Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived Joyful Life is a field guide for living an intentional life. For you to do life, instead of life doing you. It’s just the thing for the stuck. The about-to-be college grad. Those eyeing retirement or an encore career. Anyone living life.
Not another self-help book you groan. This one’s different. It rejects the notion that you have to know your passion in life. Most people don’t have that one thing they are passionate about. And frees us from the anxiety of trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do for the rest of our lives. We only need to write our next chapter.
It doesn’t shout, “You can do anything!” The realities of our lives are embedded in the design tools. It’s smart. Fun Experiential. And it works.
Bill Burnett, Executive Director of the Stanford Design Program and former tech designer with Dave Evans, fellow tech designer-turned-founder-turned-teacher, created this course to apply design thinking to designing life after college.
It quickly became one of the most popular elective offerings at Stanford. You can have the best of Stanford for under $20.
If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change
What’s in the way of good life design? We are, of course.
We have to reframe our dysfunctional beliefs and the stories we tell ourselves that aren’t true, and work to solve the right problems. You can’t fix a flat tire by putting gas in the tank.
Dysfunctional beliefs aren’t true and contribute to our getting stuck. I should know what I am doing with my life by now. Reframe: Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was in her late 70’s.
Anchor problems come from anchoring a solution in a problem. Then getting stuck on a solution. If we don’t recognize and reframe our anchors, we can be stuck for a long time. Example: I need to get a promotion. Reframe: What’s a promotion going to do for you? Bring more money? A better title? Recognition? A team to manage? How else could you get what you want?
Start where you are
No wasting time on past decisions. Pondering your purpose. After a primer on design thinking and the five “mindsets” needed to design your life — be curious, try stuff, reframe problems, know it’s a process, and ask for help — you spring into action.
Bill and Dave take you on an adventure beginning with where you are in the health/work/play/love dimensions of your life. Exploring your views of life and work. Mining data from your daily life about what engages you and gives you energy.
You use these observations to discover ideas you might want to pursue and create “odyssey plans.”
Prototype these. Get out there and trying things. You think you want to sell everything and explore the US in your SMART car? Find people who have done a version of this. Hear their stories. Try it out for a short time.
Or maybe you’re interested in being a sportswriter. Reach out to the successful and struggling among them. Try your hand at a blog or podcast.
Maybe just a small tweak in your life or work is what’s in order. Try it.
In my experience with clients, prototyping is the most powerful tool in the book When you reach out to the world in an open and curious way, the world reaches right back. Prototyping allows serendipity to happen.
If it’s a new job you’re after, there’s how not to get a job, and how to design your dream job and go after it. Regardless of your path, Bill and Dave provide frameworks for learning from failure and making good choices.
It takes a village
Don’t try this alone! My clients go through this with a little help from me, and lots of help from their partners, friends, and co-workers.
Bill and Dave suggest forming a life design team.
Life is a contact sport. We have to learn how to play. Get in the game and play with others. Get some good coaching. Suffer bumps, bruises and setbacks. And enjoy spectacular moments of brilliance.
As Dory in Finding Nemo would say, “Just keep swimming.”