I recently picked up a copy of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans - in part because it felt like a slightly more inspirational balance to some of my heavier reading in grad school, and in part because I thought it would be a helpful resource to eventually offer others or integrate into my lil’ career course.
I was excited to return to some of the exercises I had done throughout my whole quarterlife crisis, such as really intentionally outlining what my priorities were (i.e. work, relationships, health, spirituality…) and making sure they were in balance, but as I opened the book I found myself thinking: “Haven’t I done this already?”
And it was at that point I was reminded that, while I’ve made huge changes in both life and career coming out of my 20’s, these were all - and continue to be - part of a larger experimental process that will never stop asking for a continuous commitment to revisit and readjust. In fact, the main premise of Designing Your Life is just that: to take Silicon Valley’s popular notion of “design thinking” - build, test, iterate, repeat - and to apply it to your life. So just because I’ve made a career change or moved around various pieces of my life doesn’t mean I’m done. Every day is still an opportunity to check in and ask: What’s working? What’s not working? Did the change I made give me the results I wanted? What did I learn? What do I still need to learn? How can I continue to make it better?
I was inspired by an interview with Kobe Bryant a friend recently shared with me, honoring his legacy as a role model for just so many people. He shares this idea that each one of us has our own box, and that our job is to dance beautifully in the box that is uniquely ours. “It’s your job to perfect it, and make it as beautiful a canvas as you can make it,” he says. “If you’ve done that, you’ve lived a successful life.”
“Everybody’s box is different. It’s your job to perfect it and make it as beautiful a canvas as you can make it. It you’ve done that, you’ve lived a successful life.”
- Kobe Bryant
To become one of the greatest basketball players of all time, Kobe was on the court at 4am every morning to double the number of hours of practice he got in over his competition, perfecting his craft through hours and hours and days and days of growth and iteration. But I particularly love this because he doesn’t say: your job is to get up at 4am every morning so you can write code or do yoga or practice your TED Talk until you’re the best in the world. He simply says your job is to perfect your own box, whatever that means to you.
For Kobe, it was basketball. But what if we put as much passion into whatever is most important to us? For one person, their most beautiful box may look like a bright and colorful balance between family, a fulfilling career, and joyful pastimes. For someone else, it may look like a box filled with hundreds of lives impacted and peaks of once-in-a-lifetime travel. For someone else it may very well be dedicating every last ounce of themselves to becoming the best writer or doctor or athlete they can possibly be, or building the most successful company they can possibly build. But just like every hour of deliberate practice helped Kobe improve his craft, every deliberate action and intentional moment of practice toward the things we value most in our lives helps us color in and evolve our own canvases.
So whether you look at it like a software engineer looks at an app, an artist looks at a blank canvas, or a basketball player looks at his training schedule, we are given the opportunity to gracefully and intentionally design our lives in a way that looks most beautiful to us at the end of the day. It takes work, growth, and constant iteration. But this is our craft. It is ours to create, and our to perfect.
Disclaimer: While occasionally I include research and insights from my graduate classes in clinical psychology on my blog, I am not at this time a licensed therapist or mental health provider and therefore no content on this blog or website should not be considered or serve as replacement for therapeutic advice.
