Design Your Life Like a Prototype

You may not notice it, but your everyday choices are actually shaped by the kind of person you want to be — the kind of life you want to lead. If you picture yourself fit and full of energy, with enough stamina to handle your work and savour life, you will choose to exercise rather than slump on the sofa wolfing down junk food in front of the telly. If you picture yourself as someone who cares about their community and serves others, you will throw yourself into local affairs instead of merely sweeping the snow from your own doorstep. Day after day, your past choices have stacked up into the person you are now, and the choices you make now are sketching out the person you will become. But have you ever seriously asked yourself: what kind of person do you actually want to be?

Choices matter — but this time, let us start with something bigger: life itself. We have to admit that human beings have boundless desires, yet we are not Buddhas; we cannot have it all. Within the limits of our time and ability, getting clear on our view of life, our view of work, our aspirations, and the people and things that truly matter to us is enormously helpful for playing this game of life more freely and joyfully.

I, too, am often a player lost in this game of life, so the moment I came across this book, "Designing Your Life", I could not wait to take it home — hoping to find some methods in it that would let me get a better grip on my own thoughts, make decisions more smoothly, and quiet the restless heart I so often carry.

The book's two authors are Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, both professors who teach at Stanford University. Before it became a book, the two professors first passed this course on to students in the design department, teaching them to design their own lives from a product-design perspective and helping them find a path that is both meaningful and able to meet the demands of business and society. Later, the course was rolled out to all Stanford students and became its most popular elective.

There is more than one good life

Anyone born in Hong Kong has surely had the same "core values" drilled into them from childhood to adulthood: study hard, get into a good school, land a job at a good company, build a family with a partner, buy a flat… and so on — as if everyone has to follow the same recipe, ticking off every task before they can call it a good life. But people have different personalities and different aspirations. Is this really the only kind of life worth pursuing?

Borrowing one passage from the book about prototyping: a product designer will make more than one version — sometimes dozens of prototypes — to test whether a product is viable. Life works the same way. Many people cling to their own preferred Plan A, convinced that if they did not get into Harvard, their life is over and they can never gain anything afterwards… In truth, life is not a linear game like Super Mario Bros., nor does every Mario have to make rescuing the princess his sole mission (besides, the trend now is Queen Elsa, who does not need you to rescue her anyway).

Open yourself up to more possibilities. Think you might be interested in running a coffee shop? Find the owner or staff of a small café and ask them about the bitter and the sweet of it. Think filming videos as a YouTuber would let you have fun and earn money too? Try getting to know people who are already in that circle, give yourself a little taste of it, and see whether it lives up to your imagination — then decide on your next move, building a prototype that brings you closer to the life you picture, and step by step, slowly, realising the life you want to live.

Does your work fit your view of life?

As the people who love working more than anyone else on the planet, Hongkongers put in an average of over 50 hours a week. It has to be admitted that, for most people, the time spent on work over a lifetime far exceeds the time spent with a partner — or even with family. Have you ever thought about what your view of work actually is? This is not about the kind of work you want to do, or how good you are at your chosen profession. It is about what "work", as an activity, actually means to you. Beyond earning enough money to cover daily life, what is it that you want to get out of it? For me, work should bring me a sense of satisfaction after completing a task, recognition from others, and new knowledge that lets me keep learning.

Your view of life, on the other hand, takes a more sweeping look at "life" as a whole. The book offers some questions to guide your thinking, such as: why are we alive in this world at all? Is there a god or some higher being that can sway our decisions? These questions carry a philosophical flavour, but do not be intimidated, and there is no need to overcomplicate them. When I did this exercise, I simply thought back to my mother's teachings as a child: never wish harm on others; hold on to your empathy; do all you can to help others within the limits of your own ability… and so on. You can also think about what qualities the person you want to become ought to have.

Then read back over the view of work and view of life you have written down. Are they alike? Or are some of them completely at odds — poles apart? The authors note that the reason so many people feel lost, empty, or short on satisfaction is often that there are too many contradictions between their view of life and their view of work.

Getting to know yourself through repeated reflection is the first step in designing your own life. As long as you have the capacity to observe, you can work out how to decide whether to carry on with your current pattern or set about changing it.

What is mentioned above is only a few of the exercises in the book. This book demands a very high level of participation from the reader; there are eight exercises in all, each requiring the reader to spend time thinking and taking notes. I am still chewing them over slowly, and sometimes I go back over an exercise I did before to revise or correct it.

The truth is, life never had a standard answer. A good life means different things to different individuals, and each person, encountering different things at different stages, forms different views, which in turn give rise to different needs. To be in harmony while still being different — we must respect the way others choose to live; and we must also understand ourselves well enough to stay true to our own thinking and hold fast to the path we want to walk.