Bill Burnett, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

Bill Burnett, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

by Bill Burnett

1.Dysfunctional Belief: Happiness is having it all. Reframe: Happiness is letting go of what you don’t need.

2.Living coherently doesn't mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way.

3.For most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery - not before. To put it more succinctly: passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause.

4.It doesn’t matter where you come from, where you think you are going, what job or career you have had or think you should have. You are not too late, and you’re not too early.

5.Our minds are generally lazy and like to get rid of problems as quickly as possible, so they surround first ideas with a lot of positive chemicals to make us “fall in love” with them. Do not fall in love with your first idea.

6.You can't know where you're going until you know where you are.

7.A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. You get out of it more than you put in. There is a lot more than “lather, rinse, repeat” in a well-designed life.

8.A coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: who you are, what you believe, what you are doing.

9.Many people operate under the dysfunctional belief that they just need to find out what they are passionate about. Once they know their passion, everything else will somehow magically fall into place. We hate this idea for one very good reason: most people don’t know their passion.

10.Decision making is stressful, so the best time to prepare for good choosing is when there’s no choice at stake. That’s when you can invest in your emotional intelligence and spiritual maturity so that those muscles are strong and trained when it’s decision or game time. The best time to get ready for step three is months or years before the choosing. That means the best time is right now—today is the best day to start making that investment.

11.That’s why you start where you are. Not where you wish you were. Not where you hope you are. Not where you think you should be. But right where you are.

12.It's worth emphasizing that failures and hardships are a part of every life, even the well-designed ones.

13.These are all gravity problems—meaning they are not real problems. Why? Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Let’s repeat that. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved. Here

14.As a life designer, you need to embrace two philosophies: 1. You choose better when you have lots of good ideas to choose from. 2. You never choose your first solution to any problem.

15.You can’t change employers’ perceptions. Instead of changing how they think, how about working on changing how you appear to them?