Madeline
I am currently in desperate need to design and build a life that is more conducive to the way I want to live and so I picked up Designing Your Life. As discussed in the You Are A Badass At Making Money post, I recently quit my job. When I did so, I knew that is not what I wanted to do the rest of my life, but the things I was doing in my free time to change my career was too slow. I started this blog as a means to make money other than what I was doing.
What do I do when I become obsessed with a new topic? I read everything I can get my hands on and Designing Your Life: Build a Life That Works For You is exactly the book I needed in this moment. I want a career change but I don’t know where to start.
Overview
In my opinion, college is an interesting time in your life where you are on your own for the first time. But after college is an even more interesting time, where you need to decide “now what?” I know I had that experience. I was graduating with a degree I was not interested in 2009, a recession, in a relationship that limited me geographically.
Designing Your Life was written by two product designers who taught college classes to college students who were about to go into the real world. They teach their students to use product design principles to apply it to life. I could have used this class when I was leaving college. If I had this class, I would not have spent 10+ years of my life in a career I was not suited to.
The Good Time Journal
Do what you love and you will never work another day in your life. Great! So, tell me what I love? That is where the Good Time Journal comes in. The idea is that you take some time every day during your work day, or in my case, my day, and write down everything you did that gave you energy and took energy away.
This may not teach you that you love playing guitar even though you have never picked up a guitar a day in your life. But it what it will tell you is the activities that cause you to like and dislike what you are currently doing. Then you can find a way to limit the ones that drain you and do more of the ones that give you energy or a good time.
For me, the activity that drained me was customer meetings. I would get serious anxiety before each meeting. I would lose sleep trying to think about what would be discussed in the meetings I had the next day. However, it was not uncommon for me to have eight or more of them a day. My job was literally to meet with customers. My job title even had the word “customer” in it. No wonder why I was unhappy.
What gives me energy? Solving puzzles. Figuring things out. Putting things together. Determining the best solution. That is why I got into this career in the first place. I wanted to solve all the problems and give a nice solution tied neatly in a bow.
Prototyping
I love the idea of prototyping a life and this is exactly what I needed to hear. Something about me, I can jump from one hobby to the next as if it was going out of style. I have been told by close friends that I needed to stop jumping from hobby to hobby as it was annoying them that I had a new obsession every week. In prototyping to build a life, not only is it acceptable, but it is encouraged to jump around; however, it needs to be intentional jumping around, not shiny object jumping around.
I had not been out of the job for 24 hours and I wrote down everything I could think of to do next. They ranged from working at a cafe downtown to specializing in cyber security to teaching English online. But the one I gravitated to the most was selling 3D printed items on Amazon.
Now that I have read Designing Your Life, my prototyping plan is to toy around with 3D printing and selling it on Amazon. There are two obvious directions this could go in. I could decide I suck at the 3D printing piece and it’s stressful and give that up. Or I can decide selling on Amazon is not my thing, and find another way to use the 3D printing to make money. Or I will just go into cyber security.
Mentors and A Community
Mentors and building a community around Designing Your Life is one of the more difficult pieces of this book for me. I assume, no one else will be interested in going down this journey with me. Everyone else has figured out what they want to be when they grow up and I’m the only one who is looking to build a life. Wrong!
I actually know for a fact that this is not true. I have a number of friends who have started new careers as adults, some as encore careers like myself and some coming out of the stay at home mom life. I am not alone in this and I should not do this alone. This is a big goal for me, but I want to create a group. I know I have enough people in my life who would be interested to build a life, either in their current career or in an encore career.
Final Thoughts
Quitting a decade or longer career is difficult but it doesn’t need to be hard to determine the next steps to build a life. I’m grateful I read this book and if you are miserable in your career, you should do so too. And call me when you are done some we can form a group.
