Designing your life

Lectures/Discussions: 1 session / 2 weeks, 3 hours / session

This course provides an exciting, eye-opening, and thoroughly useful inquiry into what it takes to live an extraordinary life, on your own terms. The instructors address what it takes to succeed, to be proud of your life, and to be happy in it. Participants tackle career satisfaction, money, body, vices, and relationship to themselves. They learn how to confront issues in their lives, how to live life, and how to learn from it.

A short version of this course meets during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month. Then this semester-long extension of the IAP course is taught to interested members of the MIT community. This not-for-credit course is sponsored by the Department of Science, Technology, and Society. A similar, semester-long version of this course is taught in the Sloan Fellows Program.

An inquisitive nature and willingness to face the truth are required. Students should also have completed the first assignment beforehand. In addition, an open mind, a love of life, and a desire to make changes are helpful.

When students have completed this course, they should be able to

This course is not-for-credit. Everyone passes by completing the assignments.

1. Promises and consequences and areas of life

2. Theories

3. Theories, purges, and thought logs

4. Excuses

5. Parent traits

6. Haunting incidents

7. Cleaning up haunting incidents

8. Connecting theories, traits, and haunting incidents

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