Holistic life design: the six areas of a good life

Life is multi-faceted, and a good one is built from more than one part. The Optml Six are six pillars for looking at a whole life at once, in a fixed order: Power, People, Potential, Prosperity, Purpose, Play. They exist so you can see all of your life in one glance, choose where the effort goes this season, and keep every part moving. This page explains what the six are, why we use six, and how to use them to change your life.

What the Optml Six are

A pillar is a category of your life that, when disregarded, leaves you feeling short of truly fulfilled. It is a framework for looking at your life holistically and determining whether there are areas of your life that you have prioritized over others at the cost of your own fulfillment.

1. Power: Your body, energy, and vitality. Sleep, movement, nourishment, recovery, and getting the right support. Strength is personal, and it can include living well with a limitation.

   Questions: Have you done any preventative checks in the last year? Do you have the energy at 6pm that you had at 10am? When did you last sleep seven hours three nights in a row? When did you last see the dentist?

   Research: Across 49 cohorts and 266,939 people, Felipe Schuch and colleagues found in 2018 that high physical activity went with 17 percent lower odds of developing depression. Another study found that physical inactivity causes about 9 percent of premature deaths worldwide, more than five million a year.

2. People: Your relationships (friends and family) and sense of belonging. Deliberate attention to the people who make your life worth sharing, which can be small and recurring.

   Questions: Which relationship would you like to give more deliberate attention? Who would you call at 2am, and when did you last see them? Who is waiting to hear from you? How many dates per month would you like to go on with your husband?

   Research: Stronger social relationships are correlated with a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival. And in a study of students, no single thing was sufficient for very high happiness, but one was necessary: good relationships.

3. Potential: Your learning, growth, and developing capabilities. Being a beginner at something, or mastering something you have loved for a long time.

   Questions: What would you like to learn or become more capable of doing? What did you love learning as a kid that you stopped? What would you try if you were guaranteed to be bad at it for a month?

   Research: In a diary study from 1996, researchers found that good days were the days people felt more capable and more self-directed than their own baseline; and feeling competent is one of the three basic psychological needs in Ryan and Edward Deci's self-determination theory.

4. Prosperity: The resources and financial foundations that support your life. Stability, freedom, and the ability to choose, defined around your circumstances.

   Questions: What would give your life more stability or useful choice? Do you know where last month's money went? Which irregular expense will surprise you in the next twelve months? What is your financial freedom number?

   Research: Richard Netemeyer and colleagues found in 2018 that how your finances feel, how much stress money causes now and how secure the future looks, predicted wellbeing about as strongly as job, health, and relationships combined, regardless of how much money people actually had. And the famous $75,000 happiness plateau has been revised: in a 2023 adversarial collaboration, Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman, and Barbara Mellers found it holds only for the least happy fifteen to twenty percent of people; for everyone else, more stability and choice keeps helping.

5. Purpose: Meaningful work, contribution, and a sense of direction. Effort that feels like it means something, whether it is paid or not.

   Questions: Where would you like your effort to feel more meaningful? What part of your work would you do for free? When did you last feel that your effort mattered to someone? How is your spiritual life?

   Research: Across 136,265 people, higher purpose went with 17 percent lower mortality. Other researchers followed 6,163 adults for fourteen years and found the same protective effect at every age, regardless of whether people had retired.

6. Play: Fun, creativity, curiosity, and adventure. Experiences worth having for their own sake, without having to justify themselves.

   Questions: What would you enjoy doing simply because you want to? When did you last do something with no purpose beyond enjoying it? What adventure have you been calling impossible? What does a Saturday that feels like yours look like?

   Research: Engaging in leisure is correlated with higher wellbeing, and how often and how varied matters more than how many hours. Another study found that psychological detachment from work most reduced fatigue and that control over your own off-work time most raised energy. Rest is how ambition is sustained.

While these are guidelines, they do not need to be rigid. One activity can serve several pillars at once (eg. a long walk with a friend is Power, People, and Play), but we categorize it under the pillar it was most (in this case, People).

Why six?

Who cares how many pillars there are? Because the research on what makes a life satisfying keeps finding the same surprising thing: life satisfaction is a sum, not a single number.

In 2003, one of the largest long-running household surveys in the world found that people's overall satisfaction with life is explained by their satisfaction with specific domains: job, finances, health, leisure, housing, and environment. Each of those depends on real circumstances, and none of them substitutes for the others.

But it is not only the total that matters. People whose basic needs are met in a balanced way report higher wellbeing than people with the same total but more variation across needs. In other words, two people can have the same amount of good in their lives, and the one whose good is spread more evenly is happier. And the reverse is true: when work interferes with family, or family with work, outcomes on both sides suffer, including life satisfaction and health. When one part of life crowds another, both lose.

We use six pillars because it is complete enough to catch neglect and short enough to review in a minute.

It is important to remember that we are not targeting one-dimensional success. One pillar, usually Purpose or Prosperity, becomes the whole scoreboard, and the other five are assumed to be fine because nobody is measuring them. The career is excellent and the friendships have disappeared and the last real vacation was three years ago. Nothing looks wrong, because the one number that gets looked at is good. This is the failure the whole system is about, and it is the reason the six are rated, together, in a minute, every Sunday: the rating exists to catch the pillar(s) that have started lagging.

The practice

Here is how the six work in practice.

Rate them honestly, every Sunday. Ten seconds per pillar, one to ten: how does this part of life feel right now? It takes a minute, and it is the most useful minute of the week, because it shows you where life feels strong and where it feels lacking before the week fills up. The Sunday Check-In opens with it.

Move all six forward every week. Pillars that are not getting the whole week can still get an hour or two. Schedule in a morning walk for Power. Use your fifteen minute commute to squeeze in Potential. Keep Saturday afternoon empty for Play. There is always time — it's about prioritizing it and defining it before, excuse the pun, it's time.

Re-weight once a year. In the annual review the question gets bigger: which pillars deserve the most weight this year? If your parents are getting old, it may be time to focus more on that relationship than your creativity. Or if you know you have a year before kids, maybe it's time to prioritize more travel and fun before reprioritizing family the year after. We might not know where we'll be in a decade, but we can usually get clarity on the next three to five years.

Then the six become the ordinary vocabulary of your planning. Each one gets a vision for three to five years and a goal for the year. Each goal gets a quarter and a week. And each week the calendar, in six colors, shows you whether the life you said you wanted is the life your hours are making.

Read why a life needs designing on purpose for the belief behind the six, and the method for how a pillar becomes a goal, a week, and a day. Then start with whichever pillar you circled.