 I think journaling is hands down one of the best ways to design your dream life. Now, not only have I used journaling extensively to reinvent most parts of my life, on top of that, I also have one of the most viral journaling videos on the internet right now with almost five million views. So it seems like it's resonated with a lot of people and it's helped a lot of people. Well, in this video, I thought I would talk about how to design your dream life with journaling part two. What's up you guys? Alex Hine here over at Modern Health Monk. So before we jump in, I've put together a free journaling worksheet that builds off of this that will help you figure out how to get your life together and how to design the life that you actually want, all right? It's the first link right below this video. Now, the first exercise I wanna share is something that I came up with after coaching hundreds of people lost in their 20s. And the exercise I call the five-year filter versus one-time events. Now, I designed this in response to so many people in their 20s saying that there are all of these things they wanna do with their life and they aren't really sure which one to do. So let's say people say things like, I wanna go be an au pair in Spain or I wanna take a fashion program in Paris. All the way down to I wanna go bungee jumping and skydiving or launch a YouTube channel. But how do you actually do all these things and is it possible to do all these things? So initially I had people break down things they wanted to do with their life into two buckets. Now one is called the five-year filter and one is called the one-time event. So I wanna show you this here. So basically, let's say you have a list of things that you've always wanted to do and you're not sure if they're careers or just experiences basically, right? So let's say we have career versus experiences. This is the five-year filter and let's just call this one-off. And let's say you have all these ideas about what you wanna do and who you wanna become and jobs, experiences, just things you wanna try once. Let's say one is being an au pair, one is YouTuber, one is backpacking, one is being a dancer and one is medical school, another is a photographer. So let's say you have all these ideas in your life for who you wanna become or things you wanna try. But how do you know these are things you wanna do forever or they're things you just maybe wanna do once or do for a summer? So I have people write down the full list of everything they wanna do. It could be a hundred things. I have them write down at least 30, 40 or 50 because people always say I have so many ideas of what I wanna do or who I wanna become. But when I actually ask them to write them down, they're never more than 50. So you write down the full list, right? Let's say we just have six. Now, which one of these things do you wanna wake up every day and do for five years? So let's say you look at au pair in Spain. Does that sound like something you'd wanna do every day for five years? Let's just say it'd be fun for a summer but you're like, this is column B. Let's say this is column B, column A. This is B. And then YouTuber, would you wanna do that every day for five years? Let's say maybe, you think you could. Backpacking, do you wanna do that for like a month or every day for five years? I think most of us, you know, one-off experience. Dancer, yeah, maybe I wanna be a hip hop dancer or a ballet or a jazz dancer, whatever, right? That's possibly a career. What about medical school? Maybe I could do that every day for five years. Photographer, I don't know, maybe it's A or B. So now let's break them into one of these columns, right? Is this something I could do every day for five years? If yes, potentially just gut feeling alone, not logic, just gut feeling. Yeah, maybe I could do that. We have YouTuber, dancer, medical student and photographer. Could possibly be in the five-year filter, the career. And then what about experiences? Well, you know, au pair, backpacker, these are things like you wanna do, but maybe you don't wanna do for a year. So we're gonna put them in experience column B. So the first thing is all the things that you wanna do that you've thought of, some will fall into the bucket of this is a possible career and others are gonna fall into the bucket of this is really maybe just an experience and we can leave it at that. Now the second part of this is breaking down some of these five-year potential careers into really daily rituals. So let's say one of the things we had on this list was architect and right now you are in high school, let's just say, but you wanna be an architect. Well, let's flip down to what are the daily aligned actions that would lead to me becoming an architect? Maybe if you're in school, that involves studying the classes to be an architect, the pre-rex, right? Maybe if it's finding mentors to ask about what it's like being an architect or internships, maybe it's reading books just for fun for pleasure. So then let's say if the dream is maybe one of your five-year filters is I wanna be an architect. So what do I have to do on a daily basis? If I'm in high school, let's just say you're not in architecture school. Well, you know, I could say, you know, I have a time from like, you know, 9 p.m., 10 p.m., I can put this on my calendar and this could just be study architecture books, right? Maybe there are visual books on famous architects around the world that inspire you. So just spending an hour or two every night studying what they do might be the thing that you really love. So that time block would be for studying. And then maybe if you're in a job as an architect, maybe it's something similar. You know, maybe what the best architects do, the way they commit themselves to mastery is by dedicating time each evening to actually do that. So figuring out, you know, we did the five-year filter. These are some, you know, maybe some things I wanna do long-term that are not just experiences. And then we align that with daily action, which is, you know, let's say 9 to 10 every night, it's I'm gonna study. Or if I said I was gonna be a YouTuber, I'm going to study YouTube for an hour and shoot YouTube videos for an hour and then edit for 30 minutes. So making sure what's possibly just a one-off experience, meaning you could do it any time. And making sure our actions are aligned with that. Now the third part is what I call the weekly scorecard or the weekly check-in. So if you guys have seen my other videos on habits, the main thing I recommend to stay focused and consistent with your habits is keeping a visual little mini whiteboard that actually has the habits you're doing and how often you've done them. So I'll walk you through my own, but for example, if one of your five-year filters was maybe I wanna be a YouTuber, then the scorecard, for example, would be something like this. We have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And let's say some of our rituals are study popular videos. So we know what works, take an improv class, so that we're actually working on our own presentation skills, our own delivery, right? And then videography techniques. So if my goal is to do each of these, let's just say 30 minutes a day, that's 90 minutes a day, at night, after school, or after your job, then basically I can put these here on this list, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And which one of these did I do, right? So we have like study, we have improv, and then we have video, and then Monday I studied, Wednesday I studied, Friday I studied, I did improv Tuesday and Thursday, and I actually worked on my video techniques Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So then, you know, when it comes to the weekend, you can give yourself a score. And you could say, well, I said I was gonna commit myself to doing five days a week of this, and I only studied my craft three days. I only did improv two days, and I worked on my video techniques four days. And you can see how congruent you are, how aligned you are, actually with your goals and your dreams, so that there is no surprise when you're 40 or 50 and you're having a midlife crisis and you're like, well, I thought I'd be farther now. You can look at that scorecard and there's no surprise where you'll be. You know, it doesn't mean just cause you do things, your dreams are gonna happen, but they're a lot more likely. And certainly, you're not gonna be like the delusional masses that think they're gonna be somewhere magically, and there's nothing day to day that even tracks in terms of the work they're doing towards their goals and their dreams. So, if you do this three-part ritual, the five-year filter versus one-off events, your daily aligned rituals and time block them, and then you actually keep your weekly scorecard, you are a lot more likely to be someone who at the end of this year has built an amazing quality of life while all your friends talked about the same thing but did nothing. So, check that out, try that exercise out, you guys. Download the free journaling worksheet below and I will see you soon.