Designing Your Life: Build the Perfect Career, Step by Step by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

BATB Score: 9.5/10 🎨🖌️

Best for: we all need this book - fresh grads, midlife crisis, early retirement, Forbes 40 under 40 - we all need to take a day and just complete the workbook (at least once and forever more over and over again)

BATB lingering thought: -0.5 points because there were moments in the book that I was like, 🙄 I understand already please stop repeating yourself

Best to: why wasn’t this taught in school?! this is critical! emergency! paging Dr. Beat emergency!

Best as: the only reminder we all need “Life is about more than a paycheck and job performance. We all want to know we mattered to someone. We all want to know our work contributed to the world. We all want to know we loved and we lived the best we could, with as much purpose and meaning as possible, and that we had a pretty fun time doing it.”

Best quotes: “It doesn’t matter where you come from, where you think you are going, what job or career you have had or think you should have. You are not too late, and you’re not too early.”

“A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. You get out of it more than you put in. There is a lot more than “lather, rinse, repeat” in a well-designed life.”

“Now, what makes work fun? It’s not what you might think. It’s not one unending office party. It’s not getting paid a lot of money. It’s not having multiple weeks of paid vacations. Work is fun when you are actually leaning in to your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing.”

“You can’t know what you want until you know what you might want, so you are going to have to generate a lot of ideas and possibilities.”