You can design a life worth living
In Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans propose the idea of using a designer's mindset with how you live your life. Principles include a bias to action, reframing, curiosity, awareness, and radical collaboration. Rather than picture a clear end goal to work toward, however, design thinking involves gauging your life by four core needs: work, play, love, and health. Once you assess where you are in these areas, you begin testing ideas on a small scale to meet your desired levels for each. Design thinking also involves tracking when you find yourself in a state of flow. By flow, the authors are referring to a concept established by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Mee-high Cheek-sent-me-high), where people's minds are so fully engaged in an activity, they lose track of time. The benefits of using design thinking on our lives include immunity to failure, greater resilience, and the removal of self-limiting beliefs.
Takeaways:
Move on to let go. One of the book's insights is to not spend your future hoping for a better past. If you try to let go first, you will struggle to move on. Paradoxically, moving on makes you let go. I used to stew a lot on lost opportunities, especially with potential dates. This wasted a lot of time thinking about what might have been. The best way to remove regret, then, is for me to focus on the next woman to ask out.
Embrace surprise. The solution you arrive at may look nothing like what you originally imagined. The authors emphasize the value of group brainstorming and the belief that no idea is too ridiculous to consider. In fact, the radical ideas tend to lead to actionable ones. Amusingly, they also suggest keeping Play-Doh around to unlock creativity. In line with my personal application for tip #1, we can use a lead-in from David Allen's Getting Things Done, which is, "Wouldn't it be great if..." then see what ideas come about.
Test to truly know. One place the authors don't want to see people stuck is settling for generating good ideas, but never experimenting with them in simple ways. Much like in cooking, you won't know how much you like a recipe until you taste it. Even then, don't start trying to make a seven course meal. Perhaps you start with an omelet. But just start. The first dish I ever cooked for myself after moving to Houston was chicken, yellow squash, and onions. It wasn't Gordon Ramsay-level, but knowing I did it without help gave me a lot of confidence and momentum.
Practice makes progress. Your perfect job is not out there. What are the chances a random person would know your work preferences, let alone create the ideal job position solely for you? The authors challenge us to co-create jobs we would enjoy. We might not reach perfect, but our efforts can help us get close. As long as you are alive, you have the opportunity to design. This means getting excited about the chance to continually tinker and improve. When I started as a manager of an independent pharmacy, I had an opportunity chain pharmacies would never give me: establishing a company culture I would look forward to working in. Funny thing is, even though I hired the people I wanted, they didn't necessarily buy into what I thought was good. I've had to continually try new concepts to see how to bring out the best in my team. Success shouldn't stop experimentation, however. In fact, you should capitalize on the chance to focus on bigger things while you don't have any urgent crises to resolve.
An expression I struggled with when I was young is "Don't cry over spilled milk." One recent realization is that the milk doesn't cry if it's spilled, either. That is, the milk doesn't know it's gone. It's our reaction to it which counts. Whether you're dealing with a lost job, broken heart, or business deal gone south, the authors reassure you it's never too late to design a life that you love. That said, you can't afford to procrastinate. The only true failure is to not try at all. Are you ready to create a better life for yourself? Start simple, and start now.
