 If you want to have an incredible life, don't, for the love of God, do this. When you look around at most of your friends and family, do you see that they are strategically, deliberately thinking every day about the kind of life they want to live? Probably not. So despite them being good people, they probably are not living an incredible life and there's a very simple reason why. So let's jump in and discuss some more. What's up guys? Alex Hine here over at Modern Health Monk. Before we jump in, I've put together a free companion journaling worksheet that'll help you figure out exactly what you want from your life and of course how to design that dream life going forward. So you can check it out. It's the first link right below this video here. Don't be this person. I was having a conversation with someone recently who was about 44 or 45 and he was saying that currently he was doubting everything in his life and it was because of one simple thing. He said that, you know, at this moment in my life, I thought I would be somewhere different. I thought I would be more successful making six figures. I thought I would be married to my dream woman. I thought I would have two cute kids and I would have a stable family unit and I would have a purpose for being. I thought I would have traveled to all these countries and I would have written my first book and in general, I thought I would be further and I'm not there. That was leading him to have a really quite serious midlife crisis where he was considering leaving his brand new marriage because his wife didn't want kids. He was considering blowing up his career because he thought he would be further or he thought things would have unfolded a little bit differently and he bought a one-way ticket to Nepal. He went bungee jumping, he went skydiving and in general, he was living out your classic midlife crisis minus having an affair and buying that red sports car but it was pretty much the same scenario. Why did this happen? Why do we call him midlife crisis mark now? What happened was he had a vision of his life that if we're being real, his daily action wasn't aligned with. So he wanted to write books and yet was he even spending one hour a day writing his book? No. He wanted to be at a certain phase of his career and yet was he ever executing daily in a driven way towards his career? No. And in reality, what happens for many of us is we reach a point in our lives where we feel like things should have dangerous word should have been different. And in reality, they weren't because we were not taking aligned daily action in terms of our daily rituals to eventually reach those goals over time. And I wrote an entire damn book called Master the Day to explain why this happens and how you can make sure it doesn't happen to you. So don't be that guy. Now principle number one is figure out your perfect day. This is a highly underrated exercise and the reason is very, very simple. Your life is comprised of days. So let me rewind. Your whole life is comprised of individual days. If I hate today, I will hate my whole life because my whole life is comprised of two days that I hate. If you love today, you will love your life because if your day-to-day life is something that you love, the 10,000 days will be something that you love but there is never a happy ending to an unhappy journey. If the majority of the days in your life, you dislike, meaning you are not spending them the way that you want to be spending them. Inevitably your life is not going to be something that you love because the majority of that block is something that you are not going to enjoy. So what is your perfect day, right? I did this exercise some years ago and I thought, okay, you know what? My perfect day from seven to about 7.45 is I'm going through my morning routine. I spend about 20 minutes reading a personal growth book, 10 minutes going over my goals and then I jump into my number one time block or block of deep work, passionate work, which for me is medical study because I have a private practice here in Los Angeles. I see patients for integrative medicine care. So 90 minutes, I love to study medicine. I'm studying traditional Chinese medicine, general medicine, my hardest cases, reflecting on my greatest successes and in general, that is my main thing that I like in the morning. Now, I like to alternate it with writing new books. So my morning time block until let's say 10 or 11 is pretty clear. Three days a week, I like to spend from about 10 until six with patients but only three days per week. And in those three days, I'm doing the absolute best I can to solve the most difficult medical cases because my brain loves doing that and I like interacting with people in that way. On those off days, I know it's a combination of creative work and strategic work. So every other Tuesday, we spend about four hours shooting videos and the other days, I like to spend them from nine to 12 or 10 to 12 in a cafe doing general creative work, thinking about my life, thinking about how I can improve, thinking about my business, the trips I wanna take and then for 12 to five, I go to WeWork and I do some kind of deep work that can be medical study, that can be I'm thinking about how to make videos better, that can be I'm thinking about creative projects I want to launch. But in general, I'm very clear on how I wanna spend each day and if there is something that I decide is more enjoyable to me, that I want to do more, then I will try to find a way to do that in my life. But because I'm so clear on what excites me the most on a day-to-day basis, I'm clear on my life, there's no way that I'm gonna ultimately conclude that my life sucks basically, right? It doesn't mean it's all going to be unicorns and rainbows, but I'm clear that I generally like my days and so I generally like my life. I don't really ever feel like I have a job. Now, I'm a die-hard believer in having a morning routine and a piece of that involves reading a self-growth book for about 10 or 20 minutes to have your mind focused on growth and what you can work on. You know, for example, a book I'm reading, Drive by Daniel Pink, I'm listening to it on audiobook and then I'm basically going back through all the little key points by using a service called Shortform which really basically in one page shows what the key points are. You know, I can look at the one-page summary to get really clear on what the essential ideas are that I can implement and sometimes that's honestly more useful than reading an entire book because over the course of a month, you forget what you've actually read. Now, by joining through my link, shortform.com forward slash modern health monk, they'll actually give you five days of unlimited access and an additional 20% discounted annual subscription. And that subscription basically gives you access to thousands of book guides for the price of one book a month. So you guys can check it out, the link right there and the first link in the bio. Now, principle number two to design your dream life is track what I call your hunches. I had a very, very profound experience when I bought a one-way ticket to China. Now, you guys know me, buying a one-way ticket to China is a normal thing that I would do, right? I've also done vision quests in the Sahara Desert, et cetera. I'm an adventurer. So I'm 22 or 23. I bought this one-way ticket to China thinking I'd become a monk or a kung fu master or a holy man or something. I live in China for a year and a half. I get back and I end up feeling really, really depressed because I felt like I just lived this epic hero's journey, this hero saga. And now I come back to no job, a housing crisis, student debt, no friends, living with my parents. It was not a good look for me. So for a year, I just did one exercise because what brought me to China was a gut feeling, right? I was in my day job. I was a teaching assistant in a high school in New York and I was just like, man, people really do this for 40 years and then they die. And that's what most human adults call their life. That's not going to be me, right? We talked about the life crisis mark, not gonna be me. So I just write down in a notebook while I'm at my desk, right? In between tutoring kids. I'm like, what do I really wanna do? If I get cancer next year and I'm 24 and I have one year to live, what do I actually want to do? Barring the extreme things like drugs and life-threatening experiences, right? And I determined I've always been passionate about kung fu and martial arts. I've always wanted to live in the far East from the movies. And I've always been curious about what it would be like to live as a monk and see if that's for me. So that vision excited me. And since then I've learned that people always need to have a vision of the future that excites and expires them, right? Because if you have something that is always exciting and inspiring you, you're always going to have a vision that draws you in the future. Ever since that day of getting back from China, I've kept a notebook that I just call the inner directive. Now, the inner directive is just a summary of all of my current hunches. Like for this year, one hunch is that for my 37th birthday, I'm going to walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain. And I know that is going to be a life-changing experience that I will excitedly look back on when I die. Whether I die next year or I die when I'm 103 and I'm an enlightened holy man, Dr. Hybrid, right? And I just keep tracking those hunches. My hunch says, you know what? I need to move to this part of Los Angeles. My hunch says it's time to open a private practice. My hunch says I need to make new friends. My hunch says it's time to write a book, Alex, on this topic next. And this time you're going to do a traditional deal instead of self-published. My hunch says I need to write or create a video on this topic or I need to create a docu-series. That little inner directive notebook has become the book full of my inner musings. And all those things in that book are the passions that I want to fulfill. So you can imagine, if your life is full of all these little passionate musings, how can your life not become incredible, right? If your life is full of exciting, creative project to project, why would that not be the most incredible, exciting life forward? So keep a little notebook of the inner directive and start tracking those things. Now, the third principle for having your best year ever is figure out what I call the big three. That is, it's a very simple focusing question I start at the beginning of each year. What three things, if they happened, one year from now, you could look back and say that was the best year ever, right? And it doesn't have to be as big as becoming a millionaire or something stupid. But realistically, what three things, if they happened this year, would make this the best year ever? And one year, years ago, I wrote down three things. One would be if I could make 50K self-employed because then I could replace my day job and instead of working eight hours a day, I could just work, let's say, four hours a day and get the same exact outcome. The second was having a brand new friend group, right? A friend group, really, because I had just moved home from China, living home for a couple years. And the third was a hobby that excited me. Now, in this case, the hobby that excited me was bachata and salsa dancing. So I just said, these three things, if I achieve them, will be the best year ever, right? Now, the ultimate best year, not the end point of my life, but would be a really, really sweet year. I could quit my day job and just make 50K doing the same thing realistically with half the time invested working. I would have new friends and I would have a hobby that is passionate and excites me. So that became my focal point for the year. So every morning, I'm having my coffee or I'm having my tea and all I'm thinking about is if I could reach these three things, what an incredible year it would be. And then your brain starts going and it's thinking, you know, okay, well, how could I make 50K for my business? Because that would be such a nice life, right? And then it's like, well, I have to work on my YouTube videos and maybe write a book and maybe I need to promote that book more often or maybe I need to launch a course, whatever it is, the magic starts happening in the brain, right? Where it starts looking for ways that that goal can possibly happen. And then I was thinking about my friends. Well, man, it sure does suck that every Friday I get to five PM and I don't have anything fun to do on the weekends, right? And I wish I had something fun to do on the weekends. And then my brain goes, okay, well, Alex, you know, you thought about that salsa bachata hobby. Well, maybe you take classes and then you take classes on the weekend and now you have a fun hobby on the weekends. And maybe one night you go out salsa bachata dancing. So now you have a social thing on Friday nights and maybe Sunday afternoons you're taking classes. And then maybe after your Sunday night class, a lot of those people decide to go out and get dinner together. Now you have a friend group, voila. And then at the same time, I'm wondering about how to have more friends. And, you know, I've met random people, a cup of coffee here or a dinner there, but I'm not following up with anyone. So what if I just start following up with those people that I've met prior? And I take the initiative and I lead the interaction and I go far out of my way to make that happen. And sure enough, after that one year, what happens? I've made a lot of progress towards each one of those goals. Two out of three happened in just a couple months. I had friends, I was taking salsa lessons, and the third, the business, was a several year multi-year goal to be able to do that. But once I did it, then I realized there's magic at looking at your goals every day and trying to make them happen. And finally, the fourth principle to design your dream life is always have a yearly mission statement. So the yearly mission statement is purely, it could be what three things do you want to have occur? It could be these are habits I wanna work on every single day. Or for me, typically I have just one page of paper on the front. It basically has what are the outcomes I want to have happen that year. And on the back, it just has a couple habits that are most likely to make those goals happen. So part of my morning routine, when I review or read a book, I'm looking at some short form content or some books, and then I go through my one page goal setting and visioning exercise. This is what I want to have happen. These habits in the back are the ones most likely to make them happen. Because then you are priming your subconscious to always be looking for those things you want to have happen. All right guys, that's what I have for designing your dream life. Check out that link from short form right below. And then I also, before you go, I have a great video on how to design your dream life that has millions of views. So there's something over there that can help you as well.