Day 1 — How to design your dream life
They say a single idea has the power to drastically change your life.
By the end of this post, you will be kicking yourself.
You will ask: Was getting rich really this frickin’ simple all along?
When I saw the truth below…
I was FLOORED.
Before I start, I want you to internalize this single idea that will be a GAMECHANGER…
“It takes the same effort to think big as it does to think small”
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Leaving Corporate America behind
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Friday was my last day in Corporate America.
At last.
Freedom…
I was hit with a realization.
Now was my moment.
Make it or break it.
I had to told everyone at work to follow my journey.
Now I actually had to deliver.
GAME ON.
Time to put all the knowledge I had acquired into active practise.
Tony Robbins taught me, “If you want to take the island, burn the boats.” (referencing the story of the explorer Fernando Cortez and how he conquered the Aztec empire):
Well my boats were in ashes.
The job was gone.
Nowhere to go except forward…Take the island… or starve.
Over what has been a short weekend of extensive meditation (drinking) and deep self- reflection (going out), I have consolidated what I believe is the knowledge that will give you the power to obtain your dream lifestyle that society has promised, but never delivered on…..until NOW.
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The Secret to DESIGNING your DREAM LIFE
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The term ‘lifestyle design’ was most likely invented by teenage Youtube influencers wanting to make a quick buck.
To me, they all looked 15, didn’t have any facial hair, had corny videos and sat in cars which probably belonged to their parents. That said, ‘lifestyle design’ does actually exists!
(Trust me, I was as surprised as you are)
The great Napoleon Hill’s take on ‘lifestyle design’ was; before we can become rich, we have to first decide exactly how much money we want to make.
I always thought that idea was a ridiculous…
If success was that simple, we would all be driving Lamborghinis, parking our yachts down in Monaco. Surely it couldn’t be that straight forward?
I was completely WRONG.
You can actually decide exactly how much you want to make a month and get it! Here is the step by step template to designing your dream life…
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Step 1: DECIDE how much money you need monthly to live your dream lifestyle.
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1A) Define your dream lifestyle in per month cost
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Break your expenses down into costs per month. Here is an example..
Dream House…...$5M dollar house. You realize this will cost you $10K to rent a month/or in mortgage payments.
Ferrari…..Lease with insurance would set you back $3K per month.
Weekend Getaways: $15K per month.
Food and Shopping: $22K per month.
Total Monthly Dream Lifestyle Cost = $50K per month
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1B) Break your Total Monthly Dream Lifestyle Cost into DAILY COST.
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Now, you have the monthly cost of your lifestyle, you can workout your Daily Cost.
Daily Cost of New Lifestyle= Yearly Cost/Working Days in a year
= ($50K x 12 months)/(52 weeks in a year x 5 days a week)
= $2,300 per day
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Step 2: Brainstorm Business Ideas that get you to your DAILY COST
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Assess quantity sold vs price
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Let’s keep things simple, assume average margins and say that to live your dream life and make $2,300 dollars a day pure profit, you have to sell $5,000 worth of product a day in revenue:
So if you have to sell $5,000 a day in product you have a few options…
You could sell a $500 product a day to 10 people.
You could sell a $250 product a day to 20 people.
You could sell a $100 product a day to 50 people.
You could sell a $50 product a day to 100 people.
You could sell a $25 product a day to 200 people.
Your next step is to think, what products do people buy right now for $500? What about $250? What about $100? What about $50?
Start your ideas with things where you spend the most money every month. Ask what do I spend most of my money on at this price point?
Now brainstorm 2–3 product ideas for each price/quantity combination.
A simple example that I will use to illustrate throughout is…
You might spend $50 a month on dead sea hand lotion. To make your $5K a day revenue goal, you would have to sell 100 units a day (as per above). That said, at this point — don’t worry about how you will sell the product or what distribution channels you will use. Ignore that for now. Focus on just brainstorming ideas of what you could sell at each price/quantity combination…
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Step 3: Brainstorm UVPs (Unique value propositions)
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Screen each idea you brainstormed in step 2, with the following questions to get your UVP (Unique Value Proposition):
1. What annoys you about the current product you buy, which you feel you could improve on?
(For the dead sea hand lotion example, this could be as a simple as the smell…what if you could scent the lotion so it didn’t smell like salt?)
2. What would be a different functionality you could replace/add?
(For the dead sea hand lotion example, what if instead of for your hands, the lotion could be for feet instead?)
3. What about the design would be cool to change?
(For the dead sea lotion example, what if the container was in the shape of a pearl instead of the standard shape?)
4. What could you change about the pricing?
(For the dead sea lotion example, what if you increased the price to $75 and added pearls to ingredients for skin smoothness?)
5. What other ways could you differentiate your product?
(You could only sell subscriptions, instead of having a buy-on-demand product. You could only allow purchase within a specific time window to create artificial scarcity)
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Step 4: Talk to potential customers and build customer personas
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Go and observe customers that are buying the existing product (you decided on improving/altering) in the mall and ask them questions…
Observe how the customer buys, ask them what brought them in, why they made a buying choice and how they came to a buying decision?
What do the like/dislike about existing products?
What criteria made them choose one product over another?
What is the most they have paid for this kind of product and why?
What triggered them to look at products? What is the desired outcome they want from the product?
Do they care about any of the differentiators you came up with above?
Also look at how they buy and found the product, did you see them looking at their phone when you were observing them making buying decisions?
You also want to ascertain who your customers are so you can define them with demographics and psychographics.
I would google “Customer Personas” here and use the questions above as a tool to help you put good customer personas together…
(Personas are basically a super clear idea of who your customer group is that buy, what problems, pains, concerns & motivations, triggers and goals they have. Their purpose is to make sure you product messaging is super clear, so you can more easily sell to them based on their pains and expected gains. Also the clearer you are on ‘who’ your customer is, the easier it will be for you to know which sales channels you should target, as you will have a good idea of where they ‘hang out’)
Once you have validated your ideas and validated your unique take on the product solves a clear problem for a clear customer, you can move on to the next step. A really good book that will teach you what you the basic of what you need to know for customer interviews is “Talking to Humans” by Giff Constable which is FREE.
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Step 5: Evaluate Sales Channel Options to achieve Lifestyle Goals
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Now you have decided on a product and a price…
Lets say in our dead seas cream example we decided to sell it for $50, we now need to calculate how many units we need to sell per day to make our lifestyle DAY REVENUE GOAL from before of $5K. If our revenue goal was $5K and our product price is $50, that means we need to sell 1000 units everyday.
We then want to find potential channels of people to partner with to get us to our goal. We would now map out a list of channels we could use to get us to our daily unit goal..
That is why there was no point being ‘realistic’ with your initial income goal earlier. Because it often can take the same effort to set up a sales channel that sells 100 units for you, as one that sells a 1000!
Set big goals. Big partner channels are often easier to set up than setting up small ones and MAKE YOU MORE MONEY! This is why you actually can set your own income, as ridiculous as it sounds!
A really good book to keep by your side as you do this exercise is Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. It pays for itself many times over and gives some really good examples of many different channel partners you can use here…
You should also use the business model canvas to map our your full business model in addition to completing this. You can do to online at Stategyzer.com by signing up for a free account.
These are the first steps towards REAL lifestyle design…
See you at the races…
