This blog falls into a particular part of the self-help niche called Lifestyle Design. Wikipedia defines this as: “the design of a lifestyle, especially an unconventional one, providing good opportunities for personal fulfillment, leisure and adventure. Detailed methods include: career planning, entrepreneurship and travel”. So what does it mean to be a lifestyle designer? What is a lifestyle and how does one actually begin to design it? This is something that I’m going to be looking at in detail in the next couple of entries.
Like so many others, I first became aware of the term Lifestyle Design in Timothy Ferriss’ book The 4-hour Work Week
To me, the term Lifestyle Design comes from the observation and recognition of a flaw in the old philosophies of how to make a good life for yourself. In the past, people (and I was no different) would focus on the goals they had. They would set up targets and milestones and eventually the results they were going for; something similar to “I want to earn $200,000 a year” or “I want to own a beach house in Malibu”. While the actual contents of these goals are all fine and good, I think that by doing this, people were avoiding the main issue and what their actual goals were. While I am sure it’s well within the reach of many people to earn $200,000 a year, I am equally sure that most people would need to be working double or triple shifts, have no family and no social life to speak of if they wanted to pull it off. If people want a beach house in Malibu, I’m sure that if they save money for long enough – or take a large enough loan – they can afford the beach house.
What these people actually want, and what they’re failing to ask for in their wishes, is the lifestyle associated with that beach house or the money. Instead of working 40 hours a week – or more – and feeling like there is no sense of control and direction, the Lifestyle Designer will set out to actively control the way that his life looks and works. We want to be able to spend hours of quality time with our friends and families, pursuing our hobbies and catching up on reading. What we usually don’t want is to be waking up early, hurrying to eight hours of sitting in the office waiting to go home for the day. We want to have the benefits of working five hours a week without the disadvantages. Enter Passive Income.
The first step towards Designing your Freedom is, unfortunately: Money, money, money. To be able to design an optimal life, we need to be able to afford to do this. Since most people are already earning money in one way or another, it is usually not enough to just find a new job. What Lifestyle Designers usually look for is a passive income. This usually falls into one (or more) of these categories:
- Advertisement revenue on a homepage
- Selling a product of some sort
- Affiliate marketing
- The inevitable “other”
I don’t need to spend much time on these, as they are so well covered in other places. For example, Pat and his Smart Passive Income Blog does a great job at covering the way he set up his very own group of income streams. The important thing to note here is that the various passive income methods are not goals in and of themselves. The goal is not to be earning large sums of money without any major effort but to be enjoying the life that the money permits.
That, I suppose, is the key issue here. So many people start trying to earn extra money from blogs, micro-niche pages, affiliate marketing and typing up a simple e-book, so why aren’t all of them earning massive amounts of money? While I don’t have any proof on this, I feel that many people fail because they focus too hard on the actual earning of money. I’m not ready to accept many of the old axioms – “If you build it, they will come” or “If you write good content, you will get readers” – but I do believe that trying too hard quickly becomes transparent. Nobody wants to click the affiliate advertisement of the guy screaming the equivalent of “CLICK HERE SO I GET MONEY”, but they’d be happy to click a link if it appears in combination with something that they find interesting.
Generating a passive income is, for many people, the first and only step in their Lifestyle Design. They feel that if they only had the money, everything else would be great. In a future entry, we’ll look at how important it is to have something to fill your new-found freedom with.
