Designing Your Life - Bill Burnett

Yes, I think one of the great applications of design thinking is a kind of personal transformation, like we said, it's just another tool in

your

tool belt, but it's a tool that works very well on difficult problems and one of the most difficult problems. difficult. What you have is what you want to be when you grow up and this is not a problem, they are just college students, every time we talk about

designing

your

life

and the class we are teaching, you know, thirty-somethings who are thinking about you, you know how to change . jobs 40-somethings who are thinking about changing careers 50-somethings or 60-somethings who are thinking about their new career everyone wants to know, do you know what I'm going to be when I grow up, it's a question that never really goes away because, hopefully, your

life

is fun and creative and you never grow up, but it creates anxiety and particularly it creates anxiety or that moment in senior year when you're about to be trans, you know the big transformation happens when I'm in college or I mean.

I'm a student - no, I'm not a student anymore, we call it the decision explosion before that, all you had to do was work hard in high school to get into a good university, choose a major, pass the major you you know. I've jumped through all the hurdles, it's like, "Oh my God, what do I do now?" If you think about it, it's a classic, wicked problem, you can't get that much information about your future, you don't know, you don't know what. you really want to make this notion that you have a passion and you follow it.

I think it's one of the most destructive ideas that's talked about because research says that less than 20 percent of college students or anyone really know what their passion is and how to fulfill it, we find that most people They find their passion by working on something that then becomes their passion, and therefore, college students have many of what psychologists call dysfunctional beliefs and believe that their major is going to determine what they will do for the rest of their lives. lives, which is not true after 10 years out of school, less than 20% of people are doing something that has to do with their major, they think they have to do one. choice and that this choice will trace your trajectory forever.

This generation absolutely has at least two completely different careers, maybe three because this may be the first generation to work 70 years out of college, so the design class of your life just jumps in and all that stuff that says look, no. It doesn't matter where you are or you know where you are, you are here and from here we cannot navigate to your future because that is not possible, we do not know where your future is, but we can. Do what we call orientation and we can run prototypes. You know, an internship is an essential prototype.

Shadowing a doctor for a day and seeing if you really want to be a surgeon is a prototype. It's living in the world of people who do that. you think you want to do it and that's why the class is really impactful, so in a class I get more spontaneous emails, you know, from people about two years old, three years old, four years old saying I'm still using all these techniques, it seems like it's fantastic. I really feel like I'm getting the life I want, it's very generative, my friends ask me to teach them how to do this so they know that the design method really works when you have these confusing and ambiguous problems, like what you want to be when you grow up .