Dave Evans and Bill Burnett are co-authors of the New York Times bestselling Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. You may not have heard of them, but their design work has almost certainly touched your life. You know Dave's work if you've ever used an Apple mouse or laser printer. And Bill's designs include the hinges on Apple's Powerbooks and the original Hasbro Star Wars figures.
What do these guys have to teach us about being healthy and happy?
As it turns out, plenty.
Faculty members at the famous Stanford d.school (d. is pretentious for "design"), Dave and Bill are adherents of the Design Thinking approach to life pioneered by their mentor, past podcast guest and d.school co-founder Bernie Roth, among others.
The basic idea is, we don't have to live a default life not of our own choosing. And we don't have to take wild risks into the unknown when we need a change. Instead, we can apply the same principles of user-centered design that produce successful products and systems to own our lives. We can use a proven process to build, rather than just imagine, our ideal lives.
Dave, Bill, and I had a lovely Skype conversation about their bestselling book, Designing Your Life, and how we can apply design thinking not just to our careers, but to our lifestyles and diets as well.
We covered:
- the vital importance of curiosity, and how it helps you become lucky
- developing empathy for others and yourself
- "reality is where all the cool stuff happens"
- why drowning ourselves in "shoulds" isn't helpful
- we live in a body and we are a body
- the choreography of thought
- "reasons are bullshit" (courtesy of Bernie Roth)
- there's no bad or good news, just truth
- you can't operationalize "mostly plants"
- how to develop failure immunity
- why partial credit counts when you're trying new things
- being honest about the secondary gains of your failings
- developing a bias to action
- reframing problems so they can be addressed
- the difference between actionable problems and "gravity problems"
- the danger of working on a really good problem that's not the right problem
- the life assessment dashboard
- the difference between designing your life and obsessing about your life
- identifying and disputing the dysfunctional thoughts that keep you stuck
- the deadly pull of "anchor problems" and the value of prototyping
- the promise of endless do-overs
- and much more...
Links
Designing Your Life
The Designing Your Life Workbook
The Designing Your Life website
Bernie Roth on the Plant Yourself Podcast
The Stanford d.school