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

by Bill Burnett

keep it simple. The team’s focus is on supporting an effective life design—no more and no less.

Respectful 2. Confidential 3. Participative (no holding back) 4. Generative (constructive, not skeptical or judging)

and advice. “Counsel” is when someone is trying to help you figure out what you think. “Advice” is when someone is telling you what he or she thinks. Fortunately, there’s a very easy way to tell when you’re getting advice rather than counsel.

Good counselors will often seem to ask the same question a couple of times from different points of view, to be sure they’re getting it. They will often try to summarize or restate something you’ve said and ask, “Did I get that right?” This approach tells you that they’re focused on you—not on themselves.

A good mentor will resist telling you what to do, or will at least be explicitly cautious about the risks of overinfluencing you. She might say, “Well, look, I’m really not trying to tell you that I think the right thing is to take that promotion and move to Beijing for a year, but I do notice that every time you talk about China you light up and you smile.

It’s surprisingly easy to do. You just have to be the initiator. When you identify someone who you think can serve you as a mentor, find a way to spend some time with the person and direct the conversation to the areas in which you want help. Specifically, ask him not so much to tell you what he’d do as to use his insights and experience to try to help you sort out your own thinking.

Community is more than just sharing resources or hanging out now and then. It’s showing up and investing in the ongoing creation of one another’s lives. Being in that kind of community is a great way to live, and we highly recommend it as an ongoing practice, not just when making big plans or starting new things.

Kindred Purpose. Healthy communities are about something—not just getting together to get together.

The community isn’t just gathering for the ad hoc purpose of getting a project done or finishing reading the book together—it gathers because its participants agree that a life lived in a community-supported way is a better designed life, and they stick with it.

shared ground keeps the group together, keeps the conversation going, and acts as a means of establishing priorities and mediating issues as the group journeys together.

A community doesn’t have to be made up entirely of intimates, but there should be some level of personal disclosure about what each person is up to and how it’s going.

Make a list of three to five people who might be a part of your Life Design Team. Think of your supporters, your intimates, your mentors or possible mentors. Ideally, these will be three to five people also actively engaged in designing their lives. 2. Make sure everyone has a copy of the book (or buy books for everyone), so all the members of your team understand how life design works and have reviewed the team roles and rules. 3. Agree to meet regularly and actively to co-create a well-designed life as a community.

Let us tell you a little secret. There is no perfect pie. It is virtually impossible on any given day to devote yourself equally to all the areas of your life that are important to you. Balance happens over time. Life design happens over time.

Dysfunctional Belief: I finished designing my life; the hard work is done, and everything will be great. Reframe: You never finish designing your life—life is a joyous and never-ending design project of building your way forward.

Curious. There’s something interesting about everything. Endless curiosity is key to a well-designed life. Nothing is boring to everyone (even doing taxes or washing the dishes).

We urge you to revisit your compass at least annually, and recalibrate it. This will help you revitalize the creation of meaning in your life.

Perhaps the most important recommendation we can give you to sustain a well-designed life is to invest in and commit to some personal practices of the variety we described in chapter 9. In our own lives, both of us would say that our personal growth in this area—the refinement and disciplined participation in practices—has been the single most life-giving thing we’ve done.

Meditation yoga etc

Did you perform all the exercises in the book? Which ones did you find most thought provoking? 2. In the introduction, the authors point out that only 27 percent of college graduates have a career related to their majors. What

did you think when you read that statistic? Are you among the 27 percent? 3. The concept of “reframing”—pivoting your perspective to address a perceived problem—plays an important role in this book. What experiences have you had with reframing, either in your career or in your personal life? 4. When discussing the role of a designer, the authors say, “Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward” (this page). Until you read this book, had you been mostly thinking or mostly building? 5. On this page, the authors write, “Designing something changes the future that is possible.” What does this mean to you? 6. Which was a greater challenge while building your compass: describing your Workview or describing your Lifeview? 7. The authors say that the process of reconciling Workview and Lifeview often leads to the biggest “aha” moments (this page). What became clear to you? 8. Have you ever experienced “flow,” the feeling of complete engage-ment? If so, when?

On this page, the authors write, “There is no one idea for your life. There are many lives you could live happily and productively.” Have you ever thought this way before? How many lives did you imagine for yourself while reading this book? What was the most surprising connection you made in your mind map? 10. When you created your Odyssey Plans, which one set your heart to racing? Was it a new discovery for you? 11. Are you discussing this book with your Life Design Team? If you haven’t assembled one yet, what’s stopping you? 12. Chapter 6 is devoted to prototyping: asking questions, uncovering hidden biases, iterating rapidly, and creating momentum. Were you familiar with this concept before reading the book? What aspects of your life have you prototyped? 13. Did you hold a brainstorming session? What was your most successful question? How many ideas did you generate? 14. What is the difference between pursuing a job and pursuing an offer? In your own life, which do you generally do? 15. On this page, the authors talk about “pursuing latent wonderfulness.” How would you define that concept?

What did you learn from the jam study described on this page? 17. The notion of failure as a useful thing comes up frequently in the book, and particular in. In your own life, how have you “failed forward”? 18. Until now, have you received more advice (when someone is telling you what they think) when making a decision, or more counsel (when someone is trying to help you figure out what you think)? Which has proved more helpful? 19. What was your biggest revelation from this book? 20. If the authors were in this room right now and asked you, “How’s it going?” how would you respond?