Designing your life
Kindle Highlights
Highlights
Designers love questions, but what they really love is reframing questions. Reframing is one of the most important mind-sets of a designer.
reframe is when we take new information about the problem, restate our point of view, and start thinking and prototyping again.
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.
mind-sets of a designer—especially radical collaboration and being mindful of process.
Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward.
five mind-sets you are going to learn in order to design your life are curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration.
In design thinking, we put as much emphasis on problem finding as we do on problem solving.
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.
break life down into some discrete areas—health, work, play, and love.
What is your quest?
You need two things to build your compass—a Workview and a Lifeview. To
A Lifeview is simply your ideas about the world and how it works. 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?
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
For wayfinding, you need a compass and you need a direction.
the first clues are engagement and energy.
Flow is play for grown-ups. In the life design dashboard, we assessed our health, work, play, and love. The element we all find the most elusive in our busy modern lives is “play.” You
Work is fun when you are actually leaning into your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing.
Our minds are generally lazy and like to get rid of problems as quickly as possible, so they surround first ideas with a lot of positive chemicals to make us “fall in love” with them. Do not fall in love with your first idea.
Dave is anchored on this problem because he’s anchored to the one and only solution he’s been willing to accept —a perfect cars-plus-workshop layout.
This isn’t a gravity problem—it’s not impossible. It’s just that Dave’s stuck because he’s anchored himself to a solution that can’t work.
Prototypes lower your anxiety, ask interesting questions, and get you data about the potential of the change that you are trying to accomplish.
“Building is thinking” is a phrase you will often hear around the Design Program at Stanford.
Bill’s been in love with Play-Doh since his days at the toy company Kenner Products; it is a magic material that turns adults into children again. If you just let your brainstormers play with the Play-Doh while they are brainstorming, we guarantee you will get more and better ideas.
also like to use categories such as: • Most exciting • The one we wish we could do if money were no object • The dark horse—probably won’t work, but if it did… • Most likely to lead to a great life • If we could ignore the laws of physics…
For centuries, the most commonly affirmed path to such maturity has been that of personal practices such as journaling, prayer or spiritual exercises, meditation, integrated physical practices like yoga or Tai Chi, and so on. We don’t have the space,
This is the first level of failure immunity—using a bias to action, failing fast, and being so clear on the learning value of a failure that the sting disappears (and, of course, you learn from the failure quickly and incorporate improvements). By the way, that exercise in class went pretty well, and then we decided to jettison it anyway and keep the prior version of the exercise because
Designing your life is actually what life is, because life is a process, not an outcome. If you can get that, you’ve got it all.
The value of mentors’ life experience when they are giving counsel lies not in borrowing what facts or answers they know but in accessing the breadth of their experience and their objectivity, which helps them to help you to see your own reality in a new way.
Balance is a myth, and it causes a lot of grief and heartache for most of us. As we said earlier, we don’t fight reality, and living in reality means looking at and accepting where you are right now. Life design is really about being able to answer the question “How’s it going?” It is possible to design your life in such
pay attention to in living your well-designed life—your compass and your practices.
Perhaps the most important recommendation we can give you to sustain a well-designed life is to invest in and commit to some personal practices of the variety we described in chapter 9.