A popular question, one which children of all ages and stages find helpful, is "What do I want to be when I grow up?" This question reframed and ready for action is "What do I want to grow into?"
Bill Burnett is the executive director of the Stanford Design Program and cofounder of the Life Design Lab. Dave Evans is cofounder of the Life Design Lab and a lecturer in the Stanford Design Program. Both have had careers in business.
This down-to-earth resource has been put out to help women and men figure out what a well-designed life looks like for them. Burnett and Evans have come up with five design tools to map the journey of life:
1. Curiosity
2. Bias to action
3. Reframing
4. Awareness
5. Radical Collaboration
This journey morphs into three more questions
1. Where do your views on work and life complement one another?
2. Where do they clash?
3. Does one drive the other? How?
Answers to these three big ones are added to your reflections about your Workview and your Lifeview. Suggested tools include The Health/Work/Play/Love Dashboard, the Good Time Journal, Mind Mapping, Odyssey Plan, Prototyping, and Reframing Failure.
What's the point of all this activity? Burnett and Evans respond with the following:
"Dysfunctional Belief: My dream job is out there waiting.
Reframe: You design your dream job through a process of actively seeking and co-creating it."
And these ideas demand equal time:
"Dysfunctional Belief: Life is a finite game, with winners and losers.
Reframe: Life is an infinite game, with no winners and losers."
According to Burnett and Evans, life design is a team sport that cherishes community collaboration and creative interaction. The same design thinking that has worked for creating new technology, products, and spaces can be used to create a meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling life: "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." Their book signals that a new day is dawning in vocational questing.
