I'm 30 years old and I still don't know what I want to do. The book "Designing of your life" from veterans of the Silicon Valley

in #review7 years ago

I do not know about you, but everyone I have known more o less intimately is in search. Even when it seems that a person has everything defined in his life, with close communication it turns out that he is at a crossroads.

However, it's natural.
if this were not the case, there would be no coaching and self-development trainings.

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The book is called "Designing of your life". For me it will be one of the most important in this year. The authors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans are veterans of the Silicon Valley and teach at the Design Faculty in Stanford. Design is an idea and the embodiment of this idea. The authors suggest using design thinking and tools to create a cool life that suits us.

One of the popular design techniques is reframing, i.e. rethinking. The authors propose to rethink certain limiting beliefs which prevent us from developing and living the life that we like.

The most popular of them are:

1) I should realize by now what to do.

We can not find out where we are going while we do not know where we are.
The first thing that the authors advise is to identify the problem correctly. After all, we can spend years and even the whole life on the solution of the wrong problem.

And then they talk about gravitational problems. These are the problems that can not be overcome: crisis, not the right country, bad people, wrong system ...i.e. if the problem can not be solved, then this is not a problem, but the circumstances of life that needed to be taken.

In order to determine own current situation the authors offer to evaluate 4 areas of personal life: work, health, love, entertainment. Here is a worksheet from this book. Due to this analysis, it is possible to understand whether there is an imbalance and what can be done with it.

2) I need to know where I'm going.

We will not always know where we are going, but we can be sure when we are moving in the right direction.

In order to determine this direction, the authors propose to create own compass.
In this exercise, you need to determine your view of life and work, and to answer eternal questions. In the book they are divided into blocks: work (what is work for me? Why do I work?), Society, etc.

We feel life meaningful when there is consistency between: who we are - what we believe in - what we do.

3) (in my opinion, the most interesting one) There is the only true option of my life and I just need to find it.

Designers have a rule: never stop on one idea. There should be several options to choose. The same applies to life. And the authors suggest to think about and write down 3 versions of life for the next 5 years:

  1. What you are already doing
  2. What will you do if the first option suddenly disappeared
  3. What would you do if you did not have to think about money.

Life is a joyous and endless design project of our path forward. Search does not stop ever and this is the charm of life. Life is not a result, but a process.

***

Have you ever tried to do exercises from self-development books? As for me, I write them carefully down in my blocknote but do only some of them, +-10%.

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