Bill Burnett and Dave Evans open Designing Your Life by introducing their central methodological premise: the design-thinking principles they've taught at Stanford for developing successful products can be directly applied to the considerably more personal challenge of designing a well-lived, genuinely joyful life and career.

How they establish this design-thinking framing:

• Design thinking, as applied in product development, emphasizes iterative prototyping, genuine curiosity about user needs, and tolerance for ambiguity — principles the authors argue translate directly and usefully to personal life and career planning
• This framing explicitly positions life design as an ongoing, iterative process rather than a single, permanently binding decision to be made once and then followed indefinitely
• The authors draw on their extensive experience teaching a popular Stanford course applying these exact principles to life and career design, lending their specific recommendations grounding in substantial direct teaching experience with this particular application

This foundational framing sets up the book's overall structure: applying specific design-thinking tools and processes — normally used for product development — to the considerably more personal, ambiguous challenge of building a genuinely well-lived life and satisfying career.