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.

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.

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.

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.

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.