07 Jan Instead of New Year Resolutions, how about designing a new and better life!
Happiness shouldn’t just be something we set goals for once a year.
In fact goals should not be set just once each year.
What if you created a life that you loved every day?
What if happiness was your life every day?
Check out what a Stanford psychologist says in this great Washington Post article…
Throughout our lives, there will be moments when we’ll find ourselves stuck or worried that we’ve fallen short of our potential and greatest ambitions. We might find ourselves fantasizing over a different career or another partner, wondering if it is too late to change.
In their new book, “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life,” Stanford professors, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, provide tools for how we can initiate meaningful changes when we’re feeling stuck without overhauling our whole lives.
For the latest in our Inspiring Reads series, Burnett, a Silicon Valley veteran and the executive director of Stanford University’s design program, describes how they’ve taken the same process designers use to develop new products and gadgets and applied it to finding greater fulfillment in our lives. And, to that end, he explains why he doesn’t make New Year’s resolutions.
Q: What is life design founded on?
Life design has grown out of design thinking. In design, a person looks for problems to solve by going out into the world. They talk to people; they use empathy and intuition to understand the problem they are trying to solve. Once designers can understand the problem, they can reframe it and come up with lots and lots of solutions. Then they create prototypes to determine which solutions are best.
For most people, they feel stuck because they have either defined their problem in a very narrow way or they’ve mixed up the solution with the problem. For example, a nurse who says she wants to chuck everything to become a singer-songwriter needs to figures out what’s really going on. Being a singer-songwriter is a solution, so what is the problem? Is it that she needs a creative outlet or something else? Problem-finding is a very powerful tool…
…keep reading the full and original article HERE