Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

by Bill Burnett

“encore” career—work that combines personal meaning, continued income, and social impact.

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.

the research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery—not before. To put it more succinctly: passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause.

Deciding which problems to work on may be one of the most important decisions you make, because people can lose years (or a lifetime) working on the wrong problem.

If you become open-minded enough to accept reality, you’ll be freed to reframe an actionable problem and design a way to participate in the world on things that matter to you and might even work.

In order to start where we are, we need to break life down into some discrete areas—health, work, play, and love.

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.

A Workview should address the critical issues related to what work is and what it means to you. It is not just a list of what you want from or out of work, but a general statement of your view of work. It’s your definition for what good work deserves to be. A Workview may address such questions as: • 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?

Your Lifeview is what provides your definition of what have been called “matters of ultimate concern.” It’s what matters most to you. • 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?

Read over your Workview and Lifeview, and write down a few thoughts on the following questions (please try to answer each of the questions): • Where do your views on work and life complement one another? • Where do they clash? • Does one drive the other? How?

Wayfinding is the ancient art of figuring out where you are going when you don’t actually know your destination. For wayfinding, you need a compass and you need a direction. Not a map—a direction.

What you can do is pay attention to the clues in front of you, and make your best way forward with the tools you have at hand. We think the first clues are engagement and energy.

There are two elements to the Good Time Journal: • Activity Log (where I record where I’m engaged and energized) • Reflections (where I discover what I am learning)

We recommend doing your Activity Log for at least three weeks, or whatever period of time you need to be sure you capture all the various kinds of activities that arise in your current situation (some activities may only come around every few weeks). Then we recommend that you do your Good Time Journal reflection weekly, so your reflections are based on more than just a single experience of each activity.

Getting great insights out of your Good Time Journal reflections isn’t always easy, so here’s a tool designers use to make detailed and accurate observations—part of getting good at the curiosity mind-set. It’s the AEIOU method3 that provides you five sets of questions you can use when reflecting on your Activity Log. Activities. What were you actually doing? Was this a structured or an unstructured activity? Did you have a specific role to play (team leader) or were you just a participant (at the meeting)? Environments. Our environment has a profound effect on our emotional state. You feel one way at a football stadium, another in a cathedral. Notice where you were when you were involved in the activity. What kind of a place was it, and how did it make you feel? Interactions. What were you interacting with—people or machines? Was it a new kind of interaction or one you are familiar with? Was it formal or informal? Objects. Were you interacting with any objects or devices—iPads or smartphones, hockey sticks or sailboats? What were the objects that created or supported your feeling engaged? Users. Who else was there, and what role did they play in making it either a positive or a negative experience?

Designers learn to have lots of wild ideas because they know that the number one enemy of creativity is judgment.

Our minds are generally lazy and like to get rid of problems as quickly as possible, so they surround first ideas with a lot of positive chemicals to make us “fall in love” with them.

Mind mapping works by using simple free association of words, one after another, to open up the idea space and come up with new solutions. The graphical nature of the method allows ideas and their associations to be captured automatically. This technique teaches you to generate lots of ideas, and because it is a visual method, it bypasses your inner logical/verbal censor.

Life One—That Thing You Do. Your first plan is centered on what you’ve already got in mind—either your current life expanded forward or that hot idea you’ve been nursing for some time.

Life Two—That Thing You’d Do If Thing One Were Suddenly Gone. It happens. Some kinds of work come to an end. Almost no one makes buggy whips or Internet browsers anymore. The former are out of date and the latter are given away free with your operating system, so buggy whips and browsers don’t make for hot careers. Just imagine that your life one idea is suddenly over or no longer an option. What would you do? You can’t not make a living. You can’t do nothing. What would you do?

Life Three—The Thing You’d Do or the Life You’d Live If Money or Image Were No Object. If you knew you could make a decent living at it and you knew no one would laugh at you or think less of you for doing it—what would you do? We’re

A Life Design Interview is incredibly simple. It just means getting someone’s story. Not just anyone and not just any story, of course. You want to talk to someone who is either doing and living what you’re contemplating, or has real experience and expertise in an area about which you have questions.

In fact, most minds can choose effectively between only three to five options. If we’re faced with more than that, our ability to make a choice begins to wane—many more than that and our ability to choose completely freezes.

Apparently, just the invitation to reconsider and “keep your options open” makes us doubt and devalue our choice.

Failure is just the raw material of success.

Life is not about winning and losing. It’s about learning and playing the infinite game, and when we approach our lives as designers, we are constantly curious to discover what will happen next.

Reframing Failure 1. Using the worksheet below (or downloading it from www.​designi​ngyour.​life), look back over the last week (or month or year), and log your failures. 2. Categorize them as screwups, weaknesses, or growth opportunities.