“Life is the sum of your choices” — Albert Camus
What is Lifestyle Design?
Lifestyle design is about choice.
It’s about choosing with purpose & intention the kind of life you want to live, including what you do, where you do it, who you do it with, and making it happen.
Why Design Your Life?
So why design your life?
Why not just go to school, get good grades, get a degree, get a good job, meet the partner of your dreams, have kids, buy a house, car, pets, etc., and let the chips fall as they lay?
As long as you’re happy, that’s all good, right?
Well, yes and no.
Apart from the obvious, such as, you’re likely paying too much tax to corrupt governments who rarely spend tax dollars wisely. (I’ll save my political opinions for drunken evenings with friends).
Here are 5 reasons you should be designing your life;
1. You Only Have One Life
As I’m sure you’re more than aware, you only have one shot at life on this planet.
As Steve Jobs says, why spend it living someone else’s life.
Designing your life ensures that you’re living with intention and that the choices you make every day are yours and yours alone.
It means doing what you want to do, when you want to do it, and from where you want to do it.
If you live for 80 years, that’s only 4000 weeks.
When you put it like that, our whole life is a lot shorter than we think, so we need to be grabbing the juice out of every single day.
2. Freedom of Choice
The ‘Four Hour Work Week’ inspired me to change my life and start travelling the world, as I’m sure it did for thousands of other solopreneurs and digital nomads.
In a section that struck home with me, Tim muses about the possibility that;
‘The 80-hour-per-week, $500,000-per-year investment banker is less ‘powerful’ than the employed NR (what he calls new rich or in my terms solopreneur) who works ¼ the hours for $40,000, but has complete freedom of when, where, and how to live.’
The fact is that when you compare lifestyles, the solopreneur earning only $40k/year may actually have a far better life than the financially wealthy investment banker.
And that’s because real wealth (or power, as Tim puts it) is in the ability to choose.
Ultimate freedom comes from being able to make the life choices you want to make.
Whether you want to work in a 9–5 job or travel the world, wealth, freedom & happiness is about choice, not money.
3. Opportunity
It’s easier than ever to create an online lifestyle business you can run from anywhere in the world.
Do you love to bake?
