Last Updated on August 30, 2026 by Michelle
I was looking through the photos on my phone recently when I noticed something.
I have a lot of screenshots of books.
Not screenshots from Kindle. Actual photographs of pages from physical books.
Usually there is a sentence underlined, sometimes several paragraphs. And quite often, if I found something particularly interesting, I had sent the photo to one or two close friends.
Usually with very little explanation.
“This is interesting.”
Or sometimes just the photograph.
As I scrolled backwards through three years of these pages, I started reading them again.
There was Robert Kiyosaki on what we do with our spare time.
Benjamin Hardy on our future selves.
Tony Robbins on financial freedom.
Books about sleep.
Books about broccoli.
Books about our subconscious mind.
Books about relationships.
Books about retirement.
Books about habits.
Books about the brain.
At first, it just looked like I read a lot of random things.
But as I kept scrolling, I realised they weren’t random at all.
There was a chronology to my curiosity.
And perhaps more interestingly, I could see how the things I had been curious about over the years had slowly become the way I now think about my life.
I didn’t know it then, but I think I had been building BYORM long before BYORM existed.
It Started With Health
Around 2020, I became fascinated with health.
Maybe turning 40 had something to do with it.
Or perhaps COVID made all of us think a little more about our bodies and mortality.
I started listening to health podcasts and reading books about nutrition, longevity and what actually keeps the human body healthy.
I read Dr William Li’s Eat to Beat Disease.
There are photographs on my phone of pages about inflammation, the microbiome and brassica vegetables.
Broccoli. Cauliflower. Pak choi. Cabbage. Kale.
I clearly felt quite strongly about vegetables for a period of time.
I read about sleep.
I photographed a page from The Source about what happens to the brain when we don’t sleep enough.
I became interested in exercise and eventually strength training.
None of this started because I was trying to create some grand philosophy about aging.
I just wanted to understand how to stay healthy.
But somewhere along the way, my question changed.
It stopped being simply:
How do I stay healthy now?
And became:
What kind of body do I want to be living in when I’m 70?
That is a very different question.
Because once you ask it, health stops being something you deal with when something goes wrong.
It becomes something you build decades earlier.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that curiosity would eventually become one of the foundations of BYORM: Physical Vitality.
Then 2023 Happened, and I Became Obsessed With the Brain
2023 was a difficult year for me.
And my reading changed.
I became fascinated with psychology, neuroscience and the brain.
I wanted to understand why we think the way we do.
Why some thoughts become so powerful.
Why we repeat certain behaviours.
How our environment influences us.
How beliefs form.
How we change.
I listened to psychology and neuroscience podcasts constantly.
I read Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind.
I read Norman Vincent Peale.
I read Nudge.
I read books about optimism, habits, behaviour and identity.
And I started taking photographs of completely different kinds of pages.
There were passages about the subconscious mind.
About how our thoughts influence our lives.
About the environments we create around ourselves.
About the people we spend time with.
One photograph I rediscovered was from Benjamin Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.
The chapter heading itself had caught my attention:
“Your Future Self Is Different Than You Expect.”
On another page, I had underlined:
“You’ll be able to design your environment to become who you want to be.”
And another:
“Become the average of the people you surround yourself with.”
Then there was a Charlie Jones quote:
“You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.”
I can see why I photographed these now.
By then, I was no longer just interested in how the body changes.
I had become interested in how a person changes.
Can we deliberately become different?
Can we influence who we are five or ten years from now?
How much of our future self is already being created by what we repeatedly expose ourselves to today?
The people we spend time with.
The books we read.
The podcasts we listen to.
The conversations we have.
The thoughts we repeat.
The habits we build.
Perhaps our inputs slowly become us.
That idea stayed with me.
Somewhere Along the Way, I Became Fascinated With My Future Self
Looking through the screenshots, I noticed another theme appearing again and again.
The future.
Not predictions about the future.
My future self.
There was a page where Emma Grede talked about writing down a vision of what she wants her life to look like.
I had highlighted:
“Once I write it down, I work backward and then break it into yearly/monthly/weekly chunks.”
And:
“Changing habits and engineering results requires consistency, routine and focus.”
When I saw that photograph again, I laughed a little.
Because this is basically how I live now.
I imagine the person I want to become.
Then I work backwards.
What would she need to start doing now?
What would she need to stop doing?
What would she need to learn?
What kind of financial position would she need?
How strong would her body need to be?
Who would she want around her?
What would an ordinary Tuesday in her life look like?
Somewhere along the way, that became one of the central philosophies of BYORM:
I don’t make decisions as the person I am. I make decisions as the person I’m becoming.
I don’t think I invented that philosophy one afternoon.
Looking at these photographs, I think I had been circling around it for years.
Money Entered the Story Too
Of course there were also books about money.
A lot of them.
But looking back, I realise I was never particularly interested in money for the sake of money.
I was interested in what money could make possible.
I found a photograph from Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant where I had underlined:
“The only difference between a rich person and a poor person is what they do in their spare time.”
And further down:
“What you do after work with your paycheck and your spare time will determine your future.”
Again, there was that word.
Future.
I had started tracking every dollar I spent back in 2018 because I wanted to understand how much my life actually cost.
I was already well into my corporate career by then.
And I had begun wondering what would happen if one day I didn’t want to work in the same way anymore.
How much would I need?
How much passive income would support the life I enjoyed?
How could I create enough financial independence that my future decisions would be based on what I wanted rather than what I needed to earn?
I also found a page from Tony Robbins’ Money: Master the Game with an Oscar Wilde quote:
“It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.”
Apparently I found this hilarious because I had written “hahaha” next to it.
I still do.
But beneath the joke was something I increasingly understood.
Money could buy me something much more valuable than another possession.
It could buy me time.
And time would give me the freedom to decide what I wanted to become next.
That is eventually why Financial Freedom became another pillar of BYORM.
Not because I believe everyone needs to become rich.
But because I have come to believe that financial freedom is a well-aging strategy.
My Reading Kept Expanding
What interests me now is how one curiosity seemed to lead naturally to another.
Health led me to the brain.
The brain led me to psychology.
Psychology led me to habits.
Habits led me to identity.
Identity led me to my future self.
Thinking about my future self led me to financial freedom.
Financial freedom made me think about what I would actually do with freedom once I had it.
And that led to purpose.
Reinvention.
Relationships.
Aging.
What makes a good life.
I found one photograph about marriage.
The author was asked what mistake couples make in sustaining love.
The answer was surprisingly simple.
Kindness.
I had underlined the suggestion that sometimes we should treat our partners almost as though they were strangers — with the politeness, restraint and kindness we instinctively offer people we don’t know as well.
That clearly stayed with me too.
Because what would be the point of arriving at 70 financially independent, physically healthy and intellectually curious if the people I loved had quietly disappeared from my life along the way?
Relationships compound too.
Thousands of ordinary conversations.
Small acts of kindness.
Meals together.
Showing up.
Forgiving.
Laughing.
Being interested in each other’s lives.
Perhaps a well-designed life cannot only be an optimized life.
It has to contain people we love.
Then I Started Thinking About Retirement
As financial independence became more realistic for me, my reading changed again.
I began thinking more about what comes after a long career.
One photograph I had saved described retirement as:
“a crucial juncture in your life, a turning point in how you go about your days.”
It talked about people who had spent their lives throwing themselves into work and then lost their drive when the work disappeared.
I understand exactly why I photographed that page.
For years, financial independence had been the goal.
Then one day I realised financial independence only answers one question:
Can I stop working?
It doesn’t answer the much more interesting question:
What do I want to do when I no longer have to?
That changed everything for me.
I stopped thinking about retirement as an ending.
I started thinking about reinvention.
I don’t dream about retirement anymore.
I dream about Tuesdays.
What will I wake up wanting to do?
What will I be learning?
Who will I have lunch with?
What will I be creating?
Will I still feel useful?
Will I still be curious?
Will there still be something coming up that makes me think:
I can’t wait.
The Screenshot That Makes More Sense to Me Now
Among all these photographs was a quotation from Oprah Winfrey.
I had drawn a huge green box around it:
“When I look into the future, it’s so bright it burns my eyes.”
I don’t remember when I sent it to my friends.
I don’t remember what was happening that day.
But I understand why that sentence appealed to me.
I have always liked the future.
Not because I dislike my present life.
Quite the opposite.
But I like the feeling that there is still something ahead.
Something I haven’t learned.
Someone I haven’t met.
A place I haven’t experienced.
A version of myself I haven’t become yet.
This year, I finally found a word for that too.
Anticipation.
I had spent so much time thinking about purpose — what makes life meaningful — that I hadn’t realised we also need forward pull.
Something on the horizon.
Something that makes us curious about tomorrow.
It has now become the sixth part of how I think about a well-designed life.
Because increasingly I believe:
A well-designed life has purpose behind you and anticipation ahead of you.
I Thought I Created BYORM. Maybe I Discovered It.
This was the thought I couldn’t get away from as I scrolled through three years of screenshots.
I always thought BYORM was something I consciously created.
I had reflected on my life.
Developed the framework.
Named the pillars.
Started writing about it.
But perhaps that isn’t quite what happened.
Perhaps I spent years collecting clues.
In 2020, I was trying to understand my body.
In 2023, I was trying to understand my brain.
Then I wanted to understand habits and identity.
Then money and freedom.
Then my future self.
Then purpose.
Relationships.
Reinvention.
And more recently, anticipation.
I didn’t sit down with a blank piece of paper and decide these were the things that make a good life.
They were the things I kept coming back to.
The pages I photographed.
The sentences I underlined.
The ideas I sent to people I loved because I wanted them to read them too.
The questions that stayed in my head long after I had finished the book.
Eventually, those curiosities became the six things I now think matter enormously as I grow older: Physical Vitality, Financial Freedom, Intellectual Growth, Meaningful Connections, Purposeful Reinvention and Anticipation.
Maybe BYORM wasn’t something I invented.
Maybe it was something I slowly noticed.
The Books Were Different. I Was the Constant.
That is what I found most interesting about looking through those screenshots.
The authors weren’t talking to each other.
The books weren’t written as one philosophy.
A book about broccoli had nothing to do with a book about money.
A psychologist writing about identity wasn’t trying to explain retirement.
A passage about marriage wasn’t meant to sit beside one about financial independence.
I was the person connecting them.
I was choosing which sentences mattered enough to underline.
Which pages mattered enough to photograph.
Which ideas mattered enough to send to my friends.
Maybe what we pay attention to tells us something about who we are becoming.
And maybe if you want to understand what matters to you, you don’t always need to sit down and write a list of your values.
Look at what you have been collecting.
What do you underline?
What do you save?
What do you send to your closest friends and say, read this?
What ideas keep finding you?
There may already be a pattern.
I started looking through my screenshots thinking I was revisiting books I had read.
Instead, I found a record of myself becoming.
And perhaps that is what reading has given me more than anything else.
Not answers.
Clues.
Clues about the life I want to live.
Clues about the person I want to become.
And, without realizing it at the time, clues that eventually became Be Your Own Role Model.
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