Book: Designing Your Life

in the United States, only 27 percent of college grads end up in a career related to their majors.

In America, two-thirds of workers are unhappy with their jobs. And 15 percent actually hate their work.

In the United States alone, more than thirty-one million people between ages forty-four and seventy want what is often called an “encore” career—work that combines personal meaning, continued income, and social impact. Some of those thirty-one million have found their encore careers, and many others have no idea where to begin, and fear it’s too late in life to make a big change.

Designers love questions, but what they really love is reframing questions. Reframing is one of the most important mind-sets of a designer.

The five mind-sets you are going to learn in order to design your life are curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration.

Life design is a journey; let go of the end goal and focus on the process and see what happens next.

Many people operate under the dysfunctional belief that they just need to find out what they are passionate about. Once they know their passion, everything else will somehow magically fall into place. We hate this idea for one very good reason: most people don’t know their passion.

We believe that people actually need to take time to develop a passion. And the research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery—not before. To put it more succinctly: passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause.

We are serious about this: you don’t need to know your passion in order to design a life you love.

In design thinking, we put as much emphasis on problem finding as we do on problem solving. After all, what’s the point of working on the wrong problem?

These are all gravity problems—meaning they are not real problems. Why? Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Let’s repeat that. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.

The only response to a gravity problem is acceptance.

Dysfunctional Belief: Work is not supposed to be enjoyable; that’s why they call it work. Reframe: Enjoyment is a guide to finding the right work for you.

Most people are taught that work is always hard and that we have to suffer through it. Well, there are parts of any job or any career that are hard and annoying—but if most of what you do at work is not bringing you alive, then it’s killing you. It’s your career, after all, and you are going to be spending a lot of time doing it—we calculate it at 90,000 to 125,000 hours during the course of your lifetime. If it’s not fun, a lot of your life is going to suck.

Work is fun when you are actually leaning into your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing.

An anchor problem is a real problem, just a hard one. It’s actionable—but we’ve been stuck on it so long or so often that it seems insurmountable (which is why such a problem has to be reframed, then opened up with new ideas, then knocked down to size by prototyping). Gravity problems aren’t actually problems. They’re circumstances that you can do nothing to change. There is no solution to a gravity problem—only acceptance and redirection.

Dysfunctional Belief: I need to figure out my best possible life, make a plan, and then execute it. Reframe: There are multiple great lives (and plans) within me, and I get to choose which one to build my way forward to next.

Brainstorming, a technique for generating lots of creative and out-of-the-box ideas, was first described by Alex Osborn in a book published in 1953 called Applied Imagination. He described a method of generating ideas that relied on two rules: generating a large quantity of ideas without concern for quality, and deferring judgment so that participants would not censor ideas.

Like great improvisational jazz musicians, good brainstormers learn to focus on a topic, but they can also let go, be in-the-moment, and improvise, coming up with ideas that are truly original.

How Not to Get a Job 

(Entire chapter)

52 percent of employers have admitted that they respond to fewer than half of the candidates that apply.

Most great jobs—those that fall into the dream job category—are never publicly listed. The most interesting start-up jobs—at the companies that will someday be the next Google or Apple—are not listed on the Internet before they are filled. Companies with fewer than fifty employees and no human-resource departments are often exciting places to work, but they don’t regularly post jobs. Large companies typically post their most interesting jobs internally only, invisible to most job seekers. Many other jobs are not listed until an attempt has been made to fill them through word of mouth or social networks. You don’t find the great jobs on the Internet. No matter what your cousin’s friend’s brother told you about how he found his job.

The bottom line is that there is no perfect job that you perfectly fit, but you can make lots of jobs perfect enough.

Designing Your Dream Job

(Entire chapter)

More than half the time, when the approach we’re recommending results in an offer, they initiate it. You don’t have to. If they don’t start it for you, you can ask one question that will convert the conversation from getting their story to pursuing a job. “The more I learn about XYZ Environmental and the more people I meet here, the more fascinating it becomes. I wonder, Allen, what steps would be involved in exploring how someone like me might become a part of this organization?” That’s it.

It goes back to curiosity—one of the most important life design mind-sets. Whether you are seeking your first job, changing careers, or choosing an encore career, you need to be genuinely curious. That’s what prototyping conversations and prototyping experiences are all about: being open and curious about the possibilities.

Choosing Happiness

(Entire chapter)

In life design, being happy means you choose happiness.

being happy and getting what you want are not about future risks and unknowns or whether you picked the right alternatives; it’s about how you choose and how you live your choices once they’re made.

Dysfunctional Belief: To be happy, I have to make the right choice. Reframe: There is no right choice—only good choosing.

It turns out that our mind-set about how to make a good decision is as important as which decision we make.

You can work on making the best choice you can, given what’s knowable at the moment,

We are not saying you pretend you don’t know about the roads not taken, or that you will never again discover something halfway down the path and decide to back up and make a correction. What we are saying is that there is a smarter way to proceed, which will significantly enhance your ability to be successful in implementing your choices, and lead to happiness and satisfaction on the journey.

Dysfunctional Belief: Happiness is having it all. Reframe: Happiness is letting go of what you don’t need.

Designers don’t agonize. They don’t dream about what could have been. They don’t spin their wheels. And they don’t waste their futures by hoping for a better past. Life designers see the adventure in whatever life they are currently building and living into. This is how you choose happiness.

The philosopher James Carse wrote an interesting book called Finite and Infinite Games. 2 In it he asserts that just about everything we do in life is either a finite game, one in which we play by the rules in order to win—or an infinite game, one in which we play with the rules for the joy of getting to keep playing.

Being or doing? The real inner me, or the busy, successful outer me? Which is it?

All of life’s chapters—both the wonderfully victorious and the painfully difficult and disappointing—keep this growth cycle going if we have the right mind-set. In this way of seeing and experiencing things, you’re always succeeding at the infinite game of discovering and engaging your own life in the world.

Failure is just the raw material of success.

In a live meeting, he starts with a check-in to see how the person is and what news has developed since their last contact, and he always confirms the agenda before getting down to business. He often discovers important news during that check-in, but he stopped doing it some time ago on the phone, in the interest of saving time. Skipping it was clearly a risk; he just hadn’t gotten caught until now. The insight was clear—do a quick news-and-agenda check, even in phone calls. It only takes a few seconds and can make a huge difference.

The value of mentors’ life experience when they are giving counsel lies not in borrowing what facts or answers they know but in accessing the breadth of their experience and their objectivity, which helps them to help you to see your own reality in a new way. Good mentors spend most of their time listening, then offering possible reframings of your situation that allow you to have new ideas and come up with the answers that will work for you.

Tim re-evaluated all those long nights and weekends and came to the conclusion that work was not going to be the main focus of his life. He valued play and love much more, and realized that he needed to make some changes. He switched jobs to a more mature company, rose to a comfortable senior position, and then just stayed there. He’s been in that role for almost twenty years, having become very well respected as a technical guru in his firm, and has turned down promotions and the money that comes with one again and again. “You have to make enough money to pay the bills and have the things you need,” says Tim. In his case, this means supporting his family, making sure his kids have access to a great education, and having a nice house in Berkeley. “After that, what’s the point? I’d rather have more fun and more friends. Money, promotions, and more responsibility do not motivate me. The point of having a good life is to be happy, not to work.”

“I live in the best of all possible worlds. Everything I do today, I choose to do.” And then he recounts in his mind everything in front of him that day, reminds himself that all those things are things he put there, and then re-chooses them before entering the day.