Earlier this year in March, I left a company that I worked at for close to a decade. Since then I have been doing a lot of freelance work and trying to figure out what I should do with the next chapter of my life.
In the process, I've read many books on the topic of career assessment and career change. One book that helped me to clarify how I should proceed with my search is the book called Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, written by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
Changing careers or thinking about changing anything big in life can be daunting and scary. This book has helped me to have courage and confidence in the midst of uncertain change.
Below are the top quotes that I found useful from the book.
5 Simple things to do: Be curious (curiosity), try stuff (bias to action), reframe problems (reframing), know it’s a process (awareness), and ask for help (radical collaboration).
Dysfunctional Belief: If you are successful, you will be happy.
Reframe: True happiness comes from designing a life that works for you.A great design comes together in a way that can’t be solved with equations and spreadsheets and data analysis. It has a look and feel all of its own — a beautiful aesthetic that speaks to you.
Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward.
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.
Our problems become our story, and we can all get stuck in our stories. Deciding which problems to work on may be one of the most important decisions you make, because people can lose years (or a lifetime) working on the wrong problem.
If they are lucky, they will fail miserably quickly and get forced by circumstance into working on better problems. If they are unlucky and smart, they’ll succeed — we call it the success disaster — and wake up ten years later wondering how the hell they got to wherever they are, and why they are so unhappy.
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.
The only response to a gravity problem is acceptance. And this is where all good designers begin. This is the “You Are Here” or “Accept” phase of design thinking. Acceptance. That’s why you start where you are. Not where you wish you were. Not where you hope you are. Not where you think you should be. But right where you are.
Here’s another key element when you’re way finding in life: follow the joy; follow what engages and excites you, what brings you alive.
Designers know that you never go with your first idea. Designers know that when you choose from lots of options you choose better. Many people are like Grant: they get stuck trying to make their first idea work.
Look, it’s simple. You can’t know what you want until you know what you might want, so you are going to have to generate a lot of ideas and possibilities. Accept the problem. Get stuck. Get over it, and ideate, ideate, ideate!
Quantity has a quality all its own. In life design, more is better, because more ideas equal access to better ideas, and better ideas lead to a better design.
Designers learn to have lots of wild ideas because they know that the number one enemy of creativity is judgment.
One of the principles of design thinking is that you want to “fail fast and fail forward,” into your next step.
“Building is thinking” is a phrase you will often hear around the Design Program at Stanford. When that idea is coupled with the bias-to-action mind-set, you get a lot of building and thinking.
Our philosophy is that it is always possible to prototype something you are interested in. The best way to get started is to keep your first few prototypes very low-resolution and very simple.
And remember that a prototype is not a thought experiment; it must involve a physical experience in the world. The data to make good decisions are found in the real world, and prototyping is the best way to engage that world and get the data you need to move forward.
That’s how this works. It is a wonderfully happy accident that the very best technique you can use to learn what kind of work you might want to pursue (prototyping with Life Design Interviews) is exactly the best, if not only, way to get into the hidden job market in your field of interest, once you know what you want.
Getting referrals to people whose stories would be useful to hear is just the professional equivalent of asking directions. So go ahead — ask for directions. It’s. No. Big. Deal.
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.
Emotional, intuitive, and spiritual forms of knowing are usually subtle, quiet, and even shy. Rarely do people get access to their deepest wisdom by rushing around a few hours before a deadline and talking a lot or surfing the Web. It’s a slower, quieter thing.
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. And, really, is there any other choice?
If you find yourself standing alone in front of the mirror trying to solve or figure out your life, waiting to make a move until you are clear about the correct answers, you’re going to be waiting a long time.
As we said earlier, we don’t fight reality, and living in reality means looking at and accepting where you are right now. Life design is really about being able to answer the question “How’s it going?”