How to Design your Life – 9 lessons from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

What does it mean to design your life?

Well, it comes down to one simple formula:

Design thinking doesn’t focus on setting goals or outcomes – it’s focused on understanding what fundamental life design problems are preventing us from our ideal life, and creating solutions to solve our life design problems.

Lesson 1: Start by defining your problem.

What is the underlying thing that has you stuck where you are?

Very often in life, we start with problem solving.

But just as much time should be spent on the problem as we do the solution. Because if we’re not addressing the problem, then the solution we design is fundamentally wrong.

Lesson 2: Your inherent beliefs might be blocking you from seeing the real problem.

Maybe you liked animals growing up and it’s made you think that being a veterinarian must be your calling. Or maybe you had an English teacher who inspired you to write as a kid, and years later you tell yourself you want to be a writer. Maybe you were told growing up that numbers was your strength, so surely you must build your career in finance.

In each instance, you might think the problem you need to solve is figuring out how you can get to where you want to be for each desired career path.

But while these paths might well be your destiny, to base your conviction off something you were told or had experienced in your childhood can blind you to considering the real underlying problem.

The real problem in your life might actually be that you don’t like math, and you’re bogged down by a lack of creativity in a finance job. Maybe it’s that you’re not actually good at writing.

Oftentimes, we fall in love with our first idea then refuse to let it go.

Design thinking asks us to confront our biases, to consider whether the path we’re so eager to pursue is a worthy path or if we’re unwilling to face the dead end that awaits us not too far ahead.

If that’s you, then start by letting go of any romantic, or nostalgic ideas you have that may be blinding you to the real problem at hand.

Lesson 3: Avoid fighting gravity problems

Gravity problems are the problems that take an immense about of resources to fight.

Once you choose to take on this problem, it sucks you in and you end up permanently fighting this problem, because there is almost nothing you can do.

Gravity problems could be:

• • The low pay that’s generally seen across your industry

• • The number of years you’re expected to work before you can rise in seniority in a hierarchical workplace

• • An employer’s perception of your hire-ability after a career gap

These problems are simply not worth fighting. While it’s always possible that your actions could change an entire industry or workplace, but it’s not practical to do so and can be extremely time-consuming.

Rather than focusing your energy on fighting gravity problems,  accept that they exist, and instead redirect your effort into solving other problems.

Lesson 4: Find your True North

Before taking another step down the path you seek to explore, ask yourself if this path is your True North. Are you going in the right direction?  

Find your Workview by asking yourself questions like:

• • Why work? What’s work for? What does work mean?

• • How does it relate to the individual, others, society?

• • What defines good or worthwhile work?

• • What does money have to do with it?

• • What do experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?

Then, find your Lifeview by asking yourself questions like:

• • Why are we here?

• • What is the meaning or purpose of life?

• • What is the relationship between the individual and others?

• • Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in?

• • What is good, and what is evil?

After reflecting on your Lifeview and Workview, ask yourself the following:

• • Where do your views on work and life complement one another?

• • Where do they clash?

• • Does one drive the other? How?

This reflection exercise is when Burnett and Evans’ students often reach their ‘aha’ moment.

Upon reflecting on the areas of life or work, the students found areas in each or either view that needed editing, in order for them to achieve harmony and life a coherent and meaningful life.

Your True North isn’t a specific outcome you want to work achieve – it is simply a general direction, a compass to guide your life.

Any time you feel stuck and need to reorient yourself, recalibrate your compass by asking yourself these questions. Burnett and Evans does this at least once a year.

Lesson 5: Reflect on how you work

Once you have your compass, you can start to build a clearer map on where you want to go based on your past experiences.  

Consider the following when thinking about work:

• • Flow – what activities are you totally engaged in?

• • Energy – which activities energize you and which de-energize you?

• • Joy – what aspects make work fun and gives you life?

• • Purpose – what moments throughout the day give you purpose?

Start recording your answers in a Good Time Journal, where you pay attention to the activities you like and dislike at work, and the things that give you energy or keep you engaged.

If you’re at the start of your career, think about experiences from other aspects of your life, such as school assignments or volunteer projects. Anytime when you felt engaged.

In Burnett and Evans’ journal, each activity is logged next to a dial like this:

Once you’ve built up a few weeks in your journal, ask yourself what you truly liked. Consider the AEIOU exercise:

• • Activities: what were you doing? Was the activity structured or unstructured? What was your role?

• • Environments: where were you? How did the place you were in make you feel?  

• • Interactions: who were you interacting with? Was it formal or informal, in person or virtual?

• • Objects: did devices like laptops or smartphones contribute to your interactions?

• • Users: who else was there?

Self-reflection helps you become more aware of how you best work, and where you may want to go next.

Lesson 6: Ideate freely – give yourself lots of good ideas on how to tackle your problem.

In the same way that our minds may fixate on our first attempt at defining the problem, we also often settle for the first solution.

As life designers, we must give ourselves plenty of good ideas to choose from, so that we’re choosing our best solution, not the first.  

To do this, Bill and Burnett outlines the mind-mapping method for ideation.

The Mind-mapping Ideation Method

1. 1. Pick an area of great interest to you.
   2. Write down 5 or 6 things related to this topic. Be quick – write down the first words that come to mind.
   3. Repeat this process with the secondary words, by writing 3 or 4 words related to each.
   4. Highlight ideas that might be interesting, then mash them together into a few concepts. Pick from words in the outer layer of your mindmap, as those are further steps away from your conscious thoughts.

Do this fast and try not to self-censor, as this limits your ability to generate new ideas. Ideally, this exercise should take 3 to 5 minutes.

You can do this exercise three times, each time mapping out topics related to the activities from your Good Time Journal:

• • The activity that engaged you

• • The activity that gave you energy

• • The activity that put you in a state of flow.

Lesson 7: There are multiple good life choices, not just one.

There is no one set path laid out for us, where all the other paths are simply sub-optimal.

Just as there are multiple good choices we could pick from our mind maps, we are also capable of multiple good lives.

Bill and Burnett encourage us to let go of the stubborn idea that we have one chance to “get it right”.

Instead, come up with three possible life plans:

Take each life plan and create a five-year view of what that life could look like. Map this out across a page. Some things to consider:

• • Where would you live?

• • What experience/learning will you gain?

• • What are the impacts/results of choosing this life path?

• • What would life look like? What particular role, industry, or company do you see yourself in?

Once you have your life plans mapped, measure each plan against the following metrics:

• • Resources – do you have what you need to pull this plan off?

• • Likability – how much do you like this plan?

• • Confidence – how confident are you about the plan’s success?

• • Coherence – does this plan make sense with your workview and lifeview?

Jot down the questions each life plan is asking you. This might be:

• • Do I have what it takes to do this?

• • Is my idea good enough?

• • Will this work be meaningful?

• • Will this plan be profitable?

Share these ideas with two to five other people who can give you their feedback and ideas.

Once you’ve solidified your life plans, choose one plan to start working on. Remember that this is just one plan you’re prototyping – you’re not fixed on this plan for the rest of your life.  

Lesson 8: Build prototypes of your life plan

Once you have a life plan, start by building different prototypes that explore the questions you have about your plan.

This doesn’t mean right jumping into the career you’ve drawn up in your life plan. After all, there is a chance that this life plan isn’t right for you at the end of the day.

 

Prototyping could mean first conducting a ‘Life Design Interview’ with someone who has the life you want.

Reach out to friends of friends who are working in your desired industry and ask them questions over a cup of coffee. Learn about what the pain points are, and what their job actually looks like day to day.

If you’re at the start of your career, consider taking a short-term internship to learn about the industry for yourself.

 

Try brainstorming with four to six people to create a well-designed life plan prototype together.

• • Encourage all ideas in brainstorming, no matter how wild. Brainstorming is quantity over quality.

• • Build on the ideas others have shared.

• • Vote on the best ideas.

Lesson 9: Experiencing failure is part of the process.

Failure is something fundamentally unavoidable. It can hold us back from so many experiences and twist the way we perceive other people’s lives.

Prototyping your ideal life will mean that you actually fail more often, through small learning experiences.

Often, you’ll find that exploring your life prototypes don’t get you to where you want to be. Maybe you’re rejected from a job because you don’t have enough experience, or you end up finding the work in your field of interest is actually extremely tedious.

It’s important to remember that by taking the leap to design your life, you cannot be a failure.

By choosing to continually design your life, you are constantly making progress and the small failures along the way are simply experiences you can learn from.

Write down your failures and categorize them into mistakes, weaknesses and growth opportunities.

In each of category of failure, there are insights you can gain from the experience that can help you improve for next time.

Conclusion

Since writing the book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans have gone on to create a ‘Designing Your Life’ movement, with a website that offers coaching and workshops, as well as a resources page with worksheets for the exercises summarized above. They have also released two further books – Designing your New Work Life and the Designing Your Life Workbook, all fantastic resources to help you on your quest.

Designing your life isn’t going to be easy. It’s a daunting, uncomfortable process and it will challenge you to move past your limiting beliefs and fears.

But remember that this is also an incredibly exciting path towards re-shaping your life. You are taking your very first step towards creating a life you truly want.