Bill Burnett

*** The #1 New York Times Bestseller *** Whether we’re 20, 40, 60 or older, many of us are still looking for an answer to that perennial question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ In Designing Your Life, Silicon Valley design innovators Bill Burnett and Dave Evans use their expertise to help you work out what you want – and how to get it. Their phenomenally successful Life Design course has been tried and tested by thousands of people, from students to mid-career professionals to retirees contemplating a whole new future. Now in book form for the first time, their simple method will teach you how to use basic design tools to create a life that will work for you. Using real-life stories and proven techniques like reframing, prototyping and mind-mapping, you will learn how to build your way forwards, step-by-positive-step, to a life that’s better by a design of your own making. Because a well-designed life means a life well-lived.

From the authors of the #1 New York Times best seller Designing Your Life ("Life has questions. They have answers" --The NYT)--a job-changing, outlook-changing, life-changing book that shows us how to transform our work lives and create a dream job that is meaningful without necessarily changing the job we have. Dysfunctional Belief: I'm stuck in a lousy situation (and there's nothing I can do about it). Reframe: I'm stuck in a lousy situation (and I'm finding the problems and the solutions). Bill Burnett and Dave Evans successfully taught graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University and readers of their best-selling book, Designing Your Life ("The prototype for a happy life." --Brian Lehrer, NPR), that designers don't analyze, worry, think, complain their way forward; they build their way forward. In Designing Your Work Life, Burnett and Evans show us how design thinking can transform our present job and our experience of work in general by utilizing the designer mindsets: Curiosity. Reframing. Radical collaboration. Awareness. Bias to action. Storytelling. Dysfunctional Belief: Good enough isn't good enough. Reframe: Good enough is GREAT--for now. Burnett and Evans show us how, with tools, tips, and ideas, to enjoy what we have and to live in a state of "good enough, for now," one of the strongest, most effective reframes there is, and how this idea, once understood and accepted, can make new possibilities available, giving us the energy to enjoy the present moment and allowing us to begin to prototype possible futures. And if we want to quit? Burnett and Evans show us how to use the job we have to get the job we want (in another company), and show us as well, the art and science of quitting (leave the campsite better than we found it), using the power of the quit design to reframe how we finish our current job and get a better one. They write, as well, about how the work world is changing as the automation of work increases (hello Alexa, artificial intelligence, drones, and robots); how thinking like a designer can make us flexible, and ready to adapt to change . . .

At last, a book that shows you how to build--"design"--a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home--at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to "design and build "your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise. "From the Hardcover edition."