Name: Designing Your Life
Rating: 3.8 (20 reviews)
ISBN: 9781101875322

Bill Burnett

David John Evans

William Burnett (Consulting professor of design)

Introduction: life by design -- Start where you are -- Building a compass -- Wayfinding -- Getting unstuck -- Design your lives -- Prototyping -- How not to get a job -- Designing your dream job -- Choosing happiness -- Failure immunity -- Building a team -- Conclusion: a well designed life

How to Build a Well-lived, Joyful Life

Designing Your Life

I'm generally skeptical about self-help books, but this was a fine summer read for someone like me who's fresh out of college and stressed about potential future careers. The book is pretty straightforward and simple, and I appreciate that unlike most books in the genre it doesn't come off as too preachy. While none of the advice is necessarily groundbreaking, it does offer a number of guided journaling exercises that are designed to help you focus in on aspects of your life that you'd like to change. Most of the book is geared towards "building your way" into a career that works for you, so it's not as widely applicable as the hype around it may lead you to believe, but I would recommend it to people interested in making a career shift or who just don't know what they want from life. I personally found it worthwhile, especially the section about creating a coherent work/life view.

Burnett and Evans believe that in order to change, people need a process-- a design process-- to help them figure out what they want and how to create it. Rather than dreaming up a lot of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world-- or the real you-- they show us how to build a future brick by brick, how to approach our own life design challenges with curiosity and creativity. They give us the tools and show us certain simple "mind-sets," and how to use them to practice life design in your life.

Tara C

Well written and easy to digest that helped me put my life into perspective.

Cristian Garcia

Me encantó. Tiene un sustento en años de experiencia aplicando design thinking en la vida de miles de personas que han confiado en los autores para recalibrar sus vidas.
El libro viene cargado de ejercicios pragmáticos para entender mejor donde estamos y hacia donde iremos en los próximos 5 años. 
Completamente recomendable no sólo para leer, sino para hacer.

Emily

YuCheng Kuo

Whether you're 20, 40, 60 or older, many of us are still looking for an answer to that perennial question, 'What do I want to be when I grow up?' In Designing Your Life, Silicon Valley design innovators Bill Burnett and Dave Evans use their expertise to help you work out what you want -- and how to get it. Their phenomenally successful Life Design course has been tried and tested by thousands of people, from students to mid-career professionals to retirees contemplating a whole new future. Now in book form for the first time, their simple method will teach you how to use basic design tools to create a life that will work for you. Using lots of real-life stories and proven techniques like reframing, prototyping and mind-mapping you will learn how to build your way forwards, step-by-positive-step, to a life that's better by a design of your own making. Because a well-designed life means a life well-lived.

Designing Your Life How to Build a Well-lived, Joyful Life

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