Designing Your Life

What it says, and how it holds up

Burnett and Evans bring a designer's answer to a stuck problem: build your way forward instead of thinking your way there. Their book, based on the course they built at Stanford, walks through taking stock of where you are, writing down what work and life mean to you, noticing where your energy goes, then sketching three lives and testing pieces of them. The method treats a career as a series of small experiments, with no single right answer to find. Along the way they reframe what they call dysfunctional beliefs, such as the idea that there's one correct path, and suggest building a small team of three to five people to talk your designs through.

There's some evidence that the approach changes how people feel about the question, if not the answer. Laura Schram, then working in graduate career development at the University of Michigan, ran a six-week version for graduate students and reported in Inside Higher Ed in 2018 that participants' before-and-after surveys showed more hope about their careers, more confidence in asking others about career paths, and less stress about not knowing. That was one before-and-after survey, with no comparison group. A 2012 Stanford dissertation by Lindsay Oishi, on a design-thinking career course for juniors and seniors, compared students in the course with waitlisted and other students and found something similar: students in the course grew more confident about acting on their careers, while their uncertainty about what to do stayed about where it was. Confidence to act may be the more realistic thing to expect from it than a decision.