D. Life Lab
My notes from Dave Evans’ lecture on how to design the life, Feb. 22, 2017, Stanford
Some dysfunctional believes we are facing everyday:
What’s your major?
What’s your passion?
You should know where you are going by now and how to get there.
Be the best version of you.
…
However, the problem is that for most people, passion is a result, not the reason. By the way, there’re more than one version of you!
Dave Evans and Bill Burnett thus tried to use product design thinking in life design. Design a culture of mindsets:
First of all, try to connect the dots: who you are; what you believe; what you do, etc. to increase meaning-making.
2. Ideate 5 different alternatives of your life in the next five years:
A. Your current track
B. What if Option A died tomorrow?
C. For something completely different
Evaluate ABC by 1. Resources; 2. I like it; 3. Confidence; 4. Coherence
3. Then comes the famous fast prototyping process. The secret here is to prototype so fast that you gather enough information for the later decision-making without any regret. There are basically two directions here: conversation and experience. Engaging someone who already pursued that life design and ask interesting questions is recommended for it’s comparatively less time-consuming and effortless.
Two tips for life design interviews:
a. No pressure. It’s just like asking locals for directions.
b. Do some homework and don’t waste your questions on information that you can get from Google.
4. Choosing Well. It’s not about how to make the right choice, but how to make choice in a right way: to let other options and the choosing phase go. People constantly ask questions like “how do you know when you know”. It is just so difficult to handle that super long list of life choices with the thought that we only got one life. Even if VR enables us to experience another person’s life, it would still be different than living that life yourself. After all, the question is haunting but the whole point of the life design is to move on fast. I feel that it squeezes out the possibilities of regrets by encouraging someone to make trials, fail faster and let go.
Don’t ever look back once you’ve gone through this: gather&create→narrow →choose →let go & move on.
This is The Book. I probably will not buy it since the secret is out haha.
