Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life
By Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Introduction
Designing Your Life by Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans applies design thinking principles to the most complex design problem of all — your life. Instead of obsessing over “finding your passion” or “choosing the right path,” they argue for a process of prototyping, curiosity, and iteration to explore multiple lives you might live.
It’s a practical and optimistic approach to navigating career, purpose, and personal fulfillment — one experiment at a time.
You Are Not a Problem to Be Solved
Many people approach life as if it’s a linear puzzle to solve: find your purpose, choose a job, and stick to it. But this mindset causes anxiety and paralysis.
Burnett and Evans offer an alternative:
- Life design is messy, nonlinear, and creative
- There are many lives you could lead — not one “correct” one
- Your future is something to prototype, not predict
The book is about doing, not just thinking.
Design Thinking Applied to Life
Design thinking steps:
- Empathize – with yourself: how do you feel about work, energy, and engagement?
- Define – reframe your challenges and assumptions
- Ideate – brainstorm radically different life options
- Prototype – test ideas quickly with small experiments
- Test – get feedback and adapt
These steps, common in innovation and product development, work equally well for careers, relationships, and lifestyle design.
Wayfinding: Energy and Engagement
Start with tracking your energy and engagement. Use a “Good Time Journal” to log:
- Activities that energize or drain you
- Moments of flow or frustration
- People, places, and contexts that amplify your performance
This reveals patterns and clues about what makes life meaningful for you.
Reframing Dysfunctional Beliefs
The authors challenge common limiting beliefs:
- “You should know your passion” → Most people don’t have one passion, and that’s okay.
- “If you choose wrong, you fail” → There are many good lives available.
- “Work/life balance is the goal” → Aim for coherence, not balance.
Reframing is key to life design. See challenges as opportunities for curiosity and action.
Building Odyssey Plans
An Odyssey Plan is a map of three radically different versions of your life:
- What you’re currently planning
- What you’d do if Plan 1 disappeared
- What you’d do if money and social norms were irrelevant
Each plan outlines:
- What you’re doing
- Who you’re with
- What you need to learn
- How you feel about it
The goal isn’t to pick one, but to see your options with new eyes and reduce decision anxiety.
Prototyping Your Future
Prototype ideas through:
- Conversations: conduct “life design interviews” with people doing things you’re curious about
- Experiences: shadow someone, volunteer, take a short course, start a side project
Prototypes should be:
- Low-cost
- Low-risk
- Fast to execute
- Focused on learning
Prototyping tests assumptions and helps you make evidence-based decisions.
Finding Your Coherence
A well-designed life is coherent across three areas:
- Who you are – values, personality, energy
- What you believe – worldview and meaning
- What you’re doing – job, relationships, lifestyle
When these align, you experience purpose and peace. Misalignment causes fatigue, resentment, or aimlessness.
Life design is about regularly realigning your life with your evolving self.
Decision-Making and Choosing Well
The authors propose a practical decision model:
- Gather data (from prototyping and journaling)
- Clarify what matters (your filters and priorities)
- Let go of perfectionism
- Make a decision, let it go, and move forward
They emphasize “failure immunity” — no decision is final. If it doesn’t work out, prototype again.
Radical Collaboration
Designing your life is not a solo activity:
- Share Odyssey Plans with others for insight and feedback
- Build a life design team — a group of peers who help you brainstorm and stay accountable
- Use storytelling to clarify your thoughts and test resonance
Others see blind spots you don’t — collaboration fuels creativity.
Navigating Work and Career
Rather than obsess over “finding your dream job,” aim to:
- Design a job you love, within the job you have
- Focus on tasks and contexts that energize you
- Cultivate curiosity and craftsmanship
Your career is a series of experiments, not a ladder. There’s no single “calling” — only ongoing choices that shape a meaningful journey.
Failure and Gravity Problems
“Gravity problems” are challenges you can’t change (e.g., the fact that art is a competitive field, or that healthcare is expensive). Accept them. Focus on what you can change.
Failure is part of the process. The goal is not to avoid it but to:
- Learn fast
- Reframe setbacks
- Stay engaged in the next iteration
Designers fail early and often — and get better with every try.
Designing Your Life View and Work View
Write two short essays:
- Work View: What is work for? What values does it express?
- Life View: What makes life meaningful? How do you define success?
Compare them to ensure coherence. This process helps you articulate purpose and make better-aligned choices.
Key Takeaways
- You are the designer of your life — not a victim or passive receiver.
- There is no “one right path” — there are many great lives.
- Prototypes reveal what works before big decisions.
- Track energy and engagement to find clarity.
- Use Odyssey Plans to visualize radically different futures.
- Build a team — collaboration fuels creativity and accountability.
- Stay curious, take action, and adjust with compassion.
Designing Your Life is a hopeful, actionable guide to navigating uncertainty and complexity. Burnett and Evans offer a toolkit for living intentionally — not by following a rigid plan, but by staying in motion, embracing discovery, and designing your way forward.
