Top Quotes: “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life” — Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

“Three-quarters of all college grads don’t end up working in a career related to their majors.”

“A well-designed life is a life that is generative — it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise.”

“The research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop a mastery of it.”

“A well-designed life is a life that makes sense, It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together.”

“Don’t make a doable problem into an anchor problem by wedding yourself irretrievably to a solution that just isn’t working. Reframe the solution to some other possibilities, prototype those ideas (take some test hikes), and get yourself unstuck.”

“Clara didn’t start out with a plan to work for the homeless. Knowing that she hadn’t found a specific mission to direct her steps, she carefully and thoughtfully crafted a series of small but illustrative experiences and involvements to design her way forward. Her path to “homeless champion” (which, by the way, has become her passion) was not a straight line, by any means. She designed the life she is living, step by step, by thinking like a designer and building her way forward by doing small experiments — prototypes. She trusted that if she kept giving herself carefully selected hands-on encounters, she’d find her way.

She took a class on mediation. She took the job in the juvenile justice system. She joined the women’s foundation. She learned about the world of nonprofits. She got involved in the board for the homeless center. By doing the work, meeting the people, and choosing to explore her options through hands-on experience, and not just spending her time reading, thinking, or reflecting in her journal about what she should or could do next, Clara found her encore career. It was only through life design that she was able to discover a future that had been not only unknowable, but also unimaginable. Clara did it, and you can, too.”

“Prototypes should be designed to ask a question and get some data about something that you’re interested in. Good prototypes isolate one aspect of a problem and design an experience that allows you to “try out” some version of a potentially interesting future. Prototypes help you visualize alternatives in a very experiential way. That allows you to imagine your future as if you are already living it. Creating new experiences through prototyping will give you an opportunity to understand what a new career path might feel like, even if only for an hour or a day. And prototyping helps you involve others early and helps build a community of folks who are interested in your journey and your life design. Prototypes are a great way to start a conversation, and more often than not, one thing typically leads to another. Prototypes frequently turn into unexpected opportunities — they help serendipity happen. Finally, prototypes allow you to try and fail rapidly without overinvesting in a path before you have any data.”

“How could she have prototyped her idea? She could have tried catering, first-an easy business to start up and shut down (no rent, few employees, super-portable, no regular hours). She could have gotten a job bussing tables at an Italian deli to have a good look at the dirty end of the job, not just the sexy menu planning. She could have interviewed three happy and three grumpy deli-café owners to learn which group she was more like. We met Elise after it was all over. We heard her story when she was taking a Life Design Workshop with us. After the workshop she lamented, “Gosh, if only I’d taken the slow path of prototyping first, I’d have saved myself so much time!” So, yes, even if you’re in a rush, we recommend you prototype your life ideas. You’ll get a better design and save a lot of time and difficulty.”

“Once you’ve committed yourself to life design prototyping, how do you do it? The simplest and easiest form of prototyping is a conversation. We’re going to describe a specific form of prototype conversation that we call a Life Design Interview.

A Life Design Interview is incredibly simple. It just means getting someone’s story. Not just anyone and not just any story, of course. You want to talk to someone who is either doing and living what you’re contemplating, or has real experience and expertise in an area about which you have questions. And the story you’re after is the personal story of how that person got to be doing that thing he or she does, or got the expertise he has and what it’s really like to do what she does.

You want to hear what the person who does what you might someday want to do loves and hates about his job, You want to know what her days look like, and then you want to see if you can imagine yourself doing that job — and loving it — for months and years on end. In addition to asking people about their work and life, you will also be able to find out how they got there — their career path. Most people fail not for lack of talent but for lack of imagination. You can get a lot of this information by sitting down with someone and getting his or her story.”

“Ideas should be counted — you want to be able to say, “We had 141 ideas.” Group similar ideas together by subject or category, name those categories, and frame the results with reference to the original focal question. Every unique category is given a descriptive and often funny name that captures the essence of that goup of ideas. Then vote. Voting is important, and should be done silently, so that people aren’t influencing one another. We like to use colored dots to cast votes, and we also like to use categories such as:

• Most exciting
• The one we wish we could do if money were no object
• The dark horse — probably won’t work, but if it did.
• Most likely to lead to a great life
• If we could ignore the laws of physics

Once the voting is complete, the selections are discussed, and potentially regrouped and framed again; then decisions are made on what to prototype first.

At the end of our four-step process, the goal is to say something like “We had 141 ideas, we grouped those into six categories, and, based on our focal question, we selected eight killer ideas to prototype; then we prioritized the list, and our first prototype is…” Often it is possible to back off from one of the wild ideas just a little and turn it into a great idea.”

“Tip 1: Rewrite your résumé using the same words used in the job posting. Say “good written and verbal communication skills,” not “I’m a good writer and I communicate well”, say “passion for customers,” not “customer-centric attitude.” You will improve your chance of being discovered in a keyword search. And be generous; now is not the time for modesty. After all, who isn’t “highly motivated” and “creative”?

Tip 2: If you have a specific skill that is posted as required, put it in your résumé exactly the way it is written in the Internet posting. If you don’t have that skill, find a way to describe your skill set that uses the same words that will be found in a keyword search.

Tip 3: Focus your résumé on the job as described. Even if the job description isn’t very accurate, this will increase the chance that your résumé will show up in a search. Then focus on the skills that you can offer the company, using their words as often as possible. Focus on what you can do for them, not on why this job works for you. Do not appear to be a generalist or a multidisciplinary person on your résumé or in the first interview. Just focus on answering their needs. Once you have reassured them that you have the skills required, you can move on to impress them with your depth.”

“Most minds can choose effectively between only three to five options.”

“It turns out that the part of the brain that is working to help us make our best choices is in the basal ganglia. It’s part of the ancient base brain, and as such does not have connections to our verbal centers, so it does not communicate in words. It communicates in feelings and via connections to the intestines — those good old gut feelings. The memories that inform this choice-guiding function in our brains Goleman refers to as the “wisdom of the emotions”, by this he means the collected experiences of what has and hasn’t worked for us in life, and what we draw upon in evaluating a decision. Our own wisdom is then made available to us emotionally (as feelings) and intestinally (as a bodily, gut response). Therefore, in order to make a good decision, we need access to our feelings and gut reactions to the alternatives.

Remember that default response to being stuck on a decision: I must need more information! We can now see that that is exactly what we do not need. It is our too-noisy brains, talking at us constantly as they try to cogitate our way to a good decision, that are getting in the way of connecting to our gut feelings on the decision. It is very important to have good information available — to do lots of homework and take lots of notes and make spreadsheets and comparisons and talk to experts, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But once that work is done — led by the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which runs the executive functions of coding, listing, and categorizing — we need access to that wisdom center where our well-informed emotional knowing can help us discern the better choices for us.”

“In his 1960s sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein invented the word “grok” to describe a way of knowing that Martians employ. It means to understand something deeply and completely, so much so that you feel you’ve become one with it. Because of its rarity, Martians don’t just understand what water is or drink water — they grok it. Now grok has entered more common cultural use: “I grok that” is sort of like “I get that,” only more so.”

“When you finally get down to making a choice from your narrowed-down list of alternatives, and you’ve cognitively evaluated the issues, and emotionally and meditatively contemplated the alternatives, it may be time to grok it. To grok a choice, you don’t think about it — you become it. Let’s say you’ve got three alternatives. Pick any one of them and stop thinking about it. Choose to think for the next one to three days that you are the person who has made the decision to pick Alternative A. Choice A is your reality right now. When you brush your teeth in the morning, you do so having chosen A. When you sit at a red light, you’re waiting to proceed toward your destination related to living in Alternative A You may or may not actually say things to other people about this — such as “Oh yeah, I’m moving to Beijing in May!” — because such statements will cause confusion later. But you get the idea: you’ll just live in your head as the person in an Alternative A reality. You are not thinking about Alternative A from your current reality as a struggling choice maker. You are living calmly as one who has chosen A. After one to three days of this how long is up to you and a matter of taste), then take at least a day or two off to be your regular self and reset. Then do the same thing with Alternative B, then another reset break, then Alternative C. Then one more reset break and, finally, a thoughtful reflection on what those experiences were like and which one of those people you might most like to be. This technique isn’t guaranteed (no such techniques are), but you can see how the intention here is to allow your alternate forms of knowing — emotional, spiritual, social, intuitive — to have some room to express themselves to you, and thereby complement the evaluative, cognitive knowing, which, if you’re like most of us, is the dominant form of thinking and choosing you rely on.”

“When you identify someone who you think can serve you as a mentor, find a way to spend some time with the person and direct the conversation to the areas in which you want help. Specifically, ask him not so much to tell you what he’d do as to use his insights and experience to try to help you sort out your own thinking.

“Hey, Harold. I really appreciate the way you and Louise have raised your kids, and, frankly, this whole father thing scares the heck outta me. Could I buy you a cup of coffee just to hear some of your stories about that sometime?”

Of course, Harold will say yes (and, yes, this approach is strikingly similar to how we set up a prototype conversation in chapter 6). When you get together, after you have Harold tell you some of the endearing and some of the scary fathering moments he recalls, you just ask, “I wonder if you could do this for me. I’ve got a situation brewing with Skippy, and Lucy and I are kind of flummoxed about it. What if I just tell you what we’ve got on our minds, and maybe you could help me hear my own best thoughts on this? I think Skippy is pretty different from any of your and Louise’s kids, but you’ve got a practiced father’s ear, and maybe you could help me sort out the majors from the minors of what we’re dealing with here.”

That may be a different role from anything Harold is used to, but he’ll give it his best shot and probably do pretty well. If he veers into advice, just listen respectfully and come back to the request.”

“Be Curious. There’s something interesting about everything. Endless curiosity is key to a well-designed life. Nothing is boring to everyone (even doing taxes or washing the dishes).

What would someone who’s interested in this want to know?

How does it work?

Why do they do it that way?

How did they used to do it?

What do experts in this field argue about and why?

What’s the most interesting thing going on here?

What don’t I get about what’s happening here?

How could I find out?”