Design & Live The Life You Dream Of
You either design your life or someone else will for you...
I’ve always been a little different. '
Like the time my two best friends and I had our “Forrest Gump moment” at 16 years old and decided to take to the open road and rode our bicycles from Windsor to Quebec… 🤣
When it came to my career, I just never subscribed to the theory of working for 40+ years, taking 2 weeks holidays annually and then retiring, full stop.
It has never been worth it to make a gazillion dollars at the expense of my personal aspirations, my health or my family.
I always believed there was an alternative life path.
I always believed that it’s possible to both have a thriving business and career and at the same time be living the life adventure I dreamed of including travelling extensively and having awesome health and relationships.
I always believed in living with intention, in alignment with the greater calling on our lives.
And I was willing to risk it and take the chance and see how it turned out. Doing so is both involves realizing the benefits and also suffering the consequences.
This is a contrarian idea - ah… but I’m used to contrarian ideas like starting a business in 2009 in heart of the GFC and like investing in and constantly writing about Bitcoin!! 🤣
Being a dreamer, I believe that an alternative reality was and is possible.
Today, I find myself largely living the life I want to be living.
I find it fascinating and encouraging to reflect back at my journals and my life goals. I have written journals and done goal setting as far back as 2005. When I read those and now look at the reality of my life 20 years later, my life has largely turned out as I dreamed, journaled, wrote, believe, planned and designed.
There is a mysterious power and force in being intentional and writing things down.
My encouragement is for all of us to be more intentional about what we actually want out of life and then planning for and pursue that.
How do we end up living the life we dreamed of?
For starters we need to realize that we are living the good ole days. Today.
A former business partner of mine who is 20 years my senior said this to me constantly. He would always say
“never forgot, these are the good ole days”.
Referring to raising kids, he would say “you never know when it’s the last piggy back”.
For that matter,
we never know when it’s the last time for anything.
We need to realize that we are all terminal, that we never know what tomorrow holds and there is an urgency for us to get on with living.
Today, and every day, is a gift and truly are the good ole days.
So let’s get on with being more intentional and designing our lives in all areas - health, career, personal aspirations, mental, relationships, spiritual.
After decades of doing this, here are the principles and concepts that I’ve found to be most formative for designing the life you dream of.
1. Have Financial Margin
As I said last week, the first step in every financial program is… spend less than you make.
In our personal lives, that means having money left over at the end of the month.
Having financial margin in our lives allows us to be in the drivers seat to make decisions.
Don’t setup a lifestyle that requires you to work and behave in ways you don’t want to. This means keeping our lifestyle costs as low as possible for as long as possible. Which perhaps sounds contrary to this entire message but I think it boils down to you figuring out what is REALLY, ACTUALLY important to you.
For example, I used to drive a BMW. But then realized it was terrible in the snow, terrible for transporting sporting goods and super expensive to repair. Oh and it turns out that I don’t really, actually care about cars.
I now drive a pickup truck. I love my truck for transporting me and my bikes to the forest.
Because we kept our lifestyle reasonably inexpensive for years and years, because we made good investments into hard, scarce assets - now we have additional freedoms. Spending less than you make is essentially the marshmallow test.
2. Take Mini-Retirements
I’ve structured my life around the “professional athlete” model much more so than the “corporate executive” model.
Pro athletes tend to operate in seasons including preseason, regular seasons, playoffs (go Lions!) and finally the off-season. This rhythm allows them to have energy and extreme focus when needed followed by periods of extensive recovery. I have tried to structure my life in similar ways.
A key part of this extreme focus and extensive recovery is taking mini-retirements. As I said, I’ve tossed aside the concept of full retirement and instead have been taking mini-retirements or sabbaticals my entire career:
My first mini-retirement happened when I quit my promising job and career at RIM/BlackBerry in 2001 and chose to travel around the world for 7 months with Candace. I quit and RIM/BlackBerry came back and offered me a leave of absence. Wow. The only way to find out how these things will go is to do them.
In 2017 my boys were 10 years old, I took a month off for us to drive out East to Maine and the Maritime provinces of Canada.
In 2018 we took another month off and toured the west coast including Vancouver, Whistler and RVing Vancouver Island (I love this commercial from RVing Canada!!).
I have always chosen time over money and continue to do this to this day. My business and career could be more successful but I’m not willing to make additional sacrifice to self and family. And I’m willing to take responsibility for this choice and to live with the consequences.
My mini-retirements mean that my motivation for full retirement is low. I’ve setup my work life in a sustainable way that I will choose to do for the rest of my life.
3. Environment Matters
It’s true, environment matters. Where you spend your time and who you spend it with, matters a lot.
I have applied this concept extensively both in terms of where to live as well as how we travel.
We chose to live in a small town an hour plus outside of Toronto, where small town life has many benefits:
Cost of living is likely 30 to 50% less than Toronto.
The “keeping up with Jones’” pressure is next to zero.
We live 2 minutes from the lake and beach.
We are 15 minutes from a massive forest.
I can gravel bike right out of my driveway and within 5 minutes I reach the farms and forested roads.
Maybe you can’t move but you can certainly have your home environment setup how you love it.
For me, I love to be surrounded by books.
I love using great equipment so guess what, I have great laptop, a great iPad, great pens and even the paper I use matters to me.
Relatively small costs that make a big difference for me.
4. Leverage Travel-Arbitrage
Similar to living in a small town outside of Toronto at a fraction of the cost, we do the same for travel.
Travel-arbitrage means going to similar places or having similar experiences at a fraction of the cost.
When we travel, we very rarely do package or all-inclusive type trips.
We research and book things ourselves and turn this research and discussion it into a date night or family night activity.
By finding it and book it on our own, we can do high quality for a fraction of the cost:
We went kiteboarding in Morocco instead of Turks & Caicos. In Morocco, six of us stayed in an amazing oceanfront 4 bedroom home for $300/night Canadian. A similar place in Turks would be $2,000/night or more.
View from our bedroom window in Morocco We ski some of the best resorts in the world but do so at a fraction of the cost. We buy our lift tickets each spring ahead of the coming season with my IKON Pass adult season pass costing $1039 Canadian. In comparison, a single day lift ticket at Steamboat Colorado is $275 USD or $380 Canadian! For a single day!! On IKON we could ski 5 full days at Steamboat along with full season pass at approximately 50 other world class ski areas.
OPMs (Other Peoples’ Mansions) is a term our ski crew and friends made up to refer to the amazing chalets and cottages we’ve rented over the years. By renting cottages and ski chalets we have been able to explore many different mountains and lakes and even 4 weeks per year of rental cost doesn’t cover the property taxes alone, let alone other costs of such properties. Yes we would have loved to owned a cottage or chalet but always chose to just rent.
5. How to Design Your Life
Designing your life comes down to dreaming and planning. It comes down to Vision, Desire, Belief, Planning and Execution. It’s similar to strategic planning for a company or organization but strategic planning for your life. In the below article I described 6 steps for doing so.
We are all in different seasons of our lives and frankly some times are easier than others. I understand that and that’s true in my own life.
Though with that said, I’m always surprised by how under done and under-utilized strategic planning for your life is… I would guess less than 5% of people do this and perhaps it’s even less than 1%.
Remove any self-limiting beliefs about your ability to change and design the life you dream of.
I’m reminded of Viktor Frankl’s famous quote:
Between stimulus and response, is a choice.
Whether you are 80 years old or 18 years old or 35 with young kids, there are ways you can improve your life through more intentional lifestyle design.
Lifestyle design is about moving closer to living the life you dream of living.
Whatever that means for YOU!
To Your Bigger Things!
Brad 💕👊
p.s. I need to pay homage to Tim Ferriss who coined the term lifestyle design in his amazing book, 4-Hour Workweek. I’ve probably read it, or major parts of it, five times, I highly recommend.
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Really appreciate you sharing your perspectives on travel Brad! Thanks so much! You are a very thoughtful writer!! Very enjoyable to read!😀
Great message. This is my favourite post yet! Love this!