 How do you figure out what to do with your entire life? You know, when you're 20 or 19 or 15 or 40, there can seem like there's all these options and things that sound good. You have your own desires. You have success. You have love and purpose and meaning. You have the wishes of your parents and your mentors. But how do you really figure out what to do in your life? In this video, I want to share this analogy that I call the drunken staircase. What's up guys? Alex Hine, author of the book, Master of the Day. So I've included down below this video a free goal setting worksheet. Now that worksheet will help you strategize what the vision is for your dream life and how to actually make it happen. So you can check it out the first link below this video. Now I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that you really cannot plan your life, right? Like this fundamental question, what do I do with my life is very, very flawed because that's assuming that when you're 25, you're even going to want the same things as when you're 30 or you're 35. And sometimes you even get the goal that you wanted, like financial success or the respect of your parents. But you realize you don't really feel that well internally, or you may even be depressed. So the problem is how do you figure out what to do with your life? You don't. All you can do is figure out the next step. For me, I booked a one way ticket to China when I was 23. But the crazy thing was I went there thinking I'd become a martial artist, kung fu master, a monk, this ultimate sage badass, and I came back after a year. And then I was like, well, what do I do with my life all over again? But the thing is, if I tried to figure out what I was going to do after China, what I was going to do after that amazing year going after my dreams, I never would have even gone to China. But it's one of those things where because I just pulled the trigger, I got on that plane and I just took action on the first thing that that ended up leading me to the next thing. Boyd Vardy has this amazing book where he talks about the analogy and the relationship between being a tracker in the African savannah and someone who's tracking their own kind of life purpose. And the analogy he gave was very, very wise and very simple. He was saying that you don't try to follow the entire lion's track when you're tracking it. You just look for the next lead. So you may not know ultimately if you're tracking a lion for five hours outside, you have no idea what direction you could go in. Did he eat? Did he not eat? Is he mating? Is he sleeping? Is it too hot? Is it too cold? You cannot predict all of those paths ahead of time. All you know is you follow the next lead that you have. You follow the next footprint in the dirt and then you follow the footprint after that in the dirt and then the footprint after that. All you need is the next lead, not the whole trail. Now I think of this as the drunken staircase analogy. It's like when you're coming home from the bar, you've had too many drinks, and you're trying to go up the steps either into your apartment or into your bedroom, and you have your iPhone shining, you know, the flashlights on, and you're kind of drunk. So you're trying to find the next step. You don't look for the whole staircase or at the top of the staircase. You just make sure that your dumb drunk self can get that first step. And once you have that first step with the flashlight, then you find the next step. Once you have the next step, then you find the third step. So once you can find that, it's a lot easier to know exactly where you need to be to get up to your bedroom. And that's the analogy for life. So when it comes to this idea of tracking your purpose, tracking your life, the drunken staircase analogy, all of this is to illustrate you not only should not want to even have it all figured out, you shouldn't plan for that analogy to even be something that's feasible. You just need the next step. So what is that next step that is really tugging at you internally? Maybe it means uploading that YouTube video, even though you don't know if it'll lead to anything. Maybe it is taking that job in the new city, even though you don't know if a year you'll still want to stay in that new city, where it's taking the chance on dating that person. And again, you don't know if they're it, but you'll ultimately never really know unless you just take that first step, that first definite lead. So if you are trying to figure out what to do with your life, just pick the next best step. And that first best step will lead you to the second best step. And then in retrospect, you will look back on your life like I did at 23 buying a one-way ticket to China to live there, but I didn't graduate as a doctor of Chinese medicine until 33, 10 years later. And I never could have planned out all these little side paths I'd been down, but it eventually all comes back together when you look backwards through your life. So I hope that helps. If you want help strategically planning that out, download the free goal setting worksheet right below this video. And then when you finish that up, check out these last two related videos.