Do you ever wonder if you could be getting more out of life? Even if you’re mostly satisfied and grateful, do you think about how to keep moving forward? The good news: it’s never too late to design your next chapter. Two Stanford professors wrote a book to help you do exactly that, using design thinking.
Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, grew out of the popular class they teach undergrads and students in Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program. Burnett is Executive Director of the Stanford Design Program. Evans co-founded the Life Design Lab and lectures there too. Both spent years in Silicon Valley product design, including stints at Apple and Electronic Arts.
This post reviews the book, plus what the authors have been up to since, from the perspective of someone designing her own next chapter.
Why Design Your Next Chapter?
You might think your 20s are the natural time to “design your life.” They are. But this next chapter is another natural point to reflect on where you’ve been and where you still want to go. You’ve accomplished real things by now, maybe not everything you pictured at 22, but plenty worth counting.
You also likely have a sharper sense of your own mortality than you did decades ago. That’s not a bad thing. It can push you to embrace risk and finally try the thing you’ve been circling for years. This next chapter may be the perfect moment to design your life, and this book will show you how.
It’s Not About Finding Your Passion
Right up front, the authors write, “anti-passion is our passion.” I loved that immediately. I’d spent years hearing I needed to find my passion, and I’d developed real anxiety over never landing on just one. Turns out that’s not the point.
Designing Your Life takes an analytical approach instead. It applies design theory to the question of what you want to do, with exercises at the end of every chapter that gather data specific to you. You don’t need a single driving passion. You need the confidence to make small or large changes from wherever you already are.
Five Mindsets for Designing Your Next Chapter
Burnett and Evans anchor the whole book in five design attitudes:
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- Be curious. Ask questions. See opportunities everywhere.
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- Try stuff. Bias toward action instead of a single perfect plan.
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- Reframe problems. Step back and name the beliefs that are holding you in place.
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- Know it’s a process. Let go of the end goal and focus on the next step.
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- Ask for help. Good design is collaborative. Mentors and community help you go further than you can alone.
None of this is entirely new; you’ll hear echoes of Carol Dweck’s Mindset and other books on growth and resilience. But the framework is a genuinely useful way to organize it.
Start Where You Are
Wherever you are on your journey, that’s your starting place. Resist the urge to judge your situation as “bad” and jump at the first fix. Spend time defining the actual problem first. As the book puts it: “You can’t know where you are going until you know where you are.”
The authors suggest a simple dashboard: rate Work, Play, Love, and Health on a gauge from empty to full. It’s a quick, honest snapshot of where the gaps really are.
Build Your Compass, Then Go Wayfinding
The harder exercise is defining your Workview (why work at all, what makes work worthwhile) and your Lifeview (what’s the purpose of life, is there a higher power, and how does that shape things). Together they form your own True North.
The authors compare this to wayfinding, the old practice of “figuring out where you are going when you don’t actually know your destination.” I love that image for this next chapter especially. You’re not required to know the ending. You just need to connect who you are, what you believe, and what you’re doing, then write it down. Putting it on paper surfaces inconsistencies you’d otherwise miss.
Track Your Energy
One of the book’s best tools is the Good Time Journal, free on the Designing Your Life website: for a couple of weeks, log your activities and rate your engagement and energy for each. The idea borrows from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow,” that in-the-zone state when something is challenging, meaningful, and enjoyable enough that you lose track of time.
When I logged my own days, the pattern showed up fast. Writing, exercise, organizing my tennis league, and hosting friends lit me up. Errands, routine chores, and a few of my volunteer commitments drained me. None of that surprised me exactly, but seeing it on paper made clear what needed to change.
Prototype Before You Commit
My favorite tool in the book is prototyping: low-stakes conversations and short experiences that help you test a direction before you commit to it. A prototype conversation isn’t an interview about you; it’s a genuine effort to hear someone else’s story, how they got where they are, what they love and hate about it. Most people enjoy being asked. Volunteering or a short-term project works the same way, letting you gather real information before making a big move.
Skip What Doesn’t Apply
The book’s closing chapters, on job hunting, choosing happiness, and handling failure, lean more toward readers earlier in their careers. Feel free to skim; the advice is solid but familiar if you’ve been working a while.
New From the Authors: More Support for This Next Chapter
Burnett and Evans haven’t stopped writing. Their newest book, How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day, came out this past February. It builds on the same framework but narrows the focus to daily life: research-backed tools for more purpose, clarity, and connection without quitting your job or starting over completely. Worth a look if the ideas here resonated.
There’s also a growing network of certified Designing Your Life coaches now running workshops built specifically for people navigating this next chapter, not college students. One example: a six-session small-group program aimed at people three months to three years from retiring, working through the same values work, Odyssey Plans, and prototyping from the book, plus a 12-month action plan at the end. If reading isn’t quite enough and you want structure and a cohort, it’s worth searching out one of these workshops near you or online.
Design a Life You Love
The goal, the authors remind you, isn’t to become a different person. It’s to become more like you. Talk about reinventing yourself all you want, but most of us aren’t looking to bulldoze our lives and start from scratch. We’re remodeling.
Whatever this book stirs up, jarring or otherwise, you don’t need to start over to use it. The first principle of life design is to start where you are. Don’t judge your past. Use it, along with what you’re noticing now, to design your next chapter: one with more energy, more engagement, and more joy.
