Book notes: Designing Your Life

Feb 13, 2024

Book cover

By Bill Burnett & Dave Evans.

The title says it all. Design your life to be one of the best possible versions of you. Currently 4.5 stars on 5k+ ratings at Amazon. Unsure where I got this book recommendation. I read it 4 years ago, but it was a worthwhile exercise to do again. Highly recommended!

Introduction

Dysfunctional beliefs:

  • Your degree determines your career (p x).
  • If you are successful you will be happy (p xi).
  • It’s too late (p xii).

“A well-designed life is a life that makes sense. It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together.” (p xxx). Not necessarily an easy life.

Tools: (p xxxi)

  • Curiosity
  • Bias to action
  • Reframing
  • Awareness
  • Radical collaboration

1. Start where you are

Anchor & gravity problems.

Dashboards for health, work, play, & love.

Dysfunctional belief: I should already know where I’m going. (p 17)

2. Building a compass

Work and Life views. Coherence.

3. Wayfinding

Engagement, flow, energy, joy.

Dysfunctional belief: Work is not supposed to be enjoyable. That’s why they call it work. (p 42)

Flow is “play for grown ups”. (p 45)

Good time journal. Get a few weeks worth.

Analyze your good time journal with AEIOU: (p 56)

  • Activities - what actually doing?
  • Environments - where where you? What kind of place?
  • Interactions - what/who were you interacting with?
  • Objects - interacting with objects/devices?
  • Users - who else was there?

Do a GTJ on past “peak experiences” (p 58), even decades ago!

4. Getting unstuck

Dysfunctional beliefs:

  • I’m stuck (p 64)
  • I have to find the one right idea (p 65)

Need lots of ideas. First solution is usually not the right one.

Mind mapping.

Anchor problems: hard problems we get stuck on.

Exercise: mind map 3 activities from Good Time Journal (energy, engagmenet, flow). Draw napkin sketch for each of a possible job description.

5. Designing your lives

I am legion! (p 87) Have multiple lives.

Dysfunctional belief: I need to figure out my best possible life, make a plan, then execute it. (p 90)

Three Odyssey plans.

6. Prototyping

Life Design Interviews. I.e. conversations with folks in that job/industry.

Prototype Experiences. Hands-on work.

Ideas for answering your Life Odyssey questions and finding prototype interviews & experiences require brainstorming. What are your questions? What would like to understand better?

  1. Framing a good question. Don’t sway or limit the answers.
  2. Warming up. Play dough?
  3. The brainstorm: 3-6 people, no judgment, don’t censor, build off other ideas, encourage wild ideas.
  4. Process the outcomes. Group by similar/category, e.g. most exciting, if money were no object, etc.

Outcome should be something like “141 ideas grouped into six categories, based on focal questions came up with eight ideas to prototype, sorted by priority, first prototype is …” (p126).

7. How not to get a job

Standard model of job searching isn’t efficient. If you do it this way, some tips:

  1. Rewrite your resume using the same words used in the job posting. (p 137)
  2. Put specific skill set in same way it is written in posting. (p 137)
  3. Focus resume on the job as described. (p 138)
  4. Bring a physical copy of your resume. (p 138)

Some situations to be aware of:

  • Super-job description syndrome (p 139)
  • Phantom job listing syndrome (p 140)
  • Cool companies and false-positives (p 141)

Dysfunctional belief: You should focus on your need to find a job. Instead: focus on hiring manager’s need to find the right person. (p 144)

8. Designing your dream job

You design your dream job through a process of actively seeking and co-creating it. (p 145)

4 out of 5 jobs aren’t advertised. (p 146)

Networking is like asking for directions. (p 150)

Pursue number of offers instead of a job. (p 153)

Pursue “latent wonderfulness”, i.e. be open and curious to possibilities. (p 155)

9. Choosing happiness

Money quote: “… understand the difference between good choosing, which results in reliably happy outcomes and more future prospects, and bad choosing, which preconditions us for an unhappy experience.” (p 159/160)

Our gut is good at choosing (emotional intelligence). Figure out how to access this through your own personal practices (e.g. journaling, meditation).

Spend a few days “groking” (becoming) each choice, without committing doing it, to get a feel for it.

Too many options means no options. Leave the store with jam. Happiness is letting go of what you don’t need. (p 174)

Once you make a choice, let go of the other choices.

10. Failure immunity

Get some grit, dude.

Life is a process, not an outcome. (p 184)

Be -> Do -> Become (repeat). (p 186)

Failure is the raw material of success. (p 187) What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? (197)

Uh-oh, have to log and categorize failures as an exercise: screw-ups, weaknesses, and growth opportunities.

11. Building a team

Life design is intrinsically a communal effort. (p 200)

Your ideal team is 3-5 people that “walk along side you as you are doing your life design” (p 203). They are supportive of the process.

Life design rules for the team: (p 205)

  1. Respectful
  2. Confidential
  3. Participative
  4. Generative

Council vs advise: helping you figure out what you want vs an opinion on what they would do. (p 206) A good mentor offers council.

Healthy communities:

  • Kindred purpose
  • Meet regularly
  • Shared ground
  • To know and be known - this one is important.

12. Conclusion

Through the iterative process described in this book you should become more like you.

A bunch of great questions to get you going around the 5 mind-sets. (p 222-225)

Watch for subtle changes in your life and work views over time.

Daily personal practices (for emotional intelligence) are important. A little goes a long way!