I'll admit that I'm skeptical of design thinking. I think Lee Vinsel's acerbic and brutally sourced essay Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains is basically spot on. The flaws that Vinsel identifies are primarily that design thinking is that's an outsider's perspective that attempts to solve complex sociotechnical problems with one weird trick, thereby obscuring actual solutions grounded in history, local capacity building, and true insight and effort.

But design thinking may offer actual insight on a problem that you yourself have, like a job that you hate. After all, no one knows you better than you know yourself, and as Burnett and Evans explain, we often get stuck on an idea of a 'career' that we chose with little real knowledge, a linear process pushed by our parents, college major, and then the need to keep bringing home a paycheck.

As an antidote, they advise a process of true self-discovery and rapid prototyping, starting with examining your values, the kinds of things in your life that make you feel energized or drained, and then rapid prototyping of ideas and informational interviews to skip the brutal and inefficient online application process and find work that values you as a person, and not just a cog in a machine. Chapters are short, readable, and have fantastically useful advice at the end.