How to Use Design Thinking to Design Your Life (Based on Ideas From 'Designing Your Life' Book)
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a question that we’re constantly asked as kids and are expected to have an answer for. And yet, do we ever stop to think about how absurd this is?
How in the world is a kid supposed to know what he or she truly wants to become when they haven’t even scratched the surface of life itself? It’s ironic, isn’t it? And yet, the irony doesn’t stop there, does it?
We continue to cling onto those childhood dreams of the past—falsely believing they truly are our calling—and try to forge them onto our way of life today. We size up circles we drew as a kid and attempt to fit them into the squares of the reality of adulthood, until one day we “give up” and simply succumb to our present circumstances and call it fate.
You stick to the job you hate because, hey, “this is the way life is; suck it up and carry onward.” You stick to the law career path you’ve fallen into even though deep down, it’s become evidently clear that it’s not the right path for you. You’ve changed—you now much prefer work that involves visual storytelling and videography, but hey, “this is the way life is; suck it up and carry onward.”
You’re stuck and I don’t blame you.
Society has molded us into such a narrow one-dimensional way of thinking because we were raised to believe that the only way to prosperity was to choose a career path and work our way up that ladder.
You’re either an engineer or a writer.
You're either a dentist or a graphic designer.
We’re always encouraged to chase money and job titles, but never pushed to evaluate and consider what we want our actual lifestyle to look like.
So you study hard and attend university. You spend long nights in the library and thousands of dollars you don’t have on a degree in a field you think you want to work in, only to graduate and accept an offer from a shockingly average-paying job (if you’re lucky) that barely covers your living expenses.
You enter the real world and realize: “I hate this.”
Will I live the rest of my life like this?
That’s the question you start to ponder.
There has to be more, you begin to think.
As you continue to push and tug at these thoughts, and as you begin to explore what’s outside the realm of your own world, and as you juggle the conflicting beliefs that you were raised upon and the critical comments you now receive for even questioning more ambitious adventures, time will pass.
I speak from experience.
But soon enough, there will come a time when you will have to make a decision. You will either continue to tread the miserable path or you will summon your courage to bravely leap over your fears and into another direction. And if you’ve read this far into this article, then I presume you will do the latter.
Once you commit to taking that step forward in faith, that’s when you begin crossing into the trajectory of leading an authentic and intentional life, one that is true to what you believe is right for you.
In other words, that’s when you start designing your own life.
What it Means to ‘Design Your Life’
Let’s go back to the question of “what do you want to be when you grow up,” a question that has narrowed our scope of thinking.
It has limited the horizon of imagination because it squandered the definition of what it means to “grow”— growth is not something that we become, it’s something we are constantly becoming. It’s a process.
We grow from a baby to a toddler to a kid to a teen to an adult, but growth doesn’t stop there. We continue to experience growth throughout our adult life because growth is the very definition of life.
Life is not a destination, but a journey, and so is growth.
Life is not static, but dynamic, and so is growth.
Life is like the waves of the ocean, always forming and crashing, and the trees in the forest, always swaying with the winds of change. Life is all about growth and change and frankly, change is the only constant there ever is.
Perhaps it’s best, then, to reframe that original question, don’t you think?
It’s not about answering the question once and for all and then you’re done. No. It’s about asking the question to identify a direction to flow into, and then, after you do, to pause, reflect, and assess.
“Who or what do you want to grow into?”
That’s the question we should be asking. Not once, but rather, regularly—day in, day out. And that is what the concept of life design is all about: It’s about working from where we are and with what we have to design and build a meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling life, one that is aligned with our values, beliefs, and interests.
How to Think Like a Designer
Before you jump into the excitement of designing your ideal life, you first need to learn how to think like a designer. And to that function, we turn to Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, the two Silicon valley innovators and Stanford University professors who first introduced the idea of Life Design.
Inspired by years of teaching Design Thinking, they both believed that in order to create positive change in our lives, we first need a process—a design process—that would allow us to identify what it is we truly want to change and how we can go about creating it. This belief was transformed into a seminar, Designing Your Life, which soared in popularity and was later reincarnated into a New York Times Bestselling book (by the same name).
In their book, they explain that “designers imagine things that don’t yet exist, and then they build them, and then the world changes. You can do this in your own life. You can imagine a career and a life that doesn’t exist; you can build that future, and as a result, your life will change.”
These words really resonate with what Steve Jobs explained in an eye-opening interview in 1994 with the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association:
“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… The most important thing is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.”
Once you learn that you can create the life you imagine, you’ll never be the same again. As fluffy as that may sound, it’s absolutely true and I vouch for every word of it.
Once I quit my job at Google and backpacked through Central America and met the sheer number of people who had already been traveling and working remotely for a few years, I realized that traveling long-term and working remotely is possible.
Once I launched my first-ever company, I realized that creating something out of nothing and earning an income from it is possible. Likewise, once I leaned into writing, and what I knew was my true calling, I realized that you can create your purpose and do work that brings you joy, meaning, and fulfillment.
So, as per Jobs’ advice:
Shake off the notion that life is just the way it is and embrace the idea that you can design it, mold it, and improve it to your own liking. And as with everything that is worthwhile in life, it will require honest and hard work.
As per the words of Burnett and Evans:
"Designers don't think their way forward. Designers build their way forward.”
So let’s get busy building.
Here are the five mindsets you must adopt along this journey.
Be curious. Reconnect with your inner child-like imagination. Curiosity is what ignites you to ask the questions that will lead you to see all the opportunities.
Try stuff. As mentioned earlier, you can’t think your way forward, you have to build it. That’s why you must cultivate a bias to action. Remember this rule: 80% action, 20% thought.
Reframe problems. A reframe is a perspective switch. It’s what helps you articulate the right problems so you can find the right solutions. Always reframe your beliefs and problems to see them in a different light.
Know it’s a process. There will be good ideas and bad ideas. Some will work out and many will fail. Mistakes are normal. Obstacles are natural. Life design is like life itself: A journey of ups and downs. Focus on the process, learn from it, and grow through it.
Ask for help. A principle of design thinking is radical collaboration. And in everyday life, you’re not alone. Involve people, communities, and mentors in your design process and ask for help when you need it.
Step 1: Start Where You Are
“Start where you are. Not where you wish you were. Not where you hope you are. Not where you think you should be. But right where you are.”
Too often, when we want to create change for ourselves, we believe that we need to do so something radical: quit the job, move to a new city, end the relationship.
But that’s not the way it should be—because even if you make such bold moves, you won’t be fixing the root of the problem, you’ll just be dragging it along with you. And that’s why it’s crucial to first assess your situation before you make any changes. It helps you better understand where you are and what areas of your life need to be redesigned.
As Burnett and Evans put it:
“You can't know where you're going until you know where you are.”
How to Apply This:
Burnett and Evans advise us to create a Life Design Assessment.
In this exercise, you focus on four main areas of your life (financials is not one of them, but I think it should be, so I added it below) and gauge them across a spectrum of empty (zero) to full (100). This helps you create a dashboard and assess what areas need more of your attention. The former is the red (bad) zone, the latter is the green (good) zone.
Consider each of these areas of your life and reflect on their state:
Work: The stuff you do to get paid.
Play: Any activity that brings you joy when you do it.
Love: The quality of the people and relationships in your life.
Health: The health state of your mind, body, and spirit.
Financial: The state of your monetary health.
Source: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
This assessment serves as a self-evaluation activity that enables you to determine where the red zones in your life are.
Are you spending too much time working and too little time playing? Is your health in the empty zone? That’s a problem you must address. Are your finances causing you trouble? Okay, then let’s design a way forward to relieve that pain.
For example, if I were to do mine, I would say:
Work is at 60%. I know I can give more in that area.
Play is at 75%. I do what makes me happy, but I feel like I can spend more time there. More time hiking. More time playing guitar. More time relaxing.
Love is at 50%. I have some great relationships, but I can give more quality time and attention to this area of my life.
Health is 90%. I eat well, I exercise daily, and spiritually, I’m happy.
Financial is at 40%. Definitely not where I want to be, but getting there.
So, given the gauges above, I would say my focus should be on designing a process that would allow me to do more impactful work, further engage in my relationships, and boost my finances. But that depends, are these things important to me? This question brings us to step number two.
Step 2: Build Your Compass and Find a Direction
Now that you know where you stand and what areas are lagging behind, the next question is, where do you want to go?
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey explains that one of those habits is the ability to “begin with the end in mind.” Once you know where you want to go, you can reverse engineer your way there.
That, of course, falls back on the premise that you know where you want to go. But what if you don’t? Sometimes you know, sometimes you don’t—that’s the nature of life. And that’s why Burnett and Evans suggest that we build ourselves a compass that serves as our “True North.”
As we journey onward, this compass will serve as our guiding light. It will help us know whether we’re on course or off course. We might not always know what’s next for us in life, but with this compass, we can always refer back to it to know whether we’re moving in the right direction.
“You don't have to have it all figured out for the rest of your life; you just have to create the compass for what life is about for you right now.”
The ultimate goal of this compass is to create coherency in your life, and a coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: Who you are, what you believe, what you are doing.
How to Apply This:
Let’s break it down:
Who you are. Burnett and Evans refer to this as “Lifeview,” which is simply your ideas about life and how it works. What is the meaning of life? What matters to you? What’s important to you? Travel? Wealth? Family? What makes your life valuable and worthwhile? How would you describe an ideal lifestyle?
What you believe. If “Lifeview” reflects your philosophy on life, your “Workview” is what reflects your relationship with work. What does work mean to you? What defines meaningful work? It’s less about what work you want to do and more about why you work. For instance, do you see work as a means to an end or an end in itself?
What you are doing. What activities fully engage you and positively energize you? What gives you joy? When do you feel like you’re entirely immersed and joyful in what you're doing? What do you do for the love of doing, without being distracted by concerns about the outcomes?
The whole idea here is to turn inward before you go outward.
Your Lifeview and Workview reveal your values and thus form your guiding compass. And whatever fully engages you, energizes you, and allows you to fall into what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls a state of flow (being completely involved in an activity for its own sake) is what serves as your direction to follow in life.
Your job then is to first build your compass and then to identify what engages you, what energizes you, and what gives you joy, so you can design a life around it. That’s how you create alignment and coherency in your life.
For example, if, in your Lifeview, you believe in living within close proximity to your family and leaving this world a better place (if that’s what gives you meaning or what matters to you), then living the expatriate life halfway around the world while working for a corporation in fast fashion will go against your values and thus create misalignment—which will then lead to you questioning your reason for being.
An integral part of my Lifeview is the freedom to travel frequently and work remotely, so I’m working toward designing a life that would allow me to be 100% geographically-free in a few years. My Workview philosophy is that what I do defines me, so I refuse to work for corporations who’s sole products are not wholesome (Ex: I will never work for a company like Coca Cola). And when I reflected upon the times where I felt in complete flow, the trend was evident: When writing, public speaking, or facilitating a creative workshop.
So how do you find out what activities energize/engage you?
Burnett and Evans shared an exercise called The Good Time Journal.
The Good Time Journal is a log of daily activities that attempts to capture moments and actions that induce flow. Every single day for the next two weeks, record your daily activities. Note how you feel in each. Do you feel engaged or not? Do you feel drained or positively energized?
Circle the ones that lead to high engagement and positive energy.
Those are the activities you want to design a life around.
Source: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Step 3: Get Unstuck and Uncover New Alternatives
So let’s quickly recap:
You’re now aware of where you are today and what areas of your life need attention.
You’ve identified what matters to you and what your values are. This helped you build a compass that will serve as your lever for making decisions.
You’ve identified which activities in life give you a sense of fulfillment. This will now help you find a direction to move into.
Now’s the time to get unstuck.
So let’s get that designer thinking hat back on and debunk (read: reframe) some limiting beliefs. First, realize that you’re not stuck. In fact, realize that you can never be stuck. Why? Because you can always generate lots of ideas on how to move forward in life and immediately act on them. There’s always something you can do in a given situation. The equation comes down to resourcefulness—not a lack of options.
Second, recognize that you never have to find that one right idea to action. No. What you need is to brainstorm a few alternatives, rank their feasibility against certain levers, and then choose one to explore as a possibility.
This kind of thinking comes back to three philosophies of Design Thinking:
More is better. You choose better when you have lots of good ideas to choose from because more ideas result in higher access to better ideas, and better ideas will lead to better life design.
There is no judgment. The only way to brainstorm a bunch of ideas is by first deferring judgment and silencing your inner critic. So reserve your judgment to unleash your creative forces.
You never choose your first solution to any problem. If you have a problem you’re trying to solve, you never go with the first solution. Why? Because that means you haven’t thought it through yet. Hence, more is better because more ideas lead to better solutions. Another issue here is the rise of the cognitive bias psychologists refer to as anchoring—the act of relying too heavily on the first piece of information you learn. In other words, you get anchored to the first idea of a solution, even if it might not be the best course of action for the problem at hand.
The best way to begin the process of getting unstuck and unraveling new alternatives is with a tool called Mind Mapping.
How to Apply This:
Mind Mapping is an ideation technique developed by Design Thinkers. It’s an easy way to brainstorm thoughts organically, create associations between words, and thus derive new concepts and ideas.
Source: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Here’s how it works:
Pick a topic (revert back to the activities that engage you and energize you).
Expand on it by creating word associations.
Keep growing that web of ideas by making secondary connections.
As Burnett and Evans explain:
“The point of this exercise isn't to generate a specific result; it's to get your mind going all over the place and ideating without judgement. By taking the exercise all the way to imagining how to combine elements creatively into surprising roles or jobs, you've successfully moved out of problem solving (what do I do next?) into design thinking (what can I imagine?).”
The goal here is to brainstorm and not make any decisions.
There is no hurry to find a result and there is no use of judgment, but there is an urgency to tap into your imagination and let your mind wander.
Choose three activities and create three different Mind Maps.
Once your Mind Maps are complete, look at the outer-most ring and circle three items that catch your eye. Try to combine those three items into a possible job description that would be fun. Then, name your role and sketch it out on a piece of paper.
In the picture above, Burnett and Evans share the example of Grant’s Mind Map. Grand was someone who was languishing away at a car-rental agency. His Mind Map was based on an activity that engaged him: Being outdoors. His map led him to “hiking in redwoods, playing pickup basketball, and helping his niece and nephew.” Combining those three ideas, he ended up sketching a Pirate Camp.
Interesting, right? Choose three topics and create three different mind maps. Once you’re done, and you’ll have three different alternative ideas to work with—which means, now you’re ready to design your life path.
Step 4: Design Your Life Paths
There’s a simple and universal truth in life:
We will live many different lives within our lifetime.
Think about it. When you were younger, you were a student. Now, you’re a working adult paying your own bills. Those are two drastically different lives. Paulo Coelho was a hippy roaming the world before he became an author at the age of 40. Those are two drastically different lives. The Oprah before the Oprah we know today also lived a different life than she does today.
So let’s first reframe another limiting belief we all fall for: You don’t need to figure out your best possible life, make a plan for it, and execute it all right now. No. What you need is to accept that there are multiple lives that you can live, and you can intentionally choose which one to build for yourself, today.
You get to stroke your moves with the colors of your choice.
You get to design the alternatives, and then put them into action.
You get to look at the next five years ahead and answer this question: “If everything in my life, starting today, meets and maybe even exceeds my most optimistic expectations, what will my life look like in 5 years?”
How to Apply This:
In order to answer that question, we will need to come up with a few alternatives (remember, never go with the first options; more is better):
Reference back to those three ideas you had generated from your mind maps.
For each idea, create a visual time and divide it into five 1-year increments.
Go through the three ideas and unfold the events of those alternatives.
Create a title for each alternative.
Write down three questions that each alternative solution is asking. What are the assumptions? What things will you want to test and explore in each alternative option? Good questions lead to good insights.
At the bottom of the page, create a gauging dashboard, and for each alternative, evaluate the following:
Do you have the resources (time, money, skills, contact) for this? If you don’t, can you reach them?
How much do you like the sound of this plan? Does it excite you? Does it hit the spot? Or is it something that doesn’t really move you?
How confident are you that you can make it happen?
Does it align with your values (Workview and Lifeview)?
Source: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
The idea here is that you’re designing what’s next for you in life. You’re aligning with your compass and you’re leveraging the activities that energize and engage you—along with the three possible ideas of what could come out of them—to design a way forward for the next five years.
As Brunett and Evans explain:
“You aren't designing the rest of your life; you are designing what's next. Every possible version of you holds unknowns and compromises, each with its own identifiable and unintended consequences. You are not so much finding answers in this exercise as learning to embrace and explore the questions, and be curious about the possibilities.”
You aren’t designing the rest of your life.
You’re simply designing what’s next.
I did this exercise and explored three different alternatives:
Plan 1: Continue down the route of e-commerce entrepreneurship.
Plan 2: Focus on writing and creative storytelling.
Plan 3: Build a new online brand in the field of self-development.
All three were viable, but after I evaluated them against my resources, my likability, confidence, and coherence, I instinctively leaned into plans 2 and 3, with the second one being the clear winner.
And when I dug deeper, I realized that either one of those two can lead me onto the path I wish to be walking in a few years: Living remotely by the Mediterranean Sea, doing creative work that excites me, publishing a book, and conducting creative workshops in topics related to life design, public speaking, and storytelling.
So, turn to each idea and design a plan around it. Then, for each one, ask yourself this question: “What will my life look like in 5 years?”
Step 5: Prototype
When people ask me what was the biggest mistake I have ever made as an entrepreneur, my response is simple: I jumped into my idea without any prior validation. In other words, I didn’t prototype.
And that was because I naively fell for two dysfunctional beliefs.
First, I thought that I needed to jump right out of the plane and right into my idea. I didn’t think of sneaking up to it. Second, I thought that if I comprehensively researched all the details of my plan, I’ll be fine.
So I didn’t converse with other entrepreneurs in the same field to see what it was like to run an eCommerce business day in day out, which trickled into a chain reaction: I didn’t even know what the process was like and whether or not it would be something I enjoy—so I assumed I would enjoy the process of building and managing an online business. Also, since I didn’t test my idea and relied solely on research when I launched, I noticed how many variables I had missed and completely overlooked (shipping costs, marketing costs, damaged goods).
Had I thought like a designer, I would have acted like one. First, and foremost, I would’ve built my business slowly and steadily, step by step—by working my way forward through small incremental experiments, or prototypes.
As Adam Grant writes in The Originals:
“The most successful originals are not the daredevils who leap before they look. They are the ones who reluctantly tiptoe to the edge of a cliff, calculate the rate of descent, triple-check their parachutes, and set up a safety net at the bottom just in case.”
Prototyping is the process of testing your chosen life path.
It’s a way to validate it.
If you chose to start a health coaching business, don’t leap just yet. Go and talk to successful health coaches. Offer free coaching sessions to your prospects. See what the process of coaching on a day-to-day feels like.
As Netflix Co-founder Marc Randolph says:
“You have to figure out how to quickly, easily, and cheaply get your idea out of your head and collide it with reality.”
Is your plan to start a clothing-rental business? Prepare a sign and slap it on your office door (or set-up a landing page and drive traffic to it) that reads: “Need to borrow clothes? Knock.” If someone knocks and inquires (or lands on your page and engages), then you’ve validated your idea.
As Burnett and Evans explain:
“We prototype to ask good questions, create experience, reveal our assumptions, fail fast, fail forward, sneak up on the future, and build empathy for ourselves and others. Once you accept that this is really the only way to get the data you need, prototyping becomes an integral part of your life design process.”
Fail fast, fail forward.
How to Apply This:
Would you buy a car without a test drive? No, of course not. So why would you design an entirely new life path without first testing the waters to see if that’s a sea you want to swim in?
Prototype your alternatives.
Have a conversation. Talk to someone who is either doing and living what you’re currently contemplating. Learn from them.
Experience it first. The best way to learn is by doing. In order to prototype whether I would enjoy writing or not, I wrote one article and published it. Ever since then, I’ve been absolutely hooked.
Step 6: Make a Decision
So here’s the deal.
You’ve now gone through the life design process: You’ve gathered some ideas, narrowed down your list to three possible alternatives, and then, you chose one to prototype.
Now what?
Well here comes the part you’re dreading: Make a decision.
Hah, I can see that hint of a smile forming on your face. And I can hear you think: But I don’t know which path to choose.
Do you know why you struggle with making a decision? Because you think that to be happy, you’ve got to make the right choice. But here’s the reality of life: There’s never one right choice. All you really have control over is how you make a decision and how you live that choice once it’s been made. So let’s reframe that belief, shall we? To be happy, you’ve got to commit to a choice and let go of all the other choices that no longer serve you.
Redesign your environment so that it inspires to follow through on that choice. Create a support group to remind you why you made the choice. Make a journal entry about the decision you’ve just made and revisit it every single day.
Build the space that will allow you to commit to your decision.
How to Apply This:
Make a decision and embrace it.
“Once you make a choice—then embrace your choice and go with it. When the questions that lead to agonizing creep into your head, evict the thoughts, and direct your energy into living well and the decisions you’ve made. Pay attention and learn as you go, of course, but don’t get caught with your eyes fixated on the rearview mirror of decision regret.” —Burnett and Evans
What happens when you take action is that you gain experience. You learn. You grow. You evolve. And most importantly, you understand yourself better. Even if, further down the road, you come to realize that perhaps this wasn’t the right choice for you, well, now you’re more experienced and equipped with more skills on your belt to steer the ship in a different direction. As Randy Pausch put it: “Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.”
We tend to overwhelm ourselves with options and we exert so much energy on ruminating over what to do—or what we should have done—to the point of exhaustion. So we don’t end up making any decisions to move our life forward.
Don’t fall for this trap of indecision.
In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz writes:
“Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard… The alternative is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better.”
Make a choice, give your full attention to it, and let go of everything else.
Designers don’t waste their futures by hoping for a better past. Nor do they waste their present by fearing an imagined future. All you have is now. Fall in love with the adventure of actively designing your life and building it into the present moment.
In a Nutshell: How to Design an Intentional and Well-Lived Life
Life is a process, not an outcome.
We never stop growing, we just think we do.
That question of “what do you want to be when you grow up” led us to believe that at some point in time in the future, we will suddenly stop growing, which then led us to believe that life is an outcome. But of course, life is not an outcome, it’s a process, and so is growth.
Billy Burnet and Dave Evans write that “life design is ultimately a new way of life that will transform how you look at your life and how you live your life. The end result of a well-designed life is a life well-lived.” The premise is that by looking inward and working from where we are and with what we have, we can design and build a meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling life, one that is aligned with our values, beliefs, and interests.
Put in other words, when we design our lives, we create our purpose and bear meaning to it, and we intentionally craft the lifestyle we wish to lead.
The steps are simple:
Start where you are.
Turn inward to build your compass and find a direction.
Mind map your ideas.
Design new life paths.
Choose one to prototype.
Make a decision on which path to take and commit to it.
“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... You never finish designing your life—life is a joyous and never-ending design project of building your way forward.”
This is not a process you go through once because life design is ongoing. In essence, life design is built upon the question of “who do I want to grow into?” And every new day presents us with a new chance to reinvent ourselves into who we truly wish to become. So go explore what type of life you want to create for yourself and enjoy this process of designing one that works for you.