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Design the Life You Love, Part 2: Reconstruction, Ayse Birsel, Product Designer and Author, Design the Life You Love, with Ayse Birsel, Product Designer and Author, Design Your Life
Reconstruction is the other side of deconstruction. When you deconstruct something, you pull it apart, and you kind of expand on the idea. But you now need to make some choices. So reconstruction is about converging and focusing on what really matters to you. And there you have limits, you can’t have everything. So I tell people, if you could only have three things in your life, what would that be? And that’s an incredibly sharp convergence, taking all of your life and boiling it down to three principles. Three things that you want to invest in and spend time. That’s kind of like a wake up moment, realizing that design is about making choices, and you can’t have everything. And furthermore, you need to create a hierarchy, so your number one, your number two, and your number three.
There is a second exercise in reconstruction that’s a little bit more forgiving, because I realize that it’s really hard. It’s very helpful, but it’s really hard to take your whole life and just see the three things that matter. So the second exercise is the deconstruction against four quadrants. It’s doing reconstruction in four quadrants. And there you get three choices in emotion, three in intellect, three in spirit, and three in physical. And that reconstruction allows you to have a total of 12 choices, but it’s very balanced. So it’s really about, what are the three emotions that you want to have in your life? Make that clear to yourself. What are the three intellectual qualities, three physical qualities, and three spiritual qualities? If you can define those 12 things, it becomes crystal clear as to how you want to spend your time and energy. And that becomes the backbone of your design.
In emotion, you could say, I want happiness, I want love, and I want to feel safe. So then how about intellect? Intellect is about really the mind. So it’s more about the mental process. And so you could say, intellectually, I want creativity in my life. I love and want more learning. And maybe, intellectually, you want more curiosity. And maybe curiosity and learning complement each other. Physical could be, you could say, nature is really important to me. So nature could be a physical component. And I won’t give you all the other components, but one example from spirit could be sharing, becoming somebody who gives more. And even this that’s not who you are today, maybe through your values and your metaphor, you realize, well, I want to become that person.
And once you see that on paper, and you capture that, well, you can make a to-do list and you can say, what do I need to do to get from here to tomorrow? And perhaps if I want to become more of a giver, what do I need to do? And you can make yourself a simple to-do list.
Deconstruction without the reconstruction is very destructive. Once you kind of break something apart, you really need to put it back together. And that’s why reconstruction is so important and making those choices.