Introducing the Life Blueprint System!

Do any of these feelings sound familiar?

• “My life is slipping by”: I feel like my life is passing me by – every day just ticks by, days turn into months which turn into years, and even if I’m getting promoted, I’m not sure if I’m accomplishing anything
• “I’m burned out”: I dedicated my life to work up to this point (for the promotion, salary, etc. ) and thought I could grind through the long hours, but three/four/five years later I’m now burned out and looking for a change
• “What’s new is the best…until it’s not”: I started out very driven and excited for my new role. It’s my first job out of school, and I can’t wait to earn a paycheck and get promoted. Three/four/five years later: I have more financial security, the role is more familiar, the realities of bureaucracy have hindered my best laid plans, hedonic adaptation sets in, and motivation, satisfaction and engagement steadily decreases
• “The Golden Apple”: I prioritized the dream job/company/high salary over other factors and now I regret it

And the common responses including:

• Acceptance: Assuming that this is how life must be especially when it comes to work, continuing with bare minimum engagement, and feeling perpetually tired and unmotivated
• “Screen time band-aid”: (Every day) Binge watch Netflix or doom scroll TikTok or Instagram to get that shot of dopamine to try and distract yourself from reality
• “When’s the next vacation?”: Living life counting down the days until the next vacation, where hopefully you’ll finally get a chance to decompress and “recharge” – but you never fully do. So you think you need to make a more drastic move like move to a different city or country.
• “Quiet Quitting”: I’m going to log off by 2pm today – I don’t get paid enough for this and no one will know

These likely sound familiar because although no one ever writes this in their application essays, a key driver for why students want to get an MBA are these very experiences and hoping the MBA will bring about change in their lives (e.g., more satisfaction). It’s not only MBAs who feel this way, every working professional often feels this way at least once in their careers.

Why do we face these types of situations all the time? Because we’re looking at the problem too narrowly. At the beginning of our life and career, we focus our energies towards a relatively narrow goal – getting our dream job, getting the promotion, or getting into a prestigious law school or MBA. That might be ok then, but what are we going to do for the next 30-40 years of our careers? It’s time to think about our lives more holistically.

How do we harness the knowledge we’ve learned from MBA and intentionally leverage it to take actions that bring about durable change, better life choices, and strive toward Your Best Life? How do we avoid having regrets at the end of our lives – which will be here before we know it? When we encounter these feelings, how can we deal with it? And how can those who are not MBAs also avoid these situations starting from the beginning of their careers?

What is Your Best Life?

First, what is Your Best Life? Ultimately, how you define it is up to you. Often, it’s about our ability to find purpose and meaning in life, the feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment, which results in higher engagement, wellness and overall happiness. The freedom to define success on our terms. And the resilience and groundedness to survive bumps and change along the journey. To do this, we need to know how to intentionally deploy your assets and activities in the optimal way, and eliminate all those that are not in service of your goal. You have one life to live – don’t settle and put in the work to make it Your Best Life!

That’s sounds tough! It is, so let’s also acknowledge this is not a change that will happen in a year. The good news is I’ve designed The Life Blueprint to provide all the right ingredients to craft Your Best Life, but it will take consistent, focused effort from you to realize these ideals.

Let’s get started by introducing the Life Blueprint System!

Introduction

The Life Blueprint System is designed to be a self-contained one-stop-shop that distills the essence of all the concepts written about in self-help and personal development books and focuses on how you can apply these concepts in your life. Concepts are often discussed in silos – for example, there are books on productivity, or cultivating a life with purpose, but not a resource that ties it all together into a system you can use each day. This system is also flexible to accommodate any goals or vision you have for your life, and you can tailor it to be as structured or unstructured as you prefer.

The Four Pillars

There are four pillars to the Life Blueprint System:

• North Star – This pillar contains your core identity including your vision, mission, purpose, values, definition of success, and leadership statement. These elements of the North Star are your life’s compass – it’s what you always come back to whenever you’re lost.
• Goals – To achieve your North Star, you first need to define the goals to get you there. We define goals in terms of the short term (e.g., next 3-6 months), medium term (6-12 months) and long term (1 year +).
• Activities – Here, we define what you need to do to achieve your goals. This includes creating and tracking habits.
• Capabilities – Based on these activities, you need capabilities (both soft and hard skills) to do these activities. Some capabilities you already have and some you will need to build net new or develop further.

Goals, activities, and capabilities can be split into work and personal:

• Work – Includes goals, activities, and capabilities specific to career related success
• Personal – Includes goals, activities, and capabilities outside of career (e.g., family, hobbies)

Other Tasks include any activities that are not in service of your North Star

The ideal future state is to increase overlap/congruency between your work and personal lives (so they are mutually reinforcing) and reduce the amount of items in Other Tasks.

The 3 Step Process

For each of these pillars, there are three steps to follow:

1. Inventory – We need to define each of these pillars. For example, what is our vision? What are our goals? And what capabilities and activities are needed to achieve these goals?
2. Reflect and Assess – Continuous improvement is how we achieve our goals in the fastest way possible. Nothing could be worse than heading in the wrong direction. Thus, we need to reflect and assess our direction and progress in each of these pillars regularly.
3. Act – Now that we’ve done the thinking and planning, now it’s time to put our plans into action.

We will repeat this process for each of the four pillars and revisit our inventory and reflect on our progress at defined intervals.

There’s obviously much more to unpack, so in future articles, we’re going to walk through each of the four pillars in more depth. Please follow and connect with me on LinkedIn for future content and let me know if you have any feedback including if you’ve found this helpful!