I was living in Paris when I first started making pain au chocolat.
Not buying them — making them. The proper kind, with laminated dough that takes two days and a specific temperature and a patience for failure that I didn't know I had.
The first batch was terrible. The layers didn't separate. The chocolate was in the wrong position. The shape was acceptable but nothing more. I ate all of them anyway, analysed what had gone wrong, adjusted, and tried again the following weekend.
By the third attempt, something was starting to work. By the sixth, I understood why each step mattered and could begin making them feel like mine.
It was around this time that I started thinking about my life the way I was thinking about the pastry.
The design brief metaphor
Every design project starts with a brief — a set of constraints, goals, context, and requirements that define the problem you're solving. The brief is not the solution. It's the frame inside which the solution has to live.
Most people don't think of their lives this way. They think of their lives as something that happens to them — a sequence of events, choices, and circumstances that accumulate into an outcome. They're responsive rather than authorial.
The shift in perspective that pastry-making crystallised for me was this: your life is a brief, and you are the designer.
Not in the self-help sense of "manifest your destiny" or "you can be anything you want." Those framings ignore the constraints, which are real and matter. I mean in the literal design sense: you have a set of constraints (time, resources, responsibilities, history, biology), a set of goals (what you want to be able to say your life was), and a problem to solve (how do you build something worth building within those constraints).
Most people aren't working from the brief. They're copying the reference — the career that looked successful when someone they respect had it, the life that's been socially approved for people with their background, the version of success they absorbed before they were old enough to question it.
What makes a good brief
In client work, a bad brief gives you outputs without objectives. Make a website. Design a deck. Build a brand. These are activities, not goals. You can complete them and have created nothing of value.
A good brief starts from outcomes. What should be different in the world — or in the room, or in the market — after this work exists? What does success look like for the person receiving it?
Applied to life, the equivalent question is: what do I actually want to be true about my life, and why?
Not "what should I do next." That's an activity. What is the experience I'm trying to create? What is the feeling I want to have regularly — of the work, of the relationships, of the days? What are the constraints that are genuinely fixed versus the ones I'm treating as fixed because questioning them is uncomfortable?
Most people have never written their life brief. They've assembled a set of activities that felt sensible and hoped the outcome would be something they'd like.
The iteration principle
What pain au chocolat taught me about design briefs is that the first version is never right.
Not because you've failed, but because you can't know in advance everything you'll learn from doing the thing. The first batch of pastry teaches you things about the dough that no recipe could have told you. The first version of the strategy reveals assumptions that only contact with reality can test.
This is also true of life design. The version of yourself you're aiming at at twenty-two is made of incomplete information, borrowed preferences, and a significantly limited experience base. The version you should be aiming at at thirty-two — if you've been paying attention — should be different. The brief should be revised.
Most people resist this. The revised brief feels like failure — like admitting the original direction was wrong. It isn't. It's the correct response to new data. It's what a designer does.
Messy by design
The pain au chocolat is not a clean process. Butter comes out of layers that weren't cold enough. Dough tears. The timing slips. The kitchen gets covered in flour in ways that guests would not find impressive.
But the result, when everything finally comes together, is extremely particular. It's not the pastry you buy at the boulangerie — not worse, not better, but yours. Made with your hands, in your kitchen, at your pace, with your adjustments to the standard recipe.
That's what life design looks like when it's working. Not efficient, not clean, not obviously following the approved method. But unmistakably the product of an intentional process — of someone who decided what they were making and committed to figuring out how.
The brief is yours to write. The iterations are part of the method.
Start messy. Revise often. Keep eating the failures.