5 steps to designing the life you want | Bill Burnett | TEDxStanford

Hello, everyone.

I'm here to help you design your life.

We're going to use the technique of design thinking.

Design thinking is something we've been working on at the d.School

and in the School of Engineering for over 50 years,

and it's an innovation methodology, works on products, works on services.

But I think the most interesting design problem is your life!

So that's what we're going to talk about.

I want to just make sure everybody knows: this is my buddy Dave Evans, his face.

Dave and I are the co-authors of the book,

and he is the guy who helped me co-found the Life Design Lab at Stanford.

So what do we do in the Life Design Lab?

Well, we teach the class that helps to figure out

what you want to be when you grow up.

Now, I'm going to give you the first reframe.

Designers love reframes.

How many of you hope you never grow up and lose that child-like curiosity

that drives everything you do?

Raise your hand. Right! Who wants to grow up?

I mean, we've been talking about curiosity in almost every one of these talks.

And so I'd like to reframe this as:

we say we teach the class that helps you figure out

what you want to grow into next,

as this life of yours, this amazing design of yours, unfolds.

So, design thinking is what we teach

and it's a set of mindsets, it's how designers think.

You know, we've been taught probably in the university

to be so skeptical realists, rationalists,

but that's not very useful as a mindset when you're trying to do something new,

something no one's ever done before.

So we say you start with curiosity and you lean into what you're curious about.

We say you reframe problems because most of the time

we find people are working on the wrong problems

and they have a wonderful solution to something that doesn't work anyway.

So, what's the point of working on the wrong thing?

We say radical collaboration

because the answer's out in the world with other people.

That's where your experience of your life will be.

We want to be mindful of our process.