How to Resist the Attention Economy — with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

[MUSIC] >> So for the show comes from Canva. What's your next big thing? Whatever it is, you can design it with Canva. From presentations powered by AI to social media posts, from logos all the way to websites. Whatever your idea is, you can make it a thing in Canva. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing, learn more at Canva.com. [MUSIC] >> Welcome to PropG on Getting Your Life Together, a special series where we're joined by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford Educators and Best Selling Authors of Design Your Life, and most recently, How to Live a Meaningful Life. Gentlemen, welcome and thanks for doing this. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> We went to our listeners with one question. What's the biggest thing holding your life back right now? Today, we try to help. We talk about burnout, distraction, purpose, and building a life that feels more intentional. All right, let's get into it. Our first question is, how do you build a meaningful intentional life when your attention is constantly being pulled apart by phones, doom scrolling, and the attention economy? So just some data here to set the table. In 2025, Americans reported spending an average of five hours and 16 minutes per day on their phones. At 14% increase since 2024, a study by Vision Direct projects that the average American adult will spend 44 years of their life looking at screens. In 2025, researchers found that randomly moving internet access from smartphones produced a range of benefits, including improvemental health, subjective well-being, and the ability to sustain attention. So bill you go first and then I'll ask for Dave to build on it. >> Yeah, you know, this attention economy and it's horrible. I mean, I'm teaching a Stanford and the undergrad's can't get off their phone. The grad students can't get off their phone. We're really focused on trying to figure out how to help them with that. So one of the things is this whole doom scrolling thing. It's a dopamine hit. Every time you get a new page, it's a dopamine hit. So my advice is, let's get on a better dopamine diet because we're talking in our new book about flow, about wonder, and if you can get into a low state, that's a dopamine hit. If you can have an experience of wonder and wonder is literally all around. You just got to look for it a different way. That's another way of rerouting this need to have this dopamine hit. It's just a better dopamine diet to be on wonder, awe, and flow. And that expands your access to things like nature, things like relationships, things like other people in the room. I think we should design a little app that just gives you that sort of a sense of flow because then you'll get off the phone, walk outside, and notice how beautiful the sunset is. >> Touch grass, so to speak, Dave. >> Well, you know, I think, what's keeping in mind, you know, there are 10,000 really sharp, incredibly well-paid people working for multi-billion dollar companies. It's been 60 years who we think about how they compound your amygdala more effectively. So you've got a fairly substantial resource coming at you wanting to keep your attention. And people keep talking about how do I stop Doom's growing? You know, oh god, there was my phone again, and I couldn't get off. And so if you start there, you are doomed because it's too late. And so what you really need to do, there's a concept in second, the vatheria of replacement. You can't stop anything. I don't think of a blue horse right now. Whatever you do not think of a blue horse, certainly not a blue horse with a pink mane. No one, no blue horses with pink maize. Not now, at all. You screwed. So what you have to do is build things that are more attractive than the Doom's growing over time. And it's not going to happen right away because again, that dopamine hit is there. So this is where the whole design thinking model of prototype iteration would say, set the bar low and clear it, iterate, iterate, iterate. So if you start having these habits and practices, or second, but we talk about less about life as a project, more as life as a practice. So I find these little experiences and it's a lighter lift than you think, you know, to drop it in what we call the flow world, which is the present moment. And find ways to experience your humanity, whether it's in nature, whether it's music, whether it's, you know, just enjoying what you're actually doing, rather than being worried about what the screen has to say to you, you start doing that more often than what you actually start building is a different neural pathway that's attracted to this other behavior. And you can start having the good stuff, crowd the bad stuff out. The bottom line is the good stuff has to crowd the bad stuff out. If you're all leveraged on stopping bad stuff, you're doomed. Yeah, just add to that. It's not just young people. I'm addicted to my phone. It's difficult for me not to pick it up and check my text messages right now. So I empathize with, I think Big Tech is essentially evolving a new species of a social and asexual males who opt for relationships that are frictionless. And the hacks I've tried, somewhat unsuccessful, sort of, it sounds lame. I'm trying to watch more TV. I'm just, yeah, put my phone away. There's so much amazing streaming media content. I'm trying to get more into 80s music again. I love 80s music. I'm trying to listen more music. And whenever I do these things, I try and put my phone away. And I have decided, and this is hard for me, I no longer sleep with my phone next to me. And I used to do that. And then when I go to dinner, the other thing I would say just more, manage 20 to 30 are spending less time outdoors than prison inmates. And I realize there's some money involved in here, but I'm trying to say yes to more. I'm going out for dinner and drinks with two guys who are in town who I don't especially know. I quite frankly, I'm not sure I especially want to know them, but they invited me out. So I said yes. And I'm going to turn my phone off. And I'm just going to go out and, you know, probably, you know, drink and eat and not be on my phone. Anyways, let's move to question number two. Our next question is about productivity and discipline. Why is it so hard to stick to routines that we know are good for us? There's a popular stat that says habits take 21 days to stick. But according to newer research from UCL, habits actually take 66 days on average to form. That 21 days figure is a myth traced back to a plastic surgeon observing post-op patients adjusted to their new appearance. The same study found that missing a day doesn't break the process. The early days are hardest. Then it gets easier regardless of occasional slip ups. Bill, thoughts on productivity and discipline? Yeah. And getting stuff done in what we call the transaction world. We do a reframe in the class and it's going from trying to do time management because I can't make more time. That's just not possible to managing your energy. Because really what your experience is what you pay attention to. What you pay attention to is what your neurons are firing on. So that's the energy you put into something. And if you can map, we do an energy map. What do we do on Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday? We look at all the events that occur regularly. We look at whether they're energy, you know, sustaining or giving or whether they're energy draining. Like my budget meeting is an energy draining meeting. My office hours with students positive energy every time. So once you know where you're actually spending your energy, which is your attention, then you can start moving things around. You know, if you do, there's a thing in psychology called the best last effect. The only thing you'll remember in the week is the peak thing that happened and the last thing that happened. So I manage those things in my week to make sure I have a peak experience somewhere about Wednesday or Thursday and my Friday experiences are always a positive exit. So when I come to the end of the week, I go, "Hab is the week." I go, "Hey, it's pretty good. I really managed my intention, my energy." And I got a lot of stuff done because I was paying attention to the things that give me a positive boost. So that's how we reframe it. It's the energy, not time management. Dave? I think the whole issue, you know, repetition, the, when you're front of you'll have it, you know, you have this goal in mind. We're a very cold, goal driven. It's all about outcomes, it's all about impact. And you drop the ball or it doesn't work and you're outcrap, you know, and then I did it again. And then you're depressed. What do you do? You want to go look for another dopamine hit and I feel even worse. So one of the things we really emphasize on this prototyping mindset is you can prototype anything. And so, you know, we'll actually have a thing on a life-balanced dashboard. We have an exercise to rebalance your life. You know, we kind of go, "What's one little thing you could do a little different for two weeks and then decide that works you?" You know, and so you create a low bar and clear it. Everybody's trying to get inspired to become their Olympic self. We were talking in Chicago. Chicago Ideas week years ago. And I'm talking to, you know, Amy, the captain of the US soccer team and two-time gold medal winners. It can you be your Olympic best all the time? She goes, "Oh, God, are you kidding? You just helped, you just helped to peak the right week of the year." You know, so we're all shooting for things that are kind of unattainable. So if you say, "Okay, I'm going to try this one little thing. See how it works at the end, re-value, I'll try it again." I had a small group. Young professionals group working on these kind of things said, "Okay, I think we could handle getting together for six weeks." So we got together for six weeks. The conversation wasn't done. It said, "Do you guys want to keep going?" They kind of go, "Well, yes." And so we just keep meeting on Tuesday and that's the kind of going, "No, no, I can't do that. I can go." Okay, well, how long do you want to. Another six weeks? We did a six week renewal. Fifty times. We were together like four years. And 35, six week renewals and I said, "Can we just commit to this?" They kind of go, "No, I can't handle." So that fine, whatever it takes. So you really do need to kind of game yourself and recognize, don't set yourself up for failure, take the time and make the process of acquiring the habit as successful as having the habit itself. If you declare yourself a loser too soon, you'll quit. Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like I lack the discipline for habits. What I try to do is, I find deadlines are great for lazy people. I'm fundamentally a lazy person. And so I like deadlines, hard deadlines that I commit to, whether it's my publisher giving me a deadline or they'll take back their advance. One of the things I really enjoy about teaching, you really can't be late for your class. I mean, if you do, there's 180 people who spend $7,000 stake that class, who do know, that's good for me. So I like that. I, in this again, it's a story of a trainer, because when you show up at eight, I got to go outside and train. So I like self-imposed deadlines. The other thing I find is really powerful is cohort. And that is, if you decide you want to run, try and find someone else to run with. All right, we're meeting at 9am tomorrow. If I'm hung over and I'm just me running, I'm not running. But my buddy Dave's out there in Regions Park at 855 stretching. So challenges with each other. I find that the peer pressure also works pretty well. Any follow-up thoughts on that guys? Well, yeah, structurally. I learned that I'm both undisciplined and a workaholic and finally came to the conclusion, maybe alcoholics shouldn't work in liquor stores. And I was a startup guy and I worked infinite hours and my father died when I was a child. I wanted to be a good dad because I didn't have one. And I'm working 90 hours away. Kind of can't stop. So I actually finally found my way to begin, I went into gig work, you know, in my late 30s and I outsourced responsibility to my client, which was I have very tight scripts of work. I concocted lots of deliverables with deadlines, just like you're describing. I'm in order that when I was done, the client would say, stop. Go home and have dinner with your kids. We're not paying you anymore. And I didn't have the capacity to stop myself. So I delegated it to my customers. And that is what I call don't try to work through it, work around it. When you're failing at something over and over again, if you accepted your foible and designed around it, I have to run with friends because I can't get my own ass out of bed. Then you start designing a life where the game of life is learn how to play you to win. You're getting your limitations and design for them. Don't keep trying to overcome them. And we love deadlines. We just said a dead one. I mean, that affects. We just launched a new training program on our new book. And we didn't have a single slide done. And we said we got we got to have this thing really by me because a bunch of people are coming. And I'm hustling to get the last slides done. So yeah, set a deadline. Force yourself. You know, that's the exposure of social embarrassment, I guess, to get stuff done. Works great. Also, it's something it sounds really lame, but they just do a thing. Whenever it's exercise, I now have a practice. If I think about exercise, I just grab my shoes and go down to my gym. I just don't think about it. I'm just like, Oh, okay, just just literally like grab your shoes and go. Just like don't don't think about it. Just do it. So to speak. So with that, we'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Canva. An idea is just an idea, but actually transforming that idea into a thing, that's where the real work lives. It can be a journey full of pitfalls and banging your head against the wall. Or it could be a lot easier than that with Canva. Canva is packed with templates and design tools to turn your idea into something real. From presentations powered by AI to social media posts, logos and websites, whatever your ideas, you can make it a thing in Canva. Welcome back onto our last question. How can you build a more meaningful life without getting a whole different job or reinventing your life? This is obviously ground zero for your question. Dave, I'll ask you to go first. Well, it's really, really, we didn't intend to write this last book, which is a pretty different animal, but you know, we'll help people, you know, redesign your lives and then redesign their careers, wrote two books and we get a lot of feedback that worked really great. And then right after the, you know, the pandemic and the great resignation, 52 million people walk off the job because it's not good enough. What we kept sharing is I'm doing all the stuff and I'm still not fulfilled. Where it says meaningful as I want. And we looked into that and we found two things. Well, people were looking for to make life meaningful. It had an impact. I changed the world. I did something important. I mattered. I created a legacy, a lot of language around that. Or I feel fulfilled. And we think both of those actually all by themselves, if you got all your meaning eggs in those baskets, impact your fulfillment, you're screwed. That's a dysfunctional belief because impact is a thing and you're not. And even when impact works and most of the time, even if you do everything right, it doesn't work because the other eight billion people might go off script when you're not looking. And if you're lucky enough to have an impact at all, the glow doesn't last very long. So that's not a sustainable. That's a hedonic treadmill problem. And fulfillment, we know that all of us contain more aliveness than your life permits you to express. You can't be fulfilled as in expressing your entire self, which is what Maslow told you in 1943. You should do by being self-actualized and you can't get there from here. So that's why we came up with, oh, that's all about the transactional world. You got to expand into the present moment in the flow world to add other forms of meaning. Otherwise, if you're trapped in transactions all the time, you can't get there from here. And Bill can talk about where in the flow world you can get your hands on that stuff. Well, you can get it all over the place. But the trick is, if you're looking for more meaning, then look right where you are. Now, you don't have to cram more into your life. Our book is all not about like, there's five new things you gotta learn. You gotta have mindfulness practice and you gotta work out and do all sorts of stuff. Do that if you want to. That's great. Mindfulness is a good thing. But there's a lot of meaning just lying around right away. And so the whole idea is to become a meaning-making designer, a designer of moments that are meaningful. And it's about getting more out of what's right in front of you. Not trying to cram more in because we're all too busy. So you don't need a new job. You can find some satisfaction in the job you've got. You can always make it better. But you know, better is about the future. The experience of meaning is right now. It's in what you're doing right now. It's putting on your shoes and going out to the gym. You know, and then and then walk in a white feeling a little bit of a glow from the workout. It's about, you know, waking up in the morning and looking outside and taking a few, a few deep breaths and noticing that it's another beautiful sunny day here in California. So it's about getting more out of and we've had tons of techniques for doing this. And by the way, the whole idea that flow is this kind of peak experience. We know now from neuroscience. There's 20, at least 22 trigger neuroscience triggers to flow. And flow is the experience of being right here right now. And that's where you experience the more meaning that you're looking for. Yeah, I struggle with this because I struggle with anger and depression. I'm constantly for a long time was thinking about how do I, you know, find meaning as I mean, happiness or reward. And everyone has to figure out the discipline and the skills and the market dynamics such that they can take care of themselves and then, you know, operate in what is a fairly sometimes unfair capitalist society. And I, you know, that's the reality. And there's so many books since and graduate programs on how to, how to refine those skills such that you can be viable in a capitalist society. What I found is that even after I'd find I've been working so hard to get to some sense of relevance or economic security. The ones I got there, I'm like, am I really that happy or do I really feel I have meaning? And where I have found it is in what I call purpose and perspective and purpose is different. And I think what I think I thought when I was younger, some bolt of lightning would hit me and I just be so good at something I find purpose. What I found is that purpose comes from you invest so much in something you'll never get an ROI on it. And what do I mean by that? Veterans are never get I don't think most veterans are ever going to get a real ROI on their service leaving their family. Putting their person in physical danger. But that's what they get is something greater. They get purpose. They've served their country like no one can match that sacrifice. What I have found is that I will I have two boys 15 and 18. I will never get ROI on them. They will never be up at 2 a.m. worried about me. No matter if I decide to go back to graduate school at Stanford, they're just not going to pay for it. I'm never going to get the return in terms of time, love, anxiety, money that I have put into them. And what I realize is then, okay, that's my purpose. You find something whether it's a nonprofit, your country, other people that you invest so deeply in it, you're never going to get what we think of as a traditional return. And that's your purpose. That's why you're here. Well, we get asked that question all the time. And we're not trying to assist you in finding the meaning of life or figure out how to design what is the purpose of my life. Because those are outcomes, those are it's and you're not a net or definition of the human person is you are a becoming. Yeah, you're becoming their it your future self may be differently oriented, but purpose is an aspirational valence. It's a trajectory. It's not an outcome. And in this technologically enabled capitalistically optimized world, everything's about optimizing for outcome. So did I accomplish it? Did I find it? Did I get it done to have I reached? Have I achieved it? And there is no way. There's no right. There's no done and there's no it. There's just getting on with it. So we encourage people to look purposefully and experience their days meaningfully. Those are descriptions of the manner in which you're walking this thing out. And your definition of a purpose is it's a direction with going toward and going toward again and going toward again and going toward again. Not because eventually I'm going to get there. But but because going somewhere meaningfully, even productively is worthwhile. And, you know, we have a compass tool to make sure, well, you don't know where you're supposed to go, but you can't figure out whether or not you're on the right direction. Are you going north? We can go north. Let's keep going. - I want to get your response to, I have something called a, people talk about a gratitude practice, and I never, I never really, I didn't have the discipline to keep up with that. What I have though is a perspective practice, and I want you guys to respond to this. I think it's, I think a lot of us lack quite frankly, perspective or appreciation or, you know, framing things to realize most of us don't have problems we have inconveniences. And I don't own art, but I bet I spent a ton of money for me on a photograph. And it's a photograph of Otto Frank, who's the father of Anne Frank, and it's a picture of him when he returned to the attic where his family hid in an Amsterdam and was eventually betrayed. All of his family was murdered. And I have a picture of him after he returned to the attic after he survived Auschwitz. And I have it outside my bedroom. And every morning, when I leave my bedroom, I stop and I look at it for 10 seconds. And it's this very contemplative, intense photograph of him just sitting there, you could tell thinking they're staring and I try and imagine what's running through his mind. And then I start my day. And then the last thing I do when I'm going to bed is I again stare at this photo for 10 seconds. And the same thought just comes up, I have no problems. I have inconveniences, but I have no problems. That is my perspective practice and it's helped me a lot. It helps me get me out of my own bullshit and my own anxiety and realized, and I just feel stupid. And it's a good kind of stupid for the bullshit that I'm worried about or I occasionally let ruin my day. Thoughts on a perspective practice. I love that. I think it's fantastic. And it puts in perspective that most of our lives have a lot of little annoyances in them. But nobody's shooting at us. We got food. We got shelter. We got all these things. And I also talked about self-explanation. But later, before he died in his diary, he said, no, that's not his actually self-transcendence. It's going beyond itself. Purpose is going beyond myself, not for an ROI. But for the goal that I believe is either valid or noble. So I like that because I have a thing I'm not so in my door. This is my studio. I have to do it. It's from a guy named Robert Henry. He said, the goal isn't to make art. The goal is to be in that wonderful state of mind that makes art inevitable. And so I read that as I walk in the morning and read that as I walk out. Am I in that state of mind that makes our joy, beauty, inevitable? Or am I just pissed off about some little thing that happened? Because somebody at Stanford-- some bureaucrat at Stanford didn't get something done. So I think I like your idea of that kind of a practice. And I like the idea of something that forces you into a perspective larger than yourself. What you're hitting at, Scott, we talk about mindset, a lot in design. And we talk about mindsets and all of our books. And the mindset around the meeting, making approach that we're talking about now, there's five of them. And one of them, the power tofer in the mindset, is the combination of what we call radical acceptance and availability. And radical acceptance is realities. The only place anything's going to happen. Certainly the most generative or interesting thing's going to happen. So I have to be here. Go my planes like, oh, wow, wow, wow, wow, you're living in a fantasy called your head. No, the plane's late now. And there's neutral acceptance. Well, oh, OK. And then there's acceptance with availability. Oh, this is what's happening. And what's here for me? What invitation do I discern that allows me to live generously into this? So that orientation that I get to choose how to respond-- right, Victor Frankl's Mancer is for me. Also another Holocaust survivor, the one choice you always have is how to react to your circumstances. That humanity is always, always, always available to you. And so choosing what is the stance I'm coming from? That's our fourth mindset, which is create your world. Life is a story we tell ourselves. Pick your story very carefully. It's has to be reality-based. That's not magical thinking. But it has to be reality-based with a generative invitation for you to be the kind of person you want to be in the world. So right now, am I 52-year, small group, my formative community we call them? I just turned 73. Two years ago, we started talking about what it means to become 70. And the question was, what does it mean to be an elder? And I started-- and I came back with, oh, I'm moving from production to presence as my primary ministry or gift of life. I'm not here to produce. I'm here to be present. And if I'm doing present, well, what does that mean? Oh, people being in proximity to me should be experiencing their belovedness. I want people to go away knowing they've been loved, generally. That's kind of the fundamental task I'm on now. So when I walk into a room, I walk into a room and I say I had a bunch of CEOs who have the start of accelerating my part of. I got there late. Nobody knows me. And the little brain kind of goes, oh, when everybody's talking to me, is this-- is it going to make a difference? Why the fuck did I come? I shouldn't have been here. And then I'm like, stop it. Can you go to-- is there anybody here? You can love. Changes everything. Mindset matters. And what you're doing with auto is you're setting your mind on a broader point of view. That's beautiful. Yeah. I want people to walk away knowing that they've been loved. Let's leave it there. That's all for this episode. Bill Bernat and Dave Evans are Stanford educators and bestselling authors of designing your life and most recently, how to live a meaningful life. Bill, Dave, really enjoyed this. Thanks so much for your time today and your good work. Thank you. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Jenaire. Tammy Riekas, our social producer, Brad Williams, is our editor and Drew Burrows, our technical director. Thank you for listening to The Prof. Sheep Poff and Prof. Sheep Media. Thanks to Canva for their support. With incredible tools to boost your design and productivity, Canva can help turn that idea into an actual thing. From presentations powered by AI to social media posts from bloggers to websites, it's time to turn that idea into something real. Canva, it's the thing that makes anything a thing. Learn more at canva.com.