Designing Your Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work

Bill Burnett · Dave Evans

Feb 2020 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

About this audiobook

From the authors of the #1 New York Times best seller Designing Your Life ("Life has questions. They have answers" --The NYT)--a job-changing, outlook-changing, life-changing book that shows us how to transform our work lives and create a dream job that is meaningful without necessarily changing the job we have.

Dysfunctional Belief: I'm stuck in a lousy situation (and there's nothing I can do about it).
Reframe: I'm stuck in a lousy situation (and I'm finding the problems and the solutions).
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans successfully taught graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University and readers of their best-selling book, Designing Your Life ("The prototype for a happy life." --Brian Lehrer, NPR), that designers don't analyze, worry, think, complain their way forward; they build their way forward.
     In Designing Your Work Life, Burnett and Evans show us how design thinking can transform our present job and our experience of work in general by utilizing the designer mindsets: Curiosity. Reframing. Radical collaboration. Awareness. Bias to action. Storytelling.
Dysfunctional Belief: Good enough isn't good enough.
Reframe: Good enough is GREAT--for now.
     Burnett and Evans show us how, with tools, tips, and ideas, to enjoy what we have and to live in a state of "good enough, for now," one of the strongest, most effective reframes there is, and how this idea, once understood and accepted, can make new possibilities available, giving us the energy to enjoy the present moment and allowing us to begin to prototype possible futures.
     And if we want to quit? Burnett and Evans show us how to use the job we have to get the job we want (in another company), and show us as well, the art and science of quitting (leave the campsite better than we found it), using the power of the quit design to reframe how we finish our current job and get a better one.
     They write, as well, about how the work world is changing as the automation of work increases (hello Alexa, artificial intelligence, drones, and robots); how thinking like a designer can make us flexible, and ready to adapt to change . . .

This audiobook includes a bonus PDF of charts and worksheets.

Ratings and reviews

Great audiobook. Very practical. I recommend it.

About the author

BILL BURNETT is the executive director of the Stanford Design Program, and was a product leader for Apple's groundbreaking PowerBook business. He directs the undergraduate and graduate program in design at Stanford. DAVE EVANS is the Codirector of the Stanford Life Design Lab, and a cofounder of Electronic Arts, one of the world's largest interactive entertainment companies. He holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford.