Designing Your Life; What Self-Help Books Should Strive To Be

Self help books have kind of a bad reputation in the general public. Usually, they tell you to love yourself and follow your dreams and are aimed at middle aged women who are looking to reinvent themselves and are dissatisfied with their current lives. Think of something in the style of “Eat, pray, love.” Some people swear by them, but really the majority of people remain skeptical about them and have a prejudice that self help books are full of nonsensical phrases and ideas that sound good but don't actually help you all that much in real life, which is what these books are supposed to do. Going further, some of these books are connected to programs and ways to extract money from people and not actually help them.

I had a similar skepticism about this book, and really any book I encountered which even remotely resembled my idea of self help books that wanted to give me “advice” on how to live my life. But, I could not deny that I had a problem. A problem which, although it wasn’t as pressing, gave me a great deal of anxiety and dissatisfaction. It was always in the back of my mind, like a constant shadow. I thought about it before I went to sleep, and when I woke up in the morning. What am I going to do with my life?

All of us have been asked this question in our childhood as early as elementary school. Sometimes kids say they want to be an astronaut or a firefighter or a doctor. As someone who was always and remains a very indecisive person, I always answered with “I don’t know.” You see, I didn’t want to commit to anything too early. How was I going to know what the job market was going to look like in 10 years? The adults then usually laughed and said “It’s okay. You still have a lot of time to decide.” And what did I do with that time? I still don’t know.

Now, at almost 17, adults still ask the same questions. Except, this time it’s not cute small talk at family gatherings. It’s counselors, college advisors, concerned parents and teachers who want to know what the heck your plan is after you graduate high school. What’s your major? What college do you want to go to? In state or out of state? How are you going to pay for it? This time, if you say you have no idea, they don’t laugh and say that you have ‘plenty of time to figure it out’. The time is up, and I still didn’t find my one true “Passion”.

If you ask me, it’s kind of ridiculous for others to expect someone who doesn’t even have a driver's license yet to have their entire career planned out. How do I know what I want to study and pursue for the rest of my life? How do I know I won’t get bored of it and quit after 3 years and do something completely different, and that four year degree that costs $200 000? Useless. But, this is kind of a societal expectation. And it really doesn’t help when some of my peers look like they have it all figured out and know exactly what they want to do and have taken countless volunteer opportunities, classes, internships, and clubs to prepare them for just that life.

Over quarantine, there is no question that I had too much time with myself and my thoughts. So, what did I do? I devised a list of about 50 careers and planned to research everything about each of them online and rank them on a scale from one to three in categories like the average pay, how flexible they are, average job satisfaction, how appealing they sound, and others. However, this task was tedious and overwhelming, and I soon realized that having this many options is not helping me. I was stuck.

A few weeks later, I started volunteering online with a nonprofit to kill some time. There, I had a conversation with a woman named Jasmina. Out of all of the conversations I’ve had about my future with others, the one I had with her was by far the most productive and helpful. It is then that she recommended to me the book “Designing your Life.” Like I said earlier, I was skeptical at first, but she assured me that the book was written by Stanford professors and was based on a very popular course offered there. At this, my ears perked up, and I decided to give it a go.

It was one of the few good decisions I’ve made. I think it’s an exaggeration to say that it completely uprooted my life, because it did not, but I’d definitely say that, while reading it, I’ve had a few of those moments people consider as “Epiphanies”. This book has everything my greedy and inexperienced self about to enter the real world wanted to know. It’s very honest and doesn’t sugar coat or oversimplify things, but what it does is offer you very constructive and easily repeatable ways that you can re-frame your thoughts and change your life by using design thinking methods.

It includes many entertaining and useful real life examples from students and adults who took part in the Stanford course and whom the writers, Dave and Bill, helped be more satisfied with their life. It not only talks about your professional, but also your personal life. It offers pointers on everything from identifying problems and categorizing them, to philosophical questions about life, balance between work, love, play and health, mind maps, job hunting, networking, decision making, immunity to failure, brainstorming, happiness, building a community and much more. After every chapter or two there is a section dedicated to activities you can include in your everyday life to actually implement the knowledge and concepts introduced in the chapters, which I found to be particularly useful. Most of them are in forms of weekly or daily logs, measurements, maps and brainstorming. They were pretty straightforward, precise and easy to understand.

I will not go into much detail about the contents of the book, but there are about 7 key concepts that the authors stress. These are curiosity, bias to action (trying stuff out), re-framing problems, awareness (knowing that everything’s a process), radical collaboration and always consulting your compass. Your compass is made up of your Lifeview and a Workview, which are essentially just a short paragraph describing what you want to get out of your job and your private life and what you value in each of them. Ideally, these two should complement each other.

Whenever you make a major decision in your life, consult your compass to make sure there are no irregularities. Another major theme is that no matter at what point you are in your life, there’s always time to turn it around. “As long as you’re alive it’s not too late to revise the potential content of your eulogy.” P.S, this book is a great source of quotes that actually sound kind of cool.

“Just about everything we do in life is either a finite game, one in which we play by the rules in order to win—or an infinite game, one in which we play with the rules for the joy of getting to keep playing. “

“Don’t make a doable problem into an anchor problem by wedding yourself irretrievably to a solution that just isn’t working.”

“In life design, we reframe a lot. The biggest reframe is that your life can’t be perfectly planned, that there isn’t just one solution to your life, and that that’s a good thing. There are many designs for your life, all filled with hope for the kind of creative and unfolding reality that makes life worth living into. Your life is not a thing, it’s an experience; the fun comes from designing and enjoying the experience.”

I mean, come on! You could put this on a pillow and I’d buy it.

In conclusion, if you’ve ever felt like something is missing, or if you’re unfulfilled even though you have a great career with a lot of money, or even if you’re like me and you’re just starting out this great thing called being an adult, you should read this book. I mean, it’s just short of 200 pages. It’s not the Bible, and it’s definitely more to the point than the bible. With all the short stories, it's also pretty easy to read. This book didn't answer the question of what I should do to my life. It didn't answer my question of whether I should be a chemist or a designer. But it certainly helped me relax and cleared up some of the misconceptions. There is not one perfect life and not one passion I have to find. There are potentially hundreds of version of my life which can come true, and as long as I put my heart into it and follow the rules I will be successful.

Maybe after you're done reading this book, you can also answer the question “How’s it going?” with more knowledge and conviction than before, which is one of the promises the book makes.

P.S.- If you want to learn more about the book, visit their website.

Toodleydoo, Andrea