Dave: Right, exactly.
[01:14:01] Nathan: Um, and I would go through that and say, Hey, is there a way that I can 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.
[01:14:18] Right. Or you might say, Hey, I'll, uh, 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.
[01:14:25] Bill: Right.
[01:14:25] Nathan: Yeah. Because we're gonna trust that it has impact.
[01:14:27] Bill: The other one we're, we're going after is there's always a freshman book. Like, what do you, freshman read a freshman?
[01:14:32] Everybody gets in a seminar, you read it, and there's a little seminar or something. And this is a perfect freshman book. Yes. So that's another one we're pushing. So try to figure
[01:14:40] Nathan: out, and you have all the credibility within academics.
[01:14:43] Bill: Yeah. And that's a lot of books.
[01:14:45] Nathan: Yeah. I mean,
[01:14:46] Bill: all the incoming freshmen in America, that's a lot of books.
[01:14:49] Nathan: So, so then I'm like, okay, from a, you know, we're talking about warm relationships before.
[01:14:54] Bill: Right.
[01:14:54] Nathan: People who know you and Right. And uh, you potentially know them, but now we're getting into like potentially cold out outreach. Right. I would make it someone's job to find out who at every university is the decision maker on what the freshman book is.
[01:15:11] Book.
[01:15:11] Dave: Yeah.
[01:15:12] Nathan: Right. And I, timing wise right now, you think the freshman book is decided for next fall?
[01:15:17] Dave: It's a, it's like almost a year long process.
[01:15:20] Nathan: Okay.
[01:15:20] Dave: In fact, it's a big enough market that at that, there's usually a specialty sales person at the who, who does that. Somebody that Schuster, who's full-time job is, is that figuring that out.
[01:15:28] So the first sale is to sell that person assignment. Schuster like, okay, the freshman book for next year in the entire catalog of the Sound Fisher, is how to live a meaningful life. Yep. Which I think we're gonna get that. And then working with those people to, 'cause they actually have all those names.
[01:15:40] Nathan: Right?
[01:15:41] Dave: Yeah.
[01:15:41] Nathan: And that would be something where often, often in business there's a specialist who's like, oh, this is their job.
[01:15:47] Dave: There's a thing.
[01:15:48] Nathan: Yeah. 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, you're cool.
[01:15:57] Dave: Let's go. Yeah.
[01:15:58] Nathan: You should be like, great, let's come alongside you.
[01:16:00] 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.
[01:16:08] Dave: Yeah. And how many of 'em did you get?
[01:16:09] Nathan: And if you're like, Hey, I would love to. Get, you know, I have this book.
[01:16:13] 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,
[01:16:19] Bill: yeah. Yeah.
[01:16:19] Nathan: It's so much more meaningful.
[01:16:21] Bill: Yeah. And, and we've just a shout out to, 'cause the first book was with Penguin Random House and this book's with Simon. And, um, a lot of people told us, ah, the publishing industry's dead.
[01:16:30] They're not gonna support you. Our, our experience, at least our experience, and it's only you with a couple of books, has been great support. Mm-hmm. Great Support Mass media really matters. You, you know, and we, we did a couple things that didn't work in, in mass media, but NPR, um, and the way our publisher positioned us with other, you know, with other events, it really works.
[01:16:55] Like get on a, get on, you know, the, the, the time it was Diane Ream in, in, on the East Coast, and then Michael Kressley on the West Coast get on their show and I can watch the, I can watch the book on Amazon go from, you know. 22nd to mm-hmm. To actually, we got a Dan Dan Ream show. We got off that show. We were number one in Amazon for about a day Uhhuh, but we were head of Bruce Springsteen's biography and the new Harry Potter.
[01:17:21] So, I mean, it's like, yeah, mass Media really does work if you can get access and, and the first book, we got a, we got a lovely cover page in the opinion section or the lifestyle section in 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.
[01:17:38] So, um,
[01:17:40] Nathan: and the version of that. That is all absolutely. Still true. And the version of that, that's even more true now is the creator aspect of it. Totally. All of these people who have incredibly popular newsletters and podcasts.
[01:17:53] Bill: Yeah.
[01:17:53] Dave: Right.
[01:17:54] Nathan: And so that's where putting together the strategy and I'll help you list out like, hey, these are the for sure.
[01:17:59] The people who really move books, um, and all of that.
[01:18:03] Dave: Yeah. We're, we're thrilled to be seeing Mel in January.
[01:18:06] Nathan: Oh, that's amazing.
[01:18:06] Dave: Yeah.
[01:18:07] Nathan: Yeah.
[01:18:07] Dave: We're, we're,
[01:18:07] Nathan: she, she absolutely moves books. Um, and uh,
[01:18:11] Dave: we're happy for her to do that.
[01:18:13] Nathan: Yes. And so really deliberately lining those up Yeah. Um, makes a big difference.
[01:18:18] 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. Yeah. Um, because a lot of people are happy to do the shout out in the newsletter
[01:18:32] Bill: Yeah.
[01:18:32] Nathan: Or something else they'll just forget, you know?
[01:18:35] Right. And so that all campaign and then just the little updates. Right. Other creators are gonna wanna follow the behind the scenes story.
[01:18:44] Bill: Right.
[01:18:44] Nathan: You all doing this launch, which will serve two purposes. One, it will be have them be more invested in you and your success.
[01:18:52] Bill: Right.
[01:18:52] Nathan: And then two over will remind them to actually help out.
[01:18:55] Right. Right. Because the number of times it's like, Hey, yeah. When your book comes out, I'll totally help promote you. Right. You know?
[01:19:00] Bill: Yeah.
[01:19:01] Nathan: And it's like, am I gonna remember three months from now? Yeah. You know?
[01:19:04] Bill: Yeah, exactly. Well, but you know, the, the, the James Cleary story is so interesting, right? I mean, books are kind of like records, like your lunch, your album, it's a bestseller for a while, and then you're gone, and then, you know, you're off the charts.
[01:19:16] Um, 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 gonna sell almost all of your books in the first year and a half. Mm-hmm. And then you're gonna by, by your three or your four year in the, you know, back catalog and we don't care about you anymore.
[01:19:34] And he proved that's wrong. Essentially That's wrong. That, that this new digital form of. Communication, distribution doesn't have that curve. Mm-hmm. You know, isn't just when the record company releases the record, it's, it's, uh, you know, this singer Betty Ltte, you have
[01:19:51] Nathan: heard, I don't, she's amazing.
[01:19:52] Bill: She was, she was a sole singer back in the sixties and seventies, backup singer, and I don't think she, uh, she's 70 something and a couple years ago released a, a All Dylan cover album, and she's 75 years old and she's touring and she's incredibly hot.
[01:20:09] So like, okay, well that's interesting. You had a career 30 years ago, you can have another career. Um, 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 how do you do that?
[01:20:25] Nathan: I'm very excited to like, watch both everything that you all, you all have done up until this point, but also as you embark in this next book launch and Right. And, uh, I'm excited to see how it goes. I'm excited to help you promote this and, and launch it. I know a lot of people watching are probably like,
[01:20:40] Dave: yeah,
[01:20:40] Nathan: this sounds really cool.
[01:20:41] I not only wanna buy the book, uh, it's so first title, the book and when it comes out again.
[01:20:46] Dave: Yeah. Okay. So how to live a meaningful life using design thinking to unlock more, uh, purpose, joy, and flow every day.
[01:20:53] Nathan: I love it.
[01:20:54] Dave: Um, and again, to all your listeners, to all those creators out there, you know. What we're trying to do is hand very doable tools to everybody.
[01:21:03] Mm-hmm. To get more aliveness, more fulfillment, more joy out of the life you're already 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 is another thing I have to do, is how to take what's right in front of you and enjoy it more Fulfillingly.
[01:21:21] 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.
[01:21:28] Nathan: Yeah.
[01:21:29] Dave: And if you wanna reach out to us, um, shoot us a note at Dave and Bill. At Designing your life. So that's Dave, DAVE and a ND bill, BILL. All small case at Designing your Life.
[01:21:44] Nathan: Sounds good. You guys have done some remarkable work. You've got your newsletter now on Kit. Mm-hmm. I want to go and subscribe to that. So designing your life.
[01:21:51] Dave: Yep.
[01:21:52] Nathan: Check out everything you're doing and thanks so much for making the trip out to Boise. It means a lot to
[01:21:56] me.
[01:21:56] Bill: Hey, thanks for helping us. Yeah, it's been fantastic.
[01:21:58] Thanks for the conversation. For sure.
[01:22:00] Nathan: If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search the Nathan Berry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else do you think we should have on the show.
[01:22:14] Thank you so much for listening.