 I bet you've tried an annual review type exercise in your life before you've reflected on the year, you've reflected on what went well and what didn't go well and you reflected on what to do next. But in this video, I want to share the life in review exercise that I think is a little bit different than talking about goals and what to do differently in a conventional way. And I want to share that exercise with you today. What's up guys? Alex Hein, author of the book, Master of the Day, so I've included a free journaling worksheet down below the video, which will build off of this exercise here that we're going to be talking about to script your life going forward. You can check it out. It's the first link in the description below. Now when I started my business and really when I started my foray into self-improvement, I believed a very simple lie. That if you just work hard, you will eventually become successful. But then a weird thing happened. I was working hard and I wasn't becoming that successful. And the more I looked, the more I could find evidence of people who worked hard and made it, and who worked hard and who didn't make it. I found people who worked hard, but then never achieved a level of success that they wanted. And it wasn't that unrealistic. I met people that worked really hard, but then ended up gaining a lot of weight and lost our health in the process. I looked at people who worked really hard, but ended up divorced and lonely and the only thing they really wanted was that romantic person in their life and just best friends. So I saw too much evidence in my life that working hard by itself does not produce success. And this brings me to the first point of reflection. Do your beliefs reflect reality? Because this video is not going to be about tracking habits like I typically do very practically. It's really about the underlying religion and philosophy of your life is that accurate because some people spend their whole lives living a lie because they're using these beliefs or a mindset that's really not true. So your first action step for this review exercise is to actually write down, and I'm just going to give three quadrants of life examples, love, success, and happiness, write down what your beliefs were and did those beliefs prove to be true. Example, in love, you might believe if I'm the nice girl or nice guy, they'll just come around and I'll find the person I want to date. Your beliefs about work may be like me. You just got to work hard and you'll have all the success you've always dreamed of. In terms of happiness, you may believe that all you need is inner peace. And if you just meditate every day, you're going to get all the peace of mind that you want, even if your external life is in shambles. Well, how'd that work out for you? Did being the nice guy or the nice girl get you the person you want or did you get treated like crap? Did working hard make you success? Or are you only kind of the way there and it sometimes doesn't seem to work? And was meditating a great strategy in general, but did it not get you that inner peace you thought was unbreakable? So it's most important is what Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, says in his book, Principles, where he says that if you have a belief or a philosophy, test it out to see if it works, because if it doesn't work, you could spend another year or your whole lifetime with that belief and you'll never get the results that you want. So did the beliefs, your philosophy about success in that quadrant of life, did they prove to be true? The second prompt here is very simple. What potentially needs updating about your beliefs or your philosophy or your religion around what you thought it would take to reach that goal. So early on in the process of building my business, and I share that because it was the by far hardest goal I've ever had to do. You know, in that process, I met one of my best friends in the world, Clint, and Clint and I were like, you know, friend soulmates. We met, it was cosmic. It was a deep friendship from day one. We knew we'd be friends forever. Eventually I've shared the story here. He ended up committing suicide a few years back. And a big piece of that was because just this always forward never retreat business philosophy, that there's only discipline, grit, perseverance, if I'm not getting results, then I'm not pushing hard enough. And that was a piece of the evidence, not only my own life, but also in his life that that it's just about the work and the hours. It can't be true because that neglects anything related to the spirit or how you feel internally. So through my own experiences and observing other people and the death of my closest friend, it taught me that my internal system for success, which used to be just work harder, longer hours than everyone, then became that plus work that is intrinsically so exciting and fun and fulfilling that it is not draining. I don't feel like I have to push hours a day. So I updated my operating system the next year to now it's not just whatever career could potentially be successful. It's what am I drawn to and then layer on some crushing hard work behind something that is tugging at the heartstrings. So your action step number two is to just write down what needs updating about my religion or my philosophy of success in that part of life. Maybe you are the nice person, the prototypical sweet girl, nice guy. And you've realized guess what the people that I like never end up going for me. They always end up going for the jerk, the ambitious dude, the athlete, whatever. So obviously, reality is telling me being nice is important, but it's just one piece of the attraction puzzle. And maybe I've realized what women really are attracted to is, yes, a nice guy, but a nice guy in a very ambitious, focused on his own life body, right? So someone who's ambitious, he's going after his dreams, he's independent and he's nice. Then my philosophy has been updated. I know I need two things now, and then that's more likely to get me results in the future. So I want to leave you and ask you what practices or what skills do you need to be doing daily instead? The essence to me is most people review their lives one day a year, and that's at the new year. But if you review your life every single night, that's 365 times faster. You are improving yourself and iterating and going to reach your goal because you're becoming the next level version of yourself. So in that sense, if you do this kind of exercise once a week or once a month, you're a lot more likely to get faster results and get to the goal that you want. So this is the next installment of our 10 day personal growth challenge, personal development series of practices that I think can really, really help you. Again, if you want to get started with a similar journey exercise, check out the first link below for a free journaling worksheet to help you reinvent your life and plot out how to just have the most incredible life going forward. You can check it out the first link down there below. Before you go, I have the related videos right here on this challenge.