I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Bill Burnett is the head of Stanford's renowned design school, or D school. And in his TEDx Stanford talk from 2017, Burnett explains how to use the processes of design to help us make better choices and design the best possible lives for ourselves.

This is an episode of TEDx Shorts, another podcast from TED.

If you enjoy it, find TEDx Shorts wherever you're listening to this.

I'm here to help you design your life.

We're going to use the technique of design thinking.

It's an innovation methodology, works on products, works on services.

But I think the most interesting design problem is your life.

So that's what we're going to talk about.

I want to just make sure everybody knows my buddy Dave Evans.

Dave and I are the co-authors of the book, and he's the guy

who helped me co-found the Life Design Lab at Stanford. So what are we doing in the Life Design Lab?

Well, we teach the class that helps you figure out what you want to be when you grow up.

There's a meta-narrative in the culture. When I was growing up, 25, you were supposed to have, you know, maybe have a relationship,

maybe have gotten married, starting to get the family together in the book or in the class.

We don't believe in should.

We just think, all right, you are wherever you are.

Let's start from where you are.

You're not late for anything.

So I'm going to give you three ideas from design thinking. The first one is this

notion of connecting the dots. So we looked in the positive psychology literature and in the

design literature, and it turns out that there's who you are, there's what you believe,

and there's what you do in the world. And If you can make a connection between these three things,

...