Design Your Life
Savvy Saturdays (1/2/21)
I’ve started to listen to audiobooks, and a book I’ve been listening to recently is called “Designing Your Life”. It introduces a design-centered mindset in order to plan out life for any circumstances.
One idea the book poses is you need to know where you start in life in order live a coherent life.
No one travels without knowing their starting location. If you try to map out the directions for Texas to California but you plan to start in Paris, Italy (not Paris, TX, you smart geography nerds), you will find yourself sorely lost.
(Fortunately nowadays, with Google Maps, it’s easy to locate “📍Your location”, or where you want to begin when you plan to travel.)
In the same way, when planning out your life, knowing your beliefs, your perspective, and how you approach certain aspects of life will help you assert where your true “Your location” is, ensuring you won’t plan your life out from the wrong starting point.
The authors help us by sharing two views that help us find our starting location.
"Work View" and "Life View".
Your “Work View” is your perception of work, and the importance in relation to perspective influences how you approach work.
Answering questions like:
Why work?
What is work for?
How does work connect to people, others, and society?
What defines good worthwhile work?
What does experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?
Your “Life View” is your answer to philosophical questions of key values or perspectives you have. (⚠️ warning: existential crises incoming)
Answering questions like:
Why're we here?
What is the meaning and purpose of life?
What is the relationship between the individual and others?
What is the role of joy, sorrow, or justice, injustice, love, peace, and strife?
By understanding both of these views, you can gain a rough draft of what’s important to you and gain clarity on how to approach the two areas you traverse through most daily - your work and your life (basically everything else outside work).
Of course, it’ll take time to hash these all out (the book suggests 30 mins for each view), but it’s better to plan 1 hr to go in the right direction than waste 24 hrs traveling from the wrong Paris. 🚗
Questions to ponder: 🤔
What is your work view? (Pick 2-3 questions above and spend ~10 mins answering them)
What is your life view? (same as the previous question)
What are the similarities and differences in your work and life view? What overlaps and are complete opposites?
Weekly Collections
A collection of resources for you to enjoy… 📰 🎬 🎙️
Entertainment
The CEO of Alibaba, Jack Ma, made a film (22m) with famous martial artists actors like Jet Li & Donnie Yen, and it’s well made and quite entertaining.
Productivity
“Nothing truly meaningful or lasting has ever being created in a short period of time.
If you learn the story behind any great success you realize how many years went by and hard choices were made to achieve it. Reaching for more is not only an act of ambition, it also comes from passion and love.
Nothing is achieved because of easy choices. I believe that people can endure any hardship if it is sensible and constructive.
Hard choice means never retiring, because the brain has to be engaged in finding new solutions in the moment, not just remembering old formulas. Hard choices make us wiser, smarter, stronger, wealthier, and easy choices reverse our progress, focusing our energies on comfort or entertainment. In every difficult moment ask yourself what is a hard choice and what is an easy choice and you will know instantly what is right.”
—Hard Choices, Easy Life | The Happy Body
Weekly Tidbits
Learnings, verses, & quotes to chew on… 🧐
Verse of the Week
“Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.
Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing.”
—1 Peter 3:8-9
Challenging Quote
“One does not accumulate but eliminate.
It is not daily increase but daily decrease.
The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.”
—Bruce Lee
Weekly Update
Personal life stuff… 🔔
Hello friends,
Greetings from Dallas! 👋
Happy New Year! 🎉 You don’t have to see two 0s anymore in the year-part of the date anymore. You can now put 1 along with your two 2s, because this year will be #1!
Numerical date writing jokes aside, I’ve gotten to reflect on my work and life view, and man, those questions are hard.😳
I was thoroughly stumped with my view of work, and only walked away with some broad conclusions. 🤔 (Purpose of work is to provide value & impact, to express uniqueness and giftings, and bring awe and joy to others.)
The life view, on the other hand, was actually a good reminder reflecting over (as they are matters of ultimate concern). Life is about worshipping God in everything done, experiencing enjoyment, being able to express self, and being able to learn and grow constantly. 👌
(That’s a very condensed sharing of reflection, at least in those areas haha)
Also, I’m not one to do new years resolutions, as I dislike the negative connotations resolutions imply (unused gym memberships, in the moment thoughts and commitments thrown aside, etc…), but I ended up doing them. 😅
Here are my 2021 resolutions!
Be more real
Have deep kindness to self, family/friends, and strangers (based on the book, Deep Kindness)
Less multi-tasking, more focused single-tasking
What are your resolutions? Do you believe in resolutions? Would love to hear from you on it!
With that, here are several pictures from this past week: 📷
Thanks for checking in! Stay safe 😷 , keep it savvy 🧠 , and I’ll see y’all in the next update! 😊
Eric
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Want to write a guest post? Have a cool article, resource, verse, or quote to share? Email me @ eric-lee [at] utexas [dot] edu.