Shelf Help’s book of the month: Designing Your Life

September’s Book of the Month, Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, shows us how to use design thinking to build a well-lived and joyful life that we can thrive in, at any age or stage.

Here, Shelf Help’s founder Toni Jones explains why she’s chosen this book for September. 

Do you know what you want to be when you grow up? Actually, do any of us really want to grow up?! Probably not. So, let’s reframe this question and instead ask: what do you want to grow into next? I think this is a brilliant question for this back-to-school time of year and I love that authors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans assume that most grown-ups don’t actually know the answer, whether they are 20, 40 or 60-yrs-old. And so, they created this book – based on their world-famous Stanford University course by the same name – to demonstrate how to use the concepts of design thinking to help us answer the question and, in the process, create a wonderful and enriching life.

Readers aren’t expected to already have a major passion or know their purpose. “What if I don’t know my passion?” is one of the most common questions we get asked at Shelf Help, and this book shows us that we don’t need to have that part figured out to start designing a better life. It might be reassuring to know that seven out of 10 people don’t have an identified passion. Instead, Burnett and Evans explain that it is only through the process of testing and trying out different things that we usually end up finding out what’s really important to us, and what brings us most alive.

Designers love to work backwards from a problem, coming up with lots of different ways to find a solution, and we can use the same techniques, like prototyping and mind mapping, to think out of the box (and/or the rut we have grooved ourselves into) and try different things until we come up with the answer as to what we really want, and then how to get there.

This is a brilliant book to read and action as part of a group or team. Burnett and Evans call this Radical Collaboration, and I would call this a reminder that you are not alone. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the idea of self-help is really a misnomer, because this kind of work is always more powerful with the support of other people.

“You do not have to come up with a brilliant life design by yourself,” say the authors. “Design is a collaborative process, and many of the best ideas are going to come from other people. You just need to ask.”

Buy Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans on paperback, kindle and audible. 

This month’s Shelf Help book club takes place on Monday, September 30.