Designing Your Life
Bill Burnett & Dave Evans · 2016
Designing Your Life (2016) is a book by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans on Career design. Stanford's wildly popular design-thinking course in book form: stop searching for the one 'right' answer and start prototyping your way to a life you actually want. You don't think your way into a new life, you build it.
Applies design-thinking to building a fulfilling, well-lived career through prototyping and reframing.
Three of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Designing Your Life pulls out 8 insights. Here are the first three.
- Trade the 'perfect plan' for prototypes: you can't think your way to clarity, so run small, low-risk experiments (conversations and short experiences) and let real-world feedback show you what fits.
- Drop the passion myth, for most people passion follows competence and engagement, not the other way around, so try things first and let interest grow rather than waiting to be struck by a calling.
- Build a personal compass by writing your Workview (why you work) and Lifeview (what life is about), then check that your daily choices stay 'coherent' with both.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 10 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- Start Where You Are: Life Has No Final Answer
- Think Like a Designer: The Five Mindsets
- Build Your Compass: Workview and Lifeview
- Wayfinding: Track Engagement and Energy
- Getting Unstuck: Ideate and Reframe
- Design Your Lives: The Three Odyssey Plans
- Prototyping: Test Before You Leap
- The Job Search: Find the Hidden Market
- Choosing Happiness: Decide, Then Let Go
- Failure Immunity and Building a Team
Finish Designing Your Life tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
Close to Designing Your Life
-
Designing Your Work Life Bill Burnett & Dave Evans The design-thinking playbook for fixing the job you already have instead of gambling everything on the one you don't. -
Disrupt Yourself Whitney Johnson It takes Clayton Christensen's disruptive-innovation theory, the one that explains how upstarts topple giants, and turns it into a… -
Do Over Jon Acuff A practical, funny playbook that turns career panic into a deliberate reinvention you build before you need it. -
Encore Marc Freedman It reframes the years after 50 not as a wind-down toward retirement but as the launchpad for your most meaningful work yet. -
Limitless Jim Kwik In a world where knowledge is the new currency, the one skill that pays for every other is learning how to learn, and Kwik shows… -
Make It Stick Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III & Mark A. McDaniel Two memory scientists and a storyteller demolish the way almost everyone studies, proving that rereading and cramming feel…