Lifestyle Design: The Key to an Awesome Life

If I’d one goal in life, it has always been to manage my choice of lifestyle. I grew up during the collectivistic 70s (great music) and egomaniacal 80s (bad music) when this was more a dream than reality for the vast majority of people. Choice was a political and marketing slogan more than anything else. Truly choosing what to do, where to live and how to live was an utopia (and still is for 80%+).

My inspiration to defy the norm came from reading Baudelaire, Hemingway and about van Gogh. These guys were free to roam the world and were being paid - more or less - to do so. The key to their success was their insane talent and adaptation into the right ecosystem. If I wasn’t blessed with the former I could always influence the latter.

Early on I decided that I wanted to become one of three things: diplomat, business manager or artist / writer. All of these occupations had a free pass to roam the world. I dabbled with all three during my college years; going to business school, taking the foreign service test (which I nailed) and studying journalism (i.e. writing all the time).

Quickly I realized that all three of them had limitations. The diplomatic route and corporate career demanded playing by the rules and the pay from being an artist / writer sucked.

Enter the web. I intuitively knew that this was the right path to a fulfilling personal and professional life. I’d been dabbling in Hypercard 2.0 when living in Spain back in ‘92 so I understood the whole concept of links, pages et cetera.

I’d found my vehicle but so many more things needed to fall into place if I was going to realize my master plan: living in a warm, beautiful and respectful place, and working on interesting projects with cool people. It was important that this place had a minimum of bureaucracy and a maximum of entrepreneurial spirit.

Enter San Francisco. Most people in life think that life is linear and that there are career paths (in retrospect yes). Bah-humbug. Life is all about catching the right wave. And the big wave came along in the end of the 90s when a technologist like me were offered to work pretty much anywhere. I chose San Francisco via a few years in London.

All the pieces were coming together nicely for an awesome life. Except for one: the corporate organization. Despite working in small startup environments the air was still filled with command-and-control and managing managers. As the startups grew up they all transformed into a 9-to-5 life. Spontaneous and passionate innovation became scheduled innovation, or just incremental changes.

So I got bored and started my own shop to redefine work, quality and life/work balance - right when the recession started. Idiotic? Nah, rather brilliant! Recessions are perfect for reinventions and entrepreneurial endeavors (this is a wonderful manifesto explaining why). Recessions rocks. The most fun I’ve ever had was during recessions when frugality and cleverness are worth more than money (cause there aren’t any).

And the irony is that what I do today is a combination of diplomacy, business management and creative expression - all roles rolled into one lifestyle.

To be continued…