‘Even if you have a crummy job, you can have a meaningful life’: design thinking guru Bill Burnett

SINGAPORE – Bill Burnett did not expect to write another book 10 years after his million-copy bestseller, Designing Your Life: How To Build A Well-Lived, Joyful Life, in 2016.

That 272-page book, written with fellow Stanford University academic Dave Evans, applies a design thinking approach to making big decisions about life and career. It became the kind of title of which people bought 10 copies for their friends, Burnett tells The Straits Times before his latest book launch here on March 23.

Design thinking encompasses not just a process but also a mindset for problems with no obvious answer. It involves staying curious, reframing one’s problem, collaborating with others and prototyping constantly, as designers do.

In the context of life design, that means conducting small-scale experiments and doing reflective exercises to shape a life consistent with one’s interests and values.

The American duo subsequently released two spin-offs of their original New York Times hit: an interactive book titled The Designing Your Life Workbook: A Framework For Building A Life You Can Thrive In (2018); followed by Designing Your New Work Life: How To Thrive And Change And Find Happiness – And A New Freedom – At Work (2021).

Burnett, 68, executive director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford, and Evans, who is in his 70s and the design lab’s co-founder, have been teaching life design since 2007.

Both have extensive private sector experience.

Burnett designed Star Wars action figures and spent seven years at technology company Apple designing laptops, among stints with Fortune 100 companies. Evans was a product manager for the first mouse and early laser-printing projects at Apple in his three-decade technology career. He was also a co-founder of American video game company Electronic Arts.

At first glance, their new book, How To Live A Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking To Unlock Purpose, Joy, And Flow Every Day, sounds like another title you would find on the self-help shelves in bookstores.

It deals with how many people look for meaning in gestures such as hustling for more impact at work, which can be fleeting and transactional.

“If you put all of your eggs in the impact basket, it’s very likely that you will not be satisfied or find yourself self-actualised because impact is a transaction that can satisfy you only for a short period of time. It’s never enough,” Burnett says.

Meaning, he adds, can instead be found in everyday moments such as putting on your “wonder glasses” to appreciate how a flickering candle bathes people in a beautiful light or getting into a flow state doing something you love. The exercises in the book aim to help readers flip from their default transactional worldview to access the world of flow, where meaning and self-transcendence reside.

“Even if you have a crummy job, you can have a meaningful life,” says the avuncular academic, an introvert whose compelling storytelling holds the audience’s attention at the book launch.

He confesses that he does not like self-help tomes. He wrote this latest book only because he was moved by the many conversations he had with his students who were struggling with a sense of disconnect.

“There’s a meaning crisis in the world. People are displaced and communities aren’t forming the way they used to. And so we see this fracturing, this loneliness and then this lack of meaning,” he says.

“We’re not philosophers. We can’t solve the big ‘meaning of life’ question. But if you’re looking for a life that’s more meaningful or a life that’s more passionate or a life that’s more human, we can design for that.”

He feels a book about designing meaning in life is relevant at a time when people worry about survival issues because of artificial intelligence potentially taking away their jobs.

“Losing a job is one of the most important times to stop and ask yourself: ‘Rather than just trying to get the same job in another place, did I think my job was purposeful or meaningful?’ And for most people, the answer was no,” he says.

“So, before I just jump into another job that has no meaning, maybe I should ask myself: ‘What am I looking for?’ You don’t have to get all your meaning from your job, but you do have to get some.”

Design thinking is also a useful tool when “business as usual” no longer holds.

“In the case of an unpredictable future, I’d better have lots of strategies. That’s a designer’s mindset,” he says.

Scaling life design in Singapore

Burnett’s ties with Singapore run deep. The Republic has been working towards prototyping a life design movement at scale since the formation of the Designing Your Life Institute in 2023. It is affiliated to Stanford’s Life Design Lab.

Mr Mark Wee, then executive director of the DesignSingapore Council, connected with Burnett in 2021 and invited him to conduct a four-day in-person workshop for leaders in career counselling and adult education in the same year. It had rave reviews, and led them to co-found the non-profit institute. 

Around that time, Singapore was found to have the unhappiest workforce in a 2021 five-country Asian study by a human resource software company. It was also ageing rapidly.

In such an achievement-oriented society, life tends to read like a scripted template that involves going to the right schools, getting good jobs and fulfilling expectations. To that, Mr Wee adds: “I realised that we have become too risk-averse and needed our creative confidence back.”

Burnett reflects: “When I talk to people about it, they repeat that script. But they were reporting personally that it was hard for them, that it wasn’t working.”

He points to the runaway success of the institute’s programme, Designing Your Life: The Next Chapter, for people aged 50 and up, done in collaboration with Workforce Singapore and Republic Polytechnic.

In 2025, a free pilot run for 1,000 people became a hit through word of mouth, resulting in lengthy waiting lists. Mr Wee reports heartfelt feedback from participants, some of whom became emotional while exploring their potential futures.

“People really respond to this idea that they can have the agency to be the designer in their life. So, although there is a script and there is a very traditional way of thinking about things, the younger generation and a lot of people who are ready to retire really want a new story,” Burnett says.

Since its inception, the non-profit institute has trained over 150 school facilitators to deliver the programme to secondary- and tertiary-level students. Republic Polytechnic incorporated the Designing Your Life programme into its curriculum for its yearly cohort of 4,000 students in 2025. Several hundred national servicemen have gone through it, while another few hundred members of the public have signed up.

The Singapore Institute of Technology also developed its Design Your Futures programme in late 2025 with the support of Stanford’s Life Design Lab and the Designing Your Life Institute.

The institute recently rebranded as commercial entity Designing Your Life Global, with Mr Wee as its co-founder and chief executive, and Burnett as co-founder and director. It is expanding beyond workshops into public, on-ground initiatives.

It is launching a Life Design Commons at Glass Dome in China Street in partnership with social movement PlayPan. This is envisioned as “a civic space for dialogue, experimentation and reinvention in the heart of the city”. The space will host regular gatherings from May 2026, including talks, workshops and community events designed to help people navigate life and career transitions, Mr Wee says.

“If we can enable even 20 per cent of the population to think like designers – to approach life and work with curiosity, adaptability and agency – that may be enough to reach a tipping point for lasting cultural change in Singapore. At that scale, it could become a playbook for city transformation and a model for other cities grappling with disengagement and people living overly scripted lives,” says Mr Wee.

Burnett, who jokes that he had never heard of the acronym KPI (key performance indicator) before coming to Singapore, says many here grow up with a fixed mindset that they have certain talents and can do only certain things.

But the growth mindset that design thinking cultivates helps them reconnect with what makes them human.

“It’s about honouring the humanness in them and letting them dream a little. Not that they will go off and do something crazy, but just so they can get in touch again with their own creativity,” he says.

He adds: “Singaporean people are as creative and emotional and as full of capacity as anybody. They just were never given permission.”