Hitting the road was total freedom for us. But we didn’t do it on a whim, we had a plan. Not just how to hit the road but what to do when we were on it. We made a plan to earn income anywhere because we wanted to make the most of our freedom and adventures to create our ideal future.
Unfortunately, not enough people take this important step before they start full-time RVing at a younger age. Many quickly abandon the lifestyle because they lack a proper road map to successful nomadic living with steady work that generates income. That’s why a new book called “Designing Your Life” is mandatory reading for the full-time nomad.
Design Your Life for Adventure, Purpose and Joy
When you were 18, did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up? Are you doing it now? I don’t know about you but I was a total idiot at that age. It’s crazy that society tells kids to make that choice when they’re not even old enough to buy booze. That choice sends many of us onto a default life trajectory of working at jobs that don’t satisfy us, paying off lenders and collecting possessions to satiate our need for fulfillment. I know. I was one of them.
The good news is, we no longer have to decide on just one path and follow it. It’s perfectly OK and smart to decide and shift throughout life, until we reach our ideal scenario of work and living that makes us happy and financially secure. Two Stanford professors and leading Silicon Valley product design innovators show us how.
What does a well-designed life look like? “A well-designed life is a life that makes sense,” writes Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in “Designing Your Life.”
“It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe and what you do all line u p together. When you have a well-designed life and someone asks you, “How’s it going?,” you have an answer. You can tell that person that your life is going well, and you can tell how and why. A well-designed life is a marvelous portfolio of experiences, of adventures, of failures that taught you important lessons, of hardships that made you stronger and helped you know yourself better, and of achievements and satisfactions. It’s worth emphasizing that failures and hardships are part of every life, even the well-designed ones.”
Using a combination of problem-solving thought processes and hands-on worksheets, you learn how to prototype your ideal life and follow that blueprint. The teaching methods Burnett and Evans use are simple and incredibly effective.
- Re-frame dysfunctional beliefs to get yourself un-stuck and moving in the right direction.
- Mind map and create three alternate realities of your perfect job and ideal life.
- Seek and co-create the work and life that you want at this point in time.
In this book we learn that achieving our well-designed life results from challenging dysfunctional beliefs about jobs and living. We brainstorm our beliefs about income, daily living, spirituality and our role in society. The end result is your ideal Live Work Dream.
“Life is about more than a paycheck and job performance. We all want to know we mattered to someone. We all want to know our work contributed to the world. We all want to know we loved and we lived the best we could, with as much purpose and meaning as possible, and that we had a pretty fun time doing it.
And you only understand that in retrospect, because a well-designed life isn’t a noun — it’s a verb . . .”
If you aren’t satisfied with your work and your life, you need this book.