Life Is a Start Up

Have you ever considered applying startup principles to your personal life? The same strategies that entrepreneurs use to launch successful businesses can also be applied to your personal life to help you achieve your goals.

Why apply startup principles to your personal life?

There is no question that building a business from scratch can be a rewarding pursuit and a big challenge. That’s why people put their whole lives into doing it. But shouldn’t we be just as invested in building ourselves as we would be in any company?

According to Ryan Holiday, one of the world’s bestselling living philosophers and author of The Obstacle is the Way, “Like a start-up, we begin as just an idea: we’re incubated, put out into the world where we develop slowly, and then, over time, we accumulate partners, employees, investors and wealth. Is it really so strange to treat our own life as seriously as you might treat an idea for a business?“

One of the key benefits of applying startup principles to your personal life is that it forces you to think deeply about your goals and the steps required to achieve them. It also helps you think creatively and outside the box.

It involves understanding your target market, identifying their needs and pain points, and developing a solution that meets those needs. 

This means taking a deep dive into your own strengths, weaknesses, interests, and passions to better understand what makes you unique. By understanding your own “market,” you can identify opportunities for growth and development that align with your personal mission and values, skills you need to develop, areas where you need to improve, and opportunities to pursue that align with your interests and passions.

Living a startup life

Actually, there is no right or wrong way of living our lives, but it wouldn’t harm us to understand the prices of our choices and be fully committed to them. The idea here is to treat our lives like a startup, building a portfolio made of experiences. In the end, there is no winning formula for having a successful life but to love the journey, learn what to take from it and appreciate how you’re growing from it. 

Living your life like a startup, basically allows you to take back control and create happiness and fulfilment today — not someday. It’s about small, incremental goals and experiments. 

Living a startup life is about maximizing flexibility and measuring ongoing results, not avoiding failure or reaching one particular end goal. It’s about embracing defeat, analyzing it, and failing. 

“Personal fulfilment is created, not inherited or earned“, explains Anna Akbari, PhD, a sociologist and author of Startup Your Life: Hustle and Hack Your Way To Happiness. “Outside forces feel a lot less overwhelming when tacked systematically and iteratively — something startups understand, but that we don’t often apply to our personal lives. Living your life like a startup is about strategically taking control of the journey — while also making space for improvisation and a lot of unknowns. And most importantly: It’s never too early or too late to startup your life“.

Whether it’s a commitment to exercise, to grow your side hustle or a new productivity hack, you should try and upstart change in your life. Starting over it’s possible. It doesn’t mean you’ve lost everything you’ve learned, gained, and experienced. In fact, quite the opposite. Your experiences have gotten you to where you are today. And today, you’re lucky enough to be wiser than you were even just a few months ago. 

Use what you know best to build your start-up: yourself.

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