Steve Mills - Online Entrepreuership with the SPOKE system

My Lifestyle Design Plan : A Review

I just thought I would spend today giving everyone a bit of an update to my current situation. I am currently working towards my ideal lifestyle. It is amazing when you look around how many people are not. People think they are, but what they are doing is chasing the next promotion, in order to get more money, in order to buy more things.

I am after more then that. I want an independence of the 9-5, sit in an office workday. I want to be truly rich. Not monetarily rich, but time and experience rich.

Slowly my plan is starting to become real, as I am directing my life and making choices on work habits and situations based on my “lifestyle design.”

Just to get everyone up to speed, my lifestyle design plan is

• To have a variety of interesting work.
• To set up autonomous systems in order to make passive income.
• To have the freedom to work hours of my choosing, in the location of my choice.
• To be able to travel for at least 3 months of the year with my family.

The steps that I have taken so far in the last year have been to :

• Establish a network of consulting clients while still holding down a 6 - 4 (10 hour days plus 2 hour commute) job. This was the hardest part, and one that I will write about in more detail soon. I was working 18 hour days for 3 months there getting things off the ground. Not an ideal lifestyle at all. But people have to consider a small amount of hard yards, a couple of hard months if they want to seriously work at breaking the 9 -5 rut. I’m not talking about the years of corporate grind / deferred lifestyle plan of the usual wage slave, but the ability to make small scale sacrifices for massive long term gain isn’t a bad trait to have.
• Quit the job with a steady net of clients. This gave me 4 day steady work a week, 2 of which working in the city, 2 of which working quite close to home. The other day deliberately left free in order to source more contracts and work on passive income earners.
• Develop 2 sites with passive income earning potential. One is a video sharing site that should attract some advertising revenue, due to it being in a specific untapped niche.
• Develop partnership agreement with one consulting client, resulting in equity share if project goes well. Large passive income earning potential
• A growing network of web development, graphic design and internet marketing clients that I consult with purely over the phone and internet.
• Starting to develop efficiency and knowledge management tools to compress the work day down to a smaller time investment.

So I am starting to get things off the ground, and although I have deviated from my plan a few times and fallen back into unhealthy work habits, I have had the piece of mind to look back at my plan and remind myself that life is for the enjoyment and experience, not the dollars.