Designing Your Life.

Designing Your Life

By Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

Build a life you love—using the same design thinking that powers Silicon Valley’s biggest innovations.

From two Stanford professors and directors of the iconic Stanford Life Design Lab comes the #1 New York Times bestseller that’s helped millions stop drifting and start designing a joyful, meaningful life.

Designing Your Life isn’t a pep talk. It’s a proven playbook—born in the classroom, battle-tested by engineers, artists, parents, and CEOs.

Inside, you’ll master the design process to:

- Reframe stuck problems into exciting possibilities

- Prototype multiple lives before committing to one

- Run real-world experiments (no five-year plans required)

- Turn “What if?” into “Watch this.”

“Life is a project. And like any great design, it can be iterated.”

Packed with worksheets, real student stories, and laugh-out-loud exercises, this book shows you how to:

- Ditch the “one perfect path” myth

- Build energy, work, love, and play into a cohesive whole

- Fail forward—fast, cheap, and fearlessly

The book that turned life design into a global movement—now taught at 200+ universities.

Perfect for graduates, career-changers, or anyone asking: “Is this really it?”

Stop waiting for the right life. Start designing it.

Your next chapter begins with a sketch.