Designing Your Life How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

By Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

Sandra wondered if there was something wrong with her. From the outside, she appeared to be the very picture of success: She had a high flying job with a top global corporation, a lovely family, and a fancy house in the best part of town. And yet she went to bed every night with a big knot in her stomach. She felt as if there was something missing; something that got lost along the way. Sandra once believed that if she reached for all the brass rings, she’d ultimately find happiness. But, for whatever reason, happiness continued to elude her.

As it turns out, Sandra is not alone. In America, about two-thirds of workers are unhappy with their jobs. And 15 percent absolutely hate their work. You may even be one of them.

There’s no doubt that going to work every day to do a job you hate is a major problem. But it’s not quite the intractable bind it used to be. While

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earlier generations held only a couple of different jobs over their entire lives, studies show that most of us can now expect to hold over a dozen jobs in our lifetimes. The “dead-end job” is fast becoming a thing of the past.

Still, for many people, the process of beginning anew can be intimidating. It’s hard to know how and where to start. Should you scour online job boards? Go to networking events? Talk to a recruiter? All of these tried-and-tested approaches to making a major career change can be very hit-and-miss. You might find a new job that makes you happy. Or you might wind up being just as miserable as before.

But what if it was possible to design your next job to take fate and luck right out of the equation to be absolutely sure that your next job would be exactly right for you? Does that seem too good to be true?

Two former Apple executives, Bill Burnett and

Dave Evans, who later became co-founders of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University, certainly believe it’s possible. In Stanford’s design program, Burnett and Evans have taught more than a thousand students how to design their careers and their lives. Between them, they have more than 60 years of hands-on teaching experience. They’ve worked with high school students, college students, recent grads, mid-career executives, and retirees wanting an “encore career.” And after much encouragement by those who’ve found success via their program, Burnett and Evans have written Designing Your Life because, after all, not everybody can afford to go to Stanford to learn these amazing techniques.

How To Think Like A Designer“Design is all around us,” write Burnett and Evans in the opening chapter of their book. “Look around your office or home, the chair you are sitting on,

the smartphone you may be holding. Everything that surrounds us was designed by someone. And every design started with a problem. The problem of not being able to listen to a lot of music without carrying around a suitcase of CDs is the reason why you can listen to three thousand songs on a one-inch square MP3 player clipped to your shirt. It’s only because of a problem that your laptop gets five hours of battery life, and it’s also why you have running water in your home. Chairs were created because of a problem too. Someone realized that sitting on rocks all the time causes sore bottoms, and they decided to do something about it.”

It’s clear that no matter where we look in the physical world, we can see the benefits of design thinking. But according to Burnett and Evans, design doesn’t just work for creating cool stuff like laptops and Ferraris; it also works when it comes to creating an amazing life. It’s possible, they say,

to use the very same type of design thinking that one would normally apply in the physical world to create a life that is meaningful, joyful and fulfilling.

Before you can do life design, you need to think like a designer. Throughout their book, Burnett and Evans share a number of practical ways to do this, but it starts with understanding one fundamental point: Designers don’t think their way forward, they build their way forward. That means you’re not just going to be dreaming up a bunch of idle fantasies that have no relationship to the real world (or the real you). You are going to build things – Burnett and Evans call them “prototypes” – try stuff, and hopefully even have some fun along the way.

Design thinking also involves five basic mind-sets, which Designing Your Life explains in detail and then shows you how to apply. The design mind-sets are: curiosity, bias to action, re-

framing, awareness, and something called “radical collaboration.” These are your new tools, and with them, you can build anything, including a life you love.

Be CuriousMaking a career change starts with visualizing a range of options, and then zeroing in on the jobs that hold the most appeal, based on your interests and innate curiosity. This may sound like it’s simply about asking yourself what you’re most passionate about, and then going from there. But that’s not how it works. According to the authors, many people operate under the dysfunctional belief that they just need to find out what they’re passionate about. Then, once they’ve identified their true passion (e.g. coaching children or tinkering with classic cars), everything else will somehow magically fall into place. Burnett and Evans really hate this concept for one very particular reason:

most people don’t actually know what they’re passionate about. Or, at the very least, they don’t know all the things they might become passionate about, if given the exposure and opportunity.

This argument that most people are in the dark regarding their passions is grounded in research. Burnett and Evans’s colleague William Damon, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, found that only one in five young people between twelve and twenty-six have a clear sense of what they’re most passionate about. Indeed, the authors’ own experience teaching life design suggests that about 80% of people of all ages struggle with this.

Mind you, some career counselors will try to give people tests to help determine where their interests and passions lie. But anyone who has taken such tests knows that the conclusions are often far from conclusive. They also tend to

generate a lot of false positives. So Burnett and Evans are “not very passionate about finding your passion.” They believe that people actually need to take time to develop a passion, or passions. And the research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something new and develop some mastery of it – not before. To put it more succinctly: passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause.

So if making a career change based on design isn’t about pursuing your passion, then what is it about? It actually starts with tapping into your inner curiosity – the childlike part of you that is naturally curious about the world and its untold possibilities. Unfortunately, many of us have buried that childlike curiosity so far down that we can’t quite access it. Fortunately, there are techniques that can help us discover our inner child.

One of the simplest and most effective techniques for re-sparking our inner curiosity is called mind-mapping. It’s a great tool for generating crazy new ideas, especially when you’re feeling a bit stuck. Mind-mapping works by generating a free-flowing association of words, one after another, to get your creative juices flowing and come up with potential new solutions. The graphical nature of the mind-mapping method allows ideas and their associations to be captured quickly. As such, you’re able to generate lots of ideas in a short period of time. And just as importantly, because mind-mapping is a largely visual process, it bypasses your inner verbal censor (i.e. the part of your brain that thinks like a risk adverse adult). Consequently, you’re able to venture down novel pathways that the logic center of your brain might normally try to steer you away from.

To illustrate how mind-mapping works, consider the example of a young man named Grant, who

Burnett and Evans worked with a few years ago on a life design exercise. Grant had graduated from college a few years earlier, and had taken up a management position at a national car rental agency. Grant didn’t especially love his job, but he felt stuck there because he couldn’t come to grips with what a more “perfect” job might look like. So Burnett and Evans encouraged him to create a mind-map to help spark his inner curiosity.

At the authors’ suggestion, Grant went for a hike in a forest near his house as a way of clearing his mind. Then, as soon as he got home, he sat down with a blank piece of paper. Grant had thoroughly enjoyed his morning hike with all that fresh air, so he put the words “BEING OUTDOORS” in the center of his mind map and drew a circle around it. That was step one. Then he wrote down: “travel, hiking, surfing, camping, and nature.” These things all related directly to the central idea of BEING OUTDOORS. Next he took

each of those words and created new branches of word associations. Hiking reminded Grant of mountains. Travel led Grant back to a childhood trip to Hawaii, and Hawaii in turn led him to tropical beaches. The whole process of creating layers and word associations took exactly five minutes (you want to give yourself a set time limit so you do it fast and bypass your inner censor). The final step is to take the seemingly-random association of words and highlight a few things that seem most interesting (or that sort of jump out at you).

In Grant’s case, the word “beach” was singing to him more than all the others. It made him realize that some of the happiest days to that point in his young life involved being on a beach, whether it was surfing, or just soaking in the sunshine. This led to Grant asking his boss for a transfer to their Santa Cruz, California office, which he agreed to. Today, Grant no longer feels stuck. He likes his job a lot more, and he’s happier than he’s been in

years.

Be Biased Towards ActionDesigners are not only curious by nature. They also have a bias towards action.

“Building is thinking” is a phrase you’ll often hear around the Design Program at Stanford. When that idea is coupled with a bias towards an action mind-set, you tend to see a lot of tinkering. If you ask people what they’re doing, they’ll tell you that they’re building prototypes. They might be prototyping new product ideas, new consumer experiences, or new services. But it doesn’t need to stop there. The smart folks at Stanford know that anything can be prototyped, from a physical object to public policy. Even your next job.

“A good prototype isolates one aspect of a job design challenge and creates an experience that allows you to ‘try out’ some version of a potentially interesting future,” explain the authors. “In this

way, prototypes help us visualize alternatives in a very experiential way.”

Creating new experiences through prototyping gives you an opportunity to understand what a new career might feel like, even if only for a day. For example, if you think you might want to become a reporter for the local TV station, you could approach the station manager to ask if he would let you ride around with a camera crew for the day, to find out what it’s really like on the ground. Some of these experiences will undoubtedly be disappointing or underwhelming. But there won’t be any real harm done by pursuing these sorts of prototype experiences, so long as you set yourself up to fail fast.

Failing fast involves quickly abandoning prototypes that aren’t working, as opposed to letting yourself go down with the proverbial sinking ship. Burnett and Evans tell the cautionary story of their mutual

friend Elsie to reinforce this very important lesson. After spending years working in human resource departments in large corporations, Elsie was ready for a career change. Elsie loved food – especially Italian food – and she especially loved the experiences she’d had while traveling in Tuscany, eating in small local cafés and delis. It was Elsie’s dream to one day own an authentic Italian café. She had saved enough to get started, collected all the recipes she needed, and researched the best place near her home to locate. She decided to take the plunge. Elsie quit her job, bought the café she’d been dreaming about and opened to great fanfare. It turned out to be a roaring success.

Months later, Elsie found she was busier than ever. And her restaurant was more popular with the local community than she could have ever hoped. But despite all of that, she was miserable. She discovered that she didn’t enjoy managing people, and she didn’t like cooking or tracking

inventory. And she especially hated all the cleaning and maintenance.

Elsie had this wonderfully successful café, but it felt like an anchor around her neck. She thought that owning a café would be her dream job. But she hadn’t prototyped her idea at all. She didn’t “sneak up on her future.” Instead, she “jumped out of the plane right into it.” And it turned out to be a much harder landing than she’d expected.

After a year, Elsie sold the café and went into interior design. Eventually, she found the career satisfaction she’d been craving, but she got there by a very painful and inefficient path. How could she have prototyped her idea? She could have tried catering - a much easier business to start up and shut down (no rent, fewer employees, super-portable, no regular hours). Or she could have even taken a job as a server or a cook in an Italian restaurant and worked there a couple of evenings

a week, or on the weekends. Had she prototyped the experience, she would have realized that owning a restaurant wasn’t for her.

Reframe Your ProblemsBurnett and Evans have discovered that almost all of their students and clients have one important thing in common. They all carry around dysfunctional beliefs and emotional baggage that prevent them from designing the lives they want. Reframing is essential to casting this baggage aside and moving forward.

A commonly held “dysfunctional belief” about the world is that other people are probably too busy to help us, and so we shouldn’t even ask for help. Holding onto a false belief like this can really limit your potential as a designer. Because, as we saw with the prototyping concept above, you’ll likely need to reach out to all kinds of people to get connections and referrals in order to create those

mini-experiences for yourself. But if you have an aversion to the idea of networking, because you assume that you’re bothering people when you reach out to them for help, you’ll struggle with prototyping.

This is where a reframe comes in. Close your eyes for a second and imagine that you’re walking to work one day, and a tourist with a car full of kids stops you to ask for directions to the local amusement park. Would you help her out? You probably would, right? Now, ask yourself how you might feel at that very moment when the tourist gets back in her car and drives away with your directions in hand? Will you feel used and bitter? Will you be offended that she probably won’t call you the next day, or want to become your friend on Facebook? Of course not! You’re not going to stand there feeling taken advantage of. On the contrary, you’ll be feeling great about having just helped out that woman and her family.

Multiple studies confirm that the vast majority of people enjoy being helpful. It’s hard-wired into our DNA. Getting referrals from people in your network to people whose experiences could be useful to advancing your career is just the professional equivalent of asking for directions. It’s not a problem if you think of it that way.

Be Self-AwareWe know that life gets messy sometimes, and mistakes get made. But that’s totally okay, because good designers try not to take their failures too personally. Designers are self-aware enough to realize that failure is in fact the raw material of success.

If you doubt this to be the case, just ask Reed. Years before Burnett and Evans taught Reed at Stanford, he’d always wanted to be a class president. So Reed started running for office as soon as he could – in fifth grade. He lost that year.

So he ran again in sixth grade … and lost again. In fact, Reed ran for office every single year and lost every single time. During his last year of high school, Reed decided to run one more time. His parents tried to talk him out of it, not wanting him to feel like a failure. But Reed actually didn’t mind failing. In his mind, failure was a natural part of the process. With each successive loss, losing had become a lot less painful, which allowed him to take risks and test out new campaign approaches. Failure was the best way to learn what doesn’t work.

When Reed finally won and became senior class president, he was thrilled. But the authors’ point isn’t that he won. The point is that he kept running, and learning from his mistakes. At Stanford, Reed became a top student and a top athlete. Naturally, given his interest in politics, he later went on to become a successful politician at both the state and local levels. All of this is

because Reed, and people like him, have the self-awareness to understand that their failures don’t define them. They actually make them stronger.

Radical CollaborationGreat designers are always looking to partner with others. In this vein, the last mind-set of design thinking is perhaps the most important of all: radical collaboration. For Burnett and Evans, what this means is realizing you are not alone in the universe. It always takes a team to come up with a really amazing design. Sure, a single painter can create an artistic masterpiece by sitting alone for days on a windswept coast. But a designer couldn’t have created the iPhone alone, windswept beach or not. And a person’s life is more like an iPhone than an oil painting, given all the complex moving parts involved.

“You do not have to come up with a brilliant life design by yourself,” write Burnett and Evans.

“Design is a collaborative process, and many of the best ideas are going to come from other people. You just need to ask. Life design, like all design, is a team sport.”

While you will need an engaged group of people to walk alongside you as you’re designing your life, the authors are careful to point out that these people don’t necessarily have to be your best friends. In fact, they don’t necessarily have to be your friends at all. They just need to be willing to show up for you, to be helpfully attentive and reflective with you, and to care about the process. Whether or not you also see them socially is not important.

To find your partners in life design, the authors recommend you start by looking for a group of people that you share a kindred purpose with. Healthy communities are about advancing important causes, not just about getting together

for a beer, or to watch a football game. Bill’s life design community, for example, gathers together once a month to support one another in becoming better fathers and more authentic men. While still keeping things informal, and even fun, the group nevertheless has an explicit mission that keeps them directed and moving forward. Just as importantly, the members are committed to meeting frequently enough to sustain a consistent, ongoing conversation where people can pick up where they left off the previous time without starting over again and again.

Somewhat surprisingly, when you’re re-designing your life, Burnett and Evans don’t believe it is especially important to surround yourself with people who especially share your particular career interests or professional background. All that matters is that your community is an authentic one. “Even if you are uninterested in dentistry, being around a dentist who is doing a sincere job

of turning into her best self is more encouraging and impactful than being in community with someone who has exactly the same career aspirations as you but who isn’t being sincerely present, or engaging honestly with his hopes and struggles,” they write.

Life design is a journey, and it’s much harder – and a lot less fun – to try to go it alone.

ConclusionIf you’re stuck in a job you hate – or if you just feel like it’s time for a new challenge – you could roll the dice and take a new job that sounds really good on paper, but may not turn out as you expected. Or you could design your next job and take all the guess-work out of the equation. Sure, it’s a radically different way of going about a job search, but according to Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, if you truly commit to it, life design offers a better way forward.

“Designers imagine a better future that doesn’t yet exist,” write Burnett and Evans, “and then they build it. And even if your life seems perfect as is, life design can still help you make it better.”

When you think like a designer, when you ask the right questions, when you build your own career from the ground up, then your life will begin to sparkle and shine in amazing new ways. That is, joke the authors, if you happen to like sparkles. After all, it’s your life design.