May 9, 2026 May 9, 2026 2026-05-09

In 2009 I wrote about lifestyle design — the idea that every life follows some blueprint, whether you drew it consciously or not. I identified three types: emotions-driven, social-rules-driven, and values-driven. Almost 20 years after, this is still a solid framework. When it was published I’ve spent maybe two years field-testing it. Now I’ve spent seventeen. And I have a much better picture of all three angles.

The Three Blueprints, From the Inside

The original post treated these as something you consciously choose. What I’ve found is that you mostly discover which one you’ve been running — usually a few years after you started running it. As in many areas of our lives, we can only see it clearly in hindsight.

Emotions-Driven

I know this one very well. Chasing what felt motivating, engaging, discarding what felt boring. The highs were real. So were the holes it left in anything requiring sustained effort. Most of the collapsed structures I wrote about on this blog, over the years, got built in this mode — they looked good until the feeling changed, and then there was nothing structural holding them up.

Social-Rules-Driven

I also know this one. It came in the years I was trying to build something that would look legitimate from the outside — a proper company, a proper address, a proper, validated, relationship. The original post called it a truck. That’s right. Safe, hard to put it outside down, and very difficult to turn it around, very inertial. I spent about nine years in it before I noticed the engine wasn’t actually mine, I was just a shallow skeleton.

Values-Driven

The original post called this one the answer. I still think it’s the most honest starting point. But it has a flaw I didn’t see in 2009: it assumes your values are stable. And, honestly, they’re more fluid than we’re prepared to admit. What I cared about at 35 — freedom, novelty, scale, independence — had shifted significantly by 55.

The blueprint I’d built around those values was excellent for the person I was. But it slowlybecame the blueprint for a person I was no longer.

The Fourth Blueprint: Design for Flexibility

What all three original modes share is the assumption that you’re designing toward something fixed. That’s the part that doesn’t hold up anymore.

The most liveable version of my life hasn’t been a building I designed and then maintained. It’s been more like staying oriented while the terrain kept moving around me, being stable in the midst of an uncontrollable flux of changes. Which is a different skill entirely.

I’d call this fourth mode flexible design. Not because you abandon structure — you still need structure — but because you build it to absorb change rather than resist it. I found three things that make it work in practice.

Accumulate experience, not just outcomes. I spent years collecting achievements. Milestones, launches, numbers, exists from companies, countries where I lived. What actually compounded over the years was the substrate underneath them — what I’d learned to do, what I’d survived, what I understood from having been inside it. Achievements have a shelf life, just like successful apps, they live just until the next trend hits. The experience that produced them is long lasting.

Follow your values, but revisit them on a schedule. Values-driven design is right. The missing piece is treating your values as something that can change rather than something you declared once and then petrified yourself into it. I do a version of this every year now — just asking whether the things I’m still optimizing for are actually the things I care about, or the things I cared about three years ago. If there’s a noticeable gap, then that’s where the friction is coming from.

Stay ready to change course, even when it’s uncomfortable. Changing course looks inconsistent from the outside. People who were counting on the previous version of your plan will be confused. You’ll have to explain yourself, sometimes to people who won’t understand. Flexible design means accepting that as part of the deal, not treating it as a failure. The most consistent-looking people I know are often the ones who stopped paying attention to what is actually happening, being locked in a mental prison of “I should do this no matter what”.

What the Blueprint Actually Looks Like Now

I split time between two countries, one in Asia, the other one in Europe, I build apps for real needs – having 8 so far in the AppStore and gently inching toward 10 – I keep coaching people I’ve known for years, and write a blog I’ve been running for twenty years. None of that was on the blueprint I sketched in 2009. Some of it I designed deliberately, like being an app builder. But most of it emerged from noticing what was working and stopping what wasn’t.

The most useful thing the original lifestyle design post gave me wasn’t the three categories. It was the habit of asking the question at all — treating my life as something I was responsible for shaping, not something that was being done to me. That question survived every mode change. It still works.

The blueprint that actually works these days looks nothing like what I sketched at 35. Which, at this point, I take as a good sign.