Lifestyle Design

Every house you see has a blueprint behind. Before it was built in real bricks and mortar, it existed in somebody’s mind. It was first a drawing on a drawing board. A wireframe. A scheme. A design.

Your life as you live it right now has a blueprint behind. A set of rules and values. Every day you live your life according to that blueprint. You’re building your life based on your own lifestyle design.

What’s Your Lifestyle Design?

From my experience there are at least 3 ways in which you can design your lifestyle (and more than 100 ways to improve your life, for what matters). Think at them as they are architectural styles. Different ways to build a house.

The first one is emotions driven. The second one is social rules driven. And the third is values driven.

Following Emotions

Your lifestyle design is based on joy, fear, enthusiasm, sorrow, thrill, or something in between. You appreciate people based on how they make you feel. Everything you do is a result of one of your emotions.

If somebody hurts you, you’re sad. If somebody makes you happy, you’re joyful.

In the middle of your world is your heart.

Being emotions driven is a little bit of a roller-coaster. It gets you up and down pretty fast.

Following Social Rules

Your lifestyle design is built on the most visible and secure path you can find and keep. You appreciate people for the social validation you receive from them. You hate rejection and obey rules.

If somebody hurts you, you focus on how the situation looks from “the outside” rather than honestly experiencing pain. If somebody makes you happy, you feel accepted and integrated.

In the middle of your world is your material security.

Being social rules driven is like driving a huge truck. Safe, difficult to change course, powerful and sometimes pretty boring.

Following Values

Your lifestyle design is based on discovery, learning and experimenting. You appreciate people for what they can teach you, rather than for how they make you feel or how much validation you receive from them. You respond to many situations with rationality and lucidity.

If somebody hurts you, you think what you have to learn out of this. If somebody makes you happy, you’re enjoying it and then move on.

In the middle of your world is your curiosity.

Being value driven is like being a world explorer. Traveling light, looking for unusual places, learning and sharing your discoveries.

Your Master Lifestyle Design

Of course, all of the above are just abstract architectural styles. You can’t build your house exclusively on one of these, it’s just impossible to isolate a pure emotions driven lifestyle design, or a pure values driven lifestyle design. Or if you can, that lifestyle design is a serious imbalance.

In real life we mix those styles in various amounts. We have a little bit of emotional response, a little bit of social complacency and a little bit of growth fueled by our curiosity. But we do have what I call a master lifestyle design. Our master lifestyle design is the dominance of one of those three styles.

If your master lifestyle design is emotion driven, you may have a little bit of difficulty to be socially integrated. Your roller-coaster will take you higher than a truck can drive. It could also be difficult to learn new things, because you’re addicted to your roller-coaster and backpacking the world would seem dull.

If your master lifestyle design is social rules driven, than you’re having a real hard time changing your life and growing. Your truck won’t get you far away from known roads. And it wouldn’t be able to offer you the thrills of a roller-coaster ride.

If your master lifestyle design is values driven, you can get a little bit disconnected. You’re backpacking the world, but don’t have the thrills of a roller-coaster. And you’re a little bit insecure, missing the protection of a big, solid and secure truck.

The Choice Of A Personal Path

I think my predominance right now is curiosity and learning. I do have emotional responses and some of them are shaping my life big time, but my master lifestyle design is rooted in values. I’m also pretty indifferent to social rules, and social rules seem to be pretty indifferent to me, as long as I’m not a threat to the system.

Truth is you can chose whatever response you want, as long as you don’t give in to it. And as long as you know the advantages and pitfalls of each design. If you’re overly emotional, then society might raise a bit of rejection around you. If you’re concerned too much with social complacency then you might lose a hell of a good time. And if you’re too obsessed with learning and sharing, then you might get emotionally disconnected.

The bottom line of this is you can build your house exactly as you want. You are the blueprint creator. A house is built on brick and mortar but your life is much more fluid than that. You can change it. Even more than change (which is more than often something forced from outside) you can start designing it from the inside. Lay out your life structure the same way you design a house. Start with the front door.

How do you want to enter in your life?

Creating Value

Have you ever thought about the values you create? Ever crossed your mind to sit back and look out what exactly you give to the outside world in exchange for what you receive? Because this is how we, humans, are functioning: by a continuous exchange of values. The most popular value exchanged being, of course, money.

But despite its popularity, money is not the only value we exchange, is only the most popular. There are a lot of other values growing into our lives, floating around and finding their path, either inside or outside our person. Our society lives by exchange. Our incomplete nature makes for a giant commerce around the clock for getting what we need in exchange for what we give.

In today’s post I’ll share some of my thoughts about the values we create and exchange, especially the number of connections each of these values can have.

Sellers And Buyers

Every time you give something away, you’ll be the seller. And of course, every time you’ll get something back you’ll be the buyer. We play those roles all the time. We give away something valuable to the outside world and get something back in return. Sometimes we’re more in the seller’s shoes, sometimes we’re more like the buyer. And the values we trade are what defines us the most.

We give care to our family and receive emotional bonding and warmth. We give advice and compassion to our friends and get back support and gratitude. We give expertise and know-how to our clients and get back money and recognition. We give time and presence to our employers and get back money and appreciation (well, most of the time). We trade values.

Connection Values

Each of these values behave like an object, it can be picked up and stored, transported and used. And for that, it has handles. Or, to be a little more exact, connections. Each value we trade, either by selling, either by receiving it, has connections.

If you’re starting to look around in circles wandering where are those handles for the paycheck you get last month, stick around a little bit, I’ll try to explain more. It’s easier than it seems now.

The bigger the number of connections attached to each value, the higher the chance to find a potential user. If you create something with a single handle, you’ll be able to use that something only and only by that single handle. If, on the contrary, you created something with more handles, chances for that something to be picked up and used will increase by the number of the attached handles. (more…)

Journaling versus Blogging

Back in 2004 I started to keep a journal. It was basically a folder on my Linux powered laptop, with a bunch of unorganized files floating around. Everything was written hastily using vi, an editor which may be considered somehow cumbersome by the average computer user. Those were the days when my programming skills were sharper than ever… 4 years later I look at blogging from a serious business perspective, and made from eDragonu.ro blog my main activity. It was quite a process. Not always simple or even visible, sometimes pushed in the background by other, more urgent activities, but it was constant and evolving. It was like a subtle awakening. In this post I will try to outline some of my experiences from an emotional journalizing attitude to a much more fulfilling approach like blogging.

Getting emotional

Keeping a journal is a fantastic therapeutic activity. It literally keeps depression away (but don’t talk about that to your therapist, or you can notice a sudden increase in his bill). Most of the people think about journaling as a very normal and maybe even necessary activity, but only until you finish college. You are allowed to keep a journal until your graduation, but if you do this afterwards, well, you might be labelled as a strange person. Journaling is often seen as a weakness or a sign of an unstable personality.

But in fact, it is quite the contrary. The vast majority of famous people had a journal. Almost any important personality, from physicists like Albert Einstein to writers like Marcel Proust, they all kept a diary. And that seemed to enforce their inner balance and to boost their creativity resources. Having a journal is a sign of honesty and courage. You know, meeting with yourself is not always comfortable, and your journal is a continuous meeting with yourself.

I started journaling mainly because of my emotional overflow. I needed a safety valve, other than escapism, denial or alcohol. I used those safety valves before, until I actually rend them useless. They were not safety valves anymore, but addictions or psychological delusions. So I started to write whatever I felt when I was in a frustrating mood. I just wanted to know who I am and why some things are happening to me over and over again. I wanted to identify everything that made me angry, or sad, or even happy and joyful. It was an action triggered by a very high emotional state. It was an attempt to regain the balance between within and without. It was an act of relief and recharge.

After several days in which I wrote all of the pressuring stuff, I started to feel a difference. I was somehow relaxed. I felt like I processed it in some way, it was not on the inside anymore. I managed to get it out, put it in a safer place, and gain some relief over it. The emotional overflow finally found a way to flow. It felt good. But as the number of files started to grow on my folder, I began to actually read them, not only write them. It was the second important step I took. I started to actually understand.

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