Reviewing a pivotal workshop with some help from the scenes of a cult movie and excerpts from a classic book! (This is the 3rd review of my 100 Reviews Project).
Note: Folks who are time pressed can directly jump to “The Review” section:
Why am I writing this review:
When a weekend blogger comes across a pivotal event and a very interesting subject in his life that in his opinion could have an outsized impact for fellow humans – he can choose to do one of the 2 things below:
- Write a poem (like how Gulzar condenses everything Hrithik feels in this first poem after the scuba diving experience in the movie, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara)
- Write an essay (like Paul Graham who recently wrote the wonderful “How to do Great Work” guide that could help someone working in any field)
Since I lack the brevity and wit of Gulzar, and have a penchant for practical/meaningful philosophy like Paul Graham, I have chosen to do the latter.
How did I get to know about DYL and why I chose to attend the 2-day workshop:
“Communication is a kind of ‘vicarious observation’ that allows us to learn about the world without ever leaving the comfort of our armchairs. The six billion interconnected people who cover the surface of our planet constitute a leviathan with twelve billion eyes, and anything that is seen by one pair of eyes can potentially be known to the entire beast in a matter of months, days or even minutes”
– Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness (p. 234). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Having been a vicarious observer of Silicon Valley and the US ever since my early 20s, the below FastCompany headline had caught my attention a long time back and since then my heart has been prodding me to look deeper into what the most privileged college students in the world might have understood before me:
“Stanford’s Most Popular Class Isn’t Computer Science–It’s Something Much More Important (It’s called “Designing Your Life,” a course that’s part throwback, part foreshadowing of higher education’s future.”) TL:DR – 1) You don’t start with the problem, you start with you. 2) Be Intentional. 3) You can use DYL tools to be more intentional
Life happened, and I got around to listening to the book by the course’s terrific instructors only in January 2022 (during my daily morning dog walks). Even for someone like me (a self-proclaimed self-help addict), whose core hobby is reading books and newsletters about life, meaning, productivity, and being a lifelong learner, the suggestions and insights from the book were quite radical.
- I can keep going on and on about this book, but just sample this – their idea of looking at life through the 4 different lenses of health, wealth, play and love was just transformational for me at that point. (The entire consulting industry is based on the idea of breaking any big/complex corporate problem into manageable chunks, why don’t we ever apply what’s good for business to life??)
Reading a book and putting things into practice are way too different. Like Oppenheimer sums it up perfectly – “theory will take you only so far“. While I did start looking at my life through these 4 lenses and the inherent imbalance across these 4 domains of my life, I didn’t really have a chance to dive deeper into the other great ideas from the book.
To put all these great ideas into practice and on paper, I attended the 2-day Design Your Life Workshop in Bangalore on Aug 19th and 20th. The following review will summarize my best moments and key takeaways from this wonderfully organized workshop:
The Review:
There is a difference between
Watching a movie in which three protagonists overcome the deepest fears of their lives through the adventure sports their wicked friends chose for them (sky diving, scuba diving, and the Spanish bull run festival) during a reunion
vs
Confronting and overcoming your deepest fears in your own lives
and that is the same difference that distinguishes
Reviewing the DYL workshop on a blog
vs
Losing & finding oneself during the 2-day in-person workshop & building a compassionate and constructive perspective to look at life and work after the workshop
A quick detour:
What are frameworks?
Frameworks are the scaffolding that support the construction of great ideas into tangible reality – Unknown
Frameworks and Work/Life:
Like God who is invisible, but omnipresent, the world around you is full of frameworks, but no one ever notices. Case in point:
- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – This is one of the most popular psychological theories that explains why every human does what he does. In its essence, it says, all of us belong to different levels of this pyramid, and most of the activities we do pertain to the level of the pyramid we are currently in and we all constantly strive to move to an upper level in the pyramid
- Agile &/or Scrum frameworks – 91% of organizations state that it is a strategic priority to adopt the Agile framework (Source: KPMG)
- Platform Business Models, Network Effects, Hardware Software Integration – FAANG wouldn’t be FAANG if they hadn’t understood the power of these frameworks much before the rest of the world
What is DYL?
Design Your Life similarly is a framework that takes “design thinking”, one of the finest ideas used by startups and businesses (which unfortunately will always have the best minds of the world captive to it {thanks to Adam Smith}), and applies it to the most wicked problem that humanity will forever be trying to solve (or die trying) – living life to the fullest! And somehow this works like magic (or that is what seems to be the conclusion of those Stanford students who always seem to far ahead of the world and/or continue to shape it to their whims and fancies)
How was my DYL Workshop experience?
I cannot really summarize my complete experience here, but I will share the 9 Aha moments from this workshop that will stay with me for a long time (might pique your interest further):
- If you don’t take the time to sit down and write/revisit your compass, (the lifeview, workview, and coherence documents), you will be a lost soul in this world
- Google Maps can get you from Point A to Point B within the shortest time and distance possible, but this process of navigation will fail miserably when it comes to going from Point A to Point B in your life, where only wayfinding can help and time and distance are irrelevant in this journey
- Passion is an output metric and not an input metric. Steve Jobs was wrong and Cal Newport is right
- Your Maker’s Mix will tell you what your heart wants much better than your gut feelings (Right now, what are you optimizing for money, meaning, expression, or connection?)
- Everything that’s holding you back, can be reframed with some hard introspection and some good DYL friends (as long as this is not a very core life belief which might need therapy or similar such interventions)
- Energy, engagement and flow are the 3 biggest clues to finding what you love and what you can be good at (to understand the meaning and differences between these 3 terms you will have to read the book AND/or attend the workshop)
- Apart from being the most cathartic experience of your life, the mindmapping and Odyssey exercises will take you to the deepest and darkest recesses of your mind and shine light on to the 20% of the stuff you could do/start doing, so that the act of doing these things can bring you >80% of happiness in your life
- Man is a social animal. You cannot go from Point A to Point B in life without radical collaboration. You never know how another human being can change your life completely; you need to be open-minded and forever keep increasing your collaboration + networking muscles
- The People of the Workshop – Navyug, Junaid and the entire cohort of DYL Bangalore – Their questions, their perspectives, their ability to open up to strangers with their vulnerabilities and life plans, the leap of faith they took to attend this workshop (ah and their favorite book recommendations)
In Summary:
Every decision in life has a cost (eg: you choosing to read this blog, cost you time and energy); Even not making a decision triggers opportunity costs (forgetting ethg about DYL after 5 mins, when busyness strikes and history repeats) – (Borrowed from Himani Datar’s byline for her Sunday Magazine article on The Hindu, 27th Aug 2023)
Hence, I would like to end this review with a call for action to anyone who found this review helpful or interesting by proposing three simple action steps (the world always rewards actors & doers >>>> readers, so please act):
- Read the book Design Your Life
- If you want to engage more with the DYL Movement in India, connect with Navyug Mohnot and Junaid or with me
- Attend the next DYL cohort whenever it happens closer to your city
The DYL framework and its exercises have the highest RoI possible amongst any self-help book or exercises that are currently out there. It would also be great if you all can help spread the word by sharing this to those who might find this helpful!
Finally, in case you are still here, I would like to end with this dessert for thought from the one and only Daniel Gilbert, one of the finest and funniest happiness researchers of our time!
Question: If humanity is a living library of information about what it feels like to do just about anything that can be done, then why do the people with the library cards make so many bad decisions? There are just two possibilities. The first is that a lot of the advice we receive from others is bad advice that we foolishly accept. The second is that a lot of the advice we receive from others is good advice that we foolishly reject. So which is it? Do we listen too well when others speak, or do we not listen well enough?
– Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness (pp. 235-236). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition
Answer: The information we need to make accurate predictions of our emotional futures is right under our noses (via Stanford students and lived experiences of folks like me), but we don’t seem to recognize its aroma. It doesn’t always make sense to heed what people tell us when they communicate their beliefs about happiness and life, but it does make sense to observe how happy they are in different circumstances. Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities–minds unlike any others–and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.
– Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness (pp. 256-257). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition
