Design your life

I wrote my first ten year plan when I was 14.

At the time, it felt like the most serious thing I had ever done. I remember believing that if I could just think far enough ahead, and map it out clearly, then life would unfold with a kind of inevitable precision. I was convinced that I would hit the entire list.

The plan was a projection of who I thought I was supposed to become. A blueprint drawn from limited self-knowledge, but total conviction. If my life played out exactly on that path, I would be on my second kid by now, living on a completely different coast, moving through a different career, touching the world in a completely different way.

But that divergence is not a failure. It is an evolution.

It is the natural consequence of living long enough for your priorities to change, for your values to sharpen, for your understanding of what matters to you to deepen.

The plans we make when we are young are often less about predicting the future and more about declaring the kind of person we want to be. And then life does what life does, it introduces complexity. It expands you.

The second ten year plan was written in 2023, and it plots out a completely different set of objectives. Different goals, different principles, different measures of success. More intentional. More aligned. Less inherited, more chosen.

Somewhere along the way, I realized something. The plan is not the point. The point is alignment. If I say I care about something, does the way I live actually reflect it?

Because a great life does not happen by achievement alone. It happens by design.

I do not just write these plans in my Apple Notes app and forget about them for the better part of a decade. My entire life is designed around them.

My possessions, my schedule, my decisions, all of it orbits around those goals.

Not in an obsessive way, but in an orienting way. As a filter. As a compass. The question underneath everything becomes: is this moving me closer to what I say I care about? Do I still care about what I say I care about?

So I stopped treating intention as something abstract. I started treating it as something physical, something built.

I have three core pillars that dominate my life: excellence in work, testing the limits of my body athletically, and having a family. The only way those three things work in harmony is if all the noise and distractions are cut.

I wake up and my Eight Sleep is dialed into an exact temperature. Unless there is an incredibly early flight, I never wake up to an alarm. Over the last seven days, my body has woken up with an average of 7 hours and 58 minutes of sleep. That is not accidental. That is design.

My lights across the entire house turn on from my phone, set to a color temperature engineered to promote wakefulness in that room. The space is filled with natural materials, plants, and art that ties into core parts of my life. It is not decoration. It is grounding.

My phone is filtered only to show the notifications I actually want in the morning. No chaos. No noise. No hijacking of the first moments of my day.

From the minute I get up, it is about 27 minutes until I am out the door, and about 23 minutes walking to the office. The fact that I am walking is intentional. And I am taking a route that is three minutes longer than the shortest path because I find it more calming for my subconscious.

The commute is a cognitive threshold. I am focused on the optical flow, on the energy of the city, on framing my mind for the next 12+ hours.

These details might sound small, even excessive. But they are what alignment looks like in practice. How am I moving through the world to get me where I want to be? Not just literally, but figuratively.

The questions I ask myself throughout a day have long time horizons. When I’m making a hiring decision, the question is not, “Do I think this person will do their job well right now?” It is, “Do I want to spend the next decade with this person?”

The design of the product is not just about the utilitarian nature of the output, but the deeper question: how will this make me feel interacting with it every single day? Does this make me feel like I am contributing something positive to the world, or just existing inside it?

My life is entirely designed. Because whether people admit it or not, everyone is being shaped. The only question is whether it is by choice or by happenstance.

Most people do not drift on purpose. It just happens slowly.

This practice falls somewhere between manifestation, visualization, and intentional living. I have a core set of goals, values, and principles that guide my life, and I try to shape my environment, and my behavior, around moving directionally closer to those things.

Not perfectly. Not necessarily linearly. But deliberately.

Naval has a great quote: “The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. And there are two parts to that. One is getting what you want, and the second is wanting the right things.”

Not getting what you want in life is not always a lack of talent or effort. It’s a gap in criticality. A missing understanding of what you are building towards, and why.

People optimize for local comfort. They inherit ambitions ascribed to them by society. They pursue goals that were never interrogated.

And then, one day, they look up. Not trapped. Not broken. Just living inside a life they never deliberately designed.

Not necessarily wrong.

Just unchosen.