Lifestyle Design
If you are a sole trader, then effectively you are your business.
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8 Lifestyle Design If you are a sole proprietor, then effectively you are your business. In that way, your business and your personal life are effectively inseparable. And while this can sometimes be a bad thing, we’re also going to see why this can be an incredibly good thing. Because once you remove the arbitrary separation between “work” and “life,” you start to realize that you have much greater freedom to live the precise lifestyle you choose. This is one of the true benefits of entering the gig economy. This is the central idea behind “lifestyle design”—a concept popularized by Tim Ferriss in The 4-Hour Workweek, but that has been doing the rounds online for a while now. By understanding lifestyle design and how it relates to the gig economy, you can create a whole new kind of work-life balance.
What Is Lifestyle Design? To understand lifestyle design, you simply have to flip a common sequence on its head. Because for those in traditional employment, the sequence goes like this: Find job ➔ Design lifestyle to fit around job In other words, our lifestyle is dictated by our work. We need job security, so we look for the job first. That will then dictate precisely where we live, our disposable income, the kinds of luxuries we can afford . . . even the number of hours we have spare in the evenings. Using lifestyle design, though, means flipping this, like so:
© Adam Sinicki 2019 A. Sinicki, Thriving in the Gig Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4090-8_8
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Chapter 8 | Lifestyle Design Choose the lifestyle you want ➔ Design the job to fit around that This is the “lifestyle business,” a transformative way of thinking about work. Suddenly, your entire life isn’t orbiting around your career: instead your career is playing second fiddle to your life. This doesn’t necessarily require you to be self-employed either. Rather, lifestyle design simply means setting up your business or career in such a way as to provide a foundation from which to build the life you want outside of work. Let’s say for instance that you decide you want to have more time to spend with family, that this is the number one priority for you (and a good priority it is too!). In that case, you might decide that you don’t necessarily want to take on a high-paying job as the CEO of a huge corporation. While that might conform to traditional notions of success and achievement, it also means taking on a huge amount of stress, and spending more and more time in the office. Maybe you originally just wanted to provide for your family. But what you hadn’t realized is that in spending so much time away from them (and being emotionally unavailable the rest of the time), you’re actually hurting them. What’s more is that you inevitably get accustomed to a certain quality of life and end up increasing your living expenses, thereby leaving yourself with the same slim amount of disposable income at the end of it all. The stress and debt is still there, in fact it is amplified. So instead, maybe you do a “career 180” and decide you’re going to be a ga
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