TEDx Talks
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2017–2022
25:21 · 11M views · May 19, 2017
TEDxStanford talk by Bill Burnett, executive director of Stanford's design program, on applying design thinking to your own life and career. He offers five practical tips such as getting curious, talking to people and trying things.
HN recommends it as a short intro to the Designing Your Life approach when people ask about career direction and finding meaningful work.
4 comments from Hacker News
> But who is “your” company and how do we pick the “niche”? Turns out, this is a common problem. Friendly Challenge: imagine 3 very different future niches for your team. Leveraging your interests, experience/expertise. Mix in the Clients you'll serve, Products you build, and Problems you solve. Each version would have a 5 year plan. Start a discussion -- which one energizes your team? More on this subject by the authors of Design Your Life > this video Highly recommend their book! PM me if you want to discuss.
A great great book that helped me with this: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans ( [LINK] ). I first got exposed to it during a career navigation workshop that showed us this video: this video They also published a follow-up called Designing Your Work Life but I haven't read that one.
Turns out, the most interesting design problem is designing your life. Bill Burnett has a brilliant book on the subject. > this video
This might sound cheesy, but first of all: Know yourself. - What are your values? - What do you stand for? - What do you want in work and life? A design thinking approach, how to find a meaning in your work (and life) is through a simple 3 step process, provided by Burnett and Evans ( [LINK] or this video ): 1. Get curious 2. Talk to people 3. Try stuff Simple as that... Nevertheless, I think that work defines us and it becomes our identity (e.g. Joseph the Carpenter, Bob the Builder), but at the same time there is so much more in you than just work. From what you are writing, I could identify what you don’t stand for and don’t want :-) this realization is a good starting point. However, now is the time to get curious, observe, reflect and start choosing your battles wisely, because you might wake up one day and realize that all you have been doing is wasting your time and energy on fights you didn’t actually care about that much… And this is precisely why it helps to know yourself, know your values, what you stand for, your talents and strengths, and maybe even your vision or dreams of how would you like to live in the future, and how would you like the world to look like in the future… Knowing this, I think, would allow you to focus your energy on something that is meaningful for you. Because meaning exists only in your head. So whatever we do, whatever happens in the world or the universe is meaningless per se. The meaning is interpretative. You create and give meaning to wha