Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, the Silicon Valley innovators and Stanford University design educators in their hugely successful course, Designing Your Life, have helped thousands change the way they live. Burnett and Evans believe that in order to change, people need a process - a design process - to help them figure out what they want and how to create it. In this long-awaited, must-have book, Burnett and Evans make clear to us, step-by-step, how to think like a designer, and how to design and build a life - at any age - in which we can thrive.

Designers don't think their way forward, say Burnett and Evans in Designing Your Life; designers build their way forward. Rather than dreaming up a lot of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world - or the real you - they show us how to build a future brick by brick, how to approach our own life design challenges with the same kind of curiosity and creativity that resulted in the creation of the lightbulb, the printing press, and the Internet as they give us the tools and show us certain simple "mind-sets," and how to use them to practice life design in your life.

A sampling of the mind-sets of life design:

• Curiosity - It makes everything new; invites exploration. Curiosity helps us "get good at getting lucky."
• Bias to action - Being committed to building your way forward; not sitting on the bench thinking about what you are going to do with your life. Designers try things, test things out, create prototype after prototype until they find what works, and sometimes they find that the problem is entirely different from what they first thought it was. Designers embrace change. They are not attached to a particular outcome, because they are always curious about what will happen next - not what the final result will be...
• Reframing - How designers get unstuck. It isn't figuring out what to do with the rest of your life; it's just whatever you need to do next. Life design involves key reframes that allow us to step back, examine biases, and move toward a solution.
• Radical collaboration - You are not alone. You do not have to come up with a brilliant life design all on your own. Design is a collaborative process, and many of the best ideas are going to come from other people. Designing Your Life shows us how to ask, and how to know the right questions to ask. In Designing Your Life Burnett and Evans show us how to get advisers, mentors, and a supportive community to help with life design, which, like all design, is a team sport.

Designing Your Life makes clear that you don't need to know your passion to design a life you love. Most people are passionate about many different things, and the only way to know what you really want to do is to prototype some potential lives, try them out, and see what you really like...

So - open this book...and design your way to a new life.