 How the hell did you end up here? You're probably thinking that right now. I had this experience where I was talking with a 43 year old man and he was basically on the verge of tears saying that even though he has these kids and this beautiful wife and all these things, he thought he would be somewhere else. He thought he'd be further. You know, he was saying there were problems with his marriage and his kids were incredibly stressful and sucking up all of their money. And even though he had this beautiful hallmark picture perfect life from the outside in some ways, he didn't feel that feeling of satisfaction of I am where I want to be. I am where five or 10 years ago I dreamt that my life would be. And that was a really upsetting thought to him. Now, in reality, a midlife crisis can happen at any point in life. And it happens due to one thing. You are not where you thought you'd be at this exact moment. What's up guys? It's Alex Hine. Now let's jump in and PS. A lot of the concepts in my book, Milk the Pigeon are going into how to prevent having a quarter life crisis or midlife crisis. So check it out. So this is the only reason why you are feeling unfulfilled. That feeling occurs due to the gap. The gap is on one side where you are and on the other side is where you thought you'd be or where you want to be. So we have this moment and that moment is preceded by any number of things. It could be a health crisis. It could be a breakup. It could be you graduate college or it could be a new career starts or a career ends. The start of relationship, the end of relationship. But regardless, the facts are the same. You feel like you should have been somewhere else. And so you wake up every day and you're wondering, well, why am I here? I thought my marriage would look like this. I thought my finances would look like this. I thought my career would look like this. I thought my travels would look like this and they don't. And it's the sobering reality of looking at where you are, the ground zero facts. This is where I am and this is not where I wanted to be. And that can be a really painful reality to come to terms with. You know, a friend of mine posted something on Facebook a couple of years ago about a very short marriage and a very unhappy divorce. And she said, you know, this long message about I'm so embarrassed and I'm so depressed because I thought my life would be different by now. I thought I would be married to the love of my life in a stable home. We love where we are. We're happy where we are. We have a cute dog and maybe our first cute kid on the way. I'd be working at my dream nonprofit doing something that changes the world and something that really, really helps people. And I would have lots of friends and family and community and I'd feel a lot of peace where I am right now in my life. And she said, none of that has happened. And now I'm entering my mid to late 30s and I'm starting to feel like those things may never happen for me. And for her, this experience of all of these dreams sort of coming crashing to a halt was that sobering reality of doesn't mean that it can't happen, but that it didn't happen. And I'm nearing that 40 year mark. Now, like a lot of people I've gone through many of these phases in my life. And in fact, that's why I have so many videos on this channel about journaling. I mean, I've showed you, I've put together that free goal setting and journaling worksheet right below this video because the whole point is to think about what you want all the time, every damn day. Because if you're doing that, you are this much more likely to take action on what you really want in life. You are this much more likely to prevent drift in your life. You are this much more likely to not get to that point where, yes, it doesn't mean all your wildest dreams will come true, especially in the timeline you want. But the point of this worksheet is to help you understand you can very likely make at least a few of them come true if given a long enough timeline with enough focus and enough clarity and alignment day to day. Now I wanna give you two strategies that have helped me a lot to prevent this. I had this once, my quarter life crisis run 25 and I've never had it since. Now, while my life has not gone totally according to plan, there have been health crises and breakups and friends lost and all of that, that's life, what it has done is it's gone steadily and slowly up into the right and has generally gotten better and better and better. Now, the first thing I want you to think about is if your ladder is up against the right wall. This is a metaphor from Stephen Covey. He wrote The Habits of Highly Effective People and he talks about the dangerous aspect of life if you're working hard is that you're working hard towards a goal that you don't even really care about. So inevitably you've climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed the ladder, could be the corporate ladder, could be going to medical school but you're not passionate about medicine really. It's for money or status or to look good to mommy and daddy. You end up grinding and climbing this ladder for years. You get to the top and you realize this was not even what I wanted to be. This was not even what I actually wanted to do. And so as a result, now you've done all that work to get to where you wanna be and you're more unhappy than ever before because you've lost that time and that money that you've dedicated to that. So how do we make sure this does not happen? In my first job, I was a teaching assistant in a school in New York and I knew even though the job was okay, at the end of the year, my gut was screaming, this is not what I'm born to do for the next 40 years but the difference compared to most people was that I listened to it and most people do not out of fear. So let me jump in and show you this journaling exercise, the what I want three year vision. So this first exercise is basically just what I want, right? I'm just gonna write three years from today. And basically I want you just to write down in two columns what I got, meaning where I am and then here what I want. The reason this is so important is because people want a lot of things but inevitably it's difficult to have self-awareness if what I'm doing today will result in me getting what I want as opposed to what I don't want. So let's write down what I got. 45K salary, what I wanted was 100K salary by 30, right? Let's just say that's the constraint. What I got an eh relationship, what I wanted was an exceptional one, right? Exceptional or let's just write loving one, right? What I got was no real friends and what I wanted was best friends. What I got was let's say job with this salary and what I really wanted was self-employment. And finally, what I got was just write no excitement meaning there's not much in your life right now that really excites you. And what I wanted was life of excitement. So you'd be surprised how few people actually write this down. This is basically your year, right? This is like the starting point in the treasure map of this is where it all begins but this is what I wanted it to end. And yet what happens is we never take the time to even write down this is what I want, this is what I am and this is gonna have to take me on some kind of journey to get to what I want. It doesn't just happen, right? If you never ever leave the starting point, if you never move out of home you will never go on this epic adventure which is the life most people want to live. So just doing this exercise and carrying it in your wallet every day is one of the most underrated and simple exercises you can do to make sure you're always making progress towards the things you want in your life. Now, phase two is all about alignment as I call it because one thing that I've learned coaching a lot of people in their 20s and 30s is that people have a lot of dreams and not a lot of actual concrete plans to make those dreams happen. So people have this fantasy of when I get to 30 I'm gonna be married, I'm gonna make six figures, I'm gonna have lots of friends, I'm gonna be well-traveled and yet what happens is we're 22 in that job-making 40K and for five years we're not driven about learning new skills, applying to new jobs, trying to find ways to move up that ladder, not at all, we just think it's gonna happen because we wrote it on a piece of paper or we just had that thought. People say, oh I'm just gonna find love and fall in love and God will provide me with the right mate at the right time. Well, there are a lot of women in their 30s that are incredibly depressed and feeling scared and anxious because now they're 33 or 35, still single and they have to get married and have kids in the next three years because they haven't changed anything about their daily habits so they aren't meeting anymore men potentially to marry. For a lot of us, we have a mismatch between our daily action and the goal. That is the fundamental premise of my book, Master the Day, that is the whole point that I wrote it and if you can focus on the daily rituals, you will naturally achieve that goal. So let's jump in and I wanna show you an exercise. Let's break this down now into what I call alignment or congruence, right? Alignment and congruence is a lot like someone who says they wanna be a better friend and then they actually do that or the team member you work with that says I'm gonna work on this project and they actually do that. Now in reality, people like that are unfortunately not that common. We tend to fall somewhere in between but if we say what I want is here and what I got or where I am is here, that gap is an alignment gap because if you had the skill set and you had the drive and you had the position, literally, you'd be making 100K in a job. If you were the person with another the person, you'd be in an exceptional and loving relationship. If you're the kind of person who doesn't tend to make a lot of friends, there's a reason for that, right? It's not, you're not cursed. There's something about your habits or your personality traits or your actions or lack of actions that results in that. So we need to figure out how do we make what we want and what we do align because we all want a lot of things. We say we want a lot of things but they have to align in terms of action. So if let's say we want the 100K job because this is the gap, right? What are the daily, daily rituals that you have to do to turn this into a reality? So you're not waiting another five years. It may mean taking courses or training. It may even mean going back to school for some kinds of careers. It may mean flying or even networking to meet people in those industries, right? It may mean even researching, like for example, if you wanna go from making 45K to 100K marketing job, you need to probably go on LinkedIn and figure out what are those people doing day to day? What are their actual skills and where are those positions that pay that much? And then you have to change your strategy, right? If it's the friends thing, no friends or not the kind of friendships you want, we have to figure out what that alignment is, right? It may mean literally initiative, right? After a certain age, it's very rare that you just meet people and your friends and then your besties forever. So it may mean your daily ritual is I am going to be the one, me. I'm gonna be the one that invites everyone out and tries to build the community. I'm not gonna expect anyone to reach out to me. I'm not gonna be upset if people don't reach out. I'm gonna be the one that initiates. It may mean new hobbies, right? Picking up a dance class, picking up a programming class, beach volleyball, whatever. And it may mean just constant nurturing and not expecting it to be like how it was in grade school or college. So these daily rituals produce alignment. And if you focus on these daily rituals and you forget the goals, these goals will still end up happening. Because if you are the kind of person that takes initiative with people, if you're the kind of person who has varied hobbies, if you're the kind of person constantly nurturing your community, you will have friends, always, everywhere. If you're the kind of person always taking courses to grow and increasing your skills, applying or networking and meeting people, learning what is the next position, you're always gonna be getting bigger jobs that are more capable. So the clarity of the three years from today and the daily alignment with what you want is how you make sure that gap. You never fall in this position again and you are always taking little steps towards the kind of person and life that you want it to be and have. So if you have a couple of these big goals, the fundamental real talk question is, do any of my daily habits actually line up with making that goal happen? If I said I wanna write a book, am I writing every single day? That is the fundamental easiest question. All right guys, that's what I have for today. Again, I'm launching this brand new thing which is incredibly exciting. It is the Monks Courtyard, which is a collection of online courses on how to design your dream life going forward. Now I wanna share one of those courses which is the journaling course, the strategy pages journaling program. This is something that I've used to build out my channel to this point, to reinvent my life, to write all these books that I've written, et cetera. And it started from a simple journaling exercise that I did every week for years. Now that is a part of the strategy pages journaling program which is one of the links right below this video. So check it out if that appeals to you. And again, before you go, I have one more video that will help you reinvent and design your life going forward right there.