More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
A well-designed life is a marvelous portfolio of experiences, of adventures, of failures that taught you important lessons, of hardships that made you stronger and helped you know yourself better, and of achievements and satisfactions.
Often we approach our problems as if they are an addition or subtraction problem. We either want to get something (add) or get rid of something (subtract).
Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem.
Please do fight City Hall. Oppose injustice. Work for women’s rights. Pursue food justice. End homelessness. Combat global warming. But do it smart. 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
“Was I more engaged by artfully rephrasing Jon’s comment (getting the articulation dialed in just right) or by facilitating consensus among the staff (being the guy who made the group’s ‘Now we get it!’ unifying moment happen)?”
When we ask our students, “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
Don’t make a doable problem into an anchor problem by wedding yourself irretrievably to a solution that just isn’t working.
“fail fast and fail forward,” into your next step.
An anchor problem is a real problem, just a hard one. It’s actionable—but we’ve been stuck on it so long or so often that it seems insurmountable (which is why such a problem has to be reframed, then opened up with new ideas, then knocked down to size by prototyping). Gravity problems aren’t actually problems. They’re circumstances that you can do nothing to change. There is no solution to a gravity problem—only acceptance and redirection.
By doing the work, meeting the people, and choosing to explore her options through hands-on experience, and not just spending her time reading, thinking, or reflecting in her journal about what she should or could do next,
it is always possible to prototype something you are interested in. The best way to get started is to keep your first few prototypes very low-resolution and very simple. You want to isolate one variable and design a prototype to answer that one question. Use what you have available or can ask for, and be prepared to iterate quickly. And remember that a prototype is not a thought experiment; it must involve a physical experience in the world.
“How many ways can we think of to experience making an impact on women’s empowerment?”
caveat emptor.
“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?”
Networking is just asking for directions.
(impact investing in the developing world) and designed her way to three great offers in that field including the one she accepted with a boutique firm she’d never heard of before—and it only took two hundred conversations to do it. Two hundred. In just six months.
To grok a choice, you don’t think about it—you become it. 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.
Then do the same thing with Alternative B, then another reset break, then Alternative C.
So the key to letting go is to move on and grab something else. Put your attention on something—not off something.
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.
Screwups are just that—simple mistakes about things that you normally get right.
You normally do these things right, so you don’t really need to learn anything from this—you
Weaknesses are failures that happen because of one of your abiding failings. These are the mistakes that you make over and over.
some failures are just part of your makeup, and your best strategy is avoidance of the situations that prompt them instead of improvement.
Growth opportunities are the failures that didn’t have to happen, or at least don’t have to happen the next time. The cause of these failures is identifiable, and a fix is available.
What if I just tell you what we’ve got on our minds, and maybe you could help me hear my own best thoughts on this?
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.
(1) be curious (curiosity), (2) try stuff (bias to action), (3) reframe problems (reframing), (4) know it’s a process (awareness), and (5) ask for help (radical collaboration).
What would someone who’s interested in this want to know? How does it work? Why do they do it that way? How did they used to do it? What do experts in this field argue about and why? What’s the most interesting thing going on here? What don’t I get about what’s happening here?
What are all the steps behind you and in front of you that you can imagine? Is what’s on your mind actually germane to the step you’re on now? Are you on the right step, or are you ahead of or behind yourself? What happens if you don’t think more than one step ahead? What’s the worst thing that can happen? How likely is it to happen, and what would you do if it did? What’s the best thing that can happen?
Build a team. Create a community. Who are all the different groups and constituencies involved in what you’re working on? Are you connected to and in conversation with all of them? If not—get going. Keep an ask-for-help journal in which you jot down the questions you want help on, and keep it handy. Each week, identify some people who can help you with some of the journal entries and reach out to them. Journal answers and results from your helpers. Find a mentor.
practices (yoga, meditation, poetry writing/reading, prayer, etc.)
