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.

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.

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.

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?

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.