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- 🌈 Dare to dream, then make it happen
On a scale of 1 to 10, how closely does my life align with my dream life?
This is a question that I ask myself periodically, and I like it because it asks me to take stock of my current reality and also have an opinion of what my “dream life” looks like. What really matters to me and what are the things that I desire in my dream life? What am I shooting for, and how close or far away am I to this myriad of desired outcomes? What’s stopping me?
Most of daily adult life usually encourages us to think small, to hedge our expectations, or to negotiate down from what we really want.
Be realistic. Save that money for retirement, take the safer job, spend your pent-up frustration on smaller items that don’t matter.
Then I came across Tim Ferris’ Ideal Lifestyle Costing exercise, which changed my perspective of what constraints I was putting on myself and what I was actually prioritizing vs. what I thought I was prioritizing.
Money is typically the reason I give for why I’m not doing something I think is super cool, but when Tim gave a couple quick example to reframe what I thought was possible, I couldn’t help but pause.
$250 USD: “Five days on a private Smithsonian tropical research island with three local fishermen who caught and cooked all my food and also took me on tours of the best hidden dive spots in Panamá.”
$150 USD: “Chartered a plane in Mendoza wine country in Argentina and flew over the most beautiful vineyards and snow-capped Andes with a private pilot and personal guide.”
I totally get that this still isn’t accessible for many right away, and that there are so many other reasons this might not be possible for you, me, or someone else.
But what are those things that would really make a difference in your life? What if, with some planning, they were actually within reach?
The rules of reality can be bent. It just requires thinking in different terms.
He outlines a super tactical way to start making our goals a reality:
Create a 6-month and 12-month Dreamline
List 5 things you dream of having, being, and doing, in that order.
For those things that have a cost, outline the costs (parts A, B, and C below)
Calculate your current Daily Expense so you can understand where you are today and multiply that by 1.3 for some buffer
Calculate your Target Monthly Income = A + B + C + (1.3 x monthly expenses)
Example from Tim
How much money do you think you need to make to live your ideal lifestyle? I bet it’s less than you think. Try it out for yourself.
Sometimes I do this activity and it makes me realize that all these things that I want deep down are possible, other times it helps me realize I haven’t even thought that deeply about what I really want, because I assumed it was unrealistic.
Either way, I come out the other side feeling electric.
It might just be possible.
A passage worth considering
Do you have kids?
Then you know that not one of them popped out as tabula rasa, a blank slate. Each one came into this world with a distinct and unique personality.
None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul.
Another way of thinking of it is this: We’re not born with unlimited choices.
We can’t be anything we want to be.
We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become…
Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
The end.
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