Everyone wants to make a living doing meaningful work that aligns with their values and makes them happy. However, many people feel stuck in the wrong life doing unfulfilling work. They hope that once they find their “passion,” everything will magically fall into place. According to Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, this attitude hinges on the belief that there’s only one path to a meaningful life. Fixating on this single “perfect” life limits your ability to experience joy and satisfaction by preventing you from recognizing other potentially satisfying paths and disempowering you from changing unfulfilling situations.
(Shortform note: Psychologists clarify why you might fixate on a single life path and how this limits your happiness. Most people crave certainty—knowing what to expect makes you feel safe. If you’re someone who craves a great deal of certainty, you’re more likely to focus on a predictable life path and develop biases that prevent you from looking beyond this path. However, while these biases keep you safe, they also keep you trapped in unfulfilling situations: When you feel dissatisfied, instead of questioning whether your chosen path is right for you, your biases convince you that your unhappiness is a personal failure. These insecurities make it more difficult to move past your comfort zone to seek out more satisfying alternatives.)
On the other hand, believing there are multiple paths to fulfillment and happiness in your career and life broadens your horizons and empowers you to take charge of your happiness. You proactively look for different ways to fine-tune your life and pursue experiences that add more meaning and joy to your life.
(Shortform note: It’s important to note that the focus of the book isn’t on having unlimited choice in life, but rather on having the freedom to make life choices. Research shows that having unlimited choices can trigger “decision paralysis”—we don’t move forward at all and feel unhappy or stressed. On the other hand, having the freedom to make life choices is an important factor to overall well-being.)
In Designing Your Life, Burnett and Evans present a purposeful planning strategy to help you adopt this empowering belief and redesign your approach to life. You’ll learn how to recognize and explore multiple paths to happiness, purposefully plan a fulfilling career, and confidently create a more meaningful and joyful life.
This guide breaks their strategy down into an eight-step process that walks you through:
The first step to planning your life more purposefully is evaluating your life as it is now, pinpointing what you’re happy with and what you want to improve. This helps you focus on what changes you want to make before moving through the rest of the steps. Burnett and Evans suggest reflecting on and rating (from one to 10) your satisfaction in four areas: health (mind, body, and spirit), work (paid and unpaid), joy (relaxation and happiness), and relationships (your ties with other people).
Ideally, your ratings for all four areas are high and in proportion to each other. If they’re not, make a note of areas where you need to create more balance and satisfaction. For example, you might have a high rating for work and low ratings for relationships, joy, and health. This indicates that you’re prioritizing work over all else, and improving your life will require focusing on these other three areas.
Manage Expectations to Create a Balanced Life
Psychologists expand on the authors’ ideas about evaluating life areas and creating a balanced life in two ways: First, they explain that life feels balanced only when you manage your expectations about what you can achieve.
The term “balanced life” implies that you devote equal time and energy to all areas of your life and “have it all.” This is often impossible because you have a finite amount of time and energy to devote to competing demands, and your desires for each life area often exceed your ability to fulfill them. Life feels unbalanced and unsatisfying when your expectations of how life should be conflict with reality—you feel like you’re being pulled in multiple directions and fail to maintain an equilibrium between competing demands. For example, if you want to be a full-time parent and work 9-5, your inability to do so will create feelings of guilt, frustration, and dissatisfaction.
Overcome this internal conflict and feel more balanced by discerning essential needs from non-essential needs—how many needs do you truly need to fulfill to feel satisfied? This perspective encourages you to set realistic expectations and maintain an equilibrium between competing commitments.
This “How much is enough?” thinking is especially helpful considering that psychologists suggest evaluating not four, but 14 life areas—and that you need to feel satisfaction in all 14 to experience balance and overall well-being:
Physical health: Your overall fitness level
Family life: Your emotional connection with those closest to you
Spiritual practice: Prayer, meditation, or time spent feeling “present”
Learning: Formal education, such as a degree, and informal education, such as personal self-development
Love: Your romantic commitment to another person
Sexuality: Sensual experiences
Recreation: Activities you enjoy such as travel or sports
Self-expression: Creative activities and hobbies such as singing, drawing, or cooking
Emotional health: Your overall self-esteem and level of happiness
Career: Your work or vocation
Financial security: How you manage your income, savings, and debts
Social life: Your relationships with people you choose to spend time with
Residence: The comfort and security you feel at home
Social contribution: What you do to benefit others
When rating each area, discern your essential needs from your non-essential needs. For example, feeling fit and healthy is essential to improve your satisfaction—having six-pack abs is not essential.
Once you’ve identified which areas of your life need improvement, the next step is rationally determining what improvements you can make by separating uncontrollable factors from actionable problems. Burnett and Evans explain there are some things in life you simply can’t change—attempts to do so waste energy and lead to frustration. Accepting these unchangeable factors allows you to focus your energy on actionable problems you can change and improve.
For example, you regret not finishing college because the jobs you want require degrees. Lamenting this fact won’t change your past. Instead, focus your energy on solutions to the actionable problems: Improve your prospects (enroll in college or intern for work experience), or look for jobs that don’t require degrees.
How to Focus on What You Can Change
Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) also argues that accepting things you can’t change reduces stress and encourages a more proactive approach to life. However, this is often easier said than done. Covey suggests two strategies to help focus your energy on what you can change:
Think in terms of impact: When faced with a problem, think about what steps you can personally take toward solving it. This helps you more easily distinguish between concerns beyond your control (like a pandemic) and issues you can improve or solve (like organizing your work-from-home schedule).
Be accountable for your mistakes: Don’t dwell on your mistakes—reflect on how you can change to avoid repeating them. Making a conscious attempt to understand the contributing factors to your regretful experiences helps you avoid repeat scenarios: If your regret relates to your actions, alter your behavior. If it relates to other people’s actions, alter the way you communicate with others.
After identifying problems you want to (and can) solve, the next step in purposefully planning your life is developing an awareness of your priorities. Burnett and Evans explain that this is an important part of the process because there are so many paths you can pursue in life—your priorities act like a GPS that guides you toward paths that align with what you care about and feel right. Let’s explore the reasoning behind this step in more detail.
When planning your life, how can you know if a path you’re considering will feel satisfying? Ask whether the path you’re contemplating is coherent with your priorities—does this path inspire behaviors and goals that align with what you care about?
Burnett and Evans argue that happiness comes from living coherently: It’s easy to find meaning in what you do and feel good about the direction of your life when your priorities and behaviors are aligned. On the other hand, when your actions and goals don’t reflect what’s important to you, your life is incoherent—your behaviors reflect different priorities, which creates internal conflict and hinders your ability to feel good about what you’re doing.
Maintaining conscious awareness of your priorities and coherence helps you continuously move toward happiness—especially when you may need to make short-term decisions that don’t feel satisfying.
For example, you believe spending time with your family is important. If you unintentionally neglect them in favor of working 60-hour weeks, then you’ll experience incoherence and will feel unhappy. However, if you’re consciously working long hours now as part of a plan to spend more time with them in the long run, then you will feel satisfied—even if the behavior itself feels unpleasant, you’ll feel good about it because it’s coherent with your priorities.
Satisfaction and Happiness Come From Determining Your Own Values
Jay Shetty (Think Like a Monk) offers additional insights to explain why you might have unclear priorities and how this impacts your happiness. He defines priorities as the values or core beliefs you choose to live by—they determine who you want to be and how you treat yourself and others.
However, many people, due to a need for external validation, allow others to determine their priorities. This creates unclear values and dissatisfaction (incoherency): When you’re preoccupied with pleasing others to gain positive feedback, you’re distracted from thinking about how you feel, what your unique needs are, and what makes you happy. As a result, you end up engaging in activities and behaviors that don’t feel meaningful to you. This leads to a life that feels incoherent, and you’ll be susceptible to negative thoughts and distractions.
Releasing your need for external validation creates clear values and satisfaction (coherency): Switching your focus from what others want to what you want allows you to define and live in alignment with your values. As a result, you engage in activities that feel meaningful—your behaviors and your priorities are coherent. This makes you less prone to negative thinking and feelings of dissatisfaction.
Burnett and Evans suggest examining your feelings about life and work to define the priorities you want to live by. Write two separate statements, the first exploring your opinions on work (this includes everything you believe about work: what it’s for, why you do it, and what makes it good or bad). The second statement should explore your opinions on life (this includes everything you believe about the world and how it works: what it means, what gives it value, how your life relates to others, the place of money in a meaningful life, and the value you place on fulfillment and experience).
Compare your work and life statements to assess how coherent they are—do your statements complement each other, or are there conflicts? Consider how to integrate your priorities in both areas so they’re more in harmony with each other.
(Shortform note: In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey suggests a complementary method to pinpoint your feelings and priorities in work and in life: Picture yourself at the end of your career or life, looking back at your proudest moments—focus on what you want to achieve in your various roles (parent, spouse, friend, colleague, and so on). This process helps define who you want to be and what you want to achieve in each area of your life, and it encourages you to imagine how life would look after successfully integrating all your priorities.)
Once you’ve defined your priorities and understand how to assess the coherency of potential paths as you move forward, start investigating activities that make you feel good.
As you begin this step, keep your options open and look for many activities that feel good. Burnett and Evans explain that there are many paths available to you at this point, and your eagerness to move forward may influence you to pick a single path without fully considering if it has the potential to satisfy you or if it’s the only thing that will bring you joy. Taking time to clarify the many things that satisfy you will help to prevent this rash focus on one path. Further, restricting yourself to a single source of joy and thus a single destination at this early stage of the purposeful planning process will prevent you from engaging in the wide-ranging exploration throughout the following steps.
(Shortform note: Burnett and Evans argue that rashly focusing on a specific destination early in the process of planning your life restricts your opportunities for satisfaction. In contrast, Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within) argues that focusing on a specific destination as early as possible increases your ability to create satisfying experiences in two ways. First, the more specific you are about what you want, the easier it is to imagine the benefits of achieving it—these positive expectations increase your motivation to take proactive steps forward. Second, a detailed and specific plan allows you to prepare for and therefore overcome potential obstacles—allowing you to maintain momentum toward what you want.)
The authors suggest a way to reveal multiple paths that guide you toward meaningful experiences: starting a daily journal to track and reflect on how your activities make you feel. The point of this is to identify what types of experiences make you feel joyful, engaged, and energized or bored and drained.
After the first week of tracking, include weekly reflections in your journal: Zoom in on the details of each activity to identify what you specifically like or dislike about them. Pay particular attention to who you were with, what you were doing, where you were, and what you were interacting with (for example, people, objects, or a machine) as your positive feelings rose and fell. Write down any themes, insights, or surprises you discover. If your current schedule doesn’t offer much in the way of variety, consider including reflections of past experiences that stand out as particularly positive or negative.
(Shortform note: Reflective journaling offers an additional benefit that the authors don’t mention: It encourages a regular habit of introspection that increases your self-awareness. This allows you to understand and clarify your thoughts and feelings and helps you to make conscious choices about how to spend your time more meaningfully. Effective reflection requires three steps: Describe the activity and how you felt, interpret your thoughts and feelings using explanations or comparisons (for example, “I enjoyed that part because it reminded me of …”), and decide how to apply what you’ve learned in the future.)
Throughout the rest of the guide, we’ll explain how to use these reflections to plan ways to create more meaning and satisfaction in your life.
Different Perspectives on What Makes an Experience Satisfying
Many self-help books mirror the authors’ view that awareness of positive experiences provides opportunities to create more satisfaction. However, they each offer different definitions of what types of positive experience contribute to a satisfying life and suggest alternative ways to think about your activities:
Flow: Your experiences feel more meaningful when you engage in activities that genuinely interest you—you value what you’re experiencing, so you find it easier to focus your attention and feel absorbed in what you’re doing. The more absorbed you feel, the less you focus on thoughts that feel dissatisfying.
The Happiness Project: Engaging in activities purely for the sake of productivity or image limits your ability to feel happy. Focus more on activities that feel genuinely fun to you and limit engaging in activities you think you should enjoy.
Minimalism: There are two types of positive activities: those you enjoy (effortless and fun experiences) and those you dislike (they’re good for you but take more effort, such as physical exercise). Recognizing experiences you dislike as positive experiences and finding ways to enjoy them helps you live a more meaningful life.
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: You have innate gifts and talents you’re meant to contribute to the world. Aligning your strengths, interests, and positive intentions for others feels satisfying because it keeps you focused on what you want to experience.
You might find it useful to track and reflect on how applying these different perspectives to your activities contributes to your feelings of satisfaction throughout this step.
Now that you’ve identified activities that feel engaging, energizing, and joyful, the next purposeful planning step is to consider how you might pursue more experiences that feel this way. Burnett and Evans argue that while there are many ways to pursue satisfaction, it’s easy to fixate on what you already know and limit yourself to a specific set of activities. Therefore, they suggest an exercise called “mind-mapping” to help you discover new interests and activities.
The three steps in mind-mapping are:
1) Choose a subject. Pick a current problem or goal—something that’s bothering you or dominating your mind or emotions. Write it in the center of a sheet of paper.
2) Make a map. Engage in free association—what does this central topic make you think of? Write five or six words in a ring around your central topic. Draw lines to connect this second tier to your central topic. Then create a third tier by doing the same free association with each of the second-tier words. Optionally, add a fourth tier.
3) Draw connections and generate concepts. While the first and second tiers include those ideas that come to mind immediately, the outermost tier includes ideas that are furthest from your habitual thoughts and experiences. Choose four or five words from this tier that are intuitively interesting to you, and combine them in different ways to generate solutions to your problem. Keep an open mind, even toward ideas that don’t seem immediately plausible. For example, your problem might be that you feel tied down and want to escape. You pick writing, cooking, cycling, and traveling from your mind map and combine them to create a solution that involves working remotely as a food writer while cycling around Europe.
Lateral Thinking Challenges the Influence of Cognitive Biases
Cognitive research offers insights into why you might limit yourself to a specific set of activities and how exercises like mind mapping help to generate new ideas.
Cognitive biases influence your decisions. These biases are the result of your brain’s attempt to make quick judgments based on your past experiences. While there are many different types of cognitive biases, each influencing your decisions in different ways, they all restrict your thoughts to what you know and have experienced—limiting your ability to imagine or objectively assess alternative ideas and perspectives.
Lateral thinking methods—strategies that make use of your imagination—restrict the influence of cognitive biases because they employ the creative side of your brain: an area where your biases don’t operate. Consequently, these methods encourage new ideas that move you away from your habitual thoughts and comfort zone.
Mind mapping employs the creative side of your brain by converting your initial ideas into a visual diagram that encourages you to make associations between disparate ideas. Every tier you add stimulates additional ideas that trigger further associations—resulting in ideas far removed from the influence of your habitual thinking and biases.
If mind mapping doesn’t work for you, there are other lateral thinking methods you can use to bypass your biases and think creatively about your problems or goals:
Bad Ideas: Thinking of intentionally terrible or crazy ideas bypasses your biases and promotes more ideas by creating a “judgment-free zone.” Any ideas are allowed, so you’re more likely to come up with something creative that you’d never suggest otherwise.
SCAMPER: Asking questions focused on different facets of your problem broadens your approach to finding solutions—a facet you may have deemed unimportant may look different under close examination.
Six Thinking Hats: Examining problems from six different perspectives—such as positive feedback, criticisms, and emotions—ensures you don’t neglect potential ideas and solutions.
One area where this exercise is particularly useful is in determining a solution to a dissatisfying career path. Burnett and Evans suggest pairing mind mapping with the journal you created in Step #4 to generate ideas for three very different job descriptions. The goal here isn’t to create realistic jobs—rather, it’s about opening your mind to potential career paths.
They suggest picking an activity you found intensely engaging—draw a mind map with it at the center. Do the same for something that energized you and for something that felt joyful. For each map, pick three appealing items from the outer tier and use them to create potential descriptions for jobs that seem enjoyable, meaningful, and helpful to others.
(Shortform note: Career expert and editor of What Color is Your Parachute? Katharine Brooks offers an interesting way to expand upon this method and maintain focus on what satisfies you. Once you’ve generated your job descriptions, write your name in the center of a piece of paper. Write the three career paths you generated around your name. Draw a line from your name to each career and along each line, plot the steps it’ll take to get to each career. Pay attention to how you feel as you plot each career path—do you feel energized or drained? Prioritize the careers that energize you.)
Now you’ve practiced mind mapping to generate new career path ideas, expand your outlook even further—explore the multiple satisfying lives you could lead. In this step, Burnett and Evans suggest breaking free from the assumption that there’s only one perfect life path by developing three distinctly different five-year plans. This exercise helps you consider multiple life paths that could offer you happiness and a satisfying work-life balance.
(Shortform note: In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss offers an alternative approach to creating life plans. We’ll compare his process to the authors’ suggestions throughout this step.)
For your first five-year plan, focus on something you already have in mind—either the life you’re currently living or an idea you’ve been developing. For your second plan, describe what you’d do if the area you currently work in or have been planning to work in disappeared. For your third plan, describe what you’d do if you weren’t concerned about money or what other people think about you.
(Shortform note: Ferriss includes life-plan prompts that allow for more blue-sky thinking than the authors’ suggestions: He suggests asking yourself what you’d do every day if you had $100 million and what would make you really excited to wake up every morning. If you get stuck, he says to think of something you don’t want and then write the opposite.)
The authors recommend including the following components in each five-year plan:
1) A short title that captures the plan’s essence. For example, “the campervan tour across Scotland.”
(Shortform note: According to Jim Collins (Built to Last), a short title paints a compelling picture of your destination, which is a powerful way to inspire action. A meandering, vague title doesn’t have the same effect.)
2) A timeline that includes both work activities and life events you hope to experience such as having children or getting a black belt in Karate.
(Shortform note: To round out your timeline, Ferriss specifies writing five things you want to have, five you want to be, and five you want to do during this period. Don’t worry about how you would get any of these things—just focus on what you want.)
3) Responses to the following questions:
(Shortform note: You may find the questions the authors suggest here difficult to answer, as they deal with somewhat nebulous ideas. Ferris recommends a more concrete way to frame your thoughts. First, assign a specific action that represents the culmination of each plan. For example, if you want to be a black belt in Karate, your action might be to compete in a tournament. Then, work backward to figure out exactly what you need to do to make it happen. This process reveals details that help assess if you have the resources and confidence to see it through. Further, examining the details provides more information to judge how you’d feel on this path.)
4) Two or three questions the plan raises. For example, “Will I be able to work remotely from a campervan?” or “Do I need a certain type of visa to stay in Scotland for a year?”
(Shortform note: Here, instead of reflecting on questions, Ferriss recommends taking immediate steps toward progress in each of your plans. He suggests that this practice will instigate questions you wouldn’t otherwise consider and helps solidify your plans. Burnett and Evans wait until Step #8 of their life design framework to do this.)
Once you’ve created your potential five-year plans, the next step in developing them is building a team of people with whom you can regularly share and refine your plans. Burnett and Evans argue that you’re more likely to come up with exciting ideas, make better decisions, and create solutions when you discuss your plans with a team than when you work on your own.
You’ll benefit most from a team with diverse experiences and perspectives. Include close friends who know you well and supportive allies who you can rely on for honest and constructive feedback. If possible, also include one or more mentors on your team: people who are willing to offer objective advice and help you think for yourself and sharpen your insights and decision-making.
(Shortform note: It’s true that collaboration offers many benefits: With the right team, it provides support and diverse perspectives that inspire new ideas, and encourages accountability. In particular, having a mentor on the team can offer numerous benefits for both mentors and mentees—the relationship encourages strong communication skills that increase self-confidence and self-awareness. However, to be effective, collaboration of any sort needs to be mutually beneficial. In Goals!, Brian Tracy suggests evaluating what you can offer to your team—developing relationship skills such as patience and attentiveness ensures that you benefit your team as much as they benefit you.)
Once you’ve refined your three five-year plans and assembled your team, the final step in purposefully planning your life is testing out each plan to get a feel for how well they suit you. Burnett and Evans suggest two methods to learn more about each of your plans: conducting interviews and pursuing exploratory experiences. Used in tandem, these methods ideally reveal what parts of your plan are both feasible and satisfying and weed out the parts that don’t work or feel unsatisfying. The authors say that this information will generate new ideas as you seek to improve unsatisfying aspects and further refine your plans.
(Shortform note: David Epstein (Range) also argues you should test a range of different activities before you pick a path to focus on, mentioning a benefit the authors don’t touch on: You have the opportunity to pick up a wide range of transferable skills that serve you throughout your life. These skills will support you in continuing to make adjustments to your life and pursue new paths to happiness.)
The authors suggest finding someone who’s currently doing the work or living the lifestyle you’re considering and asking them how they made it happen and what it’s really like to live this life. The purpose of this method is to learn from someone who actually knows the pros and cons of the life you’re contemplating so that you can decide if your plan is really for you.
Create a list of interviewees by first contacting the people you know who are living the experiences you’re drawn to. Then, ask them for referrals to relevant people that aren’t in your network.
How to Conduct Successful Interviews
It’s true that informational interviews offer multiple benefits, such as providing insider information and providing opportunities to build beneficial relationships. However, these interviews require preparation to be valuable—follow this practical advice to organize successful discussions:
Consider your goals for the interview: This focuses your search for a suitable interviewee and helps you communicate your intentions for the meeting.
Research the topic you want to discuss as much as possible: This helps you determine what first-hand information to ask about during your interview.
Prepare open-ended questions: This primes you to lead the conversation while giving your interviewee leeway to expand upon information she thinks is relevant.
Ask for referrals: This allows you to further your knowledge and expands your network of useful contacts.
Follow up with a thank-you note: This makes your interviewee feel appreciated and opens the door for ongoing communication—potentially leading to new opportunities.
Second, seek out first-hand experiences that give you a taste of the path you’re considering. If your plans involve a career change, take on an internship or volunteer work in your desired role. For everything else, the authors suggest referring back to the questions you wrote in your five-year plans to figure out what types of experiences would benefit you—pick experiences that give you a visceral feel for the changes you’re contemplating. For example, if one of your plans involves emigrating, consider taking a short vacation to your chosen country and spending time with the locals.
With each interview and new experience, you’ll learn more about how each plan fits in with your work and life priorities. Burnett and Evans suggest you continue with these two methods until you feel confident enough to pick one of your five-year plans to pursue. If your interviews and experiments leave you feeling unsure about which plan to pursue, apply mind mapping or work with your team to consider ways to revise your approach.
Conduct Your Experiments Like a Scientist
While the authors suggest ways to choose experiments, they don’t offer practical advice on evaluating your results and moving forward. Life design experts suggest a methodical way to break this task down and benefit from your explorations—take a scientific approach to experimenting:
Start with a hypothesis: These are the assumptions you’ve made while writing your five-year plan and the accompanying questions. For example, you assume that you’ll enjoy living in Paris, but question if you’ll like the energy of a big city.
Collect data: This comes from the experiment you choose to undertake. For example, you vacation in Paris for two weeks and record how you feel throughout your trip.
Analyze your results: This involves reviewing what you learned and how you felt throughout your experiment. For example, your stay in Paris felt overwhelming at times due to overcrowding.
Validate or disprove your initial assumptions: This includes comparing your initial hypothesis against your findings. For example, your feelings about being in a crowded city disprove the assumption that Paris is a good fit for you.
Form a new hypothesis and start again: This entails revising your plan and designing new experiments. For example, you discuss your findings with your team and ask them to suggest other regions—one team member suggests visiting a calmer Parisian district. You adjust your original hypothesis and decide to explore this district.
This methodical approach allows you to continually refine both your life plan and the experiments you undertake until you find a path that fits.
A major benefit of conducting interviews and pursuing exploratory experiences is that they grant you access to a hidden job market that most people are unaware of. Burnett and Evans argue that most jobs are filled internally without ever being advertised (only about 20% of available jobs get advertised). Further, many advertised jobs are really false vacancies published only to meet company requirements—they often demand impossible qualifications. As a result, fewer than half of the job applications submitted through the traditional route (revising your resumé, writing a cover letter, and applying) ever get a response.
However, the two methods in this step allow you direct access to this unadvertised job market. Approaching people with the intention to learn more about the roles you’re interested in often leads to job offers—when someone you’re interviewing or interning with sees your genuine interest, they let you know of available positions, whether published or not.
(Shortform note: Career experts validate the existence of a “hidden job market” and explain that many jobs don’t get advertised due to budget or time constraints, or due to a preference for employee referrals. They note that, in addition to conducting informational interviews or undertaking internships, you can gain direct access to unadvertised jobs by joining network groups and professional organizations, staying active on social media (engaging with professionals and companies in your industry), connecting with recruiters, and attending industry events.)
By this point, you’ve conducted interviews and have run experiments to define a meaningful and satisfying plan to pursue. However, the process of creating a satisfying life doesn’t stop there—life can always get better. Burnett and Evans suggest you regularly take time to evaluate your life and work to assess whether you’re living coherently or if there’s room for improvement. This awareness of how you feel, combined with your developed understanding of what satisfies you, will drive you to continually pursue new experiences that best align with what’s most important to you.
Additionally, rely on the team you created in Step #7 to discuss your progress or brainstorm more ways to add meaning and satisfaction to your life. Having regular meetings with a group of people who are invested in your happiness and understand your priorities ensures you make decisions that take you where you want to go.
(Shortform note: Research provides insights into how regular team meetings benefit your well-being and your plans. Successful life improvement requires you to make many changes, such as releasing bad habits, acquiring new skills, or adopting new strategies. When working alone, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of effort required to make these changes. This limits your ability to acknowledge the progress you’ve made and makes the process feel arduous. On the other hand, sharing your progress with others creates a space to celebrate your achievements and receive ongoing support—making you feel good and motivating you.)
Finally, apply the purposeful planning strategy any time you require more clarity, such as when you feel stuck, have problems making decisions, or feel inspired to move toward even more satisfying experiences.
Make Short-Term Plans to Pursue Satisfaction
Epstein (Range) mirrors the idea that a meaningful life hinges on your willingness to continually evaluate and adapt to your circumstances. He adds a practical way to put this into action: Plan for the short term instead of the long term. He argues that it’s better to pursue satisfying opportunities in the short term than to commit to a single long-term goal or vision for two reasons:
You can’t predict how your needs will change: What satisfies you now may not satisfy you a few years from now.
You can’t predict how the world will change: It’s impossible to know what opportunities will or won’t be available in the future.
Planning for the short-term helps you to easily adapt to these changes and take advantage of immediate opportunities—exposing you to even more satisfying experiences than you might encounter with a more long-term vision. You might then use the information gathered from these short-term experiences to think about a new direction for your life or build certain factors into longer-term plans that are already underway.
Everyone wants to make a living doing meaningful work that harmonizes with their values and makes them happy. But many people feel stuck in the wrong life doing unfulfilling work with no way out. Some hope that if only they can find their “true passion,” everything will magically fall into place. Both attitudes—the defeated one and the magical passion one—are false. What we need is a clear-cut process for designing our lives, a learnable approach to building a fulfilling career.
Designing Your Life provides that process. This is a book about life design. Everything surrounding you, from furniture and electronics to indoor plumbing and toothbrushes, was designed. People created each of these things in response to a problem. Just like you can see the benefits of design thinking all around you, you can reap the benefits of such thinking by applying it to your life to create more meaning and joy.
Design problems are distinct from engineering problems. Engineering problems focus on achieving a clear goal, like creating hinges for laptop computers that will last for years. By contrast, design problems have no predetermined goal. They simply seek to address a problem in some effective way.
The ultimate design problem may be the realm of aesthetics. For example, the different appearances of a Porsche and a Ferrari represent two different design approaches to solving the “problem” of creating a beautiful car. The central concern of aesthetics is human emotions, and design thinking is the best tool for effectively addressing this. Likewise, finding happiness and fulfillment in life represents an aesthetic/emotional problem, not one with a concrete goal that you know in advance. Thus, for creating a successful, productive life, design thinking, not engineering thinking, is the best approach.
Doing life design requires thinking like a designer. A core principle of design thinking is that you make progress by building, not by pure thought. Designers build and test prototypes.
There are five basic mental attitudes in design thinking that underlie what you’ll learn in the chapters that follow:
When you apply these to your life, you’ll increase your luck. Opportunities start arising on their own. You hear about jobs and meet people in strangely serendipitous ways. Yes, you put in hard work, but the return on your investment of time and effort is disproportionately large. In other words, you get back more than you put in.
One of the most important aspects of the design approach is to reframe or pivot. As stated above, this is when you take new information and restate your point of view in a different way that leads to new thinking and prototyping. In the world of commerce, an example might be starting out thinking that you’re designing a new product but then realizing that you’re actually redesigning the experience of that product, like Starbucks did for coffee.
Like many people, you may wrongly believe there’s one “perfect” life for you. Reframing this defective belief involves the realization that there are many possible versions of yourself, that none of them is better than all the others, and that your life is about growth and evolution instead of reaching some final, static destination. Life design reframes the old question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and asks instead, “What do you want to grow into?”
Other defective beliefs to reframe include:
Defective belief: Your college degree determines your career.
Defective belief: Conventional “success” will make you happy.
Defective belief: You’re too late to design your best life. Your life is already set in stone. You missed your chance.
To fully benefit from life design, you need to gather a “design team,” a group of people who will read this book and do the exercises with you. Bringing together different people’s knowledge and perspectives can generate more solutions for everybody than any one person could generate on their own. You’ll learn more about this in Chapter 11.
The design approach to life rejects the popular notion that everything will work itself out if you just “find your passion.” Many people can’t even say what their passion might be. Nor is it true that most people have a single dominant passion. In fact, passion is something that you develop by trying things out, not something that you know ahead of time. Passion isn’t the cause but the result of intelligent life design. Using the design approach to prototype possible lives for yourself will lead you to the work you love.
The bottom line for what constitutes a well-designed life is this: It makes sense. All of its parts—even (and sometimes especially) its failures—cohere and give meaning to each other. At any point, you’re able to accurately answer the question, “How’s it going?”
The first step in tackling any design problem is to articulate the problem. Good design is like a formula:
This kind of thinking is foreign to some people because it pays as much attention to the problem as the solution. But half the task of life design involves focusing on your problem, by taking stock of your situation and figuring out which things in your life aren’t working the way you’d like.
Defective belief: I should already know my direction.
Your problems could relate to the type of work you do. Or they could relate to money, family, love, health, or a combination. One of your most important decisions is to choose which of your problems to work on. Choosing wrongly could make you waste many years—or even your entire life.
The experience of Dave, one of the authors of this book, illustrates the peril of choosing the wrong problem. Because Dave, as a child, loved watching Jacques Cousteau’s undersea adventures on television, and because he found his high school biology teacher to be highly engaging, he went to college thinking he wanted to be a marine biologist. But in fact, he was no good at biological science work, nor did he even like it. So he wasted two and a half years of college on it before admitting defeat. Then he changed to mechanical engineering and found happiness. He had focused on the wrong “problem” by thinking he already knew the answer to what he wanted to become, and he paid the price for it.
Dave could have saved those two and a half years by thinking like a designer. This would have led him to research what marine biologists actually do, and he would have quickly learned that he wasn’t interested in that work. In other words, he would have consciously approached the question of his college major and career choice as a beginner, with an open mind and an attitude of learning and investigation, instead of thinking he already knew what he needed to know.
Just as harmful as focusing on the wrong problem is focusing on a problem that isn’t really one at all. In the process of life design, things that aren’t actionable don’t count as problems. But people get hung up on them all the time. For example, someone who wants to be a poet agonizes over the low pay and status of poets in contemporary society. Someone who wants to be company vice president agonizes over the fact that they work for a family-owned company where for five generations only members of that family have gotten such positions.
Such people are mistaking facts for problems. Facts are like gravity: They simply exist. They’re not problems, because there’s no action you can take to “solve” them. So framing them as problems is a sure route to experiencing the frustration of wasted time, energy, and emotion.
Designers are utter realists. They know the only effective response to reality is to accept it. Then you’re free to start designing better actions and responses toward that reality.
If you’re the poet frustrated by the market for poetry (which you can’t change), keep writing your poetry for the sheer love of it, and find some other problem to work on—maybe finding another kind of writing work that does earn money. Or look for another kind of job entirely, to support your poetry avocation.
If you’re the would-be vice president who’s locked out of such roles by long-standing company practice (which you can’t change), consider switching to another company. Or embrace and enjoy the good things at your current job. Consider looking for greater value in your work instead of greater authority in a higher title. Become the best you can be at whatever level you can rise to. Earn enough pay raises to give you the money you want, regardless of whether you’re ever called a vice president.
The point is to: 1) realize when you’re up against unchanging facts, and 2) change your thinking. Reframe the problem to recognize where your real opportunities lie.
To tackle the right problem for life design, and to understand where you want to go, you need to understand where you are right now.
Take an inventory of four areas:
Think of these four areas as making up a “dashboard.” Like the dashboard of a car, this one tells you how your various “systems” are functioning. It lets you know if you can get to where you’re going, and it tells you when you need to pull over for refueling or repair. Health is located at the dashboard’s base because the other three gauges all depend on it to some extent; when your health is troubled, this negatively affects the rest of your life.
To use the dashboard, reflect on your status in each of the four areas. Then indicate, on a scale from 0% to 100%, how “full” it is.
For example, imagine you’re an entrepreneur who has created a new startup. If you’re totally committed to the work, your work gauge might be nearly full. But if you’ve neglected your health and taken on too much stress, your health gauge might read low. If you’ve maintained good relationships with your family and friends, that gauge might read high. But if you’ve lost touch with leisure time and doing things for pure enjoyment, your joy gauge might read medium or low—unless your joy is bound up with your work.
To help with this self-assessment, ask yourself the following questions:
Once you’ve filled out the dashboard, you’ve begun to clarify the problems that you need to address through life design. You may find that you want to revise your dashboard occasionally, because your answers will change over time.
Chapter 1 introduced you to the idea of a “life dashboard” consisting of four “gauges” to help you identify your current situation and the problem that you need to address through life design. This exercise leads you through creating your personal dashboard.
Write several sentences describing how things are going for you in the four areas of health, work, joy, and relationships. Use specific details, but be succinct.
Assign each area a percentage to indicate how full you are in that area.
How is the balance and proportionality among the different gauges? (Are the readings pretty close to each other? Or are there wide differences?)
Based on your dashboard, how well is your life running overall? What can you already recognize as problem areas that can benefit from applying design principles?
In Chapter 1, you learned how to understand where you currently are in your life journey. In Chapter 2, you’ll learn how to navigate your life by building a “compass” and discovering your “true north.”
Defective belief: “I should always know where I’m headed.”
To get where you want to go, it’s essential to know what you’re looking for. The practice of life design can help you answer these questions by teaching you to build a life compass. This consists of two components:
To create your life compass, write a statement of your work philosophy and a separate statement of your life philosophy. Then compare the two and examine how they relate to each other. The exercise at the end of this chapter will lead you through the process.
Your work and life philosophies will shift over time, so revisit and revise them occasionally to recalibrate your life compass.
Creating your life compass provides a way to gauge your life’s coherence. Remember, life design is all about having a coherent life. This means a life in which you clearly understand the connections among three things:
Incoherence in your life is easy to spot once you’ve built your life compass, which enfolds these three things. For example, if part of your life philosophy is the belief that it’s important to leave a better, cleaner planet for the next generation, but your actions include working for a large corporation that pollutes the skies and oceans, you’re living with incoherence.
Sometimes temporary incoherencies are okay, if you choose them consciously. For example, your life philosophy might value art above everything else, but your work philosophy might put art temporarily on hold so that you can make enough money to support your family while you’re raising your kids. In this case, your life is still coherent, because you’re consciously navigating temporary factors to maintain your overall life course, as opposed to being thrown off course by an unacknowledged conflict.
Once you’ve written down your work and life philosophies and considered their coherence, you’ll know your life’s “true north.” At any given moment, you’ll be able to tell whether you’re heading in the right direction. You’ll be able to use your work and life philosophies to reorient yourself whenever you feel briefly lost.
Chapter 2 introduced you to the “life compass,” which consists of your work philosophy and your life philosophy. This exercise leads you through the process of creating this tool.
Briefly write out your work philosophy (up to 250 words). What do you think work means? What is it for? How does work relate individuals to society? What makes work good or worthwhile? Does it involve service to others? What’s the place of money? Does it have anything to do with fulfillment, growth, or use of talents?
Briefly write out your life philosophy (up to 250 words). What is life’s meaning? Why are you (and everybody else) here? What’s the relationship between individuals and family, country, humankind? What are good and evil? Is there a God or higher power? What’s the role in human life of such things as justice, injustice, love, hatred, and conflict?
Where do your work and life philosophies complement each other?
Where do your work and life views clash with each other? (If noticing these clashes makes you want to go back and revise what you’ve written, feel free. Just make sure you write your philosophies honestly, stating how you really see and think about things.)
In Chapter 2, you built your life compass and discovered your true north. Chapter 3 teaches you how to find your direction by using the ancient art of wayfinding. You’ll learn to create a journal to follow the clues of your involvement, energy, and joy.
Defective belief: Work shouldn’t be enjoyable
Wayfinding helps you know where you’re going without a firm destination in mind. All you need is a compass and a direction. It requires you to pay attention to clues. For wayfinding in your life, the clues are involvement, energy, and joy.
Notice how involved and engaged you feel with your work. What makes you feel interested, focused, and excited? On the other end, what makes you feel bored and dull?
Pay attention to the intensified state of involvement known as flow. Being “in flow” means total involvement in an activity, combined with a sense of euphoria, clarity, peace, and the disappearance of time. It can happen with almost any activity—playing a sport, chopping an onion, designing a business plan. Flow relates back to the “play” gauge on your life dashboard, because flow makes you enjoy the pure doing of something.
Start paying attention to your energy level. How vital and alive do you feel? Also notice the activities you’re involved in whenever you feel highly energized, as well as the ones that make you feel exhausted.
Joy is a feeling of aliveness, engagement, and delight when an activity seems intrinsically fun. Pay attention to the activities that bring you joy, and also the ones that steal it.
To make use of these clues of involvement, energy, and joy, keep a journal consisting of two components:
Your activity log is where you keep a list of your main daily activities and indicate how involved and energized they made you feel. The point is to figure out which things motivate you and which ones demotivate you. Write in this journal frequently—at least twice a week, but ideally every day.
When you get the hang of paying detailed attention to your daily activities, you’ll have learned to “catch” yourself having a good time, and the knowledge of what produces this effect will be invaluable.
The reflections section of your Wayfinding Journal is where you write down what you learn from examining your activity log and noticing any themes, insights, or surprises about what does and doesn’t make you feel involved and energized. Before starting to do your reflections, build up a substantial activity log, at least three weeks’ worth. That way you’ll have enough material to identify real patterns. Then start writing weekly reflections on blank pages of your activity log.
Be specific in these reflections. “Zoom in” mentally and identify the exact components of your activities that involve or bore you, energize or drain you. Did you really enjoy the whole staff meeting, or was it just the part where you restated someone’s point better? If it was just that part, did your enjoyment come from restating the point artfully or from the fact that you helped to facilitate group consensus? The answers to such questions give you actionable data for designing your life (as subsequent chapters will teach you).
To help with your reflections, use the following questions:
You can create a Wayfinding Journal from your past experiences as well as your present ones. Just apply your new journaling technique to memories of past work experiences where you entered flow, reached peak energy, and experienced joy. Using these peak memories can be especially helpful when your current situation doesn’t offer much material for your journal, or when you’re just starting your professional life and don’t have much experience to draw on. You can use school projects, volunteer work, and so on.
Subsequent chapters will teach you how to use your Wayfinding Journal for various aspects of life design. Right now, you can use it to strategically plan your daily life. For example, in reflecting on his activity log, one of this book’s authors found that he experienced flow from his office hours and his drawing lessons, and that he felt energized from going on date nights with his wife and teaching classes. For activities such as faculty meetings, his involvement and energy depended on the topic at hand. He was surprised to find that one activity he thought he liked actually drained him. So he redesigned that activity to work better, and he rebuilt his schedule to maximize his energizing activities and carefully manage his draining activities.
Chapter 3 told you how to create a journal to help you practice the art of wayfinding in your life. This exercise will help you to practice the skills involved in keeping that journal.
Think of an activity where you felt both involved and energized. Ideally, think of one where you experienced flow. What was the activity?
What aspects of the activity created the sense of involvement, flow, and energy? Use the four question sets (who, what, where, and interactions) to “zoom in” with your reflections.
Think of an activity where you felt uninvolved and drained. State what it was and perform the same reflection exercise on it.
What can you do this week to act on these findings? For example, can you strategize your schedule more effectively to maximize your involvement and energy and minimize or mitigate your boring and draining activities?
In Chapter 3, you learned how to wayfind your life to discover your direction. In Chapter 4, you’ll learn how to remove blocks from your life by combining your Wayfinding Journal with the technique of mind mapping to envision multiple options.
Defective belief: I’m blocked.
Defective belief: I have to come up with the single right idea.
We all get stuck or blocked sometimes in life. We want to make a change, but we can’t figure out what to do, let alone how to do it. For example, you may feel stuck in the wrong job and blocked in your attempts to find new work. Maybe you feel like you picked the wrong college major, and now you’re too far down the road to change. What you need in such a situation is ideation: the skill and act of generating ideas. Approaching your blocks with a design mindset can generate more ideas than you ever thought possible.
To be an effective life designer, follow two principles:
Remember what you learned in this book’s introduction: There is no single best plan for your life. A successful, happy, productive “you” could take many possible forms. Moreover, there are different paths to each of those lives. So this adds up to a multitude of possibilities. And that’s where design thinking excels.
Designers thrive on ideas. They think broadly, even wildly, and they come up with as many ideas as they can. They achieve quality in ideation by vastly expanding the quantity of their ideation. Put differently, they get more good ideas simply by training themselves to have more ideas.
They also train themselves not to be fooled, when they’re working on a problem, by the first ideas that suggest themselves. These first ideas can often seem seductively persuasive, but you should always remember not to fall in love with them. The really creative solutions are almost always the later ones.
We’re all born with a creative bent. You can see it in the unself-conscious playing of children, who sing, draw, and dance with abandon. They don’t care if they “look foolish” or “do it wrong.” Self-consciousness comes later when you realize you’re being criticized or held to external standards. This kills creativity. But it’s still there inside you, and you can access it through simple tools and techniques such as mind mapping and reframing entrenched problems.
Mind mapping is a way that you can ideate on your own, without a team, and it can help you get unblocked. It works by free associating with words and ideas and generating a visual map of their relationships (a typical mind map is the “bubble map” of connected circles and words). Because it’s visual, it gets past your possible inner “censor” based on verbal logic.
The three steps in mind-mapping are:
Use your Wayfinding Journal to give you the topics for your mind maps. From your journal, pick something that you found intensely involving, and draw a mind map with it at the center. Do the same for something that energized you, and also for something that generated the experience of flow. For one of these maps, pick three items from the outer ring (making sure they’re ones that intuitively excite you), and use them to make a potential job description that would help other people and that you’d find enjoyable and interesting. Now draw a sketch of this job. Do the same with your other two mind maps. Make sure you come up with three completely separate job descriptions.
It doesn’t matter if any of these “solutions” sound realistically doable. The point is to unfreeze your thoughts and get your ideas flowing. When you learn to creatively combine ideas without stifling any of them, you have adopted the mindset of a designer.
Some problems are so tenacious that we need to recognize them as their own special category. They drag us down like an anchor and cause us trouble over long periods of time.
An entrenched problem can only be solved by reframing it. This is because we have actually created it through wrong thinking—perhaps by jumping on the first “solution” that suggested itself. Note that this means entrenched problems are different from the non-problems you learned about in Chapter 1. As stated there, a non-problem is a fact that you’ve mistaken for a problem. Because it’s a fact, it’s not actionable and can’t be “solved.” By contrast, you can solve entrenched problems by changing your thinking.
For example, a sociology professor named Melanie tried for years to get funding for a new Institute for Social Innovation. But she found herself blocked by her college’s lack of support, and her extended period of frustration damaged her friendships and her effectiveness in the classroom. Eventually, she reframed the problem and realized that she was focused on the wrong thing. Her problem wasn’t how to raise millions of dollars for the institute. Her problem was how to positively impact her college through social innovation. The idea for an institute had just been the first thing she thought of. Realizing this, she started interviewing people on campus for thoughts on how to incorporate social innovation into campus life. The influx of new ideas eventually led to the establishment of a student dorm that was themed for social innovation, with Melanie as its faculty advisor.
Chapter 4 taught you how to create mind maps to generate creative solutions to problems. This exercise will lead you through reflecting on what you can learn by doing this.
Create a mind map as described in the chapter. What did you choose as your central topic?
What are the second-layer words and ideas that you wrote about your central topic?
What are the third-layer (and, if applicable, fourth-layer) words and ideas that you built out from the second-layer ones?
What did you learn when you combined ideas from the outermost layer of your mind map? What creative solutions to your problem did you come up with? What ideas from your subconscious mind did this exercise bring to light?
In Chapter 4, you learned how to create a mind map for generating multiple ideas to solve life design problems. You also learned how to use reframing to deal with problems that are entrenched. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to design multiple life plans for yourself. You’ll develop “prototype” models for three separate lives that you could live.
Defective belief: I have to identify, plan, and execute my one best life.
It’s amazing what can happen when you stop trying to “get it right” by building what you conceive as the only right life for you. You can get wonderful results—and often unexpected results, ones far better than you could have planned for—if you intentionally think through multiple potential life paths and life designs for yourself.
To apply this principle, develop three separate Adventure Plans, each one detailing a different life that you could live, including both career factors and non-career factors. Limit each to a five-year period, which seems to be a natural rhythm; most people’s lives unfold in three- to five-year “seasons.” Considering making at least one of your plans “unrealistic” or even “wild,” like living off the grid in a tent in the Amazon rainforest (if that’s your thing).
Your first Adventure Plan will center on something you’ve already got in mind. It will be either the life you’re actually living (imagined forward by five years) or a good idea that you’ve been developing for your life.
Your second plan will describe what you’d do if the area you currently work in or have been planning to work in disappeared. For example, if you’re a management consultant, what would you do if suddenly that industry just dried up and went away?
Your third plan will describe what you’d do if money and reputation didn’t matter. What would you do if you knew for certain that: A) it would support you materially, and B) nobody would laugh at you?
Each of your five-year adventure plans will need the following components:
The final step of designing your multiple lives is to share them with a group of supportive people. You can’t always see yourself accurately. You need other people’s input. You’ll learn in Chapter 11 about putting together a life design team. For now, just pick a handful of people (three to six) whom you trust and who will provide honest and constructive reactions to your three Adventure Plans. Share your plans with this group, and write down what they say. Let their feedback inform your decisions.
Chapter 5 taught you how to create three different adventure plans for your life. This exercise helps you to get started on doing that.
Your first plan should focus on your current life (imagined five years forward) or an idea that you’ve already been developing. What is this plan? Give it a six-word title.
Your second plan imagines what you’d do if your current work world disappeared. Your third imagines what you’d do if money and reputation didn’t matter. What will you select for these plans? Give each a six-word title. Consider drawing on ideas from your Wayfinding Journal.
You can probably already imagine some questions that each of these plans will raise—about feasibility, funding, or any number of other factors. What are some of these questions?
Commit to actually creating your three plans this week using the format provided in the chapter. For now, consider what you’ll enter in the dashboard for each plan. How “full” do you think the gauges for resources, like level, confidence, and coherence will be?
In Chapter 5, you learned how to envision multiple life scenarios by developing Adventure Plans. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use prototyping to explore questions about your alternatives by conducting life interviews and pursuing exploratory experiences.
Defective belief: The best way to answer questions about my plan is to conduct exhaustive research on every aspect of it.
Recall the second aspect of design thinking that you learned in the introduction: experimentation. Experimentation simply means trying things out. The essence of design thinking in action is to build a potential solution to your problem so that you can test it. All problem solving begins with gathering data so that you can understand the problem correctly.
But life design is somewhat different because you don’t have reliable data about your future. That’s where prototyping comes in.
Many people have an idea for their lives and leap ahead with it before finding out what it really means. For example, a man may love little Italian cafes, so he invests the time and money to open his own, but only then does he discover that he doesn’t like the actual work involved in running a cafe. Prototyping his cafe plan would have shown him this ahead of time.
Prototyping your life design enables you to do the following things:
Two ways to use prototyping in life design are to conduct life interviews and to pursue exploratory experiences.
The easiest form of prototyping is a conversation, and for life design, the type of conversation you need is a life interview. In this kind of interview, you learn from someone who knows what it’s like to live the life you’re contemplating, and you let this tell you whether that life is something you’d really like to pursue for yourself. For example, the man who found that he didn’t really like running a cafe could have saved himself the grief and expense by talking with some cafe owners first and learning about what such a job and lifestyle really involves.
Life interviews are amazingly simple to conduct. You just find someone who’s currently doing the work and/or living the life you’re considering, and you get them to tell you their story by asking them: A) how they came to be doing this, and B) what it’s really like. Or you find someone who has expertise and experience, and you ask them how they got that expertise and what it was like to live that life.
Sometimes one of these interviews can lead to a job for you. People often respond empathetically when someone shows a genuine interest in them. But be sure not to approach a life interview as a job interview, because this will ruin the dynamic you’re seeking to establish by putting the other person in a judgmental frame of mind toward you.
The second kind of life design prototype is the exploratory experience, such as an internship, job shadowing, or volunteer work. Whatever form it takes, think of it as a “test drive” to give you hands-on experience and first-hand knowledge of the work and life you’re considering.
Conducting several life interviews first can provide some good ideas for possible exploratory experiences. But if you feel stuck for ideas, consider using the following two approaches.
1. Use Your Adventure Plans
You can use your Adventure Plans from Chapter 5 to intelligently plot your exploratory experiences. Pick one of your plans where the dashboard readings for like level, confidence, and coherence are relatively high, and use the questions you wrote for that plan as a guide to what you’re trying to understand better through your exploratory experiences.
2. Conduct Life Design Brainstorming
Everybody is familiar with brainstorming, but the process of life design brainstorming takes its own specific four-step form. It’s intended for use by groups of three to six people.
You may not have access to a team of people with whom you could conduct a brainstorming session. If this is the case, don’t worry: You’ve already learned how to do mind mapping (Chapter 4), and this is an excellent one-person alternative to brainstorming that you can use to develop ideas for prototypes. You can also use mind mapping to come up with ideas for life interviews that you’d like to conduct.
In Chapter 6, you learned how to prototype alternative designs for your life. This exercise guides you through an initial process of practicing this skill.
Review your three Adventure Plans. Pay special attention to the questions you wrote for each. Pick one of these plans that really excites you. What are the questions you wrote for it?
Make a list of life interviews that could help you answer these questions. Use mind mapping if it helps you get ideas.
Make a list of exploratory experiences that could help you answer the questions. Again, use mind mapping if it helps you get ideas.
Who could you approach about forming a brainstorming team for life design prototyping? Write down the names of two to four people, noting why each would be a good choice.
In Chapter 6, you learned how to prototype your Adventure Plans to help you understand what they mean in the real world. In this chapter, you’ll learn why the best route to fulfilling work is not through the want ads—the route that most people take. But if you still want to try this route, you’ll learn how to recognize what’s wrong with most job ads, how to understand the mindset of hiring managers, and how to tailor your application materials for best effect.
Defective belief: My focus should be on my need for a job.
The Internet is the most popular source for job searches these days. It’s also a massive waste of time. Although thousands of jobs are posted each week, most of the really great jobs never show up. Instead, they’re filled internally without ever being publicly shown. Only about 20 percent of available jobs are posted on the Internet (or posted anywhere). So you’re not even seeing the dream jobs that you’d like to apply for.
Moreover, a large number of published job ads are actually meaningless “phantom jobs.” They’re only published to meet some company requirement for posting a job externally before it can be filled. In reality, the company has already selected someone, and they wrote the job description to that person’s qualifications.
This accounts for the fact that fewer than half the job applications submitted through the traditional route (revise your resume, write a cover letter, and apply) ever get a response.
Then there are the problems built into job descriptions themselves. Often, these descriptions are written by someone who doesn’t understand the job, which may be why such descriptions rarely describe what a job really requires to be successful.
Here’s the typical job description pattern:
Another problem is introduced by the presence of hot (or cool, depending on your metaphor) companies such as Google and Apple—the places everybody wants to work. These companies distort the hiring arena because, with their immense popularity, they actually do have the ability to find those demigod candidates. This means good people frequently get rejected. The companies can afford to be cavalier about the common error of mistaking great candidates for lousy ones, since they always have an endless supply of new applicants.
Having said all that, there are still things you can do to improve your chances of getting a job if you want to use the conventional approach.
Using these tips, which clue you into the mindset of hiring managers and interview committees (and HR screening software), can increase your chances of job-hunting success if you choose to follow the traditional route. However, there’s a much better way: Gain access to the hidden job market. The next chapter will teach you how.
In Chapter 8, you learned about the problems with the conventional approach to job searching, and you learned some tips for increasing your chances if you do go that route. In this chapter, you’ll learn a far better approach: the approach of tapping into the hidden job market. This involves using the prototyping technique of life interviews combined with effective networking practices. You also may need to reframe your core idea of job seeking.
Defective belief: My dream job is “somewhere out there,” waiting for me in the world.
Defective belief: “Networking” is a synonym for “hustling people.” It’s a fundamentally slimy activity.
Defective belief: I’m seeking a job.
The first step in getting your dream job is to give up your idealized notion of a dream job. There’s no magically “perfect” job for anybody. What really exists are interesting jobs at worthy organizations with good people. At least a couple of these are ones that you could make close enough to “perfect” to love them for a long time. You just can’t see them right now because they belong to the hidden job market.
Remember, the purpose of a life interview isn’t to find a job but to learn about some kind of work to understand whether you’d like to do it. The wonderful thing is that job offers often occur as a side effect of these conversations, and many times they’re from the hidden market. Often when an interviewee sees your genuine interest, they’ll let you know of available positions, whether published or not: “You seem interested in our work, and you seem qualified. Would you ever think of working at a company like this?” (You can also tilt the conversation in that direction yourself, using a strategically open-ended question: “I’m fascinated by your work and the people here. What steps would it take for somebody like me to become part of such an organization?”)
The story of Kurt illustrates the superiority of this approach over the traditional job hunting method. Kurt moved to a new town with his master’s in design from Stanford and began seeking work in the sustainable architecture field. He sent out applications to 38 jobs that he found on the Internet. From these, he received eight standardized rejections and 30 non-responses.
Then he applied design thinking and started conducting life interviews—56 in all—to prototype his possible futures. He focused on people and jobs that he found genuinely interesting. This resulted in seven different job offers, six of which weren’t publicly posted, and one of which was an authentic dream job. For six of these, he didn’t have to ask; his interviewees volunteered the information. In his final interview with the board of directors for the dream job, he had already established good relationships with three of five members through his life interviews.
Kurt was so successful in lining up life interviews because he used good networking techniques. To follow his example, you first have to let go of any negative emotional connotations that you may attach to the idea of networking. Think of networking simply as asking someone on the street for directions to an unfamiliar address. Most people want to help. They don’t feel used or annoyed.
To network effectively, first reach out to your first-tier contacts, the people you actually know and have in your address files, and ask them for leads. Use what you learn to reach out to your second-tier contacts—the contacts of your contacts. Also research people and organizations. Then request life interviews with interesting people in interesting positions.
Here’s how this kind of networking gives you access to valuable opportunities:
When you use good networking skills, that’s when the Internet actually becomes valuable, because that’s when you can start putting resources like Google and LinkedIn to good use.
Finally, cap your exploration of the hidden job market by making a critical distinction in your job-searching activities: Since the defectiveness of job descriptions means you can’t really know what most jobs are about just from reading about them, adopt the mindset that you’re not looking for a job but looking for job offers. This will expand your horizons. It will shift you into a curiosity-based state of mind that leads you to investigate and evaluate opportunities with genuine interest. It will change the jobs you consider, how you write resumes and cover letters, and how you approach job interviews. It will motivate you to put life interviews and exploratory experiences to truly good use. All of this in turn will make you more attractive to potential employers who sense your interest in them.
In Chapter 8, you learned how to tap into the hidden job market. In this chapter, you’ll learn a step-by-step process for choosing happiness as an integral component of life design.
Defective belief: My happiness depends on making the right choice.
Defective belief: Happiness means “having it all.”
The underlying goal of life design is happiness. This is what gives meaning to all the attitudes, steps, and techniques you’ve learned in this book so far. As a designer, you realize that being happy comes from choosing well among the options you generate through life design. Conversely, being unhappy comes from choosing poorly. Both types of choosing depend on a person’s mental model.
Many people use a model for choosing life options that virtually guarantees unhappiness. Or rather, they don’t use much of a model at all. Instead, they choose based on an unconscious conglomeration of thoughts, emotions, values, and motivations. By failing to take control of their choosing and make it coherent, they cut themselves off from critical insights (see below) and increase the likelihood that after they finally make a choice, they’ll agonize and be unhappy.
The tendency to agonize over choices we’ve made is apparently built into human psychology. Psychological experiments have found a tendency to agonize over not having made “the best choice” in situations where people had multiple options and/or felt there were options they couldn’t see. So when you choose among alternatives for the very direction of your life, if you don’t do something to manage this tendency, you risk consigning yourself to endless rounds of stress and regret. That’s why you need to make conscious use of a good model.
The life design model for choosing is designed to maximize happiness.
First, collect and create options. This is what you’ve been learning to do in previous chapters.
Second, focus and narrow your list. Too many options create decision paralysis, like when you have thousands of streaming movies available but can’t settle on any of them. You don’t need more information; you need less. So look at your list of life design options and identify the top ones. As a strategy for doing this, group your list into themed categories, each one ordered by rank according to your interest. Then cross off lesser options.
Third, use careful discernment to choose. By “discernment” we mean relying on more than one way of knowing. In addition to the cognitive knowing that most of us usually rely on, there are affective forms of knowing (emotions, spirituality, intuition) as well as kinesthetic or bodily knowing. To make good decisions, use these forms in tandem with cognitive knowing.
After you’ve generated and then narrowed your options, pay attention to your intuitions, emotions, and body, and “listen” to what they “tell you.” For example, Burnett and Evans (the authors of this book) know a therapist who can tell whenever she’s approaching a significant issue with a client because her knee starts to hurt. She’s learned to listen to her body’s signals to help guide her therapeutic decisions.
You have to train yourself to hear these other forms of knowing. Traditional ways of doing this include practices such as journaling, yoga, tai chi, prayer, and meditation. Another practice, specific to life design choices, is to pick one of your top three life design alternatives and spend two or three days imaginatively living inside it as a kind of alternate reality. In your mind, all through the day, think and feel as if you had adopted that choice. Pay attention to your emotional, spiritual, intuitive, and physical feelings for signals about the rightness or wrongness of this alternative. Then do the same with the other two options.
If you’re not already practicing one or more disciplines like these, start now so that you can begin developing your discernment skills and have them ready when you need them.
Fourth, choose and let go. This is the capstone of the life design model for choosing. When you intelligently generate options, narrow your list, and use discernment, you’re in the mental and emotional position to choose boldly and let go of any temptation to agonize or rehash. You’ve done your best to explore options and test them out. You’ve considered their coherence with your life and work philosophies. You’ve prototyped. You’ve made a careful selection among your options using a holistic process based on cognitive plus other ways of knowing. Now you can freely let go of any lingering doubts and just concentrate on living well with the choices you’ve made.
In Chapter 9, you learned a model for making intelligent life design choices that generate happiness and eliminate regret. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to become immune to failure by reframing your belief about what failure means. You’ll also learn how to learn and grow from your failures.
Defective belief: The success or failure of your life depends on its outcome.
Defective belief: There are winners and losers in the finite game of life.
Becoming immune to failure doesn’t mean you’ll never fail again. It means you’re protected from the negative feelings of self-recrimination that usually accompany failure.
You achieve this state by reframing your belief that failure is bad. You realize that when you’re a life designer, you fail intentionally and fail more often because you regularly employ the two life design attitudes of curiosity and experimentation. These lead you to generate ideas and build prototypes—which can fail. You also learn from the failures that arise from your personal weaknesses and screw-ups.
Failure is a necessary part of the design process. It’s the raw material of success because it informs how you generate more ideas and build more prototypes. Productive failure contributes directly to who you become, both professionally and personally.
Realize that there’s a distinction between the productive failures of the design process and the psychological identity of “being a failure.” The latter is flatly impossible when you realize that your whole life is actually a process of life design. Because you’re always growing and changing, life is an “infinite game,” to use the philosopher James Carse’s memorable term. An infinite game is one in which you don’t follow preset rules in an effort to win but play with the rules themselves for the pure joy of the game .
(Shortform note: Learn more about finite and infinite games in our guide to The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek .)
Since life is an infinite game, there’s no such thing as an ultimate failure from which you can’t recover. Instead, there’s only the endlessly recursive process of life design. It’s recursive because it starts by taking stock of who and where you currently are (Chapters 1, 2, and 3). Then it moves on to trying things out (Chapters 4, 5, and 6) and making intelligent choices (Chapters 7, 8, and 9). These choices in turn change your circumstances and even yourself, thus starting the whole process over again. Stated in classical Western philosophical terms, your life is an endless loop of being, doing, and becoming. This means that as a life designer, you’re always succeeding at the infinite game of finding who you are and meaningfully engaging with the world.
And, to repeat, you’re immune to failure—it doesn’t crush your spirit. This is true even for surprise events that you can’t anticipate and that aren’t part of your life design plans, such as the onset of a major illness. These become enfolded within your infinite game as you incorporate them into your process of being, doing, and becoming.
This means you’re free to do and pursue whatever you want because you’re no longer afraid of how you’ll feel if things don’t work out the way you expected.
Here’s a practical method of reframing specific failures to convert them into growth opportunities.
First, keep a failure log. Write down your failures. Pick any time frame for them: yesterday, last week, this year. Where and how have you failed?
Second, organize your failures into categories.
Third, recognize insights for growth. Notice which failures offer opportunities to learn and improve. Identify what went wrong. Ask yourself what you could do better next time.
For example, Dave (one of this book’s authors) kept a failure log and noted that he forgot his daughter’s birthday by a week because he was traveling (a screw-up), he scrambled to finish a required budget at the eleventh hour (a recurring procrastination-based weakness), and he angered a client during a phone meeting when he skipped preliminary conversation and dived right into the agenda. He categorized this last one as an improvement opportunity because he realized that his failure to “check in” with the client about news since their last meeting had led him to start with a now-irrelevant agenda item.
Consider using the following template for reframing your failures:
| FAILURE | Screw-up | Weakness | Improvement Opportunity | Insight |
| Missed daughter’s birthday | X | |||
| Last-minute budget | X | |||
| Phone surprise | X | Start phone calls with a check-in |
In Chapter 10, you learned a method for reframing failures. This exercise leads you to try it out.
Look back over your last week or month (your choice). What failures have you made? Be sure to include one or more that represent improvement opportunities.
Categorize these failures as screw-ups, weaknesses, or improvement opportunities.
What are your improvement insights?
How can you productively integrate this exercise into your regular schedule? What will be the best rhythm for you (once a month, twice a month)? Why?
In Chapter 10, you learned how to become immune to failure so that you can fearlessly pursue any goal you choose. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to build a team to help with your ongoing project of designing your life.
Defective belief: This is my life, so I have to design it on my own.
Recall the last of the five basic mental attitudes of design thinking: deep teamwork. This attitude says life design is a collaborative and communal process instead of a solitary, “heroic” artistic pursuit. Notice that many of the skills you’ve learned so far, such as wayfinding and prototyping, depend on participation by other people. In life design, you don’t create but co-create ideas and opportunities. Your life design is “out there” in the world of people and relationships, not inside your head. You’ve already seen this as your wayfinding journal and prototyping efforts have led you to consider and become involved with various people.
Now you need to take the next step of consciously identifying your team, which includes two levels: general and specific.
Your general team consists of people who play three different roles:
Your specific team consists of three to six people whom you pick from your general team to share your life design project directly. Consider choosing people who are already involved, such as the ones who gave feedback on your alternative Adventure Plans.
When your team meets, make sure you all follow simple and clearly defined rules to maximize the benefits of their role as co-creators of your life design. For example, you might specify that everyone needs to be respectful at meetings, provide constructive advice instead of criticism, and keep all team business private. Each meeting needs a facilitator to ensure the conversation remains focused and flows productively. The most natural person for this role is you. As facilitator, make sure everyone gets to speak.
If possible, include one or more mentors on your specific team. Or at least try to find one among your general team. Mentors are people who don’t so much tell you what to think as help you think for yourself and sharpen your own insights and decision-making. They listen closely to what you say and help you reframe defective beliefs. When you have to make decisions (see Chapter 9), they help with your discernment process. Some people may be lifelong mentors to you. Others may only mentor you through a specific life period or on a specific topic. Scan through your relationships right now and see if you can identify any potential mentors. Then approach them and ask for their advice.
Beyond serving as a life design team, you may find that the group of people you gather turns into a genuine community, a group of individuals who are deeply invested in each other’s life. If this happens, be grateful for such a gift.
Communities are characterized by such things as a shared purpose, a habit of getting together regularly, and a core of shared values and attitudes. In a life design community, there’s also the added habit of talking together sincerely and openly about your lives, your dreams, and how you’re trying to unite these in a lifelong experience of happiness and success. Having such a community is one of the best ways to ensure that your life design efforts bear fruit and take you where you want to go.
In Chapter 11, you learned about creating a life design team. This exercise will help you get started.
Who are some of the major presences in all three categories of your general team: allies, key players, and intimates? List as many as you can think of.
List three to five people from the longer list above who might be good candidates for your specific team. Focus especially on anyone who is actively involved in designing their own life.
What could you do this week to start drawing together this team? (Send emails? Make phone calls? Visit people personally?)
What exactly do you plan to say to each potential team member? How will you make your invitation sound truly inviting?
In this guide, you’ve learned how to design your life by understanding where you are, building a compass (your work and life philosophies) to guide you, wayfinding in your life, generating ideas, prototyping your future, approaching the job market intelligently, becoming immune to failure, and creating a life design team.
Going forward, as you use your new skills to continually design the rest of your life, remember to apply the five design attitudes (from the introduction) whenever you encounter situations that call for them. This will bring a continuous flow of information for you to incorporate into your design activities.
Also remember to refer frequently to your life compass to assess how things are going: Are you remaining true to yourself? Is your life remaining coherent?
Finally, commit fully to a practice for tuning into non-cognitive forms of knowing, as you learned about in Chapter 9 on choosing happiness. Whether it’s journaling, meditation, tai chi, or another, the discipline of engaging regularly with one or more of these practices will help keep you centered and in touch with your whole being. You’ll have a clearer mind and spirit as you design a joyful and fulfilling life.
Defective belief: After I’ve designed my life, everything will be wonderful.
The book’s conclusion reminded you of the five design attitudes and recommended that you commit to a specific practice for remaining in touch with your whole being (not just your intellect). This exercise leads you to begin planning these things.
For designing your life, what do you presently need to know? What would you like to explore? State these things as questions, and list at least two specific ways you could intelligently pursue the answers this week.
What defective beliefs has this book uncovered in your mind? How can you reframe them right now?
What steps can you start pursuing, beginning tomorrow, to implement the lessons in this book?
If you already have a practice such as prayer or yoga, how can you integrate it in a mutually enhancing way with your life design efforts? If you don’t currently have such a practice, which one sounds the most attractive to you—meditation, prayer, yoga, tai chi, journaling, something else?—and what can you do to begin it right away?