I’ve come to see that sound strategic thinking (once you have clarity of vision) boils down to having insightful, empirically validated answers to three essential questions:

1. Where to place our big bets?

1. How to protect our flanks?

1. How to extend our victories?

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.

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.

THREE: Illumination

“That gaze, that first sight, represents a posture toward the world. A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings

aspects of things into being.