Designing Your Life
You don't need a plan for the rest of your life. You need a way to design one.
Based on the book
This course is built on Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) — the book that grew out of the Life Design courses they created at Stanford. The ideas at the heart of every week here are theirs: the reframes, the compass, wayfinding, the Good Time Journal, Odyssey Plans, prototyping, failure immunity. What you'll read on this site is our adaptation of that work for FSU first-year students, written for this course by the FSU Innovation Hub — and when we retell the authors' stories or ideas, we say so by name.
ENT 1611 · FSU Innovation Hub · Engage 100
A one-credit course can only walk you into this way of thinking. The book goes much further — if this semester interests you, it's worth owning.
This course is an independent adaptation and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the authors or Stanford University.
The Designing Your Life book gives this course its spine — but not its only voice. Three other influences show up week after week. The Conscious Leadership Group's "line" gives us the language we use to locate ourselves at the start of every class. Shawn Ginwright's book The Four Pivots teaches the mirror reflection work that we will use — the honest look at yourself like in a mirror. And Brené Brown's research on courage and vulnerability stands behind the way we share our work in this room. When a week leans on one of them, the reading will reflect the influence.
What this course is
This is a design class, and the thing you're designing is your own life. You do the work in a team of three or four — the same people, every week, all semester — because nobody designs a life alone. And there are no exams — your grade is showing up with the homework, doing the work in the room, and being honest in your reflection and your design.
It's also an Engage 100 course — one of FSU's small first-year courses, built to help new students find their place at the university. That's why the class is small, why so much of the work happens in conversation, and why you work with the same small team every single week — this course is meant to be one of the first communities you belong to at FSU. By design, you leave with two things: a set of tools for building a life that fits you, just as you're starting college — and a room full of people who know your name and a bit of your story.
The course is taught by Dr. Angi Yoder Maina of the FSU Innovation Hub, together with two student mentor assistants — FSU students who help run the room, keep the teams moving, and are your first friendly faces in the course.
How this site works
This site contains the course text — there's no textbook to buy. Before every class, there is one reading here, fifteen to twenty minutes, written for you to understand the content of the book and with it the process of designing your life. Each reading ends the same way: something to come ready with. It might be one honest sentence, a first-draft answer, or the best hour of your day yesterday. Whatever it is, it's the first thing your team works with when class starts — so the reading isn't a summary of class. It's where class begins each week.
The rhythm
Every session has the same shape, on purpose: we look at the plan, we settle and notice how we are arriving, we check in with our triads (our life design team), we do the week's work — and we end with each of us naming one small experiment we'll run on our actual life that week. Fifteen weeks of small experiments is the whole idea of this course: you don't think your way into a well-designed life. You experiment your way in.
Your mentors (Fall 2026)
[Mentor name] — [year, major]. [Two to three sentences, written by the mentor: who they are, one true thing about their own path, why they're leading this course.]
[Mentor name] — [year, major]. [Same.]
The sessions
• Week 1 · Start Where You Are
• Week 2 · Above or Below the Line?
• Week 3 · What Is College For?
• Week 4 · Building Your Compass
• Week 5 · Wayfinding
• Week 6 · Reading Your Journal
• Week 7 · Getting Unstuck
• Week 8 · The Four Pivots
• Week 9 · Three Versions of You
• Week 10 · Sharing Your Plans
• Week 11 · Prototyping Conversations
• Week 12 · Failure Immunity
• Week 13 · Choosing Well
• Week 14 · A Well-Designed Life
• Week 15 · Meet My Future Selves
The practical part
Worksheets, submissions, and grades live on Canvas — this site is for reading; Canvas is for the class organization and turning things in. Your reflection journal is any notebook you choose, and nobody ever reads it but you — so do the writing, honestly. At the end of the term, your weekly entries are what you'll pull from for your final reflection. Questions between classes go to your mentor first; anything bigger, Dr. Yoder Maina's door is open.