The innovation discussed

Using Human centered design to plan your life.

 

What YOU can do with this innovation

Design your life, that’s all. 😉

 

Human centered design is something I not only believe in, but something I know there is not enough of in the world.

Combined with my life philosophy of constant self-improvement (kaizen) and love to doing it, what a beautiful surprise it was to have found out about applying Human Centered Design to life planning, via a book and course at Stanford called Designing Your Life (book, website)! I discovered it through the Hidden Brain podcast I tweeted about below.

The authors also have a Twitter account on the topic.

I have since read the book for an overview and was very intrigued and excited about the exercises and methods involved. Aside from a few trips, I will be ready to go and design my life come September! More accurately, it’s the rest of my life, of course, because I can’t redesign and redo the past.

No matter where you are in your life, from grade 9 (as was in one of the tweets from the Designing Your Life Twitter account), and how good you feel about it, I think it’s a worthwhile endeavour to undertake… and undertake once every few years to make sure you are on course or to correct it, in whole or in part, as the authors suggest. For me, it’ll be a chance to see the possibilities of making some of my ideas for a rather different life come into reality.

I am still more than a few years away from early retirement, but not enough years away to ignore thinking about and making the transition. I plan to do it gradually and smoothly, rather abruptly like retiring and starting from scratch, devoting all my time to it. People who become entrepreneurs part time first, gradually transitioning to full time, actually have a better rate of success than those who dive in 100%, as cited in the book, Originals, by Adam Grant.

My “encore career”, or career after retirement from what I’ll have done the longest in my life, whatever it may end up being, will embrace my Signature Strengths, my rebel talent, and be entrepreneurial where I will be running the show and won’t have to restrain myself, especially my zest, creativity and curiosity that are three of my Signature Strengths, to rules of some bigger entity. I have several possibilities pretty much ready to go. I’ll just have to see going through the exercises if they come through or if I find something different, whether totally different or a derivative of them!

It’ll take me probably the rest of 2018 to do these exercises. Some of them involve gathering “data”, and prototyping. There is a lot of potential homework! But it’s your life! Life is not easy! There is plenty of room to be “wrong” in the exercises, in the sense of finding out something is not optimal for you and/or your situation, rather than your choice being “wrong”. However, you will find out quickly, and not 10 years later after a whole bunch of investments of every kind of resource!

I don’t know if you think you need, and/or would enjoy an endeavour to design your life, but if you were, I would recommend the approach by the Designing Your Life book… even if I haven’t gone through it. That’s how confident I am in it already, though the authors have had a ton of success so, really, listen to them rather than me! 🙂

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