Designing Your Work Life: The #1 New York Times bestseller for building the perfect career

by Bill Burnett

If you work forty hours a week, nearly fifty weeks a year, for forty years—you will have worked over 75,000 hours. Many of you reading this will average more than fifty hours a week and work well beyond fifty years—which puts you at nearly 120,000 hours. Almost nothing in your life takes more of your time and energy than work.

The mind-sets are: curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, radical collaboration, and—the bonus—storytelling.

Getting out in the world and talking to lots of different people who are doing interesting things that you are curious about is crucial. This is your design research.

tell. Becoming a great storyteller is something you can learn, and once learned, storytelling will become one of the primary ways you engage with others and move your job and life design forward.

What makes life meaningful and what maximizes your happiness and longevity are relationships—who you love and who loves you. And there is a strong correlation between doing something for the benefit of others and living a longer, healthier life.

“Never confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of the outcome—they are really two different things. The only thing you can control is the quality of your research and the quality of the resulting decision.”

Designing your work life is a continual process of building your way forward. Start with a bias to action—just do something. Then adopt the “good enough for now” point of view. Try it right now. No matter what isn’t working at work, meet our challenge to do something, and accept the reframe that you could make it good enough for now. Then identify and resolve your hedonic treadmills and use the Set the Bar Low method for changing bad habits and behaviors. Adopt the practice of a daily Good Work Journal, and notice one or two positive things in your life every single day. Complete a 7th Day Reflection exercise once a week. Savor your experiences, and then dig around in them for insights. You may find that the mind-sets of bias to action and reframing are becoming second nature, and this will cause you to experience your work, whatever it is, in an entirely new way. You will start to notice how much more relaxed and energetic you are. And how much more available you are—to other people and to the opportunities that have started showing up all around you. Pretty soon, good enough for now will start to feel really good. That’s because you are no longer asking from the backseat of your life, “Are we there yet?” You’re in the driver’s seat. Using design thinking. Ready to start right where you are.