Book Review: Designing Your Life

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life has a misleading title. Authors William Burnett and Dave Evans focus closely on career decisions, so “Designing Your Career” would have been a much better title. This book doesn’t provide a framework for building “a well-lived, joyful life” in any area other than career.

However, the book is excellent at what it does, which is providing a framework for thinking and working through major career changes. I found plenty of useful, practical exercises to sink my teeth into. In fact, the advice this book gives is practical and implementable to a degree that really surprised me. It gives detailed advice about every step of the career-vision-building process.

As with all self-help books, having the headspace, time, and resources to implement these life-improving principles is a matter of privilege. A friend who recently read this book commented that it was not written with full-time-mums looking to become working mums in mind, and she was absolutely right. Implementing this process does take time. But if you have the time, it can be very rewarding.