Bill Burnett Quotes

Dysfunctional Belief: Happiness is having it all. Reframe: Happiness is letting go of what you don’t need.

Living coherently doesn't mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way.

It doesn’t matter where you come from, where you think you are going, what job or career you have had or think you should have. You are not too late, and you’re not too early.

You can't know where you're going until you know where you are.

A coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: who you are, what you believe, what you are doing.

Our minds are generally lazy and like to get rid of problems as quickly as possible, so they surround first ideas with a lot of positive chemicals to make us “fall in love” with them. Do not fall in love with your first idea.

That’s why you start where you are. Not where you wish you were. Not where you hope you are. Not where you think you should be. But right where you are.

As a life designer, you need to embrace two philosophies: 1. You choose better when you have lots of good ideas to choose from. 2. You never choose your first solution to any problem.

A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. You get out of it more than you put in. There is a lot more than “lather, rinse, repeat” in a well-designed life.

You can’t change employers’ perceptions. Instead of changing how they think, how about working on changing how you appear to them?

Dysfunctional Belief: To be happy, I have to make the right choice. Reframe: There is no right choice—only good choosing.

Dysfunctional Belief: I should already know where I’m going. Reframe: You can’t know where you are going until you know where you are.

Many people operate under the dysfunctional belief that they just need to find out what they are passionate about. Once they know their passion, everything else will somehow magically fall into place. We hate this idea for one very good reason: most people don’t know their passion.

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.

It's worth emphasizing that failures and hardships are a part of every life, even the well-designed ones.

We interrogate the world by making.

We are always growing from the present into the future, and therefore always changing. With each change comes a new design. Life is not an outcome; it’s more like a dance.

These are all gravity problems—meaning they are not real problems. Why? Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Let’s repeat that. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved. Here

In fact, in the United States, only 27 percent of college grads end up in a career related to their majors.

It’s unlikely that health, work, play, and love will divide neatly into four equal parts. But when life is really out of balance, there can be a problem.

We believe that people actually need to take time to develop a passion. And the research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery—not before. To put it more succinctly: passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause.

Decision making is stressful, so the best time to prepare for good choosing is when there’s no choice at stake. That’s when you can invest in your emotional intelligence and spiritual maturity so that those muscles are strong and trained when it’s decision or game time. The best time to get ready for step three is months or years before the choosing. That means the best time is right now—today is the best day to start making that investment.

We also tend to get mired in what we call gravity problems. “I’ve got this big problem and I don’t know what to do about it.” “Oh, wow, Jane, what’s the problem?” “It’s gravity.” “Gravity?” “Yeah—it’s making me crazy! I’m feeling heavier and heavier. I can’t get my bike up hills easily. It never leaves me. I don’t know what to do about it. Can you help me?” This

When you finally get down to making a choice from your narrowed-down list of alternatives, and you’ve cognitively evaluated the issues, and emotionally and meditatively contemplated the alternatives, it may be time to grok it. To grok a choice, you don’t think about it—you become it. Let’s say you’ve got three alternatives. Pick any one of them and stop thinking about it. Choose to think for the next one to three days that you are the person who has made the decision to pick Alternative A.

That’s the problem with letting go—it’s more of an inaction than an action, and your brain just hates that, the same way nature abhors a vacuum. So the key to letting go is to move on and grab something else. Put your attention on something—not off something.

The key is to reframe your idea of options by realizing that if you have too many options, you actually have none at all. If

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 going in the right direction.

Dysfunctional Belief: You should focus on your need to find a job. Reframe: You should focus on the hiring manager’s need to find the right person.

Dysfunctional Belief: I’m stuck. Reframe: I’m never stuck, because I can always generate a lot of ideas.

Dysfunctional Belief: Work is not supposed to be enjoyable; that’s why they call it work. Reframe: Enjoyment is a guide to finding the right work for you.

Wayfinding is the ancient art of figuring out where you are going when you don’t actually know your destination.

If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.

It’s not hard to imagine that if we added up all the hours spent trying to figure out life, for some of us they would outweigh the hours spent actually living life. Really. Living. Life. We

Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Let’s repeat that. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.

A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. You get out of it more than you put in. There is a lot more than “lather, rinse, repeat” in a well-designed life. How

A Workview should address the critical issues related to what work is and what it means to you. It is not just a list of what you want from or out of work, but a general statement of your view of work. It’s your definition for what good work deserves to be. A Workview may address such questions as: • 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?

We mostly use cognitive knowing—all that good, objective, organized, informational kind of knowing—the sort of knowing that gets you A’s in school. But we also have other ways of knowing, including the affective forms of intuitive, spiritual, and emotional knowing. Add to those both social knowing (with others) and kinesthetic knowing (in our bodies).

The key to step three is to make discerning decisions by applying more than one way of knowing, and in particular not applying just cognitive judgment by itself, which is informed but not reliable on its own. We aren’t suggesting making only emotional decisions, either. We all have examples of emotions getting people in trouble (though usually those are impulse emotions, and that’s a very different thing), so we’re not saying to swap your brain for your heart or your gut. We’re inviting you to integrate all your decision-making faculties, and to be sure you make space so your emotional and intuitive ways of knowing can surface in the process. In other words, don’t forget to listen to your knee or your gut or your heart, too.

Dysfunctional Belief: I am looking for a job. Reframe: I am pursuing a number of offers.

A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise.

Most of us have to make some trade-offs and compromises along the way, including some we may not like. If your Lifeview is that art is the only thing worth pursuing, and your Workview tells you that it’s critical to make enough money so your kids have everything they need, you are going to make a compromise in your Lifeview while your children are dependent and at home. But that will be okay, because it’s a conscious decision, which allows you to stay “on course” and coherent. Living coherently doesn’t mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It simply means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way. When you have a good compass guiding you, you have the power to cut these kinds of deals with yourself. If you can see the connections between who you are, what you believe, and what you are doing, you will know when you are on course, when there is tension, when there might need to be some careful compromises, and when you are in need of a major course correction. Our experience with our students has shown that the ability to connect these three dots increases your sense of self, and that helps you create more meaning in your life and have greater satisfaction.

It turns out that the part of the brain that is working to help us make our best choices is in the basal ganglia. It's part of the ancient base brain, and as such does not have connections to our verbal centers, so it does not communicate in words. It communicates in feelings and via connections to the intestines - those good old gut feelings.

The only response to a gravity problem is acceptance. And this is where all good designers begin. This is the “You Are Here” or “Accept” phase of design thinking. Acceptance. That’s why you start where you are. Not where you wish you were. Not where you hope you are. Not where you think you should be. But right where you are.

You have to make enough money to pay the bills and have the things you need,” says Tim. In his case, this means supporting his family, making sure his kids have access to a great education, and having a nice house in Berkeley. “After that, what’s the point? I’d rather have more fun and more friends. Money, promotions, and more responsibility do not motivate me. The point of having a good life is to be happy, not to work.

At the end of our four-step process, the goal is to say something like “We had 141 ideas, we grouped those into six categories, and, based on our focal question, we selected eight killer ideas to prototype; then we prioritized the list, and our first prototype is …

We like to use colored dots to cast votes, and we also like to use categories such as: • Most exciting • The one we wish we could do if money were no object • The dark horse—probably won’t work, but if it did … • Most likely to lead to a great life • If we could ignore the laws of physics …

answer. Donald’s dysfunctional belief was related to Janine’s, but he’d held on to it for much longer—a life of responsible and successful work should make him happy. It should be enough? But Donald had another dysfunctional belief: that he couldn’t stop doing what he’d always done. If only the guy in the mirror could have told him that he was not alone, and he did not have to do what he had always done. In the United States alone, more than thirty-one million people between ages forty-four and seventy want what is often called an “encore” career—work that combines personal meaning, continued income, and social impact. Some of those thirty-one million have found their encore careers, and many others have no idea where to begin, and fear it’s too late in life to make a big change. Dysfunctional Belief: It’s too late. Reframe: It’s never too late to design a life you love. Three people. Three big problems. Designers Love Problems Look around you. Look at your office or home, the chair you are sitting on, the tablet or smartphone you may be holding. Everything that surrounds us was designed by someone. And every design started with a problem. The problem of not being able to listen to a lot of music without carrying around a suitcase of CDs is the reason why you can listen to three thousand songs on a one-inch square object clipped to your shirt. It’s only because of a problem that your phone fits perfectly in the palm of your hand, or that your laptop gets five hours of battery life, or that your alarm clock plays the sound of chirping birds. Now, the annoying sound of an alarm clock may not seem like a big problem in the grand scheme of things, but it was problem

If you’re like most of us, then the reason your choosing process is stuck isn’t about your knowledge—it’s about the length of your list and your relationship with all those options. We can most easily make this point clear by looking at how people buy jam.

One way is to do some research and find out how long the job has been posted. In a good labor market, a job posting should never be open for more than four weeks (six at the max).

Guess what the first consideration was of the graduating class of 2014 when looking for a job.1 Nature of the work. Salary and the friendliness of co-workers come in second and third, to complete this completely dysfunctional job-seeker trifecta. The problem with this scenario is that there is no way to know the real “nature of the work” before you have gotten very close to actually getting the job. It’s impossible. Since so many job descriptions are dysfunctional and inaccurate, most people rule out a job as not being “right” for them before they’ve even applied (and before they actually know what they’re rejecting). It’s a nasty chicken-and-egg problem that can severely shrink your potential opportunities. That’s why the most important reframe when you are designing your career is this: you are never looking for a job, you are looking for an offer.

Aesthetics involves human emotion—and we’ve discovered that when emotions are involved, design thinking has proved to be the best problem-solving tool.

That may be true, but it’s not the point. Designers learn to have lots of wild ideas because they know that the number one enemy of creativity is judgment. Our brains are so tightly wired to be critical, find problems, and leap to judgment that it’s a wonder any ideas ever make it out! We have to defer judgment and silence the inner critic if we want to get all our ideas out. If we don’t, we may have a few good ideas, but the majority will have been lost—silently imprisoned behind the wall of judgment our prefrontal cortex has erected to safeguard us from making mistakes or looking foolish. Now, we love the prefrontal cortex and wouldn’t be caught in public without it, but we don’t want it taking our ideas hostage prematurely. If we can get out into the wild idea space, then we know we’ve overcome premature judgment. The crazy ideas may not be the ones we pick (and rarely are, actually), but often after having the crazy ideas, we have moved to a new creative space, and we can see new and innovative possibilities that can work. So let’s bring on the crazy.

Many people think that designers are lone geniuses, working in solitude and waiting for a flash of inspiration to show them the solution to their design problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. There may be some problems, such as the design of a stool or a new set of children’s blocks, that are simple enough to be tackled by an individual, but in today’s highly technical world, almost every problem requires a design team. Design thinking takes this idea even further and suggests that the best results come from radical collaboration. Radical collaboration works on the principle that people with very different backgrounds will bring their idiosyncratic technical and human experiences to the team. This increases the chance that the team will have empathy for those who will use what they are designing, and that the collision of different backgrounds will generate truly unique solutions. This is proved over and over again in d.school classes at Stanford, where graduate students create teams of business, law, engineering, education, and medical students that come up with breakthrough innovations all the time. The glue that holds these teams together is design thinking, the human-centered approach to design that takes advantage of their different backgrounds to spur collaboration and creativity. Typically, none of the students have any design background when they enroll in our classes, and all of the teams struggle at first to be productive. They have to learn the mind-sets of a designer—especially radical collaboration and being mindful of process. But once that happens, they discover that their abilities as a team far exceed what any individual can do, and their creative confidence explodes.

The reframe for the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is this: “Who or what do you want to grow into?” Life is all about growth and change. It’s not static. It’s not about some destination. It’s not about answering the question once and for all and then it’s all done. Nobody really knows what he or she wants to be.

Everything that makes our daily living easier, more productive, more enjoyable, and more pleasurable was created because of a problem, and because some designer or team of designers somewhere out there in the world sought to solve that problem.

Work. By “work” we mean your participation in the great ongoing human adventure on the planet. You may or may not be getting paid for it, but this is the stuff you “do.” Assuming you’re not financially independent, you usually are getting paid for at least a portion of your “work.” Don’t for a minute reduce work only to that which you get paid for. Most people have more than one form of work at a time.

In truth, most people are passionate about many different things, and the only way to know what they want to do is to prototype some potential lives, try them out, and see what really resonates with them.

Our minds are generally lazy and like to get rid of problems as quickly as possible, so they surround first ideas with a lot of positive chemicals to make us “fall in love” with them. Do not fall in love with your first idea. This relationship almost never works out. Most often, our first solutions are pretty average and not very creative. Humans have a tendency to suggest the obvious first. Learning to use great ideation tools helps you overcome this bias toward the obvious and helps you regain a sense of creative confidence.

Why work? • What’s work for? • What does work mean? • How does it relate to the individual, others, society?

Designers don’t agonize. They don’t dream about what could have been. They don’t spin their wheels. And they don’t waste their futures by hoping for a better past. Life designers see the adventure in whatever life they are currently building and living into.

the kind of people he’d want to work with would view his post-cancer ski adventure as a demonstration of boldness rather than irresponsibility. As for how other people would see it—well, that was their problem.

Our problems become our story, and we can all get stuck in our stories. Deciding

Designers don’t agonize. They don’t dream about what could have been. They don’t spin their wheels. And they don’t waste their futures by hoping for a better past. Life designers see the adventure in whatever life they are currently building and living into. This is how you choose happiness.

get out of the box of being realistic and venture into the wide world of “what I might want.

there are lots of powerful voices in the world, and lots of powerful voices in our heads, all telling us what to do or who to be. And because there are many models for how life is supposed to be lived, we all run the risk, like Parker, of accidentally using someone else’s compass and living someone else’s life.

The truth is that all of us have more than one life in us. When we ask our students, “How many lifetimes’ worth of living are there in you?,” the average answer is 3.4. And if you accept this idea—that there are multiple great designs for your life, though you’ll still only get to live one—it is rather liberating.

That’s why you start where you are. Not where you wish you were. Not where you hope you are. Not where you think you should be. But right where you are. The

When designing your life, you start with who you are (chapters 1, 2, and 3). Then you have lots of ideas (rather than wait and wait to have the idea of the century) and you try things out by doing them (chapters 4, 5, and 6), and then you make the best choice you can (chapter 8). As you do all this, including making choices that set you on one path for a number of years, you grow various aspects of your personality and identity that are nurtured and called upon by those experiences—you become more yourself. In this way, you energize a very productive cycle of growth, naturally evolving from being, to doing, to becoming. Then it all repeats, as the more-like-you version of you (your new being) takes the next step of doing, and so it goes.

Living coherently doesn't mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It simply means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way. When you have a good compass guiding you, you have the power to cut these kinds of deal with yourself.

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.

When was their daughter going to turn magically into a geologist?

do we really think it is a good idea to let our earnest but misguided seventeen-year-old self determine where we work for the rest of our lives? And what about now? How often do we go with our first idea and think we know answers to questions we’ve never really investigated? How often do we check in with ourselves to see if we are really working on the right problem?

Wayfinding is the ancient art of figuring out where you are going when you don’t actually know your destination. For wayfinding, you need a compass and you need a direction. Not a map—a direction.

Love and health are never done. We are only done designing our lives when we die. Until

Design doesn’t just work for creating cool stuff like computers and Ferraris; it works in creating a cool life. You can use design thinking to create a life that is meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling. It doesn’t matter who you are or were, what you do or did for a living, how young or how old you are—you can use the same thinking that created the most amazing technology, products, and spaces to design your career and your life.

A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. You get out of it more than you put in.

The reframe for the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is this: “Who or what do you want to grow into?” Life is all about growth and change. It’s not static. It’s not about some destination. It’s not about answering the question once and for all and then it’s all done.

As you begin to think like a designer, remember one important thing: it’s impossible to predict the future. And the corollary to that thought is: once you design something, it changes the future that is possible.

When you understand who you are, design your life, and then go live your life, you cannot fail. It does not mean that you won’t stumble or that a particular prototype will always work as expected. But failure immunity comes from knowing that a prototype that did not work still leaves you with valuable information about the state of the world here—at your new starting point.

Who doesn’t want to be immune to failure? Unfortunately, there’s no vaccine, and it’s impossible never to fail.

the research shows that, for most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery—not before. To

These are all gravity problems—meaning they are not real problems. Why? Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Let’s repeat that. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.

The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at. We

When an activity is done to win, to advance, to achieve—even if it’s “fun” to do so—it’s not play. It may be a wonderful thing, but it’s still not play. The question here is what brings you joy purely in the doing.

Happiness is letting go of what you don’t need.

America, two-thirds of workers are unhappy with their jobs. And 15 percent actually hate their work.

If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved. Here’s a little tidbit that is going to save you a lot of time—months, years, decades even. It has to do with reality. People fight reality. They fight it tooth and nail, with everything they’ve got. And anytime you are arguing or fighting with reality, reality will win. You can’t outsmart it. You can’t trick it. You can’t bend it to your will. Not now. Not ever.

Work is fun when you are actually leaning into your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing.

The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at.

A well-designed life is a marvelous portfolio of experiences, of adventures, of failures that taught you important lessons, of hardships that made you stronger and helped you know yourself better, and of achievements and satisfactions.

There are multiple great lives (and plans) within me, and I get to choose which one to build my way forward to next.

In fact, most minds can choose effectively between only three to five options. If we’re faced with more than that, our ability to make a choice begins to wane—many more than that and our ability to choose completely freezes. It’s just the way our brains are wired. We’re attracted to having alternatives, and our modern culture almost idolizes options for their own sake. Get lots of options! Keep your options open! Don’t get locked in! We

Quantity has a quality all its own. In life design, more is better, because more ideas equal access to better ideas, and better ideas lead to a better design. Expanding

When we make a decision in the face of many options, or just while perceiving that there are lots of other options that we don’t even know about, we are less happy with our choice. The problem here is not just the options we had and didn’t pursue (the options we “keep open”)—it’s that mountain of options we never even had time to check out. The perception that there are gazillions of possibilities that may have been great but that we never got to is a powerful force against being at peace with our choice making; even if we don’t know what it was, there must have been a better option out there, and we missed it. In the Internet-powered, globalized world, there are always a gazillion options, so we are now more capable of being unhappy with our choices than any generation in history has been.

The conclusion is that if your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and conceive more novel innovations. Designers have known this all along—you don’t want to start with just one idea, or you’re likely to get stuck with it.

Most people fail not for lack of talent but for lack of imagination. You can get a lot of this information by sitting down with someone and getting his or her story. That

哲學家詹姆斯·卡斯（James Carse）寫過一本有趣的書，叫《有限與無限的遊戲》（Finite and Infinite Game）。[18]卡斯說，我們生命中做的每一件事，幾乎都是有限或無限的遊戲。如果是有限的遊戲，我們會照規則走，以求獲勝。如果是無限的遊戲，我們會為了享受一直玩下去的樂趣，而實驗規則。化學拿A是有限的遊戲。學習世界由什麼組成、自己要如何在世上安身立命，則是無限的遊戲。指導兒子贏得拼字比賽是有限的遊戲。讓兒子相信你無條件愛他，則是無限的遊戲。生命同時充滿有限與無限的遊戲。（「遊戲」二字，不帶有「不重要」或「幼稚」的意涵。這裡所說的「遊戲」，只是我們如何在世上採取行動，以及我們多重視自己的行動。）每個人隨時隨地都在玩有限和無限的遊戲，沒有哪種遊戲比較好。

A well-designed life is a life that makes sense. It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together. When you have a well-designed life and someone asks you, “How’s it going?,” you have an answer. You can tell that person that your life is going well, and you can tell how and why. A well-designed life is a marvelous portfolio of experiences, of adventures, of failures that taught you important lessons, of hardships that made you stronger and helped you know yourself better, and of achievements and satisfactions. It’s worth emphasizing that failures and hardships are a part of every life, even the well-designed ones.

Dysfunctional Belief: Your degree determines your career.

Reframe: Three-quarters of all college grads don’t end up working in a career related to their majors.