How the ideas behind a popular Stanford course can help people of every age, from young children to retirees, think about their lives the way a designer thinks about a problem: with curiosity, small experiments, and wise choices.
At Stanford University, one of the most popular elective courses is not about engineering, economics, or computer science. It is about the students' own lives. The course is called Designing Your Life, and it was created by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, two veterans of Silicon Valley product design who teach in Stanford's Design Program, the home of the "design thinking" approach that Stanford's d.school helped make famous.
Their central idea is simple: the methods designers use to create new products can also be used to create a satisfying life. Designers don't expect to know the perfect answer in advance. Instead they get curious, try out several possibilities, build quick and cheap prototypes, learn from what happens, and improve. Burnett and Evans argue that a life can be approached the same way. You don't need a single grand plan or one "true passion" waiting to be discovered. You can build your way forward.
The main tools of the course are easy to describe:
A dashboard to see where you are now, in four areas: health, work, play, and love.
A compass made from your Workview (what work is for) and your Lifeview (what life is for), so your choices can line up with your values.
A Good Time Journal for noticing which activities give you energy and engagement, and which drain you.
Odyssey Plans: three quite different versions of your next five years, imagined in enough detail to compare.
Prototypes: conversations with people who are already living a life you are curious about, and small, low-risk experiences that let you try a possibility before committing to it.
Choosing well: a process for deciding among good options, and then letting go of the ones you didn't choose.
Although the course was designed for college students, the authors have said their book is for all ages, and they have since applied the same approach to working life and to the later years. That makes sense, because the underlying skills (noticing what matters to you, imagining alternatives, testing them, and learning from experience) are useful at every age. What changes from one stage of life to another is which questions a person is ready to ask, and how much freedom they have to try things.
Part 2 explains the tools in more detail, connects them to research from psychologists and educators, and then describes practical ways to use life design with children in elementary school, adolescents in middle and high school, college students, working adults, and older adults.
Part 2: The details
Where the ideas came from
Dave Evans had struggled, as a Stanford undergraduate, to figure out what to do with his life. Years later, after working at Apple (where he led the team that designed Apple's first mouse) and co-founding the game company Electronic Arts, he taught a course on finding one's vocation at UC Berkeley. Bill Burnett had designed products such as Apple's PowerBook laptops and had become executive director of Stanford's Design Program. When the two met over lunch, they realized that the design methods Burnett taught engineering students could help students with the biggest design project of all: their own lives.
Their course, Designing Your Life (ME 104B), was first taught at Stanford around 2010 for juniors and seniors approaching graduation. It became one of the university's most popular electives; by 2016, Evans estimated that about one Stanford undergraduate in seven took it before graduating. The two founded the Stanford Life Design Lab, which added courses for first- and second-year students and for graduate students, and began training faculty from other colleges to teach similar courses.
In 2016 they published Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller. Later books include Designing Your Work Life (2020) and How to Live a Meaningful Life, and a companion workbook is written for recent graduates, people in mid-career, and people thinking about an "encore" career or retirement.
Five designer mindsets
Before the tools, Burnett and Evans describe five attitudes that designers bring to their work. Each one transfers directly to life design.
Curiosity
Treat your life as interesting. Ask questions about what you enjoy, what others do, and what might be possible. Curiosity turns a worry ("What should I do?") into an exploration ("What could I try?").
Bias to action
Don't just think; try things. A small action teaches you more than a long period of wondering.
Reframing
Replace an unhelpful belief with a more useful one. Burnett and Evans call the unhelpful ones dysfunctional beliefs. "By now I should know what I'm going to do with my life" becomes "I'm going to discover my way forward by trying things."
Awareness
Remember that design is a process, with stages that can feel messy. Knowing this makes the messy parts less discouraging.
Radical collaboration
Don't design alone. Mentors, friends, family, and the people you interview all contribute ideas and feedback.
These mindsets echo research from psychology. Carol Dweck's work on a growth mindset shows that people learn more when they see abilities as developable rather than fixed, which is a kind of reframing. John Krumboltz's theory of planned happenstance found that people who build good careers often do it by staying curious, persistent, flexible, optimistic, and willing to take reasonable risks, so they can make the most of unplanned opportunities.
The main tools
The dashboard: where are you now?
Designers begin by understanding the current situation. The life design dashboard asks you to rate four areas of life, health, work, play, and love, on a simple gauge from empty to full. The point is not to score yourself, but to notice where things are going well and where you might want to begin. Burnett and Evans also warn about gravity problems: situations you cannot change, like gravity itself. Time spent fighting a gravity problem is wasted; the useful question is how to work with the situation as it is.
The compass: Workview and Lifeview
Next you write two short statements. A Workview explains what you think work is for: money, service, growth, meaning, or some mix. A Lifeview explains what you think gives life meaning, and how you relate to other people, your community, and (for many people) faith or a larger purpose. When you read the two side by side, you can see whether they fit together. People who can connect who they are, what they believe, and what they do experience what Burnett and Evans call coherence, and the compass helps you stay pointed in a good direction even when you don't know the exact destination.
The Good Time Journal: learning from your own experiences
For a few weeks, you note your daily activities and how engaged and energized you felt during each one. You look especially for moments of flow, the state psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described, when a challenge is well matched to your skills and time seems to disappear. Over time, patterns appear. You might discover that you come alive when explaining things to others, or when working with your hands, or when solving a puzzle alone. These observations are evidence about yourself that is more reliable than guesses.
Generating ideas
Designers know that the first idea is rarely the best, so they generate many. One life design technique is mind mapping: start with something you enjoy, branch out to related words and ideas, then combine unexpected items from different branches into new possibilities. The goal is to widen the range of options before narrowing it.
Odyssey Plans: three possible futures
This is the best-known tool from the course. You sketch three different five-year plans:
Life One: the path you're currently on, or the idea you already have.
Life Two: what you would do if Life One suddenly became impossible.
Life Three: what you would do if money and other people's opinions didn't matter.
For each plan you give it a title, write questions it would help you explore, and rate it on how much you like it, how confident you feel about it, whether you have the resources for it, and how well it fits your compass. The surprise for many people is that they have more than one good possible life. That realization reduces the pressure of "getting it right." Psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius called these imagined futures possible selves, and their research shows that vivid, specific possible selves help motivate and guide what people do now.
Prototypes: testing a life before living it
You can't try out a whole career for a weekend, but you can test parts of it. Burnett and Evans recommend two kinds of prototypes:
Prototype conversations (also called life design interviews): talk with people who are already doing what you're curious about. Ask for their story, not a job. You learn what their days are really like, which you could never learn from a job description.
Prototype experiences: spend a day shadowing someone, volunteer, take a short course, or do a small project. These let you observe how a possibility actually feels.
Organizational researcher Herminia Ibarra reached a similar conclusion in her studies of people who successfully changed careers: they rarely planned their way into a new identity. They tested and learned, through small experiments, new connections, and reflection on what they discovered.
Choosing well
Eventually you have to choose. Burnett and Evans describe four steps: gather and create options; narrow them to a manageable few (more choices can make deciding harder, not easier); choose, using both your reasoning and your intuitions; and then let go of the options you didn't choose, so that regret doesn't spoil the good life you're building. They also encourage a kind of "failure immunity": if a prototype doesn't work out, that's not a failure of you; it's information that helps you redesign.
Life design as experimenting
The tools above can be understood as a cycle of imagining, testing, and evaluating. Craig Rusbult's framework for problem solving offers a way to see this cycle clearly, by defining an Experiment broadly: an Experiment is any situation that produces Experiences and gives an opportunity to make Predictions or Observations. (A fuller explanation is in his page about Experiments and Experiences.)
With this definition, the main tools of life design become kinds of experimenting:
Odyssey Plans are mental experiments. When you imagine your life in each plan, you are making predictions: how it would feel, what it would require, what you would learn.
Prototype experiences are physical experiments. You actually do something, and you observe what happens and how you respond.
Prototype conversations use other people's experiences. Their observations, made over years, become information you can use now.
The Good Time Journal turns everyday life into observations that you can learn from.
The information can come from your own experiences or from other people's, and it can be old (remembered or found) or new (made now). Combining these gives four ways to learn about a possible life:
From your own experiences
From other people's experiences
Old information remembered or found
Recalling your past peak experiences, and the times you felt drained
Reading biographies, career profiles, and stories of people's paths
New information made now
Prototype experiences, and the Good Time Journal
Prototype conversations with people living a life you're curious about
Then comes evaluation. In Rusbult's framework, a Quality Check compares the predictions and observations for an option with a person's goal-criteria, the qualities they want a solution to have. In life design, the goal-criteria come largely from the compass (your Workview and Lifeview) and from what the dashboard and journal reveal about what you need. When you rate an Odyssey Plan on how well it fits your values, or reflect after a prototype on whether that work energized you, you are doing a Quality Check. Life decisions are better when they are based on this kind of comparison: honest information about the options, measured against clearly understood goals.
Learning from these experiments also improves with practice. Educational psychologist Barry Zimmerman described self-regulated learning as a cycle of planning ahead, paying attention while you act, and reflecting afterward. Life design follows the same cycle: plan a prototype, notice what happens during it, then reflect and adjust.
Across the life span
Developmental psychologists remind us that people face different questions at different ages. Erik Erikson described a sequence of life challenges, from building competence in childhood, to forming an identity in adolescence, to contributing to the next generation in middle adulthood, to finding integrity and meaning in later life. Donald Super's career theory describes a similar progression: a growth stage in childhood, an exploration stage in the teens and early twenties, and later stages of establishing, maintaining, and eventually redesigning one's working life. Life design adapts well to each stage, as long as the activities fit what people at that age are ready for.
Elementary school
Focus: curiosity, noticing, and confidence that "I can learn to do things"
Young children are not ready to plan careers, and they shouldn't be asked to. But they are natural explorers, and they can begin building the habits that life design depends on.
An energy journal for kids. At the end of the day, children draw or name one activity that was fun and made them want to do more, and one that felt hard or boring. Over weeks, teachers and parents can help them notice patterns.
First prototype conversations. Children interview a family member, a neighbor, or a school worker: "What do you do all day? What's the best part? What's hard?" Career days become more meaningful when children prepare questions ahead of time.
Many small experiences. Clubs, crafts, building projects, music, sports, and nature walks are prototypes. The goal is breadth and fun, not commitment.
Reframing setbacks. When something doesn't work, adults can model a designer's response: "That didn't work. What did we learn? What could we try next?"
Avoid asking young children "What do you want to be when you grow up?" as if the answer were a commitment. Better questions are "What do you enjoy doing?" and "What would you like to try?"
Middle school
Focus: exploring identity, trying things, and questioning fixed beliefs about oneself
Early adolescents are beginning to ask "Who am I?" They are also quick to decide "I'm just not a math person" or "I'm not creative." Life design gives them tools for exploring identity while keeping it open.
Reframing dysfunctional beliefs. Students list a few beliefs about themselves and practice rewriting them as growth-minded statements. This connects directly to Dweck's research.
Electives and clubs as prototypes. Teachers can explicitly present a new elective as an experiment: "Try it for a semester, notice how it feels, and decide what you learned."
A simple dashboard. Students rate school, friends, fun, and health, and choose one small action to improve one gauge.
Mini Odyssey Plans. Students imagine three different versions of their high school years, with different activities, friends, or challenges.
Keep everything low-stakes and private where possible. Middle schoolers are sensitive to judgment, and life design works only when students feel free to be honest.
High school
Focus: real decisions about the next step after graduation
High school students face the first major fork in the road: college, community college, trade school, military service, a gap year, or work. This is where the full set of life design tools becomes practical.
Odyssey Plans for after graduation. Three genuinely different paths, each with a title, questions to explore, and ratings. Students often discover that a path they had dismissed deserves a closer look.
Prototype conversations as a requirement. Each student interviews two or three adults working in fields they're curious about, including recent graduates who are only a few years ahead of them.
Prototype experiences. Job shadowing, internships, volunteer work, summer programs, and part-time jobs, each followed by reflection: What did I observe? How did I feel? What surprised me?
Workview and Lifeview statements. Older teens can write thoughtful versions of these, and doing so often clarifies which options fit them.
Remind students that this choice is a next step, not a final destination. Most adults change direction several times, and a well-designed life is built by redesigning along the way.
College
Focus: choosing a major, a first career, and a way of living
This is the stage the Stanford course was built for, and the complete process applies: dashboard, compass, Good Time Journal, mind mapping, Odyssey Plans, prototypes, and choosing well. Many colleges now offer life design courses or workshops, often through career centers, and Stanford's Life Design Lab has trained educators from many institutions to teach them.
Use the whole campus as a prototype lab. Courses outside one's major, research assistantships, student organizations, and study abroad are all chances to test possibilities.
Reframe "Which major leads to which job?" Evans tells former students who worry that their plans are still unsettled that they have done nothing wrong; moving from student life into adult life is a process of discovery.
Build a network through conversations. Prototype conversations with alumni help students learn about careers and also build relationships that open doors later.
Working adults
Focus: improving the life you have, or redesigning toward a new one
Burnett and Evans wrote Designing Your Work Life for adults who already have jobs. Two themes stand out. First, you can often redesign your current job (its tasks, relationships, and learning) before deciding to leave it. Second, if you do want a change, prototypes protect you from leaping blindly.
Run the Good Time Journal at work. It often reveals which parts of the job to grow and which to reduce.
Prototype a change before making it. A side project, a weekend course, or volunteer work in a new field can test a possibility while you still have a paycheck.
Revisit the dashboard. In the busy years of career and family, health and play often run low. Small design changes can restore balance.
Erikson called the central task of middle adulthood generativity: contributing to others and to the next generation. Many adults find that mentoring, teaching, or service makes their lives feel more coherent, which can guide their redesign.
Older adults and retirement
Focus: designing a meaningful "encore" stage of life
Retirement removes the structure that work provided, and many people find that freedom unexpectedly hard. Life design treats this as an opportunity: one of the largest redesign projects many people ever face. The Designing Your Life workbook explicitly includes readers who are thinking about an encore career or retirement.
Odyssey Plans for the retirement years. One plan might focus on family, another on learning or creating, another on service. Writer Marc Freedman popularized the idea of encore careers that combine purpose with paid or volunteer work later in life.
A rich collection of old information. Older adults have decades of their own experiences to draw on. A Good Time Journal can include memories: when in life did I feel most engaged?
Prototypes still matter. Before moving, starting a business, or making a large commitment, try it: rent in the new town for a month, volunteer before joining a board, take one class before enrolling in a program.
Relationships as a design priority. Psychologist Laura Carstensen's research shows that as people see their time as more limited, they tend to focus on emotionally meaningful goals and relationships. Life design can support this by making those priorities explicit.
Erikson's final life challenge was integrity: looking back and finding that one's life has meaning. Designing the later years thoughtfully, with purpose, learning, and connection, helps people continue to build that meaning rather than simply wait for it.
Notes for teachers and mentors
Don't grade the life plans. Grade the process (completed interviews, thoughtful reflections) but never whether a student's goals are "good."
Don't tell people what to pursue. Burnett and Evans insist that students can't be told what they should and shouldn't pursue. The teacher's job is to provide tools, questions, and encouragement.
Model it yourself. Share your own path, including detours, and talk about prototypes you have tried.
Make it work for every student. Evans has emphasized that life design is not only for the privileged and can work on any income. Prototypes can be free: a conversation, a library book, a volunteer afternoon. Help students recognize real constraints (gravity problems) without letting those constraints limit their imagination.
Connect it to the curriculum. Every subject has people who use it in their work. A science, music, or history unit can end with a prototype conversation with someone who uses that subject every day.
Teach reflection explicitly. Students learn much more from experiences when they are taught to ask: What did I expect? What happened? What does it mean for my next step?
Sources and further reading
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (Knopf, 2016); Designing Your Work Life (2020); The Designing Your Life Workbook; and How to Live a Meaningful Life. Their website: designingyour.life