How to Design Your Life in 1 Hour

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  You can't design 'your life.' You design 'your lives.'

  Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, creators of the Designing Your Life course and book, say all of us 'contain more aliveness than one lifetime permits.' There's more than one of you in there, so there are many good lives you could live, not one right answer to find. Choosing one means saying no to others, and that's fine.

• 02

  Maslow's 'become all that you can be' is impossible, and that takes the pressure off.

  They argue that Maslow's 1943 idea of self-actualization by becoming everything you can be is 'dead wrong,' because you're 'way bigger than your own lifetime.' 'I've buried plenty of people. None of them were done.' You won't finish, so stop treating every choice as the final verdict on your life.

• 03

  If you're in your 20s and lost, you're not broken.

  They say the brain's executive and empathy circuitry isn't fully developed until about 27 or 28, later in men. They tell graduating seniors, 'You're not broken, you're 22.' That's their caveated way of explaining why your early 20s feel so uncertain.

• 04

  The Odyssey Plan: sketch three different five-year lives.

  Life 1: change nothing, and assume it goes well. Where are you in five years? Life 2: that path disappears and you still have bills to pay. What's plan B? Life 3, the wild card: money is no object and nobody would laugh. What would you do? Three is 'kind of a magic number.' You need more ideas to get to your best ones, and fixating on one boxes you in.

• 05

  The wild card exists to quiet your inner critic.

  The crazy idea (a Beanie Baby store, a button shop) isn't necessarily good. Writing it down trains you to quiet the critic, which they describe as the evolutionary voice that kept us from being eaten by saber-tooth tigers. Friends often add to it ('that's crazy').

• 06

  Next, prototype: try small, cheap versions of a life before committing.

  Pick something on a plan you want to learn about and test it with a conversation, a class or a short experience. A 'prototype interview' means talking with someone already living that life, like a contact who built an underwater camera company. 'Make a move, learn something, make a move, learn something.' You have to be 'competent at your incompetence' about a future you haven't figured out yet.

• 07

  Small steps make change happen. Big resolutions don't.

  'You're not going to change if you make something so big.' Their example is the 'I'm going to run a marathon' resolution, which fails unless it's broken into very small steps. Small wins build the confidence to keep going.

• 08

  It's almost never too late. Run the numbers.

  When a 54-year-old woman asked if she was crazy to go to medical school, one of the professors did the math with her: a likely lifespan into her late 80s, wanting to work to about 80, a year of pre-med prep, a year applying, four years of school, and residency (where, he notes, much of the doctoring happens). She'd still have more than a decade of practice. 'Cut out the crap' and look at the time you actually have.

• 09

  Reclaim 20 minutes from scrolling to just be present.

  Ask people what video they last watched and they usually can't remember. If you can't remember it, why not 'reallocate that time to something more interesting'? Sit with yourself for 20 minutes and see what comes up. One of them describes his own critic at the easel ('the world needs an older white guy painter?') going quiet if he waits it out, until ideas surface.

• 10

  The whole method in 10 words: get curious, talk to people, try stuff, tell your story.

  Burnett, a former marketing guy, came up with this on Canadian live TV when told to summarize the book in a sentence. Curiosity means leaning into what's available. Talking to people is where the real information is. Trying stuff is prototyping. Telling your story means reflecting on and sharing what you're learning, which beats 'I binge-watched Game of Thrones again.'