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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bill Burnett
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September 20 - December 4, 2016
In fact, in the United States, only 27 percent of college grads end up in a career related to their majors.
When asked what we do at Stanford, we will sometimes respond with our carefully crafted elevator reply: “We teach courses at Stanford that help any student to apply the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life at and after university.” And, of course, they then say, “Great! What’s that mean?” And we usually say, “We teach how to use design to figure out what you want to be when you grow up.” At that point almost everyone says, “Oh! Can I take the class?!
Designers love questions, but what they really love is reframing questions.
In design thinking we always say, “Don’t start with the problem, start with the people, start with empathy.
You start out thinking you are designing a product (a new coffee blend and new kind of coffee machine) and reframe when you realize you are actually redesigning the coffee experience (Starbucks).
In fact, we suggest you go out and get a design team right off the bat—a group of people who will read the book with you and do the exercises alongside you, a collaborative team in which you support one another in your pursuit of a well-designed life.
almost every problem requires a design team.
Design thinking takes this idea even further and suggests that the best results come from radical collaboration.
Radical collaboration works on the principle that people with very different backgrounds will bring their idiosyncratic technica...
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This increases the chance that the team will have empathy for those who will use what they are designing, and that the collision of different backgro...
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Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward.
most people don’t know their passion.
Problem Finding + Problem Solving = Well-Designed Life
(Dave is so grateful that he got into teaching later in life; now his age is seen as a source of wisdom, and he’s not still trying to pass himself off as a marketing expert to clients half his age who know he’s no digital native and doesn’t actually “get it” anymore.)
We are going to help you create the best-designed life available to you in reality—not in some fictional world with less gravity and rich poets.
Logging when you are and aren’t engaged and energized will help you pay attention to what you’re doing and discover what’s working.
Designers learn to have lots of wild ideas because they know that the number one enemy of creativity is judgment.
As a life designer, you need to embrace two philosophies: 1. You choose better when you have lots of good ideas to choose from. 2. You never choose your first solution to any problem.
Don’t make a doable problem into an anchor problem by wedding yourself irretrievably to a solution that just isn’t working.
Prototypes lower your anxiety, ask interesting questions, and get you data about the potential of the change that you are trying to accomplish.
we believe anything can be prototyped, from a physical object to public policy.
Prototyping the life design way is all about asking good questions, outing our hidden biases and assumptions, iterating rapidly, and creating momentum for a path we’d like to try out.
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.
You want a team of no fewer than three and rarely more than six people who have all volunteered to help.
If you just let your brainstormers play with the Play-Doh while they are brainstorming, we guarantee you will get more and better ideas.
The Rules of Brainstorming 1. Go for quantity, not quality. 2. Defer judgment and do not censor ideas. 3. Build off the ideas of others. 4. Encourage wild 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.
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
“We had 141 ideas, we grouped those into six categories, and, based on our focal question, we selected eight killer ideas to prototype; then we prioritized the list, and our first prototype is
A great way to do this would be to combine your Odyssey Plan presentation gathering (discussed in chapter 5) with a prototype experience brainstorm session.
(Don’t have a team? Try mind mapping.)
In our experience, if more than eight people have been through the wringer and no decisions have been made, the hiring process is probably broken. This is a sign that the company may not be a great place to work, and you might want to walk quickly to the exit.
One way to tell if this is happening is to find out how quickly job descriptions churn on a company’s website. If they are coming and going every week or two, this might be the reason.
Looking for candidates who would like to connect their Workview to their Lifeview • Looking for candidates who believe that good work is found through the proper exercise of their signature strengths • Looking for candidates with high integrity, the capacity to learn quickly, and high intrinsic motivation; we can teach you all the rest
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.
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.
We call it pursuing latent wonderfulness.
In the Internet-powered, globalized world, there are always a gazillion options, so we are now more capable of being unhappy with our choices than any generation in history has been. Yay for us!
The key is to remember that imagined choices don’t actually exist, because they’re not actionable.
So the key to letting go is to move on and grab something else. Put your attention on something—not off something.
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.
Dysfunctional Belief: We judge our life by the outcome. Reframe: Life is a process, not an outcome.
With each successive loss, losing got less painful, which allowed him to take risks to see if new approaches would work.
Failure reframe is a healthy habit that leads to failure immunity.
He has lots of tricks to solve this persistent failing, and they work a good 7 percent of the time.
Designers believe in radical collaboration because true genius is a collaborative process.
