Designing Your Life summary

Have you ever sat in a beautifully designed chair or an exquisitely well-made sports car? Or maybe you’ve stopped and marveled at the design of your smartphone? If so, then you’ve experienced the bliss of quality design. Now, let’s imagine that you could tinker with and fine-tune your life so that it, too, was perfectly designed.

Just as designers solve everyday problems by creating new things, so can you too address the problems in your life by focusing on its design. Designers have tools and training at their disposal to help them in their work, and these blinks aim to give you the tools and training that will allow you to build a life that brings continuous joy.

You’ll also find out

• what the four most important parts of life are and how you balance them;
• how coherency between your beliefs and what you do will give you a compass for life; and
• why you want to design several different types of life.

If you’re trying to get directions from Google Maps, you need to know more than just the destination; you also need to know your current location. The same is true when you start designing your life.

The first step to figuring out your current situation is to assess four critical areas in your life: health, work, play and love.

Health includes your emotional, mental and physical health.

Work includes both paid and volunteer jobs.

Play is any activity done simply for the fun of it.

And love applies to partners, children, friends and pets.

The goal is to find a healthy balance among all four of these areas, and the precise balance is totally up to you. Someone young will likely give more importance to play, while an elderly person might focus more on health.

After you’ve taken stock of these areas, it should become apparent to you if one is being neglected. For example, maybe you’re too focused on work, and it has caused both your health and your love life to suffer? Or maybe you’ve been too immersed in play and have neglected your career aspirations?

Once you’ve made this assessment, it’s time to assume a beginner’s mind and start asking the questions a complete novice would. A beginner’s mind is a great perspective to have whenever you’re facing a life-changing decision, such as which career to choose.

Let’s say you’re interested in studying marine biology because you love seals. Before you make the decision to start applying to colleges, approach the situation like a beginner and ask yourself basic questions like “What is the life of a marine biologist really like?” and “How much of it really involves seals?”

This will help you find the right direction. Maybe you should do some volunteer work on a research vessel to get a better idea of what the day to day is really like? If you approach situations with a beginner’s mind and ask the right questions, you’ll reduce the risk of regretting your choices later down the line.

A great many discoveries were made by explorers who had little more than a compass to guide them. When entering the great unknown of your future, you can use a compass as well.

In this case, the two guiding poles of your life are your workview and your lifeview.

Your workview is your own philosophy on work and what it means to you. Everyone has their own ideas about what “good work” entails and how important money and the societal impact are to their job satisfaction. Your idea of “good work” might be whatever earns enough to pay the bills, so long as you don’t have to work on weekends.

Likewise, your lifeview is your philosophy on life, meaning your personal values and perspectives on how it should be lived. This view covers things like how important religion is in your life, how you think society should function and what you consider to be moral and just. Your lifeview might, for instance, place a lot of importance on the environment and lead you to live a self-sustainable life on a farm somewhere.

When you start designing your life, reflect on these two areas and write down at least 250 words to accurately describe both. Try not to spend more than half an hour on each description.

Now, the goal is to find a coherent balance between the beliefs in your lifeview and the kind of job your workview suggests; if you can manage this balance, your compass will be correctly aligned.

Without the right balance, you’re bound to feel discontent and unhappy sooner or later, because you’ve compromised your beliefs, and therefore your integrity. If your lifeview says the planet must be treated with care, then you don’t want to take a job with a corporation that dumps chemicals into the ocean every day, right? And if your workview says that money and prestige are important to you, you need to choose a career that can realistically deliver those.

By taking both views into consideration when designing your life, you should be able to stay on course and know when to adjust your route.

Now that our compass is set let’s put it to use.

With your compass in proper working order, let’s take a closer look at engagement.

To live a joyful life, it’s important to know what engages and disengages you. And for this, a Good Time Journal can be an invaluable tool. This is a place to write down your experiences, in both good times and bad, and doing so will help you understand what brings joy to your life.

Throughout each day, wherever you are, write down how engaged and focused you feel, also noting if you’re unhappy or bored. Also, jot down what you were doing at the time.

One thing to make special note of is when you experience flow, where you become completely immersed in an activity and time seems to fly by. Maybe it happens when you’re researching a legal document or when you’re chopping carrots. Maybe you feel it when you play sports. It depends on you.

If you ever emerge from being in the zone and are surprised by how much time has passed, be sure to make note of what you were doing. These moments are a great indicator of your engagement, and you should keep them in mind when designing both your career and your life.

Another clue to help you find your way in life are your energy levels.

Every day involves both physical and mental work, but some activities take a bigger toll than others. And some activities can even raise your energy levels.

Use your Good Time Journal to keep track of which activities drain your energy and which ones help to sustain it. If you feel completely drained after sitting in meetings or doing data entry, but feel energized after pitching products to a potential customer, make a note of it.

Understanding how to stay energized and make the most of your day will be useful information for designing your life.

In the next blink, we’ll look at what to do when your life has you feeling neither engaged nor energized, just stuck.

At one time or another, most of us have felt stuck.

Just consider the story of Grant, who was working at a car-rental company. Even though he had recently been offered a promotion, he still loathed having to deal with angry customers and boring contracts. He felt like a mere cog in the corporate machine with nothing to keep him engaged or energized.

Like a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, Grant looked to the weekend for engagement. He enjoyed hiking and playing basketball, but these energizing activities couldn’t pay the bills. In college, he’d studied literature, but he’d felt the need to jump at the first decent paying job he found, which is how he got stuck in the car-rental business.

Eventually, Grant got unstuck, after he did some mind mapping.

Because he knew he enjoyed doing things outdoors, Grant picked “outdoor activities” as his starting point and wrote this in the center of a sheet of paper. He began to free associate and jot down what popped into his head, like “hiking,” “surfing” and “travel.” For each of these, he made secondary associations. For hiking, it was “mountains” and “exploring”; for “travel” he wrote down “Hawaii” and “tropical beach.”

Now Grant could start to put these ideas together into a plan. He thought about accepting the promotion the company had offered, but only if he could relocate to another office where he could surf and enjoy the beaches, such as California or Hawaii.

This is how mind mapping works. It allows you to open your mind to new ideas that you otherwise might not have thought of. With just a pen and paper you can begin to find your new path.

 Most of us have regrets from time to time. If only I’d played that one situation slightly differently, we think, everything would be better today! But the truth is, there’s no single, specific choice that will lead to a perfect life.

In fact, there isn’t a single best or perfect way to live a life, period. Throughout your life, you’ll have many options to choose from, even if they aren’t always apparent.

This is why it’s important to think ahead and plan, or design, many possible lives for yourself – not just one.

Consider the story of Chung: when he graduated from UC Berkeley, he was offered four different internships, three of which were ones he’d hoped to receive. But he hadn’t expected to be in the position to choose among three great opportunities.

At first, he felt immense pressure to choose the right path. After all, this would likely influence his choice of graduate degree, his career and the rest of his life. But then it hit him: there’s nothing stopping him from doing all three one after the other – which is exactly what he chose to do.

But then came another twist: while doing his first internship, Chung spent a lot of time talking to his friends via Skype. He was so pleased with his decision to do all three internships that he felt motivated to help them with their career choices, too.

In the end, he realized he enjoyed this so much that he skipped the other internships and began studying career counseling in grad school.

You can do a similar thing by charting three different paths, which the author calls odyssey plans.

Life is an odyssey, with a variety of possible routes and circumstances, so it’s wise to give yourself at least three options. But don’t rank them from worst to best. Instead, have an open mind and look at them as three equal, and equally possible, plans. An example of three equal plans could be, for instance, becoming an ecological farmer, journalist or kibbutz volunteer.

At the Stanford Graduate School of Education, professor Dan Schwartz and his colleagues have observed that people who have multiple ideas from the get-go as to how to solve a problem are more likely to come up with innovative solutions than people who start out with just one idea. So don’t settle for a single path. Keep an open mind!

This way, if your first choice doesn’t work out, you won’t panic about not having a perfectly viable plan B to turn to.