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

by Bill Burnett

“Hello, Anna, I’m so glad to connect with you. John said you were just the person I needed to speak with. I’m very impressed with what I know of your work, and I’d love to hear some of your story. Might you have thirty minutes to spare, at a time and place convenient to you, when I can buy you a cup of coffee and hear more about your experience?”

generating a large quantity of ideas without concern for quality, and deferring judgment so that participants would not censor ideas.

If the question isn’t open-ended, you won’t get very interesting results and not much volume. We tend to start all of our life design brainstorms with the phrase “How many ways can we think of to…” to make sure that we haven’t limited our potential output. Clara could have organized her brainstorm around the question “How many ways can we think of to experience making an impact on women’s empowerment?”

You can visit our website, www.​design​ingyour.​life, for a list of exercises and improvisational games that we use all the time with our students. Here’s one quick idea that always works: give everyone in your brainstorming group a can of Play-Doh. Bill’s been in love with Play-Doh since his days at the toy company Kenner Products; it

We recommend that all participants have their own pens and notepads and write down their ideas. That way, the group isn’t constrained by how fast the facilitator can record ideas, and there is less chance of losing a potentially great idea.

“We had 141 ideas.” Group similar ideas together by subject or category, name those categories, and frame the results with reference to the original focal question. Every unique category is given a descriptive and often funny name that captures the essence of that group of ideas. Then vote. Voting is important, and should be done silently, so that people aren’t influencing one another. We like to use colored dots to cast votes, and we also like to use categories such as:

Most exciting

The one we wish we could do if money were no object • The dark horse—probably won’t work, but if it did… • Most likely to lead to a great life • If we could ignore the laws of physics…

Review your three Odyssey Plans and the questions you wrote down for each. 2. Make a list of prototype conversations that might help you answer these questions. 3. Make a list of prototype experiences that might help you answer these questions. 4. If you are stuck, and if you have gathered a good group, have a brainstorming session to come up with possibilities. (Don’t have a team? Try mind mapping.) 5. Build your prototypes by actively seeking out Life Design Interviews and experiences.

Awareness is key to life design,

Empathy is a crucial element in design thinking, and

Dysfunctional Belief: You should focus on your need to find a job. Reframe: You should focus on the hiring manager’s need to find the right person.

“The more I learn about XYZ Environmental and the more people I meet here, the more fascinating it becomes. I wonder, Allen, what steps would be involved in exploring how someone like me might become a part of this organization?”

“Network” is more noun than verb. The point isn’t to “do” network-ing; the goal is to participate in the network. Simply put, it just means to enter into a particular community that’s having a particular conversation (such as sustainable architecture). Every domain of human endeavor is held together by a web of relationships between people.

You can be genuinely curious about the job, because it is absolutely true that you would like the opportunity to evaluate an offer.

People don’t hire résumés; they hire people. People they like. People who are interesting. And you know what types of people each of us is most interested in (whether it’s as a potential date or a potential employee)—the ones who are most interested in us.

You design your “really pretty terrific and surprisingly close to a dream” job the same way you design your life—by thinking like a designer, by generating options, by prototyping, and by making the best choices possible.

life design, being happy means you choose happiness.

First you gather and create some options, then you narrow down your list to your top alternatives, then you finally choose, and then, last but not least, you…agonize over that choice.

The fourth step in the process is to let go of our unnecessary options and move on, embracing our choice fully so that we can get the most from it.

Gathering and creating options is what we’ve been discussing throughout this book. Having good insights about yourself, exploring options about where to engage with the world, and prototyping experiences are the ways that your life design process generates ideas, alternatives, and viable options that you can pursue (all pursued, of course, with a curious mind-set in which you’re looking for latent wonderfulness, and approached with a bias to action versus overthinking).

write your Workview and Lifeview, to create mind maps, do your three Odyssey Plan alternatives, and prototype conversations and experiences.

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

Only after the choice was named did you become aware of your preference. So you really can’t lose when you’re shortening your list of options. If you cross out the wrong ones, you’ll know afterward. You may have to go as far as crossing out seven of the twelve and rewriting that new, clean list of just five before you realize it, but if it’s wrong, you’ll know. Trust us when we tell you that you can trust yourself.

If, however, you can’t act on your list of five because you really can’t find any preferences or meaningful distinctions between them, then—you win! You have just discovered that you’ve got a can’t-lose situation on your hands. That means that all five options are strategically worthwhile for you, with no real distinctive difference. They will all work for you, which leaves you to choose based on secondary considerations (the drive is easier, the logo is cool, the story will be sexier at cocktail parties).

Therefore, in order to make a good decision, we need access to our feelings and gut reactions to the alternatives.

we need access to that wisdom center where our well-informed emotional knowing can help us discern the better choices for us.

We define discernment as decision making that employs more than one way of knowing.

We mostly use cognitive knowing—all that good, objective, organized, informational kind of knowing—the sort of knowing that gets you A’s in school. But we also have other ways of knowing, including the affective forms of intuitive, spiritual, and emotional knowing. Add to those ...

Doing this requires that you educate and mature your access to and awareness of your emotional/intuitive/spiritual ways of knowing (or however you may name these affective aspects of our shared humanity). For centuries, the most commonly affirmed path to such maturity has been that of personal practices such as journaling, prayer or spiritual exercises, meditation, integrated physical practices like yoga or Tai Chi, and so on.

reason practices work to give you better access to your best wisdom in discerning a good decision relates precisely to the nature of such insights. Emotional, intuitive, and spiritual forms of knowing are usually subtle, quiet, and even shy. Rarely do people get access to their deepest wisdom by rushing around a few hours before a deadline and talking a lot or surfing the Web. It’s a slower, quieter thing. Practices are just that—practice.

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

C. Then one more reset break and, finally, a thoughtful reflection on what those experiences were like and which one of those people you might most like to be. This technique isn’t guaranteed (no such techniques are), but you can see how the intention here is to allow your alternate forms of knowing—emotional, spiritual, social, intuitive—to have some room to express themselves to you, and thereby complement the evaluative, cognitive knowing, which, if you’re like most of us, is the dominant form of thinking and choosing you rely on.

Dan Gilbert at Harvard has looked at this area and demonstrated the effect letting go of your options has, in a study evaluating how people made decisions about different Monet art prints.3 He asked people to rank five different Monet prints according to their preference, numbering them from one to five. Whichever prints the subjects ranked numbers three and four he said the experimenters happened to have spare copies of and were letting subjects take one home with them. Of course, most of the people took the one they had ranked number three. Then, interestingly, the experimenters told some of the people that they could swap the one they took for the other one later if they wanted to, and the other people were told that whatever print they took home was it—no swapping. After a few weeks, the experimenters checked back with the subjects. The people who had been told they could swap their prints—even though they had not done so—were less happy with their choices than the people who had chosen the exact same prints but had been told the choice was irreversible. It turns out that reversibility is not conducive to establishing reliable happiness with a decision. Apparently, just the invitation to reconsider and “keep your options open” makes us doubt and devalue our choice.

The Paradox of Choice, the researcher Barry Schwartz informs us that this nasty little feature of how our brains handle decisions goes even further.4 When we make a decision in the face of many options, or just while perceiving that there are lots of other options that we don’t even know about, we are less happy with our choice. The problem here is not just the options we had and didn’t pursue (the options we “keep open”)—it’s that mountain of options we never even had time to check out.

This is key to choosing happiness and being happy with our choices. When in doubt…let go and move on. It really is that simple.

When the questions that lead to agonizing creep into your head, evict the thoughts, and direct your energy into living well the decisions you’ve made. Pay attention and learn as you go, of course, but don’t get caught with your eyes fixated on the rearview mirror of decision regret.

make a journal entry about your decision, and reread it when you get confused.

Dysfunctional Belief: Happiness is having it all. Reframe: Happiness is letting go of what you don’t need.

you can only be making progress and learning from the different kinds of experiences that failure and success both have to offer.

Designing your life is actually what life is, because life is a process, not an outcome. If you can get that, you’ve got it all.

When designing your life, you start with who you are (chapters 1, 2, and 3). Then you have lots of ideas (rather than wait and wait to have the idea of the century) and you try things out by doing them (chapters 4, 5, and 6), and then you make the best choice you can (chapter 8). As you do all this, including making choices that set you on one path for a number of years, you grow various aspects of your personality and identity that are nurtured and called upon by those experiences—you become more yourself.

Failure is just the raw material of success.

Log your failures. 2. Categorize your failures. 3. Identify growth insights.

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. 3. Identify your growth insights. 4. Build a habit of converting failures to growth by doing this once or twice a month.

is an integral aspect of a design point of view, and it’s a key reason that design thinking works. Your life design isn’t in you; it’s in the world, where you will discover and co-create it with others.

Supporters. Supporters come in all flavors, ages, proximities, and sizes. Supporters are just those go-to people you can count on to care about your life—people close enough to you that their encouragement helps keep you going and their feedback is of real use.

Players. Players are the active participants in your life design projects—especially your ongoing work-related and avocational projects

and prototypes. These are the people you actually do things with, your co-workers in the classic sense.

Intimates. Intimates include your immediate and close extended family members and your closest friends. These are likely the people most directly affected by your life design, and, whether or not they are actively involved with your l...