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

by Bill Burnett

Activities. What were you actually doing? Was this a structured or an unstructured activity? Did you have a specific role to play (team leader) or were you just a participant (at the meeting)?

Environments. Our environment has a profound effect on our emotional state. You feel one way at a football stadium, another in a cathedral. Notice where you were when you were involved in the activity. What kind of a place was it, and how did it make you feel?

Interactions. What were you interacting with—people or machines? Was it a new kind of interaction or one you are familia...

Objects. Were you interacting with any objects or devices—iPads or smartphones, hockey sticks or sailboats? What were the objects that cre...

Users. Who else was there, and what role did they play in making it either a positive...

She realized that she was just an intense and focused worker, and that her intensity could be either nurtured or frustrated by other people (users), depending on the form of collaboration (interactions).

Take some time to reflect on your memories of past peak work-related experiences and do a Good Time Journal Activity Log and reflection on them to see what you find.

when you wrote the procedure manual that they still pass out to new writers as the standard for doing it right.

Many people are like Grant: they get stuck trying to make their first idea work.

If the kids are hungry, the bank is about to foreclose on your house, or you owe a guy named Louie a lot of money, then by all means take whatever job you can get.

You can’t know what you want until you know what you might want,

Our brains are so tightly wired to be critical, find problems, and leap to judgment that it’s a wonder any ideas ever make it out! We have to defer judgment and silence the inner critic if we want to get all our ideas out. If we don’t, we may have a few good ideas, but the majority will have been lost—silently imprisoned behind the wall of judgment our prefrontal cortex has erected to safeguard us from making mistakes or looking foolish.

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.

Do not fall in love with your first idea. This relationship almost never works out. Most often, our first solutions are pretty average and not very creative. Humans have a tendency to suggest the obvious first.

The mind-mapping process has three steps: 1. Picking a topic 2. Making the mind map 3. Making secondary connections and creating concepts (mashing it all up)

Sometimes it is more comfortable to hold on to our familiar, failed approach to the problem than to risk a worse failure by attempting the big changes that we think will be required to eliminate it.

Mind Map 1—Engagement From your Good Time Journal, pick one of the areas of greatest interest to you, or an activity during which you were really engaged (e.g., balancing the budget or pitching a new idea), and make it the center of your map. Then generate a bunch of connected words and concepts, using the mind-mapping technique. Mind Map 2—Energy From your Good Time Journal, pick something you’ve identified as really energizing you in your work and life (e.g., art class, giving feedback to colleagues, health-care access, keeping things running right) and mind-map this out. Mind Map 3—Flow From your Good Time Journal, pick one of the experiences when you were in a state of flow, put the experience itself at the center of a mind map, and complete your mapping of your experience with this state (e.g., speaking in front of a large audience or brainstorming creative ideas). Now that you’ve done these three mind maps, we’re going to invent an interesting, though not necessarily practical, life alternative from each. 1. Look at the outer ring of one of your maps and pick three disparate items that catch your eye. You’ll know which ones they are intuitively—they should literally “jump out” at you. 2. Now try to combine those three items into a possible job description that would be fun and interesting to you and would be helpful to someone else (again, it need not be practical or appeal to lots of people or employers). 3. Name your role and draw a napkin sketch of it (a quick vis...

We want you to create three very different plans for the next five years of your life. Why five years? Because two years is too short (makes us nervous that we haven’t thought far enough ahead) and seven years is too long (we know stuff is going to happen to change things by then). In fact, if you listen to people tell their stories, most people’s lives are actually lived as a series of two-to-four-year seasons strung together.

Life One—That Thing You Do. Your first plan is centered on what you’ve already got in mind—either your current life expanded forward or that hot idea you’ve been nursing for some time. This is the idea you already have—it’s a good one and it deserves attention in this exercise. Life Two—That Thing You’d Do If Thing One Were Suddenly Gone. It happens. Some kinds of work come to an end. Almost no one makes buggy whips or Internet browsers anymore. The former are out of date and the latter are given away free with your operating system, so buggy whips and browsers don’t make for hot careers. Just imagine that your life one idea is suddenly over or no longer an option. What would you do? You can’t not make a living. You can’t do nothing. What would you do? If you’re like most people we talk with, when you really force your imagination to believe that you have to make a living doing something other than doing That Thing You Do, you’ll come up with something. Life Three—The Thing You’d Do or the Life You’d Live If Money or Image Were No Object. If you knew you could make a decent living at it and you knew no one would laugh at you or think less of you for doing it—what would you do? We’re not saying you suddenly can make a living doing this and we can’t promise no one will laugh (though they rarely do), but we are saying imagining this alternative can be a very useful part of your life design exploration.

Now complete three alternative five-year plans of your own, one on each of the three worksheets here or downloadable at www.​designi​ngyour.​life.

Tell your listeners not to critique, review, or advise. You want them to receive, reflect, and amplify.

“Tell me more about…”

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, Clara found her encore career.

She hadn’t discovered that she had assumed that running a café was the same as going to a café or planning a café. She learned the hard way that she’s a great café designer and renovation project manager, and a lousy deli manager.

“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?”

How is managing an organic farm full-time different from spending a summer WOOFing (working on an organic farm as a volunteer)?

People need some support and a transitional activity to move from their analytical/critical brain to a synthesizing/nonjudgmental brain.

We don’t recommend the Internet as your primary job-finding method,

In the screening phase of the process, do not talk about your other amazing talents or bring up skills you possess that aren’t part of the job description. You will come across as unfocused. You might sound like you are not interested in the job. Worse yet, you come across as a bad listener, because you will be perceived as answering a question that hasn’t been asked. There is a time to “stand out” later in the process, but if you do it in the beginning, you will be ejected from the candidate pool.

In a good labor market, a job posting should never be open for more than four weeks (six at the max).

Another is to find out how many people have already been interviewed.

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.

In fact, in the United States only 20 percent of all the jobs available are posted on the Internet—or posted anywhere, for that matter. This means a full four out of five jobs that are available, are not available through the standard model of job hunting. It’s

“What steps would be involved in exploring how someone like me might become a part of this organization?,” Allen knows it’s time to shift gears and start thinking critically about you as a candidate. It means he’ll start using his judging brain, but that’s okay. It’s gotta happen sometime, so when the time is right—go for it.

The network exists to sustain the community of people getting the work done—and is the only way to gain access to the hidden job market.

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

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.

A perfectly planned life that never surprises you or challenges you or tests you is a perfectly boring life, not a well-designed life.

Screwups are just that—simple mistakes about things that you normally get right. It’s not that you can’t do better. You normally do these things right, so you don’t really need to learn anything from this—you just screwed up. The best response here is to acknowledge you screwed up, apologize as needed, and move on.

Weaknesses are failures that happen because of one of your abiding failings. These are the mistakes that you make over and over. You know the source of these failures well. They are old friends. You’ve probably worked at correcting them already, and have improved as far as you think you’re going to. You try to avoid getting caught by these weaknesses, but they happen. We’re not suggesting you cave in prematurely and accept mediocre performance, but we are suggesting that there isn’t much upside in trying to change your stripes. It’s a judgment call, of course, but 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. We want to direct our attention here, rather than get distracted by t...

As he thought about it, he realized that the mistake was launching right into the agenda of the call without checking in first. Almost all Dave’s calls are scheduled with an agenda topic and a tight time frame. He usually has great success if he launches into the agenda right away, but now he realized that he never does that when he meets people in person.

do a quick news-and-agenda check, even in phone calls. It only takes a few seconds and can make a huge difference.

Try Stuff Reframing Failure 1. 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.

Surprising your wife with the fact that you’re prototyping living off the grid for the next year is not going to land well.

“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.

When someone says, “Well…If I were you, I would blah, blah, blah”—anytime you hear “If I were you”—you’re getting advice. When someone says, “If I were you,” what he really means is “If you were me.” See, that’s the point of advice—telling you to do in your life what the adviser would do in your situation.

Finding someone who can give you good counsel and who regularly leaves you in a clearer and more settled state of mind is a great asset. This is where good mentors shine. We would say that all legitimate mentoring is centered on giving counsel. Counsel invariably begins with lots of questions aimed at accurately understanding you, what you’re saying, and what you’re going through. 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.

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. Neither of us could have ended up in the lives we now live had it not been for the ongoing practice of this kind of community.

they all are willing to try new things and “do the work,” including trying crazy exercises—such as asking someone to play dead, then talking about him as if they were at his funeral.