The moral to the stories of Dave, Melanie, and John is this: Don’t make a doable problem into an anchor problem by wedding yourself irretrievably to a solution that just isn’t working.

Professor Sheena Iyengar from the Columbia Business School is a psycho-economist who specializes in decision making. Her famous “jam study” was done using specialty jams in a grocery store.

There is no one idea for your life. There are many lives you could live happily and productively (no matter how many years old you are), and there are lots of different paths you could take to live each of those productive, amazingly different lives. So do the math; this adds up to tons of different possible ideas you might have. And we’re going to

we’ve found that where people go wrong (regardless of their age, education, or career path) is thinking they just need to come up with a plan for their lives and it will be smooth sailing. If only they make the right choice (the best, true, only choice), they will have a blueprint for who they will be, what they will do, and how they will live.

We introduced the idea of life design in this book by telling you five simple things you need to do: (1) be curious (curiosity), (2) try stuff (bias to action), (3) reframe problems (reframing), (4) know it’s a process (awareness), and (5) ask for help (radical collaboration).

Reframing is one of the most important mind-sets of a designer. Many great innovations get started in a reframe. In design thinking we always say, “Don’t start with the problem, start with the people, start with empathy.” Once we have empathy for the people who will be using our products, we define our point of view, brainstorm, and start

William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life (New York: Free Press, 2009).

It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together.

Ask for Help. The last mind-set of design thinking is perhaps the most important, especially when it comes to designing your life: radical collaboration. What this means is simple—you are not alone. The best designers know that great design requires radical collaboration. It takes a team. A painter can create an artistic masterpiece alone on a