This popular Stanford-led online course teaches you how to design your ideal life and career

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• "Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life" is a popular, 4-hour course.
• Stanford instructors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans teach you to find happiness using design theory.
• I took the online class and the thought-provoking questions and worksheets made me feel less anxious.

How do we build a happy life?

According to Dave Evans and Bill Burnett, two Stanford University design theory experts, that's one question we'll never get to stop asking.

Accepting the fact that we'll always be building the road while we're driving on it is one of the main takeaways from Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, the duo's bestselling CreativeLive online course. Based on their popular book of the same name, the course states that we make one life decision - be it to have kids, switch careers, begin or end relationships - that defines one "chunk" of our life, and, then we make another and move into another.

How do we approach these decisions - and essentially design our life with them - so that we feel personal fulfillment?

If you ask Burnett, Executive Director of Stanford's Design Program, and Dave Evans, co-founder of both Electric Arts and the Stanford Life Design Lab, the answer is to use design theory when making life decisions.

Design theory, a human-centered, psychology-focused methodology for designing products and services, can also help us build a life that's customized and enjoyable. Burnett and Evans teach you how to do it.

My review of Designing Your Life, plus answers to FAQs:

How is the course set up?

Designing Your Life asks students thought-provoking questions ("What defines good or worthwhile work [to you]?") and guides them through related action items. It prompts us to think about the huge, abstract categories of our lives - love, play, work, and health - with the aid of neuroscientific guardrails.

The class is broken up into 21 bite-sized videos (the longest is about 30 minutes) of a live lecture given by Burnett and Evans to a small crowd. It's engaging and interactive; while you're not in the room, you can watch short snippets of group interactions among the participants.

According to the course, you can expect to end this class with:

• An introduction to design thinking from leading experts in the field
• A new approach to work-life balance
• Three different plans for the next five years
• Actionable ways to get started now
• Secrets to cracking the hidden job market
• Neuroscientific insights on how to make good decisions

Some videos have built-in exercises, like creating your own "love, play, work, health" balance sheet to reframe how you view your life. Since it was filmed live, you also get to passively experience an in-person classroom by listening to participants' thoughts and questions.

By the end, you'll design multiple life plans for the next five years, and learn to reframe unsolvable "Gravity Problems" - like an overseas job offer when you don't want to live far from your parents - without undue anxiety or dread.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life doesn't feel like a self-help pep-talk, nor is it overly abstract nor sentimental. It's fast and concrete, feeling as real-world applicable as a coding or personal finance class.

How long is the course?

The videos are short, ranging from 4-30 minutes and amounting to a fast four hours and 39 minutes.

How much does it cost?

The course was originally listed at $199, but lately, it's discounted to $29. Once you buy it, you get lifetime, on-demand access to the course and its materials.

The pros

It also does a good job of combining new concepts with actionable ways to apply them to your life ASAP.

It reminded me of other useful, life-building courses I've taken. "Designing Your Life " utilizes positive psychology, so a lot of the concepts show up in Professor Laurie Santos' bestselling course on happiness, The Science of Well-Being - like naming and deconstructing "dysfunctional beliefs" about our happiness and replacing them with science-backed habits.

The cons

Design thinking is action-biased, which is why this recorded class is interactive. But, you won't be able to participate as actively or pose your own questions as the live audience did.

However, that can also be a boon; there's a lower barrier of entry to a course that you get to be a fly-on-the-wall for. You can get the experience of learning from a community without being put on the spot yourself.

You can also work on it with others - roommates, friends, family - by streaming it together or via Zoom.

The bottom line

Evans and Burnett are, unsurprisingly, engaging speakers. The class is fast-paced and highly digestible.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life helped me build some direction for the next "chunk" of my life - but, more importantly, it gave me tools that I can use to address the next time I find myself feeling stuck in life. Plus, it challenged and entertained me, and was shorter than other courses I've enjoyed in the past.

All in all, it was an impactful use of four hours of my life. It's hard to clearly and effectively contemplate the future if it seems like an amorphous problem you don't know how to solve. This course allowed me to face the next five years without the shame or existential dread that can impede upon the process, simply because I respected and trusted the methodology.

I'd recommend it to anyone looking for tools to answer the daunting, neverending question: What next?