Designing Your Life, the book and the theory by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, is the seminal book or basic textbook for much of this program. But it hopefully is clear that that does not exhaust what we plan to do together. This is not simply a design your life workshop, but an adaptation of their theory to everything that we are doing together. 

The book, by the way, is really misnamed; it’s not really “designing your life,” as much as it is using design theory to think about your life, but that’s too cumbersome a title to put on the front of the book. The title, as it stands, makes it look like you can, in fact, design your life, which is antithetical to what they’re trying to do in the book, which is to use the design theory of the Stanford D-School to think about how the next few years of your life might unfold.

When Peter uses the book in his course at Exeter, for example, he emphasizes design theory more than the specific content of the book, and, in fact, he does not read the book until the end of the course as a kind of a summary of what we had been doing during this term’s course called “Imagining Your Future,” as what we are doing is an exercise in imagination. But there are many exercises in the book which are worth extracting, such as writing a lifeview and a workview, or writing three Odyssey plans, all important exercises.

If you wish, and only after looking over all the other modules, you choose to start with Designing Your Life, which we generally recommend, we suggest you work your way through the book, chapter by chapter, doing the exercises in the book as written. That means filling out the Good Times journal, writing or at least thinking out a life- and work view (which we discuss in Part C below), writing or thinking out Odyssey plans and so on, and discuss among yourselves, explorer and guides, what you think, and what you’ve learned when you’ve done those exercises.