I sat there chatting with friends, thinking about how I came down this path.
“My sister couldn’t come on vacation with us; she had too much to do back at the office. So her husband and son flew out for the week, and she flew out for two days over the weekend. She can’t wait until she can retire in a few years to start enjoying life.”
I’ve heard way too many stories like that.So I responded back with a story of my own.
“That in essence is why I do what I do. Because I learned from my dad NOT to live like that. He spent 30 years in a job he learned to hate. He spent the last seven reinterviewing for his position every year, hoping to hold on. He was counting the days until he hit 55 so he could retire and do something he truly wanted to do. He was 72 days short, and died at the age of 54 of a massive heart attack.”
Lifestyle design isn’t a new concept. But it does seem to be a buzzword these days amongst those trying to buck the trends and create something new, different. Timothy Ferriss in his book The 4 Hour Work Week describes it as:
The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD).
Life doesn’t have to be so damn hard. It really doesn’t. Most people, my past self included, have spent too much time convincing themselves that life has to be hard, a resignation to 9 to 5 drudgery in exchange for (sometimes) relaxing weekends and the occasional keep it short or get fired vacation.
And so are quest began. We started out with a virtual wedding business in the 90’s, before we even new what lifestyle design was. Why do you need an office when your clients exist all over the world?
Then we bought the house, put our daughter into school, and started living the “normal” life. And soon we discovered we didn’t have to live this way, so why were we?
And the fun began…
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