One of my first and favorite book recommendations for career changers is Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. In it, the authors take the popular Silicon Valley notion of design thinking - build, test, iterate, repeat - and show you how to apply it to the problems in your own life, be it a career transition, better work-balance, and more.
Here's are some of the biggest points I have clients pay attention to:
1. First, make sure you're solving for the right problem.
The first thing I often ask my clients is what their challenges are. Then I ask them to go one level deeper. When you dig deep, what's really going on? On the surface, you may feel completely burned out by your current job, but at the core, you're chasing the things you've been told will make you happy, not the things that actually do.
Taking the time to get really clear about what the real problem is helps prevent premature optimization - that is, climbing the ladder as quickly as you can, only to step back and realize it was the wrong ladder.
2. Take the time to calibrate your compass.
Once you realize that perhaps you were climbing the wrong ladder or chasing goals - like money and recognition - other than your own, it's important to recalibrate your compass so it reflects what YOUR beliefs, not what you parents, the media, or your current work environment tells you they should be. This "undoing" to rebuild on your own terms is often a big (and sometimes even scary) phase that kicks off the process of many people's career change. While many often feel like they "wasted" so many years not following their own values and beliefs, it's important to focus on what you've learned that's now informing the direction you actually want to go. Nobody comes out of the womb with a map. It's simply part of life's work to work our way through it.
3. Life is an experiment.
To that end, the Designing Your Life approach helps reframe your life and career as one, large experimental process that will never stop asking for a continuous revisiting and readjustment. 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? It also takes the pressure off your next step having to be an overnight success. By breaking down 180 degree moves into smaller pivots, you have an opportunity to dip your toe in the water and decide if the direction is still the way you want to go.
Dancing Beautifully in Your Own Box
Kobe Bryant shares the idea that in life, each one of us has our own box, and that our job is to simply 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. But I particularly love that he doesn’t say: your job is to get up at 4am every morning so you can write your novel or build a business 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 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, just like an artist looks at a blank canvas, or a basketball player looks at his training schedule, each of us 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 ours to perfect.
