What’s In It For Me?
One of the most popular and influential courses at Stanford University, Designing Your Life, has helped thousands of people change the way they live. After teaching the course for many years, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans decided to publish a book (Designing Your Life) that provides the concepts from the course so a wider audience could put them to use. Since work is such an integral part of our the hours we spend every week, the authors focus the majority of the concepts on career satisfaction, while acknowledging the equal importance of health and relationships.
What is a well-designed life? It is a collection of adventures, experiences, and failures that teach us lessons to learn from and opportunities to grow to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and make a contribution to society. Designing Your Life is about helping you find your meaning and purpose, attempting to answer the thought-provoking questions such as:
How do I find a job I genuinely enjoy or even love?
How do I achieve work/life balance?
How can I make a difference in the world?
The Big Idea
What happens when Silicon Valley innovators apply design principles they used at Apple and other prominent technology firms to the concept of life design? The result is an innovative approach that uses a design process to help people figure out what they want and how to create it. Rather than dreaming up a bunch of fun fantasies that have no relation to the real world, or the real you, the authors suggest that in order for people to change, they need a design process to follow. The book suggests a process that uses four different mindsets to help you in the design of your life:
Curiosity: Invites exploration and excitement. It also helps you “get good at getting lucky.”
Bias to action: It is easy to waste a significant amount of time thinking about who you are and what you want to do with your life. Designers take action by building numerous prototypes, testing things out, and embracing change. More importantly, they are not attached to a particular outcome because they are always curious about what will happen next, instead of what the final result will be.
Reframing: Life design is about stepping back, examining biases, and moving towards a solution. A common belief many people have is that if you are successful, you will be happy. Unfortunately, there are many highly successful people that are deeply unhappy. The authors would describe this as a dysfunctional belief and suggest the statement is reframed as “true happiness comes from designing a life that works for you.”
Radical collaboration: Just as designers work on a team, in designing your life people play an integral role. The book gives suggestions on how to find mentors and a supportive community to help you in your life design process.
Dysfunctional beliefs can get in the way of how you approach life. A key message from the book is there is not one correct path for you in life, nor do you need to know your passion to design a life you love. The reality is most people are passionate about many different things in life, but by applying the design principles of prototyping some potential lives and trying them out, you will discover a new way to approach life.
Key Concept #1
The HWPL Dashboard
You cannot know where you are going unless you know where you currently are. Similar to the purpose of your car’s dashboard, the authors suggest having a life dashboard with four important gauges to assess how things are going in your life in the following four categories:
Health: When you are not healthy, nothing in your life works very well. A well designed life is supported by a healthy body, engaged mind, and often some form of spiritual practice. Spirituality does not necessarily mean religion, but any practice that is based on a belief that there is something bigger than ourselves.
Work: Make a list of of all the ways you work (W-2 job, second jobs, volunteering, etc) and assess your working life as a whole.
Play: Any activity that brings you joy for the pure sake of doing it can be defined as play. All lives need some play, so make a quick list of what you do for fun.
Love: If we don’t have love in our lives, our world is not as bright and alive as it could be. It is as critical to feel loved by others as it is to love. Make a list of where the love is flowing in your life, from you and from others.
Knowing the current status of your HWPL dashboard gives you a framework and data about how its really going in your life. The authors stress the importance that achieving perfect balance in all four categories is not the goal. Life design is an iterative process of prototypes and experimentation, just as health, work, play, and love change over time. The takeaway from the dashboard exercise is to ask yourself: are you are happy right now with your gauges in each of the four areas of your life? Now that you have a good idea of your starting point, it’s time to get pointed in the right direction for your journey ahead.
Key Concept #2
Build A Compass: Workview and Lifeview
What is your purpose or quest in life? We all know how to worry about our lives, analyze our lives, and speculate about our lives, but these lead to inaction and are not the best tools to use for uncovering the answers to the perennial questions of purpose and meaning in life. The authors suggest the best place to start is by building your own compass, which consists of both a Workview and Lifeview.
Workview: If you discover and articulate your approach to work (what it’s for and why you do it) you will be less likely to let others design your life for you. As an action step, write a short reflection on about your workview. A workview should address critical issues related to what work is and what it means to you. A workview may address questions such as:
Why work?
What’s work for?
How does it relate to the individual, others, society?
What defines good or worthwhile work?
What does money have to do with it?
What do experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?
This exercise is not intended to be a job description or help you find out what type of work you are interested in, but help uncover why you work.
Lifeview: Your lifeview will provide the critical defining values and perspectives that serve as the basis for your understanding of life. The questions below may help in framing your lifeview:
Why am I here?
What is the meaning or purpose of life?
What is the relationship between the individual and others?
Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in?
What is good, and what is evil?
Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent, and if so, what impact does this have on your life?
What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace, and strife in life?
After completing your workview and lifeview, it is import to reflect on the following questions:
Where do your views on work and life complement one another?
Where do they clash?
Does one drive the other? How?
By having your workview and lifeview in concert with one another, you will increase your own clarity and ability to live a coherent, meaningful life-one in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do are aligned. In life it is important to acknowledge that you will not always know where you are going, but by having a life compass that combines the workview and lifeview, you will at least know if you are going in the right direction.
Key Concept #3
Good Time Journaling and Getting Unstuck
Have you ever felt stuck in your job or career? The book gives a great example of a young man named Michael, who essentially had his mom plan a good majority of his young adult life. Michael’s mom planned where he should apply to college and even what he should major in. The result was a civil engineering degree from Cal Poly. Although Michael was not particularly interested in being a civil engineer, he simply followed his Mom’s plan. Although he made great money, after about a decade at a great civil engineering firm he was bored, restless, and miserable. Michael was on the verge of upending his career and life completely, when at the suggestion of the authors of this book, decided to engage in an exercise called the Good Time Journal. Michael was to write down when he was excited, focused, and having a good time at work, and what exactly he was doing during those times (i.e. the times he was totally engaged). Similarly, Michael wrote down all the times at work he felt unhappy or disengaged, and what he was doing during those moments. The end result was Michael discovered he actually enjoyed civil engineering, but it was the people stuff, fee negotiations, and proposal writing he hated. Michael left his job, entered a Ph.D program, and became a high level civil and structural engineer, spending most of his time doing the activities that give him the greatest joy, such as working alone on complex engineering problems.
Since we are all motivated by different kinds of work activities, it is your job to discover what motivates you and reflect on how you can double down on the activities that bring you the most energy.
We are all stuck in some way in some area of our lives. In order to get unstuck, you need to come up with lots of ideas, even crazy ideas. Many people make the mistake of chasing their first idea, or the perfect idea, or the one idea they think will be the answer to get themselves out of the situation they are currently stuck in. Believing that there is only one idea leads to a lot of pressure and indecision. There will always be a better idea or better way, but that kind of thinking is dangerous in life design. The truth is all of us have many different potential lives we could live, and each would make us happy in its own unique way. In life design more ideas lead to better ideas, and better ideas lead to a better design and new insights. The authors suggest thinking about your life in five year increments.
Key Concept #4
Prototyping
“Prototyping the life design way is all about asking good questions, outing our hidden biases and assumptions, iterating rapidly, and creating momentum for a path we’d like to try out.” Designing Your Life p. 112.
Prototypes should be designed to ask a question and get data about something you’re interested in as a way of trying out a potential interesting future. The book gives the example of Elise, a HR employee in a large corporation that was ready for a big change. Elise had a dream of running a small café, so she decided to go all in and rent a retail space, totally renovated and stocked with the best products. The business was off to a roaring success and Elise was working harder than ever, but in no time she was miserable. She had failed to prototype her idea. Instead of finding out what it might have been like to work at a café, day in and day out, she incorrectly assumed that since she enjoyed going to a café she would enjoy managing one. How could Elise have prototyped her idea? She could have started out catering, an easy business to start up and shut down with minimal overhead. Alternatively, she could have gotten a job bussing tables to have a good look at the dirty end of the job. The best approach, however, would be to interview someone who is either doing and living what you’re contemplating, or has real experience and expertise in an area who have questions. In addition to asking people about their work and life, you will be able to find out about their career path and can certainly ask for advice.
Key Concept #5
Choosing Happiness and Failure Immunity
“In life design, being happy means you choose happiness.” Designing Your Life p. 9
The secret to happiness in life design is not about making the right choice; it’s learning to choose well. In life design, the choosing process has four steps:
Gather & Create Options: Having insights about yourself, exploring options, and prototyping experiences are the best ways that your life design process generates ideas. Taking the time to write your Workview and Lifeview can help in this process.
Narrow Down the List: Once you have a significant list of options, reframe your idea of options by realizing that if you have too many options, you actually have none at all. Start by crossing off options from your list, and do not dwell about whether you crossed off the correct options.
Choose Discerningly: Integrate your decision making facilities, both emotionless and intuitive. The authors introduce a term called “grokking”, which is to understand something deeply and completely, so much so that you feel you’ve become one with it. For instance, if you have 3 alternatives you are considering, brush your teeth in the morning as if you have chosen choice A. When you are at a red light, proceed to your destination as if you made choice A your new reality. Try these for a few days and then move on to the other choices.
Let Go & Move On: If you are an analytical person, or even just human, chances are you second-guess your decisions or obsess over the thought of wondering if you made the correct decision. In his book The Paradox of Choice, researcher Barry Schwartz found that when your brains make a decision in the face of many options, we are less happy with our choice. The false perception that there are hundreds of possibilities that may have been great but that we never got to is a powerful force against being at peace with our choice making. The key is to remember that imaged choices do not exist because they are not actionable. Only by taking action can we build our way forward, being confident in knowing that you can always get more options in the future. This mindset is the key to choosing happiness and being happy with our choices.
The fear of failure looms large in people’s experience of their lives. The book introduces the concept of failure immunity, which is described as using a bias to actions, failing fast, and being so clear on the learning value of a failure that the sting disappears. It is important to remember not to judge our life by the outcome and instead recognize that life is a process. Since failure is the raw material for success, the authors suggest conducting a failure reframe exercise by using a 3-step process:
Log your failures: Write down when you’ve messed up over the past month or two.
Categorize your failures: It is useful to categorize your failures into three types so you can identify where the growth potential lies: Screwups (simple mistakes that you normally get write), Weaknesses (failures that happen because of one of your abiding failings; mistakes that you make over and over), Growth Opportunities (failures that didn’t have to happen and a fix is available).
Identify Growth Insights: If any of the growth opportunities from Step 2 have offer an invitation for real improvement, you can make meaningful progress in your life by reframing a failure as a learning experience.
Apply It
- Designers are creative people who are not afraid to think outside the box and try new ideas. There is no reason that same approach cannot be applied to your life. The book suggests that there is no one correct path for people in life, and instead people have many different lives they could live. Try creating 3 different 5-year life plans for yourself (referred to as Odyssey Plans in the book). Life one: Life plan centered around what you already have in mind for yourself, either expanded forward or an idea you’ve been thinking about for some time. Life two: What would you do if life plan one was not available? Life three: The life you would live if money or image were no object. If you knew you could make a decent living at it and you did not care about what others thought of you, what would you do?
- Fortunate college students have access to career mentors or internships to learn valuable information before diving into a career, but why should that stop after college? If you are considering a career change, try conducting an informational interview on someone in the career you are contemplating. Most people are happy to talk about their career and the new network you develop could someday lead to future job opportunities.
- The book does not suggest people should strive to achieve perfect balance in work, play, love and health. However, if you honestly evaluate those four categories, where are you not feeling fulfilled? Try reframing your negative beliefs and take action to improve in this category.
- For a two week period, categorize the type of work activities you do on your e-mail calendar at work. Identify the tasks that you enjoy doing most and those you enjoy doing least. Have a conversation with your manager on how you can spend more of your time adding value by focusing on what you enjoy (and likely are good at) doing.