Lifestyle Design: How to Create a Life You Love
Are you one of those people who are trapped in a way of life they would rather not be living? Do you want to change your lifestyle but don’t know how?
You’re stuck in a job you hate, living in a city you don’t love, surrounded by people who don’t support your ambitions, and you have no idea what the purpose of it all is. You’ve read article after article, book after book, but still feel lost and confused.
Lifestyle design is the answer. This will teach you how to create a life you love by showing you how to find your passion, set goals, and take the course of action. With this post, you can finally achieve the life of your dreams.
What Is Lifestyle Design?
In its purest form, lifestyle design is creating and living a life that you love. It means choosing how to spend your time, who to spend it with, and where to spend it in order to live with happiness and contentment.
Lifestyle design means taking more control of your life and shaping it into the way you want. It’s a combination of personal development, productivity, creativity, and goal setting.
Lifestyle design is an ongoing process – we never fully arrive at the perfect style of living. We’re constantly evolving, developing, and changing. But you can begin with the steps outlined in this post to design the way of living you desire and finally live with it.
Lifestyle Design Examples
You could find a job you actually enjoy.
For example, if you love writing, spend your free time writing short stories or novels. After a while, you gain enough momentum to quit your job in order to be a full-time writer.
You can make money by doing what you love. You just need to have the skills, talent, and desire to get your share of the passion economy.
You could become self-employed by starting your own business or doing freelance work.
You can have the freedom to do what you want while earning a decent income. To become self-employed or start a business is a scary leap, but it is also a huge opportunity.
It means leaving safe, secure employment to take control of your careers that matter. As well as creative freedom, you’ll also be able to set your own hours and fit your work around other commitments, which often leads to an improved quality of life.
You could live a semi-retired lifestyle.
Rather than working in a profession you hate, with a boss you can’t stand, you could find ways to reduce your expenses by taking a course or moving somewhere that’s more affordable.
You could then eventually reach a point where you no longer need to work and can spend your days doing whatever you want. This frees up your time and lets you travel while enjoying life.
4 Simple Steps To Design Your Lifestyle
The Catalyst
To be able to have an effective lifestyle design, you must go beyond your defining moment and try to change things. Having a pivotal moment or a life-changing experience is essential for setting your intentions.
The 4 Step “DEEP” Process of Lifestyle Design is to Dream & Describe, Explore, Experiment, and Pivot. These steps will help you to achieve your ideal way of living.
Dream & Describe
The Dream & Describe Phase maps out your lifestyle and is organized into four categories: who I am, what I do, where I live, and with whom I spend my time.
You should have plans for each of these four areas in order to design a lifestyle that is truly a unique representation of who you are.
Making adjustments to the most important things like your beliefs, culture, identity, and relationships with your parents or family can help you design a plan to be able to achieve the life of your dreams. All helpful lifestyle design begins with some simple questions.
Essential Questions For A Lifestyle Designer
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What are your values and priorities?
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How will you start incorporating your ideal life into your everyday life?
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What larger changes will need to happen for you to turn your ideal lifestyle into a reality?
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What would you do if you never had to work again or if you could retire RIGHT NOW?
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What would you do if you could never retire?
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What does your ideal lifestyle look like?
These questions are helpful because we are raised in the traditional 9-5 till 65 mindsets. After answering these questions, figure out how to integrate them into your lifestyle design. Then revisit the question of your values and priorities.
Do you have a well-spent quality time with your parents or people you love, make meaningful contributions to the community, improve your health, learn and grow, explore, and adventure?
Explore
Try to do something new and something you fear a few times a month. You cannot find the perfect way of living with just one look. You have to explore it in the same path you’d explore a new city or new country.
Each time you try something new, you challenge yourself to step out of your comfort zone and grow. You don’t have to put up with the status quo – live the life you’re meant to live!
Experiment
You have to take all of these ideas that you’ve come up with and put them into action. You can’t just think about them or talk about them, you need to go out there and act on them.
You need to know how to take action in a way that is empowering, not overwhelming. You don’t want to go out and do 100 things because then you’ll get overwhelmed and quit.
Instead, pick one or two ideas from your exploring and experimentation phase that fit into your ideal situation the best right now.
Pivot
The last thing that you will need to do is change your way of living to reflect what you’ve learned. You may discover that your perfect work doesn’t actually make you happy.
Your defining moment is only the first step. Don’t be afraid to let go of ideas, hobbies, and routines that don’t fit into the new version of your lifestyle design.
You may encounter obstacles and challenges along the way, but remember that you can adapt. You don’t need to stick with your original plans if they aren’t working out for you.
“The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD).” – Tim Ferriss
You can unsubscribe anytime if you feel stressed about your work. It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing thing.
Benefits Of Lifestyle Design
Lifestyle design is an empowering approach to creating your desired way of living. It recognizes that the choices you make every day will all add up to who you are today and who you will become.
It’s possible to live a life that is aligned with your values – one that makes sense intellectually and emotionally.
You will feel more in control of your destiny when you take charge of what matters most to you and build it into every aspect of your life (work, relationships, health, and society).
Mindset Shifts For Designing Your Lifestyle
Remember That You Have Choices
You don’t have to waste your energy to a life of misery and conformity – you can craft your own life design – not just what others tell you to do. Figure out what your priorities are.
You can make your own destiny if put hard work into it. Taking control of your own life can give you much more than just money ever could: confidence, satisfaction, and respect.
Remind yourself that everything is a choice. Instead of being miserable, make a choice today to change your own path and how your life works.
Spend Time With Yourself
Think about what you want in life and what is important to you. What do you value? What are your priorities?
Make a list of ten things that would improve the quality of your life, then start crossing them off one by one until you get a lifestyle design aligned with what you value intrinsically.
Your journey is an on-going process – it doesn’t need to stay the same forever. Therefore, reserve your energy to creating the lifestyle design that truly reflects who you are.
Doing this will connect you with your intention and vision in a way that’s meaningful to every aspect of your life.
Dream Big And Don’t Accept Limits
Remember, there are no limits to what you can achieve or who you can become. You can get anything you want – even that big house – if you dedicate yourself completely to your new lifestyle design.
“If it were easy, everyone would do it.” – Tim Ferriss
To create the life of your dreams, one thing is for sure: it will take time, energy, and hope. Don’t give up just because you think other people’s lives are better or they have a happier family and friends than you do.
Your will and intention is the fuel to your lifestyle design. Every choice you make will get you one step closer to success and will get you out of bed in the morning with happiness.
Accept Change And Take The Leap
Start designing your desired way of living and don’t ignore your frustrations of life. Have the courage to change it. Lifestyle designers try new things and push themselves outside of their comfort zone.
Allow new opportunities to come and make use of the lessons from your journey to serve as a guide in getting you where you want to be. Being your own lifestyle designer, you have to take charge of your life instead of just letting things happen and hoping for the best without taking any action.
When you’re ready to take the leap, expect that you will work hard, but also know that the rewards will always be worth it.
The lives and beliefs of other people don’t reflect yours. The moment you decided to take the journey and answer differently to what the world called you is an art.
Lifestyle Design Can Be Easy
Lifestyle design is easier now more than ever. Thanks to the internet, it offers you resources you can use for learning about entrepreneurship, making more money online, traveling the world, or living abroad.
The biggest problem that most people face is not knowing what they want in life and how to get it. Creativity, meaningful contribution to community, and the ability to express yourself without restriction will be your driving forces.
When it comes to lifestyle design, there are no rules that say you must work a corporate job for decades before traveling. You can do anything you want if you believe in yourself and never give up.
Social Media
The internet has changed the path of how we live and interact with one another. Social media gives us access to anyone in the world. You can get updated of the lives of other people through a post, join a conversation, and learn from people even though they’re on the other side of the world.
The best thing with social media is that you can work from anywhere, meet people online, and join with supportive groups that will help you achieve your goals. The concept of limitations no longer applies now because you can live your life on your own terms.
Technology
With the occurrence of various applications and right technology, you can stay organized, up-to-date, and productive without sitting on your desk all day. The best lifestyle designs involve being able to work and join meetings from any location with an internet connection.
You do not also need to read other books manually to gain more ideas – you can just browse e-books. It will save you more time and money in buying a lot of printed books.
Remote Working
The most important thing that you have to do is to find a job, online or otherwise, that you are passionate about and dedicate yourself 100% to mastering your craft.
Once you’ve done this, you will have everything you need to make your life design a success. Choosing the right direction and focusing on your ability will increase your chances of achieving your goals exponentially.
You may consider freelancing which give you more flexibility and the luxury of travelling anywhere and will help you live the life that you’ve determined is the best fit for you.
How To Afford Your Ideal Lifestyle
Save Your Money
Capital One Shopping – Start saving money by making a budget that tracks your monthly income and expenses. Use this spreadsheet to help get started.
Ibotta – Using Ibotta is an easy way to save money on groceries, toiletries, and apparels. Cashback offers are available in the form of cash or gift cards.
Honey – This app is great for saving money on online purchases like flights, hotels, or even magazine subscriptions.
Invest Wisely
Robinhood – This app lets you buy and sell stocks for free. This is a great way to get started investing and build your savings for achieving your perfect lifestyle.
Betterment – Having an automated investing plan is the best way to reach financial freedom in the long term.
Set Your Financial Goals
Personal Capital – This free tool lets you monitor your net worth, track spending, and generate retirement savings projections based on real-time market data.
CIT Bank Savings Builder – This will pay you 0.25% APY with no minimum deposit required. With this savings account, you will be able to monitor your income and develop good savings habits.
Final Thoughts
Lifestyle design isn’t just about making money. It’s about creating a life that you love, through your own vision. You are the only person that decides what your ideal lifestyle is.
Learn about yourself so you can design your lifestyle to line up with your values and ideals. Find out what you are passionate about and pursue that path with everything you have. Remember, life is too short to be wasted on the things that do not bring you joy.
It’s being able to wake up every morning and do something that makes you happy. Lifestyle design is enjoying life by designing the life you want and achieving every goal that you set.
Be your own lifestyle designer and start designing your ideal way of living using this lifestyle design worksheet!