Lifestyle Redesigned

People want to change their lives.  Not all of them, but surely enough of them.  They often know what they don’t want, but never take the time to illustrate or document the life that they really want.  If asked you’ll find that most give similar answers.  Make more money.  Work less.  Travel more.  Drive a nice car.  Lose weight.  Have a supermodel girlfriend.  They sound specific, but they are really just generalities of what they think would make them happy.  They need to dig deeper to understand and define what their dream life would really look like if they had it.

You also need to understand the meaning of what an answer like ‘make more money’ really means to you.  For some people it may mean security, others independence.  But understanding the underlying need will help you realize your goals and make them more tangible.  That makes them more attainable.

I must admit I’m not happy with my life and I aim to change it.  The problem for me is that I really didn’t know what I wanted.  When I asked my self the question I would respond with the same answers listed above.  That is until my recent trip to Pattaya Thailand.  Traveling alone gave me plenty of time to think and contemplate things.  I dug down and really looked at my life.  I saw what I didn’t want and I saw what would make me happy.  I started to formulate a plan with real goals.  Things that I could act on daily.

One of the most important things I did was to write the plan down.  It began to not only take shape, but I started to see how changing my life into the one I wanted was actually possible.  I set reasonable goals, but ones that also were a bit of a stretch.  I didn’t put down “buy a Ferrari and date a supermodel within one year.”  Those aren’t even aspirations in my mind at this point, that’s not to say I wouldn’t enjoy them if they came along.  I might have thought that type of life would have been my dream in the past, but looking deeper that’s not really what would make me happy.

Now that I have a clear set of goals and a reasonable plan to achieve them, I can start acting.  Each day I take steps towards meeting those goals.  If I have to prioritize things in a day, those actions that will help me get to the end goal go to the top of the list.  Each little step helps the feeling of accomplishment so that you can keep pushing forward.

Will I reach that life that I really want?  At this point I’m hopeful.  But I’ve let myself down before.  That’s the final piece of the puzzle.  Having the mindset to carry through.  This is the toughest part of all.  I need to break myself of the pattern of unproductive behavior and keep going down the road of activity and success.

I thought this really sets the tone of the relaunch – of my site and my life.

I’ve been struggling to find a proper direction for this site since I started it 10 months ago. It sure took me long enough, heck it takes less time for a baby to be born. But that is kind of what this site is like, my new baby. The new heading for this site is all about lifestyle design. In other words, living the life the way you want to live and not the way people think we should, or people expect us to live. Enjoy things today and not putting them off till tomorrow, or when we are too old to enjoy them. In essence the art of strategically making your life the most fulfilling it can be right now.

So how did I decide on Lifestyle Redesign as my new focus? It is the major focus of my life right at this moment in time. I want to free myself from the life I’ve unconsciously developed over the course of the last 30 some years through wrong decisions, or worse – not making decisions and allowing things to go along as they may. I wanted something more from life and I awoke one day determined to get it. My original problem was that I didn’t know exactly how I was going to do it.

I went back to old school basics – brainstorming, dreaming, and goal setting. I took a weekend and listed out my goals and dreams, and what I wanted to do and have over the next ten years. I started broad and worked back to things that I could achieve every year, quarter, and month. Now I didn’t get that detailed execpt for the first year, the other nine I left as broader goals. It really helped me outline what I wanted out of life.

Some of the things on my list:

• Workless – travel more
• More free time
• Not working for someone else
• Learn a foreign language (or two)
• Visit with my family and friends more
• Take up skiing again – in the Swiss alps
• Travel across the world
• And the list goes on…

I noticed that the majority of my items revolved on free time, working for myself, and travel. How would I achieve these things? My first step was to find a way to make money that did not require me to be tied down to one place and work for someone else. The problem was I had to do this while I was tied down to one place and working for someone else…bummer. This meant my entire free time would be dedicated to trying to start a second business. I would have to sacrifice friends, family, and social life for the greater long term good. This would not be fun, but I need to treat it like building a business.

So what type of business did I decide to build? Marketing. Internet Marketing to be specific. I started looking into it about the same time I started this site. I read all the free information I could, took in the good, got duped by some bad, but by November of 2009 I had figured out a business plan. Then I took a vacation, and with the holidays didn’t do much of anything till January of 2010. I started to press forward and started to make some money online.

February rolled around and I really started to put some work in. I got distracted on more than a few occasions and started reading again instead of doing. Which is where this site’s new direction came from. Documenting my journey to lifestyle redesign and making myself accountable. I’ll probably make some long informative posts here, but most will be updates on goals and progress so that I can keep myself accountable.

So what does march hold in store for me? I have 10 sites that either need to be started from the ground up, or have more content added and a serious marketing campaign needs to be done on all properties. For these sites, I’ll be trying 3 separate techniques to try and evaluate if one works better than the other for me.

Where do I stand currently? One site fully developed, 4 more partially developed, and 5 that need to be built from scratch.

March Goals:

• Launch all 10 Sites
• Run a full marketing campaign on each one
• Increase income from $35 a month

Long Term Goals

• Make $1,000 Per Month by the End of June
• Make $3,000 Per Month by end of September
• Make $6,000 Per Month by end of Year

These are pretty lofty goals for sure, but I believe they are attainable. I’ve be researching and testing for almost a year now, so I don’t consider myself a complete beginner. I wouldn’t have been able to make those type of goals a year ago and have a rats ass chance of making them. It is going to take a lot of hard work and dedication. I know what needs to be done, the question is whether I have the drive to do it…only time will tell. But quitting my job by Jan 1, 2011 is my goal. At that time I’ll be sitting on the beach in Thailand drinking a Singha and appreciating what my new life has to offer.

So from today on, I’m committing to myself and the rest of the interwebs to give up my friends, family, and social life for one year and work my ass off to have a better more fulfilling life. Here’s to making lifestyle redesign a reality…Cheers!