Name: How to Change your Life in a Year
Uploaded: 2024-06-22T08:11:46.000Z
Duration: 19 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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 wanna 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.

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 wanna 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 gonna 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 Ferriss' four-hour work week, but it's also an amalgamation of a couple of methods by Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar, who were like big OG productivity guru type people in like the 20th century.

And the idea behind the dreamlining 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?

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.

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 wanna think too hard about it.

You kind of know in your core and in your heart, what are some of 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 couldn't 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 gonna post on Instagram.

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 wanna write a book, maybe I've got 0.1% certainty that I might wanna write a book, that's enough.

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 a materialistic twat, basically.

We are taught in society that it's wrong to want things to have.

But you know, when I do this dream thing, I wanna have a nice big house, I wanna have a loving family, and also, I wanna have a nicer car, I wanna upgrade to the Tesla Model 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 the sphere of, 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 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 all these questions, along with my answers.

So for whatever it's worth, you can see what sort of things I wrote down in response to these questions.

Now, especially in that category of things that you wanna learn, one of your 10-year dreams, as mine was, might be to learn computer science.

And if that's the case, you may like to check out the sponsor of this video, which is Brilliant.

Brilliant is an amazing online platform, and it's the best way to learn maths or computer science or data science.

And you can learn those things in a super fun and engaging and interactive way.

Brilliant has thousands of lessons from basic to advanced topics, and they add new lessons in every month.

And recently, they've added a brand new course all about how large language models work.

So you can really understand the science and the tech behind something like ChatGPT.

Now, as I mentioned, my personal favorite courses on Brilliant are the computer science ones, because actually, when I was applying to med school, I was actually torn between medical school and computer science, because I was interested in coding.

And I went for medicine in the end, which I don't regret.

But I always harbored this interest in computer science.

And so the courses on Brilliant, the introduction to algorithms and how to program in Python, and the other stuff in the computer science series have been really nice in helping me scratch that itch to learn a little bit more about how computers and about how coding works.

In particular, one of the new courses, Thinking in Code, is also really nice, because it helps you solve real-world problems using code, which is also a really cool way to level up your own general problem-solving abilities.

Whatever your skill level, Brilliant customizes the content to suit whatever level you're at.

So it figures out where you're at, and it gives you the relevant things for that ability level.

And so if any of this sounds up your street, then head over to brilliant.org forward slash Ali Abdaal, or hit the link in the video description, and that will give you a completely free 30-day trial.

And if you're one of the first 200 people to hit that link in the video description, you will also get 20% off the annual premium subscription.

So thank you so much to Brilliant for sponsoring this video.

All right, so now that we've got our 10-year dreams 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 five-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 Burnett.

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 five years from now if you continue down your current path.

So again, what I would really recommend you do is you pause this video, and you take action, and you actually spend five minutes just drafting out pen and paper, Apple Notes, whatever the hell you wanna use.

What does your life look like five years from now if you continue down whatever path you're already on?

And it's useful here to really imagine what does an actual day in the life look like?

Like, what does a day in your life look like five years from now on your current path?

And obviously, you're not gonna know for certain, but you can make a pretty 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.

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