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Mood boards. What are mood boards? Basically, it's just a visual representation of something either digitally or in real life. For us, we're going to be doing a visual representation of our dream life. The types of things that we want to include in this mood board are things like living locations, hobbies, work, quotes, books, popular figures we like, and anything else that we want to put in there. This marks the first time in the course where we're actually going to pull things out of our heads and into reality.
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We're inching closer and closer to the planning stage more and more. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to create three different mood boards. One, for hobbies and work. Two, for living spaces/location. And three, one for just straight-up inspiration. So one mood board for all the things you'll do, one mood board for all the places that you'll live, and then one mood board just for inspiration.
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This is important because mood boards bring an idea to life visually. It's actually probably the most important lesson of this course so far. Sure, like, we've read some books, we've taken some personality tests and we've done some great soul searching already, but we have yet to make our ideas real and tangible. The good news is we can take all the stuff we've already done so far in this course and use that to inform our mood boards. I'm gonna show you how. First, though, we need to think about where we want to live. Is it somewhere exotic?
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这是海滩吗?是在山上吗?它是在e city? You need to figure that out for yourself and think about that right now. I want you to write down five places that you would love to live in. And if you're having a hard time coming up with that, just research some of the places that your favorite influencers and authors live right now or have lived in the past. Tim Ferriss, one of my favorite authors of all time said that he used to love living in Buenos Aires, so maybe I would be looking into that if I didn't know that I wanted to live here in the Philippines already.
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So there's an attached worksheet that I want you to fill out. And in this attached worksheet, there are four essential questions. One, what type of place do I want to live in? The country, the mountains, the beach, or the city? Two, how far away do I want to live from my current home? Close? Within the same country? Within a 10-hour plane ride? Or anywhere? For me, I'm anywhere. Third, what part of the world speaks the most to you? Is it Asia? Africa? Europe?
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中东吗?美洲?你想在哪里o go? Write that down too. And then number four, write down what hotspots in that part of the world really speak to you. For me, I want to live on a beach as far away from my childhood home as possible. Not because I hate my parents, but because, I don't know, I don't need to be close to them all the time. And specifically, I want to be in the Philippines.
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So all I have to do now is just Google some of the best beach home spots in the Philippines and do a little bit of research. I want you to do the same thing. Now that we know where we want to live, I can walk you through your mood boards. Before I take you through a demo of Milanote, which is a mood board, digital creator online, you'll be able to make it all online, I wanted to show you some examples of mood boards so that you can see where I'm coming from. This is a mood board for my ideal living location, a beach location. Here are a few islands in the Philippines: Siquijor, Bohol, Siargao, and Palawan.
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I prefer a beach that has a few things to do on the island, like a cinema or even a mall. I don't want anything too crowded, though. I want something that's just starting to get a little bit famous. I think it's really important to create a mood board for your ideal house style and living location as well. Use Airbnb and search in the place that you want to live. When I was on Siquijor Island here in the Philippines, they have a very distinct architectural style that some of the foreigners came in and based their houses off of, based on the locals' designs and their culture, really. And so, it's important that you do the same exact thing and try to see, like, what type of housing styles they have in whatever part of the world that you want to live in.
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You can use Airbnb and then just save some of those images that you see on that site and then use them in your mood board. This is a mood board for my work and hobbies. I'd love to get into painting, paragliding, and even rock climbing one day when I have some extra time. I'd also love to create my own media company here in the Philippines and employ 10 to 20 great Filipino writers and creators to help me execute that vision. This is where the Myers-Briggs test comes in.
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You can use the career path of the results that you saw to inform what you might want to pursue in your working life. For instance, mine says: "Advocates often pursue expressive careers such as writing, effective communicators that they are, and author many popular blogs, stories, and screenplays. Music, photography, design, and art are viable options too." That pretty much hits me right on the head, doesn't it? I didn't need to take a Myers-Briggs test to figure that out, did I?
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Okay. So we have blogging, we have photography, we have design, and writing as a whole. That could all be in my future. I'll search for some cool images online and I'll add them to this mood board. Also, look up the hobbies/work of your favorite authors, writers, and influencers. If I search on Google for "Tim Ferriss hobbies," I would find a plethora of things cause he is a hobbyist to the core. Like Jiu-jitsu, you know, workout routines, or even tango dancing. He likes tango dancing.
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Another idea is to search, put your ideal living location, whether that's, you know, Bohol or Buenos Aires, and then you put "vlogger" at the end and you can start to see how vloggers live in that part of the world and some of the things that they get into there. I think that would be very, very useful and helpful. And then here's an example of a mood board based around inspiration. This is essentially a North Star in terms of the values that I hold and the impact I want to make on the world.
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Think of things outside of work and living spaces such as charity, values, people you admire, and the greater impact you want to make on the community. For me, the Philippines is the place where I want to make an impact and help the community out. On Google, type in the name of your favorite author and then put "quotes." So for me, "Tim Ferris quote," and then switch to the images tab, and you'll start to see images with, you know, the person's picture along with the quote, like above their head or something like that, that you can use for your mood board. These are very helpful.
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Quotes are really the driving force of this mood board. So I would suggest really, you know, throwing them in as much as possible.
