Designing Your Life | Book Review

Hey friends. Welcome back to becoming a boss today. We're doing something different. It's a book review. I know, right. It's called designing your life. It's by bill Burnett and Dave Evans. And it's I found to be really interesting. So here's the thing my brother gave it to me. Shout out to little bro. And it's kind of I'm, I've been in a life crisis a little bit, I think he looked at me sadly and he was like, you probably need help. You look like you. So he gave me this book, but I'm telling you it's awesome. And it goes along with our envision for the pod is to help you live a happy life. And so we're going to talk about it. So it's really cool. the authors have written this book based on the class that they teach at Stanford. Also called designing your life and they are essentially designers and they're looking at your life like a design problem. Okay. So what that means is that you have to first measure life, start where you are. So I'm going to walk you through what I went through, and maybe you can decide whether you want to read the book also, or if you want to just. Do the things that we're gonna talk about today and move on from there. I don't know. I don't know what you're gonna do. how to design your life to make you happier because your happiness and my happiness, that we're going to have different things. Okay. I want to take a walk with my husband. You maybe don't want to do that. You hate walking. Maybe you're not even, you don't even like your husband. I don't know. So it's judgment, free zone people. Okay. Judgment free. All right. So we're going to move on. So the first thing that we're going to do is break your life down into four basic categories. Work health love play. I'm going to walk you through mine, but you basically measure yourself according to yourself. On these four categories, work, health love play. The first gauge is health. overall health. So physical health, mental health, and you want to give yourself a rating one to 10. So 10 is you're the happiest and most fulfilled ever. According to your idea of physical health and mental health. So what do you need to be physically healthy? And mentally healthy. So you jot down a few notes so that you know what you mean to be physically healthy and mentally healthy for me. I want let's do a podcast. I want to read a book. I want to spend time in my Bible every day. I want to, these are things that make me feel mentally healthy. Also walking with my husband mental health. Okay. Physical health. I need to get 10,000 steps in a day. Do I want to now. But I need to so 10,000 steps in a day, I made a commitment to do 20 minutes of strength training. Three times a week because I'm getting old. Okay. And apparently when you get old, you have to lift weights. Not trying to win a contest or anything. Okay. However, um, I do need to be able to lift my child up. Okay. She's getting heavy. She eats a lot of carbs. And I want to be able to lift her up without pain and also strain. I don't know you get what I'm saying. So whatever that means for you, your bucket of health is one to 10. Go ahead and give yourself a rating. Not for me. This was pretty high already. I think it was a seven. I made changes based on this assessment. And now I feel like I'm up. Around a nine. So there you go. Number two. Work. Okay. Work is kind of a show for me because of. Okay. My situation is weird. So anyway, you can do your own assessment for work. How fulfilled do you feel in your work? Do you feel the field happy? Do you feel good about your actual work? Yes or no. And your work does not have to mean nine to five? It could be for example, if your job is to be a mom, a stay at home mom or stay home dad like that's work. Okay. That's actual work. You're doing work. So don't think of it. Like you have to be out at nine to five in order to give yourself a rating for work. Okay. Moving up number next. It is play. Now a lot of people are failing. Okay. My people were failing on this play bucket because we just don't give ourselves time. I don't know why we get older and we think we don't need, we don't need supply anymore. So. Rate yourself, one to 10 on how you feel about your play bucket. So for example, Walk in and taking a hike in the mountains. I like to play softball, which I haven't done for. I don't even know it's been a really long time.I like seeing my toddler out to new fun places and kind of watch her play and jump around with her a little bit. I like to. Play games with my friends. we were just talking today about playing squirrel. We love playing a squirrel. It's actually not called that. It's called Acron. It's really fun. It's on the Oculus on, have you guys all right. I digress. I love museums. Y'all I'm such a nerd. I know. I am. I cannot bet. I'd like to go to a museum or some historical. I got a field day in Washington, DC. I had a field day. Okay. With the big Abe Lincoln. He just cannot be bigger. It's amazing. And just to be in the places that the people okay. Moving on. the next bucket is love. You want to give yourself a rating on your love bucket, one to 10, do you feel super, super loved? Do you feel not loved? What is it? Are you getting love from? You could get love from different places. So your spouse, what has my wife, your kids, your family. Sometimes our families are toxic and so we can't get it from there. So you have to have people which are your friends, which we've talked about. This don't make me remind you to go back and watch the episode. Find your people. You need to have your people. All right. But you should have like a friend, a good friend, a really good friend, maybe two really good friends, hopefully three really good friends. If you have an invested time there, then maybe you're not feeling the love. So write down what are some things that I need to do to feel the love, whether they're happening or not happening? What do you need to feel loved? So once you have determined, All of the things that you need for your, your health bucket, your playbook at your work bucket, your love bucket. Once you've determined that you kind of look at it. As a gauge pretend it's on your dashboard of your car and see which one is low. Now if you have several that are low. Okay. It's going to be a little bit harder, but pretend three of them are high. One of them is low. The low bucket is the one. That's your design problem that you're going to basically, you're going to look at it. You're going to see that it's a problem. And you're going to make changes according to what you said. To fix it. It doesn't have to be a bunch of changes. Just maybe one or two, again, little, little, little, little progress, one step at a time. So pretend that all your buckets are good except for play. And you realize that you're an adult, so you may not think you need to play, but now you're realizing, oh, I actually do in your play. May not look the same. Okay. So you don't want to go play with worms anymore. Okay. You're not three. But maybe you do. I don't know. It's you, you get to decide what makes you feel playful? What fills you up? Okay. Now, like I said, for me, I want to go to a museum. I want to go for a hike. I want to talk with my friends. That's okay. A little mimosa here and there. Okay. We're gonna, that's play for me now. What's played for you. I don't know. But you look at what you wrote down for your bucket and then implement a few changes. So for me, for example, I scheduled out. Time with my friends. I scheduled it out and I made regular habits. So I have. For example, a group of friends that we hang with basically once a month and we play games and we eat dinner and that's, that's one of the things I do. I have another friend who I go to church with and meet after church and we talk and we hang and that's scheduled to, okay. I have these things scheduled. Y. Because they're important to me, that is how I am filling my own play bucket. So it may look different for you, but Figure out what it is and then schedule it out. Because it's a priority. And then once you go down the road, 45 days or so, 30, 60, 90 days, you can look back and reassess and say, oh yeah, I actually feel like I'm getting more play in. I'm feel like I'm more healthy. I feel like I'm more loved whatever your design problem was because you made the change. You identified the problem and then you made the change and now you're reaping the benefits and therefore your life has leveled up. Okay. Level up life, Leonard. If, you know, you know, All right. Let me give you another example. So Denise is a doctor. Denise also has four children. Now, I know what you're thinking. When you have four children, it's a lot. And also being a doctor is a high pressure position, right? So she's a doctor. She has four kids and she's spent so much time investing in her career and also her kids that guess what her husband. Fell to the bottom of the list of things to prioritize. So here's what she did. She looked at her buckets. She saw that her love bucket was low. She saw that specifically, her love bucket was low because of the relationship that she had been cultivating with her husband. Not out of neglect just out of you. You guys know what this, you know what, this looks like. Life gets busy. You're trying to do all the things and it's like accidentally something gets left behind. Did she mean to leave her husband behind? No. Does she love her husband? Yes, but that's what happened. She left him behind. She saw this, she realized it and she installed date night. And so now every Friday they hire a babysitter to come and watch the kids and they go out together. Just the two of them eating. Eating at a restaurant because they, they love to try new restaurants. So they plan this. They enjoy the time together. They enjoy eating a new restaurant together and it has made a huge difference in her relationship with her husband. So there you go. There's another example. one more example from my lifeWhen I'm doing this assessment, I'm writing things down that I feel like make me feel fulfilled. Right. And I was kind of surprised to be honest at some of the things that I'd forgotten about. I was thinking about stuff that I've done in the past. I used to be. Uh, trainer, I used to teach people, blah, blah, blah, professionally for a living. And I had forgotten because it was so long ago, it was kind of the beginning of my career. But I was thinking about that and the root cause of that joy. Is still exists in my heart. I love to teach people. I love to help. I love to. Encourage people. I love to put. I mean, I'm doing it right now. Right? You can do it. You can do this. Make a change, you can do it. I really took stock of the things that I've done in the past and where. I felt joy. And what was it exactly that made me feel joy. I'll give you another example. I love football. Y'all. I love football, watching football, talking about football, watching shows about football. I mean, it is. I love it. And. And as much as I love it. I. I had never been to a football game. Like in real life. I know it's. Seems kind of crazy, but I don't know. I just had never given myself the, the. I'm gonna say the grace because you know, you're busy, you're trying to do all the things you're trying to work. You're trying to take care of. And I just never prioritize my play bucket to a point where I would pay however many hundreds of dollars to go to a football game and travel, and then you need a babysitter and all the things, but I'll tell you what y'all. Somebody had this idea to take me to a football game. I don't even know who it was. maybe was Paige. Okay. My daughter she's really, she's a really great at self care. And I had the best time. At this. This football game, the best. Okay. Something about just being, obviously watching a sport that I love. But also being with people that I care about also being surrounded by like-minded people that were hooting. Hooting and hollering and Y'all I was in my glory. I want to go to a football game every single weekend. Obviously that's not reasonable, but I'm saying, I was really surprised at the things that I hadn't even considered. Before. It's kind of funny. So anyway, that's a wrap for today. This was an excellent book. I enjoyed it. Those are the points that I found most insightful and Whatever your situation is. It might be a good idea to look back and revisit these buckets every now and again, just to reevaluate your life changes your, it grows, it evolves you evolve women evolve, shout out. All right. I hope you enjoyed our very first book review. If you want to hear me talk about something specific than leave me a comment on YouTube and I will try my best to talk about it. Okay. And. Listen, friend, whatever it is, you're. Going through. Remember that? You're not alone. alone. and together we can make the world a better place to work and to live. Thanks for listening team. Take care. See you next week.