 I think during this weird time a lot of us have been thinking about what really makes you happy and what it would take to add into your life to really make you feel consistently good on a daily basis. Now in this video I want to share this really deep realization I had about how I was always kind of a drug addict in a sense and this prolonged period of isolation really just made me realize it. Hey guys, Alex Hein, author of the book on Habits, Master of the Day, I've included a free link below this video for a free journaling worksheet to get your life together and plan out designing your dream life and what that would look like. It's the first link right below this video. So I was recently reflecting on this about how much I'm more of a drug addict than I think. You know for me you might have heard my story about booking this one way ticket to China and part of why I did that was specifically because it was a passion, it was something I always wanted to do but it was also because I found even working one year in a full-time job to be so, so crushingly boring that I was like how can any human live 40 years like this? I mean this is like the slow suicide of life and yet that's how most humans live their entire lives. So I booked this one way ticket to China and I'd always been a thrill seeker. You know I've been bungee jumping multiple times. I've been bungee jumping one of the highest in the world in New Zealand. I went skydiving literally the next day. I went bungee jumping again in China and I think even in Switzerland there's this huge James Bond jump. But really a lot of these experiences of my life and this constant desire for the next trip, the next move, the next project, this next series of things that I was doing in my life was really always an attempt to stave off the never-ending boredom and the never-ending monotony of day-to-day existence. But the biggest realization I had that made a difference in my life today was that I realized I was such a thrill seeker this dopamine addict specifically because I equated everyday life to death. I had literally equated the everyday state you feel on a regular day of life with depression. So anything other than a peak state was just depression. Now obviously you can see the problems that would put me in. So what this made me realize was that not every day is going to be a one-way ticket to China adventure. Not every day is going to be writing the next big book for me. Not every day is going to be a bungee jump, a yolo trip, some new flashy exciting thing. So how am I going to exist in the world? Now I realized that most of life is lived in the in-between. The in-between is just your regular morning where you get up, nothing particularly great is going to happen, nothing particularly bad is going to happen, but you just get up, you do whatever you do in the morning, you go to work, works fine, it's not too great, not too bad. You know maybe you're dating someone or you're married and you interact with them, you talk, everything's fine, it's humdrum. You're probably not in the brand new love phase and if you were at one point you probably are not anymore. And it seems true in your financial life, right? Like you go to school, some day is good, some day is bad. Just every day is kind of humdrum. I'm going to the gym, you know, go to the coffee shop, read a book, make dinner, it's not my favorite meal but it tastes good and it's healthy. Most of life is in the middle, so most of it is not going to be a peak experience. And the big realization for me was just that you have to find things that make you happy in the middle. You have to things that make you a little bit happy that give you that hidden dopamine that are not peak experiences, that are not high risk, high involvement, high money, that are just things you can do every single day. And for me one of those things is tea. So when I started to find these little things I could do daily, I started with that first question. Well, the fundamental question is what little thing can I do every day? That's the master of the day philosophy. What is the little thing I can do every day that'll make me a little bit happier? And I decided that drinking a specific kind of Chinese green tea is going to be my thing. So the main ritual that I chose for this habit was drinking tea as my dopamine hit. It's the entire process of shopping online for the tea, picking what varietals I want and where they come from in China, the excitement of various tea cakes coming to my apartment, or the smell or taste of a brand new tea that I've never had before, and even opening and steeping a different tea on each day. So this video is really a monk's challenge kind of archetype, which is in the absence of living like this massively exciting YOLO social media life, what are you going to do every day? That's the little thing that consistently makes you a tiny bit happier. For me, this tea ritual became my new addiction that helped me remember the most important thing. Most of life is lived in the in between. And if you can't love the in between, then how can you love your life?