I'm Liam. I'm designing a life on purpose, and this is how.

The question I couldn't answer

For five years I had an answer to "So, Liam, what do you do?" that I never wanted to give.

I'd be at a dinner, meeting someone new, and I could feel my chest tighten before the question landed. Then I'd say it. "Marketing Director." It was true. It just didn't feel like me.

That should have been the first red flag. When the thing you do for a living makes you anxious to say out loud, something's off.

But things were fine. The money was good. Six figures. Flexible hours across time zones. Four months of the year living overseas. The title had a kind of social credibility from the outside, and I got to travel whenever I wanted.

Inside it was AI conversations, endless numbers in spreadsheets, and the pressure of more, more, more. Complete projects faster. Obsess over hooks and headlines and percentage improvements that felt, at the time, like a very big deal. I'd follow a project down to its bitter end and then things would change, or get cancelled. I felt swallowed. Like I had no control over the work I did and no way out.

And I kept planning to do my own thing. Next quarter. Maybe next year. Sometime when the time was right.

The time is never right.

The floor in Tirana

6th of July 2025. I landed in Tirana, Albania, a few months off my five-year anniversary with the companies I worked for. I was carrying a load of personal stress and work stress, months of anxiety, and it only needed a trigger.

That night, everything came to a head. Panic. I was on all fours, crying in a ball on the floor of an Airbnb in a country I had never been to.

If you haven't had a panic attack, it feels like you're dying. Having one alone in another country is worse.

Three rough days and one expensive flight later, I'd cut a three-month trip short and moved back in with my parents (at age 28).

Two weeks at home. Swimming every day. Walking. Reading. Writing in my journal. Games online with friends in the evenings. I still felt awful from the breakdown, but the two weeks without work were so needed.

Then the thought of going back, of putting on a brave face and doing something I didn't really want to just for the money, was too much.

I quit.

It was hard. I felt like I was letting a lot of people down, and myself a little. I didn't know why, not exactly. I didn't know what was next. But I did know that chapter was over.

How a good job gets you

Nobody warns you about a good job. It doesn't destroy you. It sedates you, over time.

You wake up. You go to work. You perform. You get praised. You get stressed. You go home, or in my case shut the laptop. You do it again tomorrow. And somewhere between the Monday stand-up and the Friday clock-off you stop asking the only question that matters.

Is this actually what I want?

You don't burn out in a blaze. You erode. In silence. Over years.

The movie Inception is about going into someone's dream and planting an idea there, so that when they wake up they think it's their own. That's roughly what had happened to me. Each day, when I wasn't paying attention, I was soaking in the world's ideas about money, love, happiness and success. I woke up in a life that looked right and didn't feel like mine.

Not all of it was someone else's. But enough of it was.

And there were signs. For three years the same three lines kept showing up in my journal. I wanted to learn every day. I wanted to create every day. I wanted to teach. Year after year. I planned it. I worked on it. There's stuff in my Google Drive from two, three years ago on exactly this.

But the paycheck was good and I was tired after work, so I told myself I'd get to it one day.

The gap between who I was and who I wanted to be kept growing until I broke.

A Tuesday morning and a 60-minute timer

After the dust settled, and so did my nervous system, I spent months trying to work out what went wrong. The answer was simple. I'd been building someone else's dream and didn't know it.

So I sat down on a Tuesday morning with a blank page and set a 60-minute timer. I wrote everything I wanted in life. No filter. No "is this realistic." Just the truth of it.

Then I walked around the block, came back, and set another 60 minutes. This time I wrote what I did not want. Where I'd never live. What I'd never do for work. What I didn't want my life to look like.

When I was done I asked two questions of every line. Is this my dream? Or is it someone else's expectation of me?

Some lines got crossed out. What was left was mine.

I put it in a document and started reading it a few times a week. Within a month my actions had started to shift, not because I forced them, but because I finally knew what I was moving towards and, just as importantly, what I was moving away from.

I call those two documents the Essential Scene and the Anti-Essential Scene. Over the following three weeks I spent about seven hours on them, writing and re-reading and editing, and I kept seeing the same things I'd been ignoring for years.

The cafe

After I wrapped up the job, and moved back to Melbourne I went back to working in a cafe.

Back to my roots, from years before marketing, before I'd started my own business, before the four years of sitting in on board meetings.

From the outside it looked like a nasty step backwards. Big-dog marketing director, flying around the world, now making coffee three or four days a week in the middle of an Australian summer with zero responsibilities.

It was the best thing I could have done. I made some of the best friends I've made in my adult life. I deepened the relationships I already had. I had time to play. I had time, full stop.

I'd expected life to work like an equation. Good job plus good money equals good life. A plus B equals C. It's a trick of the mind, simplifying something that isn't simple, and it's the biggest common downfall of being human. Progress isn't linear. There are going to be weeks where you feel like you're going backwards and hits to your ego you didn't see coming.

Making peace with that was what brought me peace. This had to happen. It was always going to.

Fuji to Hiroshima

In may the following year 8 months later I rode a bike from Fuji to Hiroshima. Nine days, about 750 kilometres.

When I got back to Tokyo I was in my Airbnb, pacing around, making a voice note on my phone and thinking out loud about what came next. And it hit me.

I already had all the pieces. I'd done the thinking, over two years ago. I'd done the planning. I knew how I wanted to teach and what I wanted to teach. The only thing left to do was start.

Then, a week after I got home to Melbourne, a friend messaged me. Could they take me up on that offer of my budgeting spreadsheet, the one for freelancers and business owners? I put it into a template and sent it over, and I felt something I'd been sitting on for years.

I've always wanted to help people like this. It sounds broad and a bit wanky, but it's a true feeling statement.

My old mentor used to say, "Better out the door than in the drawer." I'd left so much in the drawer. Two years earlier I'd started a YouTube channel, made five or six videos, got 200 subscribers off one of them, then stopped when the views did. I was chasing numbers, not building something I cared about.

This time I did it the scrappy way. I recorded the whole course in one week, seven modules, no editing, because I'd spent two years not making it. Then I put it in front of real people and asked what they thought.

What I actually learned

Three things. Not a framework. I still forget them some weeks.

Progress isn't linear. Drop the simple equations. The path will make sense in hindsight. For now, live with the peace of not knowing, because where's the fun otherwise?

Outflows equal inflows. My mentor said this about marketing: the more you put out, the more comes back. It turns out to be true of everything. Relationships, craft, the world. Never 1:1 and never in the form you expect. Talking to someone in their garden as you walk past. Being kind to the person you order a coffee from. Making something and sharing it before it's ready. Do that enough and things come back that you could never have planned. People call it luck. It's luck you made, action by action.

Be the pot of gold. I'd sanded down the weird parts of myself to fit the niche, the brand, whatever was working. I'd copied the voice and the hook style of whoever was blowing up and wondered why I never broke through. Two people can both show up every day. One becomes a commodity. One becomes a magnet. The difference is being so unmistakably yourself that the right people can find you.

Why "Essentivity"

Essential plus Activity.

Essential: the essence of a thing. Activity: the doing of it. Aristotle had a word, energeia, for the kind of action that contains its own point, like seeing or thinking, as opposed to building a house, which stops when the house is done.

Essentivity is the loop where who you actually are generates what you do, and what you do feeds back into who you are. Design the life from the essence out, then act on it. Not the other way round.

It's also why I don't set goals the SMART way anymore. I set them as who I want to be. "To be a polymath and a student of life, always learning, who reads and writes each day and creates to teach." Then I act like that person, and the goals follow.

What I'm building

I've spent seven years collecting tools. From mentors. From four years in boardrooms. From literally hundreds of non-fiction books. From building and marketing an education product inside someone else's company. I've run goal-setting and visioning sessions on myself every year for eight years. I've tried a lot of methods and kept the ones that are simple and actually change the week.

I've probably spent an unhealthy amount of time on this. So I'm putting all of it on the internet.

• A free 7-module course, Essentivity, on finishing your first project. The DART Method, the Essential Vision, the Anti-Essential Scene, the 4P Framework, Time Buckets and the DAD Method, the Calendar Method, and the Sunday Review. One a day, templates included.
• A weekly newsletter, where I write what I'm doing, what's working, and what I got wrong.
• A free community, Simple Systems for Progress, where the templates live and where you can tell me what you're working on.

Who this is for

Not hustle bros. Not people trying to build the next big thing (though you're welcome).

It's for someone with a project that has a name and isn't finished. Someone in a career who wants the next level with fewer contact hours. Someone in hospitality or retail who wants their first big job outside the industry. Someone who knows what they'd rather be doing and has built a week that won't let them.

Someone honest enough to admit that part of the life they're living was never theirs to begin with, and who wants to change that.

I noticed something about Australia. People feel ashamed for trying. Effort gets read as thinking you're better than everyone. I'd like to make trying normal again.

One honest thing

I'm never going to be the expert. I'm the person who learns, applies, reflects, then shares the results. Follow someone building it in real time, not teaching from hindsight.

Twelve months on from the floor in Tirana, I'm sitting at home in Melbourne, happier than I've been in years, building something that's mine. Learning every day. Creating every day. Teaching. All the things that kept showing up in my journals.

The panic attack wasn't the end of something. It was the beginning.

I'm more myself now than I was with the title, the travel and the trajectory.

That isn't nothing. That's everything.

Liam