Design Your Ideal Life in 4 Simple Steps
By Warren Wong
Lifestyle design is being intentional with how you want your life to look. It’s about investing in your current lifestyle in order to reach a long term outcome of how you envision your future life. It’s about tradeoffs, opportunity costs, and self-investment.
Lifestyle design is being proactive instead of reactive. Of course, life will throw you curveballs, but it’s up to us to make concerted efforts to prepare ourselves for the eventualities of life, and death.
Lifestyle design has been a pet project of mine for the last decade. I spent thousands of hours building a life that I envisioned for myself. And not to say that my vision of my life hasn’t changed over the years, but the core fundamentals have remained the same.
Why Lifestyle Design?
Each of us wants happiness, security, community, and love in our lives. At the core of lifestyle design, it’s meant to help us reach these goals in a sustainable manner. A younger version of me may not have believed what I am about to tell you, but with age and first hand experience, I’m now a true believer.
You’re in control of your life. You have the power of change and mold your dream into reality. But first you must believe you can. I think it’s far too easy to just coast by life and ride the wave. And sometimes that’s perfectly alright depending which life stage you’re at.
But, I know that most of us want a bit more out of life and are willing to put in the work to make it so. But sometimes we’re lost and need guidance. That’s where lifestyle design comes in.
What is Lifestyle Design?
Lifestyle design is actively shaping your life and lifestyle in order to reach personal goals in your relationships, career, health, and leisure in order to live with purpose and fulfillment.
Lifestyle design has a few layers, but ultimately to reach your goals you’ll need systems and habits to bring you from your current state to your desired state.
Your habits and systems are the action required to reach the dream life that you want. Without them, progress will be painfully slow, if at all, and you can find yourself drifting aimlessly.
And you might be asking, “but I don’t know where I’m headed.” And that’s perfectly normal. Many of us don’t have an “ideal” lifestyle because we haven’t sat down and reflected upon what our own vision for our life is. We don’t need anyone to give us permission to dream and want such a life. It begins with a desire for change.
Our lives are our own. And as commonsensical as that sounds, many of us don’t believe it. Pressures from society, family and friends to conform to a certain lifestyle gives us an illusion of safety, but also traps us in a box. And most of us, visionless, just accept our fate.
Lifestyle design is a tool to combat against that. It is about intentionality. To live life on our own terms, and not let life happen to us.
Self Reflection
In order to get us from where we are to where we want to be, we have to be true to ourselves. Self reflection and evaluation are tools to assess where we are currently in life, so that we can formulate a plan to get to where we need to be.
Take some time and write out where you’re currently in your life. Relationships, career, health, leisure. How are you feeling? Are you satisfied, is there room for improvement? Really assess and be objective.
What are your current habits, the good and the bad that you practice day in and day out. Are they aligned with your vision? If they are, keep doing it, and look for areas of improvement. And if they aren’t, then really ask yourself if this is the life that you are willing to live out for the rest of your life?
Bad habits have a way of creeping up on us. They start off small, and innocent and we justify them because we’re stressed, tired, feeling lazy or need a break. Days become weeks, weeks become years, and years become the rest of our lives. Just like good habits, bad habits compound and build into a snowball effect.
Awareness is the first step in reversing those bad habits.
Systems and Habits
Our systems and habits are the fuel needed to bring our vision to life. What are systems? Simply put, they’re a series of actions or habits that when placed together can bring about a result.
You can build systems for your nutrition, health, fostering relationships, career and finances. If my vision for myself was to have more quality friends and build a strong community, I would develop a system that enables me to see friends and meet more people on a consistent basis. I would look for local events and opportunities that are geared towards my interests and start attending them on a weekly basis.
Some ways to engage and make new friends would be proactively planning events and get togethers on a small level outside of the event to foster deeper relationships. Over a sustained time you’ll notice a difference in your friend circles and find satisfaction in the effort you invested.
Our habits are the tiny pieces that make the system work. The habit of reaching out to friends first. The habit of planning a get together. The habit of checking in on friends. The habit of showing up. These are all part of the system that will ultimately bring success to your original goal and vision of fostering community and maintaining those relationships you hold dear.
The above takes work. And that’s where most of us falter, myself included. And I would say that not everyday needs to be perfect. Just try your best. There will be days when we feel antisocial, and lacking in energy. That’s normal. What matters is that you pick up where you left off.
Conclusion
Over time our efforts to actively shape our lives will bear fruit. The easier option is to let life happen to us. But, if you’ve read this far, you’re determined to do the opposite. You’re a person that truly wants to live life, and not just let it happen to you. Go out and make it happen. I believe in you.
