4 Ingredients to Design a Life

An update to an old favorite

Three years ago I wrote a post called 3 Ingredients to Design a Life, and it just won’t stop rattling around in my brain. I use it as a guidepost often, I would even say it’s felt fundamental to my thinking, and yet something has been missing.

I think I’ve spotted that missing ingredient now. It was there, but never in the spotlight. So without further ado, here is the post again, revised and updated. In the spirit of simplicity I’ll try not to keep adding more ingredients, but like the famous Monty Python skit about the Spanish Inquisition, there’s just one more thing that had to be mentioned.

4 ingredients to design a life

How would you help an adolescent design a life?

You can’t give them answers. You can’t try to make master plans. But you can create the right conditions. That’s our job description.

But first, an important clarification. This is not about pushing adolescents to decide what they want to do when they grow up. Those conversations, unless invited by a young person with authentic interest, all too often end up as a pipeline of adult pressures and judgments. Even if all are participating wisely and lightly, a fundamental flaw exists when long-term planning with someone as rapidly evolving as an adolescent. Poet David Whyte said it best: “what you can plan is too small for you to live.”

So if this is not about helping someone create the master plan for their life, what are we talking about here?

This is about the way all of us, at any age, try to fit ourselves to the worlds we discover inside of and around us. We discover deep wells of purpose, desire, trauma, sensitivity, and curiosity. We navigate the complex worlds of people and money. We experiment with daily rhythms and ways of being. Life design is how we try to reconcile all these forces. It’s how an introverted kid starts to figure out how much social interaction she really wants, and when to say no. It’s how a kid who spends every off-hour watching YouTube clips about Greek mythology discovers that his curiosity has opened a door. We’re all designing and re-designing our lives, all the time.

It’s a central effort in our lives, and adolescents are the authors of their own story. But our choices as parents and educators will make their efforts easier or harder. I’d like to suggest that there are four ingredients we should make available to them, to facilitate this process of life design.

Ingredient #1: Variety

To figure out who they are, adolescents need variety. Real variety. Each different (non-traumatic) environment they can experience themselves in is a fruitful experiment, sometimes a breakthrough one. As it stands now, too often adolescents have only token variety. They generally know one, maybe two family systems, particularly in cultures that have relatively isolated, nuclear families. They probably get just one teaching style at school (even when they learn different academic subjects, likely all are taught in similar ways). What if we thought much bigger about variety?

What if they got to experience:

• A variety of adult mentors, informal or formal, who model radically different ways of looking at the world?

• A variety of teaching and learning styles, ranging from traditional lectures to tutoring, online learning, project-based learning, etc?

• A variety of family systems, through extended stays with other families whose worldviews and ways of being were quite different?

• A variety of friend groups, as some lucky kids do now when they go to sleep-away camps or other immersive programs?

• A variety of cultures, through travel and immersion when possible?

I recognize that many of these ideas are difficult to implement, but there are also relatively easy things we can do to add variety. Parents can consider how to invite their kids into immersive experiences outside of their norm—this could be a visit to an aunt you rarely see, or a travel experience if you are so fortunate, among many others. Schools can add variety by becoming more open to the world around them. They can invite in community members, experts, artists, businesspeople and the like—and invite students to get out of school for real-world learning as often as feasible.

Ingredient #2: Self-reflection

Variety is great, but without some kind of self-reflection, the insights may wash away. We need to build the habit of noticing, both during and after experiences. How did that feel? How did I experience myself—how did others experience me? What surprised me? Would I want to do more or less of that? And onward.

Self-reflection thrives with unhurried time, as I’ve written about elsewhere. While a quick reflection prompt can be helpful, often we need the space to daydream, to notice what we keep wondering about, to tinker and let our interests emerge when we ourselves witness them.

Developing a habit of self-reflection will call on us to use three fundamental roles—to be a model, a mentor, and a mirror. We model self-reflection with our own practices in how we talk, journal, or notice our own state or that of other’s. We mentor by occasionally providing a challenge or an invitation, for example the gift of a journal. And we can be a mirror by learning how to reflect back, without judgment, what we see in the young person we care for. “I notice how peaceful you are after the camping trip.” Or, “I noticed that you had so much fun designing the video game that you lost all track of time.”

Ingredient #3: Agency

With variety and self-reflection, we begin to be able to calibrate. We discover that we would like more of this, less of that. We learn what kinds of situations make us anxious, or creative, or endlessly motivated. Sometimes, this is enough. The calibration and tinkering can begin, and each experiment sheds a little more light on these questions of life design.

But sometimes it is not enough. Implied in that tinkering is a sense of agency: the feeling that you can control your own destiny, or at least some part of it. Sometimes this sense of agency is systematically removed from students by the way we school them. If we focus them on external measurements and push them hard to achieve, it may appear that they have agency when what they really have is compliance. If we stuff their schedules full of activities they may start passively shuffling from one to the other, waiting for the next instruction. These are not situations of agency.

Simply put, young people need to experience at least one domain in their lives where they feel genuine agency. Perhaps school is traditional and makes them passive, but they have incredible summer experiences where they feel a sense of adventure and self-determination. Perhaps it’s one teacher that creates this environment, or just their home life, or their experience in a club or sport. One way or another, adolescents need to know what it feels like to have the freedom to control part of their life and live the results.

The Field

Let’s imagine a lucky young person has those first three ingredients around them. Radical variety in their experience, providing the contrast that makes life feel full and clarifies what they really want. An honest, ever-deepening practice of self-reflection. And growing skill and confidence in using their own agency.

These are extraordinary starting points — the right materials to design a beautiful life. But something is missing here. Or perhaps implied, but not in the spotlight as it should be. It’s the place where these ingredients mix and ferment into something powerful.

That place — that missing fourth ingredient here — is a social field.

In simplest form, a social field just means the dynamic space between two people. It’s the story that emerges as two people figure themselves out in the context of the other. (And it can be with more than two people as well — a classroom has a social field, a household has a social field, and so on).

But let’s make this more specific. I’m writing this post not just as an educator, but as a father about to embark on homeschooling my daughter. I know I’ll offer her variety, agency, and self-reflection. Plus a pod of fellow homeschoolers. But I think what’s underlying this whole adventure, at least for the start, is the way that she and I relate. The trust and sense of fun that’s grown over a year of doing homeschooling one day per week. Or the way she knows that certain arguments, like being bored out of her mind in school, will resonate with me.

That’s the kind of social field I’m talking about. It’s a central circle among many overlapping circles, as she starts to enter the social field of homeschool pods, tutors, and other new relationships. And as she finds her path, as those ingredients of variety, agency, and reflection all mingle, I think this social field is where things have space to take root.

So whatever your role may be, I think we have two types of tasks to help someone design a path that gives them meaning. One is to set the conditions — making sure that good ingredients are present, like variety, agency, and reflection. The second is to tend to the field, the relational space between us and our students or children. This field is not a condition we create, because we don’t control it. Rather, we give energy to it. And we try to free ourselves from bias, trauma, and fear so that we can show up authentically in it. When we step away from those, and we listen, magical things happen. The field is the place where the ingredients mingle and form something far greater — perhaps even a life full of meaning and contribution.

Rumi says it best:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

There is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

Doesn't make any sense.

(Translated by Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi, 1995)

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In Other News…

Challenge Accepted is almost here! As a little preview, here is the near-final version of the cover design. (To make sense of this image, imagine it folded over a book - the left side is the back cover, followed by the spine, then the front). Deep appreciation to Rye Hickman, whose illustrations breathed so much life into these ideas. We’re making last tweaks to the interior layout, then it goes off to the printer in a few weeks, heading toward official release in mid-August. I can’t wait to share this one with you all!