Designing Your Life
Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
Designing Your Life applies the methods of product design to a career. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who teach the course of the same name at Stanford, argue that there is no single right life waiting to be found, only several good ones you could build, and that you find out which by prototyping: starting honestly from where you are, sketching three different five-year plans, and testing them with conversations and small experiences before you commit.
Most career advice asks you to think harder about who you are until the answer appears. Burnett and Evans start from the opposite habit, the designer's: you learn what works by building small versions of it and watching what happens, and the same is true of a working life.
The book in essence
Burnett, executive director of Stanford's Design Program, and Evans, a lecturer there who earlier co-founded Electronic Arts, built the book from a course they developed for students facing life after university. Its premise is that a career is a design problem with many good answers rather than a puzzle with one, and its tools follow from that. You begin by accepting where you are, with a dashboard of four gauges, health, work, play and love, and by separating real problems from gravity problems, circumstances you cannot act on and can only accept or work around. You collect evidence about yourself with a Good Time Journal that records which activities leave you engaged and energised. You generate options with Odyssey Plans, three deliberately different sketches of the next five years. And you test the promising ones with prototype conversations, short talks with people already living a version of that life, and with prototype experiences such as a day of shadowing or a small project. Along the way the authors name the dysfunctional beliefs that keep people stuck, such as 'I should know by now' or 'it's too late', and reframe each into a question with a next step.
Published in 2016 and translated into many languages, the book was followed by Designing Your Work Life (2020), which turns the same tools on the job a reader already has. Its strength is that every chapter ends in an exercise. Its limit is the same: it rewards readers who work through the exercises over several weeks, and it offers little to anyone hoping to be told what to choose.
Who it's for
- People who have been thinking about a career change for months and have tested nothing
- Professionals torn between staying, changing roles and changing fields
- Graduates and early-career readers who feel they should already know what they want
Who it's not for
- — Readers who want a single answer or a personality test; the book offers a process, not a verdict
- — Anyone without a few weeks to give its exercises; read quickly, much of it sounds like common sense
Key lessons
01
Start where you are
A designer locates a problem before trying to solve it. The health, work, play and love dashboard gives an honest picture of the present, and the idea of gravity problems keeps you from spending years fighting circumstances you cannot change. Only what you can act on is a problem worth designing for.
A bank operations officer in Samsun is sure her career is the problem. On the dashboard, work is half full, but play is empty and health a quarter. She starts by protecting two evenings a week for exercise, and only then looks at her job again, with more energy to think about it.
02
Collect data, not guesses
Memory favours dramatic days and self-image flatters, so the Good Time Journal records engagement and energy for each activity over two or three weeks. Patterns beat impressions, and the AEIOU questions (activities, environments, interactions, objects, users) help locate exactly what made a good moment good.
A cost accountant in Bursa assumes she dislikes finance. Two weeks of entries show that the low points are month-end reconciliations, while the high points are the afternoons she explains margins to the sales team. She asks to join the monthly pricing review instead of planning an exit.
03
Build your way forward
Three Odyssey Plans, your current path, the path if it vanished, and the path if money and image did not matter, turn one frozen choice into options. Prototype conversations then test them for the price of a coffee: you ask someone living the option for their story, not for a job.
A civil servant in Ankara curious about urban data analysis writes three five-year sketches, then asks an analyst at the city's transport department what an ordinary week looks like. Hearing that half the job is cleaning messy data, he takes a short data course before deciding anything.
Try this today
Write six-word titles for three different five-year lives: your current path, the one if it vanished, and the one if money and image did not matter. Then name one person living a version of one of them.
Quick check
What do Burnett and Evans mean by a gravity problem?
What is a prototype conversation for?
Selected quotes
“Designers don't think their way forward. Designers build their way forward.”
“If it's not actionable, it's not a problem.”