Be The CEO Of Your Own Life

Read this on victoriaprew.com​

Read time: 3 minutes

Hey! Happy Monday.

If you have followed me on Instagram for a while, you will know I am big into designing my life. For so many years I felt like I was jumping through hoops. For investors. For the team. For the next funding round. For the board. There is a version of building a company where you spend so long optimising for other people's metrics that you forget to ask what you actually want.

I am entering a chapter where my own goals and ambitions come first. Not in a selfish way. In a deliberate way. I am doing everything differently this second time round. And honestly, it feels like the most important shift I have made.

Before I get into this week's issue, I would genuinely love to hear from you. What do you want more of in this newsletter? More personal storytelling, more frameworks, more on health and performance, more on building? Hit reply and tell me. It is really helpful to make sure what I am putting out here actually hits the mark for you all.

TODAY AT A GLANCE

• The concept: why most founders have a five-year plan for their business and no plan for their life.
• The framework: The Life P&L, how to design your life with the same rigour as your business.
• The lesson: the daily decisions that compound into a life you actually want.
• What I am reading: Emma Grede's new book, Start With Yourself.
• My workout this morning: 45 minutes, full body, no equipment.
• This week's resource: my five-year personal strategic framework, free to download.

[the concept]

The Document Most Founders Never Write

Most of us are running a business with a five-year plan and living a life with no plan at all.

We have financial projections, hiring roadmaps, exit strategies. We can articulate the company vision in one sentence.

Ask the same person what they want their life to look like in five years? Most of them go blank.

The reason is simple. We have been taught to treat the business as the north star and the personal life as a side effect of that. Work hard enough for long enough, and the life you want will somehow materialise on the other side.

It does not work that way.

The biggest risk is not missing your revenue target. It is hitting every number on the spreadsheet and arriving there broken, exhausted, and completely out of alignment with who you actually wanted to become.

When I was building HURR, we spent months perfecting the company five-year plan. Financials, hiring, exit strategy. Completely airtight. But the people running that business, including me, had no plan for themselves. No roadmap for health, relationships, growth. Just a vague hope that the personal stuff would sort itself out once the business did. It did not sort itself out. I had to go back and build it deliberately.

You are the most important asset in your business. And you are the only one without a strategic plan.

[the framework]

The Life P&L

The same way you run a P&L for your business, I want you to run one for your life. Three parts. So I've built you the framework I've been using over the past couple of months, you can download it for free:

​BE THE CEO OF YOUR OWN LIFE: A Five-Year Personal Strategic Framework for Founders and Operators ​

Part one: the audit.

Where are you actually right now across every area that matters? Health, energy, relationships, finances, learning, joy. Not where you tell people you are. Where you actually are. Score each one out of ten. Write one honest sentence per area. Your lowest scores are not weaknesses. They are the areas your plan needs to protect most.

Part two: the vision.

What does a specific Tuesday look like in five years? Not a vague aspiration. A specific day. Where are you, who are you with, what are you working on, what have you stopped doing. Vague visions produce vague lives.

Part three: the gap.

Look at part one and part two side by side. The distance between them is not a problem. It is a plan waiting to be written. For each area, what is the single biggest thing standing between where you are and where you want to be? Not a list. The single biggest thing.

Most people do this for their business every quarter and leave their life entirely to chance.

Your action: block two hours this week. Run the three-part Life P&L on yourself. Write it down. The act of writing it is the beginning of designing it.

[the lesson]

The Daily Decision

The version of you that has the life you want made different decisions by 9am. If your calendar does not reflect your values, your values are not your values. They are just words.

Designing your life starts with a simple daily plan. The plan is the document above. Start there.

[what I am reading]

​Emma Grede's first book came out this week and I have already read half of it. She grew up in East London, dropped out of school, and went on to co-found Good American and become the founding partner of SKIMS. The book is her framework for how she thinks about business and life, and it is exactly as direct as you would expect from someone who built what she built.

If you are in a season of building something new or reinventing yourself, this one is worth your time. It came out April 14th. Go and get it here.

[my workout this morning]

I did this one this morning and it is a proper workout. No faff, no equipment, just hard work! If you have been meaning to get back into a consistent movement habit, this is the one to start with.

Until next week,

Victoria