 So for the last few weeks, I've been doing this long life experiment where I've been testing out what happens to my life if all I do every day is exactly what I want to be doing, what intuitively you draws me, what feels the most energizing, and what is the least goal oriented. And I promised myself for an entire year that I would track this daily in a little notebook, a tiny little journal, and at the end of the year, better or worse, I would just report what ended up happening. Now, in this video, I want to share my week two findings on my one year of surrender. What's up, you guys? Alex Hein. Now, before we jump in, there's a free journaling worksheet. If you guys like journaling, like the way I am journaling the surrender experiment, right below this video, the first link is for a free journaling worksheet that plan out how to get your life together and how to reinvent yourself. So you can check it out right below this video before we jump in. Now, I wanted to share three realizations I've had in the last week or two, doing this experiment. The first realization is that whereas we think that the more productive we get, the happier we will feel because we feel that sense of accomplishment or that we've done something, in reality, often the happier people are more productive. So let me give you an example. Have you ever been broken up with, lost your job, or had an illness? If you've answered yes to any of those, tell me how motivated have you been to go and do anything in your life after one of those events? I mean, there are people who get divorced and lose their job. For years, they are not the same person. Some people for decades. Some people, even throughout history, you hear Johnny lost Cindy Lou who in the war and he was never the same and never remarried and he never recovered. So it's tricky because we think that a lot of these things we want to have happen in our lives, the body, the business, the person we want to meet, we can just strong arm. And yet what I often see so much in my own life, looking back, is that the years where I am the happiest, I'm often the most productive. Like one thing that I found personally is that, you know, there may be this one project you've been procrastinating on pretty hard for six months, right? And every time you sit down to do it, you feel that pit in your stomach, you feel the resistance, you just don't really want to be doing it. But then you take a few weeks off, you start going out with friends, just getting dinner, having drinks, talking about life, you go for hikes with your dog, you take time to sleep in and you eat good food, and you just play for a couple weeks. You know, and then one day you sit down and you are so energized that day that you just sit down in a coffee shop, good cup of coffee, and you begin banging out that project that you've been procrastinating on for half a year. I find that very often the surrender experiment is just a redirection temporarily, forgetting the same result, just a tiny bit later on, and you will feel better in the short one. The second thing I learned in this week two of my one year of surrender is that we often are not good judges of what makes us happy. We often cannot really predict what we think will make us happy. What makes us happy is not often on the same ground. You know, when I moved to China in my early 20s, I bought this one way ticket. And in my head right in my head, what I thought was going to happen was that I would stay there for 10 years, I would become a monk, become a martial artist. I was a martial artist, but I would really dedicate my whole life to that to go deep into being a monk and a martial artist. And then from there, I could always come back to the US and live whatever mundane or normal life I wanted to live. But I remember talking to my mom about six months after living in China. And I was putting so much pressure on myself to study seven hours a day to learn Chinese, to go train in the park with this Chen Tai Chi master I've been studying with to really be disciplined about squeezing every drop out of life. And I was telling my mom, I was like, I don't know, should I stay? Should I not stay? I don't really feel that happy here. You know, I don't really know, just generally lost. So she said, you know, maybe why don't you just try the next six months to do something different to try to have as much fun as possible. So the next six months, that other term I signed up for these morning classes of Chinese just so I had a place to come to and show up to every day. Now the next six months, my only goal was, I'm going to try to meet all my classmates, just kind of try to get dumplings with them during the day, get drinks and go to karaoke at night. We're just going to go out and have as much fun and live it up in China and have the time of our life. Nothing related to goals. I even stopped going to the martial arts teacher, the sure food that I was seeing in the park. The reason I moved to China, I forgot any idea of becoming a monk. I was like, I'm just going to travel to the holy mountains just for fun. I'm just going to go see them. And I just in general decided that not having any goals became my new goal. Low and behold, that next six months or nine months I ended up staying after my initial six months were the most fun, the most happy years really of almost a decade for me. I mean, I came home and I got so depressed that next year, because just the contrast of having this absolutely incredible year compared to that last one was so stark that it affected me deeply. And so this idea of sometimes we don't really know what makes us happy. But you don't have to. Because if you're chasing what excites you, that is your body's recognition that that is what makes you happy. Now the third thing I realized is that there is really a snowball effect in life. And you don't have to plan every step out. You know, somebody wisely said to me, you don't always have to plan out the five year plan of your goals. Very often if you're working hard and excitedly towards something that you're interested in, these new doors will be opening and closing all the time. I mean, it's like hundreds of doors always in motion moving opening closing. And a year from now, new doors will open or close that you could have predicted. And so trying to plan all of this ahead of time is futile. But one thing that I see is that you take someone and they start getting fitter. And after a while, a few months or six months, they start to gain an increase in confidence, because now they look good. And they feel good, because they're healthier, they're more energized, they like who they see in the mirror. But it doesn't end there. It goes on where now guess what, that person who was single for two years, now ends up getting into a relationship, because they excite themselves. And now they can excite another person because their self worth has bumped up a bit. Now they're in a relationship. They're even happier because they're having fun. They have a good social life. They have all this stuff going on. And then that leads to getting a promotion in their job. Because again, more energy, more confidence, those little tiny disciplines they've built are now spilling over into. All right, what if I just stay a little bit later at work and I'm more strategic about this project, or I take the initiative on this project. And so the problem is at the beginning, we so often logically try to say, you know, I want to get the dream person, then the promotion, then I'll get fit, then I'll have my 401k, so you know, this very artificial, linear logical setup. But sometimes the great things will happen nonlinearly in a way you could not predict, but they will happen nonetheless. And so sometimes that five year plan happens without you trying to line it up and orchestrate all of it. So that is my week two revelations of my one year of surrender, my year surrender experiment. If you guys want to follow along, download the free journaling worksheet below this video, because that is kind of one of the exercises I'm using to track and reinvent myself and really strategize my life going forward. All right, you guys, so download that below. And before you go, check out these two related videos here.