Customize Your Life
How one word clarified a whole way of living
“As you get older, you customize more your life. You know what you like, you know what works for you, you know what doesn’t. That leads to some more self-satisfaction and happiness.”
—Matthew McConaughey
Here’s another line from that rich McConaughey interview I keep coming back to (the relevant exchange runs from 8:57 to 11:45). It’s a quick line—but I immediately heard a lot in it. And I want to unpack why.
He’s talking about aging. Not resisting it. Not mourning it. But actually enjoying it—because as he puts it, getting older means getting clearer. You start to know what works for you. What doesn’t. You get better at shaping your life to fit.
And that word—customize—is a surprisingly helpful way to frame the process: how we tend to live with greater clarity and intention as we grow—though not always overtly.
And that’s the point I want to help us hold onto.
I. The Power in a Simple Shift
To customize your life means to live by design, not by default.
It means looking at the shape of your days, your habits, your surroundings, your relationships—and asking: Does this suit me?
Most people don’t do that. We inherit schedules, environments, and patterns—many of them long before we fully know who we are. By the time we’re adults, we often find ourselves entangled in obligations, routines, even relationships that were absorbed unconsciously during the whirlwind of growing up.
At that point, we’re often reacting to what’s around us instead of shaping what’s around us to reflect who we’ve become—and what we now value.
That’s the default mode: reactive.
But customization is proactive—beginning with clarity: What matters most to me? And from there, it builds outward.
“I’m the one living this life. So I’m going to shape it.”
It’s not passive adaptation. It’s Intelligent Design—authored by you.
And that shift—from passive recipient to deliberate designer—is what makes the difference between drifting and thriving.
II. Why Customization Matters
Time is limited.
Not just limited—finite. It’s the one resource you can never restore.
You don’t get to do everything, be everything, experience everything. You have to choose. And those choices—how you spend your time, energy, and attention—compound. They shape not just how you feel today, but who you become tomorrow.
Which is why it’s so important to get clear on your values—what really matters to you, at the deepest level. Because once you’ve chosen your priorities, you can begin to reverse engineer your life around them. From there, you can customize how you live: what you do, where you do it, who you do it with, and how often.
That’s why I wanted to capitalize on this framing of customization. (Thanks, Matthew.)
I love the term because it gives people a clearer feel for what I mean by optimizing for one’s own individual human flourishing—not as perfectionism or a productivity metric, but as the ongoing process of shaping your life to fit your values.
And not in the “pimp my ride” sense—rims, spoilers, tinted windows. Not surface tweaks for flash or flair. That’s decoration.
Now, decoration isn’t bad. In fact, some of it may matter more than you think. But what I’m talking about goes deeper. It’s design. Customization as self-curation: engineering your surroundings, rhythms, and routines to reflect what you genuinely value. Not only cosmetic. Foundational.
You only get one life. Your job is to make it work—for you.
So ask yourself:
Is my home arranged to calm me, energize me—or both, depending on what I need?
Is my workspace set up to make my best work easier?
Are my mornings a rush or a ritual?
Do my clothes make me feel like the person I want to be?
Do my friends reflect my values—or just my history?
Does my calendar reflect my priorities—or other people’s demands?
These aren’t trivial questions. They’re central—because many of these “trivial” details are exactly where your values play out.
III. From Values to Visible: Customization in Action
Those questions are where it begins. Let’s now look at how the answers take shape in a few core areas of life.
Your Home
Customization here could mean clearing the clutter from your counters so mornings feel smoother. It might mean putting your running shoes by the door—or your journal on your pillow. It’s about friction reduction. Environment as ally—facilitating the habits you want to embody.
Your Workspace
Design it to encourage deep focus. No visual chaos. Tools within arm’s reach. Maybe ambient light, or a playlist that cues flow. The point is not aesthetics for their own sake—but design that facilitates your work.
Your Car
It can be your second sanctuary. Keep it clean. Keep a good podcast or playlist queued up. Make it support your mood and mission.
Your Clothes
You’re not dressing to impress—you’re dressing to express. Choose fabrics, cuts, and colors that help you feel alert, agile, confident, you.
Your Relationships
This one matters most. Not everyone gets equal time. And not everyone should. Customize who gets what part of you—based on depth of value. Be generous, but not automatic. Love well, but love deliberately.
Your Time
Your calendar is a mirror of your values. Or it isn’t. Protect your peak hours. Design your week so your priorities get your best. Say yes like a strategist and no like a professional.
The Customization Mindset: It All Matters
And of course, these are just a few core areas. And the suggestions above aren’t exhaustive. There are entire books, podcasts, and professionals dedicated to helping people refine how they eat, sleep, dress, work, and relate. I’m not your guy for all of that. But they do illustrate the point I am here for: to reinforce that such considerations are essential.
Because the practice of customization can—and should—extend to every part of life, big and small.
Think about:
Your diet
Your routines for sleep and rest
How you use your phone
Your commute
The music, scents, and light in your home
The way you manage notifications
Your weekend structure
The types of conversations you prioritize
Even the pens you write with
Every detail is a design opportunity. Every choice, a vote for the life you’re building.
And it isn't a one-time setup. It's a habit of attention—a mode of living.
IV. The Art of Living by Design
What all of this adds up to is simple, but far from easy: live intentionally. Don’t drift. Don’t settle for a life that merely happens to you.
Customization is how you reclaim authorship. It’s how you make your life more livable, more beautiful, more aligned—across time. Not just by reacting to what each day throws at you, but by proactively and continuously setting it up to serve what you most value.
Customization isn’t a one-time decision. It’s a living process. You keep learning. You keep tuning. You keep refining how you live—so it works for the person you are and the life you want to lead.
This is the heart of optimization—not some unreachable ideal, but thoughtful refinement. The practice of shaping your days to reflect what matters most—and then inhabiting those choices with clarity and care.
Customization is deliberate living—and deliberate living is moral living.
That’s what McConaughey was pointing to in that super helpful term, customization—which has become a kind of shorthand for me for what it means to live by Intelligent Design. The more you grow—older, wiser, more self-aware—the more you begin to know what works, what doesn’t. And that knowledge becomes a tool for shaping a life that fits.
Live Accordingly
This is your life. Let your values shape your arrangement. Let your environment support your priorities. Let your time tell the truth about what you care about.
If you customize with intention—you’ll find that it, as he puts it, “leads to some more self-satisfaction and happiness.”
📺 Watch Matthew McConaughey’s original comment about the aging process and “customizing your life”—followed by my deeper analysis of how deliberately shaping your life to fit your own values is not only selfish, but moral. I also discuss the toxic package-deal that wrongly equates this kind of thoughtful self-regard with hedonism.
Editor’s Note:
This essay expands on a single thread from my longer piece “Matthew McConaughey Thinks It’d Be a Lot Cooler If You Were Selfish.” While that essay explores the broader meaning of rational selfishness, this one focuses on what it means to shape your life through deliberate design.
(—Pimp your own ride with a free subscription. More than just new rims—it’s a fresh perspective.)
What a powerful unpacking of one deceptively simple word. “Customize” becomes a call to live deliberately with clarity, authorship, and moral alignment. Loved how you framed it as Intelligent Design, not surface-level tweaking but deep, values-driven refinement. Bravo.