Book Summary: Designing Your Life
Bill Burnett’s Designing Your Life looks at ways to trade in a boring, mundane work life for something that will you both more inspired and happy. He delves into advice, exercises and ideas that you can use to help escape your current environment.
Related Book Summaries:
The Social Animal – David Brooks
The Art Of Asking – Amanda Palmer
The Year Of Living Danishly – Helen Russell
Quotes:
Dysfunctional Belief: Happiness is having it all. Reframe: Happiness is letting go of what you don’t need.
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.
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.
Designing Your Life Book Summary Notes:
The Four Key Areas Of Life
The first step to designing a life you want to live is taking stock of what you currently have. The four key areas to assess are your; health, work, love and play.
Health includes your emotional, physical and mental health.
Work covers both paid and unpaid work.
Play contains any activity you do simply for the joy of it and not because you are obligated like in employment.
The last is love. Partners, children, pets and friends all come under this banner.
Your initial goal should be to find a balance between the four areas. Begin by assessing if you are over reaching in one area, at the expense of another and start to make a shift.
Workview and Lifeview
When you begin to redesign your life, another thing you want to do is figure out your personal workview and lifeview.
Your workview is your personal perspective on what work means to you. What are you happy to commit to or not commit to, for example are you willing to earn only as much as you need to survive while maximising your time away from work. Do you value working from home or are you unwilling to ever work weekends for career progress?
In the same way, your life view should reflect your beliefs on living a good life as well as your own personal values. Things like how important is religion or giving back to society to you?
By figuring out what these views mean to yourself you can begin to align your life to both of your views.
