The document discusses applying design thinking principles to career and life. It notes that only 20% of people can identify a singular passion and that life is not an equation but a creative adventure. It advocates designing your life by taking a problem-finding, human-centric approach using iterative design thinking methods rather than trying to analyze your way forward. This involves having a curious, collaborative mindset and taking action through small steps to continuously improve yourself over time.

1. Applying Design Thinking
principles to career and life
Sathish Seshadri
17 March, 2017
Designing Your Life

2. What we intend to cover…
• Why should we design our lives?
• What’s Design Thinking
• Why Design Thinking for life?

3. It ain't what you don't know
that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure
that just ain't so.
- Mark Twain

4. What do I want to be when I grow up?

5. Only 20% of the population can identify a singular passion
(Bill Damon, Path to Purpose)

6. What you study determines your future?
What’s your goal?
Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?
Life is not an equation to be solved.

7. So, lets build our way
forward by designing our
lives!
Life is a creative adventure
to be engaged.

8. “If I had asked people what they wanted,
they would have said faster horses.”
― Henry Ford

9. Problem Solving
• Ways of problem solving
• Engineering thinking
• Business thinking
• Design thinking
• Solving Wicked problems
• Success criteria is ambiguous and change in time.
• Once you have solved it you cant reuse
• Human problems
• Build our way forward

10. Design Thinking
Human Centric
Ambiguous
Tangible
Iterative
Re-design

11. Designing your life
• Solve for Future that hasn’t occurred yet
• Somehow figure out the way forward
• Only way is to build your way forward and not analyze your way
forward
• Define – problem find before we problem solve
• Do one step at a time to become a better version of you.

12. Designer Mindset
• Curiosity
• Reframing
• Mindfulness to the process – don’t get ahead of the moment
• Radically collaborate
• Bias towards action
• False best is the enemy of the available better
• There is more aliveness in us than what we could achieve in one
lifetime

13. The unexamined life is not
worth living!
- Socrates

14. Acknowledgement - Ideas from the book: