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

by Bill Burnett

technology, products, and spaces to design your career and your life. A well-designed

life

curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration.

We believe that people actually need to take time to develop a passion. And the research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery—not before.

it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life.

health, work, play, and love.

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

What is work for? Why do you do it? What makes good work good? If you discover and are able to articulate your philosophy of work (what it’s for and why you do it), you will be less likely to let others design your life for you. Developing your own Workview is one component of the compass you are building; a Lifeview is second.

What gives life meaning? What makes your life worthwhile or valuable? How does your life relate to others in your family, your community, and the world? What do money, fame, and personal accomplishment have to do with a satisfying life? How important are experience, growth, and fulfillment in your life?

Who you are • What you believe • What you are doing

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?

(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?

Write a short reflection about your Workview. This should take about thirty minutes. Shoot for about 250 words—less than a page of typed writing. 2. Write a short reflection about your Lifeview. This should also take no more than thirty minutes and be 250 words or so. 3. Read over your Lifeview and Workview, and answer each of these questions: a. Where do your views on work and life complement one another? b. Where do they clash? c. Does one drive the other? How?

We think the first clues are engagement and energy.

Michael wrote down when during the day he had been feeling bored, restless, or unhappy at his job, and what exactly he had been doing during those times (the times when he was disengaged). He also wrote down when he was excited, focused, and having a good time at work, and what exactly he was doing during those times (the times when he was engaged). Michael was working on what we call the Good Time Journal.

Flow is that state of being in which time stands still, you’re totally engaged in an activity, and the challenge of that particular activity matches up with your skill—so you’re neither bored because it’s too easy nor anxious because it’s too hard. People describe this state of engagement as “euphoric,” “in the zone,” and “freakin’ awesome.” Flow was “discovered” by Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has been researching this phenomenon since the 1970s. When he first described the state of flow, he had studied the detailed activities of thousands of people going about their daily lives and was able to isolate this very special form of intense engagement.1

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.2

follow the joy; follow what engages and excites you, what brings you alive. Most people are taught that work is always hard and that we have to suffer through it. Well, there are parts of any job or any career that are hard and annoying—but if most of what you do at work is not bringing you alive, then it’s killing you. It’s your career, after all, and you are going to be spending a lot of time doing it—we calculate it at 90,000 to 125,000 hours during the course of your lifetime. If it’s not fun, a lot of your life is going to suck.

Work is fun when you are actually leaning into your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing.

We are suggesting that focused attention on engagement and energy level can provide very helpful clues to wayfinding your path forward.

Activity Log (where I record where I’m engaged and energized) • Reflections (where I discover what I am learning)

Write your weekly reflections on blank pages in your Good Time Journal.

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?

Peak experiences in our past—even our long-ago past—can be telling. Take some time to reflect on your memories of past peak work-related experiences and do a Good Time Journal Activity Log and reflection on them to see what you find. Those memories have stuck with you for good reason.

Complete a log of your daily activities, using the worksheet provided (or in your own notebook). Note when you are engaged and/or energized and what you are doing during those times. Try to do this daily, or at the very least every few days. 2. Continue this daily logging for three weeks. 3. At the end of each week, jot down your reflections—notice which activities are engaging and energizing, and which ones are not. 4. Are there any surprises in your reflections? 5. Zoom in and try to get even more specific about what does or does not engage and energize you. 6. Use the AEIOU method as needed to help you in

“How many lifetimes’ worth of living are there in you?,” the average answer is 3.4. And if you accept this idea—that there are multiple great designs for your life, though you’ll still only get to live one—it is rather liberating. There is no one idea for your life. There are many lives you could live happily and productively (no matter how many years old you are), and there are lots of different paths you could take to live each of those productive, amazingly different lives. So do the math; this adds up to tons of different possible ideas you might have. And we’re going to give you the tools to generate such ideas.

Picking a topic 2. Making the mind map

Making secondary connections and creating concepts (mashing it all up)

Mind Map 1—Engagement From your Good Time Journal, pick one of the areas of greatest interest to you, or an activity during which you were really engaged (e.g., balancing the budget or pitching a new idea), and make it the center of your map. Then generate a bunch of connected words and concepts, using the mind-mapping technique. Mind Map 2—Energy From your Good Time Journal, pick something you’ve identified as really energizing you in your work and life (e.g., art class, giving feedback to colleagues, health-care access, keeping things running right) and mind-map this out.

Mind Map 3—Flow From your Good Time Journal, pick one of the experiences when you were in a state of flow, put the experience itself at the center of a mind map, and complete your mapping of your experience with this state (e.g., speaking in front of a large audience or brainstorming creative ideas).

Look at the outer ring of one of your maps and pick three disparate items that catch your eye. You’ll know which ones they are intuitively—they should literally “jump out” at you.

Now try to combine those three items into a possible job description that would be fun and interesting to you and would be helpful to someone else (again, it need not be practical or appeal to lots of people or employers).

Name your role and draw a napkin sketch of it (a quick visual drawing of what it is), like the one shown here. For example, when Grant (who was languishing away at the car-rental agency) did this exercise based on when he was engaged in his life (hiking in redwoods, playing pickup basketball, helping his niece and nephew), he ended up drawing a sketch of himself leading a Pirate Surf Camp for children.

Do this exercise three times—once for each of your mind maps—making sure that the three versions are different from one another.

Review your Good Time Journal and note activities in which you were engaged, energized, and in flow. 2. Choose an activity that you were engaged in, an activity that you felt highly energized from, and something you did that brought you into flow, and create three mind maps—one for each. 3. Look at the outer ring of each mind map, pick three things that jump out at you, and create a job description from them. 4. Create a role for each job description, and draw a napkin sketch.

Reframe: There are multiple great lives (and plans) within me, and I get to choose which one to build my way forward to next.

Criteria for choosing what’s next may be based on available resources (proximity, time, money), coherence (how the alternative fits into your Lifeview and Workview), your confidence level (do you believe you can do this?), and how much you like it. But first things first. You need to develop the alternatives.

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?

The Thing You’d Do or the Life You’d Live If Money or Image Were No Object.

1. A visual/graphical timeline. Include personal and noncareer events as well—do you want to be married, train to win the CrossFit Games, or learn how to bend spoons with your mind?

A title for each option in the form of a six-word headline describing the essence of this alternative. 3. Questions that this alternative is asking—preferably two or three. A good designer asks questions to test assumptions and reveal new insights. In each potential timeline, you will investigate different possibilities and learn different things about yourself and the world. What kinds of things will you want to test and explore in each alternative version of your life? 4. A dashboard where you can gauge a. Resources (Do you have the objective resources—time, money, skill, contacts—you need to pull off your plan?) b. Likability (Are you hot or cold or warm about your plan?) c. Confidence (Are you feeling full of confidence, or pretty uncertain about pulling this off?)

Coherence (Does the plan make sense within itself? And is it consistent with you, your Workview, and your Lifeview?) • Possible considerations ° Geography—where will you live? ° What experience/learning will you gain? ° What are the impacts/results of choosing this alternative? ° What will life look like? What particular role, industry, or company do you see yourself in?

° Do keep in mind things other than career and money. Even though those things are important, if not central, to the decisive direction of your next few years, there are other critical elements that you want to pay attention to. ° Any of the considerations listed above can be a springboard for forming your alternative lives for the next five years. If you find yourself stuck, try making a mind map out of any of the design considerations listed above. Don’t overthink this exercise, and don’t skip

You want them to receive, reflect, and amplify. Find two to five people who are “there for you” and will show up for an evening dedicated to helping you design your life (or who are willing to read this chapter, at the very least). When it’s time for questions, “Tell me more about…” is a great approach that keeps the inquiry supportive. If you really don’t want to or can’t find

a group to share with, then video yourself presenting your Odyssey Plans and watch and listen to yourself as though you weren’t the author; then see what you have to say to yourself and jot down your ideas.

Create three alternative five-year plans, using the worksheet provided. 2. Give each alternative a descriptive six-word title, and write down three questions that arise out of each version of you. 3. Complete each gauge on the dashboard—ranking each alternative for resources, likability, confidence, and coherence. 4. Present your plan to another person, a group, or your Life Design Team. Note how each alternative energizes you.

Prototypes should be designed to ask a question and get some data about something that you’re interested in. Good prototypes isolate one aspect of a problem and design an experience that allows you to “try out” some version of a potentially interesting future.

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.