The two books that every young lawyer needs to read… (Comprehensive Guide - Part 2)
In this second part to ‘The two books that every young lawyer needs to read…’ I examine the book ‘Designing Your Life’ by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
In Part 1, I explained that if ‘Love+Work’ by Marcus Buckingham was the theory then ‘Designing Your Life’ is the practical guide to the question: ‘How do I find the right job?’.
‘Love +Work’ explained the importance of identifying the ‘red threads’ which represent the unique skills and interests that are peculiar to each of us. ‘Designing Your Life’ gives a clearly structured method for turning those threads into a tangible career plan.
The key premise of ‘Designing Your Life’ is that rather than thinking of our careers as a series of jobs we should think in the same way as a designer of a piece of technology:
Have a clear creative process;
Generate lots of ideas;
Build prototypes;
Record what works and what doesn’t;
Reframe problems with a focus on taking action and building forward; and
Develop a long term structure to keep the project on track.
With the idea that each of us can:
Design a career that you love.
How do you start designing a life?
As with ‘Love + Work’ the starting point for this book is that too often people have dysfunctional thoughts around their career including:
‘Your degree determines your career’
‘It’s too late to change’
‘I should already know where I am going’
‘Work is not supposed to be enjoyable, that’s why they call it work’.
‘I need to figure out one single plan, then execute it’
‘My dream job is out there waiting for me’
‘Happiness is having it all’
‘I have to make the right choice’
Instead ‘Designing Your Life’ starts with the idea that you can go back to very first principles at whatever stage you are at and build your career forward using a series of specific tools. The point is you can be forensic and intentional about your career if you think like a designer.
The book repeats one phrase throughout: ‘You are here’. The point being that rather than overthinking how your career has panned out to date or what you expect ‘should’ happen in the future, just come back to the facts of where you are now, accept them for what they are, and then start the design process.
Step 1: work out where you are
Much like ‘Love + Work’ the book notes that very often people fall into jobs without correctly diagnosing why they are in them or whether it really matches the things they enjoy:
‘It has been our experience…. that people waste a lot of time working on the wrong problem. If they are lucky, they will fail miserably quickly and get forced by circumstance into working on better problems. If they are unlucky and smart, they’ll succeed — we call it the success disaster—and wake up ten years later wondering how the hell they got to wherever they are, and why they are so unhappy.’
So the first exercise the book recommends is a ‘work/play/love/health assessment’. The point is that these four categories represent the basic building blocks of a balanced life and the key is to start by making an honest personal assessment of each of these aspects of your life to see how it is really going:
The work/play/love/health dashboard
You cant work out where you want to go until you know where you are. For example, if your enjoyment and satisfaction of your ‘Work and ‘Play’ gauges are high but your health is poor then that might give you a starting point to rebalance your life to address that.
Step 2: work out what you value
You can’t start to design a career unless you first stand back and ask yourself what really moves you, what are your ‘red threads’ and what is the overall direction of travel.
‘Designing Your Life’ says that at the outset people don’t need a specific goal but what they need is a compass to identify their ‘true north’ so that while individual designs and experiments might change or fail, the general direction of travel is clear.
The exercise for identifying that ‘true north’ is a writing exercise in which you articulate your Workview and your Lifeview.
The point of the exercise is to identify connections between who you are, what you believe and what you are doing, to try to connect your work to your wider life.
A Workview should be a written answer to the following questions:
Why work?
What’s work for?
What does work mean?
How does it relate to the individual, others and society?
What defines good or worthwhile work?
What does money have to do with it?
What do experience, growth, and fulfilment have to do with it?
The point is that very few people in their career sit down and force themselves to answer these questions.
A Lifeview should be a written answer to the following questions:
Why are we here?
What is the meaning or purpose of life?
What is the relationship between the individual and others?
Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in?
What is good, and what is evil?
Is there a higher power or other value system which plays a role in your life?
What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace and strife in life?
The point of doing this exercise is once you have written out these two views you will be able to start identifying how your Workview and Lifeview overlap and where they clash, with the purpose that:
‘By having your Workview and Lifeview in harmony with each other, you increase your own clarity and ability to live a consciously coherent, meaningful life – one in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do are aligned. When you’ve got an accurate compass, you’ll never stray off course for long’.
This is often where people surprise themselves as how far their Workview and Lifeview and ‘true north’ might have drifted from the job they are currently in.
Step 3: work out what you enjoy
A key message from the book is that designers log precisely what is working and what doesn’t and the reasons for that, and we should do the same in our careers.
The starting point is undertaking a weekly ‘Good Time Journal Exercise’ where we start to log exactly when we feel i) most engaged and ii) most energised by work.
In other words, we try and identify in detail exactly when we experience joy and fulfilment in our work and we make a note of exactly what that experience is. The key is to do this with as much specificity as possible on a weekly basis so you can start to identify trends and patterns.
Log the ‘AEIOUS’ of each of these moments (what was the activity, what environment were you in, what interactions were you having, what objects were you using and who were the other users).
The ‘Good Time Journal Exercise’ - engagement/energy/flow
For example: ‘I felt very engaged and energised when I was asked to present in-person to a small group of 4 or 5 junior lawyers in my department on my learnings from recent cases I had worked on. I particularly enjoyed presenting the cases using statistical information and creating graphics to illustrate my points. When I was asked to summarise the same information in 30 seconds on a full departmental call without any slides I felt less motivated ’
Obviously 99% of people don’t reflect on their job with this type of focus and so again the results can be revealing.
Step 4: create a mind map of all your ideas
A key message of the book is that designers are never ‘stuck’ because they can always explore new ideas. As long as you are ‘ideating’ forward you are not stuck – designers know that all possible ideas, no matter how radical, should be explored.
‘There is no one idea for your life. There are many lives you could live happily and productively (no matter how many years old you are) and there are lots of different paths you could take to live each of those productive, amazingly different lives’.
The mind mapping exercise is designed to force you to explore the more weird and wonderful ideas you have never seriously considered but also to encourage you to make secondary connections between disparate ideas.
Start by putting something you identified as positive in your ‘Good Time Journal’ in the centre like ‘Being Outdoors’ and then start writing words associated with that idea and then make free associations with those words and so on…
The key to the exercise is that by conjuring up lots of weird and wonderful associations you may start to see themes emerge or a couple of ideas jump out at you which you hadn’t previously considered.
Once you have done the mind map pick three words from anywhere on the page which catch your eye and try and combine them into a possible job description. You can repeat this exercise endlessly as it generates more ideas. You don’t need one plan, you need many.
Step 5: make 3 ‘Odyssey Plans’
Now you have generated lots of ideas using the mind mapping exercise the idea is to sketch three alternative five year plans for your life.
The point is to deliberately pick three very different alternative life paths (including the wild and fanciful).
Life One—the thing that you do currently
Life Two—the thing you would do if the first thing was suddenly gone
Life Three—the thing you would do if money/ image were no object
The point is to create a graphical timeline of the various professional and personal events that would happen in these three different life plans. Give each plan a six word title: ‘Australia adventure - private practice down under’.
A good designer in assessing each option should then assess what each alternative is asking:
What resources does the plan require?
Are you excited about it?
Is the plan coherent with your Workview and Lifeview?
Are you confident about the success of it?
What will life look like?
In sketching the three alternatives out in detail you will get a ‘feel’ for which of the options excites you, which terrifies you, which leaves you cold.
Step 6: start prototyping
Once you have some options it is tempting to feel that you simply have to pick a single ‘best’ idea and abandon the others.
But in the spirit of design a more constructive approach is first to ‘prototype’ each of the options by creating ways to experience and try out each alternative without fully committing. The key is to gain data and insight on each of the options and to ‘think by building’. The point is to try and imagine your future as if you are already living it.
Prototyping can take the form of conversations with people who are already doing the job or experiences like volunteering to undertake similar work for free or shadowing someone in the same industry. The point is just to try and gain as much ‘real’ lived experience of the option you are signing up for.
Not prototyping an idea carefully can obviously result in bad decision making.
The reason why prototyping is particularly powerful is because many good jobs aren’t formally advertised but are part of the ‘hidden job market’ of opportunities which arise through connections and conversations.
In fact it is very unlikely that the perfect job tailored to all your strengths will be advertised, it is much more likely that this type of role can be co-created through prototyping and negotiation.
How to prototype a career plan….
Step 7: choose well
The central tenet of ‘Designing Your Life’ is a series of tools that allow you to produce a number of creative and varied ideas for how to develop your career and then to prototype them.
But an equally important part of the process is choosing well.
If you have too many options you have none at all and so it is important to be clinical in moving towards a single choice when you have enough data.
One way to do this, and importantly to get out of the overly logical part of your brain, is to select one of your Odyssey Plans or prototypes and to pretend for three days in everything you do that you have made that choice and are living it. I.e. you are no longer thinking about ‘Alternative Option A’ from the position of a struggling choice maker, but rather instead you are embodying the person who has already made that choice.
Another crucial bit of advice is that when you do eventually make a choice: let go and move on. Agonising over the path not taken is not a productive way to ‘build your way forward’.
Instead make the choice with conviction, work hard at it and know that by making the choice you are taking the action which will really inform how your career evolves (rather than being trapped in hypotheticals).
The key point is that by taking these steps and designing your life in this way the process becomes the choice. You cant ‘fail’ because each decision only refines the overall direction of travel.
Conclusion
The thing I really valued about ‘Designing Your Life’ is that so many books, articles and podcasts about careers and life decisions talk in abstract terms about ‘mindsets’ and ways to reframe your thinking, but when you are busy and tired what you really want are specific tools and exercises to do. You want to be told: ‘do this and you’ll move forward’.
If you follow the processes which are clearly explained in this book you will generate some new ideas for your career and have concrete ways to take those ideas forward.