Designing Your Life Book News / Tips for Designing Your Life

Reconsidering the Future: What Happened When I Put Designing Your Life to Work for Me

Nothing makes the Designing Your Life team happier than learning about how the book has positively impacted your life. From big to small, your stories truly brighten our day and encourage us to find more ways to empower our community. We especially like this review by Jennifer Ridgway of Brightly, who highlights how important it is to put the work in, and sums up the ethos of Life Design well. Here’s an excerpt:

Designing Your Life isn’t a simple self-help or career book filled with tips and tricks — it really is a full class in a book. What does this mean for the reader who wants to get the most out of it? It means you have to be ready to put in the thoughtfulness required and work through all of the exercises in the book, which are pulled from the Stanford course. Some of these exercises take ten minutes, such as the Health/Work/Play/Love Dashboard, which helps you realize where you are by assessing these four areas of your life on a quick scale. (Users learn that design thinking can help you to move forward from where you are, but you need to know where you are first to make that step!) And some of the exercises can take months, such as Prototyping, which includes things like brainstorming, interviewing people who are doing work you are interested in doing, and/or finding ways to actually experience the possibility you’re exploring (for example, through job shadowing). The prototyping process is crucial to helping you make an informed decision, just as it is in product design — you have to make a prototype of a chair to ensure it works as intended before releasing it to the wider public!” Continue reading…