#Prototype 3 lost odyssey how to#

Designing your life idea #1: Connect the dots After all, Dave and I are human-centered designers, so we want to be helpful. TheyвЂ™re the ones that people whoвЂ™ve read our book or taken our class or workshop told us were the most useful and most doable. Now that youвЂ™ve practiced some reframing, IвЂ™m going to give you five ideas from вЂњDesigning Your LifeвЂќ to try out. Our reframe: вЂњlife design is a journey let go of optimizing an end goal and focus on the process and see what happens next.вЂќ Our experience is that life is anything but linear. Well, there is no evidence that there is one singular best version of you - we believe there are many, many versions of you and any of them can result in a well-designed life. Why? It implies that thereвЂ™s just one singular best and that life is a linear progression towards this singular best. This is a dysfunctional belief that we really donвЂ™t like. We reframe this as вЂњLetвЂ™s start from wherever you are youвЂ™re not late for anything.вЂќДysfunctional belief #3: вЂњYou should try to optimize the best possible version of yourself.вЂќ The notion that you вЂњshould be somewhere youвЂ™re notвЂќ and вЂњyouвЂ™re lateвЂќ is a dysfunctional belief. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, calls these years the Odyssey Years - when we explore many alternative versions of ourselves.Дave and I donвЂ™t believe in вЂњshouldвЂ™sвЂќ. We know that nowadays people are living their lives much more fluidly, and they are staying in dynamic career motion between the ages of 22 to 35. Here we asked the obvious question, what exactly are you late for? When I was growing up you were supposed to have married and be on track to start a family by about 25. You donвЂ™t need a passion to start designing your life, and the reframe is вЂњyou are OK, just where you areвЂќ.Дysfunctional belief #2: вЂњBy the time youвЂ™re out of college, you should know where youвЂ™re going. HeвЂ™s studied this question of passion and purpose, and it turns out less than 20 percent of people have a single identifiable passion in their lives. To investigate this passion idea Dave and I went over to StanfordвЂ™s Center on Adolescence, which by the way now goes up to 27, and we met with professor Bill Damon. Or you knew at the age of 7 you wanted to be a clown at Cirque du Soleil and now you are one. Maybe you wanted to be a doctor as long as you can remember. If you actually have a passion, thatвЂ™s awesome. IвЂ™ll share three of the most common.Дysfunctional belief #1: вЂњKnowing your passion will tell you what you need to do with your life.вЂќ

If you want to design your life, you need to reframe these beliefs. Many people have beliefs about life which psychologists would label as dysfunctional.

Reframing is essential to finding the right problems and the right solutions. Life design involves a lot of reframes that allow you to step back, examine your biases and open up new solution spaces. Reframing also makes sure that weвЂ™re working on the right problem. One of the most important ways to get unstuck is reframing. So I get stuck and unstuck and stuck and unstuck all the time. When I signed up to be a designer, I knew that I was going to work on something brand new, something IвЂ™ve never done before - every single day of my career. WhatвЂ™s more, they didnвЂ™t have the tools for getting unstuck. We started the class because weвЂ™ve been in office hours for a long, long time with students, and we saw that many of them were getting stuck in their lives. Instead, design thinking says you should start with empathy and lean into what youвЂ™re curious about.ДЄt Stanford, Dave and I teach a class called вЂњDesigning Your Life,вЂќ which we adapted into the book Designing Your Life, Designing Your Work Lifeand a set of online workshops. School has taught most of us to be skeptical and to be rationalists, but those arenвЂ™t very useful mindsets when youвЂ™re trying to do something new, something no oneвЂ™s ever done before, or something that has no one clear solution.

#Prototype 3 lost odyssey how to#

There, we teach people how to take design thinking - which is both a process and a mindset - and apply it to their own lives. I cofounded the Life Design Lab with Dave Evans at Stanford. ItвЂ™s an innovation methodology that works on services and products and experiences, such as designing a great-looking sports car or a laptop that contains its own built-in mouse.Д«ut I think the most interesting design problem is your life. This post is part of TEDвЂ™s вЂњHow to Be a Better HumanвЂќ series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community В browse through all the posts here.Дesign thinking is something that weвЂ™ve been working on at the Stanford Design School and in the School of Engineering for over 50 years.