Design Thinking: How to Build, Scale, and Upgrade Your Life Like a Product | Steve Davis Jr. | E13
Business MVP
Former Big Ten football player Steve Davis Jr. shares how he transitioned from professional sports disappointment to becoming a life design
Key takeaways
- Steve Davis Jr. applies 'Design Thinking' by treating life stages as beta tests that require feedback and updates.
- The foundation of any career pivot must be establishing the 'who'—understanding one's core values and identity before deciding on the 'what'.
Main topics
- Design Thinking in Life Design
- Athlete Career Transitions
Notable quotes
Failure helps you learn more and faster than success does.
Conclusion
The episode offers a practical, iterative framework for anyone looking
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) The NFL saying no to me was the first time in my life that I got a no in something that I expected to get a yes. Speaker 1 (0:07) My next guest was a four-year starter, all Big Ten player, and senior captain at the University of Minnesota. The NFL was supposed to be next. But it wasn't. All Speaker 2 (0:16) of my identity and my worth was around football. The fact that it didn't happen for me really forced me to try to figure out who I am. Speaker 1 (0:27) Today, Steve Davis Jr. oversees alumni engagement for over 500,000 people at the University of Minnesota. He's a certified Designing Your Life coach using the Stanford Design Thinking methodology. and he's the founder of Strive Higher After Sports, including a product line of journals used by high performers across the country. When Speaker 2 (0:45) you go out to the real world and you're trying to do something, you don't want to fail. You don't want to be seen as a failure. But failure helps you learn more and faster than success does. Speaker 1 (0:57) So what's the hardest business decision you've had to make and how did your athletic background shape how you handled it? Speaker 2 (1:02) This is an exclusive. So the hardest business decision I've had to make I just made. Speaker 1 (1:09) Steve, welcome to Business MVP. Speaker 2 (1:12) Wow. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much for bringing me onto your platform. Excited for the conversation. Speaker 1 (1:17) Steve, you did everything right at Minnesota. Four-year starter, All-Big Ten captain. The NFL said no. And then you went through sales, project management, events, alumni work. What were you searching for and what finally clicked? Speaker 2 (1:32) That's a great question. You know, The NFL saying no to me was the first time in my life that I got a no in something that I expected to get a yes. Speaker 1 (1:43) Oh, love that. Speaker 2 (1:44) It was something that really pushed me down a pathway of self-discovery because all of my identity and my worth was around football and the idea of being an NFL player with tons of money, tons of access, tons of stature. The fact that it didn't happen for me really forced me to try to figure out who I am. And I think a lot of my career was exploration, trying out different things, getting into the experience of things that I thought that I really wanted to do and then making pivots. But a lot of it really boiled down to having conversations with people, specifically athletes. And as I had more conversations, a regurgitating theme kept coming up in regards to identity and people being lost in identity. So that kind of steered me in the direction of figuring out what I can do to help. And it just evolved in my career and my professional endeavors to the point where I became an entrepreneur. But that wasn't my goal at the beginning of my post-career football. It was really trying to figure out myself. And then once I figured out athletes needed help, I was like, well, what can I do to help? Speaker 1 (3:11) So what did competing in Big Ten football build in you that you now use in business every day? Speaker 2 (3:18) You know, being in the Big Ten, you know, competing on the highest level, you know, getting the opportunity to have that platform and also play against the best of the best really boosted my confidence, knowing that I was able to maintain a good level of stature there, a good level of respect there, being able to adjust and be in high pressure environments. really prepared me for whatever I was going to do in my life and in my career. It gave me the confidence to move in different spaces knowing that I belong or I can find my way through it and climb that ladder to make an impact because I did that at the Big Ten. I did that in football. I also felt like what really stood out to me as my highlight of my career was being named captain my senior year. unanimously by my teammates. And to me, that really, you know, steered me in a direction that, you know, I can be a leader and people can follow me and I can influence the environment. And that's something that I always look at when I go into rooms. It's like, I want to know everybody. I want to understand everybody's role and eventually, you know, showcase my leadership abilities. Speaker 1 (4:34) Yeah, no, that's great. You're a certified Designing Your Life coach using the methodology developed at Stanford. For the entrepreneurs listening who've never heard of design thinking, what is it and why should they care? Speaker 2 (4:47) Yeah, so design thinking was something that I stumbled on in my time at the University of Minnesota Alumni Association. You know, I was still, you know, finding ways of helping people and connecting them to resources. And we had brought some practitioners along that would do workshops and they started talking about designing your life. And as I paid attention to it, I was like, wow, this is actually something that I really resonate with because I felt like I was already doing it in my life. And for those who don't understand what that means is so design thinking and life design is really this focus of looking at your life like a product designer looks at a product. You put something together and that product is not a finished product at the beginning. It has to go through beta testing. So it goes out into the market. It is. getting tested and getting feedback from the users. And then from that feedback, you're able to make some updates to that product. And then you upgrade that product so that it has better features. And then eventually you learn from all those different things with those features to eventually evolve that to another version. Say, for instance, an iPhone 17 to an iPhone 18. Life design is like... Very similar in how you look at your life as a product of testing, learning and growing, giving yourself the ability to, yes, come up with ideas and things that you want to do, but go test those things out. Go out and try things, experience things. And when you experience them, then you have data. Then you have. information and what you do with that information is up to you. But basically you have something to make informed decisions about by giving yourself a chance and having this bias towards action. So that's the methodology that I really like fell in love with. And I wanted to learn more about it and help other athletes to do it because we're already trained to like make that next step and move forward and learn from our mistakes. It's like, how do we apply that same principle that we use in athletics to life? And life design is a great way to be able to apply that in a tangible way. Speaker 1 (7:07) Yeah, that's great. So walk me through what this looks like in practice. If an entrepreneur comes to you and says, I'm stuck, I don't know what's next. What's the first thing you do? Speaker 2 (7:16) Yeah, well, the first thing that I focus on, I think is really important is before you can make a move in any direction, you first have to understand the reasoning, the why, the foundation to kind of give you a grounding. So a lot of things that I focus on at the beginning stage is really driving at the who. Like, who are you? What are your values? What are your intangibles? What is the story and narrative that you want to tell in this world? Like, who's the person that you're trying to become? Focusing on that who and driving on that who will really clarify what your mission is, what your beliefs are, what your values are, so that you can use that to ultimately figure out different pathways. And I think sometimes people get stuck in the thought process of I am only thinking about this one thing, especially athletes. I'm thinking about I'm making it to the league and everything else is going to trickle from there. Or as an entrepreneur, you may have an idea and it's like this narrow pathway of one thing that you're thinking about and you're driving towards. But with me, I'm trying to open up multiple possibilities to say, OK, well, that's one path. Say, for instance, that path does not exist. Sports does not exist. what would you be doing in the world? Like what would be your makeup? And kind of inspiring and challenging the thought process of what your identity is and different pathways of what your life could look like so that you can pull elements of that today and use elements of that today. So giving you that foundation of who to help build out the what is really the starting process. Speaker 1 (9:05) Yeah, I love that. Most people try to plan their way out of uncertainty, right? But design thinking says that's wrong. Why? And what should entrepreneurs do instead? Speaker 2 (9:16) Yeah, I mean, because you can't make a move. You can't know where you're going to go until you know who you are. If you really want to grow yourself, you have to know yourself. So design thinking allows you to really kind of think in a design methodology of you're building a product, but before that product goes out to market, we got to build a foundation. We got to understand, like, what's the principles behind this? What's the why behind this? What are we ultimately trying to build here? What's the story that we're trying to tell? And when you have that foundation, it allows you to go out and test some of these different ideas, but understand what are you looking for that will bring it back to alignment to that foundation. And for anybody going out in life and trying to create a business, create a fulfilling life in general. It's not just about your performance in work. Sometimes it's that balance of, you know, the relationships that you hold, the hobbies that you have. We're not just built to work every day. There's more to our life.