When you were a kid – perhaps even a teenager – video games were something that consumed your life. You would spend hours per day tapping buttons and taking names. Gaming was life and life was gaming.
Now fast forward to adulthood – the “real world” that your parents always warned you about – and your gaming muscles get very little exercise. You’re lucky to get more than a few minutes per day. (And an extended gaming session is a rarity.)
It’s not that you’ve lost your love for video games – it’s just that you don’t have the time or bandwidth to make it happen. You have a career, family, and other adult responsibilities that always seem to push gaming to the back burner.
But what if you could live a responsible adult life and still spend multiple hours gaming every single day?
If that sounds too good to be true, you’re unfamiliar with the concept of lifestyle design. And the sooner you understand how it works, the faster you’ll reach a stage of bliss.
What is Lifestyle Design?
Once you graduate from college and enter into the workforce, you’re told that you need to work 40 hours per week (preferably more), create a budget, put all disposable income into a 401(k), enjoy your two weeks of annual vacation, and hold on for 40 years until you reach retirement age. And once you retire, you’ll have to carefully budget your nest egg so that you have enough funds to last you until you die. Then it’s over.
You’ll find some financial advisors who use livelier language and more engaging descriptors, but that’s the basic gist of it.
Lifestyle design is all about flipping this script. It’s the attempt to purposefully design a life of your own choosing – whatever that looks like for you – so that you can enjoy today without compromising the future. It bucks the notion that you have to follow the American playbook. Instead, you get to write your own playbook as you go – one that works for you.
Using Lifestyle Design to Become a More Active Gamer
People use lifestyle design for any number of purposes. Some use it to travel the world. Others use it so that they can spend more time with their kids or grandkids. Some pursue lifestyle design so they can watch their favorite sports teams on a more regular basis.
The what changes from person to person, but the why remains the same: People want to discover freedom and happiness.
Your lifestyle design goal is to spend more time indulging in video games – and nobody else can judge that. Here are some tips to help you achieve this objective:
- Determine Your TMI
Author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss is one of the leading voices behind the concept of lifestyle design. And in his opinion, it’s important to move beyond thinking in terms of annual income and start looking at monthly/daily income. (Rather than saying you want to make $100,000 per year, say you want to make $8,333 per month or $273 per day.)
By narrowing your focus to your Target Monthly Income (TMI) or Target Daily Income (TDI), you figure out precisely how much you need to make in order to fulfill your life goals. And if you’re good about prioritizing the things that matter, you’ll quickly discover that you don’t need as much as you think.
- Switch to a More Flexible Career
If you’re working a desk job or shift job that requires you to be in the office for eight to ten hours per day, Monday through Friday, someone else is designing your lifestyle for you. The key is to break free and switch to a more flexible career.
Real estate is a great example of a flexible career. You can take online classes to get licensed and then immediately start building your own business – working only the hours that you wish to work. It’s tough work in the beginning, but things eventually snowball and you’ll reach a point where you can run a lot of your business via your smartphone.
- Kill Unnecessary Expenses
What if you could get rid of all of the unnecessary expenses in your life? (You could lower your TMI, work less, and play more.)
Go through your debit and credit card statements line by line and proactively seek out all unnecessary expenses in your life. Most people can easily eliminate a few hundred dollars in monthly spending.
What’s Your Ideal Lifestyle Look Like?
The beauty of lifestyle design is that you get to paint the picture of what you want your life to look like. Other people are free to give their opinions, but they ultimately have no say in your choices and outcomes.
If more time spent gaming is the goal, design your lifestyle around this objective and figure out a way to make it happen.