Full transcript:
Tracy: In our last episode, healthcare designer and founder of Prescribe Design, Aaron Sklar talked to us about creating a collaborative network of healthcare experts and design professionals to reimagine medical products and services, and create healthcare experiences that are useful, usable, delightful and impactful for all. Today, we introduce you to designer Jenny Jin, whose motto is always learning. A graduate of Stanford and MIT, she recently worked at the Alicia Foundation, founded by world-renowned chef of El Bulli, Ferran Adria to promote healthy eating for everyone. Jenny is an entrepreneurial learner and doer and is here to inspire us with her sense of optimism, and roll up your sleeves, kick open your own door attitude, living up to her motto, we recently caught up with Jenny, as she was preparing to lead a class at MIT's Edgerton Center for Experiential Learning, to teach undergrads how to apply design thinking to their lives.
Jenny: I'm working on lobbying, and I want to do a competitive analysis. And essentially, I just want to live in Spain for a while because people eat and live in a really holistic way that I don't see here in the US as much.
Tracy: Yeah.
Jenny: I want to work with a food company that actually is like mindfully doing this. And she was like, you know, I think Ferran Adria, the chef, do you know him? I was like, yes, he has this food foundation that combines health and food and tried to be able to innovate on the two together, I was like, shut up, trying to see if they would be willing for you to work with him this summer. I was like, please, that would be absolutely fantastic. And so MIT like, was able to make the connection fund me to go, I thought I would just only have the opportunity to work on the business side. They invited me to work in the kitchen half time because when I was personally interested and asked you even though I have no qualifications as a professional chef, I felt like it did help me to understand their operations and be able to help them with their strategy and growth component of it worked on some pretty cool hands-on project like I helped going back to healthcare, like the elderly have trouble swallowing as they get older, like astronomy techniques to experiment and create new textures for food, still eat the food they love, but with different textures that allow them to actually be able to swallow.
Tracy: That's amazing. I just was listening to a tool go on days being mortal. He was sharing an anecdote about as you get older, I guess, as your head goes back when you're eating, that increases your likelihood of choking, and I had no idea. So I love that you guys are actually working on that to try and solve that for people.
Jenny: No, I didn't. I feel like we've gotten a lot of press lately. Do you know which one this was called?
Tracy: I don't remember but it was basically shadowing them for a year and showing how they take off three or four or maybe it's even six months for the year and this one El Bulli was still open, obviously, yeah, they were just experiment, they would go get inspired by other cuisines and just out in the world in and nature. And they had all these notebooks full of ideas. And then all of the chef's would test these things over and over again, they kept the notebook, which was all of their experiments, the things that had worked well and had failed, and they would try each other's creations and give feedback. And you're right, it is actually very similar to the design thinking process, especially around experimentation and prototyping. And then they were basically just setting it all up for that year's menu as it would be just for that one year. And so say it was six months that they're experimenting, and then it was six months that they were serving. And even while they had that six months of serving, they were still experimenting and pushing things forward. But they really crafted what they wanted the experience to be. And when I was thinking about what I wanted to do, after I do that was in my mind was sort of like taking things to the field, or talking to working with clients and getting them ramped up on what the process was, and then taking six months time off to sort of synthesize it all and then prototype what the next series of client collaborations could look like. I just love that process of really taking time to reflect and also taking time to put something out in the world that you've really considered early.
Jenny: So I guess I can start with myself. I just graduated from the MIT Sloan program, which is their MBA program this past June. So I had the pleasure to be a grad student at MIT for the last two years. I went to Stanford, my undergrad. And I think the culture and the campus of MIT are as wonderful as Stanford's, but it's very different. The first thing I heard when I got to the MIT campus with that there is a strong philosophy of drinking from a firehose, I didn't hear about it until I got to MIT. I mean, it's basically this like imagery that it's a really strong current of things that they're going to throw at you. And the part of the learning experience is figuring out how you're going to manage what you can handle, what you want to do, what you don't, or else, you're just going to drown. It's such an interesting approach to how they structured academic life for both undergraduate and for the grad students. And I have to say that it was definitely exactly that.
Tracy: That sounds overwhelming, how do you even begin to manage that?
Jenny: In the beginning, I can't manage it very well, to be very honest with you. And when I talked to my classmates within my MBA program, and then beyond that, when I made friends with like other grad students, and undergrads always felt like it was this really steep learning curve. And we were incredibly stressed out by it, all of us came to different ways to be able to cope with it, or it could be able to redesign our lives in a way that felt like it was manageable. One of the key takeaways I hear a lot is that students say that they get pushed beyond the boundaries, what they can handle, and then it helps them to discover what their boundaries are. And then when they survive, and when they do well, they really wear this badge of honor to have a huge, immense amount of confidence and pride that they can tackle anything else. Beyond that my team, I had conducted design research around the topic of well being at MIT, I thought about this a little bit more like backed up, I was like, dude, that's actually a lot of pressure and a lot of risks beyond your boundaries. And only when you achieve something we feel successful, do you feel like you came out of it? And you got something from it? The question for me that was really curious about was what happens if we actually create an environment and like a culture where students could still do this, they could still push the boundaries of what they think is possible and discover who they are as on the process, but without this real risk, and like this lack of support?
Tracy: Yeah, I mean, that's one of the tenants I feel like a design thinking is to try and start small and take manageable risks so that you're not at risk of falling in your face and completely failing.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And talking about pulling from inspirations from different places. I had used to work at Google as my first job out of college. And at Google, we always talked about different terminologies that were really useful to me like one was sandbox. The idea that before you put something out in the wild or in the real world, you test it in a smaller environment first one that felt safer and was more controlled and which really allows you to be able to you know, flex like your muscles before you felt like you had to deal with all the possible risks out there.
Tracy: Did you say sandbox, like a little play space?
Jenny: Yeah, like a little place. I love that association to absolutely be able to play rather than think of it as like performance or work and that became an anchor for we're trying to design for, we wanted to see if we can create a true sandbox at MIT, where people come to MIT from high school and the sanctuaries and the roles of their homes. And as part of the curriculum that they're offered to MIT is like a true sandbox to be able to play experiment and see what they can learn along the way.
Tracy: Yeah. So you came to MIT after you did undergrad at Stanford, I can't even imagine the overwhelm that you would feel coming from high school to MIT and drinking from that fire hose.
Jenny: Yeah, so one of the biggest supporters for the class currently is the Dean of Undergraduate advising and her primary students that she works with our freshman. She says that there is a huge kind of range of students, once you come in, very, like ready to take in this environment and go with it. And then people who really struggle with and it's a design challenge for them as well how to create experience for that entire range.
Tracy: Yeah, because my philosophy would be that just because you enter MIT and kind of can't jump in right away and go with the flow doesn't mean that you don't have the potential to be amazing at what you do. And you already have overcome so many challenges and persevered to get there in the first place. Is that a similar mentality? Or people kind of like cut bait? If people don't get it within? You know, the first semester?
Jenny: No, I think there's a deep sense of personalization, a few. So we had interviewed several students. This was a design project last spring, where we came in with just curiosity. We were like, just very curious about what well being and a happy campus look like. And we interviewed Natalie, over 20 undergrads, we also interviewed grad students and the MIT community of faculty and admin and the dean and going back to the undergrad. So we interviewed what was really interesting, one of the key things that we heard over again, was that students said, Oh, it's not about the workload, and it's not about the professor's being really hard on me, I'm actually harder on myself. And like anyone else, sometimes when they do hit like a roadblock, there's a lot of like, rather than taking the data and seeing how to make it useful to improve, there is a lot of feeling very personalized about how it speaks to you as a person.
Tracy: I could imagine that I would think that the types of folks who go to MIT have already been hard on themselves for most of their lives to get to where they are. And I wonder and that question made me think, do you think that that's necessary, in order to succeed in such a way or go to such a place, that trait is necessary.
Jenny: One of the things that I learned and one of the classes I took as long which was incredibly transformational. For me, it was improv. I had never taken improv in the past, because I'm terrified, like public performance class was really great, because they lured me in by saying, look, this class is going to teach you about leadership skills, it's going to do in a very trusting way because it's going to be a very small group of people, you have to do anything they don't comfortable. One of the role-playing activities that we did was playing out what we call it, the inner critic, the inner editor, and the inner champion, wherein all those different goals, you will say, what we'll be going through your head, like I would be nervous about public speaking, I'm about to prep for it. Like my inner critic will say, you know what, if you felt this, she's going to be terrible, you are just never going to be good at this. Whereas the inner kind of editor is something where they'll say, look, you do need to project yourself, you do want to be authentic, you do want to share because these are things that will align with your goals. I think that is like the critical voice that we want to hear our head where it's using the critical skills of analysis without being self-critical, and keeps you from being preoccupied and distracted when you're trying to really work on your goals. Obviously, like the champion, and you're going to say I can do it like and even if you don't, that's okay. This does not speak anything about yourself, like an inner champion, something that people talk about that as that's what we all have, I think people overlook the role of the editor. I think that people who are really high achieving have that as well.
Tracy: Yeah, that's interesting. I've never heard of it being talked about in that way. I've only heard this from the critic and the champion.
Jenny: Yeah. So improv was transformational. I highly recommend it to anyone.
Tracy: Okay. So all of this curiosity and exploration around well, being at MIT has turned into something very tangible now. And do you want to talk about what that is?
Jenny: Basically, we came up with an idea for creating a sandbox. And we didn't really know what shape that would take at MIT without it could be a club. This could be after school workshops, it could be something that we do over you know, spring break, it could be like a lot of things. And so then we thought about what's our target personas and who we really want to reach. And we want it to be like freshmen and sophomore primarily at MIT. So with that in mind, we just started to interview more freshmen sophomores about their daily lives and their schedules to make sure that we wouldn't create anything that would burden them or make it hard for them to access and so it allows into a four-semester class, it's going to be a hands-on lab where for two hours a week, students come to the class. And they're just going to be taught basic tools and design thinking, as well as improv, mindfulness to really be able to use these fools to start to just experiment on the things that matter the most in their lives. And then from those experiences, we expect them to start to learn things and to start to be interested in topics that they're able to air out with a group of fellow students, why did you choose freshmen, sophomores? That was a really interesting age group because I think that when students have experienced a major change in their lives, that's when they're the most susceptible and the readiest to think about what it means and to be thoughtful about it. That was the hypothesis that we had. And we tested this with a few advisors who worked a lot in human behavior and psychology. And they also thought that that was a really interesting test, we started to talk to students, and it kind of backed us up and that like a lot of freshmen, a lot of sophomores said, Look, we came to MIT, and we were told, we're gonna go out there and change the world. I think that's really exciting. I love to embrace that challenge. How do I go about doing that with my workbook, I'm ready to think outside of the box but I don't see a lot of resources?
Tracy: That's amazing. Even though I'm just thinking back to my own college experience, I don't think I would have thought about, oh, I'm here to change the world, I would probably have been thinking about it as what's my major? What do I want to do for a career? I love that there's a broader perspective about why you're going to college in the first place.
Jenny: Yeah, I think that I hear the same concerns about majors and so forth. But it was really wonderful and surprising to me to hear that this emphasis on impact, what can I do that will actually create impact? It's a really sticky topic. And people are both intimidated by it, curious about it, and don't really know how to be able to negotiate about doing it. And I think that that's like the biggest draw of the class. If I were telling people to look, we're going to tackle those questions. We won't be diving into that big question from the beginning. But over the process of the semester, I think that you'll have more clarity, and you'll have a space to be able to explore it.
Tracy: It's interesting, I went to go see Neil deGrasse Tyson speak earlier this week. And he was talking about being in Silicon Valley doing this talk here in San Francisco, and somebody's gotten up to ask him a question. And he's like, you're here with all these engineers? What do you think we should be doing to help impact the world and Neil was basically like, start working on problems that matter. He's like, it's not about the next app, what the next thing is that you can put on your phone to do something for you. And I also have just recently read an article where they're talking about Silicon Valley kind of being focused on creating solutions for things that your mom can do for you or used to do for you. So you're trying to take over what mom used to do, and instead, maybe focus on things that might make your mom proud. I think that in my own career, I sort of came to that realization, too, once you have the skillset that allows you to know how to tackle an insurmountable seeming challenge. You feel compelled to do that. And so many times we hear people talk about how they want to do something good. They want to help maybe with Syrian refugees, or with their local homeless population because there are so many different challenges in the world, and not knowing the first steps to take. And so the skill set, I feel like, is incredibly valuable, because you don't have to know what the outcome is, in order to know which first steps to take.
Jenny: Absolutely. And that goes back to design thinking, which I think is a wonderful practice, where it really makes you feel very comfortable not knowing what the outcomes are, if you can just look at what the processes that you can take to get there.
Tracy: What should they expect coming into class on this first day? What are you telling them they're doing?
Jenny: Just to go back to what we were just talking about before about creating a huge impact in the world? One of the biggest things that I know I'm always forgetting is that in order to create impact outwardly, like, the first thing is to prioritize and to create impact with yourself, essentially, like the target goal of the class is to say, How do I use the same curiosity and the same tools of critical analysis and the same hard work and rigor, like the passion that I put all these like other challenges and problems out there the tackling, and apply that to myself? And the same amount of compassion that I put towards helping others solve their problems I can put towards myself too. And so the first day of class, we're going to orient towards that and say, what's going on with yourself? How much do you know about the problem of seeing your own life? What are the things to know about it? What are the gaps in information that you don't know about it? How can we really dig into that with this same principle of curiosity?
Tracy: And so the language that you're using around this in class, I'm curious, because I feel like there are two worlds that I live in one is talking about design thinking for change with an organism. And then there's design thinking for people's lives. And I don't necessarily think that the term design thinking is very attractive to people, necessarily. So is there any way that you're talking about that sort of makes it more personalized? Or are you trying to make that connection so that they see the overlap?
Jenny: You know, what's interesting about MIT is that unlike the West Coast design thinking is fairly popular and new here, has just recently started to really take traction. And a lot of people are really curious about things that they can learn from, there was a lot of ways that we could have talked about the class, I think that design thinking has like the same kind of universal principles as, say, mindfulness as, for instance, like improv, and like leadership, we wanted to call the 12 design thinking for the undergrads because going back to your point, what was one of the things that have been practiced time is what major in what internship that they're going to get after the first year, a lot of the companies that MIT students are really interested in are tech companies and design companies. And so the idea is that not only are these tools of their learning going to be useful for them to draw on when they're exploring topics that are important to them personally, but these are also like tools that will be useful to them as they enter, like companies like Google, and like IDEO, and like Salesforce, and so forth, that really do like integrate these practices into like everyday product development.
Tracy: That's pretty powerful and enticing.
Jenny: Yeah. So we were really designing for engagement. And we're just like, how do we do this? How do we get people to come? And so I think that that was just like a natural way,
Tracy: It sounds similar to how people got you interested in taking the improv class by talking about it as a leadership skill builder.
Jenny: Absolutely, just creating these bridges of what might be really challenging to you. But also really, like the sound is very useful to you.
Tracy: Are there certain activities or experiences in particular that you're excited to take students through?
Jenny: We're really excited to, for instance, have students start designing from the get-go, small design projects that we'll be addressing some of the problems or the challenges that they really want to work on. And from day one, starting to form small groups where they start practicing need-finding, and then like designing the projects and starting to deploy in their own lives. But then, the interesting thing about personal challenges is that usually, we work on it, and then like a vacuum, we go home, and we're like, I really want to work on weight loss. I might tell people about it, but I won't like to keep them up to date on my progress until I see it live enough. And then I'll share it with like my entire network, or my support base we're asking students to do is that every week, track what happened not only in that design goal, but they want what surprised them, what went well, what didn't go well, what happened, the processes and the environment to be very kind of rigorous about it. And then in their small group to do a debrief like a post mortem. And then for the small group to like, ask them supporting questions and coach them through it to also review how they're going to iterate the next week. We want students to sustain this kind of refinement and like an iteration of this design project every six or seven weeks. And I'm really excited to see how students not only go through this process with a project and what comes out of it, I'm also curious to see how their mindset about sharing in public before something is fully baked, how they react to that, how they feel about that by the end of the semester.
Tracy: Yeah, I would imagine that would be intimidating.
Jenny: I think it's going to be really intimidating. It's definitely going to be like a learning curve, we should begin time for people to air out how they feel about it in the classroom as you're doing it, rather than just like having them go.
Tracy: And it sounds like what is part of smart design for this class is not only you made it a class versus a club, so students are committing a certain amount of time. And they're also getting rewarded for it by getting a grade and having an impact on their GPA and all those great things. But also that the class has the model of having small groups for idea generation, but also accountability and emotional support. It aligns with a lot of the things that we've been talking to previous guests about which is having a team when you're designing for yourself, and whether that's friends or some mentors or experts that you really trust. I think that that's a really successful way to go about it as far as the class too.
Jenny: I think that the community aspect was what we hope to be able to build out. It's something that MIT, I think that people are extraordinarily collaborative. Oftentimes in our lives, when we run scientific experiments, we're very used to doing it on our own. And to be able to straddle that balance between working on something that's very personal to you, but be able to see what happens when you're able to share with a group of students how they could challenge your perspective, add their own to the richness of it, it'd be really that's one of like the key data points that we want to learn new class.
Tracy: So I know that we want to check back with You once the class is over and sort of have our own debrief. And I wonder if you wanted to state, what your aspirations for the class are, and maybe some thoughts that you have on what some of the challenges will be for students.
Jenny: Yeah, designing for metrics is one of the key challenges that I've had in setting up the course. So currently, we have a small team of people who are going to be teaching the course. And we realized that once a class gets started, we might become so focused on teaching that tracking is not going to be as much of a priority. But really, when we started out this class, the idea was that this idea, and we don't know what's going to come out of the idea until we actually test it. And so in all, very similar to what we want to teach, the class itself is a prototype, and we want to learn from it. So some of the things that we really want to learn from it, that we put on paper, one trust, we're going to do a baseline survey with students about what they think about trust in a circle of people, they just met by the trust. And like, every week, we'll check in with them on how they feel about the trust level of like the community of the class two is going to be about the projects that like the students conduct is something that they really feel like gives them the freedom to be able to flex like the muscles to be able to try and do they feel like they have enough support as they're going through the process. And so that would be probably also qualitative and trying to understand what they feel is support or they define it? And do they feel like they've met that bear threshold and receiving every week? And then finally, we're really interested in what students choose to attend this class and to engage with the class to really learn from this experience, like what are the types of classes that MIT has the opportunity to offer as an offering and to be able to translate this insight got to MIT and see like one more we can be able to offer to students going forward?
Tracy: Is this a part of an overall vision that you have working at MIT? Or what's sort of your future? This moment? What do you envision your future to look like?
Jenny: I definitely feel an emotional argument to be able to do this class at MIT since I was like a student here, myself. And I'm a huge fan of MIT. I also recognize that the design challenge, and the content of the classes, it's very universal to freshmen and sophomores in colleges everywhere. And so that's something that we're definitely keeping in the back of our heads, and thinking about in terms of impact, how to be able to document our journey, so that maybe people who feel that there's a similar design challenge at their campus, we'll be able to use this if they want to, and how we are able to share that knowledge across the board.
Tracy: Yeah, that's amazing. I know, I feel like there's a small but growing group of people who are thinking about and experimenting with in this space of applying it to their lives and, and having tools and resources, things that are very practical and tangible, will be useful going forward for sure.
Jenny: I have felt really blessed over the last three months by the feeling I have found an ecosystem, people doing this within MIT, as well as the ecosystem of people who are trying to innovate on this outside of MIT. So it's great to be able to share knowledge with a lot of different people who are dealing at different scales, or K to 12, all the way to people who are doing it for people who are already professionals.
Tracy: So I wonder for folks who are listening to the podcast, and they're like, This all sounds great, I'm not going to go to MIT, and I'm maybe not even in college at the moment anymore.
Jenny: That's a great question. I'm actually thinking about my own personal journey when I feel like I started to essentially try to design my life as well.
Tracy: I feel like for me, it was a process over time, just sort of starting with something that you want to change. And then who are other people out in the world doing this? Or who are experts in this and gathering information or like, you are talking a lot about curiosity, sort of being open to the why behind why you feel a certain way about a challenge, or what are some potential opportunities for looking at it differently. And they didn't know we were talking to Ela Ben Ur and she had called it the compass, which I think you guys have been working together, right?
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. I know the compass model. Well, I think it's a really great tool for anyone to be able to apply that to their lives.
Tracy: And so I didn't know if there was like a framework or anything that you were kind of going into the class with that you felt like oh, here's a good grounding framework or first step for people to take.
Jenny: I do really believe in content and tools to be able to allow for anyone who's just starting out with a new topic to feel very comfortable with it. I feel like using Ela’s compass model would be a great way to start to frame some of the questions that anyone can have. For me, I feel like one of the biggest things that happened to my life was actually to think about taking tiny experiments for myself, without any pressure to see what will happen to say, I don't care what the outcome is, let me try something. So one example of this is, I think, two years ago, I had heard someone use this terminology saying below the neck thinking, and they used it in a different context. I really loved that phrase below the neck thinking the next day when I woke up, and I was feeling for some reason, like a little bit tired that day. And there were a lot of things I knew that I wanted to take care of in terms of schoolwork, but I just felt really tired. And I told myself and actually announced this publicly on Facebook to give myself a little more accountability to I said, Look, guys, today, I'm just going to try something called below the neck thinking where I'm going to not pay attention to anything above my neck because my mind is telling me to do, I'm just not going to pay attention to it. The thought that passes through my mind, I'm not going to pay attention to it, I'll let it happen. I'll allow it to pass, really see to hear what my arms, my chest, my heart, my legs, and so forth are telling you to do and go with it.
Tracy: Wow, I've never heard of that before.
Jenny: It was kind of like, kind of out of the blue. I didn't know why I chose to do this, I decided to go with it. Telling everyone on Facebook really kind of just nailed my affirmation to do it. And then that day, I started to do it. And it was just really, really interesting to experience what was going through my body as I was happening, and how it affected my day and my actions. And then I didn't know what was going to come out of actually some really positive, interesting things coming out of those. Well, at the end of the day, I think the biggest takeaway was I looked around, I was like, you know, what, the world of my life and I came crashing down just because I stopped listening to my head for the day. And that just like a really interesting experiment to run on me and to see what happened.
Tracy: Yeah, what are some of the things that you ended up doing that you wouldn't have done if you're just listening to your chattery brain?
Jenny: For instance, I think that there was a certain part of the day I think it was 11 am, and had been up for a couple of hours. And my, I think that my hips were telling me, you know, I'm kind of tired, I just want to go back into bed. So I did, I went back to bed and I took a half-hour nap, didn't set an alarm, and just walked away. I felt like it was wonderful. And it was actually incredibly like a great kick start to doing the next thing I wanted to do. And I think oftentimes, my brain feels like it's a battle with the rest of my body, where it pushes itself rather than what was the rest of the body. And that was an interesting insight for me to learn as well. Like, when to feel this relationship and to understand what was going on.
Tracy: I mean, you're just kind of opening my eyes, because I don't think that I've ever shut my brain off and let my body lead things. I mean, now when you're saying and I'm like, that sounds really practical, and I can relate to it. I've never done it. I'm going to try that.
Jenny: Yeah, try it. I encourage people to do these tiny experiments. I don't really have a template for what types of experiments to run. But I just think anything that's interesting or curious that you've always wanted to try, I don't see anything stopping anyone from dealing if you allow yourself permission to do it. If you really want a rule of thumb, I think the Facebook thing, at least for me, worked and the social and public aspect, and that I told someone else beyond myself. So a great gave me both pressure as well as a meaning behind it and also told everyone I was like, Look if I had an appointment with you, and I decided to not follow through on it today, I hope you can be able to forgive me, responded positively to that as well. So I think that the social aspect of it really didn't matter.
Tracy: Yeah. What were some of the responses that you got from people?
Jenny: I got a lot of people who are very curious to see where the day would take a few people who I was supposed to have meetings with that day that said, go for it. That sounds great. You don't know until you say something like that to gauge what people's reactions are. And if they had said, No, I still would like to meet with you, you actually realize that's okay, too. It's okay to just at least put out there and see people's feedback rather than worry and do the work for them to wonder what their feedback is.
Tracy: All right. This was fantastic. I love hearing about this class. I am so jealous. I don't get to take it. We're super excited to check back in with you then later once it's done and maybe even talk to a student or two and hear about their experience as well.
Jenny: I think that that will be such a great idea. I will love to be able to share what happens and what came out of the class. what went well, what didn't go well, what surprised us. Also, to invite students who want to share their experiences as well. I think that that would be so great. It just rings so true with the class, which is to learn publicly and to err on just doing and trying. And let's see what comes out of it. So I think that'd be a great opportunity.
Tracy: Perfect. Well, thanks, Jenny. I can't wait to hear what's going on and we really appreciate you being on the show.
Jenny: It's such a pleasure to be on the show. Thanks for having me.
Chris: So there were three mindsets. There was the editor, there was the critic and then it was the cheerleader, more of the encourager. But it was the editor that was really, really ended up being super valuable in the trifecta.
Tracy: Why did you think that the editor was an interesting addition?
Chris: I thought that the cheerleader almost kind of superficially turned you on. When you kind of know, maybe that's not what you need. And so the editor allows you to translate from the one that's kind of beating you up is pretty useless. The editor is sort of the most productive of the three. So it's like, you can look to the right. And as a cheerleader, you can look to the left, and there's someone being like, you're not going fast enough, what's your problem. And the other is kind of like, here's actually how we're going to handle this, these get ridiculous.
Tracy: They figure out what's important.
Chris: And Jenny talked about doing this in really malleable-state freshmen and sophomores at MIT being very open and receptive to making adjustments and thinking about their life in that way.
Tracy: I mean, in behavior change in general, it's like finding points where people are making transitions already when they're kind of letting their habits fall away, are easier times to graft those new behaviors on there in a more open mindset. So it's like, if you're having a baby, then you're gonna suddenly be shopping at different stores, and your values will be different like you're interested in certain things. And companies know that, right? Because they try to take advantage of those periods of time. Yes, like, oh, you're gonna have a baby? Well, now, all these companies kind of out of the woodwork to market to you. But we don't realize that.
Chris: We don't, then the biggest thing and I think this resonated with you, as I heard you guys talking through the interview is that MIT takes this fire hose approach which is basically we're gonna break people, we're gonna take them too far and they're going to figure out how to curate and decide what they want to work on, which felt I'm sure as all the listeners are curious, like, so relevant right now. As she was describing, it's like, I feel like many people are on their breakpoint right now. Like they're living this MIT thing live. They're drinking from the firehose, and they need to prioritize the thing that they must care about. I just thought that was a really interesting approach for bright people, obviously, coming in MIT is, let's try to break them and see if they can figure out how to prioritize in order to be effective. It's so relevant for so many of our jobs, and so much of managing your household and raising your kids is how you prioritize.
Tracy: Part of me thinks that that sounds horrible, all of this coming at you, and then if you can't figure it out, imagine the shame that you have, especially if you're somebody bright, who's going to MIT, and then you fail, you can't prioritize, you can't make your way in that environment. That's something that's gonna scar you for life. But then the other part of me is like, the times I've felt most happy about something I've done is when I've pushed myself or been pushed, and made my way through. So it's like, the challenge itself is what made it something to look back on fondly. I think Gretchen Rubin talks a lot about happiness. But she says happiness doesn't always feel good at the time. And I totally relate to that. Yeah, you can be going through something and being like, I know in the future, I'm gonna be happy I did this. But right now it sucks. I'm sure you would know a lot about it.
Chris: I think you can find little kinds of spots of happiness. If there was no positive reinforcement along the way. I really don't think many of us would do the things that we do. But yeah, it's like a little bit of suffering, a little bit of your 100-mile bike ride up a mountain but I would say that in interstitial steps, there's definitely positive reward of going out there, exercising hard, and then getting all the endorphins of what that means. Like, it's not that there's no feedback that's positive.
Tracy: So what are some of the moments during that experience that are happy? What drives you to continue?
Chris: Seeing your friends? The challenge? The Type A stuff that's like, you did that hill, the third-fastest time that you've ever done that healing as I did? Oh, neat. Cool. I'm gonna try to do it the second-fastest next time. So I just think there's an achievement variable, but it's awesome. Just I was hammering along with this group. And I just turned right, like it just abandoned the group and started writing up this other road. And it was beautiful. We've had a lot of rain in California that it just looked like, everything was so green and climbing up this road. It's a pretty long climb, just I didn't go fast. It just went up the road, like this is beautiful. And I've noticed on that ride every Saturday now I keep taking that right-hand turn, I just keep going up that road. And yes, I've gone a bit faster. And now I can regroup. And it's like now there's a little challenge in there. But it's beautiful out there. And I find like this is way more connected and more interesting than what I would normally do.
Tracy: You are right in the first place.
Chris: Being exhausted going doing the same thing after a week with the same group. And I think that there's something to learn from that, too. It's just like the constant achiever and be like, no, this is what you did last year, keep doing that. We need a new plan. It's a breakpoint. That's right, here's a breakpoint the designs expired. That's a really good point, too, is the old designs don't often work. So what you've always done won't always be the same thing. Like now I'm doing that on an older body, or now I'm doing that with a different group. For now, I'm doing that in the new state, or now I'm doing that with a kid. These need new designs. So the designs never did this unit talked about, right. But the dinner party with Jenny was that I was surprised by what I expected her to say was, so everyone comes in and they get a fire hose. And you asked her, well, how did you figure it out? And she talked to other people, and they were struggling too. And she was struggling. And then I thought she was gonna come back and say, you finally get given the formula. And there's like the MIT way. And they finally share with you like, here's how you do it. Right? And it wasn't that at all. She said basically, I figured out my own, I'm left to find out my version. And that's which is actually far more inspiring, I think because it assumes that the truth, which is we're all really different. So this class that she's got going, which I can't wait to talk to him more about as the class goes on is how do people come up with their own frameworks and their own processes? Like even if it's the anti process or whatever they cope, however they cope? Yeah. And then how does that change? Because as you go on to the world, you're cool. freshmen, the MIT framework may not work when you have a real job, and you have a family.
Tracy: I would hope it doesn't become boring implies that we haven't really grown. Yeah, I mean, I think we're always everybody is always seeking the answer. Yeah, there's a medium article I always get to digest in my inbox and it's like 10 things, be more productive, be highly productive. People do what it's just like, oh, my God, we all just want the answer. So we can go apply it and be done with all of it.
Chris: I think we even get teased with that. And we added on our own podcasts movie interviewed story, right? Here's the guy. That's pretty much figured how all of life works out, has just been reapplying. It's like, oh, surgery, that's an easy framework, right? Oh, you want to go to outer space, I can do that. I know how to do it. So you do crave that sort of story level insight, like, ooh, he's got the code that all of us are seeing?
Tracy: Yeah. And I guess I think like, that's kind of, to me what design thinking is a way to do anything that's true, like I have been talking about it recently is as a way to creatively and consistently solve seemingly impossible challenges. Yes, it's consistent and creative. And both of those things have to work together. Because if it's consistent, but not creative, then it's just a production line, right? Just like making the same things over and over again, which is what I think we tend to think the answer is that we fail to realize like the creative part. And usually, creativity is like its Muse that lights up on your shoulder and visits you when you're worthy. And this is easily scaring, but it's not a design thinking kind of proves that it's a muscle that the mind says you can apply over and over again. I think that's why I'm so drawn to it.
Chris: Me too. And yet, I think most people here are processing how they think, oh, boy, here we go again. Here's another one of those, like, the top five ways to figure out life, but in it lies. I think it's a very general process like there is sort of a way but you don't even have to do it in the right order. There are so many interpretations of this same thing that is broad is saying, Here is the outdoors. Go do whatever you want with it.
Tracy: Oh, and realizing that everybody talks about it differently. Five steps. Step six, there's no common language.
Chris: You want a 25 step design process? I'll give it to you.
Tracy: That’s because it's based on what people need, right? If you're in the education space, you talk about it differently than if you're in you know, traditional business space. or social impact space before I've been talking about is like, get inspired, go out and see what's happening in the world be curious, then it gets focused, what is it that you're trying to solve now that you have all this information and inspiration, and then get scrappy, which is all the like brainstorming and prototyping, coming up with experiments and then get smarter, which is iterating, trying to figure out how it works, and then realizing that you might have to iterate again in six months or in a week. And the reason why I was breaking it down like that was I was trying to figure out how do I succinctly talk about this?
Chris: And your medium article was great, by the way, people still talk about that.
Tracy: I needed to do that for myself to understand what I was thinking.
Chris: No, it was really good. at some future date. In this show, we talked about MIT and we think about MIT and science, and data and engineering are some of the brightest minds that come out of that. And so I think at some future show to me, one of the debates rests in wearable design and data meeting in an eloquent way and not on Monday, this conversation really scares me on Tuesday, I find it inspiring on Wednesday, I think it's unethical and on Thursday, it's really, really cool again. And so I think predictive analytics, as we use data to figure out how and why something's going to happen. It’s becoming pretty sophisticated. I heard a story recently about crime. They were using predictive analytics for domestic violence. And they can tell you on what street corner, the next likely domestic violence incident was going to happen based on predictive analytics before it happened. Wow. And so it's like, oh, this is getting really interesting. And so do you intervene? What's it mean? And then what's the relationship between if we looked at all the information we'll have, we'll have information on the weather, your genetic code, your thought processes, potentially, right? And so what's that mean for design thinkers and design thinking where it's far more emotional, based, far more intuitive? In a way trying to block that prediction is like, No, actually, I'm going to take the lead here. Yeah, my own human spirit, do something that's you're not going to be able to predict. I think beauty may come in the blend. I think that's where it's going.
Tracy: But it's just like, I mean, with behavioral economics, where people created this whole foundation around economics, thinking that people always act rationally. Yes. And then you realize they don't. And we need to design for that. So like data, people don't just work with data. They don't exist in the data.
Chris: Think the odd ones are like 23andme, for example. So I find it hard to comprehend, or what you're going to do if your life were more predictive, given your setup, you've probably got 20 years. Yeah, like, wow, you're gonna live differently, knowing that information. So I think the opinion is, it can be used for good and evil. Yes. And I hope that the world prevails and is amazing instead of awkward and hot and functional.
Tracy: All right, that's a wrap. Thanks so much for listening. Our dream is to build a community of people who can create and take advantage of any opportunity that interests them. To do this really well, your participation is key. So if you want to try it out and share back your own life design experiments, or if you've already got a great story of how you design your life, we'd love to hear from you on our Facebook page, or at resultsmayvarypodcast.com. Our website is also where you'll find show notes and links to all the things we mentioned in the podcast. And if you would be so kind, subscribe to the show and rate us and write a review on iTunes or Stitcher. Even more, people start designing their lives. Special thanks to composer and filmmaker HP Mendoza for the Results May Vary theme music and graphic designer Annessa Braymer for our logo. And of course, thank you so much for listening to Results May Vary.