Designing your life (2026)

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Key Takeaways

• Designing your life Written by J.D.
• Roth | Published: 21 August 2022 - Updated: 11 December 2024 | 9 comments 36 shares 34 2 I am obsessed with the film Everything Everywhere A...
• From the moment I saw the trailer, I knew the movie was meant for me.

Designing your life Written by J.D. Roth | Published: 21 August 2022 - Updated: 11 December 2024 | 9 comments 36 shares

• 34
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I am obsessed with the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. From the moment I saw the trailer, I knew the movie was meant for me. I was right. The film’s bizarre blend of action, philosophy, science fiction, taxes, and juvenile humor feels specifically targeted to me and my brain.

For those unfamiliar, here’s a quick plot synopsis.

Evelyn and Waymond Wang own a laundromat. Their business is failing, their marriage is fracturing, and so is their relationship with Joy, their daughter. During a meeting with the IRS, Evelyn is visited by a version of her husband from a parallel universe. He says that the multiverse , all of the numerous parallel universes , is under attack from an evil being named Jobu Tupaki, and Evelyn is the only one who can save it. The rest of the film is about Evelyn overcoming her skepticism and discovering her true power (and Waymond’s).

This trailer pretty much nails the mood and theme of the film. If this preview intrigues you, you’ll probably like it:

Everything Everywhere All at Once is strange. Very strange. It starts mundane and boring, descends into madness, then ultimately ties everything together in some magical ways. Some people hate it. They can’t finish watching it. That’s too bad, because if you abandon the film during the boring part or the strange part, you never get to the magical part. The tedium and the madness are all part of the journey.

I’ve watched the film five times now (and will likely watch it a sixth later today), and I get something new from each viewing. The movie is rich. And detailed. And layered. In fact, it’s designed for repeat viewing (because frequently there’s no way to know something has meaning the first time through).

The reason the film hits me so hard, I think, is that its themes are aligned with things I’ve been ruminating over throughout 2022. While I was caring for my dying cousin during the spring, I reached some sort of nihilistic nadir. Like Jobu Tupaki, the movie’s “villain”, I decided that nothing matters, that life is inherently meaningless.

At heart, though, I’m a Waymond figure , and I always have been. It didn’t take me long to realize that even if life is inherently meaningless (especially if life is inherently meaningless), then it’s up to each of us to make our own meaning. And that kindness matters.

Then there’s the movie’s wild exploration of the multiverse. I’ve been exposed to this concept repeatedly in 2022, most notably in the novel The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, which has a plot similar to Everything Everywhere All at Once: a woman is trapped in a limbo state between life and death, where she explores the numerous alternate lives she might have lived.

It’s as if the universe is trying to beat me over the head with a message: “J.D., you bozo, you are not trapped by your current reality. If you’re dissatisfied with this timeline, it’s up to you to create a timeline you like better.”

Message received, Universe.

Designing Your Life

Last week, I re-read a book that helped me understand how to take this esoteric idea and do something practical about it. That book is Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Ostensibly, Designing Your Life is about finding a career that fits you. In reality, it’s about looking at the multiverse and deciding which of the numerous available universes you want to live in.

Fundamentally, Designing Your Life is a career book targeted at young adults. The material here is derived from a Stanford University course taught by the two authors.

Bill Burnett is the executive director of the Stanford Design Program (and was a part of Apple’s early laptop design team). Dave Evans is the co-director of the Stanford Life Design Lab and a very early employee of Electronic Arts, the videogame company.

Burnett and Evans aim to get students (and readers) to apply principles from the world of design to the process of planning their future. While sometimes this approach (and the terminology associated with it) feels forced, most of the time it works surprisingly well. In fact, I found this book was full of aha! moments.

What does a well-designed life look like? What does that notion even mean? “A well-designed life is a life that makes sense,” the authors write. “It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together.” They call this alignment coherence, and I think it’s an excellent concept.

To build a coherent life, the authors encourage readers to practice five disciplines:

• Curiosity. Curiosity, of course, is about being open-minded, about casting a wide net. The authors want you to explore, to be open to opportunity. Doing so will help you “get good at being lucky”.
• Bias to action. It’s not enough to simply read and think about things. Burnett and Evans want you to act , even if your actions are imperfect. They want you to try things. They want you to fail over and over, because failure is the foundation of success.
• Reframing. People get stuck all of the time, and frequently this “stuckness” is a result of an inability to shift perspective. Designing Your Life urges readers to reframe problems in order to remove barriers and circumvent perceived roadblocks. (Reading this book helped me realize I do a poor job of reframing problems in my life. I allow myself to stay stuck for far too long, in most cases.)
• Patience. Design, the authors say, is a process. Life design is no different. “For every step forward,” they write, “it can sometimes seem you are moving two steps back.” They advocate what they call prototyping , testing new ideas and solutions. “Life design is a journey,” they say. “Let go of the end goal and focus on the process.”
• Radical collaboration. Lastly, the book urges readers to seek help. Excellent design requires multiple minds tackling a problem. In designing your life, you want to consult with friends and family and mentors. You want to meet people and ask questions. You want to get input from people you trust.

Because this book is based on an actual college course, it’s filled with exercises. These exercises were quite clearly homework assignments for Stanford students, but for old folks like me they’re useful tools to gain clarity.

One exercise, for instance, asks readers to write a 250-word Workview (a short statement about what you believe work is for and what constitutes good work), a 250-word Lifeview (a short statement describing what you believe makes life worth living), then explore how the Workview and Lifeview clash and/or complement one another.

But the exercise I like the most in Designing Your Life makes me think of the multiverse.

The Numerous Versions of You

“This life you are living is one of numerous lives you will live,” write Burnett and Evans. “The plain and

Final Thoughts

Before you check out, double-check designing life against current offers and any coupons you can stack. Small habits like this add up to real savings over a year.

Originally published at getrichslowly.org.