← Book Notes

Designing Your Life

Using Design Thinking to create a more meaningful life. By Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

  • 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.”
  • But before you can figure out which direction to head in, you need to know where you are and what design problems you are trying to solve.
  • In design thinking, we put as much emphasis on problem finding as we do on problem solving.
  • 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.
  • “I want to go back to school and become a doctor, but it will take me at least ten years, and I don’t want to invest that much time at this stage of my life. 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.
  • it’s impossible to predict the future. And the corollary to that thought is: once you design something, it changes the future that is possible.
  • Anytime you start to feel your life is not working, or you’re going through a major transition, it’s good to do a compass calibration. We do them at least once a year.
  • Dysfunctional Belief: Work is not supposed to be enjoyable; that’s why they call it work. Reframe: Enjoyment is a guide to finding the right work for you.
  • Remember that designers have a bias to action—which is just another way of saying that we pay a lot of attention to doing things, and not just to thinking about things.
  • Activity Log (where I record where I’m engaged and energized) • Reflections (where I discover what I am learning)
    • Note:update you report’s form for this
  • Quantity has a quality all its own. In life design, more is better, because more ideas equal access to better ideas, and better ideas lead to a better design. Expanding your thinking improves your ability to ideate and allows for more innovation.
  • Designers learn to have lots of wild ideas because they know that the number one enemy of creativity is judgment.
  • As a life designer, you need to embrace two philosophies:
      1. You choose better when you have lots of good ideas to choose from.
      1. You never choose your first solution to any problem.
  • With help, Melanie got unstuck by adopting a design thinking mind-set, remembering what her real problem was, and exploring some prototypes.
  • Don’t make a doable problem into an anchor problem by wedding yourself irretrievably to a solution that just isn’t working.
  • It is okay for prototypes to fail—they are supposed to—but well-designed prototypes teach you something about the future.
  • You are legion. Each of us is many. This life you are living is one of many lives you will live.
  • Working with adults of all ages, we’ve found that where people go wrong (regardless of their age, education, or career path) is thinking they just need to come up with a plan for their lives and it will be smooth sailing. If only they make the right choice (the best, true, only choice), they will have a blueprint for who they will be, what they will do, and how they will live. It’s a paint-by-numbers approach to life, but in reality, life is more of an abstract painting—one that’s open to multiple interpretations.
  • Chung had learned life design. He had tools he could use, and accepted that there was more than one happy path he could chart his life by.
  • 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.
  • One started with three ideas in parallel,
  • Note:This is how my brain should work
  • The conclusion is that if your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and
  • “Building is thinking”
  • At Stanford, we believe anything can be prototyped, from a physical object to public policy.
  • When you are trying to solve a problem, any problem, you typically start with what you know about the problem: you start with the data. You need enough data so that you can understand what causes what, and what is likely to happen when something else happens.
    • Note:design thinking in a nutshell
  • Prototypes help you visualize alternatives in a very experiential way.
  • Not only is it true that doing prototyping is a good idea; it’s equally true that not prototyping is a bad and sometimes very costly idea.
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