Designing Your Life: Summary Review
This is a summary review of Designing Your Life containing key details about the book.
What is Designing Your Life About?
"Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life" is a book written by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, both experts in design thinking and product design.
Designing Your Life is a book that aims to help readers organize themselves through journaling and design thinking. This book utilizes a series of exercises throughout its eleven chapters in order to provide others with a sense of structure in their lives. These creative and thought provoking exercises allow the reader to reflect on their life and determine what they should do with their future. They can then generate a road map and plan how to accomplish their goals.
Summary Points & Takeaways from Designing Your Life
Some key summary points and takeaways from the book include:
* The authors argue that life design is a creative process, just like product design, and that it can be approached in a systematic and intentional way.
* They provide a step-by-step guide for designing a fulfilling and satisfying life, starting with the development of a clear vision and a set of personal values.
* The book emphasizes the importance of experimentation and iteration in the design process, and encourages readers to try out new experiences and prototypes in order to discover what works best for them.
* The authors discuss the role of habits and routines in life design, and provide practical tips for developing good habits that support one's goals and values.
* The book also includes exercises and tools for exploring one's passions, skills, and values, and for creating a roadmap for personal growth and development.
* The authors also address common obstacles to life design, such as fear of failure and lack of motivation, and provide strategies for overcoming these challenges.
Designing Your Life Summary Notes
1. Breaking Free From Career Limitations
Many people feel stuck in their careers and are unhappy with their lives. The dissatisfaction can be due to various reasons such as a lack of personal meaning, societal impact, or limited options. In fact, a large percentage of workers express dissatisfaction with their jobs, feeling trapped because their degree is in a field they don't enjoy.
The good news is that everyone can design their way to a better life. It's never too late to create a life that is fulfilling, creative, and allows for personal growth. Design thinking is not limited to creating physical objects but can also be applied to our lives. By thinking like a designer, we can create a well-designed life that meets our needs and desires.
A well-designed life provides us with a sense of freedom to change and grow, regardless of our age, background, or profession. It's about creating a life that allows us to be happy and fulfilled, with personal meaning and societal impact. Designing our lives enables us to avoid feeling stuck and unproductive, and provides us with the opportunity to design and achieve our dreams.
The key to designing our lives is to think creatively and consider all options. We should not let our degrees or past decisions limit us. Instead, we should focus on our passions and interests and explore new opportunities that align with them. It's never too late to pursue a different career, and we should not be afraid to take risks and try something new.
2. Take Stock and Identify Problem Areas
Designing your life is all about finding a healthy balance among different areas of your life. In order to achieve this, you need to assess four critical areas: health, work, play, and love. These areas cover your emotional, mental, and physical health, paid and volunteer jobs, any activity done simply for fun, and partners, children, friends, and pets.
The first step in designing your life is to assess these areas and identify which area is being neglected. For instance, you may be too focused on work and neglecting your health and love life. Or you may be immersed in play and neglecting your career aspirations. Once you've identified the problem areas, it's time to adopt a beginner's mind and start asking questions like a complete novice would.
A beginner's mind is a great perspective to have when facing a life-changing decision, such as choosing a career. For example, if you're interested in studying marine biology because you love seals, approach the situation like a beginner and ask basic questions like "What is the life of a marine biologist really like?" and "How much of it really involves seals?"
This will help you make the right decision. You can also volunteer on a research vessel to get a better idea of what the day-to-day life of a marine biologist is like. Approaching situations with a beginner's mind and asking the right questions will reduce the risk of regretting your choices later down the line.
3. Align Your Workview and Lifeview for a Meaningful Career
When it comes to finding a fulfilling career, it's not just about finding a job that pays well or is in a desirable field. To truly feel satisfied and happy in your work, you need to consider your personal values and beliefs, both about work itself and about life in general. These are your workview and lifeview, respectively.
Your workview encompasses what you consider to be "good work" and what factors are important for job satisfaction, such as salary, work-life balance, or societal impact. Your lifeview, on the other hand, represents your personal values and perspectives on how life should be lived, covering topics such as religion, social justice, or environmentalism.
When designing your life, it's crucial to align these two views to find a coherent balance that allows you to pursue a career that is meaningful and fulfilling. This means choosing a job that aligns with your personal beliefs and values, and avoiding compromises that would compromise your integrity.
For example, if you believe in the importance of environmentalism, you might want to seek out a career in sustainability or renewable energy, rather than working for a company that doesn't prioritize eco-friendliness. Or, if work-life balance is important to you, you might choose a job that allows for flexible hours or remote work options.
By taking both your workview and lifeview into consideration when designing your life, you can set your compass on a path that feels true to your values and goals. This not only leads to greater job satisfaction and happiness, but also a sense of purpose and fulfillment in your life as a whole.
4. Log Your Engaging Activities with a Good Time Journal
Living a joyful life requires understanding what engages and disengages you. Keeping a Good Time Journal can be an invaluable tool for this. By logging your experiences, noting your energy levels and what you were doing when engaged, you'll discover what brings joy to your life.
One essential feature to monitor is the state of flow, where you become completely absorbed in an activity and time passes quickly. These moments are a great indicator of your engagement, and you should note them to help you design both your career and your life.
Another clue to help you find your way in life is to monitor your energy levels. Use your journal to keep track of which activities drain your energy and which ones sustain it. Understanding how to stay energized and make the most of your day will be useful information for designing your life.
By becoming more aware of what engages and energizes you, you'll be able to build a life and career that aligns with your values and brings you joy. In the next book summary, we'll explore what to do when you feel stuck in life.
5. Find Your New Path with Mind Mapping
Feeling stuck is a common experience that many people face in their careers and lives. However, it's possible to overcome this feeling and generate new ideas for your future by using a mind map. Grant's story illustrates how he used mind mapping to move from feeling stuck in a job he hated to finding a new path.
To begin, Grant started with a central idea he enjoyed, which was "outdoor activities." He wrote it in the center of a sheet of paper and then began to associate other ideas that came to mind, such as "hiking," "surfing," and "travel." For each of these, he made secondary associations. For hiking, it was "mountains" and "exploring"; for "travel" he wrote down "Hawaii" and "tropical beach." By doing this, he began to generate new ideas and possibilities that he hadn't considered before.
Mind mapping is a simple and effective tool for generating new ideas and breaking out of feeling stuck. It allows you to explore your interests, passions, and skills in a non-linear way. It's a creative approach that can help you find a new direction in your career or life.
By using mind mapping, you can break free from the limitations of your current situation and start to see new possibilities. It's a way to connect the dots between your interests and skills and find a path that's both engaging and energizing.
6. Give Yourself Options and Alternatives by Designing Multiple Lives and Parallel Paths.
Life is full of choices, and sometimes it can be overwhelming to try and pick the perfect path. However, the truth is that there isn't just one right choice that will lead to a perfect life. It's essential to think ahead and design multiple possible lives for yourself, not just one. By doing so, you can give yourself options and alternatives to consider, even if they aren't always apparent.
The story of Chung is an excellent example of this. Instead of feeling immense pressure to choose the right path when he was offered three great internship opportunities, he chose to do all three in succession. This decision led him to discover a new passion for career counseling that he hadn't considered before.
You can do something similar by creating odyssey plans that outline three different paths that you could take. Don't rank them from worst to best. Instead, look at them as three equal, and equally possible, plans. Having multiple ideas from the beginning can lead to innovative solutions that you may not have considered otherwise.
It's important to keep an open mind and to remember that life is an odyssey with many possible routes and circumstances. By giving yourself multiple options and alternatives, you won't panic if your first choice doesn't work out. You can take comfort in knowing that you have viable plan Bs to turn to. So start designing your multiple lives and parallel paths today.
Who is the author of Designing Your Life?
Bill Burnett is the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford. He got his BS and MS in Product Design at Stanford and has worked professionally on a wide variety of projects ranging from award-winning Apple PowerBooks to the original Star Wars action figures.
Dave Evans is an entrepreneur who led the design of Apple's first mouse and was an early employee at Electronic Arts before becoming a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford University.
Book details
- Print length: 240 pages
- Genre: Nonfiction, Personal Development, Self Help
What are the chapters in Designing Your Life?
Chapter 1. Start Where You Are
Chapter 2. Building a Compass
Chapter 3. Wayfinding
Chapter 4. Getting Unstuck
Chapter 5. Design Your Lives
Chapter 6. Prototyping
Chapter 7. How Not to Get a Job
Chapter 8. Designing Your-Dream Job
Chapter 9. Choosing Happiness
Chapter 10. Failure Immunity
Chapter 11. Building a Team
What is a good quote from Designing Your Life?
Top Quote: “Dysfunctional Belief: Happiness is having it all. Reframe: Happiness is letting go of what you don’t need.” (Meaning) - Designing Your Life Quotes, Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
What do critics say?
Here's what one of the prominent reviewers had to say about the book: “Designing Your Life walks readers through the process of building a satisfying, meaningful life by approaching the challenge the way a designer would. Experimentation. Wayfinding. Prototyping. Constant iteration. You should read the book. Everyone else will.” — Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive
* The editor of this summary review made every effort to maintain information accuracy, including any published quotes, chapters, or takeaways. If you're interested in furthering your personal growth, you may want to explore my list of favorite self-improvement books. These books, which have had a significant impact on my life, are carefully curated and come with summaries and key lessons.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
