Designing Your Life

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

Notes on Designing Your Life: treating a career as a design problem, the Odyssey Plans, prototyping a direction before committing to it, and the beliefs that have to be reframed first.

Reading notes in Google Docs.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans teach design at Stanford, and the book comes out of the course they built there. Their argument is that a career is a design problem rather than a puzzle with one correct solution, so the methods that work on a product work here: state the problem accurately, generate several options, build small cheap versions, and choose from what you learn.

Concepts

• Gravity problems. A circumstance that cannot be acted on is a condition to design around. Naming it stops the effort spent trying to solve it.
• Dysfunctional beliefs come before bad plans. “There is one right job for me” produces a search that cannot end. The reframe comes first.
• Three Odyssey Plans, not one. Write out three different five-year versions of the life, each plausible. Holding three at once stops any one from being defended.
• Prototype before committing. A conversation with somebody doing the work, or a short stretch of doing it, costs days instead of years.
• Workview and lifeview. Write down what work is for and what life is for, then check whether the two agree.