Before Session 4 · Building Your Compass
Read this before class — 15 to 20 minutes. Come-ready is at the end, and this week there are two things: your finished CollegeView, and one new sentence.
The big idea: you don't need a destination — you need a compass
Burnett & Evans open this part of the book with three questions: What is your name? What is your quest? And — if you know your Monty Python — what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? Two of those are easy. The hard one is the quest. Most people, they point out, spend more hours worrying about their life than living it, waiting for the day the destination becomes clear. The design move is to stop waiting for a destination and build a compass instead: something that can't tell you where you'll end up, but can always tell you whether you're headed in a direction that's actually yours.
The compass has two components in the book, and three in this course. You built the first one last week: your CollegeView. This week you build the other two. A Workview is your working philosophy of work — not a job title or a career plan, but your honest answers to questions like: what is work for?
Why do people do it? What makes good work good, and what would make work feel empty even if it paid well? A Lifeview is bigger: what gives life meaning? What makes a life feel worth living? What do you owe other people, if anything, and what's the relationship between you and everything that isn't you?
If those sound like enormous questions for a Tuesday — they are, and that's fine. Burnett & Evans ask for about 250 words on each, written in thirty minutes, and they mean it: a first honest draft, not a philosophy dissertation. Everyone already has a Workview and a Lifeview; most people have just never written theirs down, which means — same as last week — they're running on borrowed ones without noticing. You've done this move once now. This week you do it twice more, and then the interesting part starts.
Coherence: where your three views meet
Here's why it's called a compass and not just three essays. Once your CollegeView, Workview, and Lifeview are written down, you can hold them next to each other and ask the questions Burnett & Evans consider the real payoff: Where do they agree with each other? Where do they flat-out clash? And does one of them secretly drive the others?
The clashes are the gold. Take a worked example — Jasmine, a first-year we made up. Her Lifeview says family is the center of everything and success means nothing without people to share it. Her Workview says work is for achieving big things, and big things demand sacrifice. Her CollegeView says these four years are for positioning herself for the most competitive career possible. Each view sounds fine alone. Side by side, there's a collision hiding in plain sight — a work philosophy that demands the exact hours her life philosophy calls sacred. Jasmine doesn't have to resolve that this week. But finding it as a first-year, on paper, in a classroom, costs nothing — finding it at thirty, in the middle of a life built on the clash, costs a great deal. That's what the compass is for.
Burnett & Evans add one more habit: come back to it. They recalibrate their own compasses at least once a year, the way you'd change the battery in a smoke detector. Your views at eighteen are not a contract — they're this year's reading, and the course will hand the compass back to you in Week 14 to see what moved.
The questions, unpacked
The Workview and Lifeview questions look simple and aren't, so here's what each one is really fishing for — worth reading slowly before Wednesday, because the write sprints in class move fast.
“What is work for?” is not asking what job you want. It's asking what work is FOR in a human life — money, obviously, but is that all? Contribution? Identity? Structure for your days? A way to matter? Notice which answers you reach for first and which you'd never have thought of; both are information.
“What makes good work good?” has a shadow question that unlocks it: what would make work feel empty even if it paid well? Almost everyone can name a job that would technically succeed and quietly waste their life — and whatever makes that job feel like a waste is your Workview talking. We'll use exactly this question in class.
“What gives life meaning?” resist the greeting-card answers and go concrete: think of the two or three moments in your life so far that felt most worth being alive for. What was actually happening? Who was there? Meaning is easier to find in your evidence than in your vocabulary.
“What do you owe people who aren't you?” is the one first-years skip and shouldn't. Family, community, strangers, the future — your honest answer here, whatever it is, quietly shapes every other choice, and for many students it's the strongest force in the whole compass. If your family's sacrifices are part of why you're at FSU, that belongs in your Lifeview in plain words, not as background guilt.
One warning from Burnett & Evans that saves people grief: don't write the views you think you're supposed to have. A Workview that says “work should be pure passion” when you actually deeply value stability isn't aspirational — it's a faulty compass, and a faulty compass is worse than none. Accurate beats admirable, every time.
This week's belief → reframe
The belief that gets people stuck: “By now, I should know where I'm going.”
The designer's reframe: Burnett & Evans say you won't always know where you're going — and don't need to. What you can always know is whether you're moving in a direction that's yours. That's what a compass is for.
Your journal
One entry before class: pick the single hardest question from this page — for most people it's either “what makes good work good?” or “what makes a life feel worth living?” — and free-write on it for ten minutes. Don't try to be wise. Try to be accurate. Whatever comes out is raw material for Wednesday's drafting; nothing is wasted.
Come Ready
Two things this week. First: your finished CollegeView draft — the full version you committed to in the closing round. Your triad works with it directly, so a missing draft is a missing teammate. Second: one new sentence, same rules as last time — your first-draft answer to “what is work for?” It can be borrowed, it can be wrong, it just has to show up. That sentence is where class begins.
ENT 1611 Designing Your Life · FSU Innovation Hub · The line: Conscious Leadership Group; vulnerability research: Brené Brown, Daring Greatly (2012); gravity problems: Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life (Knopf, 2016) · Worksheets and submissions on Canvas