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

by Bill Burnett

Janine imagined that there was something wrong with her. Who wakes up every morning the picture of success, and goes to bed every night with a knot in her stomach, feeling as if there’s something missing, something that got lost along the way? Where do you turn when you have everything and nothing all at the same time? Like Ellen, Janine held a dysfunctional belief. She believed that if she rode all the merry-go-rounds and grabbed for all the brass rings she would find happiness. Janine is also not alone. In America, two-thirds of workers are unhappy with their jobs. And 15 percent actually hate their work.

Dysfunctional Belief: If you are successful, you will be happy. Reframe: True happiness comes from designing a life that works for you.

set your own goals of success or the world will set them for you and it'll become harder to undo those ideals we adopt as more responsibility, expectation, and opportunity come with age and experience.

well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. You get out of it more than you put in.

The satisfaction of seeing return on investments in yourself.

Your life is not a thing, it’s an experience; the fun comes from designing and enjoying the experience.

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.

When you have a bias to action, you are committed to building your way forward.

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.

When you reach out to the world, the world reaches right back. And this changes everything. In other words, life design, like all design, is a team sport.

Our experience suggests, similarly, that 80 percent of people of all ages don’t really know what they are passionate about.

To put it more succinctly: passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause.

There will be effort and action involved, no doubt, but it will seem, rather surprisingly, as if everyone is conspiring to help you. And, by being aware of the process, you will have a lot of fun along the way.

You are not too late, and you’re not too early.

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?

Sometimes our problems can feel so overwhelming that we don’t even try to solve them. We just live with them—like an irritating roommate we constantly complain about but never get around to evicting.

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.

The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at. We are all for aggressive and world-changing goals.

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.

How healthy you are will factor significantly into how you assess the quality of your life when answering that “How’s it going?” question.

By “work” we mean your participation in the great ongoing human adventure on the planet. You may or may not be getting paid for it, but this is the stuff you “do.”

Most people have more than one form of work at a time.

Dysfunctional Belief: I should already know where I’m going. Reframe: You can’t know where you are going until you know where you are.

are only done designing our lives when we die. Until then, we’re involved in a constant iteration of the next big thing: life as we know it.

If you discover and are able to articulate your philosophy of work (what it’s for and why you do it), you will be less likely to let others design your life for you.

Nowadays, many of us are knowledge workers, and we use our brains to do the heavy lifting. The brain is a very energy-hungry organ. Of the roughly two thousand calories we consume a day, five hundred go to running our brains. That’s astonishing: the brain represents only about 2 percent of our body weight, and yet it takes up 25 percent of the energy we consume every day. It’s no wonder that the way we invest our attention is critical to whether or not we feel high or low energy.2

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Remember, life design is about getting more out of your current life—and not only about redesigning a whole new life.

Dysfunctional Belief: I have to find the one right idea. Reframe: I need a lot of ideas so that I can explore any number of possibilities for my future.

And don’t worry about being stuck. Designers get stuck all the time. Being stuck can be a launching pad for creativity. When you think like a designer, you know how to ideate—how to “flare”—to come up with lots of options for lots of possible futures.

Look, it’s simple. You can’t know what you want until you know what you might want, so you are going to have to generate a lot of ideas and possibilities.

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. Learning to use great ideation tools helps you overcome this bias toward the obvious and helps you regain a sense of creative confidence.

The plain and simple truth is that you will live many different lives in this lifetime. If the life you are currently living feels a bit off, don’t worry; life design gives you endless mulligans. You can do it over at any point, at any time. “Correction shots” are always allowed.

We all contain enough energy and talents and interests to live many different types of lives, all of which could be authentic and interesting and productive. Asking which life is best is asking a silly question; it’s like asking whether it’s better to have hands or feet.

Dysfunctional Belief: I need to figure out my best possible life, make a plan, and then execute it. Reframe: There are multiple great lives (and plans) within me, and I get to choose which one to build my way forward to next.

Multiple studies confirm this—most of us like being helpful. It’s hard-wired into our DNA. We are social creatures, and helping one another is one of the things that makes us feel best.

Every domain of human endeavor is held together by a web of relationships between people. Real people. That web is the fabric that undergirds, contains, and holds together that part of society.