Designing Your Life

What It Is

Design thinking, applied to your life

Designing Your Life (DYL) is the methodology created by Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans*, built on their #1 New York Times bestselling book of the same name. It takes design thinking, the same approach used to build products, spaces, and technology, and blends it with positive psychology, applying both to the much harder problem of building a life.

Instead of searching for one right answer, Designing Your Life treats your life as a design problem: something to get curious about, prototype, and reshape through small, testable steps rather than one big leap. There is no data for the future, so you cannot think your way to it. You have to build your way there.

* Bill Burnett and Dave Evans co-founded the Stanford Life Design Lab and have taught this approach to millions of people worldwide, from recent graduates to women reinventing midlife. Learn more at designingyour.life.

Where It Began

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans first taught this approach inside Stanford's Design Program, pairing the tools of design thinking with research on what actually makes people flourish.

Now Taught Well Beyond Stanford

The class outgrew its original lecture hall and is now part of the curriculum at universities from Harvard to Oxford.

A Following of Its Own

Between the bestselling book, workshops, and retreats it has inspired, the ideas have reached far more people than a classroom ever could.

Beyond Stanford, a growing network of certified facilitators now brings this work to people navigating transitions across Europe, including workshops and retreats run by Designing Your Life Netherlands for expats and internationals in similar seasons of change.

Why It Matters Here

Built for a moment exactly like this one

Reframes "stuck" as solvable. An empty nest, a closing career chapter, or a quiet "what now?" becomes a design problem, not a crisis to survive.
Trades certainty for prototypes. You do not need a five-year plan. You need a small, low-risk way to test a possible next chapter.
Draws on radical collaboration. Designing a life was never meant to happen alone, which is exactly what our circles are for.
Works at any age or stage. Designing Your Life was built for reinvention at every stage of life, from a first career to a next chapter.
Moves you to action. You leave with real next steps, not just insight.

How We Use It

Part of what a Magnificent Middle circle can offer

Designing Your Life is not something we invented, and it is not required to join a circle. It is a proven tool we can draw on when a circle is ready for it: a way to move from reflection into practical next steps, guided by trained facilitation. Where our circles hold the space for the emotional and spiritual work of this chapter, Designing Your Life offers a concrete process for reshaping what comes next.