The homepage of Cyrus Kirkpatrick
Writing, photography, film and North Korea news
Pic courtesy creative commons.
Lifestyle design is both a philosophy and a business motto. Like many people, I heard about it the first time thanks to tech geek guru and business savant Timothy Ferris. I was a college sophomore in 2007 when he published “The Four Hour Work Week“. Although in 2014 I can look back at this book as being rather dated, with certain business principles that are no longer applicable, the big idea about “lifestyle design” remains the same.
EDIT: This book is currently an Amazon Best Seller in both the job hunting and adventure travel categories. It’s taken months of work but I’m finally a best selling author! — Hey everybody, I have a brand new book up this week. Below is my description from the Amazon.com page. Basically, I’m selling it dirt-cheap, and it’s about how to make money on the road and live to your full potential. Continue Reading
Do you buy into the vacation myth? Or do you know how to actually travel on a budget?
This is the myth that a vacation must involve some kind of 5-star resort, with masseuses, and various suburban luxuries. The worst I’ve seen: people in far-away, exotic places who spend the entire time in the safe confines of their hotel room ordering room-service and watching pay-per-view movies. Come on! You can do this from home. The real purpose of traveling should always be to immerse yourself in some new flavor of culture and lifestyle. If you’re not doing this, you’re not traveling right, and you’re probably wasting thousands of dollars on the vacation myth.
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Unrealistically beautiful people. A glamorous lifestyle you can never achieve. These are the images the media sends us all the time. It’s a carefully constructed hyper-reality which tugs at our desires of who we want to be. The people are usually airbrushed to perfection, and the lifestyles appear equal parts pretentious and exclusive, yet also fun and without the drama or problems we incur in real-life. How can that be?
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Smashing!
Excitement incarnate.
Nothing is as ominous as a scary CEO
How do you regulate and manage your life?
I’m asking because I consider myself the CEO of my life. I have different concepts and goals, which I delegate into different “departments” in my mind. On some days, I might be focusing on a particular department (ie: learn how to play some sport, develop a particular web-site, etc.). I’ll journal, and think about ways to enhance this area. If something just isn’t working out, I may be forced to terminate that department.
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“I just want somebody who’s interesting…”
Most girls want this in a guy. And, there’s a lot of guys who want this in girls.
“He / she is not very interesting…”
These are not words you want a potential employer to say after you leave the interview.
“What I do is not very interesting…”
This statement translates to “I’m not a very interesting person”.
Let’s face it, there’s a lot of interesting-anxiety out there. Am I interesting enough?
If you don’t feel like you’re very interesting, there are ways to treat this. Most likely, the culprit is a lack of inner-motivation, a lack of direction, and a tendency to withdraw during your spare time into media-centered anesthetization (video games, movies, web browsing, internet pornography, or whatever you fancy).
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Also see: How To Figure Out Your Major
These days many people are returning to school as they face the notion that their current skill-set isn’t marketable enough. This usually happens after getting laid-off, or after realizing that jobs are so hard to find that a competitive edge must be created.
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Many people go to college to achieve a degree in something which they believe is the “correct thing to do”. In other words, they have no desire to become a lawyer, but going pre-law and preparing for law school is the “responsible” thing to do, what friends and family want and expect, and therefore the only logical choice.
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In the previous article, I discussed the “why” of self conscious behavior, plus the characteristics of it. As previously mentioned, this is a very common problem among people of all ages. While this blog is not a substitute for professional help, the following pieces of advice are my personal methods and ideas for pushing the tide against your self conscious issues.
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(Note: an excessive amount of self conscious feelings could be symptoms of an anxiety disorder where you may need to seek professional help not found on this blog). There is no “cure all” to feeling self conscious, and most people experience it quite routinely. My definition is “feeling uneasy about yourself in relation to others, and the world around you,” and the terminology literally describes the phenomenon: you’re thinking excessively about yourself, versus living in the moment. Self consciousness seems to dissipate with age and experience, hence why teens have it the worst. Although, I believe it never goes away for some people, and it goes hand-in-hand with the insecure behavior that both adults and teens exhibit.
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Cyrus is an avid traveler, author and publisher. He enjoys going places other people don't. He works as an independent writer and marketer.