Designing your life : how to build a well-lived, joyful life / Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

Includes bibliographical references.

Introduction: life by design -- Start where you are -- Building a compass -- Wayfinding -- Getting unstuck -- Design your lives -- Prototyping -- How not to get a job -- Designing your dream job -- Choosing happiness -- Failure immunity -- Building a team -- Conclusion: a well designed life.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, the Silicon Valley innovators and Stanford University design educators in their hugely successful course, Designing Your Life, have helped thousands change the way they live. Burnett and Evans believe that in order to change, people need a process--a design process--to help them figure out what they want and how to create it. In this long-awaited book, Burnett and Evans make clear, step by step, how to think like a designer, and how to design and build a life--at any age--in which we can thrive. Designers don't think their way forward, say Burnett and Evans, designers build their way forward. Rather than dreaming up a lot of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world--or the real you--they show us how to build a future brick by brick, how to approach our own life design challenges with the same kind of curiosity and creativity that resulted in the creation of the lightbulb, the printing press, and the Internet as they give us the tools and show us certain simple "mind-sets," and how to use them to practice life design in your life. Designing Your Life makes clear that you don't need to know your passion to design a life you love. Most people are passionate about many different things, and the only way to know what you really want to do is to prototype some potential lives, try them out, and see what you really like.--Adapted from dust jacket.