Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You

by Bill Burnett

A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise.

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Your life is not a thing, it’s an experience; the fun comes from designing and enjoying the experience.

You weren’t put on this earth to work eight hours a day at a job you hate until the time comes to die.

You can’t change gravity. You’d have to relocate the earth’s orbit to pull that off, and that’s a pretty crazy goal. Skip it. Just accept it. When you accept it, you are free to work around that situation and find something that is actionable.

you start where you are. Not where you wish you were. Not where you hope you are. Not where you think you should be. But right where you are.

HEALTH/WORK/PLAY/LOVE DASHBOARD 1. Write a few sentences about how it’s going in each of the four areas. 2. Mark where you are (0 to Full) on each gauge. 3. Ask yourself if there’s a design problem you’d like to tackle in any of these areas. 4. Now ask yourself if your “problem” is a gravity problem.

We have just three questions for you: What is your name? What is your quest? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Why am I here? What am I doing? Why does it matter? What is my purpose? What’s the point of it all?

• Why work? • What’s work for? • What does work mean? • How does it relate to the individual, others, society? • What defines good or worthwhile work? • What does money have to do with it? • What do experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?

Why are we here? • What is the meaning or purpose of life? • What is the relationship between the individual and others? • Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in? • What is good, and what is evil? • Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent, and if so, what impact does this have on your life? • What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace, and strife in life?

the brain represents only about 2 percent of our body weight, and yet it takes up 25 percent of the energy we consume every day. It’s no wonder that the way we invest our attention is critical to whether or not we feel high or low energy.

what makes work fun? It’s not what you might think. It’s not one unending office party. It’s not getting paid a lot of money. It’s not having multiple weeks of paid vacations. Work is fun when you are actually leaning into your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing.

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paying detailed attention to what was engaging and energizing them.

And don’t worry about being stuck. Designers get stuck all the time. Being stuck can be a launching pad for creativity.

Accept the problem. Get stuck. Get over it, and ideate, ideate, ideate!

number-one enemy of creativity is judgment.

fuhgedaboudit.

www.designingyour.life

Most people fail not for lack of talent but for lack of imagination.

You wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive, would you? But we do this all the time with jobs and life changes.

Alex Osborn in a book published in 1953 called Applied Imagination.

The bottom line is that there is no perfect job that you perfectly fit, but you can make lots of jobs perfect enough.

imagined choices don’t actually exist, because they’re not actionable.

rehash and ruminate.

agonize.

Is what’s on your mind actually germane to the step you’re on now?