Designing Your Life Rina Vassallo DVR-PASCD Board Member Designing Your Life: The Movement to Live a Well-Lived, Joyful Life is written by two Stanford professors who have utilized the principles of design to teach college students to carefully and thoughtfully design their life. The book was developed from a very popular elective course by the same name and TED talks are available by both authors.
The crux of the book are the mindsets they developed to assist in designing a well-lived lifecuriosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness and radical collaboration. Each step is defined, and multiple examples are presented and discussed. Additionally, the book provides activities to utilize activities to utilize and deepen these concepts.
Design thinking frequently used in engineering to design and in business to look at innovations and enhance customer service can be described as creative thinking utilized to problem solve. It follows 5 stages: empathize, define (the problem), ideate, prototype, and test. In this book, authors Burnett and Evans adapt and personalize this organizational approach to answer the iconic questionwhat do I do with my life? IMAGE SOURCE: https://designingyour.life/the-book/
Though often recommended as a career book, the ideas presented in this book can be utilized by anyone who is transitioning from school to the workplace, from one career to the next, from career to retirement or an encore career- really anyone who desires an innovative path to add meaning and purpose in life. It would also inform educator’s work with young adults. At the end of the book the authors discuss three ways of looking at work and careers They include thoughts and ideas on expanding our current role, changing our job or exploring what we would do if money was not an issue.
13