Burnett, Evans

Designing Your Life: Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

Introduction: Life by Design

“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 the problem, restate our point of view, and start thinking and prototyping again.

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. It’s not static. It’s not about some destination. It’s not about answering the question once and for all and then it’s all done. Nobody really knows what he or she wants to be.

We’ll explain a few simple ways to do this, but first you need to understand one really big point: 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.

Want a career change? This book will help you make that change, but not by sitting around trying to decide what that change is going to be.

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, and with them you can build anything, including a life you love.

Be Curious. Curiosity makes everything new. It invites exploration. It makes everything play. Most of all, curiosity is going to help you “get good at being lucky.” It’s the reason some people see opportunities everywhere.

Try Stuff. When you have a bias to action, you are committed to building your way forward. There is no sitting on the bench just thinking about what you are going to do. There is only getting in the game. Designers try things. They test things out. They create prototype after prototype, failing often, until they find what works and what solves the problem. Sometimes they find the problem is entirely different from what they first thought it was. 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.

Reframe Problems. Reframing is how designers get unstuck. Reframing also makes sure that we are working on the right problem. Life design involves key reframes that allow you to step back, examine your biases, and open up new solution spaces. Throughout the book, we will be reframing dysfunctional beliefs that prevent people from finding the careers and the lives they want. Reframing is essential to finding the right problems and the right solutions.

Know It’s a Process. We know that life gets messy. For every step forward, it can sometimes seem you are moving two steps back. Mistakes will be made, prototypes thrown away. An important part of the process is letting go—of your first idea and of a good-but-not-great solution. And sometimes amazing designs can emerge from the mess. The Slinky was invented this way. Teflon was created this way. Super Glue. Play-Doh. None of these things would exist if a designer somewhere hadn’t screwed up. 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.

Ask for Help. The last mind-set of design thinking is perhaps the most important, especially when it comes to designing your life: radical collaboration. What this means is simple—you are not alone. 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. You do not have to come up with a brilliant life design by yourself. Design is a collaborative process, and many of the best ideas are going to come from other people. You just need to ask. And know the right questions to ask. In this book, you will learn how to 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. In other words, life design, like all design, is a team sport.

1: Start Where You Are

“Design thinking can help you build your way forward from wherever you are, regardless of the life design problem you are facing. 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.

It has been our experience, in office hour after office hour, that people waste a lot of time 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.

Here’s a little tidbit that is going to save you a lot of time—months, years, decades even. It has to do with reality. 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. You can’t trick it. You can’t bend it to your will.

Not now. Not ever.

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.

2: Building a Compass

“And the questions we’re ultimately asking are the same ones the Greeks started asking in the fifth century b.c. and we’ve all been asking ever since:

What is the good life? How do you define it? How do you live it? Throughout the ages, people have been asking the same questions:

Why am I here?

What am I doing?

Why does it matter?

What is my purpose?

What’s the point of it all?

Our goal for your life is rather simple: coherency. 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

3: Wayfinding

“We think the first clues are engagement and energy.

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.

Energy is also unique in that it can go negative—some activities can actually suck the life right out of us and send us drained into whatever comes next. Boredom is a big energy-suck, but it’s much easier to recover from boredom than from being de-energized, so it’s important to pay specific attention to your energy levels.

Here’s another key element when you’re wayfinding in life: follow the joy; follow what engages and excites you, what brings you alive. Most people are taught that work is always hard and that we have to suffer through it. Well, there are parts of any job or any career that are hard and annoying—but if most of what you do at work is not bringing you alive, then it’s killing you. It’s your career, after all, and you are going to be spending a lot of time doing it— we calculate it at 90,000 to 125,000 hours during the course of your lifetime. If it’s not fun, a lot of your life is going to suck.

Getting great insights out of your Good Time Journal reflections isn’t always easy, so here’s a tool designers use to make detailed and accurate observations— part of getting good at the curiosity mind-set. It’s the AEIOU method that provides you five sets of questions you can use when reflecting on your Activity Log.

Activities. What were you actually doing? Was this a structured or an unstructured activity? Did you have a specific role to play (team leader) or were you just a participant (at the meeting)?

Environments. Our environment has a profound effect on our emotional state. You feel one way at a football stadium, another in a cathedral. Notice where you were when you were involved in the activity. What kind of a place was it, and how did it make you feel?

Interactions. What were you interacting with—people or machines? Was it a new kind of interaction or one you are familiar with? Was it formal or informal?

Objects. Were you interacting with any objects or devices—iPads or smartphones, hockey sticks or sailboats? What were the objects that created or supported your feeling engaged?

Users. Who else was there, and what role did they play in making it either a

positive or a negative experience?

4: Getting Unstuck

“The truth is that Sharon had no idea what she really wanted out of business school, and this lack of genuine interest was probably apparent to the people who interviewed her. She had spent a long time trying to do the right thing instead of doing what was right for Sharon. A year into her job search, she felt she was out of options. She felt defeated. But Sharon wasn’t really out of options—she just hadn’t come up with a lot of real options in the first place.

Most people do the same thing Sharon did when they need work: they look at the job listings and look for a job that they think they can get. This is one of the worst ways to get a job, and actually has the lowest success rate (we’ll discuss the phenomenon in detail in chapter 7). This way of thinking is not design thinking; it’s just grasping whatever might be in reach, and it’s unlikely to result in long-term satisfaction. If the kids are hungry, the bank is about to foreclose on your house, or you owe a guy named Louie a lot of money, then by all means take whatever job you can get.

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. If you work through lots of ideas, your chances of hitting on some that can be really energizing for you go up, which increases your chance of creating something that can work and that you’ll love. More ideas also equal new insights.

Designers learn to have lots of wild ideas because they know that the number one enemy of

creativity is judgment. Our brains are so tightly wired to be critical, find problems, and leap to judgment that it’s a wonder any ideas ever make it out! We have to defer judgment and silence the inner critic if we want to get all our ideas out. If we don’t, we may have a few good ideas, but the majority will have been lost—silently imprisoned behind the wall of judgment our prefrontal cortex has erected to safeguard us from making mistakes or looking foolish.

And, more important, he’s starting to think that it’s not about finding the perfect job, it’s about making the job he has “perfect.

This isn’t a gravity problem—it’s not impossible. It’s just that Dave’s stuck because he’s anchored himself to a solution that can’t work.

The moral to the stories of Dave, Melanie, and John is this: Don’t make a doable problem into an anchor problem by wedding yourself irretrievably to a solution that just isn’t working. Reframe the solution to some other possibilities, prototype those ideas (take some test hikes), and get yourself unstuck. Anchor problems keep us stuck because we can only see one solution—the one we already have that doesn’t work. Anchor problems are not only about our current, failed approach. They are really about the fear that, no matter what else we try, that won’t work either, and then we’ll have to admit that we’re permanently stuck—meaning we’re screwed—and we’d rather be stuck than screwed. 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. This is a pretty common but paradoxical human behavior. Change is always uncertain, and there is no guarantee of success, no matter how hard you try. It makes sense to be fearful. The way forward is to reduce the risk (and the fear) of failure by designing a series of small prototypes to test the waters. It is okay for prototypes to fail—they are supposed to—but well-designed prototypes teach 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 (instead of trying to solve your huge problem in one miraculous leap), then decide to try a series of small, safe prototypes of the change you’d like to see happen. It should result in getting unstuck and finding a more creative approach to your problem. We will talk a lot more about prototyping in chapter 6.

5: Design Your Lives

“You are legion.

Each of us is many.

This life you are living is one of many lives you will live.

Now, we are not talking about reincarnation, or anything with religious implications. 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.

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.

One of the most powerful ways to design your life is to design your lives. No, we haven’t hit our heads and that isn’t a typo. We’re going to ask you to imagine and write up three different versions of the next five years of your life. We call these Odyssey Plans. Whether or not three interesting variations of your next five years immediately leap onto the screens in the multiplex movie theater in your head or not, we know you’ve got at least three viable and substantially different possibilities in you. We all do. Every single one of the thousands of people we’ve worked with has proved us correct in this. We all have lots of lives within us.

A team led by Professor Dan Schwartz evaluated two groups. One started with three ideas in parallel, then subsequently had two more ideas on the way to their final idea. The second team started with one idea and then iterated four more times. Each team generated five rounds of ideas, but the parallel team did much better—generating more ideas and clearly better final solutions. The serial team—who started with just one idea—tended to keep refining the same idea over and over, never really innovating. 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 conceive more novel innovations. Designers have known this all along—you don’t want to start with just one idea, or you’re likely to get stuck with it. Try not to think of your Odyssey Plans as “Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C”—where A is the really good plan and B is the okay plan and C is the plan that you really hope you don’t get stuck with but that you would accept as tolerable if absolutely necessary. Every Odyssey Plan is a Plan A, because it’s really you and it’s really possible.

Life One—That Thing You Do. Your first plan is centered on what you’ve already got in mind—either your current life expanded forward or that hot idea you’ve been nursing for some time. This is the idea you already have—it’s a good one and it deserves attention in this exercise.

Life Two—That Thing You’d Do If Thing One Were Suddenly Gone. It happens. Some kinds of work come to an end. Almost no one makes buggy whips or Internet browsers anymore. The former are out of date and the latter are given away free with your operating system, so buggy whips and browsers don’t make for hot careers. Just imagine that your life one idea is suddenly over or no longer an option. What would you do? You can’t not make a living. You can’t do nothing. What would you do? If you’re like most people we talk with, when you really force your imagination to believe that you have to make a living doing something other than doing That Thing You Do, you’ll come up with something.

Life Three—The Thing You’d Do or the Life You’d Live If Money or Image Were No Object. If you knew you could make a decent living at it and you knew no one would laugh at you or think less of you for doing it—what would you do? We’re not saying you suddenly can make a living doing this and we can’t promise no one will laugh (though they rarely do), but we are saying imagining this alternative can be a very useful part of your life design exploration.

Life design is about generating options, and this exercise of designing multiple lives will guide you in whatever’s next for you. You aren’t designing the rest of your life; you are designing what’s next. Every possible version of you holds unknowns and compromises, each with its own identifiable and unintended consequences. You are not so much finding answers in this exercise as learning to embrace and explore the questions, and be curious about the possibilities.

Remember, there are multiple great lives within you.

You are legion.

And you get to choose which prototype to start working on next.

6: Prototyping

“Clara didn’t start out with a plan to work for the homeless. Knowing that she hadn’t found a specific mission to direct her steps, she carefully and thoughtfully crafted a series of small but illustrative experiences and involvements to design her way forward. Her path to “homeless champion” (which, by the way, has become her passion) was not a straight line, by any means. She designed the life she is living, step by step, by thinking like a designer and building her way forward by doing small experiments—prototypes. She trusted that if she kept giving herself carefully selected hands-on encounters, she’d find her way.

She took a class on mediation. She took the job in the juvenile justice system. She joined the women’s foundation. She learned about the world of nonprofits. She got involved in the board for the homeless center. By doing the work, meeting the people, and choosing to explore her options through hands-on experience, and not just spending her time reading, thinking, or reflecting in her journal about what she should or could do next, Clara found her encore career. It was only through life design that she was able to discover a future that had been not only unknowable, but also unimaginable. Clara did it, and you can, too.

Building is thinking” is a phrase you will often hear around the Design Program at Stanford. When that idea is coupled with the bias-to-action mind-set, you get a lot of building and thinking. If you ask people what they are doing, they will tell you that they are building prototypes. They might be prototyping new product ideas, new consumer experiences, or new services.

Prototyping the life design way is all about asking good questions, outing our hidden biases and assumptions, iterating rapidly, and creating momentum for a path we’d like to try out.

Prototypes should be designed to ask a question and get some data about something that you’re interested in. Good prototypes isolate one aspect of a problem and design an experience that allows you to “try out” some version of a potentially interesting future. Prototypes help you visualize alternatives in a very experiential way. That allows you to imagine your future as if you are already living it. Creating new experiences through prototyping will give you an opportunity to understand what a new career path might feel like, even if only for an hour or a day. And prototyping helps you involve others early and helps build a community of folks who are interested in your journey and your life design. Prototypes are a great way to start a conversation, and, more often than not, one thing typically leads to another. Prototypes frequently turn into unexpected opportunities—they help serendipity happen. Finally, prototypes allow you to try and fail rapidly without overinvesting in a path before you have any data.

Our philosophy is that it is always possible to prototype something you are interested in. The best way to get started is to keep your first few prototypes very low-resolution and very simple. You want to isolate one variable and design a prototype to answer that one question.

Once you’ve committed yourself to life design prototyping, how do you do it? The simplest and easiest form of prototyping is a conversation. We’re going to describe a specific form of prototype conversation that we call a Life Design Interview.

A Life Design Interview is incredibly simple. It just means getting someone’s story. Not just anyone and not just any story, of course. You want to talk to someone who is either doing and living what you’re contemplating, or has real experience and expertise in an area about which you have questions. And the story you’re after is the personal story of how that person got to be doing that thing he or she does, or got the expertise he has and what it’s really like to do what she does.

You want to hear what the person who does what you might someday want to do loves and hates about his job. You want to know what her days look like, and then you want to see if you can imagine yourself doing that job—and loving it—for months and years on end. In addition to asking people about their work and life, you will also be able to find out how they got there—their career path.

The first thing to know about a Life Design Interview is what it’s not—a job interview. If you find yourself in the middle of a Life Design Interview and you’re answering questions or talking about yourself rather than getting the story of the person you’re with, stop and flip it around. This is critical. If the person you’re in conversation with misperceives that your meeting is a job interview, then it’s a disaster, and your Life Design Interview has failed or will fail. It’s all about mind-sets.

If it turns out the answer to that first question is “Yes, we do have an opening available,” then the second question is “Does she fit here?” The mind-set of a job interview is critique and judgment, and that is not the mind-set we’re looking for if we are after an interesting story and a personal connection.

All you’re doing here is identifying people who are currently doing things that you’re interested in and whose stories you want to get.

Prototype conversations are great; they’re incredibly informative and easy to come by. But you’re going to want more than just stories as input for coming up with your life design. You want actually to experience what “it” is really like—by watching others do it or, better yet, doing some form of it yourself. Prototype experiences allow us to learn through a direct encounter with a possible future version of us. This experiential version could involve spending a day shadowing a professional you’d like to be (Take a Friend to Work Day), or a one-week unpaid exploratory project that you create, or a three-month internship (obviously, a three-month internship requires more investment and a larger commitment).

Life design brainstorming has four steps, and a very structured approach to coming up with lots of prototypable ideas. Typically, if you are the facilitator who brings the group together, you might have already framed the brainstorming topic. You want a team of no fewer than three and rarely more than six people who have all volunteered to help. Once the group is convened, the session proceeds as follows.

1. Framing a Good Question

It is important to frame a good question for a brainstorming session. The facilitator uses the process of coming up with the question as a way to create a focus for the group’s energy. When coming up with the question, the facilitator needs to be aware of some guidelines. If the question isn’t open-ended, you won’t get very interesting results and not much volume.

Most of the time when people tell us “our brainstorm didn’t work,” we find out that they framed a poor question—either one that already assumed a solution or one that was so vague they couldn’t get any traction for generating ideas. Watch out for this when you start to brainstorm with our four-step method.

2. Warming Up

People need a transition from their hectic, event-driven workday to a state of relaxed, creative attention if they are going to do a good job brainstorming. People need some support and a transitional activity to move from their analytical/critical brain to a synthesizing/nonjudgmental brain. It’s a mind-body problem and it takes some practice to get good at making such a transition. A good facilitator takes the lead and makes sure everyone is warmed up and feeling creative. This is essential if the brainstorm is going to be high-energy and generate a lot of ideas.

3. The Brainstorm Itself…

The Rules of Brainstorming

1. Go for quantity, not quality.

1. Defer judgment and do not censor ideas.

1. Build off the ideas of others.

1. Encourage wild ideas.

1. Naming and Framing the Outcomes…

Voting is important, and should be done silently, so that people aren’t influencing one another. We like to use colored dots to cast votes, and we also like to use categories such as:

• Most exciting

• The one we wish we could do if money were no object

• The dark horse—probably won’t work, but if it did...

• Most likely to lead to a great life

• If we could ignore the laws of physics...

At the end of our four-step process, the goal is to say something like “We had 141 ideas, we grouped those into six categories, and, based on our focal question, we selected eight killer ideas to prototype; then we prioritized the list, and our first prototype is...

7: How Not to Get a Job

“The Super–Job Description Syndrome…

Jane (the employee who quit) was a great program manager, but, boy, I wish she had been better at X, Y, and Z. Now that she’s gone, let’s post a job for a “Super Jane” and list all the things that Jane used to do, and all the things we wish she had done, and hope for the best.

The super–job description is posted, résumés are collected from keyword searches, and candidates are screened by phone. Interviews are scheduled, and candidate after candidate is interviewed and rejected because he or she is not a “Super Jane.” This is especially true since no one who fits the new job description will work for what they used to pay Jane. Interview processes like these are essentially broken—they burn out both the interview team and the candidates, and nobody gets hired.

In our experience, if more than eight people have been through the wringer and no decisions have been made, the hiring process is probably broken. This is a sign that the company may not be a great place to work, and you might want to walk quickly to the exit.

The Way It Should Be

One thing that you may have noticed is the conspicuous absence of job descriptions that sound like this:

• Looking for candidates who would like to connect their Workview to their Lifeview

• Looking for candidates who believe that good work is found through the proper exercise of their signature strengths

• Looking for candidates with high integrity, the capacity to learn quickly, and high intrinsic motivation; we can teach you all the rest.

Awareness is key to life design, and this is true especially when you are designing your career. If you are aware of the process involved in hiring, in writing job descriptions, in reading résumés, in interviewing (from the employer’s perspective), your success rate in getting a job offer goes way up. Empathy is a crucial element in design thinking, and having empathy—and understanding—for the poor hiring manager buried under a sea of résumés will help you know how to design a more effective job hunt. Effectiveness in getting hired involves a simple yet important design reframe.

8: Designing Your Dream Job

“As we said earlier, we don’t recommend mining the Internet for a job. In fact, in the United States only 20 percent of all the jobs available are posted on the Internet—or posted anywhere, for that matter. This means a full four out of five jobs that are available, are not available through the standard model of job hunting. It’s a staggering number; no wonder so many people feel frustrated and rejected when job seeking.

How can you break into this hidden job market? Well, you can’t. No one can. There is no such thing as breaking into the hidden job market. The hidden job market is the job market that’s only open to people who are already connected into the web of professional relationships in which that job resides. This is an insider’s game, and it’s almost impossible to get inside that web as a job seeker. But it’s quite possible to crack into the network as a sincerely interested inquirer—someone just looking for the story (not looking for the job). That’s how this works. It is a wonderfully happy accident that the very best technique you can use to learn what kind of work you might want to pursue (prototyping with Life Design Interviews, as discussed in chapter 6) is exactly the best, if not only, way to get into the hidden job market in your field of interest, once you know what you want.

Dysfunctional Belief: Networking is just hustling people—it’s slimy.

Reframe: Networking is just asking for directions.

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. Kurt didn’t know his way around the sustainable architecture industry in Atlanta. You may not know your way around the nanotechnology community in Hong Kong, or the craft beer crowd in Wichita, or the emergency-room nursing union in Seattle. What do you do? You ask a local for directions. Getting referrals to people whose stories would be useful to hear is just the professional equivalent of asking directions. So go ahead—ask for directions. It’s. No. Big. Deal. “Network” is more noun than verb. The point isn’t to “do” network-ing; the goal is to participate in the network. Simply put, it just means to enter into a particular community that’s having a particular conversation (such as sustainable architecture). 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. The Stanford “network” that we are a part of holds Stanford together. The Silicon Valley “network” is the loose community of West Coast folk that allows tech entrepreneurship to flourish. Most individuals have both a professional network (of colleagues) and a personal network (of friends and family).

It goes back to curiosity—one of the most important life design mind-sets. Whether you are seeking your first job, changing careers, or choosing an encore career, you need to be genuinely curious. That’s what prototyping conversations and prototyping experiences are all about: being open and curious about the possibilities. We call it pursuing latent wonderfulness. What this means is that you ask yourself, “Is there a 20 percent chance there’s something interesting to me going on somewhere in this organization? Is there a 10 percent chance?

Kurt entered into genuine conversations, and he found a good job that he’s been able to build into a great job. You can do the same. We know this is hard. We know this is a lot of work and is sometimes scary. But it’s also incredibly interesting and is the only way we know to crack the hidden job market. To some degree, it’s also a numbers game—the more connections you make, the more prototypes you run, the more opportunities will turn into offers.

Consider the alternatives.

Thirty-eight applications for zero offers.

Fifty-six conversations for seven offers and a great professional network.

Which approach do you like better? It’s your call.

It is more than possible to use design thinking to get your first job, transform your current job, design your next job, and create a career that integrates your Workview and your Lifeview. In fact, we recommend it, because there is no Job Charming coming to rescue you. The idea that your dream job already exists, fully formed, just waiting for you to find it, is a fairy tale.

9: Choosing Happiness

“The Life Design Choosing Process

In life design, the choosing process has four steps. First you gather and create some options, then you narrow down your list to your top alternatives, then you finally choose, and then, last but not least, you...agonize over that choice. Agonize over whether you’ve done the right thing. In fact, we encourage you to spend countless hours, days, months, or even decades agonizing.

The fourth step in the process is to let go of our unnecessary options and move on, embracing our choice fully so that we can get the most from it.

Professor Sheena Iyengar from the Columbia Business School is a psycho- economist who specializes in decision making. Her famous “jam study” was done using specialty jams in a grocery store. One week, the researchers set up a table in the store showing off six different specialty jams (with snazzy flavors like kiwi-orange, strawberry-lavender...you get the idea). Then they watched how the shoppers behaved—who stopped to look and, of those who stopped, who actually bought some jam. The first week, with six jams on display, 40 percent of the shoppers stopped to check out the six jams and about a third of them bought one—about 13 percent of the shoppers.

A few weeks later, in the same store, with the same time frame, the researchers came back with twenty-four jams. This time, 60 percent of the shoppers in the store stopped by—a 50 percent increase over the six-jam display! But with twenty-four jams on display, only 3 percent of the shoppers bought one.

What does this research tell us? First, that we love having options (“Whoa! Twenty-four jams?! Let’s check this out!!”), and, second, that we can’t deal with too many of them (“Um...so many...can’t decide; let’s go get some cheese”). In fact, most minds can choose effectively between only three to five options. If we’re faced with more than that, our ability to make a choice begins to wane—many more than that and our ability to choose completely freezes. It’s just the way our brains are wired. We’re attracted to having alternatives, and our modern culture almost idolizes options for their own sake. Get lots of options! Keep your options open! Don’t get locked in! We hear this sort of thinking all the time, and it seems to make sense, but there absolutely can be too much of this good option thing. When you toss in the Internet and the fact that we can now be made aware of seemingly every idea and activity on the planet after a subsecond Google search, most of us are suffering a pandemic attack of too many options.

The key is to reframe your idea of options by realizing that if you have too many options, you actually have none at all. If you get frozen in front of your daunting list of possibilities, then, in fact, you have no options. Remember that options only actually create value in your life when they are chosen and realized. We often teach our students that when an option grows up it becomes a choice. So, when you’ve got twenty-four jam options, you actually have zero options. Once you understand that, in choice making, twenty-four equals zero (and, boy, is it hard to believe when you love your options and worked so hard to find and come up with them), then you are free to take the next step: narrowing down.

If you’ve got a list of twelve options, cross out seven, then rewrite your list with just the remaining five on it, and go to step three. Most of our students and clients freak out at this idea.

“You can’t just cross options off!”

“What if I cross out the wrong one?”

We understand. But we’re not kidding—you just cross them off. Remember, if you’ve got too many options, you really don’t have any, so you’ve got nothing to lose. And you won’t cross off the wrong one. We call this the Pizza-Chinese Effect. We’ve all experienced it. Ed sticks his head in your office and says, “Hey, Paula—we’re going out for lunch. Wanna come?”

“Sure!”

“We’re choosing between pizza and Chinese food—got a preference?”

“Nah—whatever’s good!”

“Okay—we’re getting pizza.”

“No, wait. I want Chinese!”

In that situation, when you gave your first answer (“whatever’s good”), you thought you meant it. You didn’t know that you had a preference until an unwanted decision occurred as a fait accompli.

Step 3: Choose Discerningly…

The memories that inform this choice-guiding function in our brains Goleman refers to as the “wisdom of the emotions”; by this he means the collected experiences of what has and hasn’t worked for us in life, and what we draw upon in evaluating a decision. Our own wisdom is then made available to us emotionally (as feelings) and intestinally (as a bodily, gut response). Therefore, in order to make a good decision, we need access to our feelings and gut reactions to the alternatives…

The key to step three is to make discerning decisions by applying more than one way of knowing, and in particular not applying just cognitive judgment by itself, which is informed but not reliable on its own. We aren’t suggesting making only emotional decisions, either. We all have examples of emotions getting people in trouble (though usually those are impulse emotions, and that’s a very different thing), so we’re not saying to swap your brain for your heart or your gut. We’re inviting you to integrate all your decision-making faculties, and to be sure you make space so your emotional and intuitive ways of knowing can surface in the process…

Doing this requires that you educate and mature your access to and awareness of your emotional/intuitive/spiritual ways of knowing (or however you may name these affective aspects of our shared humanity). For centuries, the most commonly affirmed path to such maturity has been that of personal practices such as journaling, prayer or spiritual exercises, meditation, integrated physical practices like yoga or Tai Chi, and so on…

Emotional, intuitive, and spiritual forms of knowing are usually subtle, quiet, and even shy. Rarely do people get access to their deepest wisdom by rushing around a few hours before a deadline and talking a lot or surfing the Web. It’s a slower, quieter thing. Practices are just that—practice. We both practice regularly, month in and month out—especially during our off season, when there’s no pressure to perform and we can focus on just doing the practice and gaining strength and balance.

In his 1960s sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein invented the word “grok” to describe a way of knowing that Martians employ. It means to understand something deeply and completely, so much so that you feel you’ve become one with it. Because of its rarity, Martians don’t just understand what water is or drink water—they grok it. Now grok has entered more common cultural use; “I grok that” is sort of like “I get that,” only more so. It’s “I get that” on steroids. When you finally get down to making a choice from your narrowed-down list of alternatives, and you’ve cognitively evaluated the issues, and emotionally and meditatively contemplated the alternatives, it may be time to grok it. To grok a choice, you don’t think about it—you become it. Let’s say you’ve got three alternatives. Pick any one of them and stop thinking about it. Choose to think for the next one to three days that you are the person who has made the decision to pick Alternative A. Choice A is your reality right now.

This technique isn’t guaranteed (no such techniques are), but you can see how the intention here is to allow your alternate forms of knowing—emotional, spiritual, social, intuitive—to have some room to express themselves to you, and thereby complement the evaluative, cognitive knowing, which, if you’re like most of us, is the dominant form of thinking and choosing you rely on.

Dan Gilbert at Harvard has looked at this area and demonstrated the effect letting go of your options has, in a study evaluating how people made decisions about different Monet art prints. He asked people to rank five different Monet prints according to their preference, numbering them from one to five. Whichever prints the subjects ranked numbers three and four he said the experimenters happened to have spare copies of and were letting subjects take one home with them. Of course, most of the people took the one they had ranked number three. Then, interestingly, the experimenters told some of the people that they could swap the one they took for the other one later if they wanted to, and the other people were told that whatever print they took home was it—no swapping.

After a few weeks, the experimenters checked back with the subjects. The people who had been told they could swap their prints—even though they had not done so—were less happy with their choices than the people who had chosen the exact same prints but had been told the choice was irreversible. It turns out that reversibility is not conducive to establishing reliable happiness with a decision. Apparently, just the invitation to reconsider and “keep your options open” makes us doubt and devalue our choice.

The key is to remember that imagined choices don’t actually exist, because they’re not actionable. We’re not trying to live a fantasy life; we’re trying to design a real and livable life. If we burdened ourselves with knowing everything about our decisions and discovering every option possible (which, of course, you should do if you’re going to make “the best choice”), we’d never decide. In life design we know that there are countless possibilities but aren’t stymied by that fact. We revel in exploring a few possibilities, then taking action by starting with a choice.

Do yourself the favor of getting lots of options, then culling the list down to a short and manageable size (five max); then make the best choice that you can, given the time and resources available to you, get on with it, and build your way forward. Note that if you’re doing this with prototype iteration, you don’t have too much at stake, and you will be able to adjust as you go, before you really reach a significant investment. And once you make a choice—then embrace your choice and go with it. When the questions that lead to agonizing creep into your head, evict the thoughts, and direct your energy into living well the decisions you’ve made. Pay attention and learn as you go, of course, but don’t get caught with your eyes fixated on the rearview mirror of decision regret.

This letting-go step relies primarily on personal discipline. Keep your reframed understanding of decision making handy, and be sure to win the internal argument with yourself when you’re tempted to rehash and ruminate. Put in place the support you need to stick with it—find a life design collaborator or team to help remind you why you made the choice or choices you did; make a journal entry about your decision, and reread it when you get confused. Find what works to enable yourself to enjoy your choices fully.

So the key to letting go is to move on and grab something else. Put your attention on something—not off something.

10: Failure Immunity

“We’ve been trying a lot of different things on the way to designing a life that is worth the living. Using the curiosity mind-set, we’ve gone out into the world and met some interesting people. We’ve radically collaborated with friends and family and prototyped some meaningful engagements with the world. And throughout this life design journey, we’ve gotten comfortable with the bias-to-action mind-set, and whenever we’re in doubt, we know it’s time to do something.

All along, you have been developing something positive psychologists like Angela Duckworth call perseverance or grit. Duckworth’s studies on grit and self-control demonstrate that grit is a better measure of potential success than IQ. Failure immunity gives you grit to spare.

Fortunately, if you’re designing your life, you can’t be a failure. You may experience some prototypes and engagements that don’t attain their goals (that “fail”), but remember, those were designed so you could learn some things. Once you become a life designing person and are living the ongoing creative process of life design, you can’t fail; you can only be making progress and learning from the different kinds of experiences that failure and success both have to offer.

Designing your life is actually what life is, because life is a process, not an outcome.

If you can get that, you’ve got it all. We are always growing from the present into the future, and therefore always changing. With each change comes a new design. Life is not an outcome; it’s more like a dance. Life design is just a really good set of dance moves. Life is never done (until it is), and life design is never done (until you’re done).

So what does this have to do with life design? Just this: when you remember that you are always playing the infinite game of becoming more and more yourself and designing how to express the amazingness of you into the world, you can’t fail. With the infinite-game mind-set, you are not just adept at failure reduction—you are truly failure-immune. Sure, you’ll experience pain and loss or serious setbacks, but they won’t make you less of a person, and you don’t experience these setbacks as an existential “failure” from which you can’t recover.

It’s easy for us to describe the lofty goal of attaining failure immunity, but getting there is another matter. Here’s an exercise to help you do just that—the failure reframe. Failure is the raw material of success, and the failure reframe is a process of converting that raw material into real growth. It’s a simple three-step exercise:

1. Log your failures.

1. Categorize your failures.

1. Identify growth insights.

Categorize Your Failures

It’s useful to categorize failures into three types so you can more easily identify where the growth potential lies.

Screwups are just that—simple mistakes about things that you normally get right. It’s not that you can’t do better. You normally do these things right, so you don’t really need to learn anything from this—you just screwed up. The best response here is to acknowledge you screwed up, apologize as needed, and move on.

Weaknesses are failures that happen because of one of your abiding failings. These are the mistakes that you make over and over. You know the source of these failures well. They are old friends. You’ve probably worked at correcting them already, and have improved as far as you think you’re going to. You try to avoid getting caught by these weaknesses, but they happen. We’re not suggesting you cave in prematurely and accept mediocre performance, but we are suggesting that there isn’t much upside in trying to change your stripes. It’s a judgment call, of course, but some failures are just part of your makeup, and your best strategy is avoidance of the situations that prompt them instead of improvement.

Growth opportunities are the failures that didn’t have to happen, or at least don’t have to happen the next time. The cause of these failures is identifiable, and a fix is available. We want to direct our attention here, rather than get distracted by the low return on spending too much time on the other failure types.

Life designers don’t fight reality. They become tremendously empowered by designing their way forward no matter what. In life design, there are no wrong choices; there are no regrets. There are just prototypes, some that succeed and some that fail. Some of our greatest learning comes from a failed prototype, because then we know what to build differently next time. Life is not about winning and losing. It’s about learning and playing the infinite game, and when we approach our lives as designers, we are constantly curious to discover what will happen next.

The only question that remains is one we’ve all heard a time or two before: What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

11: Building a Team

“What we mean is that life design is intrinsically a communal effort. When you are wayfinding a step or two at a time to build (not solve) your way forward, the process has to rely on the contribution and participation of others. The ideas and opportunities you design are not just

presented to you or fetched for you by others on your behalf—they are co-created with you in collaboration with the whole community of players you engage with in life. Whether they think of it this way or not, all the people you meet, engage, prototype, or converse with along the way are in your design community.

Lots of people will be ready to give you advice on your life. Be very careful about that. Counsel is entirely different. Counsel is always helpful. You can never be too clear on your own thinking. You can never get too good a grasp of your own best wisdom and insights. Finding someone who can give you good counsel and who regularly leaves you in a clearer and more settled state of mind is a great asset. This is where good mentors shine. We would say that all legitimate mentoring is centered on giving counsel. Counsel invariably begins with lots of questions aimed at accurately understanding you, what you’re saying, and what you’re going through. Good counselors will often seem to ask the same question a couple of times from different points of view, to be sure they’re getting it. They will often try to summarize or restate something you’ve said and ask, “Did I get that right?” This approach tells you that they’re focused on you—not on themselves.

The value of mentors’ life experience when they are giving counsel lies not in borrowing what facts or answers they know but in accessing the breadth of their experience and their objectivity, which helps them to help you to see your own reality in a new way.

This is where being a good mentee comes in. You don’t need 100 percent master mentors. Sure, master mentors are great, and if you’ve got some, hang on to them. But all you really need are mentor-capable people from whom you can extract a mentor contribution. It’s surprisingly easy to do. You just have to be the initiator. When you identify someone who you think can serve you as a mentor, find a way to spend some time with the person and direct the conversation to the areas in which you want help. Specifically, ask him not so much to tell you what he’d do as to use his insights and experience to try to help you sort out your own thinking.

Beyond Team to Community…

There is something incredibly special about being part of a community. It’s how humans are supposed to live. Community is more than just sharing resources or hanging out now and then. It’s showing up and investing in the ongoing creation of one another’s lives. Being in that kind of community is a great way to live, and we highly recommend it as an ongoing practice, not just when making big plans or starting new things.

Identifying what sustaining practices will help keep you growing and enjoying your well-designed life is an important part of the formula, and community is an important piece…

Kindred Purpose. Healthy communities are about something—not just getting together to get together…

Meets Regularly. Whether at the same time every week or month or quarter or not, the community must meet regularly…

Shared Ground. If possible, in addition to a kindred purpose, it’s helpful to have other shared ground.

To Know and Be Known. Some groups are all about the content or the process, and some groups are all about the people. We are talking about a community that’s at least in large part about the people. You can be in a really great book club, where people do the reading and show up prepared and have thoughtful discussions on writing, narrative, and the state of civil society plus a little wine tasting on the side, and you all really like one another, and it’s great. But that’s not a community as we mean it. It really is great—don’t get us wrong…

What makes an effective community is not having people in it with the right expertise or information. What makes it work is people with the right intention and presence. It is most helpful to be with people who are trying to connect the dots and live in coherence with themselves and the world in an honest way.

Conclusion: A Well-Designed Life

“So, if wayfinding is how you found your way into the life design you want to live, then it’s also the way to live it. Just keep building your way forward. Design isn’t just a technique to address problems and projects—it’s a way of living. One of the reasons that design thinking has worked so well in our Designing Your Life classes and consulting is that it’s so human.

We introduced the idea of life design in this book by telling you five simple things you need to do: (1) be curious (curiosity), (2) try stuff (bias to action), (3) reframe problems (reframing), (4) know it’s a process (awareness), and (5) ask for help (radical collaboration). We’ve reminded you of these mind-sets throughout the book as we’ve walked through the various ideas and tools that constitute life design.

Reframe Problems. Reframing is a change in perspective, and almost any design problem can use a perspective switch.

What perspective do I actually have?

Where am I now coming from?

What other perspectives could other people have? Name them, and then describe the problem from their perspective, not yours.

Redescribe your problem using some of the following reframe lenses: Your problem is actually very small. Very easy to fix. An opportunity more than a problem. Something you can just skip entirely. Something you actually don’t understand at all yet. Not your problem. And how will it look a year later?

Beyond the five mind-sets, there are two more things that you particularly want to pay attention to in living your well-designed life—your compass and your practices. Your compass is about those great big organizing ideas of your Workview and Lifeview. These, along with your values, provide the foundation for your answer to “How’s it going?” They inform you if you are on a good track for you, or are out of sync with yourself. They determine if you’re living a coherent life in which you’ve got who you are, what you believe, and what you’re doing in adequate alignment.

Perhaps the most important recommendation we can give you to sustain a well-designed life is to invest in and commit to some personal practices of the variety we described in chapter 9.

Donald used the mind-set of curiosity to reframe his complaint, “Why the hell am I doing this?,” into a new question, “What is so interesting around there that it keeps all these people coming back to this company day after day?” He followed that question into lots of Life Design Interviews with his colleagues, looking for the ones who were really enjoying themselves and had figured out just what the hell they were doing there. When he combined his insights from those stories with the results from his Good Time Journal, the pattern was clear. The way to get re-energized was to refocus on the people. He discovered that he wasn’t in the wrong place, he was just in the wrong state of mind. He’d gotten so preoccupied with the what and the how of business success and family responsibilities that he’d completely forgotten the why and the who. He reinvented himself without having to change anything about his situation. Reframing his work from “getting the job done” to “creating a dynamic culture where my employees love their work” was transformative.

Acknowledgements:

“Lindsay Oishi, Ph.D., and Tim Reilly, Ph.D., who made the huge personal investment of dedicating their doctoral research projects to demonstrating the efficacy of DYL, and in so doing set our work apart and ensured we gave people what they deserved. To Professors Dan Schwartz and Bill Damon, their advisers, for their support and guidance, and Dr. Denise Pope, founder of Challenge Success, for her careful research insights and demonstration that you can change the education system.