Designing and living a joyful life
Mastery before passion, coherence between Workview and Lifeview, and develop Three Odyssey plans
In a previous post, we looked at designing and finding happiness at work. The authors of the book that inspired that post - Bill Burnett and Dave Evans - have another book, Designing Your Life. The book provides some tools and frameworks(and many anecdotes) to live a joyful life. I felt most of them were even more relevant to our careers. After all, if you are living a joyful life, it is very likely that you are happy at work.
Mastery before passion
The authors start strong by making a case that ‘follow your passion’ is the wrong approach to starting off your career.
“Passion comes after people try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery.”
I don’t think it makes the choice easier, but at least it frees up the typical 16-year-old high schooler from the weight of having to choose his career for 40 years. If anyone enquires about their passion and undergrad choice, they can quote the above one1.
Health Work Play Love framework
This is my favorite framework from the book. This framework presents 4 good aspects of a joyful life.
Health
How do you define health?
Emotional, Social, Mental, and Physical parameters can be considered
How healthy are you?
Work
How is your work?
Play
What do you do for fun?
Do you indulge in playtime?
Love
Do you have loving people around you?
Build your compass - Workview and Lifeview
Thinking about your Workview and Lifeview will help you to develop your compass(or north star), which will come in handy while building your career. The example that the authors used is ‘if sustainability is a major factor of your Lifeview, then you will not find your happy work at a polluting company’. In other words, coherence between Lifeview and Workview is key to happy work.
Workview
Why work?
What is work for?
How does it relate to others and the society?
What defines good or worthwhile work?
What does money have to do with it?
What do experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?
Lifeview
Why are you here?
What is the meaning or purpose of life?
Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in?
What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, love, peace, and strife in life?
Activity Log - engaging and energizing
One way to identify your passion is to reflect on the activities in your work day and score them on engagement and energy.
Engagement - How engaged are you in the activity? A good measure of engagement is thinking if you get to a flow state while engaged in the activity.
Energy - Do you feed energized after the activity?
The authors present the AEIOU framework to further break down any activity2. For example, you may like an activity but only in a certain environment with specific users.
Activity - What were you doing?
Environment - Where did the activity take place?
Interaction - Were you interacting with people or machines?
Objects- What type of objects were you interacting with?
Users - Who else was there?
Three Odyssey plans
This is my favorite framework from the book3. The key idea is to think of your career as at least 3 journeys.
Your current career
Your career if your current career did not exist
Your career if money was not a consideration
We have seen these questions being lobbed in many celebrity interviews, or maybe in your own job interviews. Thinking about 2 and 3 will help you think outside the constraints of your current career. Thinking can lead to action, and you may end up in 2 and that may be a good thing. If you land on 3, good for you. But even if you do not, you can give that as your post-retirement plan.
Go build a joyful life!
Or give some generic answer like - I have always loved math, hence engineering. And make peace yourselves that you have time to discover your passion.
I strongly dislike meetings(Activity). But I love it if it is with my favorite peers discussing a challenging problem(Users).
Did I say that before? I get a pass since I have more than one kid, and all of them are my favorites.