#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.
Take an inventory of four life areas: your health, work, joy, and relationships. Think of these four areas as making up a “dashboard” that tells you how your various “systems” are currently functioning.
To wayfind your life, pay attention to your sense of involvement, energy, and joy. What activities and situations make you feel interested, focused, and excited? Conversely, what makes you feel bored and dull? For energy, notice how vital and alive you feel. Which activities energize you? Which ones drain you? For joy, pay attention to the activities that make you feel engaged and joyful.
1. Develop three separate five-year Odyssey Plans, each one detailing a different life that you could live. For each plan, come up with a short title to capture its essence and a dashboard gauge that shows your available resources (time, money, skill, and so on), your “like level” (how much you like the plan), your confidence level in the plan, and how coherent the plan is with your life compass. 2. Come up with ways to “test”/ prototype each of those different lives. Prototyping your life design enables you to ask the right questions, gain experience through experimenting with alternatives, and test your assumptions.