Designing Your Life

Whether we're 20, 40, 60 or older, many of us are still looking for an answer to that perennial question, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' In Designing Your Life, Silicon Valley design innovators Bill Burnett and Dave Evans use their expertise to help you work out what you want - and how to get it. Their phenomenally successful Life Design course has been tried and tested by thousands of people, from students to mid-career professionals to retirees contemplating a whole new future. Now in book form for the first time, their simple method will teach you how to use basic design tools to create a life that will work for you. Using real-life stories and proven techniques like reframing, prototyping and mind-mapping, you will learn how to build your way forwards, step-by-positive-step, to a life that's better by a design of your own making. Because a well-designed life means a life well-lived.

What Hacker News says

insightcheckAug 2022

> "For me, I don't derive as much meaning from a career as I thought I would, probably because I put too much expectation that it would provide that."

"Designing Your Life" is a book based on a Stanford course on career planning that explored this idea very well. A summary is at [0], and a relevant idea is that focusing on one area of your life is likely not sufficient for a good life. For example, over the course of a week, it can be useful to make sure you are hitting goals in "work, play, love, and health." It can sound like common sense, but it's useful to consciously do this, especially for people inclined to optimize for just work, at the expense of physical health and relationships.

An anecdote that stuck out to me was a positive example about a person who rose to a high level at a large company, then kept refusing promotions because he finally struck a good balance between career and having time for family. I'm sure this may not always be the best idea, but I liked the idea behind inclusion of the anecdote, which is that continuously climbing the career ladder may not actually be helpful for one's personal goals.

[0] https://dansilvestre.com/designing-your-life-summary/

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UsualWallMay 2022

I’ve added some movies I love too :)

Books ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho ‘Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress’ by Steven Pinker ‘Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You’ by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans ‘Exhalation’ and ‘Stories of Your Life and Others’ by Ted Chiang

Movies ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ ‘King Richard’ ‘Shawshank Redemption’ Anything Studio Ghibli

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samh748Apr 2022

A great great book that helped me with this: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (https://designingyour.life/the-book/).

I first got exposed to it during a career navigation workshop that showed us this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SemHh0n19LA&ab_channel=TEDxT...

They also published a follow-up called Designing Your Work Life but I haven't read that one.

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falafeliteDec 2021

If book suggestions are helpful, I found “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to provide a helpful framework on how to think/act/prototype your way to what works for ya. Not sure if it’s everyone’s cup of tea but I found it useful.

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peterst28May 2021

There's plenty you can do, but you have to figure out what appeals to you, the tradeoffs, path, etc. I found that the book "Designing your life" really helped me. It encourages talking to people who are already in different fields / roles that interest you. When I did this, sometimes I found myself saying, "yes that sounds amazing." Other times I found myself saying, "ugh that's not what I thought it was at all." Eventually I decided that the best move for me was to sales engineering. It's engineering-adjacent so I can make use of my years of experience, but it's people-oriented and has tons of variety. You'll probably have a different final answer, but I highly recommend the techniques in the book. You may even find yourself a job you're excited about through the process of talking to people about what they do. https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Your-Life-Well-Lived-Joyful...

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yingw787Feb 2020

I read a great book, "Designing Your Life" by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, that said "A problem you can't change isn't a problem, it's a truth and you have to accept it". I think that mental reframing helps process effectively immutable events.

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