Designing Your New Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness--and a New Freedom--at Work

by Bill Burnett

Ask for help. If we want to figure out how to transform our experience of work, we can’t sit at home and ruminate; we need to interact with the world of work and workers. We need to ask for help. We call this asking-for-help step “radical collaboration,” and when coupled with a bias to action, it results in rapid learning, an abundance of prototype opportunities, and some life-changing experiences. 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. And when you radically collaborate, you also discover that you are not alone, that many people are asking the same questions and have the same concerns. When the subject is work, we want to double down on the idea that design is a collaborative process and many of your best ideas are going to come from other people. You just need to ask for help. When you reach out to the world, it’s been our experience that the world reaches back. And that changes everything.