Business Book Review: Designing Your Life

Welcome to Business Book Reviews on The Indieprenuer! I’m always looking for another book to help me understand business just a bit better, so I figured it was time to start putting my thoughts up rather than letting them languish somewhere in the back of my head along with quotes from the latest episodes of My Little Pony and rules to whatever new board game I probably shouldn’t have picked up.

Hope you enjoy!

High Level Summary of Designing Your Life

Worth a Read for Indiepreneurs: Yes, if you’re feeling like you’re not sure about your business path

What It Does Well: Lays out actual activities you can do to figure out what you enjoy in life. Separates what you can change with what you can’t change (e.g. “gravity problems”).

What It Doesn’t Do: Tell you how your discovered dream will put food on your table.

Overall Thoughts

Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans is the ultimate First World Problems book. I couldn’t help but imagine my Scottish ancestors charging across their verdant green fields to cut down the invading English and thinking, “I wonder if I should study Accounting or Information Systems at University?”

But even though this might be “First World Problems,” guess what? If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re in the First World. It’s like the old admonition when I was a kid: “Eat your food. Don’t you know there’s starving people in China?” Sure…but I’m neither in China nor starving, so what does that have to do with me?

In other words, just knowing how relatively good we have it doesn’t mean that we don’t come home sobbing because we just spent another day doing something that feels like it’s draining our soul away.

In Designing Your Life, the authors take what they’ve learned teaching a similar course at Stanford to help people figure out what they actually like doing, then gives some advice on how to actually do it.

The book has activities to help you take apart your life and figure out what you enjoy and what sticks a Bissel right to your energy reserve. Many of the activities are available on their website for free, but the book helps you understand what you’re doing on each one and why they’re important. Plus it gives follow up on what to do once you figure it all out.

Like so many books of this type, reading what to do is great, but it’s all for naught if you don’t actually do the activities. The purposes of Designing Your Life is to get you to DESIGN YOUR LIFE, not just read about how you could do it.

All of that design stuff is in the first part of the book. Maybe I was just in the wrong place when I read it, but I felt like the second half of the book was significantly weaker than the first. That second half is all about taking that design and using it to get the right job interviews. That might be for you, but it wasn’t for me at the time. And it seems like it dragged on a bit too much.

Key Takeaways

Here’s the helpful parts that stood out to me:

The Gravity Problem

“If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem.” There’s a lot of things that we would like to do with our lives. That’s great…but some are just impossible. Sure, if you’re a multi-billionaire you might be able to even do silly things like get into space. But not even Jeff Bezos can actually stop gravity from functioning.

Focus on the things that are solvable. Leave the impossible ones behind.

Find Your Compass

I’m overgeneralizing here, but my my parents generation reduced much of life to money. Or at least that’s what I learned from all those shows I watched in the 80’s.

Life’s more than money, though. If your Workview is in conflict with your Lifeview, you’re never going to be happy.

Figure out what’s really important to you. Find work that doesn’t conflict with it.

Find the Good Times

Look…I’m an accountant, which is not the land of people loving their job. But there are legitimately things that I enjoy about accounting. Recording those enjoyable things down then maximizing your opportunity to do them will make life better. Even if they are not *gasp* the things that bring in the most money.

Be Happy

Back in high school, I had a youth leader at my church who always asked, “Why are we here?”

The answer: “To be happy.”

No, I’m not taking a theological turn here. We all want to be happy. Whether we admit it or not, that’s our goal in life. This book is hardly a guide on how to be happy, but it does address some important things that can drag us down. Like focusing on making the “wrong” choice rather than just moving on. Or getting caught up in our failure.

I know I can do that very thing. I’ve spent the past week telling myself that a huge decision I just made is actually really fine.

Really.

It is.

Conclusion

It’s easy to both feel sick about what we’re doing in our day to day life and feel like we have no choice but to keep on doing it. This book isn’t going to answer everything–especially since there are maybe more “Gravity Problems” in the short term than the authors admit–but it does give a basic roadmap. A way of Designing Your Life to figure out what you would like to do, even if you can’t do everything on it right away.

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