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

by Bill Burnett

Let’s say you’ve got three alternatives. Pick any one of them and stop thinking about it. Choose to think for the next one to three days that you are the person who has made the decision to pick Alternative A. Choice A is your reality right now. When you brush your teeth in the morning, you do so having chosen A. When you sit at a red light, you’re waiting to proceed toward your destination related to living in Alternative A. You may or may not actually say things to other people about this—such as “Oh yeah, I’m moving to Beijing in May!”—because such statements will cause confusion later. But you get the idea: you’ll just live in your head as the person in an Alternative A reality. You are not thinking about Alternative A from your current reality as a struggling choice maker. You are living calmly as one who has chosen A. After one to three days of this (how long is up to you and a matter of taste), then take at least a day or two off to be your regular self and reset. Then do the same thing with Alternative B, then another reset break, then Alternative