People are asking me “What is lifestyle design?”

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Because of an email I received recently I decided to really dig deeper into what did Lifestyle Design really meant. I found that a lot of people have put their two cents into it. There are hundreds of new blogs every day writing about lifestyle design grrrrr, yea this word again. Myself included have gotten confused about what it means.

So what’s LIFESTYLE DESIGN?

If we ask Google, this is the answer we get: Lifestyle Design is the design of one’s ideal lifestyle, especially an unconventional one, providing good opportunities for personal growth, leisure and adventure. Detailed methods include: career planning, entrepreneurship and travel.

Corbett Barr says in one of his posts titled “What is lifestyle design?”: It’s about design­ing your life instead of let­ting soci­ety design it for you.

Justin Wright says: In a nutshell, lifestyle design is all about creating your own design and plan for life.

Taner Maluchnik explains it this way: Goals are what you want to achieve, whereas lifestyle designs are the experiences that you want to have in life.

Adrian Koh wrote on a guest post for Litemind: Whether you call it lifestyle design, life design, work-life balance, or enlightened self-management, the central idea is this: life should be lived consciously and deliberately, and not left to chance.

But if we go by what Tim Ferriss wrote on his four hour work week book: 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).

Out of all the interpretations that I found, Corbett really broke it down the easiest way. We live in a society that believes we should go to college, get a good job after graduation, get married…etc…etc then retire when you’re 65. That’s the way life has been designed for us, and that’s the ways IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE. Nooooo, not anymore!!!

I understand it has to be tough for you to know what exactly lifestyle design is when there are so many people blogging about it and so many blogs coming out every day talking about how to live “the lifestyle design“. If you ask me, there really is not a one-size fits all to the word.

I got introduced to the four hour work week when I read the book. The best way to get familiar with this whole new movement is to connect with people doing the things that Tim suggests in the book, and reading his blog as well. Go through the archives and learn about all the assumptions we’re so accustomed to believing, automation, online businesses, outsourcing and all the other 4HWW vocab that might be new to you.

If you think that Lifestyle Design is a scam or some kind of fad, I want to know why. What are your thoughts on LD? Do you think it’s here to stay? What do you know about it that we can learn?

photo by shazwan

2 Factors That Stop you From Achieving the Lifestyle you Want

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I don’t know how many people are chasing the location independent or lifestyle design life as some of us call it, but it seems like every day I find a new person coming aboard. I’m not trying to hate on them; that would make me a hypocrite. I actually love that more and more people are starting to realize that you can live the life you want to live, and do unconventional things. Can you handle the truth?

Can every one of us REALLY live the life they want to live?

No worries, there are people already doing it. It is possible and they’re showing us how to do it too. One of the biggest evangelists of doing what you love and getting paid for it has done all the tests for us. Tim Ferriss – author of The 4-Hour Workweek and now The 4-Hour Body doesn’t Bullshit, he actually does what he preaches and there’re people that back him up.

Here is the issue with a lot of us, including myself in 2010. We want the life but we don’t want to put in the work. You and I know that anything worth having takes effort and patience. Another issue is that we got all these GURUS, FAKE A#$, marketers trying to make false promises of making thousands in a couple of hours of work with no effort and getting results within days, sometimes minutes!

effort:
1. exertion of physical or mental power: “It will take great effort to achieve victory.”
2. an earnest or strenuous attempt: an effort to keep to the schedule.
3. something done by exertion or hard work: “I thought it would be easy, but it was an effort.”

patience:
1. the quality of being patient, as the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain, without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like.
2. an ability or willingness to suppress restlessness or annoyance when confronted with delay: to have patience with a slow learner.
3. quiet, steady perseverance; even-tempered care; diligence: to work with patience.

Those are some of the meanings of these two words that I found. If you’re not doing any of those two, you’re not striving towards the life you’ve been dreaming about.

Take these two giant words and put them in front of your computer or ingrain them into your brain if you can. Any time you feel you’re not achieving the success you expected, ask yourself

“how patient am I right now?” or “how much physical or mental power am I putting into this work?”

It’s good to sometimes just stop ask yourself these questions. To often we want it to be a smooth ride or a quick one. But it’s not!

Starting now you should stop looking for shortcuts and start making an effort and having patience if you want to get where it is you want to be in 2011. It’s not what you do today or at the end, but in the middle.

If you’re one of those people that’s gotten into lifestyle design or location independence and been sold BULLSHIT and stuff is not happening, it is time to realize you need to forget about that get-rich quick shit and start making the effort and having the patience to succeed.

photo by antwerpenR