Productivity
Designing Your Life Summary & Review: You Don’t Find a Passion — You Prototype One
Designing Your Life summary: Burnett and Evans replace 'find your passion' with Odyssey Plans, prototypes, and a 7-day plan to design a…
Read Summary →Dave Evans
"The Apple-and-Stanford designer who helped turn life design into a weekly practice"
Dave Evans is a designer and educator who led work on Apple’s first mouse, was an early employee at Electronic Arts, and later taught at Stanford. With Bill Burnett he built the Designing Your Life course and co-wrote the 2016 Knopf book of the same name, arguing that a stuck career is a design problem you prototype rather than a passion you wait to find.
1 book·Life Design & Career Design
Books by Dave Evans
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work
Key Ideas & Recurring Themes
Gravity problems
Facts you cannot change are constraints, not puzzles to crush with more effort.
Workview and Lifeview
Why you work and what a good life is for must be written down or every job will feel off.
Failure immunity
Log what broke, extract the lesson, run the next prototype — versions are supposed to die.
Notable Quotes
"The only way to know if an idea is any good is to try it."— Designing Your Life
"Dysfunctional belief: I need to find my passion. Reframe: I need to design a life."— Designing Your Life
Book Author Dave Evans
Designing Your Life Summary & Review: You Don’t Find a Passion — You Prototype One
Designing Your Life summary: Burnett and Evans replace 'find your passion' with Odyssey Plans, prototypes, and a 7-day plan to design a life that fits.