Design Your Future
Three Simple Steps to Stop Drifting and Start Living
Book Edition Details
Summary
Ever felt like you're running in place, despite the outward success you may project? "Design Your Future" isn't just another self-help book—it's a transformative manifesto for those who feel stifled by life's monotony. Dominick Quartuccio offers a dynamic approach to reclaiming your zest for life, challenging you to confront the hidden beliefs that tether you to mediocrity. This book dismantles the self-imposed barriers that keep you anchored to the past and guides you toward crafting a future that reignites your passion. With practical strategies and profound insights, it's a call to arms for anyone ready to break free from the shackles of routine and embark on a journey of intentional living. If you're tired of life's predictability and crave a vibrant, purposeful existence, your roadmap starts here.
Introduction
In the gleaming towers of corporate America, Dominick Quartuccio had achieved what many would consider the pinnacle of success. By his early thirties, he had become the youngest sales VP at a Fortune 100 company, commanding impressive compensation packages and living in a coveted Manhattan apartment. His MBA from NYU was fresh on his wall, and his professional achievements spoke volumes about his drive and capability. Yet beneath this veneer of accomplishment lay a profound restlessness that would ultimately reshape his entire understanding of what it means to live a fulfilling life. Quartuccio's journey from corporate high-achiever to life design coach represents more than a simple career change—it embodies a fundamental shift in how we approach success, fulfillment, and personal authority. His story illuminates the often-hidden struggle of successful professionals who find themselves trapped by their own achievements, drifting through lives that look impressive from the outside but feel hollow within. Through his transformation, readers discover powerful insights about breaking free from unconscious patterns, designing intentional futures, and finding the courage to pursue authentic fulfillment over external validation.
The High Achiever's Trap: Success Without Fulfillment
Quartuccio's early life was marked by an insatiable drive for external validation, a pattern that began in elementary school and would define decades of his existence. His memories of playing "Around the World," a simple math game, revealed the seeds of what would become both his greatest strength and his most limiting prison. The terror he felt at the possibility of losing, despite his consistent victories, demonstrated how deeply he had internalized the belief that his worth was contingent upon performance and approval from others. This need for validation propelled him through an impressive career trajectory in financial services, where he excelled at meeting targets, building relationships, and climbing corporate ladders. His success was measurable and celebrated—tripling sales goals, earning recognition, accumulating wealth and status. Yet each achievement only served to reinforce a hollow foundation built on external metrics rather than internal satisfaction. He had become masterful at generating the very validation he craved, but the satisfaction was always temporary, always requiring another conquest to maintain. The paradox of high achievement became increasingly apparent as Quartuccio reached what should have been the height of his career satisfaction. Despite unprecedented professional success, he found himself emotionally numb, disconnected from the very accomplishments that had once energized him. This disconnect revealed a fundamental truth about success-driven lifestyles: when achievement becomes the primary source of identity and worth, the authentic self becomes buried beneath layers of performance and expectation. His recognition of this trap marked the beginning of a profound awakening. The very skills that had made him successful—his ability to meet external expectations, to push through discomfort, to achieve measurable results—had also created a prison of his own making. Breaking free would require not just changing what he did, but fundamentally reimagining who he was and what truly mattered to him.
Breaking Free: The Journey from Drift to Awakening
The moment Quartuccio acknowledged his emotional numbness marked the beginning of his liberation from what he would later term "drifting"—that unconscious state where 95% of our behaviors are driven by automatic patterns rather than conscious choice. This realization came not through a single dramatic event, but through the accumulation of successful days that felt increasingly meaningless. His life had become a series of responses to external demands rather than conscious choices aligned with his authentic desires. His decision to seek help represented a fundamental shift from his long-held belief that asking for support was tantamount to admitting failure. This breakthrough opened the door to a comprehensive exploration of personal development, from working with coaches and attending seminars to developing a meditation practice and voraciously consuming wisdom literature. Each new avenue of exploration revealed layers of unconscious beliefs and automatic behaviors that had been running his life without his awareness. The process of awakening proved both exhilarating and terrifying. As Quartuccio began to see the invisible "water" he had been swimming in—the unconscious beliefs, stories, and patterns that shaped his reality—he faced the daunting prospect of taking complete responsibility for his life circumstances. This shift from victim of external circumstances to author of his own experience required abandoning the comfortable narratives that had previously explained his dissatisfaction while avoiding personal accountability. Through meditation, coaching, and rigorous self-examination, Quartuccio learned to create intentional awakenings rather than waiting for external crises to force change. This proactive approach to personal transformation became a cornerstone of his later teaching, demonstrating that individuals have far more power to reshape their lives than they typically recognize. The journey from unconscious drifting to conscious design required courage, commitment, and a willingness to question every assumption about how life "should" be lived.
Designing a Life Worth Living: The ADD Transformation Method
From his personal transformation, Quartuccio developed the ADD Cycle—a systematic approach to breaking free from unconscious patterns and designing an intentional future. The first element, Awakening, involves cultivating the awareness necessary to see the invisible forces shaping our lives. This process requires courage to examine limiting beliefs, confront the pain of staying stuck, and take radical responsibility for one's circumstances. Awakening creates the readiness for change by making the unconscious conscious. The second phase, Disrupting, involves actively interrupting the automatic patterns that keep us trapped in cycles of "more of the same." This might involve temporarily abstaining from habitual behaviors, decluttering various aspects of life, or experimenting with entirely new approaches to familiar challenges. Disruption creates space between stimulus and response, allowing for conscious choice rather than automatic reaction. The goal is not permanent change but rather generating feedback about why certain patterns exist and whether they serve our authentic purposes. The final element, Designing, transforms insights from awakening and disrupting into concrete plans for creating a desired future. This involves claiming ultimate authority over one's life, writing a compelling vision of one's legacy, and breaking down that vision into actionable 90-day plans. The design phase recognizes that transformation requires both inspiration and systematic execution, combining the emotional power of a compelling vision with the practical discipline of consistent action. The cyclical nature of this process acknowledges that transformation is not a one-time event but an ongoing practice of conscious evolution. Each cycle of awakening, disrupting, and designing creates new insights and challenges, leading to deeper levels of self-awareness and more authentic expressions of one's true nature. This approach transforms the overwhelming challenge of "changing your life" into a manageable, iterative process of continuous growth and conscious choice.
Teaching Others: From Personal Change to Global Impact
Quartuccio's transition from corporate executive to transformation coach represented more than a career change—it embodied the principles he had discovered about designing a life aligned with one's deepest values and aspirations. His decision to leave a lucrative and secure position to pursue work that felt meaningful required applying everything he had learned about breaking free from external validation and trusting his internal compass. The financial uncertainty and social skepticism he faced became opportunities to practice the very principles he would later teach. His approach to coaching and speaking draws directly from his corporate background, bringing systematic thinking and measurable results to the often-fuzzy world of personal development. Rather than offering generic advice or purely inspirational content, Quartuccio provides specific tools and frameworks that high-achieving professionals can implement immediately. His work addresses the particular challenges faced by successful individuals who feel trapped by their own achievements—people who cannot simply "think positive" their way out of complex life circumstances. The impact of his teaching extends far beyond individual transformation to influence families, organizations, and communities. When high-performers learn to break free from unconscious patterns and design lives aligned with their authentic values, they model possibilities for everyone around them. Their increased energy, clarity, and purposefulness creates ripple effects that transform workplace cultures, family dynamics, and social networks. Quartuccio's message resonates particularly strongly in an era where traditional markers of success—wealth, status, achievement—often fail to deliver the fulfillment they promise. His work provides a bridge between the drive for excellence that characterizes high-achievers and the deeper human need for meaning, connection, and authentic expression. By teaching others to design futures they cannot wait to live into, he offers a path beyond the endless pursuit of "more and bigger" toward lives of genuine satisfaction and contribution.
Summary
Dominick Quartuccio's transformation from successful but spiritually bankrupt corporate executive to purposeful life design coach illuminates a fundamental truth about human fulfillment: external achievements, no matter how impressive, cannot substitute for internal alignment and authentic self-expression. His journey demonstrates that the very qualities that drive professional success—ambition, discipline, achievement orientation—can become prisons when they operate unconsciously, disconnected from deeper values and authentic desires. The practical framework Quartuccio developed from his personal transformation offers hope for anyone feeling trapped by their own success or caught in patterns of drift and reactivity. His ADD method provides concrete tools for awakening to unconscious patterns, disrupting automatic behaviors, and designing lives based on conscious choice rather than external expectations. Perhaps most importantly, his story proves that transformation is possible at any stage of life, requiring not dramatic upheaval but rather the courage to examine our assumptions and the discipline to act on our discoveries. For high-achievers struggling with restlessness despite outward success, and for anyone ready to move from drifting to designing, Quartuccio's insights provide both inspiration and practical guidance for creating lives of genuine fulfillment and authentic contribution.
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By Dominick Quartuccio
