I’ve always wondered why there were so many books about designing your life written by designers. It’s become clear that it’s because designers tend to approach life as one big design problem.
When you design something, there’s a deliberate process… you set clear goals and intentionally craft solutions to fulfill a specific purpose. Designers naturally apply these same principles to their own lives. What are we optimizing for? What does success look like? How do we orient our lives to fulfill those success criteria?
We shouldn’t expect that this process is easy. Figuring out your personal success criteria and then designing your life around those goals is a difficult challenge. Understanding what success means for you requires deep self-examination. Yet most people live on autopilot, never going through this process.
If you’ve ever designed anything, living without intention doesn’t make any sense. The companies we admire—Apple and Dyson come to mind—succeed because they thoughtfully seek to understand the context, define what success looks like and then create innovative solutions to accomplish these goals. They design with purpose.
you can’t copy and paste a life
You cannot copy and paste someone else’s success criteria. You have to do the hard work to spend time examining yourself and your life to understand what success looks like uniquely for you. When we simply adopt others’ definitions of success, we arrive at poor, ill-fitting solutions that never tap into our full potential.
What we lose by copying and pasting is beyond authenticity, it’s also our creativity. As we funnel ourselves through various systems and blueprints set out for us, we collectively lose our individual creativity. This, I strongly believe, is the source of the widespread angst among millennials and Gen Z in the workplace. We’ve conformed to prescribed paths at the expense of our creative potential.
the principles of a designed life
Living a fulfilling life requires the same thoughtfulness and consideration we apply to design problems. Here are some core principles:
First, establishing your success criteria takes real work. The hardest battles you’ll face are the ones within yourself. It takes time to work through these questions, and there are no shortcuts—only deferrals.
Second, while life is flexible and success criteria can shift over time, it’s difficult to live intentionally if you’re constantly having to define success at every decision point. Setting some intention early is crucial, not because it locks you in, but because it provides clarity for the decisions ahead.
Third, when we each define our own success criteria, we’ll see more flourishing in the world. This doesn’t mean everyone will become an artist, but rather that we’ll design lives that bring genuine fulfillment instead of breeding more angst among those playing by someone else’s playbook.
I’ve never fully understood what people meant by ‘be true to yourself,’ but this seems to be what people were trying to get at—the hard work and creativity of defining and living by your own success criteria rather than unconsciously adopting someone else’s.
the cost of deferring decisions
The temptation to copy someone else’s life or definition of success is strong, but you’re only deferring the decision-making process. This is the most salient example we can draw from the design process: if you’re not aligned on goals upfront, you’ll face constant churn downstream with all the various “stakeholders” in your life.
I’ve learned this the hard way through countless design projects. When you make fundamental decisions early, you gain clarity. The more you defer those decisions, the more complexity you add downstream, because you’re forced to remake that decision at multiple points along the way.
Some might call this first principles thinking, but I think it’s about alignment. It’s about establishing certain decisions early so you can reduce the amount of decision-making required in every choice that follows. That’s what good branding is. That’s what good system design is. And that’s what a well-designed life looks like.
You can see the effects of this choice everywhere. People who never defined their own success criteria end up in their thirties, forties, fifties and beyond wondering whose life they’re living. They feel the downstream churn in every major decision—career moves, relationships, where to live—because they’re constantly trying to figure out what they actually want versus what they think they should want.
The process is hard, and paving your own path takes courage. But the alternative is a life lived in service of criteria you never consciously chose, which is a price too high to pay.
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