Design Thinking: Your Life Has Purpose

As we navigated from childhood to adolescence, many of us heard some form of the question: What do you want to be when you grow up? Then, when we actually did grow up, the questions became more specific about our plans and next steps: What do you want to do? What do you want to become? 

We live in a culture that awards composed answers to questions like these, even if the responses are a façade. This same world punishes the unknown or the perceived incorrect.

But these questions do not always consider life’s fluidity, its transitions or the continual evolution of the journey. After all, life is rarely a linear path, but instead a road of twists, turns, light, darkness, detours and pit stops. 

It is a journey with no finish line. But each of us is in more control than we think of how we go about navigating it. It is never too late to start. As long as we have life, we have the gift of the present and an opportunity to cultivate a journey of intention, meaning and purpose.

Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans introduced a problem-solving theory aimed at limiting the pressures we put on ourselves. They highlight the concept of “design thinking” in their New York Times best-selling book, Designing Your Life. Design thinking is a process of exploration, curiosity and discovery focused on three frameworks.

Framework 1. Radically accept where you are in the journey

Radical acceptance is “clearly recognizing what we are feeling in the present moment and regarding that experience with compassion (radical acceptance).”

Framework 2. Seek to understand yourself

Each day, we have a unique opportunity to learn more about our background, beliefs, values, interests and skills instead of focusing solely on passion.

Best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert of the memoir Eat Pray Love once said: "We live in a world that has come to fetishize passion… if someone says ‘follow your passion’ they have harmed you…it makes you feel more excluded, like a failure… Curiosity is a milder, quieter, more welcoming and more democratic entity [than passion]…curiosity is our friend that teaches us how to become ourselves." 

Framework 3. Define what matters to you

Life is too short to be living someone else’s dream. The 86,400 seconds we get every day provide us the ability to examine, to use our voice and to take ownership of what really matters to us. We are also granted the opportunity to release things that are not serving us and aligning with our most authentic selves.

Whether we are 18 or 90, we will constantly be confronted with some of these questions. And that's okay because by studying and implementing the concepts of design thinking, we give ourselves the grace not to have it all figured out.

But we also give ourselves permission to construct a career that feels true to who we are today and who we aspire to be tomorrow.