Since I went through the process of converting my business into a location independent business about a year ago, I’ve been hanging out a fair bit in the lifestyle design community, learning a lot from other people who’ve been working in a location independent way for a long time, and following many of the practicing and aspiring location independent and “unconventional living” discussions on various blogs. And as a newbie to the online world, I’ve learned loads about practical strategies for making a location independent business possible, met plenty of interesting adventurers, made many new friends and had my dream machine stimulated in a big way by seeing, reading and hearing about the choices other people are making. All of this has extended my perspectives on what’s possible. Don’t you love it when that happens!?
There have been lots of things about the lifestyle design community that I really identify with and I think a lot of the Agile Living tribe overlap with the lifestyle design tribe. Many of the lifestyle design discussions resonate with my core values of wanting to bring more of the following experiences into our lives: adventure, exposure to diverse ways of living, conscious living and making lifestyle choices that express what you love rather than just following an automatic script, taking responsibility for creating the life you want and being who you want to be rather than being a victim of circumstances, having a loose attachment to material stuff, embracing change and novelty, and living in alignment with your values.
But you know, I’ve had a bit of a sadness-frustration thing building up over the past while. Because I feel like I’m a part of the lifestyle design community, there are messages being promoted in the broader lifestyle design scene that, on a day when I’m feeling compassionate, make me feel kind of sad, and on a day when I’m feeling less compassionate, make me feel all self-righteous and rant-ey. These days I’m getting better at remembering that when I’m feeling rant-ey it’s not because other people are wrong and need to change. It’s because I’m discovering something that’s important to me. Annoyance is a sign-post that you’re becoming clearer about something you value and anger is a sign-post that you’re letting other people ignore or violate what you value. From the comments on Corbett’s post recently, it seems that I’m not the only person having this reaction.
To be really clear: I loathe drama and I’m not up for a mud-slinging match between bloggers (in spite of the link bait and blog traffic that’s supposed to provide), so this post is not about bashing bloggers in the lifestyle design scene, especially since I know that there are many bloggers in the lifestyle design scene who’ll share my perspective.
This post isn’t about bashing the concept of lifestyle design either. It’s about me getting clearer on my Agile Living values and vision and I wanted to share with you this example because it’s a very clear example showing how you can turn your irritation into inspiration. I’ve been keeping quiet about my annoyance with these messages because, as a natural contrarian, I’ve come to learn (the hard way!) that it’s not enough to just know what you don’t want and to rail against that. That’s not a vision, that’s a reactionary anti-vision. It’s the stereotypical rebel without a cause. A vision is about knowing what’s important to you and what you want to create in the world. The most influential visions are driven by love and creativity, not anger or fear. So I’ve been reading and watching, watching myself mostly, and noticing where the annoyance pops up and doing some probing to discover what I value that I feel is being ignored or violated. And then asking myself what I want to be involved in creating in the world instead. And now that I’ve moved past an “anti-vision” in this regard and I’m clearer on my vision and what’s important to me to be a part of creating in the world, I’m ready to pipe up and share my thoughts.
So here’s the thing that’s been pressing my buttons. There’s this story I’m coming across over and over again in the lifestyle design arena, and it goes something like this:
“The ideal is to avoid any form of institutionalization, whether it’s educational institutions or corporate institutions. Institution is a dirty word and it’s one of the big nasties that are responsible for brainwashing you and making you live a ‘template’ life. Working for someone else is bad (I’ve even seen it called ‘prostituting yourself’ and ‘renting out your brain!’) To be truly free, to do creative work and to live a rich and meaningful life, you must quit your job, start an online business, cut your work hours to just 4 hours a week and travel the world with all this free time and money. And you can have all of this straight out of school, in like, under 6 months. Because the internet is amazing and has dissolved all the barriers to entry.”
What’s wrong with this story? Well I want to just say first that there are some parts of this message that I love. I do love the idealism, the big dreams, the belief in your potential, and the willingness to question some of the assumptions we’ve been brought up with. And the internet is pretty darn amazing. But there’s something I value big-time that’s being ignored, even violated here.
It’s the process of mastery.
Mastery
Mastery is both a process and a result. Everybody wants the results of mastery, but few are willing to endure the process of mastery. And, as so many great psychologists, researchers and authors are highlighting, you can’t get the results without the process. The mastery process is not as glamorous as the results. It’s full of hard, tough, frustration, boredom, resistance and stuckness. It’s often about putting off instant gratification now, so that you can have even and even richer experience and even greater enjoyment later. Mastery takes time and experience, and so it demands patience, persistence, discipline and the ability to do stuff you don’t love doing because you recognize that it’ll gain you valuable lessons, experience and skills.
In his book, “The Dip,” Seth Godin talks about how the mastery process has a “dip” in which you have a really hard time while you’re learning and developing your ideas and skills. Most people look for easier ways of doing things and try to get their results without going through the dip (and this is what every “get rich quick” scheme is appealing to). But you have to go through the dip to build mastery. And the more remarkable and valuable the contribution you want to make, the greater the dip will be. From Seth’s perspective, we should be grateful for the dip because it separates the remarkable from the mediocre, and it’s part of what creates the uniqueness that makes your contribution more valuable when you stick through the dip.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his recent book, “Outliers,” also talked about how talent develops over time, through deliberate practice and famously claimed that you need to put in 10 000 hours of deliberate practice before you can claim that you’ve achieved mastery. Daniel Coyle, in “The Talent Code,” also emphasizes deliberate practice, calling it “deep practice.” Deep practice demands that you practice minute, often boring details of a skill over and over and over until it’s perfect… and then practice some more to see how you can make it even better. Coyle shows how talent is less about genetic blessings and more about putting in the hard hours of conscious deep practice and constantly looking to do better. And Dan Pink in his latest book, “Drive,” talks about the mastery process as one of three key intrinsic motivators that bring us real joy and fulfillment in our work. The whole process of investing in growing yourself and your skills is a natural human drive and is enjoyable in itself - sometimes in spite of the hard bits, and sometimes because of the hard bits. So many people want that satisfied, motivated, fulfilled feeling from their work and other pursuits in life, but don’t want to do the hard work part of the mastery process, in order to get there. I understand the theory of why mastery is so important as Godin, Gladwell, Coyle and Pink explain it, but most of all, throughout my life I’ve loved pursuing mastery and from my own experience I’m convinced that pushing myself to be and do better each day is an essential ingredient to feeling alive and well.
Formal educational institutions and corporations aren’t innately evil. It all depends how you use them (this is a whole post in and of itself!). They can be great places to build your experience and mastery because there are often a lot more mentoring opportunities around you than when you’re trying to go it alone as an entrepreneur. Sure, the internet is pretty amazing, and it has dissolved a lot of barriers to entry. But that’s even more reason why, if you want your online business to be successful, if you want to stand out in all the noise that all the crowds around you are making since the barriers to entry were dissolved, you’re going to have to develop even greater mastery and genius
So how does mastery fit in with Agile Living?
Agile Living isn’t about seeking the fastest route to your goals or achieving “easy and elegant” change by avoiding the hard parts. It’s about negotiating change and creating what you love “easily and elegantly” because you love the hard parts as much as the easy parts and you’re resourceful enough to use both the easy and the hard stuff to continue to learn and to create. It’s about having the agility and resourcefulness to create what you love in the world and make your contribution, regardless of the risks and the rules and restrictions that other people try to apply. And I’m not talking about an “all-sail-and-no-rudder” approach to “breaking the rules.” I’m talking about having both the mental agility to believe in yourself and your ideals when nobody else does AND having the self-discipline, competence and mastery to bring your ideals into reality and keep improving your results each day. Agile living is about using all of your resourcefulness, and continually expanding your resourcefulness, knowing that as you develop your mastery, you can create more and more ways of bringing what you love into the world and you can make a richer contribution as a result.
My logo and brand color were conscious choices to reflect what’s important to me in my life and work philosophy. The turquoise is about idealism, movement, change, flow, dynamism, ease and elegance like water and sky. And the brown I chose because it was important to me to balance the turquoise with the grounded-ness, depth, calmness and stability of an earth color. For me that’s one of the essences of Agile Living - to have a core that has stability, depth, experience and wisdom, so that you can be agile and adjust and expand your contribution from that place of resourcefulness, centredness and responsibility. Without that stable core, you’re likely to just be a wild card, skimming the surface of life and creating drama as you go.
If you’re young and haven’t built much experience or mastery, I’m not trashing your dreams and saying the contribution you’re making is worth nothing. Hell, I’m only 30 years old myself! I’m all for stepping up to leadership as a young person, even if the people you’re leading are much older than you. And I’m definitely not going to say, “You’re not an expert and shouldn’t do anything unless you’ve racked up 10 000 hrs. Whether or not you call yourself a “lifestyle designer,” keep your idealism and keep making your contribution. Get out there, show up and be doing your thing and racking up those 10 000 hours and more.
There probably are lots of sources of income that can sustain you on four hours a week of work. But that’s unlikely to be truly purposeful, inspiring and meaningful work. And if it were truly purposeful, inspiring and meaningful work that you love doing, why would you want to work just 4 hours a week? If you want to live a rich and meaningful life and do truly genius work, stop aspiring to the “I only work 4 hours a day” badge of honor. Be patient, it’s a process. And love the hard work that will make your results and your contribution so much more valuable.
Easy isn’t what expands our hearts and minds, and gives us that rich sense of feeling fulfilled that we get when we engage fully with all of life. Its the often messy, frustrating and downright hard process of building our mastery that’ll enable you to be, do and give more of what you love and to feel alive and well. And that’s what Agile Living is about - continually expanding your head, heart and hands and resourcefully using what you’ve got to make a meaningful contribution.
Many of us are not aware of the things that matter most in life. Some fall for the lie of instant gratification and some on get rich over-night schemes. I believe that the greatest success we can achieve in this life is self mastery. Material success tends to corrupt. Spiritual growth brings forth understanding that is beyond this world.
Awesome points here about both mastery and “the dip,” Cath. In the comments of the post at Free Pursuits that you mentioned, I took away the same thing. The lifestyle design bandwagon that has grown so large over the past year is increasingly made up of people who want something for nothing and hucksters who are more than happy to sell it to them.
In my view, this is why weaving passion into what you do to make a living is so important. A 4-hour workweek might be possible (if that’s what you crave), but probably not without putting in the 10,000 hours you mention on average. Some lucky and skilled people might be able to achieve mastery in less time, but I wouldn’t count on it. That’s where passion comes in. You need enough passion for the process and journey, not just the results, to push you through the dip and on through mastery.
That’s why the term “lifestyle design” as it was coined by Ferriss does people a disservice. The lifestyle he describes is desirable to many, but the effort it takes to really get there is glossed over (not by accident either). I suppose this is why you’re using the term Agile Living instead, and I get that. There are multiple factions within the lifestyle design community, and those of us without “get rich quick” delusions may need some other banner under which to operate. Thanks for the post.
Corbett Barr´s last blog ..By: Lani
wow, love your perspective on this. This is my first time here, I’ll be sticking around.
Hi Cath - your post sat with me all day. I left it open in my web browser because I really wanted to come back and comment. This is so well written. You have touched on the core of the challenge most people have. To be very good at something without having put in the time. I am not particularly close to the Lifestyle Design movement but I appreciate those that want it. A big part of life is simply experiencing things over time as a way to self development.
Tomorrow I’ll be putting up a post on a similar topic I have worked all week (we are peas in a pod sort of) on ways to recognize how to master yourself so you can make progress towards anything. Hopefully you will stop by and have a read. I look forward to reading more of your work.//Marc.
Cath you are so right. You expressed so clearly what I have been thinking for some time. Mastery means depth and depth takes time and effort. Of course focus will help us to make sure that our time and effort is well directed, and we sometimes have resources we do not realise but if it is instant it probably is not worth much. I mean if anyone wants an instant degree there are plenty of places you can get one, or you could just print your own, or go on a proper degree couse and buy all your assignments on the internet. But that’s not really what it is about. Or at least that is not wht it should be or could be about. There is so much more to be gained from real learning, real knowledge, real thinking that any effort in this direction is likely to be rewarded hundreds of times over. I’m currently developing some new ideas to enable people to do coaching and personal development work over the internet, and so far I’ve been refining and testing this for over a year. The thinking and planning which has gone into this has been at least four years, and it’s informed by work I’ve been doing for over twenty years. I’m also doing some evaluation work on the outcomes of residential care where a part of the qualification for me to do this is some work I did 25 years ago! I’ve been involved in learning and changework for a long time, and using irritation as a way to drive creativity is a great idea, the mother of invention and all that….. Maybe there are differences or distinctions we need to recognise between a fantasy and a reality. Of course we can expand our map of ‘reality’ and develop new skills and knowledge and inpiration but there will probably be some time and effort involved somewhere along the way, and we may want to celebrate this fact.
andy sumpter´s last blog ..Using internet sources for academic writing
I can’t tell you how difficult it is to convey this idea to people sometimes…that success doesn’t just come overnight and that you have to put in hundreds and thousands of hours of repetitive, boring, menial labor before you can hope to be at the level where you can ‘lifestyle design’ your worklife.
I think you hit the reason right on the head, too: people like to hear about the sexy stuff and will completely ignore the buildup to that.
I get emails all the time asking me how I managed to start up a business and keep it profitable while moving to a new country every 4 months; the assumption being that there is some magic trick that will allow anyone doing anything to do the same.
Sure, there are little tricks that I’ve learned over time that can help anyone improve their business or lifestyle. But the big secret (that should be no secret at all after how frequently I talk about it on my blog and in the response emails to my readers) is that I’ve really just been working incredibly hard and putting in ridiculous hours for MANY years, starting way before I started up my business.
It is nice for people to have something to look forward to - an ideal to strive for and all that - but even better is to have that oasis in the distance and to be able to take a path that will actually result in their reaching it.
Colin Wright´s last blog ..The Insufferably Viral Arrogance of the Middle Class
Hi Walter, I think that self-mastery naturally brings a lot of success (often material success too), because mastery is about getting better and better at something, and so it naturally takes you to a place where you’re adding value and other people want to pay you for that value. But material things never bring you mastery. And that’s where a lot of people make the mistake - they assume that having material things will show other people that they’re competent and give them a sense of purpose.
Thanks for adding your thoughts, Corbett, and for raising a good discussion on your blog too. I think you’re spot-on about the importance of weaving your passion into your work, rather than looking for a quick source of passive income that has nothing to do with what you love. In many ways, his argument was “set up a passive income stream so you can have free time to do what you love,” and I have to ask the question, “What if I can just go straight to doing what I love and find a way to earn income from that?” What does it matter where your money is coming from if you’re doing what you love doing? Ferriss himself spends all his time doing what he loves most these days and I’d guess that most of his income comes from that - writing/ speaking/ doing business deals.
Thanks for pitching up, Dan. Hope to see you around here again soon, and to hear more from you.
Marc, drop me a tweet with the post and I’ll have a read. Sounds great!
Andy, it sounds like you’ve put in a lot of time into developing your mastery, and I’ll bet that you’ve felt/ are feeling that sense of fulfillment that comes from knowing that your work is deeply grounded in rich experience and knowing that you’re making a rich contribution. I like that you suggest that we celebrate the time and effort required to develop mastery!
Colin, thanks for adding your thoughts. I think you’re right that the “dream/ ideals” need to be kept alive while you’re doing the slog work to get there, so it’s great that there’s so much inspiration out there. I’m just thinking that there needs to be more celebration of the hard work and the mastery process (not just the mastery product), as Andy suggests. There are people out there, celebrating hard work, like Gary Vee but, as you’ve experienced, there’s a trend in the lifestyle design scene, particularly amongst the Gen Y folks, to think that hard work isn’t “sexy.” My sense is that people who see hard work as sexy are more likely to get the business and life results they want, especially when it comes to experiencing a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.
For the record, I do not believe Tim Ferriss etched Lifestyle Design as being cast in stone in any particular way. He targeted his book toward overworked employees and entrepreneurs who were stuck in their businesses (not those who are perfectly happy doing what they do). His key message is that we should all consider reclaiming our time and mobility (if we are dissatisfied with what we are doing). Hence the story about employees negotiating remote work agreements.
I don’t think this message is at odds with mastery. Sure some people associate the title and some of the ideas in the book with how to get rich quick, but I don’t think the majority are swayed by that. For me mastery describes the process of becoming intimately acquainted with some vocation or avocation. Of course this is compatible with LD. Ferriss became intimately familiar with his supplement business before he was able to automate it and reduce his direct involvement.
I’m so relieved to read this post. You’ve expressed (in a completely elegant fashion!) my frustrations with this attitude that I see popping up all over the place. I happen to find the phrase “lifestyle design” really ick, but that’s beside the point — there are ways to approach it as a means of consciously tapping into the Thing That Drives You, and there are ways to approach it as a way to live life like a rockstar-ninja-cowboy gallivanting around the world. Hrm… I choose the former. Unfortunately, the two tend to get shoved under the same umbrella, which seems to create a lot of confusion and muddle messaging. Thank goodness you’ve written such an eloquent post that has a clear message — this feels just right to me.
Zoe´s last blog ..On the Universe, and the Small Things
Darryl, Thanks for adding your thoughts. I agree with you that Tim Ferriss’ message isn’t at odds with mastery. Tim’s method of totally immersing himself in mastering a new skill - whether it’s swimming, languages or tango dancing, is an example of how he uses mastery. Also, I joined the Cape Town meetup and Tim spoke about how much he “hates” writing, yet its something he does a lot of these days. So Tim’s no stranger to hard work. And I think Tim really gets the whole link between purpose and mastery - he writes a whole chapter on the existential crisis that comes with greater autonomy over your time and tasks, and the questions of “how do I want to use my life” that come up as a result. I don’t think this rich understanding is carried through by everyone who reads his stuff though, and a lot of people just run with the idea that working four hours a week is where its at. And that’s fine, if you’re not expecting to experience mastery in your work (and the deep sense of fulfillment and purpose that comes with that). All too often though, I see young folks who are wanting to experience mastery and meaning in their work, but with only 4 hours a week devoted to it.
Zoe: thanks for the feedback. I’m thrilled to hear that this was a clear message and that it resonated for you. Welcome t the Agile Living tribe!
I forgot to add that what I liked most about this post was that it encouraged me to look at *why* those things bother me, as you did. I’d much rather turn annoyance into a constructive thing than just feel slimy.
Zoe´s last blog ..Madness, Genius, and the Things We Don’t See
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by cathduncan: In Defense of Mastery (or How to Mine the Inspiration in Your Irritation) http://bit.ly/aLtUhS #lifestyledesign #4hww…