The Life You're Not Paying Attention To: Dave Evans at Bookshop Santa Cruz, August 27
Dave Evans, Stanford Life Design Lab co-founder, EA co-founder, and Santa Cruz Works board member, discusses his new book "How to Live a Meaningful Life" at Bookshop Santa Cruz, Thursday, August 27, 7pm. Free.
There is a claim, easy to state and strangely difficult to absorb, that sits at the center of any serious inquiry into human well-being: the quality of your life is determined, almost entirely, by the quality of your attention. You can have the career, the house, the résumé that reads like a press release, and still find, in the quiet moments, that something essential is missing. This is not a failure of achievement. It is a failure of engagement.
Dave Evans has spent decades thinking rigorously about this problem. Most of us know him as the co-founder of Electronic Arts, a veteran of early Apple, the co-creator of Stanford's famed Life Design Lab, and, closer to home, an Ex Officio member of the Santa Cruz Works Board of Directors. On Thursday, August 27, from 7:00 to 8:00pm, Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes him for a free in-store conversation about his new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day, co-authored with his longtime collaborator Bill Burnett.
“This book isn’t self-help—it’s self-discovery. It will help you stop chasing meaning and start making meaning, one choice, one experiment, and one particularity at a time.”
What distinguishes this book from the vast, mostly useless literature of self-improvement is its intellectual honesty. Evans and Burnett are not selling transcendence. They are not asking you to quit your job, move to an ashram, or become someone else. Their argument is that meaning can be found without blowing up the life you already have. Wonder, coherence, flow, and community are not rewards waiting at the end of some heroic transformation. They are capacities available to you now, given the right tools and a willingness to run small experiments on your own experience.
This strikes me as exactly right. Meaning is not something you find. It is something you make, one deliberate choice at a time.
The event is cosponsored by Leadership Santa Cruz County, and an RSVP is appreciated: register here. Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave. Signed copies will be available.
Whatever you believe about purpose, you will spend this evening somewhere. Consider spending it examining the question of how to spend all the others.
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