Build a life that works for you
(Below you can find my selected notes from the book by authors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, which you can get here. Quotes are often edited for readability due to lack of context and bolded to help give structure to the notes).
Desiging your life: When you realize that life is always about designing something that has never existed before, then your life can sparkle in a way that you could never have imagined. The five mind-sets in order to design your life are curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration.
You are not alone. The best designers know that great design requires radical collaboration. It takes a team … Life is more like a great design than a work of art, so you cannot create it alone, either. You do not have to come up with a brilliant life design by yourself. Design is a collaborative process, and many of the best ideas are going to come from other people.
People actually need to take time to develop a passion. And the research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery—not before. Most people are passionate about many different things, and the only way to know what they want to do is to prototype some potential lives, try them out, and see what really resonates with them. Once you know how to prototype your way forward, you are on the path to discovering the things you truly love, passion or not.
We’ve all got problems. Sometimes those problems relate to our job, sometimes to family, or health, or love, or money, or any combination of these things. Sometimes our problems can feel so overwhelming that we don’t even try to solve them. We just live with them—like an irritating roommate we constantly complain about but never get around to evicting. Our problems become our story, and we can all get stuck in our stories. Deciding which problems to work on may be one of the most important decisions you make, because people can lose years (or a lifetime) working on the wrong problem.
How often do we check in with ourselves to see if we are really working on the right problem? …gravity problems—meaning they are not real problems. Why? Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Anytime you are arguing or fighting with reality, reality will win.
How healthy you are will factor significantly into how you assess the quality of your life. “Healthy” we mean being well in mind, body, and spirit—emotional health, physical health, and mental health. … once you’ve figured out how you define “health,” you need to pay attention to it.
Assuming you’re not financially independent, you usually are getting paid for at least a portion of your “work.” Don’t for a minute reduce work only to that which you get paid for. Most people have more than one form of work at a time.
You don’t have to have it all figured out for the rest of your life; you just have to create the compass for what life is about for you right now. It’s impossible to predict the future. And the corollary to that thought is: once you design something, it changes the future that is possible.
Wayfinding is the ancient art of figuring out where you are going when you don’t actually know your destination. The first clues are engagement and energy. Work is fun when you are actually leaning into your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing.
Surround these less engaging activities with more engaging activities, and to give himself small rewards when he completes “energy-negative” tasks. The best way to deal with these energy-negative activities is to make sure that you are well rested and have the energy reserves needed to “do them right.” Otherwise, you might find yourself doing them again—costing you more energy than they should.
The truth is that all of us have more than one life in us. There’s always got to be a better idea, a better way—even a best way. That kind of thinking is pretty dangerous to life design. When we ask our students, “How many lifetimes’ worth of living are there in you?,” the average answer is 3.4. And if you accept this idea—that there are multiple great designs for your life, though you’ll still only get to live one—it is rather liberating. There is no one idea for your life.
Sometimes it is more comfortable to hold on to our familiar, failed approach to the problem than to risk a worse failure by attempting the big changes that we think will be required to eliminate it.
Life designers know that if a problem isn’t actionable, then it’s not solvable. You can’t defy the laws of nature, nor do we live in a world where poets reliably make a million dollars a year. Designers may be artful at reframing and inventing, but they know better than to go up against the laws of nature or the marketplace.
Where people go wrong (regardless of their age, education, or career path) is thinking they just need to come up with a plan for their lives and it will be smooth sailing. If only they make the right choice (the best, true, only choice), they will have a blueprint for who they will be, what they will do, and how they will live. It’s a paint-by-numbers approach to life, but in reality, life is more of an abstract painting—one that’s open to multiple interpretations.
He thought there was one best way to spend his life, and he had to know what it was or he’d be settling for second best—or worse. But that’s not true. We all contain enough energy and talents and interests to live many different types of lives, all of which could be authentic and interesting and productive. Asking which life is best is asking a silly question; it’s like asking whether it’s better to have hands or feet.
Most people’s lives are actually lived as a series of two-to-four-year seasons strung together. Even important longer periods (the child-rearing years) are broken into substantially distinct two-to-four-year chunks—the
You wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive, would you? But we do this all the time with jobs and life changes. It’s crazy, when you think about it.
Making our best choices: The part of the brain that is working to help us make our best choices is in the basal ganglia. It’s part of the ancient base brain, and as such does not have connections to our verbal centers, so it does not communicate in words. It communicates in feelings and via connections to the intestines—those good old gut feelings.
Once that work is done—led by the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which runs the executive functions of coding, listing, and categorizing—we need access to that wisdom center where our well-informed emotional knowing can help us discern the better choices for us.
Don’t forget to listen to your knee or your gut or your heart, too. Doing this requires that you educate and mature your access to and awareness of your emotional/intuitive/spiritual ways of knowing (or however you may name these affective aspects of our shared humanity). For centuries, the most commonly affirmed path to such maturity has been that of personal practices such as journaling, prayer or spiritual exercises, meditation, integrated physical practices like yoga or tai chi, and so on.
Let’s get better and better at building by getting better and better at letting go of the options we don’t need any longer. (And now you have the confidence to know that you can always get more options in the future, just the way you got these.) This is key to choosing happiness and being happy with our choices.
Once you make a choice—then embrace your choice and go with it. When the questions that lead to agonizing creep into your head, evict the thoughts, and direct your energy into living well the decisions you’ve made. Pay attention and learn as you go, of course, but don’t get caught with your eyes fixated on the rearview mirror of decision regret.
Designers don’t agonize. They don’t dream about what could have been. They don’t spin their wheels. And they don’t waste their futures by hoping for a better past. Life designers see the adventure in whatever life they are currently building and living into. This is how you choose happiness. And, really, is there any other choice?
Prototyping to design your life is a great way to succeed sooner (in the big, important things) by failing more often (at the small, low-exposure learning experiences).
The really big reframe in design thinking. Are you ready? Designing your life is actually what life is, because life is a process, not an outcome. If you can get that, you’ve got it all. Life is not an outcome; it’s more like a dance. Life design is just a really good set of dance moves. Life is never done (until it is), and life design is never done (until you’re done).
Being or doing? The real inner me, or the busy, successful outer me? Which is it? Life design thinks that’s a false dichotomy. Since life is a wicked problem that we never “solve,” we just focus on getting better at living our lives by building our way forward.
Life design is about your life, but it’s not all about you—it’s all about us. If you’re the sole architect of your brilliant future, then you think the whole thing up and you heroically bring it into being—it’s all about you. When we say we can’t do this alone, we don’t just mean that we’d like to do it ourselves but we’re insufficient, so we have to go get some helpers. What we mean is that life design is intrinsically a communal effort. When you are wayfinding a step or two at a time to build (not solve) your way forward, the process has to rely on the contribution and participation of others.
We all want to know we mattered to someone. We all want to know our work contributed to the world. We all want to know we loved and we lived the best we could, with as much purpose and meaning as possible, and that we had a pretty fun time doing it. And you only understand that in retrospect, because a well-designed life isn’t a noun—it’s a verb
Is what’s on your mind actually germane to the step you’re on now?
Perhaps the most important recommendation we can give you to sustain a well-designed life is to invest in and commit to some personal practices of the variety we described (personal practices such as journaling, prayer or spiritual exercises, meditation, integrated physical practices like yoga or tai chi, and so on.). In our own lives, both of us would say that our personal growth in this area—the refinement and disciplined participation in practices—has been the single most life-giving thing we’ve done.
Almost no modern cultures excel here. The good news is that even a small effort can bring great results. By educating your emotions and maturing your discernment through such practices, you stand to reap great benefits that are accessible on an almost daily basis.
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