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1-Page Summary of Designing Your Life

Overview

Designing Your Life is a self-help guide that teaches people how to improve their lives and careers by thinking like designers. The book aims to spread the lessons taught in Stanford University’s “Designing Your Life” course, which helps students design their postgraduate lives.

Designers are different from most people. They seek out problems, and they don’t give up when things go wrong. If something doesn’t work, they’ll try to fix it until it does work. This way of thinking can be applied to other parts of life in order to make a person happier and more fulfilled.

The most important part of thinking like a designer is to learn how to reframe questions. Designers will take seemingly impossible questions and find new ways to look at them that might open up multiple solutions or answers. Then, they’ll build prototypes and test their theories about what works best. By using this method in your own life, you can avoid getting stuck on a wrong answer or making choices that aren’t fully considered and tested for success.

Key Takeaways

The heart of designing your life is the ability to reframe questions. To design a life, you must have an open-minded approach and not be afraid to look at things differently. Designing a life can never really be done because it’s always evolving and changing. To design your own life, you must adopt five mindsets including being patient with yourself when trying out new ideas or experiences and appreciating all that comes along with everyday living. People don’t need to know exactly what their passion is in order to make sure they’re doing something they love for work every day. You should develop an internal compass that accounts for both your Workview (what you like about the job) and Lifeview (what makes up a fulfilling lifestyle). Many people take the faulty approach of searching for their dream job online instead of looking within themselves first before making any decisions on where they want their career path to go next.

Designers learn to reframe their problems by becoming immune to failure.

Key Takeaway 1: The heart of a designer’s work is the ability to reframe questions.

Most people are held back by questions that lead to dysfunctional beliefs. These misconceptions stop people from finding the best solutions to problems. Designers can reframe these questions so they can begin brainstorming and prototyping potential solutions in order to better understand the problem at hand.

In September 2016, New York Times reporter Steven Kurutz attended a class at Stanford University called “Designing Your Life”. He watched as an art history major confronted her dysfunctional belief that she didn’t know what to do with her life. With the help of her professors, she reframed this belief to realize that math is where she was most engaged and not in art history.

Key Takeaway 2: Designers are trained to have an open-minded approach to problems.

Designers know that they must identify problems in order to come up with innovative solutions. Likewise, people should actively seek out the problems in their lives so that they can solve them and be happy. If people are able to do this, then they will not become overwhelmed by life’s challenges.

Problems are essential to life. Many people get stuck on the wrong problems, but there can be no correct answer if a person is looking at the wrong question.

There are two kinds of problems, which depend on whether or not there is a solution. The first kind—gravity problems—do not have solutions, no matter what you do. The second kind—anchor problems—have solutions; they only seem impossible because someone has been stuck on them for too long.