Designing Your Life by Dave Evans and Bill Burnett offers a strategy to find fulfilling careers by exploring multiple life paths, testing assumptions, and identifying what truly energizes and engages you.
Main Lessons
- Recognize that life isn’t about finding a single calling. Multiple paths can lead to fulfillment.
- Use ‘prototype conversations’ to test career assumptions and avoid mistakes, much like Elise should have done with her deli.
- Keep a ‘Good Time Journal’ to identify moments at work when you’re engaged and energized.
- Design three potential future lives over five years: an optimized life, an alternate life, and a fascinated life.
- Reframe failures as learning experiences to refine your life design process.
- Practice building network connections and seek mentorship and real-life stories from those who live the life you envision.
- Realize that the right career might involve maximizing enjoyable tasks rather than completely changing jobs.
- Avoid over-committing to a career path without simulating real-life experiences first.
- Challenge the belief that there is only one true passion; there are diverse ways to find satisfaction.
- Utilize visual tools like sketches to imagine and plan different life scenarios.
- Understand that lasting happiness in a career comes from doing what engages you, not what the external world values.
- Prototype your future by testing small scalable experiments rather than committing immediately.
- Learn to recognize patterns in what gives you joy at work and refocus your career path to amplify those moments.
- Assess life and career decisions through the lens of what would fascitate you if money or image were irrelevant.
- Engage in self-discovery practices to reveal what truly satisfies you and aligns with your values.
