 The irony of trying to achieve your goals is that trying to achieve your goals too hard doesn't actually work. It's a lot like if you've ever seen a guy trying too hard to pick up a girl at a bar and then he starts fumbling over his words and says something incredibly stupid instead when actually she might have liked him. Speaking from experience here. Now in this video I wanna share what is the sweet spot between discipline and surrender that creates flow when it comes to achieving your goals in life. What's up guys, it's Alex Hine, let's jump in. So why will detaching from an outcome of a goal you want help you reach your goals faster very often? The story I love to give is the story of dating. You know, when I moved to Los Angeles I had just finished my doctorate, I opened my private medical practice here, integrative medicine, I'm a doctor of TCM and I had no friends and it was the pandemic. So I thought well what is the best way to possibly meet someone here in Los Angeles? Well it's the pandemic so everything is shut off physically and locally so I guess I'm gonna have to go online. So I spent about three months hating my life on hinge basically allocating the only 10 or 15 minutes that I was on the toilet every morning to my hinge time and after that that was all I could actually stomach because I hated it so much. Now I went on one or two dates over the course of three months but no one was really striking my fancy so to speak and again I wasn't meeting anyone in person because I had no friends, it was a global pandemic and Los Angeles County was completely shut down. So eventually what happened was after three or six or nine months of doing that I just decided that you know what this sucks I'm never going to date and I'm just gonna focus on what makes me happy. So I had done everything up until that point to try to make new friends, go on newcomers to LA hikes and join hobbies and I decided I'm gonna give up and I'm just gonna focus on whatever makes me happy in my life. So around that time there was a hobby I'd been wanting to take up for a while which was bachata and salsa and the reason I wanted to take it up is as an introvert I've always been someone that was the guy who had to have five glasses of wine before he would dance at a wedding and I made the personal promise to myself that in 10 years I'm gonna be ashamed if I'm still that guy. Just for that one thing, just dancing at weddings as opposed to having some dance skills. So let me do something that no one else could see me doing that is unlikely and let me just take that up as a hobby maybe I'll meet friends. So I pick up this new hobby with just bachata class and the first time this was out in the park where we were practicing bachata we were all wearing our masks you couldn't even see anyone and eventually as COVID began ending in Los Angeles my bachata teacher opened up a private studio and I started going there every Sunday for two or three hours and going to the practices on Saturdays. Now after about three months I ended up falling in love with this craft, this hobby. I found it to be a way to meet people I found it to be a somatic hobby that made me feel really good day to day and I found it to be something that was just kind of unlocked a part of myself that I didn't really access prior. Now, about a month later a new girl walks in the new circuit of bachata class and we hit it off right away. Now, since then we have been traveling all over the world going to these bachata congresses we've been all over Croatia where there's this giant salsa and bachata event in a little city called Rovin we went down to Malaga recently and to Mallorca doing all kinds of bachata events we went to to loom dancing everywhere and I was just reflecting back at the cosmic irony of this that I wanted this so bad I felt like I was finally ready for a serious relationship I was seeking it out so bad I was taking action I was taking massive action and it wasn't happening it doesn't mean that just because you work hard towards your goals they're going to happen it just increases the chances that they will happen but the irony of it all was that the day I said forget it I don't really have an outcome and I don't really have a goal that I'm going after suddenly I found a hobby I loved I met my first friends in LA and I met the woman that I've been dating for years and I thought this is a life lesson here that sometimes when you detach and follow whatever is your soul's highest excitement it leads you to those other pieces but not in the linear and logical way you expected it to happen now what if it comes to actually detaching to build something really complex like a business something you assume has a lot of hustle and a lot of grinding and a lot of getting things done one of the things I've put together here is actually a free goal setting worksheet it's the first link right below this video that will help you really figure out building something as big as a business how do you turn that into quarterly little goals and how do you break those quarterly little goals into daily habits and daily rituals so download that worksheet fill it out and check it out because that is something that can help you plan a big goal, detach and then figure out what makes you happy now but in general let's say you're talking about shooting YouTube videos or writing books things that I've both done many times there's a difference between trying to create videos that do well on the internet that you dislike versus trying to just focus on I'm just gonna learn the craft of video production I'm going to learn about storytelling I'm going to learn and I'm gonna play with it and yes there has to be a business side or else it is a hobby not a business but learning to view business as the intersection of play right I'm just going to play with this and I'm gonna work on making them better and better and better and I'm just gonna see where it goes and I'm gonna learn and I'm gonna iterate and with the book every day I'm just gonna write, write, write and from there what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna edit it and I'm gonna read other books and just see what works well and then I'm gonna narrate my book and then see if it flows viewing things like businesses that are complex and traditionally associated with grinding work ethic viewing them from the point of view of play and learning is often what takes off the edge that is how you detach and you will often have the exact same outcome so the secret to detachment while still having success is in the happiness of pursuit you know Laozi who wrote the Daodging says that the sage, the enlightened person does their work and then lets it go and so what that means is that you do the best you can and then you are not attached to how well it works but then you learn and for many of us if you can focus on the happiness of pursuit the happiness of building the craft the happiness of learning the happiness of iteration the happiest path to trying to meet new people to date the happiest hobby that may also result in having new friends all of that kind of thing is something that will inevitably build in detachment that will not only make you feel good now because you're not stressing that it's not working or it's not happening but you'll feel good now and chances are you're gonna have that success and that goal happen anyway now I've actually launched something brand new that's incredible called the Monks Courtyard and instead of me putting together a bunch of sponsors here that may not be related or interesting to you guys I've actually been launching my own online courses that are all about how to design your dream life so the link right below is for this Monks Courtyard and check it out because right now I'm offering a time limited deal on some of these courses and the bundle to get these courses but I think there are things and topics that will be really interesting to you I've had thousands of students they're based on my own books based on a lot of my best videos here so I hope it helps check it out down below before you go don't forget to check out a related video here on what happened when I tried manifesting for a hundred days because while I hate the topic of manifesting I have a really fascinating case study of real life successes that have happened to me from manifesting so check it out