The best lesson you can ever learn is the one that teaches you to learn and, of course, the one that teaches you to find out what you need to learn. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans don’t give you answers in their book – Designing Your Life – but a model or tools that can help you find an answer to almost anything.
There must be only a few lucky people in this world who have never thought about what to do with their lives or how to make the most of their time and be successful. The authors once again reinforce that there is no one answer to these questions.
David Burnett teaches Designing Your Life class at Stanford University, which also happens to be one of the most popular lass on the campus. He puts these important questions to his students and also provides them the tools that help them answer these questions in a systematic manner, implementing principles and processes of designing a product.
DAVE EVANS is an adjunct lecturer in the Product Design Program at Stanford, a management consultant, and a co-founder of Electronic Arts.
Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life
Authors: Bill Burnett, Dave Evans
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Knopf (September 20, 2016)
ISBN-10: 1101875321, 978-1101875322
Designing is essentially a problem solving process. A product must meet various requirements on different axes. There is structural integrity, then there is the question of usability, and also the aesthetics. Your life too needs to be designed on multiple axes. However, only you can answer what these axes are. For many, X means success and success equals happiness. But this oft repeated mantra may not be true for you. You could be successful in the eyes of many, but still living a miserable life, wasting hours in a job you hate.
You will get these important answers wrong. But that is OK. The authors emphasize that failure is part of the design process. You need to try out different things before you can reach the best possible solution. By applying principles of Prototyping. They give practical advice like trying out the job you think you have passion for, on weekends. Shadow someone for a day who you think does what you want to do. Live the life that you think is better than your current situation. By living it you can make a better decision than jumping into something that turns out to be another failure.
But as the authors say, the most important thing before you begin, is to think like a designer and understand this:
“Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward.”
The author discuss some of the most common problems like finding the career that is right for you or looking for a job when you are unemployed for a long time. However, they come with a new perspective and also help you look at the problem statement with a different perspective. Above all the authors tell you that a designer’s work is never done and there is always scope to build a better way forward.