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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

We interrogate the world by making.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

we suggest you go out and get a design team right off the bat—a group of people who will read the book with you and do the exercises alongside you, a collaborative team in which you support one another in your pursuit of a well-designed life.

Start small, set the bar low, and try something.

Activities. What were you actually doing? Was this a structured or an unstructured activity? Did you have a specific role to play (team leader) or were you just a participant (at the meeting)? Environments. Our environment has a profound effect on our emotional state. You feel one way at a football stadium, another in a cathedral. Notice where you were when you were involved in the activity. What kind of a place was it, and how did it make you feel? Interactions. What were you interacting with—people or machines? Was it a new kind of interaction or one you are familiar with? Was it formal or informal? Objects. Were you interacting with any objects or devices—iPads or smartphones, hockey sticks or sailboats? What were the objects that created or supported your feeling engaged? Users. Who else was there, and what role did they play in making it either a positive or a negative experience?

Anytime you’re changing your situation, or pursuing a new thing, or wondering what you’re doing at a particular job—stop. Before you start, it’s a good idea to check your compass and orient yourself.

People in flow report the experience as having these sorts of attributes: • Experiencing complete involvement in the activity. • Feeling a sense of ecstasy or euphoria. • Having great inner clarity—knowing just what to do and how to do it. • Being totally calm and at peace. • Feeling as if time were standing still—or disappearing in an instant.

Similarly, the HWPL dashboard will tell you something about the four things that provide energy and focus for your journey and keep your life running smoothly.

All through the process of life design, we will be right here with you. To guide you. To challenge you. We’re going to give you the ideas and tools you need for designing your way through life. We’re going to help you find your next job. Your next career. Your next big thing. We’re going to help you design your life. A life that you love.

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.

prototype is not a thought experiment; it must involve a physical experience in the world.

Yet most jobs are built around tasks to get done and transactions to manage, and most managers aren’t comfortable talking about meaning and impact. When you become the designer of your work life, you can help your boss and your company make your job the job you want.

The mind-sets are: curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, radical collaboration, and—the bonus—storytelling.

Renewing and Repairing things • Sustaining and Supporting things • Creating New-New things

Designers love to ideate broadly and wildly. They love the crazy ideas as much as or more than the sensible ones. Why? Most people think that designers are just “out there” and prefer crazy stuff because they’re edgy, avant-garde, dark-sunglass-wearing kinds of people (think berets, cool shoes, and the hippest restaurants). 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.

You choose better when you have lots of good ideas to choose from. 2. You never choose your first solution to any problem.

Designing your life is actually what life is, because life is a process, not an outcome.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Deciding which problems to work on may be one of the most important decisions you make, because people can lose years (or a lifetime) working on the wrong problem.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

• Possible considerations ° Geography—where will you live? ° What experience/learning will you gain? ° What are the impacts/results of choosing this alternative? ° What will life look like? What particular role, industry, or company do you see yourself in? • Other ideas ° Do keep in mind things other than career and money. Even though those things are important, if not central, to the decisive direction of your next few years, there are other critical elements that you want to pay attention to. ° Any of the considerations listed above can be a springboard for forming your alternative lives for the next five years. If you find yourself stuck, try making a mind map out of any of the design considerations listed above. Don’t overthink this exercise, and don’t skip it.

Odyssey Plan 1. Create three alternative five-year plans, using the worksheet provided. 2. Give each alternative a descriptive six-word title, and write down three questions that arise out of each version of you. 3. Complete each gauge on the dashboard—ranking each alternative for resources, likability, confidence, and coherence. 4. Present your plan to another person, a group, or your Life Design Team. Note how each alternative energizes you.

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…

Dysfunctional Belief: Networking is just hustling people—it’s slimy. Reframe: Networking is just asking for directions.

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

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

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.

One of the best things about designers is that they love to explore crazy ideas. They embrace crazy ideas because they know the biggest creativity destroyer is judgment. If we want to create all possible ideas needed in our lives, we must first silence the critical voice in our head. Making mistakes is totally normal and expected. It is natural. And even though that crazy idea may not be what we end up with, it may help us create other creative possibilities. PART 7: WHAT IS MIND MAPPING?

Happiness is love. Full stop.

The idea is to try to become as precise as possible; the clearer you are on what is and isn’t working for you, the better you can set your wayfinding direction. For instance…What you initially logged as “Staff Mtg—Enjoyed it for once today!” might, after you’ve looked at it again, be more accurately restated as “Staff Mtg—Felt great when I rephrased what Jon said and everyone went ‘Ooooh—exactly!’ ” This more precise version tells a much more useful story about what specific activity or behavior engages you. And it opens the door to developing even greater self-awareness. When your entries have that kind of detail in them, your reflections can be more insightful. When journaling your reflection on the log entry about that staff meeting, you might ask yourself, “Was I more engaged by artfully rephrasing Jon’s comment (getting the articulation dialed in just right) or by facilitating consensus among the staff (being the guy who made the group’s ‘Now we get it!’ unifying moment happen)?” If you conclude that artful articulation was the real sweet spot of that staff meeting moment for you, that important insight can help you be on the lookout for content-creation opportunities over group facilitation opportunities. Take this sort of observation and reflection as far as you find helpful (and no further—you don’t want to get stuck in your journal).

She had spent a long time trying to do the right thing instead of doing what was right for Sharon.

Dysfunctional Belief: I have to find the one right idea. Reframe: I need a lot of ideas so that I can explore any number of possibilities for my future.

Look, it’s simple. You can’t know what you want until you know what you might want, so you are going to have to generate a lot of ideas and possibilities. Accept the problem. Get stuck. Get over it, and ideate, ideate, ideate!

Making secondary connections and creating concepts (mashing it all up)

Step two is making the mind map. For this, you take the original idea and write down five or six things related to that idea. Be rigorous in writing down the first words that come to mind. Now repeat this process with the words in the second ring. Draw three or four lines from each word, and free-associate new words related to these prompts. The words that come up for you do not need to be associated to the words or question in the center, only the word in the second ring. Repeat this process until you have at least three or four rings of word associations.

Kelley, the founder of the d.school, says you often have to go through the wild ideas to get to the actionable good ideas. So don’t be afraid to come up with crazy stuff. It may be the jumping-off point for something really practical and really new. Also, you should create your mind map on a big piece of paper. You are looking for lots of ideas—so make your map as graphic and as big as possible. Go out and get a giant piece of butcher paper or a large white board, and have big ideas.

The big move here is to get rid of the image of the perfect garage and reimagine a different result or steps along the way. If Dave keeps the picture of his old, perfect garage (the solution) pasted on that refrigerator door in his mind, he’s never going to get anywhere, because it’s too hard. Too hard doesn’t work. This isn’t a gravity problem—it’s not impossible. It’s just that Dave’s stuck because he’s anchored himself to a solution that can’t work.

Melanie believed that her problem was getting fifteen million dollars to fund her social innovation institute. But that wasn’t her problem; that was just her first idea of a solution to her problem, and she got so anchored to that idea that she was mired in stuckness and failure. Oh, and did we mention that she was getting depressed by all this rejection, and that her teaching was suffering from the fund-raising distraction, and that her colleagues, sick of the Melanie money lament, had begun avoiding her? You see, when you anchor yourself to a bad solution, it just gets worse and worse with time.

Be curious. Get curious, about people, work, and the world, because a designer always starts with a beginner’s mind and asks “Why?” Curiosity is your natural human state, and it is the source of the energy you need to get started and get out and meet people who are interesting. Curiosity is the most important mind-set of a designer, because it drives inquiry and action and is the start of almost all design activities. Leave your rational skeptic at home (she’ll come in handy later when you need to evaluate all of your wonderful options) and get curious. It is a very interesting world out there! And when you’re sincerely interested in people and things (i.e., curious), people are happy to engage with you. Remember—interested is interesting.

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.

Dysfunctional Belief: If you are successful, you will be happy. Reframe: True happiness comes from designing a life that works for you.

Janine is also not alone. In America, two-thirds of workers are unhappy with their jobs. And 15 percent actually hate their work.