Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett is a book with a powerful message: everyone deserves a meaningful, fulfilling life. The book challenges readers to step outside the traditional career paths and create a life that centers around their values and aspirations. The best part? This isn't an out-of-reach dream; Burnett provides an actionable plan for creating a life that is rewarding and inspiring.

First, Burnett stresses the importance of self-discovery. He encourages readers to question their assumptions about success and prioritize self-discovery in order to understand who they really are and what they truly value. From there, he offers an actionable 3-step design process that involves re-imagining the perfect life, prototyping, and testing strategies to determine if they are headed in the right direction.

The cornerstone concept of the book is “building a portfolio of experiences”. Burnett believes that life is not a linear journey and encourages readers to explore and experiment in order to find their true calling in life. He provides strategies and exercises to help readers create an action plan, such as exploring what energizes and drains you and building personal capital such as relationships and skills.

One key piece of advice Burnett gives is to seek feedback from others. He encourages readers to find mentors and role models, as well as develop personal networks that can offer support and perspective. Burnett’s idea of feedback is closely tied to the book’s themes of feedback and iteration: he argues that feedback is essential to development and growth, and encourages readers to use the design process to build a “well-lived and joyful life”. In the end, the goal, as Burnett puts it, is to “design your way to a life that works for you.”

The strength of Designing Your Life is its practical approach. Burnett doesn’t focus on inspiring success stories or preach about achieving singular glamorous goals; instead, he focuses on finding meaningful work, life, and relationships that make you genuinely happy. He provides both an insight on life-design combined with practical steps to make it happen, helping his readers to create a life that works for them, rather than conforming to pre-defined ideas of success.

Overall, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life is an inspiring and practical guide to creating a life that works for you. It provides an actionable plan for transformation through self-discovery and feedback. Burnett’s message is a reminder that life is a journey, and that it’s possible to design a life that is deeply meaningful and incredibly rewarding.