Before Session 15 · Meet My Future Selves
Read this before the showcase — 10 minutes. All logistics — timing, format, and what to have ready — are on Canvas. This page is about what the day actually is.
The big idea: introducing your futures, not defending an answer
The showcase has a simple premise: fifteen weeks ago, if someone had asked what you were going to do with your life, most of you had either a rehearsed answer you didn't believe or an honest “I don't know” that felt like a confession. Today you stand up with something better than an answer — you have futures, plural, built from your own data, and you can introduce them by name.
Notice what you're not doing. You're not announcing a decision. You're not defending a five-year plan to a panel. Burnett and Evans are clear that the point of building three versions of you was never to pick the winner on a deadline — it was to prove there's more than one great life in you, and to learn the process that builds the next one, and the one after that. The showcase presents that proof. A direction, held with confidence and worn loosely — that's the posture.
Why say it in front of people
You already learned the mechanism in Week 10, in your triad: something changes when a plan leaves your head and enters a room. Your voice tells you things your notes can't. The showcase scales that up — more witnesses, more energy, and a version of the same effect: a future you've introduced out loud to a room of people is more real to you afterward. Not because anyone will check up on it, but because you heard yourself say it and meant it.
Your other job: witness
For most of the session you won't be presenting — you'll be an audience. That's a job, not a break, and it's the same one your triad has practiced all term: full attention, no fixing, no advice. You've watched these people locate themselves, map their weeks, fail and sort it, and build three futures from scratch. You're one of the few people on earth who knows what these presentations cost. Watch like it.
This week's belief → reframe
The belief that gets people stuck: “By the end, I'm supposed to stand up with the answer.”
The designer's reframe: You stand up with futures — plural — and the process that built them. That's more than an answer. That's a practice you keep.
Your journal
One last entry before the showcase: write the introduction you'd give yourself if you were introducing a stranger — this person walked in fifteen weeks ago with X, and walks out with Y. Ten minutes, honest, no polish. Nobody sees it but you. It's the private version of what you're about to do publicly — and it's the entry you'll want to reread in a year.
Come Ready
Everything you need to have prepared — materials, format, timing, order — is spelled out on Canvas, and your triad already saw the working version in Week 14. Beyond that, come ready to do two things well: introduce your future selves like people you're proud to know, and witness everyone else's like the last fifteen weeks earned it. They did.
ENT 1611 Designing Your Life · FSU Innovation Hub · Multiple lives and the design process: Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life (Knopf, 2016) · Showcase logistics and submissions on Canvas