Design Your Life, Don’t Just “Fix It”
When you start approaching mid-career territory, you start to feel different. Your mentality is you’ve been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and even sat in VIP. You look around and wonder, “what’s next?” Even if you haven’t hit that milestone quite yet, you may still feel that way. Or maybe you feel stuck, unfulfilled, or flat out miserable.
And then you start thinking, “I need to fix my attitude or outlook,” but the idea of “fixing” is where the problems actually start.
Hear me out for a minute.
When Fixing Doesn’t Work
When things in your life don’t go as planned, the knee-jerk reaction is to “fix it.” I mean, that’s what conventional wisdom has taught us, right? If you absolutely hate your job or feel burned out, the obvious answer is to go out and get a new one. But we never stop to ask why we’re so unfulfilled in the first place. And if we do, we only focus on one element (the money, the company culture, or the long commute) and we fail to look at the bigger picture.
Fixing is not the answer.
Fixing is reactive in nature; it’s about getting back to normal, not reimagining fulfillment.
And that’s just not what we need to do here.
We don’t want to go back to what was, we want to move forward and create something even better (in this case our life).
Designing a Life That Energizes You
That’s why we need to start designing, and not fixing, because designing is proactive.
Designing is based on the idea that you are the architect of your life and have the ability to create, envision, test, and build a life that works for you.
You lay the groundwork for what you want early so you don’t end up having to course correct later.
Imagine having a blank canvas in front of you and asking yourself:
What kind of life would energize me?
What experiences do I want to collect?
What would it look like to align my time with my values?
How can I experiment my way into a better version of myself?
In other words, “What type of life would I create if I wasn’t just trying to fix what I already have?”
Experiment Your Way to Your Best Life
Designing your life is about getting real with your wants, hopes, and desires, and not about listening to what our parents, friends, and status quo tell us. Once you’ve laid it all out on the table and gotten clear on the direction you want to go in, you start crafting a life based on personal values, pragmatism, and passions.
You think about everything you want to do, or at least “try out” and see if it fits. The experimentation is where the discovery and the true beauty happens, because designing is all about pathways and possibilities — not problems. We don’t have time to ruminate over the things we hate.
What good is that going to do us?
