 You know the biggest problem with goal sending advice? It's that if you don't even know what you want or you aren't even sure what you're trying to get at in life, it's very difficult to actually do anything to make that happen. So in this video, I thought I would share four journaling prompts that can only help you reinvent your life but design the life you want going forward. What's up guys, it's Alex Hine. So before we jump into this video, I've put together a companion worksheet, which is a free journaling worksheet. It's the first link below the video that will help you figure out not only how to get your life together and figure out what you want, but some specific exercises that will actually help you do that going forward. So check it out right below this video. All right, so step one, you definitely need a journal, right? And get a good pen. I know some of you internet weirdos have told me you like my handwriting, so we're gonna get some, a lot of that up and close. First thing, first exercise that I think is useful is what's your perfect day? Now, I know a coach that paid Gary Vaynerchuk years ago, which was still an astronomically high fee to coach him in business. And apparently what Gary said was, what's your perfect day? Reverse engineer your perfect day. If you wanna be at home with your kids until 9 a.m. and then go to work, then become an entrepreneur that allows you to do that. If you wanna study as an artist all day and sit in your studio painting, then just do that. So reverse engineering the kind of life you want by number one, thinking about the perfect day. Let's start with the morning for example, and I'll give you an example from my life about how you can live life any way you want. You just have to do it. So day to day, three or four days a week, I see patients. But you know what I do? That you're not supposed to be able to do in the eyes of society. I don't see anyone before typically 10 or 11. So I decided my perfect day is from 10 to 11, that's when I start seeing patients. And I'll see them until 6 p.m. And then I'm also only gonna do that three to four days a week. And you know what? In the morning, I can do either whatever the hell I want or realistically, I just like the morning to study with a good cup of tea or a good cup of coffee. So I use eight to 11 or eight to 10 as my morning routine. And then from there, the rest of my day can get planned out any way I want. I can go out to dinner with friends in the evening. If I'm toast, I can just go home and recover or even introvert pretty hard and eat dinner by myself in a restaurant. But basically I know what I'm doing from nine to five and I know what I'm doing in the morning. And then the evening is open-ended. But the biggest thing I would say is try to figure out what your daily life looks like in your ideal average day, right? Not on the beach in Thailand, but what's the average day that you like? Now the second prompt is if you don't really know what your perfect day looks like, what's on your not-to-do list? So sometimes you don't even know what you want, but you know what you hate. And I know for me, one of the things I never wanted was a nine to five office job. For some people, not to do means you don't want to work with your hands, right? You would rather do intellectual labor versus manual skilled labor. So that could be, you know, office job versus field. When I was in school, I majored in conservation biology and pre-med. So I was fully planning to either basically be a freaking park ranger because I did not want to be behind a desk. I wanted to be out in the woods and just walking in my body or using my hands in medicine. What about being in an office or doing intellectual labor where you're a programmer on a computer 12 hours a day? That's very different your day-to-day life. So are any of those a not-to-do, right? What about shift work? Maybe if you want to become a nurse, you are going to have to do night shift and completely flip your sleep schedule. And that's something you don't want to do. You know, for example, a lot of people don't want to only have 10 days of vacation. Well, if you don't, then you better become self-employed or an entrepreneur like myself because otherwise you don't get very much time off. And that's pretty rough. So figure out vacation. Do you want to work in an office? Do you want to work out in the field somewhere? Does it not even matter to you? Who are the kind of people you want to work with? I mean, I work alone. Maybe you love working around people and you love that 5 p.m. water cooler chat. So number two is the not-to-do list. Number three is if I could never take a vacation, what would I do? And I think this is a really important one. Seth Godin has this quote of, if you keep finding yourself taking vacations to escape your life, why don't you build a life that you don't need to take a vacation from? And this is a bigger question, right? I mean, theoretically, if any of us was given $100 million, our life would look very different on a daily basis. But let's say no vacation. What does your life look like? What do you want it to look like? For me, we just talked about the fact that I have a private medical practice. I don't go there at nine in the morning. I don't want to go there at nine in the morning. I don't want to get up at six in the morning and I don't have to. So if you're an entrepreneur, you could afford to do that. So if you never could take a vacation, what is the most sustainable life for you going forward, right? I'll give you some ideas. Maybe it means you work 20 hours to 30 hours instead of 40 to 60. And you have to figure out how to make that work financially. Maybe no vacation means you choose to do only things you're passionate about and you're gonna hire anyone else to do whatever else is in your business or your life, your house cleaning, your cleaning of your clothes, whatever, just so you don't have to do all these little menial things that you're not really that interested in. So if you could never take a vacation, what would your day-to-day life look like? What would your weekly life look like? The work hours, what you work on, if you had to work forever until 90, what would you do? That's a really important prompt to think about for me in my opinion. Now the fourth one is what will I regret not doing? So I'm gonna write deathbed regrets. So Brani Ware was a hospice nurse and supposedly was at the bedside of hundreds of these people dying. And she said, she heard the same few deathbed regrets. Basically what they said was, I wish I did what I actually wanted to do, right? She wrote it as, I wish I lived the life true to myself and not the life others had expected of me. What that really means is, I wish I did whatever the hell I actually wanted to do and not what society or my mom or my dad told me I should do. So in terms of deathbed regrets, what are the things you wanna do that you've put off because you won't make enough money or I'm not sure, do people succeed doing that or you're afraid you'll be judged or you're afraid you'll fail? So I'll write down, what do you actually want? So what do you actually want? Meaning you get $100 million. What do you wanna do every day? What do you actually wanna do? Forget parents, forget, let's say all your friends loved you and your parents would love you no matter what you do and you're financially taken care of. What do you actually want? That's a really important journaling prompt because it'll help you get clear on being attuned to what your gut and your intuition says and not what the voice and the thoughts of society or your parents say. So these prompts are ways you can get your life back on track and design your dream life going forward. And again, there's a free journaling prompt, a free worksheet, the first link in the description and you'll also get a weekly journaling email every couple of days showing you how to design your dream life going forward. So check those out and I'll see you guys in the next video.