 Journaling is for a bunch of dorks or at least that's what I was telling myself. Before I started journaling, so I'm a total hypocrite ignore me. I started journaling a couple years ago, but I never started journaling religiously on a day-to-day basis. There wasn't a specific strategy. It was just to improve my life, figure out how to make it better, and get clear on what I wanted. Now, after doing it every day for 90 days, I want to show three realizations that I've had that I think will help you live a better life. So let's jump in and we'll check it out. Now, don't forget, there's also a free companion journaling worksheet I've put together here. It's the first link right below this. It's free. It will help you figure out what you want, how to make it happen, how to have a vision for it, and what are the daily rituals and habits that will most likely make that happen. So check it out as we go through this video. Now, one thing I've learned is that your life only changes looking backwards. That's the only way you're going to realize what was not working and how to make things work. You know, I used to complain a lot about not having friends, right? It wasn't because I was weird or strange or alternative. It was purely because I was just an introvert who'd rather go home and play video games than meet people and be social. So what happens? Start journaling and I'm writing down all the things that frustrating me. I really wish I had that weekend feeling, you know, in those certain phases of life where I was like, all right, I'm hitting my buddies. What are we doing this weekend, guys? Let's go have dinner, drinks. Let's go do some fun event. Let's do a weekend trip. And there are lots of years in my life where I haven't had that community, right? And I've moved around and I've lived all over the world. So it was by looking back through journaling that I realized I had a lot of negative beliefs around basically people. I'm not a people person. I'm an introvert. I don't like people that much or like that many people that much. It takes a lot of work to make friends. It's like a second job and I'm already self employed, which is 80% of my life force energy goes into staying in business. So I realized by journaling, the first is that I had a lot of beliefs about this friend situation. And those beliefs were a barrier to me actually having success in this case, having a lot of friends. So by writing that down, I became aware of a life long pattern of believing a certain thing that I don't have a lot of friends. There are these issues I have that I'm not that social that I don't like that many people. And I realized really I wanted that, but I just didn't want to put in the amount of effort because it felt like such a chore, but that was the reality. Now perhaps the biggest realization I made looking back was purely the fact that the best years of my life had only one commonality. It wasn't how much money I made. It wasn't where I lived. It wasn't a nice apartment versus bad apartment. Loved where I lived, the state or country hated where I lived. It was one factor. Did I have lots of good friends to do things with in the evenings and the weekends? And when I realized that, everything changed because I didn't expect to have more happiness for more success, for more followers, for more income. I realized that the best years had one thing, a lot of friends, which is a sobering thought because that blew up all my beliefs around I don't want to, a noise. But it showed me a fact and that came through pages and pages of reflecting on what is working, what's not working. Now the second thing that journaling made me realize is that we tend to only focus on the gap in life. When I came back from China, I bought this small skin, right? And lots like these. I have a whole list of them down below this video. The ones that I use are these middle-sized ones and the little ones. I got back from China and I realized, okay, what do I want going forward in my life? What I want is I want freedom. I want to be able to travel a lot more than an average employee could. And I want to have the flexibility to work on multiple different projects per day. So I need to be self-employed. How can we make this happen? And I was just thinking, you know, if I could just make 50k, which is what I made in my full-time day job, if I can make 50k less boring than my day job and realistically, I could probably do that in about four hours a day, if I could just do that, then you know what? I could probably have a lot of free time and freedom to live the life anyway I want to live. So, you know, every day I would work my nine to five job. I would go home for an hour to eat and I'd go to a cafe for three hours and work on my business. Now, as time goes on, I think it was like three years before I could quit my job, just making 50k for my business. And it was this great celebration. I quit my job. Now, great. I have a new job, which is self-employment. So fast forward another few years. And I'm going through this journal and I'm realizing that I'm stressed financially. And I'm thinking, this is weird. I make a lot more than that at that moment when I was reflecting. Why am I stressed out financially? And I looked back through this journal and on one particular page, I saw that I wrote, I would be ecstatic if I just made 50k so I could quit my job, have the freedom I want to live anyway I want, maybe just work four or five hours a day to get that same income or to work on whatever I wanted to work on. When I realized that now I was earning many multiples of that, but I was less happy and I was financially stressed all over again. And I had just superseded that last goal that was my dream goal. And it made me realize we have what a lot of entrepreneurs call the gap, which is that there's a kind of horizon you're always looking towards to try to get to. And you think that when you get there, you're going to be happy and you never are. Typically, you can't even reach that horizon because once you make enough money, then you're like, well, Christ, enough is stressful. I need to make double enough to be relaxed. And then when you're double enough, then you're like, well, if I had a little bit more, I could save for a home. I live in a little apartment. And then it's like, well, crap, now I'm married. Now I need to have support my kids and my wife and honor on a ghost until 50k turns into 350k. And now suddenly 350k is break even point. One thing that journaling regularly showed me was that my mind is obsessed with the gap, which is where I have to go next. And what that does is produces success, but not fulfillment. And by journaling, you can help track what is going on in the mind. The story, the narrative, as I call it in master of the day, there's a reason why the first half of the book is all about the story. And for some people, the story is I'll never succeed. Some people, the story is, if I just get there, I'll be happy. Other people, the story is, I'm going to build XYZ thing. But the journaling is what will help you illuminate what is the pattern in your mind. So the third thing that journaling has showed me is that you only have to improve 1% to reach your wildest life goals. What's the difference between saving 100 a month versus zero? Now I think even if you have an entry level income, wherever you are in the US or Europe, you can save 100 US dollars per month. But after a year, you have 1200 a month, right? After 10 years, you have 12,000. Now that's a decent savings cushion. You're not going to buy a Mac mansion, but you have a safety blanket that a lot of people don't have. That's just a small change. We're not talking about investing a thousand a month or saving a thousand a month for a home. Just 100. The difference between maybe you're living a healthy life and not is just eat a healthy dinner every night. That's one of your meals per day out of three. If you can just pick one thing, you will see significant improvements. Or what about if you want to write a book? At this point, I've written multiple and all of them I had written with just 1000 words per day. 1000 words a day is what leads to eventually a full book. After 90 days, one season of the year, you've written almost 100,000 words. And that's a book right there. If you talk about journaling, just writing in that journal for 10 minutes a day about what your goals and your dreams are and what you can do to always be improving and growing to reach them in 5 or 10 years, you'll be shocked what you achieve. So a lot of the little progress is what leads to the big things in your life. And the people who tell you you need to do these big things are the ones who typically haven't achieved them in their own life because most of those great achievements come from doing little daily disciplines on a daily basis. And journaling is one of those tiny daily disciplines that can make all the difference guys. So before you go, don't forget to check out that companion journaling worksheet. And also there's another journaling video I've put together right here that has more exercises I haven't shared here. So check it out.