How to Change your Life in a Year (3 Simple Ideas)

hey friends welcome back to the channel so what does it mean for a given person like you watching this video right now to change your life in a year well I think it mainly comes down to one simple idea which is to go from where you are right now point a to where you want to be 12 months from now point B as efficiently as possible I.E in as few steps as possible while enjoying the journey along the way now this is simple but not very easy and one of the tricky things is to actually

figure out where you are right now and where you actually want to be and that's what we figured out in the first two videos in this three-part video series so in part one we figured out what's our North Star and what is the sort of destination we want to get to and in part two we tried to figure out where we are right now based on our past and present experiences but now we're bringing everything down to just the 12 months time Horizon changing your life in a year and so we need to figure out

how to go from A to B as efficiently as possible and while enjoying the journey along the way and in this video we're going to go over three of my favorite methods for doing just that okay so the first method for changing your life in a year is the dreamlining method now I first came across this from Tim Ferris 4our work week but it's also an amalgamation of a couple of methods by Jim ran and Zig Ziggler who were like big OG productivity Guru type people in like the 20th century and the idea behind the

dream learning method is that you basically ask yourself the question in the next 10 years what are the sorts of dreams that I might like dream for myself and I really like this exercise because it encourages us to go outside of our usual day-to-day and actually think a little bit longer term and so here is the prompt that's worth thinking about in the next 10 years what do you want to learn what do you want to have who do you want to be what do you want to try what do you want to see what

do you want want to do where do you want to go what do you want to create what do you want to contribute to and what do you want to overcome now what I'd really encourage you to do is pause the video right now with all of these 10 things on screen and just take 10 minutes set a 10-minute timer on your phone and just like write this down and the goal here is to go for quantity rather than quality your goal almost is to just keep the pen going as much as possible and almost

like write as much as you can without even taking the pen off the page yes you can type it if you want but I actually think there's something even more powerful about writing this stuff down and there is some evidence that writing things down by hand also kind of increases the Pathways in our mind and all that fun stuff but I'd really encourage you to pause the video right now and please do this exercise I guarantee if you actually do this exercise it will change something about your life okay so I hope you've done that

but if you're struggling with this then usually perfectionism gets in the way a lot of people will think oh no but like now I have to think so hard and really the point of this exercise is you don't want to think too hard about it you kind of know in your core and in your heart what are some of the these things that you want and if you let the head get in the way if you let the Mind think no that's not possible no I can't do that no I could possibly have that then

that's sort of defeating the point this is not a list you need to share with anyone it's not a list you're going to post on Instagram it's just a personal list for yourself and we're just brainstorming we're brainstorming some ideas here so one way of thinking about this actually is that if there's anything in the next 10 years that you think you might want or there's even a remote possibility that you might want it you have to put it down on the list and I want you to imagine that if you don't put it down

on the list it is not going to happen but if you do put it down on the list then there is at least a possibility that it might happen so if you think for example maybe in the next 10 years I might want to write a book maybe I've got 0.1% certainty that I might want to write a book that's enough put put down write a book on your 10-year dream list the other thing with this method is that don't worry about coming across as as a materialistic basically like don't worry about it we are

taught in society that it's wrong to want things to have but you know when I do this dream thing you know I want to have a nice big house want to have a loving family and also I want to have a nicer car like I want to upgrade to the Tesla Model L you know it's it's actually totally fine to put down these sorts of materialistic things again you're not sharing the list with anyone unless you make a YouTube video about it so don't allow yourself to be held back by like the sphere of like

no it's wrong of me to want something that costs large amounts of money if you think you might want it put it on the list and you can work towards it and maybe as you get there you'll realize you don't actually want it but at least you're like going in the direction that you've defined for yourself and there's a link down in the video description if you want a free Google doc that has this all these questions along with my answers so for whatever it's worth you can see what sort of things I wrote down

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vaguely pencil sketched out just a sort of sense of what I maybe might want in the next 10 years let's now move on to Method number two which is bringing it down to a 5-year time Horizon and Method number two is the Odyssey plan now this is an amazing exercise from the book designing your life by Dave Evans and Bill Bernett they are professors at Stanford Business School and they have a class about how to apply design thinking to your actual life now the idea of the Odyssey plan is that you have these three different

prompts the first prompt is your current path and the prompt is write out in detail what your life looks like 5 years from now if you continue down your current path path so again what I would really recommend you do is you pause this video and you take action and you actually spend 5 minutes just drafting out pen and paper Apple notes whatever the hell you want to use what does your life look like 5 years from now if you continue down whatever path you're already on and it's useful here to really imagine like what

does an actual day in the life look like what time are you waking up what are you doing for breakfast how long are you committing to work are you even working like what's going on there what are you doing at work what time is your lunch break what time do you get back from work what do you do in the evenings like what does a day in your life look like 5 years from now on your current path and obviously you're not going to know if certain but you can make a prettyy good guess depending

on where you are in your life right now all right now we come to prompt number two so ignore everything you've written for your current path you're going to design A New Path and this is your alternative path write out in detail what your life looks like 5 years from now if you took a completely different path so I took some people through this exercise when I gave a talk at Google a few months ago and all of them were software engineers and so what you know their current path was continuing down the route of

software engineering whereas the alternative path what I said to them is like all right guys you're no longer allowed to do software engineering as a career and you also get fired from Google and you not allowed to apply for another job at Google what does your alternative path look like in that context so that just hopefully gives you an idea of like what we're talking about with current versus alternative and again I'd recommend you pause the video write it down because I guarantee this exercise has the potential to change your life if you actually do

the work and then once you've done that we now have the most interesting question which is ignore your answers to the first two prompts the current path and the alternative path and now write out your radical path write out in detail what your life looks like 5 years from now if money and social obligations and what people would think were completely irrelevant I would recommend you pause the video think about it write it down and I guarantee if you do it really has the potential to change your life now the whole idea behind the Odyssey

plan is not that you're necessarily picking one of these or picking an amalgamation of them but it just gives you permission to think a little bit more divergently to think a little bit more broad because all of us have a tendency to stick to the path that we already on and we fail to realize that actually what wherever you are in your life right now even though it might not seem like it you actually have loads of different options if you are sitting here watching this video video right now on some kind of device you

have more options than like 90% of the world's population or however Grim you think your situation individually might be now whenever I bring up this Odyssey plan to people there are always people in the audience that say oh but you know what about these Financial constraints I have what about these family obligations and you know this sort I can't just abandon my kids can I and yes I'm not suggesting you abandon your kids the current path is the path that you're currently on with all of the financial and family and all of these social obligations

that you currently have the alternative path is those obligations are still intact it's just you have to take a different path but the radical path asks us to imagine a world in which just like imagine what if money were No Object what if you just had 100 million in the bank how would you then be spending your time what might that path look like and the whole idea behind the whole social obligation thing it's not that you're going to abandon your kids in this in this radical path the idea is that you're not worried about

what other people will think often the fear of what others will think and the Judgment they might bring on us holds us back from achieving the things that we actually want to achieve in life obviously if you have kids you've got to deal with the kids like I'm not suggesting you mad on your kids like that's not the goal of this the goal is to to just break free of the limitations of what Society is telling you you need to do with your life based on what you've already done up to this point now I

think a lot of people might think that the value of something like the Odyssey plan is these alternative Futures that you're imagining but actually for me when I did this in 2019 the main value I got from it was recognizing what is the life I will have if I continue down my current path and I actually wrote about it in My Weekly Newsletter that I've been writing every week since 2018 so this is what I wrote out when I was around 25 um and this was about four something years ago uh and feel free to

pause the video if you want to have a read of it but then this is what I wrote in my email afterwards when I was writing this out I honestly felt a bit depressed I had a feeling of is this really it I guess it's similar to the classic midlife crisis that you're supposed to have when you hit 40 when you realize that your life is basically over don't get me wrong this Future Vision is a pretty idelic life but there's nothing particularly cool about it it's just a very standard result of the path I'm

currently on and if I think about the climb the process of getting there it's pretty pedestrian I just have to do more of what I've been doing for the last few years churn out more YouTube videos launch a few more more online courses and next thing I know I'll be 30 looking back and wondering where my 20s went now this exercise was really impactful for me because it made me realize that you know this current path it's not really the path I want there are aspects of it I like I like the idea of continuing

to make YouTube videos but do I really want to be training as a part-time traine in anesthetics and supervising physiology on the side just seemed a bit not very exciting and that was the realization that made me realize oh hang on I can make a change to what I'm doing right now and I can actually choose the sort of direction that I want to take with my life and I can actually tweak what I'm currently doing to land at an entirely different destination okay so what does all this have to do with our goal here

which is to change your life in the next year well the idea behind figuring out what you want in the next 10 years and figuring out what you might possibly kind of aim for in the next five is to ultimately boil it down to a list of things that we want to achieve in the next 12 months and this is Method number three which is the 12mon celebration what you want to do is basically pick somewhere between 3 to five goals that you're going to focus on for the next 12 months and I call it

a celebration because the way I like to figure the these goals out is by imagining 12 months from now I'm sitting across with a friend and we're having coffee and we're celebrating the progress we've made in our lives and how great things have gone over the last 12 months and usually I like to have at least one thing for health one thing for relationships and one thing for work and I don't like to have more than five because I think four is a good number because like more than five you start to not really remember

what you're focusing on you start to focus on too many things and so I would encourage you to post the video right now and have a think 12 months from now what would you like to be celebrating with a friend in your health in your work and in your relationships and any other category of life that you might choose to celebrate things in and this is why figuring out what our 10year dreams are is often helpful because mostly people find that a lot of their 10year dreams could actually be accomplished in the next 12 months

if they really set their mind to it and even just deciding that and making that list and writing it down and just looking at it every now and then is basically guaranteed to change your life this is this whole idea of manifestation but manifestation is really just like you've set a goal in your mind and now your brain your default mode Network your reticular activating system all of these like aspects of the brain and mind are focused then on like recognizing those things that will get you closer to your goal but if you want to

make this even more powerful then there are three follow-up questions you may want to ask yourself for each of these three to five goals and those questions are why how and when so the first one is why why is this goal actually important to you the more reasons you have for doing something the more likely you are to do it whereas the fewer reasons you have the less likely you are to do it if something is really important to you you know starting with why really connecting to the purpose behind it it is far more

likely to happen compared to if it's just a thing that you just sort of maybe feel like doing and don't have really any compelling reasons to do the thing secondly how are you going to do the thing what are the three to five major moves that will help you get to that goal so for example one of my goals for 2024 is to get into the best shape of my life why because of various reasons to involving improving my appearance improving my cardiovascular health improving my stamina I don't want to die young I've kind of

got a bit of a belly and poor genetics so I want to get rid of all that stuff I don't want to have my increased risk of cardiovascular events or Strokes like that run in the family there's all sorts of reasons I have for wanting to get into the best shape of my life and then if I figure out the how the how is like the three to five main moves that are going to get there and so what are those it's gym three to four times a week Progressive overload eating healthily and eating lots

of protein and honestly if I actually went to the gym three to four times a week with Progressive overload with healthy eating and enough protein I'm basically guaranteed to get I'm basically guaranteed to get to my goal of being in the best shape of my life and that's how I know that I've got the right plan at least for now and then the final question is when when are you going to find the time to work on those specific things and really getting spef specific on what that actually looks like is going to be ridiculously

important and if you're interested in the specific method that I use to manage my time and do all this stuff that'll be linked up there and down below it's the Trident method for managing your time now for me I'm going to be honest I did not have a systematic way of setting goals back in the day I've only recently come across a lot of this stuff uh as I've been reading a lot about the signs of goal setting and things like that but if I connect the Dos looking backwards oh you know one thing that

I did actually do is the Odyssey plan and you can see the results of that um but every year I would try and set goals and I would sort of come up with a bunch of random ones and I've been doing like annual reviews on notion since 2019 so but but there were always goals like I want to learn the guitar I want to learn how to sing I want to get into a relationship I want to improve my posture I want to become a gym shark athlete there were just too many things but if

I really think about it I only really had one goal when I started this YouTube channel and sort of worked on this business and that one goal was the goal of Financial Freedom I knew that like with every fiber of my being that I never wanted to be Shackled to a job that I didn't enjoy and I saw so many doctors around me absolutely miserable at work and I was like this is my personal definition of hell so the thing that I would think about in the shower the podcast I would listen to on the

way to work and back the YouTube videos I would I would be watching the courses I'd be taking the books that I'd be reading all of this stuff was all focused on this one goal of how do I Achieve Financial Freedom you know I was giving a talk at at Cambridge yesterday to a bunch of medical students and a bunch of them were asking you know what are your tips for making money one of them was tutoring for 440 an hour and I was like he was like you know I'm doing some private tutoring and

I was like how much money you're making he was like oh it's a lot of money I was like how much it was like £40 an hour oh my God so much money it's like $50 an hour and I was was like ah BR um he I you know I then asked asked some follow-up questions and he was I was like okay you know what are we aiming for and he was like you know I really want to build a business and you know make lots of money Achieve Financial Freedom and I asked him okay

how many books have you read about building a business he was like zero I was like how many YouTube videos do you watch about building a business I was like you know just yours I was like do you watch any Alex hosi stuff no how many podcasts do you listen to about building business I was like I mean I don't have time to listen to podcasts I'm a I'm a student and I was like oh I'm not knocking the guy cuz it's good that he was making for 40 quit an hour as a private tutor

but when you set your goal on like this one thing and you Orient your life towards just that one thing you know like Michael Phelps all he probably thinks about is swimming right he's not thinking he's not worrying about all these other 18 different goalss that he wants to achieve he's focused on that one thing and doing that one thing really well and he lives and breathes that one thing similarly even now I'm still focused on the goal of growing my business that's one of my three goals for the year also focused on my health

which is why I did a personal trainer session this morning but I'm so focused on that that like I've like today it's it's like 2:30 and I've already listen to like three podcasts at 2 2.5 XP all about growing a business and this is what I think a lot of people don't realize that this sort of stuff doesn't just happen accidentally I have not met a single entrepreneur who has achieved Financial Freedom who has not dedicated a lot of their life to the Mindless pursuit of that one thing there's a good book by Felix Dennis

called how to get rich which basically talks about that if you actually want to get rich you have to devote your life to that one goal I'm not saying that that's what you should want but if you do want it then it's worth recognizing that there is value in focusing there's value in focusing on that goal and like orienting your life towards it and orienting the consumption of content and reading and writing and like podcasting and audiobooks and all the stuff towards that one goal if your one goal is to get really good grades in

your exams then obviously you you already spending a lot of your time doing that thing but for some reason when it comes to non-w workk themed stuff non-academic stuff we don't realize that based on the goal you should absolutely change your behaviors if you actually care about achieving that goal now what have I said in this video I've basically said figure out what you want in the next 10 years figure out what you might want in the next 5 and and then turn it into a bunch of 12-month goals it's the basic standard advice that

every personal development and like personal growth and self-help book has been spouting since the dawn of time but it's still ridiculously valuable and yeah loads of people set 12-month goals but then how often do they actually think why how and when how often do they actually look at those goals you know one thing that often sometimes super successful people say is that all you need to do is write down what you want to do and just look at that list every every day and even just that act of writing down what you want and actually

looking at it every day will nudge your brain and your mind and your behavior towards that direction and yeah you might not be able to specify exactly what the timeline for the thing is like when you're going to achieve the goal but if you write it down and look at it every day it's often magical how the brain somehow finds different things to latch onto and helps you get towards that thing that you think you want but you have to write it down so this brings us to the end of our three-part series on how

to figure out what you actually want in part one we talked about finding your North Star in part two we talked about finding where you are right now and in part three in this part we've talked about boiling it all down to a series of 12- month goals and defining a why a how and a when for each of these three to 5 12- month goals if you haven't seen the other videos in the series I'd recommend you might like to check them out especially if you've got to this part of the video you probably

Vibe with this sort of stuff and genuinely these are all like journaling prompt things like like no one can tell you what you want in life it's a really hard question to answer but it's not an impossible question to answer and I think a lot of us have the default assumption that like oh it's just you know it's it's sort of like the meaning of life like like there's no answers but it's it's not like the meaning of life in that there are answers and those answers you can get at through a systematic process of

journaling prompts of reflection and ideally of writing things down and the importance really of writing things down it's like if you're trying to solve a complex mathematical equation you wouldn't try and do it in your head you would write things down and the complex mathematical equation of what you actually want is exactly the sort of thing that benefits from some serious thought serious effort because if you change the things that you want that completely changes your direction in life and so really the more effort you can put into figuring out this fundamental question of what

do I actually want the more likely you are to actually get it now if you haven't seen episode one or two in the series episode one will be linked over there around finding our North Star and episode two will be linked over here around figuring out where you are and what you actually want so thank you so much for watching I hope you enjoyed the series and I'll see you in the next video bye-bye