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

by Bill Burnett

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.

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

These are likely the people most directly affected by your life design, and, whether or not they are actively involved with your life design project, they are the most influential people in it.

What makes an effective community is not having people in it with the right expertise or information. What makes it work is people with the right intention and presence.

(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).

Redescribe your problem using some of the following reframe lenses: Your problem is actually very small. Very easy to fix. An opportunity more than a problem. Something you can just skip entirely. Something you actually don’t understand at all yet. Not your problem. And how will it look a year later?

Write down all the questions, worries, ideas, and hopes that you have, and then ask yourself if you know what to do next. Does it feel different now?

Keep an ask-for-help journal in which you jot down the questions you want help on, and keep it handy.