Lifestyle Design - An Example

I am Dustin Whitson, creator of Rooftop Ventures.

I am the night manager of a motel in Ouray, Colorado. I live rent free, have no utilities bills, and commute eleven stairs to work.

I live at 7,800 ft elevation and can hop in my Jeep and after 45 minutes of off-roading up Camp Bird Road to Yankee Boy Basin arrive at 12,000 feet (there are over 100 miles of jeeping trails in Ouray County, it's been dubbed the Jeeping Capital of America http://ouraycolorado.com/ouray-activities/Jeeping.php).

I am a photographer, and Ouray is in the middle of the Uncompahgre National Forest where there is no shortage of wildlife, landscape, and stars to photograph.

I can walk seven minutes to the gym, or jump on either my mountain bike or road bike and ride from my door step.

There are over 80 hiking trails, most of which I can walk to the trail heads from home (http://ouraycolorado.com/ouray-activities/Hiking.php).

I can go bouldering by myself or grab a buddy and climb any of over 200+ bolted routes in the area (mountainproject.com).

I can not tell anyone where I'm going and explore abandoned mine shafts.

I can cruise on my motorcycle one of the top ten highways to ride in America (The Million Dollar Highway).

The official population of Ouray is around 1,000.

While I did not know that Ouray had all of these things to offer (and more) before accepting a job here, my arrival was the accumulation of years of a principal called lifestyle design, which lead me to intentionally seek to incorporate all of the above into my life. In later posts I'll describe the evolution of my lifestyle design process.

Lifestyle design is first and foremost about you designing your life. Therefore you need to know, not only what you want, but who you are. I spent years in San Diego trying to fit into the mold of fast-paced, big city life, but that's not me. Five years ago, if you told me that I would live any more than ten miles from the beach I would have told you that you were crazy, but I discovered who I was and watched what I wanted change.

Consider what is important to you and ways to do it more efficiently. How do you spend your time? How do you want to spend your time? Who do you want to surround yourself with? What are your biggest expenses? What are you biggest frustrations? I'll make you a promise. Ask yourself these questions and I guarantee . . . it will be depressing. Primarily because you'll be faced with a multitude of changes you want to make but don't know where to start. It is a lot easier to just accept the hand you've been dealt. However, life is too short to not live how you want to and it's a lot more possible than you think for you to live your dream life. If you take a couple of months to work on specific areas of your life, in a few years time you will have made incredible progress.