Self-help · Book club
Designing Your Life book club questions
Here are 12 book club questions for Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, ordered to open easily and end somewhere worth arguing about. Copy them, print them, or bring them up one at a time.
Designing Your Life borrows tools from Silicon Valley product design and applies them to the messier problem of building a fulfilling life.
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans · 2016 · 4h 30m
Full summary and key takeaways →The 12 questions
- 1.
Burnett and Evans say most people treat career decisions as engineering problems with one correct answer. Where in your own life are you still looking for the one right path?
- 2.
Write down your workview in two or three sentences — why do you work, and what do you believe work is for? Does it match how you actually spend your days?
- 3.
Which of your three 'odyssey plan' futures would you most resist showing someone else? What does that resistance tell you?
- 4.
Think about a decision you've been stuck on for months. Is it really a constraint, or is it a belief you've been treating as a constraint?
- 5.
Who in your life is already living a version of a future you're curious about? What would you actually ask them if you had an hour?
- 6.
When did you last feel fully engaged at work — energized by the task rather than just pushing through it? What made that state possible?
- 7.
The book distinguishes between being stuck and being in transition. Which one are you in right now, and does that change what kind of action makes sense?
- 8.
Burnett and Evans argue that failure is data. What's a professional failure from the last few years that you haven't fully examined for what it revealed?
- 9.
What assumptions about your current job or career path have you stopped questioning because you've held them so long?
- 10.
If you ran a prototype of one of your alternative futures for just one month, what would you actually do? What's stopping you?
- 11.
The book is optimistic about agency and choice. Where does its framework feel unrealistic given your actual situation?
- 12.
What's one thing you learned from keeping a good time journal, or would learn if you tried it for two weeks?
How to run the discussion
- Pick six to eight, not all of them. An hour of real discussion covers fewer questions than anyone expects, and racing the list is what makes a book club feel like homework.
- Open with what people noticed, not what they concluded. Asking for a verdict first hardens opinions before anyone has heard each other.
- Let the disagreement run. The questions below that split a room are the ones worth the time; the ones everyone answers the same way can be skipped.
- Ask the quiet person a specific question. A direct, narrow question is far easier to answer than an open invitation to contribute.
Themes worth steering toward
If the conversation stalls, these are the threads that usually restart it.
Common questions
What are good book club questions for Designing Your Life?
Here are 12 book club questions for Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, ordered to open easily and end somewhere worth arguing about. The strongest openers ask what each reader noticed rather than what they concluded, and the discussion usually turns on career design, life planning, prototyping.
How long should a book club discussion of Designing Your Life last?
Most groups run 60 to 90 minutes of actual discussion. That is roughly six to eight questions, not all of them, so pick the ones that suit your group rather than working down the list in order.
What are the main themes in Designing Your Life?
Career design, Life planning, Prototyping, Self-discovery, Meaning. Those are the threads most likely to divide a room, which makes them the useful places to steer a discussion that has gone quiet.
Picking the next one? See books like Designing Your Life or questions for other book club picks.
