Designing a Life

If you want to have the life you dream of, you’ve probably realised by now that it’s not just going to fall in your lap after meditating and visualising it for years on end. You’ve also probably heard that in order to achieve your goals you need to set really specific goals for yourself in order to achieve them, and yet a lot of the time that just isn’t enough… 

So recently I’ve been rethinking what it is I am going to do with my life, yes I want to do what I am passionate about, I want to have a fulfilling life, I want to give to others, I want to live comfortably etc, all those “Quote-on-Quote” goals we all tend to have, but it feels like the goals I have set for myself have changed so much over the years; and so, to give myself more clarity and direction, I am going to focus on how to design a life I want to live, over simply creating goals.

So how this all came about was that I realised that the goals I set for myself at the beginning of my self-development journey have changed so much, and it is because those goals were things I thought I ought to strive for. When setting goals they often follow a recurring theme, and they are often all based on the traditional metrics of success; and while yes those goals are better than our current reality, they may not truly be what we want. So I realised I needed to change what my definition of success was for me, not based on traditional metrics or societal standards.  

So why is it important to design your life and what makes it different from ordinary goal setting and habits?

Designing your life is at its core, is a holistic and detailed way of creating goals and the systems in order to get you there. When designing our lives we generally plan for a specific amount of time into the future, could be 3 or 5 years etc. and how we want that to look. We visualise and imagine the exact kind of life we want to have, and all the other details associated with that life. 

So now that we know why creating a design your life model is important, let’s go on to how we actually go about creating one?

Before you can start designing your life it is important that you remember and become super clear on what your values and morals are, as this will help you in where and for what you allocate your time towards; and will ultimately change or add too the goals you have set out. 

When deciding on what you want your life to look like it is important to start asking yourself different questions than you normally do when creating goals. The quality of your life depends on the quality of your questions. Tim Ferris writes about this very idea in his book “The Four Hour Work Week”, where he said that he used to work a boring call sales job, but it all changed when he asked himself what would happen if he did the exact opposite of his normal approach for 48 hrs. So instead of calling 9-5 he would call from 7:00-8:30AM and 6:00-7:30PM and the rest of the day he focused on cold emails. As a result he wrote this” My last quarter in that job, I outsold the entire L.A. office of our biggest competitor, EMC.” We can also change how we work and operate by thinking outside the box, asking ourselves the right questions and taking chances to see if our designed life is really that far removed from where we are now. So remember not to limit yourself to your current reality when designing your life, but try see the possibility of what it can be.

A helpful tool in designing our lives is to distil our lives into their most basic parts, and all our lives can be broken down into roughly 8 different categories such as: Physical environment/location, Career and Business, Finance and Wealth, Friends and Family, Fun and Recreation, Health and Fitness, Love Life and Spiritual and Self-development life. You can make this into a list or a pie chart to give you some visual aid for this process. 

So now that we have the 8 main categories of our lives, we can write under each of these main categories, all the most important subcategories, for example under fitness and health can go, dietary plan, and gym routine as basic subcategories. So take some time to come up with a few important subcategories for each. If you want to take this exercise a step further you can assign a percentage value to each one of the subcategories depending on their importance to you, or the amount of time you need to spend on each in relation to the others. 

After you have taken some time to write down the most important things that need to go into those subcategories, you can then create a strategy for how you are going to implement all these factors into your daily, weekly, or monthly calendar. These new goals we create for ourselves are rooted in what we value and find important to us, not based on other peoples metrics of success. So make them as detailed as possible and ask yourself many different questions in this process. Remember that what gets scheduled gets done, so make sure you have a plan to get to each one of those subcategories. For example in relationships, it can be planning dates ahead on time once a week on a day that works for you both etc. 

This process should be a guideline and an indicator of what to strive for. We do our best work when we are taking care of all these 8 factors together; as we as humans need all those factors to work together to function optimally. 

Be aware that this may be a difficult process, not just because its a deep detailed plan we are working on, but also because most times we think from our current circumstances and we get recency bias, thinking that what has happened to us in the past while is going to continue to be the norm. So when we think of these great ideas of what we want our lives to be like, we generally are met with limiting beliefs of our current reality right now. I’m not saying, you can become the next Bill Gates in 2 years if you design your life,  visualise and shoot for the stars; I am saying do not limit yourself completely and make goals you aren’t even excited about. Once you have finished with your new goal setting and system planning, it may be useful to create a small 1 page diagram of all  the general steps you need to take in order to get to your goal. This is just to remind yourself daily of your plan, because we tend to easily forget what we are working towards if we do not actively remind ourselves of it. 

Ok so the last part of our design our life exercise is creating an Odyssey plan. 

So to create an odyssey plan, write down everything you can think of, of how your life will look like in 5 years from now if you decide to pursue your current path. Some questions you can ask yourself are: where do you live, what work do you do, who are you surrounded by, what are your finances like, what’s your free time like, what hobbies do you do, how’s your health, how’s your relationships like? Etc. This is Your Odyssey plan A (your most likely plan of action). This should come really easy to you after doing the previous steps. 

Now create a second Odyssey plan called odyssey plan B. Odyssey plan B is if your first odyssey plan was null and void due to AI taking over your job for example. So odyssey plan B is an alternative to plan A. So it would be if you decided to choose a completely different path for the next 5 Years instead of Plan A, and rather pursued one of your other strong passions instead. What would that look like? And again asking yourself the same questions as in plan A, create your odyssey plan B.

Lastly and probably the most fun one, Odyssey plan C. This odyssey plan is all about what would your life look like if societal expectations and money didn’t exist or isn’t a problem. People like asking the question, “what would you do if money was not an object”. Now just write down that answer. It may take some time, so give it some thought. Maybe you are a YouTuber, maybe a designer, or maybe you want to play games professionally etc. The sky is the limit. 

*For more information on Odyssey plans check out this TED Talk from Bill Burnett, who has with his co-founder Dave Evans created the Life Design Lab at Stanford University. Together they created the odyssey plan methodology.

Now it is important that before you read on from here you write down those 3 odyssey plans, as what we are going to move on to next builds off of those plans…

Now that you are done with this exercise, sit down and think, what are the similarities or overlaps between all these plans, are there any reoccurring themes or values that stand out the most? This should reaffirm to you what you value and take note of those key overlaps and. You might even realise that you are more drawn to and more excited by your odyssey plan B instead; and this may make you want to rethink why you are on your current path and make some much needed changes. 

The other side benefit of doing this is that you actually realise you have more options at your disposal than you may have thought of before. Generally we tend to have this all or nothing mentality of, “If I do not get this done and make it as an ABC, then I am a failure and I won’t amount to anything in life”, or maybe that’s just me. However, having these options make you realise, ok…, I actually have way more options available to me if plan A does not work out for whatever reason. 

Once your odyssey plans are written down, and you have decided on what you want to pursue, then start by reaching out to people who have accomplished what you want to accomplish or are living the life you want to live and ask them how they got there. Do not be discouraged, the worst thing that can happen is they do not respond to your message. But your future is already here, someone else is living it right now, you just need to find those people and ask them for advise on how to create that future for yourself. If at all possible, try shadowing someone in the career you want to pursue, or do as much research as you can about the lifestyle of those kinds of people so you move from fantasy to reality of what that future will actually be like, so you can really see if that is what you want. 

Once you have made your decision and your plan is in place, do not give yourself a way out. Yes we have different odyssey plans, but they are all apart of the greater life design model we created four ourselves. When you give yourself the option to backtrack your potential for happiness goes down drastically. This is because you are always wondering if you made the right choice and get so caught up in that mode of thinking, that you start to resent the choice you have made altogether.

If you see a flaw in your plan or things and circumstances change, adapt the plan and move on, but the principals will still stay the same. 

Something that can be worthwhile doing after creating your odyssey plans, if you feel like you are still lacking motivation, is briefly thinking what would happen if for the next 5 years you did the exact opposite of what you needed to do to get to your desired life? It’s probably a terrible life, and that gives you something to keep in mind to run away from. This exercise is helpful as people are generally motivated by two things, avoiding pain or seeking pleasure. Designing our lives and what it could look like gave us pleasure; now thinking of the opposite too that gives us pain and something to avoid.

It’s important to note when making these plans, that this exercise should not be a heavy on you and not to worry too much about wether you chose the right plan/career. There is so much evidence to suggest that millennials will have to have multiple different careers in their lives just because the world is changing at such a rapid rate. So odds are that you will probably need to change careers multiple times in your life.  So designing your life is probably going to be a never ending process as your life changes and evolves overtime.

I would like to leave you with this one last quote from Steve Jobs before I go, he said: “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future”.  So do not doubt your plan looking at it from face value, trust that in the future things will all make sense and that making these preparations will lead you on the right path.

So that does it for this blog, I hope that you have enjoyed the read and that it has helped give you some value in how to create and design a life you want to live.

Stay tuned for more blogs like this or come check out my YouTube Channel for the video versions of these blogs.

This has been Josua Nel, till next time.