Designing Your Life
How to Build a Well-lived, Joyful Life
by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
summarized by Adrie Kuil
Brief summary
Life design is about getting more out of your current life. A well-designed life is a life in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together. Life design is about getting better at living your life by building your way forward. You start with who you are, generate lots of ideas, try things out by doing them, and make the best choice you can. Life designers don’t fight reality. They design and build their way forward, no matter what. When you understand who you are, design your own life, and then go live your life, you cannot fail.
Full summary
This summary is an informal write-up of my understanding of the key messages from the book Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
Every design starts with a problem. Design thinking is the best problem-solving tool for problems that don’t have one predetermined, clear solution. Designing your life is a problem that doesn’t have one clear goal. Use design thinking to create a life that is meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling.
In design thinking we don’t start with the problem, but with empathy for people. Your life can’t be perfectly planned and it doesn’t have just one solution. Life is not a thing, it’s an experience, it’s about growth and change. Who or what do you want to grow into? Life is about designing something that hasn’t existed before.
Designers don’t think their way forward, they build their way forward. Design thinking involves five mind-sets: Be Curious (beginner’s mind), Try Stuff (bias to action, create prototypes, don’t be attached to a particular outcome), Reframe Problems (to get unstuck), Know It’s a Process, Ask for Help (radical collaboration).
Passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause.
A well-designed life is a life in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together.
You need to start from where you are. With design thinking you can build your way forward from wherever you are. Deciding which problems to work on is one of the most important decisions you will make in your life. How often do we check if we are working on the right problem?
If something is not actionable, then it’s not a problem but a fact of life. When you fight with reality, you will always lose. Don’t get stuck on a problem that’s not actionable. Accept it and work around it, or find a problem that is actionable. If you can’t change a situation, you can try to change your thoughts about that situation.
To answer the question “How’s it going?” we can break down life into some areas: Health (emotional, physical, and mental), Work (paid and unpaid), Play (doing activities that bring joy purely in the doing) and Love (sense of connection).
Awareness and curiosity are required as you begin to build your way forward.
You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you are. Complete the Health/Work/Play/Love Dashboard to figure out where you are and what problem you’d like to tackle. Think of this like the gauges on your car’s dashboard. The dashboard sometimes warns us that something is not right. Only you know what is or isn’t good enough right now. Look at your gauges honestly, and decide which life area needs action.
Once you design something, it changes the future that is possible.
To answer questions like “What is the good life?” and “ Why am I here?” you need to build your compass.
To discover what work means to you and why you do it, write a short reflection of your work philosophy (Workview). This is your definition of what good work is. Address what is important to you, which might include the subject of service to others.
To discover what gives your life meaning and makes it valuable, write a short reflection of your ideas about the world and how it works (Lifeview). Identify essential personal values and perspectives. The design process itself is values-neutral. Be curious and think like a designer.
Integrate your Workview and Lifeview and if required edit them.
You now have your compass that can guide you towards a well-designed life. In a coherent life there is alignment between who you are, what you believe, and what you are doing. In such a life you are living in alignment with your personal values, and do not sacrifice your integrity along the way. Calibrate your compass at least once a year.
To find your way you need a compass and a direction. The clues for direction are engagement and energy.
Discovering the activities that engage you can be very useful for your life design. Flow is a state of being where you’re totally engaged in an activity. When we’re in flow we are fully present in what we’re doing.
Some activities give us energy and some drain it. Life design is about getting more out of your current life. High levels of engagement often coincide with high levels of energy, but sometimes engagement drains your energy.
Follow your joy, do what engages and excites you, what brings you alive.
A Good Time Journal consists of an Activity Log and Reflections on the log. The Activity Log lists your primary activities, and indicates per activity how engaged and energized it made you feel. The Reflections capture any trends, insights and surprises that you notice in your Activity Log.
Describe your activities as precise and clear as possible. The clearer you are about what does and doesn’t work for you, the better you can set your direction. To make detailed and accurate observations use the AEIOU method: What were you doing? Where were you? What or who were you interacting with? Were you interacting with any objects? Who else was there and what role did they play?
Also take some time to reflect on “peak experiences” from your past. Pick the activities that most engaged and energized you, log them in the AEIOU format and reflect on them.
Never go with your first idea. You choose better when you choose from lots of options. You are never stuck, you can always generate lots of ideas. Ideation is about coming up with lots of ideas, including wild and crazy ones. There are multiple great designs for your life. There are many lives that can make you happy, and there are lots of different paths you can take to live these lives.
The number one enemy of creativity is judgment. We have to defer our judgment if we want to get all our ideas out. Ideation techniques include mind mapping, brainwriting and brainstorming. You need to move out of problem solving mode (what do I do next?) into design thinking mode (what can I imagine?).
Anchor problems are problems that keep us stuck in one place for years. We become anchored when we jump too quickly to a solution that isn’t working, and stick to this solution. To get unanchored we need to investigate what our real problem is, consider alternative solutions and prototype those solutions.
We stick to our anchor solution because we fear that other solutions won’t work either, and then we would be permanently stuck. Change is always uncertain, there is no guarantee of success. Reduce the risk of failure by doing some small prototypes. This lowers your anxiety, and gives you answers to the questions you are interested in. Fail fast and fail forward.
Life design is not about creating a plan for your life, or about making the best, true, only choice. Life is like an abstract painting, it’s open to multiple interpretations. There isn’t only one best way to live your life.
Imagine and write up three completely different versions of the next five years of your life. These are called Odyssey Plans, as life is an adventurous journey into the future. Three Odyssey Plans allow you to choose more creatively, as you stay more open to multiple life paths.
Here’s a quick way to come up with three Odyssey Plans. Life 1 is what you’ve already got in mind. Life 2 is what you would do if life 1 is no longer an option. Life 3 is what you would do if money and reputation were no object.
Each Odyssey Plan consists of a timeline, title, and your questions about the plan. It also has a dashboard to score your plan on resource sufficiency, attraction, confidence, and coherence with your Workview and Lifeview.
These plans can help us define important things we still want to do in our lives. Share your plans with a group of friends to get feedback and ideas. They can ask questions, but should not offer critiques or unwanted advice. You’re not designing the rest of your life, just the next part of it.
Start from where you are and design and build your way forward. Try out things first before committing yourself to them prematurely. Build your way forward by doing small experiments – prototypes. Building is thinking. Anything can be prototyped. Prototyping is about exploring questions, revealing hidden assumptions, iterating rapidly, failing fast and forward, and creating momentum for the path you’d like to try out. A prototype requires a physical experience in the world.
What are your questions? What would you like to understand better?
The easiest form of prototyping is a Life Design Interview. Gather the knowledge and insights of people who have real experience and expertise in the area about which you have questions. In the interview you’re after an interesting story and a personal connection. Make a list of prototype interviews that can provide you with the answers to your questions.
The second form of prototyping is a Life Design Experience. Experience what something is really like by watching others do it or by doing it yourself. For instance shadow a professional you’d like to be for a day. Or take a free lesson to find out if you like yoga. Make a list of prototype experiences that might help you answer your questions.
If you are stuck, hold a brainstorming session. Brainstorming is about generating a large quantity of ideas, by deferring judgment of their quality. Frame a good question for the brainstorming session, like “How many ways can we think of to…?”. Do some warming up exercises. Generate and write down as many ideas as possible. Go for quantity, not quality. Do not censor ideas. Build off the ideas of others. Encourage wild ideas. After generating the ideas, group similar ideas together by category, and vote to determine the best ideas.
Most great jobs are never publicly listed. Four out of five available jobs are not posted externally anywhere. They are filled internally, by word of mouth or via social networks. Via Life Design Interviews you can get into that hidden job market. But remember while conducting the interview that you’re not after a job, you’re after the story of your interviewee. As a side-effect an interview might lead to a job offer.
Networking is like asking for directions. Most people like being helpful. Getting referrals to people whose stories you want to hear, is the professional equivalent of asking for directions. The goal is to participate in the network. Networking is a lot of work and sometimes scary, but also incredibly interesting.
You can’t know the real nature of a job before you are very close to actually getting that job. That’s why you shouldn’t look for jobs, but for offers. Become curious about what kind of interesting offers you might be able to find in an organization. This flips your mindset from judging to exploring, which makes a huge difference.
Being happy means you choose happiness. It’s about how you choose and how you live your choices once they’re made. There is no right choice, only a good way of making choices. The life design choosing process has four steps. You create a list of options, narrow down your list, choose the top alternative, and embrace your choice fully so that you get the most of it.
We can only choose effectively between three to five options. Options only create value in our life when they are chosen and realized. Make decisions by applying more than one way of knowing: cognitive, intuitive, emotional and social. Grok your choice: understand your choice so deeply that you’ve become one with it.
Don’t agonize whether you’ve made the best choice. You can’t know what the best choice is until all the consequences have played out. Just make the best choice you can, based on your knowledge at the moment. Imagined choices don’t actually exist, because they are not actionable. Don’t dream about what could have been. Only by taking action can we build our way forward. Once you make a choice, embrace it fully and go with it.
You can become immune to the negative feelings caused by failure. Because of its bias to action, you experience more failures with life design than with any other approach. But as life designer you can’t fail, you can only make progress by learning from both failures and successes. Life design is about succeeding sooner in big, important things, by failing more often at small things (prototypes).
Designing your life is actually what life is, because life is a process, not a result. Life is like a dance, and life design is like a good set of dance moves. You are always playing the infinite game of becoming more and more yourself. Life design is about getting better at living your life by building your way forward. You start with who you are, generate lots of ideas, try things out by doing them, and make the best choice you can. In this way you energize a cycle of growth: from being, to doing, to new being, to new doing, etcetera. A life without surprises or challenges is a boring life.
Reframe your failures. Log them, and categorize them into screwups, weaknesses and growth opportunities. Identify growth insights from your growth opportunities: What is there to learn? What went wrong? What could be done differently next time?
When you understand who you are, design your own life, and then go live your life, you cannot fail. Life designers don’t fight reality. They design and build their way forward, no matter what. There are no wrong choices and no regrets. There are just prototypes, of which some succeed and some fail. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
You live and design your life in collaboration with others. ‘We’ is stronger than ‘I’. Life design is intrinsically a communal effort. You co-create your life design with the people you interact, experiment and talk with.
Keep at least your intimates informed or involved in your life design activities.
Create a Life Design Team of three to six people to support you with creating an effective life design.
Find some good mentors, who can help you clarify your thoughts. Mentors ask lots of questions to accurately understand what you are saying and what you are going through. They summarize what they have heard to check their understanding. They provide you with alternative interpretations of your situation, so that you can consider new ideas and solutions.
Become part of a community that has a shared purpose, actively meets regularly, and where it is in large part about the people themselves.
We all want our work to contribute to the world. Life is a never-ending design project of continuously building your way forward. Life design is a way of living. Life design is about how to design your life, not about what life you should live. Life design will make you more like you: it releases the best of what is already in you.
Five simple things you need to do. Be curious: there’s something interesting about everything. Try stuff: no more being stuck. Reframe problems: change your perspective. Know it’s a process: be aware of the process. Ask for Help: radical collaboration.
The most important recommendation we can give is to commit to some personal practices like yoga, meditation, drawing, writing, or walking in nature.