The key ideas

Designing Your Life

Bill Burnett, Dave Evans, 2016

“What do you want to be?” — the question that leaves so many people stumped and anxious. Two Stanford professors suggest you stop searching for a single correct answer and start treating life the way a designer treats a project: try, fail, redo. Not a perfect plan on paper, but small experiments that gradually lead you toward a life that actually fits you.

Who it is for

Anyone who doesn't know what they want from life or work, and is tired of hunting for the “one right” path instead of building it

You can't think your way out of your life — you can only build your way out.

What the book is about

From childhood we're taught that somewhere out there is the “right” life and the “right” profession, one you have to guess correctly once and for all. Hence the fear of choosing wrong, the paralysis in the face of a decision, and the nagging sense that you're already running late. Burnett and Evans say this whole approach is fundamentally mistaken.

When a designer creates something, they don't try to dream up the ideal in their head — they make attempts, test them, redo them. You can treat your life the same way: instead of calculating the one correct route, build it through small experiments. This book is a set of simple tools that turn the anxious question “who should I be?” into a clear process where failing isn't frightening — it's useful.

Idea 1. You don't plan a life — you design it

A plan assumes the future is known: you pick a goal and walk a straight line toward it. But life doesn't work that way — circumstances, desires, and the world around you keep shifting. So a rigid plan tends to break and breed guilt more than it helps.

Design thinking is a different approach. A designer doesn't know the final answer ahead of time and isn't afraid of that: they move through attempts and revisions. Treating your life as a project means giving yourself permission not to know everything in advance and starting to act in small steps.

For a year Nikita puts off every decision, waiting until he “figures out his calling.” The moment he lets himself just try things in small doses — a course, an internship, a conversation — he learns more about himself in a couple of months than in a year of deliberating.

Stop waiting for the perfect plan — start designing your life through experiments, like a designer, instead of guessing at the future.

Read in Livria

About the author

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans are Stanford professors and the creators of the “Designing Your Life” course, one of the most popular in the university's history. Before Stanford, Burnett led design at Apple (including the first laptops) and made Star Wars toys; Evans was a co-founder of the video game company Electronic Arts.

Why they wrote this book. Both built successful but winding careers, and their own experience convinced them: almost no one reaches the work they love in a straight line. At the same time, they watched their students, and grown adults — agonize over “what should I do with my life,” waiting for a flash of insight and freezing in place. That's how the idea was born to apply to life what designers have long applied to products.

How they got here. In design you can't “dream up the perfect thing in your head” — you build it through prototypes, tests, and countless attempts. Burnett and Evans realized life can't be calculated in advance either; it can only be built and tried. They turned their Stanford course into a book so the method could reach far beyond their own classroom.

All books by this author: Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

Terms from the book

  • Prototype
  • design thinking: solving problems like a designer: trying, testing, and improving rather than hunting for the perfect answer up front
  • reframing: restating a problem from a different angle so that it finally has a solution at all

All terms

Similar books