 For a long time, I had professionally coached people in their 20s, and the struggles in the 20s tend to be the same kind of questions. They're questions about what do I do with my life? How do I find work I love? And really, how do I create an insanely enjoyable, meaningful existence? Those were the three main things that came up when I coached people. But I found that a lot of people dealt with this feeling of feeling paralyzed, or they didn't make decisions because they felt like, you know, maybe if I made a decision, I could go down the wrong path for potentially years and not be able to get that time back. Well, in this video, I wanna share a simple journaling exercise that I did with coaching clients that has since become a very, very useful exercise. So guys, Alex Hyen, author of Milk the Pigeon, a field guide for anyone lost in their 20s on Amazon and Audible. Now, I've included a free drilling worksheet below this video if trying to plot out the path going forward in your life, figure out how to get your life together, reach your goals and create a great life is a question. Check out the free journaling worksheet below. So the first step in this exercise is to brain dump all of your ideas. Now, this sounds very simplistic, but every time I had spoken with a coaching client years ago, they would always say this exact line, I have all these ideas, but Alex, I have all these ideas for careers, but Alex, I have all these things that I wanna do, but Alex, I have all these travels, all these experiences that I wanna go on. And every time it led to inaction because it sounded like so many different career and life paths. But what I found was that when I coached people, if I had them actually write down the exact things that were there, so many ideas, it usually was not more than 20 or 30, 50 at the absolute max. Now, 50 is a lot of ideas, no doubt, but most people, they really couldn't even come up with 20. And I found that if they just wrote them down, they did the napkin math, just by putting down all the possible ideas, the possible possibilities that they wanna do or that are really exciting them, if they just did that, they'd realize, wow. Number one, not as many as I thought. Number two, one third of these are garbage when I look at them closer. And number three, some of these really are peaking my interest and my curiosity. So then let's go on to the second step, which is to analyze these ideas that you wanna do. Usually this is, what do I do with my life also with what do I do with my career or what do I do for work, a job? These two are always the big questions I've seen in my experience. So I found that people get confused because their things that they wanna do, their desires, their dreams, their hopes are a fusion of three things. Experiences, trips, and careers. So the second step is you've written down all these ideas, right? You have them all on paper and now you break it down into two filters. This next step is you break it down into the five year filter. So let's say you've come up with just five ideas for the time being, your five ideas are become an au pair in France, move to New York, become a writer, become an actor in LA or become an engineer. Now a helpful filter to understand which of these things to do is the five year filter which is effectively to differentiate is this something like a one-off trip? Is this an experience? Is this a dabble? Is this a hobby? Is the question of can you see yourself doing this every day for at least five years? So let's go back through that list. An au pair, can you see yourself? You're in France, you're watching kids, you're being a nanny, you're dealing with all the parental and kid stuff. Can you do that every day for five years? The other one is moving to New York. Congrats, you have a new life. Now, are you taking the subway? Are you walking around? Where are you going and specifically what are you doing? Like is that a reality you can see yourself in every single day for five years or does that sound disconnected and overwhelming? And then you go through all of these things that you have on your list and you go through the five year filter which is effectively that exact thing. And what this does is it parses out. It parses out what's just an experience you want maybe for just two weeks and then what is really something you want to do long-term as work or a career? The second filter I found very, very helpful working with people is, is this an event or is this a career? Another way to think of it is that is this an experience I want to have or is this like work I really want to do every single day? So let's go back through that base five point list. The first one is becoming an au pair in France. Now is this an event or is this a five year long-term career? You probably realize this is probably an event like it's an experience you want to have. So let's put that in the event bucket. The second one is moving to New York. Well, this could be an event or a career. Maybe you just want an internship there for the summer or you want to work there during the pandemic or just get a job there for a year or it could also become a career moving to and living in New York. So that's kind of on the line. And then you go to becoming a writer. Well, this one is clearly could be a hobby or an event but most likely this is a career that you're going to do long-term. The fourth one was become an actor in LA. That's clearly more of a career. And then the last one was becoming an engineer which is clearly more of a career. So now as you break these down are these events or experiences you want to have or are they real careers? And then you can differentiate in your mind this is something I should actually work towards as a job and this is something I could just do as an experience on a trip to Fiji to go scuba diving and see what it's like to study giant clams in the South Pacific. So I find that this narrows a lot of the confusion because a lot of things that we want to do are just experiences we want to have but they're not things we want to do every single day. You know, living in Paris sounds romantic to basically every American you ask but if you live there you realize there may be things you love and things you hate about it. So try to understand is this an experience I want or truly a career is usually very helpful at plotting. You know, this is just a trip and this is what I want to do every day at least for the next phase of my life. I hope that helps you guys. The napkin math has been a very useful exercise for myself as well as for a lot of the people that I've coached and that I've worked with. Again, I have a free journaling worksheet below this video that can also help you plot out exactly what to do going forward and how to actually make that a reality. So you can check it out below the video and I have more videos on figuring out what to do with your life right over here.