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There’s a good chance that you don’t give a damn about driving an Aston Martin or living in a mansion or earning $40,000 per month. Sure, you’d happily accept them, but you would be just as happy with far less. You’d settle for “enough” — enough to live comfortably (or intentionally uncomfortably), enough to not have to obey inane orders barked at you by an unworthy superior, enough to have every need reliably met each month, maybe even enough to travel a couple times per year.

From my experience, this is the case with most people. As it’s been said, people don’t want to be millionaires, they just want the lifestyle they think millionaires have. The reality is that a lot of millionaires don’t have their ideal lifestyles and, in fact, ideal lifestyles come quite a bit cheaper than a million bucks.

Normal people are just as capable (if not more so) of designing adventurous, passionate, compelling lifestyles for themselves, but it takes thought, effort and smart (not necessarily hard) work. Here are four ways you can start easing yourself into absolute freedom.

1. Find Your Passion

Institutionalized education (K-12, University) mostly sucks, but if I had to pick the single most troublesome shortcoming it would be that they tend to teach the how but not the why. We’re never taught to really explore what it is we want from life. The average college student in the United States is typically studying whatever it is they are studying for at least one of two reasons. Either they are studying because they were expected to or because whatever they are studying provides a high salary. Very few people are learning for the sake of learning. Even fewer have any idea what it is they’d even want to learn.

If you want to start your lifestyle design journey today, start cultivating an attitude that stays aware of passion-filled activities. Keep an eye out for the things you do that give you great joy because one of those (or maybe more) is the thing that will give you the life you want. Keep in mind that finding your passion isn’t usually something that can be done in a couple hours after a quick brainstorming session. Believe me, I tried. In my experience, what you think you like to do isn’t necessarily what you really like to do. I was knee deep in the lifestyle design process before I figured out I got the most satisfaction from WordPress design. Before that I was a miserable generalist doing things I thought were great before I actually started doing them — copywriting, product reviews, audio editing.

Don’t be afraid to do things that suck and don’t be afraid to fuck up. Even after you find the thing that works best you’re not guaranteed to do it forever. Chances are you won’t. People grow, interests change. That’s okay. I once read somewhere that Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) looks in the mirror every night and asks himself, “Am I happy with everything I did today?” If the answer is “no” for more than a few consecutive days he steps back and examines his life to try and pinpoint what’s wrong and correct it. Finding your passion is a lot like this. Keep assessing and reassessing what you’re passionate about to ensure that you’re always doing something you love. Don’t go overboard, though, and don’t pretend that you’re less passionate about something just because the going gets tough.

2. Quit Your Job (or Redefine It)

Once you know what it is you most enjoy doing, use that as standard of comparison for your current job.

Are you just working for the paycheck? Quit. Tim Ferriss once said, “Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.” Don’t be one of those people. I can assure you from personal experience that going unemployed and broke isn’t nearly as rough or scary as you’ll make it out to be. I won’t pretend like quitting is an easy thing to do. You get an imprisoned sort of mindset when your stuck in a job for an extended period of time. But if the security offered by a paycheck is all the value you get from your work, quitting is non-negotiable.

I never took any precautions when I quit. I became depressed, pissed off and unemployed in the span of two weeks. I was carried by a sea of negative emotions straight through the exit and I never looked back. That’s probably not the best way to go. For a major decision like this you should do a little planning. Decide when you’ll bail (within six months is a good goal) and start saving as much money as you can each month. You should also start looking into some possible professional options (See #3 below).

Now, if you find that there are some perks to your job and you’re fairly happy (not completely, but happy enough) with it, then you should try to change the things you’re least happy with. I can’t tell you what these things are, you’ll have to figure that out on your own. But I will say that if you can remove yourself from the office somehow it will probably be a good start. In my former workplace, things that could be completely finished in two hours of near total productivity were stretched into eight hours of near total fucking around. Why? So we could look like we were hard at work. Ridiculous, right? Find some way to escape monotonous workspace culture and to take control of your work and plenty of free time will start opening up.

3. Turn Your Passion Into A Product or Service

There’s always someone willing to pay for some aspect of your passion, whatever that passion is, and I’m sure you could always use a little extra money in your pockets. If you collect lawn gnomes and lawn gnomes are (for some reason) your life, you could easily sell, create, paint, repair, appraise or write about them for money. It might not be easy (nothing worthwhile ever is), but it’s definitely possible. You might think the market for lawn gnomes is pretty weak, but the more targeted your products or services are, the better. Think about this… who earns more money — a specialist or a generalist? If you become the go-to-guy for lawn gnomes (which I don’t imagine would be very hard to do if you really wanted to) then any time someone wants to buy a lawn gnome they’d know whose store to visit.

When I was starting out my portfolio was a mess. I was an audio engineer, a copywriter, a graphic designer, a web designer, a ghostwriter and on and on. I thought I was doing myself a favor by opening up to different markets. Man, was I wrong. I never got a single job through my first site. Not one. Not even spam comments in my inbox. Tumbleweeds.

Then as I started growing as a freelancer I realized that what I liked most was the actual designing. My hours were best spent in Photoshop and not coding. This is when I first started using WordPress. WordPress enabled me to make bad ass websites without doing all the boring coding I disliked. In the second version of my website (and to this day) I describe myself as a WordPress specialist. I get at least one contact about a job per week because skill set is no longer wishy-washy. I’m a WordPress man.

The hardest part of creating a service or product around your passion is finding out exactly what it is that people want. Welcome to the world of marketing. A simple way to test an idea is to go to the Google Adwords keyword research tool and check for phrases that would lead to the purchase of your product or service. For example, say you were selling lawn gnomes. Do a keyword search for “custom garden gnomes.” You choose a phrase like “custom garden gnomes” because it’s likely that anyone searching for that will be close to purchasing. They clearly have an interest in it.

The results for “custom garden gnomes” come back pretty weak, but if you go down the list of additional keywords, you’ll notice “garden gnomes for sale” gets about 1300 searches per month. Kind of low, but probably worth exploring. At the least, it’s evidence of a possible market.

4. Start a Blog, Follow Others

Even if you don’t feel like a writer, you might secretly be a blogger. Blogging isn’t about rules and perfect technique. It’s about teaching, inspiring and engaging your audience. I would consider having a blog to be essential to your success because it can be used to establish your reputation as an expert in your passion, to build your credibility and to connect you with like-minded people who can help you along the way. Take a look at my series on getting started. You’ll have a blog up and running in no time.

You should also start following and participating in the conversations happening at other blogs, especially those related to your blog’s topic. It’s important to comment on other blogs not just because it will help your blog get more traffic, but also because it will get you involved with some pretty cool people. Many of my current friends were met simply because we commented after one another on a blog we both liked. From there, my network of people branched out and diversified. Now, whatever it is you might need done (web design, writing, film making, audio recording, etc.) I likely personally know someone who does it and can recommend them whenever I find an opportunity. They can also do the same for me. It works out quite well.

This list could easily be expanded on. What would you suggest the average lifestyle designer do? If you are the average lifestyle designer, what things confuse you? What do you wish you knew more about?

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2. The Beginner’s Guide to Lifestyle Design
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4. Want to Start a Blog, Gain a Following, Help People and Make Some Money Doing It?
5. Challenging What You Consider Normal