Designing Your Life

Everything that makes our daily living easier, more productive, more enjoyable, and more pleasurable was created because of a problem, and because some designer or team of designers somewhere out there in the world sought to solve that problem.

A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise.

“Don’t start with the problem, start with the people, start with empathy.”

A reframe is when we take new information about the problem, restate our point of view, and start thinking and prototyping again.

Your life is not a thing, it’s an experience; the fun comes from designing and enjoying the experience.

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.

Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward.

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.

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.

curiosity is going to help you “get good at being lucky.” It’s the reason some people see opportunities everywhere.

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.

Life design is a journey; let go of the end goal and focus on the process

research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery—not before.

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.

More important, do we really think it is a good idea to let our earnest but misguided seventeen-year-old self determine where we work for the rest of our lives?

These are all gravity problems—meaning they are not real problems. Why? Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Let’s repeat that. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.

The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at.

Love does make the world go around, and when it’s lacking, our world can feel like it’s not moving us much.

We call spiritual any practice that is based on a belief in something bigger than ourselves.

Living coherently doesn’t mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It simply means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way.

If you can see the connections between who you are, what you believe, and what you are doing, you will know when you are on course, when there is tension, when there might need to be some careful compromises, and when you are in need of a major course correction.

Work is often the largest single component of most people’s waking lives, and over a lifetime it occupies more of our attention and energy than anything else we do.

the positive psychologist Martin Seligman1 found that the people who can make an explicit connection between their work and something socially meaningful to them are more likely to find satisfaction, and are better able to adapt to the inevitable stresses and compromises that come with working in the world.

Flow is that state of being in which time stands still, you’re totally engaged in an activity, and the challenge of that particular activity matches up with your skill—so you’re neither bored because it’s too easy nor anxious because it’s too hard.

Flow was “discovered” by Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has been researching this phenomenon since the 1970s. When he first described the state of flow, he had studied the detailed activities of thousands of people going about their daily lives and was able to isolate this very special form of intense engagement.1

Flow is one key to what we call adult play, and a really rewarding and satisfying career involves a lot of flow states.

The brain is a very energy-hungry organ. Of the roughly two thousand calories we consume a day, five hundred go to running our brains.

the brain represents only about 2 percent of our body weight, and yet it takes up 25 percent of the energy we consume every day.

Here’s another key element when you’re wayfinding in life: follow the joy; follow what engages and excites you, what brings you alive.

Work is fun when you are actually leaning into your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing.

We have to defer judgment and silence the inner critic if we want to get all our ideas out. If we don’t, we may have a few good ideas, but the majority will have been lost—silently imprisoned behind the wall of judgment our prefrontal cortex has erected to safeguard us from making mistakes or looking foolish.

David Kelley, the founder of the d.school, says you often have to go through the wild ideas to get to the actionable good ideas.

Sometimes it is more comfortable to hold on to our familiar, failed approach to the problem than to risk a worse failure by attempting the big changes that we think will be required to eliminate it.

Change is always uncertain, and there is no guarantee of success, no matter how hard you try. It makes sense to be fearful. The way forward is to reduce the risk (and the fear) of failure by designing a series of small prototypes to test the waters.

life is more of an abstract painting—one that’s open to multiple interpretations.

One of the most powerful ways to design your life is to design your lives.

The conclusion is that if your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and conceive more novel innovations.

Odyssey Plans are sketches of possibilities that can animate your imagination and help you choose which wayfinding direction you will actually take to start prototyping and living into next.

“Building is thinking” is a phrase you will often hear around the Design Program at Stanford.

Alex Osborn in a book published in 1953 called Applied Imagination. He described a method of generating ideas that relied on two rules: generating a large quantity of ideas without concern for quality, and deferring judgment so that participants would not censor ideas.

Designing a career and a life requires not only that you have lots of options and good alternatives, as we have discussed; it also requires the ability to make good choices and live into those choices with confidence, which means you accept them and don’t second-guess yourself.

In life design, being happy means you choose happiness.

It turns out that the part of the brain that is working to help us make our best choices is in the basal ganglia. It’s part of the ancient base brain, and as such does not have connections to our verbal centers, so it does not communicate in words. It communicates in feelings and via connections to the intestines—those good old gut feelings.

once that work is done—led by the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which runs the executive functions of coding, listing, and categorizing—we need access to that wisdom center where our well-informed emotional knowing can help us discern the better choices for us.

The time for gaining maturity by practice isn’t during the playoffs, when things are stressful and demanding. Decision making is stressful, so the best time to prepare for good choosing is when there’s no choice at stake.

the invitation to reconsider and “keep your options open” makes us doubt and devalue our choice.

The perception that there are gazillions of possibilities that may have been great but that we never got to is a powerful force against being at peace with our choice making; even if we don’t know what it was, there must have been a better option out there, and we missed it.

This letting-go step relies primarily on personal discipline. Keep your reframed understanding of decision making handy, and be sure to win the internal argument with yourself when you’re tempted to rehash and ruminate.

find a life design collaborator or team to help remind you why you made the choice or choices you did; make a journal entry about your decision, and reread it when you get confused.

Duckworth’s studies on grit and self-control demonstrate that grit is a better measure of potential success than IQ. Failure immunity gives you grit to spare.

This is the first level of failure immunity—using a bias to action, failing fast, and being so clear on the learning value of a failure that the sting disappears (and, of course, you learn from the failure quickly and incorporate improvements).

Designing your life is actually what life is, because life is a process, not an outcome.

We are always growing from the present into the future, and therefore always changing. With each change comes a new design. Life is not an outcome; it’s more like a dance.

Life design is just a really good set of dance moves. Life is never done (until it is), and life design is never done (until you’re done).

The philosopher James Carse wrote an interesting book called Finite and Infinite Games.2 In it he asserts that just about everything we do in life is either a finite game, one in which we play by the rules in order to win, or an infinite game, one in which we play with the rules for the joy of getting to keep playing.

Getting an A in chemistry is a finite game. Learning how the world is put together and how you fit in it is an infinite game.

All of life’s chapters—both the wonderfully victorious and the painfully difficult and disappointing—keep this growth cycle going if we have the right mind-set. In this way of seeing and experiencing things, you’re always succeeding at the infinite game of discovering and engaging your own life in the world.

A perfectly planned life that never surprises you or challenges you or tests you is a perfectly boring life, not a well-designed life.

Embrace the flaws, the weaknesses, the major screwups, and all the things that happened over which you had no control. They are what make life worth living and worth designing.

When obstacles happen, when your progress gets derailed, when the prototype changes unexpectedly—life design lets you turn absolutely any change, setback, or surprise into something that can contribute to who you are becoming personally and professionally.

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 ideas and possibilities and roles and forms that you will end up living do not actually exist anywhere in the universe right now, as you are reading this. They are all waiting to be invented, and the raw material to invent them is found out in the world and, most important, lying in wait in the hearts and minds and actions of others—many of whom you’ve not met yet.

It is most helpful to be with people who are trying to connect the dots and live in coherence with themselves and the world in an honest way.

Life is about more than a paycheck and job performance. We all want to know we mattered to someone. We all want to know our work contributed to the world. We all want to know we loved and we lived the best we could, with as much purpose and meaning as possible, and that we had a pretty fun time doing it.

The opportunities to live into being curious or to try stuff are endless.

There’s something interesting about everything. Endless curiosity is key to a well-designed life.