 When I was first working on changing all the parts of my life, really at the same time in my 20s back then the thing that inspired me the most was really seeing the stories of other people's transformations. You know, it's a lot like if you have to lose 50 or 100 pounds. It seems impossible. Like it's never going to happen. But if you see one of those success stories on the internet, now you know it's possible. So I thought in this video today, I would share a little bit about the story of my 20s and three of the most important lessons that I learned. What's up, you guys? Alex Hein, author of Milk the Pigeon, a field guide for anyone lost in their 20s. Subtle product placement there, right? Now I've included a free worksheet below this video to try and figure out what to do with your life and plot the path forward. The free journaling worksheet right below in the link there is going to help you figure out exactly what to do, at least to plan out your next steps. You're also going to get a weekly email on how to use journaling to direct the future of your life. So if I'm being brutally honest, you know, in my 20s there were three main things, three questions I was obsessed with. I mean, those questions made up this book, Milk the Pigeon. Those three fundamental questions are the three fundamental chapters, each with the lessons inside. But the first fundamental question is really what the hell should I do with my life? And I want to tell a little bit of a story for each of these lessons, because I think in some way it's going to help you as well as my takeaway from that specific lesson and how I answered that question. So what the hell should I do with my life question really began with my move to China? And I've talked about it here before, but I want to share it in sequence because some of those things I think will help you. So I got a job at a college. It wasn't in the field I studied, which was biology and environmental science. And it wasn't even really a job that I specifically wanted that much. But I had been at home with my parents looking for a job for a while. And my dad got me an introduction to the principal at this school in New York. And she said, you know, did you want to teach and help in the two drink center in our high school? So I got the job. It was a great job. I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do forever, even though I do love teaching. And so near the end of the year, I was like, well, what have I always wanted to do? You know, I'm not going to be this young forever and not this free forever. So I should probably just do something that I really, really, really feel excited about. So I was like, well, since I was a kid, I'd always been into kung fu and meditation. I thought I'd become a monk. Like even since my early teens, I joked about potentially becoming a monk. And I always felt this dichotomy between living a human life as well as the split between do I just retire to some mountaintop and do some esoteric practices every day. So I always felt that pull, you know, that tug since I was a little kid. So I was like, well, guess what? I mean, if this is the last chance in my life, I have to potentially be totally free to do that. Then I should go do that. So I get this one way ticket to China. And the whole all the while I'm thinking like, what the hell do I do with my life? I know it's not being a teacher. I know it's not that. What do I do with my life? So the whole year I'm living in China, I'm learning from kung fu teachers in the park in the middle of February freezing in Beijing. I'm studying Chinese four or five, six hours a day. But still this nagging feeling of this is a great adventure. But this is not what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. You know, this just feels like the next step. So where do I go from here? Well, long story short, honestly, going to China and living there did not help me answer that question of what the hell to do with my life. Because all it answered for me was that I did not want to continue living in China forever, certainly not as an English teacher. Kung fu probably was not the passion of mine that I wanted to do every day for the rest of my life. And what it really did was it opened up this kind of massive, deeper existential crisis when I came home. Because now basically as being, you know, an expat who's repatriated, I felt even more lost than the first time. Because now I did the thing that suddenly I thought I was going to do forever. You know, I told my parents I'm planning to be there for a decade. And now I'm 24 and I'm back home. So it taught me a very important lesson. The really essential lesson of what the hell to do with your life is the following. There is no map. Once you leave conventional grade school, school gives a structure. So even though you may hate school or you don't want to show up to school, school gives you a structure that also gives your life meaning. Because you have a place to be. You have a mission to do. You have things to get done every day. Now, even if you don't like that, at the very least, having a clear purpose in the moment gives your life direction. So if you're outside of the structure, you've graduated, you're in the real world, whatever that means. Now you have to create the treasure map. You are now the captain of the ship. You just have to figure out where the ship is going. And that is a very difficult thing. And it doesn't solve itself in one year or three years, five years, seven years. In reality, the ship is always sailing. That's the point of a ship. It has to always be sailing somewhere because that's what it was designed for, not to be docked in a bay somewhere, but to be going in a certain direction. And the other big lesson for this from me was that you may not know where you're going for a long time. But at the very least, you need to pick a direction and go in that direction. Whatever is the best opportunity at the moment that may last a month, that may last six months, that may last 10 years. But you have to be sailing in some kind of direction if you're not even sure where the treasure map is and where you want to go. So just pick the best direction that excites you the most and has the best potential for your future right now. So my action step for this question that plagued me was to really be obsessive about being very deliberate with where you want to go. And if you really aren't sure where you want to go and I know so many of you have told me that and I thought that for years, pick just the next best decision and just commit to that. But whatever you do, be deliberate. Question number two was really all about how do I find the work I love? Because I learned very quickly, I am not the guy you want to hire to just pay a lot of money to do something I don't like. Or worse, something that pays me a lot of money that I don't feel like delivers any value to the world. The problem for me was that I had spent all these years building this entrepreneurial venture. Actually, I had tried multiple, but Modern Health Monk was the first one that worked out to the point where I made enough money to quit my job. So I'm in this phase of my life where I'm hustling. I'm back from China now. It's 24, 25, 26. I'm feeling very lost. I'm trying dozens of careers. None of them excite me. None of them I'm passionate about. I don't want to be doing any of them three months from now, let alone 20 years from now. So I'm feeling like the world's biggest failure because nothing excites me. I don't know where to go next. I don't know what I want to do. I'm thinking about just moving back to China and just making the best of it. I'm working multiple jobs. I'm freelancing. I'm also going back to do night classes for physics and some other stuff, considering maybe a conventional medical program to follow up. I do what every lost 20-something does, which is you think about grad school, even though it's not clearly really related to a next step, but at least you're doing something and buying some time. I thought about fleeing back to the last place I came from, China. I think about all these entrepreneurial ventures, but then an interesting thing happened, which is that I had been committed every single night and every single weekend to building this entrepreneurial venture to try my best to earn my freedom. You know, if I could just make 3,000 US a month, that would be enough to reclaim my time and begin doing what I wanted to do with it. So I'm working every single night, every single weekend, every single Sunday. My girlfriend and I at the time, who dated for like five years, only saw each other on the weekend for three years, right? Nothing Monday through Thursday. And eventually, after over 1,195 days, I counted. I was able to make enough money to quit my job. Wasn't a lot of money. It was barely enough to live. It was like $2,500 US a month. But I figured I could at least pay my rent and eat. And now I would have 40 hours a week to decide how I wanted to live my life. But a crazy thing happened next. This goal that I'd been just destroying myself, crushing myself, trying to make happen. Now all of a sudden I find myself with all the time in the world to work on what I want and I'm building a business that I don't even like. Because now as an entrepreneur, my job is to do sales and marketing and business growth all day, which were not things I naturally enjoyed anyway. They weren't things I wanted to be spending my time doing. So I learned my next very important lesson about how to find work you love. The big lesson in a realization here was that your excitement about what you like is always changing. It's always evolving. Even if you are an entrepreneur, the business you're so jacked up about now in three years or five years, you could hate it. I mean, look at professional athletes. They do the crazy grind. They have sickening discipline and work ethic, even those that love the game. You know, by the end of their career, they just don't even want to play anymore. They're just done. And so there's two really important things about finding work you love. Number one, it's kind of a journey of exciting projects. I think of it as almost phases of your work life, where this phase you're working on, this thing that excites you, but in a year or three or five or two months, that's completely different. It's a totally different game. And the second thing is that what is eternal is the valuable skills you acquire in the process. Because you never really know what your next exciting project is going to be, that then it's going to tie in all those prior skills that you developed that are now super useful for being successful. You know, for example, I had no idea that I was going to ever write any books, but two of those skills I acquired before I wrote my books were audience building and learning a bit about marketing, which is just helping people find out about you. So when it came to doing my best to write these two books that I talk about here, I not only had an audience that was willing and interested in buying them, but I knew how to like generate buzz and interest about these books and how to regularly get the word out about the books because I don't have a publisher. I don't have a huge marketing publishing house that can get the word out to millions. And as a result, those prior skills I acquired that didn't seem that relevant to anything else resulted in my books all being Amazon bestsellers and I've made almost six figures in royalties from them. So these skills you acquire that are super valuable are closely tied into these exciting projects after exciting projects. So my action step and my formula for this phase became chase what is always exciting you and in the process continue to acquire valuable skills. Now my third and final question, which is one that kind of always plagued me since I was young was how do I build an awesome meaningful life worth living? Like how do I build a life that I feel inspired by? That end of the day, I feel like it's just such a good full life. You know something that just excites me and makes me feel alive. Now around this time of me reinventing myself and coming back from China and trying to work on all the pieces of my life. I went to this business conference and met a guy named Clint. Clint and I were it was just a weird almost like a Hollywood friend soulmate for like a better word like a platonic same sex male friend soulmate. Just one of those friends you instantly connect with. You know you're going to be friends forever. You're immediately hanging out all the time talking on the phone. I mean, I'd never I've never had that kind of friendship as a guy with another straight guy basically is what I'm saying. You know, I've had that that weird connection with a girl in dating that then progressed to a relationship but never with friendship. So I thought this was awesome. It was like the best thing ever. I'd never had like a best friend maybe outside of being eight years old. So to be an adult and to find that was pretty cool actually. So this friendship just evolved quickly. We were always talking about business. We were planning like cool business mastermind trips together. You know, we met each other's friends and we were in these entrepreneurial circles. And it was just one of those people you just know you're going to be friends with for the rest of your life. And it really got me thinking about what makes life meaningful. Whether you achieve things but you don't achieve things. What makes it meaningful? Now the dark turn of the story is that, you know, about six or nine months into us hanging out all the time. He gave me a call left a voicemail and said, you know, could you help me move in a couple days? I'm going to be moving into my fiance's with her. So, you know, around closer to the time of him calling me, I called him back and I was like, yeah, where do you want to meet? Where do you want to go first? And no response, which was very unlike him. Next day, I called him again. I texted him also no response, which was definitely not like him. So that's kind of where I got the hunch that maybe something was wrong. And I found that he committed suicide, you know, the night before I was supposed to help him move. You know, a piece of that experience was besides just feeling like, like something went wrong in the matrix. Like it was actually an error in the universe. Like, you know, someone didn't carry a decimal or, you know, a number or two. And then this person randomly died in the cosmic order. Besides that feeling kind of unsettling me. It also made me just feel a little confused about what I found meaningful in life. And I thought a lot about the experiences that I had and whether success and just even working hard was tied to meaning for me. And I came to the realization of two very important things being important. The first was meaningful relationships, because here I am, you know, five years later talking about how meaningful that relationship was to me. And I'm not here bragging about, you know, how satisfying hard work is. So the first was that an inherent piece of a meaningful life is not related to anything you achieve at all. It's just being with great people that you want to just sit and drink a beer with and just reminisce. And the second piece was that meaning is closely tied to whatever makes you feel alive. And usually it overlaps with contribution. So things that you do that then impact and help other people usually are higher on the meaning spectrum than things that you just do that don't affect anybody else. But the most important thing about meaning is that, you know, when you're a millennial, you compare yourself to the factory farm lifestyle. The status quo is you get a job, you get the nine to five, you get the white picket fence, the 2.5 kids, that's life. That's the status quo. So the juxtaposition, the opposite, the contrary is a bucket list life, right? YOLO. Create a list of all these crazy experiences, do all those crazy things. That is a full life. But that's often not a meaningful life. Contrary to that, a meaningful life is usually not a bucket list life. And that's my big point here. Meaning is usually a lot more subtle. And it usually is related to relationships, to key core emotional experiences, and just projects you work on that are helping other people, you know, as well as are personally fulfilling. So my formula for this question became, you know, meaningful work and meaningful relationships. That was the secret to me, having a meaningful, really full, alive life. So I realized that's a pretty long video, you guys, but I hope those stories help answer kind of some of these existential questions, which were not so easy for me. And some of those I'm still working on. But I do feel like that restlessness I had is very much not there anymore. And I think because I really thought about these questions a lot. Now, if you want to work on those, try to get your stuff together. Check out the free journaling worksheet below the video, because you're also going to get any journaling series on how I use journaling to plot the path forward in my life. Now you can do that as well. All right, you guys, before you go, I have two related videos right over here. I'll catch you in the next video.