Hello my loves, welcome back to Lavendaire.
Today I am excited to talk about
how to design your dream life.
So this is what Lavendaire is all about.
I'm all about encouraging you to discover,
become your true self,
and then create the dream life that you've always wanted.
And that process is a lifelong journey
and it happens in phases.
So, step-by-step.
So in today's video,
I'm going to help give you some questions,
a lot of questions, actually,
that will help you define what your dream life is
because the first step in getting what you want
is knowing exactly what you want.
And then I'll share some exercises
that will help you start planning
and executing your dream life.
And then later I'll share a little bit of my story of creating my dream life
and where I am now.
So here are the questions to ask yourself.
What are the characteristics of my dream life?
Where do I want to live?
It doesn't have to be an exact place,
but describe your ideal place, house, community,
as best as you can, like your environment,
whether you're in a bustling city like New York
or living on a farm in a remote area.
How am I spending my day to day?
So these are the daily habits that you want to do in your ideal life.
Another way to ask this is:
What does a typical day in my life look like?
What does a typical week in my life look like?
How does my year generally look?
So maybe you have plans for any yearly rituals,
like Christmas with the family, skiing in the Alps.
What are the things that you do throughout the year?
Who are the people around me?
And how often do we talk or see each other?
What type of food am I eating?
How am I dining?
So are you cooking healthy meals for yourself every day?
Are you eating a lot of Asian food?
Are you eating at Michelin restaurants?
Define that.
What am I doing for fun?
And how often am I doing it?
So think of weekend hobbies.
Whether you want to go fishing, things like that.
What material things do I have?
So think of your dream car, house, clothes, equipment,
just physical things that you want in your dream life.
What non-material things do I have?
So these are intangible things like peace, gratitude, a support system.
How am I vacationing?
Where do I travel to?
How much money am I making?
And how am I using my money?
How will I give back?
Whether it's with your money, your skills or your time?
How do I look?
Describe yourself physically, as specific as you can,
from how your hair is, how your skin is,
what clothes you're wearing.
And lastly, how do I feel?
So be as specific as possible about all the feelings that you are feeling,
living your dream life.
Do you feel peaceful?
Do you feel proud?
Do you feel fabulous?
Do you feel happy?
List everything that comes to mind.
I know that was a lot of questions.
So take some time to really reflect
and consider, what is it that I truly want?
I feel like most people get it wrong
because they don't even take the time to ask these questions of
what do I truly want out of my life.
Once you have the intention,
then you have the awareness of what you want.
And then you can start planning and building from there.
Aside from this reflective exercise,
you can also create a vision board for
the ideal life that you want to live.
A vision board is basically a mood board of images
that inspire you just depicting the life you want to live.
If you are a visual person,
it also helps to create a vision board
for what your dream life looks like.
Basically having the visuals collected in a place where you'll see it often
will help bring greater awareness to what you truly want.
And it will not only inspire you,
but it will attract that actual life to you.
So I've talked about vision boards a lot in my channel.
If you want videos there and down below,
they're super popular and they work
the first exercise you want to do
once you have this grand vision of all the details
of what you want to build with your dream life
is to start to prioritize.
I'm not saying you can't have everything,
but you got to decide,
okay, what are the most important?
Which ones are the foundational things that I need first
in order to build everything on top of
it might help you to create a flow chart
of everything that you want.
Basically, if I have this,
then it will lead to this, this, this, and this.
So for example, if I have a career that I love,
then maybe then I'll be able to build financial freedom.
Then I'll be able to help others.
Then I'll be able to blah blah blah.
So know which parts of your dream life are crucial to focus on building first
in order to allow the rest to flow.
So I would choose maybe one to three goals
based on what you've dreamed up in your vision.
Another exercise I want to share with you guys is called dreamlining.
I first read about this in The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.
Essentially, dreamlining is making a
spreadsheet calculating
how much everything in your dream life costs,
whether it's a one-time purchase or a monthly fee,
whether it's rent at a place or mortgage or payments on a car.
Just try to think of all the dream things you want in your life.
Do I want a lifetime subscription of this?
How much does that cost?
Like put it all in a spreadsheet and
calculate how much your dream life costs.
I try to average it by the month.
So on average,
my dream life costs this amount of money,
and that gives you a clue to how much money you ideally would need to make
in order to support your dream life.
This is a very practical exercise.
And I did this a few years ago because I was like, okay,
my dream car is a Tesla.
I want this, I want this. I want to be able to travel.
How much do I want to spend on travel on average per year?
And so it kind of forces you to think backwards,
calculate everything out so that you have a concrete number.
It doesn't have to be perfect, obviously,
but it is there to just give you some thing to work with.
And from there you get a lot of clarity
on how much money you need to be making or saving
in order to achieve these things that you want.
Most of the time, if you're not being too lavish,
this exercise helps you realize that your dream life is actually more attainable
and more affordable than you thought it would be.
Obviously everyone's different.
Everyone has different dreams,
but for the most part, putting it in concrete numbers helps you realize,
"Oh, okay. If all I need is this amount,
then I know what to do to work towards that".
The next exercise is to build a rough timeline for realizing your dream life.
So ask yourself, okay, what is possible in one year?
What can I do in one year?
What is possible in two years, in three years,
four years, five years.
And you can even go up to 10 years, okay.
This will help you break down what's possible.
And what's realistic for your timeline from now
to the next five years or so.
I find that it's pretty hard to plan beyond five years
because anything can happen.
Anything can change in that timeline.
Another thing that I find is true, at least for me,
is that things generally take a lot longer than you think it will take.
There's this quote that this reminds me of
people generally overestimate what they can do in one year
and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.
So you might think that you can achieve
all of these things within one to three years,
but in reality,
it might take longer than that,
but you also might be underestimating what you can do in 10 years,
because a decade is a long time.
There's actually a lot that can happen a lot that can change.
So I would say don't limit yourself for the long-term,
but for the short term, between one to five years,
try to be realistic so that you don't feel bad for not hitting your yearly goals
after you've planned out a rough timeline for yourself.
Now it's all about just breaking it down
and planning how to execute that.
So if you watch my productivity videos, you know,
I'm all about just breaking it down into simpler and simpler pieces.
So from your yearly timeline, it just break it down.
What's possible in the next six months,
what's possible in the next three months,
what's possible the next month.
And then break it down in the next week.
What can I do this week?
That will be one baby step closer to this yearly goal.
My best advice for executing your plans is to prioritize,
focus down and break it down.
Alright, so now I'm going to share my journey to creating my dream life.
I'll not go into too much detail because that would take forever.
If you watched my previous video on the story of my twenties,
that basically tells the how,
but today I want to illustrate the thinking that went behind it,
as well as like illustrating how you build your dream life in phases.
It's not like something you achieve immediately.
So my journey started about 10 years ago
when I was in college about to graduate.
And started thinking for myself,
Oh, I don't want to follow this path that everyone told me to follow
this path that I thought that I was gonna follow, my whole life.
And I started to really question, what do I want out of my life?
How do I create it?
And I spent a good three-ish years exploring what I even wanted
because I had no idea what path I wanted to take.
I knew I wanted to be creative.
I knew I wanted to be my own boss in some sort of way.
I knew I wanted a lot of flexibility and freedom in my life,
but I didn't know what it looked like.
So I spent a few years exploring and figuring that part out.
So even the first step of defining what you want,
that took me a few years, but to reiterate,
I did know the parameters of the dream lifestyle that I wanted.
I didn't know how I was going to get there,
but I knew what the parameters were.
And that helped guide me to where I could create a life that fit those guidelines.
So my guidelines where
I wanted to be creative,
I wanted to be my own boss.
I wanted time freedom,
the freedom to work, wake up, sleep whenever I want.
Location freedom,
the ability to not have to go to the same office every day
and work from wherever I want
and ultimately financial freedom to not have to
worry about money.
I obviously wanted to do something.
I love something that feels meaningful.
Like I'm making some positive impact on the world.
I knew that in the beginning,
because I had all these internships where
I felt like a little tiny ant in this big corporation
and it just didn't feel meaningful and fulfilling.
So I knew I wanted to pursue a life that would give me that.
So those were my main guideposts for my dream life.
Obviously I had a lot of flowery details and extras that I put in my vision,
but I felt like I couldn't really have those extra things like,
where I wanted to live,
the community around me and the clothes I wore.
Like I wasn't able to get that until I figured out the foundation first.
So like I said,
I spent about two to three years figuring out
what path would fit all my criteria
that I could build a dream life on top of.
And that journey of exploration led me to start Lavendaire.
But even once I started Lavendaire I wasn't sure that
it was going to be a success or lead anywhere.
So I want to say it took me about two years doing Lavendaire
until any money started trickling in.
So like let's say two to three years to finally realize, okay,
this is a solid path.
And I do want to say that in the meantime,
even though my career was not making money at that point,
it felt super aligned to my dream life
because I could see that through this career,
I was doing something I loved.
I was creative.
I was my own boss.
I had all these freedoms.
Plus I was making a positive impact in people's lives.
I felt like what I was doing was meaningful based the comments
or the emails that I would get from you guys.
So that was really encouraging even though the money wasn't coming yet.
And from the point that money started trickling in,
I want to say it took another two years after that point where I felt
my income was pretty stable and that was probably 2018,
was like the year that I'm like,
oh my god, this is a career.
I can count on this as my income.
I see it's going somewhere.
And so 2018, 2019, 2020, it was like solidly growing.
And then the second part is learning to build financial freedom.
So building financial freedom means building a lifestyle where
money flows to you without you even working that hard for it.
Meaning passive income streams, investments.
Basically I'm at a point where I'm starting to learn how to invest my money wisely,
how to build passive income streams,
meaning not tying my time with the money that I get,
because when your time is forever tied with money,
it's not scalable
and you're always going to have to be working for it.
So I want to find ways where I can maybe do all the work at once
and then it'll be a passive income stream,
which I think everyone should learn how to build.
But like I said, this phase comes after
you've figured out
your first phase of where your main income is going to come from.
I'm also in the process of exploring where I want to live.
And I know that seems silly because I've always lived in California,
but I still live at my mom's house.
I live at home and I live in the suburbs.
I don't have friends that live in the city with me,
my friends, I guess I do have friends, but I have to drive a little bit to see them.
Whether it's like thirty minutes an hour,
like it takes me an hour to get to my friend's house in LA.
That's not ideal.
Like my ideal community is having a close knit community closer to me.
Whether I can see people every day.
Obviously you can tell I work from home by myself and I can't do that.
I need some social time.
So I would like to be able to see people more often.
The people I want to surround myself with are creative, entrepreneurial, spiritual,
who care about the environment.
And althought I do feel
I have that community online,
physically, I don't feel like I have that here.
And I'm not sure if I'll be able to find a place that fits that.
But yeah, I'm still exploring that part of my dream life.
And that's the reason why I feel like I want to explore the world a little more.
I want to explore different cities, different ways to live.
And so the journey continues.
So I am still on this journey of creating my dream life.
It happens in phases and it takes exploration along the way.
What I know is important though, is intention.
And just making time to define what you want and also being open
to change,
because what you want now might be different from what
you want in three years.
So it's an ongoing process.
I wish you all the best.
If you'd like to share what you've discovered
or what you've clarified in your dream life,
please comment down below.
Sending you guys so much love,
and I will see you in the next one.
Bye.