7 Ways to Design the Life You Want

TL; DR: You can and should deliberately engineer the lifestyle you want to have. There are 7 key principles to keep in mind, and the Tool of the Week will give you action steps for each one. They mostly revolve around being clear about what you want, monetizing your passions, and getting buy-in from the people who matter.

When I was fresh out of college, a bunch of things went wrong all at once. Work, a romantic relationship, and my living situation all fell apart in the same week.

My naïve, youthful solution was to let go of everything and ride freight trains with a hobo I had recently befriended.

Weirdly enough, this turned out to be exactly what I needed. I came back a month later with an understanding that the world was a huge and exciting place, overflowing with new experiences and opportunities.

I decided right then that I wasn’t going to spend my best years behind a desk. I was going to live a life of adventures.

I spent the next 20 years or so doing exactly this.

I didn’t know it at the time, but there’s a term for people like me (and maybe you, too, if you’re reading this)

The Secrets of Lifestyle Engineering

In my early 20s I was practicing “Lifestyle Engineering” without even knowing that was a thing.

The term should be self-explanatory, but here’s my definition: Deliberately, intentionally taking steps designed to create the lifestyle you want.

I’m going to give you seven principles that will let you engineer the lifestyle you want. Be sure to use the checklist in “Tool of the Week” for specific planning and action steps.

One: Think Big

If you’re committed to designing your own life, you’ll be way more motivated when you’re swinging for the bleachers.

Create a vision that’s big enough to inspire you. Grand, ambitious dreams are only a little bit harder to achieve than mediocre goals.

Two: Monetize What You Love

Many people dream of being financially free so they can spend all their time doing what they love.

But there’s a shortcut: Spend your time on what you love right now and pay your bills with that activity. I’ve helped several people accomplish this, and I’ve done it five times for myself, as well.

There are always people who will pay to watch you, learn from you, or buy the products you create as you do the thing you’ve always wanted to do.

Three: You Are Not a Resume

A job hunt is always an attempt to please strangers. You stand out when you share things that aren’t part of your work history.

Use your passion to attract job opportunities, clients, and new business.

Four: Buy-In from the People Who Matter

If your spouse/partner/children don’t believe in your dream, you’re halfway defeated. A few ways to convince them:

· Tell them how they will benefit when you’re living your dream life

· Ask for something specific (“I just want 2 hours each Saturday afternoon to work on my novel.”)

· If someone is against your new pursuit, remind them of the consequences of inaction. (“Do you want to live in this tiny apartment for the rest of our lives?”)

Five: Learn from the Past

Think of the most exciting time of your life. What were your dreams back then? Do you still want the same things now?

Six: Take Care of Your Relationships and Health

Sometimes engineering your lifestyle requires an unbalanced life.  But going off the deep end should be a temporary thing.

Set some ground rules. For example, if you’re “in the zone” for a week, the following week will include at least two social activities and three nights when you sleep more than eight hours.

Seven: Constant Progress

Never stop learning but remember that action trumps research.

Develop a plan to study topics that will help you engineer your life. And whenever this leads to a new insight, do something about it immediately.

The Real Secret: Knowing What You Want

The latest research suggests there are three lifestyles that make people truly happy.

The life most people prefer is full of enjoyment, pleasure, good food and good company. It doesn’t have to be extravagant. Good health and comfort are enough for most people, most of the time.

Psychologists call this the hedonic lifestyle.

But for some people, a life of comfort, or even luxury, isn’t enough, even when you add love and good health to the equation.

There are many people who can only feel truly happy when they are giving something back to the world. You don’t have to be Mother Theresa to find joy in volunteering or otherwise serving others.

The eudemonic lifestyle is one where you find happiness in service.

For many years, the few people who bothered to think about what really makes a person happy thought that these two lifestyles were it.

But more recently, Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate proposed a third kind of lifestyle.

Oishi and Westgate discovered that 27% of the population is not fully satisfied by either pleasure or service.

These are people who seek adventure, who want to learn and grow by trying new things and going to new places.

Oishi coined the term “psychological richness” for this form of happiness, because we want to live a life that’s rich in experiences. I say “we” because I, too, am a part of the daring 27% club.

If you’re in this category, I created Ithaka for people like us. I also created the program, Changing the WIND to help you drill down into the experiences you want and put it into practice.

I’ll be sending you more details about this soon. In the meantime, here’s a checklist to get you started:

Tool of the Week: Implement Your Lifestyle Engineering (a Checklist) 

• Look at your existing goals (or write some if you don’t already have a list). Pick your favorite one and brainstorm 10 ways to make it better.

• Imagine the person you were 5-10 years ago, and the person you’ll be 5-10 years from now. What would they say about your plans? Listen to their input.

• Publish your passions. Choose one (only one at this point) social media platform and post every day about something you love doing. Get used to thinking about it, sharing it, and becoming the person who “does” this.

• Start following other people who post about the same topics that interest you. Comment on their posts.  This will benefit you in more ways than I can include here. A route to monetization will eventually emerge.

• Talk to your peeps. Tell the people closest to you about the lifestyle you want to create. Emphasize that it’s going to benefit them. Ask for a specific amount of time/space/encouragement to make it happen.

• Set some ground rules to “rebalance” yourself. If you’re going to put in late nights or early mornings, schedule time to recuperate. If you’re going to be unavailable (physically or emotionally) to the people you love, spend extra time with them before you go and when you come back.

• Do something concrete to learn a skill that will help you realize your ideal lifestyle. Buy a book, enroll in a course, hire a coach, etc. Schedule a date (specific day and time) to implement what you learn. What gets scheduled gets done.

If you check off every item in the list above, things will start to happen. But I realize each one of these could be broken down into its own separate checklist.

I’ll be doing that in the near future. In the meantime, I recommend you create checklists of your own.

That wraps it up for this week.

If you’re enjoying these rants, lessons, and tools, I would love to hear from you.

If you’re not, I would like to hear from you even more.

Reply to this email and tell me what you think, what you’d like to see in the future, or just to drop me a line about your cat.

I don’t always have the time to reply to your message, but I read every one of them.

Jacob