If you want to design your life, where you live also matters

On your life stage priorities, rejecting the algorithm, and embracing my multipassionate self

Aug 16, 2022

Hi new friends and subscribers,

I'm writing this while I'm on a train from Madrid to Barcelona, where my hubby and I will fly back home to Toronto.

I honestly can't even put into words how amazing the past three weeks were, exploring Spain and Portugal.

As I've said in my previous newsletter, living in Spain has been a dream of mine. But instead of packing up and leaving everything, my hubby and I decided to visit the two countries as a vacation.

In fact, I met up with a fellow creator, Daniel Canosa, and his girlfriend to ask about what it’s like to live in Madrid. And during our dinner, one of his questions struck me.

He asked, “after living in Canada for 11 years, you don’t feel like it’s your home?”

I hadn’t thought about why Canada doesn’t feel like home. So I started thinking,

"why does it matter so much where I live?"

After reflecting on it, here's the answer I came up with:

It matters when it affects the way you feel about yourself.

It matters when you have a different idea or view of what your life needs to feel like.

It matters when you crave for an experience that helps you express who you are.

I wrote about it in-depth in this article, but in a nutshell, your personality needs to match the place you're living in.

If you're an extroverted person and live in a tiny town, you'll always have this gnawing feeling of going to a place where you can fully express yourself—whether that's through art, technology, or business.

Similarly, if you're an introverted person, you're probably more likely to find contentment in low-key or quieter town.

For an inexplicable reason, I want to live in a country where there's a lot of rich history and culture.

I want to be surrounded by interesting architecture. I want to have easy access to good coffee shops. (Right now, it takes me 30 minutes to drive to a Starbucks, and their coffee isn't even that great.) I want to be inspired by my surroundings.

I have a specific vision of what I want my life to look like, and my current home close to Toronto doesn't provide that.

If you want to design your life, choosing where you live is a big part of it.

I even came up with a list that matters the most to me, right now:

The language I want my future kids to learn one day
Good healthcare system
Good education system
The culture and history of the place
Accessibility of activities
Affordability of the cost of living
The POV of the culture about work, life, etc.

I don't know when or how I’ll make this happen, but I now know it's one of my priorities in my current life stage.

What about you, have you ever moved away? How did you choose your current home?

If not, do you have similar experiences of wanting to leave home but can't?

Dinner with fellow creator in Madrid 🤯 (Isn’t the Internet crazy?!)

🧚 3 Fairy Tips for Multipassionate Creators

🎥 Your chosen “jobs” are just a vehicle for the skills and values that actually matter to you.

This insight was inspired by Elizabeth Filips in this video when it comes to motivating yourself doing things you like or don’t like. Sometimes, we have ZERO motivation to do things because we forget why we started.

So instead of forcing to motivate yourself, you can actually list the skills and values that matter to you.

For example, sometimes, I talk myself out of my YouTube tasks. I’d think, “who cares? I’m a very small YouTuber, no one will notice if I don’t upload.”

But creating YouTube videos isn’t just about publishing or learning how to speak in front of a camera or learning fancy edits. For me, it’s a vehicle to become a great visual storyteller, a better communicator, and it helps improve my self-awareness.

While the first reason can be a great reminder of why I started, the latter makes me take action today because of the skills I want to learn and care about.

📝 Reject the algorithm.

As a creator, our work depends a lot on algorithm.

And as a multipassionate who refuses to talk about one topic on social media, I always have this constant inner battle: make myself happy or make the algorithm happy.

It turns out, I’m not the only one. This piece by Nick Maggiulli summarized nicely how I feel about creators who only exist to feed the algorithm, and it costs us ourselves.

When we let algorithms online and offline rule our life, we ultimately let others shape our lives and our thoughts.

🎙 If your work had an amazing impact on the world, would you be happy?

But what if it cost you everything in life? Would you still be happy?

To be honest, I don’t know what the answer would be because I know that true happiness comes from within, and not from external accomplishments.

But this podcast conversation between Malcolm Gladwell (author of 5 best-selling New York Times) and Steve Bartlett really made me think what truly drives artists, and therefore creators. Is it out desire to contribute to the world, or is it our desire to self-actualize?

If my work cost me everything in life, I don’t think I’ll ever feel content. But Malcolm disagrees. He believes that people that made amazing contributions are happy in some form or another.