New
The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
Pages
274
Published
2016
Designing Your Life
How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life Using Design Thinking
Apply the same iterative, prototype-driven process designers use to build products to build a career and life that actually fits you.
Most career advice tells you to find your passion and follow it. That advice is broken. Designing Your Life borrows the tools of product design — reframing, prototyping, and iterating — and turns them on the hardest design problem you will ever face: your own life. Stanford design professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans give you a repeatable process for generating options, testing them cheaply, and choosing a direction with evidence instead of anxiety.
About this book
Career planning tends to collapse into two bad options: follow a vague passion you may not have yet, or grind forward on a path chosen at twenty-two and never revisit it. Neither works. Designing Your Life offers a third way.
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans teach the most popular course at Stanford. For years they have watched engineers, lawyers, and liberal-arts graduates use design thinking to escape dead ends, discover unexpected options, and build lives they actually want to live. This book is that course in book form.
Design thinking is not self-help optimism. It is a structured, testable process: define the problem clearly, generate many possible solutions, build low-cost prototypes to test your assumptions, and iterate based on what you learn. Burnett and Evans translate each step into concrete exercises you can complete on your own or with a small group.
You will start by honestly auditing where your life stands right now across work, play, love, and health. You will identify the dysfunctional beliefs and "gravity problems" that keep you stuck before you even start exploring. Then you will generate at least three genuinely different five-year plans — not variations on a single theme — and begin prototyping them through real conversations and small experiments before committing to anything.
The process works whether you are a recent graduate staring at a blank future, a mid-career professional who suspects the next promotion will not fix anything, or someone returning to work after a long break. It scales to any life stage because it is not a prescription. It is a method.
- Reframe the questions you are asking so the problem becomes solvable
- Map your engagement and energy to find the work that actually sustains you
- Generate multiple coherent life plans instead of optimizing a single guess
- Run "prototype conversations" to test assumptions before making large commitments
- Choose among good options without getting paralyzed by maximizing
- Build a support team and work the process with other people
Designing Your Life does not promise a single right answer. It promises a reliable way to keep finding better ones.
🎯 What you'll learn
- Audit your current life across four dimensions to see clearly where you are before deciding where to go
- Identify the "gravity problems" and dysfunctional beliefs that make your problem feel unsolvable
- Connect daily work activities to energy and engagement levels to pinpoint the work that actually sustains you
- Generate three distinct five-year Odyssey Plans so you are choosing among real alternatives, not optimizing one guess
- Design and run low-cost prototype conversations and experiences to test career assumptions before committing
- Make confident decisions when facing multiple good options without defaulting to paralysis or regret
- Build a personal support community to sustain the design process over time
👤 Who is this book for?
- Recent graduates who feel paralyzed by too many options and no clear direction
- Mid-career professionals who have hit a ceiling or a wall and need a structured way to think about what comes next
- Career changers who know they want out of their current field but cannot yet name where they want to go
- People returning to work after a gap — parenting, illness, or other life events — who need to rebuild a professional identity
- Managers and coaches who guide others through career transitions and want a repeatable framework to offer
- Anyone who has tried goal-setting systems and found them either too rigid or too vague to act on
Table of contents
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01
Start Where You Are
You assess your current life honestly across work, play, love, and health using a simple dashboard exercise, then confront the broken beliefs — including the passion myth — that make the problem seem harder than it is.
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02
Building a Compass
You construct a personal workview and lifeview to articulate what work is for and what life means, then learn to use the coherence between those two statements as a navigational compass.
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03
Wayfinding
You track your daily activities against energy and engagement levels using a work activity log, learning to read the signals your own experience is already giving you about what kind of work fits.
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04
Getting Unstuck
You identify the dysfunctional beliefs and gravity problems keeping you anchored, then practice reframing those problems so that at least one actionable path forward becomes visible.
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05
Design Your Lives
You build three complete and genuinely different five-year Odyssey Plans, each with a confidence dial, a timeline, and a set of open questions, so that you are working with real options rather than a single default path.
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06
Prototyping
You learn to test your plans cheaply through prototype conversations with people already living versions of the lives you are considering, and through small prototype experiences that give you real data without requiring a full commitment.
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07
How Not to Pick a Job (And How to Choose a Life)
You work through a structured decision-making process that helps you choose among good options without maximizing or second-guessing, distinguishing between decisions that need more data and decisions that need more courage.
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08
Failure Immunity
You reframe your relationship to failure by learning to log failures, categorize them, and extract the design insights they contain, building resilience for the iterative work ahead.
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09
Building a Team
You identify and assemble a personal support community — a small group of people who can help you work the design process over time — and learn how to engage that community without burdening it.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need any background in design or design thinking to use this book?
No prior design knowledge is required. The authors explain every concept from scratch and the exercises require nothing more than a notebook and honest reflection.
Is this book aimed at people early in their careers, or does it work for mid-career readers too?
It works at any career stage. The book explicitly addresses recent graduates, mid-career professionals, and people returning to work after a break. The process adapts to your current situation rather than assuming a particular starting point.
How much of this is reading versus active exercises?
The book is exercise-heavy. Most chapters include hands-on activities — journaling prompts, conversation guides, and planning templates — and the authors are explicit that reading without doing produces limited results.
Is this based on research, or is it motivational content?
It is grounded in design-thinking methodology developed at Stanford and tested over years of classroom use. The tone is practical and process-oriented rather than inspirational.
Does the book provide a companion workbook or downloadable materials?
The exercises are contained within the book itself. Any supplemental resources would be available through the publisher or the authors directly — check their official channels for current offerings.
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