During the first 5 pages, Burnett and Evans lead you through their way of finding the Designing your life approach. This part is an entertaining read. Then it gets tough with their first exercise which is to write a workview review.
A WORKVIEW would address the critical issues related to what work is and means to you. It is not just a list of what you want from or out of work, but a general statement of your view of work.
Burnett & Evans, 2015
Why work?
Whenever the question of what work is or what it means, I remember Hannah Arendt who had written about the Vita Active – an active life. In an active life, people engage in work to feed themselves and their children and to keep the system running smoothly. Their human body but also their lives and their households. Work – they way I understood it from Hannah Arendt – looks like putting energy into cyclical processes to make sure they don’t come to a halt and would thus endanger our survival.
Let’s look at an example: We eat cereals and fruit in the morning to fuel or body. This cereal, however, has never fallen into our cereal bowl by accident. We need to grow cereal on a field, feed the plant, harvest the crop, clean and transport it, so that I will finally be ready for being eaten. All these processes are cyclic – planting, harvesting, eating, planting again.