Print List Price:	$28.00
Kindle Price:	$16.99 Save $11.01 (39%)
Sold by:	Random House LLC Price set by seller.

Add Audible narration to your purchase for just $7.99

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

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

Follow the Author

Bill Burnett

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life Kindle Edition

by Bill Burnett (Author), Dave Evans (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 4,908 ratings

in Job Hunting

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$16.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover, Illustrated

"Please retry"

$18.47

$11.17

$3.86

Audio CD, Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$19.07

—

$18.56

Kindle
$16.99 Read with Our Free App
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your Audible trial
Hardcover
$18.47

119 Used from $3.86 68 New from $11.17 1 Collectible from $11.21
Audio CD
$19.07

3 Used from $18.56

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times

Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve.

In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

Print length

269 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Knopf
Publication date

September 20, 2016
File size

10914 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download

Available on these devices

Bill Burnett
105
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.99
Jenny Blake
586
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99
Steve Dalton
426
Kindle Edition
in Job Interviewing
1 offer from $7.99
Dr. Dawn Graham
221
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $13.49
Martin Yate
180
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $13.99
Scott Anthony Barlow
35
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99

Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

The five mind-sets you are going to learn in order to design your life are curiosity, bias to action, reframing, awareness, and radical collaboration.
Highlighted by 12,344 Kindle readers
Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward.
Highlighted by 10,032 Kindle readers
Work is fun when you are actually leaning into your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing.
Highlighted by 9,675 Kindle readers
The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at.
Highlighted by 8,869 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Life has questions. They have answers…Learn how to find a fulfilling career…learn how to better navigate life’s big moment decisions and kill your ‘wicked problems dead.”
—The New York Times

“The prototype for a happy life…Burnett and Evans show how to apply Stanford’s famous design principles to finding your place in the world, as a recent graduate or mid-career.”
—NPR’s Brian Lehrer

“Designing Your Life walks readers through the process of building a satisfying, meaningful life by approaching the challenge the way a designer would. Experimentation. Wayfinding. Prototyping. Constant iteration. You should read the book. Everyone else will.”
—Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive

“This [is] the career book of the next decade and . . . the go-to book that is read as a rite of passage whenever someone is ready to create a life they love.”
—David Kelley, Founder of IDEO

“An empowering book based on their popular class of the same name at Stanford University . . . Perhaps the book’s most important lesson is that the only failure is settling for a life that makes one unhappy. With useful fact-finding exercises, an empathetic tone, and sensible advice, this book will easily earn a place among career-finding classics.”
—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

BILL BURNETT is the executive director of the Design Program at Stanford.

DAVE EVANS is an adjunct lecturer in the Product Design Program at Stanford, a management consultant, and a co-founder of Electronic Arts

www.designingyour.life --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Designers imagine things that don’t yet exist, and then they build them, and then the world changes. You can do this in your own life. 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. If your life is pretty perfect as is, life design can still help you make it an even better version of the life you currently love living.

When you think like a designer, when you are willing to ask the questions, 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. That is, if you like sparkles. It’s your design, after all.

What Do We Know?

In Stanford’s Design Program, we have taught more than a thousand students design thinking and how to design their lives. And we’ll let you in on a secret—no one has ever failed our class. In fact, it’s impossible to flunk. We have more than sixty years of combined teaching experience, and we have taught this approach to high school students, college students, graduate students, Ph.D. students, twenty-somethings, mid-career executives, and retirees wanting an “encore” career.

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. We’ve had students come back to us over the years since they’ve graduated, and they’ve told us how the tools, ideas, and mind-sets that we teach have made a difference for them. We’re quite hopeful—and, frankly, pretty confident— that these ideas can make a difference for you, too.

But don’t take our word for it. Stanford is a very rigorous place. Though anecdotes are nice, they don’t count for much in academia. To speak authoritatively, you need data. Our class is one of the few design thinking classes that have been scientifically studied and have proved to make a difference for students on a number of important measures. Two doctoral students did their dissertations on the course, and what they found was pretty exciting.2 They found that those who took our class were better able to conceive of and pursue a career they really wanted; they had fewer dysfunctional beliefs (those pesky ideas that hold you back and that just aren’t true) and an increased ability to generate new ideas for their life design (increasing their ideation capability). All of these measures were “statistically significant,” which, in nongeek-speak, means that the ideas and exercises we lay out in our course and are going to walk you through in this book have been proven effective; they can help you to figure out what you want and show you how to get it.

But let’s be perfectly clear right from the start. Science or no science, this is all highly personal stuff. We can give you some tools, some ideas, some exercises, but we can’t figure it all out for you. We can’t give you your insights, change your perspective, and provide you with nonstop “aha” moments, all in ten easy steps. What we can tell you is that if you actually use the tools and do the life design exercises, you will generate the insights you need to have. Because here’s the big truth: there are many versions of you, and they are all “right.” And life design will help you live into whatever version of you is now playing at the Cineplex. Remember, there are no wrong answers, and we’re not grading you. We will suggest you do some exercises in this book, but there are no answers in the back to tell you how you did. We’ve added a recap of the exercises at the end of each chapter that has them—a Try Stuff box—because we suggest that you, well, try stuff. That’s what designers do. We’re not measuring you against anyone, and you shouldn’t measure yourself against anyone, either. We’re here to co-create with you. Think of us as part of your own personal design team.

In fact, 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. We’ll talk about this more later in the book, and by all means you should feel free to read it on your own first. 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. Hundreds of successful student projects and innovative companies, such as D-Rev and Embrace,3 have come from this process, and are proof that collaboration is the way design gets done today.

So be a genius at your life design; just don’t think you have to be one of those lone geniuses.

Think Like a Designer

Before you can do life design, you need to learn to think like a designer. We’ll explain a few simple ways to do this, but first you need to understand one really big point: Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward. What does that mean? It means you are not just going to be dreaming up a lot of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world—or the real you. You are going to build things (we call them prototypes), try stuff, and have a lot of fun in the process.

Want a career change? This book will help you make that change, but not by sitting around trying to decide what that change is going to be. We’re going to help you think like a designer and build your future, prototype by prototype. We’re going to help you approach your own life design challenges with the same kind of curiosity and the same kind of creativity that resulted in the invention of the printing press, the lightbulb, and the Internet.

Our focus is mainly on jobs and careers, because, let’s face it, we spend most of the hours of our days, and the days of our lives, at work. Work can be a daily source of enormous joy and meaning, or it can be an endless grind and waste of hours spent trying to white-knuckle our way through the misery of it all until the weekend comes. A well-designed life is not a life of drudgery. You weren’t put on this earth to work eight hours a day at a job you hate until the time comes to die.

That may sound a bit melodramatic, but many people tell us that this is a good description of their lives. And even those who are lucky enough to find a career they love often find that they are frustrated and have a hard time designing a life that is balanced. It’s time to start thinking differently—about everything. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01BJSRSEC
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; 1st edition (September 20, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 20, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 10914 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 269 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ B0B621VKK3

Best Sellers Rank: #15,725 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1 in Job Hunting (Kindle Store)
- #6 in Career Guides
- #10 in Job Hunting (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 4,908 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Bill Burnett

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

BILL BURNETT is a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford and currently the Executive Director of the Design Program.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

4,908 global ratings

5 star		71%
4 star		18%
3 star		8%
2 star		2%
1 star		2%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all customer images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Amazon Customer

A great book if you want to change your life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 8, 2023

Verified Purchase

A great book if you want to change your life. I work with midlife clients who wish to change their life before it is too late. This book is an excellent tool for individuals to evaluate their lives and determine what they want. I am sure the course on which the book is based is even more helpful.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Rocklyn

GREAT READ

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 25, 2023

Verified Purchase

I purchased this product from the seller on Amazon and I am thoroughly impressed.I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 30, 2023

Verified Purchase

I bought this for one of my favorite people and he loved it, I was confused about whether would he like it or not but he said he loved it made my week and I'm pleased about it

Helpful

Heather R Sparks

This book helped me changed my life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 24, 2023

Verified Purchase

Seriously, this book helped me change my life. That might sound dramatic, but it gave me the questions to ask and tools to use for an important career pivot. I'm much happier in my work and I owe it in part to the book's recommendations to ask questions, prototype life designs, and build a support system. I paired it with the workbook and loved it!

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Kamil S

Design your life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 15, 2023

Verified Purchase

Highly recommend this book for anyone. It is quite captivating and gripping .

Helpful

Parker

A practical and helpful guidebook when sorting & improving your life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 11, 2022

Verified Purchase

There's only two self-improvement books I'd recommend to anyone: "Designing Your Life" and "Eight Dates."

Designing Your Life does a fantastic job outlining a roadmap filled with practical exercises that can help you explore new avenues or dig in deeper on opportunities you've identified. It's non-judgemental in its tone, but it does require you to be honest with yourself and at times push yourself outside your comfort zone.

Just get it, start reading it, and see how you like it. Not every exercise hit perfectly for me (and some were certainly harder to do regularly than others.) But, I can promise you, you'll come out the other side having learned something about yourself.

4 months of applying the exercises in the book, I've finally finished reading it, but the real work has just begun. I've got a weekly book club set up with some friends to keep talking about the strategies and projects we're working on.

Can not recommend this book enough!

26 people found this helpful

Helpful

Safia

Glad that I read it

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 24, 2022

Verified Purchase

I appreciated some concepts presented in the book, and overall it was of value to me. For instance, I like the idea of becoming more aware of what activities engage or energize you, even if you don't plan to change your job.

The anecdotes and examples in the book were primarily oriented toward Silicon Valley, ivy league, and tech backgrounds.

I was surprised that the book almost entirely dealt with designing your career, and not with designing other aspects of your life (e.g., relationships, health, hobbies) --given the book's title and given that the authors have another book on designing your work life.

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

Stephan Sorger

Designing Your Life: Product Management for Life Design

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 22, 2018

Verified Purchase

This book is a good introduction to applying design thinking to life planning, with an emphasis on careers. The content below includes my interpretation of the book's chapters and key ideas. It is my intent that the review kindles your interest and spurs you on to buy the book.

Chapter 1. Start Where You Are
The authors advise readers to accept what you can't change, avoiding so-called "gravity problems," which, by their very nature, cannot be changed.

Chapter 2. Building a Compass
This chapter discusses one's Workview (the reason one works) and Lifeview (areas that give life meaning), and encourage readers to align the two to form a Life Compass.

Chapter 3. Wayfinding
The book defines Wayfinding as figuring out where to go when the destination is not known. The authors emphasize engagement and energy in finding one's way in work and in life.

Chapter 4. Getting Unstuck
In this chapter, the book reviews the use of Mind Maps to generate new ideas.

Chapter 5. Design Your Lives
The book encourages readers to develop (at least) 3 potential "Lives" and assess them.

Chapter 6. Prototyping
In this chapter, the authors encourage testing the potential lives through informational interviews and other techniques to try out the lives in a non-committal way.

Chapter 7. How Not to Get a Job
Chapter 8. Designing Your Dream Job
Chapters 7 and 8 were disappointing, offering obvious advice such as, "pursue as many job offers as you can," and showed little knowledge or awareness of the today's job search process.

Chapter 9. Choosing Happiness
The chapter encourages people to embracing the choices we make, rather than agonizing over them. It especially recommends paying attention to the Basal Ganglia (the ancient base brain) to monitor personal feelings toward potential choices.

Chapter 10. Failure Immunity
The authors recommend learning from one's mistakes, to become "immune" to the sadness of failure.

Chapter 11. Building a Team
Here, the authors encourage the reader to engage others toward one's life path.

Overall, I found the book interesting with useful elements.
The book would be improved by removing chapters 7 and 8, and in their place, adding more examples of people going through life designs and the challenges facing them, especially those wishing to change careers. Recommended for people interested in applying design thinking toward career development.

769 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

A Reader

For those who have never self-reflected

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 19, 2018

Verified Purchase

Overrated and disappointing. Perhaps needs something more apt for the UK but even then I’m not too sure. It’s pribably good for a teen. Well branded and great on line support. If you see someone who has NEVER self-reflected then this would be a dream so I’m perhaps my expectations were too high. So may regift it.

9 people found this helpful

sarabrandt

Große Erwartungen

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on April 1, 2019

Verified Purchase

Durch eine Youtuberin wurde ich auf das Buch aufmerksam (Cheyenne Barton), und die Leseprobe überzeugte ebenfalls. Doch im Verlauf des Lesens stellte sich heraus, dass der Titel des Buches leider recht irreführend ist. Zwischendurch ging es gut voran, und ich konnte den Übungen auch einiges abgewinnen. Aber ca. ab dem 1. Drittel des Buches ging es nicht mehr um das Leben, das designt werden sollte, sondern nur noch um die Arbeit. Das ist an sich nicht schlimm, und bestimmt wird das auch einige Leser ansprechen, die sich mit dieser Thematik auseinandersetzen wollen. Aber wenn man sich "Designing your life" als Titel vornimmt, dann sollte es auch um die verschiedenen Lebensbereiche gehen, nicht nur um einen einzigen.
Wer also auf der Suche nach Möglichkeiten ist, seine Sicht auf die Arbeit zu verändern oder allgemein eine andere Richtung sucht, die er mit seiner Arbeit einschlagen kann, ist bei diesem Buch genau richtig. Alle, die mehr als nur diesen Bereich verändern wollen, würden hier leider - wie ich- enttäuscht werden.

21 people found this helpful

Translate review to English

Gabriela

Too simplistic

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on September 22, 2020

Verified Purchase

Personally, expected more elaborated and interesting techniques. Found the book too simplistic and expected more value, that honestly, I couldn't find, but maybe someone will. Just for a person like me that thinks a lot about life and that is looking for answers in other places as well, the book can feel quite repetitive and without added value.

One person found this helpful

Franz

Lacks substance

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on January 31, 2023

Verified Purchase

This book truly lacks substance. It's that very superficial kind of self-help. I can't really fully say how I feel about it because as usual my review won't be published.

One person found this helpful

Adrian Akbari

A life chaanging book

Reviewed in the Netherlands 🇳🇱 on September 30, 2021

Verified Purchase

Having came out of a long unhappy life and therapy. I found this book. The exercises here can really make changes in your life. The way they teach you to reframe your mindset from dysfunctional beliefs to practical ones helped me a lot. I recommend this book to everyone.

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers	6pm Score deals on fashion brands	AbeBooks Books, art & collectibles	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Sell on Amazon Start a Selling Account

Amazon Business Everything For Your Business	Amazon Fresh Groceries & More Right To Your Door	AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally	Home Services Experienced Pros Happiness Guarantee	Amazon Ignite Sell your original Digital Educational Resources	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Listen to Books & Original Audio Performances	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	Box Office Mojo Find Movie Box Office Data	ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics	DPReview Digital Photography	Fabric Sewing, Quilting & Knitting

Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	IMDbPro Get Info Entertainment Professionals Need	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Photos Unlimited Photo Storage Free With Prime	Prime Video Direct Video Distribution Made Easy

Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands	Amazon Warehouse Great Deals on Quality Used Products	Whole Foods Market America’s Healthiest Grocery Store	Woot! Deals and Shenanigans	Zappos Shoes & Clothing	Ring Smart Home Security Systems

eero WiFi Stream 4K Video in Every Room	Blink Smart Security for Every Home	Neighbors App Real-Time Crime & Safety Alerts	Amazon Subscription Boxes Top subscription boxes – right to your door	PillPack Pharmacy Simplified	Amazon Renewed Like-new products you can trust

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Follow the Author

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life Kindle Edition

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Videos for this product

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

About the author

Bill Burnett

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries