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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bill Burnett
Started reading
December 15, 2022
Dysfunctional Belief: If you are successful, you will be happy. Reframe: True happiness comes from designing a life that works for you.
There’s a difference between design problems and engineering problems. We both have engineering degrees, and engineering is a good approach to solving a problem when you can get a great deal of data and you’re sure there is one best solution.
in some ways, aesthetics is the ultimate design problem. Aesthetics involves human emotion—and we’ve discovered that when emotions are involved, design thinking has proved to be the best problem-solving tool.
When we were faced with the problem of helping our students leave college and enter the world as productive and happy people—to figure out just what the hell to do with the life in front of them—we knew design thinking would be the best way to solve this particular problem. Designing your life doesn’t involve a clear goal, like creating hinges that last five years, or building a giant bridge that will safely connect to landmasses; those are engineering problems, in which you can get hard data on your options and engineer the one best solution. When you have a desired outcome (a truly portable
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A 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. There is a lot more than “lather, rinse, repeat” in a well-designed life.
Designers love questions, but what they really love is reframing questions. Reframing is one of the most important mind-sets of a designer. Many great innovations get started in a reframe. In design thinking we always say, “Don’t start with the problem, start with the people, start with empathy.” Once we have empathy for the people who will be using our products, we define our point of view, brainstorm, and start prototyping to discover what we don’t yet know about the problem. This typically results in a reframe, sometimes also called a pivot. A reframe is when we take new information about
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In life design, we reframe a lot. The biggest reframe is that your life can’t be perfectly planned, that there isn’t just one solution to your life, and that that’s a good thing.
Your life is not a thing, it’s an experience; the fun comes from designing and enjoying the experience.
The reframe for the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is this: “Who or what do you want to grow into?” Life is all about growth and change.
We’re not measuring you against anyone, and you shouldn’t measure yourself against anyone, either.
in today’s highly technical world, 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 technical and human experiences to the team.
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 backgrounds will generate truly unique solutions.
Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward. What does that mean? It means you are not just going to be dreaming up a lot of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world—or the real you. You are going to build things (we call them prototypes), try stuff, and have a lot of fun in the process.
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. These are your design tools,
curiosity is going to help you “get good at being lucky.” It’s the reason some people see opportunities everywhere.
Designers try things. They test things out. They create prototype after prototype, failing often, until they find what works and what solves the problem.
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.
An important part of the process is letting go—of your first idea and of a good-but-not-great solution.
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.
The best designers know that great design requires radical collaboration. It takes a team. A painter can create an artistic masterpiece alone on a windswept coast, but a designer cannot create the iPhone alone, windswept beach or not. And your life is more like a great design than a work of art, so you cannot create it alone, either.
use mentors and a supportive community to help with your life design. When you reach out to the world, the world reaches right back. And this changes everything.
Many people operate under the dysfunctional belief that they just need to find out what they are passionate about. Once they know their passion, everything else will somehow magically fall into place. We hate this idea for one very good reason: most people don’t know their passion.
80 percent of people of all ages don’t really know what they are passionate about.
We believe that people actually need to take time to develop a passion. And the research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery—not before.
passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause.
In truth, 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 marvelous portfolio of experiences, of adventures, of failures that taught you important lessons, of hardships that made you stronger and helped you know yourself better, and of achievements and satisfactions. It’s worth emphasizing that failures and hardships are a part of every life, even the well-designed ones.
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? We emphasize this because it’s actually not always so easy to understand what our problems are.
Often we approach our problems as if they are an addition or subtraction problem. We either want to get something (add) or get rid of something (subtract). We want to get a better job, get more money, get more success, get more balance, get rid of ten pounds, get rid of our unhappiness, get rid of our pain.
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. Our problems become our story, and we can all get stuck in our stories.
Deciding which problems to work on may be one of the most important decisions you make, because people can lose years (or a lifetime) working on the wrong problem.
people waste a lot of time working on the wrong problem. If they are lucky, they will fail miserably quickly and get forced by circumstance into working on better problems. If they are unlucky and smart, they’ll succeed—we call it the success disaster—and wake up ten years later wondering how the hell they got to wherever they are, and why they are so unhappy.
How often do we go with our first idea and think we know answers to questions we’ve never really investigated? How often do we check in with ourselves to see if we are really working on the right problem? “I need a better job” is not the solution to the problem of “I’m not that happy working, and I’d rather be home with my kids.”
Beware of working on a really good problem that’s not actually the right problem, not actually your problem. You don’t solve a marriage problem at the office, or a work problem with a new diet.
We also tend to get mired in what we call gravity problems. “I’ve got this big problem and I don’t know what to do about it.” “Oh, wow, Jane, what’s the problem?” “It’s gravity.” “Gravity?” “Yeah—it’s making me crazy! I’m feeling heavier and heavier. I can’t get my bike up hills easily. It never leaves me.
This example may sound silly, but we hear versions of this sort of “gravity problem” all the time. “Poets just don’t make enough money in our culture. They’re not respected enough. What do I do about it?”
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.
People fight reality. They fight it tooth and nail, with everything they’ve got. And anytime you are arguing or fighting with reality, reality will win. You can’t outsmart it.
If you can’t change your life (because of gravity), you can just change your thinking. Or you can decide to take a different route—be
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.
by “healthy” we mean being well in mind, body, and spirit—emotional health, physical health, and mental health.
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.” Assuming you’re not financially independent, you usually are getting paid for at least a portion of your “work.” Don’t for a minute reduce work only to that which you get paid for. Most people have more than one form of work at a time.
Play is any activity that brings you joy when you do it. It can certainly include organized activity or competition or productive endeavors, but when those things are done “for the joy of it” they are play.
Love comes to us in a wide range of types, from affection to community to eroticism, and from a huge array of sources, from parents to friends to colleagues to lovers, but they all share that people thing. That sense of connection. Who are the people in your life, and how is love flowing to and from you and others?
You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you are. Really. You can’t.
health / work / play / love dashboard.
If you are a regular volunteer in any organization, figure that in, too. If you are a homemaker, like Debbie, make sure you remember that raising children, providing home-cooked meals for your family, taking care of aging parents, and doing housework are all forms of “work.”
I love great art, painting especially, and it moves me like nothing else. I love music in all its forms—it can make me happy and can make me cry. I love the great spaces in the world,
