How to Figure Out What You Really Want in Life

so if you really want to understand what you truly want and like where you actually want to go in life it's really important that you get a very strong sense of where you are right now so imagine you're in a forest and maybe you're lost in this Forest there are kind of three things that you need to do to become unstuck and to get not lost in the forest step one is that you kind of need to know where you're going step two is that you need to know where you are right now and step

three is that you need to figure out your path to get from where you are right now to where you want to be and now you won't be lost in that forest and then you won't be lost in life anymore and to help address all of this stuff this is episode 2 in a little minseries that we're doing here on the channel about how to figure out what you really want and in episode number one which will be linked up there and in the video description we try to figure out what is our North Star

like based on what we want our future to look like where is that destination what direction are we broadly trying to go in and now in this video we're going to figure out where we are right now and we're also going to be looking back at our past and our present to help get the sense of how to figure out what we really want we are trying trying to tackle some very big questions here that can get very big and very heavy but the key thing is to not let ourselves get discouraged by the fact

that we're trying to answer these big questions really what we're trying to do is act as adventurers we're on this little Adventure through life and we're just trying to figure out you know where are we right now and what is the compass telling us about where we kind of want to be and we don't need to overthink it it's so easy to overthink this stuff but what I would encourage you to do is just give it a go and I guarantee if you just give it a go and think about the things and maybe even

write them down you'll get a little bit more clarity on what you actually want which is part of the point of the series all right so let's start with part one of this video which is taking stock of where we are right now and the first prompt that we can consider here is fairly simple it's when it comes to work right now what's working and what's not working and I'd love for you to pause the video right now and think about the answer to the question when it comes to your work what's working and what's

not working and do consider writing down your answers writing things down gives Clarity in a way that just thinking about this stuff really doesn't and so if I rewind if few years and if I were asking myself when it comes to my work what's working and what's not working right now I'm a foundation year 2 doctor I'm working In Obstetrics and Gynecology in West suffk Hospital in beron Edmonds and I would say what's working is the fact that it's pretty fun assisting in emergency cesarian sections I really enjoy seeing patients on my own and I

love being able to make a management plan and then running it past a senior so that they can check my work and make sure I'm doing things in a reasonable fashion I also love the fact that especially in the evenings I'm able to have enough time on the side to be able to Tinker away with some YouTube video scripts and work on my business and stuff when it's a little bit quiet what's not working is the fact that I don't really look forward to going in I get the Sunday night scaries when it's Monday the

next morning it's an hour long drive to go to work and also back again and I quite enjoy the drives because I listen to fantasy fiction audiobooks usually by Brandon Sanderson on the way but then when I get to work I'm like oh I just want to keep on listening to this Audi book I don't want to actually go in once I'm in it's it's pretty reasonable but there are a few colleagues that I don't really get on with one in particular and I also have a sense of like I don't really know where this

career is taking me because I feel like I don't have a sense of where I actually want my medical career to go just yet so it sort of feels like I'm on a bit of a hamster wheel just waiting for this year of being a foundation your doctor to end so that I can then like make a decision about what I really want and I feel like my life is being run by a rotor coordinator rather than that I'm in control of my own life I'm just telling you what my answers would have been just

to give you a sense of like this is the sort of thing that we're trying to get at and then we can do exactly the same thing for our life so when it comes to my life what's working and what's it's not working and if you need a bit of a prompt life is usually mostly personal health and relationships those tend to be the things that make up life although some people would say that play or joy is part of life or like growth is part of life you know what life means to you so

I'd encourage you to pause the video right now if you haven't already and think about the answer to that question for yourself and maybe even write it down now based on just those two questions right now you should already have a reasonable sense of where you are in life right now which is useful for figuring out what you want but another more specific way of assessing where you are in life is something called called The Wheel of Life exercise I've mentioned this in my book Feelgood productivity which is just become a New York Times and

suunday Times bestseller so thank you everyone for your support on that and I also mentioned it in a couple of the previous videos so if you've done this exercise already you don't need to do it again but this is the exercise for those of you who haven't come across it before you're going to start by for example drawing a circle on a page and you split it up into three components work health and relationships now within each of these three components you split them up into another three components So within health for example I would

say body mind and soul relationships I would categorize into romance family and friends and work I would categorize into Mission money and growth and then I would add a final category which is outside of the wheel and I would call it Joy The Joy category now these are sort of 10 different areas of life and the idea of The Wheel of Life exercise is that you rate yourself from a scale of 0 to 10 how aligned do you feel in this area of your life or how satisfied am I with the progress I'm making in

this area of my life so for example if you want to be a billionaire and you're not yet a billion but you're like taking steps to get there you might rate yourself quite high on the money front even if you're not a billionaire yet if you get what I mean so this diagram is going to be on screen and I would suggest you pause the video and just think what are your answers to these 10 different prompts now I'm just going to run you through my scores for whatever it's worth right now I would give

physical health or body a 9 out of 10 because I've just signed up to a personal trainer and I've hit the gym very frequently in the last couple of weeks the Mind category I would say is out of 10 and the Soul category I would probably say is like a four in terms of relationships romance is probably a nine family is probably a s 11 friends is probably a five and in terms of the work category mission is nine money is 10 and growth I would say is probably a six and in the joy category

I would say Joy is probably a 6 out of 10 and often that's all it takes to do this exercise sometimes I just think about it if I'm like waiting in line somewhere or if I'm on the toilet I'll just think hm what are my Wheel of Life scores and then I'll just run through the categories and think about the numbers and then usually once I've thought about the numbers I'll identify a clear area where I'm like ooh that's an area that I want to work on on so as I just did this exercise live

I realized ooh my friends category is only like a five out of 10 yeah it's cuz I haven't actually seen some friends in a while and I'm actually in London for the next month so I should probably just reach out to a bunch of people and be like hey do you want to hang out which is not what I'm going to do Straight Out filming this video see we've already made progress on things that matter to us just by virtue of doing the self-reflection exercise and if you can't be bothered to do The Wheel of

Life by yourself that's also totally fine we actually have an online quiz version of The Wheel of Life you can click down in the video description it's completely free you can take the quiz and it will give you a nicely designed Wheel of Life that you can then like print out or screenshot into whatever software you want now whenever I do this exercise with people in real life there are always some people in the audience and this might be you who rate themselves very low and if you're rating yourself very low across all areas of

life then I suspect you're the kind of person who's probably a little bit harsh to yourself you're probably pretty kind to your friends or family you're probably pretty critical of yourself so that's just one thing to say it's like you know let's not be too pessimistic about these different scores it's important to really look for positive evidence here like if you have rated everything a zero I highly highly doubt that every single thing in your life is a zero so if even some of the categories are anything above zero what you can do is ask

yourself what is it that makes this category a three rather than a zero what am I giving myself points for and then you can ask yourself okay what would it take to get it to a four what would it take to get it to a five we're not shooting for 10 out of 10 here we're just shooting for a little marginal Improvement because often figuring out what we want is about figuring out what are the marginal improvements I want to make in this era of my life if for example you're only making a few hundred

a month and you would like to be making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and that might be your 10 out of 10 let's not shoot for that right now let's just go from like you know what would it take for me to I don't know increase my income by 10% or 20% you know things like that and you know there is that phrase It's Not About The Pursuit of Happiness it's about the happiness of pursuit we should concern ourselves not so much with the pursuit of happiness but with the happiness of pursue like

pursuing something and feeling ourselves making progress towards a goal that we've set for ourselves is profoundly motivating so if you're feeling demotivated by the exercise taking action and actually moving forwards in some of these areas that you want to work on will I promise improve your motivation Absolut by by by an absolutely huge amount now once you've done this Wheel of Life exercise if you realize that your growth category is a little bit suboptimal then you might like to check out the sponsor of this video which is skillshare if you haven't heard if You' have

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that link will get a completely free 1 month trial of skillshare and in that time you can watch all the classes to your heart's content and then you can decide if it's for you or not so thank you so much to skillshare for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it and now we come to the final exercise of part one of this video which is about figuring out where we are and this is the truths exercise now to explain this exercise I want to show a clip from a podcast interview that I did

with my friend and business coach Robin weight and this was filmed about 7 months ago list off 10 things that you know are true about you right now yeah right now okay 10 Things I know are true about me y are we talking I mean like anything life business male I'm 5' 11 and a half but I go by 6'1 on hinge obviously um um I enjoy playing video games though I don't make much time for it I enjoy reading books I have a YouTube channel I uh have a podcast I went to medical school

I vaguely enjoyed working as a doctor I uh used to play chess and would like to get more into it I like playing the guitar I love musical theater and and Taylor Swift um I'd like to release an album of songs one day cool I think that's about 10 uh and you could probably come up with a hundred different things a thousand different things which you know to be true about you and the thing is nobody can take those away so you saw here what I did like it felt a bit uncomfortable initially but I

was I was like whoa like what do you mean but then I listed a bunch of these truths about myself and we actually got a bunch of different people in our team to do this as well and this is a really valuable exercise you know there's that phrase you can't read the label from inside the bottle often you know we're inside the bottle of our own lives it's very hard for us to see the label that on that bottle and it's so easy for us to think of ourselves as like oh I'm not making progress

I'm not doing this I'm not doing that but by listing out these truths about ourselves things that we know to be true it actually often gives us a sense of oh yeah that is who I am that is how far I've come that is what I'm doing and you know I do have these friends and I do have this family and this is what I do for work and this is what I do for fun the other thing is that you want these to be positive statements please do not write negative statements about yourself think

about what you do have and who you are rather than what you don't have and who you are not and we're going to do part two of this exercise in part two of this video and hopefully you'll see how these truths become relevant as part of figuring out what we really want all righty let's move on to part two of the video which is how to actually know what you want and we're going to use a little technique here which is about looking backwards in order to look forwards now before we go there I want

to say there is one major mistake that a lot of people make when it comes to thinking about what they really want and that's the idea of mimetic Desire now this is a theory that a philosopher called Renee Girard came up with like a few decades ago and there's a really good book about it it's called wanting by Luke Burgess and this book is all about kind of why we want the things that we think we want and basically to cut a long story short mimetic desire is the idea that the things that we want

are often not shaped by some sort of internal sense of self some internal authenticity the things that we want are often shaped by what people around us want if a friend or a neighbor has bought a Tesla Model 3 you're going to be much more likely to spontaneously decide that you also want want a Tesla Model 3 if a friend has got a promotion you're going to think oh I should be getting that promotion now there's no getting around the fact that like you know we live in society and humans are social creatures and so

there's naturally going to be an element of Mimis in basically everything we do but there are a few different strategies that we can use to make sure the things we're working towards are actually authentic to us and Method number one for this is fulfillment stories and the prompt is to think about or write about a time in your life when you did something well and it brought you a sense of fulfillment when in your life did you do something well that brought you a sense of fulfillment now a fulfillment story needs to have these three

things and here I'm going to read some highlights from the book wanting by Luke Burgess number one it's an action you took some concrete action and you were the main protagonist as opposed to passively taking in an experience as life-changing as a Springsteen concert at The Stone Pony might have been for you it's not a fulfillment story it might be for Bruce but not for you dedicating yourself to learning everything about an artist and their work on the other hand could be second you believe you did well you did it with Excellence you did it

well by your own estimation and nobody else's you are looking for an achievement that matters to you if you grilled what you think is a perfect riby Stak the other night then you did something well and achieved something don't worry about how big or small the achievement might seem to anyone else and number three it brought you a sense of fulfillment your action brought you a deep sense of fulfillment maybe even Joy not the fleeting temporary kind like an endorphin rush fulfillment you woke up the next morning and you felt a sense of satisfaction about

it you still do just thinking about it bring some of it back and the idea here is that you want to identify 3 to five or more potentially fulfillment stories from your life where you did something you did it well and it brought you a sense of fulfillment and this gives you a sense of what you actually want but in a way that's probably distinct from what Society is telling you now when I think about these fulfillment stories one of the most Salient ones that comes to my mind just to give you an example is

when I was the director of the medical school pantomime in my fifth year of medical school this was a pantomime that we put together whereas I was directing it with a friend his name is will it was great amazing experience we got like a hundred different medical students together from all year groups and we produced to this pantomim that was a bit of like a a sort of a parody of Hercules with a bunch of like medical songs and stuff it was absolutely sick I guess you had to be there but one of the things

I still remember this was this was years ago this was like seven years ago it still almost brings a tear to my eye when I think about it to this day because we were all working together to produce this thing that was greater than we were as individuals and so it was it was this combination of like teamwork and togetherness for the sake of something greater you know we didn't make any money from it like that wasn't the goal no one was being paid to do any of this stuff pure voluntary effort where I also

felt like I was leveling up and learning something the fact that that is one of my fulfillment stories gives me a sense of H maybe I want more of those sorts of experiences where I'm leveling up where I'm working with people where we're working towards something that's bigger than any of us are individually that's pretty freaking cool all righty method number two now for for figuring out what you want is by doing an energy audit so the idea here is that you look back on your calendar or the activities that you've done in the last

let's say 2 weeks and you want to figure out which were the ones that gave you energy and which were the ones that drained your energy now if you're looking at your calendar you might adjust the calendar event like if it gave you a lot of energy you put a plus or a double plus by the thing and that will that's a sign that it gave you energy if it drained your energy you put a minus or a minus minus or a plus minus if it was like a little bit neutral I think this exercise

is from Grace Len's book called think big but the guys who wrote the book designing your life also have a similar one which they call the good time Journal where you wrate your energy and engagement in the in each of these different activities so what I would suggest is that you pause the video right now if you would please and just think about what are some things that you did in the last week that gave you energy and what are some things that you did that really drained your energy that'll give you a bit more

of a sense of trying to figure out what you really want now this energy order is particularly important when it comes to work because if you can find the things related to work that give you energy that gives you a pretty reasonable sense of what kind of work you actually want to do for example I find for myself tinkering away on a website landing page and doing website design and development gives me a lot of energy for some weird reason and that's probably why I've been tinkering away with websites for the last 15 16 17

nearly years of my life my goodness I'm old but for me doing very detail oriented work and looking through spreadsheets and data and stuff that tends to drain my energy rather than give me energy whereas there are people on my team there are friends of mine who freaking love a spreadsheet they love being in in the weeds with the data and that lights them up and that is amazing that there are people like that out there actually interestingly on that note at various points in my life I've thought you know what I should get back

into playing video games cuz I used to love playing World of Warcraft back in the day I used to be so addicted to it and earlier this year I was like you know started playing B gate I was playing Hogwarts Legacy last year and I would always do a little bit of an energy audit after a while and I would ask myself does sitting down and playing video games give me energy or does it drain my energy and annoyingly it drains my energy a lot of the time and that's kind of annoying cuz I'm like

oh maybe actually this whole like I want to play more video games is actually just me clinging to an identity that I had when I was 14 years old and actually for my life right now playing video games is actually a drain of energy rather than something that gives me energy it gives me joy sure and some it's totally okay to do things that drain your energy they also give you Joy so it's it's it's something I'm a little bit unsure about but you know it's often the things that we think will give us energy

don't actually give us energy this is another just as a side note a tip for dealing with burnout that we talk about in the book either way the point of doing the energy audit is that it helps you figure out what it is that you really want and now the final method for how to figure out what you really want by looking backwards to look forwards is to add in some more truth statements so if you saw the early bit in the video I'm now going to play the rest of that conversation with Robin in

12 months time what do you want to be true about you I'd like to be a published author um I'd like to have written a book I'm proud of I'd like to have sh up the foundations of the business I'd like to have lived in Austin for a bit you know a few things like that okay so one one little tweet to that is the language which you used so you said I'm going to I'm going to So when you say I'm going to it kind of gives you permission to kind of put it off

into the future okay so when you're creating future trues you have to treat them like they've already happened so you just change the language that I have I am cool y I'm a published author um I have lived in Austin for a few months I've written a book I'm proud of I am currently working on my second book uh I have built my business in a sort of sensible operationally effective way Etc yeah there you go so that's Allie's identity in 12 months time that's that's who you are okay but literally I have a list

of like 100 truths all those things both future ones and exist pre-existing ones I know are true about me whenever I have that ele that moment of self-doubt I go back to that and I look at the Legacy which I built up and I look at who I am as my makeup my identity everything and it makes me feel good am I more or less likely to do stuff when I feel good more likely to do you're you're going tock on yeah you're going to see those challenges that you might see as challenges they're going

to be just you just going to have taken the edge off it by just giving yourself a little boost of self-confidence and selfworth cuz these things are true can't be taken away from you so that was filmed 7 months ago and actually since then I have now become a published author and our business operations are now more streamlined and I actually spent like two weeks living in Austin rather than a few months cuz various other things came up it was interesting how asking that question what are some truths that you would like to be true

about yourself 12 months from now also gives you that that sense a little bit more authentically of what are the things that you really want all of this stuff really feeds into a definition of success that I like which is that success is working towards the things that matter to you and enjoying the journey along the way now if you've been through this video firstly well played you're one of the 10% of people that get to the end of Long YouTube videos like this one you probably want success and happiness and fulfillment but you probably

want it on your own terms right you don't just want what someone else's definition of success is or what like like more money or more accolades or more status more achievements all that stuff that Society tells us should be our definition of success it's figuring out what matters to you and working towards it while enjoying the journey and the point of the series is to make that first bit easier to that first bit of figuring out what really matters to you cuz you can do whatever you want you can you can do whatever you set

your mind to but you can't do everything that you want and so it's worth really drilling down to what do you actually want what is the goal what is the North Star what are we trying to do here cuz if we know what the goal is if we know what we want then the how takes care of itself like the process of getting there is then easy enough to figure out but what I'm hoping is that this video and some of the prompts in this video and also some of the last video which will be

linked up there and down there if you haven't seen it these prompts will give you more of a sense of figuring out what you want now if you haven't seen episode one of this little miniseries that'll be linked right over there and if you have worked through episode one and you'd like to see episode 3 that will be right over there and that is going to be about how to get from where you are to where you want to go through a structured process of dreaming and goal setting our favorite thing so thank you so

much for watching have a lovely day and I'll see see you in the next video bye-bye