Designing Your Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work

by Bill Burnett

MAKER MIX EXERCISE 1. The goal of this exercise is to come up with a subjective evaluation of how much moneymaking, impact-making, and expression-making you have in your life right now, your Maker Mix, and how you feel about it. The visualization is simple: You set up your Maker Mix Board to represent your current life mix. Notice once again that there are no right answers—there are lots of good mixes. If lots of expression and little money, or lots of money and little impact, sounds right or seems in tune, then your sliders are right where they should be. And remember, the positions of the sliders on your money/impact/expression mix board are “set” from your gut-level understanding of what is actually the “you are here” state of things. 2. Write a few sentences about how it’s going in each of the three areas: moneymaking, impact-making, and expression-making. 3. Adjust the location of each maker slider in your current situation. 4. Ask yourself how you feel about your board. 5. Now build the board you aspire to, the one that you think would represent one manageable step toward a better balance, one that would result in a more coherent life. 6. Brainstorm a couple of simple changes you’d like to make to adjust any one of your “slices.” 7. Come up with a few simple prototypes you’d like to try that move a slider a little to change the allocation of money, impact, and expression in your mix (review the Set the Bar Low method from chapter 1).