Dysfunctional Belief: Your degree determines your career. Reframe: Three-quarters of all college grads don’t end up working in a career related to their majors. (Location 74)
She had everything she thought she should have, everything that she thought she wanted, but she was profoundly unhappy. (Location 82)
Who wakes up every morning the picture of success, and goes to bed every night with a knot in her stomach, feeling as if there’s something missing, something that got lost along the way? (Location 84)
In America, two-thirds of workers are unhappy with their jobs. And 15 percent actually hate their work. (Location 87)
Dysfunctional Belief: If you are successful, you will be happy. Reframe: True happiness comes from designing a life that works for you. (Location 88)
an “encore” career—work that combines personal meaning, continued income, and social impact. (Location 100)
Dysfunctional Belief: It’s too late. Reframe: It’s never too late to design a life you love. (Location 103)
When you have a desired outcome (a truly portable laptop computer, a sexy-looking sports car, or a well-designed life) but no clear solution in sight, that’s when you brainstorm, try crazy stuff, improvise, and keep “building your way forward” until you come up with something that works. (Location 139)
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 get out of it more than you put in. There is a lot more than “lather, rinse, repeat” in a well-designed life. (Location 152)
everyone struggles with similar questions about life, about work, and about his or her meaning and purpose in the world. (Location 193)
Reframing is one of the most important mind-sets of a designer. Many great innovations get started in a reframe. (Location 204)
“Don’t start with the problem, start with the people, start with empathy.” Once we have empathy for the people who will be using our products, we define our point of view, brainstorm, and start prototyping to discover what we don’t yet know about the problem. (Location 205)
A reframe is when we take new information about the problem, restate our point of view, and start thinking and prototyping again. (Location 207)
In life design, we reframe a lot. The biggest reframe is that your life can’t be perfectly planned, that there isn’t just one solution to your life, and that that’s a good thing. There are many designs for your life, all filled with hope for the kind of creative and unfolding reality that makes life worth living into. (Location 212)
Life is all about growth and change. It’s not static. (Location 216)
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 don’t exist; you can build that future you, and as a result your life will change. (Location 223)
fewer dysfunctional beliefs (those pesky ideas that hold you back and that just aren’t true) (Location 241)
Radical collaboration works on the principle that people with very different backgrounds will bring their idiosyncratic technical and human experiences to the team. This increases the chance that the team will have empathy for those who will use what they are designing, and that the collision of different backgrounds will generate truly unique solutions. (Location 260)
Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward. (Location 273)
A well-designed life is not a life of drudgery. You weren’t put on this earth to work eight hours a day at a job you hate until the time comes to die. (Location 282)
The five mind-sets you are going to learn in order to design your life are curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration. (Location 287)
When you have a bias to action, you are committed to building your way forward. There is no sitting on the bench just thinking about what you are going to do. (Location 294)
Reframing is how designers get unstuck. Reframing also makes sure that we are working on the right problem. Life design involves key reframes that allow you to step back, examine your biases, and open up new solution spaces. (Location 300)
An important part of the process is letting go—of your first idea and of a good-but-not-great solution. And sometimes amazing designs can emerge from the mess. (Location 306)
Life design is a journey; let go of the end goal and focus on the process and see what happens next. (Location 309)
You do not have to come up with a brilliant life design by yourself. Design is a collaborative process, and many of the best ideas are going to come from other people. (Location 316)
passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery—not before. (Location 334)
passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause. (Location 335)
A well-designed life is a life that makes sense. It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together. (Location 344)
In design thinking, we put as much emphasis on problem finding as we do on problem solving. (Location 379)
Sometimes we think we need a new job or a new boss, but often we don’t really know what’s working and what’s not in our lives. (Location 381)
Often we approach our problems as if they are an addition or subtraction problem. We either want to get something (add) or get rid of something (subtract). (Location 382)
Sometimes those problems relate to our job, sometimes to family, or health, or love, or money, or any combination of these things. Sometimes our problems can feel so overwhelming that we don’t even try to solve them. (Location 387)
Deciding which problems to work on may be one of the most important decisions you make, because people can lose years (or a lifetime) working on the wrong problem. (Location 390)
How often do we fall in love with our first idea and then refuse to let it go? No matter how badly it turns out. (Location 433)
How often do we check in with ourselves to see if we are really working on the right problem? (Location 436)
Beware of working on a really good problem that’s not actually the right problem, not actually your problem. (Location 438)
gravity problems—meaning they are not real problems. Why? Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Let’s repeat that. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved. (Location 451)
key thing we’re after here is to free you from getting stuck on something that’s not actionable. When you get stuck in a gravity problem, you’re stuck permanently, because there’s nothing you can do, and designers are first and foremost doers. (Location 463)
We recognize that there are two variations of gravity problems—totally inactionable ones (such as gravity itself) and functionally unactionable ones (such as the average income of a full-time poet). (Location 465)
Some of you are trying to decide if the thing you’re stuck on is a gravity problem that isn’t actionable, or just a really, really hard problem that will require effort and sacrifice and runs a high risk of failure but is worth trying. (Location 466)
Skip it. Just accept it. When you accept it, you are free to work around that situation and find something that is actionable. (Location 471)
Who needs a title if you’re getting paid what you want? (Location 499)
If you can’t change your life (because of gravity), you can just change your thinking. (Location 505)
The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at. (Location 508)
The only response to a gravity problem is acceptance. And this is where all good designers begin. This is the “You Are Here” or “Accept” phase of design thinking. Acceptance. That’s why you 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. (Location 514)
emotional health, physical health, and mental health. (Location 525)
How healthy you are will factor significantly into how you assess the quality of your life (Location 527)
Don’t for a minute reduce work only to that which you get paid for. (Location 531)
Play is any activity that brings you joy when you do it. (Location 533)
The question here is what brings you joy purely in the doing. (Location 536)
Who are the people in your life, and how is love flowing to and from you and others? (Location 542)
The idea is to pick what to design first, and be curious about how you might design this particular area of your life. (Location 545)
Awareness and curiosity are the design mind-sets you need to begin building your way forward. (Location 546)
The Health / Work / Play / Love Dashboard (Location 550)
A way to take stock of your current situation, the “You Are Here” for you, is to focus on what we call the health / work / play / love dashboard. (Location 550)
the HWPL dashboard will tell you something about the four things that provide energy and focus for your journey and keep your life running smoothly. (Location 553)
Dysfunctional Belief: I should already know where I’m going. Reframe: You can’t know where you are going until you know where you are. (Location 555)
Health is at the base of our diagram because, well, when you’re not healthy, nothing else in your life works very well. (Location 558)
A well-designed life is supported by a healthy body, an engaged mind, and often, though not always, some form of spiritual practice. (Location 566)
the diagram may serve as an indicator that it’s time to pull over and figure out what’s wrong. (Location 570)
healthy to us means being well in more than just your body; you might want to take into account your mind and spirit, too. (Location 590)
Make a list of all the ways you “work,” and then “gauge” your working life as a whole. (Location 606)
Play is about activity that brings joy just for the pure sake of the doing of it. It can include organized activity or productive endeavors, but only if they are done for fun and not merit. (Location 617)
We do think that love makes the world go around, and when we don’t have any, our world isn’t as bright and alive as it could be. We also know that we have to pay attention to love, and that it arrives in a wide range of forms. (Location 628)
And it is as critical to feel loved by others as it is to love—it has to go both ways. (Location 631)
Knowing the current status of your health / work / play / love dashboard gives you a framework and some data about yourself, all in one place. (Location 646)
If you’re beginning to think like a designer, you will recognize that life is never done. Work is never done. Play is never done. Love and health are never done. We are only done designing our lives when we die. (Location 649)
Are you happy right now with where your gauges stand in each of these four areas? Have you looked at them honestly? Are there areas that need action? (Location 652)
Designing something changes the future that is possible. (Location 662)
It’s not hard to imagine that if we added up all the hours spent trying to figure out life, for some of us they would outweigh the hours spent actually living life. Really. Living. Life. (Location 682)
Worry, analysis, and speculation are not our best discovery tools, and most of us have, at one time or another, gotten incredibly lost and confused using them. (Location 684)
This is not designing your life. This is obsessing about your life. (Location 688)
You need two things to build your compass—a Workview and a Lifeview. (Location 700)
What is work for? Why do you do it? What makes good work good? (Location 701)
A Lifeview is simply your ideas about the world and how it works. (Location 705)
What gives life meaning? What makes your life worthwhile or valuable? How does your life relate to others in your family, your community, and the world? What do money, fame, and personal accomplishment have to do with a satisfying life? How important are experience, growth, and fulfillment in your life? (Location 705)
Our goal for your life is rather simple: coherency. 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 (Location 722)
Living coherently doesn’t mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It simply means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way. (Location 733)
A Workview should address the critical issues related to what work is and what it means to you. It is not just a list of what you want from or out of work, but a general statement of your view of work. It’s your definition for what good work deserves to be. (Location 745)
For this exercise, we’re not interested in what work you want to do, but why you work. (Location 759)
Workviews can and do range widely in what they address and how they incorporate different issues, such as service to others and the world, money and standard of living, and growth, learning, skills, and talents. (Location 764)
By having your Workview and your Lifeview in harmony with each other, you increase your own clarity and ability to live a consciously coherent, meaningful life—one in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do are aligned. (Location 802)
It’s rare that people sail beautifully straight through their beautiful lives, always looking beautiful. (Location 807)
Heading True North, you may sail one way, then another direction, and then back the other way. Sometimes you sail close to the shoreline to avoid rough seas, adapting as needed. And sometimes storms hit and you get completely lost, or the entire sailboat tips over. (Location 809)
Dysfunctional Belief: Work is not supposed to be enjoyable; that’s why they call it work. Reframe: Enjoyment is a guide to finding the right work for you. (Location 848)
Wayfinding is the ancient art of figuring out where you are going when you don’t actually know your destination. For wayfinding, you need a compass and you need a direction. (Location 856)
When you learn what activities reliably engage you, you’re discovering and articulating something that can be very helpful in your life design work. (Location 871)
Flow is engagement on steroids. Flow is that state of being in which time stands still, you’re totally engaged in an activity, and the challenge of that particular activity matches up with your skill—so you’re neither bored because it’s too easy nor anxious because it’s too hard. (Location 875)
Flow is one of those “hard to describe but you know it when you feel it” qualitative experiences that you’ll have to identify for yourself. (Location 892)
Flow is one key to what we call adult play, and a really rewarding and satisfying career involves a lot of flow states. (Location 898)
It’s no wonder that the way we invest our attention is critical to whether or not we feel high or low energy. (Location 908)
structural engineer, who spends his time, mostly alone, working on the kind of complex engineering problems that make him really happy. And he’s become so technically valuable that no one asks him to do the administrative stuff anymore. On good days, he goes home with more energy than when he left for work in the morning. And that’s a pretty great way to work. (Location 933)
another key element when you’re wayfinding in life: follow the joy; follow what engages and excites you, what brings you alive. (Location 936)
Work is fun when you are actually leaning into your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing. (Location 941)
Your job is to drill down into the particulars of your day and catch yourself in the act of having a good time. (Location 972)
Activities. What were you actually doing? Was this a structured or an unstructured activity? Did you have a specific role to play (team leader) or were you just a participant (at the meeting)? Environments. Our environment has a profound effect on our emotional state. You feel one way at a football stadium, another in a cathedral. Notice where you were when you were involved in the activity. What kind of a place was it, and how did it make you feel? Interactions. What were you interacting with—people or machines? Was it a new kind of interaction or one you are familiar with? Was it formal or informal? Objects. Were you interacting with any objects or devices—iPads or smartphones, hockey sticks or sailboats? What were the objects that created or supported your feeling engaged? Users. Who else was there, and what role did they play in making it either a positive or a negative experience? (Location 1016)
Having the narrative of your peak experiences written down will make it easier to extract from those stories the activities that most engaged and energized you, and to discover insights that you can apply today. (Location 1052)
You are moving from one level of awareness to another, really exploring how things make you (not your mom, dad, boss, or spouse) feel. (Location 1061)
Complete a log of your daily activities, using the worksheet provided (or in your own notebook). Note when you are engaged and/or energized and what you are doing during those times. Try to do this daily, or at the very least every few days. (Location 1069)