Designing Your Life

Designers imagine things that don t yet exist, and then they build them, and then the world changes. You can do this in your own life. You can imagine a career and a life that don t exist; you can build that future you, and as a result your life will change. If your life is pretty perfect as is, life design can still help you make it an even better version of the life you currently love living.

When you think like a designer, when you are willing to ask the questions, when you realize that life is always about designing something that has never existed before, then your life can sparkle in a way that you could never have imagined. That is, if you like sparkles. It s your design, after all.

What Do We Know?

In Stanford s Design Program, we have taught more than a thousand students design thinking and how to design their lives. And we ll let you in on a secret no one has ever failed our class. In fact, it s impossible to flunk. We have more than sixty years of combined teaching experience, and we have taught this approach to high school students, college students, graduate students, Ph.D. students, twenty-somethings, mid-career executives, and retirees wanting an encore career.

As teachers, we have always guaranteed our students office hours for life. This means that if you take a class from us we are there for you, forever. Period. We ve had students come back to us over the years since they ve graduated, and they ve told us how the tools, ideas, and mind-sets that we teach have made a difference for them. We re quite hopeful and, frankly, pretty confident that these ideas can make a difference for you, too.

But don t take our word for it. Stanford is a very rigorous place. Though anecdotes are nice, they don t count for much in academia. To speak authoritatively, you need data. Our class is one of the few design thinking classes that have been scientifically studied and have proved to make a difference for students on a number of

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

Life has questions. They have answers Learn how to find a fulfilling career learn how to better navigate life s big moment decisions and kill your wicked problems dead.
The New York Times
 
The prototype for a happy life Burnett and Evans show how to apply Stanford s famous design principles to finding your place in the world, as a recent graduate or mid-career.
NPR s Brian Lehrer

Designing Your Life walks readers through the process of building a satisfying, meaningful life by approaching the challenge the way a designer would. Experimentation. Wayfinding. Prototyping. Constant iteration. You should read the book. Everyone else will.
Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive

This [is] the career book of the next decade and . . . the go-to book that is read as a rite of passage whenever someone is ready to create a life they love.
David Kelley, Founder of IDEO
 
An empowering book based on their popular class of the same name at Stanford University . . . Perhaps the book s most important lesson is that the only failure is settling for a life that makes one unhappy. With useful fact-finding exercises, an empathetic tone, and sensible advice, this book will easily earn a place among career-finding classics.
Publishers Weekly