Design a Life You Love, Starting From Where You Are Right Now
In the past years, I’ve read many books on career advice. Some focus on building small habits to gradually transform your life, while others focus on the power of persistence. Another approach is to build up rare and valuable skills and trade them for a desirable career.
 |
|---|
| Photo by Ole Witt on Unsplash |
A common theme among contemporary books is, that the advice “follow your passion” is outdated. Instead, you should craft a career you can become passionate about in the long run.
To me, a great approach to achieve this is Life Design - an approach by the two Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
In this article, I want to sum up the core elements of their methodology.
Life Design in a nutshell
Burnett and Evans use the design thinking method to answer the question: ”What do I want to be when I grow up?”.
Five core topics are essential for this - they are based on the design thinking process:
- Be curious: We only discover new things through curiosity. Curiosity is crucial in the design thinking process.
- Try stuff: Only by trying things out (i.e. actually doing them instead of just reading/talking about them), we find out what works and what doesn’t.
- Reframe problems: In the context of design thinking, this is also called a pivot.
- Know it’s a process: Designing is always a process - there is no clear goal, but a problem for which there are many (creative) solutions. The process consists of finding a solution that solves the problem better step by step.
- Ask for help: It is always possible to get an external view of things.
Start where you are right now
Have you ever daydreamed about a job where you do what you love all day and earn tons of money?
I did.
The thing is, as long as we don’t take action, nothing will change.
But getting started can be difficult and scary. This is especially true if the goal seems very far away - like an Anchor Problem.
Because the task seems so overwhelming we often find ourselves not even starting at all.
What we should do instead is to figure out what we actually want and where we are at right now. Based on that we can design a path to a career (and life) we love. This can be broken down into two steps:
- Work/Play/Love/Health Dashboard: This method supports us in analyzing where we are at right now.
- Lifeview & Workview: Putting down to paper what we want from life (and work) helps us set our compass in the right direction.
1. The Work/Play/Love/Health Dashboard
We may work on the wrong problem without realizing it.
If you are smart, this can lead to a ”success disaster”: you only realize after a very long time that you have been working on the wrong problem all the time.
To avoid this, it is important to figure out your goals and the direction you want to go in. To determine your direction, it’s essential to initially grasp your current position.
A method I personally have come to like for that is the Work/Play/Love/Health Dashboard.
The goal of the method is to evaluate where you are in the four most important areas of your life
- Work: This is obviously a big portion of how you spend your day. Ask yourself some questions about your work: How do you work right now? Think of all the work that you do, including employed work or studying and your side hustle if you have one. Are you satisfied with it? What would you like to change?
- Play: Everybody needs play in their life - these are activities that bring you enjoyment. However, everyone plays differently: for some, it could be sports, others consider sports as play, and some like to play video games. How do you define play? Do you have enough time to play?
- Love: This dimension summarizes romantic love and friendship. How would you rate it at the moment?
- Health: Unfortunately, we all too often neglect this topic in our busy lives. However, health unlocks the energy to engage within the other dimensions. Do you feel healthy? Are you stressed? Do you take the time for physical exercise?
Fine, these are four dimensions, but what should you do with them now?
Create your WPLH dashboard
Take 15 minutes and go through the different questions. Make estimates between 0 % and 100 % for each dimension of how fulfilled you are right now.
3, 2, 1, … Go!
Ready?
Once you have gone through each dimension, reflect on your results. Is there a dimension that is particularly high/low? Why is this the case? Are there underlying design problems you need to solve?
Reflecting on the results is already the transition to the next step: crafting a compass.
2. Workview and a Lifeview
Life design answers the questions of why I am here and what I want to do.
Do you know what it is you want?
I think most of us do. But chances are, you didn’t write it down yet. I didn’t until I applied Life Design in my own life.
And I have to tell you, it is great to have done it.
The thing is, as long as we have something just present in our minds, it often is very unclear and has many contradictions in it. But when we start to put our thoughts into written works this changes: ideas become clearer, contradictions unfold, and new ideas form. It is like extending your mind with more working memory (the written words).
This is why I think you should really do the next task. And it doesn’t take too much away from your precious time - you can finish the task in roughly under 1 hour!
Fine, what is the task?
Create your compass
Write a vision for your life.
Actually, you should write two visions: one for your work life and one for your life as a whole.
- Craft a brief reflection about your view on work. Invest around 20 minutes and aim for roughly 250 words. You can use the following questions:
- Why do I work and what do I work for?
- What does work mean to me?
- How is work related to the individual, others, and society?
- What is good or bad work?
- What does money have to do with it and what do experiences, fulfillment, and growth have to do with work?
- Craft a brief reflection about your view on life. Invest around 20 minutes and aim for roughly 250 words.
- Why are we here? What is the meaning or purpose of life?
- What is the relationship between the individual and others?
- Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in?
- What is good, and what is evil for me?
- Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent, and if so, what impact does this have on my life?
- What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace, and strife in life?
- Compare the two views: Do they complement each other? Where do they clash? Does one drive the other?
- Update them so that the two views align.
Great job! You’ve made your own compass. When you’re faced with an important decision, look at your two views. Choose the option that matches them best. Your compass will lead you in the right direction!
Just one more thing: as our lives unfold, also our goals and visions change. So we need to regularly update our compass to stay on track. The founders of Life Design suggest that you update your workview and lifeview once per year.
It only takes about half an hour and is a great way to reflect on the past year during Christmas time, or before making New Year’s resolutions.
Thank you for reading!
This was the first part of my in-depth series exploring “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Check out the entire series here: