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“encore” career—work that combines personal meaning, continued income, and social impact.
(www.designingyour.life),
You weren’t put on this earth to work eight hours a day at a job you hate until the time comes to die.
The five mind-sets you are going to learn in order to design your life are curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration.
Curiosity makes everything new. It invites exploration.
Designers embrace change. They are not attached to a particular outcome, because they are always focused on what will happen next—not what the final result will be.
Reframing also makes sure that we are working on the right problem.
When you learn to think like a designer you learn to be aware of the process. Life design is a journey; let go of the end goal and focus on the process and see what happens next.
research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery—not before. To put it more succinctly: passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause.
most people are passionate about many different things, and the only way to know what they want to do is to prototype some potential lives, try them out, and see what really resonates with them.
A well-designed life is a life that makes sense. It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together.
In design thinking, we put as much emphasis on problem finding as we do on problem solving. After all, what’s the point of working on the wrong problem?
These are all gravity problems—meaning they are not real problems. Why? Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Let’s repeat that. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.
anytime you are arguing or fighting with reality, reality will win.
the key thing we’re after here is to free you from getting stuck on something that’s not actionable.
there are two variations of gravity problems—totally inactionable ones (such as gravity itself) and functionally unactionable ones
The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at.
The only response to a gravity problem is acceptance. And this is where all good designers begin. This is the “You Are Here” or “Accept” phase of design thinking. Acceptance. That’s why you start where you are. Not where you wish you were. Not where you hope you are. Not where you think you should be. But right where you are.
perfect balance is not our goal,
this diagram can sometimes warn us that something is not right.
It’s not hard to imagine that if we added up all the hours spent trying to figure out life, for some of us they would outweigh the hours spent actually living life. Really. Living. Life.
you don’t have to have it all figured out for the rest of your life; you just have to create the compass for what life is about for you right now.
inspired by people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, but that didn’t mean he had to walk their same path. He ended up redesigning his life as a thought leader and writer—still working for the same goals, but in a way that was less about imitation and more about authenticity.
A coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: • Who you are • What you believe • What you are doing
Living coherently doesn’t mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It simply means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way.
It’s your definition for what good work deserves to be.
• Why work? • What’s work for? • What does work mean? • How does it relate to the individual, others, society? • What defines good or worthwhile work? • What does money have to do with it? • What do experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?
What we’re after is your philosophy of work—what it’s for, what it means. This will essentially be your work manifesto.
people who can make an explicit connection between their work and something socially meaningful to them are more likely to find satisfaction, and are better able to adapt to the inevitable stresses and compromises that come with working in the world.
Your Lifeview is what provides your definition of what have been called “matters of ultimate concern.” It’s what matters most to you.
• Why are we here? • What is the meaning or purpose of life? • What is the relationship between the individual and others? • Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in? • What is good, and what is evil? • Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent, and if so, what impact does this have on your life? • What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace, and strife in life?
Ask the questions that work for you, make up your own, and see what you discover.
Try Stuff Workview and Lifeview 1. Write a short reflection about your Workview. This should take about thirty minutes. Shoot for about 250 words—less than a page of typed writing. 2. Write a short reflection about your Lifeview. This should also take no more than thirty minutes and be 250 words or so. 3. Read over your Lifeview and Workview, and answer each of these questions: a. Where do your views on work and life complement one another? b. Where do they clash? c. Does one drive the other? How?
We had him spend a few weeks doing a simple logging assignment at the end of every workday. Michael wrote down when during the day he had been feeling bored, restless, or unhappy at his job, and what exactly he had been doing during those times (the times when he was disengaged). He also wrote down when he was excited, focused, and having a good time at work, and what exactly he was doing during those times (the times when he was engaged).
Of the roughly two thousand calories we consume a day, five hundred go to running our brains.
There are two elements to the Good Time Journal: • Activity Log (where I record where I’m engaged and energized) • Reflections (where I discover what I am learning)
We recommend doing your Activity Log for at least three weeks,
we recommend that you do your Good Time Journal reflection weekly,
Typically, after you start to get the hang of paying more detailed attention to your days, you notice that some of your log entries could be more specific: you need to zoom in to see more clearly. The idea is to try to become as precise as possible; the clearer you are on what is and isn’t working for you, the better you can set your wayfinding direction.
AEIOU
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.
Designers know that when you choose from lots of options you choose better.
Mind Mapping
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.
you something about the future. Prototypes lower your anxiety, ask interesting questions, and get you data about the potential of the change that you are trying to accomplish. One of the principles of design thinking is that you want to “fail fast and fail forward,” into your next step. When you’re stuck with an anchor problem, try reframing the challenge as an exploration of possibilities
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
Gravity problems aren’t actually problems. They’re circumstances that you can do nothing to change.
Life designers know that if a problem isn’t actionable, then it’s not solvable.
Try Stuff Mind Mapping 1. Review your Good Time Journal and note activities in which you were engaged, energized, and in flow. 2. Choose an activity that you were engaged in, an activity that you felt highly energized from, and something you did that brought you into flow, and create three mind maps—one for each. 3. Look at the outer ring of each mind map, pick three things that jump out at you, and create a job description from them. 4. Create a role for each job description, and draw a napkin sketch.
