Dave Evans (3) (1953–)

This book came into my life at the right time: stress at work leading to burnout is prompting me to carefully look at what I want out of work and how to dig out of the hole a bit. At the same time, I’ve taken courses and had conversations recently that relate to the concepts being discussed. Specifically, both a recent course and this book talk about fixed vs. growth mindsets: being curious and interested and seeing failures as opportunities to learn, instead of considering talents as show more immutable and failure as a sign of loserdom. And at work we were talking about the CliftonStrengths Assessment, then lo and behold it was mentioned in this very book right after that conversation. So a timely book for me and an interesting one.

This is the sequel to Designing Your Life, but I don’t think you need to have read the first one; there is some overlap, but it’s not as though there are spoilers :) The authors are a little more on the upbeat side than grumpy catastrophizing pessimist here, but they do take pains to state the limitations of the advice given here. It’s useful for overwhelm, but for burnout you need to get more specialized help. And although they present a strategy for quitting gradually (so that you can exit gracefully), they recognize that if a workplace is toxic or downright harmful, you need to get out of there ASAP. I appreciated the honesty and the examples from the authors’ own lives; they seem to do their best to practise what they preach.

There are a lot of useful exercises and worksheets available on the authors’ website to complete and put the book’s ideas into practice, and I think I’ll look into those and get my own copy of this book for future reference. Recommended if you’re stuck in a job and not sure where to go next. show less

I'll admit that I'm skeptical of design thinking. I think Lee Vinsel's acerbic and brutally sourced essay Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains is basically spot on. The flaws that Vinsel identifies are primarily that design thinking is that's an outsider's perspective that attempts to solve complex sociotechnical problems with one weird trick, thereby obscuring actual solutions grounded in history, local capacity building, and true insight and show more effort.

But design thinking may offer actual insight on a problem that you yourself have, like a job that you hate. After all, no one knows you better than you know yourself, and as Burnett and Evans explain, we often get stuck on an idea of a 'career' that we chose with little real knowledge, a linear process pushed by our parents, college major, and then the need to keep bringing home a paycheck.

As an antidote, they advise a process of true self-discovery and rapid prototyping, starting with examining your values, the kinds of things in your life that make you feel energized or drained, and then rapid prototyping of ideas and informational interviews to skip the brutal and inefficient online application process and find work that values you as a person, and not just a cog in a machine. Chapters are short, readable, and have fantastically useful advice at the end. show less

I normally shun anything resembling a career mapping book. The modern working world feels too volatile and career counseling feels unhelpfully stuck in the 20th century to be of any use. The best advice right now seems to be embrace change and learn to adapt, which doesn't require a book to make its point. So, I was ready to chuck this one too, but then it started clarifying a different kind of advice. It started to change my mind.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evan's book is called "Designing Your show more Life" but it could also be called "Designing Your Career" given how so much of our life revolves around the work we do. So, yes, I was a reluctant reader for a while until the authors pitched the idea of prototyping as their method of choice. Eureka! Now we're talking. Prototyping, or simply trying stuff until something works, is a much more organic approach, and a much more successful one.

Almost entirely gone are the days of my great uncles who, as the story is told, found themselves unemployed and bored one day so they headed down to the local phone company and applied for jobs. They were hired and subsequently worked for the company for the rest of their lives. It feels like a fairy tale in many ways. As a friend recently remarked, "Once it was considered bad conduct to job hop every two years. Now it's encouraged." The Designing-Your-Life approach is fully in sync with this idea. show less

I appreciated this book's focus on having an intentional plan for figuring out your next steps in life. However, I found it much too narrow in scope. It's exclusively targeted at those who want a traditional career, working for someone else. There's no mention of entrepreneurship or doing things completely off the beaten path. The authors also treat certain careers as terrible life choices. For example, they see being a poet as a sure way to end up living in a cardboard box somewhere, with show more no mention of the non-monetary rewards that come with choosing such a career, or even the fact that although it may be difficult, nothing is impossible -- including making money as a poet (Hello, Rupi Kaur!).

It's a very traditional, academic, and in today's world, narrow-minded approach to making a living -- and making a LIFE. show less