Book SummaryDesigning Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Designing Your Life

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. Fixating on this single “perfect” life limits your ability to experience joy and satisfaction by preventing you from recognizing other potentially satisfying paths and disempowering you from changing unfulfilling situations.

(Shortform note: Psychologists clarify why you might fixate on a single life path and how this limits your happiness. Most people crave certainty—knowing what to expect makes you feel safe. If you’re someone who craves a great deal of certainty, you’re more likely to focus on a predictable life path and develop biases that prevent you from looking beyond this path. However, while these biases keep you safe, they also keep you trapped in unfulfilling situations: When you feel dissatisfied, instead of questioning whether your chosen path is right for you, your biases convince you that your unhappiness is a personal failure. These insecurities make it more difficult to move past your comfort zone to seek out more satisfying alternatives.)

On the other hand, believing there are multiple paths to fulfillment and happiness in your career and life broadens your horizons and empowers you to take charge of your happiness. You proactively look for different ways to fine-tune your life and pursue experiences that add more meaning and joy to your life.

(Shortform note: It’s important to note that the focus of the book isn’t on having unlimited choice in life, but rather on having the freedom to make life choices. Research shows that having unlimited choices can trigger “decision paralysis”—we don’t move forward at all and feel unhappy or stressed. On the other hand, having the freedom to make life choices is an important factor to overall well-being.)

In Designing Your Life, Burnett and Evans present a purposeful planning strategy to help you adopt this empowering belief and redesign your approach to life. You’ll learn how to recognize and explore multiple paths to happiness, purposefully plan a fulfilling career, and confidently create a more meaningful and joyful life.

This guide breaks their strategy down into an eight-step process that walks you through:

• How to evaluate your life and identify areas to improve
• How to define your values and motivations
• How to generate ideas for potentially satisfying career and life paths
• How to decide upon the most satisfying path to pursue at this point in your life

Step #1: Assess Your Life

The first step to planning your life more purposefully is evaluating your life as it is now, pinpointing what you’re happy with and what you want to improve. This helps you focus on what changes you want to make before moving through the rest of the steps. Burnett and Evans suggest reflecting on and rating (from one to 10) your satisfaction in four areas: health (mind, body, and spirit), work (paid and unpaid), joy (relaxation and happiness), and relationships (your ties with other people).

Ideally, your ratings for all four areas are high and in proportion to each other. If they’re not, make a note of areas where you need to create more balance and satisfaction. For example, you might have a high rating for work and low ratings for relationships, joy, and health. This indicates that you’re prioritizing work over all else, and improving your life will require focusing on these other three areas.

Manage Expectations to Create a Balanced Life

Psychologists expand on the authors’ ideas about evaluating life areas and creating a balanced life in two ways: First, they explain that life feels balanced only when you manage your expectations about what you can achieve.

The term “balanced life” implies that you devote equal time and energy to all areas of your life and “have it all.” This is often impossible because you have a finite amount of time and energy to devote to competing demands, and your desires for each life area often exceed your ability to fulfill them. Life feels unbalanced and unsatisfying when your expectations of how life should be conflict with reality—you feel like you’re being pulled in multiple directions and fail to maintain an equilibrium between competing demands. For example, if you want to be a full-time parent and work 9-5, your inability to do so will create feelings of guilt, frustration, and dissatisfaction.

Overcome this internal conflict and feel more balanced by discerning essential needs from non-essential needs—how many needs do you truly need to fulfill to feel satisfied? This perspective encourages you to set realistic expectations and maintain an equilibrium between competing commitments.

This “How much is enough?” thinking is especially helpful considering that psychologists suggest evaluating not four, but 14 life areas—and that you need to feel satisfaction in all 14 to experience balance and overall well-being:

• Physical health: Your overall fitness level

• Family life: Your emotional...

Designing Your Life Summary Introduction

Everyone wants to make a living doing meaningful work that harmonizes with their values and makes them happy. But many people feel stuck in the wrong life doing unfulfilling work with no way out. Some hope that if only they can find their “true passion,” everything will magically fall into place. Both attitudes—the defeated one and the magical passion one—are false. What we need is a clear-cut process for designing our lives, a learnable approach to building a fulfilling career.

Designing Your Life provides that process. This is a book about life design. Everything surrounding you, from furniture and electronics to indoor plumbing and toothbrushes, was designed. People created each of these things in response to a problem. Just like you can see the benefits of design thinking all around you, you can reap the benefits of such thinking by applying it to your life to create more meaning and joy.

Design Problems vs. Engineering Problems

Design problems are distinct from engineering problems. Engineering problems focus on achieving a clear goal, like creating hinges for laptop computers that will last for years. By contrast, design problems have no predetermined...

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 1: Your Life Dashboard

The first step in tackling any design problem is to articulate the problem. Good design is like a formula:

• Good Design = Correctly Identifying the Problem + Effectively Solving It

This kind of thinking is foreign to some people because it pays as much attention to the problem as the solution. But half the task of life design involves focusing on your problem, by taking stock of your situation and figuring out which things in your life aren’t working the way you’d like.

Defective belief: I should already know my direction.

• Corrected belief: I can’t know my direction until I know where I am right now.

Picking the Right Problem

Your problems could relate to the type of work you do. Or they could relate to money, family, love, health, or a combination. One of your most important decisions is to choose which of your problems to work on. Choosing wrongly could make you waste many years—or even your entire life.

The experience of Dave, one of the authors of this book, illustrates the peril of choosing the wrong problem. Because Dave, as a child, loved watching Jacques Cousteau’s undersea adventures on television, and because he found his high school...

Shortform Exercise: Create Your Life Dashboard

Chapter 1 introduced you to the idea of a “life dashboard” consisting of four “gauges” to help you identify your current situation and the problem that you need to address through life design. This exercise leads you through creating your personal dashboard.

Write several sentences describing how things are going for you in the four areas of health, work, joy, and relationships. Use specific details, but be succinct.

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 2: Your Life Compass

In Chapter 1, you learned how to understand where you currently are in your life journey. In Chapter 2, you’ll learn how to navigate your life by building a “compass” and discovering your “true north.”

Defective belief: “I should always know where I’m headed.”

• Corrected belief: “I may not always know exactly where I’m headed, but I can always know if I’m heading the right way.”

Creating Your Life Compass

To get where you want to go, it’s essential to know what you’re looking for. The practice of life design can help you answer these questions by teaching you to build a life compass. This consists of two components:

• Your work philosophy includes everything you think and believe about work: what it’s for, why you do it, and what makes it good or bad. Your work philosophy is what work means to you.
• Your life philosophy includes everything you believe about the world and how it works: what it means, what gives it value, how your individual life relates to others,...

Shortform Exercise: Build Your Life Compass

Chapter 2 introduced you to the “life compass,” which consists of your work philosophy and your life philosophy. This exercise leads you through the process of creating this tool.

Briefly write out your work philosophy (up to 250 words). What do you think work means? What is it for? How does work relate individuals to society? What makes work good or worthwhile? Does it involve service to others? What’s the place of money? Does it have anything to do with fulfillment, growth, or use of talents?

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 3: Finding Your Way

In Chapter 2, you built your life compass and discovered your true north. Chapter 3 teaches you how to find your direction by using the ancient art of wayfinding. You’ll learn to create a journal to follow the clues of your involvement, energy, and joy.

Defective belief: Work shouldn’t be enjoyable

• Corrected belief: Enjoyment will guide you to the right work for you.

Wayfinding Your Life

Wayfinding helps you know where you’re going without a firm destination in mind. All you need is a compass and a direction. It requires you to pay attention to clues. For wayfinding in your life, the clues are involvement, energy, and joy.

Involvement

Notice how involved and engaged you feel with your work. What makes you feel interested, focused, and excited? On the other end, what makes you feel bored and dull?

Pay attention to the intensified state of involvement known as flow. Being “in flow” means total involvement in an activity, combined with a sense of euphoria, clarity, peace, and the disappearance of time. It can happen with almost any activity—playing a sport, chopping an onion, designing a business plan. Flow relates back to the “play” gauge on...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Your Wayfinding Skills

Chapter 3 told you how to create a journal to help you practice the art of wayfinding in your life. This exercise will help you to practice the skills involved in keeping that journal.

Think of an activity where you felt both involved and energized. Ideally, think of one where you experienced flow. What was the activity?

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 4: Generating Ideas for Your Life

In Chapter 3, you learned how to wayfind your life to discover your direction. In Chapter 4, you’ll learn how to remove blocks from your life by combining your Wayfinding Journal with the technique of mind mapping to envision multiple options.

Defective belief: I’m blocked.

• Corrected belief: I can always generate new ideas, so I’m never blocked.

Defective belief: I have to come up with the single right idea.

• Corrected belief: I need multiple ideas so that I can explore multiple options for my life and future.

We all get stuck or blocked sometimes in life. We want to make a change, but we can’t figure out what to do, let alone how to do it. For example, you may feel stuck in the wrong job and blocked in your attempts to find new work. Maybe you feel like you picked the wrong college major, and now you’re too far down the road to change. What you need in such a situation is ideation: the skill and act of generating ideas. Approaching your blocks with a design mindset can generate more ideas than you ever thought possible.

Two Principles of Life Design

To be an effective life designer, follow two principles:

1. When you have many good...

Shortform Exercise: Generate Ideas With a Mind Map

Chapter 4 taught you how to create mind maps to generate creative solutions to problems. This exercise will lead you through reflecting on what you can learn by doing this.

Create a mind map as described in the chapter. What did you choose as your central topic?

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 5: Designing Multiple Lives

In Chapter 4, you learned how to create a mind map for generating multiple ideas to solve life design problems. You also learned how to use reframing to deal with problems that are entrenched. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to design multiple life plans for yourself. You’ll develop “prototype” models for three separate lives that you could live.

Defective belief: I have to identify, plan, and execute my one best life.

• Corrected belief: I have multiple wonderful lives and life plans inside me. I can choose which one to build next.

It’s amazing what can happen when you stop trying to “get it right” by building what you conceive as the only right life for you. You can get wonderful results—and often unexpected results, ones far better than you could have planned for—if you intentionally think through multiple potential life paths and life designs for yourself.

Three Adventure Plans

To apply this principle, develop three separate Adventure Plans, each one detailing a different life that you could live, including both career factors and...

Shortform Exercise: Plan Your Adventure Plans

Chapter 5 taught you how to create three different adventure plans for your life. This exercise helps you to get started on doing that.

Your first plan should focus on your current life (imagined five years forward) or an idea that you’ve already been developing. What is this plan? Give it a six-word title.

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 6: Prototyping Your Future(s)

In Chapter 5, you learned how to envision multiple life scenarios by developing Adventure Plans. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use prototyping to explore questions about your alternatives by conducting life interviews and pursuing exploratory experiences.

Defective belief: The best way to answer questions about my plan is to conduct exhaustive research on every aspect of it.

• Corrected belief: I need to build prototypes to explore my questions and understand my alternatives.

Recall the second aspect of design thinking that you learned in the introduction: experimentation. Experimentation simply means trying things out. The essence of design thinking in action is to build a potential solution to your problem so that you can test it. All problem solving begins with gathering data so that you can understand the problem correctly.

But life design is somewhat different because you don’t have reliable data about your future. That’s where prototyping comes in.

Prototyping for Life Design

Many people have an idea for their lives and leap ahead with it before finding out what it really means. For example, a man may love little Italian cafes, so he invests...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Prototyping

In Chapter 6, you learned how to prototype alternative designs for your life. This exercise guides you through an initial process of practicing this skill.

Review your three Adventure Plans. Pay special attention to the questions you wrote for each. Pick one of these plans that really excites you. What are the questions you wrote for it?

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 7: The Problem With Job Searching

In Chapter 6, you learned how to prototype your Adventure Plans to help you understand what they mean in the real world. In this chapter, you’ll learn why the best route to fulfilling work is not through the want ads—the route that most people take. But if you still want to try this route, you’ll learn how to recognize what’s wrong with most job ads, how to understand the mindset of hiring managers, and how to tailor your application materials for best effect.

Defective belief: My focus should be on my need for a job.

• Corrected belief: My focus should be on the hiring manager’s need for the right person for the job.

The Problem With Internet Job Listings

The Internet is the most popular source for job searches these days. It’s also a massive waste of time. Although thousands of jobs are posted each week, most of the really great jobs never show up. Instead, they’re filled internally without ever being publicly shown. Only about 20 percent of available jobs are posted on the Internet (or posted anywhere). So you’re not even seeing the dream jobs that you’d like to apply for.

Moreover, **a large number of published job ads are actually meaningless...

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 8: Plugging Into the Hidden Job Market

In Chapter 8, you learned about the problems with the conventional approach to job searching, and you learned some tips for increasing your chances if you do go that route. In this chapter, you’ll learn a far better approach: the approach of tapping into the hidden job market. This involves using the prototyping technique of life interviews combined with effective networking practices. You also may need to reframe your core idea of job seeking.

Defective belief: My dream job is “somewhere out there,” waiting for me in the world.

• Corrected belief: I must design my own dream job through a combination of active seeking and co-creation.

Defective belief: “Networking” is a synonym for “hustling people.” It’s a fundamentally slimy activity.

• Corrected belief: Networking is just asking other people for help and direction.

Defective belief: I’m seeking a job.

• Corrected belief: I’m pursuing several offers.

The first step in getting your dream job is to give up your idealized notion of a dream job. There’s no magically “perfect” job for anybody. What really exists are interesting jobs at worthy organizations with good people. At least a...

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 9: Choosing to Be Happy

In Chapter 8, you learned how to tap into the hidden job market. In this chapter, you’ll learn a step-by-step process for choosing happiness as an integral component of life design.

Defective belief: My happiness depends on making the right choice.

• Corrected belief: No “right choice” exists. There’s only good choosing.

Defective belief: Happiness means “having it all.”

• Corrected belief: Happiness comes from releasing whatever you don’t really need.

The underlying goal of life design is happiness. This is what gives meaning to all the attitudes, steps, and techniques you’ve learned in this book so far. As a designer, you realize that being happy comes from choosing well among the options you generate through life design. Conversely, being unhappy comes from choosing poorly. Both types of choosing depend on a person’s mental model.

A Model for Choosing Unhappiness

Many people use a model for choosing life options that virtually guarantees unhappiness. Or rather, they don’t use much of a model at all. Instead, they choose based on an unconscious conglomeration of thoughts, emotions, values, and motivations. By failing to take...

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 10: Becoming Immune to Failure

In Chapter 9, you learned a model for making intelligent life design choices that generate happiness and eliminate regret. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to become immune to failure by reframing your belief about what failure means. You’ll also learn how to learn and grow from your failures.

Defective belief: The success or failure of your life depends on its outcome.

• Corrected belief: Life isn’t an outcome. It’s a process.

Defective belief: There are winners and losers in the finite game of life.

• Corrected belief: There are no winners or losers in the infinite game of life.

The Value of Failure

Becoming immune to failure doesn’t mean you’ll never fail again. It means you’re protected from the negative feelings of self-recrimination that usually accompany failure.

You achieve this state by reframing your belief that failure is bad. You realize that when you’re a life designer, you fail intentionally and fail more often because you regularly employ the two life design attitudes of curiosity and experimentation. These lead you to generate ideas and build prototypes—which can fail. You also learn from the failures that arise from your...

Shortform Exercise: Reframe Your Failures

In Chapter 10, you learned a method for reframing failures. This exercise leads you to try it out.

Look back over your last week or month (your choice). What failures have you made? Be sure to include one or more that represent improvement opportunities.

Designing Your Life Summary Chapter 11: Creating Your Team

In Chapter 10, you learned how to become immune to failure so that you can fearlessly pursue any goal you choose. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to build a team to help with your ongoing project of designing your life.

Defective belief: This is my life, so I have to design it on my own.

• Corrected belief: I live and design my life in collaboration with other people.

Recall the last of the five basic mental attitudes of design thinking: deep teamwork. This attitude says life design is a collaborative and communal process instead of a solitary, “heroic” artistic pursuit. Notice that many of the skills you’ve learned so far, such as wayfinding and prototyping, depend on participation by other people. In life design, you don’t create but co-create ideas and opportunities. Your life design is “out there” in the world of people and relationships, not inside your head. You’ve already seen this as your wayfinding journal and prototyping efforts have led you to consider and become involved with various people.

Now you need to take the next step of consciously identifying your team, which includes two levels: general and specific.

Establishing Your Team

...

Shortform Exercise: Create Your Team

In Chapter 11, you learned about creating a life design team. This exercise will help you get started.

Who are some of the major presences in all three categories of your general team: allies, key players, and intimates? List as many as you can think of.

Designing Your Life Summary Conclusion: Designing for the Rest of Your Life

In this guide, you’ve learned how to design your life by understanding where you are, building a compass (your work and life philosophies) to guide you, wayfinding in your life, generating ideas, prototyping your future, approaching the job market intelligently, becoming immune to failure, and creating a life design team.

Going forward, as you use your new skills to continually design the rest of your life, remember to apply the five design attitudes (from the introduction) whenever you encounter situations that call for them. This will bring a continuous flow of information for you to incorporate into your...

Shortform Exercise: Assess Your Design Attitudes

The book’s conclusion reminded you of the five design attitudes and recommended that you commit to a specific practice for remaining in touch with your whole being (not just your intellect). This exercise leads you to begin planning these things.

For designing your life, what do you presently need to know? What would you like to explore? State these things as questions, and list at least two specific ways you could intelligently pursue the answers this week.