One thing leads to another. I was stressed up at work, I started running long distance, and to keep me sane, I listen to audiobooks. Then I came across “The 4 hour work week” by Tim Ferris. I was immediately intrigued by this catchy buzzword – “lifestyle design”, made more explicit and popular by Tim’s best seller. So let’s discuss what it meant for me after some of my own reflection on my life. And maybe for you too if you are in the same demography as me.
The idea of lifestyle design was proliferated and popularised by many bloggers and web entrepreneur about a decade ago, resulting in many positive sharing of their experiences, most of the ideas and theories but not a lot on actual actions other than building a blog that earns them some income. The more successful ones came out to brag about living off these incomes. However, I also noticed that there are also equal numbers of naysayers out there.
Live the life you design
Similar to the proposition of getting rich, designing our lives is really a
Lifestyle design is about living with intention and working in harmony with your purpose.
“Lifestyle” is the pattern of habits for how you spend your resources such as time and effort to achieve a desired life you can thrive in. Money is also another important resource. The bulk of resources in terms of time and effort is actually spent on work to get the money. Other habits albeit less time spent, are having fun, learn, energize yourself, spend time with other people and generally engage with life.
Some common lifestyles people live today based on how they work are, for example, 9-5 office jobs, military, civil service, freelancer, engineers, bankers, self-employed, blue-collar worker …… These professions entail spending a vast majority of their time, in exchange for money. And these amount of money drives your lifestyle, usually self-perceived “upwards”. To fund the better lifestyle, you seek more money, like a never-ending (vicious) cycle. So, the first thing to self-recognise is that you have a choice – do you want to be caught in this cycle or design a well-lived, joyful having the balance between time, effort and money.
Of course, if you don’t want more time and more money or don’t care about choosing how you get to work, that’s your choice too!
“Design” is the intentional plan based on informed research, detailing the specific actions to be taken to achieve a specific purpose. It is interesting to note that we all have our design of an ideal lifestyle, and some kept saying they were stuck on “survival mode”. In truth, its the expectations within what was deemed ideal. Your survival mode may be someone else’s ideal. A “surviving” lifestyle in a rich city such as Singapore (struggle to pay the mortgage for a pose condominium and car), with the same resources, one can build an ideal lifestyle somewhere else.
What if you have complete control over every aspect of your life? This sounds impossible to many, but that’s what designing your lifestyle around your resources is all about. Want to live and work on your terms? It just takes some soul
To me, Lifestyle design is about finding the balance of meaningful work, commensurating efforts and to reclaim time. Like all types of designing, there are infinite possibilities depending on the individual, there will be no one-size-fits-all solutions. Someone nearing retiring with family to feed will have a vastly different design with someone young, single and with energy. These are some possibilities:
- Front load to make money first then take “retirement” periods, repeat the cycle.
- Negotiate with your boss to allow work out of office, full or partially.
- Build passive income and not having to work at all.
- Remote control your business, unlock your time.
- Outsource tasks to virtual assistants, unlock your time
- Or simply, find meaningful work you enjoy.
So the first step towards designing my own lifestyle was by answering this question, “What is the life I’ve always wanted?” Surprisingly, the answer is simply being simple and happy, and have the time of my life for my family, and a host of things I like to do including writing (despite my poor command of English). Then I look at my current reality… erm ok… there is going to be some work, in gist, not easy.
What the naysayers say
Whilethe proposition is compelling, there are, however, some who pointed out that even if it seemed possible to “not work” and enjoy a leisure life (which is not what lifestyle design meant), many who jumped onto the bandwagon simply copied the formula of internet entrepreneurship. Their sole intention is an easy life cashing in. Not surprisingly, these are the 20 something-year-olds trying to blog, write some self-development books, sell a few courses and do it from a resort while the cash rolls in. Others simply set up advert heavy sites with generic contents that response to the top search questions like “how to delete facebook” or any searches which are trending.
People complained that there are already more than enough authors who are working hard on their craft trying to get recognised, or people who are actually good enough with loads of experience at something to write a worthwhile book about his topic. These wannabes showing up on the scene just trying to make a cut dilutes the pool and distracts people away from work that is actually good.
I find it rather ironical that the guy that popularise the idea of “lifestyle design”, Tim Ferriss, is the exact opposite to all of these people. He doesn’t live a life of leisure, he lives a life of work. His books may seem gimmicky, but years of research went into all of them. Lifestyle design is not about seeking a leisure life, there ought to be some hard work
Pre-requisite
All designs are possible, but some are more likely to succeed and countless died of natural death. I believe there must be some form of pre-requisite, such as talent, skills or monetary savings. Like I mentioned earlier, 20-something-year-old fresh out of college trying to teach people life lessons, are not going to make the cut. Conversely, a professional who has qualified himself with established skills have a higher chance of designing his lifestyle surrounding his/her expertise, even if he uses the internet entrepreneurship formula so sell information or simply sharing the experiences.
So in gist, I adopted the idea of designing my lifestyle because I felt I have some pre-requisite, not fantastic ones, but enough work and life experiences. I believe I have some resources to build a long-term income to fund the lifestyle – the Simplicity I aim for, the Simple life I seek for, and the Simplified thoughts that leads me.
I got to start somewhere. gobassky.com gave me this platform to start and share my journey. Let’s see where this brings me to.
gobassky