What Students and Young Adults Can Learn from Designing Your Life
Choosing a major, a first job, or a direction after graduation can feel like a search for the one correct answer hiding somewhere out there, if only you research and overthink it enough. Designing Your Life pushes back on that idea directly: get curious about what's actually working and not working for you right now, test a direction with something small before committing years to it, and build a sense of what matters to you rather than borrowing someone else's definition of a good path. None of this guarantees you'll land somewhere perfect, but it replaces paralysis with a way of moving forward you can actually trust.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Get curious about what's actually working for you
Instead of treating a hard class or a draining internship as proof you're in the wrong field, or the right one, look closer at what specifically is and isn't working.
A student picks a major because it's what her family expected of her, and when she dreads every problem set, she assumes it means she's simply "not smart enough" for the field. She never separates whether the actual problem is the subject itself or the specific way it's being taught in her program.
After a class or work experience that felt off, write down exactly what part dragged and what part, if any, you didn't mind — the difference is often more specific and more useful than "I hated it" or "I loved it."
Test a direction before committing a year to it
Before locking in a major, a full-time job offer, or a big move, look for a smaller, faster way to learn whether the direction fits.
A student accepts a full summer in an unpaid role in a field she's curious about, without first doing anything smaller — a short informational conversation, a small volunteer project, a single class — to check the fit. She spends the whole summer before discovering the daily reality doesn't match what she imagined.
Before committing a semester or a summer to a direction, find one small, low-cost way to sample it first — a short conversation with someone doing the work, a small project, a single relevant course.
Build a sense of what matters to you beyond what's expected
Prestige, salary, and other people's approval are easy defaults when you haven't yet worked out your own criteria for a good path.
A recent graduate chases the highest-paying offer on the table because it's the obvious metric to optimize, and only a year in realizes he never asked whether the actual daily work — long solitary hours at a screen — matched anything he cares about.
List three things beyond salary or prestige that matter to you in daily work — kind of people, pace, amount of structure, type of problem-solving — and use that list, not just the offer letter, to weigh your next decision.
Imagine a few different possible next few years
Rather than trying to find the one right five-year plan, it helps to sketch two or three genuinely different versions of what the next couple of years could look like — different fields, different cities, different combinations of work and study — and notice which one actually excites you to picture, before assuming any one of them is the only real option.
Curiosity and small tests take time you may feel you don't have before a deadline. When a decision truly can't wait, make the best call you can with what you've learned so far — a decision made under a deadline isn't final, and you can keep testing and adjusting after you commit.
Name one thing, honestly
What's one assumption about your future path you've never actually tested against real experience?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
List three things beyond salary or prestige that matter to you in daily work — kind of people, pace, amount of structure, type of problem-solving — and use that list, not just the offer letter, to weigh your next decision.