An introduction to a thoughtful, low-pressure process for testing ideas, exploring options, and taking next steps.
Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, is a book based on a popular course from Stanford University’s Life Design Lab. The course brought design thinking principles—originally developed for engineering and product development—into a new context: helping people navigate life and career transitions.
Many career books offer a set of stand-alone activities: worksheets, values lists, personality profiles. While useful, it’s not always clear how those pieces are meant to connect or what to do with the insights. What stood out to me about Designing Your Life was the structure. Each stage builds on the last, guiding you from reflection through to action in a way that feels coherent and cumulative.
This kind of process can be especially helpful at mid-career. It’s a time when many people are already thinking deeply about their work and direction — but still feel uncertain about what to do next, or how to begin.
How Design Thinking Supports Career Transitions
Design thinking is an approach to solving complex, open-ended problems. Rather than aiming to find the one “right” answer, it helps you explore many possible directions. The focus is on generating options, trying things out, and learning through doing.
In the context of career change, this means:
clarifying your personal beliefs about work and life
generating ideas without editing them too early
imagining different futures
identifying small ways to test ideas before making big decisions.
It’s not a loose collection of tools. The power of the approach is in how the pieces fit together — creating a sense of direction, without needing to commit to a particular career option too soon.
If you’d like to explore these ideas further, I recommend reading Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It’s widely available online and in bookstores, and offers clear explanations and practical activities to help you think through your next steps. I listened to the audiobook first and then bought a hardcopy.
References
Burnett, B. (2017, May 20). 5 steps to designing the life you want [Video]. TEDxStanford. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SemHh0n19LA
Burnett, B., & Evans, D. (2016). Designing your life: How to build a well-lived, joyful life. Knopf.
