80% of all people don’t have a single dominating passion/purpose
Most people have many passions!
Mastery causes passion. Not the other way around!
Dysfunction beliefs
Your degree determines your career
2/3 work in a career that is unrelated to their major
It’s too late to change
It’s never too late to change course
Life design requires a design mindset!
One clear goal → Engineer mindset
No clear solution in sight → Design mindset
5 mindsets of design thinking
Curiosity
Bias to action
Prototype your life!
Reframing
Pivot
Choose new point of view based off knowledge about the problem
Be aware of process
Accept mistakes, move on
Let go of the destination
Radical collaboration
Don’t design your life alone!
Chapters
Start where you are
Begin with a beginner’s mind, so you ask the right questions!
Find the right problem to work on!
Problem finding + problem solving = Well designed life!
Avoid gravity problems! (Those that are not actionable)
Building your compass
Dysfunctional belief: I should know where I’m going!
Reframe: I won’t always know where I’m going, but I can always know whether I’m in the right direction!
Meaningful life = Congruence between who you are, what you believe & what you do!
Wayfinding
Look for activities that make you feel engaged & energized
Ultimate engagement = Flow
Complete involvement in activity
Ecstasy or euphoria
Inner clarity: Knowing what to do and how to do it
Calm & peace
Time standing still or disappearing
Getting unstuck
Dysfunctional belief: I need to find 1 right idea!
Reframe: I need to find many ideas, so I have a lot to chose from!
2 principles
You choose better, when you have more ideas to choose from!
Don’t choose your first idea!
Many designs of your life could be amazing!
Design your lives
Dysfunctional belief: I need to figure out my best possible life, make a plan, and then execute it!
Reframe: There are multiple great lives (and plans) within me, and I get to choose which one to build my way forward to next!
Prototyping
Avoids premature commitment
Design experiments to answer your career questions
Talk to people who do what you want to do
They should not think that it’s a job interview
Make it a friendly conversation
Listen to their story
Ask what it’s really like
What does he love? What does he hate?
What does a typical day look like?
How they got there?
Job shadow
Try the job yourself
How not to get a job
The standard model of applying to online job listings often fails
Many of the most interesting jobs go unlisted (only 20% get listed online)
They get filled first by word-of-mouth or referrals
Small companies with less than 50 people often don’t publish all jobs
Large companies may hide some listings for all other than its own employees
How to make applying online work for you
Use their exact keywords!
Make yourself sound like a fit (don’t sound too unfocused)
Avoid employers with unrealistic expectations
It’s a bad sign if the position has been open for more than 6 weeks in a good labour market
Designing your dream job
Life design interviews may be more effective at getting you a job, than applying!
You seem very interested
It gives you access to the 80% of job listings that aren’t posted online!
Choosing happiness
It isn’t about making the right choice, but about choosing well!
Live some days as if you had to already made the choice, rather than just contemplating the choice from outside!
Process
Gather & create options
Narrow down the list
Most of us can only effectively choose between 3-5 options!
If you have so many options that you freeze, you effectively have 0 options!
If you cross out the wrong one, you’ll know!
If you can’t find any meaningful preference among your 3-5 options, then you can’t lose!
Choose discerningly
Our best choices comes from a combination of using the basal ganglia & rational mind
Basal ganglia
It’s not connected to our verbal centers
It communicates to us through feelings and our intestines (gut feelings)
So we need good access to our feelings & gut reactions to our options!
It draws upon our memories of what has and hasn’t worked for us previously!
Let go & move on!
Avoid agonizing like:
“Did I do the right thing?”
“Am I sure this is really the best decision?”
“What if I’d done option four instead?”
I wonder if I can go back and do it over?”
In a study, subjects were told to evaluate 5 paintings and were told they could get their number 3 or 4 choice. Those who were then told that they could later switch were less happy with their choice!
Knowing that you’ve made the “best choice” is impossible (all consequences would need to have been played out first)
It will keep you agonizing and drain all satisfaction from your choice!
Move on by focusing on something else!
We can’t take our focus of something, but we can focus on something else!
Failure immunity
Failure is a natural part of the path!
Building a team
Radical collaboration!
Exercises
Start where you are: Health / Work / Play / Love Dashboard
Rate yourself from 1-10 in these areas
Health
Work
Play
Love
Are there any design problems in those areas you would like to fix?
Are they gravity problems?
Building your compass: Workview & Lifeview reflection
Workview
Why work?
What’s work for?
What does work mean?
How does it relate to the individual, others, society?
What defines good or worthwhile work?
What does money have to do with it?
What do experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?
Lifeview
Why are we here?
What is the meaning or purpose of life?
What is the relationship between the individual and others?
Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in?
What is good, and what is evil?
Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent, and
if so, what impact does this have on your life?
What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace, and strife in life?
Coherence
Where do your views on work and life complement one another?
Where do they clash?
Does one drive the other? How?
Wayfinding: Good Time Journal
Do activities log for 3 weeks:
Keep track of the things that make you feel engaged & disengaged
Keep track of the things that give and take energy from you
Be as specific as possible in your entries!
Reflect & find patterns in your activity log weekly.
Use AEIOU to analyze your activities log
Activities: What were you doing? What type of activity was this?
Environment: What kind of environment were you in?
Interactions. Were you interacting with anyone?
Objects. Which objects were present?
Users. Who else was present?
Getting unstuck: Mind mapping
Find 3 activities from your good time journal. One for each:
Engaged
Energized
Flow
Make a mind map with each of the 3 activities in the center
Find things that jump out & make a job description based of them
Design your lives: Odyssey Plan
Make 3 plans for the next 5 years of your life!
Inspiration for the 3 plans
Plan 1: The thing you already do or have in mind
Plan 2: The thing you would do, if plan 1 wasn’t an option
Plan 3: What you would do if nobody would laugh and money didn’t exist
For each of the 3 plans:
6 word headline that describes the essence of the choice
Visual timeline with career & non-career events
3 questions that come to your mind
Rate them on:
Resources: Do you have what it takes? (Contacts, skills, money, time)
Likability: Does it excite you?
Confidence: Do you believe you can do it?
Coherence: Does it fit in with your workview & lifeview?
Present your plan to someone else, and notice which ones energize you
Or otherwise film yourself presenting them, and watch that!
Prototyping
Find the questions you wrote on your Odyssey Plans
Find prototype conversations & experiences that will help you answer them!
If you are empty of ideas, than from a brainstorm group (3-6 people)
Quantity of ideas > Quality of ideas
Don’t judge or censor
Encourage wild ideas
Build on top of each others ideas
Failure immunity: Reframing failure
Write down a list of your failures
Categorize them
Screwups
Normally you don’t make these mistakes
Weaknesses
You make many of these mistakes, but can’t fix them
Growth oppurtunities
You know the cause & the fix!
Write down any insights you got
Building a team
3-5 people
Supporters: Give encouragement & valuable feedback
Players: The “co-workers” in your projects & prototypes
Intimates: Family & friends
Find a mentor who can counsel you rather than giving advice
Find a community (with most of these attributes)
A shared purpose (and possibly the members also have other things in common)
