On designing your life - the call

ow can i become the perfect instrument? What instrument do I want to become?

The last few months I have been working through a framework outlined in the book Designing Your Life. Over the next few blogs I want to share where that framework has lead me, the outputs of this process and what I have learned from it.  I am no stranger to the design thinking process but I had never utilized it with a view to hack my life. The end goal doesn't have to be disrupting your life and setting you on a new path (although it could be), it can be as simple as trying to maximize the value out of your current situation.

Hearing the call

What makes people make a change in their life? A feeling of discontent? A longing for something more? The intuition that they need to be working on something they're passionate about?

But what are you passionate about?

It's ok if you got stuck on that line for a while, most people can't articulate a clear answer to that question. And this is the problem that haunts many people entering the workforce and well into a person's career.

Career counselor: "What are you passionate about?"

Job seeker: "I don't know"

Career counselor: "Well, come back when you figure it out."

Many people don't know what they are passionate about at a young age.  If you know exactly what you want to do coming out of high school, you probably won't being doing it in ten years, or, you won't be happy doing it.  If you are the minority who knew what you wanted to do at 15, and are still doing it today. Kudos.

For most of us, passion comes after we dabble in a few things, live a few different lives. Passion is the result of good life design, not the cause.

There are two time frames to consider when designing your life. The present and the long term of cumulative impact. What do you want that impact to look like? How coherently can you describe the answer to that question? Maybe not that well, but it doesn’t matter right now. What’s important is that almost anyone, just by posing the question, can begin to define their sense of direction.

The mindset shift

There are five mindsets that will be important moving forward in designing (and re-designing) your life. These mindsets are your design tools, and with them you can build anything you want, including a life you love.

Be curious. Curiosity makes everything new. It allows you to be open, and explore things you may have never thought of.  Curiosity is the doorway to opportunity.

Try Stuff. When you have a bias to action, you are committed to driving your life forward. Try things, test things, fail, learn, repeat.

Reframe Problems. Reframing life's problems allows us to step back, eliminates our biases, and focus on solving the right problems.

Know it's a process. Life design is a journey. Let go of the end goal you have in mind. Track your life one path at a time and see where it takes you.

Ask for help. Be ready to build a team to work through this with.  I had two other people who bought the book the same time I did which helped immensely as design and innovation, in any context, is a collaborative process.

Tracking your life

It’s time to start listening, turn your attention back on. What is the thing you know that, if you don’t do it you’ll go out of integrity with yourself. Hearing the call creates intention, it’s the broader vision that we can move towards. You need the first track to follow, the first small movement towards what you’re looking for. This movement is the smallest thing you can do to take you towards yourself. Track awareness is training yourself to see the subtle signs of your trail and see your path forward. Your body speaks in emotions and sensations. Listen for it.

If you aren’t sure what you want, leverage the circumstance you’re in to get to the place you want to be. Explore different lives.

To go in search of serendipity recognizing you still need to drive forward on a plan while searching for the ideas that you haven’t fully formed out works better than trying to form your life in a sequential process. In other words, don’t leave your current life in pursuit of a life your haven’t gotten clear on, leverage your current plan and resources to go through your discovery phase. You need to find your purpose-market fit.

In life there are big pathways. If you can see your life laid out before you, it’s not your life. Culture presents us with roads we should go, intuition takes us where we need to go. Your wild self knows what you’re here to do. Your social self becomes so dominant that it overwhelms the wild self. Social self is full of should and have to. Don’t look for the meaning of life look for the feeling of being alive and it will lead you there.

You may not be experienced in the life you end up designing, but what calls you from the inside, you will have an innate ability to be able to pick it up easily. The social self says here’s what you should be good at. The wild self says here’s what you’re meant to learn to be great at. Be in the state of unknown and uncertainty for a bit. People want to know every step and all the pieces they need before they act. Listen to yourself. Find the one thing you need. That’s your first track. Your process is a culmination of tracks, sometimes the next track you need does not present itself until you explore the track you’re on.

We all want to know we matter to someone, that we're valued for the effort we put in.  We all want to know the impact our work has on the world and the people around us. And we all want to live a fulfilling life driven by purpose and have a good time doing it.

So, who's ready to design a life that is constantly creative, productive, evolving and fulfilling?

The next series of posts will work through my journey and will be titled:

Start where you're standing + Find your True North + Track your life + Getting Unstuck + Designing Your Life(s)

If you are interested in designing your own life I highly recommend you get a copy of Designing Your Life as I will touch on the basics of their framework and focus more on the outputs I got out of it and the lessons that came with that.