Has there ever been a more opportune moment than now to reconsider how we’re working, living and generally leading our lives? The first global pandemic in a century has shaken us out of workplaces, habits and relationships, giving many of us perhaps the best shot we’ll ever have at figuring out what we really want to be when we grow up.

But how do we answer this question? One answer is to follow our passion, or “bliss” in the words of late professor Joseph Campbell, articulated in the 1980’s in a series of television interviews with journalist Bill Moyers:

Bill Moyers: Do you ever have the sense of... being helped by hidden hands?

Joseph Campbell: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition . . . that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

Today “follow your bliss” is the stuff of bumper stickers on old Volvos, and passion detractors are legion. Advice columns and graduation speeches caution against making major life decisions based on enthusiasm alone. As venture capitalist Marc Andreseen put it recently, "Don't follow your passion. . . . Your passion is likely more dumb and useless than anything else. Your passion should be your hobby, not your work. Do it in your spare time."

A recent Wall Street Journal article offered a cautionary tale. ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off describes the sad financial fate of graduate students in fields such as history, social work, and architecture. Recent film graduates of Columbia University taking out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000, but were making less than $30,000 a year after graduating.

Should they have “followed the money” instead? This is the other popular guidestar for people making career and life decisions. Every year thousands of students follow the money into undergraduate computer-science programs and graduate programs in law, medicine, and business.

Yet we know it doesn’t necessarily lead to wealth or happiness. Just ask many executives and law firm partners trapped in corner offices and expensive lifestyles or sales engineers with jobs they dislike but no other path to as much remuneration.

Most of us understand that it’s better to strike a balance between bliss and money, and the holy grail, of course, is to find a path that leads to both. However, it’s hard to recognize this path, since how can we know in advance how we’ll feel about our decisions until we get there?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could take a hyperspace leap five years into the future to see how our choices played out? If we could spend even a day with our future selves and compare this life with the alternatives, we’d be far better equipped to make a good decision today.

There are still big questions about whether the multiverse exists, but as science-fiction writer William Gibson has said, “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” In terms of how our choices will play out, there are people all around us today who made the same or similar choices earlier and are living with the consequences. If we can tap into their experience and wisdom, we might be able to “sneak up on the future.”

This is the message of two Stanford professors, Bill Burnett and David Evans, who developed a popular course to apply design thinking to career and other life decisions. They packaged their ideas in their book “Designing Your Life,” and Bill Burnett provides a summary in his Ted Talk.

They distinguish between “engineering problems” where you’re clear on the solution you need and there’s lots of data to help solve it, and “design problems” for which there’s not a clear goal, but more of a vague idea of what might work and lots of “ideas floating around.” As they note,

A great design comes together in a way that can’t be solved with equations and spreadsheets and data analysis. It has a look and feel all of its own - a beautiful aesthetic that speaks to you. (Intro, p. xv)

A great design is something that “you know it when you see it.” There are, moreover, likely multiple designs that might fit this criterion, since “there are many versions of you, and they are all ‘right.’” (intro p. xxiii)

It’s heartening to know that there are probably many solutions that might work, whether for a career choice or the similar dilemmas people face with decisions about how and where they want to live, and what the “work-optional” (aka “retirement”) part of their lives might look like. However, it’s the existence of multiple choices that can make choosing well so difficult.

Professors Burnett and Evans offer a five-step process to help:

Assess Yourself
You start with where you are with your current dilemma and make an assessment along the important variables. With a career choice or retirement decision, how would you assess your current health, work life, play life, and love life?

Having done this, monitor how you feel during the day as you perform your routine activities - what energizes you, what depletes you, how are you feeling as you move through the day?

Build a Compass
To create a meaningful life, you need first to articulate your purpose by “connecting the dots” between Who You Are, What You Believe, and What You Do. With career decisions, for example, they urge people to “write a work view” to articulate their theory of work and what’s it for?

Develop Three Odyssey Plans
Next, use your imagination to think about the multiple ways you could have a good life. To help with this, they advise developing three lives:

The life you’re leading now.
The life you would lead if your current one went away, perhaps because you lost your job or a relationship.
A “wildcard plan”: what would you do if you didn’t have to worry about money and you didn’t care what anyone thought about it.

Prototype Your Ideas
Building a prototype or model is a time-tested method used for centuries by artists and scientists to explore questions and question their assumptions. For an important life decision, you can use informational interviews, classes, and internships to gather information, uncover hidden assumptions, and figure out what questions to ask.

Make a Choice
Finally, having done all this, you’re ready to make a choice. This last step can be a doozy and it’s where a lot of people stall out. But if you can use both your head and heart to make the decision, then trust that you’ve done your best to figure it out, you’ll increase your chances of success

When I first read the book, I recognized the process I’d used two decades earlier to make a career transition from law to financial planning. My first thought was “Eureka, this is exactly the process that everyone needs!” My second thought was, “Yes, but few people will be able to make it through the process on their own.”

The process of making my own transition took two years. It started with a flash of inspiration one day at a continuing-education seminar and was followed by internet research, informational interviews, going back to school for more education, and a nearly two-year internship working with another career changer who’d left his physics career to start his own planning firm.

Meanwhile, I was still managing a full workload in my appellate practice and preparing for the arrival of my first son. It wasn’t the most propitious time to be exploring a career change.

Even if it had been, I would never have started down the path of exploration without a wake-up call. One day, after winning a major appeal, one that got some news coverage and even led to being nominated for “lawyer of the year” by an enthusiastic client, a wave of depression hit me. My gut told me that this was as good as it would ever get with my appellate work; yet I was never going to be satisfied with the work. After all the investment I’d made in law school and learning my trade, this was far from welcome news.

To their credit, professors Burnett and Evans recognize how difficult their life-design process is, so offer suggestions for how to collaborate with peers as well as workshops to help support people through the process.

Even being willing to seek help, however, can be a challenge, though, since the big risk with the design process is that it may lead you to answers you don’t like. What if you discover that you don’t really like where you live or what you’re doing? What if your life partner isn’t happy to learn of this discovery? There are a host of scary possibilities that can keep anyone from starting to nose around their latent desires and aspirations.

This is one of the reasons I like to say that “I wouldn’t wish growth on anyone.” It’s not an easy path and yet, ironically, it’s the path that professor Joseph Campbell was describing when he advised people to follow their bliss. Joseph Campbell, after all, is the professor who described the “monomyth” common to many religions and ancient societies and articulated the steps of the “hero’s journey” that has inspired filmmakers like George Lucas and other artists.

As Campbell teaches, following your bliss is the right guidestar for making life’s important decisions, but it doesn’t mean that you’ll enjoy following it. As my grandmother might say, following your bliss isn’t for sissies.