How to Design Your Ideal Lifestyle in 4 Steps
Create the life you want with positive action
To most of society, the concept of “lifestyle design” is still a far-fetched influencer’s dream.
Only Instagrammers travel the world full-time. Only IT geniuses build profitable startups. And most importantly, only trust-fund kids escape a commoner’s debt-ridden 9 to 5 existence.
Most people cloud their minds with restrictive thinking patterns. In short, they believe that an ideal lifestyle is out of reach for the average Joe.
And they have a point.
Not everyone can become a millionaire. Most people will not collaborate with luxury brands and spend six months a year in five-star hotels. And very few aspiring entrepreneurs will build startups with seven-figure turnovers.
However, designing your ideal lifestyle isn’t tributary to making millions of dollars.
You don’t need a seven-figure bank account to live the life you want. You don’t need hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers to travel the world full-time.
And above all, you don’t need to found the next Facebook to escape your monotonous 9 to 5.
What you need to design your ideal lifestyle are the following: a vision, priorities, a plan, and discipline.
These elements will enable you to take positive action. And this positive action is the key to achieving lifestyle design.
On this basis, here’s how to design your ideal lifestyle in four steps.
1. Form a vision of what your life should look like
The first step toward living the life you want is to create a vision of what it is you want.
In today’s world, many people make decisions according to societal expectations, peer pressure, and external cues.
If you want to design your ideal lifestyle, you’ll have to make decisions according to personal values. As such, you need values in various aspects of life.
The main areas are work, relationships, health, and leisure activities.
Together, those values will forge a complete picture of what your lifestyle should include.
In a nutshell, your values will be the pillars of your vision.
A few years ago, I spent my days rotting away in a corporate office, collecting handsome paychecks without a sense of purpose or fulfillment.
Two crucial elements would become part of my future lifestyle vision: purpose and fulfillment.
In professional terms, they would become essential values and outweigh other aspects like the size of my monthly paycheck.
As such, experience often determines our values.
After spending several years as an aid worker in West Africa, American bestseller author Chris Guillebeau’s values changed.
A former adventure-seeking backpacker, his values now included leaving a positive impact on the world, and he built his lifestyle around it.
Throughout the next decade, he visited every country in the world and became a world-renowned travel blogger, pioneering the modern concept of “lifestyle design.”
The lesson here is the following: your values will become the foundation of your vision, and your vision represents the first step towards building your ideal lifestyle.
2. Identify the essential elements of your vision
Now that your vision is clear, it’s time to dissect the essential from the non-essential.
In simple terms, you need to identify the practical elements that form the core of your vision.
When I first started designing my ideal lifestyle, my core elements were traveling full-time, working on purposeful projects, and attaining fulfillment by filling my days with value-driven activities.
The practical implications would be the following:
- I would travel full-time while working online, becoming a fully-fledged digital nomad.
- My work would include projects I truly believe in, as opposed to being a replaceable part of someone else’s money-making machine.
- My days would contain the following activities: talking to strangers with a different background, exploring new cities, physical exercise, and reading. I would eliminate cheap entertainment and negative distractions from my daily routine.
These cardinal elements made up my initial vision. Of course, there would be flexibility and bumps along the road, but the foundations were set.
Three years after first writing down these bullet points, the reality looks as follows:
- I became a digital nomad and nowadays travel full-time.
- I had to fight through a lot of hardship as a freelance writer, but after countless trial and error lessons, I now work on purposeful writing projects and interesting photography gigs.
- On most days, I spend my mornings writing and my afternoons exploring places and working as a photographer. I try to read every day and canceled all my entertainment subscriptions.
My example showcases how an initial vision translates into reality.
Adaptations and minor tweaks are inevitable, but your first vision is crucial because it will become the road map for your journey toward lifestyle design.
However, before embarking on your quest, you need to eliminate the non-essential. You need to remove impediments.
3. Remove all the things that aren’t part of your vision
Knowing the main aspects of your ideal lifestyle is crucial, but identifying the things that hinder your vision is equally important.
Ask yourself: what habits, commitments, and activities don’t work in favor of my vision?
If your ideal lifestyle includes full-time travel, stringent obligations in one place will undoubtedly impede that vision.
If your preferred professional path is all about entrepreneurship, a lack of funding and time constraints in your day-job will hamper that project.
And if your vision includes building your best possible physique, bad eating habits and excessive partying will restrict your physical improvement.
Consequently, the third step toward lifestyle design is the elimination of the non-essential.
If you’re serious about creating the life you want, you’ll have to make sacrifices.
You’ll have to find out which components of your current lifestyle prevent you from achieving your ideal lifestyle in the future.
After removing the non-essential from your current lifestyle, the road ahead will be clear.
You now possess the tools you need to achieve lifestyle design. The next step is to come up with plans that will help you navigate the various stations.
4. Come up with a ten-year plan, five-year milestones, and yearly goals
Having a vision and defining the specs will point you in the right direction, but ultimately, your execution will decide the fate of your quest.
That’s where lifestyle planning comes to fruition.
“A goal is a dream with a deadline.” — Napoleon Hill
How do you see yourself in one, five, or ten years? Many companies ask this question when interviewing candidates for a vacancy, and there’s a good reason for that.
You might confuse a ten-year plan with banal New Year’s resolutions like losing ten pounds or quitting cigarettes. There is a major difference.
New Year’s resolutions are usually isolated goals that people dream up after feeling guilty for their Christmas indulgences.
These goals might be clear, but they lack the tools that make their achievement possible: habits and milestones.
A ten-year plan, on the other hand, is intentional and well-thought-out. The plan has to contain all the practical elements that put your initial vision into practice.
So, how can you come up with long-term plans that work?
You need to plan the execution, not the end.
In ten years, I want to be financially independent. How much money do I need every month? How will I make money? What kind of financial habits do I need to adopt?
These are the broad elements. The next step is to break them down into five-year milestones.
I need to make 3,000 dollars a month to become financially independent. What kind of online businesses can I start that will secure those income streams within five years?
I cannot spend more than 1,500 dollars a month to remain financially independent with savings and investment buffers. What kind of budgeting techniques can I implement over the next five years?
Next, illustrate your five-year milestones with yearly goals.
To make 3,000 dollars a month consistently, I need six 500-dollar a month income streams. In my first year, I will try to build two by creating a blog and a writing business. I will invest X amount of hours every day and complete Y courses.
To stick to my spending budget of 1,500 dollars a month, I need four major changes. I will move to a cheaper location, sell my car, consume intentionally, and invest astutely.
In the first year, I will sell my car. The year after that, I will move to a more budget-friendly city. And in the third year, I will have learned the basics of investing.
This method of starting broadly and working your way down toward small, daily actions is the key to achieving lifestyle design.
The grand vision might sound outlandish at first, but once you manage to divide it into small habits that you can adopt over time, it all becomes a simple combination of daily actions.
Summary and final thoughts
- Lifestyle design is not a millionaire’s fantasy but a journey that you can take on with the right mindset, priorities, and daily actions.
- Start with a grand vision of what your ideal lifestyle should look like. Define your values and build your vision around them.
- Find out what the essential and non-essential elements of your vision are. Focus your energy on the essential, and eliminate impediments.
- Devise a ten-year plan and break that plan down into five-year milestones and yearly goals.
- Once you know what you have to do every day to transform your vision into a sustainable lifestyle, it becomes a clear-cut plan, not an abstract idea.
