#1 New York Times Bestseller 

At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage 

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.

Includes a bonus PDF of worksheets, journal exercises, illustrations, and more

“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

From the authors of the #1 New York Times best seller Designing Your Life (“Life has questions. They have answers” —The NYT)–a job-changing, outlook-changing, life-changing book that shows us how to transform our work lives and create a dream job that is meaningful without necessarily changing the job we have.

Dysfunctional Belief: I’m stuck in a lousy situation (and there’s nothing I can do about it).
Reframe: I’m stuck in a lousy situation (and I’m finding the problems and the solutions).
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans successfully taught graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University and readers of their best-selling book, Designing Your Life (“The prototype for a happy life.” –Brian Lehrer, NPR), that designers don’t analyze, worry, think, complain their way forward; they build their way forward.
     In Designing Your Work Life, Burnett and Evans show us how design thinking can transform our present job and our experience of work in general by utilizing the designer mindsets: Curiosity. Reframing. Radical collaboration. Awareness. Bias to action. Storytelling.
Dysfunctional Belief: Good enough isn’t good enough.
Reframe: Good enough is GREAT–for now.
     Burnett and Evans show us how, with tools, tips, and ideas, to enjoy what we have and to live in a state of “good enough, for now,” one of the strongest, most effective reframes there is, and how this idea, once understood and accepted, can make new possibilities available, giving us the energy to enjoy the present moment and allowing us to begin to prototype possible futures.
     And if we want to quit? Burnett and Evans show us how to use the job we have to get the job we want (in another company), and show us as well, the art and science of quitting (leave the campsite better than we found it), using the power of the quit design to reframe how we finish our current job and get a better one.
     They write, as well, about how the work world is changing as the automation of work increases (hello Alexa, artificial intelligence, drones, and robots); how thinking like a designer can make us flexible, and ready to adapt to change . . .

This audiobook includes a bonus PDF of charts and worksheets.