How to Design the Life You Love with Ayse Birsel

 How to Design the Life You Love

We design business cards, posters, and websites, but what if we used our skills to design lives that we love?

It can be tough learning how to balance work, life, and still find the time to be creative. We all have a number of competing priorities at any given moment. Your job, a significant other, children, or even a side business you’re working on, will all take a significant amount of your most precious resource: time.

How you manage your time will go on to define the person you become.

I challenge you to ask yourself it you’re living the life you truly want to live. If not, what are you doing to design the life you want to be living?

Today, I had the incredible opportunity to speak with Ayse Birsel, the famed designer, creative thinker, and author of Design the Life You Love. Her book applies her unique principles and creative processes from the design world, to giving readers a set of tools that’ll lend a new perspective on viewing life.

Ayse shared with me some of her thoughts on how we can all go about architecting a life we’re proud (and happy) to live.

Learn How to Design the Life You Love Today

Q. Who is your new book, Design the Life You Love going to be most impactful for?

Ayse: “There are no roadmaps today. Nobody is telling us what we need to do, in order to live a good life. It’s up to us, to define what will create happiness in our lives and that’s both an incredible opportunity and challenge. We can now define our own rules and design our lives the way we want – my book gives you the tools to do exactly that.”

“This book is for people who’ve accomplished plenty of things in life and are now contemplating what’s next. It’s for empty nesters who are pondering about life without young kids. It’s for people about to retire and are imagining life after work. It’s for young people, high schoolers as well as college students, who have their whole lives ahead of themselves.”

“My goal is to give you a simple process and creative tools to think about life proactively. I want to be sure that you know have the ability to live any life you have the strength to create for yourself. If you’re at a crossroads and want to think about what’s next in your life through optimism and creativity, I’d say this book is for you.”

Q. What are the key principles to designing a life you love?

Ayse: “In my book, I go through the 4 core steps I’ve developed from my experience from the lens of a creative designer. You must first start with the principle that anything is possible.”

1. Deconstruction: Taking the whole apart and breaking our preconceptions.

2. Point of View: Seeing the same things, but looking at them differently.

3. Reconstruction: Putting your life design back together, knowing that you cannot have everything.

4. Expression: Giving your new life design, an elegant form.

“Throughout this process, I’ve found it incredibly useful to select and examine heroes in your life, which helps us to think about your values and will greatly inspire your life design. Metaphors also help us to articulate the scenarios we imagine for our lives.”

Ayse Birsel Designer Creative Thinkger

Q. How did you develop Design the Life You Love and why did you create it?

Ayse: “Our life is our most important project. As a designer I wondered what would happen if I applied my design process to my own life. Could I design my life?”

“It started as an experiment and took off once I started sharing it with others. People started coming to me and telling me that my workshop changed their lives. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that ordinary people are extraordinarily creative once they have a process to help guide them.”

“Those people are the reason why I do the workshops and why I wrote the book.”

Join us for a free live broadcast featuring a series of creative exercises and Q&A session with Ayse, in Designing the Life You Love right here on CreativeLive.

Ryan Robinson FOLLOW >

Content marketing consultant to the world's top experts and growing startups. Online educator at ryrob.com where I share business advice and teach entrepreneurs how to start a blog and other side businesses. Check out my post on the best business ideas, read about how I validated a business idea in just 30 days, get my recommendations for the best business books, and check out my favorite motivational quotes.