There is a quiet, creeping unease that comes from living a life by default. It’s the feeling of being a passenger in your own story, following a script that was handed to you years ago – by family, society, or even a younger version of yourself. This is the path of passive acceptance.
You do what you feel like you must do at all times, and even the pleasures you experience are within a solidified, limited spectrum of options. There is this thought in your mind that “someday” things will be different…
But are you better now than you were 5 years ago?
I’m not here to tell you there’s another way – you already know that, and it’s frustrating already.
I’m here to share a story with you.
And hopefully, you’ll find some ideas useful about how to reinvent yourself
You Can't See the Picture from Inside the Frame
The story starts not with a grand action, but with a quiet, internal realisation. For years, my life was a script I had received from my environment, a path that was glorified around me, but was not mine. Aga’s was the same, just on a different stage – a successful career in marketing that had become its own kind of golden cage.
We were both living inside a picture, and as long as you are inside the frame, you can never truly see it.
This is the first, and most crucial, lesson we learned about reinvention. The process to reinvent yourself doesn’t begin with changing your job or your location.
We had to accept that you cannot design a new life while looking through the lens of your old one.
You need contrast. You need an outside view.
For us, that meant leaving our home countries, our careers, and everything familiar behind, a journey we document in our work in Portugal.
Check our store with Portuguese Products
The Principles of a Life by Design
Stepping outside the frame is the first step, but what do you do once you’re out there? How do you start building?
We found that the process wasn’t a single, grand plan, but a commitment to a few core principles.
1. Whoever discovered water wasn’t a fish
You cannot see the picture when you are inside the frame. By the same token, you cannot truly understand your own life while you are completely immersed in it. The familiar becomes invisible. Your defaults, your routines, your ingrained beliefs – they operate on autopilot.
Reinvention requires contrast. It demands that you place yourself in a new context to see the old one. For us, leaving our home countries wasn’t just an escape; it was a deliberate strategy. By immersing ourselves in a new culture, a new language, and a new way of living, we were able to look back at the lives we’d left behind and see them with an almost startling clarity.
The contrast illuminated what we wanted to keep and, more importantly, what we needed to leave behind.
2. Anchor Your Life in Values, Not Goals
A life by default is often a life spent chasing external goals: the next promotion, the bigger house, the salary increase. These are finish lines set by others. A life by design, however, is guided by an internal compass: your values.
Instead of chasing goals, we decided to build a life around what truly mattered to us: freedom, sustainability, meaning, and connection.
Our blog became a manifestation of this – not a content farm chasing clicks, but a place to explore what it means to pay attention.
Our online shop, with its focus on cork and handmade goods, is our anchor to the tangible, a choice to celebrate story and sustainability over trends and disposability.
When your daily actions are aligned with your values, your life itself becomes the reward.
3.The Principles to Reinvent Yourself
The default path is comfortable precisely because you are an expert in it. You know the rules, the expectations, the language. To reinvent yourself, by its very nature, demands that you give up that expertise and embrace the profound discomfort of being a beginner again.
For us, this was the hardest and most rewarding principle. It meant being clumsy with a new language. It meant rebuilding our careers from scratch, leaving the security of “expert” and “marketing professional” for the uncertainty of “writer,” “filmmaker,” and “entrepreneur.”
That feeling of awkwardness and uncertainty is not a sign that you are failing. It is the price of admission for a new life. It is the undeniable proof that you are learning, growing, and designing something new.
4. The Conclusion - Your First Deliberate Choice
The journey to reinvent yourself is not a single, dramatic event that happens overnight. It is not a destination you arrive at. It is a quiet, continuous process of making deliberate choices – small and large – that align with the person you want to become. It is the practice of designing your life, day by day.
The story of our move to Portugal, our blog, and our shop is not meant to be a map for you to follow. It is simply our evidence that it is possible to step outside the frame. It is the proof that you can dismantle a life built by default and begin to design one that is authentically, intentionally yours.
The most powerful way to begin is not with a grand plan, but with a single question:
What is one “default” in your life that you can consciously examine this week?
What is one small, deliberate choice you can make – not because it’s expected, but because it aligns with the life you truly want to design?
That is where the journey begins.
