PDF Summary:Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

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 and limits your ability to experience joy and satisfaction.

In Designing Your Life, Burnett and Evans argue there are multiple paths to career and life happiness—learning how to recognize and evaluate these paths increases your chances of experiencing satisfaction. They share principles from their popular life design courses to help you explore multiple paths and purposefully plan a balanced life in which you can truly thrive.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the authors’ methods for purposefully planning a happy and meaningful life. We’ll also expand on their ideas with research and practical advice from other self-help practitioners.

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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.

Step #5: Formulate Ideas to Expand Your Possibilities

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.

Use Mind Mapping to Create Three Distinct Job Descriptions

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.)

Step #6: Design Three Different Lives

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:

• Do you have the time, money, skill, and other necessary resources for the plan?
• How much do you like the plan?
• How confident do you feel about moving forward with this plan?
• Does the plan resonate with the work and life priorities you set for yourself in Step #3?

(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.)

Step #7: Create a Team for Ideas and Support

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.)

Step #8: Conduct Interviews and Experiments to Explore Your Plans

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.)

Method #1: Conduct Interviews

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.

Method #2: Pursue Exploratory Experiences

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.

Experimentation Creates Opportunities for Meaningful Work

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.)

Keep Moving Forward

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.