How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day

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Simon and Schuster, Feb 3, 2026 - Self-Help - 240 pages
Read the life-changing book Mel Robbins calls “a blueprint to find [meaning] where we are.”

From the #1 New York Times bestselling creators of Designing Your Life comes an actionable guide to finding real meaning in the life you already have.

Many of us have lives that look successful on paper but feel strangely empty. How to Live a Meaningful Life offers research-backed tools to help you build purpose, clarity, and connection without quitting your job, blowing up your life, or starting from scratch.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, the visionaries behind Stanford’s renowned Life Design Lab, have helped millions use design thinking to craft lives and careers they love. In this new book, they evolve their framework to focus on one question: What makes a life feel worth living, day to day?

Drawing on the latest science and years of teaching, they show you how to:

-Reduce stress by aligning your time with what actually matters
-Bring more wonder, coherence, and flow into your everyday routines
-Turn ordinary moments into roots of joy and meaning
-Strengthen relationships and build “formative” communities that support you

Instead of cramming more into an already overwhelming routine, Burnett and Evans show you how to get more out of the life you’re already living.

Perfect for readers of Jay Shetty and Brené Brown, How to Live a Meaningful Life offers a clear, hopeful path out of the noise and overload of modern life and into deeper engagement, connection, and purpose, because everyone deserves a meaningful life.
 

Contents

The Greatest Design Problem of All
1
Meaning and Purpose Reframed
13
Think Like a Designer
35
A Tale of Two Worlds
67
The Wonder Formula
93
Living the Coherent Life
111
Finding Flow
135
Designing Formative Communities
161
Ages and Stages
187
Living a Meaningful Life
203
Acknowledgments
209
Endnotes
211
Index
215
Copyright

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About the author (2026)

Bill Burnett is the executive director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University and an adjunct professor in mechanical engineering and design at Stanford. He is also the founder and managing director of the Designing Your Life Institute in Singapore.

Dave Evans is the cofounder of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University, adjunct lecturer, and cofounder of Electronic Arts.

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