Intentionally Design Your Life

Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett, Dave Evans,  Dave Evans

“Designers imagine things that don’t yet exist, and then they build them, and then the world changes. You can do this in your own life. You can imagine a career and a life that doesn’t exist yet; you can build a future you, and as a result, your life will change. If your life is pretty perfect as is, life design can still help you make it an even better version of the life you currently love living.” ~ Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

According to the authors, you need to adopt five mindsets to design your way forward and create a life you love. They are as follows:

  1. Curiosity: When we are curious, we are enthusiastic about learning new things, making knowledge acquisition feel like play. The more we are innately curious, the more opportunities we begin to see surrounding us. 
  2. Bias to action: Taking the initiative to try things out for ourselves is how we build our way forward, not by merely thinking and dreaming about taking action. Take action, receive feedback, make improvements, and continue this process until you find a solution—Iterate, iterate, iterate. 
  3. Reframing: When you feel stuck, step back and gain some perspective by reframing your perceived problem by looking closely at any personal biases or blind spots. Reframing is vital to being solution-focused. 
  4. Process orientation: Understand that life design is a process in which you make mistakes. Failure would be not trying. Know that these mistakes will provide critical insights that will inform you if you remain open-minded. It’s important to remember to let go of initial ideas that offer not-so-great solutions. 
  5. Radical collaboration: You are going to need help, so ask for it. Life design should be a collaborative process with people you know, trust, and respect. You will need quality teammates interested in intentionally designing their lives and are willing to meet regularly to help the team move forward collaboratively. 

What I found most helpful about Burnett and Evans’ work was the exercises they included to help the reader design their way forward. They were kind enough to have an assortment of helpful options, and they are as follows:

  • The Health/Work/Play/Love Dashboard
  • Workview and Lifeview
  • A Good Time Journal
  • Mind Mapping
  • An Odyssey Plan
  • Prototyping
  • Reframing Failure
  • Building a Team

I will touch on a few of them briefly here:

  • Health/Work/Play/Love: In a nutshell, you write a few sentences about each of these categories, then rate yourself on a scale from empty to complete for each. From there, ask yourself how you can design your way forward and make the necessary improvements to improve your quality of life. You can do this by deciding if you have what the authors called a design problem (solvable) or a gravity problem (no solution; either walk away or accept it. 
  • Work and Lifeview: Here, you write a short reflection on meaningful work and meaningful life. The authors offer some helpful guided questions for each of these, so please read the book for yourself to complete it correctly. 
  • Good Time Journal: Keep track of your activities and when you feel the most engaged on a scale from low to high, with high being when you genuinely experience flow state. You’re going to this for a minimum amount of time designated by the authors while using their AEIOU method to gather more insight through personal reflection; A = activities, E = Environments, I = Interactions, O = Objects, and U = Users.

You can see how these simple exercises can help you look within yourself to gain more clarity and stimulate your creative faculties to create actionable solutions. Essentially you iterate, iterate, iterate until you reach your desired outcome. You would do the same for the Odyssey Plan, Prototyping, Reframing Failure, and Team Building. To get the most from these exercises, you need to get a copy of the book and utilize the supplemental graphics. I found them helpful, and I think you will also. 

I enjoyed this book and hope the brief synopsis serves you well. If you’d like to get a hard copy from Amazon, click here, or if you prefer the audio version from Audible, click here. 

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