Deconstructing + Reconstructing a life

We design our lives by every choice that we make—from how we plan our days, to how we approach our relationships, to our interactions with our environments. The question we can all practice asking ourselves, she offered, is: “Is what I’m about to do conducive to life?”

If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding .1 Put simply:

• I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people

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I’m always amused when I get credit for coming up with the 100-Day Project, because part of what makes it interesting is that there’s nothing original about it. It’s what we all do every day. We do routine things, and we do things that require acts of imagination that we’re never going to do again, whether it’s naming a goldfish or responding to a... See more

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap : situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.

The mediocrity trap is a nasty way... See more

A lot of the time realising more in my personal life means doing less in my professional life, but I am absolutely fine with that trade off because my end goal isn’t to build a massive multimillion dollar business, it’s to build a life that’s creative and fulfilling.