Lifestyle Design – Part 1
Do you ever feel overwhelmed?
Do you feel like you’re ‘doing it all’ rather than ‘having it all’?
Do you feel like you life is passing you by and you spend most of your time doing stuff you’d rather not be doing?
Lifestyle Design could be the answer.
The term ‘Lifestyle Design’ was coined by Timothy Ferriss in his book The 4-hour work week which became an online phenomena a couple of years back. I’ve read the book and although many of the ideas aren’t workable for parents (like becoming location free) there are many ideas that we could all gain from exploring. As with all ‘out there’ ideas you need to keep an open mind and take the bits you think you can apply to your own life that will be a benefit.
What is Lifestyle Design?
Lifestyle Design is the designing of one’s life to make it more authentic, that is more in keeping with your true goals and passions in life. For Timothy and his followers this relates to personal growth opportunities, adventure, leisure and the ability to be location free ie. their income is either passive or their work is based online enabling them to travel the world with their laptop. Not ideal or even a goal for many of us but I think we’d all like a bit more freedom, no?
All sounds a bit ‘buzzy’ and ‘blue sky thinking’? Well don’t write the idea of just yet because I think we can all take something from this idea of Lifestyle Design.
What can we take from Lifestyle Design
At it’s core the idea of Lifestyle Design is to design a life that prioritises the priorities. For many of us the main part of our existence is the pursuit of earning money, I would argue that many of us do so with no fixed idea of how much we need to earn or no specific end goals, we simply go to work earn money and try to get promoted to earn more money. Have many of us actually sat down and worked out a life plan and how much we actually need to acheive that plan? Probably not, I hadn’t until recently.
In his book Timothy says
People don’t want to be millionaires—they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy
Timothy goes on to show you that you can live the life you want on much less than you think.
In my next post I’ll discuss how lifestyle design has helped me move forward with my own goals, freed me of the need to earn and buy and generally made me much happier.
Until then here’s a link to Tim’s book – The 4 Hour Workweek – in case you’re interested, as I said it focuses predominantly on people who want to radically overhaul their lives, but it’s all relative and I think everyone can take a little something from the ideas he talks about.
Hope this post doesn’t sound too preachy, I just think there’s something in what Timothy teaches and it’s definitely encouraged me to take a different view that I think might be of benefit to some other people in the same boat as myself (stay at home mum at a crossroads wondering what the hell to do next!)
I've been blogging for four years and write about anything and everything that takes my fancy.
Above is me with my beloved Ernie in Port Aventura and left with our love child in Florida.
Themocracy
Hmmm. Sounds very interesting indeed. I’ll check out that book and await your next post. A four-hour work week? Sounds pretty good to me!
Yeah, apparently he only works four hours a week. I think 20-25 hours a week sounds pretty good