Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times

Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve.

In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

Review

“Life has questions. They have answers…Learn how to find a fulfilling career…learn how to better navigate life’s big moment decisions and kill your ‘wicked problems dead.”
—The New York Times

“The prototype for a happy life…Burnett and Evans show how to apply Stanford’s famous design principles to finding your place in the world, as a recent graduate or mid-career.”
—NPR’s Brian Lehrer

“Designing Your Life walks readers through the process of building a satisfying, meaningful life by approaching the challenge the way a designer would. Experimentation. Wayfinding. Prototyping. Constant iteration. You should read the book. Everyone else will.”
—Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive

“This [is] the career book of the next decade and . . . the go-to book that is read as a rite of passage whenever someone is ready to create a life they love.”
—David Kelley, Founder of IDEO

“An empowering book based on their popular class of the same name at Stanford University . . . Perhaps the book’s most important lesson is that the only failure is settling for a life that makes one unhappy. With useful fact-finding exercises, an empathetic tone, and sensible advice, this book will easily earn a place among career-finding classics.”
—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

BILL BURNETT is the executive director of the Design Program at Stanford.

DAVE EVANS is an adjunct lecturer in the Product Design Program at Stanford, a management consultant, and a co-founder of Electronic Arts

www.designingyour.life

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Designers imagine things that don’t yet exist, and then they build them, and then the world changes. You can do this in your own life. You can imagine a career and a life that don’t exist; you can build that future you, and as a result your life will change. If your life is pretty perfect as is, life design can still help you make it an even better version of the life you currently love living.

When you think like a designer, when you are willing to ask the questions, when you realize that life is always about designing something that has never existed before, then your life can sparkle in a way that you could never have imagined. That is, if you like sparkles. It’s your design, after all.

What Do We Know?

In Stanford’s Design Program, we have taught more than a thousand students design thinking and how to design their lives. And we’ll let you in on a secret—no one has ever failed our class. In fact, it’s impossible to flunk. We have more than sixty years of combined teaching experience, and we have taught this approach to high school students, college students, graduate students, Ph.D. students, twenty-somethings, mid-career executives, and retirees wanting an “encore” career.

As teachers, we have always guaranteed our students “office hours for life.” This means that if you take a class from us we are there for you, forever. Period. We’ve had students come back to us over the years since they’ve graduated, and they’ve told us how the tools, ideas, and mind-sets that we teach have made a difference for them. We’re quite hopeful—and, frankly, pretty confident— that these ideas can make a difference for you, too.

But don’t take our word for it. Stanford is a very rigorous place. Though anecdotes are nice, they don’t count for much in academia. To speak authoritatively, you need data. Our class is one of the few design thinking classes that have been scientifically studied and have proved to make a difference for students on a number of important measures. Two doctoral students did their dissertations on the course, and what they found was pretty exciting.2 They found that those who took our class were better able to conceive of and pursue a career they really wanted; they had fewer dysfunctional beliefs (those pesky ideas that hold you back and that just aren’t true) and an increased ability to generate new ideas for their life design (increasing their ideation capability). All of these measures were “statistically significant,” which, in nongeek-speak, means that the ideas and exercises we lay out in our course and are going to walk you through in this book have been proven effective; they can help you to figure out what you want and show you how to get it.

But let’s be perfectly clear right from the start. Science or no science, this is all highly personal stuff. We can give you some tools, some ideas, some exercises, but we can’t figure it all out for you. We can’t give you your insights, change your perspective, and provide you with nonstop “aha” moments, all in ten easy steps. What we can tell you is that if you actually use the tools and do the life design exercises, you will generate the insights you need to have. Because here’s the big truth: there are many versions of you, and they are all “right.” And life design will help you live into whatever version of you is now playing at the Cineplex. Remember, there are no wrong answers, and we’re not grading you. We will suggest you do some exercises in this book, but there are no answers in the back to tell you how you did. We’ve added a recap of the exercises at the end of each chapter that has them—a Try Stuff box—because we suggest that you, well, try stuff. That’s what designers do. We’re not measuring you against anyone, and you shouldn’t measure yourself against anyone, either. We’re here to co-create with you. Think of us as part of your own personal design team.

In fact, we suggest you go out and get a design team right off the bat—a group of people who will read the book with you and do the exercises alongside you, a collaborative team in which you support one another in your pursuit of a well-designed life. We’ll talk about this more later in the book, and by all means you should feel free to read it on your own first. Many people think that designers are lone geniuses, working in solitude and waiting for a flash of inspiration to show them the solution to their design problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. There may be some problems, such as the design of a stool or a new set of children’s blocks, that are simple enough to be tackled by an individual, but in today’s highly technical world, almost every problem requires a design team. Design thinking takes this idea even further and suggests that the best results come from radical collaboration. Radical collaboration works on the principle that people with very different backgrounds will bring their idiosyncratic technical and human experiences to the team. This increases the chance that the team will have empathy for those who will use what they are designing, and that the collision of different backgrounds will generate truly unique solutions.

This is proved over and over again in d. school classes at Stanford, where graduate students create teams of business, law, engineering, education, and medical students that come up with breakthrough innovations all the time. The glue that holds these teams together is design thinking, the human-centered approach to design that takes advantage of their different backgrounds to spur collaboration and creativity. Typically, none of the students have any design background when they enroll in our classes, and all of the teams struggle at first to be productive. They have to learn the mind-sets of a designer—especially radical collaboration and being mindful of process. But once that happens, they discover that their abilities as a team far exceed what any individual can do, and their creative confidence explodes. Hundreds of successful student projects and innovative companies, such as D-Rev and Embrace,3 have come from this process, and are proof that collaboration is the way design gets done today.

So be a genius at your life design; just don’t think you have to be one of those lone geniuses.

Think Like a Designer

Before you can do life design, you need to learn to think like a designer. 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. We’re going to help you think like a designer and build your future, prototype by prototype. We’re going to help you approach your own life design challenges with the same kind of curiosity and the same kind of creativity that resulted in the invention of the printing press, the lightbulb, and the Internet.

Our focus is mainly on jobs and careers, because, let’s face it, we spend most of the hours of our days, and the days of our lives, at work. Work can be a daily source of enormous joy and meaning, or it can be an endless grind and waste of hours spent trying to white-knuckle our way through the misery of it all until the weekend comes. A well-designed life is not a life of drudgery. You weren’t put on this earth to work eight hours a day at a job you hate until the time comes to die.

That may sound a bit melodramatic, but many people tell us that this is a good description of their lives. And even those who are lucky enough to find a career they love often find that they are frustrated and have a hard time designing a life that is balanced. It’s time to start thinking differently—about everything.

Review:

4.8 out of 5

95.00% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book regardless of where you are in your career

M.A. · June 8, 2024

This was required reading for my grad program, but I’m so glad I took the time to read it and do the exercises. If you have considered a career change, are looking to start your first career, or maybe you’re fine where you are but are interested to know what your passion really is, give this book a read and do the exercises. It really gets you thinking and is fascinating with how helpful it can be.

5.0 out of 5 stars A practical and helpful guidebook when sorting & improving your life

P. · December 11, 2022

There's only two self-improvement books I'd recommend to anyone: "Designing Your Life" and "Eight Dates."Designing Your Life does a fantastic job outlining a roadmap filled with practical exercises that can help you explore new avenues or dig in deeper on opportunities you've identified. It's non-judgemental in its tone, but it does require you to be honest with yourself and at times push yourself outside your comfort zone.Just get it, start reading it, and see how you like it. Not every exercise hit perfectly for me (and some were certainly harder to do regularly than others.) But, I can promise you, you'll come out the other side having learned something about yourself.4 months of applying the exercises in the book, I've finally finished reading it, but the real work has just begun. I've got a weekly book club set up with some friends to keep talking about the strategies and projects we're working on.Can not recommend this book enough!

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the best self motivation book I ever read

y. · September 27, 2023

Exercises are very practical, you just have to do it and you will seeIt is enjoyable and give you a brand new perspective about future.

5.0 out of 5 stars Problem Finding + Problem Solving = Well-Designed Life

T.S.C. · January 26, 2020

The media could not be loaded. “there are lots of powerful voices in the world, & lots of powerful voices in our heads, all telling us what to do or who to be.”At some point, we all wake up to the live we’ve lived by default. Some have that awakening at 20, others at 80. Whenever it happens—we have a choice: Do we continue to live what our default & habits have brought us to? Or do we choose to do & be different.And it may not be a singular awakening, or a “Harajuku Moment” as Chad Fowler calls it. It could be several pivotal or teachable moments. Birthdays, new years, significant milestone events. There are these moments that challenge not only who we are, but how we define our place in the world.Definition can come from default, or design.That’s what this book covers. It brings a Stanford d.school approach, to lifestyle design. It’s a total package approach. I especially like the dysfunctional beliefs & reframes, sprinkled throughout the book.Taking this to the end—the authors want you to truly get all your ideas of life & work out of your head, and onto paper. Craft your workview & life view, then take a log of how much your current life measures up.Comparing that log, you start finding places where you can expand your views into action. Into your practice. And over time, you can recast yourself into someone new.Simple, not easy.It’s easy to agonize about being wrong. It’s easy to decide to let design happen on it’s own. But then months & years pass—and we lose the initiative on what our design could have been.This book isn’t an indictment or judgment. It’s supportive & empathetic. The authors want you to use all their tools, & enjoy the process of lifestyle design. Enjoy the process, you’ll enjoy & own more of what the results could be.You have to make space for joy, to make sure you find it.

5.0 out of 5 stars Love this book

S.P. · September 12, 2024

Such a good book. Recommend for any person at any point in their life that wants their life to be even better

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Book to Unstuck Your life

H. · September 30, 2024

One thing really resonated me is, life is never done, dont only have 1 path of life, great book to read!

5.0 out of 5 stars For all ages.

A.L. · July 11, 2024

I had the misfortune of reading a book called “The Defining Decade” by therapist Meg Jay, which meant for her bored and aimless clientele. These were adults in their 20’s who had finished college, had endless familial support, and still managed to flounder. Some were facing ennui after returning from a year of travel, some were working “dead-end barista jobs”. Jay chastises them, listing all the ways their lives will be off track if they aren’t in a career-track job and mindfully dating their future spouse (but not living with them, of course) by the age of 30.At the time, I was 29, literally working as a barista to finish college (4 years late) without digging myself further into debt. I was unmarried but living with my partner, and as Jay had pointed out, it would have been extremely difficult to break up. By her account, I had done everything wrong. This pulled at the structural fear thread at my core - that experiencing a series of tragedies had set me behind my peers in a permanent way, and I had missed my chance at happiness.I am so grateful that I found this book next.Evans and Burnett lit a fire under me by teaching me to think iteratively. I started to see possible futures in front of me instead of all the failures behind, started to understand what was important to me in a job instead of focusing on my lack of personal connections. Design thinking tells us that there is always a solution, we just need to iterate towards it. I did graduate and find a job that led to fantastic opportunity. I built a beautiful life with my partner by learning to work through the challenges that came with moving in together too soon. I still return to this book when I feel stuck again, and it quickly helps me to recenter on what’s important to me today. It’s never too late to redesign your life.

Enlightning

J.E.G.E. · August 14, 2024

At 61, I've intuitively done many of the things suggested in the book. Some of the trail-and-error required significant resources and time to yield a result. This books articulates and synthesizes the ideas and experiences that will help me communicate with my son, who is at the cross-roads of choosing what to study and with my wife as we approach "retirement" (end my formal money-making work). DYL is a life-long Odyssey, and the book is always relevant.

Gut

p. · February 26, 2024

Gut. Danke.

A life chaanging book

A.A. · September 30, 2021

Having came out of a long unhappy life and therapy. I found this book. The exercises here can really make changes in your life. The way they teach you to reframe your mindset from dysfunctional beliefs to practical ones helped me a lot. I recommend this book to everyone.

Good book

o. · June 6, 2021

Quite a good book. Well written. Recommended to those who are interested in the topic.

Inspiring!

A. · January 25, 2021

Sto leggendo questo libro molto volentieri. Mi piace molto il modo in cui è scritto, ne rende gradevole la lettura e ti aiuta a riflettere senza dare mai l'impressione di fare i compiti a casa

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Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

Name: Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life
Brand: Knopf
SKU: U1101875321
Price: 10.46 BHD
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Rating: 4.5 (12 reviews)

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