Why lifestyle design?

Happy T.O. day!

Welcome to Travel Onist featuring travel stories, personal growth reflections, and inspiring content. Today is my 50th email to you all. Thanks for being a part of the ride. 🎉 🎊 

Greg’s Lifestyle Design

Travel is a big part of my life.

It’s a passion, a personal growth tool, and sometimes even an escape.

Hence why Travel Onist was born.

But it’s not all of me. And it can be hard to write about travel during periods when I’m not traveling.

However, one of the things I love most about travel is that it has opened my eyes to alternative ways of living.

Not only that, but travel has fostered a desire to incorporate some of those alternative ways of living into my own life.

This is where lifestyle design comes in.

My intention with this weekly email has always been to incentivize my personal growth while sharing something valuable (or at least interesting) with my audience.

This intention, paired with my learnings from this process, has led me to a conclusion:

I want to use this platform to study how others live authentic, intentional, and fulfilling lives to help inspire myself and my audience to do the same.

I’m not going to stop writing about travel. Travel was the impetus for this change after all.

I’ll still share travel stories when I have them. I’ll just be broadening the focus.

Weekly Write-up

I’ve noticed my new neighborhood offers more of a community feel.

Community is something I’ve always taken for granted.

The last few years, I have been so focused on myself and what I’m going to do with my life, that the importance of community became lost on me.

But community has begun to reappear in my life. Partly by chance, and partly because I’m more open to it.

When I first moved to New York, one of the things I loved about the city was that no one ever paid attention to me. I still love that.

Everyone minds their business. So I started to mind my business. That was freeing.

But after a while, I got the sense that I took it too far.

When I first started at my new jiu-jitsu academy, it was a bigger school and was easier to blend in. I liked that. I could show up, train, and go home without worrying about putting myself out there.

But after a while, it was strange going to the same place routinely without feeling like I belonged.

I opened up a bit at Jiu Jitsu and began to make some friends. I now have a core group of training partners, some of which I’ve spent time with outside the gym.

I’ve also begun to make connections in our new neighborhood. It’s a bit easier here, but still, being open is half the battle

It’s not healthy to self-isolate, and while it is sometimes the easiest option, I was robbing myself of fulfillment.

As I learned in The Courage to Be Disliked, a sense of belonging is something you create for yourself through your own efforts, it is not given at birth.

Content Recommendation

Solito

I’ve learned recently that I enjoy reading memoirs as my “fun reads.” This wonderful story is told from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy as he seeks to cross the border into the United States to reunite with his parents. Not only was it a gripping story, but the young boy’s perspective added an element of innocence and wonder that I appreciated.

AI Travel Art Piece of the Week

Cheers ‘til next week,

T.O.