Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Designing Your Life is a book and a design thinking framework by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans that can help one design the life they want. Bill and Dave, long time designers and educators from Stanford, apply principles of design thinking to life coaching and self-development. If I were to suggest to read just one self-help book in 2019, I would definitely recommend this one.
It is astonishing how often we get in our own way trying to unstuck, that is, to figure out how to get out of situations that we don’t want to be in (be it a specific job, a career, a relationship, or anything bigger than that). We might track it down to an early question of ‘who you want to be when you grow up?’, which is one of the hardest to answer. Not many grown-ups know how to answer it, especially if they feel that something is off at where they are now.
Why Designing Your Life approach is so helpful?
Here are three thoughts:
- It has been tested by thousands of people. Designing Your Life is the most popular elective class at Stanford, and has been tried by thousands of students, as well as hundreds of people through DYL workshops.
- It is based on scientifically significant research and tested on many people. The approach was used by Stanford PhD students in their thesis works, with experiments, control groups and all the other attributes of proper scientific research. Over and over, the tests proved that people who applied design thinking techniques to create the life they want, reported being better off, less lost, and more empowered to live a life they wanted.
- Design thinking is a powerful method by itself, something that has proven to work in many industries. For example, research shows that design-driven companies (that is, companies using design methods and approaches) outperform the S&P companies by 2019% over 10 years span. When design thinking it is applied to a field of life/career coaching, it just amplifies the outcomes and offers a truly remarkable and inspiring way forward.
The approach in a nutshell
- Use curiosity and learn about yourself: where you are now, what matters to you, and what gives you energy and sense of engagement. Look at least at four aspects of life: work, play, love, and health. Use this knowledge to create your compass, something that would guide you towards your North Star.
- Defer judgment and create multiple ideas, including crazy ones. Involve other people in the process, making it truly collaborative endeavor. Great design is done by teams, not individuals.
- Get your hands dirty: prototype and try stuff. Figure out what works by creating prototypes, and actively engaging other people. For example, doing a bunch of interviews with people who might be doing kind of things that you are interested in.
- Create your team (and even a community) of support, including mentors, friends and other people who want to design their lives, just like you do. Communal effort helps to amplify the effect of a life well designed. In many ways, it is an integral part of such life.
- Get to live the life you design. Not as something final, but rather ongoing process, full of opportunities to try, evolve and enhance.
The book has a ton of resources, exercises, and ideas that are helping navigate this process. In the end, it asks people to adhere to just five principles of Life Design:
- Be curious
- Try stuff
- Reframe problems
- Know it’s a process
- Ask for help
A few concepts that are particularly good
- Compass. A tool that helps you find your true north no matter what you do, by combining personal workview and lifeview reflections.
- Multiple lives. Embracing the idea of living not one, but many lives, and allowing yourself to have more than one ‘correct’ plan.
- Reframing. A practice of always thinking of problem from more than one perspective, and consciously stepping back, examining biases, and moving toward a solution.
- Prototype conversations. A way to understand certain aspects of a job or a role by talking to people (rather than interviewing for a position).
- Failure Immunity. An idea that failure is something to look for, necessary fuel for growth.
Powerful distinctions
- Follow your passion to build a life your want → Prototype lives you want and use the insights to refine the results
- Find the right solution → Generate multiple options
- Best possible life plan → Multiple, non-mutually exclusive lives
- Look for a job → Pursue a number of offers
- Right choice → Good choosing
- Life is about outcomes (finite game) → Life is a process (infinite game)
- Failure is something to avoid → Failure is a raw material of success
The book was fantastic in its simplicity and rigor, combining design thinking approach and good evidence-based coaching. I am planning to include more design thinking into my coaching practice, and look forward to more books that combine design methods and life/career coaching.
