Books

Designing Your Life

A practical book that treats life choices like design problems: iterative, testable, and less fragile than perfectionism allows.

Burnett and Evans take Stanford design thinking and apply it to life planning, which is a fancy way of saying they teach you to panic less and prototype more. I support that agenda completely.

What stayed with me

What stayed was the permission to experiment. The book keeps insisting that a life can be designed through tests, conversations, and iterative moves rather than one definitive act of certainty.

What it changed

It changed how I think about planning. Plans became less like declarations and more like hypotheses. That made movement easier because it reduced the emotional cost of revision.

Why I still keep it on the shelf

I still think about this book whenever someone talks about being stuck. Often the next step is not a giant answer. It is a well-designed experiment.