The concept of lifestyle design has been around for decades, but it became a global phenomenon following the success of Timothy Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek.

Lifestyle design is the art of creating a fulfilling lifestyle now, rather than waiting for retirement or some unexpected windfall.

Lifestyle design does not look the same for any two people, or even for any two different stages of life. Some people have a passion they can fulfil for their entire lives. Other people discover new passions over and over throughout their lives.

Right now my lifestyle is designed to enable me to travel long-term and have time to immerse myself in whatever project I am currently inspired by. In a couple of years my dream lifestyle will most likely be different because I will want to spend my time with the children I would like to have.

The starting block is the life you are living right now. This is the foundation upon which you can design the life you choose to live. Like me, not many people will start designing their dream lives on a blank canvas. The majority of us have pre-existing responsibilities (such as children, family, debts or a business) and things that we like, dislike or are profoundly passionate about.

How we design our lives is based on our passions and responsibilities. The life you design could involve:

• quitting a job to start a business
• creating an alternative income, enabling you to spend more time with your children/family
• working from home or in other countries
• working less
• travelling more
• committing your time/life to making a difference
• scoring your dream job or changing career
• going full-time with your hobby
• starting community projects
• living sustainably and/or off the grid.

The options are endless.

A life of freedom

My experience of living a life I’ve designed is a recent achievement.

I am writing this from a gorgeous apartment in Bolivia, with views across the city to snow-capped mountains. My husband and I have been travelling for more than one and a half years. About six months into our trip I realised that I was used to this lifestyle. I now accept that visiting amazing places and meeting inspiring people is my everyday life. It feels normal to wake up each day and decide what we are going to do, be it going to the beach, visiting a ruin, learning something new, working on one of the many projects we are involved in, or writing a blog or book!

We have designed our life to fulfil our passions and goals. We are not afraid to have big goals. We accept that we may succeed or fail, but we give each of them our best shot.

Although this life is normal now, I still pinch myself occasionally because this lifestyle seemed impossible for most of my life. I say seemed impossible because once we took a series of actions towards achieving our goal, it all became very possible.

At many times in the past I had been resigned to how things were, even when a lot of things sucked, such as:

• long commutes to work sitting in traffic
• working long hours for my employer
• being scared to leave my job
• when I did leave my job, spending a few years working long hours, seven days a week on my businesses
• having huge debts
• earning very little and having no financial security
• being single and lonely
• failing at many things I tried
• not looking after my health.

You can see why getting used to my new life of love, travel and adventure is pretty thrilling!

It wasn’t easy getting here, however. I have worked very hard and invested a lot of time and energy on projects, goals, businesses and charities — learning and trying, over and over again. I have worn myself out at times trying to figure out how to free myself from the shackles of the life I had, in order to live a life I love.

The problem was that I didn’t know it was freedom that I was looking for. In hindsight, it is obvious and I can see that it didn’t need to be so hard to figure out.

Freedom mindset

It is very easy to understand and adopt a sense of freedom when you have been travelling for as long as we have. But the mindset is possible whether you travel or not. It is something you can cultivate even if you are bedridden, or have never left the country you were born in. The experience of freedom comes when you realise that you call the shots in your life. There are many situations where you may not feel this to be true, where you may feel trapped or constrained. But you do have choices, whether you can see them or not. They may not necessarily be choices that you like all the time, but they are choices nonetheless.

Sadly, we are not taught how to develop our freedom mindset at the schools that most of us attend. Although many people aspire to live with this mindset, most people believe in some way that it is something possible for other people, but not possible for them. This is not true. It is possible to create freedom in your life by simply realising that you are free. You are able to do fantastic and exciting things with your life.

The problem for many people is that with freedom comes great responsibility. To be free you must accept that you are responsible for your life — that you are creating it, whether you realise it or not. Many people blame their parents, boss, partner, kids, health, the government or anything or anyone else for how unhappy and unsatisfied they are. The fundamental flaw in blaming others is that you are giving others an invisible hold over you. You are giving away your power to be free.

Don’t get me wrong, things will happen to you that are outside your control; many tragic and wonderful things will probably happen in your lifetime that you have no control over.

But you do control your reactions to these things. You do control how you view and act in the world around you, and the situations you are faced with. This is how you create your world; this is where your true freedom lies.

Creating a freedom mindset is something that you can do, and for most people it means a dramatic change in how you see the world. The self-help industry is enormous because there are millions of people out there looking for more out of life and wanting to learn the elusive secret of how to be truly happy, fulfilled and free.

In my experience there is a shortcut. The quickest way to create a life of freedom and fulfilment is to be bold and work hard to do what it takes to fulfil your dreams now, even if they seem impossible.

Throughout this book I am going to share with you stories of real, everyday people who had a moment of clarity and decided to take life into their own hands. They were people just like you, with lives just like yours. Each one of them reached a point where they saw they had to take action to make their dreams a reality, even if their dreams seemed impossible and they had no idea how to make them happen.

I hope you take inspiration from their stories when you embark on your own life-changing adventure. I begin with Lee’s story.

What you need to succeed

There are certain types of people who are more likely to make their dreams come true. These people are not born this way and there is no genetic relationship between them. It is a mindset shift that occurs at some point in some people’s lives. I like to call it a Good Life Crisis.

A Good Life Crisis is when you look at your life and think, ‘If I continue on the path I am on, my life is going to be more of what it is already’. If your path looks dreary, hard or boring, with no exciting goals ahead, then you may experience an inner fire to alter your life dramatically — a motivator for change that is almost too insistent to ignore.

Emotionally there are three stages that lead to a Good Life Crisis:

• Feeling stuck, bored, hopeless or depressed. This stage is tough because it feels like you are trapped, you have no control over your life and everyone else is having a better time than you. You will notice everything that sucks about your life and you may fixate on how awful certain people — such as a boss, a friend, a family member or a past or current partner — are.
• Feeling that there is more out there but being unsure how to access it. This is the stage where you notice the success of inspiring people in the news, friends of friends, and so on. Your ears prick up because you are excited about the possibility of something happening in your own life, but you lack the self-confidence to make it happen. You are pretty sure that they have something you don’t and that although you would love change, you don’t believe you can make it happen. You have some dreams, but they seem impossible.
• Feeling motivated to take action. When you reach this stage you will find yourself looking for opportunities. You may know what it is you want to do or change (or at least have a general idea). You find yourself doing things you wouldn’t normally do, or taking on new challenges, reading related books, doing courses and being drawn to new people or communities. This is the stage where you start to create a new way of life, and however scared or uncertain you may be, your determination to create change propels you into a new way of life.

You may experience any one or all three stages when approaching a Good Life Crisis. Each person is different. But what is the same is the point when you start to take action. If you are reading this book, it is likely that you are looking for more out of life and are willing to do something exciting and extraordinary with your life. It’s up to you whether you start to take action on making your dreams a reality today or in 5, 10 or 30 years’ time.

In my experience, there are some important elements that contribute to the likelihood of success. They are:

• a supportive, like-minded community
• a public declaration of your goal/s
• deadlines
• coaches and mentors
• your commitment to do what it takes.

This book and its accompanying resources address the first four items in this list. The fifth is up to you.