why lifeshifting?

Lifeshifting came out of an article I wrote for Esquire in 1996 when I interviewed 6 people who had made radical career shifts. I spoke to a lawyer who had become a worker on London Underground, a physiotherapist who became a dive instructor, a criminal who became a disc jockey, a footballer who became an artist and an IT specialist who became a hard access war cameraman. I realised that UPSHIFTING ie. the career, was dead, or at least dying. I knew from my own time living on peanuts that DOWNSHIFTING ie. dropping out was pretty miserable around Christmas, especially with kiddies. So that left this new kind of living where you found exactly what you wanted to do by LIFESHIFTING ie. changing your life so that it centres around what you want to do rather than around a way to make money. The idea is you do YOUR THING during your primetime and earn money at other times, or from your chosen interest. But what really appealed to me, and still does, is that multiple lifeshifting offers a practical application, or one of them, of POLYMATHY. Call it really practical polymathy.We are lead to believe that all 'top jobs' are occupied by smart people. But really smart people don't have jobs.I mean- why would they? Of course at times they (ah the mythical 'they') work very hard. But this work is like the work you do on a hobby that really absorbs you.

And those 'really smart' people don't often seem so very smart when you meet them, rather they appear enthusiastic.

I later found that many of the people I interviewed later went back to their old jobs- but only part time, the rest of the time they continued with their new interests and enthusiasms. I know from writing for a living that making money out of the thing you love can, if you aren't careful, turn into a treadmill which makes the thing you love(d) into the thing you'd really rather avoid...So lifeshifting isn't a panacea, rather its a way of energising yourself into making growth changes in your life.

I've also worked away at something I call TIMESHIFTING. This is very exciting as an idea but a little slippery to grasp but really it is changing your subjective perception of time passing by increasing the amount of learning in your life. It also includes making better use of that time by organising it around ways that suit your life pattern rather than a 'one size suits all' time of time management system.

There is a lot of material on LIFESHIFTING and TIMESHIFTING to be found in the archive or in the sidebar article listing ->