Designing Your Life
About the Book
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—everything in our lives was designed by someone, and every design starts with a problem that a designer seeks to solve.
In Designing Your Life, 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. 1
Why This Book
Designing Your Life aligns most closely with Stage 5 — Integration, with conceptual roots in Stage 3 — Translation. Both focus on building a structure that sustains alignment between your intrinsic motivations and intentions and daily reality. Burnett and Evans extend design thinking into personal systems, focusing on how to prototype routines and environments that evolve through iteration. This reflects the Path's focus on maintaining alignment through deliberate structures and refinements, rather than fixed goals or routines.
It complements the Path by offering further tools, frameworks, and step-by-step exercises for readers who may be in need of more additional applicable tools. While the Path remains primarily conceptual and introspective, Designing Your Life translates the same logic into practical methodology. While its focus on careers differs from the Path's neutrality, it can remain a pragmatic extension of the Path's integration phase, and its principles can be applied outside the book's intended scope.