Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process

Giacometti’s studio

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Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
—John Stuart Mill

• If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding.¹ Put simply:

  • I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.

  • I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.

  • Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.

• When you design something, a useful definition of success is precisely that—the form fits the context—as Christopher Alexander argued in Notes on a Synthesis of Form (1964). This is true of relationships, and essays, and careers: you want to find something that fits.

  • A glove is well-designed if it fits the hand nicely.

  • A relationship is healthy if it fits the personalities and needs of the people involved (and the resonance between them).

  • An essay is good if it fits a context made up of 1) the truth, 2) the intellectual needs of the writer, and 3) the reader's mind. The better the form fits that context—the truer, more insight-generating, and resonant it is—the better the essay.

• The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context.

  • To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.

• The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.

• If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.

• It is a feedback loop between you and the context. By gradually adjusting the thing you are designing and observing how well it fits the context, you create a feedback loop that embeds the context’s knowledge into your design. Your design ends up smarter than you.

• The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy: if you could just make it into another context your problems will go away.²

  • Applying to university, I looked in the catalog and thought, Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to be a diplomat! I spent half a year applying to the political science program and going through all sorts of schlepp. Then, after 18 months, I realized I didn’t like it at all. It had been a vision. I panicked, dropped out—and then came up with a new vision.³

• Instead of trying to force a vision, here is how you can lean into unfolding.