 I've asked all the time, what is the most important thing that people need to live a better life? If I'm a teenager, what's the thing I can do to live a better life? If I'm in my 20s, what do you wish you knew in your 20s to not make them suck and to be more deliberate and conscious and to really reach your goals in the future? Well, in this video, I want to share what I think is the most important thing you do daily to live a healthy, happy, fulfilled, balanced, successful life. Hey guys, Alex Hine, author of the book Master the Day. Now for me, one of the biggest things you can do is actually plan out what your ideal year looks like. The first link in the description, I've included a free worksheet on how you can plan out having your best year ever. The first link there, once you click that, you're also going to get a weekly email on the things you can do to improve your life and make this year the best you've ever had. So what is the most important thing in life? To me, the most important thing in life is to have goals. And it doesn't mean because I think achievement is the most important thing. It's because to me, goals direct human consciousness, goals direct your mind. They give you direction, they give you fulfillment, they give you something to look forward to and be inspired by daily. So goals, to me, are the most important thing to do in your life, to set them into work towards them. And I want to share why that is. So the first thing is, without goals in life, if you don't set the direction, things and life just happens to you and you don't know why. The number of people I've talked to in their 40s and 50s that tell me, Alex, I just woke up one day and I was in this life that I don't even know how I got here. I don't even know what I want. I don't even know why. Like, why? How did I get here with three kids? The mortgage, all this debt, every day is kind of like, well, how did I get here? That's what happens when you don't set goals and you're not consciously thinking about the direction you want your life to go in. You know, so many of us, when we don't set goals, it's this feeling of being a rudder of the ship. It's like, you know, a boat that's just pushed into the ocean and then it's like, all right. Have fun. Bob, we'll see where you end up. And of course, they end up in Mysteryland or the Bermuda Triangle or they end up in some random bay somewhere on the earth and they're like, what, what, how, why? But it wasn't a mystery, right? It's a ship without a rudder, a ship that sets course from, let's say, New York and it wants to go to London. It's going to get there every single time because even if it gets blown off course, out of a disaster, it can always course correct. It's like, whoa, we're going way over here. All right, let's bring it back. Whoa, my dad's way over here. All right, I got to work on that. Whoa, my relationship's really sucking. All right, let's bring it back to the middle. And in school, so often why, even if school's unhappy and it's not that fun or it's stressful, it's harder to feel depressed in school than it is in life because in school, at least there's direction. In school, at least we know I've got to do this year of school with these classes. I got to show up and be somewhere. So even if you don't want to do it, it's hard to really feel depressed. But in the real world, especially your early 20s, depression is almost like an expected thing because there's no game anymore. There's no direction. There's no goals. There's no mission. There's no deadlines. There's no, you just show up and work nine hours a day forever, 50 years. That's all you do every day the same thing day in, day out. That's depressing to me. That's depressing. That's dying at 20 and being buried at 70, whatever that quote is, because there's no direction going forward. The second thing is that goals provide means for growth and growth is life. Now, have you ever been at your desk or working or studying and you're like, my life is good and I have all the things I want. I'm not starving. I have a good apartment, but I'm not happy. Have you ever felt that before? Because I felt that a lot in my 20s. So how could you be unhappy if you have all the material needs? You maybe have a partner you like, your friends, but life overall is just meh and you don't understand why and it's kind of scary. The reason for that existential angst about life is because there's no growth. There's no challenge. You know, you take someone who's sitting like that. They have all their first world needs met. But the second you give them an exciting, inspiring goal, I'm going to train for a 5k. I'm going to spend every evening writing my book. I'm going to spend this weekend working on my passion project and business I want to create. That person is an excited, inspired person. You know, you find a person who's deeply happy and deeply fulfilled. They're off building a boat in the backyard or repairing old cars. They're planning a trip around the world. They're working on a passion project. They're building a model. They're writing that book. They're trying to find an awesome way to make their relationship better. They're building a tree fort in the backyard. That's a person who's deeply happy because they have a project. They have growth. They have a mission. There's a reason why people with purpose some research suggests can live up to 8 years longer than people without purpose in their lives. What I'm suggesting is that with goals, you can create a mission and direction and that will give your life fulfillment and excitement going forward. The last thing is that goals provide direction and meaning, a purpose or a mission. One of those days when I was sitting at my desk, I developed this bad habit of trying to make myself feel excited and inspired. I would go to kayak.com forward slash explore and when you go to that, it shows you how far away you can fly for how much money. In my head, I would be going through all these trips and all these amazing things I could do and the planes I would jump out of the skydive and the bungee jumping I wanted to do in New Zealand and all these adventures because right now, even though my life was good, it wasn't exciting. I didn't feel alive. Just by setting a goal and the longer the goal, the bigger the mission, the more it's going to fulfill you and the more it's going to drive you. And so just by having goals, you have a mission in your life. It's the person who wants to transform healthcare, the person who wants to become a YouTuber and like figure this stuff out how to build a business, how to build a brand. How do you just build that most exciting, inspiring life? That's the person you meet at a friend's party and they're just jacked up on life. They're excited. They're inspired. They're doing all the stuff that they love the most in life. That's the person you want to be around. You know, it's not the person that's like, I have a great job, I've got a lot of prestige and respect. I'm a movie star and I've got all this cool stuff going on and I'm a model. It's like cool story, bro. Show me someone who's living something cool, like something exciting, inspiring. I want to meet people with passion because passion is the rarest quality in people. Trying to find someone that's truly alive and excited, inspired by their life is the rarest thing, isn't it? And the older you get, the harder it is to find that and that's why you have to become that person because the world needs you to be that person who is excited, alive and inspired because that is what inspires the world. It's the people who they themselves are alive in their body. They're jacked up on life and they know where they're going and what they want. And that person with a purpose and a mission is the person that thousands or millions of people can get behind. That is the kind of person you want to be in your life and that is why you should set goals. So that's my inspired rant for today but before you go if you want to get started on setting goals, download the free worksheet I've provided on planning out your best year ever because that's going to help you figure out how you can really do that in your life. So click the first link below. You'll also get a weekly email on how to begin setting goals in your life. And after that come check out my related videos on this topic right there and right there.