Why You Feel Lost (And What to Do About it)

if you clicked on this video then maybe you're feeling a little lost maybe you feel like you're behind in life that other people have found their true passion or they're making a load of money or they found love and maybe you haven't yet hit those Milestones that you were hoping to hit by this point maybe you feel like you're in a transitional state in your life right now where things seem to be changing and you're not sure if the direction of change is really what you want and maybe you're not even sure what you really

want because there's so many options out there for what you could do with your work and your life and you don't want to waste years of your life going down the wrong path so you end up feeling a little paralyzed I've had these thoughts and feelings at various points of my life as well and so in this video I wanted to share five strategies that I've personally found really helpful that I hope you might too from a neuroscientist who studies and writes about this stuff for a living embracing the fact that you are in Perpetual

transformation that the person you are today is different from the person you will be tomorrow and sometimes it can be a little bit uncomfortable when you're going from one state to the other that's fine that's just what life is this is literally part of the definition of life so that's an LA Lun she is a neuros ien IST former Google executive and author of the wonderful book a tiny experiments which is sort of the neuroscientist guide to navigating this feeling of uncertainty that a lot of us have about whether we're really making the right choices

in life and by the way if we haven't met hello my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and author of The New York Times bestseller Feelgood productivity which is about how to be more productive in a way that feels good these days my main gig is that my wife and I along with our team are building a series of productivity apps that we wish existed in the world and on the side since 2017 I've been making videos on this channel that are all about the books strategies and tools that we can use to

help build a life that we love so if that soundss like fun then you might consider subscribing strategy number one recognize the Red Queen effect so the Red Queen effect comes from a quote from Alice in Wonderland where she's speaking to the red queen and the Red Queen basically says you have to run really really fast to keep in the same place and if you want to get anywhere in life you have to run twice as fast as you're physically capable of doing and so the Red Queen effect is this feeling that we have in

Modern Life where we have to keep on running faster and faster on the treadmill of life but somehow we still feel like we are falling behind we're working longer hours we are optim in the out of our morning routines we are hustling on our side projects and our personal Brands and we are doing all this while we are scrolling the highlight reels of other people's lives who seem to be further ahead than we are and this never-ending race this hamster Wheeling that we're all doing is the perfect setup for what neuroscientists like ANW call time

anxiety time anxiety is this belief this Sensation that you have that you're late in life that you haven't done enough yet that your peers are doing better faster and living more interesting lives when I first read about time anx in the book I was like yes this is it this is the name of that feeling that I've had at various points throughout my life when I was in high school and applying to medical school like it was this feeling that other people out there had done more work experience had better grades had more things on

their CV when I was in medical school and trying to become a doctor it was this feeling that like you know other people are able to get ahead in their studies and they're also really popular and they're also doing the sports and they're also getting these Publications and extra CV points and now in my life as an entrepreneur and author it's like oh man I should be doing more book promotion because these other authors are selling more books and now we're building all these apps but like they're not growing fast enough like we could grow

them faster if we just did more things it's this time anxiety thing that like time is running out and I am not moving fast enough it really stems from social comparison because we all have this giant leaderboard that we're all looking at where we see that our friend or our colleague or this person we used to know is already there in their career or has this salary or is married with two kids already and we haven't done these things yet we keep on comparing our timelines and this is what creates the time anxiety so people

probably would have had time anxiety back in the day but back in the day the only people you could feasibly compare yourself to were other people who were around you whereas now in the realm of social media with YouTube and Instagram and Tik Tok obviously all of the stuff we're no longer just comparing Our Lives to the people around us we are comparing Our Lives to literally everyone else in the world and because of the way the algorithms are set up we are very unlikely to come across an Instagram re from someone who's leading a

totally normal life instead we're going to come across these Instagram reals of these people who are like I don't know building custom furniture for their kids or growing a$1 million business to a billion dollars in revenue and valuation and so whatever game you are playing in your life there are always people who are further ahead of that game that you're going to encounter on the social media feeds and with this sort of thing there really is no Finishing Line it's a constant game of comparison the whole keeping up with the Joneses thing just supercharged in

the realm of social media so firstly is to recognize that literally everyone has this feeling I have spoken to people who are billionaires who have the feeling that like they're not working hard enough because their neighbor has more billions in the bank than they do and the second thing to recognize is that you can never really win this game if you playing the game in the first place so the question is not how do I catch up and how do I feel this behind it's why am I feeling as if I'm in this race in

the first place and there is a really good prompt which is what would your life look like if you didn't feel like you were in such a rush what would change about how you're leading your life what would change about how you're doing your work or running your business what would change if you didn't feel like you were in such a rush and this is something that every time I think about it it just like I'm just like ah just gives me a feeling of Liberation I don't need to be in a rush we do

not need to be rushing we don't need to have this feeling that we are behind on the Milestones oh by the way if you are enjoying this video and in the majority of my audience who either are a Creator or would like to be a Creator someday then you might like to check out spotter Studio who are very kindly sponsoring today's video now I wanted to show you a little bit of a behind the-scenes look at how I come up with ideas for my videos because coming up with fresh and hopefully non-repetitive content ideas week

after week is honestly one of the hardest parts about being a Creator and that's why my team and I have been using spotter Studio which is an incredible AI powered platform specifically designed for creators like us and it's basically changed our entire ideation process for making videos so what you can do is whenever you're creating a new video you can create a new project you can put in the title and thumbnail that you're thinking about for the project and then you can brainstorm which is super nice and I quite like explode which then uses the

AI to kind of take the idea that you've come up with and give you a bunch of different options that could work for an alternative framing of that particular video and you can see for example which specific words are outperforming in different niches like storm apparently does really well in titles World apparently does really well in titles and so I can find something I like to look off like your guide when feeling lost and then you can kind of go through and short list your titles there's also a very helpful outliers tool here which kind

of figures out what the niche of your YouTube channel is and then looks for other videos that are overperforming from other channels within a similar Niche and this is the sort of thing that used to be really manual and kind of time consuming back in the day but now spotter makes it really easy with this outlier analysis and then if there's a video that you like the look of you can use the brainstorm feature which then helps you take that General concept and do it in your own way spotter Studio has saved me and my

team so much time on ideation and research which means I can focus on the thing that I actually enjoy which is like creating the content rather than worrying about how to package the content and so if you're a Creator who wants to take a more datadriven approach to your content strategy then check out spot Studio using the link in the video description and they're constantly adding new features and tools to help creators like us hopefully make more useful videos for our audience so thank you so much spotter studio for sponsoring this video now a big

part of why we feel as if we are behind in these specific Milestones that leads us to strategy number two which is to identify your invisible scripts so cognitive scripts are little patterns little stories that we have stored in our brains and that help us navigate our lives and the world in the most efficient way possible and those scripts tell you how you're supposed to behave and in what order in what situation so to give you an example let's say you go to the dentist and they ask you to open your mouth right in the

waiting room in front of everybody you'd be like what I thought I was supposed to right and that's a cognitive script everybody has it we all know that you go there you wait in the waiting room they're going to call your name and then you go in the doctor's office and then you open your mouth so this idea of cognitive scripts was first identified by Roger shank and Robert ablon who were scientists back in the 1970s and the thing is like these cognitive scripts can be really useful and they're useful because they're mental shortcuts that

we can take so that we don't need to figure out how to order coffee every time we order coffee or like figure out how to cross the road from scratch every time we're trying to cross the road but with all the time and brain space that these cognitive scripts save there is also a darker side to these cognitive scripts because they can basically hijack the most important decisions of our lives like what we do for school or career or relationships without us even realizing it because we have inadvertently subconsciously taken that mental shortcut and we

end up living our life according to someone else's screenplay now in the book and law talks about three specific cognitive scripts that keep us feeling lost and uncertain about where we're going firstly we have the sequel script this is when we feel like we need to make decisions today based on what we did yesterday so for example when you finish University you might only consider the types of jobs that are aligned with the studies that you did something that makes sense that will make for a clean CV a nice story nobody's going to be confused

it's just that movie but again sequ if you work in management consulting for example there are a few pretty obvious sequels you could do like private Equity Investment Banking uh do an NBA and so there's this profound like subconscious pressure to do the next thing that makes sense based on whatever the previous thing was and then we have popular script number two which is the crowd pleaser script the crowd pleaser is when you use a script that you know is going to make everybody around you happy nobody's going to be disappointed especially not your parents

so in this one you might go for a career that you're not that excited about but that you know everybody's going to be happy about this is naturally where we prioritize external validation sometimes without even realizing it and that's why we feel sometimes we're like you know I'm doing this thing to please my parents or cuz Society told me to whatever society means anyway and like I don't feel like it's quite the right thing and then we have the third one that personally hit me the hardest which is the Epic script it's the idea that

if you're going to do something with your life it better be big it better be a Hollywood movie and because of that we make ourselves miserable trying to find our passion to find our purpose if if we can't find it if we feel a bit lost if we're still searching for what is that thing that makes us want to wake up in the morning we feel like we're a failure this is the one I've been grappling with for the last few months where it feels like okay I mean I've done the YouTube thing and I've

wrote my book it got to the bestseller list like what's the next even bigger thing it feels pretty weird to be saying like you know what I'm pretty content where I am you know I've just gotten married I've got a kid on the way I just want to chill out and spend time with the family like that's kind of what I want to do but it's also like I kind of want to do these other things and like this build the software stuff and I have feel this pressure that like the next thing has to

be even bigger than the last thing because like you know it's kind of lame if I'm just making productivity content for the rest of my life right and so what I found really helpful from reading the book and from having the conversation with anore is to just just have the terminology for this to recognize oh yeah that's why I feel pulled towards this thing it's because there is this subconscious script that's playing out in my mind that the next thing I do must be by definition bigger than the last thing that I did even if

that's running the risk of me making decisions that aren't actually aligned with my my own authentic values but then this feeling of uncertainty this feeling of like what am I even doing like am I am I going there or am I going there I'm going there I've got the I've got all these different options this feeling of uncertainty embracing this feeling of uncertainty leads us to strategy number three that I found incredibly helpful oh by the way if you looking for some introspective exercises to help you navigate these cognitive scripts I have created a completely

free resource the journaling Hub which is a completely free constantly evolving document where I store my favorite journaling prompts for introspection about these big questions about what we should do with our lives if you like that sort of thing and you want to try some of these questions there is a link down below it's completely free so strateg number three is to embrace linal spaces now if there was only one thing that I was allowed to take away from this book it would be this terminology this idea of a Lial space a Lial space is

an in between it's a time in your life where you're not quite sure what you should be doing next where there are no clear rules where there's no definition of success that you can follow no recipe that you can apply and the automatic reaction that we have when we find ourselves in the Lial spaces to try and cross it as quickly as possible get back on Shore get back to safety so the word lional comes from the Latin lemon meaning threshold the idea is that you are standing at this threshold this doorway between who you

were and who you are becoming you're not quite there but you're also not quite here you're in this sort of in between space now these Lial spaces are everywhere in our lives we can have physical Lial spaces like being in an airport or being in a lift or being in a waiting room these places aren't destinations in and of themselves they tend to be transitional places between other places you can have physiological Lial spaces like a going through puberty where you're sort of neither here nor there or as my wife tells me the process of

becoming a mother where where is it's sort of like you're in this in between space between not being a m and being a m but then there's the third category of Lial spaces that a lot of us might have found ourselves in which is emotional Lial spaces like where you finish University before you have landed your first job and you have this like weird Gap and whenever we are in these Lial spaces it is totally normal for that uncertainty of the space to feel really uncomfortable you don't know what your role is you don't know

where you're going you don't know who else is in that space you don't know how big the space is then it's really scary your brain is looking at this and feel like we have zero information let's get out of here so from an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense like uncertainty used to equal danger if you didn't know where your next meal was coming from then that was a legitimate survival threat and so our brain evolved over like 300,000 years to develop mechanisms that reduce the amount of uncertainty in our lives and help us feel

comfortable with certainty but then the problem that we have is that this survival mechanism can completely backfire in our modern lives and so whenever we are in one of these Lial uncomfortable uncertain spaces like this threshold between two things the in between space where you just quit your job and you're not sure what the next thing is the Primitive regions of the brain are so wired to like rush to something certain as soon as possible so that we can feel safe but the key thing ANL talks about in her book and that we talked about

in the conversation as well is that rather than trying to escape ainal space we should Instead try to embrace it good way to think about limal spaces is to picture yourself on a plane where you're going somewhere so there are two ways that you could react if you find yourself on a plane the first one is to start panicking because you're not the one one in the pilot seat you have zero control and you're in this tin can that is flying super quickly in the sky right but there's another way you can consider this experience

this is an amazing opportunity to have time for yourself completely disconnected from the world no Wi-fi nobody can reach you and you can finally read that book that you've been wanting to read for a long time you can Journal you can even watch that kind of Sil movie that your friends would be a little bit surprised to see you watch and this is basically the two Reas reactions that you can have in the linal space now having this conversation with ANW was genuinely transformative to me like we had a conversation a couple months ago and

at the time I was in the throws of like like do I do I go here with this software stuff or do I like write another book or do I do this YouTube thing or do I like do try and do something even bigger and reading the book and the conversation made me realized that ah I in a Lial space it is normal for a Lial space to feel uncomfortable and it is normal for me to feel like uh-oh I'm not doing the right thing by trying to get to certainty as soon as possible and

so the main thing that I really took away is that in those moments rather than trying to rush to make a decision it's actually totally okay to stay with that uncertainty to get comfortable with that feeling of uncertainty and to recognize that actually a lot of personal growth and a lot of figuring out what we truly authentically want comes from being in those Lial spaces rather than being outside of them all right so what do we do when we're in one of these Lial spaces well that's where strategy 4 comes in which is to escape

the tyranny of purpose now there is a cool graph that Anor shows in her book which is if you look at like how often in books the phrase find your purpose purp was mentioned this is what the graph looks like like in the last 200 years no one really cared that much about finding that purpose but in the last 20 years suddenly everyone is all about trying to find their big p purpose and the key argument that Anor makes in the book really is that this idea of finding your purpose came about as a way

to reject the rigid traditional career path like most of us are probably not going to be in exactly the same career for 50 years like our parents maybe were and so we replaced that rigid traditional thinking with this idea of we've got to find our purpose but what Anor argues is that actually this find my one true purpose is equally restrictive as a traditional career once was like we thought that we were choosing Freedom like oh I can do whatever I want I can find my purpose but actually what she argues is that we have

just swapped one cognitive script for another I found myself really resonating with this when we were having that conversation like I feel this pressure in my own life there's this constant feeling to identify that one thing that I'm supposedly supposed to do for the rest of my life and there are books that talk about this there's the one thing by gck K there's essentialism by Greg mccuan and I really like a lot of these books and a lot of the message behind them is that hey if you you know if you can find that one

true thing then that's the thing that will get you out of bed in the morning and help you feel motivated when motivation inevitably dips and this feeling of like if I haven't yet found that one true thing then this you know I'm doing I'm doing something wrong but the problem with this sort of thinking is that we have turned purpose into a destination which is a fixed end point that we need to reach after which everything will magically make sense but this is another classic example of the arrival fallacy that's like a thing in Psychology

that once we arrive at a particular destination then we will dot do dot be happy once I've gotten that promotion once I find my purpose then I will no longer struggle with what the point is but the truth is purpose is something that you live every day that changes that evolves with you because you change as a person and so instead of chasing it as almost as this destination that you need to reach ha I found my purpose I'm good I won it should really be something that you live with like a question that you

have and that you keep on exploring for the entirety of your life and this was genuinely one of the most liberating ideas that I got from the conversation and from the book which is that what if per purpose is not something that you are looking for like this this treasure that you find once and for all and then you never have to think about it ever again what if purpose is instead this thing that we are continuously discovering and rediscovering as we go along so if you're at this point in the video and maybe you're

feeling a little lost because you haven't found your one true purpose or your one true calling then maybe you're not the problem maybe it's just this definition that we have somehow scoped ourselves into believing that this purpose has to be this singular unchanging like unifying thing that will give everything in your life meaning and so instead of asking something really big like what is my life's purpose what would happen if we instead tried to ask oursel a question like what gives my life meaning right now in this season of life and I really like this

idea of like seasonality in this current season of life for me what gives my life meaning on the workfront is continuing to make YouTube videos that I think are helpful and building cool productivity apps that I want to use every day and that hopefully millions of people can use but a few months from now when I become a dad then maybe the purpose thing will change and maybe my whole stick will be like oh my goodness the thing that gives my life meaning and purpose right now is spending time with my wife and daughter I

don't know what's going to happen but the fact that I don't know and I'm now having read this book and had the conversation I'm now okay with not really knowing what the future could look like in terms of purpose that just gives me an enormous feeling of like Liberation and freedom and like ah I don't need to worry so much about this and so finally we come to strategy number five which is to run tiny experiments and that is why the title of the book is Tiny experiments how to live freely in a goal obsessed

world and the idea here is that if we are in one of these Lial spaces where we feel a little bit lost we might find it helpful to shift away from thinking about linear goals to instead thinking about experimental goals a linear goal is a goal that has a very clear Milestone and it's a binary definition of success so either you make it to met school or you don't either you get the job or you don't get the job either your startup is a success or it's a failure it's very very binary now obviously the

problem with linear goals is that they're kind of all or nothing you've either succeeded at the goal or you have failed at the goal and they put a lot of pressure on us now I think linear goals are totally fine in a lot of different circumstances like right now I have a linear goal to grow our various productivity apps but that's because I know that for me in the season of life right now building these productivity apps is a thing that I'm actively working towards it's a thing that I'm doing with my wife we formed

a little bit of a family business around it we're working with our friends we're working with our team it's like a fun thing that we're doing and So within that specific context setting linear goals make sense but in a domain where you're feeling a little bit lost where you're not sure if whatever you're pursuing is the right thing to do linear goals make a lot less sense and the alternative is experimental goals so if you design a goal that's experimental rather than linear you're starting from a hypothesis instead of saying let's go there and if

we don't get there we failed you say okay what if we tried this and you then design an experiment where you're going to collect data so you say that for a certain period of time you're going to perform that action that could be publishing a certain number of YouTube videos or that could be writing a newsletter that could be even for personal stuff your health meditation going to bed at the same time and you're not saying we're going to do that we're committing to this this is going to be a habit or that's the big

goal for the next year you're saying this is an experiment whatever happens this is data there's no failure when the only objective is to see what happens if it works great you can keep going or you can even scale up if it doesn't you've learned something and you can use that information to inform your next experiment if you are in that moment of feeling like oh I haven't I haven't yet figured out what that path is or like what my career is right now instead of thinking I need to do a big thing to make

this happen instead we want to think okay what is a tiny experiment that I might run that can just give me some more data and Anor talks about how you can structure these tiny experiments as packed p a CS now P act pack stands for purposeful so this thing should feel exciting and meaningful to you actionable something actually concrete that you can do continuous it's simple enough to repeat regularly for the duration of your experiment and trackable with a clear yes or no answer to did I actually do the thing like in my case back

when I was a doctor and I was unsure of like do I quit medicine to do this YouTube thing or do I like kind of do both at the same time my hypothesis was okay I'm going to try part-time medicine and see what it feels like so I was like all right cool for the next few weeks I'm going to do two shifts every week of the hospital and see how I feel about it and I R the experiment I realized hm I don't even enjoy particularly doing those two shifts when the alternative is I

can work on my business on my books on my YouTube channel and so that was a tiny experiment that I ran that gave me permission to just gather more data about what personally felt meaningful to me and so really the whole idea of creating tiny experiments is that we are reducing the pressure on us we don't have to find the right thing immediately you can just run a bunch of different tiny experiments and she's got a bunch of like strategies in the book that are really good that talk about more details about how to specifically

carve out a tiny experiment in your life or multiple experiments based on what you want and the more of this data that you gather about yourself through these tiny experiments this becomes like a process of self-discovery where slowly you get all this data and you realize okay this is the sort of direction that I seem to be enjoying taking my life and so when you're in one of these Lial spaces where you feel lost you're not like wholesale trying to commit to a new path straight away you're staying in that Lial space you're embracing this

feeling of discomfort you're running tiny experiments from this feeling of discomfort and as you gather more data you'll move to a new phase of your life where you won't be in so much of a Lial space and then the thing will happen again because after a few years you might realize you know what this new career that I'm in h I'm in a different season of life and I want something different and now you're back to the Lial space again where you've got to embrace the discomfort embrace the uncertainty and again run some tiny experiments

from that place of Discovery now if you enjoyed this video I think you'll get a lot of value from this very short playlist of three videos that I created last year which are my favorite journaling prompts and methods for introspecting and helping you figure out what you really want if you're in one of these Lial spaces so check that out over there thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye-bye