It was just lunch, Dave Evans told himself. Just a conversation. Evans was a tall, smooth-talking Silicon Valley jack-of-all-trades with a resume that included heading up the team that designed Apple’s first mouse and cofounding the video game giant Electronic Arts. Lately, he’d been teaching a popular course at the University of California, Berkeley, on navigating life after college, and was wondering if his friend Bill Burnett, the newly appointed executive director of Stanford’s Design Program, would be interested in doing something similar there.
A thoughtful, no-nonsense design geek, Burnett had a similarly wide-ranging portfolio. As an undergraduate at Stanford, he’d gotten swept up in the human-centered design movement, a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to engineering that had revolutionized product design in the ’70s. Over the course of his career, he’d created award-winning designs for Apple’s Powerbook and the original Star Wars action figures, as well as helping launch several successful tech startups.
Evans thought it would take a year of lunches to win Burnett over, but as soon as he laid out his scheme, Bill started peppering him with ideas about how to add design principles into the mix. “This problem has been walking into my office for the past 20 years,” he said. “Why don’t we put together a prototype of the course this summer and launch it in the fall?”
What emerged in the months that followed was a new way of thinking about life and work that, like so many other Silicon Valley innovations, turned conventional wisdom on its head. The fundamental question that Bill and Dave wanted to address was: How do you build a life that works for you? And it turned out that their offbeat approach to design thinking was a surprisingly useful model for attacking this question.
That became clear in the summer of 2007, when they rolled out their prototype to a group of Stanford design students. At the end of the class, when Evans announced that it was time to go, one student stood up and said, “No, we’re not going anywhere.” When Evans asked why, the student replied, “Because we don’t have any other place to have this kind of conversation.”
For most of us, “passion is an end product. You discover passion by working hard on something.”
The course was a hit, and a few years later, the university asked Bill and Dave to create an expanded version that would be open to all juniors and seniors, not just design students. That class, one of the most popular electives at Stanford, has spawned a broad range of product-line extensions, including workshops and online classes for the general public and recently the New York Times #1 bestselling book, Designing Your Life.
At first, I was skeptical. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been a how-to junkie, yearning in vain to find that one ineluctable truth that was going change my life forever. I’ve dabbled in all kinds of self-help workshops over the years, and after reading the works of everyone from Epictetus to Marcel Proust to Brené Brown, I doubted that a couple of Silicon Valley engineers, no matter how savvy, had anything new to offer on the subject. But I soon discovered, after meeting Evans and Burnett, that they weren’t interested in philosophizing. Their program is a practical blend of mindfulness, self-compassion, and creativity. “We’re not trying to get you to do anything,” says Evans. “We’re trying to build ideas and tools that give you access to you.”
In essence, design thinking is about building your way forward by creating ideas and testing them in the real world. It’s a way of “sneaking up on the future,” explains Evans, adding that it works particularly well in situations where you don’t have a lot of hard data to rely on. The starting point is exploring who you are and what you want to do with your life. Many of us assume that there’s only one right answer to that question, but once you start looking at your life with a designer’s point of view, a multitude of creative possibilities emerge. “Life is not a problem to be solved,” says Burnett. “It’s an adventure to be engaged.”
When Evans was a sophomore at Stanford, his dream was to become a marine biologist. But when that didn’t work out, he found that the adults he turned to for advice were as clueless as he was about what he should do next. “Everybody just wanted to hold me accountable for an answer I didn’t have,” he recalls. “So I had to figure it out the hard way, by trial and error.”
And what he learned in the process was that “making it up as you go along is actually the only thing that we have available to us. You just want to get really good at it. To be a competent person at winging it.”
That’s particularly true in the shape-shifting world we live in today. “The only job we all know we’re going to need someday is the job of getting the next job,” he says. “You could make the argument that life design is what life is. We’re all designing our life all the time.”
Making it up as you go along is actually the only thing that we have available to us. You just want to get really good at it.
All of this sounded fine for twentysomethings making their way into the workforce for the first time. But what about the rest of us? Would Bill and Dave’s life and vocational “wayfinding,” as they called it, work for someone stuck in a stifling midcareer job? Or, in my case, someone who had held big jobs in the media industry but was now searching for creative ways to find fulfillment in the next phase of my life?
That was the question tugging at me as I walked onto the set of Bill and Dave’s online workshop at the CreativeLive studios in San Francisco. The diverse mix of participants was encouraging. At my table, for example, were two entrepreneurs in their 50s, Diane and Patty, who’d recently launched a tech startup targeting women re-entering the workplace, and three thirtysomethings: Matt, a project manager for a large construction firm; Louise, a freelance event planner who dreamed of starting her own media company; and Derek, an Iraq war veteran, businessman, cartoonist, and all-around free spirit.
To kick things off, Burnett proposed that it was time to reframe the age-old question: What do you want to do when you grow up? The real issue, he said, was: What do you want to grow into next?
In Burnett’s view, one of the most common obstacles people face trying to make that leap is the widespread “dysfunctional belief” that once you find your “true passion,” everything else will magically fall into place. But research by Stanford’s Center for Adolescence shows that only 20% of people age 18 to