Notes on Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Photo by Frank McKenna on Unsplash
Read this if you read nothing else
You can't think your way out of being stuck.
Burnett and Evans teach design at Stanford, and their central move is to treat your life like a product nobody has tested yet: stop trying to work out the right answer in your head, and instead run small, cheap experiments in the real world until the data tells you something.
The answer is not in your head. It is out there, and you find it by doing and testing, not making assumptions.
Who wrote it and why you should care
Bill Burnett runs the Design Program at Stanford.
Dave Evans co-founded Electronic Arts and did early work at Apple.
They started teaching a life design class at Stanford because students kept turning up in office hours asking what to do with themselves, and nothing in the careers service was any help.
The class became the most oversubscribed course on campus, and the book is that class written down.
Their podcast interviews are where they are bluntest about what actually works.
Hot take
Passion is not a starting point. It is an output.
Burnett reckons fewer than one in five people has a single identifiable passion, which means the standard careers advice, "follow your passion", is useless to roughly 80% of the population and quietly makes them feel a bit rubbish.
Passion mostly turns up after you have tried something, found you liked it, and got good at it.
The highlights
- Fewer than 20% of people have one identifiable passion. Following yours is not a plan.
- Gravity problems cannot be solved, only accepted. Stop pushing them and redesign around them.
- Build three five year plans, not one. Options make you braver, not more indecisive.
- Track your energy for three weeks. You are a worse judge of yourself than your diary is.
- Prototype before you commit. You would test drive a car. Do the same with life.
The big ideas
You build your way forward, you do not think your way forward. The stuck feeling is usually mistaken for a thinking problem, so people respond with more thinking: another week of turning it over, another long walk, another conversation with themselves. Burnett is flat about this on the Bregman podcast: "You can't just think your way to a better future, you have to design it." If you knew the answer you would already be doing it, so the job is to go and get data. Book a coffee. Do one day of the thing. Make the smallest version of it that exists.
Know a gravity problem when you see one. Some problems are not problems, they are conditions. Poets do not get rich. You are 47 and will not play for England. The mortgage exists. The book's line is that anytime you argue with reality, reality wins, and the useful question is not "how do I fix this" but "what can I design given this". Related trap: the anchor problem, where you have mistaken one specific solution for the goal. "I need to move to the country to grow things" is an anchor problem. You want to grow things. There is an allotment two miles away.
Three plans, not one. The Odyssey Plans exercise asks you to sketch three different five year lives. One is your current path, done well. One is what you would do if that path vanished tomorrow. One is what you would do if money and other people's opinions were no object. Each gets a six word headline and an honest list of what you would need. The point is not to pick one. It is to prove to yourself that you contain more than one workable life, which takes the pressure off the single decision you have been agonising over for two years.
Your diary knows you better than you do. The Good Time Journal is three weeks of logging what you did and rating engagement and energy for each thing. Then you look for the pattern. People are consistently wrong about what drains them and what lifts them, because they remember jobs by title rather than by texture. The follow up, AEIOU, breaks a good moment into activity, environment, interactions, objects and users, so you learn that it was not "the workshop" you loved, it was six people in a room solving something concrete.
Choose, then genuinely let go. Their last move is the one people skip. Gather your options, narrow them, choose, and then close the door on the ones you did not take. Their evidence is that reversible decisions produce less satisfaction than irreversible ones, because a door left ajar keeps you half in the old life. And as Evans puts it in the Moontower interview, you never find out about the ones you did not try, so waiting for certainty is waiting forever.
Things worth trying
- Rate health, work, play and love out of ten, then write a paragraph on why for each. Expect at least one gauge to be very low and to have been ignored for years.
- Keep a Good Time Journal for two weeks. Log what you did, plus engagement and energy out of five. Expect the pattern to surprise you.
- Write your three Odyssey Plans in one sitting. Give each a six word headline. Expect the wildcard one to be more doable than you assumed.
- Have three prototype conversations with people already doing the thing you are curious about. Ask about their average Tuesday, not their career. Expect to lose one option and gain two.
- Take the decision you have been stalling on, make it, and tell someone. Expect the relief to arrive faster than the doubt.
Where people go wrong
- Treating gravity problems as personal failures, then burning years trying to solve something that was never a problem.
- Reading the book instead of doing the exercises. It is a workbook wearing a book's jacket.
- Prototyping to prove yourself right rather than to learn. A prototype designed to succeed teaches you nothing.
My verdict
Skim it, then actually do the exercises.
That is a real distinction and it matters here, because the prose is fine but forgettable and the exercises are the entire value. The first two thirds earns its keep: the gravity problem idea alone is worth the price if you are currently grinding away at something immovable. The job hunting chapters have aged badly and read like 2016 LinkedIn advice (Bespoke Apply), and there is a stretch in the middle where design thinking gets stretched a bit thin over ordinary common sense.
Could it have been a long blog post? The ideas could. The exercises could not, and they are the point.
Read this note, do the Odyssey Plans and the Good Time Journal, and you have got about 90% of what the book has to give you.