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Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso Podcast, your morning shot of what's new in the world of real estate investing. I'm your host, Victor Menash. Today's show is the Book of the Month. On the first day of each month, we review a new book. In order to be considered for Book of the Month, a book needs to meet a very simple criteria. It needs to be impactful enough that it can change your life or your perspective on the world. Whether it does or not, of course, is up to you. If you merely read the book and comment on how good it is, you're just entertaining yourself and watching the game of life from the stands. But if you want to play the game of life on the court, then reading the book and making it part of you is the path to engaging what you read. The COVID 19 outbreak has caused major upheaval in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Things that seemed important only a few weeks ago have faded into the background. That massive dislocation has caused many to re evaluate both the content and the context of their lives. Some people will re evaluate their lives based on their own initiative, but for many, that reevaluation won't happen until it's forced upon them. Perhaps COVID 19 will be that forcing function. Even if you don't have the misfortune of contracting the disease, the disruption caused by it could be enough to cause a reset. The silver lining could be re evaluating your life. This month's book is Designing youg Life how to Build a well Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Nothing could be more timely than re evaluating and redesigning your life. Since life isn't normal now, why would you want things to go back to normal? I actually don't want things to go back to normal. I want my life to move forward so that what emerges from this dislocation in history is going to be better than it was before. Now I fancy myself a designer. I used to design microchips, then I designed systems that would process millions of phone calls per hour. I designed hardware systems, and these days I'm designing subdivisions and buildings and apartments. And of course, this is a team effort involving architects and engineers of many disciplines. Designers love problems. Every single item that you find in your house was the result of some designer somewhere encountering a problem and coming up with a solution. That's why you've got running water. That's why you have a dishwasher and a toaster and a chair. These things would not exist if there were no problems. They were only created in response to a problem in each and every case. So if you're going to design your life, you probably, in fact, you absolutely need problems. And Lord knows there seems to be no shortage of problems at the moment. The book is based on a design methodology that's been taught at Stanford university for over 50 years. Design thinking starts with curiosity, and oftentimes people are working on solving the wrong problems. So perhaps a reframe of the question of the problem can often get you unstuck. There's a number of dysfunctional beliefs that hold people back. One of the biggest ones is what's your passion? Well, only 20% of people asked had a clear answer. So if that's a prerequisite, you're already set up for failure. The second is, don't you know by now? You should really know by now. Well, there is no should. You are where you are right now. You did what you did. You didn't do what you didn't do. It simply defines your starting point, not your destination. Are you being the best possible version of you? You've probably heard that the good is the enemy of the best. Well, the corollary to that is the unattainable best is the enemy of a whole bunch of really good alternatives. There are several core ideas in the book that are based on years of research at Stanford and Berkeley. Connecting the dots to creating a meaningful life involves connecting who you are, what you believe in, and what you do. When all three of these are connected together, you will experience life as being more meaningful. But if you've never asked yourself these questions, you won't get the clarity. More importantly, life is not a destination, it's a journey. And if you spend your entire life chasing an elusive destination, then by the time you get there, you'll have missed it. You cannot solve a problem you're not willing to have. And if you're not willing to accept the problem, then it's not a problem. You. It's merely a circumstance. It's what you choose in life that makes you happy. And designing this requires evaluating several alternate futures. The obvious first choice is to take your current path, the one that you're on, and simply making it better. If your current reality was uprooted and then you needed a plan B, well, what would that be? And finally, if you had no constraints and you could design your wildcard plan, what would that be? Coming up with these alternate plans is part of designing your life. But you can't live three lives. You only get to choose one. But by creating these alternate life paths, you generate enough ideas to figure out where you want to go next, but you've ultimately got to choose. So how do you choose? Well, you want to prototype your life, that is try it on for size, so that you know not only at an intellectual level, but at an emotional level if if that choice is going to work for you. And then finally, you need to choose. Well. That doesn't mean making the best choice, but it means making the choice in a way that you're going to let go of the other alternatives and not second guess yourself. The book Design youn Life might be the best thing you can do to immerse yourself right now when your life has been disrupted. As you think about that, have an awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen. We'll talk to you again tomorrow.