Life Grid

See The Patterns At Work
In Your Life To Help You Recognize
Hidden Turning Points When They Come Your Way…

… And Document Your Achievements
So That You’ll Have More Than Just Talk To Pass On
To Your Grandchildren

If you’re a talented artist, designer, engineer, architect, or all round high functioning thinker but feel that your life & career have gone nowhere…

… then I have just the thing for you.

It’s called Life Grid.

You know…

… there are people walking this earth right now, whose natural abilities would give angels a run for their money.

But they ain’t living the good life, they don’t have a seat at the table, and they usually don’t even have two nickels to rub together.

Or they’ve done incredible work in the past but never got the recognition they deserved (nor the financial rewards).

In this brutally expedient race-to-the-bottom modern world, it’s all cookie cutter and hype and bright shiny objects.

Lights, camera, action today…

… straight to landfill tomorrow.

Look.

If you’re anything like me, not using your skills and abilities to the max and not being able to do things right, (according to the vision in your head) of how they could be and should be…

… you’re headed for the funny farm.

Which is exactly where I was going.

I was a job transient.

I’d held (and lost) five jobs within the first five years of graduating. None of them fit who I was and what I was good at, and…

… I was already 31 years old.

Other people were buying new cars, expensive holidays and flash houses…

… but here I was with two college degrees, with no job and no money and struggling to keep the lights on in our tiny two bedroom rental.

I’d been a freelance designer, a QA manager, a production manager, a production manager again, a project manager, and a project manager yet again…

… and after the last stint (which I was actually doing well in)… I couldn’t get arrested, let alone another job.

And I didn’t want to be a manager anyway, I had too much art in me.

So I said screw this.

I hit the road and spent the next 7 years cutting my teeth on the mean streets, going it alone as an independent design consultant.

I said screw this

My first gig was designing a 3D printed titanium automotive brake caliper for a big government research facility.

3D printing was just hitting fever pitch in the media back then…

… it was new, it was sexy, it was the latest bright shiny object.

And being pure titanium my brake design only weighed 612 grams (that’s light), which really caught the attention of some automotive manufacturers.

But unfortunately for me, the local car industry was in the process of shoving off in search of cheaper (3rd world) labor…

… and after many fruitless presentations at many fruitless meetings, my brake design went nowhere and I didn’t get paid a cent.

I was a young husband and a newly minted dad to a beautiful baby girl…

… and I was dead broke.

Where the hell was all this going?

The eat what you kill lifestyle can really take its toll.

However.

After licking my wounds, I realized (despite the storm raging around us) that:

• We still had a roof over our heads and comfortable beds to sleep in

• We still had plenty of food to eat

• We were still physically very healthy

• Our baby girl was thriving and I got to spend a lot of time with her

• We lived in a peaceful and free country

• The sky was not falling on our heads

Yeah sure, the paint job on my car was getting a bit tired in certain spots (it’s 29 years old).

But nothing else on the road came close to matching that car’s simple ‘90’s good looks (it’s a 300zx), and most importantly…

… I still liked it.

So even though I was bummed about my flat-lining career, I figured that maybe the desire to mope was all in my head.

I could either stay up all night drinking and watching TV in the dark…

… or I could marshal my senses and take stock of where I’d been and what I’d done.

Not only did that give me an important morale boost (cuz everything else was dogging my self-image)…

… the clarity I gained from that was the key to not losing my mind (this was before Jordan Peterson by the way).

And that’s how I came up with…

Life Grid

Life Grid is a way to chronicle your life, past, present and future…

… into a lo-tech, hi-fidelity, hack proof, idiot proof, evil megalomaniac Big Brother internet corporation proof physical personal artifact.

It takes your past achievements, drawings, designs, photos, significant events, and compiles them into a 18 x 13 grid.

Your grid then gets burned onto a cold war era, spy hunter, 6” x 4” blue microfiche.

I hear what you’re saying.

Why not use PDF or some cloud based mobile app?

Listen to me.

I can’t guarantee you that in a hundred years from now, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, or whatever internet tribe you belong to, are even gonna exist (I suspect they’ll be swallowed by something bigger, greedier and altogether unholier)…

… but I can guarantee that your Life Grid will.

Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, YouTube…
… they’ll be swallowed by something bigger,
greedier, and altogether unholier

The technology is about as bomb-proof and idiot-proof as you can get, and if stored with care it can last over 100 years…

… maybe even 500 years.

It’s a true artifact.

All you need to view it is a magnifying lens and a light source…

… and that’ll be true 100, 200, 300, or even 500 years from now (Kodak introduced polyester based microfiche in the ‘90’s, and it’s damned near indestructible).

It’s a platform you’ll truly own.

Life Grid is your precious personal artifact,
it’s one of the last platforms you’ll ever truly own

Although my titanium brake caliper project was a bust, it flowed on into me doing this 3D printed jet engine for a major French aerospace outfit (which didn’t pay well, but at least we could now eat)…

… which eventually flowed on into me becoming a defence consultant (which did pay well).

The money I commanded as a defence consultant gave me time for my subconscious to relax a bit, and start working on a longer term trajectory (really important).

It’s so powerful to retrace your steps in life.

You gotta look back every so often to see how far you’ve come and the steps you took to get here.

And here’s why this is Zen level stuff.

When you have a clear image to reflect on, the problems, the difficult circumstances…

… the deep dark deleterious thoughts dogging your subconscious suddenly dissipate.

You’re left with more peace and more clarity, which makes you more productive, which creates even more peace and more clarity, which makes you even more productive…

… which ultimately creates time and wealth for you to achieve your vision for your life and for those whom you love.

So here’s how it works…

How It Works

In your Life Grid you break each year down into the momentous events, or milestones, that you lived through.

Years go across the top and months go down the side, and you can fit 18 years of your life on one Life Grid.

For me, it was times like March 2004.

I had returned back to design school to finish off my final year papers…

… and I clearly remember the apprehension I had because the previous year hadn’t gone so well for me (I had burned out and dropped out).

And so the first epiphany was finishing in December 2004 and getting all A’s.

Then the next one was leaving Mum and Dad and driving off to another city, alone, to look for work.

That was March 2006.

I found work but it came in spurts, which made life difficult financially.

I also struggled with finding a place to live in that city and ended up renting a room with an old WW2 veteran. He was from Scotland and was an engineer during the war.

He’d traveled the world, he was very intelligent, but he had some skeletons in the closet.

The rent was cheap but his house was creepy, and I spent most of that year just trying not to lose my mind while I sent out job application, after job application, after job application… and waited, and waited, and waited.

However.

Looking back on my own Life Grid, I realized that it was during this phase of soul crushing stress (and isolation) that I did some of my best work.

Life Grid Principle #1
Intense pressure can make you do your best work

I remember the morning after moving in, it was a Saturday, and the old man personally woke me up at 7am.

I had to politely tell him not to do that again (talk about feeling weird in a strange and unfamiliar place).

Anyway.

Some of that very first commercial work I ever did is captured in the 2006 column of my Life Grid.

And here’s the thing…

… it was only a little freelance contract worth $2500 but it got me a job worth $85,000, in another country, 3 years later.

Life Grid Principle #2
The true value of what we do in life
is not at all obvious to you at the time

So fast forward 3 years, I find myself married and living in another country and working as a project manager in construction earning $85,000.

Of course, I eventually lost that job right after Amelia (our first child) was born, and decided to go out on my own on the 22nd of February 2012.

That was exhilarating and terrifying.

My skills increased exponentially but the work I did from there became more and more industrial…

… it was more about solving technical problems than creating actual innovation.

So, after a couple of years of doing this I found myself getting a bit depressed, I was doing all this amazing work but none of it was really mine.

However.

I discovered that whenever I looked back over my old student work (work that I still held dear), I would get a morale boost.

I would get a morale boost because it would immediately connect me back to the art side of my personality…

… something that was sorely missing from my professional life.

These tiles are from my student days, and they went in the 2003 & 2004 column of my Life Grid…

Life Grid Principle #3
Art embodies what we admire most in the world
(and that’s why we should preserve it in our own lives)

There’s art in industrial design, there’s art in engineering, there’s art in computer programming, there’s art in farming, there’s art in writing, there’s art in law, there’s art in mathematics, there’s art in cooking, there’s art in athletics, there’s art in systems, and there’s art in relationships, there’s art in marriage, in running a household and in raising children, and…

… there’s art in the story of your life.

For me it’s been about looking for doors, however unlikely, and walking through them (Life Grid Principle #2 in practice).

That doesn’t mean all the doors will lead somewhere, most won’t, but just having even the vaguest inkling of this principle (that the true value of something is often hidden under the surface) meant I seized some key opportunities (you only need one or two) that would’ve otherwise sailed on by…

… like the one that took me from making $1000 a month to $1000 a day as a defence consultant.

Now with Life Grid, you’re virtually guaranteed to seize yours too.

So here’s what to do…

Start Your Life Grid Now

It’s easy.

Just click the button and you’ll get your own bluprintthinker.com account and your own private Life Grid folder that you can start uploading to.

One Life Grid has up to 15 years of your life but you can make as many Life Grids as you need.

If you fill up a few Life Grids at the outset, that’s not a problem. We’ll send them out to you at the end of your 2nd subscriber month, anywhere in the world via DHL Express.

Subsequent Life Grids will be sent to you every 6 months as you progress towards achieving the vision, or forming a new vision, for your life.

Don’t worry, you’ll get clear and easy to understand instructions on exactly what to do.

All you need to do is click below and get started.

Life Grid: $199/month

What You’ll Get

Your Life Grid will be carefully prepared by expert graphic designers and made into a blue microfiche.

Why microfiche?

Because it lasts a seriously long time (it’ll outlast you).

Life Grids that you fill up with info from your past, will be sent to you after your 2nd subscriber month.

And you’ll also get…

You’ll also get this incredible viewing device, called the Magnifier (valued at $300), that I’ll send you with your first Life Grids.

The Magnifier has adjustable magnification up to 50x and two focus controls.

It also has both UV and White LED light sources, each with 5 intensity levels, which means that you can view your Life Grid on any light colored flat surface, at any time.