How to be the designer of your life: tips from Bill Burnett, Stanford Design Program Manager and Apple Veteran

When Bill Burnett, together with fellow professor Dave Evans, created the course Designing Your Life for Stanford students, all he wanted was for young people and girls to apply the principles of design thinking to create after the release of that life, which they want for themselves.

After 10 years, the book "Design your life" was translated into 26 languages, published in hundreds of thousands of copies and is a bestseller. At Stanford itself, the Design of Your Life course is the most popular among electives, and at least two scientists have made doctoral dissertations for themselves, testing how the method works. (Verdict: everything works .)

I recently talked with Bill as part of the DYL certification program. It turned out such a story, a set of covenants and fables about how you can look at changes in life, if you think like a designer. Further from the first person:

Do not get fooled by the dichotomy, like "the balance between work and personal life . " In fact, there is no work-life balance. You are separate from your work, and you are separate from your personal life. When a person can distance himself from thinking “either this or that”, he has the opportunity to objectively look at things and change something in his life.

Every person has many lives. You can live several different lives, and not soared that she is alone. One can be an entrepreneur, an artist, a professor, a designer and a farmer - all within the framework of living a single biological timeline. At the moment when we understand that we have a choice of how to live this or that segment of life, we discard a bunch of socially determined beliefs and lower our anxiety for our future.

If you set up your own system of goals and metrics based on your own values ​​that are not imposed from outside, you begin to make decisions that are not the most trivial. I know a graduate of the Stanford Business School who, instead of working on hateful work after graduating from uni, optimized his expenses so as to live in Silicon Valley at $ 1,500 per month [this is about living at $ 400 in Moscow] and do what he really likes. This is one of the happiest guys I know.

The university is an extremely outdated place. I remember that we applied design thinking to redesign training at Stanford and proposed the concept of a university of the future to management. They praised the project and were surprised at the prospects, until they realized that one of the conditions was that the management should not be able to screen out applicants. After they realized this, the project was quietly rolled up and laid on a shelf.

People often postpone the solution of precisely those tasks that are most important to them. I know a lot of people who dream of enrolling at Stanford or Harvard to change their career path that they hate and do something else. But if you think about it, you can come to the campus, go to a lecture on the subject of interest to you and understand whether this profession is for you or not. Why spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to understand that you will never enjoy law or business?

I knew a lady who dreamed of quitting work and opening her coffee shop. She saved enough money, invested a couple of years and a ton of effort into creating her dream cafe. She managed to open such a cool place that it instantly became super-popular, people came there from other areas. At the same time, she herself was absolutely unhappy: the idea of ​​having a cafe was perfect, but the daily routine with waiters, suppliers, bookkeeping, and all that was exactly what she liked in life the least. If she knew that important decisions in life can be prototyped, then she would have managed to avoid this painful disappointment.

Prototyping is the most important thing when changing careers. Moreover, the prototype can be as simple as pulling a person on a coffee who is already doing something that you are potentially interested in.

It is better to seek joy, not happiness. Joy is a state of involvement and fullness of energy. Our task is to celebrate what makes us feel a state of flow and what fills us with energy, and try to make life built around it.

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Video : Bill Burnett talks more about TEDx. There are Russian subtitles.