Bill Burnett (47:53)
I'm here to help you design your life. We're going to use the technique of design thinking. Design thinking is something we've been working on at the D School and in the School of engineering for over 50 years. And it's an innovation methodology, works on products, works on services. But I think the most interesting design problem is your life. So that's what we're going to talk about. We think no plan for your life will survive first contact with reality. Reality has a tendency to throw little things at us that we weren't expecting, sometimes good things, sometimes bad. So we say, just have a bias to action, try stuff. So I'm going to give you things that people have written back to us who read the book or taken the class and said, hey, these were the most useful, these were the most doable, they were the most helpful. And we're human centered designers, so we want to be helpful. The first one is this notion of connecting the dots. The number one reason people take our class and we here read the book is they say, you know, I want my life to be meaningful. I want it to be purposeful, I want it to add up to something. So we looked into positive psychology literature and in the design literature. And it turns out that there's who you are, there's what you believe, and there's what you do in the world. And if you can make a connection between these three things, if you can make that a coherent story, you will experience your life as meaningful. So we do two things. We ask people, write a work for you. What's your theory of work? Not the job you want, but why do you work? What's it for? What's work in service of? Once you have that 250 words, then this one's a little harder to get short. What's the meaning of life? What's the big picture? Why are you here? What is your faith or your view of the world? When you can connect your life view and your work view together in a coherent way, you start to experience your life as meaningful. That's the idea number one. Idea number two, I do a little thought experiment with my students. We say, let's have some ideas. We're going to ideate your future. But you can't ideate just one. You have to ideate three. And it's transformational. We give them this little rubric. One, the thing you're doing, the thing you're doing right now, whatever your career is, just do it. So that's plan one. Your life now goes great. Plan two, I'm really sorry to tell you, but the robots and the AI stuff, that job doesn't exist anymore. The robots are doing it. We don't need you to do that anymore. Now what are you gonna do? And everybody's got, you know, everybody's got a side hustle or something that they can do to make that work. And three is, what's your wild card plan? What would you do if you had enough money and you didn't care what people thought? Anything from, I'm gonna go study butterflies to I want to be a bartender, you know, in Belize. What would you do? And people have those three plans. Now, what happens when they do? This is one, they realize, oh my gosh, I could actually have imagined three completely parallel lives. They're all pretty interesting. Two, they rarely go become a bartender, you know, in Belize. But a lot of times the things that come up on the other plans were things that they left behind somehow. And so they bring them back and they put them in plan one. They make their lives even better. Sometimes they do pivot, but mostly they just use this as a method of ideating all the possible, wonderful ways they could have a life. Now, in our model, the thing you do after you have ideas is you build a prototype. We have met people who've quit their job and suddenly done something else. It hardly ever works. You kind of have to sneak up on it because in our model, we want to set the bar really low, try stuff, have some success, do it again. So when we say prototype in our language, what we mean is a way to ask an interesting question. What would it be like if I tried this? A way to expose the assumptions. Is this even the thing I want or is that just something I remember I wanted when I was 20? You know, William Gibson, the science fiction writer, has a famous quote. The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. So there is someone who's a bartender in Ibiza. He has been doing it for years. I could go meet him and have a conversation. He or she talk to people and try stuff. The last idea you want to make a good decision. Well, it's a hard thing, particularly nowadays when we have so many choices. So we have a process, gather and create options. Once you get good at design, you're really good at coming up with lots of options. You got to narrow those down to a working list that you can work with. It's just a process. Mindful of process. Collect, reduce, decide, move on. That's how you make yourself happy. It's simple. Get curious, connect the dots to find meaning through work and life views. Do three plans, never one. Prototype everything in your life before you jump in and try it. And choose well. There's no point in making a good choice poorly. Choose well and you will design a well lived and joyful life. Thank you.
