Lifestyle design means designing your life the way you want it to be. It’s when you create yourself and your environment and turn your vision into reality.
Lifestyle design is about freedom, reclaiming your time and doing things you like. It’s about spending each day in the best way possible, feeling the way you want to, and making it all meaningful by helping others with what you do and leaving a dent in the universe.
What Lifestyle Design is Not
It has nothing to do with conventional thinking. It’s the opposite of mediocrity. It’s different from what average people are doing with their life.
Here’s what being part of the system means:
- continuing your education as long as possible
- getting a degree
- starting a job in the field
- working from 9 to 5
- dreading Mondays and looking forward to the next weekend, until ultimately the next vacation comes
- dedicating the most energetic and promising years of your life to being stuck in an office
- waking up because you have to get to work
- being lazy in your free time
- blaming others and life itself for what you’re not doing with your life
- expecting everything to be in a certain way and getting disappointed when it doesn’t go as planned
- working your whole life so that you can have money when you retire
- and then retiring but not having the energy and desire to do anything with the time you’re finally given.
Lifestyle design is not the system.
Some lifestyle designers may seem like they are living quite an ordinary life because they have a home in the suburbs, spend all their time with their family and don’t seem to be doing anything risky or adventurous, but there’s more behind this.
They have still said ‘no’ to every single thing they didn’t like about their life once, and consciously worked to change each aspect so that they can live on their own terms. The result may not be what you’re looking for, but it doesn’t need to be.
We all have different definitions of happiness and success, and the whole point of lifestyle design is to define it for yourself, then work your ass off to get it.
Lifestyle design isn’t about waiting till you retire to travel the world, it’s about finding a way to do it now. Be it by working jobs abroad, becoming a freelancer and doing your work remotely while traveling, or building an online business and moving to the other corner of the world.
Read also: How to Save $100K by Age 25, Quit Your Job and Travel The World
Where It All Begins
Lifestyle design is absolutely possible, but it begins with drawing a picture of your ideal life. Include your dream job, the people you want in it, the person you want to become and the ways in which you want to spend your time and money.
A lifestyle designer takes conscious decisions and knows that if specific goals are defined, if there’s a strategy, if daily choices are made with the end vision in mind, anything is possible.
You must be clear about what you want in your life, and set aside even more time and put even more thought into understanding what needs to be eliminated.
You also can’t go without continuous learning.
Transforming your life means shifting your mindset too. Rejecting conventional wisdom isn’t possible without becoming a strong individual, building great personal qualities and habits, and constantly challenging yourself.
Lifestyle design is life outside of a comfort zone. So you’ll need to try new, often untested things and see how it goes.
Then, instead of feeling upset or being on the verge of giving up, you simply analyze how it went, and see how you can do better next time.
Failure, in the mind of such an individual, is just another lesson added to your experience and knowledge base, that actually takes you closer to the solution.
Another important thing many people tend to overlook which prevents them from designing the lives of their dreams, is working hard.
It’s average to always look for the easy way out, to open up a browser and search for ‘make money online fast’, or anything like that. It’s average to procrastinate, overthink, go back to the past, or live in the future.
Average people don’t become lifestyle designers.
Instead, the latter are those who are constantly working on something new, who do their research and don’t complain about spending tens of hours to get familiar with a new concept or market.
They spend time in social media only to stay in touch with friends and family or to monetize their audience. Unlike average people who check out other people’s updates, consume unnecessary information, get tempted to click on spammy links, and compare their life to what they see posted online.
Living The Life You Want to, Today
If you’re not living the life you want to right now, you should be working to get there.
Knowing that you’ll spend your next few mornings to learn about a new business idea that might turn into something big in a few months, is a thought that should excite you.
Becoming ruthless with your time includes not going to most of the parties friends invite you to and leaving your social life behind for a while.
Then, you can create your lifestyle design blueprint, read some life-changing books, take some serious decisions about your future, write your business plan, save money to live off of for a few months until you get your startup off the ground, etc.
You get the point.
Lifestyle design is for serious players only.
If you decide to go for it, you’re investing the rest of your life, accepting failure as the most natural thing in the world, becoming adaptive and decisive.
To live life on your own terms, you’ll have to not just play the game but change it completely.
We’re talking about innovation, questioning anything other people or society tell you, not settling for anything less than success, and taking another direction when necessary.
So if you’re having doubts, and even if reading about so many other people out there who succeeded in becoming their own bosses and living the dream, I’m yet another person to assure you:
Life is what you make it.
If you manage to get out of the system at an early age and ruthlessly follow a direction of your own while putting in the work and desire, you’ll not just get far, you’ll get even further than that. 🙂
What’s your definition of lifestyle design?
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