Designing Your Life

And they all had different specialties.

And the third part of the Design Your Life process is prototyping, trying new things, experimenting.

And I noticed that they were all hesitant, struggling, and resistant, just as you had said.

And so I asked one of them one day, I said, I hope you understand what's going on here so I can help all of you because I sense this is universal among the seven.

You've laid down the fundamentals of why autonomy, competence, and relationship are essential needs, psychological needs of people.

But anybody can write a book where they say, no, it's these four things, and come up with other terms.

So let's start at a few things at the very beginning.

When you started doing this work in the 70s, maybe earlier than the 70s, but the seminal paper in the early 70s.

And some of the most miserable people who both interviewed and had on the show had built their career around introjection, around what they thought other people wanted them to do with their career and how it would look to other people and that they had built a complete career and in fact found, one person I had on the show recently found that she had no independent ability to judge what she liked and didn't like.

outside of how other people saw her.

Her book started off with her, the first line was, I was someplace nobody ever wants to be, lying on the floor of a public bathroom because she was having panic attacks.

I've seen that a lot.

But another important piece is the next step, which is visioning.

With so many options, how do we envision what we really want our next 15 years to look like? I became very curious about this idea of the next 15 years when I interviewed Francis Morales, the co-author of the best-selling book Ikigai, and you can listen to the episode 277 and 278 where I interview him.

And he told me that because the life expectancy of humans is so much longer now, many of us may have 20 or 25 good years after our formal working lives, what he called an ocean of time.

And this is a time when the job, perhaps raising our children or caring for our parents, may be behind us.

Why should we choose one over the other? This role or that one, stay or go, start a business or consult.

We go around and around in circles because we're trying to choose a path before we really understand why or where that path will lead.

There's a tool that I came across that I really love from the best-selling book Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who led the Stanford Life Design Lab.

They call it Odyssey Plans, a kind of way of brainstorming how your life could unfold from this point of transition.

What's a book you'd like to recommend for entrepreneurs?

My favorite book, probably the book that I've recommended the most is called Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett.

And it is an incredible book that really talks about the importance of using the design thinking principles, how to use empathy and analysis to really figure out your own way in your life and your career and your business.

So I encourage people to look at it.

And build on that to be the next thing.

If you're looking for a bunch of improv games, we put up a bunch of, we've got a whole appendix from Designing Your Life book that's up on our site, www.designingyour.life is the URL.

And you can go download a copy of all the improvs we use at the G School, about 20 different games that are there.

And they're broken into sort of low impact, high impact improvs that stoke up the team and get them excited, improvs that get the team communicating better.

When you start doing this, that's when things are really gonna come into focus for you."

So I notice in taking people through the Designing Your Life process, it was created by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans at Stanford, that some people who've spent decades doing analytical work, it can be lawyers, doctors, financial people, and others, they can struggle when we get into mind mapping, which is a version...

It's a three-minute exercise, version of what you talk about in the book as rapid idea generation.

What suggestions would you offer someone like that who's, who's been really used to for many years thinking one way, and I'm asking now to put that aside and do something different for three minutes?

And so there is this idea of prototyping and there's a guy called Bill Burnett and a colleague of his at Stanford.

They wrote a book called, I think it's called Design Your Life.

And they talk about this idea of prototyping.

So what is the smallest step that you can take towards this bigger goal? So we want to think big, but act small.