Why following your passion doesn’t work. Today I bring you, Bill Burnett. After years of drawing cars and airplanes under his grandmother’s sewing machine, Bill went off to the Stanford and discovered that there were people in the world who did this kind of thing every day (without the sewing machine) and they were called designers.

Bill is the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford. He got his BS and MS in Product Design at Stanford and has worked professionally on a wide variety of projects ranging from the award-winning Apple PowerBooks to the original Star Wars action figures. He holds a number of mechanical and design patents, and design awards for a variety of products including the first “slate” computer.

In addition to his duties at Stanford, advises several Internet start-up companies.