Founder Fridays No. 180

Stop Searching for the Meaning of Life. Start Making Meaning in It.

I'm doing something different this week. No roundup, no links, just one conversation I haven't been able to shake. I recently interviewed Dave Evans, co-founder of Stanford's Life Design Lab and author of How to Live a Meaningful Life. What he said was simple enough to fit on a sticky note, but it rearranged something in the way I've been thinking about work, ambition, and what any of it is actually for. I wanted to share it with you while it's still fresh.

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Stop Searching for the Meaning of Life. Start Making Meaning in It.

Dave Evans has spent 20 years at Stanford helping people find purpose. His advice? Stop asking the big question.

What’s the meaning of life?

It’s the question we’re all circling, whether we admit it or not. It surfaces at 2 a.m. when sleep won’t come. It lurks beneath the Sunday evening dread. It’s there when you watch your kids grow and wonder if you’re doing this right, or when you sit across from your spouse and realize you’ve been talking logistics for weeks without really connecting.

I recently sat down with Dave Evans, co-author of the New York Times bestselling Designing Your Life series and co-founder of Stanford’s Life Design Lab. His new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, tackles this question head-on. Check out the full interview below.

Or rather, it sidesteps it entirely.

“If I knew the meaning of life, I’d tell you,” Evans said when I asked him directly. “The book doesn’t answer that question.”

Instead, Evans proposes something that sounds almost too simple. A one-word change that reframes everything.

The Preposition Problem

The meaning of life is a deathbed question. It’s aspirational, long-term, and, Evans argues, not particularly useful for the people asking it at 35 or 45 or 55. It’s the kind of question that paralyzes rather than propels.

But there’s a different question hiding in plain sight: How can I make more meaning in life?

“The big question is fine, but it’s not very answerable,” Evans told me. “A different one, how to make more meaning now in the life I’m already living, that we’ve got some ideas about.”

This isn’t wordplay. The shift from “of” to “in” changes everything about how you approach Monday morning, your marriage, your friendships, your role as a parent or colleague or neighbor.

The meaning of life asks you to solve an equation before you’re allowed to feel satisfied. The meaning in life asks you to notice what’s already working, and to design more of it.

Why We’re All Asking This Now

Evans and his co-author Bill Burnett have been teaching life design at Stanford for two decades. But something shifted after the pandemic. The questions got more urgent. The dissatisfaction got louder.

During the Great Resignation, somewhere between 47 and 52 million Americans walked away from their jobs, most without another position waiting. They’d lived through an existential threat. They’d watched people die, or nearly died themselves. And when they looked at the lives they’d built, many found those lives wanting.

“People jumped,” Evans said. “I’m not sure how many of them got to a better place, frankly. But since then, the hue and cry we’re hearing is, ‘It’s just not meaningful enough. It’s just not fulfilling enough. And what did I do wrong?’”

This isn’t just a career question. It’s a life question. The same dissatisfaction shows up at home, in relationships, in the quiet moments when we wonder if we’re actually present to our own existence or just going through the motions.

The Impact Trap

When Evans asks people what would make their lives feel more meaningful, two answers dominate. The first, by a wide margin: impact. Am I making a difference? Am I changing anything?

The second: fulfillment. I just don’t feel fulfilled.

Both answers reveal the same underlying problem. We’ve outsourced our sense of meaning to outcomes we can’t control.

“Impact is a transaction,” Evans explained. “It’s a production outcome. My life is about producing results. Well, that’s a very small part of the human experience.”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can do everything right and still fail. Your carefully planned initiative might not work. Your kids might make choices you wouldn’t make for them. Your marriage might go through seasons where connection feels impossible despite your best efforts. The other 8 billion people on the planet don’t follow your script.

Even when impact works, its shelf life is short. “About five minutes later,” Evans said, “the world asks, ‘What have you done for me lately?’”

If you’ve staked all your meaning on impact, you’re perpetually behind.

Living in the Flow World

Evans draws a distinction between two modes of existence. The transactional world is where most of us spend most of our time. It’s the world of to-do lists and deadlines, of planning the future and evaluating the past. It’s productive and necessary. It’s also, Evans argues, where meaning goes to die.

The alternative is what he calls the flow world. Not the flow state that productivity experts talk about, that feeling of being “in the zone.” The flow world is simpler than that. It’s the awareness of the present moment, the recognition that it’s always now.

“The transactional world lives in the past evaluating what you did, and mostly in the future asking if you’ve pulled this off yet,” Evans said. “It’s never lived in the present moment.”

But wonder, connection, coherence, the things that actually make life feel meaningful, those only happen in the present. You can’t schedule awe. You can’t optimize love. You can only be available for them.

Evans estimates that 99.7% of us spend 98% of our time in transactional mode. We’ve become, in his words, “half-brained people who have lost access to part of themselves.”

The Compass Practice

So how do you shift? Evans offers a deceptively simple exercise called the compass. It asks you to articulate three things.

First, your life view. What do you actually believe about the big questions? Why are we here? What happens when we die? What’s the relationship between individuals and others?

Second, your work view. What is work for? What does it mean to do it well? How does it connect to your life view?

Third, your story. How did you get here? What experiences shaped you?

Then you examine alignment. How well are these three elements getting along right now?

“You can’t experience alignment unless you’ve articulated it,” Evans said.

This isn’t about achieving perfect coherence. It’s about catching yourself in the act of living coherently. Those moments, when your actions match your stated beliefs, when your work connects to your larger sense of purpose, when your story makes sense of your choices, those moments are meaning. Not the promise of future meaning. Meaning right now.

The Paradox of Control

Evans shared something that initially sounds discouraging. The correlation between good decision-making and desired outcomes is zero.

Let that land.

How well you think through something today has no causal impact on the future. Too many variables intervene. Other people make choices. Circumstances shift. The world doesn’t cooperate.

But here’s the twist. Good decision-making, coherent living, still matters. If you ran the same experiment across a thousand parallel universes, the person making thoughtful, aligned choices would succeed more often. The odds improve. You just can’t guarantee any individual outcome.

“You’re not in control of the world,” Evans said. “You’re in control of yourself.” Seneca would have nodded. He wrote that the wise person does everything well while knowing that nothing is promised. The effort is the point. Not because outcomes don’t matter, but because they were never yours to guarantee.

This is actually liberating. If outcomes aren’t the measure, you’re free to focus on the only thing you can actually control: how you show up right now.

Catching Yourself in the Act

The most practical advice Evans offered was this: notice when it’s working.

Not when the outcome worked. When the living worked. When the conversation with your spouse felt connected. When the project at work aligned with what you care about. When the moment with your child, even a mundane one, felt fully present.

“Am I actually present to the reality that I’m in?” Evans asked. “Living coherently, some would say, is about all you get.”

This isn’t about lowering your ambitions. It’s about locating your satisfaction correctly. The meaning isn’t waiting for you at the end of some achievement. It’s available right now, in this conversation, this meal, this evening, this life you’re already living.

You don’t have to figure out the meaning of life. You just have to make more meaning in it.