Design Your Future Book Summary - Design Your Future Book explained in key points

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Design Your Future summary

Name: Design Your Future
Rating: 4.3 (326 reviews)
Author: Dominick Quartuccio

Dominick Quartuccio

Three Simple Steps to Stop Drifting and Start Living

4.3 (326 ratings)

22 mins

Brief summary

Design Your Future by Dominick Quartuccio is a practical guide that helps individuals create a vision for their future and take steps towards achieving their goals. Through various exercises, it provides tools to overcome limiting beliefs and prioritize actions to live a fulfilling life.

Topics

Success

Table of Contents

Design Your Future
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Learn to live your life to the fullest.

Success doesn’t guarantee happiness. Even if you’ve got it all – a high income, the perfect house, a loving family and your dream car parked in the driveway – things can sometimes just feel off. Maybe the job you once adored has become dreary beyond description, or your old passions just don’t do it for you anymore.

If that sounds familiar, you’ve probably been drifting through life for a while now. That’s hardly surprising – between work and personal commitments, there just isn’t much time to really think about what it is you want to be doing. Then there are those niggling worries that hold you back. Sure, it’d be nice to ditch the old nine-to-five in favor of something more fulfilling, but that’s never going to pay the bills, right?

Well, according to life coach Dominick Quartuccio, it just might! The key is to develop a new can-do mindset, and start being proactive about getting the most out of your life – think of it as designing the future you’ve always wanted. Change can be painful, but it is possible. And, as you’ll learn in these blinks, there are a ton of tools out there to help you along the way.

Read on to find out:

how meditation can set you up for success;
why it’s better to focus on one goal at a time; and
how to break out of old habits and patterns.

Overcoming limiting ideas can help you avoid the trap of predictability.

Even the most successful people are often deeply unsatisfied. Although they can’t quite put their finger on why they feel that way, they’re frustrated and bored. Something just isn’t right. Why? Well, there’s a good chance that their lives have become overly predictable.

That’s an issue because predictability is a trap. Here’s how it works: you find yourself a well-paid job, get married, have kids and settle down. Soon enough, you realize your time is being swallowed whole by your career and family commitments. Every day has its set pattern and familiar chores – tasks you know so well that you’re basically cruising through them on autopilot.

If you’re a high achiever or have an ambitious personality, this can be a killer. After all, you’re at your best when you’re working on exciting new challenges or experimenting with novel ideas. But all your commitments have you on a treadmill – you’re always running but not getting anywhere. By the end of the day, you’re exhausted and ready to collapse on the sofa in front of yet another Netflix series. In the morning, you’ve recharged your batteries just enough to start all over again.

So why do so many people end up in this trap? Well, that’s where limiting beliefs come in. If you want to know what those are, just think of all the “should” sentences you’ve told yourself over the years: “I should get a reliable, safe job,” say, or “I should have another child” and “I should put other people’s needs above my own.” These aren’t necessarily bad ideas, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever be happy if you’re pursuing them because you think society expects you to!

Then there’s the notion that you can turn a bad situation around, that is, do more of the thing that’s making you miserable. It sounds crazy, but plenty of folks end up doubling down on a job they loathe, believing that the next pay rise or promotion will finally give them the life they’ve always dreamed of. But that rarely works out; if you’re not doing something you’re passionate about, chances are it’s never going to be fulfilling.

So how do you get yourself out of this trap? In a word, change. And that’s what we’ll be looking at in the next blink.

Fear keeps people stuck in the status quo, but you can move forward by taking three simple steps.

The worst thing about being stuck in a soul-crushing cycle of predictability is how hard it is to break out of it. In fact, people often only take decisive action when fate forces their hand, for example, when they’re laid off or get sick. So what stops us from making those all-important changes?

It’s usually fear that keeps us locked into the status quo. Nothing scares us more than the unknown – as the saying goes, “better the devil you know.” Sure, things might suck right now, but what if they got worse? Then there’s the fact that change can be difficult, even if it’s ultimately for the best. Just think of something as simple as changing your cable provider: even if the present one drives you up the wall, buying, installing and acclimatizing to a new setup is a pain.

Connecting with your future self can help move you to start making positive changes.

We’ve seen that fear often holds us back from making changes, but why? After all, we all know that getting fired or losing a partner are possibilities even if we stick with the status quo – some things just aren’t within our control. That suggests that the real obstacle isn’t a rational calculation of possible outcomes, but our inability to imagine and connect with our future selves.

Take the work of economist Hal Hershfield at the UCLA School of Management. His research uses MRI scans to look at people’s brain activity when they think about the future. When Hershfield asked subjects to picture themselves three to five years from now, their brains reacted as if they were thinking about a complete stranger. That goes a long way toward explaining why it can be hard getting out of a dead-end job you hate – it’s virtually impossible to picture what another half decade in your current position will do to you!

Meditation takes practice, but it can help you embrace your full potential.

Meditation might just be the most powerful tool there is for improving your life. Why? Well, it’s a key part of the awakening process we’ve already mentioned. In this blink, we’ll take a closer look at how it works.

One of the reasons we end up feeling stuck in the present status quo is habit: we’re basically running on autopilot when we going through our daily chores. That’s where meditation comes it. The practice is all about creating a gap between stimulus and response, and learning to observe thoughts dispassionately without immediately reacting to them.

Challenging habits and being picky about your social circle can help positively disrupt your life.

Sometimes all you want to do when you’ve had a long day at the office is relax on the sofa with a glass of wine and zone out in front of the TV. While that can be relaxing and fun, it’s often little more than a waste of time. So how do you position yourself to do something more rewarding with those precious after-work evenings and weekends?

Well, the key is to disrupt ingrained habits. It’s not about giving up everything you enjoy doing, but rather developing a healthier relationship with things like entertainment or alcohol. So why not challenge yourself to go a hundred days without drinking, or abstaining from TV and Netflix for the next three months? If you’re hopelessly addicted to your smartphone, you could try declaring your home a cell phone-free zone for two weeks.

Focusing on one goal at a time makes it much more likely that you’ll fulfill your ambitions.

High achievers have hundreds of goals, but very little time and extra energy to pursue them all. So what do you do if you want to learn Japanese, tone your abs and get that promotion you’ve been angling for? Well, you’re much more likely to succeed if you focus on one target at a time.

Sounds pretty commonsensical, right? But here’s the rub: it’s so obvious a notion that lots of strivers and go-getters end up overlooking it. That’s something the author has seen in his clients time and time again. Ambitious people often pursue multiple projects at the same time, spread themselves too thin and end up feeling frustrated by their lack of progress.

Scorecards and daily rituals are great tools to help you design your future.

The sense that you’re simply drifting through life without really accomplishing anything is a huge source of anxiety. That said, focusing your efforts and actually completing things that matter to you isn’t easy, especially if you’ve got a million other commitments. Luckily, there a couple of tools you can start using today to help you.

Let’s start with scorecards. A scorecard is essentially a list of things you want to achieve within a certain timeframe. Simply ticking them off as you work through your targets is a great visualization of your progress, which is bound to inspire you to keep going. Take it from the author. He set himself three targets for a 90-day period: avoid TV, skip dessert and get a full eight hours of sleep each night.

Achieving success is all about keeping your eyes on the prize and taking things one step at a time.

In 2010, Facebook employees spray-painted one of the company’s core beliefs on the walls of its headquarters: “Done is better than perfect.” That’s an idea all high achievers should take to heart – after all, the desire to do things perfectly all too often gets in the way of getting anything done at all!

That’s a bitter pill to swallow if you’re the go-getter type. Chances are, you’re all about 120 percent motivation, inspiration and success at all times. But here’s the thing: that’s just not realistic. There’ll be days when you’ll feel tired, overwhelmed or out of your depth, and simply incapable of knocking it out of the park. That shouldn’t distract you from an important truth, however – even if you’re “only” hitting 75, 50 or even 25 percent of your daily targets, you’re still that much closer to your goal.

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What is Design Your Future about?

Design Your Future (2017) is a roadmap intended to get you out of your comfort zone and onto the path toward a more fulfilling and happier future. Packed with actionable insights and an array of handy tools to start turning your life around today, these blinks provide the ultimate go-to guide to becoming your best self.

Design Your Future Review

Design Your Future (2020) is a book that guides readers towards creating a life they love by designing their future intentionally. Here's why this book is worth reading:

Packed with practical strategies and insightful exercises, it empowers readers to take control of their lives and shape their own destiny.
By combining personal experiences with expert advice, the book offers a relatable and authentic perspective on transforming one's future.
The book's unique approach challenges conventional thinking and encourages readers to think outside the box, making it a compelling and thought-provoking read.

Best quote from Design Your Future

Trapped is what you feel when you are living into a future of more of the same.

—Dominick Quartuccio

Who should read Design Your Future?

High achievers
Entrepreneurs and CEOs
Coaches and mentors

About the Author

Dominick Quartuccio is a motivational speaker and counselor who specializes in helping business leaders and entrepreneurs reach their full potential. By actively designing his own life, he aims to show others how they can improve their lives both today and in the future.

Categories with Design Your Future

Personal Development Career & Success

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