Life Design

Any full life includes joy and collapse, love and loss, laughter and sorrow.  When your proverbial house falls down, you can rebuild to spec or choose a new plan.  The big question is, in the wake of destruction, are you going to recreate something that was there before, or go for something new?  Are you going to raise a Frauenkirche, or build yourself the Barbican?

Similar challenge, different finish

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans draw an explicit parallel between life design and actual design in their work.  Both are incredibly enthusiastic late-middle-aged professors in the design thinking program at Stanford.  With Designing Your Life and Designing Your Work Life they offer a pop version of courses for all the rest of us.

Burnett and Evans believe that designing a good life is more than an aesthetic or creative exercise: it is moral, social and psychological work.  Life design is driven by who you are and what are your values.

Design work isn’t a solo exercise.  Burnett and Evans encourage readers to go and build a design team that can thrive on “radical collaboration.” Design thinking provides a reason and a mission to get people working together.  It is human-centered and thrives on variety to spur collaboration and creativity.  Design labs need people to think differently because it’s those unique sparks that compel work forward.

Designers love to build, prototype and try ideas.  This requires constant curiosity and a bias to action.  Designers refuse to get stuck and hold a unique kind of focus on only the things they believe can be solved.  “If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem” and therefore does not require any energy or attention.

Action for the Win

Burnett and Evans propose a Life View | Work View exercise to consider “what is your quest” and this answer relies on self-centred questions like Who are you?  What are your values?  Where are you going?  What is good, and what is evil?  Is there a higher power, and how does that impact your life? 

Burnett and Evans also want readers to explore values and core beliefs about work.  Why do we work?  What is it for?  What does work mean to you? 

By taking time to answer these big questions for ourselves we are on the way to creating a “life plan” and “work plan,” two statements of value that are unique to you as a person.  Then it’s time to assess coherence between the two: where do both align and connect? Where do they clash?  Is one driving the other, and how? 

Burnett and Evans encourage a work and life plan that are both in harmony.  We need to spend time thinking on how or if that is possible at all, and if there is any gap between the two, what has to change for that to close.

More is More

Most importantly, Burnett and Evans want people to come up with lots and lots and lots of ideas, and then come up with some more.  When thinking like a designer, you know how to “flare,” generating an almost infinite variety of options for possible futures.  In this kind of state, being all over the place shows you have range and it’s a creative superpower.

Designing Your Life closes with a few reminders about how to brainstorm with classic rules that haven’t changed since they were first published by Alex Osborn in Applied Imagination over 70 years ago: generate a LOT of ideas, go for volume, and do not judge until your sessions are done.  

Brainstorming also works best with a team of people who you trust and share the same values, people who Burnett and Evans call your “co-creators in life design.”  When it’s time to choose the best idea and move forward, you will have a collective sense of discernment, feeling and intuition to use as a guide.

Following on the success of their first book, Burnett and Evans wrote Designing Your Work Life five years later.  It’s a decent sequel that offers a slightly different flavour of the same principles.  Facing some criticism that their writing was too lofty and idealistic, this book claims to be more practical and accessible for people who may not be Stanford grads.

Designing Your Work Life is heavier on the importance of taking a pause.  Career development is a notorious home for restless ambition that may be impossible to satisfy.  Changes in employment are ideal opportunities to step off the hedonic treadmill and remind yourself that whatever is happening right now, if you are physically and materially safe for a while, you are good enough.  It’s important to reach a headspace that is secure and comfortable in this way, so you can have the room to think bigger. 

This is a luxury that Burnett and Evans assume their readers have: to find at least a few days before desperately needing new employment so you can take some time for yourself.  They challenge our assumptions that we must live in the same way as before and always.  Instead of trying to stay on a constant track of “making more” through life, wanting less can become a transgressive way of having more, and finding more, and being more: more expansive, more joyful, more fun, more appreciative and more grateful.

But it’s not just me.  Harvard’s extensive Grant study found that at the end of day, love and joy are what produce genuine happiness in life; not money, not titles, not positions and power.  LOVE.  Beyond hugs and kisses and cuddles, a warm regard and connection and unconditional appreciation for each other.  Those are simple human feelings, and all the internal magic you cannot buy or collect or acquire. 

This excerpt is from a longer newsletter. Sign up for updates and subscribe at clarecameron.ca