CLOSER with Bill Burnett
CLOSER with Bill Burnett
Designing Your Next Chapter – What Else Is Possible From Here?
A special CLOSER experience with Bill Burnett, Co-Founder of Stanford University's Life Design Lab
and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Designing Your Life.
The Next Chapter Doesn't Reveal Itself. It Gets Designed.
At different points in life, many of us find ourselves standing at a crossroads.
Not because something has gone wrong. In fact, quite often, life is full.
We've built careers. Raised families. Created stability. Achieved goals that once felt deeply important.
And yet, somewhere along the way, a new question begins to emerge: What comes next?
Perhaps you're leading a business and wondering if this is still the path you want to be on.
Perhaps you're entering a new season of parenthood.
Perhaps you're caring for ageing parents, rethinking your relationship with work, or questioning a version of success that once felt clear.
You don't necessarily want to start over.
But you sense that something is shifting.
The next chapter of your life may look different from the last.
The challenge is that most of us approach these moments as though there is one right answer.
One right career move.
One right decision.
One right path forward.
One right future.
But what if there isn't?
What if there are multiple futures available to you?
What if clarity comes not from deciding immediately, but from giving yourself permission to explore?
To imagine different possibilities.
To test different directions.
To design, rather than simply react.
That is the power of Odyssey Planning.
Rather than trying to predict the future, Odyssey Planning helps you explore multiple possible futures and discover which ones feel most aligned, energising, and alive.
Because sometimes the most important breakthrough isn't finding the answer.
It's realising there is more than one future available to you.
The Stanford Method Behind
Designing Your Life
In this immersive workshop,
Bill Burnett will guide participants through Odyssey Planning,
one of the most powerful exercises from Stanford University's renowned Designing Your Life methodology.
Rather than trying to predict the future, Odyssey Planning invites you to design multiple possible futures.
You will create three different versions of your next chapter.
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The life that unfolds if you continue on your current path.
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A different future that becomes available if your current path disappeared tomorrow.
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A future unconstrained by expectations, obligations, titles, or conventional definitions of success.
Together, these three futures create a richer picture of what is possible.
And the exercise extends far beyond career planning. It explores the whole of life:
Work and purpose
Family and relationships
Lifestyle and wellbeing
Community and contribution
Identity and growth
Meaning and legacy
The goal is not to discover the correct future.
The goal is to uncover possibilities you may never have given yourself permission to imagine.
Is this for you?
This experience is for anyone sensing that a new chapter may be emerging.
You may be asking questions such as:
Should I continue building this company?
Should we stay in Singapore?
What kind of education do I want for my children?
What would life look like if I worked less?
What am I optimising for now?
Is this still the career I want?
What kind of parent do I want to become?
What would a meaningful next chapter look like?
What does success mean to me now?
If I could redesign my life, what would I keep and what would I change?
What possibilities have I not yet allowed myself to explore?
A structured way to imagine
futures beyond the one
you've always assumed.
You do not need to be in crisis.
You do not need to have all the answers.
You simply need to be curious about
what else might be possible.
These are not questions a
productivity system can answer.
They require something different.
Space to think.
Permission to explore.
What You’ll Leave With
Most people know how to pursue a goal.
Few people know how to redesign a life.
By the end of this workshop, you will leave with:
✔️ Three detailed Odyssey Plans for your future
✔️ Greater clarity on what matters most in this season of life
✔️ A deeper understanding of the possibilities available to you
✔️ Practical experiments to test future directions before making major decisions
✔️ A framework for navigating uncertainty, transition, and change
✔️ Greater confidence in the choices ahead
✔️ Most importantly, you will leave with something surprisingly rare: A way of seeing your future that is bigger than a single answer. And permission to imagine a future different from the one you've always assumed.
The Promise
Most people spend years reacting to life.
This workshop is an opportunity to design it.
Because the future is rarely discovered.
It is created.
And sometimes the most important breakthrough isn't finding the answer.
It's realising there is more than one future available to you.
About Bill Burnett
Bill Burnett is the Co-Founder of Stanford University's Life Design Lab and the #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Designing Your Life, one of the most influential personal development books of the past decade.
His work has helped millions of people around the world apply design thinking principles to life's biggest questions, from career transitions and reinvention to purpose, meaning, and growth.
Prior to Stanford, Bill spent more than three decades as a designer and product leader, including pioneering work at Apple.
Why CLOSER?
At CLOSER, we believe growth is not about becoming someone else.
It's about becoming more fully yourself.
We create experiences for people navigating questions of identity, ambition, meaning, and becoming.
At the heart of many of our conversations is a simple question:
Who are you becoming?
Odyssey Planning offers one of the most practical and powerful frameworks we've encountered for exploring that question.
This collaboration brings together the humanity of CLOSER and the rigour of Stanford's Designing Your Life methodology
to help participants approach their next chapter with greater clarity, intention, and possibility.