“We know we don’t want someone to stand at our funeral and say, “Dave had good written and verbal communication skills.” Or “Bill really demonstrated the ability to juggle competing priorities and move quickly.””

Right now is a great time for gaining some perspective and reframing what we want our lives to feel like. And this book, DESIGNING YOUR LIFE by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans is a great resource for this. I’ve had this book for more than 3 years and never opened it until a few weeks ago. I made it a habit of reading a chapter a day on my balcony after lunch, enjoying the sun and usually with my kids around; the youngest going after my highlighters, bookmark and coffee mug.

You know, I love design thinking. It’s a mindset, a set of tools and techniques to foster innovation and creativity and to solve problems. Until now, I thought it was great for product and services, but didn’t really grasp how to apply it to life. This book has the answer. It applies design thinking to reinventing and redirecting one’s life, exploring new opportunities, consider new path, getting unstuck and having fun along the way.

It’s a very well-designed book that brings you on a journey back to your aspirations, your values, reframing important questions, conducting introspection, getting curious, identifying what lights you up. It will set you on creative mode to generate lots of life path options you hadn’t thought about, that resonate with your deeper self and that will fuel your reflection.

It will change your mind on many things such as the illusion that there is only one best answer to your life. It’s not about one life goal of yours you have to discover and then work as hard as possible to get to. The book also sets you on ideation mode, teaches you to defer judgment, to prototype to experiment and learn fast, to embrace failure. And it inspires to have a sound distancing with expectations, in order to choose wisely and let what’s right come out of the process.

To me, one of the fundamental ideas in the book is that we need a team. It’s about people. As they put it: “you don’t have to come up with a brilliant life design by yourself.” “Great design requires radical collaboration.” And “Design is a collaborative process, and many of the best ideas are going to come from other people. You just need to ask. And know the right questions to ask.”

An what’s interesting from a design thinking point of view is that the empathy is directed towards the designer, yourself. That’s quite a shift to what I was used to.  

Although it focuses on the professional life, especially towards the last third of the book, it also goes way beyond to integrate your job into what’s life for you.

Genuine and simple care and kindness emanates from this book that is also fun and relaxed.

So, what’s the outcome for me? Well, some really interesting things came up with the ideation exercise, such as a professional occupation protecting mafias and helping them agree with one another in a remote place. Weird, yes, but there are some clues in this crazy idea. And now that I have gathered quite a lot of ideas and concepts to draw upon, I will go ahead building my team of mentors.

Here are a few quotes from the book:

“A great design comes together in a way that can’t be solved with equations and spreadsheets and data analysis.”

“Designers love questions, but what they really love is reframing questions.”

“Your life is not a thing, it’s an experience; the fun comes from designing and enjoying the experience.”

“If you work through lots of ideas, your chances of hitting on some that can be really energizing for you go up, which increases your chance of creating something that can work and that you’ll love.”

“The crazy ideas may not be the ones we pick, but often after having the crazy ideas, we have moved to a new creative space, and we can see new innovative possibilities that can work.”

“Unfortunately, when you are designing your life, you don’t have a lot of data available, especially reliable data about your future. You have to accept that this is the kind of messy problem in which traditional cause-effect thinking won’t work. Luckily, designers have come up with a way of sneaking up on the future through prototyping.”

This lockdown might very well be an opportunity to explore what your life could look like, so if you feel it, just get the book or follow their online course.

Take care

Timothée

Resources :

Here is the website of the book: http://designingyour.life/ – By the way, they have a new book called Designing your work life.

They have a course derived from the book on CreativeLive (on sale right now) -> https://www.creativelive.com/class/designing-your-life-how-to-build-a-well-lived-joyful-life-bill-burnett-dave-evans

Et le livre existe aussi en FRANÇAIS : https://www.amazon.fr/Design-vie-Faire-explorer-possibles/dp/280731547X/ref=tmm_other_meta_binding_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1586953910&sr=8-6